Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 11 - The Singing Of The Dead

by The Singing Of The Dead(lit)

  the status of sainthood." Her mouth pulled into a wry expression. "All

  of a sudden, the Native way of life is perfect, or was, before the big

  bad Western Europeans came along and ruined everything."

  "And it wasn't," Bobby said.

  "What's perfect? I know an Inupiaq elder from Barrow. She was telling me

  stories about life up there, about whale hunting, and the big dance

  festival they've got every winter, and the polar bears coming in off the

  ice so you have to be careful before you go outside so you don't run

  into one." She paused. "The one thing I remember most vividly is

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  when she told me about the whale hunting, the strikes, the landings, the

  town getting together to butcher the whale and cut up the maqtaq. It's a

  delicacy now, she told me, not a staple, and then she looks at me and

  she says"-Anne's voice slowed and an almost imperceptible rhythm began

  to shape her words-" "In olden days,? that woman says, "we hunt to eat.

  Now we have stores. We buy food. Some years we get a whale; some years

  we don't. When we get a whale, that's a good thing for the people. It

  brings us together; it reminds us of the olden days.?

  "And then," Anne said, "and then she dropped her voice so no one else

  could hear her say it, and then she told me, "I lived in olden days.

  Olden days was not so good. Nowadays is better, because everybody has

  enough to eat.?

  Bobby, for probably the only time in his life, was at a loss for words.

  "If it really was the olden days," Anne said, "and the town didn't get

  its whale, it became the duty of the eldest and most useless of the

  tribe to walk out on the ice as far as they could and stay there until

  they died, of starvation or exposure, whatever came first."

  "I thought that was just an old fairy tale," Bobby said.

  "Not unless real people die in fairy tales," Anne said. "And, yes, baby

  girls born to a tribe living on the edge of starvation were put to death

  as another useless mouth to feed too." With deliberate intent, she

  looked at Dinah, still holding Katya on her hip. "You know who had to

  kill them?"

  "No." But he did.

  "Their mothers."

  There was another moment of dead air. "I'm not saying there weren't real

  wrongs perpetrated against Alaska Natives and Native Americans," Anne

  said. "Even Disney couldn't pretty up what turned out to be genocide.

  But what I really hate is the mythology that seems to be growing up

  around this new awareness of Native life. Nobody talks

  P

  25

  now about the wars fought between tribes years ago, even though you can

  see examples of the armor the warriors wore into battle in museums, but

  you call your friend Mary Ellen the Athabascan an Eskimo one time and

  see what she says. And we, the Native peoples, a lot of us are buying

  into it, into the myth. Everything was wonderful then, everything's

  lousy now, and it's all the Anglos' fault. Baloney. All that attitude

  does is nourish resentment, perpetuate stereotypes, and fund political

  campaigns. Turns us into victims. I am not in any way, shape, or form a

  victim. Rousseau has a lot to answer for."

  "Who?"

  "Jean Jacques Rousseau, a French philosopher back in whenever,

  precolonial days. Inflicted the idea of the natural man or the noble

  savage on the rest of the world. I had to study him in Humanities at

  college, and I'll tell you right now I never read such nonsense in my

  life. There's nothing noble about hunger. Hunger is a stronger force

  than either fear or sex. It always, always takes priority. In the olden

  days, like my friend in Barrow knows only too well, the bottom line was

  you did what you had to for the tribe as a whole to survive, and if that

  included killing off the elderly when they became less of an asset and

  more of a liability or killing a baby because you couldn't feed it,

  that's what you did. It's not about humanity or compassion then, it's

  about survival. It's easy to idealize that time retrospectively, when

  you're full."

  There was a brief silence. "Don't be shy, Anne," Bobby said. "Tell us

  what you really think."

  Anne stared at him for a moment, and surprised everyone by bursting out

  laughing. There was a palpable lessening of tension in the room. "I

  don't know where all that came from. I must be tired." She looked up

  when Darlene put a hand on her shoulder and gave her a reassuring smile.

  "Okay, folks, you heard it here first. Anne Gordaoff is not a victim,"

  Bobby said into the microphone. "This is

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  Park Air, taking you now to the studios of beautiful downtown Detroit,

  with some music to raise campaign funds by." He put in a CD and pushed a

  few buttons, and the Temptations singing "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" rocked

  out of the quadraphonic speakers in full surround sound.

  "Turn it down, Clark!" Dinah yelled, and he did, marginally, and caught

  sight of Kate, standing stock-still and staring at Anne Gordaoff with an

  odd expression on her face. "Shugak!" The wheelchair rolled forward like

  it was jet-propelled, and Kate emerged from her trance in time to

  sidestep the wheels and save her toes, only to be yanked into Bobby's

  lap and thoroughly kissed. She disengaged herself with difficulty, after

  which Mutt reared up to pay Bobby her respects, which left him with a

  very wet face. "Goddamn!" he bellowed again. "You let the fucking wolf

  back in the house! I keep telling you no fucking wolves in the house!"

  Mutt, paws on the arms of his wheelchair, laughed down at him lupinely,

  not in the least alarmed at his tone of voice. He gave her an

  affectionate cuff and rolled over to the wood box, where there was

  always a Jurassic anklebone or two to keep the wolves at bay. "How the

  hell are you, Shugak?" Bobby said, dark eyes examining her for nicks and

  scratches.

  "I'm fine," Kate said. "Really."

  Easier to convince than his wife, or maybe just wanting it to be true,

  he accepted this. "Well, join the damn party! Gimmee some beer, woman!"

  "Excuse me a minute," Kate said, and threaded through the crowd

  surrounding Darlene and Anne. She waited for Darlene to notice her, and

  when she didn't, nudged her ungently in the ribs.

  "Hey," Darlene said, turning. "Oh."

  "I hear you're looking for my kind of help," Kate said.

  The door opened and another group of people jammed into the house. The

  noise jumped seven or eight decibels,

  too

  27

  and then a figure moving very fast shot around the pillar and hit the

  back door at a dead run. The screen door slammed sharply in its wake.

  "Johnny!" The voice, high-pitched and furious, bounced off the ceiling.

  "Get back here!"

  "I'll get in touch tomorrow," Kate said, and beneath Darlene's

  astonished eye hit the floor and was under the counter that encircled

  the central pillar of electronic equipment. She scrabbled around the

  pillar, the snake's nest of cables slowing her down.

  There was the whisk of rubber tires on wood. "And who might you be, madam?"

  "I'm Johnny Morgan's mother, and
I just saw him run out the back door.

  Let me by! Johnny! Come back here right now!"

  There was a brief scuffle, followed by an "Oof!" as someone came up

  against a solid wall of chest.

  "Do you have any identification, ma'am?" said Jim Chopin.

  There was the shuffle of a lot of feet, and Kate pictured everyone

  crowding around to watch, forming a barrier between Jane Morgan and the

  back door. One for Rats, Rats for All, she thought, and grinned in spite

  of the situation. She shook off a piece of coaxial cable determined to

  keep her beneath that counter forever and made a break for the door.

  Bodies parted and closed in behind her. She pushed open the screen door.

  It squeaked, loudly.

  "Who's that? Johnny? Johnny, is that you? Get over here, right now! Johnny?"

  "Hey, lady, watch who you're shoving," Old Sam Dementieff growled.

  "Relax, jeeze, have a beer," Mac Devlin said. "You busy tonight, honey?"

  "Ayah," said Auntie Vi, "never mind these men, they just want to get you

  drunk and take advantage. Have some iced tea. We have lemon."

  28

  "I don't want any beer or any iced tea! I want my son! Now let me through!"

  Kate slipped outside, dodged the northwest leg of the antenna tower, and

  trotted through the vehicles parked in the yard, over the bridge and

  down the road to where her truck was parked. Johnny's face gleamed white

  in the shadows beneath the dashboard.

  Kate climbed in and started the engine. "You'll have to talk to her

  sometime, Johnny."

  "Just get us out of here, okay?"

  Kate, in the full awareness that she was breaking half a dozen statutes

  and probably a couple of federal laws while she was at it, put the truck

  in gear and headed down the road to her homestead.

  29

  Paula Pawlowski was a writer. She had been rewriting the first four

  chapters of her novel for going on eleven years now. When she got them

  perfect, she was going to send it to Simon and Schuster, whose address

  she had found in a copy of the 1987 edition of Writer's Market on the

  shelf at the Salvation Army.

  She'd recently given some thought to letting Hollywood have first crack.

  Steven Spielberg was an obvious first choice there, although she worried

  that he had a dangerous predilection toward the saccharine. He'd found

  ways to end movies on racism, the Holocaust, and World War II on an

  upbeat note, which said a lot for his abilities as a filmmaker but not

  much for the accuracy of his vision. Still, she owed him the right of

  first refusal for ET. Honor among artists, she thought, coming a phrase.

  She stretched and rolled her head back, left, forward, right. Microfilm

  was a wonderful invention, no doubt, but watching it spool past for more

  than two hours at a time tended to make her muscles cramp up. Not to

  mention making her seasick.

  Seated at a reader in the Fairbanks library, she compared the stack of

  microfilmed and microfiched issues of the Anchorage Daily News, the

  Anchorage Times, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, the Alaska Journal of

  Commerce, and various public records going back sixty years that she had

  skimmed through with the stack that she hadn't, and sighed.

  30

  Her day job was also that of a writer, of technical reports, grant

  proposals, position papers for political candidates of any party, and

  press releases for corporations too small to have their own PR

  departments. She was a good writer and better still, she was fast, but

  even so, sometimes there just weren't enough writing jobs to make the

  payment on the Airstream trailer parked on a weedy five acres that was

  all her mother had left her when she died of smoke inhalation in another

  trailer parked on that same lot five years before. The Airstream had a

  built-in double bed, a tiny kitchen, and an even tinier bathroom, but it

  had running water, at least in the summertime, and in the Park, where

  homes, of any kind, from a one-room, two-by-four tarpaper shack to a

  split-level ranch brought in premium prices, she was lucky and she knew

  it. True, January's heating bill sometimes hit three hundred dollars,

  but at least it was better than her friend Lillian, who had moved in

  with a man she didn't even like that much just for a warm place to stay.

  She who moves fastest moves alone, Paula thought to herself, and bent

  back over the reader. Her job was to look at the incumbent's family

  history going back as far as there was any in Alaska. "Don't get

  ridiculous about it," Darlene had said. "Don't go back to the Russians

  or anything, but take a look, see what pops up. If you spot anything

  with potential, let me know."

  For "anything with potential," read any nasty surprises Anne Gordaoff

  could attack Peter Heiman on, like a secret abortion, a messy divorce,

  an unacknowledged child, an indiscreet affair, a lie on a Permanent Fund

  Dividend application, a too-large and too-obvious quid pro quo from a

  lobbyist anytime during the past eight years Heiman had been in office.

  At the last minute, as Darlene was leaving, the campaign manager had

  stopped in the doorway of the Airstream and added, "Look up the Gordaoff

  family history while you're

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  at it, too." She saw Paula's raised eyebrow. "If there's anything to

  find, you find it first."

  Paula had shrugged. "Okay." She'd worked for Darlene Shelikof before, on

  other campaigns, on political action committees, on lawsuits. She was a

  good researcher, and she was for hire. One thing about this campaign was

  that it was extremely well funded. Peter Heiman had tried to hire her,

  and Darlene had outbid him, which had to be the first time that had

  happened to an Alaskan Republican since the early days of the pipeline.

  Speaking of Peter Heiman-she sighed and bent over the reader once more.

  Peter Heiman had been elected senator from District 41 eight years

  before and had been returned to office four years after that with

  minimal opposition. That was before the legislature and the governor had

  pissed off everyone in rural Alaska by ignoring, avoiding, bullshitting,

  and otherwise bypassing the hot-button issue of subsistence to the

  extent that they had managed to overturn a publicly mandated demand to

  submit the issue to a general vote. The legislature's passive resistance

  on the issue of subsistence was what had put sovereignty on the map as

  an Alaska Native issue; if their own state government couldn't or

  wouldn't give them preference to hunt and fish, particularly in times of

  game shortages, they'd sidestep it and appeal to the federal government

  for the authority to oversee their own lands and waters, and take that,

  Juneau.

  The sting was all the sharper since the Native community had put the

  current governor and half the legislature in office, with endorsements

  from most of the Native regional corporations and a little matter of two

  hundred fifty- three votes from the tiny-and closest to the

  International Date Line-Native community of St. Martha's and therefore

  the last to be counted after voting day. Two days later the hottest

  selling i
tem in St. Martha's was a T-shirt, the front of which read,

  "ST. MARTHA'S-THE LITTLE TOWN THAT ELECTS GOVERNORS!" Eighteen months

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  later the hottest selling item in St. Martha's was that same T-shirt,

  the back of which now read, "AND AREN'T WE ASHAMED OF OURSELVES."

  All of which only went toward making Anne Gordaoff's chances of

  attaining office better than even.

  But Peter Heiman's credentials were impeccable; he was a card-carrying

  Alaskan old fart. His grandfather had come north with the U.S.