White Sky, Black Ice

by Stan Jones

  And now, Martha seemed to have settled into Chukchi's version of married, middle-class comfort. Leroy, who delivered stove oil for the local Chevron dealer, hunted and fished more than a lot of Inupiat. Martha now headed the teacher-aide program at Chukchi High. They lived in a modern house on a quiet back street with a new Ford Ranger in the driveway and three snowmachines—one for each Johnson—in the yard. Active parked the Suburban in front, went past the Ranger into the kunnichuk, and knocked on the inner door.

  Leroy, Jr. opened it. The rich smell of boiled muktuk billowed out.

  "Hey, Nathan," the twelve-year-old said. Sonny had inherited his mother's dark hair and eyes, but, thanks to Leroy, his skin was light enough to make it clear he was the product of two races.

  "Hey, Sonny," Active said. In Chukchi, juniors were known as Sonny until the seniors died. Then they got to use their real first names.

  "Your tip worked. I got to Phleebhut on Space Quest," Sonny said.

  The boy ran off to a computer in a corner and resumed his game. Active walked over and watched the screen for a moment, trying to imagine his half-brother ending up like George Clinton. Was it possible? The house seemed so full of love. There was no curse on this family, not now, but who knew what time and Chukchi would do to them? Well, Martha and Leroy both worked and neither drank now, so maybe the Johnsons would be all right.

  He turned and walked to where Martha and Leroy were seated at a big dining table with a heavyset Inupiat woman he didn't know. She wore a light calico parka with a pattern of tiny blue-and-red flowers on it, known locally as a kuspuk. She was older than Martha, he judged, but not old enough to be an aana, like Lucy's grandmother.

  On the table sat a bowl of muktuk, some mustard, a jar of peanut butter, and a box of Sailor Boy pilot bread. A pot of coffee simmered on Martha's fancy propane-fired cookstove.

  "Nathan, my baby!" Martha said. "Come get your muktuk! This my Cousin Clara, Clara Stone." Active nodded to the stranger and took a seat at the table.

  Martha got up and fetched him a plate and cutlery from a row of cupboards along the wall near the stove. He helped himself to a chunk of muktuk and two big round pilot bread crackers. He spread mustard on the muktuk, sliced off a piece, bit into it, and savored the taste: fatty and succulent, like a pork roast, but with a slightly nutty flavor behind it.

  Leroy ate his muktuk Inupiaq-style. He took a strip from the bowl, clamped his teeth on one end, and stretched the muktuk out tight with his left hand. With his right, he slashed downward with an Old Timer clasp knife, slicing the muktuk strip in two, and began chewing. The four-inch blade, Active calculated admiringly, had passed less than an inch from the tip of Leroy's nose.

  Cousin Clara, for some reason, wasn't having any muktuk. She just sipped her coffee and fidgeted.

  Martha followed the same practice as Leroy, except it was even more alarming to watch because she used the ulu, the traditional Inupiat woman's knife improved by the incorporation of white man's steel. It was shaped like a big piece of pie, with a bone handle at the apex and the sharpened edge on the outer arc. It flashed in front of her face like a guillotine as she ate the blubber.

  Active couldn't imagine how the technique could be acquired without the loss of facial parts, but he hadn't seen any evidence of missing lips or noses in Chukchi. Evidently it was so simple even children and drunks could master it. Probably just a matter of getting up the nerve to try it, he decided.

  He chewed his own muktuk—cut the Anchorage way, lying safely on a plate—and thought again what an odd match Martha and Leroy seemed.

  Leroy was short and wiry, red-haired, and didn't talk much, especially if Martha was around. He was seven years younger than his wife, but when he wasn't out fishing, hunting, or hauling stove oil, he seemed content just to bask in her energy.

  For Martha Active was like a sun in her house. She was just forty-one, no sign yet of middle-age fat, the black hair still glossy. Her face was smooth, except for laugh lines around the mouth and the sparkling black eyes.

  A knowing grin usually played around those eyes and that mouth. Martha was always teasing, just as when she had left him the message about being a real Eskimo. But there was a point to her teasing. Her house ran smoothly, without anybody ever quite being aware that it didn't happen by itself. Active had never heard her make a direct request of Leroy or Sonny, but neither had he known either of them to refuse to do things her way.

  He remembered when Martha's new propane stove had arrived the month before. For a week, it sat in the middle of the kitchen in its shipping carton. For a week, Martha said, "My Leroy will put it in for me." For a week, Leroy was busy with other things.

  One Saturday, while Active was over to do his laundry, the matter had come to a head, or as close to a head as things ever came in Martha's house. He was drinking coffee with Martha when Leroy, who liked to sleep in on weekends if he wasn't hunting or fishing, finally got up around noon. He came to the door of the kitchen in a bathrobe, a towel over his shoulder.

  "Sweetie, do I have any clean underwear?" he asked.

  "Of course," Martha said. "Your T-shirts are on the top shelf and your shorts are on the bottom, just like always."

  "No, they're not," Leroy said. "I looked in the closet."

  "Oh, I guess I forgot to tell you," Martha said. "I moved them."

  "You moved them? Where?"

  "I put them in the new oven. Seem like if we're not going to cook with it we could use it for a closet, ah?"

  A sheepish-looking Leroy crossed to the oven, took out a set of underwear, and left the room without a word.

  "I think my Leroy will put that stove in now," Martha had said with a huge grin. When Active had showed up the next day for Sunday dinner, Martha was cooking with gas, her old oil-fired range nowhere to be seen.

  Maybe they weren't such an odd match after all, he decided. Two people with Martha's energy probably would have ended up killing each other. And two as mellow as Leroy probably would have ended up in abject poverty, with an oil cookstove.

  He found himself grinning as he remembered the affair of the gas range. "Hey, Leroy," he said. "This new stove sure cooks nice, huh?"

  "I guess," Leroy said with a pained look.

  "So what have you been up to?" Active didn't hunt or fish much, so he found it hard to talk with Leroy, who thought of little else.

  "I was going across to the Katonak River for whitefish today, but I didn't go," Leroy said. "I don't know if I can handle that ice on Chukchi Bay yet."

  "Still soft from the warm spell, huh?" The conversation was veering toward weather, which bored Active even more than hunting and fishing. But it looked like he was caught. "Why stop at the Katonak? I thought the fishing was better over on the Nuliakuk."

  "Kay-Snow said there's another fish kill over there," Leroy said.

  "Did they say what it is this time?" Active finished a piece of muktuk and swallowed some coffee. He put peanut butter on a piece of pilot bread and took a bite.

  "They say it's all that rain we had in the fall," Leroy said. "The ground is too wet to soak it up so a lot of minerals are flushing into Gray Wolf Creek and it carries them into the Nuliakuk."

  Leroy pushed his plate back, wiped the Old Timer with a napkin, and studied the blade intently. He pulled a small whetstone from a sheath on his belt and began stroking it with the Old Timer. Leroy's hands were always busy.

  "Too much rain?" Active asked. "I thought when we had that dry spell last summer they said it was low water killing the fish."

  "Yeah, the water in the Nuliakuk was so low even the normal amount of minerals was too much. That's what they said."

  "And they're saying it's not the mine this time either?" Active asked.

  "That's what they say." Leroy stopped whetting for a moment and drew the Old Timer's blade along the hair of his forearm. He inspected the result, squinted, spat on the whetstone, and went back to work.

  "They say the environmental controls at the mine are good
and it's not affecting the creek," he continued. "I dunno, though. I never heard of any fish kills up there before the Gray Wolf started."

  "Well, I suppose GeoNord knows what it's doing. Plus the Department of Environmental Protection watches them pretty close."

  "I guess," Leroy said.

  Martha cleared her throat. "You guys done talking about fishing? Cousin Clara want to talk to you, Nathan." She nudged the other woman.

  He braced himself. Cousin Clara no doubt had a daughter or a niece who was lovely, lonely, accomplished in the domestic arts, and embarked on a suitable career. In short, a fitting daughter-in-law for Martha Active Johnson.

  "That Aaron never come home yet," Cousin Clara said, suddenly and anxiously.

  "What?" Active asked.

  "That Aaron never come home yet," she repeated. "He say he come home this morning."

  "I'm lost," Active said. "Who's Aaron? Where did he go?"

  "Her husband have a camp over by Katy Creek," Martha said. "He go there Monday, tell Clara he stay couple nights, huijtj caribou, get his trapline ready for when season open, then come home this morning."

  Active had never been to Katy Creek, but he had gathered from casual conversation it was north across Chukchi Bay, near the mouth of the Katonak River.

  "I tell her not to worry," Martha said. "Aaron is late before. I tell her he's just waiting for the ice to get good."

  They both looked at Cousin Clara.

  "He say he come home Wednesday morning when ice is hard from cold night," she said with a stubborn frown. "It's Wednesday night now."

  "I think maybe Aaron could have come back today," Leroy said. They looked at him. "I saw a couple of the older guys go across by snowmachine this morning all right. I think if they could do it, Aaron could. He knows the ice better than anybody."

  Despite his upbringing in Minnesota, Leroy's speech had picked up traces of village English. As far as Active could make out, Leroy tried to be like Chukchi's expert old Inupiat hunters in everything he did, even talking.

  "Did you check with Search and Rescue?" Active asked Cousin Clara. "Did she check with Search and Rescue?" he asked his mother.

  "I talk to them," Cousin Clara said. "They say he's probably just waiting for the ice to get good. Then they say they're about out of gas money. Some kind of problem with their physical year."

  "Could that be fiscal year?" Active asked.

  "That's what I say, their physical year," Cousin Clara said.

  "You could try check, ah, Nathan?" his mother said.

  "Well, Search and Rescue is supposed to decide when to start a search," Active said. A hunter a half-day late in Chukchi was barely late at all. Carnaby would fry him if he burned up travel money checking on this one. "We troopers are supposed to leave it up to them. It's in our interagency agreement."

  The two women stared at him. Leroy stared at him. The only sounds were the simmering of the coffeepot and whoops, whistles, and explosions from Sonny's computer game at the other end of the room.

  "He say he come home Wednesday morning," Cousin Clara said again. "He tell me that when he call from the Gray Wolf."

  It took a moment to click. "The Gray Wolf? Mr. Stone works at the Gray Wolf?"

  "Yes," Cousin Clara said, speaking slowly and patiently. "I tell you already: He get off Monday and he call me and say he ride his snowgo to Katy Creek, stay couple days, hunt caribou, then come home Wednesday morning. Now it's Wednesday night."

  "How did his snowmachine get to the mine?"

  "How you think? He ride it there when he go on shift two weeks ago," Cousin Clara said with a pitying look at Active. "He always ride back and forth to mine in winter. Then he can hunt on the way."

  Cousin Clara rattled a question at Martha in Inupiaq, speaking too rapidly for Active to follow. Leroy, whose Inupiaq was pretty good, smiled and looked at his coffee. Martha giggled and shook her head.

  "What did she say?" Active asked.

  "She ask me if you went mental from being at Anchorage too long," Martha said.

  "Can a plane land at Aaron's camp?" Active asked Cousin Clara.

  "That Cowboy can," she said. "He take us up there sometimes."

  "Cowboy Decker? We have a contract with him," Active said. "I could take a look tomorrow."

  "You don't have any problem with your physical year?" Cousin Clara asked.

  He smiled and shook his head, then looked at Martha. "Can I use your phone, aaka7."

  He went down the hall to Martha and Leroy's bedroom, pulled the skinny Chukchi region directory out from under the phone on the nightstand, looked up the number, and dialed.

  "Cowboy," he said. "This is Nathan. Can you take me up to Nuliakuk tomorrow morning, maybe around eight o'clock? The city council wants to talk to me about bootleggers."

  "Sure," Decker said. "We'll take the Cessna. I got a load of soda pop for the store up there anyway. I'll give you a seat rate instead of the charter rate."

  "No, bring the Super Cub."

  "The Super Cub?" Decker protested. "I can't haul you and the pop in the Super Cub, and it'll take twice as long. And cost the troopers more."

  "I need to land at Katy Creek on the way and check something."

  "OK," Decker said. "The Super Cub it is, then. You're paying."

  "Just make sure the invoice shows it as a charter to Nuliakuk," Active said. That way, his freelance search-and-rescue work wouldn't show up on the books.

  Active hung up and dialed Evelyn O'Brien's home number.

  "Evelyn," he said when the trooper secretary answered. "It's Nathan. I'm going up to Nuliakuk tomorrow for a city council meeting. But I'm leaving real early and I won't be in the office before I go. Will you call Mayor Crane and let him know I'm coming? In fact... do they have a fax machine in Nuliakuk?... Good. Look, after you call him, write the mayor a letter saying I'm coming, sign it for me, and fax it to him too, will you? Just make sure the paperwork's all there."

  He went into the bathroom and showered. Then he went back to Martha's kitchen for another helping of muktuk and pilot bread. He was enjoying the warm feeling that muktuk always spread through his body when the telephone in Martha's kitchen rang. She answered, then handed it to him.

  "It's that Lucy," she said, a frown in her voice.

  "Nathan," the dispatcher said, "where are you? My Aana Pauline says you didn't pick her up for bingo."

  He looked at his watch, and groaned. "I'm on my way."

  "Don't forget to turn on your flasher," Lucy said.

  He hung up and looked at his mother. "I have to go. I promised to give Pauline Generous a ride to bingo."

  He went down the hall to the bathroom to collect his shower things. He was rolling up his towel when his mother spoke from behind him.

  "Is that Lucy going to bingo too?"

  "I don't know. I don't think so." He dropped the towel into the gym bag. "Why?"

  "Somebody tell me you talk to her at work sometimes."

  God, how did women find these things out? "I talk to everybody at work. It doesn't mean anything."

  Martha watched silently as he dropped a plastic bottle of shampoo into his gym bag, then pulled it out, tightened the cap, and dropped it in again. "Lucy's pretty, ah?"

  In his mind's eye he suddenly saw her. Hair like a raven's wing, the face an impossible study in reflected diagonals: mouth curving up at the corners, upturned almond eyes, slanting brown cheekbones.

  "I'm too busy with work to notice things like that."

  "That's good. You'll get ahead that way."

  He dropped in a stick of deodorant and a bar of soap in a red plastic case. "What if I did notice Lucy?"

  "I guess she's nice, for a village girl."

  "You mean an Inupiat girl? Should I look for somebody white, like you did with Leroy?"

  "Maybe it's better if she's Eskimo, but white's OK. Main thing is, you should look for girl like you," Martha said. "Smart, went to college, good job. Village girl will never do anything but have babies, p
lay bingo, and get fat."

  "Would a village girl give her baby away like an extra pup?"

  Instantly, he regretted his lapse of control. He knew he should let his mother undo the past, or at least think that she had, but he could never leave the sore spot untouched for long. She put her head down and he knew she was crying.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to say that."

  "No, no, you're right, Nathan," Martha said, tears glistening on her cheeks. "You were my baby and I gave you away. But..."

  "We don't have to go through this again, aaka. It always comes out the same."

  "But I did it because I loved you. I knew I couldn't take care of you right," she said. A switch had been thrown and now there was no stopping her. "So I found somebody else to do it. Weren't Ed and Carmen good to you?"

  He pulled out his handkerchief and handed it to her. "Of course they were, but they're not Inupiat. Now I don't know what I am."

  "That was bad time for me, just drinking and sleeping around," she said. She wiped her eyes and put his handkerchief in the pocket of her slacks. "I thought Eskimos were all going to hell like me. It's white man's world, that's what I thought. So I gave you to white people. That's one reason I marry Leroy after I straighten out, because he's white."

  "And now?"

  "Now I see Eskimos can learn like white people," she said. "You're smart. Sonny, he's learning to program that computer you give him. Tom Werner's smart. Look what all he do for us, leading our corporation and getting the Gray Wolf and everything. And now maybe he will get liquor banned in Chukchi."

  "Maybe he will."

  "Anyway, Nathan, I'm sorry if I mess up." She looked at him. He looked down and fiddled with the zipper of the gym bag. "I always try to take care of my responsibility best way I can. When you're born, that seem like giving you to white people."

  "I know you did what you thought was right."

  "And now that you're back up here, I try to see you end up with good wife. That's mother's responsibility too, ah?"