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

Page 7

by The Singing Of The Dead(lit)


  Ethan did look at her then. Seated, his eyes were level with hers, a

  direct, piercing blue. His hawk-featured face was set, and his rare,

  warm smile was not around that morning. He hadn't bothered to shave, not

  for days, and on the olfactory evidence Kate was willing to bet that he

  hadn't

  49

  bathed in longer. "Where's Margaret?" she said. She looked around,

  noticing for the first time how quiet it was in the Int-Hout homestead.

  Since Ethan had moved back the year before with his family, a jolly,

  zaftig, redheaded wife and a set of rambunctious and equally redheaded

  ten-year-old twins, one boy, one girl, she would bet it was never quiet.

  "Margaret's not here," he said, squinting down the barrel of the BB gun,

  seeming to debate whether or not to take another shot. He did. "Damn,"

  he said, "missed him," and lowered the gun again.

  "Where are the kids?"

  "She took "em." He leaned the gun up against the greenhouse wall and

  stood up, towering a foot and a half over Kate. Johnny's eyes widened.

  "Come on, I'll make some coffee."

  The kitchen was a mess, the sink filled with dirty dishes, the top of

  the cooking stove encrusted with blackened grease. Ethan didn't

  apologize, and he didn't try to stop Kate when she started in on the

  dishes while they waited for the kettle to boil.

  The coffee was instant. Kate hid a wince and loaded in the creamer.

  Johnny's cocoa was instant, too, but the marshmallows, though stale,

  melted in a satisfactory manner. After Ethan cleared the chairs around

  the kitchen table of unopened mail, dog-eared catalogues, a Shooter's

  Bible, and a stack of Aviation Week magazines, they sat down, still in

  silence.

  Usually, Kate was comfortable with silence. It was why she lived alone

  on a homestead in the middle of a twenty-million-acre federal park,

  twenty-five miles away from the nearest village over a road that was

  impassable to anything but snow machines in the winter and to anything

  but the sturdiest trucks in the summer.

  Ethan's silence was palpable. He was angry, but he wasn't sulking over

  it. She decided there was nothing for it but to wade in. "I need a

  favor, Ethan," she said. She

  50

  wasn't happy asking and, although she tried hard not to let it show,

  Ethan, when he bothered to look up, could see it in her face. For the

  first time that day he smiled.

  He'd always been able to read her, from the day they shared what was her

  first kiss at the top of Widow's Peak after an hour's hike one hot day

  the summer she was sixteen. He was back from his freshman year of

  college and they were both working for his father, tending the dogs and

  the farm while Abel was out setnetting with Old Sam Dementieff and Mary

  Balashoff on Alaganik Bay. They'd spent the morning clearing alders off

  the airstrip and the afternoon hilling potatoes, and when Ethan

  suggested a picnic as a reward, Kate had been all for it.

  Ethan was the second of Abel's four sons and the closest to her in age.

  A three-year difference at five and eight or ten and thirteen might as

  well be thirty, but at sixteen and nineteen the distance had suddenly

  narrowed. Ethan came home and for the first time Kate noticed how

  attractive his smile was, how smart and funny his conversation, how

  capably he shouldered the business of the homestead. Ethan came home and

  for the first time noticed that Kate had breasts and a figure to go with

  them, and a smile that, when she bothered to use it, melted him right

  down to the marrow in his bones. His marrow had been melted before, of

  course; he was self-aware enough to realize that his looks and his

  talent at center on the basketball team would get him most of the girls

  he wanted without too much effort. The girls at UAF did nothing to

  disabuse him of this notion, especially the girls in the Wickersham

  Dorm, for whom the jocks of Lathrop Dorm (basement, basketball; first

  floor, hockey; second floor, swim team) were a specialty.

  So when Ethan looked at Kate when he returned home from school that

  June, it was with the eye of a newborn connoisseur. She was aware of

  him. He could tell that from the sidelong glances, the occasional soft

  blush, the not-so- accidental bumpings of arms and hips, but he made no

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  move until his father was safely out of the way. Even then, he waited

  until the work of the day was done, and felt virtuous in doing so.

  Kate at sixteen had never been kissed. Truth to tell, no boy had ever

  had the courage to so much as try to hold her hand. It might have been

  the force of her grandmother's personality, or the power Ekaterina had

  over the tribe, but it might also have had something to do with Kate's

  air of self-containment, of assurance, of capability. She didn't give

  off vibes like she needed anybody in her life, let alone a guy. Her

  classmates saw her as smart, and some of them translated that as

  arrogant, and some of them translated that as eccentric. She was quiet

  and some of them translated that as stuck up, others as shy. She had no

  close friends. She had no boyfriends.

  Which was why Ethan's obvious attention hit her like a ton of bricks.

  Tall, good-looking, funny, smart (even then Kate couldn't abide

  stupidity), competent at whatever he turned his hand, and best of all,

  someone with whom she was familiar, someone with whom she already had

  history, someone who didn't require the elaborate ritual of inane

  chatter and silly giggles and he-told-my-brother-and-my- brother-told-me

  conversations and slap-and-tickle games that preoccupied her

  contemporaries. This was Ethan, and it was obvious that he was

  interested. It was enough to make every female nerve in her body sit up

  and take notice. The three weeks between Ethan coming home and Abel

  leaving were the longest and most excruciating three weeks of her life.

  The homestead was at fifteen hundred feet, on the edge of the wide,

  level valley that made up the center of the Park. Widow's Peak was

  another thousand feet up, a mere foothill to the Quilaks looming behind.

  It was a clear day, and they fancied they could see all the way to

  Prince William Sound. "Think they're catching anything?" Ethan said as

  he unpacked their picnic.

  52

  Kate shook out an old olive green Army blanket. "I hope so. I haven't

  had any salmon out of the Sound yet this summer."

  Ethan sat back on his heels and narrowed his eyes against the sun. "If

  I'd known that, I would have brought you one out of the creek myself."

  Kate hoped her skin was too dark and the light was too bright for him to

  see her blush. "No, I meant salt water fish. They're always fatter than

  the ones you catch in fresh water." She changed the subject. "Do you

  want a fire?"

  "Do we need one?"

  She looked up to meet his eyes and flushed again. "I guess not," she

  said, and reached for the Spam sandwiches.

  They ate mostly in silence, because Ethan, after all, also had been

  raised in what Robert Service had called "the hush of the Great Alone,"

  but when th
eir meal was over and they were packing the debris into their

  daypacks, he found occasion to brush her hand with his. It felt exactly

  as if an electric spark had leaped between them, and she jumped. He

  grinned, and leaned in.

  She didn't move during that first kiss, curious at the touch of his lips

  on hers. He drew back and looked at her. "Come on, Kate," he said, his

  voice husky, "kiss me back."

  She wouldn't admit to not knowing how, but she let him teach her, and oh

  my, did it feel good. So did his tongue delicately tracing the whorls of

  her ear, his teeth at the base of her throat, his hand cupping her

  breast, his knee rubbing between her legs. She felt like she'd been run

  over by a truck, a big one; she had no breath to protest, and no will

  to, either.

  She was naked, and he was shirtless and starting on the zip of his jeans

  when the Super Cub buzzed the top of Widow's Peak on a short final into

  the homestead. It was Abel, flying back from Alaganik Bay after the Fish

  and Game had closed the bay to fishing for the week, and he got an eyeful.

  53

  Abel asked Ethan one question when they got back down to the homestead.

  "You use a rubber?"

  Ethan set his jaw. "We didn't get that far," he muttered finally, when

  it became evident that his father wasn't going to let it go.

  That evening, Abel flew Kate to a one-man placer gold- mining operation

  near Nizina. Seth Partridge was the miner, and Micah Int-Hout, Abel's

  third oldest boy, barely thirteen and no competition for Ethan, was

  already apprenticed to him for the summer. Seth agreed to take Kate on,

  too. She spent the rest of July and most of August pining for Ethan and

  the astonishing feelings he had coaxed from her body, and learning how

  to alter the course of a creek with a D-5 Caterpillar tractor. When she

  got back to the homestead, Ethan was already back in Fairbanks. The next

  summer, Abel found him a job in Anchorage.

  Two years later, upon graduation from high school and at the insistence

  of her grandmother, Kate went to Fairbanks and joined Ethan in the ranks

  of the student body. Ethan knocked on her dorm room door on the day

  after she arrived. "Hi," he said, and smiled, and she toppled over the

  same edge she had been teetering on two summers before. She wanted him,

  she wanted him so much her teeth ached. It seemed that he wanted her,

  too, and only the fact that they both had roommates kept them out of

  each others' beds for as long as it did. They necked a lot, squirming

  together on a chair in a dark corner of the Student Union Building,

  taking time out up against a tree in the middle of running the Equinox

  Marathon, in the back row of the campus theater during a showing of

  Psycho. "I think it's going to fall off before I get the chance to use

  it again," he groaned one evening in the Lathrop lounge, when they were

  interrupted by a horde trouping in to watch Dallas.

  He must have taken steps to see that it wouldn't happen, because a week

  later she caught him with another girl, and

  54

  that was the end of that. Disloyalty was the one sin Kate Shugak would

  not, could not forgive.

  At Thanksgiving break, Abel, not usually so slow, woke up to the fact

  that the UAF campus wasn't all that large and that his son the junior

  and his foster-daughter the freshman were both living on it In December

  Ethan transferred to the University of Washington, ostensibly because

  the wildlife-management curriculum was larger and with better teachers,

  and would round out his degree. There he met Margaret, and married her

  the month after he graduated.

  Kate, left alone at UAF, went into hibernation, emerging only at the

  invitation of an inspired English teacher, who taught her how to read

  recreationally. From that point on, she had never been lonely. She had

  seen Ethan perhaps a dozen times for brief periods since. She was always

  civil. He was always courteous. They might have been strangers, instead

  of almost lovers. Since he had moved back to the Park, family in tow, to

  start a fly-in bed-and-breakfast on Abel's homestead, she had seen him

  perhaps half a dozen times, at the Int-Hout homestead when Mandy had

  wanted to stop in and say "Hi," at the post office in Niniltna, and at

  the Roadhouse. She was still civil. He was still courteous.

  It was obvious by the gleam in his eye that Ethan was remembering a lot

  of the same things she was. Johnny looked suspiciously from one adult to

  the other. When Kate looked at him, he sneered, and she could imagine

  his thoughts. "My dad not dead a year, and you're ready to jump in bed

  with somebody else." She thought of July in Bering and Jim Chopin, and

  then she did not. "I need a favor, Ethan," she said again.

  "You said that," he replied.

  "Yeah," she said, "sorry." She nodded at Johnny. "Johnny's-" She

  hesitated. "Johnny's staying with me for a while, but I'm going to be in

  and out for most of the next month or two. I don't want him to stay at

  the homestead

  55

  alone, so I was wondering if he could park here for the duration."

  Ethan looked at Johnny, who met his gaze with a sullen expression. "He

  looks like he wants to move over here, all right."

  Kate kicked Johnny beneath the table.

  Johnny kicked her back, hard enough to make her jump and swear.

  Ethan laughed, which transformed his face. Johnny relaxed a little.

  Still laughing, Ethan told Johnny, "You're my kinda guy, kid. Sure, you

  can bunk in here if you want to." The laughter faded, leaving him

  looking glum. "It's not like I don't have the room."

  Voice carefully devoid of anything that might be mistaken for genuine

  interest, Kate said, "So, when is Margaret coming back?"

  Ethan got up and collected their cups. "She isn't, according to her," he

  said over his shoulder. "She's filed for divorce."

  All Kate could think of to say was, "Why?" and then she added hastily,

  "I'm sorry, Ethan. None of my business."

  He snorted. "Like it wasn't all over the Park by sundown the day she

  left. Where have you been?"

  "Out of town," she said. "So what happened?"

  He turned around and folded his arms, leaning back against the sink.

  "She wants to move back to Seattle. That's where her parents are, and

  her sister. Says she doesn't want the kids growing up all alone in the

  middle of a wilderness. Says they're going to have a civilized

  upbringing. I think myself she wants cable back." He sighed. "Breakup

  was too much for her, I guess. Or maybe it was breakup and the Park in

  combination. She wasn't raised to it like we were. I probably should

  have seen it coming. She never did like Cordova much, either, and she

  sure wasn't happy when we moved back to the homestead. Didn't like the

  idea of

  56

  cooking and cleaning up after strangers, so the fly-in Band-B idea went

  west. After that it was one big downhill slide. She and the kids left in

  May, right after school let out."

  He looked at Johnny. "You gotta have cable, kid?" Johnny shook his head.

  "Good. Cause they ain't a
ny such animal here. Or phones. Got lights,

  though, and hot and cold running water." He hooked a thumb at Kate.

  "Better'n her dinky little cabin."

  A brief silence. "I'm sorry, Ethan," Kate said, sounding as inadequate

  as she felt.

  Johnny gave Ethan a curious look. "Don't worry," he said suddenly, "he's

  not."

  "Johnny."

  Ethan stared into the blue eyes so unlike his own. "It's okay, Kate," he

  said finally. "He's right. I miss the kids." He smiled again, and again

  transformed himself from someone who ground men's bones to make his

  bread into yet another rueful Alaskan backwoodsman who had picked the

  wrong woman. "But that's about all I miss."

 

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