Whisper to the Blood (3 page)

Kate shrugged. "Okay," she said, and Johnny had whooped for joy.
He passed his driving test at the Ahtna DMV that afternoon and she let him
drive the whole way home. It was his first time behind the wheel over the Lost
Chance Creek Bridge, seven hundred feet long, three hundred feet high, the
width of one vehicle-barely-and no railings. He made it across, very slowly and
very carefully, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. His father had been
afraid of heights, too. "He puked on me once when we were at the top of a
mine shaft," she told Johnny when they were safely on the other side, and
Johnny had laughed so hard he stalled out the truck.

Today they were looking at the engine, a superfluous activity because in
operation the pickup sounded like a contented tiger. Kate had had Rachel in
Anchorage
send up a
Chilton's manual for Ford pickups from 1965 to 1986, which had immediately
replaced Jim Butcher as Johnny's preferred recreational reading.

Mutt was pacing the perimeter, nose to the ground, picking up a scent for
lunch. She was first to hear the vehicle coming down the track from the road.
She raised her head and gave Kate a heads-up by way of an advisory yip.

Kate recognized the sound of it almost immediately, and swore beneath her
breath. Next to her Johnny went still, frowning at the distributor cap. He said
tentatively, "Auntie Vi?"

"Sounds like." She ducked out from under the hood of the pickup
and beheld the powder blue Ford Explorer as it emerged from the trees. It drew
to an impatient halt, and Auntie Vi, a round, brown little woman of
indeterminate age and defiantly black hair, bounced out and stormed in their
direction. "Katya!"

Kate recognized the signs. "Have I screwed up anything lately?"
she said out of the corner of her mouth.

"Not that I've noticed," Johnny said. "Hi, Auntie Vi!"

"Hi, Johnny! Almost tall like your father now. Stop that."

Johnny grinned. "Yes, ma'am."

Mutt trotted over and paid her respects. Other than Kate, females of any
species were usually beneath the notice of the 140-pound wolf/husky mix but
Auntie Vi was accorded the respect of a sister sovereign, coequal in power and
authority. "This the new truck then?" Auntie Vi said, patting Mutt's
head absently as she looked it over with a critical eye. "Those tires need
rotate, Katya."

"We'll get right on that, Auntie," Kate said, while Johnny dived
cravenly back beneath the hood.

The tires were, in fact, new-bought, mounted, and balanced the day of
purchase.

Auntie Vi dismissed the subject of the truck. "You hear, Katya?"

"Hear what, Auntie?"

"About dock."

"What dock?"

"That Katalla dock."

"What Katalla dock?" Kate said. "There's barely a dozen
pilings left of the old dock there, and they're rotting and covered with
barnacles."

Auntie Vi clicked her tongue, looking impatient. "The state say they
starting survey to build new dock."

"What for?" Kate said, and then she said, "Oh. What kind of a
dock? Deepwater?"

Auntie Vi was thrown off her stride. "How you know?" she said,
suspicion darkening her face.

"If it's a deepwater dock, they're doing it for the bulk carriers that
will be coming in to ship the ore out from the Suulutaq Mine."

"There," Auntie Vi said, pointing at Kate. "That! What they
do!"

Kate, skewered by the finger, perceived that she was at fault, and found
herself at something of a loss. "It only makes sense, Auntie," she
said placatingly. "They have to ship the ore to market once they pull it
out of the ground. That is the object of the exercise." She stripped the
gloves from her hands and started toward the house. "Come inside. It's
about time for lunch anyway."

"Grilled cheese!"

Kate grinned without turning around. "In your dreams, kid. Moose liver
pate if you're lucky."

Johnny made gagging noises beneath the hood. Mutt departed in search of her
own lunch. Auntie Vi followed Kate up the stairs to the deck and into the
house. It was still hard for Kate to accept that she had a deck, never mind a
house. Both had been a gift of the Park, a product of a Park rat house raising,
what, almost two years ago now. She and Johnny each had their own bathroom and
bedroom, and what was most amazing of all, she had a refrigerator. And
electricity. And a whole bunch of other stuff that even if she thought about it
for too long didn't weigh her down as much as she thought it ought to.

Comfort could be corrupting, she thought darkly. What she didn't have was
the log cabin her father had built on that same site, the one he had brought
her mother home to nearly forty years before, the one she'd been conceived in,
had been born in, had grown up in. That cabin had been burned to the ground by
someone who had thought to solve all his problems by burning Kate alive. That
Johnny had also been living there by then appeared not to have concerned him.
He was now a guest of the state in a maximum security prison in
Arizona
, where Kate
cordially hoped he was rotting slowly away, one putrefying limb at a time.

She made coffee and seated Auntie Vi at the table with a mug and cream and
sugar, and busied herself with the makings for lunch. "Why are you so
upset about this dock, Auntie?"

"Not dock." Auntie Vi looked up from her coffee and said with
bitter emphasis, "Mine."

"The Suulutaq Mine?" One grilled cheese for her, half of one for
Auntie Vi, and three for Johnny. "That's past praying for, Auntie. Global
Harvest bought the leases fair and square from the state, and that's state
land."

"We hunt there," Auntie Vi said fiercely. "We fish
there." She surged to her feet and thumped her breast with one fist.
"We live there!"

"They gave us most of Iqaluk in the settlement, Auntie. Just not that
part."

"And you think they don't know that gold there when they did!"

"Well," Kate said. "This is the state of
Alaska
we're talking about here."

Auntie Vi took in a visible gulp of air, became aware that she was on her
feet, and sat down again. "You see plans for this mine?"

Every Park rat with a post office box had gotten the flyer, and just in case
they hadn't Global Harvest had blanketed every public place in every town and
village in the Park as well, from the Club Bar in Cordova to the
Niniltna
School
gym to the Costco in Ahtna. It
was a glossy production, color pictures of salmon spawning in streams, moose
browsing in lakes, and caribou calves frolicking in the foothills. There was a
map of the proposed mine, fifteen miles square, a tiny gold-colored splotch
crowded between grids and graphs of different colors denoting the borders of
three federal parks, one state park, two national forests, three marine
wildlife refuges, and four separate Native land allotments belonging to four
different Native tribes. Towns and villages were dots on the landscape and the
map's scale was too small to distinguish the minimal amounts of private
property. It was an excellent way to illustrate just how small the acreage in
question was.

On the flip side of the flyer, an attractive man displaying a perfect set of
teeth in a friendly smile was identified as Global Harvest CEO Bruce O'Malley.
Next to his head a conversational balloon quoted O'Malley as saying,
"Global Harvest is fully committed to ensuring the healthy stocks of fish
and wildlife and all the natural resources of the Iqaluk region so essential to
the lives of the people who live there. The Suulutaq Mine can only succeed if
Global Harvest Resources becomes a working partner with the people who live
next door. We will apply the best available science and technology to ensure an
environmentally friendly operation that will coexist with and within the
community. Our employees will be drawn as much as possible from that community,
and since most estimates have the Suulutaq Mine in operation for a minimum of
twenty years, at minimum an entire generation, we expect the relationship to be
long and profitable for everyone concerned."

"Yeah, I saw the flyer, Auntie," Kate said. She poured a dollop of
olive oil into a hot frying pan and tossed in a chunk of butter after it, and
assembled sandwiches made of homemade white bread buttered on both sides,
slices of Tillamook Extra Sharp, and green chilies. When the butter melted, the
first two hit the pan with a loud and aromatic sizzle. She went to the door,
opened it, and yelled, "Lunch!"

"I don't like mine," Auntie Vi said.

She sat there, a round dumpling of rage and, Kate thought, some bewilderment.
Auntie Vi had seen a lot of change in her eighty-plus years, and now more of it
was bearing down on her like a freight train.

Other Alaskan villages had tribal councils. Some even had mayors and city
assemblies. The Park had the four aunties. They were its backbone, its moral
center, its royalty. They were all widows, Auntie Vi serially, four or, if
Kate's suspicions were correct, possibly five times. They had all been born in
the Park, and Auntie Vi was the only one who had ever been farther away from it
than
Anchorage
.
This was due to her third husband, an enthusiastic gambler who had introduced
her to the illicit joys of one-armed bandits in Vegas before he keeled over of
a heart attack after a successful run at the craps table.

The aunties knew the Park and they knew everyone in it chapter and verse,
birth to death, white, black, Aleut, Athabascan, or Tlingit, male or female,
old or young, married or single, gay or straight, atheist, agnostic, or born
-again Christian. They could be found most nights at the Roadhouse, working on
the most recent quilt and knocking back Bernie's Irish coffee in quantities
that would have had anyone else facedown on the floor. They called it a
quilting bee, but everyone else called it holding court. If a kid was a serial
misbehaver, he or she was hauled before the aunties when the parents and the
schoolteachers threw up their hands. If a husband was beating on his wife, as a
last resort before calling in the trooper the wife could complain to the
aunties, who would deputize the four Grosdidier brothers to haul him up in
front of them. Since the four Grosdidier brothers were also Niniltna village's
first responder EMT team, this solved the punishment and the 911 call afterward
with neatness and dispatch. If someone let his dog team run wild, to the
detriment of another neighbor's ptarmigan patch, and upon protest refused to
restrain said team, the neighbor could complain to the aunties, one of whom was
always related to the offender's mother and all four of whom had probably
babysat him at one time or another.

A summons before the aunties was something no Park rat could ignore. As each
individual case demanded, Auntie Joy would look sorrowful, Auntie Balasha would
cry, Auntie Edna would glare, and Auntie Vi would fix the offender with a
basilisk stare that, combined with the other three aunties' disapproval,
generally reduced the Park rat with even the stiffest spine to a gibbering,
knee-knocking wreck, sobbing their contrition and swearing on his or her
negligible honor never, ever to do it again.

Most of the time it was enough for the offender to slink off beneath the
stern admonition to go and sin no more. The aunties were remarkably evenhanded
in their dispensation of Park justice, dealing fairly and with very little
favoritism with all who came-or were forcibly hauled-before them. Jim Chopin,
while taking no official notice of this ad hoc court of civil justice, had been
heard to say that the four aunties halved his caseload.

Although even the aunties had their blind spots. Willard Shugak was one. And
to Kate's considerable surprise, Howie Katelnikof was another, or had become
one lately. Perhaps they had decided that now that he was out from under the
influence of Louis Deem, Howie deserved their best redemptive effort. If so,
Kate didn't think turning a blind eye to Howie's repeat offender status was
quite the right tack.

Kate had her own issues with Howie Katelnikof. However, she knew that Howie
wasn't smart enough to stay out of trouble for long. She could wait.

"I don't like mine, Katya," Auntie Vi said again, and Kate was
recalled to the present.

"I don't, either, Auntie," Kate said, "but you can't stop
it."

Auntie Vi's expression became, naturally, even more obdurate. "Why
not?"

Johnny clattered in the door and headed for the kitchen with the
single-minded voracity of the average adolescent. "Fuggedaboutit!"
Kate said. "Wash those hands or you go hungry."

Johnny rolled his eyes and muttered something about Kate's anal attention to
personal hygiene and stamped into the bathroom. Kate served the sandwiches cut
in halves with a bowl of tortilla chips and another of salsa. Johnny dived in
like he hadn't eaten in a month, and Kate, a notorious feeder, tucked in with
only marginally less appreciation, while Auntie Vi nibbled around the edges of
her half of a sandwich with the air of someone who seldom ventured beyond the
realm of PBJ on pilot bread, and who liked it that way just fine, thank you. An
occasional desecration of mac and cheese by diced ham was about as far into the
culinary wilderness as any of the four aunties cared to go.

Afterward Johnny cleared the table and washed up and Kate walked Auntie Vi
to her car. "Look at it this way, Auntie," Kate said. "We're
Alaskan citizens. We'll get royalties. More, as citizens of the region, we'll
get jobs. If there's steady work, maybe some of the kids will move home from
Anchorage
. Maybe some of
them won't leave in the first place."

Auntie Vi closed the driver-side door and Kate thought she might have gotten
away clean, until Auntie Vi rolled down her window. "That what you say at
meeting?"