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

by The Singing Of The Dead(lit)

  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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
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  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.