White Heat

by Melanie McGrath

  'I guess I'd better go spread the good news.'

  The pilot's door opened and Martie climbed down onto the strip. A moment of discussion followed, Martie signalled for someone to open the main door and let down the steps and Sammy and Simeonie came on board.

  Simeonie, slyer and more calculating than his brother, turned to Edie:

  'Does the skinny qalunaat understand Inuktitut?'

  Andy Taylor did not respond.

  'I guess there's your answer,' Edie said. She didn't like Simeonie. Never had, even when he was her brother-in-law

  'Did he have anything to do with this?'

  Edie could see the man's mind already at work, cooking the story, working the facts into whatever version of the truth best served Simeonie Inukpuk.

  She went through it all in her head. Andy Taylor had two rifles with him, a Remington Model 700 and a Weatherby Magnum. Felix Wagner had insisted on three: a Remington, a 30-60 Springfield and a Winchester, most likely a 308. Both men had discharged their Remingtons in the morning during an abortive hare hunt, but not since. She briefly considered the possibility that Felix Wagner had shot himself, but from the position of the wound it seemed so unlikely it was hardly worth the expenditure of energy in the thought. Then there was the zig-zag footprint with the ice bear at its centre. A theory suddenly came together.

  Edie said, in Inuktitut: 'The way I see it, someone out hunting mistook Wagner for game and took a shot at him.' The hunter was probably on his way back to Autisaq or one of the other hamlets right now. Most likely he'd lie low for a few days, then fess up. It had happened before; the qalunaat had signed a release form, absolving the community of responsibility in the event of an accident. It was unfortunate, but not catastrophic. The elders would shrug ayaynuaq, it couldn't be helped, there would be a generous insurance payout to Wagner's family and the whole episode would be forgotten. The Arctic was full of dangers. She'd made sure Felix Wagner had understood that.

  Simeonie coughed, glanced at Taylor to make sure the man wasn't following, then, drawing himself up to his full height, said:

  'Speculation is a white man's disease. Take the other qalunaat back to the hotel, make sure he's got whatever he needs.'

  She nodded.

  'One thing, he hasn't got a sat phone, has he?'

  Edie shook her head

  'Good, then don't let him make any calls.' He turned to Andy Taylor: 'We're very sorry about this accident, Mr Taylor. We have to ask you not to leave until we've made some investigations. Small stuff, just details really.'

  Andy Taylor blinked his understanding.

  Joe leaned forward and spoke in a low voice: 'Uncle, none of this is Edie's fault.'

  Inukpuk ignored him, reverting to Inuktitut:

  'There'll be a council of Elders meeting tomorrow to decide what steps to take next,' he said, stepping out of the plane and back onto the landing strip, something threatening in his tone.

  Joe shook his head. 'Aitiathlimaqtsi ark.' Fuck you too.

  Back at the hotel, Andy Taylor showed no interest in making phone calls. He only wanted to have a shower and get some rest. A man not used to death, Edie thought, watching him heave his pack along the corridor to his room at the rear of the building. It occurred to her that she ought to go home and wait for Joe. She'd been bothered by a sense of foreboding, the feeling that she and Joe were somehow being drawn into something. It was nothing she could put her finger on yet, but she didn't like the way Simeonie Inukpuk had spoken. Never trusted the man much, even when he was kin. Trusted him even less now.

  She waited downstairs in the hotel until she could hear the sound of Taylor's snores, then went home. The moment she reached the steps up to the snow-porch door, she knew .Joe was already inside waiting for her. In the same way that a frozen ptarmigan would gradually revive when put beside the radiator, it was as if the house gradually came to life when Joe was there. She pulled the door open, peeled off her boots and outerwear in the snow porch and went in.

  Joe was sitting on the sofa staring at a DVD. Charlie Chaplin was playing table ballet with two forks stuck into two bread rolls. She plunked herself down beside her stepson and stroked his hair.

  'I can't help thinking this is my fault, Kigga.'

  'Are you crazy? No one's going to blame you, Joe, not for a minute. And if they do, they'll have me to answer to.' On the TV Charlie Chaplin continued to twirl the bread rolls into pirouettes and pas de bourees. 'This was an accident. Someone from Autisaq, or maybe one of the other settlements. Maybe he couldn't see, maybe he'd had a bit to drink. It happens.'

  Joe said: 'You think?'

  'Sure,' she said. 'It'll blow over, you'll see.'

  The bread roll ballerina took her bow and Edie flipped off the player. A moment of regret drifted between them.

  Joe said: 'Only thing is, a man's dead, Kigga.'

  She looked at him, ashamed at her own momentary lapse of principle. She was her best self when she was with him, he made sure of it.

  * * *

  Chapter Two

  'Bee El You Bee Bee Ee Ar.' Edie drew the letters on the whiteboard as she went. She'd hadn't slept well and was finding it hard to focus, thinking about Wagner's death and the council of Elders meeting where she was going to have to account for her actions.

  Pauloosie Allakarialak put up his hand.

  Edie underlined the word with her finger. 'Blubber.'

  Pauloosie's arm started waving. 'Miss, did someone kill that qalunaat?'

  Edie rubbed her hand across her face. Shit, if Pauloosie knew, then everyone knew.

  Edie pointed to the word on the whiteboard. 'You know what this says?'

  The boy looked blank. Poor kid. Sometimes Edie had to wonder what she was doing, spending her days drumming into Autisaq's youth words they would almost certainly never use in English - 'baleen', 'scree', 'glacial', 'blubber', words so much more subtly expressed in Inuktitut, and prettier, too, written in script. Of course, the hope of the federal government in Ottawa was that some of them would go on to graduate from high school and even take degrees in southern universities, just as Joe planned to do, but it was a rare kind of Inuk who harboured such ambitions. Going south meant leaving family, friends, everything familiar for a city where the streets were flustered with buildings and ears crowded in on one another like char in a shrinking summer pond and where, for at least six months of the year, It was intolerably hot. Why put yourself through that in the hope that you might finally land the kind of job back home that had, for decades, only gone to qalunaat?

  No, the fact of the matter was that most of the faces before Edie now would be married with kids by the time they were old enough to vote. Most would be lucky to get as far as Iqaluit, the provincial capital, let alone to the south, and the vast majority would never once have occasion to have to spell 'blubber' in English. And the irony of this was that, all the time they were sitting in rows learning how to spell 'baleen' in English, they could be out on the land, learning traditional skills, discovering how to be Inuit.

  The recess bell rang. On her way to the staff room, an idea sprang into Edie's mind. It was something the headmaster, John Tisdale, would no doubt call 'unorthodox pedagogy', a disciplinary offence, if he found out about it. Not that Edie cared. She'd been up before him so many times for flouting the rules - his rules, southern rules - that she'd come to expect it. In any case, she suspected Tisdale secretly approved of her methods, even as he was rapping her over the knuckles for them. The man had come a long way. A few years ago, when he'd first arrived with a brief to 'broaden education in the Arctic', she'd asked him what exactly he thought they were educating Autisaq's children for.

  'To take their place in the world,' he'd replied. He really had been a pompous ass back then.

  She'd waited until the look of self-satisfaction had faded a little from his face then said: 'Maybe you don't realize, this is their world right here.'

  Tisdale had marked her down as a troublemaker but Edie hadn't been bothered b
y his condescension. She knew it wouldn't last. Pretty soon he'd begin to find himself out of his depth, then he'd come looking for her with his tail between his legs.

  It happened sooner than even she had anticipated, after a sermon he gave Autisaq's parents on the dangers of violent computer games. What a blast! Everyone had laughed at him. Hadn't he noticed where he was? Up here, violence was embedded in almost everything: in the unblinking ferocity of the sun, in the blistering winds, the pull and push of the ice.

  In any case, most Autisaq kids had neither the time nor the money for computer games; their leisure hours were taken up with snaring ptarmigan and trapping hare or fox, or helping their fathers hunt seal. They spent most of the time they weren't at school being violent.

  The day after the talk, the headmaster found a dead fox hanging across his snow porch, but instead of heading south on the next plane, as many in his position would have done, he'd knocked first on Edie's door then on others, asking where he'd gone wrong. He'd stuck it out until, over the years, he'd come to realize that 'broadening education in the Arctic' included him.

  He'd pretend to disapprove of today's 'unorthodox pedagogy', but it was all a sop to his masters back in Ottawa. Head down, so she wouldn't have to make conversation with anyone on the street, Edie trudged through dry and squealing snow to the meat store at the back of her house, picked out a small harp seal she'd hunted a few weeks earlier, attached a rope to its head and dragged it back along the ice to the school building. She waited until no one was around then smuggled the dead animal into the school through the side entrance.

  The moment the kids returned from recess and caught sight of the creature, their faces, sensing an end to the abstractions of language lessons, lit like lanterns. Edie got two of the oldest boys to help her lift the animal onto the table. Then she handed over two hunting knives and left the kids to get on with the business of butchering, instructing the older children to show the others how to handle the knives, and to write down the name of everything they touched and the verbs to describe their actions in English and Inuktitut on the whiteboard.

  It worked. Before long, the seal lay in a number of neat pieces on the table and the kids were encouraging one another to dig deeper and cut more finely, jostling to be the first to the front to write 'spleen' or 'whiskers' or 'flense'. Butchering the animal and noting its parts had become a gleeful and very Inuit kind of a game. Even Pauloosie Allakarialak was joining in. He'd forgotten the white man's death and the fact that he didn't know how to spell 'blubber'.

  At lunchtime, Edie trudged across to the Northern Store, thinking to buy some Saran Wrap and plastic sacks she could use to package the chopped seal before it thawed and became difficult to handle. Swinging open the door into the store's snow porch, she banged her boots against the boot- scraper, glanced out of habit at the announcements board (nothing about Wagner) and went inside.

  The Northern Store was officially a co-operative, owned by the inhabitants of Autisaq, every one of whom had a right to a share of the profits, if ever there were any. It was managed by Mike and Etok Nungaq.

  Mike was an affable, steady sort of guy. He had an interest in geology, which he cultivated whenever geologists from the south came into town. As a thankyou for some favour, an American geologist had left him a laptop a couple of summers back and Mike was now the person anyone came to when they had computer problems. Not that many did. Some of the younger generation had games consoles, but few in the community had bothered with computers and there were only three in public use connected to the internet: one in the mayor's office, one in the nursing station and one in the library at the school.

  When he wasn't digging out rocks and fiddling with computers, Mike Nungaq lived for gossip, though rarely the malicious kind. Mike just liked to know who was doing what, with whom, and when. There was something in his makeup that meant he couldn't help himself. If you needed to know what was really going on in town, you just had to ask Mike.

  Mike's wife, Etok, disapproved of her husband's chattering. Around Autisaq, Etok was known as Uismuitissaliaqungak, the Person with Crooked Teeth who is as Scary as a Mother Bear. People watched themselves around her. She looked harmless enough but at the slightest hint of gossip, Etok's eyes would freeze over and she'd bare a set of fangs that wouldn't have disgraced a walrus. But despite her best efforts to quash them, rumour and innuendo persisted, fanning out through the aisles of the Northern Store to the farthest reaches of the settlement, often transforming in the process from harmless titbit to outrageous slander and loathsome smear.

  It was Edie's habit to pass by the cash till to say hi to Mike before she began her shopping, but today she knew he'd want to know about the Wagner affair and she didn't feel like talking about it, so she took herself directly to the third aisle at the back of the store where the plastics were kept, between the cleaning products and the snowmobile maintenance section. They didn't have the extra-wide Saran Wrap Edie had seen advertised, so she picked up a packet of the regular stuff plus some plastic sacks and was walking back up the aisle when Pauloosie Allakarialak's mother,

  Nancy, appeared. Nancy Allakarialak was a cheerful woman, regretful at having brought her son into the world with foetal alcohol syndrome, and keen to make amends. She took a great interest in Pauloosie's education and was usually eager to discuss his progress with Edie. Today, though, she only smiled faintly and edged her way past down the aisle.

  It was a bad sign. Word had obviously already got around that a qalunaat had died on Edie's watch.

  Edie slapped the roll of plastic bags and the Saran Wrap on the cash desk. Etok was standing with her back to the desk, sorting the mail. She looked around, registered Edie then slipped through the door at the back to the store. Mike Nungaq watched his wife go then sidled along the desk to the till.

  'Hey, Edie. Nice day out.' He met her eyes and smiled. As he handed over her change, his fingers lingered over her hand.

  'I'm shunned already.'

  'Oh no,' Mike said. 'That thing yesterday? Folks a bit unsettled by it is all. Once the council of Elders have met, everything'll settle right down.'

  She nodded and smiled back, appreciative of his attempt to reassure her. She wondered if the council of Elders would see things the same way. They had the right to revoke her guiding licence and Simeonie, at least, had the motivation to do it. He'd been running for re-election as mayor when the business of Ida and Samwillie Brown blew up.

  Until Edie got involved, everyone in Autisaq had been quite prepared to put Samwillie's death down to an accident. He was unpopular and a known wife-beater. Edie's intervention in the case - 'meddling', Simeonie Inukpuk called it - had led to Ida's conviction for her husband's murder. It was widely believed that Simeonie had lost the election on account of the bad publicity and the affair had cast such a shadow over his political ambitions that it was another four years before he finally managed to get reelected. Edie often wondered if it was Simeonie who had been responsible for the death threat she'd received not long after Ida's trial began.

  Her ex-brother-in-law had other reasons to hate her, too. He blamed her for the breakup with Sammy. Too caught up in women's rights, he'd said at the time. What about a man's right to have his woman stand by him? No matter to Simeonie that, by the time she left, she and Sammy were drinking one another into the ground. Most likely they'd both be dead by now if they hadn't split. Maybe Simeonie Inukpuk would have preferred it that way. He was casual with his family. Sammy had always been loyal to him, but Simeonie had never returned the favour.

  Edie knew she had a lot to lose. It wasn't the investigation itself she was afraid of. Joe was right. A man had died a long way from home and it was only fair to his family that they get to the bottom of it. What she dreaded was that Simeonie would use Wagner's death as an excuse to persuade the elders into rescinding her guiding licence. None of the elders except Sammy thought anything of women guides; some of them had probably been looking for an excuse to get rid of her for years. In a
ny case, most of them would be glad to see her go.

  For herself, she didn't much care. The years of drinking had taken away what pride she might once have had. But without her guiding fees, there was no way Edie would be able to help Joe fund his nursing training. Part-time teaching barely covered her living expenses. He wouldn't be able to turn to Sammy and Minnie. His mother drank away her welfare and his father had an old-fashioned idea of what constituted a real Inuk man, and it wasn't studying to be a nurse. Besides, Sammy didn't want his son doing anything that might involve him having to leave Autisaq. Over the years, Sammy had let a lot of things slip by him: a few good jobs, a couple of wives and a whole lot of money. Along with booze and American cop shows, his boys were one of the few comforts remaining to him.

  After school, Edie walked back home past the store and the little church she last visited on the day of her mother's funeral. Sammy's shitkickers were lying inside the snow porch and his blue government parka was hanging on the peg. Two years after she'd kicked him out, Sammy still regularly treated Edie's house as home. At first she'd discouraged it, then she'd given in, mostly because when Sammy was at her house, Joe spent more time there too.

  The smell of beer drifted in from the living room, along with some other, more chemical, aroma. Edie prised off her boots and hung up her hat, scarves and parka, then opened the door into the house. Sammy and Joe were sitting on the sofa watching TV.

  Edie said: 'Hey, allummiipaa, darling.' The remark was directed at Joe but Sammy looked up with a hopeful smile on his face. Edie didn't miss the days she'd called her ex darling, but Sammy did. If Sammy had his way they'd still be married and she'd still be a drunk.

  'I put my stuff in my room, Kigga,' Joe said. The boy went to and fro these days - a few nights at Sammy's, a week or two with Minnie - but right now he was spending more time with his stepmother than usual, and she couldn't help liking it.