Frozen Sun

by Stan Jones

Martha smiled. Chukchi had all of twenty-five hundred people, but that was still five or six times bigger than Ebrulik. She recalibrated her expression to a frown, and tried to look like she was wracking her brain for a solution.

  Leonora was just a village girl. But she was smart, she spoke Inupiaq fluently, and she worked hard. With a little coaching and a few nudges in the right direction, Leonora might go off to the University of Alaska in Fairbanks or Anchorage, and come back a real teacher some day.

  “How about you take one week off, then you come back for the rest of the school year?”

  Leonora’s face lit up in a big smile, and she raised her eyebrows in the Inupiat sign of assent. “Thank you. I’ll tell my family you’re good person.” She rose to go.

  “How’s your father’s boat, anyway?”

  Leonora stopped with a confused look on her face. “It’s good, I guess.”

  “It never breaks down?”

  “Sometimes, maybe.”

  Now Leonora looked wary, probably scenting the trap. Martha closed the girl’s folder and dropped it into a wire basket on her desk. “I sure hope it doesn’t break down when it’s time for you to come in from camp at the end of next week.”

  Leonora sighed. “I’ll tell Dad to check it real good before we go.”

  Martha raised her eyebrows in assent and Leonora hurried out.

  It was still more likely than not, Martha calculated, that Mr. Oneok’s outboard would suddenly and inexplicably malfunction when the time came to bring Leonora back to Ebrulik to catch the plane for Chukchi and her job at the high school. But Martha decided she would manage somehow if boat troubles kept the girl in muskrat camp. She could use the unapproved week’s absence to gain some kind of leverage. Maybe she would make Leonora start work early in the fall, to help get things organized for the next school year.

  Martha smiled as Nathan came in and took the seat vacated by Leonora. “So nice to see you, Sweetie! How long since you came over to the house? Almost a week?”

  Martha studied her son closely as he squirmed for a defense to the implied accusation. His color was good, he looked well-fed and well-rested. Martha didn’t fully approve of Nathan’s girlfriend, Lucy Generous, but at least she appeared to be taking good care of him.

  “I’ve been going to the Rec Center at night,” he said finally. “I put on a little weight over the winter.”

  “Maybe it’s somebody’s cooking making you fat. I could give that Lucy some of my diet recipes. Bean sprouts, yogurt, tofu, brown rice, I got a recipe for whatever you want.”

  Nathan grimaced, then at last came up with the smile she had been fishing for. “I think I’d rather spend a year working out than five minutes eating that stuff. Anyway, I didn’t come to talk about food. Or Lucy.”

  She smiled back. “You mean it’s official business? I didn’t know you Troopers would arrest a mother just for trying to do her job.”

  Nathan pulled a notebook from a back pocket and a pen from his shirt. “Actually, it is official business. Do you remember Grace Palmer?”

  “Of course I remember her. Prettiest girl in school. Smartest one, too. Valedictorian, Miss North World, then next thing you know, she’s on Four Street. So sad, ah?”

  “What happened to her?”

  “That Anchorage is a bad place for Eskimo girls. Boys, too. Couple times when I went to Anchorage before I met your stepfather, I went on Four Street, all right, and I almost thought about staying there, it’s so - - anyway, that’s why I always …” She stopped, realizing the conversation was heading for the place where she always started fighting with her son. Well, he was on duty, maybe he would let it pass. No, he had that look on his face.

  “That’s why you always worried about me when I was growing up down there? You should have thought about that when you adopted me out to white people.”

  When the Troopers had posted her son to Chukchi two years earlier and they had begun having this argument, Martha would always start crying at this point, and she felt her eyes misting up now. But, from long practice, she was learning to hold back the tears and just get through this ordeal they seemed to have to repeat every few months.

  “But you know how it was, Nathan. I was only fifteen when I had you. All I wanted to do was drink and party. I knew I couldn’t take care of any baby.” She heard the pleading in her voice and was ashamed to realize once more that if she could just convince Nathan she had done right to adopt him out to two teachers at Chukchi High, then she would be able to believe it herself. “I knew Ed and Carmen would take good care of you, even if they move to Anchorage. Didn’t they?”

  “Yes, but like baby-sitters. Not like real parents.”

  “That’s not true. I talk to Carmen every couple weeks when you’re growing up down there. She loves you very much. Ed, too, I think. And you always seem pretty happy when you’re little boy and they bring you up for visit.”

  Nathan sat silently, thinking this over. At first he looked sulky, his eyes and lips pinched, then his face opened up in that honest way he had. “I guess I know that. I’m just saying how it felt to me when I would think about you sending me away.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. l did the best I could, even if it was wrong.”

  “I know you did, Aaka. Up here I know it, anyway.” He tapped his right temple, then dropped his hand to his heart. “Down here, I just can’t seem to learn it.”

  She had to wait a moment before she could say anything. “Well, I’m just glad the Troopers sent you up here for your first assignment, even if you didn’t want to come.”

  She waited, hoping he would say he had changed his mind about Chukchi, about being near her again. Or at least something polite and vague enough to allow her to believe what she wanted.

  But not Nathan, not with his painful honesty.

  “Aaka, I’m still putting in papers every time there’s an opening in Anchorage,” he said gently. “I’ve told you that.”

  “I know, Sweetie, I know.” She misted up again and this time Nathan reached for his handkerchief. She shook her head to stop him. “Don’t mind me.”

  She opened a drawer in her desk, found a Kleenex, and dabbed her eyes. “Anyway, why you interested in Gracie Palmer?”

  “Jason Palmer asked me to find her just now. He said her mother has cancer and wants to say good-bye.”

  “Oh, so much trouble in that family. Jeanie die huffing snowgo gas, then Gracie end up on Four Street. And now Ida is sick.”

  “Jeanie? Who’s Jeanie?”

  “That’s Gracie’s little sister. Couple years after Gracie go off to college, they find Jeanie slumped over the gas tank of her snowgo with her parka over her head, she’s already dead.”

  “Jason didn’t say anything about that.”

  Martha looked at him, marveling at how little this smart son of hers knew about people. “Maybe it’s not an easy thing for a father to talk about.”

  “I suppose not,” Nathan said with a depressed look. “We’ve had three huffing deaths just since I got stationed here. It’s like an epidemic all over the Bush, from what I see in the Trooper reports from the other villages.”

  Martha nodded, still pondering the bad luck of the Palmer family. “You could go to our library, see the yearbooks from when Gracie’s here. She’s on every other page, seem like. She’s perfect girl till she get to Anchorage. That happen sometimes.”

  “Lots of times, I guess.” Nathan shook his head and wrote something in his notebook, then put it away. “These kids, huffing, Four Street … Anchorage, the villages. What happens to them?”

  “Nobody know, Sweetie. I’m just glad it never happen to you.” She looked at Nathan, and gave a little prayer of thanks that her own bad behavior as a young girl hadn’t killed both of them. “You want to come over for dinner Sunday? I’m cooking muktuk. Point Hope people already caught four whales this spring and one of my old students said he will send some down tomorrow.”

  She knew that Nathan, despite his efforts not to like an
ything about Chukchi, had developed a great fondness for the succulent strips of whale hide with the blubber still on, especially when it was freshly boiled. “Lucy can come, too.”

  “I’ll ask her. She’s still scared of you. You’ve got to stop asking about her grades at the community college.”

  “Well, I don’t want you marrying somebody dumb.”

  “She’s not dumb and we’re not getting married. We’re just … going out.”

  Martha stifled the impulse to say they were staying in a lot, from what she heard. She was finally learning to avoid fights she couldn’t win, sometimes. “Ah, hah. Well, you tell her I won’t talk about grades if she comes over for muktuk.”

  “I’ll tell her. Good-bye, Aaka.”

  “Bye, Sweetie. You call me about Sunday, ah?” She watched as he crossed the hall to the library. In a few minutes, he came out with four Chukchi High yearbooks under his arm and started down the hall.

  He was overdue for a haircut, she noticed as he put on his Trooper hat. She wondered if that Lucy girl had said anything to him about it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Active stopped on the deck outside the school to savor the spring weather now gracing Chukchi. A blue sky, his face simultaneously chilled by a breeze off the sea and warmed by a sun that would stay above the horizon until August.

  Across Beach Street and fifty yards offshore, Chukchi Bay was a sheet of light too bright for the eye, pools of blue meltwater rippling on top of the ice.

  Between the ice and the shore, spring runoff from the Katonak and Isignaq rivers rushed along the narrow tongue of beach gravel and tundra where the village stood. He spotted the sleek black heads of two seals moving against the current. Did their instincts tell them there would be food upstream now, or were they just restless and curious, like humans at this season?

  A red Honda four-wheeler buzzed north along the gravel of Beach Street, carrying an Eskimo woman with a little girl riding in front of her. The woman’s parka had a hump in the back, and a baby’s head poking out at the neck.

  Active descended the steps and walked to the Trooper Suburban nosed up to the side of the school. He unlocked the door, tossed the Chukchi High yearbooks onto the seat and climbed in. He turned the key and the old rig rumbled to life. The Suburban, he had found in his time in Chukchi, would always run, but never completely right. Lately, the left-turn signal didn’t work unless the headlights were on. So he switched them on as he pulled away from the school, even though the day was so bright they would surely be invisible to other drivers.

  Chukchi was beautiful enough this time of year, he had to give it that. Unless you pulled your vision in from the glories of nature and looked at the town itself, with its square, unpainted wooden houses and straggling dirt streets. The vanishing snowdrifts were disclosing a winter’s worth of dog droppings, caribou bones, discarded trash bags, lost mittens, cigarette packs, and crumpled beer cans. He passed two ravens at work on the rear half of a tortoiseshell cat, the head and forelegs still frozen into a rotting snowbank.

  And all too soon, the sea ice would go out and take the good weather with it. Weeks, maybe months, of fog and wind would ensue, with a day or two of blue sky and sunlight thrown in here and there for torment. Well, if he kept putting in for jobs in Anchorage, he was bound to get one eventually.

  He parked in front of the Chukchi Public Safety Building and went in, the yearbooks under his arm. He stopped at the dispatcher’s station, where Lucy Generous sat speaking into a headset.

  “Uh-huh … uh-huh … uh-huh,” she said, rolling her eyes with each “uh-huh.” She held up a finger to indicate “one minute” and silently mouthed “Elmer.”

  Active nodded with a sympathetic grimace. Elmer Newsome for twenty-seven years had tended the oil furnace at the government hospital in Chukchi, then retired and unexpectedly remained in town. Everyone agreed he was one of those unhappy white men who stay too long in the Bush and find themselves unsuited for life anywhere else. Now he spent most of his time drinking in his cabin on Lagoon Street and calling Lucy and the other dispatchers to demand the arrest of one or another of his neighbors for letting their dogs do their business in his yard.

  Active waited, but the “uh-huhs” didn’t stop. Finally, Lucy shrugged and threw up her hands, still saying “uh-huh” every few seconds.

  He gave up and hauled the Chukchi High yearbooks up the two flights of stairs to the Trooper offices on the third floor. In the reception area, Evelyn O’Brien, the red-haired Trooper secretary, had a headset on and was transcribing from a cassette recorder into her computer. She glanced up, nodded, and looked back at the computer screen without slowing the faint rattle of the keyboard.

  One other Trooper, Dickie Nelson, was present, just visible through the window in his office door. A telephone receiver was crunched between his shoulder and ear, and he was scribbling notes on a yellow pad, saying “yeah … yeah … yeah” as he wrote.

  Active walked into his own office, dropped the yearbooks onto a chair, then went out and stood by Evelyn’s desk. After a moment, she stopped typing, turned off the transcriber, pulled off the headset, and extended it his way. “You volunteering to finish this transcription for me? That would explain the interruption.”

  Active raised his hands in supplication. “Sorry. I was just wondering if you knew Grace Palmer.”

  “What, Lucy’s not keeping you busy enough, you’re interested in Gracie Palmer now?”

  “No, this is business.” He told the secretary about Jason Palmer’s request.

  Evelyn laid the headset on her keyboard and leaned back in her chair. “It was Jason this time? Usually it’s Ida begging us to find Gracie.”

  “I guess she’s getting pretty sick.”

  “Yeah, I heard that.” The secretary was quiet for a moment. “Sure, I remember Gracie. Who wouldn’t? Smart, beautiful, and a basketball star. An unbeatable combination, at least in Chukchi.”

  “You didn’t like her?”

  Evelyn looked at him pityingly. “This isn’t dislike, you moron, it’s envy. No one deserves that much youth, brains, and beauty. It’s not fair.”

  “Did you feel better when she hit Four Street?”

  Evelyn blushed a little and looked at her keyboard, which he took as an admission of guilt. But she said, “Of course not. No one deserves that much pain, either.”

  “So what was she like?”

  “She was perfect, like everybody says. She used to baby-sit for us when our kids were little. Matt and Lisa loved her—she used to tell them Eskimo stories, even did the dishes and vacuumed the house, which is something that no other baby-sitter I ever had, white, Eskimo, or Korean, ever did.”

  Active returned to his desk and opened the first of the annuals, from Grace Palmer’s freshman year. As Martha had suggested, she was everywhere and in everything—girl’s basketball, orchestra, the yearbook staff, Honor Society, Inupiat Heritage Club, even Math Club. She was gawky and hadn’t gotten her hair right yet, but the beauty she was about to become already showed. So did the defiance that stared out of the Miss North World mural at the high school.

  The other three annuals were the same, except that activities came and went. Math Club and the yearbook work vanished, to be replaced by cross-country skiing and the school newspaper. And she had matured into the Grace Palmer of the mural.

  Next, he opened the photofinisher’s envelope Jason Palmer had given him, expecting to find a few shots of Grace in the last couple of years before she left for Anchorage.

  Instead, he saw what amounted to her life in pictures—shots from infancy through high school. He arranged them in his best guess at chronological order and flipped through the stack.

  Pictures of the baby Grace alone, Grace with an Eskimo woman he took to be Ida, the mother, and Grace with a girl he took to be Jeanie, the younger sister. A picture of toddler Grace strapped into the right seat of a Cessna Bush plane with a young Jason Palmer at the controls in the left seat.

  He stopp
ed at a picture of Grace at a birthday party, maybe her fifth or sixth. She stood in the middle of the room in a frilly white dress and shiny black patent shoes and a little gold tiara. Fancy clothes for the Chukchi of that day, even for a teacher’s daughter, Active thought. Her hands were clapped together, her eyes wide, her mouth open in delight. She was looking at something, probably someone with a gift, off-camera to the photographer’s left.

  He stopped again at a small version of the mural shot—the beauty with the inaccessible eyes, in her Miss North World regalia.

  Active sighed, put the photographs back in the envelope, and replaced the rubber band. It was his impression all girls became angry when they hit puberty. It had happened to Kelly, his own little sister—his adoptive sister, really, the natural child Ed and Carmen had produced three years after adopting him.

  In a single year, Kelly had turned from a sweet gawky twelve-year-old soccer fanatic into a screaming demon who didn’t like anything about her life. Not her parents, especially not her mother, not her adoptive brother, not their house in Muldoon, not the school she went to, not soccer, not anything. It all sucked.

  Yet Kelly, like the sisters of Nathan’s friends, had gotten through it somehow, had steadied up and turned human again when she was about seventeen. Now she was happily married to a federal wildlife biologist in Ketchikan and expecting her first child around Thanksgiving.

  No such luck for the Palmer sisters, apparently. Whatever it was that hit girls at puberty, it had killed Jeanie and never let go of Grace Palmer, had dragged her onto Four Street in Anchorage and left her there. Maybe it was because she was from the Bush, or because she was half Inupiaq and half white, but she was probably beyond redemption, if she was still alive.

  In any event, her redeemer would not be Nathan Active.

  He picked up his phone and punched the speed dial code for the Anchorage Police Department. “Hi, it’s the Troopers in Chukchi,” he said when a dispatcher answered. “Is Dennis Johnson in?”

  “Hang on, I’ll check,” the dispatcher said. She sounded like her vocal cords had been tanned into shoe leather by whiskey and smoke.