White Sky, Black Ice

by Stan Jones

  WHITE SKY,

  BLACK ICE

  WHITE SKY,

  BLACK ICE

  a Nathan Active mystery

  Stan Jones

  The Eskimo Storyteller: Folktales from Noatak, Alaska, © 1975

  Edwin S. Hall, Jr. and Claire Fejes, used by permission of

  University of Tennessee Press.

  Copyright © 1999 by Stan Jones.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jones, Stan, 1947-

  White sky, black ice / Stan Jones.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-56947-3334 (alk. paper)

  1. Eskimos—Alaska—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3560.0539W45 1999

  813'.54—dc21

  98-46957

  CIP

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Nunmuk, the packer

  Contents

  Author's Note

  An Inupiaq Glossary

  CHAPTER 1

  Wednesday Morning, Chukchi

  CHAPTER 2

  Wednesday Morning, Chukchi

  CHAPTER 3

  Wednesday Evening, Chukchi

  CHAPTER 4

  Thursday Morning, Katy Creek

  CHAPTER 5

  Thursday Evening, Katy Creek

  CHAPTER 6

  Friday Morning, Chukchi

  CHAPTER 7

  Friday Morning, Bluff Cemetery, Chukchi

  CHAPTER 8

  Friday Afternoon. Chukchi

  CHAPTER 9

  Saturday Morning. Gray Wolf Mine

  CHAPTER 10

  Saturday Night, Chukchi

  CHAPTER 11

  Sunday Morning, Chukchi

  CHAPTER 12

  Sunday Afternoon, Chukchi

  CHAPTER 13

  Monday Morning, Chukchi

  CHAPTER 14

  Monday Afternoon, Chukchi

  CHAPTER 15

  Monday Afternoon, Jade Portage

  CHAPTER 16

  Tuesday Afternoon, Chukchi

  CHAPTER 17

  Tuesday Evening, Werners Camp

  CHAPTER 18

  Wednesday Morning, Chukchi

  CHAPTER 19

  Thursday Morning, Chukchi

  Author's Note

  "Eskimo" is the best-known term for the Native Americans described in this book, but it is not their term. In their own language, they call themselves Inupiat, meaning "the People." "Eskimo," which was brought into Alaska by white men, is what certain Indian tribes in eastern Canada called their neighbors to the north; it probably meant "eaters of raw flesh."

  Nonetheless, "Eskimo" and "Inupiat" are used more or less interchangeably in northwest Alaska today, at least when English is spoken, and that is the usage followed in this book.

  But things are changing. To some extent, the authentic and indigenous "Inupiat" is superseding the imported "Eskimo," especially among younger and better-educated members of the culture.

  Occasionally, the Inupiat use "Eskimo" in another way, in the same way that African-Americans use "nigger" among themselves. Sometimes this seems intended as a kind of ironic armor against white prejudice; sometimes it seems to reflect instead the internalizing of that prejudice. That usage also appears in this book, as when one of the characters refers to his own people as "dumb Eskimos."

  In formal or public speech—such as journalism—"Inuit" is probably the most widely accepted collective term for the Eskimo peoples of Siberia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, but it is not an Alaskan word and so is not much used by the Inupiat of the state's northwest coast. Accordingly, it doesn't appear in this book.

  A few Inupiaq words—those commonly mixed with English in northwest Alaska—appear in the book. They are listed below, along with pronunciations and meanings. As the spellings vary among Inupiaq-English dictionaries, I have used spellings that seemed to me most likely to induce the proper pronunciation by non-Inupiaq readers.

  An Inupiaq Glossary

  Each story had a meaning beyond words and plot. Soon I was lost in a world not of my own making—an alien world that sometimes frightened me with its violence, its fatalism, its acceptance of the duplicity of man and beast. And yet, the very same tales told of the special reciprocal relationship between man and the animal world, of the devotion and love of Eskimos for their kin, and of the humor Eskimos find in their harsh world.

  —Edwin S. Hall, Jr. and Claire Fejes, The Eskimo

  Storyteller: Folktales from Noatak, Alaska.

  CHAPTER 1

  Wednesday Morning, Chukchi

  ORDINARILY, ALASKA STATE TROOPER Nathan Active didn't get involved with deaths inside the Chukchi city limits. But the city cops were all out and he was flirting with Lucy the dispatcher when the call came in, so he took it.

  "You better get over here, Nathan," said Hector Martinez. "Some kid shot himself across from the Dreamland and I want him moved."

  "Who is it?"

  "Don't matter who," Martinez said. "Just come get him. He's scaring away business." The bar owner hung up.

  Active climbed the stairs to his office, took his fur hat and down parka from the hooks by the door, and went out to the eight-year-old trooper Suburban. The west wind that had set in yesterday scraped his face as he unlocked the driver's door and tossed in his briefcase.

  A thin gray belt of cloud scrolled overhead, spitting snow at the narrow tongue of beach gravel and tundra that contained Chukchi's square unpainted wooden houses and its straggling dirt streets. He had arrived at work only an hour before, but already the Suburban's windshield was covered. The temperature was maybe six above, he judged as he brushed off the snow. The warm spell of the past few days was definitely over.

  There were many things he had come to detest about Chukchi since the troopers had posted him there eighteen months before. But it was probably the west wind he detested most.

  It was the west wind's toothache-like persistence. God help you if you had to go gloveless in it, changing spark plugs on the Suburban or working an evidence camera. It gnawed at your hands and sprayed grit in your eyes. Inside a house at night you could hear it scratching bushes and weeds against the wall. You could feel it suck warm air out the cracks around the windows and push cold air under the door and through the electric sockets.

  Well, he could persist too. Another year or two and he figured he would be promoted out of Chukchi to Alaska State Trooper headquarters in Anchorage. Where his adoptive parents lived and where he had been raised. Where, thank God, the west wind never blew like it did here in Chukchi, the vil-lage where he was born.1

  He pulled out of the parking lot behind the Chukchi Public Safety Building, a three-story stack of fading brown plywood siding and blue aluminum roofing. He drove up Third Street, the only paved road in town, turned right at Lake Street, then drove east a block and stopped across from the Dreamland. The Chukchi police van was already there and two officers were walking toward something in a clump of willows maybe seventy-five yards out onto the tundra. The dispatcher must have reached the city cops by radio or caught one of them at home by phone.

  Several Honda four-wheelers were pulled up beside Lake Street too. A gaggle of breakfast drinkers watched the proceedings from the steps of the Dreamland. They were probably the business "scared" away from Martinez's bar.

  Active followed the city cops to where the dead man lay on his back near the edge of the Chukchi cemetery. He was young, his black hair was collar-length, and he wore a small mustache. His legs were drifted over with snow but his head and upper body, more sheltered by the willows, were only lightly frosted.


  There was a snow-covered rifle across his snow-covered legs, a bullet-sized hole in his throat, and a shadowy stain on the snow under his neck. Active was sure that, when they turned him over, they would find a much larger hole where the slug had come out.

  "Mind if I take a look?" he asked one of the city cops, a white man named Mason.

  Mason nodded. "Just don't touch anything till the chief gets here."

  Active squatted and studied the rifle through its dusting of snow. It looked like an old 30-30 Winchester carbine, good for anything from seal to caribou, even moose. Most people nowadays had newer rifles that shot farther and hit harder, but 30-30s were still common in Chukchi, where nothing was thrown away if it still worked, or might do so again someday.

  Active stood up. There were some liquor bottles lying around, mostly plastic "travelers" that could be hauled in a boat, plane, or snowmachine without breaking. But Martinez ran a package store next to the Dreamland, so the tundra nearby was always littered with bottles. How many of them had the boy with the hole in his throat emptied in his last hours?

  Active turned as footsteps crunched in the snow behind him. Jim Silver, the city police chief, stopped beside Active and studied the corpse.

  Silver was a tall, paunchy man with an acne-cratered face. He had been around Chukchi since before Active was born. Active imagined that Silver would still be there, like the west wind, when Active was long gone.

  "Another one, huh?"

  "Looks like it," Silver said. "Third suicide since the weather turned cold."

  "You know him?"

  "I think so, but let me check." Silver squatted and patted the boy's coat pockets, then reached into one and pulled out a photo ID badge by one corner.

  "Yep," he said after a moment's study. "George Clinton, one of Daniel's boys. Looks like he got himself a job at the Gray Wolf mine."

  He waved the badge at Active, then tucked it back into the same pocket it had come from. "We'll move him pretty soon, we just need to get some pictures for the coroner. Not that there's much doubt what happened."

  "Well, you don't need me. I'm only here because Lucy couldn't find you guys at first." Active started toward the Suburban.

  "Actually, there is one thing."

  He turned, knowing what was coming. Silver was white, and so were the other city cops on the scene. He, Nathan Active, was Inupiat Eskimo. Like George Clinton.

  "You got a minute to go by and break the news to old Daniel?"

  "Jim, I speak less Inupiaq than you do. You know that."

  "Well, Daniel's English is pretty good."

  "How about one of the other guys?" Active jerked a thumb toward the two city cops starting to work over George Clinton's body.

  "I need them here for a while yet."

  Active shook his head and shrugged. "Where's the house?"

  Silver pointed across the tundra to the southeast. "That white one there, by the lagoon."

  "You owe me, Jim."

  "I owe you," Silver said.

  Active walked back to the Suburban and pulled out his keys.

  "Going uptown?"

  He turned. A scrawny civilian in a Mariners baseball cap and a long dirty blue parka had detached himself from the gang around the Dreamland steps and was walking toward the Suburban, a can of Olympia in hand.

  "Not uptown, Kinnuk. I'm going down toward the airport," Active said.

  "Great, me too," Kinnuk Wilson said in his high voice. He climbed into the passenger seat of the Suburban, cradling the beer between his knees.

  Kinnuk Wilson was a part-time marijuana dealer who did just enough business to keep himself in beer. The troopers and the city cops tolerated him for two reasons. One, anybody who could get people to smoke pot rather than guzzle booze was doing everybody a favor, in the eyes of the Chukchi law-enforcement establishment. And two, Kinnuk Wilson liked to talk to cops.

  The weird thing was, everybody in town knew he talked. But instead of dropping him through a hole in the sea ice some night, the bootleggers and the rest of Chukchi's riffraff kept talking to Kinnuk and Kinnuk kept passing it along.

  Active could never figure it, but why look a gift horse in the mouth? He climbed into the driver's seat.

  "You're going to see to old Daniel about George, ah?" Wilson said as Active turned the key.

  "Yeah, but you're not."

  "No, I'll wait in your truck."

  Active headed east on Lake Street, toward the lagoon. They bounced along in silence for a good ten seconds.

  "Too bad about George, ah?" Wilson said.

  Active said nothing. When Kinnuk Wilson had something to say, silence was the best way to get him to say it.

  "It was his turn, though."

  "His turn?" Active was immediately irritated with himself for breaking his vow of silence.

  "Yeah, from the Clinton curse."

  "The Clinton curse?"

  "You never hear about it? You mind if I turn up your heater? Alipaa today." Wilson flipped the fan onto high without waiting for an answer. "You didn't know two of Daniel's other boys kill theirself already? Oh, yeah, I forget you was down in Anchorage with your white parents." He tilted the Olympia and swallowed, Adam's apple bobbing in the scrawny neck.

  Active reached over and thumped the Oly can. "You know you can't be in here with that."

  "It's empty anyway." Wilson rolled down the window and tossed the can onto the tundra.

  "What about this curse?"

  "Oh, yeah." Wilson rolled the window up again. "It start maybe fifteen years ago. There was this old man, Billy Karl, up on Beach Street. He used to make dogsleds."

  Active nodded, turning the Suburban onto Fourth Street. Now they were headed south, parallel to the lagoon. It was freezing up as winter came on, the spot of open water in the middle shrinking like the pupil of an eye in bright light.

  "Billy Karl have this kid named Frank," Wilson said in the stripped-down village English that was starting to sound as familiar to Active as the standard English spoken in Anchorage. Another reason to get out of Chukchi as soon as possible.

  "Frank decide he want Daniel Clinton's wife, even though she's a lot older than him," Wilson went on. "She and Frank Karl were cousins or something, and you know them Karls always like to monkey around with their relatives. That's why they're so goofy."

  "How do you know this?"

  "George tell me about it when we're in fifth grade."

  "Then I guess it must be true."

  Wilson ignored the sarcasm. "Frank was no good, drinking and fighting all the time, and Annie—that's Daniel's wife— go to church a lot. So she won't have nothing to do with him. But Frank think it's because she want Daniel too much, and he start talking around town how Daniel better get out of the way.

  "Finally one night, Frank get drunk and go over to Daniel's house with a rifle. He's out front, screaming and crying and shooting up in the air, threatening to come in and get Daniel and Annie and kill them both, or shoot himself. This is before Daniel have a telephone, so there's not much him and Annie can do. They and their kids are trapped in there."

  They had reached Daniel Clinton's house now. Active stopped the Suburban in front. But he didn't get out.

  Wilson pointed at the weathered plywood storm shed attached to the front of Clinton's house. "Frank go up to Daniel's kunnichuk there and start pounding on the door like hell. But Daniel put a board across it, so Frank can't get in. Then Frank start shooting through the door. Annie and all the kids get down behind some stuff in the back, so he never hit anybody."

  Wilson looked from the kunnichuk to Active and back to the kunnichuk again. "But Daniel have all he can take. He put a slug in his shotgun, and he stick the muzzle right up against the kunnichuk door and pull the trigger.

  "Well, he make a lucky shot. That slug punch a big hole right through Frank's guts and hit his spine. Frank fall dead right there."

  "There." Wilson pointed again at the storm shed. "See them holes in the door of the kunni
chuk! They say that's the holes Daniel and Frank make shooting at each other that night. The big one is from when Daniel finally kill Frank."

  Active studied the door. The hole looked too big and smooth-edged even for a shotgun slug. But perhaps it would look like that after fifteen years of rain and wind and kids poking sticks through it. "So what happened?"

  "The nalauqmiut cops decide it's self-defense, and they let it go," Wilson said. "But the Eskimos know it's not over. For one thing, Frank was the only boy that Billy had. The rest of his kids were all girls. Besides that . . . you know what an angatquq is?"

  Active remembered the word from a book his adoptive parents had given him to help him understand his origins. At the time, he had been more interested in Hardy Boys mysteries. "A shaman?"

  "Yeah, that's right," Wilson said. "Early days ago, before the missionaries come, the angatquqs run everything. The old-time Eskimos thought they could do magic, and they were scared of them."

  "Anyway, Billy Karl was supposed to be from a family of angatquqs, and lotta people always think he's one himself. So everybody wait to see how he will kill Daniel Clinton. They think it will be a real old-time Eskimo blood feud."

  Active shifted to look at the holes in the kunnichuk door again, then turned back to Wilson. "But Daniel is still alive."

  "That's right, Billy never kill him. One night there's big blizzard, and somebody knock at Daniel's door. When he open it, there's Billy. He look in and he see Annie back in there, and George and their four boys. He stare at each boy in turn."

  " 'I won't take any revenge on you for what you did,' he tell Daniel. 'But you took my son from me and now your sons will take themselves away from you.'"

  Wilson turned toward Active, then swung his gaze around the Suburban like Billy Karl studying Daniel Clinton's cursed sons. Then he looked at Active again.

  About fifty percent of what Wilson said was true usually. But it was braided with the untrue like the strands of a rope. Wilson's tale of curses and blood feuds didn't sound like any-thing in any of the books Active's adoptive parents had given him, or in the anthropology courses he had taken while studying criminology at the University of Alaska.