Though Not Dead (23 page)

Auntie Joy’s shoulders slumped. “Yes. Before the war, after the war. All the same, yes.”

“He homesteaded the hot springs for you, didn’t he?”

Auntie Joy rallied at this. “He homestead the hot springs because his mother say so.”

“But … why?” Kate said. “Why on earth did she want him to stake his claim so far back in the mountains? There’s like five hundred square feet of horizontal land in the whole hundred and sixty acres, and either you bushwhack in on foot in the summer or snowgo in winter, or you don’t get there at all.” Did they even have snow machines back then? “How did she expect him to survive?”

Auntie Joy spread her hands. “He say only that his mother say he must homestead there.”

Kate’s eyes narrowed. “What’s up there besides the hot springs, Auntie Joy?”

“He don’t tell me, Katya,” Auntie Joy said, in a manner that brooked no contradiction.

This time Kate almost believed her.

“Something else,” Auntie Joy said, in a voice so low Kate had to strain to hear the words. “One time, I have baby in the belly. Davy … our baby comes too soon.” Auntie Joy’s voice was the barest thread of sound. “After, no children for me.”

Kate worked it out and was too shocked to be tactful. “Davy beat you into a miscarriage, you couldn’t have children afterward, Davy died, and when Old Sam came home you wouldn’t marry him this time because you were barren?”

Auntie Joy avoided her gaze. “Every man deserve his chance at children, Katya.”

“I’m raising a kid I didn’t give birth to right now, Auntie. God.” She shook her head. “And Uncle never married, and so far as I know never had children with anyone else. All this time you spent apart, and for what?” She saw the look of misery on Auntie Joy’s face and stopped herself before she went any farther. There was no point in telling Auntie Joy that all her life choices had been wrong. “What did Old Sam do then?”

“Angry.” Auntie Joy sighed. “Very angry. He bring story home about his father, he say no reason no more why we don’t marry, times different anyway, he don’t care about kids. When I still say no, he—” Her voice broke and it took her a moment to recover it. “He go away angry.” Her mouth twisted. “I don’t see him again until 1956.”

Over ten years. And then Kate said, “Wait, what? What story, Auntie? And which father?”

Auntie Joy’s head came up with a snap. “You know about Old Sam’s father?”

“I know my whole life I thought his father was Quinto Dementieff, and I know now there is a good chance it was some guy named One-Bucket McCullough. Are you saying Old Sam wrote it down?” Kate sat up straight in her chair. “Auntie,” she said, barely breathing the words, “do you still have it?”

Auntie Joy rose to her feet and went to a chestnut armoire polished to a blinding gleam, hulking in one corner of the cabin. It was surmounted by what Kate thought was called a cornice, which overhung the armoire by a good six inches on three sides. She wondered where Auntie Joy had gotten it. She wondered how she had gotten it to Niniltna from wherever Outside she’d bought it, because nothing like that was for sale anywhere this side of Seattle.

She wondered how Auntie Joy had gotten it through the door.

Auntie Joy opened the doors and felt around inside. There was a click, and a hidden drawer popped out of the bottom.

“Hey,” Kate said, and got up for a closer look.

For a moment both women forgot the painful topic under discussion in a mutual admiration of the cunning little drawer that fit invisibly into the base of the armoire. Auntie Joy closed the drawer again and showed Kate the latch that released it. “That is really clever,” Kate said, closing the drawer and opening it again. She stood back and looked at the armoire. “You’d never know it was there if you didn’t compare the outside dimensions to the inside ones, and maybe not even then.” She even got down on her knees to examine the foot of the armoire at close range. “Man, it fits together so well, even close up you can’t tell the drawer from the base. Whoever did this knew what he was doing and then some.”

She pulled herself together. The air seemed suddenly thick with secrets—Park secrets, tribal secrets, family secrets. Secrets in the frickin’ furniture.

She sat back and stared at the foot of the armoire. She knew a sudden impulse to leave the drawer shut and turn away.

In the nine days since Old Sam had died, it was as if someone had focussed the lens through which she viewed the history of her family in the Park. Things, people, events that had seemed to her clear, fixed, and immutable were now blurred and less substantial. It was unnerving to lose that kind of solidity, that kind of permanence at your back. Somehow she knew that she was never again going to be able to look over her shoulder without fearing that the view had changed from the last time she had seen it.

She felt unsettled, and apprehensive. She looked up at Auntie Joy, who stood with her hands folded in front of her, waiting.

Up to you if you want to know or not. Auntie Joy might have spoken the words out loud. Kate wiped suddenly sweaty palms down her jeans and reached inside the armoire to feel for the latch. The drawer popped open again.

They both stared down at the contents, a tattered, nine-by-twelve box tied up with string. “Is that it?”

Auntie Joy nodded.

“May I take it and read it?”

“No.” At Kate’s expression Auntie Joy said, “Read here. Samuel give that story to me.”

“He threw it at you, you said.”

“He leave it with me,” Auntie Joy said again. “He never ask for it back.” She hesitated, looking half defiant, half fearful, and all stubborn. “You read it here.” She reached for the box and gave it to Kate with both hands and part of a bow, as if she were handing over the keys to the kingdom to the heir apparent, which maybe she was. “You understand when you read it.”

“Understand what?” Kate said.

Auntie Joy pointed at the recliner. There was no gainsaying that finger, and it wasn’t like Kate was going to wrest the box from Auntie Joy’s hands and depart the premises. She wasted a moment or two hoping that the new storm louring on the southern horizon would hold off another day, and subsided into the chair with equal parts resignation and anticipation.

The string was kitchen string, the box the thinnest of gray cardboard, the pages loose and numbered top right, fifty-three in total. The paper was onionskin, aged and translucent and fragile, and the text had been typed on a manual typewriter with the
e
and the
i
out of alignment and the
q,
the
d,
the
o,
and the
p
filled in. It was double-spaced, with one-inch margins, and it had been edited by hand.

The story began without title or preamble, on the first page, halfway down.

Halfway through the manuscript she raised her eyes to see Auntie Joy watching her. “Jesus Christ, Auntie.”

Auntie Joy, that prim and proper woman of faith and goodness, didn’t so much as wince at Kate taking the Lord’s name in vain. “Read more,” she said.

1945

Niniltna

Sam slammed out of Joy’s cabin in a rage that kept him going all the way to Ahtna. There he went straight to Bea’s, ordered his own bottle of the good stuff at a prohibitive price he ignored, and towed January Jane upstairs. JJ, so called because of her ability to warm up a man even in the depths of January, had cause to complain of his roughness. As angry as he was, Old Sam would never hurt a woman. Besides, he’d read between the lines, he knew what kind of a marriage Joyce had had with Davy Moonin, and part of his rage was at that dead man. No need to take it out on JJ, though, and he apologized and finished his business at a more considerate pace.

“What had you so wound up, anyway?” JJ said, reaching over the bed to where he’d dropped the bottle.

Under the influence of whiskey and sympathy, Sam told her more than he might have otherwise.

“So first she wouldn’t marry you because her parents said you weren’t good enough, and now she won’t marry you because she can’t have kids?” JJ said.

“That’s about it,” Sam said, getting angry all over again.

JJ soothed him with an adroit caress. She was a professional, adept at turning anger to the purpose for which she was paid. After another interlude they lay together long into the night, talking. He told JJ how Mac McCullough had saved his life in the clean-up operation on Attu, about the dim suspicion that had been born next to Mac’s deathbed on Adak, about meeting Dashiell Hammett, about the news of Mac’s death that had come to him with the story of Mac’s life.

She listened because she was paid to listen, and she filed it all away.

*   *   *

The next day, without regret, he left most of what remained in his wallet in Bea’s rapacious palm, nodded a greeting to Albie Anglerandt who was on his way in, and hitched a ride up the Glenn Highway to Tok. There he hitched another ride down the Alaska Highway with a couple of guys from Wallace, Idaho, driving a Lincoln Zephyr. The Alcan, shoved through in one hell of a hurry three years before to provide support for the war effort, was pretty much in the same condition the U.S. Army had left it. Most of it was in Canada, who weren’t that interested in maintaining it. Much of the trip was spent digging the Lincoln Zephyr out of the mud, but twenty days later they made Spokane, where they parted company.

Old Sam hitched across Washington state to Seattle, where he bunked in at the local Salvation Army, always good for a meal and a bed, until he found a room in a boardinghouse that was reasonably clean. The following week he got a job in Ballard working for a marine contractor who was happy to find someone who knew a bow from a stern and who put him to work tearing down PT boats for conversion to commercial fishing. Two and a half weeks and a considerable bump in salary later, he was supervising the night shift.

But the job was only to pay his way, to pay for food and clothing and a roof over his head, and build a stake for the trip home. No, his purpose in Seattle was personal.

He was determined to track down the curio dealer to whom Mac had sold the icon at dockside just before the Pinkerton agent had picked him up. If Mac hadn’t lied to Hammett, if Hammett hadn’t just made it up out of whole cloth, if Old Sam had in fact sold the icon to a dealer on the Seattle docks, it was a safe bet it was to someone in business in Seattle. Someone in business twenty-five years before, true, but he had to start somewhere. Every afternoon before he went to work and every weekend was spent tracking down every antiques dealer, junkyard, thrift shop, and curio store in the Yellow Pages, from Seattle north to dingy Lake City and south to boomtown Kent. He was bitten by a Doberman pinscher in a junkyard, escaped barely virtu intacta from a woman twice his age who was selling chipped tea sets on tatted doilies in a dusty one-room shop on First Avenue that looked sadder than she did, and learned a great deal more than he wished to about Hull Pottery piggy banks, first of all that they even existed.

It was a hopeless task and he knew it, but he was determined to exhaust every possibility. Somewhere at the back of his mind lingered the hope that if he returned to Niniltna bearing the icon, proving his worth to the tribe, Joyce would be his reward. By then, perhaps enough time would have passed that Joyce would have gotten over her marriage, and maybe, too, by then she would miss him as much as he missed her. He could give a good damn about having kids, it was Joyce he wanted. It had always been Joyce.

Trudging through this odyssey, he was still trying to assimilate the story of his own unknown history, set down in stark black-and-white in unsparing prose devoid of judgment or sentimentality. Not to mention through a third-party filter. Oh yes, Hammett had made a good story of it, in part, Sam had to admit, because it was a good story. He wondered what Joyce had done with the manuscript, if she’d kept it or burned it, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t need to see it ever again. The words on the pages were burned on the inside of his eyelids.

Herbert Elmer McCullough, also known variously as Mac, One-Bucket, and Scotty, had been a liar, a cheat, a confidence man, and a thief. He’d been born in Vancouver, British Columbia, to Scots immigrants who booted him out of the house when he was caught seducing the upstairs maid, so add conscienceless Casanova to the list of his lifetime achievements. He’d come north during the Klondike Gold Rush, and according to him—and at this stage Samuel Leviticus Dementieff (bar sinister McCullough) was not in a credulous mood—had made a good living out of salting and selling gold claims.

He’d migrated from the Klondike into Alaska and arrived in Niniltna in company with the Spanish flu. It would have been entirely in character, Old Sam thought, for Mac to have brought the flu bug in with him.

Mac had gone up into the mountains to stake a claim and perform his usual alchemical magic before putting the claim up for sale. When he’d come down to announce his “strike,” half the town and most of the mine workers out at Kanuyaq were already ill.

He himself was one of the lucky few who appeared to be immune, and from then on it was easy pickings. All he had to do was wait until a household was struck down and volunteer to help find food or fetch wood, play the good Samaritan only doing his bit. It was literally a license to steal. He was free to walk in and out of their homes and businesses at will and collect whatever caught his fancy. He stuck to smaller, more portable items, as he was not a man to weigh himself down with either possessions or people. Jewelry, loose cash, gold pokes, some of the smaller ivory carvings—if it could fit into his pocket he put it there. Let’s face it, most of the people he stole from, as sick and incapable as they were, would have considered it fair exchange for the food and firewood he left behind.

He shuttled back and forth between the town and the mine, and his pack grew ever heavier. And then Mac had heard that the Niniltna chief and his wife and daughter had caught the influenza in their turn, and he figured that a tribal chief ought to have something worth liberating. He went inside, where he found the house freezing cold, the chief and his wife dead in their bed, and their daughter, Elizaveta, nearly dead in hers.