KS13.5 - Wreck Rights

by Dana Stabenow

  The old man was Moses Alakuyak, short, thick through the chest and shoulders, with his Yupik mother’s brown skin and flat cheekbones and hints of his unknown Anglo father in his height, in the high bridge of his nose, the roundness of his eyes, the suppressed curl and color of his hair. Some called him a shaman. Some called him a drunk. On occasion, he was both, and neither.

  This morning he was a teacher of tai chi, a sifu, and he demanded his student’s full attention and submission. He got it, too, the little despot, Wy thought without rancor. He was standing to her left and a step behind. She could feel his eyes on her, checking the level of her hands, the depth of the cup of her palms, the tilt of her chin, the angle behind her bent knees, the straightness of her spine, the focus of her eyes.

  “Lower,” he said. “How’n hell you supposed to strengthen your thigh muscles for the real work if you don’t push them in Horse Stance?”

  She made a silent and anatomically impossible suggestion as to where he could put his Horse Stance, and bent her knees, which after ten minutes were starting to tremble, to a deeper angle. Her center of gravity seemed off, and she swayed back an inch or so. There. She was supposed to feel the balls and heels of her feet rooted to the earth, the crown of her head suspended from a string. Root from below, suspend from above. Her breathing deepened. Her eyelids lowered, her gaze unfocused on the horizon.

  The sneaky little son of a bitch waited until she was completely engrossed in the first position of the Yang style of tai chi chuan before he brought out the big gun. “How long you gonna wait before you talk to Liam again?”

  She couldn’t control the start his words gave her, but she could — and did — bite down on her verbal response. She said nothing, trying to recapture the peace of mind that had been hers only moments before.

  “It’s going on three months, Wy,” Moses said. He stood upright and walked around to face her. “Too stubborn, is that it? Too damn proud to make the first move?”

  She stayed in position, staring straight ahead as if she could bore through his skull with her eyes. If only.

  He waited. He was good at it. It was six a.m. on a sunny Sunday morning in July. The birds were singing or honking or chirping or croaking. At the foot of the cliff the massive Nushagak River moved by with stately unconcern. Wy had a six-week contract to fly supplies into an archaeological dig ten miles west of Chinook Air Force Base. Moses had volunteered to take Tim to his fish camp upriver for the silver run, away from the rough crowd of boys he had fallen in with during the school year. He’d learn to run a fish wheel, salt eggs, fillet and smoke salmon and, she hoped, realize what a rush it was to earn money of his own. Best of all, he’d be out of the reach of his birth mother, who was prone to fly in from Ualik and, after a night at the bars, shove her way into Wy’s house and demand Tim’s return, even if the last time he’d been in her custody he’d wound up in the hospital, broken, bruised and bleeding.

  All in all, the next month looked positively rosy, especially when she compared it to the previous three years. She was marginally solvent, content in her work and her family, and if the lawyer handling Tim’s adoption called a little too frequently for more money, it was summertime and the flying was frantic. She could hear the cash register ringing on every takeoff and the cash drawer sliding out on every landing.

  So what if it was three months since she’d spoken to Liam Campbell? There were other fish in the sea, and in particular, there were a whole hell of a lot of other fish in Bristol Bay, with and without fins. The small voice that pointed out that she had allowed only Liam to swim up her stream and spawn could and would be ignored. She was content. She used the word like a mantra. She didn’t need anything more — or anyone else — to complicate her life.

  Wy became aware that her teeth were clenched so hard that her jaw ached, and made a conscious effort to relax.

  Moses, naturally, persisted in attempting to suck the well-being right out of her. “You want him. He wants you.” Her sifu snorted. “And it sure as hell ain’t like you’re getting it anywhere else.”

  “I have Tim to consider.” Her voice had a pronounced edge to it.

  Moses pounced. “Give your menfolks a tad more credit than that, Wy. Liam’s a grown man, and he had a son of his own. He knows how to handle kids. And as for Tim, hell, having a man — the same man — around on a regular basis would be a new experience for him. Would teach him all men don’t get drunk and hit. A good thing for him to learn, I’d’ve thought. Of course, that’s just me.”

  Wy felt her teeth clamp together again. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Oh, really? How did you mean it, exactly?”

  Her neck got warm. “I meant that I have to look good to the adoption board. They look at your lifestyle, at your habits.”

  “Ah.” Moses gave a judicious nod. “I see. So the adoption board won’t let kids go to prospective parents who have the audacity to have healthy, normal lives of their own.”

  The warmth seeped from her neck up into her cheeks.

  Moses’ eyebrows, thick and black, rose into interrogatory points. “Anything to say about that? Besides ‘I’m sorry for trying to bullshit you, Sifu’?”

  She hadn’t.

  “Good,” he said briskly. “On your feet.”

  She rose shakily to her full height, five feet eight inches; five inches taller than Moses, not that it ever seemed like that much of an advantage. Her dark blond hair, streaked with gold by the summer sun, had come loose from its ponytail. Thankful to have something to do with her hands, she made a business out of tying it up again. That done, there was nowhere to run. She blotted her forehead on her sleeve and sought refuge in work. “I’ve got an early morning flight, I’d better get going.”

  “You said some harsh things to each other in May,” Moses said to her retreating back. “Hurtful things. Especially you.”

  That did it. She spun around, her face furious with anger, shame and guilt. “I handed him my heart and he ate it for lunch. I am not on the dinner menu!”

  Pleased with what she felt was a splendid exit line, she turned to march up the stairs and into her house.

  From behind her she heard Moses’ voice, acerbic and irascible as always. “How about dessert?”

  The slam of the door was his answer.

  The old man sighed and shook his head. “Youth is wasted on the young.”

  He waited for the voices to kick in. For a change, they didn’t. Mostly they were insistent, forceful, regular spiritual bulldozers, determined to make him a legend in his own time.

  He stepped to the edge of the cliff and looked at the beach below, strewn with boulders and tree trunks, the occasional fifty-five-gallon drum, the odd Styrofoam cooler. It wasn’t that far down, but far enough. He could shut the voices up for good. That option had always been open to him, from the time he first heard them when he was twelve and they made him tell his mother that his father was going to kill her. She didn’t listen, of course, no one ever did, but that didn’t make the voices let up any.

  They seldom told him anything straight out, though, and they had a marked tendency to be both insistent and peremptory. Sometimes he wondered if, in seventy-eight years of a very full life, he had perhaps acquired enough wisdom to make his own judgments, his own rulings, his own estimates of what kind of trouble his extended family, stretching from Newenham to Nome, needed his help to get out of.

  Not that anyone ever looked happy when they saw him coming. Foresight, the open eye that looked inward to the future, was more of a curse than a blessing. Uilililik, the Little Hairy Man who snatched up children and took them away, never to be seen again, was more welcome in the villages than he was.

  He thought of Cassandra, and sighed again. Doomed forever to tell the truth, and equally doomed forever to be disbelieved. She’d died young. Lucky for her. He stepped back from the edge of the cliff, from the fifty-foot drop to the vast expanse of southward-moving water. It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the la
st.

  As he walked around the old but well-maintained house set twenty-five feet from the cliff’s edge, he thought about the float plane on a short final for the elongated, freshwater lake that served as Newenham’s seaplane base. Wy had been right; that had definitely been someone not flying their own plane. There was no need to be at full RPMs on final; it didn’t do anything but make a lot of noise and move up the time for an overhaul. Hell, there was no need to be at full RPMs after takeoff, or at least not for long. Once the plane was in the air the pilot should back off on the throttle and the prop pitch. If he didn’t, the mini-sonic booms generated by the tip of the prop exceeding the speed of sound were enough to rattle windowpanes for a mile in every direction. The sound was a dead giveaway that the guy or the gal on the yoke didn’t have to pay to fix his or her own engine. Or had enough money not to care about maintenance costs.

  But this pilot — ah, now, this pilot. Moses smacked his lips and grinned. There had been a gold shield on the pilot-side door, bright with gilt. Wyanet Chouinard might fancy herself content with her life, but she was about to receive a first-class wake-up call. Good.

  Meanwhile, he squinted at the sun. Seven-thirty, he estimated, give or take five minutes. “About time for a beer.”

  He might not be able to drown the voices, but he could and would drown them out, at least for a time.

  · · ·

  He heard Charlie crying and sat up to go to him. A solid object whacked him in the forehead. “Ouch! Shit!”

  Liam Campbell sat in the narrow bunk, rubbing his head. While his vision cleared, he remembered that he was still sleeping on board a twenty-eight-foot Bristol Bay gillnetter that had seen better decades. Since moving onto the Dawn P, he had begun to think longingly of his office chair, which had served as his bed for the first month of his posting to Newenham, in spite of the fact that the chair had a tendency to roll out from under him at three in the morning. At least his office had a higher ceiling than the low bulkhead on this frigging boat. And it didn’t smell like an old, wet wool sock.

  The pain in his forehead faded and he remembered what had woken him: the sound of his dead son’s tears. Before the sense of loss could take hold and pull him under, as it had too many times before during in the last two years, he swung his feet to the floor, and swore again when he splashed down into a half inch of water. His office didn’t need its bilge pumped out every morning, either.

  This was all Wy Chouinard’s fault. He wasn’t sure why, but if he gave himself some time he was sure he could come up with three or four excellent reasons.

  He struggled into sweats that felt clammy against his skin and stamped up to the harbormaster’s office, where the public shower was, for a change, empty. He stood a long time under hot water, and felt marginally better when he came out. Shaved and with his uniform on, he felt almost human again. He checked the knot of his tie, smoothed the line of his left lapel and stepped back for a critical survey of as much of him as he could see in the square little mirror hung over the sink.

  The uniform was barely three months old, and tailor-made back in Anchorage. He would have hotly denied that he liked what the uniform did for his looks, but he put it on and his shoulders straightened, his spine stiffened and his chin went up. He’d wanted to be an Alaska state trooper from the time one had visited his fifth-grade class at Chugach Elementary, and nothing that had happened to him since, not even the deaths in Denali Park, had changed the feeling of pride he took in donning the uniform. It was fabric, that was all, a mixture of cotton and wool and synthetic fibers, a slack bundle of blue and gold on the hanger; but on him, it was a tacit investment in the might and majesty of the law.

  He plucked a piece of lint from the bill of his cap, pulled it on so that the bill was at precisely the right angle over his eyes and emerged onto the dock to come face-to-face with Jimmy Barnes, the Newenham harbormaster.

  Most days, Jimmy looked as if he should have been wearing a red suit with big black boots, with a white beard down to his waist. This morning, his usually rosy round cheeks were pale. Liam’s hand dropped instinctively to the polished butt of the nine-millimeter Smith and Wesson automatic holstered on his right hip. “What’s the matter, Jimmy?”

  “I got an emergency call. A boat was found adrift off the coast about halfway between here and Togiak.” He swallowed hard, as if convincing his stomach contents to stay where they were. “Crew of seven. All dead.”

  “Seven?”

  Jimmy nodded. “Seven.”

  Christ. Liam absorbed this in silence. “Who found it?”

  “The Jacobsons on the Mary J were drifting just outside of Metervik Bay. They saw the Marybethia come out of Kulukak on the tide. They didn’t think anything of it until it got closer. Larry said you could see she wasn’t under power, and then when they got closer you could see the burn marks on the cabin. She was low in the water, too.”

  “Burn marks? It had been on fire?”

  Jimmy nodded, looking sick, and Liam understood why. On a boat, there was nothing worse than a fire. On a boat in Alaskan waters, which were an average temperature of forty degrees and where hypothermia set in after two minutes’ immersion, it was especially deadly. Nowhere to run, no place to hide. “Didn’t they have a skiff, or a life raft?”

  Jimmy nodded. “Both. The skiff was tied off to the stern, and the raft hadn’t been popped. Maybe the fire burned too fast. Maybe they were all asleep, and died of smoke inhalation.”

  “Where is the boat now?”

  “Larry and his dad towed it into Kulukak Bay. It’s tied up to a slip in the small boat harbor.”

  “Can you fly in? Is there a strip?”

  Jimmy nodded. “A long one. There’s a road to a gold mine a couple of miles inland. They fly supplies into Kulukak strip on a Here at least once a week.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Jimmy.” Liam pulled the billed cap with the Alaska State Troopers insignia on the brim low over his eyes and headed for the line of vehicles parked between the two docks leading down into the boat harbor. The white Blazer with the same insignia on the door as his cap was midway down the row.

  He didn’t start the engine at once. What would be the best way to approach her? It didn’t have to be personal; he was a state trooper, she was a pilot, there was a case, he needed a ride, the state paid top dollar. Pretty simple.

  Except that nothing was simple when it came to Wyanet Chouinard. Perhaps it would be best to keep things formal. A phone call from his office, instead of a knock on her door. A door that could be slammed in his face. Of course, she could hang up on him, too.

  He drove to the post, a small, neat building with a parking lot out back enclosed by a twelve-foot chain-link fence. When he had arrived in Newenham that spring the lot had held a sedan, a pickup and a dump truck. The Cadillac Seville had been sold at auction for restitution of a fine imposed on its drug-dealing owner, and the International pickup had been ransomed by an angry fisherman who had thought parking in a handicapped zone was his god-given right. Liam still hadn’t been able to find out who the dump truck belonged to, or why it had been impounded. It had since been joined by a gray Ford Ranger pickup with 103,000 miles on it, the vehicle of one Gust Toyukak, who had drunk and driven one too many times. License and truck both had been deemed forfeit by the local magistrate. The pickup would be sold at auction later that year.

  He walked up the steps and opened the door.

  There was someone sleeping in his chair. Shades of Goldilocks, although this Goldilocks was older and a brunette. The chair was tipped back and her feet were crossed on his desk. She was in uniform, dark blue pants with gold stripes down the side seams, long-sleeved lighter blue shirt with dark blue pocket flaps, dark blue tie. If he was not mistaken, the uniform of his own service.

  He stepped inside and let the door shut, loudly. The woman sat up with a jerk, took Liam in with one glance and popped to attention. “Trooper Diana Prince, reporting for duty, sir.”

  She was almost as tall as Li
am was, at least six-one, and that before her boot heels. With her boot heels she looked him straight in the eye. Everything else was height-weight proportionate, in spades. Her eyes were a clear gray and thickly lashed, her black curls were cropped short and her pale skin looked susceptible to sunburn. There was a set of suitcases stacked near the door, maroon leather, bulging at the sides.

  “I’m sorry, sir, I overnighted in Lake Clark on the way down from Anchorage and left pretty early this morning. I guess I was tired when I got in.”

  “How’d you get in the door?”

  “Mamie at dispatch has a key. Sir.”

  “Hold the sirs, I’m a trooper just like you,” Liam said.

  Maybe now. She didn’t say the words out loud, but they hovered in the air regardless. She knew his history, all right.

  Just as well. Better she should know the story going in, how Liam had been busted down from sergeant to trooper because five people had frozen to death in Denali Park on his watch. He hadn’t been the trooper who had made the decision not to check out the call, but the two troopers who had worked directly under his supervision had, and someone’s head had to roll to satisfy the community’s not altogether unjustified cries for blood. So Liam had been broken in rank and transferred in disgrace to Newenham, a town of two thousand on the southwestern edge of the Alaskan coast. The next landmass over was Siberia, and Liam was well aware of the inference to be drawn.

  It had taken thirty-six hours for that family to die, and for the troopers not to respond to repeated calls reporting their disappearance. It had not been the Alaska State Troopers’ finest hour, and Liam felt very much on probation in his new posting. It didn’t help that the dead were Natives, and that a large portion of the population of Newenham and its environs was also Native.

  All this Trooper Diana Prince would know, and probably more. It seemed to Liam as if the last two years of his life had been lived largely on the front pages of every daily newspaper in the state; the automobile accident, Jenny’s coma, Charlie’s death, the trial, the drunk driver’s second arrest by none other than the surviving member of the family, Liam himself. The deaths in Denali were the nadir of three horrible years, all of which made for fine reading in the Sunday papers, oh yes indeed.