A fine and bitter snow (8 page)

Kate's voice sounded husky to her hypercritical ears and she had to change octaves to hit the high notes. "Yesterday" was even harder to reach, but when she came to the end of the last verse, Johnny said, "That sounded fine. You can sing, Kate."

Her fingertips were tingling. She stood up and hung the guitar on its hook next to the door, making a mental note to oil the wood before Johnny's vigorous playing split the instrument in half. She looked over at Mutt, who had lowered her head back to her paws and appeared dead to the world.

"Can I learn to do that?"

"You can learn to do just about anything," Kate said. "It takes practice, is all."

He was about to reply, when a yawn split his face. She fetched sheets, blankets, and a pillow, and, in that unnerving fashion of adolescents, he was asleep before she smoothed the blankets over him. Shadows gathered as she turned off three of the kerosene lanterns, turning down the one hanging in the kitchen corner to leave a soft, dim glow in case he needed to get up in the middle of the night. Shadows moved with her across the floor and on the walls.

The book Johnny had been reading was a history textbook. School wasn't in session for another week. Kate sighed. Johnny was studying as hard as he could because it was his avowed intent to pass his GED when he turned sixteen, thereafter to walk away from school and never go back. She was hoping against hope that he'd fall in love with a girl whose avowed intent was to graduate high school in four years and go on to college afterward.

She stoked the fire in the woodstove, checked the oil stove to see that the pilot light was still burning, and refilled the wood box. After brushing her teeth and washing her face with the last of the water in the kettle, she refilled the kettle and set it on the back of the stove. She climbed the ladder to the loft and lit the lamp that hung next to the bed, undressing by its light, pulling on a nightshirt, and sliding beneath the thick down comforter. She was rereading
My Family and Other Animals
for what was probably the twenty-seventh time, but she had only lately gone back to full-time reading, and for the present, her preference was for books she had already read and enjoyed, ones with no surprises in them.

But even ten-year-old Gerry Durrell and his scorpions in matchboxes couldn't keep her attention this night. She put the book down and turned off the light to stare at the ceiling.

Jack Morgan had been dead for over a year now. She missed him, missed having him in her life. She missed his voice, she realized suddenly, that slow, deep bass voice that had made every feminine nerve she had stand up and salute every time she'd heard it.

Ethan's voice wasn't as deep, but that wasn't necessarily enough to deny the man her bed.

Jack had been brawny, a bruiser with the muscles of a prizefighter and a face that could most kindly have been described as interesting.

Ethan could have made a living modeling clothes for Brooks Brothers.

Only now did she realize how patient Jack had been, how long-suffering, how much he had put up with. When she had left Anchorage six years before, fresh out of the hospital, unable to form words clearly for four months—never mind sing—she had left the job and the man at one and the same time, vowing never to return to either. Eighteen months later, Jack had showed up in the Park with an FBI agent in tow and a missing person's case in hand. Eighteen months, during which she had tried to find his substitute in two other men, to no avail, both of whom she had made sure Jack knew about. If it had bothered him, he had never shown it. Much. He had waited for her—waited for her to heal, waited for her to come back to him—like he'd taken a vow to the Church of Kate Shugak and would not allow himself to become apostate.

He'd irritated her, bewildered her, astounded her, and charmed her. He had wooed her with Jimmy Buffett and seduced her with chocolate chip cookies, and in the end, he had saved her life at the expense of his own. "I love you, Shugak" had very nearly been his last words to her, and it was only after his death that she realized what they had meant.

She ached for him, suddenly, fiercely. They had been well matched sexually, coming together like thunder and lightning. She ran her hands down her body, remembering.

No. There was a perfectly good man not ten miles away. Why was she hesitating? Jack was dead, she was needy, and Ethan was eager. Love would never come again unless she gave it a chance. Wasn't that the way it worked? What was the matter with her?

She gave up on sleep, got up and dressed again, and crept down the ladder. Johnny didn't move. Mutt was waiting for her. She opened the door and slipped outside, catching it before the spring slammed it shut.

The trail around the cabin led to the A-shaped stack of six fuel drums. A fainter trail branched off from it and led through the trees, emerging at a cliffs edge. The boulder at the edge was as high as her waist, with a cleared spot on it worn smooth, just the size of someone's butt. Mutt sat at its foot, her shoulder at Kate's knee.

Below the snow-covered landscape was a crystalline palace, and above the stars seemed even brighter than they had before. The moon had a big smudged white ring around it that filled up half the sky. The northern lights were out, though only faintly and without much movement or color to them, long pale streaks across the northern horizon.

She'd turned thirty-five in October, and had been a sovereign nation unto herself pretty much from the age of six. It wasn't like she needed a man in her life. It was a matter of simple biology. And after all, she was Kate Shugak—she recognized no rules but her own. She could be chaste. Chaste by choice, by god, even Chaste by Choice—she could start a movement. Everything she wanted, everything she needed, it was all right here on this homestead. She had even, she reminded herself with awful sarcasm, managed to have a child without ever having given birth or having changed a single diaper. Now there was a miracle of modern parenting for you.

She could still feel the imprint of Ethan's mouth, hand, body. She could still taste him. How long had it been?

Somewhere very far away, or perhaps quite close, a songbird gave forth with three pure descending notes. Kate's laugh was half sob. "Oh, Emaa," she whispered, leaning her head on her knees, "these white boys are going to be the death of me. Where have all the Aleut boys gone, long time passing?"

Unbidden, the memory of those few moments in that bunk in Bering in July flashed into her head, and Jim Chopin's muffled curse rang in her ears. And later, the gentleness of his hands and lips and the—she could only call it the
kindness
in his eyes, the comfort of his arms just before he flew back to the Park.

"No," she said, jumping to her feet. Mutt, ears tuned to the rustle of a ptarmigan beneath a spruce tree thirty feet east, leapt up and barked an inquiry.

"No, no,
no"
Kate said, and marched back to the cabin.

4

Jim Chopin had been an Alaskan state trooper for almost twenty years, most of it posted in Tok, a town of twelve hundred, which sat on pretty much the northern limit of the Park and sixty-odd miles short of the Canadian border. The Tok trooper post, consisting of one sergeant and two corporals, constituted the sum of state law enforcement for the entire Park, a vast area occupied by less than fourteen thousand people—Park rats and Park rangers, hunters and trappers and fishermen, homesteaders, a few farmers, pilots, miners. They were elders and babies, housewives and career women, doctors, lawyers, and thirty-four Indian chiefs. They were white and Athabascan and Aleut and Tlin-git and Eyak. They were Latino and Russian and Japanese and Korean. There was even one lone Frenchman from Toulouse, who had emigrated twenty years before and now had a cushy job pushing the grader down the road for the state, stationed at the road-maintenance facility at the Nabesna turnoff, from which he lay ardent siege to every woman with car trouble who drove or didn't drive by. His optimism was much admired, although even the cynical had to admit his success ratio was amazingly high. "Of course his standards aren't," Bernie pointed out, and sage heads nodded around the bar.

Jim, an immigrant from San Jose, California, liked two things about the Park right away: Pretty much everyone knew everyone else, and the air was clear every day. Later, when he passed his check rides, he liked flying even more, so much so that after getting his license for fixed wing, he went on ahead and got it for rotor, as well. Responding to a cry for help a hundred miles away and getting there in under an hour while never, ever, being stuck in traffic added considerably to the bottom line of his "Closed Cases" column.

He liked the people, good people, mostly, although obstinate, opinionated, determined, capable, and, above all, independent, with the highest per capita ratio of Libertarians in the state. Of course, this was a state where the Democratic party had feared that Jimmy Carter was going to come in third in the 1980 election.

He liked the sheer beauty of the place, the mountains, the rivers, the valleys. He liked that he could fly hundreds of miles in every direction with only an occasional roof, painted dark green to blend in with the treetops, to remind him that he was still on the same continent he'd been born on.

He liked the job. He knew he was good at it. He was the first call for the village elder with a knifing on his hands, the first call for the mayor of the town with the sniffing problem at the high school, the first call for the Fish and Game trooper who had caught someone fishing behind the markers. He knew where all the dope growers lived and where all the dealers they sold to drank, and who took the black bear out of season and sold the parts on the black market to what Asian dealers, and what guides were likely to violate the wanton-waste law by taking the rack and leaving the meat. He was all the law many of the Park rats would ever see in their lives, and for some of them, the only government representative. In his time, he had helped kids fill out Social Security forms, flown the public health nurse into villages where the entire student body of the local school had been stricken with chicken pox, backed up a tribal policeman in way over his head in a hostage situation involving a drunk, the drunk's best friend, the drunk's wife, a pint of Everclear, and a .357. Most of the time, he was able to talk the situation into the clear. A few times, he'd had to pull his weapon. So far, he had never had to fire it, managing to restrain himself under the grossest possible provocation, such as someone shooting at him first.

He was on call twenty-four/seven and the ringing of the phone sounded to his ear like a bugler sounding a charge. He was the cavalry riding to the rescue of any Park rat who was under attack, and he didn't care how politically incorrect the analogy was.

The phone rang constantly that morning in his office as he fielded calls from an irate father whose daughter had run off with her high school sweetheart, a distraught grandmother whose grandson had been beating her, a village elder reporting a shipment of 102 cases of vodka and whiskey into a dry village, a big game guide wanting to know what the summons was for and how the hell he was supposed to get to Ahtna for a courtroom appearance with his plane broken down. The next call was from a young man who had failed at fishing in Alaganik and who now wanted to go to the University of Alaska Interior in Ahtna to learn how to work a computer but didn't know how to fill out the form. Jim ascertained that the eloping daughter was of legal age, dispatched one corporal to take the grandmother's statement, dispatched another to intercept and confiscate the shipment of alcohol, hung up on the big game guide, and walked the fisherman through the application form.

The next call was from his boss in Anchorage. "Hey, Jim, how's it hanging?"

Jim sat back and put his feet up on his desk, there to admire the immaculate shine on his black leather boots. "About six inches from the floor," he replied.

A scoffing laugh. "Yeah, you wish."

"No, you do."

There followed the traditional exchange of insults and exaggerations so dear to the hearts of the male of the species, particularly those who were longtime friends and allies in the war on crime. Finally, his boss said, "We've been doing some thinking down here, Jim."

Uh-oh. "Thinking about what?"

"About your workload."

"What about it?"

A genial chuckle. "It's kind of heavy, isn't it?"

"So what else is new?"

"Well, we were thinking of lightening it up a little."

Jim took his feet off the desk and sat up to look at the map of the Park tacked to the wall behind his desk. "Define 'lightening up.' "

Another chuckle. "Breaking a chunk off your post's area of jurisdiction, for starters."

"What chunk?"

"The southern half. From, say, Niniltna south."

Fully half of his command. Which wouldn't do his career a hell of a lot of good. But then, he wasn't bucking for promotion anyway. He had no ambition to retire in Tal-keetna.