Bad Blood (2 page)

Two years before, the world’s second-largest gold deposit was found sixty miles north-northeast of where the creek and the river met.

Before the first backhoe was airlifted into the Suulutaq Mine, the population of Kuskulana climbed onto its many four-wheelers and beat down a serviceable trail between their village and the mine site. With ready access winter and summer, the trail made their people more attractive as employees to mine management. Given the working airstrip, Kuskulana became the designated alternative landing site in case Niniltna and Suulutaq were both socked in at the same time. Which made the Kuskulana strip eligible for federal funds for runway improvements, an electronic weather-reporting station, and the construction of a hangar.

Kuskulana was, therefore, enthusiastically pro-mine, and their people came home to spend their paychecks.

Kushtaka, on the wrong side of the river, sent fewer workers to the mine. Those who went seldom returned, preferring to resettle in Kuskulana and Niniltna and Ahtna and even Anchorage, where there was cable and Costco, and Beyoncé concerts only a 737 ride away. Kushtakans, fearing the drain on their population and resenting the ever-increasing wealth of their parvenu neighbors, came down hard against the mine, on the side of the fishermen and the environmentalists and the conservationists who were devoting their considerable resources to stop it.

That September, Zeke Mack was out moose-hunting on the south side of the river. Inexplicably, he missed the bull with the four brow tines on both sides and instead put a hole through the trailing edge of the right wing of Joe Estes’s 172. Joe having just taken off from the south end of the Kuskulana airstrip and at that time 150 feet in the air.

Joe got back down in one piece, but it soon became known in both communities where the shot had come from, and there was some subsequent conversation about just how bad Zeke’s eyesight was. A lot of laughter accompanied the conversation in Kushtaka. Laughter was conspicuous by its absence in Kuskulana, whose pilots started taking off to the north.

The following May, the state announced that it was closing the Kushtaka school because enrollment had fallen below ten students, and that Kushtaka students henceforth would attend the Kuskulana school. Truth to tell, Kushtaka had been fudging the numbers for years. Roger Christianson, Jr., in Kuskulana and Uncle Pat Mack in Kushtaka—on the whole, sensible men—did think privately that perhaps some of the hostility between the two villages might abate once the kids started having to sit next to one another in class.

That, of course, was before someone tried to set the Kuskulana Public School on fire with a five-gallon can of gasoline and a blowtorch.

And last September, Far North Communications built a cell tower in Kuskulana. They dedicated one of the antennas on the tower to Kushtaka.

Geography informs who we are.

Kuskulana, flush with ANCSA, state, and federal dollars and land, a post office, an airstrip, a store, a school, a cell tower, on the same side of the river as a world-class industrial development and with a trail navigable by ATV and snow machine between the two, flourished.

Kushtaka … did not.

Act I

Two

TUESDAY, JULY 10

Kushtaka

Tyler Mack was an eighteen-year-old stick of postadolescent dynamite just waiting for the right match. He was smart in all the wrong ways, using his intelligence chiefly to conspire with Boris Balluta, his best friend and coconspirator since childhood, on ways and means to avoid manual labor.

Of medium height, built mostly of muscle and bone, Tyler had thick dark hair that flopped into dark brown eyes that always seemed to be more focused on his next deal than on the person he was talking to. He was a shirttail relative of Auntie Edna in Niniltna, which made the entire Shugak clan part of his extended family in Byzantine ways known only to its elders. Auntie Edna considered him a member of her personal tribe and was quick to grab him up by the ear when word of his activities came her way. Tyler, as quick as he was lazy, took good care to keep his ears out of her reach.

But this morning he hadn’t been quick enough, his uncle Pat having dumped him out of bed at sunup, which in mid-July was 2
A.M
., and booted him into his clothes and on his way upriver without so much as a mug of coffee to get his heart started.

It was a beautiful morning, clear and cool. Mist smoked up from the surface of the water, broken temporarily by the bow of the skiff moving upriver, closing in again behind its stern. Night, in summer only a suggestion of twilight between midnight and oh-dark-thirty, gave way to an intensifying rim of gold on that part of the horizon stretching from the northeast all the way around to the southwest. Uncle Pat’s outboard was so finely tuned and so diligently maintained that its muted purr was barely audible above the rush of water beneath the skiff’s hull. Eagles chittered from treetops. A moose cow and two leggy calves foraged for the tenderest shoots of willow on one bank. Around a bend, a grizzly bear sleeping peacefully on a gravel bar woke with a snort and glared around nearsightedly. He rolled to all four paws and gave himself a good shake, his thick golden pelt moving almost independently of the rich layer of fat beneath, and lumbered into the water to bat out a morning snack of red salmon.

Tyler noticed none of this. He hated working the fish wheel almost as much as he hated getting up before the crack of noon. Working the fish wheel was way too wet and entailed way too much heavy lifting for a man clearly meant for a cushier life. Uncle Pat was well able to tend to the fish wheel himself, eleven hundred years old or not. Tyler had had plans for today, plans that involved Boris and a scheme that was going to make them both rich enough to escape the influence of old farts like Uncle Pat and Auntie Edna once and for all and set their feet on the path to riches and the high life. Park Strip condos in Anchorage, fitting themselves out in Armani at Nordstrom, parties at the Bush Company, weekends in Vegas. They’d be MVP Gold on Alaska Airlines before the year was out, and then everyone who’d ever shown Tyler Mack the back of their hand had better by god look out. Tyler was on his way to the big time, and no one and nothing was going to get in his way. He’d already proved that once, and he was ready to do it again, anyplace, anytime.

He imagined Uncle Pat coming to him for a loan for a new kicker or a new shotgun, and smiled to himself. Of course he would give him the money. Of course he would. He only hoped the old man would stroke out trying to say thank you.

Two miles above Kushtaka village, the river had carved a wide loop in the face of the landscape. Cottonwood grew in clumps on the curve, thick trunks covered with coarse bark looming thirty feet over the alder and diamond willow jostling for place below. The soft wood of the cottonwood tree made it prone to snap off in high winds. Cottonwood scrags formed bridges for the alder and willow to lean on and trail leafy fingers in the water beneath. Together they cast welcome shadows over the gravel shallows for weary salmon returning home to spawn.

The Mack family had had a fish wheel just below that gravel bar since 1901, when a stampeder, one Joshua Malachi Smith, had struck out panning for gold and got lost on his way to Valdez for a boat home. Daniel Mack found him trying to catch salmon with his bare hands, and the Kushtakans took him in before he starved to death or died of exposure, whichever came first. In return, he taught them how to build a fish wheel, a series of buckets on a wheel caused by the current of the river to rotate on an axle. The buckets scooped up the fish on their way upriver and dumped them into a chute that led to a holding pen. When the salmon were running, the holding pen had to be emptied two and three times a day. During a good run, sometimes more.

The first fish wheel was made of woven willow, which did not stand up well to a current made swift and strong by runoff from a winter’s worth of snow, and had to be rebuilt every spring. Today, the Mack fish wheel was made of stainless steel and mesh, held together with nuts and bolts. It was indestructible as well as portable, designed to be removed from the water at the end of each season and rebuilt at the edge of the river again every spring.

A fat red jumped on Tyler’s left, falling back against the water with a rich, full smack! The sun peeped over the Quilaks just in time to turn the resulting flash of droplets into liquid diamonds, suspending them momentarily in midair before they fell back into the river, itself a moving, jeweled surface pregnant with mystery and treasure.

None of which did Tyler take any notice of, and this in a year in which king salmon were scarce and cloudy, rainy days plentiful.

What he did see as he nosed the skiff into the bank next to the fish wheel, was Jennifer Mack in a skiff on the other side of the river. The wrong side of the river, which is what you might expect from a girl, who had no business anywhere near a fish wheel anyway.

He opened his mouth to ask her what the hell she thought she was doing—maybe he could blackmail her into working the wheel today while he was at it—when he caught sight of a second figure, a man standing in the alders at the foot of the set of stairs leading down to the gravel bar that served as Kuskulana’s landing. The man stepped forward to catch the bowline she threw and hitched it to a tree branch.

It was Ryan Christianson, and the outraged yell died in the back of Tyler’s throat, unuttered.

Pat Mack’s outboard was so quiet that neither of them heard or saw Tyler, or maybe they were just too concentrated on each other to be aware of anything else. They vanished into the undergrowth as if they’d never been there. He would have doubted his own eyes were it not for the skiff, the name,
Jennifer M.
, painted plainly across the stern for all to see. Or rather, her father’s skiff. Even without the name, Tyler would have recognized that elderly New England dory with the blue paint fading to white anywhere between here and Cordova.

He realized his own skiff was drifting out from shore and he gunned the outboard to nose it back in. The aluminum hull grated against the gravel and he hopped out and tugged it up out of the water close to the fish wheel, all the while his mind busy with speculation. What was his cousin, Jennifer, a Kushtaka Mack, doing meeting Ryan, a Kuskulana Christianson? And at this hour of the morning?

He pulled on rough rubber gloves that reached well past his elbows and hooked the suspenders of his hip waders over his shoulders. The water next to the fish wheel’s bin was teeming with salmon, and he didn’t even sigh at the sight.

Give him credit, he tried to be fair. He tried to think of all the reasons why Jennifer would be meeting Ryan on the wrong side of the river this early in the morning, and in the end could only come up with the obvious. If there had been any doubt, it would have been wiped clean by the way Jen’s hand went into Ryan’s—sure, easy, familiar. She’d put the boat in at his feet and he’d been standing in exactly the right spot to catch her bowline, too. It wasn’t the first time they’d met there.

Tyler’s eyes narrowed. So, he knew something he hadn’t before. What was in it for him?

He’d have to talk it over with Boris. Boris always had all the best ideas.

He waded into the water and plunged his hands into the holding pen, grabbing the salmon by the gills and tossing them with a practiced throw so they thumped hard into the plastic tote sitting amidships of his uncle’s skiff. He was good at it, because he hated it so much, he’d figured out the most economical way to get the job done as fast as possible. It was a good catch, maybe twenty-five reds weighing an average of eight pounds, and still pretty fat for having traveled all this way upstream.

He was so focused on getting the salmon out of the pen and into the tote that he didn’t even hear the boots crunching into the gravel behind him.

*   *   *

Pat Mack was, indeed, eleven hundred years old, but there was nothing wrong with his eyesight, and when that worthless grandnephew of his hadn’t shown up by four o’clock that afternoon, he went grumbling down to the beach and climbed into Tyler’s tiny, trash-filled skiff, having sent Tyler upriver in Pat’s own skiff because it was big enough hold a fish tote. The kicker, new when Eisenhower was invading Normandy, took a dozen tries before it caught and with a sound like a chain saw giving birth ripped a shrieking hole in the serenity of the afternoon. Tyler probably hadn’t changed the oil since spring. Useless little fucker.

He pushed the kicker as hard as she’d go, which amounted to about half a knot per year. The sun had traveled to the other side of the sky and was making its usual empty threat to set by the time he got to the fish wheel. His mood, already bad, didn’t improve when he saw that the fish wheel was jammed, the current battering it and rattling the above-water baskets in their brackets.

“Goddamn good-for-nothing little shit,” he said, and beached the skiff.

His own skiff was there, drawn up on the gravel next to the fish wheel, tied off to a scrub spruce growing out of the edge of the bank.

Tyler wasn’t, which only fueled his ire.

The tote held at least a dozen fish, red salmon, almost a hundred pounds of fish. Pat’s temper spiked when he saw that they were all dead and had been sitting in the sun without ice. He poked at them. All day, by the look of them. It’d been a warm one, and they were starting to smell.

“Tyler, you useless little fucker, you’ll be lucky if you’re able to walk ever again when I get done with you!”

His bellow echoed across the water and startled a flock of pintail into the air. There was a rustle in the bushes across the river and he snapped his head around, one hand reached for his rifle. This time of year there was enough fish for everyone, but bears were not reasonable creatures.

It wasn’t a bear; it was a man, ducking back into the alders behind the Kuskulana landing on the other side of the river. Pat squinted. Some Kuskulaner, most likely a Christianson, since most Kuskulaners were Christiansons, with a few Estes and Halvorsens and last he heard still one lone Romanoff thrown in. Might have been Roger’s son. They all looked alike to Pat anyway. Although he had heard tell of a couple of new families totally unrelated to the existing population moving in. Which wasn’t surprising. Kuskulana had everything Kushtaka did not and a functional airport besides, so you could get the hell outta town when you had to.