The Singing of the Dead (10 page)

“I was, from the day after we graduated. I was with them until this April. Then Darlene came knocking at my door with an offer I couldn't refuse.” She saw Kate's expression and added, “You couldn't, either, I hear.”

Kate, about to deny it, decided to laugh instead. “Yeah, well. I guess I've sold out.”

“Doesn't take long, does it?”

“No, it sure doesn't.” She looked with affection at Tracy's good-natured face, at the thick hair pulled back from her brow with a tortoiseshell band, at the big blue eyes sparkling with the sense of fun that had gotten them all into trouble more than once way back when. She was dressed in a long-tailed green silk shirt, black stretch pants, and ballet slippers. There was a black portfolio over one arm and a clipboard in the other. “What are you doing for the campaign?”

“I'm the flack.” Kate looked puzzled, and Tracy translated. “Media consultant.”

Kate provided her own translation. “You talk to reporters.”

Tracy's blinding smile beamed out again. “You've always been better than average bright, Shugak. I've always liked that about you.”

Mutt interjected with a polite sneeze, and Tracy looked down. “You must be Mutt.” She offered a fist, palm down. Mutt sniffed it, sneezed again, and looked at Kate as if to say, I've had enough of dodging people trying to step on my toes, thanks.

Kate looked around, assessing the room, and picked a spot against the wall opposite the stage. Moving toward it, she said, “I got your letter, and the poem. It meant something, Tracy. Thanks.”

“It helped me some when my dad died. I thought maybe it might you, too. Look, Kate, I won't go here more than once, but I want you to know I'm sorry as hell about Jack.”

Kate could tolerate Tracy's sympathy, just. “Thanks.”

“I have to say, I'm glad you made it, though.”

“Yeah.”

Tracy gave her a sharp look. “One day, you'll be glad, too.”

I don't know, Kate thought. I don't know if I want to be.

“So,” Tracy said, giving a group of men standing not very far away an obvious and provocative once-over,“I hear you're our new security.”

Kate found an overlooked chair, unfolded it, and stood on it. “That's me.”

Tracy's attention was divided equally between the group of men, who were by now looking back, and her conversation with Kate. “Jim Chopin talk you into it?”

Kate looked down from her scan of the crowd. “No. How does he come into it?”

“He's the one who told Darlene to hire you.” Looking toward Darlene standing on the stage conferring with Anne, Tracy added,“I'd have liked to have been in the room when he did to see just how well that went over.”

“I thought it was all Billy's idea.”

Tracy shrugged. “I only know what they tell me.” She gave a theatrical sigh. “Who's the famously hunky Jim Chopin sleeping with nowadays, anyway?”

Kate stared hard at a high school boy who was lighting up what she was fairly certain was a joint. He saw her looking and choked on the first inhalation. The smoke went down the wrong way. Coughing, tears streaming down his face, he stumbled out of the building. “I wouldn't know.”

“Because I am most definitely available.”

“Congratulations,” Kate said.

“What's wrong?” Tracy eyed her with an appraising expression. “You sound a little—”

“What?”

“I don't know, a little testy, I guess.”

“Just hungry, I missed my dinner. I met the new owner of the Ahtna Lodge when I checked in.”

“Who, Tony? Isn't he precious? No hope there for the heterosexual woman, I fear.”

Kate grinned. “All I care about at the moment is how good his cook is.”

Tracy sighed. “Still thinking with your stomach, Shugak. I feel like I'm right back on the fourth floor in Lathrop Dorm.” She watched Darlene aim a long, expressionless look at Kate. She watched Kate meet it with a long, expressionless look of her own. “Oh yeah, right back there. You still pissed at her? It's been a long time.”

“I never did like her much,” Kate said, “even before.”

“I noticed,” Tracy said. “We all did. You didn't have two words to say to anyone that first year, but you had even less to say to Darlene Shelikof. Did you guys know each other before UAF?”

Kate watched a thin young man wedge himself into the first row of the bleachers on her left, his head shaved bald beneath a Cordova District Fishermen United cap. No visible tattoos. He was alone—no, a woman appeared and plunked down in his lap and he laughed and kissed her. Kate dismissed him as a suspect at once. Skinheads never laughed, and they almost never got laid. “No,” she said to Tracy. “I didn't know her before.”

A stocky young man with his mother's dark hair and eyes and his father's quick grin had been introduced to Kate as the candidate's son, Tom. He came up to them, his eyes admiring the redhead. “Hi, Tracy.” He spared Kate a brief glance and no greeting. “Mom wants you.”

Tracy hitched up her portfolio and said,“Duty calls. Later, Kate.”

“Later,” Kate echoed.

The group of men watched Tracy walk past with identical needy expressions on their faces. One of them was the fisherman who'd given Kate a ride in from the airport. Never say die.

There were two television cameras trained on the stage, one at the head of each of the aisles formed by three blocks of metal folding chairs, by now most of which were full. So were the bleachers.

The Gordaoff family was in the center of the front row, and a stream of what Kate from her experience with Emaa holding court at public functions instantly recognized as wannabe toadies formed a more or less continuous line in front of them. Erin, the candidate's daughter, had a nondescript face and a build that combined her father's lean with her mother's padding to make a figure that gave every man in the room whiplash when she walked by. She sat next to a tall blond man, introduced as Jeff Hosford and Erin's fiancé. Erin's senior by at least ten years, he had the blunt features and the pumped-up look of a weight lifter. His right hand rested on the back of Erin's neck. Erin stayed motionless beneath that hand, as if she were on a leash. Kate had been surprised when he was introduced as an attorney with a firm in Anchorage and the campaign's chief fund-raiser. He looked more like muscle for the mob. His smile had been automatic and without feeling, his handshake damp, and he had tried a little too hard.

Peter Heiman came in and was immediately surrounded by supporters of his own, fewer in number, and whiter. Kate wondered how indicative this was of the district as a whole. Maybe Darlene was right, although she hated to entertain that notion for more than a second at a time.

The two candidates took up positions behind their podiums, the two people vying to represent one of the most geographically, culturally, ideologically, and economically diverse regions in a state where, in a gathering of four people there are five marriages, six divorces, and seven political parties. Kate thought of the Park, and she thought they were both crazy, one to want to keep the job, and the other to want to take it away from him.

The Park, twenty million acres of mountain and glacier and river and plain, deep in the heart of Alaska. North and east were the Quilak Mountains, south was Prince William Sound and the Gulf of Alaska, west was the TransAlaska Pipeline and the Alaska Railroad. Its biggest river was the Kanuyaq, two hundred and fifty miles of twist and turn, broad and shallow and filled with sandbars to the south, narrow and deep and boulder-filled to the north, with a thousand creeks and streams draining into it. It's biggest mountain was Angqaq Peak, known to mountain climbers the world over as the Big Bump, eighteen thousand feet and change of rock and ice, attendant peaks of twelve and fourteen and sixteen thousand feet forming an entourage.

For every mountain there was a glacier, thick tongues of millennial ice receding reluctantly to reveal a wide, high plateau that sloped into rolling foothills and a long, curving valley that drained into the Kanuyaq. The Kanuyaq was the Park's well and its breadbasket. It was also the Park's major highway, navigable by boat in summer and by dogsled and snow machine in winter.

One road led into the Park, maintained, barely, by a single grader stationed at Ahtna, the town that marked the junction between the Kanuyaq River Highway and the spur of gravel leading to Niniltna. The grader took a week to scrape the road one way into Niniltna, spent the weekend at Bernie's Roadhouse, and then took a week to scrape back to Ahtna. The road stood up under this assault, as it had been first laid down as a railroad grade a hundred years before, engineered to get the copper out of the Kanuyaq Copper Mine and down to the port of Cordova. When copper prices fell in the thirties, the mine closed and they pulled up the tracks of the Kanuyaq River & Northern Railroad. Park residents followed behind, digging out the ties for use as needed in shack foundations, raised-bed gardens, creek bridges. Bernie had scavenged the last of them, back when he built the Roadhouse in the early '70s, to hold up the bar. The railroad roadbed was still flat, more or less, and still driveable, more or less, or it was in summer. In winter it wasn't plowed, and the Park lay inviolate behind twelve-foot drifts of impassable snow. The most important traffic over it was the fuel truck, and the most important trip it made was the last delivery before Labor Day.

Boats, snow machines, and dogsleds were all very well, but the preferred method of transportation was always and ever air. Everyone with a homestead had their own airstrip, and for those with lesser acreage there was the forty-eight-hundred-foot strip that ran right through downtown Niniltna, which served as the base of operations for George Perry's semi-irregular air taxi service. When George wasn't beating the water at Rocky River, or trysting with the latest girlfriend at his hunting lodge south of Denali.

Kate shut down on all thought of George's lodge and focused on the stage. It was cool in the cavernous room but with this many people it wouldn't stay that way for long. The smells of dried salmon and fresh moose and curing hide and wood smoke saturated the air. She knew many of the people there by sight; others were new to her. Nobody looked like they were carrying, other than those who had knives strapped to their belts, although with Alaska's new concealed-carry permit, available to anyone who trundled themselves down to the local police station to take the class, someone in this crowd could have a rocket launcher stuffed into their boot and she'd never know it.

There was constant motion. In a crowd this big, there were always people on their feet, moving to a new seat, to the water fountain, to the bathroom, outside for a smoke or a drink or a toke. But on the whole, attention was focused on the stage, and on the debate. It surprised her. She had thought that rural Alaska had given up on politics years ago. Of course, Anne Gordaoff was one of their own. She was probably related to more people in the Park than Kate was.

Anne Gordaoff was forty-six years old, a chunky woman with short brown hair in an untidy Dutch boy haircut, big brown eyes with laugh wrinkles fanning away from the corners, a pursed rosebud of a mouth that opened to reveal large, white, even teeth, and a double chin that went away when she raised her head to smile. She smiled a lot.

She was dressed in a conservative brown pantsuit that looked straight out of the Eddie Bauer catalogue, and Kate was willing to bet that the lightweight T-shirt beneath the blazer was one of a dozen in the same color. All the better to disguise the wear and tear of travel. Practical. Comfortable. Conservative, except for the dancing-shaman brooch that dominated a lapel. If Kate had had a left nut, she would bet it all on the possibility that a Park artist had made the brooch and that the artist was in the audience tonight.

The debate moderator was a plump woman with a neat cap of short blonde hair. She was also smart, articulate, and well informed on Alaskan issues. She pushed both candidates right into the deep end with a question on subsistence. Anne came down hard in favor of rural preference, Peter playing the same tune in a lower key and, as a consequence, sounding less radical and less angry.

“The people who have been hunting and fishing these lands for the last ten thousand years ought to be the ones who have preference, especially in times of shortage,” Anne said in reply. “It is unconscionable for the state government to say to the upriver Athabascans and the downriver Yupik,‘You cannot fish the Yukon River this year because we must meet quotas for the commercial fishermen.’ ”

Jeff Hosford walked by Kate's chair, talking into the cell phone that seemed to be permanently attached to his right ear. He looked up and saw Kate watching him. His smile was slow and insolent, and he stripped her with his eyes. It was obvious from his expression that she was now expected to leap into his arms and wrestle him to the floor. When she let her gaze drift past him as if he weren't even there, he couldn't stand it and walked over. “Ms. . . . Shugak, isn't it?”

“Mr. Hosford.”

“You're our campaign security?” The amused disbelief in his voice was provocative.

“I am.”

“A cute little thing like you?”

“Yup.”

“I've heard about you, you know. Everybody has. I don't . gure half of it's true.”

“Could you step to one side, please? I need a clear view of the stage.”

He lurked around her peripheral vision for a few more moments, and then moved on. Jerk.

“Well, now, Anne, in times of shortages, I'd have to agree with you,” Peter said, and gave the issue an adroit twist. “But what about the Natives living in Anchorage? There's about thirty thousand of them, at the last census, and more moving in every day. They call Anchorage Alaska's largest Native village. Are you saying that because they have chosen to live in an urban environment that they have lost all rights to fish and hunt where their parents and grandparents did?”

Peter was trying to get Anne to say that she preferred Native preference, period, for hunting and fishing priorities, which was almost certainly true but which would lose her a lot of non-Native votes in the district and probably the election, but Anne was too smart for that.

“I am saying, Peter, that the people who live off the land should be allowed to do just that in times of shortage, and that the people who have a cultural history of subsistence hunting and fishing should also be allowed to continue to do so.”