A Night Too Dark

by Dana Stabenow

  “When did you get started in the take-out business, Auntie?”

  Auntie Edna, normally an Olympic-class grump and hands down the sourest of the four aunties, this fair summer evening looked happier than Kate had ever seen her. “Some boys follow their noses to my kitchen on Memorial Day,” she said, aiming a beam of Auntie Joy–wattage at the line. “Other boys follow. Good eaters, all them boys.” She lowered her voice. “And good payers, too.”

  Over her shoulder Kate saw that Auntie Edna had borrowed some of the larger pots from the school cafeteria, which sat steaming on a stove with all four burners on high. Tacked next to the door was a hand-lettered menu, beginning with bagoong. Kate toted up her order and was ready with her tab when Auntie Edna handed out a full bag, and almost went into shock when Auntie Edna waived payment. “My niece,” she told the line, turning Kate to face them, hands on her shoulders holding her on the top step. “She make mine happen. She why you here. Okay, next?” A firm shove and Kate was displaced on the top step by the next in line.

  The combined smells liked to drive Kate insane before she got to the homestead, and she was conscious enough to look guilty when Jim raised an eyebrow at how few lumpia had survived the trip. It wasn’t her fault. Lumpia was finger food. You can’t eat long rice and drive at the same time. “Did you know Auntie Edna is running a take-out restaurant out of her kitchen?”

  He nodded. “I’d heard something about it.”

  She shook her head. “Auntie Vi sells her B and B, Auntie Balasha is selling kuspuks at the Riverside Café, now Auntie Edna is selling Filipino takeout out her back door. What next?”

  “I’ll set the table while you shower,” he said, and picked her up and kissed her. She kicked him in the shins with one of her dangling feet, but not very hard.

  Jim pulled all the leftovers out of the refrigerator to join what Kate had brought home, which didn’t look like anywhere near enough to either his eye or his stomach. Fifteen minutes later they sat down to a meal that while it adhered to no particular nutritional guideline was immensely satisfying. Jim had even sliced some sashimi from a fresh king filet he found in the refrigerator and mixed up a wasabi–soy sauce accompaniment.

  All was quiet for a time, and then Jim sat back and burped in a very satisfied manner. “I might live.”

  “Me, too. So how was your day, dear?”

  He told her. “How was yours?”

  She fetched the boot remnant that was still sitting on the deck.

  He studied it, turning it over in his hands. “Suulutaq buys gear for their employees, right?”

  “Outside gear. Parkas, jackets, bibs, overalls.”

  “And boots?”

  “And boots.”

  “Boots like this one?”

  “Almost exactly like this one, I’d say.”

  He grunted, and set the boot aside.

  “Bed?” she said.

  “God, yes,” he said, and followed her up the stairs. They stripped off their clothes and tumbled down together and were instantly asleep.

  The next morning Kate woke up, sat up, and said, “Who else hasn’t shown up for work at Suulutaq in the past month?”

  Jim opened one sleepy blue eye and considered. “Good question. You’re back on the clock.”

  She threw back the covers and swung a leg over the edge of the bed.

  A long arm snaked out and grabbed her before she got both feet on the floor. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  She let herself fall back onto the mattress. “I think I’m staying right here.”

  He pulled her beneath him. “Good decision.”

  That it was.

  After checking in with Maggie at the post and turning a blind eye to the accumulating pile of pink call slips she had left in the exact center of his desk, Jim went to Old Sam’s house. This was a log cabin on the very edge of the Kanuyaq River, about five hundred feet north of Ekaterina Shugak’s old house, now occupied by Martha Barnes and her large brood of children, six or eight of which he could hear whooping and hollering in a game of cowboys and Indians. Sounded like the Indians were winning.

  Old Sam’s cabin was very much lost in the tall grass, and the forget-me-nots, columbine, and moss campion that were running riot over the sod roof provided a much-needed homing beacon. A path led to a weathered but sound wooden walkway that led in turn to the cabin door, and from there down to a small dock. At the end of the dock there was a bench made from lengths of alder woven together in a sturdy frame that had achieved the patina of old pewter. On that bench sat Old Sam, coffee mug in hand and feet crossed on an overturned galvanized steel bucket. He’d heard Jim’s footsteps on the dock. “Go on in, get yourself a mug up if you want.”

  Jim had to duck to get in the door. Inside, there was a counter with a sink and a pump handle, an oil stove for cooking, a wood stove for heat, a beat-up brown leather Barcalounger and shelves made of two-by-twelves fixed to every inch of available wall space. Jim, perforce, paused to look at some of the books on the shelves. Old Sam’s taste in reading was catholic, he’d give him that. He had everything ever written by Robert Ruark, including three different editions of Use Enough Gun. Wilbur Smith and Peter Capstick were well represented, and Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour very much in evidence. Jim pulled down a book with a leopard-print cover that revealed itself to be a much-thumbed copy of The Truth About Hunting in Today’s Africa, which fell open to a black-and-white photo of “the dreaded tsetse fly.”

  He closed the book and replaced it on the shelf. So far as he knew Old Sam had never left Alaska.

  The next shelf was dedicated to Captain Cook, including a venerable edition of Cook’s three-volume log bound in worn maroon leather with gilt titles, a copy of Tony Horwitz’s Blue Latitudes, a favorite of Jim’s, and the Cook biography by Alistair MacLean. The next shelf was reserved for Alaskana, autobiographies by Wicker-sham and Gruening and Hammond, histories of the war in the Aleutians and the gold rush, bios of Bush pilots. He opened one at random and found dog-eared pages with copious notes in the margins.

  He’d never thought of Old Sam as a reader. The old man had always seemed to him to be more a man of action than reflection. He shrugged and replaced the volume on the shelf. No law said a man couldn’t be both.

  A chrome-legged dining room table and chairs that would have been new around 1957 took up the center of the room. Overhead was a narrow sleeping loft, reached by a homemade ladder whose uprights were worn smooth from long use.

  It felt very familiar, and after a moment Jim knew why. Although older and smaller, Old Sam’s cabin looked a lot like Kate’s old cabin. Well, why not? Old Sam must have known Kate’s father. They might even have helped put up each other’s cabins. Why screw with a floor plan that worked.

  This cabin had electricity, though, and a plug-in coffeepot. Jim poured a fluid the viscosity of thirty-weight into a boat mug he found on a shelf and added a precautionary dose from the can of evaporated milk standing providentially near to hand.

  The sun was warm on his face as he walked down the dock. The current was running strongly downstream, where other cabins and houses and docks could be seen with their toes in the swift-running water. Old Sam moved over on the bench, which creaked, but not alarmingly. Jim sat down next to him and crossed his heels on the edge of the dock. He took a sip of coffee and hid his wince. “Meant to say yesterday, aren’t you supposed to be down Alaganik way this time of year?”

  “I would be if the goddamn fish hawks would call an opener.”

  “Who’s minding the Freya?”

  “That Jeppsen boy and the Lestinkof girl Kate wished on me.”

  “Who’s minding them?”

  “Got her anchored up just offshore of Mary’s site. She’s keeping an eye out.”

  The two men contemplated the passing river in companionable silence. A pair of eagles chittered from the top of a nearby scrag, three ravens chased each other in a madcap spiral, and a lone seagull zeroed in on the carcass of a spawned-out sa
lmon cast up on a nearby sandbank. Almost immediately half a dozen other seagulls materialized to fight for their share.

  Martin Shugak went by in an ancient, paintless dory powered by a seventy-five-horsepower Mercury outboard engine that looked brand-new. He raised a hand in greeting to Old Sam, saw Jim and hunched his shoulders and looked the other way.

  “Nice outboard,” Old Sam said.

  “Don’t go there,” Jim said.

  A little while later Edna Aguilar came upriver in an olive green inflatable boat with a two-horsepower Evinrude on the back that looked like a large mosquito. It sounded like one, too.

  “Is it just me or does she always look pissed off?” Jim said.

  “It ain’t just you,” Old Sam said.

  The proper thing would be to compliment Edna on last night’s meal but Jim was too scared to. Both men gave perfunctory waves and prayed silently that she would go on by. They breathed more easily when she had.

  Andy Martushev appeared in his canoe, paddle moving through the water at a steady beat, the sun illuminating the crystalline drops of spray over the bow when he changed sides.

  “Andy,” Old Sam said when Andy was in earshot.

  “Sam,” Andy said.

  “Want some coffee?”

  “Got some waiting on me at the café.”

  “And somebody a lot prettier to wait on you,” Old Sam said.

  Andy grinned and paddled on by. “He’s dreaming,” Old Sam said.

  “Why?” Jim said. “Andy’s all right. Laurel could do a lot worse.”

  “I hear she and Matt Grosdidier might maybe got a thing,” Old Sam said, always a step ahead of everybody else on Park gossip. “Besides, Laurel’s not about to throw herself away on a fuckup like Andy. She’s too much her mother’s daughter.” Old Sam drank coffee. “Things going okay with the girl?”

  Grunt.

  “Looking like it’s going to last?”

  “Jesus, Old Sam, I don’t even talk about this stuff with Kate.”

  “Maybe you oughta.”

  With what he felt was pardonable indignation, Jim said, “Whose coffee am I drinking here, Dear Abby’s?”

  “The NNA chair knows that mine’s a good thing for the Park. Industry, jobs, a tax base so they can start picking up where the state’s falling off.”

  Jim looked at the old man, startled by a comment that seemed right out of left field.

  Old Sam wore an uncompromising expression. He was going to say what he had to say and Jim was going to hear it. “The Park rat’s a different story. The Park rat, she hates the mine and everything to do with it. The mine’s invading the place that healed her when she was wounded body and soul after that job in Anchorage. It’s a violation of the peace and the privacy she’s taken as her birthright. This mine will change the face of the land itself, scar it so that it will never be the same again.” Old Sam looked down into his mug. “This ain’t easy times for the Park rat. Just saying you should keep it in mind, is all.”

  His peaceful mood shattered, Jim finished his coffee and set the mug down on the dock. “You remember where you guys found that body in May?”

  Old Sam scratched his chin and pretended to think about it. “The body that was previously identified as this guy who staggered out of the woods day before yesterday?”

  “Yeah.”

  Old Sam thought some more. “I reckon I could find it again, was I asked.”

  This was the purest sophistry, of course. Old Sam Dementieff had more time served in the Park than any ten other Park rats you could name. He’d covered most of its twenty million acres on the ground, on either foot, four-wheeler, or snowmobile, not to mention cross-country skis, snowshoes, pickup, and the ever and omnipresent airplane. There wasn’t a grizzly den or a caribou calving ground within a hundred miles that Old Sam couldn’t have found in his sleep. He’d walked out of at least one plane crash in the dead of winter when everyone else on board including the pilot had died, showing up in Niniltna a week later. “Didn’t look like he’d missed a meal,” Kate had said. “What’s more, he led them straight back to it, no passing Go, no collecting two hundred dollars.” She’d shaken her head. “I’m a pretty good backwoodsman, but Old Sam …”

  Jim knew it, and Old Sam knew he knew it, but Jim wasn’t going to say it, partly because it would just pander to the old fart’s ego, which justifiably or not was already the size of Big Bump, and partly because saying so might then necessitate a discussion about what Old Sam had really been doing out in the woods the day the search party had tripped over him. Like Kate, Jim thought the less official notice taken of that, the better for all concerned. So he said only, “I’d appreciate it if you could guide me out there.”

  “What for?”

  “Well.” Jim squinted into the sun. “Kate tells me the bunch of you were in something of a hurry when you left.”

  “We were at first.” Old Sam grinned that saturnine grin. “After, of course, Dan insisted we skin out that ol’ griz and take his bladder so no one else would and sell ’em off on the black market.”

  “Yeah, Kate said. She is especially torqued that Dan wouldn’t let her keep the hide. Anyway, I was thinking there might be something there that got missed in all the excitement.” Jim looked back across the river, wishing he could sit next to its calm serenity for the rest of the day. “The thing is, I’m going to need a hell of a lot more than I’ve got now if I’m ever going to identify that body.”

  Old Sam drove them to the place where they’d found Gammons’s pickup. He parked and they got out. He had his Model 70 slung over his shoulder. At Jim’s look he said tersely, “Fish are hitting fresh water. The bears’ll all be down on the creeks by now.”

  Jim had brought the shotgun from his Blazer anyway.

  They moved through the woods, Jim following Old Sam. To Jim it looked like your average forest, dark, impenetrable to the sun, and possessed of a malevolent spirit that was out to get him and only him. Scrub spruce flung up roots for him to trip over and then slapped him in the face with their branches, if they didn’t outright leap into his path. Diamond willow wound themselves into a tangle that would have put the Gordian knot to shame. Where the willow left off the alder began, and when he managed to fight off the alder a grove of birch trees was lurking in a dense fence with no bole more than six inches from the next. Biting flies and mosquitoes gathered around this heaven-sent infusion of fresh blood and in spite of the bug dope he had slathered on himself before they went in he was attacked with the enthusiastic, single-minded dedication only genus Aedes can bring to their duty. The one place they didn’t bite was where the spruce sap had attached itself to his skin, and he knew from bitter experience the only way to remove spruce sap was to grow a new epidermis.

  There was a reason for the invention of airplanes, and it was so you could fly over this crap instead of walk through it. Jim knuckled a drop of sweat depending from the tip of his nose and soldiered on.

  Ahead of him, by contrast, Old Sam ambled forward with all the air of a man taking a walk down a country lane on a mild Sunday morning. He didn’t trip or stumble, he didn’t sweat or swear, he didn’t swat or slap, no, he simply slid through the brush as if it had been greased specifically for his passage, while the bugs kept a respectful distance.

  It felt as if hours and miles had passed before Old Sam said at long last, “Here,” and Jim emerged into a clearing, blinking in the rediscovered sun that had been there all the time and that beamed down on them now like an old friend. He stood there for a moment to let his eyes adjust to daylight again. A raven croaked from the top of a tree, and a couple of crows cawed from another. Even the birds had attitude today. He pulled out a bottle of water, uncapped it, and drank it down in one long continual swallow.

  Old Sam stood to one side, one hand hooked on the sling of his rifle, the other in the pocket of his jacket, watching with a quizzical expression on his seamed face. Fucker wasn’t even sweating.

  Jim crushed the bottle, replaced the c
ap, and put it back in his pocket. “Okay, let’s take a look around.”

  “You want help, or you want me to stay out of the way?”

  “Help, definitely. We’ll walk it in a straight line, side by side about six feet apart. Walk slow and watch where you put your feet.”

  Old Sam surveyed the area. “You really expecting to find anything?”

  He had a point. When they’d been there the month before, Old Sam said, the grass had just been beginning to green up. Now it was four feet high and under the influence of twenty hours of daylight leaping even farther skyward with boundless enthusiasm. Jim could wish it were a little less healthy.

  The raven croaked again and then changed dialects like they sometimes did, producing a series of clicks and taps and claps. Two more ravens arrived and joined in the chorus.

  “Great, we’ve got an audience,” Jim said.

  Old Sam said nothing, eying the ravens with a narrow stare.

  “Okay, let’s get it done,” Jim said.

  It took them a full fifteen minutes to wade slowly the length of the clearing. About halfway across on the return trip Jim tripped over something. He rooted around until he found whatever it was, and froze in a bent-over position, his eyes wide.

  “What?” Old Sam came up to stand next to him and peer into the grass. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah, that’ll be the bones left from that griz Kate shot. We skinned ’em and left the rest.” He admired the pile of bones, stripped clean of any shred of flesh or gristle, leaving nothing behind but tooth marks in varying sizes. “Got to admire the efficiency.”

  Jim straightened up and passed a shirtsleeve over a sweaty forehead. “Right. Sure. Of course.” He would never have admitted it, especially not to Old Sam, but he didn’t like the tall grass any better than he’d liked the impenetrable forest. A clear view in every direction was the best defense against predators, whether they had two feet or four.

  “Hell,” Old Sam said, still peering at the bones, barely visible in the abundant new growth. “I’m not sure I’m even seeing all the way to the ground. Shoulda brought Mutt. She could sniff out anything.”