Bad Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  “Never been so sure about anything in my life,” Ryan said.

  The note of deep certainty in his voice opened their eyes a little, but the other boy only nodded. “All right, then. We got your back.”

  Ryan shook hands with all of them. “Thanks. Have a good time on the river.”

  They laughed. “You should talk.”

  They pushed off and he stood watching as they started the outboard. Ten minutes later, he raised a hand in farewell as they went around the next bend and out of his sight, probably for the last time. He pulled his skiff up under cover of the trees and settled in to wait.

  The first time he’d seen her, they would have been about ten, him on his side of the river scraping the bottom of his father’s skiff, her on her side helping her father on the fish wheel. Their eyes had met, holding, until her father spoke sharply, drawing her attention away, and Ryan had gone back to scraping the hull, although all he could see was her face.

  There had been other glimpses over the years, at potlatches up and down the river, at Costco in Ahtna, at the Park Basketball Tournament in Niniltna. He could walk into a room and know if she was in it before he saw her. Always there would be that first, long glance, always interrupted by her father or mother or a friend, turning her attention elsewhere. Nothing else, no lingering glances, not a word spoken between the two of them.

  And then the Kushtaka school closed, and her parents moved her to the Kuskulana school. Her beauty garnered its share of attention from the boys, but she favored none of them, at least so far as he could tell. She did her work, an A student who answered when called on by the teacher but who didn’t volunteer. She played guard on the women’s basketball team, with fast hands, quick feet, and an ability to score three-pointers when they were really needed. She was pleasant but made no friends. Her confidence and self-possession kept her apart. Sometimes he thought the other students were a little afraid of her.

  He wasn’t, but he wasn’t going to be so stupid as to alert anyone in either village to his interest. And then came that away game last October. Men’s and women’s teams both to Ahtna, playing in the regional tournament on the Ahtna high school gym floor by day and sleeping on it by night. Even then it didn’t seem as if there would be any chance to talk to her. Late the second night, burningly aware that she was in her own sleeping bag on the other side of the gym, he sneaked out alone, only to find her sneaking out right behind him.

  He smiled.

  That was the beginning.

  If nothing went wrong, she should have heard his message this morning, and they would be away before anyone knew. A few hours’ head start was all he asked.

  His smile faded. The death of Tyler Mack was going to complicate things. He thought back to Tuesday morning on the river, and shuddered, remembering the meaty thunk of metal hitting flesh. A horrible sound.

  He remembered, too, Chopper Jim’s eyes fixed steadily on his face at Kuskulana landing before he and his posse had left. But what could the trooper know? Only what everyone did, that Kuskulana and Kushtaka were at each other’s throats and had been for years. He couldn’t know anything else, because no one on the Kuskulana side of the river would ever tell him anything.

  Especially not Ryan.

  Nine

  THURSDAY, JULY 12, EARLIER

  Niniltna

  Kate left her phone in the house and worked off frustrated sexual tension by a morning spent splitting wood. After lunch, the hammock and Peter Lovesay’s latest beckoned, but she was still restless. She and Mutt drove back into Niniltna, through it, and five miles down the older and even less well maintained Roadhouse road. There she turned left on the track that led to the one-lane wooden bridge over Squaw Candy Creek, pausing to give prior right of passage to two young bull moose whose half-grown racks were covered in rich velvet and who had their eye on a stand of young alder they had somehow previously overlooked, stopped again on the other side of the bridge for a big fat bristly porcupine who was superbly indifferent to Kate, Mutt, the moose, fire, famine, or flood, and continued up to the A-frame with the 212-foot steel communications tower looming up behind it. The yard was covered in shorn green velvet and western columbines, and rugosa roses bloomed promiscuously everywhere Dinah had fought the brush to a standstill and freed up a small patch of ground.

  Kate parked and got out to hold the door for Mutt, who brushed past her without so much as a backward glance. “Faithless bitch,” Kate said in her wake, and followed her to the A-frame’s front door at a far more leisurely pace.

  The spruce bark beetle had visited Bobby’s property, too, so that for the first time in the decade she’d been visiting him here, Kate could see the blue flash of a few mountains between the few still-standing trees. As on her homestead, as all over the Park, there seemed to be even more light than usual everywhere she looked, and during an Alaskan summer when there was already enough light to keep everyone up all night, the result was almost blinding.

  The door stood wide open to the second warm day in a row, and Kate abandoned the busy hum of happy bees for the cool of the relative darkness inside.

  Bobby was sitting at the center console of the A-frame, back to the door, when Kate walked in. His wife, Dinah, was nowhere to be seen, nor was the ball of fire also known as his daughter, Katya. Kate’s namesake and goddaughter, Kate had also delivered her one memorable August day five years before, about an hour after she had acted as best woman and officiator at her parents’ marriage. A fraught occasion.

  She admired his broad shoulders with appreciation. Long before Dinah came into his life, back when Kate herself was in the middle of a long, painful recovery from five and a half years working the front lines of sex crimes in Anchorage, she had cause to know those shoulders and everything affiliated with them in intimate and delicious detail.

  His back was bare and muscled, a trim waist disappearing into a pair of cutoff jeans, from which two legs emerged, both truncated at slightly differing lengths just below the knee, the missing pieces having been left behind in a rice paddy in Vietnam. A wheelchair with the parking brake on put him within easy reach of every knob and switch of the custom-made electronic Frankenstein sitting on the custom-made table that circled the twelve-by-twelve beam running straight up to the ridgepole of the roof. Wire and cable snaked up all four sides of the beam, connecting Frankenstein with the antennas and dishes on the tower out back.

  All to support the NOAA observer in the Park. Allegedly. It was not the done thing to inquire too closely into how Bobby really supported himself and his lifestyle, which included a hefty portion of alcoholic refreshment imported by the case direct from Tennessee, his once and never again home state. Kate could make a good guess, but she didn’t. Dinah probably knew, but she wasn’t talking. Nobody else, if they knew what was good for them, was prepared even to speculate out loud, and Jim didn’t care so long as Bobby was retired. Which he appeared to be.

  Headphones were balanced precariously one ear on and one off, and he was speaking into a microphone dangling from a segmented metal pole. “Yeah, been a long cold one, but the sun’s finally out and so am I, Bobby Clark, your very own silver-tongued Bard of the Big Bump and all we survey, coming to you live from—never mind.”

  Sometimes Bobby broadcast for four hours every night, usually during an election year, and sometimes for fifteen minutes once a week in the morning, usually during fishing season. Park rats had to divine the correct frequency pretty much telepathically because it changed every day and sometimes twice a day. Park Air was, unsurprisingly, FCC-unapproved and certainly unlicensed.

  “Got a couple of screaming deals for you today, fellow rats,” said that basso profundo, which registered on a visceral level with everyone in the Park with an X on both chromosomes, and not a few with XY, too. “A PSA before we get to them. Listen up. Red Run wants their safe back. They know who took it, they know you can’t open it, just bring it back and no questions asked. No reward, either, and no whining about it or they call in Choppe
r Jim. You know how he gets when he has to fill out all that paperwork. And won’t you just love being on the inside during the first above-sixty days we’ve seen this year. Sober up, morons, and get that safe back in the Red Run city hall offices pronto.”

  Bobby had a tendency to editorialize his public service announcements, but the entertainment value was worth the risk to most Park rats who wanted them broadcast. It certainly ensured that everyone would be listening.

  Bobby adjusted a knob. “Scott Ukatish is dragging up, which is not surprising, considering he’ll probably be the last one left to turn out the lights when he leaves the ghost town of Potlatch, for what I understand is a nice little one-bedroom condo in Sag Harbor, corner unit, top floor, good bar on the ground floor, frequented by a lotta local talent.” A verse from “Looking for Love” rose and fell briefly in the background. “Scott says he’s outta here September first, as he don’t want to hit any snow on the Alcan going south. Between now and then, everything he can’t fit into the back of his pickup is for sale, list price the day you show up or best offer by August fifteenth and it goes without saying you haul it away yourself. There’s a list of the stuff he’s got for sale on parkair-dot-radio, and it also goes without saying that you’ll be bidding against me for the vintage collection of Playboys, which Scott tells me goes all the way back to the December 1953 first edition, yeah, the one with Marilyn Monroe on the cover, the one every guy my age remembers locking himself in the bathroom with.”

  If possible, his voice dropped even lower. “Just don’t tell Dinah.”

  Bobby let Elton John’s “A Candle in the Wind” drown him out while he shuffled bits of lined notebook paper, most of them scribbled in his own hand in scrawling black Sharpie. Elton muted, Bobby back at full volume. “Herbie Topkok needs a mechanic. Someone versed in the mysteries of everything from Evinrude to Honda to Ski-Doo to Fix Or Repair Daily. Full-time, hourly wage to be negotiated, and if you’re any good, that includes straight through the winter, Herbie’s word on it. Method of payment also negotiable, cash, check, or money order.” Bobby laughed, a laugh that lived up in every timbre to the bass profundo voice. Kate was sure she would have heard it in the fillings in her teeth, if she’d had any fillings.

  “Apply in person, preferably not loaded, last house on the left but one on your way to Ahtna.

  “Okay,” he said, looking down and shuffling more paper, “Boris Balluta wants to sell his Honda Rancher ATV. Four years old, been to the river and back a few times but in good shape overall. Yeah, I’ve see Boris running that four-wheeler hell-for-leather through town. She does look rode hard and put away wet, but she sounds sweet, and while Boris may always be looking for the easiest out in a room filled with bill collectors, he knows his way around an engine. He should be banging down Herbie’s front door, and if he didn’t mind getting his hands dirty with actual work, he would be, but we all know that’s not happening, don’t we?

  “Ruthe Bauman is looking for a print of Machetanz’s Eighty Winters. A print, she says, not the original, doesn’t have to be matted and framed, but she’ll pay more if it is, save her doing it herself. Leave a message for her at the Roadhouse.”

  He pushed a slider over an inch, pulled another one back two inches. “Couple of personals now.”

  This was what the Park rats really tuned in for, or did before cell phones. Kate wondered how many were listening now.

  “‘Carol Sweeney, we’re in Anchorage, due in on George tomorrow on the nine A.M. flight. Love you, see you soon.’ Ha. Must be Carol’s folks in from West Virginia. Welcome almost back, Sadie and Bert. Showing me something, coming back after last time and that whole moose collision incident.

  “‘J, I’ll be at the usual place this afternoon and I’ll wait.’ Hmm. Short, to the point, sure hope J knows where ‘the usual place’ is.” Bobby sat up, his back still to Kate, and popped his neck. “Okay, going out on a piece of big juicy gossip. Kermit the Clark here, with Park Air News, deet-te-deet-deet-deet. Listen up, folks.” The sound of typewriter keys clicked and clacked over the speakers. Kate wondered how many of Bobby’s listeners even knew what a typewriter was. “You know that new film incentive law they wished on us down in Juneau? Well, your intrepid reporter has heard a rumor that the Park—yes, our very own Park—is being scouted as a film location.”

  Kate’s heart skipped a beat.

  “No, no names, we don’t know yet if it’s Robert Downey, Jr., Hugh Jackman, or Gabe McGuire who will be starring in our very own personal Park epic, but I’m holding out for Denzel to play me, and I’m kinda hoping Zoe Saldana plays the love interest.” He dropped his voice. “Just don’t tell Dinah.”

  He reached for a knob. “Okay, that’s it for now. Might be back on tonight, might not, but right now let’s go out on somebody who knew their way around a song.”

  He flipped a switch, turned another knob, ran some sliders in opposite directions, and the first bars of the Beatles’ “Please Mr. Postman” rocked out of the speakers.

  Mutt couldn’t stand it one minute longer and took the intervening space between the door and the man in one smooth leap and reared up to rest her paws lightly on the back of the wheelchair and swipe a long, agile tongue right up Bobby’s bare spine, ending with a loving tickle behind his right ear that took the headphones the rest of the way off. Bobby jumped so violently that he knocked the brakes loose on his wheelchair. The wheels rolled forward and he rolled backwards, right out of the chair to land on his back on the floor. Where Mutt took merciless advantage.

  “God damn!” The roar went right out over Park Air, west to Ahtna and all the way down to Cordova when the skip was good, or it would have if the mike had still been hot. “Fucking wolves in the fucking house again! Shugak! Get this beast off me! Goddammit, Shugak, I know you’re there!”

  Kate, hands in her pockets, strolled over to grin at him upside down, where he was feebly trying to stave off Mutt’s efforts to remove the skin from his face with her tongue. “You rang?”

  “Get this fucking wolf off me!”

  “Only half,” Kate said.

  “Shugak!”

  Kate gave an elaborate sigh. “Mutt?” she said, but really it was only a suggestion, and all three of them knew it.

  Mutt moved back maybe an inch and laughed down at Bobby, a lupine laugh, tongue lolling out of her mouth.

  “Shugak! Goddammit, call her off!”

  Kate sighed. “Well, okay. If you insist.”

  “Shugak!”

  Kate signaled Mutt, and Mutt gave Bobby one last, loving swipe, shook her coat into elegant layers, and trotted over to the wood box, where she knew Bobby stored the occasional mammoth clavicle to stave off marauding wolves.

  “God damn,” Bobby said, wiping the face in the crook of his arm and blinking up at Kate. “How many times have I told you about fucking wolves in the fucking house, Shugak?”

  “Lots and lots of times, Clark,” she said, giving him a hand up.

  Slyly, he took that hand and held on while using the other to right his chair and slip into it, managing in the same motion to yank her into his lap and give her a lavish kiss.

  She gave as good as she got, and when he pulled back she smiled up at him, a siren’s seduction in her eyes, and said in a come-hither voice, “Where’s your wife?”

  He boomed out a laugh and dumped her on her feet. “She left me. Her and the kid both. Abandoned. Bereft.” He waggled lascivious eyebrows. “All by myself.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  “I’d put on some Eric Carmen to prove it if I could stand to listen to the fucker.” He rolled over to the kitchen to put on the kettle. “They’re in Anchorage. Eye doctor, dentist, shots, like that. Dinah wants to get a jump on the paperwork for school this year.”

  “Right, first grade,” Kate said. “You, uh, volunteering at the school again?”

  “Damn right I am.”

  She sighed. “You’re going to give the kid a complex before she’s ten.”

  �
�Then she has a complex. Nobody messes with the kid, Shugak.”

  “Understood, Clark. But really, who would dare?”

  “Exactly,” he said smugly. He opened the bag of coffee—Kaladi Brothers French Roast, not bad—and poured it into the filter without measuring. “What’re you doing in town?”

  “You know. This and that. Checking the mail. Buying some groceries. Visiting my best bud.”

  He glanced at her over his shoulder and grinned. “Where’s Jim?”

  “Up yours,” she said, annoyed.

  He laughed. The kettle whistled and he poured the water through the filter, doctored a mug with cream and sugar just the way she liked it, and they moved to the long couches in the living room, where Mutt was gnawing on a monster bone that looked fresh out of a Jack Horner dig with an expression of pure bliss.

  “Did you ever meet Anne Flanagan?” she said after a moment to properly appreciate the magic elixir in her mug.

  He cocked his head. “Minister? Down Cordova way?”

  She nodded. “Ran into her outside the post office yesterday, we went for coffee. She’s the new flying pastor for the Park.”

  “Yeah? A woman pastor?” He snorted. “I wonder how some of the old farts in the villages are gonna take to that.”

  “Old Sam liked her.”

  “Old Sam is no longer here to run interference for her,” Bobby said, and added, “Sorry,” when Kate didn’t quite wince.

  She waved off the apology. “She’s excited. They fronted her the money for a Piper Tri-Pacer. Said she’s always wanted to fly.”

  “Good on her,” he said, nodding. He had a specially modified, exquisitely maintained Piper Super Cub on call on his own strip behind the tower in back of the A-frame. She’d known it well, at one time, and they smiled at each other in mutual remembrance of a certain sunny day beside a certain sparkling stream with a conveniently placed dirt strip nearby.

  “I’ve been thinking about Canyon Hot Springs,” she said.