Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 11 - The Singing Of The Dead
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"Hi, Ethan."
"Hey, Billy. How you doing?"
"Same old, same old. How's Margaret?"
"I wouldn't know," Ethan said easily. "She split."
"Oh. Oh. I didn't know. I'm sorry, Ethan."
"Don't be."
"Couldn't take breakup in the Park?"
"I think it was more that she couldn't take me, anywhere."
Billy gave a short, surprised laugh. "You seem to be fine." He looked
from Ethan to Kate, and then to Johnny. "Hey, Johnny."
"Hi, Mr. Mike."
"Call me Billy, Johnny. How do you like living in the Park?"
The two of them went ahead as Ethan and Kate brought
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up the rear. Ethan cocked an eyebrow at her. "What?" she said.
"Billy'll have us shacking up all over the Park by tomorrow morning at
eight A.M.," he said.
She shrugged. "You got a problem with that?"
"Well," he said, drawling it out. "I'd prefer that it was true."
She stopped on the upslope to the A-frame and looked him straight in the
eye. "I understand your need to reinvent your manhood after being
deballed by Margaret, Ethan, but don't imagine for one moment that I'm
going to help you. I had a man, a real one, a good one. He was all I
needed."
"He's also dead," Ethan said. "It's been over a year. How long do you
think you can go without?"
"A lot longer than you, evidently," she said, and was up the hill and
into the A-frame before he could reply.
"Shugak!" somebody yelled, and she heard the whisk of rubber tires over
hardwood floor a second before something hit her in the back of the
knees, and she fell into Bobby Clark's lap. He gave her a smacking kiss.
"Goddamn! About time you showed up!"
Mutt tried to jump on top of Kate, to the peril of all involved.
"Goddamn!" Bobby roared again. "It's that goddamn wolf again!"
Kate shoved Mutt down, where she stood with her tail wagging furiously
and an adoring gleam in her eye. "That chair ought to be a registered
weapon," she said, struggling to her feet.
Bobby's grin was wide and lecherous. "The better to get you horizontal,
my dear."
Dinah, flushed and laughing, was stirring a pot of something at the
stove. Katya, perched on Old Sam's hip, saw Kate, held out her arms and
launched. Kate caught her, just. "Hey," she said.
"What?" Dinah said.
"This kid needs a new diaper."
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Dinah nodded at the corner the crib had taken over. "Have at it."
Grumbling, Kate did so, Katya laughing up at her from the crib and doing
her level best to prolong the process as long as possible.
There was a hooraw at the door and they both turned to look as Peter
Heiman walked in, shaking hands with Bobby and coming over to kiss Katya
on his way.
"Give me my woman," Bobby said, snatching Katya.
For the first time, Kate noticed a big glass jar on the floor next to
the door, filling slowly with bills of one denomination or another. She
hadn't noticed a jar when Bobby and Dinah had hosted Anne.
"Come on, Pete," Bobby said, wheeling around and heading for the pillar,
Katya's wild giggle floating behind, as well as a pained cry when Bobby
rolled over someone's toes. "Now, everybody, listen up. I'm pirating a
little radio air for Pete tonight. We're all warmed up and ready to
roll. Be prepared to make noise!"
A roar rose from the very overcrowded room, and the loudest yell came
from Mac Devlin, the gold miner whose toes Bobby had rolled over, which
led Kate to wonder how much Bobby's aim was off.
Pete sat down next to Bobby, and they both squared up to the microphone.
Bobby flicked a few switches; there was some kind of electronic whine
and into the mike Bobby said, "Okay, folks, it's show time. Bobby's all
talk, all the time, when it isn't all music all the time, one and only
Park Air. Tonight my guest is Peter Heiman, who is running for
reelection this year. Pete, how the hell are you?"
"Fine, Bobby, just fine."
"Running behind in the polls, are you?"
"More like neck and neck, Bobby. I have a fine opponent this year, and
she's working hard at throwing the bum out of office."
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"Well, if she's successful, at least you won't have to work with Ramona
Halford anymore."
Pete was surprised into throwing his head back and laughing out loud,
and the crowd joined in. "That is surely the truth, Bobby."
"So why do you want to be reelected? My god, man, you have to live in
Juneau five months out of the year. You have to associate with
politicians on a regular basis. You've always got to have your hand out
so you'll have enough to run the next time. The media is breathing down
your neck every minute, so you can't take a whizz without it showing up
on film at eleven. That's no life for a decent human being, and yet
you're sitting up and begging for it. Tell me why."
Pete leaned forward and looked Bobby straight in the eye. "Babes, Bobby.
Politicians get all the best babes."
It was Bobby's turn to throw back his head and whoop with laughter.
Next to Kate, Dinah said, "Did I tell you about the new documentary I've
got going?"
"No," Kate said. "What's it about?"
"Grab up a pop and I'll show you."
On the opposite side of the pillar from Bobby's radio station equipment,
Dinah had carved out a small workspace. She commandeered a couple of
chairs and put them in front of a television monitor hooked to a VCR.
Her camera was tucked carefully into the top drawer of a filing cabinet
beneath the counter, the bottom drawer having been reserved for exposed
videotapes, all carefully labeled. Dinah selected one and inserted it
into the VCR.
Kate, watching the monitor, said, "That's the mine ruins, isn't it?"
"Yeah."
"You doing a documentary on the Kanuyaq Copper Mine?"
"Yes, I am. See, here's the idea-everybody knows
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about the TransAlaska Pipeline, how long it took to get approval, the
design, the construction; everybody always whoops and hollers about how
it's the biggest manmade construction effort in the history of the
world, gets compared to the pyramids and the Great Wall of China."
"Yeah. So?"
Dinah waved a hand at the screen. "What about Kanuyaq? The guys who
built that puppy humped the parts over rivers and glaciers, on their
backs until they got the railroad built. They had hot running water in
the living quarters at the mine by 1907. In 1907 most of the rural areas
of the South Forty-eight didn't even have cold running water. Here they
had electricity and telephones." Her smile turned sly. "And then there
was Niniltna."
"What about Niniltna?"
"Niniltna was party town for the miners. Niniltna was where the miners
got drunk and got laid. Just four miles down the road, all the saloons
and booze and gambling and hookers a man could want."
"I didn't know Niniltna was a party town. Not something Emaa or Auntie
Vi ever told me."
"Yeah, well, there's a lot of that going around," Dinah said. "I took a
> drive up to Fairbanks last month, ran into someone at the library who
quoted me a little poem about how California got started. It goes like this:
The miners came in "49, The whores in '51. And when they got together,
They produced the native son."
Kate laughed.
"Substitute "99 and "01 and that could have been written about Alaska.
She said that half the first families, first while families anyway, were
made up of gamblers-turned-bankers and
dance-hall-girls-turned-respectable-matrons, only of
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course none of their descendants want to admit it today."
Kate sat up, a stray thought running loose through the back of her mind.
Trying to round it up she almost missed Dinah's next words.
"You read up on that time, it wasn't the greatest for women. The only
jobs open to them were housework or prostitution. No penicillin, either,
if it comes to that. You've got to admire somebody willing to take on
that job just to make a better life for themselves." She thought. "You
forget, until you start on a project like this."
"Forget what?" Kate said, still distracted.
"How much was going on here at the same time it was going on everywhere
else. The dance halls in Dawson. Front Street in Nome. The Line in
Fairbanks. The hook shops in Cordova." She smiled. "And the Northern
Light in Niniltna."
"That was-"
Dinah nodded. "That's what they called the whorehouse in Niniltna, or
one of them."
The Northern Light. She'd heard that name before.
"Kate, are you okay?"
Kate refocused and saw Dinah staring at her with a puzzled expression.
"Sure. Why?"
"I don't know, all of a sudden you looked way far away."
"You mentioned running into someone in Fairbanks," Kate said. "The one
who told you the poem."
"What about her?"
"It was a woman?"
"Yes."
"Do you remember her name?"
"No. She was just someone who was looking up stuff the same place I was.
The same newspapers, magazines, like that. We didn't talk that much."
"What did she look like?"
Dinah thought. "Heavyset. Curly gray hair. Big eyes,
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long curly eyelashes, made her look like a ten-year-old. She-" She saw
Kate's expression. "What?"
"Have you got a working computer here?"
"Sure." Dinah scooted over one space, and Kate reached into the daypack
and pulled out Paula's computer disk, a second copy of which Kenny had
made for her.
Kate moved her chair in front of the keyboard. This time she ignored the
dirt file and clicked on novel, the seventh draft. She scrolled down a
few pages. Paula's typing was similar to her handwriting, chaotic, with
a lot of ellipses, dashes, exclamation points, and pairs of brackets,
every kind there was to be had on the keyboard, holding in inserted
thoughts and comments that were straining to burst free and spill all
over each page.
Kate found the find function and used it. Dinah, reading over her
shoulder, said in a marveling voice, "Wow. Did you know?"
Kate shook her head and scrolled slowly down the page.
"Do you think it's true?"
"She was a researcher. She took notes on what she found. If it was
written down right in the first place, then it's true."
"Wow," Dinah said again. "Do you think Anne would talk about it on
camera? It'd make for a great segment in the documentary. The
candidate's family history. And maybe soon the Senator's family history."
"The filmmaker raising her ugly head," Kate muttered.
"Hey, I resent that remark."
There was laughter on the other side of the pillar. Dinah peered around
the counter. "Bobby and Pete are signing off. Hey, who's the blond
stranger you rode in with?"
"Ethan Int-Hout. Abel's son."
"Oh yeah." Dinah sighed, a sigh of pure female appreciation. "My,
doesn't he look just fine." She turned her head to look at Kate, one
speculative eyebrow raised.
"Johnny's staying with him while I'm on the road."
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"Huh. Johnny going to stay in the Park?"
"He says he is." Kate closed the file and pulled the disk. "Dinah?"
"What?"
"Hang on to this disk for me, okay?"
"Okay."
"And don't tell anyone what's on it."
Dinah's gaze sharpened. "Why not?"
Kate sat back in her chair, linked her hands behind her head, and stared
at the ceiling, unmoved by the increasing sound of rising voices and
loud music and clinking glasses from the other side of the pillar. "Did
I ever tell you about Darlene?"
"Darlene? Darlene who?"
"Darlene Shelikof. She's Anne Gordaoff's cousin, and her campaign manager."
"Don't think I've had the pleasure."
"We went to school together."
"At UAF?"
"Yeah. Anne wasn't there. She was going to nursing school Outside
somewhere, I think. But Darlene was there, and she was running elections
even then."
Dinah was mystified. "And this concerns you how?"
"The student government elections. She was behind one of the candidates
for student body president. What the hell was his name?" She shrugged.
"I can't remember, and it doesn't matter now. What does matter is that I
was curled up in a chair in the Student Union Building late the night of
election day, kind of in a corner back where no one could see me, and I
saw Darlene go into the student-union office. That was where the ballot
box was being kept until the official count the next morning. I got
curious-"
"Always your problem."
"-and I followed her, and I watched through a crack in the blinds, and I
saw her fill out a bunch of ballots and stuff the ballot box."
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Dinah's eyes were round. "You're kidding me!"
"No. Darlene's been stealing elections for a long time."
"You think she's stealing this one?"
Kate thought it over. "Not stealing, no. A student election at a small
college, sure, if she thought she could get away with it. But a
statewide election, with all the lights on? No."
"What, then? Why are you telling me this story?"
"She told me after I hired on to Anne Gordaoff's campaign that there