Play With Fire (9 page)

"Used to?"

His gaze slid away. "Well. Dad wasn't home this year, so ... " He watched a third mosquito buzz around Kate, give an almost visible shrug and zero in on the back of his neck. He swiped at it and missed. "They don't bother you much."

She shook her head. "No. Not much."

"You're lucky." They stood in silence for a moment. "You know what happened to him, don't you."

She met his eyes. "I think so."

He looked back down at his arm, rubbing the bite. When next he spoke his voice was almost inaudible. "He's dead, isn't he."

"I don't know for sure, Matthew," she said, "and I don't want to say anything until I am absolutely sure."

"Matthew." His grandfather's voice carried clearly, effortlessly to them across the expanse of parking lot.

It was like watching special effects in a movie, one person usurping the face and body of another in a seamless meld of shifting flesh. The vulnerable little boy stiffened into a champion for Christ, a soldier for God. His spine stiffened, his chin came up, even his voice deepened.

"I've got to go."

On a mission from God, no doubt. "All right," Kate said. "I might know something more in a couple of days. I'll come and tell you if I do."

"God bless you." He hesitated, looking from her to the tall, spare man with the shock of white hair standing in the doorway to the little church, the tiny steeple stretching overhead like an extension of his backbone. "If he's dead, it's God's will, and I must learn to accept it." He saw her expression and repeated stubbornly, "It's God's will."

He turned and walked back to the church, steps firm, chin up, spine straight. The door closed behind him.

So it was God's will, was it? Kate thought.

Maybe.

Then again, maybe not.

The post office was closed but the general store it cohabited with was open and doing a rousing trade that Sunday afternoon, or as rousing a business as a one-room store does in the Alaskan bush when the salmon are running. The building was a structure typical of the bush, beginning with a double-wide trailer, a lean-to built on to the double-wide, a log room added to the lean to, and a prefab with slick metal siding going up into a dizzying second story added on to the log room. The four different roof levels were crowned with five chimneys and a satellite dish, and the various eaves were hung with--Kate counted--seventeen sets of wind chimes that tinkled monotonously in the light breeze. There was a weather vane in the

Gold and silver and dresses may be trusted to a messenger, but not boleti.

--Martial shape of a rooster; that afternoon its beak pointed into the southeast.

Except for the chimes, it all reminded her a little of her grandmother's house in Niniltna. The eaves of her grandmother's house were festooned with racks and skulls, the first kills of anyone related to Ekaterina by blood within the last fifty years. The antlers from Kate's own first deer, a gracefully balanced four-pointer, neat but not gaudy, were positioned near the ridgepole. Kate could still taste the steaks. Best meat she'd ever eaten.

The store occupied the log cabin part of this preposterous structure, and it was packed so solid with shelves so crammed with goods there was barely room enough for customers, but they managed to wedge themselves inside, fill their arms with purchases and wait in a line that grew steadily longer in front of a counter with one register and one man working that register. He was short and stocky, with straight dark hair, big brown eyes, and a taciturn expression alleviated by a sudden and infrequent grin that relaxed his whole face and turned him from wood into flesh. "Russell, how much for these spinners?" somebody called from the back, holding up a box of silver lures.

"Price on the box," Russell said, ringing up a carton of Kools and a case of Rainier.

"No, it's not."

"Look on the shelf underneath."

A housewife dueled with two toddlers over a box of Captain Crunch. She won, only to refight the same battle over a bag of Doritos. Kate and Mutt stood to one side, out of the line of fire.

A plane sounded overhead. Without looking up Russell said, "There's Slim with that new 185."

The thin man with the ponytail and the intense look who was next in line paused in counting out money. "Didn't I hear tell where he stole it off some poor guy for only sixty-five grand?" Russell nodded and the hippie shook his head in admiration. "With less than six hundred hours on the engine. Damn. He could turn the sucker around for eighty-five tomorrow.

Like money in the bank."

"Don't think he wants to, he says it always starts." Another plane approached and the storekeeper cocked his head a little, listening.

After a moment his brow smoothed out. "Butch in the Tri pacer. Been a while since he's been up."

"Wonder if he brought his wife," the hippie said.

"We can only hope."

The hippie gathered up his dried apricots, gorp and stone cut oatmeal and headed for the door, pausing on his way for a long, appreciative look at Kate. The housewife wrestled her kids two throws out of three for a bag of butterscotch drops, won, and arrived at the counter flushed with triumph. Behind her back, the four-year-old swiped a Snickers bar and hid it in his pocket. Something in the air triggered the suspicious instinct alert in every mother when her back is turned and her head snapped around and she stared down at him sternly. He stood it for maybe ten seconds before caving, pulled the candy bar out of his pocket and put it back on the shelf, red-faced. She nodded once, sternly, and then spoiled the effect by getting two fruit wraps from the top shelf and handing them over, one each. Their faces lit up. It wasn't chocolate but it wasn't a bad second best. They grabbed for the goodies and streaked out the door quick before she changed her mind.

Russell rang up her order and ducked around the counter to hold the door open for her as she staggered through, arms full of bags. He let it swing shut and looked at Kate, standing patiently next to the counter.

"Something I can help you with?"

"I'm Kate Shugak," she said. "I met your wife at church this morning."

"Kate Shugak?" She nodded. "Any relation to Ekaterina Shugak?" She nodded again. He took in the color of her skin and the epicanthic folds of her eyes, she the slant of his cheekbones and the thick, straight black hair. He didn't say, "Aleut?" and she didn't say, "Athabaskan?" but they both relaxed a little, the way people of color always do when the door closes after the last white person has left the room.

Her eyes traveled past him to the wall in back of the counter. "Is that a hunter's tunic?"

He turned to look. "Yeah."

They looked at it some more, silent, taking their time. It was worth it, a testament to hundreds of hours of painstaking, eye-straining, finger-cramping labor. It was made of caribou hide, tanned to ivory.

Red, white and blue beads were worked around the collar in a pattern that sort of resembled the Russian Orthodox cross, or maybe those were birds; Kate wasn't sure. The seams at shoulders, armholes and underarms were heavily fringed and hung with dyed porcupine quills. Dentalium shells gleamed from a sort of a breastplate, and something in the order in which they were sewn to the hide hinted at the shape of a fish. You could see the fish better if you didn't look straight at the design.

"Your grandfather's?" she said after a while. He nodded. "I saw Chief William in one of those last year. He had leggings, dancing slippers, even a nose ping The work on it reminds me of this one."

"Maybe by the same hand," he said.

"Maybe. It's looks about the same age. A lot of this stuff around?"

"Some. What there is, people don't bring out much."

"Why do you?"

"I like to look at it."

"You ever wear it?"

He shook his head. "It's too small for me. I'm always afraid I'll split the seams." He turned to face the counter and her. "You need something?"

"Got any Diet 7Up?"

"In the cooler."

She got a can, paid for it and popped the top. "Like I was saying, I met your wife in church this morning."

His face closed up. "Oh?"

Kate ignored the uncompromising syllable. "Yeah, she invited me to dinner but she took off before I could tell her I can't make it today."

She gave him one of her very best smiles. "I just stopped by to see if maybe I could weasel a rain check out of her."

He wilted visibly in the presence of that smile, a force of nature Jack Morgan could have told him was lethal and always effective. It was much like Chopper Jim's grin, but Kate would never have admitted that, even if Jack had had the guts to draw a comparison between the two.

"She's in the house, I can go get her."

"Nah, I've got to get back or my picking partners will think I'm slacking off on them." She drank some pop. From outside the door came a low, impatient

"Woof."

Kate looked for beef jerky and had to settle for a package of teriyaki pepperoni. She stripped off the shrink wrap and opened the door. Mutt caught the stick of meat neatly in her teeth.

She felt Russell Gillespie come up behind her. "Nice dog. Got some wolf in him."

"Her. Half."

"You breed her?"

"Not intentionally." Russell smiled, that sudden, transforming expression that seemed momentarily to change him into a different person. "Come around back.

Got something to show you."

"Okay."

He locked up the store and took her around back and of course there were about a hundred dogs staked out over an acre of ground cleared between tree stumps, and of course Mutt had to exchange greetings with each and every one of them, reminding Kate yet again of Ekaterina Moonin Shugak working the room at the Alaska Federation of Natives' annual convention.

No nose went un sniffed and no tail, either, and Kate was thankful they were well past Mutt's estrus. One old lop-eared male did give an exploratory growl, which Mutt dealt with summarily.

The male yipped and jumped away from the nipping teeth, and Mutt moved on.

Russell Gillespie watched, standing next to Kate. "She'd make one hell of a lead dog. You do any mushing?"

"No. You?" A disingenuous question, since she'd seen the sled and the harnesses hung on the wall, as well as the dog pot fashioned from a fifty-five-gallon drum.

"Some."

"Race?"

"Some." As with most mushers she had known and loved, the urge to show off his dogs was irresistible, and it was twenty minutes of dog talk before Kate judged it safe to raise the topic again. "I didn't see you at church. Did I miss you?" "I don't go," he said flatly. "I leave that to the wife."

"Oh?"

"Yeah." He hesitated, then went on. "She got the call and was born again and then she tried to convert me. It didn't take." The grin turned thin and sour, like good wine gone bad. "So now she prays for me."

Kate shrugged. "Every little bit helps." He almost smiled, but not quite, and she trod warily. "Quite a sermon the pastor preaches."

"Yeah," he said, and there was no trace of humor left. "Old Seabolt damns and blasts with the best of them."

"I haven't been up this way in a while, but I don't remember the church being here before."

"It wasn't here until seven years ago," he said shortly, red creeping up the back of his neck. "Sea bolt led a crusade or some damn thing up from Outside. About ten families altogether, they drove up the Alcan, bought Ralph Satrie's homestead and divided up the one hundred and thirty acres eleven ways."

"Eleven?"

"One part for the church."

"Oh. Where they from, originally?"

He shrugged, but there was a wariness in him that sparked her curiosity.

She would have pursued it but in the distance came the sound of a plane and he cocked his head, listening intently.

"Somebody you know?" Kate said, watching him.

"Don't think so," he said, "it's a Super Cub, but it doesn't sound familiar."

The three of them, man, woman and dog, waited, looking into the western sky until the white plane with the faded red trim came into view over the tops of the trees. "Seven Four Kilo," he said, squinting at the tail letters. "Nope, never saw it before." The engine throttled back and the flaps came down. "Better open up the store, they might buy something."

It was a hint, and Kate, realizing confidences were at an end for the day, took it.

As they came around the corner of the store, they surprised a woman in the act of picking up a garden hoe propped against the open door of the greenhouse. Not seeing them, she turned to walk away. "Hey," Russell said.

She paused and looked over her shoulder. "Oh. Hi." She was in her late sixties, gray hair cropped short and permed in tight little curls, face weathered and brown from ten years of retirement. Her jeans were loose and faded. Her faded pink T-shirt commemorated the Alaska Highway's Fiftieth Anniversary.

"Where do you think you're going with my hoe?" Russell said.

The woman looked at the hoe as if she'd never seen it before. "This is your hoe?"

"Yes." She said accusingly, "I thought this was a ghost town."

"You thought wrong," Russell said, and retrieved his hoe.

She wasn't embarrassed, watching him lean the hoe back up against the greenhouse with a speculative expression. "You're Indian, aren't you?"

She looked over at Kate. "Both of you? Could you wait a second while I get my camera so I can take your picture?"

Russell looked at Kate. Kate looked at Russell. They both looked back at the woman.

"Ugh," Kate said.

"How," Russell said.

Mutt, having completed her social obligations, chose this moment to trot up, pausing next to Kate and examining the woman with a long, curious yellow stare. The woman paled. Mutt yawned widely. The woman turned and trotted around the building. Mutt gave Kate an inquiring glance. "Good girl," Kate said.

Russell went back inside, and Kate arrived in the parking lot in time to see a Winnebago with Georgia plates kick gravel as it pulled out onto the road, going the wrong way if they wanted to get back to the main road, but it wasn't Kate's RV and it wasn't her problem. She just hoped she wouldn't have to help pull them out of a ditch on the way home.