A Cold-Blooded Business (25 page)

Jack stared out the window, hands in his pockets. "You could stay."

Kate's voice was surprisingly gentle. "No. No, I couldn't."

"Not even for Costco? The Book Cache?" Me? he thought, but didn't say out loud. She heard him anyway. "No."

Even though he was expecting it the word fell like a blow. "Mind telling me why?"

"Jack," Kate said. His jaw stayed stubbornly out thrust and she sighed.

"I like my homestead."

"It's lonely." "Yes," she said. "That's one of the reasons I like it. I like living alone. I like turning Don Henley up to nine and cleaning the house at one A.M. if I feel like it. I like farting whenever I want."

She sighed again. "I don't like television. I don't like 747s on a short final into Anchorage International roaring down my chimney.

I don't like the bass on a car stereo playing Ice-T threatening to break my windows."

"Watch your mouth, my son the rapper's upstairs."

She looked at the back of his head as he stood, staring out the window, and said softly, "And I'm no mommy."

"I love you," Jack said. It was the first time he'd said it out loud.

It was the first time in five years he'd been sure she wouldn't run if he did.

Kate slid her arms around his waist and pressed her cheek against his back. "I know." He tried to turn in the circle of her arms and she wouldn't let him. "I know."

His hands came out of his pockets and locked over hers. "Well, at least I made you solvent for a while. As long as I can keep Johnny from helping you spend the rest of it on more games for that damn Game Boy you bought him." He waited. "What's wrong? Talk to me."

She shook her head. "I don't know. I don't know if I can explain it."

Her voice turned halting, hesitant, as if the words were finding their own way out. "You remember that cairn I told you about?" He nodded, and she said, "It was the damnedest feeling, standing there, looking at that pile of rocks some ancestor of mine built a thousand years ago to make the caribou migrate in the direction he wanted them to. And then I looked over and saw that Christmas tree, and I wanted to rip and tear."

"Why?"

"At first I didn't know why. The human race has always managed the earth, since the race stood up on two legs, the cairn proves that. The wellhead just showed that our management techniques have become a little more sophisticated. Although not that much more sophisticated," she added. "Jack, did you know they don't even pump the oil out of the ground up there? The formation's just one big pressure cooker. They punch holes in it and stand back quick before the oil jumps out and squirts them in the eye."

"Somehow I don't think it's quite as simple as all that."

"Well, maybe not quite," she admitted.

Jack rubbed her hands. "So why were you mad?"

She thought, rubbing her cheek against his spine. "I guess," she said slowly, "I guess because the difference is how much damage the managers do in the process, or leave behind afterward. I was taught to give back.

In the village, the old way, the right way, the one way is to give back, always somehow, in some way to give back. At Prudhoe, we're taking something and we're not giving back. We're robbing the biggest grave of all. Oh, hell," she said, disgusted with how inadequate the words were,

"I can't explain it. Forget it."

For a moment Jack was silent. "Let me ask you something. How did you get here?"

She snorted. "I know all the arguments, Jack. Snowmobile, train, Blazer, I know, all those vehicles run on products made from oil."

"So? What should we do?"

"I don't know. Something else. Soon."

It was time. He turned and she met his eyes and her own widened.

"What? Jack, what is it?"

The drawer slid out from the wall. The plastic bag was unzipped. Kate stared down at the brown, seamed face, the rheumy eyes closed. "That's him."

Jack nodded to the morgue attendant. The bag was zipped up, the drawer closed.

In the hallway she said, the sound of her torn voice made worse by its complete lack of emotion, "How did he die?"

He squeezed her shoulder. "This'll be tough, Kate."

She looked at him, and her patient, unwavering stare reminded him of a line of poetry, drummed into his head long ago by some forgotten high school English teacher. This is the way the gods ordained the destiny of men, to bear such burdens in our lives, while they feel no affliction ... Endure it, then. Priam to Achilles, wasn't it? No, Achilles to Priam. It was Hector who had died, and Achilles who had killed him.

Kate waited. Enduring. Jack said, "They found him in the doorway of a downtown store Sunday morning."

Kate's expression didn't change. "Exposure?" Jack nodded. "Drunk?"

"Two-point-one."

A muscle twitched next to Kate's mouth. "Nobody saw him?" Jack said deliberately, "If they did, they figured he was just another drunk in a doorway."

"Of course they did." She paused. "What was his name?"

"Emil Johannson."

She was silent for a moment, and then surprised him with the ghost of a laugh. "Emil Johannson. A good Yupik name."

Outside on the street, she pulled the little otter from her pocket.

Jack stood next to her, waiting patiently, watching her fingers gently caress the little paws, the thick curve of the tail. "You want to hear something funny, Jack? When Jerry started telling me how they got the stuff off the Slope, I assumed he was talking about the artifacts. I wasn't even thinking about the dope, I could have cared less if every Sloper snorted a pound of cocaine a day and two pounds on Sunday. All I could see was that old man and his box of ivory, ready to trade it in on a fifth of Windsor Canadian."

"What are you going to do with it?"

"The ivory?"

"Yes."

The little otter looked up at her from behind inquisitive whiskers. "I don't know yet."

His coal-black eyes gleamed brightly in the sun. The spring breeze ruffled through his ivory fur.

And then she did.

Two days later she was in her grandmother's kitchen in Niniltna.

Afternoon sun poured through the windows in a steady, unceasing stream, gilding the worn linoleum, turning the bulk of the squat oil stove into a brooding graven image, back lighting Ekaterina's head so that Kate couldn't read her features. "I've come for a favor, emaa," she said, and named it.

The old woman was silent for a long time. "How did he die?" she asked finally.

"It doesn't matter now," Kate said wearily. "He's dead."

Another pause. "What was his name?"

"Emil Johannson. Do you know any Johannsons from St. Lawrence?"

"I might."

Kate gave the box a little shove. "This belongs to them, then. Will you return it?"

The silence stretched out between them. Kate counted dust motes shimmering in the air. At last the old woman stirred. "Why did you do it, Katya?"

Kate made no pretense of misunderstanding. She gave a faint shrug. "I wanted to see the Slope." With some acerbity Ekaterina said, "I've been trying to get you up to the kivgiq in Barrow for three years."

The corners of Kate's mouth creased. "Maybe I'll go now." She paused, thinking of Cindy Sovalik. She would like to see the old woman again, to talk with her. There was much to learn, there. "I wanted to see Prudhoe.

I wanted to see what all the shouting was about. Oil pays for our electricity, hell, it paid for the town's generating plant, for the school." She paused. "I wanted to see the monster up close and personal."

"And now that you have?" "It has a human face, emaa," Kate said. "And the project itself is impressive as hell. Not as impressive as the Kanuyaq Copper Mine, I grant you, they humped their equipment in over mountains and rivers and glaciers on their backs. No haul road, no airport for them. But Prudhoe is impressive. And they have done a good job. I don't know that they would have done as good a job if the government and the environmentalists hadn't been breathing down their necks every step of the way, but for whatever reason, they did do a good job."

"And now?"

"And now? The job is done. I am home." Kate looked across the kitchen table at her grandmother, age and wisdom and authority carved into her face with every line. She had to make Ekaterina understand.

"This isn't an apology, emaa. I'm not sorry I went." Kate took a deep breath. "I am sorry I hurt you." She had to struggle to get the next words out. "Please forgive me."

When it came, the old woman's voice was low and soft, as soft and vulnerable as ever Kate had heard it in her life. "Do you know how much it hurt me, Katya, after your father died, when you chose to live with Abel, instead of me?" "I do now," Kate said gently. "Emaa. Who was it who told me, you don't own the land, the land owns you? I couldn't leave it. I couldn't." To her horror, Kate felt her breath catch on a sob. She fought for control.

"You were all I had left of them."

"When they died, the land was all I had left of me," Kate said. "It still is."

Ekaterina raised her head and looked at Kate. "I'm not sure I understand that." "Oh, emaa," Kate said, her ruined voice caught on a shaken laugh,

"you don't have to. You just have to accept it."

Unable to hold her grandmother's gaze, Kate looked beyond the sunlight to the dozens of framed family pictures lining the wall. She and her father and her mother were there somewhere, a picture she knew so well she didn't have to get up and look for it, a picture she had memorized and knew every shape and shadow of by heart. Her mother seated on the floor of the cabin, laughing, fighting off the eager advances of a large gray husky mix that bore a distinct resemblance to Mutt. The husky ridden by a baby girl in diapers with dark tangled hair. Her father leaning on one elbow to one side, his face split wide in a huge grin.

Yes, she knew the picture, and yes, she knew it was there. Hung to the right of one of Martin at his naming potlatch. To the left of Axenia's graduation picture. Above Luba and Barney's wedding portrait. Below the one of Niniltna High School's 1990 varsity basketball team, four of the starting five of which were Ekaterina's direct descendants, grinning around their Class C state championship trophy.

"I'll make cocoa," her grandmother said, the words startling Kate out of her absorption.

The two women stared at each other across the table. Her voice husky, Kate said, "Remember, I like it lumpy." A smile whispered across Ekaterina's brown, seamed face. "I remember."

Ponderously, she rose to her feet and put the teakettle on the stove.

The truck pulled into the clearing and Kate let the engine die. "Home," she said with a sigh, and relaxed against the seat. Mutt indicated a wish to exit the truck in no uncertain terms and Kate opened her door.

Mutt flattened her ears, gathered her muscles together and took Kate and the steering wheel in a single, smooth graceful leap, disappearing into the bushes with barely a rustle.

Kate looked closer. Those bushes were budding. Tomorrow she would go down by the creek and look for pussy willows. And maybe the next day she would get out needle and twine and mend her dip net. The ice was almost gone from the Kanuyaq River in front of her grandmother's house.

Who knew? The day after she might be eating one of those reckless and impetuous salmon that never did get the time of year to swim upstream quite right in their genes.

A lump of snow dissolved and coalesced with other drops and ran to the end of a branch. With a soft plop it dropped to the ground. It had snowed while they had been gone, but it had thawed again, too, and the shallow drifts were melting like powdered sugar in the spring sun. The smell of wet earth filled her nostrils. The air was soft on her cheek.

In the distance she heard the anticipatory chuckle of water over stone.

An eagle screamed a taunting challenge far away, receiving only the low, roguish croak of a raven in reply.

Peace.

Dana Stabenow is the author of the Kate Shugak mystery series--A Cold Day for Murder, A Fatal Thaw, Dead in the Water, A Cold-Blooded Business, Play with Fire, Blood Will Tell, Breakup, Killing Grounds, and Hunter's Moon--each of which brings to life a different aspect of the Alaskan experience. She lives in Anchorage, Alaska.