Breakup (21 page)

Chopper Jim, standing at her shoulder, exacerbated her irritation with a deep, rich chuckle. Mark Stewart, still the pillar of sorrow, stood at his side. They both watched as her chin came up, her shoulders stiffened and she all but marched across the room.

"Katya." Auntie Vi looked mildly surprised but welcoming. Auntie Joy beamed. Harvey looked apprehensive, Demetri stolid and Old Sam thin and gaunt and apparently immortal. He distributed his thin, gaunt and apparently immortally nasty grin around the group and straddled a chair from a nearby table, his hands on the back and his chin on his hands.

Kate looked slowly from face to face, as if she were seeing them all for the first time. Harvey, the self-important businessman and incipient dandy. Demetri, the guide, square and stolid and as monosyllabic as his wife. Billy Mike, the tribal leader and commercial fisher with the bright button eyes and the wide, cheerful smile. Auntie Joy, subsistence fisher, housewife, mother, grandmother, robust, laughing, her tubby figure dressed always in flowered, be- furred and rickracked kuspuks.

The fifth board member was its newest, Old Sam Dementieff, commercial fisher, tenderman, movie critic, basketball fan and father of twelve, who had outlived his wife and five of his children and three of his grandchildren and for whom Kate occasionally deck- handed in the summer. Old Sam had taken Kate's grandmother's place on the board, reflecting the shareholders' need for an elder of stature in the governing body.

Auntie Vi, the board secretary, acquired a lined school notebook and a pen with two spares, one behind each ear. Auntie Vi believed strongly in redundancy.

Kate stood around the perimeter of the group, unable or unwilling to bring herself to sit down. Harvey was the youngest board member at forty-five. Billy was what? Forty-eight? Demetri was fifty, Auntie Joy's entire family had just celebrated her sixty-fifth birthday, and Old Sam was a hundred and three if he was a day. Auntie Vi had been thirty for the last forty years and was determined to remain so until she died.

Harvey was pro-development, period. Demetri usually sided with Harvey, Auntie Joy usually against him. Auntie Joy would vote for anything with the word "education" in it, Demetri for anything prefaced by the phrase "rural preference." Billy Mike changed sides so often there was no decoding his bias, and as for Old Sam- She pulled herself up short. She had no business analyzing and measuring their characteristics, their prejudices, their strengths, their weaknesses. They were her elders and betters, who, like Emaa, always had looked and always would look at events through a local lens and would adjust accordingly their vision of what should be. These were Emaa's sisters and brothers, her daughters and sons, her mothers and fathers, and Kate would defer to them and to their wisdom. She would, she repeated to herself sternly.

Together, they had lived a total of more than three centuries and were at present marching resolutely toward their fourth. It was an impressive accumulation of wisdom and perspective. The difficulty was that sometimes that wisdom and perspective hardened into a stance inimical to change, to new ideas, to fresh faces, to youth. Kate had been born and raised among them, but at thirty- four she was by far the youngest person in the group, and she knew that had she not been Ekaterina's granddaughter she would have had no place there.

In this, she was less than perceptive of the considerable regar d in which she was held in the Park. Whether she knew it or not, she wore authority like a long cloak, with much was that swept up in its weighted hem of which she was unaware, including the undivided attention of the six people sitting before her now. Six pairs of sharp eyes watched her without seeming to, noticing the lines of control bracketing the usually mobile mouth, the fresh scab on her temple. None of them lingered over the scar on her throat, but then they'd all seen it before, and most of them knew the story behind it, or thought they did. Like the presence of the wolf-husky hybrid chowing down on beef jerky at the end of the bar, it only added to the accumulating legend.

The six elders sipped coffee brought by a self-effacing Bernie, who recognized a tribal council meeting when he saw one. They chatted in low voices, settling into their seats and getting comfortable with one another.

"Well," Billy said, setting his coffee down. Auntie Vi flipped open her notebook and retrieved one of her pens. Old Sam's bright eyes flicked from one face to another. Harvey frowned into his mug. Auntie Joy's needle flashed through a square of cloth. "I'd like to thank you all for assembling on such short notice." There were grave nods all around, except from Old Sam, who grinned his vulpine grin. "We've invited Kate to sit in on the meeting. She's got a proposal she'd like to lay before the board."

"What?" Kate said.

"Go ahead, Kate," Billy said encouragingly, and the other four board members swiveled their heads in unison to look at the youngster come amongst them.

On her best day Ekaterina Moonin Shugak couldn't have passed a better buck. You son of a bitch, Kate thought furiously, you set me up.

She sent a scowl across the table that should have fried Billy's brain in his skull. He took no notice of this lapse in generational respect, only continued to look at her, waiting, face schooled to an expression of innocent inquiry. So did the rest of the board.

The weight of their expectancy had a perceptible drag all its own, towing her in, sucking her under. She wasn't strong enough to resist, so she took a deep breath and waded in. "Cindy Bingley nearly killed her husband, Ben, this afternoon." Auntie Joy's beam vanished, and Kate waited for those who had been present to fill in those who hadn't been before continuing. "This wasn't the first time she's tried it. The next time he uses his and his kids' dividend checks to finance a drunk, she might get lucky. I don't think anyone here wants that."

Going immediately on the attack, Harvey went straight for the jugular. "So what are you saying, Kate? You want the Association to hold back Ben's and the kids' dividend checks?"

"I don't know, that's pretty extreme action you're suggesting," Billy observed without heat, "holding up a dividend for a lousy toot to Ahtna."

Kate hadn't suggested it, in fact hadn't even thought of it until now, but was willing to discuss the red herring Harvey had dragged across the trail just to get it out of the way. She might score some points of her own in the process. "It wasn't his first toot, Billy," she said, "and he isn't alone, as you very well know. Half the shareholders blow their dividends when they come in. Most of the time it's the wives and kids who suffer for it."

"They get their own dividends," Demetri said.

"Not if somebody beats them to the mailbox."

Harvey's glassy stare made him look as if he'd been stuffed and mounted, Auntie Joy beamed at her placidly, Old Sam examined Kate with a critical eye.

"I suppose we could hold Ben's and the kids' checks for Cindy to pick up," Billy said.

They studied that in silence for a while. From the expressions on their faces they were all entertaining visions of shareholders storming the Association offices for their checks and not relishing the prospect. "You know," Demetri said, "Cindy's not exactly blameless in this situation. She's done plenty of partying herself."

"She takes good care of those kids," Auntie Joy said.

"He'd sue," Harvey said flatly, because that was what he would do and don't any of them forget it.

"Not if he doesn't have any money to hire a lawyer," Auntie Joy said, because she hadn't had much use for Harvey since he hogged most of the fry bread at a dinner she cooked for the high school basketball team on which Harvey was a starting forward. That had been over twenty years ago, but Auntie Joy never forgot an act of greed or selfishness.

"Someone would take it on spec," Demetri said unexpectedly. "There are a thousand Philadelphia lawyers in Anchorage just drooling at the prospect of taking on a solvent Native Association for costs alone. They could drag the case out for years and run their billable hours into the stratosphere. We can't chance it."

Everyone was impressed by this professional assessment of the situation. Everyone also wanted to know where Demetri had come by the easy familiarity with legal jargon, but Bush manners prevailed and no one asked.

Personally, Kate didn't think Ben could leave off drinking and chasing women not his wife long enough to retain an attorney, so the point was moot. "Ben is a shareholder, like the rest of us," she said. "ANCSA funds were allocated by congressional act. It's probably a federal offense to interfere with their distribution. Ben gets his check, same as you, same as me, same as every other Niniltna shareholder."

They thought about that for a while. Tribal elders spent a lot of time thinking in silence, which led to rational problem solving and sensible decision making. It was one of their greatest strengths.

Demetri stirred. "She could divorce him. That way, she could attach his dividend for child support."

"If she hasn't divorced him yet, she's not going to," Billy said.

"He is a charmer," Auntie Joy admitted with a rueful sigh.

"What the Association could do," Kate said. Billy looked at her encouragingly. "What the Association could do," she repeated, setting her jaw, "is tackle it from the other end."

Bernie returned to refill their mugs and set a plate of Oreo cookies on the table, his inspired contribution to a harmonious meeting. Seven hands reached out, and everybody except Harvey opened up the cookies and licked the frosting off the inside.

"It's not just Ben and Cindy and their kids who need help. I'm sure you've all heard about the shoot-out the Jeppsens had with the Kreugers here yesterday," Kate said. "Some of you were present for it." Her hand moved to her left temple to finger the scab left by the too-close-for-comfort graze. Six pairs of eyes followed the gesture. Old Sam chuckled, and Auntie Joy looked at him, scandalized. "Three people were hurt. But," she said, and paused for effect. "But," she repeated, "because we had emergency medical technicians in the bar, we had treatment ready to hand."

"There wasn't anybody hurt that bad," Demetri observed. He'd had too many near misses with wannabe Great White Hunters for a couple of minor bullet holes to upset him.

Auntie Joy transferred her scandalized look from Old Sam to Demetri.

"True," Kate said. "But I believe the result would have been the same even if someone had been badly hurt. The point is, we had trained people at the scene to deal with the situation." She paused again. "People trained in Ahtna, by the Ahtna Native Health Foundation."

She held up her right hand. "I caught myself a splinter the other day, a bad one. Figured I'd need a tetanus shot. When I was in Ahtna this morning, I stopped by the health clinic and talked hina Barnes into giving me a DPT booster. You all know Irina. She's the community health representative for the Ahtna Native Association, trained in town by the Public Health Service in emergency medical care and standard immunization and testing procedures." Kate paused. "A useful person to have around. We could do with one of our own."

This time it was Billy who broke the silence. "What are you saying, Kate?"

Kate took a deep, steadying breath and spoke her first words in an advisory capacity to the Niniltna Native Association board of directors. "I'm saying it's time we started some kind of clinic of our own, right here in Niniltna. Half the villages in this state already have some kind of health care clinic. Why not ours? Raven Corporation has a nonprofit health branch that's been trying to get a foot in the door here for years."

Harvey said, face set in taut lines of disapproval, "We don't want any outsiders telling us how to live. We can take care of our own."

Kate thought again of the Bingleys, of her cousin Martin's lifelong struggle with alcohol and drugs, of Chick Noyukpuk's, of her parents'. Of her mother's. Yeah, she thought, and we've done such a good job of it so far. She had to fight to keep from saying so out loud, and tried instead for a placating smile, but her facial muscles were unaccustomed to the effort and she gave it up. She did take a beat to rein in her temper, because abusing elders, especially in the presence of other elders, was no way to get anything accomplished in the village. On the other hand, she and tact were no more than passing acquaintances.

Learn, then, Katya, a stern voice said.

She closed her eyes. The board, watching and waiting, saw a shadow pass across her face, the usually smooth skin acquire lines that aged it into a harsh mask that had seen too much of suffering and sorrow. A mask that recalled the presence among them of an older, wiser woman whose deliberate and resolute speech echoed in the rasping voice of her granddaughter.

Kate opened her eyes and the mask vanished.

"We could try circulating a petition to go dry again," Auntie Joy said doubtfully.

Harvey rolled his eyes, but then Harvey liked a martini before dinner and a shot of Drambuie afterward. Niniltna had gone dry once, by a three-vote margin. Dry meant that no alcohol, not for retail sale or personal consumption or gin for Harvey's martini, was allowed on tribal land, none, zero, zilch, zip. The Association ha d hired shareholders to act as guards to check planes at the airstrip for incoming contraband, armed guards that were empowered to break up any intercepted shipments on the spot. It was a miracle that the Dry Act had passed at all, a miracle aided by a sagacious decision to hold the election during the summer, when most of the fishers were out in Prince William Sound.

When the fleet got back into town, another petition was circulated and another vote was taken, this time for the village to go damp, which meant alcohol couldn't be sold but it could be imported in small quantities for personal use. The second petition passed by a four-vote margin, having been held during the AFN convention, when all the dry votes were in Anchorage.

Everyone was afraid of what the circulation of a third petition might bring. No one wanted any bars opening up again in the village; at least the Roadhouse was twenty-seven miles away and Bernie was a responsible bartender. He didn't serve drunks or pregnant women, and he forcibly removed truck, snow machine and D-9 keys from driving lushes and bedded them down in one of the cabins out back.