The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (26 page)

THE POLICE LIEUTENANT had pressed Lecha for more information—the police wanted the exact location of the snowbank concealing the corpse. Lecha tried to concentrate on the image of the snowbank, but there had been too many distractions. Try as she might, all Lecha had been able to visualize had been rural Alaskan snowbanks, memories from the year she had spent in Alaska. As far as Lecha was concerned, the only excitement had come in the spring when the big rivers, the Yukon and the Kuskokwim began to thaw and all night the earth along the riverbanks shook with the thunder of the breakup of the ice. At breakup time the newspapers from Anchorage and Fairbanks began to catalog grisly discoveries in melting snowbanks. Except for the 1,200-mile dogsled race to Nome, the body count of winter’s toll had been the only interesting Alaska news. The 1,200-mile dogsled race had been the whole reason she had ended up in Alaska in the first place.

Lecha thought this must be the tundra spirits’ way of taking revenge—to cook you for playing with another woman’s husband. Here she was sitting under the hot television-studio lights, a widow sobbing and the mood of the audience and host beginning to curdle, and all Lecha could think about was a Yukon River Indian and his dogsled team. She had watched the handsome racer bend over the tawny lead dog to talk in low, sweet tones; at that instant Lecha had fallen in love with him. Lecha had reasoned a man who was gentle and loving with his sled dogs might be depended on to treat a woman decently. Well, yes and no, she discovered, because the racer had a wife and four kids living upriver. The racer had been conditioning his dogs for the big race, and the distance between the village where Lecha stayed and the village of his wife and kids was just the workout his dogs required—eighty miles round-trip.

By the time Lecha managed to get the dogsled racer off her mind, the talk show host had quieted the widow and settled back in his matching gold velvet armchair. The host dramatically asked Lecha again if she could give a better description of this snowbank. Lecha closed her eyes.
“Snowbank.” All Lecha could think of was the spring thaw in Anchorage when the body of an Eskimo man had emerged from a snowpile at the ambulance and emergency entrance of the hospital. Eskimos and Indians had joked that the man had died waiting to be examined by U.S. Indian Health Service doctors.

The talk show host and audience were quiet, waiting on the edges of their seats to hear more about the location of the corpse. Without hesitation, Lecha told them to search snowbanks near local hospitals. The show’s host had nodded at the police lieutenant and then at the director’s assistant, who had just flashed him the thirty-second signal.

In the women’s rest room outside the TV studio Lecha examined the huge half-moon perspiration stains on the new white linen dress. The tension had left her exhausted. No wonder old Yoeme had answered so bitterly when she was accused of being a fraud. Yoeme used to say not many would dare trade their work to perform hers.

Lecha had been relaxing in a hot bath back at the hotel when a radio news bulletin announced the body had been located outside a Boulder, Colorado, hospital. The first phone call had been from the television producer telling her they wanted to have her appear a second time for a follow-up. The second call had been from the police lieutenant to thank her, and to ask if they might list her with the other “psychics” the Denver Police Department contacted from time to time. Lecha told the producer she would have to think it over. She told the cop she would only be staying in Denver another day or two.

Lecha dozed in the hot water and bath salts thinking about the handsome dogsled racer. The best he had ever done in the big race had been fifth. Lecha’s handsome racer had carried one of his dogs while his other dogs pulled the sled across the finish line. A white man who followed the handsome racer across the line also carried a dog and had a dead dog lashed to his sled. What had been clear to Lecha that afternoon in Nome was that dogsled racers lived and traveled on a modest human scale. They sewed new dog booties at night along the trail and coaxed and cried over their dogs. Lecha wasn’t interested. Two days after the finish of the big dogsled race, she had gone. Lecha made it a rule to leave a place or person
before
she had any regrets. The dogsled racer had been ardent and gentle, but he had not been as important as the two Eskimo women Lecha had met there.

THE RACER had been in a hurry to take his dog team and sled upriver where his wife was. He had complained jokingly that Lecha had worn his penis raw. The racer had been acquainted with Rose because she had gone to school “down below” in the lower forty-eight. Lecha could tell the racer had slept with Rose when he had come downriver. Rose had carried both Lecha’s suitcases and had talked nonstop. Rose had said the first thing Lecha had to understand, if she was going to be a boarder in her house, was this: a terrible thing had happened nine years ago, and nothing could ever be right again. Rose warned Lecha she might notice things in the house were not as they should be. But this was unavoidable, because of the terrible incident.

At this point in the story, they had reached Rose’s old log and sod house on a hill above the river. Lecha did not see or feel anything out of the ordinary when she stepped inside and put her things on the bed across from Rose’s bed. She did notice the clocks—the old-fashioned kind preferred by all the old folks in Sonora—big clocks that needed keys inserted in their faces to wind them. The clocks filled Rose’s little house with their ticking.

“They are set for different times,” Rose explained, “because this way I know how much time they would have had if they had lived.”

“Who?” Lecha saw no snapshots or graduation photographs. “My younger sisters and brothers. There were six. Three girls and three boys.”

The little children had been left alone many times before. The parents were across the river at the bootlegger’s house. Sometimes the parents stayed over there for days. All money went to the bootlegger. The children got cold. The house was only plywood and tar paper covered with tin. There was no stove. Only half of a steel oil drum where they burned kerosene. The oldest child had been a girl of nine. In the dark she went outside for the red fuel can by the father’s snowmobile. But the can she had picked up was full of gasoline, not fuel oil. The explosion had blown the plywood and tin shack apart. The village people
saw the six children running. Through the dark in a line along the riverbank the children ran in halos of yellow flame that flared higher each time another limb or article of clothing caught fire. “These are your angels of fire. Jesus Christ of the white people!” Rose had interjected. But the children did not quite reach the river. They fell in the snow, drowning in the fluid of their seared lungs.

Rose had dreamed about the fire four consecutive nights in the girls dormitory of the school for Eskimos and Indians. This is what Rose tells Lecha the first afternoon they are together. Nothing could be done. Not even the Yupik dormitory matrons would place a radio-telephone call to the trading-post man. She had been a mother to her sisters and brothers since she was eleven but they refused to allow Rose to go home. Rose did not remember anything after the news of the fire had reached her. School officials had sent Rose south to the psychiatric hospital in Seattle.

“I finished up school down there. I was a day student. At night I slept at the hospital. I tried to talk to the children for a long time. The doctor would ask me what I wanted to say to them. I only wanted to tell them I was sorry. I would have taken care of them if I had been there. I did not want to go away. I never wanted to leave them. I used to cry at night in the dormitory. It took a long time. Finally, after the doctor quit asking about them and started asking about my father and my mother, I had a dream about them. I talked to all the children. They were standing together, smiling at me. They seemed all right and happy. Except they were all in flames, standing there on fire, but never being burned up. The old woman told me later she had seen them too—on that night, and then afterwards, right before dawn, playing together along the river. They were always in flames.”

Those nights the dogsled racer stayed upriver with his wife, Lecha had gone with the others to the village meeting hall where government experiments with satellites had brought the people old movies and broadcasts from the University of Alaska. Lecha had sat with her friend Rose. Everyone huddled close to the TV screen. Rose had translated everything that was said, all the wisecracks and remarks that were made in the Yupik Eskimo language. Teenagers who had been away to boarding school stood at the back of the hall whispering and laughing in English and in Yupik. Lecha realized Rose had befriended her because Rose was considered an odd one by the others in the village. Without Rose, Lecha might have been lonely in the downriver village where the older people had nicknamed her the Racer’s Workout, and the village teenagers familiar
with television called it “Love, Athabascan Style.” The people had been polite to Lecha, considering the rivalry that had once existed between the racer’s people and the Yupik people downriver.

The broadcast was a home economics show from the University of Alaska. Even the men had watched closely. Everyone enjoyed making wisecracks and jokes about the Yupik woman who had been recruited from a rival village to become a “TV star.”

“If she had grown up in our village she’d have a better recipe for fermented beaver tails,” one woman remarked. All the women, even old, sleepy-looking women, had clapped their hands and caused the metal folding chairs to squeak and clang with their laughter. Lecha had looked at Rose and frowned because she was having difficulty appreciating the humor of fermented beaver tails. “Oh,” Rose said. “I forgot. You weren’t here when that happened.” Rose had smiled and patted Lecha’s arm. “It seems like you’ve always lived here.” Lecha nodded, although she had not planned to spend the winter in an Eskimo village eighty miles from the Bering Sea. But Lecha had met the handsome dogsled racer in the airport bar in Seattle, and he had offered just the change of scene Lecha had needed.

“The beaver-tail recipe is kind of a sick joke,” Rose said, smiling.

“She gave out the beaver-tail recipe one week. Three old women from a village down river tried the recipe, but instead of doing things as they had in the old days, when they used to wrap the beaver tails in seal bladder or wax paper, the three old women used plastic. They placed the beaver tails in a warm corner behind the stove, like you are supposed to. They let them ferment three or four days just like the recipe directed. But when they ate the beaver tails, they were poisoned because plastic encourages botulism.”

Now the television home economist was demonstrating a technique for making pie crust, but no one was watching. Instead people talked. Even the teenagers at the back of the community meeting hall were hunched over cigarettes and giggling and talking, waiting for “Love, American Style” to come on.

An old woman had begun to speak in a loud voice, and the other women turned to listen. Rose interpreted for Lecha. The old woman was saying she was not much impressed with television, except for movies with men on horses. The old woman repeated she was interested in horses; otherwise, television did not impress her. She had seen far more amazing acts performed right there in that very room. It seemed to Lecha the old woman was looking directly at her, so Lecha leaned
closer to Rose to hear the translation. Lecha was careful not to move her eyes from the old woman, who reminded her of old Yoeme; not because of any physical resemblance, but because of the old woman’s command of attention. Even the men, planning hunts or discussing snowmobile repair, stopped talking and began listening.

“When we have visitors from far away, I wonder if they know why we live here,” the old woman said, and reached into a grimy canvas satchel by her feet. Out came a heavy, curved ivory tusk. The old woman held up the tusk for everyone to see. The voices and faces on the television screen could not compete. Two university professors were discussing American foreign policy in Southeast Asia. The old woman was swinging the big walrus tusk around and around her head like a lariat. Lecha glanced at the TV screen and imagined the tusk colliding with their white faces. The old woman was stronger than she looked. Then the old woman lowered the tusk, laughing.