Whisper to the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  Of course, a lot of people had made their way to Alaska long before the wherefores and whyases of said acts were a twinkle in Congress’s eye, many under the auspices of the Homestead Act, others who came north with the gold rush and stayed, who came north with the army and the air force and returned after mustering out, who came north as crew on fishing boats or canneries, married locally, and settled in for the duration. Their holdings were grandfathered in and the parks and refuges created around them. Which was why Dan O’Brien’s map of the Park, on the wall of his office in Park HQ on the Step, had all those minuscule yellow dots on it, each one signifying private ownership.

  Land in Alaska, who owned it, and who could do what on it where was in fact a subject that preoccupied an embarrassing amount of everyone’s time and attention—public official, corporate officer, and private citizen. Any discussion of the subject was generally preceded by all combatants producing driver’s licenses and comparing numbers. The lower the number, the longer they’d been in the state, and the longer they’d been in the state, the louder and longer they got to talk.

  “Land ownership in Alaska is like time travel in science fiction,” Kate said out loud.

  “How so?”

  “Just thinking about it makes me dizzy. Where’s Martin now?”

  “Sleeping it off in the lockup. I’ll let him out in the morning.” He thought for a moment, and added, “If the aunties have calmed down by then. The quilt was for Auntie Edna’s granddaughter.”

  “Yeah, I know. Elly. She’s ready to pop any time.”

  “Who’s the dad?”

  “She won’t say.”

  Jim took a long look at Kate’s closed expression. There had been some muttering about a priest at the private school Elly had attended in Ahtna. No doubt he’d hear all about it in time from Ahtna police chief Kenny Hazen, whether he wanted to or not. He just hoped that if the rumor was true, Auntie Edna wouldn’t follow the current trend and settle accounts with the man herself. He shuddered to think of the damage the four aunties could inflict if they put their minds to it. “Any luck on a vehicle for the kid?”

  Johnny Morgan, son of Kate’s dead lover Jack Morgan and Kate’s foster son, had achieved the ripe old age of sixteen, and was now in the market for a vehicle of his very own.

  Kate’s face cleared. “Bobby’s putting it out on Park Air this afternoon. I imagine somebody’s got a junker they want to unload.”

  “You care if it runs?”

  She made a face. “I’d rather it didn’t.”

  He laughed out loud this time, and she was forced into a chuckle herself. “I didn’t mean it that way,” she said. “Or mostly not. I’d just rather he spent some time under the hood before he started driving himself. He should know how to change the oil and a flat and the points and plugs. You know.”

  “No,” he said.

  She looked at him, amazed and a little scornful. “You don’t know how to change a flat?”

  “In theory, I do,” he said. “Never had to, though. And I would rather I never had to.”

  “You will,” Kate said with certainty and perhaps with some smugness mixed in. “Probably in winter. Probably January. The middle of the night. You’ll be barreling down the road and one of your tires will pick up an old railroad spike and that’ll be it, you’ll have to stop and get your hands dirty.”

  “Or I could call you for help,” he said. “You do know how to change a tire.”

  “That I do,” she said.

  “I’d expect there to be a price,” he said.

  “You’d expect correctly,” she said.

  “And I’d expect to pay it,” he said, “in full,” and he grinned at her.

  The combination of wide grin, crinkled blue eyes, and rumpled dark blond hair was enough to make a grown woman sigh, but if Kate did sigh she kept it to herself. No point in giving Chopper Jim any leverage. Six-foot-four to her five feet, he outweighed her by seventy pounds and was as white as she was Native. Not to mention that he was a serial womanizer and she was strictly a one-man woman. He’d never expressed any interest in having children and here she was, a foster mother, and the kid was the son of Jim’s ex-rival for Kate’s affections, no less. Plus Jim was a cop and she was a PI.

  By any sane standard of measurement, they shouldn’t be here. Wherever here was. It’s not like either one of them knew.

  He ate the last bite of cake and washed it down with the rest of his coffee. “So, where is the kid?”

  “At Annie’s, splitting wood for her winter supply.”

  He snorted. “Sure he is.”

  Annie Mike was the guardian of one Vanessa Cox, Johnny’s best bud ever since he’d arrived in the Park. Vanessa had been a gawky and awkward child who was growing into a very attractive young woman. Neither Jim nor Kate held out much hope that Johnny hadn’t noticed. “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it,” Kate said.

  “You two have the talk?”

  “About seventeen times. I even gave him a box of condoms.” She smiled at the memory. “He nearly died.”

  He laughed. “I bet.” He stood up and pulled her to her feet, stepping in close. “Did we have the talk?”

  His teeth nibbled at her ear. Her eyes drooped, her nipples hardened, her thighs loosened. ’Twas ever thus with Jim, and it would have annoyed her if she hadn’t seen the pulse beating frantically at the base of his throat. “We did,” she said, her voice the merest thread of sound.

  “Thank god for that,” he said, and led her upstairs.

  Mutt returned from an extended lope around the homestead, her daily constitutional, nosed the lever handle on the door open, and bounded inside. She had been alerted to the presence of her favorite trooper by his truck in the clearing outside and was impatient to demonstrate her affection upon his person.

  Instead, she paused just inside the door to cock a sapient ear at the ceiling. She listened for a moment, and then, displaying a tact it was a shame no one was there to see, quietly let herself out again.

  CHAPTER 2

  The following weekend Kate and Johnny were under the hood of a 1981 Ford F-150 short-bed pickup truck, acquired from the son of one of Auntie Balasha’s childhood friends, who had died in Ahtna at the age of ninety-seven after a life spent smoking like a chimney, drinking like a fish, and marrying seven times, which, as the son told Kate, “should be a lesson to us all.” The truck had less than 75,000 miles on it and the son had sold it to Johnny for $2,500. It was dark blue, the bed offered up only a few rust spots after the most minute inspection, and Kate had thought on the day of purchase and thought now that it was a steal. She had even made a half-hearted attempt to offer the seller more money, an offer the son, an affable man in spite of being named Zebulon Porkryfki, had waved off. “I think Gramps’d like to see it go to a young man all full of juice and go. No, $2,500’ll do.”

  Kate shrugged. “Okay,” she said, and Johnny had whooped for joy. He passed his driving test at the Ahtna DMV that afternoon and she let him drive the whole way home. It was his first time behind the wheel over the Lost Chance Creek Bridge, seven hundred feet long, three hundred feet high, the width of one vehicle—barely—and no railings. He made it across, very slowly and very carefully, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. His father had been afraid of heights, too. “He puked on me once when we were at the top of a mine shaft,” she told Johnny when they were safely on the other side, and Johnny had laughed so hard he stalled out the truck.

  Today they were looking at the engine, a superfluous activity because in operation the pickup sounded like a contented tiger. Kate had had Rachel in Anchorage send up a Chilton’s manual for Ford pickups from 1965 to 1986, which had immediately replaced Jim Butcher as Johnny’s preferred recreational reading.

  Mutt was pacing the perimeter, nose to the ground, picking up a scent for lunch. She was first to hear the vehicle coming down the track from the road. She raised her head and gave Kate a heads-up by way of an advisory yip.

  Kate re
cognized the sound of it almost immediately, and swore beneath her breath. Next to her Johnny went still, frowning at the distributor cap. He said tentatively, “Auntie Vi?”

  “Sounds like.” She ducked out from under the hood of the pickup and beheld the powder blue Ford Explorer as it emerged from the trees. It drew to an impatient halt, and Auntie Vi, a round, brown little woman of indeterminate age and defiantly black hair, bounced out and stormed in their direction. “Katya!”

  Kate recognized the signs. “Have I screwed up anything lately?” she said out of the corner of her mouth.

  “Not that I’ve noticed,” Johnny said. “Hi, Auntie Vi!”

  “Hi, Johnny! Almost tall like your father now. Stop that.”

  Johnny grinned. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mutt trotted over and paid her respects. Other than Kate, females of any species were usually beneath the notice of the 140-pound wolf/husky mix, but Auntie Vi was accorded the respect of a sister sovereign, coequal in power and authority. “This the new truck then?” Auntie Vi said, patting Mutt’s head absently as she looked it over with a critical eye. “Those tires need rotate, Katya.”

  “We’ll get right on that, Auntie,” Kate said, while Johnny dived cravenly back beneath the hood.

  The tires were, in fact, new—bought, mounted, and balanced the day of purchase.

  Auntie Vi dismissed the subject of the truck. “You hear, Katya?”

  “Hear what, Auntie?”

  “About dock.”

  “What dock?”

  “That Katalla dock.”

  “What Katalla dock?” Kate said. “There’s barely a dozen pilings left of the old dock there, and they’re rotting and covered with barnacles.”

  Auntie Vi clicked her tongue, looking impatient. “The state say they starting survey to build new dock.”

  “What for?” Kate said, and then she said, “Oh. What kind of a dock? Deepwater?”

  Auntie Vi was thrown off her stride. “How you know?” she said, suspicion darkening her face.

  “If it’s a deepwater dock, they’re doing it for the bulk carriers that will be coming in to ship the ore out from the Suulutaq Mine.”

  “There,” Auntie Vi said, pointing at Kate. “That! What they do!”

  Kate, skewered by the finger, perceived that she was at fault, and found herself at something of a loss. “It only makes sense, Auntie,” she said placatingly. “They have to ship the ore to market once they pull it out of the ground. That is the object of the exercise.” She stripped the gloves from her hands and started toward the house. “Come inside. It’s about time for lunch anyway.”

  “Grilled cheese!”

  Kate grinned without turning around. “In your dreams, kid. Moose liver paté if you’re lucky.”

  Johnny made gagging noises beneath the hood. Mutt departed in search of her own lunch. Auntie Vi followed Kate up the stairs to the deck and into the house. It was still hard for Kate to accept that she had a deck, never mind a house. Both had been a gift of the Park, a product of a Park rat house raising, what, almost two years ago now. She and Johnny each had their own bathroom and bedroom, and what was most amazing of all, she had a refrigerator. And electricity. And a whole bunch of other stuff that even if she thought about it for too long didn’t weigh her down as much as she thought it ought to.

  Comfort could be corrupting, she thought darkly. What she didn’t have was the log cabin her father had built on that same site, the one he had brought her mother home to nearly forty years before, the one she’d been conceived in, had been born in, had grown up in. That cabin had been burned to the ground by someone who had thought to solve all his problems by burning Kate alive. That Johnny had also been living there by then appeared not to have concerned him. He was now a guest of the state in a maximum security prison in Arizona, where Kate cordially hoped he was rotting slowly away, one putrefying limb at a time.

  She made coffee and seated Auntie Vi at the table with a mug and cream and sugar, and busied herself with the makings for lunch. “Why are you so upset about this dock, Auntie?”

  “Not dock.” Auntie Vi looked up from her coffee and said with bitter emphasis, “Mine.”

  “The Suulutaq Mine?” One grilled cheese for her, half of one for Auntie Vi, and three for Johnny. “That’s past praying for, Auntie. Global Harvest bought the leases fair and square from the state, and that’s state land.”

  “We hunt there,” Auntie Vi said fiercely. “We fish there.” She surged to her feet and thumped her breast with one fist. “We live there!”

  “They gave us most of Iqaluk in the settlement, Auntie. Just not that part.”

  “And you think they don’t know that gold there when they did!”

  “Well,” Kate said. “This is the state of Alaska we’re talking about here.”

  Auntie Vi took in a visible gulp of air, became aware that she was on her feet, and sat down again. “You see plans for this mine?”

  Every Park rat with a post office box had gotten the flyer, and just in case they hadn’t Global Harvest had blanketed every public place in every town and village in the Park as well, from the Club Bar in Cordova to the Niniltna School gym to the Costco in Ahtna. It was a glossy production, color pictures of salmon spawning in streams, moose browsing in lakes, and caribou calves frolicking in the foothills. There was a map of the proposed mine, fifteen miles square, a tiny gold-colored splotch crowded between grids and graphs of different colors denoting the borders of three federal parks, one state park, two national forests, three marine wildlife refuges, and four separate Native land allotments belonging to four different Native tribes. Towns and villages were dots on the landscape and the map’s scale was too small to distinguish the minimal amounts of private property. It was an excellent way to illustrate just how small the acreage in question was.

  On the flip side of the flyer, an attractive man displaying a perfect set of teeth in a friendly smile was identified as Global Harvest CEO Bruce O’Malley. Next to his head a conversational balloon quoted O’Malley as saying, “Global Harvest is fully committed to ensuring the healthy stocks of fish and wildlife and all the natural resources of the Iqaluk region so essential to the lives of the people who live there. The Suulutaq Mine can only succeed if Global Harvest Resources becomes a working partner with the people who live next door. We will apply the best available science and technology to ensure an environmentally friendly operation that will coexist with and within the community. Our employees will be drawn as much as possible from that community, and since most estimates have the Suulutaq Mine in operation for a minimum of twenty years, at minimum an entire generation, we expect the relationship to be long and profitable for everyone concerned.”

  “Yeah, I saw the flyer, Auntie,” Kate said. She poured a dollop of olive oil into a hot frying pan and tossed in a chunk of butter after it, and assembled sandwiches made of homemade white bread buttered on both sides, slices of Tillamook Extra Sharp, and green chilies. When the butter melted, the first two hit the pan with a loud and aromatic sizzle. She went to the door, opened it, and yelled, “Lunch!”

  “I don’t like mine,” Auntie Vi said.

  She sat there, a round dumpling of rage and, Kate thought, some bewilderment. Auntie Vi had seen a lot of change in her eighty-plus years, and now more of it was bearing down on her like a freight train.

  Other Alaskan villages had tribal councils. Some even had mayors and city assemblies. The Park had the four aunties. They were its backbone, its moral center, its royalty. They were all widows, Auntie Vi serially, four or, if Kate’s suspicions were correct, possibly five times. They had all been born in the Park, and Auntie Vi was the only one who had ever been farther away from it than Anchorage. This was due to her third husband, an enthusiastic gambler who had introduced her to the illicit joys of one-armed bandits in Vegas before he keeled over of a heart attack after a successful run at the craps table.

  The aunties knew the Park and they knew everyone in it chapter and verse
, birth to death, white, black, Aleut, Athabascan, or Tlingit, male or female, old or young, married or single, gay or straight, atheist, agnostic, or born-again Christian. They could be found most nights at the Roadhouse, working on the most recent quilt and knocking back Bernie’s Irish coffee in quantities that would have had anyone else facedown on the floor. They called it a quilting bee, but everyone else called it holding court. If a kid was a serial misbehaver, he or she was hauled before the aunties when the parents and the school-teachers threw up their hands. If a husband was beating on his wife, as a last resort before calling in the trooper, the wife could complain to the aunties, who would deputize the four Grosdidier brothers to haul him up in front of them. Since the four Grosdidier brothers were also Niniltna village’s first responder EMT team, this solved the punishment and the 911 call afterward with neatness and dispatch. If someone let his dog team run wild, to the detriment of another neighbor’s ptarmigan patch, and upon protest refused to restrain said team, the neighbor could complain to the aunties, one of whom was always related to the offender’s mother and all four of whom had probably babysat him at one time or another.

  A summons before the aunties was something no Park rat could ignore. As each individual case demanded, Auntie Joy would look sorrowful, Auntie Balasha would cry, Auntie Edna would glare, and Auntie Vi would fix the offender with a basilisk stare that, combined with the other three aunties’ disapproval, generally reduced the Park rat with even the stiffest spine to a gibbering, knee-knocking wreck, sobbing their contrition and swearing on his or her negligible honor never, ever to do it again.

  Most of the time it was enough for the offender to slink off beneath the stern admonition to go and sin no more. The aunties were remarkably evenhanded in their dispensation of Park justice, dealing fairly and with very little favoritism with all who came—or were forcibly hauled—before them. Jim Chopin, while taking no official notice of this ad hoc court of civil justice, had been heard to say that the four aunties halved his caseload.