The kettle steamed on the back of the stove, the smell of baking bread teased her nostrils, the early afternoon sun sent thin, searching tendrils through the windows, and her grandmother was taking too long to answer.
"Did you know him?" Kate probed, not changing her relaxed position but alert for every word, every movement her grandmother might make. She liked this job less and less with every pa.s.sing moment, but Ken was missing and it was her fault. No. She gave herself a mental shake. He was a grown man, and she had never minimized the dangers of the Park and its inhabitants, be they on four legs or two, which not least dangerous of the two-legged variety was the old woman sitting across from her now. She jumped when Ekaterina at last decided to speak.
She spoke slowly, deliberately, as if remembrance of the events were coming to her as she talked. "Xenia was seeing some young Outsider a month or two ago."
"What was his name?"
The old woman shrugged, her eyes on the strong, wrinkled hands wrapped around her mug.
Kate said patiently, "Was it Miller, emaa?"
There was a long silence, and then the old woman said, "It might have been."
Kate"s mind was busy creating and discarding scenarios. "A month or two, that fits. He hasn"t been heard from in six weeks." Kate looked keenly at the old woman. "So he was seeing Xenia, was he?"
"Yes." Her grandmother did not elaborate, and from her manner Kate knew she had said her last word on the subject.
"Well," Kate said, "I guess the next step is to find Xenia and talk to her."
"You said you were looking for two people."
"Yes," Kate said. "The ranger"s family has pull in Washington, D.C.
They put the FBI on it."
"The FBI?"
Kate laughed. "You look just like Abel did when I told him the FBI was on the trail, emaa."
The old woman became, if possible, even more deliberate in speech.
"Abel?"
"Yeah, have either of you robbed any banks lately? Anyway, the local agent asked Jack Morgan if he would look into it since he knew the Park, and he sent Ken Dahl out here." She paused with her mug halfway to her lips, and her smile faded. "He"s been missing for two weeks."
"The blond man," her grandmother said. "I remember. You brought him to the potlatch this summer."
Kate stiffened. "Yes, emaa, I brought him to the potlatch, and I have yet to hear the end of it." Her grandmother looked bland, and Kate smacked her mug down on the table and said explosively, "It was only a party, for G.o.d"s sake; it"s not some holy tribal ceremony. I brought Jack--" Her mouth snapped shut, and she wondered bitterly what it was about her grandmother that could put her so instantly on the defensive.
"For the four years before that, yes, I remember him, too. Jack Morgan. A good man."
"For an Anglo and an Outsider," Kate agreed sarcastically. "Yes, I know."
The two women were silent, listening to the kettle whistle on the stove. "Katya," the old woman said at last, "I have a favor to ask you now."
With Ekaterina, there was always a quid pro quo. Nothing was for free, not even for granddaughters anointed to follow in her footsteps.
Perhaps especially not those, Kate thought. "What?" she said.
"Another council meeting you feel I should attend? Another amendment to the Native a.s.sociation charter you feel it necessary I be present to vote for in person?" The old woman looked at her, and she looked away.
"Sorry, emaa," she said gruffly. "I didn"t mean to be rude."
"I want you to talk to Xenia, Katya," her grandmother said.
"I"m going to anyway, but what do you want me to say to her?"
"She wants to move to town."
Kate"s shoulders slumped a little. It was always the same whenever she came home. It was one of the reasons she rarely did. In Ekaterina"s view, Kate was the elder sister of her family and Ekaterina"s personal sergeant at arms. It was, Ekaterina believed, one of Kate"s duties to mount a guard on the perimeter of the jail in case any of her cousins" kids took it into their heads to escape the confines of family, village and park. Escapes went on all the time, some successful, some thwarted. "And I"m supposed to talk her out of it?"
"She wants you to find her a job. You won"t."
Kate took a deep breath, and expelled it. "I might. If she"s really sincere about it, and willing to work, I might look for something for her to do. Maybe even in the D.A."s office."
"You will do no such thing."
Kate met her grandmother"s stern eyes. "Why not?" she said. "What"s all that wrong with Anchorage?"
"Why did you leave it?" the old woman countered, and Kate flushed.
"What is there for her to do here?" she snapped. "Get pregnant so she can go on welfare? And then she needs more money so she has another baby, and then she needs more so she has another? Or maybe she could marry some guy from Tana who didn"t finish high school, who fishes all summer and drinks all winter and beats on her in between? And then he drinks too much to fish and she goes on welfare anyway and gets Bernie to cash her checks for her, and maybe because she"s lonely, or maybe because she just wants time off from the kids she starts drinking herself, and spending her weekends at the Roadhouse, leaving the kids to raise themselves, until one night she staggers out for a leak in the snow and pa.s.ses out and dies of exposure? Is that what you want for her?" The last words were almost shouted, and Kate stood, glaring at her grandmother, breathing hard.
"Xenia is not your mother," Ekaterina said softly into the angry silence of her kitchen.
They stared at each other. Kate looked away first. "Ah, the h.e.l.l with it."
Ekaterina allowed the silence to linger, for Kate to lose steam, and then she said softly, her words dropping quietly into the silence, "It was easy for you, Katya. It would not be so easy for Xenia."
Easy? Kate looked at Ekaterina and laughed; she couldn"t help herself.
For a change Ekaterina looked off-balance. It was a bitter and entirely unamusing sound, Kate"s laughter, and Kate let it die a natural death. She paced once around the room, her hands shoved in her pockets. "I went Outside last year, did I tell you? Jack has an interest in an apple orchard in Arizona. We rented an RV and drove everywhere. Beautiful country. Not like Alaska, but beautiful in its own way."
"Sounds like fun," Ekaterina said neutrally, alert to the seeming change of subject, watching her granddaughter with wary eyes.
"Mmm. One day, while we were driving everywhere, we came to a Indian gift shop by the side of the road, and we stopped. The man who was running it, a Navajo he said when we asked him, wanted to know where we were from. We told him, and he wanted to know, where do Indians live in Alaska? Jack said, a lot of the time next door. He didn"t believe us. I told him I was an Aleut, and he looked at Jack, and he looked at me, and he looked at our camper van, and he looked at my clothes, and he didn"t say anything, but it was obvious he didn"t believe that, either."
Ekaterina chuckled, and Kate smiled. "I know. So we showed him pictures of where we lived, and he laughed. He wanted to know what kind of reservations we had, and we told him, none, or none like they do Outside. He still wouldn"t believe us, but he was too polite to call us liars to our face, and so he sold me this gorgeous silver bracelet and took us home for supper."
Kate stopped next to the stove, her hands held out over it. "Home was a twenty-year-old Airstream trailer propped up on bricks and insulated with newspapers, sitting next to a dry creek bed.
No power, no running water, but the creek ran most of the year, he told us. His oldest girl was thirteen. She was pregnant. They wanted to know about Alaska and we had a map and showed it to them, and they couldn"t read enough to understand it. His wife was drunk from the moment we stepped into his trailer, and before we left her sister and her sister"s husband showed up with another bottle. It was a school day, but none of the kids had bothered to attend. What was the point? he asked us. There were no jobs on the reservation."
The old woman looked at her, one arm on the table, the other planted on a knee, her face impa.s.sive, and Kate said gently, "They stay home, emaa. They never leave it. And do you know who they have for tribal police? The FBI. There"s your self-determination. There"s your sovereign nation. Don"t you see, that by forcing Xenia to stay here, you would be forcing her to give up any chance she has at a future?"
Ekaterina sat still, again her eyes half-closed. She said, "Billy Mike was in Prudhoe last year when the Barrow whalers landed that bowhead.
They were not in kayaks, they were in Zodiacs with outboard motors.
Their harpoons had exploding heads. One of the oil companies provided a tractor with a come-along and winched the whale ash.o.r.e, after the hunters had struck three times and finally killed it. A third of the meat was ruined by the time the carca.s.s was beached. Another third spoiled before it could be harvested, before even the polar bears could gather to finish it off, the way they were put here to do. This is your twentieth century, Katya. This is your civilization. Don"t you see that if Xenia leaves, she abandons the culture that gave her birth?"
Kate smiled at the old woman, and flicked the switch next to the door, plunging the room into arctic afternoon gloom. "And yet you have electricity in your house, emaa. You have running water in your kitchen and bathroom."
"Provided by the a.s.sociation for its members," Ekaterina said composedly.
Kate flicked the switch again, restoring the light. "Funded by taxes on Prudhoe Bay oil, emaa."
FOUR.
Unfortunately Kate knew exactly where to find her cousin Xenia.
Bernie"s Roadhouse was twenty-seven miles away from Niniltna, which put it exactly nine feet, three inches outside the Niniltna Native a.s.sociation"s tribal jurisdiction. A road of sorts, following the west bank of the Kanuyaq River, connected the two. It was a road created and maintained from the wear and tear of truck tires and snow-machine treads. Any other road with that much traffic would have qualified for federal matching funds.
The bar was a low, sprawling place built of the inevitable plywood and two-by-fours flown in piece by prohibitively expensive piece, strapped to the struts of a Super Cub whose young pilot paid off the loan on his plane with that job. A satellite dish hung precariously from the eaves. There was a shack for the generator, another for the water tank whose contents Bernie pumped out of the Kanuyaq each fall, and the house in which Bernie and his wife, Enid, born a Shugak, and seven children lived and from which Bernie fled nightly into the Roadhouse. A half dozen tiny cabins, where Bernie put his children to work as soon as they were tall enough to change sheets on a bed, were rented out year-round to the stray tourists and Demetri Totemoff"s hunting parties.
Unfinished wooden steps climbed up to the front door. Inside, the building was one cavernous square fifty feet on a side, with exposed beams that patrons occasionally swung from, depending on how late the hour and when Bernie cut them off. A bar with stools and a bra.s.s foot rail ran down the left side of the room, with a mirror and racks of dusty bottles of exotic liqueurs in back of it. There was a large television hanging from one corner of the ceiling, with tall men chasing a basketball across the screen. Tables and chairs, video games and a jukebox with selections guaranteed to be not more than five years old filled up the rest of the room. There were two restrooms, with functional toilets, and homesteaders for miles around came just to remember how it felt not to have to hang it out in the cold with the mosquitoes snapping at your a.s.s in the summer and the dogs doing the same thing in the winter. On New Year"s Eve and on the Fourth of July the bar stayed open until five, three hours past its usual closing time, and on such occasions Bernie had been known to bring in live entertainment from as far away as Tok.
The room hadn"t been swamped out in memory of man, and it smelled strongly of stale cigarette smoke and vomit. Behind the bar was Bernie, tall, dark and skinny, with a calm face and a hairline that was marching inexorably up the crown of his head. The remainder was clipped back into a ponytail, a defiant reminder of those halcyon days when he had been more hippy and less yuppy and much, much younger.
It was noisy that night, like every other night. Mutt saw Bernie and bounded across the room to jump up with her two front paws on the bar.
"Hey, no dogs allowed in-Oh, it"s you, Mutt," Bernie said. "Hold on a minute." He turned and plucked a package of beef jerky off a stand and ripped it open. He tossed a chunk to Mutt, who caught it neatly in her teeth. Bernie looked between her ears and said, "Hey, Kate."
Stretching out a thin, wiry hand, he added, "It"s been a while."
"Not long enough," she said, taking his hand and shaking it warmly.
He gave an exaggerated wince and examined his hand tenderly. "You been splitting too many logs, Kate."
"You haven"t been practicing your slam dunks, Bernie."
"What"ll you have?"
"c.o.ke," she said.
"d.a.m.n," he said, reaching for a tall gla.s.s, "you"re bad for business, Kate. I never make any money off you."
"You do when you charge a buck and a half for a c.o.ke," she said, digging in her pocket.
He waved her money away and leaned on the bar, his arms folded in front of him. She sipped her c.o.ke and looked around. The smoke obscured her vision, and the ba.s.s from the jukebox was powerful enough to bounce her right off her stool. The talk was necessarily loud, the dancing energetic and the drinking nonstop. "You"re not doing too bad," she said, half-smiling.
"Mmm. I should do all right if I can keep Billy Mike and that bunch off my back."
"You having problems with the tribal council again?"
"Nah." Bernie grinned. "I"ve been allowed a few months" grace, seeing"s how the boys" team brought the state championship home last March."
"For the second time in four years." Bernie grinned and said nothing.
"How"s the team shaping up this year?"
He shrugged. "Too soon to tell." Bernie never handicapped the teams he coached.
Suzy Moonin came up to the bar, said h.e.l.lo to Kate and ordered a rum and c.o.ke. Bernie looked at her and shook his head gently but with finality. "No, Suzy."
Suzy, a plump young woman with sparkling brown eyes and punked hair tucked behind her ears, said blankly, "What?"
He met her eyes squarely. "You"re pregnant. I don"t serve expectant mothers."
She flushed. "Who told?"
"Your mother was in last night."
"That b.i.t.c.h!" she spat.
"True," he admitted. "Doesn"t make any difference. You"re cut off until after the baby"s born. Would you like a c.o.ke? Or maybe a Shirley Temple? I"ll put in an extra cherry."
She stared at him impotently, her body rigid with anger. Then she reached over and slapped the gla.s.s he was polishing out of his hand. It crashed to the floor in a hundred pieces, and she swung around and stamped across the room.
"Someone"ll share," Kate said.
Bernie sighed and started picking up gla.s.s. "Probably. If I catch them at it I"ll throw the both of them out."
"Why don"t you just throw her out now?"
"If she wants it bad enough, she"ll find it."
"Why don"t you just close up shop, then?"
Bernie sighed again. "Don"t go getting sanctimonious on me, Kate. I may be the only game in town but when they lay down three bucks I give them three bucks" worth of booze. That bootlegger you busted last winter was getting forty bucks for a bottle of Windsor Canadian that would cost seven in Anchorage. Thanks for that, by the way. Didn"t get a chance to say so, afterwards."
Kate couldn"t argue with him because she knew he was right. "Get any more CARE packages from your folks?"
He brightened. "Funny you should ask. Got one on today"s mail plane."
He stooped to lift a large, cardboard U-Haul box from beneath the counter. Kate knelt on the stool so she could peer in. "Water filter? Waterproof compa.s.s? Hey, a Swiss army knife! Does it have a screwdriver?"
He recovered the knife deftly. "Straight-edge and Phillips."
"Wow."
"Forget it. Buy your own."