"That's all."
The room was silent but for the rustle of grass. Kate kept her head bent over her basket. When she could speak, she said, "Do you ever go back to Anua?"
"Sure," Becky said, at the same time Olga said, "No."
The girl's eyes widened. Olga said easily, "Only for the grass. In June or July, when it is ready to pick. But mostly we use Chinaman's grass, raffia, that we buy from Outside. It takes too long to pick and cure the rye grass." The old woman smiled. "And the tourists can't tell the difference."
Kate grinned. Before she could reply, Sasha said suddenly,
"Home."
They all looked at her, seated on the floor, her crippled leg again twisted awkwardly beneath her. She still had the ivory knife, and with it she traced a pattern on the old linoleum floor, the yellowed ivory of the old knife looking odd against the cracked paisley pattern. Her brown eyes were bright and alert, the most alive features in that blunted face, "Kayak. Men. Thunderbird. Men.
Horne."
"That's the same story she was telling on the beach this morning," Becky told Olga. "What does it mean?"
Olga shrugged, and leaned forward to pluck the storyknife from Sasha's now limp fingers. "I don't know. What do any of Sasha's stories mean?"
"But her stories always make sense, Auntie," Becky protested. "Somehow, they always do. You just have to figure them out."
"Thunderbird," Sasha said clearly. "Men. Kayak. Men.
Home."
"See? She knows what we're talking about."
Olga looked at Becky. "The storyknife is just a toy, Becky. It makes Sasha happy to play with it. That's all."
Becky's mouth closed and she bent back over her basket, a tinge of red creeping up into her cheeks.
"Tell me about the storyknife, Auntie," Kate suggested into the uncomfortable silence that followed. "I've never seen one before. It's beautiful."
Olga looked down at the ivory knife she held in her hands. "My grandmother gave it to me. My great-uncle made it for her when she was a little girl. It's a toy. A girl's toy. We use it to draw stories in the sand, and in the snow."
"Where did it come from? The custom, I mean ?
Olga shrugged. "Some people say it used to be a real knife. That the Eskimos used it to cut snow into blocks for igloos. All I know is I got this one from my mother.
My mother got it from her mother. Other girls had them when I was a child. It was a custom." She handed the storyknife to Kate.
Kate accepted it in reverent hands. The handle was carved with the stylized likeness of a sea otter floating on his back. In spite of the wear and tear caused by at minimum four pairs of grubby little hands, each individual whisker stood out on his tiny face. He stared up at Kate, expectant. The ivory seemed to grow heavier in her hand. Kate cleared her throat. "Are they always made from ivory?"
"No. Some are made from bone or wood."
"It's a beautiful thing, Auntie," Kate said, handing it back. "And valuable. It should be in a museum."
"And would a museum take it out and play with it?"
Olga demanded, and gave a snort. "Its spirit would die, locked up in a place where it was never touched. Here the girls play with it, and it tells them stories."
Which made it something more than just a toy, Kate thought. She looked down at the rapidly shredding beginning of her basket, and said ruefully, "I don't seem to be doing very well at this, Auntie. I guess I'm just a cultural illiterate."
"Nonsense," Olga said briskly. "It takes practice, like anything else. You will take some grass with you when you leave, so you can work at it on your own."
Wonderful, Kate thought, but said meekly, "Thank you, Auntie."
"And now more tea? And some alodiks?"
"Alodiks?" Kate said.
The old woman looked at her reprovingly. "You have no Aleut?"
Kate shook her head.
"Because your grandmother wanted you to?" Olga guessed shrewdly, and laughed, a loud, cackling laugh, at Kate's expression. Kate was relieved when Olga turned to the stove, and even more relieved when alodiks proved to be nothing more than fried bread.
A few minutes later Olga put a plateful of the stuff in the middle of the table, puffed up and golden brown.
Everyone around the table made a concerted grab, not excepting Kate.
"There were killer whales in the bay this morning, Auntie," one of the girls said around a mouthful of fried bread.
"Ahhhhh," Olga said. "Killer whales in the bay." The smile faded from her face and she shook her head gravely.
"What does it mean?"
"Killer whales in the bay?"
"Yes. Do you know what it means?"
"I know only what everyone knows." Olga worked her next few stitches without speaking. The girls ceased their giggling and whispering, and as the silence gathered and grew, Kate had the feeling of a curtain about to go up.
When she spoke again, Olga's voice fell again into a kind of singsong, with a full-stop pause at the end of each sentence. It was subtle but clear. It wasn't as if Olga banged a drum on the downbeat at the end of every line, but Becky and her sister began nodding their heads slightly to the beat. Kate had noticed a similar kind of cadence to Olga's story of the Aleuts' exile and repatriation during and after World War 11, and now consciously scanned the old woman's words for rhythm. She found it, and repetition, and internal rhymes, and alliteration.
Without moving, the girls seemed to draw tighter together in their circle, intent, absorbed, almost hypnotized, acolytes hanging on the words of their priestess.
"When killer whales come to a bay with a village,"
Olga chanted, "they come hungry for someone's spirit.
"When the killer whales come
"To a bay with a village
"Someone is going to die.
"When the killer whales come
"To a bay with a village
"The people know.
"When the killer whales come
"To a bay with a village
"It won't be long.
"Maybe one month.
"Maybe two.
"When the killer whales come
"Someone dies in that bay.
"When the killer whales come.
"That's all.'"
As she spoke the last words, Olga looked straight at Kate. She held her gaze for a long moment, before her eyes dropped to the scar on Kate's throat. The skin there began to itch beneath that intent gaze. Kate held perfectly still. "That was a beautiful story, Auntie," she said. "You're a poet."
Olga laughed, a loud robust laugh, and the priestess was gone and her acolytes, too, on the gust of merriment.
"It's just an old legend," she said, dropping back into prose. "I'm a good Christian missionary's daughter, myself. I don't believe any of that stuff."
Kate burst out laughing, and the girls joined in again.
As she rose to leave, Kate hesitated, not wanting to trespass but the memory of those graceful, swooping sand drawings haunting her. "About Sasha."
Olga's face was expressionless. "What about her?"
"Has she seen a doctor? There might be-"
"There is nothing," Olga said flatly. "Her mother drank too much."
"Where does Sasha live?" Kate asked Becky outside.
"With family, parents, what?" She was determined to do something, anything. Anyone who could draw like Sasha was not, could not be entirely beyond help, fetal alcohol syndrome baby or not.
She turned her head to find Becky looking at her with surprise. "What?"
Becky jerked a thumb over her shoulder, at the house behind them. "Sasha lives right here, Kate, Auntie is Sasha's mom."
SIX
THE harbor's dock space was so limited that the Avilda was again third in a row of boats rafted four deep. The next morning the tide was at slack and it was a long way down to the first boat tied to the dock. There are worse things in life than hanging in the pitch-dark from a forty-foot ladder, trying to find a foothold on the
icy railing of a boat being tossed up and down in the enthusiastic embrace of a spirited groundswell. Offhand, Kate couldn't think of one.
She shut her ears to the rush of water, the smack of the swell on the bottom of a hundred hulls, the murmur of idling engines, the shout of impatient skippers. Moving one limb at a time, she felt her cautious way down to the next rung on the ladder and extended a foot in what she prayed was the general direction of the boat. A barnacle crunched beneath the foot still on the ladder, the sole of f r boot slid across the rung, her balance shifted and one hand pulled free. She made a wild grab for the ladder and by a miracle caught it.
She pressed her forehead against cold metal and scratchy barnacle, her heart pounding in her ears, gasping for breath. Water rushed in among the pilings with a chuckling sound. Her mouth tightened into an unseen snarl and she swiveled on the rung, bent her knees, let go and jumped blind. For a moment she was suspended in midair, and then she hit the deck awkwardly. Instinct took over and she tucked her head and rolled forward in a somersault. Her butt hit something hard and she stopped rolling, her feet failing forward with a thump.
For a moment she just lay there, panting. She heard a noise from the boat's cabin like someone was about to come on deck and she shot to her feet and made for the opposite railing. The rest of the journey was by comparison a piece of cake; all she had to do was straddle the tied-together railings of the two boats with one leg and swing her other leg over. Always supposing the boats were of equal size, which they often weren't, in which case she had to either climb up or jump down or both. When she slithered onto the Avilda's heaving deck she knew a moment of pure triumph.
She was making breakfast when Andy emerged from their stateroom, rumpled and yawning. He peered over her shoulder at the eggs scrambled with cheese and onions and green chile and bits of shredded tortilla.
"Looks good. Smells great."
"You eat eggs?" she said, eyes wide. "Eggs come from chickens. Come to think of it, eggs are chickens, before they hatch. You might be chowing down on something's soul here, messing up their prana all to hell and gone. Maybe you should reconsider." She gave him a big smile. "I could pour you a bowl of cereal."
Ignoring her, he poured himself a cup of coffee.
"Thought it was Ned's turn to cook."
"He's not back on board yet."
Andy looked surprised. "I thought we were taking this tide."
"So did L" Kate sprinkled in some garlic powder and gave the eggs a final stir before turning off the burner and removing the skillet from the stove.
"Harry'll be pissed," Andy said, sounding satisfied at the prospect.
"He's not back yet, either." The toast popped out and Kate buttered it with a lavish hand.
Andy stopped with his cup halfway to his mouth.
"Seth?"
"Nope.
There was a short silence. Into his coffee mug Andy said, "This isn't a very well-run boat, is it, Kate?"
"Nope.
"I mean it, I'm getting off, soon as I find something else."
Kate shrugged. "You should have been on my last boat." And only, she thought but didn't say. "The skipper had a loudspeaker mounted on the foredeck and wired into a microphone on the bridge so he could talk to the crew on deck whenever he wanted to, and he wanted to all the time. Yap, yap, yap, from how to grab a buoy with a boat hook to how to chop bait to how to fill a bait jar to how to tie door ties to how to sort crab. This guy never but never shut up." Kate ladled eggs onto a plate and paused, remembering. "He had this real high, squeaky voice that sounded ten times worse amplified.
It drove everybody crazy."
"What happened?"
Kate shrugged again. "One day the speaker didn't work. For a while the skipper didn't notice it. We'd look up at the bridge and he'd be standing at the wheel, yapping away into the mike, but we couldn't hear a word. It was like the difference between heaven and hell. Then he gave somebody an order and of course nobody heard him and he realized something was wrong.
He traced the wires to the speaker and found somebody'd cut them."
Andy grinned. "How much do you know about electronics, Kate?"
Kate handed him a heaping plate. "Shut up and eat your breakfast." She made herself a plate, scraped the remaining eggs to one side of the frying pan and stacked the rest of the toast next to them, She covered the whole thing to keep it warm and sat down to eat. She, too, wondered where the rest of the crew was, and what they were doing. If Harry old buddy and his two chosen sons were going to make this vanishing act a habit, she was going to have to figure out how to tail them through Dutch Harbor's immense metropolitan district without getting spotted. The prospect did not delight her. She was good, but she wasn't that good.
They were on their second cup of coffee when Harry, Ned and Seth finally showed up. Ned and Seth were carrying suitcases, one each, the shiny silver kind that photographers use to pack their lenses into.
Kate eyed the suitcases. "Been Christmas shopping?"
"You could say that," Ned said, almost pleasantly, which made Kate wonder if there was something wrong with her hearing.
"Yep, visions of sugar-plum dance in our heads,"
Seth added, and the three of them burst out laughing, even Seth.
They were in a wonderful mood in an exclusive sort of way, nudging each other, exchanging winks, sharing muffled comments and chuckles. The only thing worse than this crew surly was this crew merry. Andy finished his coffee and, reassured by an expansive Harry Gault that the Avilda was staying where she was for the time being, went uptown, probably to work on sniffing out a new berth. Kate put her dishes in the dishwasher and went out on deck to coil shots and chop bait, and plot a chance to locate and find out what was inside the shiny silver suitcases brought on board that morning.
She was still on deck when a pump started below and began emptying the bilge into the harbor. After a while the pump stopped, but in the growing daylight the oily sheen growing from their hull was easy to spot, until Ned came forward with a bottle of detergent and squirted it over the side. It cut through the oil and the sheen floated off. Ned grinned at her. "Slicker'n snot."
"Thought we weren't supposed to pump the bilge out into the harbor," she said in a neutral voice, eyes on the line she was coiling. "Turn the place into a sewer if we all did it."
He shrugged. "Ain't my harbor."
He went aft, and Kate thought that maybe Andy had the right idea.
When the Avilda arrived back out on the fishing grounds Kate was surprised and relieved to find all their gear right where it was supposed to be. The take had decreased, but the lines were intact, the netting unslashed and the buoys whole. It was more than she had expected.
On their two previous trips they had averaged a hundred tanners per pot (or at least that was their average on Pots that had not previously been picked). If the average weight of bairdi was two and a half pounds, at $1.50 per pound that meant each pot was worth $375. Her crew share, eight percent, had been thirty dollars a pot, and they had been picking a minimum of forty pots a day.
Kate began to feel cheated whenever a pot came up half empty, and she got downright surly when most of what was in the pots proved to be garbage.
Apparently Harry Gault felt the same way. He gave orders not to bait and reset the pots as they were pulled, but instead to stack them on deck. Naturally the deck boss didn't bother telling the rest of the crew what the plan was.
Andy finished coiling and stacking a shot of polypro and wandered over in Kate's direction. "What's going on?" he asked in a low voice.
Kate ran a final loop through the frame of the last pot and tested the line. It held firm. She gave a satisfied nod.
"Looks like the skipper's finally noticed we've lost the crab. Best guess? We're going prospecting."
Andy looked confused. "Prospecting?"
"Set a pot here, there. Try to find where the tanners went."
For the next week that's what they did, cruising up and dow
n the Chain, setting a few pots, pulling them to examine the contents, meandering a little farther west, a little farther south to repeat the process in untested waters. Occasionally the fog would clear and a smoking, snowcapped volcano would loom up off the bow. With the amount of weather that swirled in and out in a twenty-four-hour period, it was hard for the crew to tell just what direction they were traveling in, and of course Harry Gault was as garrulous and forthcoming as always, which meant that the only time he opened his mouth was to bark an order.
So immersed was she in her role as deckhand that Kate began to be concerned over the lack of crab in each pot and the subsequent lack of crab in the hold.
The paychecks from her last two trips out were folded away into the pocket of her jeans, where they made a nice, solid weight. Her sleep had begun to be disturbed by dreams of a new truck, a larger generator for the homestead. Maybe even a satellite dish. She liked to watch MTV and VH-I when she visited the Roadhouse, catch up on the latest in music. She used to sing and play the guitar. Singing was out now, as that baby raper's knife had almost taken out her vocal cords, but she still loved music, and her taste was eclectic to say the least. She had recently become a fan of k. d. lang's, and remembered suddenly that on satellite you got The Nashville Network, too. She reached inside her pocket to touch the two folded slips of paper, and dreamed on.
She woke up to realize it was coming up on dinnertime and her turn to cook. She straightened and stretched.
The gray-green gulf stretched out endlessly in every direction, a snowcapped peak with a faint plume rising from it floated in a ring of fog off the port beam, and Ned was emptying a pot on deck.
He was about to toss its contents over the side and she raised her voice. "Hold it, Ned."
"Nothing but garbage," Ned growled when she came up next to him.
Kate sorted through the pot's contents. "We've got four red kings-"
"Not in season."
,.-a chicken halibut-"
"Which can't weigh fifteen pounds."
,,-and a half-dozen Dungeness. Big ones, too," Kate said admiringly.
"What you want them for?" Ned asked suspiciously.
Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 03 - Dead In The Water Page 10
