"Once upon a time "A couple of days ago
"A young woman goes walking in those woods
"She has long black hair "She has big brown eyes
"She fills out a kuspuk pretty good, too "In those woods she meets a young man
"That young man he loves her right away "He is tall and handsome
"He is a good hunter and the fish they jump into his trap
"But that young woman she is afraid "She runs
"He says stop but she is afraid "She runs very fast
"He chases her "She runs to the mountains
"He chases her "She runs to the forest
"He chases her "She runs to the water and jumps in, all over wet
"She can't swim as fast as she runs "She starts to drown
"He sees this "He jumps in after her." Kate paused. "What happens?"
Johnny demanded. "Did they both drown?
What, Kate?"
Kate stared at Susitna. Just beyond the sleeping lady's feet, she thought she caught a glimpse of another mountain. "Then a bunch of belugas conics in the water ' They talks to that young man
"They says, What you do in that water?
"They says, You not salmon "They says, You not otter
"They says, You not whale "They says, You drown
"Young man cries out "He says, Help me to swim
"The beluga they looks at him "They sees he is strong and good
"They says, We help this one "They gives him gills to breathe
"They gives him fins to swim "They gives him blubber to be warm
"He is beluga then "He swims back to Susitna
"But them whales they takes too long to make up their minds "Susitna she is dead
"That young man who is beluga now he takes her upon his back "He carries her to that mountain
"He lays her down on top of that mountain
"He covers her with a blanket of snow "He lays down beside her
"They sleep together now "They sleep together now always
"That's all."
There was a long silence.
"Geez, Kate," Johnny said at last. "That's great. That's just--great.
And her name was Susitna?"
Kate nodded, sober as a judge. "The Sleeping Lady."
"What was the guy's name?"
"Beluga, of course."
"Beluga! Wow! There's another mountain behind Susitna called Beluga, did you know that?"
Kate looked again beyond Susitna's feet. "Yes."
"That's great," he repeated. "And belugas are the white whales that chase the salmon up the Knik every summer, right?"
"The very same."
"I never heard that story before."
Possibly because I just made it up, she thought but didn't say.
"How come I never heard that story before?" Without waiting for her to answer he said, a touch wistful, "We don't have anything like that. No stories or legends like that." He added, "White people, I mean."
She looked at him. "What do you call all those legends about Zeus and Athena and Hercules and the rest of them?"
"You mean like in the Ilyat and the Oddsea? Those are just baloney," he said, disparaging. "One-eyed monsters and singing rocks. No whales--" he pointed at Beluga "-or bears or eagles or--" he looked at Mutt, nose down, trotting along the creek "--wolves. Huh. They don't mean anything to me." "Just stories," she said. Clearly, Johnny stood in eminent danger of rejecting his tribal myths. This must be rectified. "Come with me."
"Where?" She didn't answer. Puzzled but willing, he followed her off the bridge and past the three benches tucked into the curve of the trail.
Between the thin layer of topsoil holding up the scrub spruce and the birch trees and the flat expanse of mud flats made of centuries of glacial silt washed down the Knik and Matanuska Rivers, there was a narrow strip of dark-grained sand, as much as ten feet wide in places, almost wide enough to merit the designation of "beach." Kate jumped the two-foot embankment.
"What are you doing?" Johnny said. He jumped down next to her, and scuffed at the sand with a doubtful foot.
She found a stick of driftwood and drew a long line in the sand. At the right end of the line she wrote the current year. Working backward, she broke the line into equal sections. Mutt, looking down at them from the bank, decided that this was going to take a while and trotted off to find something more interesting to occupy her time, like breakfast, in the form of a nice, plump, juicy rabbit.
"Each one of these is ten years," Kate said, pointing with the stick.
"One decade. What year were you born?" He told her. "Okay, so this is you," she said, making a mark just behind the first decade mark from the left. "When was your dad born?" He looked uncertain. "He's, what, forty-six?"
"I think so."
"So he would have been born, let's see, about here." Kate marked it on the time line, with the notation, "Jack born" beneath it. "Okay. When was your mom born?"
His face closed down.
"Come on," Kate said impatiently, "she's still your mom and part of your family history. How old is she?" He mumbled something. "What?"
"Thirty-nine," he said, raising his voice. "She turned thirty-nine this year." His eyes slid away from Kate's. Amused, she said, tongue in cheek, "I take it it wasn't the happiest day of her life." A snort was his reply, and with real nobility she forbore from pressing for more information. "Okay, forty, that means she was born about here. When did she come to Alaska?"
He brightened. "She flew up with my grandfather."
Elbows resting on her knees, she looked at him. "Now that sounds like a story comes with it. Tell me." Uncertain, he said, "I don't know. A story?"
"Tell me," she repeated. "What time of the year was it? When they flew up?"
"May. 1955, I think."
"May, 1955. Alaska was still a territory. So your grandfather was a pilot?"
"Yeah. Um, he was the copilot, and my grandmother and my mom and my aunt and my uncle were all on board. The plane they flew in on was a DC-3
Starliner, and it took eight hours to get from Seattle to Anchorage, and Uncle Jim got to go up front with the pilots and Auntie Margaret drank so much pop she barfed all over Yakutat." The words came out by rote, as if he had heard just those words said in just that order many times.
Kate grinned. "And your mom?"
"She was just a baby. But Auntie Margaret had a kitten. They took her picture when the plane landed and it was on the front page of the paper."
"What happened to your grandfather?"
"He died before I was born."
"Too bad. Pilots are like fishermen. They tell all the best stories."
Kate made a mark before the one indicating Johnny's birth. "What happened to your grandmother?"
"She's retired. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. We go down to see her every year."
"What did she do before she was retired?"
He straightened up and preened himself a little. "She lived in Charlotte Amalie."
He looked at her, expectant, and she didn't disappoint him. "Charlotte Amalie? Never heard of it. Where is it?"
"On St. Thomas."
Again he waited. Again she played straight man. "Where's St. Thomas?"
"In the Virgin Islands," he said, triumphant.
"The Virgin Islands," she said. "In the Caribbean?" He nodded. "Wow. How did your grandmother get from Alaska to the Caribbean?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. She went there after my grandfather died, I guess. She had a job with the government. She used to send me the greatest presents. One time I got a voodoo doll."
"The kind you stick pins in?" He nodded proudly, and Kate gave an elaborate shudder. "Eek." She gave him a stern look. "Did it work?"
He grinned. "I'll never tell."
She put her hand to the side of his head and shoved. He toppled over into the sand, laughing.
"So," she said, contemplating the time line, "your grandparents, your mother, your aunt and your uncle flew up to Alaska in the fi
fties. How about your dad? When did he come north?" "Nineteen-seventy," he said at once.
"Oho." Kate made a mark on the time line. "Right after the Prudhoe Bay nine-hundred-million-dollar lease sale. Okay."
"Okay what?"
"Okay, what we got here is a family legend. Look." She pointed at the mark indicating his family's arrival. "Your mother's side of the family came up before Alaska was even a state. In fact, they came up the year of the constitutional convention. The territorial governor, Ernest Gruening, gave the keynote address to the constitutional convention in Fairbanks." She looked at Johnny with a twinkle in her eyes. "In which he compared the territory of Alaska to revolutionary America and the federal government to King George III ."
Johnny brightened. "We've been studying King George III in school. Isn't he the guy that on the day they issued the Declaration of Independence wrote in his diary, "Nothing of importance happened today'?"
"That's the guy. You know what Ernest Gruening said at the convention?"
"No, what?"
Kate pulled in her chin and deepened her voice. "
"Inherent in colonialism is an inferior political status!"
" she thundered. "
"Inherent in colonialism is an inferior economic status!"
" "Wow," he said, awed. He didn't understand all the words but he caught the drift.
"Makes you want to run right down and throw tea in the harbor, doesn't it?" Kate agreed.
"Isn't that, like, you know, treason?"
"That's why we've got a First Amendment, so you can say what you think without getting thrown in jail for it." She returned to the time line.
"So your family was in Alaska almost five years before it's even a state. They might even have landed at Merrill Field, which at that time was still out of town." Kate made a mark for statehood. "In 1964 is the Big One."
"The earthquake?" he said quickly. "Were you born then?"
"I was three. I don't remember it. Of course, we didn't get it as bad in the interior as they did on the coast, anyway. They got the tidal wave.
Whole villages were wiped out on the coast. An entire suburb went in Anchorage." She nodded at the houses on the rise of ground behind the trail. "The next big one, they slide right into Knik Arm."
"Really?"
"Really. Your father's a moron. Promise me you'll never buy a house anywhere on the Coastal Trail. The view won't be worth it, trust me."
Johnny was agreeable. "Okay. What's next?"
"Let me see. After statehood, Fish and Game outlawed all the fish traps at the mouths of the rivers and in the late sixties the salmon started coming back. About that same time we started to fish for king crab commercially. Then in 1968, they discovered a super-giant oil field in Prudhoe Bay, the largest one in North America. In 1969, they had a lease sale, and--"
"--in 1970, my dad came up!"
"Right. When did your mom and dad get married? What year? Do you know?"
"Ten years before I was born."
And you were born the same year as the divorce, Kate remembered. She made a mark. "Right here, construction began on the Pipeline. Oil in was
1977."
"Oil in where?"
"Into the pipeline. That's how they call it. Oil in."
"That's right, you went up there this year, didn't you? Did you catch the bad guys?"
"Ah-yup," Kate drawled in her best Dodge City sheriff imitation. "We run thim varmints right outta town." She tapped the sand in front of the time line, drawing his attention back to it. "So what do we have here?"
He contemplated the scratches in the sand.
"What we have here," she said, "are stories. Just stories."
He looked up, uncertain. "Stories?"
"Sure. Just stories about people. Without any one-eyed monsters or guys with magic cloaks in them. Or guys that chase girls into the water and get turned into whales. Still, just stories."
She pointed at him with the stick. "But wait a thousand years. By then, your grandfather will have become the god of travelers himself." He looked blank, and she said, "Mercury."
"The guy with wings on his shoes?"
"That's the guy."
He thought about that for a moment. "Draw your time line." She smiled.
"That would take up the whole day and most of the beach."
She tossed the stick to one side and thought how to say it. She'd probably only get one chance, and she wanted it to come out right. "When you go to court, Johnny, and you have to get up on the witness stand and speak your piece." She could see him stiffening, and kept her voice neutral and her eyes on the time line. "When you get up there, and your mom's lawyer is asking you questions, and maybe you hear some things you don't want to hear and maybe she makes you say some things you don't want to say, and you're maybe getting a little mad at your mom, and maybe even your dad, too?" Kate pointed at the timeline. "Remember this.
It's just another story, just another part of the family history. Some stories are good. Some are bad. Some are both." She pointed at Susitna.
"Like that one."
"Is that what a legend is?" She nodded. "So," he said slowly, "so she could be like Medusa, and I could be like Perseus."
Remembering what had happened to Medusa and who did it to her, Kate was a little alarmed. "Yes. Well. I suppose you could--remember, Johnny, the Gorgons had the heads and arms of women. They may have been monsters, but they were partly human, too."
He looked unconvinced, and she decided it was time to leave before she waded any further into that particular mire. They started walking again, staying down on the sand instead of climbing back up onto the trail.
There was a soft swish of wings and they looked up to see the two eagles returning, flying low and slow, the tips of their wings almost brushing the tops of the trees. Across the water the white peak of Mount Spurr reared up against the pale blue of the sky.
They paused to admire it, and a gray streak cannoned into Johnny from behind, knocking his feet out from under him. He landed on his back in the sand. "Whoof." He blinked up at the sky for a moment before elbowing himself up and looking around.
Kate was standing next to him, shaking with laughter. A few feet away Mutt crouched down, tail wagging furiously, eyes begging for fun. Johnny caught his breath and said, "So you wanna play rough, do you? You asked for it!"
Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 06 - Blood Will Tell Page 6