Whisper to the Blood (24 page)

At last, a rustle of noise, a shuffle of feet. The door opened. A rheumy eye
peered out at her and a cracked voice said, "What do you want?"

"Can I come in, Vidar?" Kate said. "It's cold as hell out
here, and I sure could use some coffee."

He thought about it for long enough that Kate actually considered the
possibility that she might be refused entrance, and then the door swung wide.
"Get your ass in here, then, and be quick about it so I don't have to
stand here all goddamn day with the goddamn door open letting the goddamn
winter in."

"Nice to see you, too, Vidar," Kate said, and she and Mutt
quick-stepped inside.

Vidar glared down at Mutt. "Didn't say the goddamn dog could come in,
too."

Mutt dropped her head a little and lifted her lip. There was no love lost
between Mutt and Vidar.

Kate ignored both of them and said brightly, "I'm about froze solid. I
sure could use that coffee, Vidar."

He grumbled something that probably would not measure up to the generally
accepted standards of Bush hospitality and shuffled to the stove. "Siddown
if you want."

The interior of the house was so cluttered with traps and magazines and
tools and parts and dirty clothes and Louis L'Amour novels and caribou antlers
and moose racks and bear skulls and pelts in various states of the curing
process that it took a minute or two for a chair to coalesce out of the jumble.
There was a table, almost invisible beneath a thicket of beaver skins hanging
from the exposed trusses that formed the roof. She pulled the table out from
under the beaver skins as far as there was room for it and displaced the wolf
skins on the chair to a stack of four-wheeler tires. Mutt rumbled her
disapproval of the wolf skins.

Kate sat down in the newly liberated chair. She did not remove her boots, as
she would have as a matter of custom and courtesy in any other house in the
Park, or
Alaska
for that matter. Mutt sat down next to her with an air, while not wishing to
rush Kate through her business in any way, of nevertheless being ready to quit
the premises at their earliest opportunity.

A very old woodstove, encrusted with years of soot and ash, was doing a poor
job of heating the house, probably because Kate could see daylight through a
crack here and there in the unfinished two-by-twelves that formed the walls.
There was an old-fashioned blue tin coffeepot with a wire handle sitting on the
back of the stove and from this Vidar produced two thick mugs full of liquid
that put Kate persuasively in mind of Prudhoe Bay crude. It tasted like it,
too, and Kate used fully a quarter of the can of evaporated milk on the table
to thin it down. She didn't go light on the sugar, either, although that had
mostly solidified in the cracked bowl it sat in.

Mutt wasn't offered anything. She did not take the snub in good part.

An upholstered rocking chair with stuffing leaking from various rips and
tears sat at right angles to the woodstove and into this Vidar subsided,
although it could be more properly said that he collapsed.

Vidar Johansen was in his nineties, the sole surviving child of the
village's founders, who were the direct and indirect progenitors of anyone born
there. He had his father's height, in his prime standing six feet six inches
tall. He was bent with age now, with wispy gray hair that looked as if he cut
it himself whenever it got in his eyes, and a beard that was mostly grizzle. He
wore a plaid shirt so faded it was impossible to tell what the original color
had been, and a pair of jeans whose seams looked ready to give at any moment.
His feet were bundled into wool socks and homemade moccasins lined with fur
gone threadbare. His cheekbones stood out in stark relief from the rest of his
face, and the skin on the backs of his hands was so thin Kate imagined she
could see the bone through it.

"What are you staring at?" he said belligerently, and she looked
away, at the Blazo box shelves on the wall that were mostly bare, at the
half-empty case of Campbell's Cream of Tomato soup that sat on the counter, at
the oversize box of Ritz crackers sitting next to it. An empty trash can sat
under a rough counter that supported the sink, which held a saucepan, a bowl,
and a spoon crusted with red.

She looked down at her mug, and wished she hadn't used so much of Vidar's
milk.

He rocked and slurped down some coffee and looked at her. She drank
heroically and managed a smile. "Oh, that's great, Vidar, thanks,"
she said. "You're saving my life here."

He grunted. The wooden runners of his chair creaked. "What you
want," he said.

Okay. "I was hoping your sons would be around."

He grunted again. The chair creaked some more. "Why?" He was
avoiding her eye, but she couldn't decide if that was because he had something
to hide or it was just Vidar being his usual antisocial self.

"Need to talk to them," she said. Grunt. Creak. "What
about?"

"Some people were attacked and robbed on the river by some other people
on snow machines."

The chair stilled and Vidar was silent for a moment. "You think it was
my boys."

"Their names have been mentioned, yes."

"Somebody see 'em?"

"Not to identify them, no."

He grunted and resumed rocking. "Probably was them."

"Yeah," Kate said. Vidar had as many illusions about his sons as
she or any other Park rat did.

Icarus, Daedalus, and Gus Johansen were Vidar's sons by his only wife,
Juanita, a Guatemalan woman who had waited on him at the Northern Lights
Denny's in
Anchorage
while on a supply run to town. She wanted American citizenship and at
fifty-five he wanted someone to cook and clean and warm his bed. Twenty-four
hours after she'd brought him breakfast for the first time they were on the
road to Ahtna with a truck full of groceries and a full set of brand-new winter
gear for her.

There were many who said it wouldn't last, Juanita used to being a lot
closer to the Equator and all, and Vidar not necessarily the sweetest-talking
man in the Park, and nearly thirty years older besides, but she stuck it out
until Gus was born. She vanished out of the hospital in Ahtna the next day.
Vidar didn't waste time trying to find her, he just took Gus back to Tikani,
where the other two boys were being looked after by a relative. "Your ma's
gone off some-wheres," he was reported to have said. "You boys'n
me'll be batching it from now on."

He never spoke her name again, and there had never been money to waste on
fripperies like photographs, so Gus never did know what his mother had looked
like, and neither his father nor his brothers remembered or wanted to. There
were no soft edges on Vidar. There weren't any on his sons, either. They'd
brought women home and every time, when the romance of living in the wilderness
wore off, they had in their turn been abandoned, too. There were children, no
one knew how many. It looked like all of them had left with their mothers.

"So," Kate said. "The boys around?"

"Not lately."

Kate looked again at the can of milk, the cans of soup, the crackers.
"When was the last time you saw them?"

He hawked and spat, missing the metal water dish on the floor by a good six
inches. "Month. Maybe less. Maybe more."

"Don't they live here anymore?"

He glared at her from beneath thick, wiry eyebrows, one eye gone kind of
white, the other a red-streaked brown. "Didn't say that. You asked had I
seen them. Said no. Haven't. Heard their machines, though."

"So they are still living here."

He shrugged. "Far's I know. They haven't been up to the house for a
while."

Kate felt a lick of anger. Vidar's house was maybe fifty feet max from the
front door of the house in Tikani farthest away from his. "Anybody else
seen them? That you've talked to lately?"

"Ain't talked to anyone lately," he said. "Everybody's
gone."

"What?"

"Something wrong with your hearing? Said everybody's gone. Nobody left
here 'cept us."

"Jesus Christ, Vidar," Kate said, her worst suspicions confirmed.
"You mean you're here all by yourself?"

He grunted. The chair creaked. "Ick's new girl was the last one out. At
least she stopped in to let the young uns say good-bye to their grandpa. More'n
I can say for the rest of those losers the boys brought home."

"I'm sorry," Kate said. "I didn't know."

Grunt. Creak.

"Do the kids know?"

Grunt. Creak.

"You want to come back to Niniltna with me?" she said.

The chair stopped and he glared at her. "Hell no. No towns for me, not
any longer'n it takes to buy a new set a spark plugs. I'm fine out here."

"What if you run out of fuel? Food? What if you get hurt and there's no
one here to help? Come on, come back with me. We'll get you a room with Auntie
Vi and then figure something out for the long term."

Grunt. Hawk. Spit. Creak. "Told you. Don't do towns. Like it here fine.
Man can hear himself think."

"Is it because you're worried that the boys'll come back and find you
gone? We can leave them a note."

"Ain't going nowhere," he said with a finality that denied
opposition. "Tell the boys you was here when I see 'em again."

"Vidar. . ."

"You had your coffee, got yourself warmed up. Time for you and that
hound to go, if you wanna get home safe."

He stared at her with his one good eye. "Like you said. Bad things
happening on the river lately."

FIFTEEN

D
inah met Jim at the door, finger to
her lips, and stepped back to let him enter.

Bobby was right where Jim wanted him, broadcasting on Park Air, the pirate
radio station that had been changing channels one step ahead of the FCC for a
dozen years now. This morning featured an interview with one Talia Macleod of
Global Harvest Resources Inc. Bobby was sitting knee to knee with her in front
of a microphone and appeared spellbound. Nothing loath, she was flirting hard
right back, but that didn't stop either one of them from getting what they
wanted said out on the air.

"Open pit mining isn't known for having the environmental
friendlies," Bobby said. "Don't you need a lot of water for the
extraction process? Where you gonna pull all that water from?"

"Plenty of water in local feeder streams to get the job done,"
Talia said, her voice a low purr.

Anyone listening would think, with some justification, that they were
listening to pillow talk, Jim thought. Talia looked up and saw him, and a smile
spread across her face. Behind Jim, Dinah frowned.

"Yeah, but babe," Bobby said, his voice a correspondingly
caressing rumble, "those feeder streams are pretty much all of them salmon
streams. You might miss the
Gruening
River
, it being so far up the valley from the mine,
but what about Keehler Creek, Jones Creek, the
Stone
River
?
They run straight down the valley. You're going to use toxic chemicals to
extract the gold, which means you're going to have a lot of acid runoff. It
gets into those salmon streams, the salmon are dead." He gave her a
winsome smile, his caressing tone unchanging. "And so are a lot of the
families who live off those salmon runs, from Ahtna to
Alaganik
Bay
."

Talia returned a smile every bit as winning as his own. "If you'd look
at our construction plans, Bobby, you'd see that we have designed a 4,700-acre
drainage lake to capture all the acid runoff, protected by a dam." Her
smile widened. "Two dams, in fact, just in case. Global Harvest is all
about safety first."

"Earthen dams, as I understand it," Bobby said without missing a
beat. "Made out of dirt. Which, as we all know, turns to mud in the
rain." He chuckled. "And then there are, um, what do you call those
things? Earthquakes, that's it. A whole lotta shakin' goin' on. What does that
do to the stability of a dam that's going to be bigger than the Hoover Dam?
Sounds like a Superfund site in the making to me."

"Why, Bobby," she said, "if I didn't know better I'd say you
were against the Suulutaq Mine."

"You would?" Bobby said innocently.

They laughed together. Jim looked at Dinah, who rolled her eyes and went to
admire Katya's efforts at a dangerously tilting block castle.

"No reason for you to be against it," Talia murmured, "and
plenty of them for you to be for it. Didn't I mention? We're going to be
bringing jobs into the Park in numbers that haven't been seen since the old
days of the Kanuyaq Mine. Two thousand, maybe more, during construction, and a
thousand to keep it running after, and did I also mention how long we expect to
be here? Forty years, minimum. That's forty years of jobs for Park rats, Bobby,
and good-paying jobs, too."

"Yeah, Talia, but what kind of jobs we talking about here? Making beds,
serving slop?" Bobby's smile slipped a little. "Not something I
aspire to for the kid." He looked up at Jim and said, "Chopper Jim
Chopin in the house, folks. Hey, Jim."

"Hey, Bobby," Jim said, walking forward so his voice was within
reach of the mike.

Bobby watched him with a sapient eye. "You look like a man with a
purpose. What's up?"

"I'm looking for Howie Katelnikof. Have you seen him?"

Bobby's eyebrow quirked up. "No, can't say's I have. What's Howie up to
these days?"

"Well," Jim said apologetically, "he's in a little bit of
trouble, and he's got some people looking for him. Not very nice people, I'm
afraid."

"Really," Bobby said, his basso dropping to profundo.
"Imagine my surprise."

"Yeah," Jim said, trying not to laugh, "and these people
looking for him have put up a reward for whoever finds him."