Whisper to the Blood

by Dana Stabenow

  “You!” Bernie said, pointing at Johnny. “Get out, and don’t come back for another five years!”

  His voice was loud and meant to carry, so naturally all activity came to a halt while everyone turned to look where he was pointing. It was a technique that Bernie had perfected over the years in ridding the Roadhouse of wannabe underage drinkers.

  Johnny felt his face redden. “I’m not looking for a drink, Bernie.”

  Any other time an underage entered the bar, Bernie wouldn’t let up until the door hit him in the ass. But then, Bernie had not been the same since a year before, when Louis Deem had robbed his house of a greater part of Bernie’s gold nugget collection and in the act of escaping had killed Bernie’s wife and eldest son, Fitz. Fitz had been a friend of Johnny’s, and he could not look at Bernie now without pain and sympathy. Bernie, unable to face it head on, turned his back abruptly and said in a hard voice, “Then get the hell on outta here.”

  Johnny caught Doyle Greenbaugh’s eye, and nodded at the door. Greenbaugh nodded and said, “Take five, boss?”

  Bernie nodded without looking around, and Greenbaugh snagged his coat and followed Johnny out on the porch. “Man, that Koslowski is one cranky old bastard.”

  Johnny stiffened. “He’s a good guy, Doyle. He just lost his wife and son last year, and he’s not over it yet.”

  “I heard. Helluva thing.” Greenbaugh blew on his hands and shoved them into his pockets. His coat wasn’t down and wasn’t a parka, and he started to shiver almost at once. “How you doing, Johnny?”

  “I’m fine. I dropped by Auntie Vi’s to see if you’d shown up, and she said you were working here.”

  “Yeah, I remembered your stories about the place. I didn’t believe the half of it when you told me.” Greenbaugh grinned. “Especially the belly dancers.”

  Johnny laughed, appeased. “Now you know better.”

  “No kidding. Anyway, I told Bernie I was looking for work, so he put me on temporary while his regular barmaid is off.”

  Johnny remembered his dad saying that the Salvation Army was the best place to go for a bed and a meal when you were down to your last dime. It was the one charity Jack had been willing to write a check to, but there was no Sally’s in the Park. A little shyly Johnny said, “Are you okay for cash?”

  Greenbaugh shrugged. “I’m okay for now, but thanks for asking.”

  “Did you hear about the mine?”

  Greenbaugh jerked his head at the bar. “Hard to miss, with the babe going full steam. She’s been here for a couple hours now, talking it up to everyone who walks in.”

  “Did she talk to you?”

  “She did.” Greenbaugh grinned. “She says she thinks she might be able to find something for me. There are some real opportunities in this mine. Get in on the ground floor and a person can just coin the money, you know?” He winked at Johnny. “I’m hoping it ain’t only a job, if you catch my drift.” He nudged Johnny with a jocular elbow. “We’re staying in the same boardinghouse, after all.”

  Johnny felt uncomfortable at sexual badinage with someone so much older than he was—the guy had to be in his thirties—so he pretended not to understand. “That’s great, Doyle, I’m really glad to hear it. She told everybody up to the school that they were going to start taking applications immediately and that they’d start putting people to work on the first.”

  “Barely two weeks from now, I know. Howie Katelnikof was talking to me about it.”

  “What’s Howie know about it?”

  “He was the first guy she hired, caretaker out on the claim. He says he’ll try to get me on next. He’s a good guy.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Greenbaugh looked surprised. “No. Why would I be?”

  Because, Johnny thought, every Park rat worthy of the name knew that Howie Katelnikof was the best excuse for preventive homicide the Park had ever seen. Because whenever a cabin was burgled, a snow machine stolen, a truck stripped for parts, Howie Katelnikof was the guy voted most likely to. Because Howie Katelnikof was always going to be the go-to guy in the Park to fence stolen property, buy a lid of dope or a hit of coke, and Jim Chopin was certain he was cooking up batches of crystal meth and selling it retail out of the homestead he and Willard Shugak had been squatting on since the death of Louis Deem.

  But mostly because Howie Katelnikof had tried to kill him last year, and Kate, and he had almost killed Mutt. Johnny thought of himself as a pretty easygoing guy, but once he got pissed off he stayed pissed off, and he was pissed off at Howie for life. He opened his mouth to issue a warning of some kind, but he’d hesitated too long. Greenbaugh had something else on his mind. “Listen, kid, do me a favor?”

  “Sure,” Johnny said. “Not like I don’t owe you about a hundred.”

  “I’m going by the name of Gallagher here. Dick Gallagher. Richard, if you want to get technical on me.” He grinned again, but he was watching Johnny with a sharp eye.

  “Oh,” Johnny said inadequately. He rallied. “Um, I guess it’s none of my business why.”

  Greenbaugh—Gallagher—shrugged. “I don’t mind saying. There’s stuff left over from my life I’d as soon be shut of.” He grinned again. “Women, mostly. I want to start fresh, new life, new name, new job. Remember how you told me that day in Ahtna that a lot of people do that at the border crossing?”

  Johnny had said that. “Yeah.”

  “Well, that’s me, to the life. I’m starting over here, clean slate. So Dick Gallagher from now on, okay?”

  Johnny thought back to earlier that day and making fry bread with Auntie Vi. Had Greenbaugh’s—Gallagher’s—name been mentioned? “Is that the name you’re registered under at Auntie Vi’s?”

  “Yep. Started the way I mean to go on. So what do you say? Forget that loser Greenbaugh?”

  It seemed ungrateful and unreasonable to refuse. What did it matter, anyway? A new name to go with a new life. Wouldn’t be the first time that had happened in Alaska. He remembered the stories Kate had told him of her time in Prudhoe Bay, when the news cameras would come into the mess hall and half a dozen guys would get up and walk out, leaving their dinner on the table, before the deserted wife or the parole officer they’d left Outside caught them on film at eleven. “Okay,” he said, “sure. Why not?” He was proud that Greenbaugh—Gallagher—trusted him enough to ask the favor. How many times does a sixteen-year-old kid get asked to help somebody hide out from his past? It was right out of Zane Grey. It made Johnny feel like a card-carrying member of the Last Frontier.

  Greenbaugh—Gallagher!—thumped his shoulder and grinned at him again. “I’m sure glad I picked you up on the road, Johnny. You’re my lucky charm!” He laughed heartily, gave Johnny’s shoulder another thump. “Oh,” he said, pausing with one hand on the door, “and maybe you could tell that little girlfriend of yours, too. Make sure she knows my new right name, and tell her why?”

  “Sure,” Johnny said. “Van’s cool. She’ll be happy to.”

  “Great,” Gallagher said, and disappeared back inside.

  Without knowing how, Johnny had the distinct feeling that there was a joke he was missing, but it was getting darker and colder and later by the minute, so he shrugged it off, climbed back on his snow machine, and headed for home.

  CHAPTER 6

  “Kate?”

  She heard Jim’s voice from downstairs. She didn’t move.

  His footsteps sounded on the stairs. “Kate?”

  “Go away,” she said, her voice muffled by the comforter she’d pulled over her head.

  “Kate? Where are you?” The overhead light clicked on. “Oh. Hey, Mutt.” The bed moved as Mutt lifted her head and whined, a single, plaintive note.

  “Kate, what’s wrong?” Jim said in a different tone. “Are you sick?”

  “No. Go away.”

  The side of the bed sank beneath his weight and she felt the comforter pulling away. “Don’t,” she said, grabbing for it, but by then it was too late. She blinked up
at Jim and Mutt, two pairs of eyes, one blue, one yellow, staring down at her with equal concern.

  “What’s going on?” Jim said. “You’re never in bed during the day.”

  “None of your business. Leave me alone.” She pulled the cover back over her head.

  The weight of him on the bed didn’t move. Neither did Mutt’s. “Oh. Has this got something to do with the board meeting this morning?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I take it it didn’t go well.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it!”

  “Okay.” The bed heaved and she heard footsteps go downstairs. The bed heaved again as Mutt jumped down and followed, the ticky-tack of her claws sounding on the floor.

  “Traitor,” Kate said, her voice muffled by the comforter. Given Jim’s come-hither presence downstairs, and given Kate’s present mood, it was doubtful that Mutt would have returned even if she had heard Kate call her name.

  Kate was, in fact, sulking. Nobody loved her. Everyone thought she was stupid. In fact, she was stupid, didn’t even know what a quorum was. She’d looked it up in Webster’s when she came home and it was the minimum number of members of the group meeting required to take a vote. She’d had the vague idea that it had had something to do with books, and how they were put together, but no. Thank christ she hadn’t said that during the meeting.

  The aroma of frying bacon crept beneath the covers, a sinuous and seductive smell.

  Although she’d said plenty else that Harvey Meganack would be happy to repeat over the bar at Bernie’s for months to come. If not years. She still couldn’t believe they got paid for sitting on the board. And what the hell was a point of order, anyway?

  Johnny’s truck drove up and a few minutes later she heard the sound of his feet on the stairs. The door slammed. He said something to Jim. Jim replied, and both of them laughed. Probably laughing at her.

  She’d looked for the U-Haul box when she got home. It wasn’t in the back of Johnny’s truck. It wasn’t in the garage. It wasn’t even in the woodshed. She wondered if maybe she’d tossed it onto the slash pile from the beetle kill the three of them had cleared at intervals this summer. The slash pile was a mile from the house and she didn’t have the energy to navigate the three-foot layer of snow between, especially not in the cold and the dark.

  There was more banging around in the kitchen, and other interesting smells began to waft upstairs.

  Kate’s stomach growled. It was getting very hot and humid beneath the comforter. She swore a ripe oath, extricated herself from the tangle of bedclothes, and stamped down the stairs.

  “Hey, Kate,” Johnny said with a grin.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she said. Maybe she snarled.

  Startled, he actually backed up a step. “I . . . I . . .”

  Jim, pouring a bottle of red wine into a pot, said, “It means hello.” He gave her a look from beneath lowered brows. “At least it does in most of the cultures I run in.”

  “What’s with the wine?” she said.

  “Relax, the alcohol will boil off.”

  She knew that, he’d cooked with wine before and on occasion she’d been known to pour a dollop or two into a soup or a stew, but it left her with nothing to argue about. She stamped over to the couch and flung herself down and glared out the window.

  Johnny withdrew stealthily backward, sidled into his room, and closed the door very gently behind him. He’d meant to introduce the subject of Greenbaugh—Gallagher!—into the conversation at the first opportunity, let Kate and Jim know the Park had acquired a good guy, but it could wait.

  Meanwhile, back on the couch, Kate glowered at the view. It was clear and cold that evening, a dark sky glittering with stars and a waxing moon on the rise, a luminous, reflected glory in the snow-covered landscape beneath. The Quilaks bulked up on the eastern horizon, igneous bullies flexing their sedimentary and metamorphic muscles to intimidate the lesser beings cowering in their shadow. Angqaq towered above them all, the jagged, homicidal peak a reckless gauntlet flung down to every mountaineer worthy of the name. From the heights, the mountains and glaciers fell precipitously, interrupted only by an irregular shelf of land called locally the Step, before rolling out into a vast plateau seamed with rivers and carpeted with spruce and cedar and willow and hemlock and birch and cottonwood. Bordered on the south by the Gulf of Alaska, on the west by the Alaska Railroad and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, on the north by the Glenn Highway, and on the east by the Quilaks and the border of the Yukon Territory, the Park was twenty million acres in size, several steps out of the mainstream of Alaska life and a light-year away from the rest of the world. They got their news from satellite television, the state was bringing at least one Internet connection into every village with a school, and every adult and not a few children had a Costco card, but that didn’t necessarily make them members of the global community. It frequently wasn’t enough to make them Americans.

  Alaskans had attitude, no doubt about that. They loved their land with a fierceness that bordered on mania, while freely admitting insanity was a prerequisite for living there. This might have been a partial explanation as to why, as a community, they voted Republican with an enthusiasm that continually overwhelmed Democrats at elections, disavowing anything that smacked of big government subsidies. At the same time they paid no state income taxes, instead accepting a check every year from the state in per capita payment of the gross annual taxes on oil produced in Prudhoe Bay.

  And that, Kate thought, was why Global Harvest Resources Inc. was going to get the red carpet treatment from everyone involved, governor’s office on down to the lowliest Park rat. Alaskans had grown accustomed to handouts. A whole generation of kids had been raised to believe it was the natural order of things, the permanent fund dividend, earmarks to congressional budget bills for big budget construction projects like schools in villages and bridges to nowhere, government subsidies at federal, state, and local levels to actually run the government. The federal government was Alaska’s biggest employer.

  The Niniltna Native Association wasn’t blameless in this, either. It handed out a quarterly dividend, one to every shareholder, representing half the Association’s annual profits, the rest of the profits going back into the Association’s operating capital account. The payments were legitimate, earnings from leases sold to companies like Global Harvest, though heretofore much smaller in scale, to exploit natural resources on Native land.

  But it bothered Kate. It had been a bone of contention between Emaa and herself. “All this money coming at us, Emaa,” she had said, “and we don’t do anything to earn it. The state grades the road into the Park. Who pays for that? Not us. The village has running water and electricity. Who pays for that? Not us.”

  “You want to send money to the state, Katya,” her grandmother had said dryly, “you go right ahead,” and that was the end of that conversation.

  “Supper’s on,” Jim said, and Kate looked up to see the table set and a pot of stew steaming on a trivet in the middle of the table.

  She seated herself and Jim ladled out stew all around.

  “Smells great,” Johnny said. “What is it?”

  “Coq au vin.”

  “Huh?”

  “Chicken stew with bacon and mushrooms, you little cretin.”

  “Yum,” Johnny said after the first taste, and for a while was heard from no more.

  Kate took a bite. Johnny was right. The bread was store bought, but she knew what Jim would have said if she’d remarked on it. She’d been in no shape to bake any when she’d gotten home, so she didn’t. She ate, silent while the men exchanged news. Jim had responded to an accident out at the Sheldons’, a bad one. “They were digging a hole for a new septic tank.”

  “Now? In October?”

  “They did leave it a little late, which might have something to do with why the Cat broke a tread on a slope and rolled over. Maybe, I don’t know. The Cat used to belong to Mac Devlin—
I could see where the Nabesna Mine logo had been on the side before it got painted over—and it didn’t look real well cared for. At any rate, it killed the driver. Messy. The driver? The son. Yeah, just the one kid. Bad news all the way around.”

  Most of the news featured Talia Macleod’s arrival in the Park, the community’s reaction to her, and what the mine was going to mean in the long run.

  “More work for me,” Jim said, “is all I see.”

  “Why?” Johnny said.

  Jim helped himself to more stew. “They’ll mostly be hiring young men, and when you put young men together with a lot of money, trouble comes.”

  “You mean like drugs?”

  “Drugs, booze, women, bigger and better and more dangerous toys, and people who will be selling all of the above.” Jim gave his head a gloomy shake. “Not to mention all the hucksters hanging around the fringe offering the newly rich wonderful investment opportunities, most of them scams. I’ve heard about some of the stuff the Slopers have been sucked into, apple and pistachio farms in Arizona, oil wells in Colorado, real estate deals in Seattle. All of them fail, everybody takes a bath, and the losers start looking for somebody to blame, which always ends well. It won’t be pretty.”

  “But there’ll be jobs,” Johnny said tentatively. “Macleod says there will be as many as two thousand jobs during construction, and a thousand after, when the mine is operating. A thousand steady jobs, Jim, where there were zero before. That’s gotta be good. Doesn’t it?”

  “Sure,” Jim said, reaching for more bread. “But there’s a price for everything, Johnny.”

  “I was thinking. . . .” Johnny looked at Kate and hesitated, but she wasn’t listening. “Macleod said there were certain professions that would be especially attractive to Global Harvest, like engineers and geologists.”

  “And?”

  “I graduate in two years. I figured I might check out the degree programs at UA, see if any of them fit.”

  “I thought you were interested in biology, in wildlife management.”

  Johnny grimaced. “I’ve been talking to Dan O’Brien, and he says those kinds of jobs are almost always government. He says they’re hard to come by, and that they don’t pay very well, and you don’t get to pick where you work.”