Bad Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  If he’d been less concerned with his own affairs and the affairs of the village of Kushtaka, he would have heard the undertone of anxiety warning of problems closer to home.

  But he’d already caught seventeen different kinds of grief from the village elders for teaching Jennifer to work the fish wheel. Especially from the women, whom one would have thought might have been on Jennifer’s side. From there, things seemed to progress exponentially, until somehow he was taking her with him when he was running his traplines. She learned, quickly, just by watching, how to set traps, how to skin and tan hides.

  Her mother had tried to teach her how to smoke fish, but here, too, Jennifer nagged Dale until he took her out on the Sound and taught her how to gillnet. The whole village heard what the elders had thought about that. Girls didn’t fish, either. At least Kushtaka girls didn’t.

  Resentful of the criticism, despairing because he had no son, he bought her a rifle and taught her to shoot. It didn’t help that she turned out to be the best shot in the village, taking down a bull moose the previous fall so big, it had taken two days to pack out. There was plenty of grumbling over this blatant flouting of tradition, too, but Dale hadn’t seen any of the elders turning up their noses at Jennifer’s mom’s moose stew at the Christmas party at the gym.

  She’d always been smart, and quick to learn. She should have been a boy.

  Jennifer, of course, had ignored the whispers behind her back and the scolding to her face with equal disregard. Perhaps that kind and quality of beauty bred its own indifference to authority.

  Suddenly, Dale Mack was afraid for his daughter, afraid for his family, for his village, a nameless, inchoate fear that threatened to well up and choke him where he sat.

  He looked at Rick. “Want to stay for supper, Rick?”

  The younger man brightened. “Sure.”

  And Dale Mack cravenly ignored the dark fury in the glance directed his way by his only child, and said, “Set an extra place, Jennifer.”

  Six

  WEDNESDAY, JULY 11

  Niniltna

  The cell tower on the hill in back of the school was the first thing to be seen driving into Niniltna, a village built along one street that paralleled the river. Houses varied in construction from one-year-old split-level ranch homes to hundred-year-old log cabins, with a few tar paper shacks thrown in just to keep the place humble. The school’s gymnasium was the largest building in town and where every event of any significance was held, from the Kanuyaq Kings basketball team’s annual grudge match with the Cordova Wolverines to Niniltna Native Association annual board meetings to potlatches for any event, birth, death, wedding, or old-fashioned ego trip for the host. See how rich I am? See what good food I serve? See how many rifles and blankets I can give away? You should vote for me next time, for NNA board or CEO or state senator.

  There was a single grocery store, a restaurant, and a fuel dealer with a lone gas pump out front, $7.40 a gallon today, Kate saw. Which was why everyone who could afford to bought their gas in fifty-five-gallon drums trucked in from Ahtna, or in bulk delivered to personal fuel tanks by the tanker truck that made the trip into the Park once a month during the summer. Which wasn’t much cheaper, but every little bit helped, especially before the fish started running.

  The Kanuyaq River at Niniltna was deep enough along its eastern edge to bring smaller fishing boats in to the many docks attached to the houses built along the bank. The southern side of the river was less populated, mostly by log cabins that predated the Park, every second one of which was abandoned, tumbledown, and covered with moss.

  Kate stopped at the Riverside Cafe for one of Laurel’s Americanos, heavy on the half-and-half, and spent a few moments catching up on the local gossip. Kushtaka did not figure in it, so the news had not percolated this far north. Cindy and Ben Bingley did. “Is the store closed?” Kate said, thinking of the shopping list she had in the pocket of her jeans.

  A Meganack, the apple hadn’t fallen that far from the familial tree in that Laurel owned and operated the Riverside Cafe, one of Niniltna’s newer and healthier commercial concerns. The mine had helped, of course, since the café was the only place a Suulutaq miner could buy a burger and at the same time eye up the local talent, of which Laurel was certainly a member. In her twenties, long dark hair pulled into a loose ponytail, big dark eyes framed with thick lashes, an hourglass figure showcased in tight jeans and tighter T-shirts, even if Laurel had been the worst cook between Niniltna and Anchorage, she could still have packed them in just by bending over the counter to refill mugs. She knew she wasn’t only selling espresso.

  Laurel stripped a piece of beef jerky out of cellophane and offered it to Mutt, who took it delicately between her front teeth and then suffered her head to be scratched with a kind of weary stoicism. Mutt wasn’t a misogynist, precisely, but with a few rare exceptions, Kate fortunately among them, she did vastly prefer men to women. “No,” Laurel said, answering Kate’s question, “Annie took care of it.”

  “What’d she do?”

  Laurel smiled. “She sent Auntie Vi over to the Bingleys.”

  Kate laughed. “Auntie Vi drop-kick Cindy back to the store?”

  “No,” Laurel said. “She demanded the keys. Said if Cindy and Ben couldn’t get enough of their shit together to sell milk to the Park rats, she’d do it for them.”

  Kate’s eyebrows went up. “Auntie Vi’s running the store?”

  “She is,” Laurel said gravely, but with a twinkle in her eye, “and it’s my understanding that about five minutes after she did, Howie and Willard had to find somewhere else to conduct business.”

  Kate made an effort to keep her grin tacked in place, but on her way up to the post office she did wonder where Howie and Willard had moved their operation. Bootlegging was one industry that never went out of business in the Park.

  The old-fashioned brass bell above the door jingled when she pushed it open. The Niniltna post office had been built on the side of the airstrip, the easier to transfer mailbags and packages from the plane they rode in on. Inside there was a Dutch door opposite, top half open, next to a wall of post office boxes. One corner held a shelf with a selection of USPS shipping boxes, Bubble Wrap, and strapping tape; another, a tall brass étagère with glass shelves. The étagère held a selection of Bonnie Jeppsen’s beadwork—headbands, eyeglass holders, earrings, bracelets, and bookmarks—all tastefully displayed with discreet price tags attached. “What’s this?” Kate said, examining one such object. “It looks like a rock. With beads on it.”

  The postmistress was a large, zaftig woman with long, grayish blond hair and a floating, floral style of dress. “They are rocks, Kate. With beads on them.”

  Kate picked one up, fascinated by the incorporation of tiny snail, mussel, and clam shells among the green and gray and brown beads. “Did you glue them on?”

  “No, I sewed them on.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope,” Bonnie said. “Needle and thread. A skinny needle and a special kind of thread.”

  “Wow. Must have taken a while.”

  “I went to Anchorage and took a couple of classes.”

  Kate put the rock down and turned. Bonnie was in her fifties, with an air of incorporeality that might have been studied or might have been natural, Kate could never tell. It was relatively new, dating from her leaving her sister Cheryl and Cheryl’s abusive husband and the rest of the born-again Jeppsens up on their homestead and moving into town. That was, what, five years ago now? At any rate, Bonnie had switched allegiance to Wicca and was now into homeopathy, healing crystals, herbal tinctures, and for all Kate knew, dancing naked under a solstice moon.

  “Gorgeous,” she said, putting the rock back on the shelf without looking at the tag on the bottom. However tempted, she would rather wash dishes for three days in a row than try to dust that rock after it had been sitting on a shelf in her house for more than a week.

  She felt to see if the ivory otter was still
in her left-hand pocket. It was, as it had been for the last six years, and it would never need dusting so long as she carried it around with her.

  “Want your mail?” Cheryl said.

  Kate took a step toward her mailbox and Bonnie said, “Don’t bother, I’ve got it in overflow.” She disappeared and reappeared with a plastic bin filled to the brim with envelopes white and manila, magazines, catalogs, half a dozen book-shaped packages from Amazon, and a glossy color brochure. The brochure’s logo was a circular figure of a woman with long swirling dark hair cradling Planet Earth in her arms.

  “Gaea still in business, I see,” Kate said.

  “That one’s four weeks old,” Bonnie said. “You might like to check your mail more than once a month.”

  “Has it been a month?” Kate said, trying not to sound guilty. “I thought it was only a couple of weeks.”

  Bonnie gave her a stern look. “What if there’s an overdue bill somewhere in there?”

  Kate didn’t have that many bills, but she took Bonnie’s point and hauled the bin out to her pickup and spent half an hour sorting the wheat from the chaff. Direct mail advertising and catalogs were fast-forwarded to the trash. Neither was she interested in solicitations from the AARP, the NRA, the AFL–CIO, the United Fund, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, the Libertarian Party, the Secessionist Party, or the Tea Party. Likewise, she tossed missives from Doctors Without Borders and Heifer International, both of which organizations she sent a check to every Christmas already. Why was it that the instant you sent someone a check, no matter how worthy the organization, the first thing they did was ask you for more? Irritating, and a waste of the money she had just sent them.

  There were, miraculously, some items meriting a forty-six-cent stamp. She smiled over a postcard from Andy Pence, which read, “You don’t call, you don’t write, you couldn’t stop off in Dutch on your way to Adak?” She wondered how he had found out about her overnighter to Adak in January, though not for long. Fishermen were worse gossips than any auntie she had ever met.

  There was a rare letter from Stephanie Chevak in Bering. Stephanie was, what, fifteen now? But she wrote with all the formality of a Victorian great-aunt. She was well and in good health, as Kate knew she would be graduating early from high school and she was already preparing to submit college applications. Would Kate be willing to write her a letter of recommendation?

  Kate would indeed, since she was already convinced that little Stephanie Chevak of Bering was well on her way to becoming the Carl Sagan of her generation. Fifteen seemed to be a little early to be thinking of graduation, even for Stephanie, and then Kate remembered that her middle school teachers had jumped her a grade. Or was it two? Past time Kate went out to Bering for a visit. She set the letter aside with Andy’s postcard.

  Another envelope from Pletnikof Investigations, Ltd., held a deposit slip to her account in the Last Frontier Bank. Kate paid her respects to the amount of numbers in front of the decimal point with a reverent whistle. A scribbled sticky note read, “Business is good. Kurt.”

  From bear-poaching Park rat to Alaska’s Allan Pinkerton in three years, courtesy in part because Kate had bankrolled Kurt Pletnikof as a silent partner. One of her better investments.

  She looked over at Stephanie’s letter. Stephanie would undoubtedly be offered a full ride at whatever institute of higher learning was lucky enough to get her, but just in case, it was good to know Kate had her financial back.

  There was a separate communication from Kurt’s executive assistant, a flat manila envelope postmarked the previous month, which contained an update on the activities of one Erland Bannister, owner and proprietor of Arctic Investments, an Alaska venture capital firm that was a recent minority shareholder in the Suulutaq Mine. She’d put Kurt on retainer to keep an eye on him. This month’s report included a few clippings from the Journal of the Alaska Chamber of Commerce, Alaska Business Monthly, and a highlighted paragraph in a Wall Street Journal story on the Suulutaq Mine, in which Erland declared himself delighted at being a stakeholder in the mine, a project with an extremely beneficial effect on the long-term economy of the state of Alaska.

  The fact that he’d been jailed for attempted murder until a smart—read expensive—lawyer got him out on a technicality involving alleged prosecutorial misconduct appeared to have escaped the reporter’s notice. Lips pressed together in a straight line, Kate stuffed the clippings back in the envelope without reading the rest of them and set it aside. She leaned back against her seat and stared out the open window of her pickup.

  Traffic at the Niniltna airstrip was certainly more active than at this time two years before. One of George Perry’s Single Otter turbos touched down at the end of the 4,800-foot runway, paved only last year, and taxied briskly up to the Chugach Air Taxi hangar to disgorge a load of Suulutaq workers, hungover from their weeks off. They were bundled into two Beavers, which whisked them into the air on a south-southeast heading for the mine. Meanwhile, the Otter loaded the mine workers headed for town. Some of the outgoing miners didn’t look to be in much better shape than the incoming ones, and Kate wondered what Vern Truax, the mine’s superintendent, was doing about substance abuse on the job. She also wondered who was bringing said substances in. There were over a hundred workers out at Suulutaq, last time she checked. Howie and Willard at their most efficient couldn’t have supplied a tenth that many without tripping over their own dicks in front of Jim, or her.

  Two of the outgoing miners, both skinny young men in worn jeans, scuffed boots, and plaid jackets, got into a fistfight over who got to board first. A third, in line behind them and older and much larger, raised two hands the size of baseball gloves and smacked their heads together, once. Once was enough. The two younger miners went rubber-legged up the airstairs with an inexorable assist from their disciplinarian and a round of applause from the miners behind him.

  George, observing from a distance, saw Kate on the other side of the runway and waved in the middle of his preflight. In very few moments, the Otter was but a memory on the horizon. “You fine,” Kate said to its rapidly disappearing rudder. The Otter turbos were new, and very fine, indeed.

  Demetri Totemoff drove up to meet a Cessna 180 with a pilot and five passengers on board. Demetri loaded them into his brand-new Dodge Durango Citadel (the one with all the options, including the fold-down captain’s chairs in the second row and the DVD entertainment section; Kate had already had the tour), and he, too, waved without stopping. Kate wondered where he was taking them, because there wasn’t a road to his high-end hunting and fishing lodge. It was located south of the Suulutaq, almost as close to the Canadian border as Canyon Hot Springs, and with a lot better view of Mount Saint Elias.

  Well, she thought, there hadn’t been a road last time she’d checked.

  A yellow and white Piper Tri-Pacer set itself down with circumspection at the end of the runway and taxied decorously to a parking spot on the post office side of the runway. When the pilot got out, Kate could hardly believe her eyes.

  “Anne! Anne Flanagan!” She got out of her truck.

  The pilot shaded her eyes with one hand. “Kate? Kate Shugak?”

  She was of medium height and sturdily built, with blond hair cut short and blue eyes that crinkled when she smiled. She was smiling now, and she took Kate’s hand in both of her own.

  “What are you doing in Niniltna?” Kate said.

  “I’m on my way downriver. Hoping Bonnie will let me use her bathroom.”

  Kate nodded at the Tri-Pacer. “Since when are you a pilot?”

  Anne’s smile was proud. “And thereby hangs a tale.”

  * * *

  This time when Kate walked into the Riverside Cafe, a young miner who was either drunk or high or both was behind the counter making an inept attempt at opening the cash register. Laurel kept slapping his hands away, and looked to be rapidly losing her patience. “Knock it off,” she said as they walked in, but the miner either ignored her or was so under t
he influence that his ears had stopped working.

  Kate walked up behind him and tapped on his shoulder. She had to do it twice before he turned around. His pupils were the size of Lincoln pennies, and the whites were a streaky red. He scratched first beneath his left arm, moved up to the back of his neck, and then reached for his crotch, stepping from one foot to the other. “Hey,” he said to Kate, without much interest, “you’re hot.” He looked at Anne. “You wanna dance? There should be music.” He looked up at the ceiling and shouted, “I need me some Linkin Park! Building it up to burn it down! Whoa.”

  He closed his eyes and put out his arms for balance. “The room’s going around. I hate that.”

  When he opened his eyes again, they fell on the cash register and he reached for it again. Laurel slapped his hands away. He burst into tears.

  Laurel looked at Kate. “Five minutes ago, we were having a perfectly rational conversation about whether Justin Bieber was the Antichrist.”

  The young miner stopped crying as if he had turned off a faucet and said, “Do you have any eggs? I’ve got a recipe for a killer cheese souffle.” He made for the kitchen, only to be thwarted again by Laurel.

  Before he could burst into tears a second time, Kate said to Anne, “Be right back,” got the miner by one arm and a handful of hair, and frog-marched him out the door and up the street, to scattered applause and a few honks from Peter Grosdidier’s passing pickup. Around the corner and up the hill to the trooper’s post they went, where with Maggie’s blessing, Kate tucked him into one of the cells and left him to dry out or come down.

  It was the only one of the cells that was empty, and the smell of vomit lingered unpleasantly on the air. She went back out to the office and tossed a small, clear plastic bag full of white powder on Maggie’s desk. “Found it in the pocket of his jeans.”

  “Another one?” Maggie sighed and got out an evidence bag.

  “Is that what the other three are in for?”