KS17.5 - Cherchez la Femme

by Dana Stabenow

  Cherchez la Femme

  Dana Stabenow

  Author’s Note

  T. Jefferson Parker, he of Charlie Hood fame, was putting together a collection of short stories about fishing, and he asked me for a contribution. The anthology was published by The Countryman Press, and all royalties from sales went to two charitable organizations, Casting for Recovery and Project Healing Waters, which both help cancer survivors on the road to recovery by taking them fly-fishing.

  So, the story had to involve fishing. Mine does, several kinds, but only in the most glancing and peripheral way, in the vocations of the Balluta brothers. But mostly, I wrote this story because my friend Pati came home from one trip to the Interior with a true story about a man, a woman and a road grader.

  It was just too good to pass up.

  THERE IS ONE in every village.

  They don’t have to be young, they don’t even have to be pretty, but there is one woman in every Alaskan village whose very presence short circuits something in the nervous system of the male of the species, resulting all too often in events that spiral into intervention on the part of a professional peace officer.

  In the case of Dulcey Kineen, the femme fatale came in a pleasant enough package, medium height, nice curves, regular features, but with Dulcey it was more attitude than pulchritude. Her hair was thick and black and she wore it long, in a shining cape she could toss around her shoulders, made a man think about wrapping it around his fist and hanging on for wherever the ride took him. Her eyes were a warm, wicked brown, and they had a way of peering from beneath already thick lashes so heavily mascaraed it seemed her lids couldn’t be strong enough to hold them up. She had a habit of using her tongue to toy with her teeth and the corners of her mouth, which she left open much of the time, as if she were about to take a bite out of whatever was nearest, fry bread, smoke fish, that sensitive spot beneath a man’s left ear.

  Most women hated her as much as their men loved her, of course. Margaret Meganack had erupted into Bobby Clark’s house when Marvin, that morning’s guest on Park Air, had strayed from the advertised topic, which was the current red salmon run or lack thereof, to wax eloquent on what Dulcey hadn’t been wearing at the Roadhouse the night before. Dinah had banished both Meganacks from the property and interdicted Marvin as an on air guest ever again, and given the subsequent repair and replacement bills you could see her point.

  And then there was the time Dulcey ran for Miss Niniltna and won, allegedly on the strength of the blueberry pie she baked for the talent competition. That was fine until Auntie Vi accused Dulcey’s cousin Norma Ollestad of baking the pie for her, which no way Norma would have done, given that little episode a while back involving Dulcey, Norma, and Norma’s boyfriend Chuck. Turned out Dulcey really had baked the pie but she was stripped of her crown anyway. Never a good idea to show up on the auntie radar, and Dulcey had made what Auntie Vi, with uncharacteristic restraint, had described as a nuisance of herself with more than one of the boarders at Auntie Vi’s B&B. Auntie Vi could give a hoot what Dulcey did with whom, but she resented the need to wear earplugs to bed every night in her own home.

  Sergeant Jim Chopin said that fully a third of the local callouts to the Niniltna trooper post involved Dulcey Kineen in some way. Either she was enticing men at the Roadhouse to drink so she could drink with them, or she was seducing men away from their wives and sweethearts, or she was vamping men for cash, moose backstrap or a free ride to Ahtna with Costco privileges thrown in, or spurned suitors were getting drunk and wreaking mayhem and madness on a town too small to ignore either. The incident the previous winter involving Dulcey, Wasillie Peterkin and the road grader was still a painful subject to everyone concerned.

  Dulcey and the Balluta brothers. Anybody should have been able to see it coming. But nobody did, until it was far too late.

  There were three Ballutas, Albert, Nathan and Boris. Their father had been a commercial fisherman, their mother had worked as his deckhand until Albert was seven and big enough to take her place. She returned to their house at the edge of the rickety dock on the river and seldom left it again, the last time when they buried her next to their father out back. She’d been a quiet woman and her eldest, Albert, took after her. He was twenty-eight now, a steady, serious, capable, reliable man. He’d inherited the Mary B. outright, along with his father’s Alaganik Bay drift permit, and fished it every summer, coming in high boat two out of three years and piling up a healthy balance in the bank in Cordova. Winters he worked on the Mary B. in dry dock and on his gear in the net loft over the dock.

  Albert inheriting the Mary B. was a source of friction with the youngest brother. Boris was twenty-two and self-involved, opportunistic, loud and lazy. He fished subsistence when he worked at all, but his smoke fish was the best on the river and, packed in fancy balsa wood cases, twelve eight-ounce jars to a case, sold at a hefty premium to the clientele of Demetri Moonin’s high-end lodge up in the Quilak foothills. He made a mouth-watering caviar from the eggs, too, for a list of subscribers from as far away as New York City, every batch sold out months before it was in the one-ounce jars. It was enough to keep him in beer and Edwin jeans. Boris was also a bit of a dandy, who had been known to fly all the way to Anchorage for the right haircut.

  Nathan, twenty-five, was a typical middle child. He worked summers for Demetri, guiding Demetri’s clients to the best fishing streams in the Quilaks so they could beat the water for record kings. Winters he worked on the Mary B.’s moving parts, paid minimum wage by the hour, and kept all their vehicles running for fun. He was cajoling and conciliatory and could charm the most obstreperous client out of a sulk, which made him invaluable to Demetri, who paid him accordingly.

  They all lived together in their parents’ house, managing to co-exist for the most part in peace, until Dulcey Kineen came along.

  Well, Dulcey didn’t come along, exactly, she’d always been there, born a Park rat to a typical Park rat family, part Russian, part Aleut, part Norwegian. Her father fished and drank. Her mother had babies and drank. The eldest, Dulcey fell heir to the babysitting and housekeeping chores early on. When her mother died her father began to use her as a stand-in for other things as well. She stood it until she was sixteen, when Nick Totemoff told her loved her. It was the first time anyone had ever said that to her. She eloped with him to Cordova that night.

  Nick had been motivated by what young men are usually motivated and he’d disappeared within a month, leaving her on her own. She got a job bartending at the Alaska Club and the tips allowed her to rent a tiny mother-in-law apartment. It was her own home, her first and as it turned out, her only, because her father came into the Alaska Club in the middle of the following fishing season and tried to haul her out across the bar. The damages included her job. The next day, Jim Chopin brought her the news that on the way back to his boat her father had fallen into the small boat harbor and drowned.

  Her next oldest sibling was fourteen. There was no one else to take care of her three brothers and two sisters. She went back to Niniltna, sold her father’s boat and permit to Anatoly Martushev, and that and their quarterly NNA shareholder payments, their annual PFD from the state and their parent’s social security death benefits managed to keep the family together in the little log cabin with the loft. Cramped, crowded, with no running water and an outhouse out back, everyone took turns splitting firewood for the oil drum stove and no one went hungry.

  Which didn’t necessarily turn Dulcey into a pattern card of respectability. There were men. There were a lot of men. She had been forced to a realization of her power early on, she knew how to use it, and it didn’t help that she was a walking, talking example of chaos theory.

 
And so, inevitably, Ulanie Anahonak, that self-appointed moral arbiter of village and environs, took exception to Dulcey’s behavior, and further, took it upon herself to call DFYS. They didn’t show for almost a year. When they did, they spent ten minutes evaluating the situation before scooping up the five minors and shipping them off to four different foster homes in Ahtna, Anchorage, and Valdez.

  Dulcey didn’t fight them. Some said she just didn’t care. Some said she was relieved to be rid of the burden. Some thought she figured she couldn’t win against the state so why try. Instead, she got a job waiting tables at the Roadhouse, in spite of stiff opposition from Jim Chopin, who was already spending too many duty hours breaking up brawls between Suulutaq miners and Park rats fighting over the same girl. Putting Dulcey in the Roadhouse seemed to him like rolling a nuke into a firefight. The resulting explosion was predestined and the fallout would be toxic to everyone in range for a long time.

  To his surprise, indeed, to the Park’s collective surprise, Dulcey managed to suppress whatever incitements to riot she had hardwired into her DNA for the hours she was on duty. Off duty was another matter, and most of her off duty hours were spent at the Roadhouse. Hard to tell when she first started hooking up with the Balluta brothers, and no one ever did figure out if it was serially or concurrently.

  Everyone remembered the fight Nathan and Boris got into that April, though. It had already been a notable evening, what with Pastor Nolan having confessed his affair with Patsy Aguilar, and his wife sitting right there at the congregational table. Then there was the group of climbers who, having summitted Big Bump, had come in for their requisite shots of Middle Finger. It was always fun to see their expressions when Bernie took down the unmarked bottle of Everclear with the forefinger floating in it.

  And then the fight had erupted and spread to engulf Pastor Nolan’s parishioners, the Big Bumpers and the quilting bee in the corner, where it upset three of four Irish coffees. The aunties were pretty pissed about that. So was Dulcey when she had to clean up the mess, and it then became blindingly obvious what the fight had been about, as Nathan and Boris vied with one another to rush bar rags to the scene and then got into another fight over who was allowed to carry the dirtied rags back.

  Dulcey twitched her fine behind around the bar and fixed Bernie with a fiery glance. “I didn’t start that.”

  “I saw,” Bernie said, and got out the baseball bat. Fortunately Albert walked in and broke it up before Bernie had to break any heads.

  Now, you’d think that would have been it, spleen vented and honor satisfied, but instead things seemed to escalate. That spring Nathan guided a couple of salmon hunters to one of the secret streams where Kanuyaq River kings of trophy size came home to spawn, and found Boris there already, tromping back and forth in hip waders, muddying the waters and scaring everything with a fin two creeks away. He was carrying a dip net. Said he was fishing for female kings so he could make his caviar. Nathan’s clients, who had had the look of very good tippers, didn’t so much as get their lines wet.

  A couple of weeks later Boris was fixing to set up his fish wheel. It was a lot of work and Boris didn’t put in that kind of effort unless he was certain of a return, so he’d spent the previous week watching the river, watching the reds run, and coming up with a pretty fair estimate of when they’d hit his beach. Once the fish wheel went into action it stayed in action until he’d caught his limit, when he packed up the whole shebang and brought it and the fish back to the house.

  Only this time, once he’d loaded all the parts in his pickup, driven the forty miles to the trailhead, humped all those same parts down a mile of rough and more or less vertical trail to the gravel bank, and started to assemble the wheel, he found all the bolts missing.

  There were other incidents, and the queer thing was that in between them Boris and Nathan maintained an outward civility. They would show up at the Roadhouse and take turns courting Dulcey, where under Bernie’s watchful eye they were as polite as ever they could be, to each other and to everyone else.

  “It’s real amusing to watch,” Bernie told Jim, “but it feels like sitting on top of an unexploded bomb.”

  Jim talked to Albert, who shrugged. “What am I supposed to do? Give ‘em a time out? They’re adults, they screw up you can lock ‘em up.”

  “Maybe it’s Dulcey oughta be locked up.”

  That earned him a sharp look. “Not her fault my brothers are making fools of themselves over her.”

  Jim, ashamed, said, “I know. I’m just worried somebody’s going to get hurt.”

  The Mary B. strained at her moorings. “Boys aren’t dumb. They’ll figure things out eventually. Meantime, I got a tide to catch tomorrow and too much to do between now and then.” Albert laid a hand on the gunnel and vaulted on board.

  The Park waited, holding its breath.

  · · ·

  The very next day Jim was in his office at the post when he heard a commotion in the outer office. He got to his door in time to see Boris Balluta, covered in blood, yelling, “She’s dead! She’s dead, I’m telling you, she’s dead and he killed her!”

  “She,” it transpired, was Dulcey Kineen, and it wasn’t Boris’s blood. He’d acquired it when he went to Dulcey’s place, went in and found it on the couch, on the coffee table, and on dish towels and hand towels wrung out into the sink. He’d torn the place apart looking for a body and hadn’t found one, which he guessed was how he’d gotten blood all over himself.

  Jim went to the tiny little cabin. Dulcey wasn’t there. The scene was about as bad as Boris had described it, and since Auntie Edna lived next door and kept a weather eye out for the goings and comings of her neighbors she had seen Boris go in that morning and come out again not five minutes later not quite as spick-and-span as he had gone in. He had placed no bundles in his pickup, however, and buried nothing mysterious in the yard. He had shouted greetings at Albert, who had only a moment before loosed the lines of the Mary B. prepatory to heading downriver to Alaganik Bay and the next fishing period.

  Jim, his heart sinking, drove around looking for Nathan’s pickup. He found it parked in front of the post office and Nathan himself coming out the post office door. He gaped at Jim’s questions. No, he hadn’t been to Dulcey’s place in the last twenty-four hours. He hadn’t seen Dulcey in five days, come to that, he’d been up at the lodge guiding Demetri’s fishermen to trophy mounts for their corner office walls.

  At the post Nathan saw Boris’s red-stained hands and launched himself at his brother. Jim pulled out the Capstun, told the dispatcher to vacate the premises, and emptied the canister on the brothers. He followed Maggie outside and held the door closed until the brothers stopped screaming and started sobbing. Afterward, he put Boris in one cell and Nathan in another, over the vociferous objections of both.

  No Dulcey, a lot of blood, and two brothers in a fierce competition for the affections of the same woman. Demetri Moonin confirmed Nathan’s alibi. Auntie Edna confirmed Boris’s.

  Jim went back to Dulcey’s cabin with his murder bag.

  One room with a loft for sleeping, the cabin’s floor plan was a familiar one. On the ground floor there was a wood stove for heat, an oil stove for cooking, a sink in a counter with shelves above and below, a small dining table with mismatched chairs, a battered couch, a coffee table, some brick-and-board shelves. Electricity had been added post construction and there were wires tacked to the log walls everywhere.

  One end of the dark blue corduroy couch was stained with blood. He took photographs.

  The coffee table, a relic of George Jetson’s living room circa 1962, was staggering on the corner nearest the stained end of the couch. Upon closer examination, that corner had a preponderance of blood on it, along with a quantity of short dark hairs.

  On the table were two place settings, plates, knives, forks, and the remains of a pork chop, green bean and applesauce dinner, for the most part unconsumed. Meal, interrupted.

  Upstairs, the bed looked lik
e it had been hit by a tornado, covers slid to the floor, bottom sheet holding on by one corner, mattress cattywumpus on the box springs. Dulcey’s clothes were stacked neatly on more brick-and-board shelves under the eaves, though. He couldn’t tell if any were missing. He took more photographs, bagged the sheets from the bed, some samples from couch and coffee table and sink, and returned to the post, where he spent some time writing a timeline of events, and some more time in thought.

  Then he sent for Kate.

  Kate Shugak was a lifetime Park rat and a private investigator who took on the occasional job for the state at his behest. Five feet, a hundred and twenty pounds, hazel eyes tilted at the corners, short cap of black hair, she had a presence that reminded him of that line somebody, maybe Shakespeare had written, ‘Though she be but little, she is fierce.’ Her size was indeed deceptive, for she was strong as an ox, quick as a snake and smarter than the average bear. She was also related to most of the Park either by blood or by marriage, which made her a walking, talking repository of Park history going back generations. Whoever was voted most likely to, odds were Kate knew them, knew where they lived, and could bring them in without mess or bother. She was sort of like shorthand for the Alaska state trooper presence in the Park. The Park covered twenty million square acres and he was its only trooper, so she was the perfect resource, in more ways than one.

  She listened without comment as he ran down the story of Dulcey’s disappearance, said, “I’ll be back,” and left without speaking to Boris and Nathan.

  · · ·

  “You unbelievable morons,” Kate said two days later, Jim thought pretty dispassionately under the circumstances. Kate’s tolerance for idiots was very low and well-known. “She’s not dead.”

  Both brothers sat up at this. “What do you mean?” Nathan said.

  “I saw the blood!” Boris said.

  “It was all over you!” Nathan said.