Tundra Kill

by Stan Jones

  He drove to the spot, parked the Chevy in front, and studied Arctic Hair. It was well kept for a Chukchi house. No broken windows, no missing shingles, no dead snowgos in front, and the paint was still a deep red, not blasted down to a dull rust by wind and snow. Two rooms, he guessed, with a tiny kunnichuk in front. A wooden sign on the front identified it as the Arctic Hair, illustrated by a painting of an Arctic hare stretched out in full sprint.

  Active smiled a little at the pun as he noticed another thing: Arctic Hair had trees in front—two spruces, two cottonwoods, all healthy and tall by Arctic standards. He couldn’t recall ever seeing anything bigger than alders and dwarf willows on the spit of gravel and tundra where Chukchi stood. How had Milton Sipary coaxed trees to grow so large in front of his house?

  He went through the kunnichuk and knocked on the inner door. There was a stir inside, then the door opened to reveal a lean Inupiaq with an angular face.

  “I’m Milton,” he said. “Come on in.”

  He was in his late fifties, maybe, silver hair in a kind of crew cut, a ring in one ear. He looked healthier than Active had expected. Also straighter, which made Active wonder what he thought a gay man should look like, and why?

  “Nathan Active.”

  “I know who you are.” The hairdresser studied him without offering a hand. “Your hair’s not that long.”

  Active took off his parka and hung it on a hook by the door. “It’s kind of a special occasion.”

  “And you’re the new police chief. And you’ve never been here before.”

  He brushed a hand over his hair again. “I could use a trim.”

  “You said that on the phone. Am I in trouble?”

  “Of course not.”

  Sipary tipped his head toward the barber chair in the middle of the room. Active settled in and noticed a slight smell of cat box mixed with the aroma of hair spray. Little dishes of food and water were set against a wall. There was no sign of the cat, though. All Things Considered played from a radio that shared a shelf with a cigar box, spray bottles, gel tubes, and hairdressing gear. Next to it were framed certificates that looked military, including one with a medal on a ribbon.

  Sipary spotted him checking out the lineup on the shelf. “I guessing you won’t be wanting any product?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Sipary draped the cape around Active’s shoulders. “Just a trim?”

  “Just a trim.”

  Sipary took scissors from the shelf and Active watched him work in the mirror above it. His hand was light and sure, the same delicate touch as a house dog sniffing the cuffs of a new arrival. Sipary seemed to relax, and hummed little snatches of melody as he worked.

  How to get into it? “They say people tell hair stylists everything,” Active said at last.

  “That’s somewhat true,” Sipary said. “At least I find out how the kids are doing and who’s sleeping with who, if it’s women.”

  “And if it’s men?”

  “How’s fishin’, how’s huntin’, how’s the weather?” Sipary said with a little chuckle. “I like the women better.”

  “Who doesn’t?” Active said.

  Sipary seemed to tense a little, and Active wondered how to walk back what he’d said. But it was Sipary who eased the moment.

  “I’m sick, you know.”

  “I heard that.”

  “Mm-hmm. But not what you might be thinking. It’s nothing you can catch.”

  “I wasn’t worried.”

  “Mm-hmm. That’s why I didn’t want to cut your hair. I’m tired all the time. I’m only going to cut hair one more month.”

  “Are you on chemo or anything?”

  In the mirror, Sipary shook his head. “I was and it went away. But it came back. So now I’m done with all that.”

  “You’ll stay in Chukchi after you quit cutting hair?”

  Sipary lifted his eyebrows in the mirror. “Mm-hmm. I’ve got relatives in Anchorage, all right, but most of my family and friends are here, so this is more home.”

  “I’m sorry for your trouble, Mr. Sipary.”

  “I don’t complain. My life’s been all right.”

  Sipary snipped away as Active tried again to come at his question.

  “I like your trees,” he said finally. “Nobody else in Chukchi has trees in front of their house.”

  Sipary smiled in the mirror. “My mother had a secret.”

  Active lifted his eyebrows in the Anchorage expression of inquiry.

  “You plant them on the east wall. That way, they’re protected from the west wind, and they get the light of the rising sun in the coldest part of the day. It bounces off the wall and they get it twice.”

  “Ah,” Active said. “I think my house has a pretty good east wall, all right.”

  “Then you should plant some trees over there.” Sipary pulled the cape off Active’s shoulders and shook it free of clippings. “But that’s not why you’re here, ah?”

  “No, it’s not,” Active said.

  “And you’re not like me.”

  “Ah, no, that’s not it. I’m…I’m with Grace Palmer.”

  “A beautiful woman. If I wasn’t like me, I’d like to be with her, I think.”

  “I’m very lucky,” Active said.

  “So why are you here, then?”

  “Did you know Pete Wise?”

  “The guy who was run over? A little, not very well.”

  “Was he, ah…”

  “Like me? No.”

  “You sound sure.”

  “Pretty sure, all right. My naluaqmiut friends call it gaydar. It’s almost always right.”

  “And Pete didn’t trip yours or anyone else’s?”

  “Not that I ever heard of.” Sipary paused. “But I could check around. People tell their stylists everything, all right.”

  “Thank you.” Active handed him a business card. “How much for the trim?”

  “It’s twenty-five.”

  Active found two twenties in his wallet and passed them over. Sipary put them in the cigar box and returned with a ten and a five.

  “No, you keep it.”

  “I probably won’t need it,” Sipary said. “But it can’t hurt.” He put the bills back in the box.

  Active put out his hand. Sipary hesitated, then took it.

  “Good luck on your journey,” Active said.

  Sipary lifted his eyebrows, yes, and studied the business card. “I’ll call you if I hear something.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Tuesday, April 15

  THE SUN was sliding toward the northwest horizon as Active pulled his crew-cab to a stop at Grace’s house. Nita burst out, threw an armful of sleeping bags into the dog sled hitched behind his snowgo, and started to lash them in place with yellow polypropylene line.

  He studied her in the slanting light. She was coltish now, all energy and enthusiasm and drama, her body a little ahead of her coordination, and starting to look enough like Grace to spook him sometimes.

  She straightened, examined her lashings, then spotted him with his arm out the window of the Chevy and his official cop mirror sunglasses down over his eyes.

  “Uncle Nathan! You ready? I got all our stuffs on the sled. Me and Christina are gonna win the sheefish derby!”

  “Both of you? How is that possible? I thought there was only one first place.”

  “We made a pact. We’re both gonna win, like first place and second place or something, then we’re gonna share the prizes equally. There’s, like, an iPhone, some mukluks, a beaver hat—I’ll give you the beaver hat—a caribou parky.”

  Active frowned as he walked over to the sled. “You two are gonna share an iPhone maybe? How’s that gonna work?”

  “It’ll be so cool. Each of us will have it for a week and we’ll tell all our friends. And we’re gonna record the voicemail message together—like a duet?—and it’ll say you can leave a message or you can call either one of us at home and then we’re gonna put our
home phones on it. Cool, ah?”

  “Pretty cool, all right. But what if I try to call you and Christina answers?”

  “Duh! She’ll say, ‘It’s Christina, Nathan. You could call Nita at home.’”

  Active grinned. “That’s a great plan. What could possibly go wrong.”

  “Arii, you always do that. You’re a—what is it Mom says?”

  “Curmudgeon?”

  “That’s right, a great big curmudgeon. You should learn to be happy. It’s not that hard.”

  “The world needs curmudgeons,” he said. “We take care of the worrying so regular people can be happy. Like you.”

  Active put his agnosticism on hold long enough to send up a small prayer that the girl would never have to unlearn happiness, as her mother had done. In that space, Nita dashed over, mounted the running board, and put her cheek against his.

  “Poor Uncle Nathan. Such an old soul.”

  “What?” he said as she sprinted for the door. “Where did you hear that?”

  “Nelda Qivits told me,” she shouted as she raced inside. “It’s the same as a curmudgeon, but more lonely.”

  He stared after her, then pondered the words as he checked the load on the sled. What else did Nita and the tribal healer talk about?

  He shook his head in resignation—no man could understand women, even little ones—and followed Nita inside. He found Grace in the kitchen with a red Igloo cooler abrim with supplies, plus two wooden jockey boxes, one topped off, the other almost so.

  “Think you got enough stuffs there?”

  Grace dropped a package of Oreos into the not-quite-full box. “Shut up if you want these with your milk tonight.”

  She waved the Oreos at him. His mouth watered.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “But it’s only one night and Leroy’s ice camp is just up by the Point. We could drive back to the Arctic Dragon if we get hungry.”

  “Nuh-uh, no way,” Grace said. “Fish camp is fish camp. You don’t break the experience in the middle. You come back when you come back, and that’s that.”

  AN HOUR LATER, Active cut his engine and coasted the Yamaha to a stop at Leroy’s ice camp. It consisted of a white canvas wall tent with a stovepipe that poked out a rear corner of the roof. The west wall—the one against the wind—was stacked with firewood scavenged off the beaches or cut from the scrub spruce that started a mile or two inland. A rusty bow saw lay atop the pile.

  He swung off the seat, stamped a few times to loosen his joints, unzipped his parka, threw back his hood, and pulled off his goggles and neoprene mask. He turned to his womenfolk, as he found he thought of Grace and Nita these days.

  Just their noses and goggles showed amid the cocoon of sleeping bags and caribou hides they’d used for cover on the way out. They shook their way free. Nita raced to the tent and began to unlace the front door. Grace came to stand beside him.

  “Looks good, ah?”

  He nodded. “The wood rack’s still squared up, no sign anybody’s borrowed any, door flaps still tied in place till Hurricane Nita hit.”

  Nita poked her head out. “Well, come on in. We gotta light the lantern and the halfagascan.”

  “I’ll do the halfagascan,” Grace told Active. “You do the Coleman. Those things scare me.”

  Active had to admit, lighting a pressurized lamp full of camp fuel—white gas, as it was called in the Bush—was not for the faint of heart. First you used a little plunger to pump air into the gas tank to create pressure. Then you turned on the gas valve for a couple seconds to get fuel into the mantle. Then you lit a match and put it though the access hole under the mantle. The mantle caught with a whoosh—hopefully soft, not a boom—you turned the gas on again, and then you were in business. Lots of light and quite a bit of heat, enough in mild weather that you didn’t need a halfagascan. And, as Active also had to admit, it was rare to hear of a tent or cabin blown up by a Coleman lantern, despite the lethal-seeming proximity of gas, pressurized air, sulfur matches, and human fallibility.

  And this time the lighting did go well. He put the match in at the right moment, the whoosh was soft, not percussive, and the tent filled with the homey hiss and buttery glow of a reliable old Coleman on camp duty.

  The other essential in a cold-weather Bush camp was the halfagascan, so-called for a couple of reasons. One was, it consisted of half an oil drum with a door in front and a stovepipe that came out the top and ran up through the cabin roof.

  The second was, the thing’s official name, other than barrel stove, was Athabascan stove. As far as anyone knew, that was because it was so much used by the Athabascans of Alaska’s vast interior after British and Russian fur traders came into the country.

  Somewhere in the migration of “Athabascan” to “halfagascan,” Active sensed, lay a sly Inupiat joke, though he wasn’t quite sure what it was. There were tales of actual warfare and woman-stealing between the Athabascans and Inupiat in the old days before the white man arrived. Maybe enough of the old rivalry still lingered that, by calling the stove “halfagascan,” the Inupiat insinuated the Athabascans were half-men, especially below the belt? Active wouldn’t put it past them.

  At any rate, the halfagascan was perfect technology for its operating environment in the Alaska Bush. Crude, simple, easy to make from scrap materials, and almost idiot-proof. Plus, the halfagascan would burn pretty much anything you threw in it—wood, whale blubber, seal fat, even waste engine oil. You could use it to cook food, boil water, heat the tent, or dry clothes and mukluks—nearly any process that involved the transfer of thermal energy.

  Grace, he saw, was just about set with the halfagascan. Leroy—or whoever had borrowed his camp last—had, as Arctic protocol dictated, left a stack of wood and scrap paper in a box beside the stove. Grace had crumpled some paper, thrown on four or five logs, and poured on a little white gas. Now she struck a match, it flared, she tossed it in, and whoosh!

  She turned and gave him that smile. “Heat from the halfagascan, light from the Coleman, what could make a camp more perfect?”

  He shrugged. “I dunno? Some dinner?”

  She grinned, hands on hips. “Just like a man. Expecting the woman to do all the cooking.”

  He grinned back. “Would you eat a dinner I made? Or feed it to your child?”

  “Mom, don’t let him make dinner.” Nita, out of Grace’s line of sight, winked at Active. “Ple-e-e-ase?”

  Active had to admit, it was maybe the most expert wheedle he’d ever heard out of a kid. He wanted to give the girl a fist-pump, but he was within eyeshot of Grace.

  The audience for their little charade shook her head in disgust. “All right, you two, enough. I know, I know, it’ll be dark before long, it might be too dark already, but you just gotta get your rigs in the water right now in case there’s one or two last really stupid sheefish down there. Don’t even say it, just get out there.”

  They raced out before she could reconsider, pulling on winter gear as they went, and rifled through the jockey box at the back of the sled for the sheefish hooks.

  Like the halfagascan and the white canvas wall tent, sheefish hooks were perfectly suited to their environment. A “hook” actually consisted of the entire rig, not just the hook itself: a boomerang-shaped stick about a foot from tip to tip with a line attached at one tip, a notch at each end to catch the line as you wound it on or off the rig, and a few yards of clear monofilament with a big silver spoon and treble hook.

  But it didn’t look like they would catch any sheefish tonight. They patrolled around the camp looking for an open hole. They found plenty of holes, but all had layered over with several inches of new ice since their last use. Active went back to the sled for the long-handled ice chisel known as a tuuq, picked a hole, and began testing. Impervious to the tuuq. He moved on. He was on number three and thinking of breaking out Leroy’s gas-powered ice auger when Grace yelled from the tent door.

  “Bunnik, phone—it’s Christina.”

  So ended the she
efishing for that night. Nita dashed away. Active gathered up the gear and trudged back to dump it into the sled.

  As he stepped into the tent, Grace had the phone and was saying, “Great, I’ll bring her right down.”

  Active cocked an eyebrow at the two of them.

  “I’m gonna stay with Christina tonight and we’re gonna watch the whale movie on her iPad!”

  “Nice! How many times is this?”

  “Only, um, seven, I think.” She looked at her mother.

  “Or eight,” Grace said. “Maybe nine.”

  “Whatever.” Nita gathered up enough stuffs to get her through the night and dashed out to lash it onto the sled.

  They grinned after her.

  “The whale movie,” Active said. “I forget, is that the inspiring one or the uplifting one? Or heartwarming?”

  “Shut up,” Grace said. “Especially if you want to get lucky.” She waggled her fingers like a masseuse limbering up.

  “Ah-hah. Servile silence it is, then. “

  “Just wait till I get back. We’ll see how silent.”

  She suited up and followed Nita out to the snowgo and soon the machine sputtered away into the distance as he contemplated the prospect of an evening at the mercy of Grace Palmer’s magic hands.

  Maybe it wasn’t real sex, but it was really good sex, especially when it worked right, which it usually did. He just hoped it wouldn’t go sideways from the Pete Wise case and Helen Mercer’s calls.

  WHEN HE HEARD the snowgo returning, he realized with regret he was going to have to play watchdog for one last round. Maybe he wouldn’t get lucky tonight after all. Well, he had emotional intelligence, Carnaby had said. Maybe it would get him through.

  The machine sputtered into silence and in a moment there she was in the doorway, pulling off the helmet, hair tumbling out, face flushed from the ride, rubbing wind-tears from the corners of her eyes.

  “So,” he said. “All good over there at Christina’s folks’ camp?”

  He didn’t see her tense up, but he could feel it.

  “Of course.”

  “Really all good? No men in camp? No liquor?”