Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 02 - A Fatal Thaw
Page 17
"That won't take long," he growled.
"From the looks of things I'd guess the shot came from that stand of
hemlocks just up the strip. Don't go over there, and don't let anybody
else go over there. Let Jim and his team get to it first before you
track up the snow."
"They're not going to find anything; it's been melting faster than
butter on a hot plate the last week. Wait a minute," he added as she
started toward her snow machine, "where do you think you're going?"
"I've got to talk to someone. I'm sorry, Danny boy, but it's important."
She mounted the machine and started the engine.
"Goddammit, Shugak, I'd like to know what's more important than
answering a lot of dumb questions from that dumbass trooper from Tok!"
"The only reason you don't like Chopper Jim is because he beat you to my
cousin Martha," she yelled over the noise of the engine. "Come on, Mutt!"
Mutt, with an apologetic look over her shoulder at Dan, hopped up behind
Kate, and the machine lurched off down the mountain.
"Women!" Dan O'Brian said, with a loathing that encompassed mistress and
dog, and set about the task of calming down twenty-five slightly
hysterical Park workers, most of whom had never heard a shot fired in
anger before in their lives, unless they were Fish and Game agents.
eight
BY running the engine flat out Kate made it Step to town in less than an
hour. She was lucky and met Bernie at the door of the Niniltna High
School gymnasium. "Bernie, hold up! I want to talk to you."
"Can't stop now, I got a potlatch to go to."
"I didn't know you came to potlatches," Kate said, momentarily diverted.
"I didn't come, I was commanded," he said. "Didn't you hear? Ekaterina
put the word out-the whole Park is supposed to be here. Besides, the
first game of the tournament begins right after."
"What tournament?" she asked innocently.
"Ha, ha. What happened?" he asked, nodding at her bandage. "Jack clip
you one?"
"Ha, ha," she replied. "Bernie, I need to-"
He waved her through the door and the words died on her lips.
The gym was large and rectangular, with a high ceiling, a hardwood floor
and bleachers on one side. From one backboard hung an American flag,
from the other the maple leaf of Canada. Centered on the opposite wall
was a sign that read in large, black, plain-spoken letters, "Please
Honor And Respect That This Is An Alcohol Free Event." Beneath the sign
half a dozen long tables placed
end to end were stacked with platters and casseroles and bowls and
trays, each featuring the owner's very own
special recipe for fish head stew or caribou sausage or blood stew or
boiled moose tongue or muktuk or kulich or pashka. Drums were beating as
Kate entered, the crowd in the bleachers spilled out around the walls of
the room, and Ekaterina Moonin Shugak was calling down the tribes, and
everything else was driven out of Kate's head.
"Inupiat!" The drum beat on, the response was tepid,
and Ekaterina said, her deep voice amplified by the microphone,
"Inupiat! Come on, get out here! You know if you don't I'll come up
there and get you out!"
Half a dozen people groaned and laughed and climbed down out of the
bleachers to join the costumed tribal dancers on the floor. They
crouched over bent knees, stepping from one foot to the other and
shaking their hands in time to the beat.
"Athabascan!", ., An old, old man in beaded buckskins and wearing
hearing aids in both ears made his slow and stately way out onto the
floor. He was using a walker, but he had his dancing slippers on, made
of buckskin and heavily beaded.
Bernie noticed Kate standing very still. "What is it?" She took a
breath. "It's Chief William. From Tanana.
He almost never leaves his house nowadays. Emaa must
have asked him to come as a personal, favor to her." "Who's Chief
William?" .
"He's the oldest chief of any tribe in Alaska. He's
probably the oldest Alaskan there is, for that matter."
"How old is he?"
"He was born in 1867. The year Russia sold Alaska
to the United States."
Bernie whistled, a long, low whistle. "That'd make him-what? A hundred
and ... ?"
"A hundred and twenty-five."
"And still dancing," Bernie said, marveling. "I should be
in such good shape when I'm a hundred and Twenty-five."
Kate shook herself, resisting her awe. "He was born somewhere up around
Ahtna, way before there was a town. He doesn't have a birth certificate,
so they can only guess at his age. He's probably younger."
"He could be older," Bernie suggested.
Kate's breath expelled on a short laugh. "So he could. I never thought
of that."
The other dancers made way for the old chief's slow but steady progress
out into the middle of the floor. As small and wrinkled as he was, as
hampered by the walker as he was, his dancing was deliberate, dignified
and kept to the beat of the drums, which had slowed to accommodate him.
His voice was small and weak when he called out, but somehow the words
echoed clearly across the big room and brought responding shouts from
everywhere in the crowd. Accompanying him was a young boy of ten or
twelve, wearing jeans and Nike tennis shoes and clutching an eagle
feather in each fist. He was a little clumsy but enthusiastic as he
followed his great-great-grandfather around the floor, stamping his feet
and shaking his eagle feathers.
"I didn't know there were so many of you," Bernie said, staring in
wonder at the crowded floor
"Not so many," Kate said, too low for him to hear. "So few." As always,
the dance of her ancestors stirred opposing emotions in her. There was
much joy in the sight of so many of her people together in one place,
celebrating their heritage. There was as much sorrow. They were so few,
barely enough to fill this gym.
Bernie looked from the dancers to the short, lithe woman standing next
to him, her pensive expression emphasizing the beauty of her flat, high
cheekbones, the clear, light brown, almond-shaped eyes with the hint of
the epicanthic fold in the crease of the upper lid, the wide mouth, held
firmly, even a bit primly, the clear, golden skin stretched tautly over
good bones, the shining black fall of hair braided severely back from
her face. She
looked like a walking, breathing advertisement for "How the West Was
Won," except that if Kate had been there he wasn't sure it would have
been. He ran through what he knew about Kate Shugak. She never touched
alcohol. She could turn her hand to any task in the Park and perform it
in an efficient and competent manner. Her sense of humor was strong. He
had seen the sense of responsibility she felt toward the people of the
Park, which warred with her veneration for personal freedom, the ability
to think and do as one chose. He had also seen the way people of the
Park looked at Kate, with respect verging on awe. Their voices dropped
when they spoke of her; they drew back where she walked. Her deeds w
ere
legend, from her apprehension of the child molester that had resulted in
the scar across her neck, to the brutal if efficient ejection of the
bootlegger last winter. Abel Int-Hout's suicide four months ago and the
two murders that had preceded it were still being talked about over the
bar at the Roadhouse, and with each retelling Kate's part in the events
became ever larger than life.
Now, Bernie looked at her and for the first time saw a Native Alaskan, a
hard, tough descendant of a thousand years of Great Land-lordism.
"What's he wearing?" he said, in a voice soft enough not to break the
spell. "Chief William. It looks like something out of a museum."
"It probably should he in one. It's a hunter's tunic and
leggings." "Made out of what?"
"Tanned caribou hide, probably. Maybe moose." "What're the decorations?"
"Beads and dentalium shells." "The earrings?"
beads and dentalmm shells. The nosepin's
talium shell, too."
Chief William caused, one hand on his walker. With
the other he pulled out what looked like a long, brown,
hollow tube. "What's that?" Bernie said.
"A sucking tube. Made of antler. Shamans use them
to suck the evil spirits from the sick."
The tube raised to his lips, Chief William sucked in, once, twice, three
times. The drums picked up speed, and the crowd shouted their approval.
Chief William put the tube away and made his stately way back to his seat.
"Aleut!" Ekaterina called.
A shriek went up fit to raise the roof and half the bleachers took to
the floor in a stamping, shaking mass.
"Koniag!"
A woman moved out from the crowd to dance directly in front of
Ekaterina. She wore a skullcap made from strings of brightly-colored
glass beads that hung in fringes over her eyes and down her back, and an
ivoryandfeather finger mask on each hand. The beads swung and sparkled
in the light, the feathers on the finger masks
swept wide arcs through the air. Her face was broad and
bronzed, her eyes merry, her hair long and straight with reddish gleams
beneath the light. Her movements were
deft and graceful and she looked delightful, and if her
up-from-under glances at the male dancers
were any indication, she knew it.
"Hawaiian!" Ekaterina called. "Come on, Keoki!"
An enormous man wearing a high, plumed helmet
and a floor-length cloak made of brilliant yellow and
red feathers took to the floor and hurled himself into
hula, and there was a roar of approval. "The black man!"
The circle of dancers drew back and looked around.
No one came forward. The drummer whacked the drum louder, and Ekaterina
repeated in a voice pitched to be
heard in Oregon, "The black man!"
Bobby wheeled out of the crowd amid a roar of
val. "See, Bobby, I knew you were here!"
called.
Bobby moved the wheels, of his chair backward and
forward with the beat of the drums and walked his head
and shoulders like an Egyptian. A circle of high-stepping, gyrating
dancers formed around his chair, and he threw back his head and howled,
his black face gleaming with sweat, his mouth split wide in a grin.
"The white man!" There was a whoop and a holler and one lone Rebel yell
and a dozen more people took to the floor.
"I thought a potlatch was for naming a baby," Bernie said to Kate,
raising his voice over the increasing roar of the crowd.
"It is. It's for a lot of things." "It's like a, what, religious rite?"
Kate shook her head. "It's more social than religious. In the old days,
it was so the people could come together and help share the work and the
food. A village would throw a potlatch to celebrate the raising of a new
totem pole, or a big chief would have one to show how rich and powerful
he was, or maybe a couple's parents would throw one for their wedding."
She smiled. "I remember when I was a little girl, my cousin Martin's
parents had a potlatch to name him when he was a year old, and another
when he turned five and had his first haircut, and a third for when he
shot his first caribou." She sighed. "Then, when my Aunt Mary and my
Uncle Bob were cheated out of their homestead by a bank in Fairbanks,
their children had a potlatch to show them how many people loved them,
to take the hurt away. You can have a potlatch for anything, when it
comes from deep down in your heart."
"And this one?"
"This one's for the ten people who were killed here last month."
"I thought they were all white."
Kate gave him an impatient look. "It wouldn't matter one way or another
if they were. They lived here. They were our neighbors."
"Even Mac Devlin?" Bernie asked with the lift of an
eyebrow.
"Even Mac Devlin," Kate said firmly. "Nobody likes him and I wouldn't be
surprised if somebody shot at him again someday, but he was part of the
event, the ... the tragedy, if you will. And, not.that it matters, but Tina
Weiss was a quarter Aleut. I think we were related in a shirttail sort
of way through my father's family in Cordova. And the Jorgensens had
lived here forever, and Pat's brothers still do. And who wouldn't grieve
over the deaths of two newlyweds and their unborn baby?" Kate was
speaking dispassionately now. "Emaa had this potlatch to call their
spirits back one more time, to remember them with joy instead of sorrow,
to celebrate their life and friendship, and then let them go."
Potlatches, she could have added, were also held to put the guests under
obligation to the host. She looked across the room at Ekaterina, broad,
ageless face creased in a wide grin, and thought, No, Emaa never does
anything for only one reason.
The drums gathered force, and as each individual dancer took to the
floor and fell in with the rhythm, the crowd began to take on the look
of a single, joyous
entity. Bobby's Fifth Annual Celebration of the Twentieth Anniversary of
the Tet Offensive had been a dirge lamenting useless death and a
senseless war. By contrast,
the potlatch was a paean to life and to those who lived it, a
remembrance of the dead, an act of homage. If the dancers mourned the
passing of the dead, they also rejoiced in the lives those individuals
had lived, and rejoiced as well, unashamed, in their own. Kate thought
of the quilters and the mushers and the parishioners and the belly
dancers at the Roadhouse on Wednesday, and smiled suddenly. Even The
Rite of the Middle Finger, that Flipping Off of Fate by Big Bumpers who
had made it all the way to the top and lived whole and entire to tell
the tale, was part and parcel of the same service.
Ekaterina threw back her head and called in a voice that rung off the
rafters, "Everybody!"
"This is incredible, Kate," Bernie said. "I've never seen anything like
this." There was no reply and he looked around. "Kate?"
She was down on the floor, moving among the dancers with Iluid grace.
Her legs were bent at the knee, her arms were up, and she leaned
forward, stepping from
one foot to the other, always in time with the
beat of the drums. The drums became louder, until they filled the room
up to the ceiling and bounced back down again. Kate threw back her head
and called, to whom or to what Bernie didn't know. Half a dozen people
called back, and the beat increased in speed and decibel level. Chief
William's
great-great-grandson tossed Kate an eagle feather, and she caught it
deftly in her right hand and used it to draw graceful pictures in the
air as she danced. The Koniag girl threw her a finger mask, and she
slipped the carved ivory-and-feather hoop over her left index finger.