The Singing of the Dead (33 page)

“We use the river in customary and traditional ways,” she said, more loudly this time, and loud was the roar that acknowledged recognition of those two hot-button words incorporated into Title VIII of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980. “We are Natives! We have been fishing these waters for thousands of years! And what does the Alaska legislature say about that?” She dropped her voice again, commanding instant silence.

“They won't let us vote!”

Another roar.

“You know why?” Anne said, managing to be heard without shouting, a neat trick. “I'll tell you why, because they know the vote will go against them! Those white men in Juneau, they know the state wants rural preference! Those white men in Juneau, they know we'll vote to let us fish! Those white men in Juneau, they've taken too much money from those white men in Seattle to back down now!”

Anne Gordaoff had stood, hands folded in demure contrast to her rabble-rousing words, translator at the right edge of the stage, microphone and face in shadow, quick to fill Gordaoff's pauses with the Athabascan and Aleut equivalents, her consonants and gutturals swift and precise and timed to be out of the way when Gordaoff spoke again.

“It's our basic human right to control our own affairs,” she told them. “It's our basic civil right to hunt and fish as our grandfathers and grandmothers hunted and fished.

“It's two weeks till the election,” Gordaoff said. “When the time comes, I ask you to go to the polls, right here in the Ahtna High School gym, and cast your vote for me. Your interests, your concerns, will be my interests and my concerns in Juneau.” She had smiled, raising her chin and giving them the full wattage.

“They already are,” Gordaoff said in a softer voice. “I am your daughter. I am your sister. I am your auntie. I am your mother. I will go to Juneau, and I will speak with your voice.”

She bowed her head, and a whisper of applause grew to a rumble and then another roar, and she smiled again and bowed herself off the stage. A woman who had been standing stage left beat her hands together, encouraging the audience to keep it up until Gordaoff was down on the floor among them, shaking hands and accepting hugs and greeting nearly everyone by name. They didn't know that her campaign manager was presently a guest of the state of Alaska, and if they did know, they didn't care. She was one of their own.

No, Kate thought now, Pete Heimen had best not rest on his laurels, not yet.

A log cracked and broke in the fireplace, breaking the silence. Kate looked at Johnny.

He was sitting on the couch between Bobby and Dinah, holding Katya in his lap. She seemed to have fallen in love with him at first sight, and when she woke up, demanded his attention. She got it, too; Johnny was either one of those rare young men who liked babies or who had just taken a liking to this baby in particular. They talked to each other, Johnny in English and Katya in baby talk, appearing to understand each other with no difficulty. It made Kate dread all the more the coming council of war.

She looked at Jim. “You're here in an advisory capacity only.”

“Understood,” he said.

“It would be better if you weren't here, but we need you, so you are.”

“Consider me invisible.”

She took a deep breath. “You've met Johnny Morgan.”

“I have.”

“You've met his mother.”

His face didn't change but his voice did. “I have.” Johnny looked at him and grinned.

“Johnny Morgan is fourteen. His parents were divorced when he was twelve. His father had custody. When his father died, custody reverted to his mother, and his mother took him to live with her mother in Arizona. As you know, Johnny, Jim is a state trooper. Tell him what you told me.”

The grin vanished, and his grip on Katya must have tightened because she uttered an inarticulate protest. “Sorry, Katya, ” he said, horrified, and resettled her. With an heroic effort Bobby managed to restrain himself from snatching his child to his bosom.

Johnny looked at Jim, making an obvious effort to stay calm, to keep his voice level, above all to present the appearance of someone who was old enough to determine his own destiny. Kate was glad he was holding Katya.

“Like Kate says, my mother took me to Arizona. I went along at first because I was—” his eyes flicked at Kate and away again “—well, because I was upset about Dad.” His lips thinned. “Mom went back to Alaska as soon as she dumped me off. Grandma's okay, but she lives in a retirement community, and they're all mad because she's got a kid living with her. She didn't want me with her, and I didn't want to be there. I toughed it out as long as I could. I tried, I really did, Mr. Chopin, but I didn't like her, I hated Arizona, and I missed Alaska, and I just wanted to come home. So I left.”

“You ran away from home,” Jim said.

“I left,” Johnny said stubbornly. “I left to come home.” He looked at first surprised and then pleased at his own words. “She caught me the first two times, but the third time I made it all the way back. I came to the Park, to Kate's, and I'm not leaving. I don't care what she says or does or what the law says I have to do, I'm not going back to Arizona!” His voice rose in spite of himself.

“Uh—huh,” Jim said thoughtfully. “You can't stick it out till you're sixteen? That's, what, two more years?”

Johnny shook his head, a mulish and mutinous expression on his face. “Can't and won't.”

Jim looked at Kate. “So you been hiding him?”

“Yeah.”

He looked at Ethan. “And you been helping.”

Ethan grinned at Johnny. “Yeah.”

“Shit, Jim, ” Bobby said,“if it comes to that, the whole Park's in on it.”

They waited.

“As a matter of law,” Jim said, “and as an officer of the court, I am required to return Johnny to his mother, who is his legal guardian.”

Johnny flushed red up to the roots of his hair, opened his mouth, encountered Kate's level gaze, and shut it again.

“Are you thinking of pursuing legal guardianship?” Jim asked Kate.

“Yes,” she said.

“Don't,” he said. “All that does is tell his mother where he is. You'll have to produce him in any court battle, and you'll lose.”

“I won't go,” Johnny said.

“She already knows he's here,” Dinah said.

“Yeah, but she didn't find him.”

“And she'll be back,” Bobby said. “That bitch has got teeth if I ever saw them; she's got them sunk into this.”

“She doesn't care about me,” Johnny said fiercely. “She doesn't care where I live. She just doesn't want me anywhere near Kate. Not even in the same state.”

That pretty much summed up Kate's feeling on the matter.

“My dad loved Kate,” Johnny said, looking at Kate. She met his eyes. “My dad loved Kate, and my mom hated her for it. She wants me away from her.”

Kate couldn't speak. Jim looked at the expression on her face and away again, quickly.

“I'm sorry, Kate, ” Johnny said.

“I know,” she said. “It's all right, Johnny.”

He opened his mouth as if to say more, and she shook her head, trying to smile. “It's all right,” she said again. “It's okay. I understand.”

There was a brief silence. Kate thought of the copy machine she had found when she had burgled Jane's residence in Muldoon, what was it, two years ago now. She'd figured then that Jane, who worked for the federal government in a department that allocated bids, had secretly been bringing bids home, copying them, and selling them to competitors. She could go to Anchorage, investigate, prove it.

She looked at Johnny, sitting on Bobby and Dinah's couch with a lapful of Katya.

No, she couldn't.

“It's a big Park,” Bobby said. “We'll keep an eye out, make George watch for incoming moms. For the moment, best he stay with Ethan. She knows where Kate lives now.”

“Works for me,” Ethan said. “Okay with you, kid?”

Johnny nodded, face taut with hope.

“If George spots her coming, we'll shuttle Johnny around some. He can stay here, at Auntie Vi's; Bernie'll be glad to take him in for a while. Old Sam. Demetri. Billy and Annie Mike are running a boarding house for every stray kid in the Park now as it is, one more and Annie's cup runneth over.” Bobby looked around and demanded,“I mean, how long can Jane Morgan keep this up? I'm assuming she's not independently wealthy; she's got a job she has to go to. She can't be out here all the time, and in two years Johnny will be sixteen and on his own, if he so chooses.”

“I do,” Johnny said.

“What if Jane shows up at the school?” Kate said.

“I don't have to go to school,” Johnny said.

“Dream on, kid, ” Dinah said.

Johnny, who Kate had only just discovered had an enormous crush on Dinah, blushed at being directly addressed by his dream woman.

“Same thing,” Ethan said. “If George spots her coming, he gets to the school himself or sends someone ahead to get Johnny out and gone.” He added,“Who's teaching up to the school nowadays?”

“It's a pretty good group,” Dinah said. “There's even one local, Billy Mike's oldest girl, who brought her degree home. She's teaching fourth and fifth grades.”

“And Bernie's up there all the time coaching,” Bobby said.

Kate looked at Jim. “What happens if she gets through us?”

“I give her the slip and get back the fastest way I can,” Johnny said promptly.

Jim looked from Kate to Johnny and back again.

“Don't let her get through you,” he said.

They were snowed in but nobody minded, and there were enough sleeping bags to go around. Bobby built up the fire and retired to the big bed in the back, where he could be heard making lecherous noises in Dinah's direction. She giggled and told him to behave, and he did, mostly. Johnny, sleeping the untroubled and dreamless sleep of those who have absolute faith in their friends, lay curled in a corner with his head on Mutt's flank.

Kate went out on the porch to breathe deeply of cold, fresh air. She moved to the top step, out from under the eaves. Snow melted beneath her bare feet, searing her soles with cold fire. It fell on her upturned face, cool, melting kisses that seemed to sink beneath her skin and become part of the blood moving slowly and steadily through her veins.

The door opened, and she looked up to meet Ethan's eyes. He pulled the door shut behind him and walked forward. In silence, he took her hand and pulled her up to the porch. In silence, he took her place on the top step, which put his head on a level with hers. They were so close that she could feel the heat of his body.

“So the kid stays with me?”

Asked and answered, she thought, but replied,“For now.”

“Fine by me.” He raised a hand to smooth her eyebrows, tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, trace the line of her lips. She watched him through lashes heavy with snow. “At school, that thing with Darlene.”

She waited.

“It didn't mean anything. She saw that you wanted me, so she wanted me, too. That was Darlene all over.”

“So it was all Darlene's fault?”

“Oh hell,” Ethan said, disgusted. “You just won't let me lie, will you.”

It was a rhetorical question, and Kate's only answer was the tiny smile at the corners of her mouth.

He grinned. “The truth was, I was hornier than a bull moose in rut,” he said, “and I wasn't having any luck with you. She came to my room and offered it up, and I wasn't about to turn it down.”

“That's more like it.”

His grin faded. “Okay, that was then. Seventeen years ago, I was just a kid being led around by my dick. Today I'm older, and maybe a little smarter. You want to give this another shot?”

It was his turn to wait. “Kate?”

She opened her mouth, and closed it again. “I don't—Jack was—I'm not—” She gave her head a tiny shake, annoyed with her inability to say what she felt, to give him an answer.

“I admit,” he said, “this whole Kate-and-Jack thing. It's intimidating as hell. I only saw you guys together a couple of times, but when I did it was like you were reading each other's minds. Margaret and I—well, it was nothing like that with Margaret. Maybe I'm jealous.”

He watched her for a long moment, and she waited for him to go back inside the house. Instead he bent his head, taking his time, giving her a chance to step away.

She didn't.

On the other side of the window, Jim Chopin stood, watching, as his hands clenched into slow, heavy fists.

Fairbanks

U nkempt, neglected, forgotten, abandoned to the privations of elements and time. Markers made from rounds of wood sliced from a downed tree, splitting with age and decay so that the words carved upon them are hardly legible.

Each successive autumn another untended drift of leaf and bracken falls; the white picket fence has long disintegrated; a clump of diamond willow suffers from the attention of every wandering moose; the mounds of the dead have been overtaken by the wild rose and the devil's club. Black hairs from a passing bear stick in the sap of a living spruce tree's trunk where he has rubbed against it, more than once. The sunshine caresses equally the golden leaves of the aspen and the deep red stalks of the fireweed, as both stir slightly in the merest breath of a wind that as yet carries no hint of the winter soon to come.

The sound of an engine is heard, stops, a door opens, closes, footsteps approach. Grass yellow from age and a dry summer crackles underfoot. The chickadees cease their song, and wait, and watch.

A woman picks her way through the trees, a beast with yellow eyes and silver fur pacing at her side. They stop at the edge of what is no longer a clearing. The woman's shoulders slump in momentary defeat as she looks around at the crowded trees, the thickness of the brush, the height of the grass that obscures what lies beneath.

Her shoulders straighten. Stepping with care, she seeks out each remaining marker, one by one, pulling the foliage away so as to see what there is left to read. Her short cap of hair gleams raven's wing black in the light; the rich nut brown of her skin takes on an added glow of exertion from the warmth of the day, a deeper color from the heat of the sun. Her companion sits, motionless and silent at the edge of the clearing, ears flickering to follow each sound, alert, vigilant, patient. A magpie comes scolding into the clearing and, seeing them, departs at once. The three ravens roosting high above in the cottonwood keep their own counsel.