The Singing of the Dead (3 page)

She had the grace to flush.

“All you'll do is get him off,” he warned. “That's what he wants, attention, film at eleven.”

“Or she,” she reminded him.

He looked at her in sudden suspicion. She read his thought before he could speak it out loud. “Fuck you, Chopin,” she said, her voice rising.

“Okay,” he said, patting the air. “Okay. Sorry. Just a thought, a dumb one, I admit, but—”

“As if I would—as if Anne would—just fuck you, Chopin!” She shot to her feet and marched to the door. Hand on the knob, she turned and said, spitting the words like knives, “Thanks for nothing. If— when Anne gets into office, if this asshole doesn't kill her first, we'll remember this when it comes time to look at the budget for the Department of Public Safety. I'd say trooper salaries and step rates for Bush posts are way overdue for review.”

“Darlene!”

His voice, cracking like a whip, stopped her halfway out the door. She looked back, very ready to escalate hostilities.

“If you're that worried, if you really think Anne's in danger . . .”

She didn't move. “What?”

“What about hiring security for the campaign?”

“You mean like guards?”

“I mean like one guard.” The one he was thinking of wouldn't need any help.

She let go of the handle, and the door hissed closed on its hydraulic hinge. “You suggesting someone in particular?”

He just looked at her and, being a well-trained law enforcement professional of intensive and lengthy experience, was able to pinpoint the exact moment when realization dawned.

Also because she said, “Oh fuck, no.”

“She knows the Park,” Jim said. “Who she isn't related to she's drinking buddies with.” He thought of Amanda and Chick, Bobby and Dinah, Bernie. Old Sam, the quintessential Alaskan old fart, Auntie Vi, the quintessential Alaskan old fartette. Dan O'Brien, the only national-park ranger in Alaska to survive the change of federal administrations and gain the affection if not the actual respect of Park rats. George Perry the air taxi pilot, next to whom Jim had stood on that airstrip south of Denali last September. He banished that memory the next instant, or told himself he had. “If she was a drinking kind of woman, that is.”

“Not her.”

“She's probably related to Anne, come to that.”

Darlene's voice rose. “Not her, Jim.”

He was surprised at her vehemence. “Who else?” he said. “She's a teetotaler. She a local. She's a Native. She has a reputation—”

“Oh yeah, she's got a reputation, all right, a well-deserved one.”

“Took the words right out of my mouth.” Curious, the curse of any good cop, he went fishing. “You sound like you know her.”

She opened her mouth, met his eyes, and closed it again. “I knew her,” she said at last.

He waited hopefully. No weapon in the cop's arsenal worked better than the expectant silence.

“We went to school together.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I didn't know you were from Niniltna.”

“In Fairbanks. UAF.”

He gave a neutral kind of grunt, and waited again. In the ensuing stony silence, he wondered why the feud. If one person hating a second person who, so far as Jim knew, was indifferent to the first person's existence, could be called a feud. Did Kate crib from Darlene's test? Wear Darlene's favorite sweater without permission? Steal Darlene's boyfriend? It irritated him that he would like to know, to add to his fund of Kate Shugak lore. Said irritation moved him to say, “Just a suggestion.”

“A bad one,” she snapped.

“No,” he said, suddenly weary. “Just a suggestion.”

S it still,” Dinah said, yanking Kate's head around by a fistful of hair.

“Ouch!” Kate, wedged into Katya's high chair, muttered something beneath her breath.

“Stop whining,” Dinah said, no sympathy in face or voice. “It wasn't my idea to give you a crew cut.”

“It's not a crew cut.”

“It might as well be. Why don't you let it grow out again?”

Trooper Chopper Jim Chopin, watching from where he leaned against the wall with his arms folded, saw a shadow pass across Kate's face.

Kate looked up and met his eyes. She felt cold metal slide between her nape and her hair, heard the crunch of shears. Her skin prickled. “I like it short,” she said.

Something in her voice kept Dinah from pursuing the subject. “Well, if you're going to keep it this short, you're going to need a trim once a month. If you're going to get a trim once a month, you have to sit still for it.” Dinah paused, hand holding scissors the way Van Gogh might have held his brush in a pause between stars, and looked Kate over with a critical frown.

“You look like you're putting the final touches to a masterpiece that's going to sell to Bill Gates,” Jim said, echoing Kate's thought in a manner she found more than a little eerie. “It's just a haircut.”

Dinah extended the scissors. “You want to give it a try?”

He held up both hands, palms out. “No way. I like living.”

“Then put a lid on it.”

“Yes, ma'am.” Jim shifted, and Kate saw the gleam of a shield. As usual, Jim was immaculately turned out in the blue-and-gold uniform of his service. As usual, he looked like a recruitment poster. Not as usual, his presence sent a definite ripple of unease up her spine. She looked away.

A pillar ran through the center of the house, around which a built-in counter supported a variety of electronic gadgets, including radios, VCRs, tape decks, a turntable, monitors both television and computer, music in vinyl, cassette, and CD format, and boxes of parts and tools. It should have been a mess, but it was very well organized, with hooks on the pillar to hang the tools from and sets of Rubbermaid drawers beneath the counter to store parts in. Lines to the satellite dish and the antennas mounted on the one-hundred-twelve-foot tower outside snaked up the pillar and disappeared through the roof.

At the console in the center of this mess, Bobby flicked a few switches. There was some kind of electronic whine and into the mike Bobby said, “Okay, folks, it's show time. Bobby's all talk, all the time, when it isn't all music all the time, one and only Park Air. Coming to you live once a month, or whenever I feel like broadcasting a little pirate air. Lately, I've been feeling like it a lot. That's right, it's election season again, god help us. In less than two months we elect a new president and reelect our congressman-for-life. And with me tonight is one of the candidates for the office of state senator from District 41. Yes, all you Park rats and ratettes, that's your very own election district. Remember, if you don't vote, you can't bitch, and what's a democracy without bitching?” He adjusted the fuzzy black microphone hanging from the articulated metal arm. “Anne Gordaoff, how the hell are you?”

“I'm fine, Bobby. Thanks for having me on the show.”

“Couldn't hardly not, seeing as how you're going up against my boy, Pete Heiman. What's wrong with him? He's been in, what, two terms now? What can you do that he can't do better with the benefit of experience and seniority?”

Anne Gordaoff smiled. “Gee, Bobby, according to you, everybody who isn't one of the good old boys ought to just fold their tents and steal away by dark of night.”

Anne Gordaoff's campaign manager stood two feet away, a sheaf of paperwork cradled in one arm, a pencil tucked behind one ear and another in her hand, alert, attentive, following every word of the discussion as if it were being broadcast live on 60 Minutes.

“Not in this lifetime,” Kate said.

“Quit muttering,” Dinah said. A judicious snip, one more, and she stood back with the air of Hercules finishing up his twelfth labor. Kate, no less relieved, extricated herself from the high chair and removed the dishcloth from round her neck.

Dinah put the shears away and scooped up her daughter in the same motion, a plump little coffee-with-cream-colored toddler with tight black curls and a broad, merry grin exactly like her father's. Little of Dinah's ethereal blondness had been reproduced in her daughter, if you didn't count the blue, blue eyes. Kate tried to remember what she'd learned about recessive genes in high school biology, and failed. Didn't matter; whatever the ingredients, the result was superb.

“Kate,” Jim said.

“Not in this lifetime,” she repeated, watching Dinah and Katya blow bubbles at each other, an oasis of tranquility in the crowded, noisy house.

“Her boss needs help. Your kind of help.”

“Let her hire a rent-a-cop.”

“You know the Park the way a rent-a-cop from Anchorage never would.”

“You sleeping with her, Jim? You afraid you're going to lose your latest main squeeze?”

He looked at this short, lithe woman with the golden skin, the eyes like hazel almonds, the neat cap of shining black hair, and the old white scar across her throat, and felt an unfamiliar sensation rise up in his chest. He investigated. Anger. Fury, maybe. Might even have been rage. “No,” he said, his voice clipped. “I'm not sleeping with her.”

“Sorry,” Kate said, not sounding sorry at all. “Given past history, it was a logical assumption.”

Darlene must have heard her, or at least the tone of Kate's voice had registered, because she raised her head to look at Kate. Their gazes met and held, identical impassive stares that gave nothing away to curious onlookers, of which there were more than one.

Darlene looked away first. “Not in this lifetime,” Kate said for the third time. “Dinah, you got any coffee made?”

“Sure.”

The immense A-frame on the bank of Squaw Candy Creek was lit up like a Christmas tree, and cars and trucks spilled over from the yard across the little wooden bridge and down both sides of the creek. Inside, the kitchen table had been extended with sawhorses and a piece of plywood, the whole covered by a series of disposable tablecloths in a garish red-and-blue plaid pattern.

Bobby didn't like doors so there were only two: one to the outside and one to the bathroom. Both were wider than normal doors, and the countertops and tables were low to the ground, as was all the furniture, all the better for someone who'd lost both legs below the knee in Vietnam and who now relied on a wheelchair for locomotion. Well, two, actually, a new racing model for when he was sober and a twenty-year-old clunker for when he was hungover.

“How are you, Kate?” Dinah said, keen eyes examining Kate for signs of wear and tear. Katya fussed and Dinah gave her a carrot to gnaw on.

“I'm okay, Dinah,” Kate said, a little wearily. “Really, I'm okay.” The inspection continued in silence, with the addition of one upwardly mobile eyebrow. “All right,” she said. “I miss him, is that what you want to hear? I miss him like hell. I'll always miss him. But almost the last thing he said to me was that life goes on.”

“Jack is dead,” Jim had said. “You aren't.” She did not look over her shoulder to see if he had heard her. “I'm home now.” She looked at Dinah and tried to smile. “It would help a great deal if my friends didn't treat me like I'm about to break.”

“You were.”

“I'm not now.”

Dinah, a slender blonde who was about as white as Bobby was black, seemed to make up her mind. “Fine,” she said. “Hey, kid.”

Johnny appeared at her elbow to regard the spread on the extended table with wide eyes. There was caribou sausage, smoked fish, moose steaks, deer stew, blood stew, mulligan stew, fry bread, zucchini bread, homemade bread, cranberry bread, date nut bread, banana bread, raisin bread, macaroni salad, carrot salad, potato salad, three-bean salad, pickles dill and sweet, olives black and green, cubed cheeses cheddar and jack, chocolate cake, pineapple upside-down cake, apple and cherry and Boston cream pies. And that was just on the table. It didn't include the counters full of chips and dips overflowing into the living room.

“Help yourself,” Dinah said, and Johnny said “You bet,” and picked up a paper plate and a plastic fork to wade in with the infinite appetite of the fourteen-year old.

“Okay, let's get a little serious,” Kate heard Bobby say, and turned to watch.

“All right,” Anne Gordaoff said, who never looked anything less than.

“I have a friend, Mary Ellen. She's Native.”

Mary Ellen Chignik, Kate thought, a Native rights activist who spent more time in Juneau picketing than the legislature did in session. She lived and breathed confrontation.

“She's this amazing woman, really smart, really informed, knows a lot about Native culture and history.”

Knows a lot about Athabascan culture and history, Kate thought.

“We were at the Roadhouse a while back. She was talking about the Black Death, an influenza epidemic that was brought to Alaska by gold miners and reduced the Native population on the Y-K Delta literally by one-third.”

“Yes.”

“Turns out the Black Death Mary Ellen's talking about hit in 1919. I said, ‘Mary Ellen, that was the influenza pandemic that hit the whole planet after World War I. Over twenty-one million people died, not just Alaskans.’ ” Bobby paused. “She was angry with me. This is a smart woman, well-educated, a leader. But she didn't want to hear that the Black Death hit everywhere, all over the planet. The Black Death was personal. The Black Death was brought to her tribe by Anglos, just one of many instances of white wrongdoing in Alaska. That's the way she was told it, that's the way she sees it, and that's the way she's going to tell it to her children.”

After a moment of dead air, Anne said, “What's your question, Bobby?”

“Hell, I don't know,” he said, frowning. “I guess, why? Why was that her reaction? And why was she angry when I told her the truth about the Black Death?”

Maybe it was the late hour. Maybe Anne Gordaoff had had a long day and a longer week, and the campaign trail was taking its toll. Maybe she had been infected with Park Air's no-bullshit policy and made a snap decision to abandon discretion. Whatever the reason, her answer was blunt. “Political correctness sucks.”

Everybody blinked, including Bobby. “Excuse me?”

“Family pride is going to kill all of us if we're not careful.”

The A-frame's large single room was crowded with Park residents, from Old Sam Dementieff to Billy Mike to Mac Devlin to Aunties Vi and Joy to Dan O'Brian. Even Bernie Koslowski was there, turning the Roadhouse over to the inmates for the evening. Native, white, fisherman, ranger, homesteader, miner, hunter, trapper, they were all listening to Anne Gordaoff. Behind her, Darlene looked, for a change, indecisive, as if she couldn't decide whether to interrupt or let her candidate rip. In the end, it was obvious that Anne was on a tear and there was no stopping her, and Darlene was smart enough not to try.