reenter the building. No alarm was sounding, so they must have disabled it.
On stage, challenger Anne Gordaoff and incumbent Peter Heiman were being
miked, and moderator Mary Frances Chernikof stood frowning at a fistful
of notes, all three flanked by the stars and stripes on one side and
eight stars of gold on a field of blue on the other. In the audience, one
74
woman had brought her knitting, another a mukluk she was trimming with
caribou. A group of old men sipped something out of a paper bag and
muttered among themselves. A group of young men were bent over a Game
Boy. A few young couples were taking advantage of the dimmed lights to
neck, and small children ran off an excess of energy in running up and
down the steps bisecting the bleachers, shrieking with laughter at the
booming noise they gave off. A mixture of Athabascan, Aluutiq, and
English made a low background hum, and a crew sporting jackets with the
gaudy logo from an Anchorage television station appeared to be having
trouble with their cameras.
Billy Mike stood next to Kate looking intent and serious, as befitted
the tribal leader of the Niniltna Native Association. Outwardly, he was
careful to maintain an impartial air, and Kate saw the incumbent bend a
long and thoughtful look on Niniltna's chief. If Anne Gordaoff had
Billy's endorsement as candidate for state senate, Anne Gordaoff was as
good as sworn in. Kate could see other Park rats following Pete's gaze
and coming to the same conclusion,
"Kate?" a voice said.
Kate looked around and saw a short, plump redhead beaming at her.
"Tracy? Is that you?"
"Kate! I heard you were coming, and I couldn't believe it!" The redhead
threw her arms around Kate and hugged her.
"Tracy Huffman," Kate said, freeing herself with difficulty. "What the
hell are you doing in Ahtna? Last I heard you were reporting for the
Daily News-Miner."
"I was, from the day after we graduated. I was with them until this
April. Then Darlene came knocking at my door with an offer I couldn't
refuse." She saw Kate's expression and added, "You couldn't, either, I
hear."
Kate, about to deny it, decided to laugh instead. "Yeah, well. I guess
I've sold out."
"Doesn't take long, does it?"
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"No, it sure doesn't." She looked with affection at Tracy's good-natured
face, at the thick hair pulled back from her brow with a tortoiseshell
band, at the big blue eyes sparkling with the sense of fun that had
gotten them all into trouble more than once way back when. She was
dressed in a long-tailed green silk shirt, black stretch pants, and
ballet slippers. There was a black portfolio over one arm and a
clipboard in the other. "What are you doing for the campaign?"
"I'm the flack." Kate looked puzzled, and Tracy translated. "Media
consultant."
Kate provided her own translation. "You talk to reporters."
Tracy's blinding smile beamed out again. "You've always been better than
average bright, Shugak. I've always liked that about you."
Mutt interjected with a polite sneeze, and Tracy looked down. "You must
be Mutt." She offered a fist, palm down. Mutt sniffed it, sneezed again,
and looked at Kate as if to say, I've had enough of dodging people
trying to step on my toes, thanks.
Kate looked around, assessing the room, and picked a spot against the
wall opposite the stage. Moving toward it, she said, "I got your letter,
and the poem. It meant something, Tracy. Thanks."
"It helped me some when my dad died. I thought maybe it might you, too.
Look, Kate, I won't go here more than once, but I want you to know I'm
sorry as hell about Jack."
Kate could tolerate Tracy's sympathy, just. "Thanks."
"I have to say, I'm glad you made it, though."
"Yeah."
Tracy gave her a sharp look. "One day, you'll be glad, too."
I don't know, Kate thought. I don't know if I want to be.
"So," Tracy said, giving a group of men standing not
76
very far away an obvious and provocative once-over, "I hear you're our
new security."
Kate found an overlooked chair, unfolded it, and stood on it. "That's me."
Tracy's attention was divided equally between the group of men, who were
by now looking back, and her conversation with Kate. "Jim Chopin talk
you into it?"
Kate looked down from her scan of the crowd. "No. How does he come into it?"
"He's the one who told Darlene to hire you." Looking toward Darlene
standing on the stage conferring with Anne, Tracy added, "I'd have liked
to have been in the room when he did to see just how well that went over."
"I thought it was all Billy's idea."
Tracy shrugged. "I only know what they tell me." She gave a theatrical
sigh. "Who's the famously hunky Jim Chopin sleeping with nowadays, anyway?"
Kate stared hard at a high school boy who was lighting up what she was
fairly Certain was a joint. He saw her looking and choked on the first
inhalation. The smoke went down the wrong way. Coughing, tears streaming
down his face, he stumbled out of the building. "I wouldn't know."
"Because I am most definitely available."
"Congratulations," Kate said.
"What's wrong?" Tracy eyed her with an appraising expression. "You sound
a little-"
"What?"
"I don't know, a little testy, I guess."
"Just hungry, I missed my dinner. I met the new owner of the Ahtna Lodge
when I checked in."
"Who, Tony? Isn't he precious? No hope there for the heterosexual woman,
I fear."
Kate grinned. "All I care about at the moment is how good his cook is."
Tracy sighed. "Still thinking with your stomach, Shugak. I feel like I'm
right back on the fourth floor in Lathrop
77
Dorm." She watched Darlene aim a long, expressionless look at Kate. She
watched Kate meet it with a long, expressionless look of her own. "Oh
yeah, right back there. You still pissed at her? It's been a long time."
"I never did like her much," Kate said, "even before."
"I noticed," Tracy said. "We all did. You didn't have two words to say
to anyone that first year, but you had even less to say to Darlene
Shelikof. Did you guys know each other before UAF?"
Kate watched a thin young man wedge himself into the first row of the
bleachers on her left, his head shaved bald beneath a Cordova District
Fishermen United cap. No visible tattoos. He was alone-no, a woman
appeared and plunked down in his lap and he laughed and kissed her. Kate
dismissed him as a suspect at once. Skinheads never laughed, and they
almost never got laid. "No," she said to Tracy. "I didn't know her before."
A stocky young man with his mother's dark hair and eyes and his father's
quick grin had been introduced to Kate as the candidate's son, Tom. He
came up to them, his eyes admiring the redhead. "Hi, Tracy." He spared
Kate a brief glance and no greeting. "Mom wants you."
Tracy hitched up her portfolio and said, "Duty calls. Later, Kate."
"Later," Kate echoed.
The group of men watched Tracy walk past with identical needy
expressions on their faces. One of them was the fisherman who'd given
Kate a ride in from the airport. Never say die.
There were two television cameras trained on the stage, one at the head
of each of the aisles formed by three blocks of metal folding chairs, by
now most of which were full. So were the bleachers.
The Gordaoff family was in the center of the front row, and a stream of
what Kate from her experience with Emaa holding court at public
functions Instantly recognized as
78
wannabe toadies formed a more or less continuous line in front of them.
Erin, the candidate's daughter, had a nondescript face and a build that
combined her father's lean with her mother's padding to make a figure
that gave every man in the room whiplash when she walked by. She sat
next to a tall blond man, introduced as Jeff Hosford and Erin's fiance.
Erin's senior by at least ten years, he had the blunt features and the
pumped-up look of a weight lifter. His right hand rested on the back of
Erin's neck. Erin stayed motionless beneath that hand, as if she were on
a leash. Kate had been surprised when he was introduced as an attorney
with a firm in Anchorage and the campaign's chief fund-raiser. He looked
more like muscle for the mob. His smile had been automatic and without
feeling, his handshake damp, and he had tried a little too hard.
Peter Heiman came in and was immediately surrounded by supporters of his
own, fewer in number, and whiter. Kate wondered how indicative this was
of the district as a whole. Maybe Darlene was right, although she hated
to entertain that notion for more than a second at a time.
The two candidates took up positions behind their podiums, the two
people vying to represent one of the most geographically, culturally,
ideologically, and economically diverse regions in a state where, in a
gathering of four people there are five marriages, six divorces, and
seven political parties. Kate thought of the Park, and she thought they
were both crazy, one to want to keep the job, and the other to want to
take it away from him.
The Park, twenty million acres of mountain and glacier and river and
plain, deep in the heart of Alaska. North and east were the Quilak
Mountains, south was Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska, west
was the TransAlaska Pipeline and the Alaska Railroad. Its biggest river
was the Kanuyaq, two hundred and fifty miles of twist and turn, broad
and shallow and filled with sandbars to the south, narrow and deep and
boulder-filled to the north, with a
79
thousand creeks and streams draining into it. Its biggest mountain was
Angqaq Peak, known to mountain climbers the world over as the Big Bump,
eighteen thousand feet and change of rock and ice, attendant peaks of
twelve and fourteen and sixteen thousand feet forming an entourage.
For every mountain there was a glacier, thick tongues of millennial ice
receding reluctantly to reveal a wide, high plateau that sloped into
rolling foothills and a long, curving valley that drained into the
Kanuyaq. The Kanuyaq was the Park's well and its breadbasket. It was
also the Park's major highway, navigable by boat in summer and by
dogsled and snow machine in winter.
One road led into the Park, maintained, barely, by a single grader
stationed at Ahtna, the town that marked the junction between the
Kanuyaq River Highway and the spur of gravel leading to Niniltna. The
grader took a week to scrape the road one way into Niniltna, spent the
weekend at Bernie's Roadhouse, and then took a week to scrape back to
Ahtna. The road stood up under this assault, as it had been first laid
down as a railroad grade a hundred years before, engineered to get the
copper out of the Kanuyaq Copper Mine and down to the port of Cordova.
When copper prices fell in the thirties, the mine closed and they pulled
up the tracks of the Kanuyaq & River Northern Railroad. Park residents
followed behind, digging out the ties for use as needed in shack
foundations, raised-bed gardens, leek bridges. Bernie had scavenged the
last of them, back when he built the Roadhouse in the early "70s, to
hold up the bar. The railroad roadbed was still flat, more or less,
still driveable, more or less, or it was in summer. In winter it wasn't
plowed, and the Park lay inviolate behind twelve-foot drifts of
impassable snow. The most important traffic over it was the fuel truck,
and the most important trip it made was the last delivery before Labor Day.
Boats, snow machines, and dogsleds were all very well, but the preferred
method of transportation was always and
80
ever air. Everyone with a homestead had their own airstrip, and for
those with lesser acreage there was the forty-eight- hundred-foot strip
that ran right through downtown Niniltna, which served as the base of
operations for George Perry's semi-irregular air taxi service. When
George wasn't beating the water at Rocky River, or trysting with the
latest girlfriend at his hunting lodge south of Denali.
Kate shut down on all thought of George's lodge and focused on the
stage. It was cool in the cavernous room but with this many people it
wouldn't stay that way for long. The smells of dried salmon and fresh
moose and curing hide and wood smoke saturated the air. She knew many of
the people there by sight; others were new to her. Nobody looked like
they were carrying, other than those who had knives strapped to their
belts, although with Alaska's new concealed-carry permit, available to
anyone who trundled themselves down to the local police station to take
the class, someone in this crowd could have a rocket launcher stuffed
into their boot and she'd never know it.
There was constant motion. In a crowd this big, there were always people
on their feet, moving to a new seat, to the water fountain, to the
bathroom, outside for a smoke or a drink or a toke. But on the whole,
attention was focused on the stage, and on the debate. It surprised her.
She had thought that rural Alaska had given up on politics years ago. Of
course, Anne Gordaoff was one of their own. She] was probably related to
more people in the Park than Kate was.
Anne Gordaoff was forty-six years old, a chunky woman with short brown
hair in an untidy Dutch boy haircut, big] brown eyes with laugh wrinkles
fanning away from the corners, a pursed rosebud of a mouth that opened
to reveal large, white, even teeth, and a double chin that went away
when she raised her head to smile. She smiled a lot.
She was dressed in a conservative brown pantsuit looked straight out of
the Eddie Bauer catalogue, and Kate
81
was willing to bet that the lightweight T-shirt beneath the blazer was
one of a dozen in the same color. All the better to disguise the wear
and tear of travel. Practical. Comfortable. Conservative, except for the
dancing-shaman brooch that dominated a lapel. If Kate had had a left
nut, she would bet it all on the possibility that a Park artist had made
>
the brooch and that the artist was in the audience tonight.
The debate moderator was a plump woman with a neat cap of short blonde
hair. She was also smart, articulate, and well informed on Alaskan
issues. She pushed both candidates right into the deep end with a
question on subsistence. Anne came down hard in favor of rural
preference, Peter playing the same tune in a lower key and, as a
consequence, sounding less radical and less angry.
Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 11 - The Singing Of The Dead Page 10
