A Fatal Thaw

by Dana Stabenow

  “No.”

  You must have had the album out for some reason, Kate thought, but refrained from saying so. Although, looking around, she wasn’t sure anything in this house was ever really put away. “Was Lisa seeing anybody when she… Was there someone special lately?”

  Lottie’s lips twisted in a humorless travesty of a smile. “When wasn’t there?”

  “Anyone in particular?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “Just wondering, Lottie,” Kate said in a level voice. In a way she was relieved at Lottie’s hostility; anything was better than that inanimate, somehow faceless shell. “I knew she was seeing Chopper Jim,” she lied.

  “Who wasn’t seeing him, at one time or another?”

  “Well, there’s me,” Kate said, smiling.

  The shell seemed to crack a little. “That’s right. I remember, you never did much like standing in line.”

  “And then there’s you, so that makes two of us.” Kate tried without success to see through the crack in the shell to what was beneath.

  “Lisa’s thing with Jim ended in February.” Lottie’s voice was without expression.

  “Anyone since then?”

  “It’s nobody’s business if there was or there wasn’t,” Lottie said, her fists clenching. “None of it matters now. Lisa’s dead. Why don’t you just butt out?”

  Lottie was entitled to her grief, and suddenly Kate felt disgusted with her intrusion into that grief. “I’m sorry, Lottie,” she said, rising to her feet. From the corner of one eye she caught a glimpse of a gray streak and turned to see the cat curling into a neat ball in the warm place Kate’s bottom had left. Kate smiled and turned to share it with Lottie. There was no response from that bleak face. “I’m sorry,” Kate repeated, her smile fading. “Oh yeah, I saw George Perry on my way out here. He told me to tell you he needs a guide for a party of Koreans climbing Angqaq.”

  “North or south peak?”

  “He didn’t say. They’re two-timers, though. George said to stop by the hangar tomorrow morning if you’re interested.” Kate gestured at the foil-wrapped package she’d carried in with her. “I brought you some bread. Just baked a batch last week.”

  Without expression Lottie jerked her thumb at the kitchen table, and obediently Kate walked over to it.

  The table wasn’t just crowded with the detritus of life; it was stacked with casserole dishes, none of them touched. Some were just beginning to go green on top.

  “Why do people always bring food?” Lottie said from behind her.

  Kate shrugged. “I don’t know. Because they want to do something, and it’s something to do.” She hesitated, almost spoke, and thought, The hell with it. It can wait. She turned and went to the door.

  “Kate,” Lottie said.

  Kate paused and looked over her shoulder.

  “Why?” Lottie said. “Why did he do it?” She took a step forward and repeated in that earnest, little-girl voice, “Can you tell me why?”

  With her hand on the knob, Kate debated with the grain of the wood in the door for a reply. “I don’t know, Lottie. Who knows what’s going on in the head of someone like that? He’s just another crazy. They happen along sometimes.” She looked up and sucked in her breath.

  Lottie’s pale features seemed blunted somehow, bludgeoned by circumstance into numb acceptance. “Why?” she repeated, looking directly at Kate for the first time. “Why did he do it?”

  Kate, abashed in the presence of so much grief and pain and rage, shook her head without replying. She had no answers for Lottie.

  *

  Outside, Mutt nudged her head against Kate’s hand, but Kate stood where she was. listening. There was no sound from inside the house, nothing to indicate that Lottie had descended from her mountain of grief. Kate turned to her left and went around to the back, moving quietly along the slippery paths.

  The backyard of the Getty homestead looked pretty much like her own, although much less neat. A tumble of empty, rusting fifty-five-gallon drums and five-gallon Blazo tins stood heaped beneath a concealing, albeit rapidly melting, layer of snow. There was an open garage filled with hand tools, a small tractor, a snow machine with a trailer attached, and an old ceramic toilet bowl, minus the tank. There were two small windows over the workbench, both of them so festooned with cobwebs and years of grime that the light they shed on the inside was negligible.

  In front of the barn, hands in her pockets, Kate stared around, her gaze unfocused, letting the feel of the place sink in. It was like a hundred other homesteads all over the Alaskan bush. There was a food cache, a fuel cache, a woodpile, a generator shack and a barn, none of which contained anything out of the ordinary. There was even a satellite dish on the roof of the main house, and Kate wondered idly how much it cost in fuel to run the generator through the winter. She’d given some thought to installing a dish herself, if only for MTV and VH-1 and the Nashville Network.

  A honking wedge of Canada geese flew into view. They were early, but there were a few newly opened leads in the marsh next to Niniltna. It definitely was spring.

  Her eyes followed the flock and caught in a thinning of the treetops behind the barn. She walked around and found a greenhouse, close to and not much smaller than the barn, built of two-by-fours and plastic siding. A profusion of greenery showed through the translucent walls. From the outside, the tall plants filling up the interior in leafy profusion looked like tomato plants.

  From the inside, they did not.

  “Son of a bitch,” Kate said, more in sorrow than in anger.

  She returned to the barn and pulled and shoved her way into the clutter, making no attempt to keep her activities quiet. She moved a crate of eggs to one side, lifted a sack of potatoes into a corner and boosted a barrel of flour which the mice had found before her onto the crate. She found what she was looking for stacked high in the far right corner, beneath a lashed-down tarp.

  She came out of the barn beating the dust out of her clothes and looked up to find Lottie watching her, mute. Kate didn’t apologize. She jerked her head toward the greenhouse. “Did you know? Were you partners?” Lottie said nothing, and Kate forgot about shielding Lottie from the news. “Lottie, McAniff didn’t shoot Lisa.” The other woman’s head snapped up, and Kate nodded grimly. “That’s right. The police ran a test on the bullets they found. They know that the one that killed Lisa came from a different gun.”

  Lottie didn’t move, didn’t speak; her expression didn’t change. It infuriated Kate. “Lottie! If you two were wholesaling dope out of your backyard, any fights you had with one-time or potential customers give us one hell of a list of suspects! Who were you selling to?”

  When Lottie still didn’t answer, Kate, exasperated, went to her and shook her. It was like trying to shake Angqaq Peak. “Talk to me!”

  Lottie’s face seemed to crumple, her voice to shrink. Kate had to strain to hear her. “What?” she said. “What did you say?”

  Again the stumbling, shrunken voice. “Are you going to tell?”

  “Oh hell,” Kate said, disgusted, and left.

  Five

  SHE COULD HEAR the noise from Bobby’s house all the way down to where Squaw Creek joined the Kanuyaq River. Its main component seemed to be stentorian male voices doing a lot of whooping and yelling of song lyrics that were faint but audible, even above the noise of the Jag’s engine, and which grew steadily louder as she approached the house. Just to be on the safe side, Kate parked the Jag down by the creek and walked the remaining distance to the ramp that led up to the front door.

  It was a large cedar A-frame, its roof festooned with a writhing cluster of wiring that led to a 112-foot metal tower rising starkly up out of the backyard like the skeleton of a spaceship. Mounted on the tower were two white drum-like apparatuses facing west and south. A satellite TV dish, pointing low on the Alaskan horizon to pick up equatorial-orbit satellite transmissions, hung precariously from a crossbar above and behind the microwave shots. Antennae of
one kind or another took up what little space there was left, and the whole thing looked top-heavy and Leaning Tower of Pisa-ish.

  The closer Kate came the louder the noise got, and the less melodic the singing. Country Joe McDonald and the Fish were leading the chorus in a verse urging mothers to be the first one on their block to have their boy come home in a box. Normally Kate would have opened the door without knocking and gone in. Today something told her this might be unwise.

  The music stopped abruptly, and from inside the house somebody yelled, “Hey, Bobby, I think it’s time to call it down.” There was a deafening avalanche of approving raspberries, oinks and rebel yells.

  “Okay, okay, you guys,” Kate heard Bobby say in his customary roar. Mutt, standing next to her, recognized his voice and her ears went up and she looked at Kate with a quizzical expression. Kate sat down on the porch railing and prepared to listen to Bobby call whatever it was down. Mutt, knowing what was waiting for her in Bobby’s wood box next to the fireplace inside, sat down herself with a disgruntled thump. There was a kind of rustling from inside the house, as if many were arranging themselves to listen, and then Bobby’s big bass voice, fifty decibels lower than it generally was and unnaturally solemn, began to speak.

  “January 30, 1968,” he intoned. “Tet, the Asian Lunar New Year, begins. The VC break into dry cleaners and steal ARVN uniforms to wear during the attack. They bring out hidden weapons and test-fire them during the holiday fireworks.” He paused. “That night, it begins. The VC attack a hundred major cities and towns in the Central Highlands and Lowlands of South Vietnam.”

  Someone screamed. There was no other word for it, and it was instantly answered by other screams rising together in a single, united, animal howl. Mutt was instantly on her feet, ears back, yellow eyes wide and alarmed. With a hand she noticed was shaking a little, Kate smoothed the hair down on the back of her neck and patted Mutt’s head.

  Bobby’s voice resumed. “January 31, Day 2. The VC attack in Saigon, Hue and the Mekong Delta. They attack and hold the American embassy in Saigon for six hours against Marine counterattack. In two weeks, the VC fights its way into every town and village in South Vietnam.” Bobby paused. “Westmoreland calls for 206,000 more troops and another 15 tactical fighter squadrons.”

  There was another chorus, one of whistles and jeers and boos. “But hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today goes on television and says there is light at the end of the tunnel!” somebody yelled.

  Bobby raised his voice over the resulting uproar. “March 16. My Lai.” Silence. “That same day, Bobby Kennedy announces he’s going to run for president.”

  Someone made a rude comment concerning Marilyn Monroe, and the animals were back in force.

  “March 22. LBJ relieves Westmoreland.”

  The rafters of Bobby’s house resounded with cheers.

  “And on March 31, hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today withdraws from the 1968 presidential race!”

  This time the cheering thundered through the cedar logs and up through the deck of the porch, joyless and unrestrained, a wall of raging sound. Mutt couldn’t stand it and began to bark, and Kate locked a restraining hand in the fur of her ruff.

  “We were there!” Bobby roared. “We were at Hue!”

  “The City of Perfect Peace!”

  “Sometimes you have to destroy a city to save it!”

  “We were at the embassy in Saigon!”

  “Send in the spooks to lead the counterattack!”

  “Yeah! The fucking CIA oughta be good for something!”

  “Spear carrier!”

  “Cannon fodder!”

  “Ass wipe!”

  “Yeah!”

  “We were at Da Nang!”

  “Khe Sanh!”

  “The ghost of Dien Bien Phu!”

  “Nha Trang!”

  “Tan Son Nhut!” Unsurprised, Kate heard a voice she recognized as George Perry’s. “The battle for the body bags!”

  “Yeah!”

  “Gentlemen,” Bobby roared, “here’s to promotion through attrition!”

  “Hear, hear!”

  “Here’s to the fucking Five O’Clock Follies!”

  “Body count! We want a body count!”

  “Briefing by Colonel Blimp!”

  “Here’s to the fucking light at the fucking end of the fucking tunnel!”

  “Fucking A!”

  “Here’s to 206,000 more troops and another 15 tactical fighter squadrons!”

  “And to another 30 MIAs!”

  “Here’s to fragging the fuckers up front!”

  There was an unexpected pause, into which came a voice that sounded aggrieved and a little bewildered. “But we won,” he insisted. “We won Tet.”

  Someone must have hit the Play button on the stereo. The tape slipped a little, and then picked up in the middle of the song, singing whoopee we’re all going to die. Someone began stamping his feet, they all joined in, and again the floor of the porch began to shake.

  “Didn’t we?” the voice said sadly, a plaintive question that reached Kate clearly through the door. “Didn’t we win?”

  The door jerked open. A sepulchral voice announced, “This is the end.” Kate took an involuntary step backward.

  The doorman had smeared black makeup beneath his eyes and wore combat fatigues fraying at knees and elbows. In one hand he held a half-empty bottle of mescal, still with worm; with the other he raised a joint to his lips and sucked in. Kate didn’t know him. She backed up another step and gave an ingratiating and, she hoped, nonthreatening smile. “I’m looking for Bobby.”

  He looked at her without expression. Behind him the singing continued unabated.

  “Who is it, Max?” A voice came from behind him. The owner of the voice wheeled into Kate’s view.

  “Well, hey, gorgeous!” Bobby roared. With a single shove he sent his wheelchair sliding down the ramp, and with a flick of large-knuckled, clever hands turned himself sideways and slid to a hockey stop in a shower of wet, grainy snow. He looked up at her with a grin. “Come to celebrate the retaking of Hue with us?”

  “Bobby, I’m sorry,” she told him, “I completely forgot what time of year it was. You want me out of here?”

  He waved an expansive hand. “No problem. The Fifth Annual Twentieth Anniversary Celebration of the Tet Offensive is open to anybody, especially good-looking round eyes.” He leered at her on his way back up the ramp, and she jumped out of the way. Bobby Clark drove his wheelchair like an offensive weapon.

  The fatigue-clad figure holding the joint at shoulder arms hung around the perimeter like a green-and-brown ghost. His eyes were deeply set and vacant, the pupils dilated out to the edge of the iris. “Excuse me,” Bobby said, “you met Max Chaney yet? No? Max Chaney, Kate Shugak. He works for Dan O’Brian; he’s the ranger took Miller’s place.”

  “Oh.” Kate held out a hand. “Hi, nice to meet you.”

  “My only friend, the end,” Max Chaney replied. He took another toke, pulling the smoke deep into his lungs, and without exhaling vanished back into the house. Kate only hoped he didn’t swell up and explode.

  “Ah, never mind him, poor bastard’s carrying a hell of a load, what with—” A rifle went off somewhere. “Goddammit, you guys,” Bobby roared, a bellow that echoed around the clearing and off the treetops. “I told you to cut that shit out! Everybody’s jumpy enough with that craziness week before last! Cut it out!” There was no reply; neither were there any more rifle shots.

  “What brings you here, sweetcakes?” Bobby waggled rakish eyebrows. “Am I about to get lucky?”

  “You wish,” she retorted. Affronted at being ignored, Mutt reared up and laved Bobby’s face with a damp and loving tongue.

  “Goddam, woman,” Bobby roared, “you brung the wolf with you! How many times I gotta tell you, no goddamn wolves in the house!” He cuffed Mutt on the head. She grinned up at him, tongue lolling out of the side of her mouth.

  “Well, get o
uta the friggin’ doorway, you’re blocking traffic,” he grumbled, shoving open the door. Kate was almost blown back by the blast of sound. With a single push of powerful black forearms, Bobby whizzed over to the stereo and turned it down. There were protests, which he quelled with a single roar. “Shut the hell up, you noisy bastards! We got company!”

  Half a dozen men looked up from various sprawling positions about the room. They were all in their early forties and dressed alike in jeans and T-shirts, some with fatigue caps, some with olive-drab jackets. The air was layered thickly with the smells of dope and alcohol and cigarettes.

  Mutt made a beeline for the wood box. She nosed and pawed her way down through the kindling and the split logs and struck gold, bringing up a bone that looked vaguely mooselike in character and still had bits of meat and gristle clinging to it. She sat down at once to gnaw.

  “Mutt!” Kate said, shocked. “Where are your manners?”

  Mutt, without releasing her grip on the bone, rose and trotted over to rear up with both forepaws on the arms of Bobby’s chair. She didn’t quite know how to go about discharging her debt of gratitude without dropping the bone, and this she was clearly unwilling to do, so she growled around it as affectionately as she was able, causing several of the men to move closer to the door.

  “Goddam, woman,” Bobby roared, fending her off, “get this goddam wolf offa me!”

  Kate grinned and signaled Mutt down. “Goddam, woman!” Bobby roared again. “I don’t know why I let either of you in the goddam house!”

  “Me. either,” somebody said.

  Kate knew that voice. “Bernie?”

  A tall, skinny man with long, thinning hair bound back in a ponytail looked up from a Nintendo Game Boy. “Hey, Kate.”

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “Wait just a damn minute here. I know for a fact you weren’t in Vietnam.”

  “Nope,” Bernie agreed peacefully. “I was in the mall.”

  Kate was mystified and looked it. “The mall?”

  Bernie took pity on her. “The Washington. D.C. mall, in 1970, in company with about a million other people. I was also among the three thousand John Mitchell honored with tossing behind a chicken-wire fence for twenty-four hours, in direct contravention of our first amendment rights.” He thought, his brow creasing. “Or was it fourth amendment? I was never really sure.”