Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  “Look for yourself,” she said, and while he was communing with his new muse she cleared the table and washed the dishes, after which he was still cradling the Winchester like it was his firstborn son. A horrible thought. “Enough,” she said. “Put it in the rack and get started on your homework.”

  “Can’t I sight it in?”

  She glanced out the windows that formed most of the front wall of the house. “It’s too dark. Tomorrow.”

  “Morning?”

  “After school,” she said, and added craftily, “You’ll want to show it to Van.”

  On a lesser sixteen-year-old what would have been a pout brightened. Van was the girlfriend. Of course he wanted to show the Winchester off to her. He set it in the gun rack next to the front door with reverent hands, stood back to admire it for a moment, heaved a lovelorn sigh, and fetched his homework from his bedroom.

  He sat on one side of the table, working math problems, and she sat on the other, working her way through Old Sam’s will as the first, fabulous notes of Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me” beat out of the speakers.

  Old Sam had kept it simple, leaving everything he owned to Kate outright and attaching a letter disposing of those possessions he wanted to go to specific beneficiaries. It was dated the day after the will, which had been written by one Peter P. Wheeler, an attorney in Ahtna. Kate didn’t know him. Two weeks ago had been the end of fishing season and the beginning of hunting season, and she wondered that either of them had had the time.

  The letter accompanying the will was in Old Sam’s copperplate handwriting. You could always tell an elder by their writing—if they’d gone to school at all they’d had penmanship to rival Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beaten into them by a series of teachers intent on beating the Native right out of them, starting with their language. The letter was five pages long, written on what looked like printer paper in black ink by what appeared to be a Bic pen with a medium nib.

  The cabin in Niniltna he wanted to go to Phyllis Lestinkof, which came as something of a surprise. Kate sat back. Or did it really? “Girl ain’t got a pot to piss in,” Old Sam wrote, “let alone a place to lay her head, and those worthless parents of hers ain’t going to be no help to her. She needs somewhere to raise that baby. You keep the title, tell her it’s hers for as long as she lives in it, year-to-year lease for one dollar a year.”

  Phyllis Lestinkof was seventeen and pregnant and her parents had kicked her out of the house. The father, a young Suulutaq miner careless of his seed, wanted nothing to do with either Phyllis or his child. Kate had dragooned Old Sam into taking Phyllis on as a deckhand on his fish tender this past summer, along with Petey Jeppsen, another Park rat with his own moderate to heavy personal problems. Phyllis had been raised on her daddy’s drifter, and Old Sam wrote, “At least she can tell a humpy from a dog.” High praise indeed. Well, well.

  Of course this made Kate a landlord, which didn’t thrill her, but Old Sam had said it and it must be so, at least for the foreseeable future. He had added, “Kid grows up, Phyllis moves to town, whichever comes first, turn it into a museum. The Samuel Leviticus Dementieff Niniltna Museum of History and Art. Don’t that got a fine ring to it, girl?” “Town” meant Anchorage in Parkspeak, and was a place all too many Niniltnans had been moving to—or they had been before the advent of the mine.

  Jackie Wilson took over from Ben E. King, shooby doo wop wopping through his lonely teardrops. Kate looked at Johnny, widely known never to have listened voluntarily to anything recorded before Usher started laying down tracks. The eraser on his pencil tapped out an undeniable rhythm. She looked back at the will.

  Old Sam wanted the Freya to go to Petey Jeppsen. She had to read it twice before she believed it.

  The Freya was Old Sam’s seventy-five-foot fish tender. It had to be as old as he was, if not older, but he’d put a fresh coat of copper paint on the hull every spring, had renewed the varnish on the trim every winter, and had serviced the engine once a year like the Freya was going to sprout wings and require recertification by the FAA. According to Old Sam, who had taken the trouble to seek out her provenance, the Freya had started life as a herring tender in Seldovia, owned and operated by Alaska Year Round, which when the herring were fished out had put her up for auction. There followed a varied career hauling passengers and freight between Cordova and Seattle in the 1920s, mostly for the Kanuyaq River & Northern Railroad and Kanuyaq Copper, contracting with the U.S. Navy to provide support to their bases in the Aleutians in the thirties, and a brief but exciting period during World War II when she hosted training missions for Castner’s Cutthroats.

  Old Sam had bought her in 1950, and continued hiring her out to whoever had deep enough pockets to haul freight or fish. In later years it had been mostly the latter. You name the species, if there was a market for anything with fins or shells, Old Sam had a positive genius for getting a hold full in time to fetch the highest price per pound.

  Kate had long thought the Freya was the love of Old Sam’s life, that he’d had a stronger romantic attachment to her than even to Mary Balashoff. Which made his handing it off to Petey Jeppsen nothing short of astounding.

  She’d sent a note to Mary Balashoff on her set net site in Alaganik by way of Mary’s family in Cordova. She still felt guilty for not going down in person. Mary and Old Sam had been an item for as long as Kate could remember.

  “I know what you’re thinking, girl,” Old Sam had written, “and I know what those goddamn women’ll say.” Kate identified “those goddamn women” as the four aunties without any difficulty. “They’ll say I should have left it to somebody with my blood, or at least tribal blood. They’ll be all pissed off because Petey’s white and his family ain’t even been in the Park more than one generation. Well, there ain’t nobody with my blood who wanted her enough to work summers on her. I thought about leavin’ her to Martin—”

  Kate’s own blood ran cold.

  “—hoping maybe owning something of value might jump-start him out of the general worthlessness he’s adopted since grade school, but realistically you just know he’d sell her to the first person with enough cash to rent him a lifetime stool at the Cordova House. And if he couldn’t sell her he’d let her sink at the dock. I’m going to be too busy to haunt anybody who mistreats her and you got other fish to fry. So let Petey have her. At least this summer he learned to tell her bow from her stern, and he might just treat her right. That’s about all I can make sure of from here.”

  She could almost hear the old man cackle.

  He’d added a postscript. “Make sure to fetch the compass off the bridge before you hand the Freya over to Petey. You learned to steer on that compass, and I want you to have her. Petey can get one of those goddamn GPS things.”

  Old Sam’s compass. Kate put down the will and stared off into space. Well did she remember standing at the big wooden wheel on the Freya’s bridge, turning it one spoke at a time and waiting for the bow to answer as she watched the floating dial of the compass slowly revolve beneath the glass. The antique brass compass was set on gimbals in a square teak box. No speck of tarnish was ever allowed to mar the brass, and the wood gleamed with polish, the special care of the skinny, cranky Captain Bligh standing at her shoulder. No one else was allowed to touch it.

  Jackie Wilson segued to Ray Charles, drowning in his own tears. Tears seemed to be the order of the evening. Kate blinked her eyes clear again. She’d have to go into town tomorrow and find Petey to give him the good news. Last she’d heard he was renting a room from Iris Meganack, as Iris’s daughter Laurel had moved in with Matt Grosdidier. Matt’s brothers, Mark, Luke, and Peter, were said to be overjoyed, as well they should have been because Laurel was one hell of a cook. Iris was known to be tight with a buck and Kate had no doubt she was alleviating her displeasure at Laurel’s moving in with someone without benefit of clergy by charging Petey rent on the order of summer rates at the Kanuyaq River Princess Lodge in Ahtna. At the very least he could now move on board the F
reya and save himself some money. Since the Freya was docked in Cordova, it would also move him out of range of his parents, another good thing.

  Kate knew a huge feeling of relief, and it didn’t have anything to do with the potential for improvement in Petey’s lifestyle. Thinking of the jumbled mess of wooden pallets and coiled lines and spare engine parts and tools that was her last view of the Freya’s focsle, her courage had almost failed her. Old Sam was a true Alaskan, he never threw anything away, he just tossed it in the focsle. He’d been doing so for sixty years, and Kate had not been looking forward to inventorying and disposing of the contents. Now she didn’t have to.

  More good news followed. “You get the books, girl,” Old Sam had written. “Keep the ones you want and farm the rest of them out to the library.” The school library served as the community library and was chronically short of both books and funds to buy books, although they had approached Vern Truax about the Suulutaq Mine’s becoming a Friend of the Library. Since Global Harvest seemed to have given Truax a blank check for local sponsorships designed to smooth the mine’s way with Park rats, the latest of which featured a ThinkPad for every student in Niniltna Public School and a satellite dish on the roof to connect them all to the Internet, Kate thought the library had a pretty good shot at an affirmative response.

  “You been eying that log of Captain Cook’s pretty near since you learned how to read,” Old Sam wrote. “I figure it’s the one thing guarantees you won’t miss me all that awful goddamn much.”

  She laughed and sniffled.

  “You okay?” Johnny said.

  She blew her nose on a paper towel. “Just Old Sam being Old Sam.”

  Reassured, he went back to his math, and she returned to the will. She was taking her time, savoring each paragraph, each sentence. It was her final communication from Old Sam and she wanted to make it last as long as possible.

  He’d owned a couple of pieces of property she hadn’t known about, a lot in Ahtna that she thought might be on First Street, another in Niniltna adjacent to the lot his cabin stood on that appeared to take in most of the riverfront between his house and Harvey and Iris Meganack’s, and a third identified only by latitude and longitude. At a rough guess, after a quick consult with the map of the Park on the wall in the living room, this last was in the Quilaks, this side of Canada somewhere between Park Headquarters and the Suulutaq Mine, which took in a lot of territory. Probably a mining claim Old Sam had staked back in the day when every second Park rat and a whole bunch of Outside boomers were claiming every loose rock that didn’t manage to get out of the way first.

  She looked at the lat and long again. The dimensions looked pretty substantial. She was fuzzy on the rules of claim staking but she had a vague recollection that mining claims were limited in size by law. The Park’s chief ranger, Dan O’Brian, would know. She’d head up to the Step tomorrow. The map on his wall was a lot bigger, too, and had better topographical detail than hers did.

  As to whether there was enough gold or whatever ore was there to pull out of the ground, economically speaking, was anybody’s guess. Odds were always against, but Old Sam hadn’t acquired that property for no reason. Too bad Mac Devlin wasn’t still around. While he’d never been one of her favorite people, he’d had a good nose for the viability of a gold claim. Just never one of his own.

  She looked at the clock. Nine thirty. Jim was taking the redeye to Los Angeles, departing at 1:00 A.M. Three-hour layover in Seattle. If you were flying Alaska Airlines and you wanted to go to hell you had to fly through Seattle to get there. He was scheduled to arrive in Long Beach at ten thirty tomorrow morning, Pacific time. Thirteen hours from now, less one for the time zone change. Around two thousand air miles. Three thousand six hundred miles if you were driving.

  Wilson Pickett weighed in on the midnight hour.

  Johnny looked up and caught her staring at the clock. “If we had cell phones in the Park you could call him,” he said.

  She jumped, startled. His grin was sly.

  “Smart-ass,” she said.

  He snickered. “That would be me.”

  She looked at the gangly sixteen-, no, seventeen-year-old with the almost ugly mug and the carefully groomed thatch of hair streaked with remnants of the summer sun. His father had been a giant teddy bear of a man with a deep, rumbling voice, eyes as bright and blue as his son’s, a jaw as firm. Almost his last living act had been to entrust his son to Kate’s care. Four years later, she didn’t know who she loved more, the man then or the boy now. “Want some cocoa?”

  “Sure. Long as I get some of those no-bake cookies to go along with it.”

  “Chocolate, more chocolate, and peanut butter, may God forgive me,” she said, and got to her feet.

  While she was waiting for the milk to heat on the stove she went out on the deck. It was cold enough to see her breath, clear enough to follow Merak and Dubhe to the North Star almost directly overhead, no mosquitoes and as of yet no snow. A perfect September evening. The sun set farther to the south every night after less time in the sky every day, but in compensation the stars were back, the Pleiades fleeing across the sky as Orion climbed up over the jagged bulk of the Quilaks in hot pursuit. Ever wilt thou love and they be fair. Johnny would be getting out his telescope when the homework was done.

  Far overhead a light moved steadily from north to south. A jet? A satellite, more likely. How many did the state have now, three? She hadn’t kept track, and for all she knew by now it was probably twice that. All those cell phones.

  She sighed. As chair of the board of directors of the Niniltna Native Association, she had already instructed Annie Mike, the Association secretary, to begin talks with the two major cell phone companies in Alaska, as well as to put out feelers to any other telecommunications companies who might be interested. If nothing else, maybe Kate would be able to score an iPhone out of the process.

  But before long, perhaps even before winter set in, one of them could be building the first of their galvanized steel Tinkertoy towers, in a string that would follow the Kanuyaq River from Ahtna to Chulyin, and from there overland to the Suulutaq Mine, where the world’s second largest deposit of gold had been discovered two years before. When they were done, Annie assured Kate, cell phone coverage would cover at minimum half of the twenty million acres of the Park, leaving only the remotest areas out of reach. In exchange for sponsoring their requests for leases on the likeliest locations in the best areas to locate their towers, the companies were even willing to discuss the possibility of constructing towers and providing coverage to the more outremer Park rats. They wanted the business, they’d left the NNA board in no doubt about that. And Ranger Dan had no intention of Park HQ being left in a no-service area, so whoever their cell phone provider wound up being would also be running towers up to the Step.

  Kate wondered what the elders had thought when the discovery of copper at Kanuyaq in 1900 had caused the first telephone line to be strung in the Park, although it hadn’t been a Park yet and wouldn’t be for another seventy years. The telephone lines had not survived the closing of the mine. Now, a century later, twenty-four-seven communication was about to come back with a vengeance. She’d done a little after-hours Googling on one of those donated computers at Niniltna Public School at the start of the school year. Typically, mobile communications service providers paid anywhere from a thousand to three thousand a month to lease tower space, for five-year terms that customarily included an option for extending the lease in five-year increments up to twenty-five years. The price paid generally increased in direct proportion to how long the landowner was willing to lease the land for. If Tikani looked like a good prospect for a tower, for example, Vidar Johansen, its last living resident (or last living resident who wasn’t in jail), could pull down as much as a hundred and seventy-five large.

  Money like that hadn’t been seen in the Park in a long, long time, the Suulutaq Mine notwithstanding, and Kate could only imagine the stampede when the news got out. />
  She hated talking on the telephone. She just wasn’t one of those people who had an answer when it rang and someone said, “Hey, how ya doing?” She wanted to see the face of the person she was talking to, watch as their expression changed, take in the lift of an eyebrow or the sideways glance that told her what they were really saying. In Kate’s experience, and after five and half years working sex crimes as an investigator for the Anchorage DA and another—god, was it really?—almost ten years now working as a private investigator out of the Park, the difference was vast. Words could mean anything, anything at all. Faces, now, faces told a different story, often as you were sitting there listening to their mouths say something else entirely.

  Still. The brat had a point. If they’d had cell phone service in the Park right now, Jim could have called her from the airport. The airport in Anchorage. The airport in Seattle. The airport in Long Beach.

  Every day he was gone.

  A shooting star painted a fading streak across the night sky. She looked north to see if the lights were out, but it was too early in the evening. A cold nose touched her hand and she looked down to see that Mutt had followed her outside.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said, “I know. In the immortal words of Billie Holiday, what lonely hours the evening shadows bring, when your lover has gone.”

  Mutt stared at her with wise yellow eyes.

  “Oh, shut up,” Kate said, and went back inside to make cocoa.

  Three

  Johnny drove his own pickup to school the next morning, Kate and Mutt following behind an hour later. She paused at the Riverside Café long enough for one of Laurel Meganack’s first-rate americanos and a giant two-pump French vanilla nonfat latte, Dan’s favorite, extra hot so there was a chance it’d still be lukewarm by the time it got to the Step. Lucky she wasn’t staying for breakfast, as every table and booth and counter was jammed with raucous, unshaven Suulutaq miners. Every Park rat with a four-wheeler was renting it out by the hour to any miner who came along, and the miners had lost no time in tearing a track into the muskeg between the Suulutaq and Niniltna, after which they had very quickly found their way to Bernie’s Roadhouse. When it snowed, the Park rats would probably switch out rentals from four-wheelers to snowmobiles, at equally extortionate rates.