by Stan Jones
"You smell like Lucy's shampoo," she said finally, with an air of satisfaction.
"That wasn't right, what you did," Active said.
"Not good for young man go too long without woman."
"It still wasn't right. I don't think I have the same feeling for Lucy that she has for me. You shouldn't have told her to do this."
"Not good for young man to be without a woman," she said stubbornly. "Go mental, start messing with old ladies or even dogs. Early days ago, nobody make such a big deal about it. Young man and woman want to get together, they go in tent, start baby, that's that. Nowadays, everybody think too much, talk too much, go mental. That's what I tell your aaka when I talk to her today. Now turn on your flasher."
"You told Martha about . . . about . . . about your plot with Lucy? My God, what did she say?"
"I never tell her nothing about that," Pauline said. "I don't think she like Lucy."
"How can you tell?"
"Woman always know what other woman think," Pauline said. "So I just ask Martha if she think you're mental because you take old lady to bingo all the time. She say, no, she think you just learn different way to do things at Anchorage." She turned and looked at him. The lenses of her glasses were like two radar dishes aimed at him.
"Then I say, maybe you're mental from going too long without woman and I ask your aaka if you have girlfriend down there. She laugh, but she say you don't. You like boys better, maybe?"
"Of course not," Active said. "I'm just too busy with my trooper work to take care of a woman right now."
"Maybe you need woman to take care of you."
"Maybe someday," Active said. "Not now."
"Hmmph," Pauline said. "Turn on your flasher. Bingo start already."
"Oh, yeah," Active said, remembering why he had come to the old lady's house to begin with. He started the Suburban and headed down Beach Street for the Lions Club.
But he left the flasher off. "First, what about Tillie Miller? Does she have a granddaughter like Lucy who can talk to her?"
"No one," Pauline said. "No one. You heard about that tuberculosis, come through long time ago, kill us Natives?"
He nodded.
"Kill my uncle, kill my first husband, kill everybody in Tillie's family but her, and she's in hospital long time with it herself. Since she get out, she never talk to nobody hardly. She just make mukluks and mittens to sell, walk around town and drink and fight, like now."
He turned on the flasher.
CHAPTER 9
Saturday Morning. Gray Wolf Mine
SATURDAY DAWNED UNDER A high film of opalescent cloud, a ruthless white sky that leached all contour and distinction from the snowy landscape. When Active came out of the trooper office, electric snow eels jittered across his retinas before he could get his sunglasses on. Even with the smoked glass for protection, he squinted as he steered the Suburban down Third Street toward the airport to board the Gray Wolf shuttle.
It was five days since George Clinton and Aaron Stone had gotten off shift at the mine. Three days since George's body had turned up across from the Dreamland. Two days since he and Cowboy had found Aaron's body under the spruces at Qaqsrauq Lake.
But Aaron had almost certainly died first, since his body was frozen solid when they found it. Assuming, as the rumpled pillow and unrolled sleeping bag suggested, that he had slept at least one night at Katy Creek, he could have been killed as early as Tuesday—four days ago.
Murders not solved quickly were usually not solved at all and he wasn't even sure this was a murder case. What did he have, really? Statistical anomalies. Crazy talk from a drunken bereaved aana. A jumpy mining engineer who had apparently hired a lawyer, which proved only that he was jumpy.
Active parked, walked into the terminal, gave an Inupiat girl at the counter his travel request, got a ticket, and went out onto the tarmac.
The Gray Wolf shuttle was a Twin Otter, an ugly, stubby Bush workhorse with no bathroom or flight attendants. Just two turboprop engines and two young pilots wearing mirror sunglasses and Lienhofer Aviation shirts with epaulets on the shoulders. They were on a career track that had long since passed Cowboy Decker by, building hours until they had enough time in their logbooks to get out of Chukchi and into the cockpit of an Alaska Airlines jet. Somewhat like Nathan Active. Or so he hoped.
He found a seat beside a middle-aged Inupiat woman in a black Arctic Cat snowmachine suit and Sorel boots. On her lap a yellow Walkman lay atop a folded green parka with a Gray Wolf patch sewn onto a shoulder.
"You're that Eskimo trooper, ah?" she said as he snapped his seat belt. "I heard about you."
"Nathan Active, at your service."
"Lillian Ross." She extended her hand.
He shook it and studied her face. Ross was a Chukchi surname, but he didn't remember having seen her around town. "You live out in one of the villages?"
"No, Anchorage," she said. "Soon as my husband and I get jobs at the Gray Wolf, we get our kids out of Chukchi fast as we can. It's not good for them here. Bad schools, too much drinking and fighting. Too much west wind too."
She dug into a parka pocket and pulled out a package of Juicy Fruit. "You want one? It's good for your ears when you fly."
He shook his head. She unwrapped a stick from the pack and began chewing.
"How do you like Anchorage?"
"It's OK," Ross said. "We have nice house in Muldoon area, kids go to good schools. But it's hard to get Eskimo food. And the kids miss their aana. Maybe if the liquor ban pass, we will move back."
"Yeah, sometimes I'm not sure Anchorage is really in Alaska," he said. "I lived in Muldoon myself when I was a kid."
"That was when you was with your nalauqmiut parents, right?"
He nodded. "Who takes care of the kids while you're up here?"
"My sister live in Anchorage too," she said. "She watch them when my Lennie and I are both away. But our shifts are staggered, so one of us is usually there."
"Doesn't it cost a lot to fly back and forth to Chukchi all the time:?"
"No, the Gray Wolf pay for us to commute."
"Really? I thought the Gray Wolf was supposed to help the economy in Chukchi, not Anchorage." The pilots started the Otter's right engine. Then the propeller on the left whined to life.
"Well, that's kind of what Tom Werner say when we ask him about it," Ross said, her voice rising to be heard over the engines. "But we tell him, if white engineers and bosses can live in Anchorage, commute to mine, how come Eskimos can't? Then the Gray Wolf have to let us."
She finished in a shout, then shook her head, slipped on her earphones, and started the Walkman.
Active put foam plugs in his ears, leaned back, and went to sleep.
He awoke when the pilots throttled back over the Gray Wolf, the whine of the turbine engines collapsing to a burble. From the air, the mine looked so sterile that, except for the snow on the ground, it might have been a moon colony. A landing strip scratched across the floor of a rocky treeless mountain bowl; a cluster of blocky industrial buildings with pickups and snowmachines scattered around; a dirt-walled settling pond, iced over in the cold. And the scar of the mine pit itself, with earth movers scraping out the ore and dumping it into huge trucks that hauled it to the plant.
The pilots dropped the Otter onto the gravel runway, pulled onto an apron where a pickup and a van waited, and shut down the engines.
"Look, it's Tom Werner himself," Ross said as they left the plane. She pointed at the pickup. She got in the van, and Active walked toward the truck, a cold wind plucking at his parka.
Tom Werner was smoking a cigarette, presumably from the pack of Marlboros on the dash. He was wearing the blue sunglasses from the funeral, but this time he had on a shiny Gray Wolf windbreaker.
He stuck his hand out the window of the truck. "Nathan," he said. "Welcome to the Gray Wolf. Ever been here before?"
Active shook his head.
"Get in and I'll give you the grand tour."
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p; Active walked around the front of the truck and climbed into the passenger seat. "You got my message?"
"Not till after I already heard you were coming from my kid sister." Werner grinned at Active's look of mystification. "She works for Lienhofer. She booked your flight last night and took your ticket this morning. Then she called me and told me to find out if a certain state trooper has a regular girlfriend."
Active shook his head. "I'm surrounded."
"Yep," Werner said. "A young man with prospects and no wife . . . well, he's a challenge to all of Inupiat womankind."
Werner started the truck and drove them up a gravel road that paralleled the runway, then climbed toward the rim of the bowl. He stopped at a pullout on the crest. To the left the mine lay snow-covered in its bowl, the sharp-edged manmade things seeming to float on a white ocean under the white sky.
To the right, the road descended the slope, crossed Gray Wolf Creek, and ran, a thread of gray-brown etched on a sea of white, along the Nuliakuk River toward the port on the coast. It was a scar on the purity of the Arctic desert, Active supposed, but such a tiny scar, and the only one in millions of acres of tundra. Further proof of the Arctic's near-total imperviousness to man's efforts to make it anything other than the beautiful frozen barren it had always been.
"You know how we got this mine, Nathan?"
He had heard most of the story, but it was obvious Werner wanted to tell it. He shook his head.
"Brains, timing, and luck. The usual things you need to get anything out of the white man. When we were trying to put the mine together, copper prices were low and interest rates were high, like now. GeoNord said it didn't pencil out. They were going to pull out unless somebody else paid for the road down to Nuliakuk and the port there too."
Werner stopped talking and pointed out the window of the pickup. "Look at that."
Active squinted into the glare. "What? I don't see anything."
"Snowy owl," Werner said. "It's a good day for him. He's invisible against this sky."
Finally, Active caught a flicker of white as the bird passed in front of a rocky outcrop scraped free of snow by the wind. "What will he find to eat out here ?"
"Not much," Werner said. "But he's keeping an eye on the brush along the creek bed down there. If a rabbit shows his nose, our friend will feast."
"You were telling me how GeoNord was ready to pull out."
"Right," Werner said. "Right. I was in the state senate then, so I put in a bill for a hundred and eighty million dollars to have the state build the road and port, just like it builds roads and ports for the white people in Anchorage and Fairbanks." He took some Dentyne gum from inside his windbreaker, unwrapped two pieces, and put them in his mouth. He saw Active watching. "Want some?"
"No, thanks."
"Anyway, I worked the Gray Wolf bill through the senate, but Governor Turner said it was special-interest legislation and he got it bottled up in the House. The legislature adjourned for the summer and I thought we were dead. Then Turner almost got impeached. You remember the Ship Creek prison scandal?"
Active had been at the university in Fairbanks the summer a grand jury accused Governor Dale Turner of throwing the prison contract to a gang of Anchorage construction executives who had put more than a hundred thousand dollars into his election campaign. The legislature had called itself into special session and tried to impeach Turner. He had survived by two votes in the senate but lost the next election by twenty thousand.
"I remember," Active said. "The governor fired the attorney general and the head prosecutor, but got distracted before he worked his way down to the trooper investigators. Everyone was very relieved."
Werner chuckled, then continued. "So, the impeachment hearings were going full tilt and the governor's lobbyist came around to see how the Bush Caucus was leaning. I told him the Bush Caucus was leaning in favor of the Gray Wolf Infrastructure Project. He called back a couple hours later to say the governor had been doing a lot of soul-searching and had decided the Gray Wolf was in the public interest, after all. The Bush Caucus voted against impeachment and the Gray Wolf bill passed on the first day of the next regular session."
"So Governor Turner was a man of his word," Active said.
Werner smiled, started the pickup, and headed back down into the bowl.
"Anyway, the Gray Wolf's been generating jobs three, four years now, ever since construction started," he said. "Unemployment's dropping in Chukchi, the social workers tell me wife-beating is down sixty percent, and child abuse is lower too. When we get the liquor ban, I think it will get even better. There's a chance here that we Inupiat can deal with Western culture on our own terms for once, instead of getting run over by it."
Werner took him through the plant, pointing out the ball mills that crushed the ore and the flotation tanks and furnaces that extracted the copper from it. They went through the Gray Wolf's warehouses, then to a cavernous shop filled with pickups, dump trucks, earth movers, and snowmachines in various stages of repair by men and women in Gray Wolf coveralls.
"This is where Aaron worked mainly," Werner said.
"So these people worked with him?" Active motioned at the rumps of two mechanics whose heads were buried under the hood of a Ford pickup.
"No, his crew went off shift the same time he did last week," Werner said. "I can probably have somebody dig up their names and home addresses. You want them?"
Active shrugged. "Sure."
"We'll fax it to the trooper offices this afternoon or tomorrow. You want a list of the janitors who worked with George Clinton too?"
Active nodded, and Werner pulled a little notebook from a hip pocket, wrote in it, and put it away.
Werner took him quickly through the cafeteria and the recreation area, then to the hive of Atco trailers where the workers slept.
"This was George's during his last shift." Werner opened a door to one of the cell-like sleeping rooms. "Looks like it's empty this shift, though."
It contained a single bed, a desk and lamp, a television and a closet, but no sign of a sink, shower, or toilet. Evidently, the bathroom facilities were communal at the Gray Wolf.
Active looked in the desk drawers and the closet, but found nothing to show that George Clinton had ever lived there.
"We have lockers they can leave their stuff in between shifts," Werner said. "George's was empty. I'll show you what was in Aaron's in a minute."
He led the way to a door that said Chukchi Region Inc.
"We have our own little setup here, separate from Geo-Nord." Werner opened the door and motioned Active into the empty office. "It's mainly so the Native workers will have some place to go if they have problems with GeoNord. I'm usually up here at least once a week, and, when I'm not, someone else from the Chukchi office is. We even have an eight hundred number in case there's a problem when we're not around."
He sat at one end of a green vinyl couch in the little suite's waiting room and motioned for Active to sit at the other. The only other furnishings in the room were an old gray metal desk with a telephone and lamp on it and a filing cabinet, also gray and metal. An Alaska Airlines calendar hung on a wall, but the page hadn't been turned in two months.
"So what are you finding out about George and Aaron?" Werner started to take off the blue sunglasses, then seemed to think better of it. He slid them back up the bridge of his nose. "I hear you think maybe they didn't kill themselves?"
"I haven't reached any conclusions yet," Active said. "I just want to be thorough. Were they having any problems at work? Either one of them ever use your eight hundred number?"
"George Clinton had a little trouble, but not serious," Werner said. "He came into the Chukchi office to see me about it, oh, maybe three weeks ago."
"What was the problem?"
"One of the white guys here was giving him a hard time, and he thought the guy hated Eskimos."
"Was it Michael Jermain?"
Werner frowned. "Jermain? No, why would you think of him?"<
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"He was pretty jumpy when I talked to him yesterday. And I hear he's bringing in a lawyer."
"Really? Any idea who?"
Active shook his head.
"I wouldn't make too much of it," Werner said. "Jermain's the nervous type. Probably just wants to make sure he and the company don't get blamed for overstressing the help or something."
"Yeah, probably," Active said. "So what about the guy who was hassling George?"
"1 told George I could probably get the guy fired but I thought he should work it out himself, like I had to do when I was younger. Some of these old guys have worked remote so long, all you have to be is human and they hate you. George said he would think about it a while, try to take care of it himself, and come see me again if he couldn't. That was the last I heard about it."
"What's the man's name?" Active asked, pulling out his notebook. "I'll see if George seemed upset enough about him to kill himself. Or if the guy acts mean enough to have killed George."
Werner dragged silently on a Marlboro and looked out the window at the white hills around the mine. "I'm trying to remember. I'm not sure George ever told me the name."
"You didn't get his name? Couldn't somebody like that disrupt things at the mine?"
"Sure, he could," Werner said. "But George wanted to handle it himself and I decided to let him. You can ask around if you want, but the Gray Wolf has something like four hundred employees. And about half of them are off shift any given day. They're scattered from Seattle to Barter Island."
"How about Aaron Stone? Do you know why he might kill himself?"
"No idea," Werner said. "He started here before the mine opened, did his job, never caused trouble. I heard he might hit the Dreamland sometimes when he was off shift, but I never heard of him having a drinking problem at work."
Werner stood up and went to the filing cabinet. "We did find this when we cleaned out his locker, though." He pulled a shopping bag from a drawer and handed it to Active.
The trooper looked in. Two pairs of white socks, one clean and one dirty. One Louis L'Amour novel. A copy of the Alaska hunting and trapping regulations. And four Jack Daniel's miniatures, the kind stewardesses sold on airliners.
