A taint in the blood

A Taint in the Blood

Dana Stabenow

1

“I’ll get it," Kate said, and fetched the Crisco forthwith.

Auntie Vi eyed her. "Your auntie not that old, Katya." "I know, Auntie," Kate said. "But I was closer." She had, in fact, been in the next room at the time, but Auntie Vi, exercising monumental, not to mention unnatural, restraint, forbore to comment.

"I can do that," Kate said, taking the scraper out of Old Sam's hand. The
Freya
was in dry dock, where her hull had been drying out above the high-tide line in preparation for a new coat of copper paint.

Old Sam took the scraper back. "I can do it myself." "I know, but I can help," Kate said, reaching for the scraper again.

Old Sam warded her off. "Yeah, and the next thing I'll be listening to you whine about getting the goddamn copper paint outta your hair. Now you get outta mine, girl."

"I can do that," Kate told Bernie, and took the bar rag out of his hand.

"You know that's what I do," Bernie said, watching her with a wary eye.

"I know, but I'm here," Kate said, chasing an elusive drop of beer.

"You certainly are," Bernie said, and went to pour himself a beer, an event almost unheard of in the annals of the Roadhouse, then sat down at a table, an event unparalleled in memory of man.

"Oh, shut up," she told Harvey Meganack at the July board meeting. "You know Billy's right. Any moron knows there's no way the shareholders are going to vote to open up Iqaluk to drilling anyway."

Harvey's face turned a dark and unbecoming red.

There was a collective suck of indrawn air around the conference table in the Niniltna Native Association's boardroom, followed by a thud as the forelegs of Billy Mike's chair hit the floor. "You know, Kate," he said, "I really appreciate you dropping by."

He propelled her to her feet and frog-marched her to the door.

"I was just trying to—"

"Come back anytime," he said, closing the door in her face.

"That's nice of you, Kate," Ruthe Bauman said, looking askance at the cord of wood stacked next to the back door of her cabin. "It'll go real well with the five cords I already ordered from Darryl Totemoff."

"You can never have too much firewood," Kate said.

Ruthe looked down into Kate's earnest face. "No," she said, "I suppose you can't."

"Give her to me," Kate said, stretching out her arms.

Bobby glared. "I can diaper my own damn daughter!" he bellowed. "What the hell's got into you, Shugak, the Red Cross? Jesus!"

Hurt, Kate said, "I just wanted to help."

"Well, stop it!" Bobby said. He rolled his chair over to Katya's changing table. Katya stared at Kate over his shoulder, blue eyes blinking at Kate from beneath a corkscrew assortment of black curls.

Kate went to stand next to Dinah. "I could dry those dishes for you," she said in a small voice.

"You can wash them, dry them, and put them away if you want," Dinah said amiably.

Brightening, Kate took the sponge and waded in.

"What in hell is going on with that broad?" Bobby demanded of his wife, soul mate, and chosen partner in life when the sound of Kate's truck had faded across the Squaw Candy Creek bridge. "I can't lift a hand in my own goddamn house! For crissake, Dinah, I'm not some cripple!"

"I know," Dinah said soothingly. In fact, he was missing both his legs below the knee, souvenir of a land mine in Vietnam, but it wasn't as if it slowed him down much. Or at all.

Bobby settled Katya into her crib for her afternoon nap. Katya, infuriatingly, stuck her thumb in her mouth and her butt up in the air, gave a deep, satisfied burp, and promptly fell asleep. "She never does that for me," Dinah said enviously.

But Bobby was not to be distracted. "So what's wrong with her?"

Dinah deduced correctly that he wasn't speaking of their daughter. His face—taut black skin stretched over high cheekbones, a broad brow, and a very firm chin—bore an anxious expression, which didn't become him, mostly because she'd never seen it before. Her heart melted, and she subsided gracefully into the lap that there was enough left of his legs to make. "I think it's her house."

He was honestly bewildered. "Her house?"

"The one the Park built for her. I think she feels like she owes us."

He still didn't get it, but he was calming down. He tucked a strand of white-blond hair behind her ear. "Why us?"

"Not just us us," Dinah said. "Everybody in the Park us. Everyone who had a hand in the construction and the furnishing thereof anyway. And the purchase of materials for."

"Oh, sure," Bobby said after a moment. "I get it. Her cabin burns down and the Park rats build her a new one, so she turns herself into a one-woman version of the Salvation Army, with a little Jimmy Carter thrown in?"

"All summer long," Dinah said, nodding her head. "Billy Mike told me he had to throw her out of an NNA meeting before things escalated into a shooting war."

Dinah was happy when Bobby grinned and then threw back his head and laughed out loud. "I'd like to have been a fly on the wall that day."

"Yeah, Billy said Kate kept insisting on telling the truth, out loud and in front of God and everybody. Said it took him a month to calm the board down to where he could get a decent vote out of them."

Bobby shook his head. "How long do you think she's going to keep this up?"

"I don't know. Edna told me Kate got her and Bernie a counselor so they could work on their marriage. Annie Mike says Kate's been calling in favors all the way up to the state supreme court to help out with Vanessa's adoption." Dinah paused, and said with a straight face, "I hear tell she took Keith and Oscar fishing for reds down at the aunties' fish camp."

Bobby stared at her with an expression as close to awe as his face could humanly manage. "You gotta be shittin' me, Cook-man."

Dinah shook her head, grave as a judge. "I shit you not, Clark. She camped out with them, and then she took them into Cordova, where she treated them to breakfast at the Coho Cafe."

Bobby whooped so loudly this time that Katya grumbled and wiggled her butt. There were actual tears of mirth in Bobby's eyes. "Did they hit on any of the fishermen?"

"Not that I've heard."

He wiped his eyes. "She's gonna help the whole friggin' Park into an early grave is what she's gonna do."

Dinah grinned. "If someone doesn't help her there first. I also hear tell that she was sitting in on one of the aunties' quilting bees at the Roadhouse the other night."

There was a moment of dumbstruck disbelief. Bobby's jaw might even have dropped.

"She sewed the quilt they were working on to her jeans."

This time, his whoop was so loud, Katya did wake up.

"Okay," Old Sam said. He took a deep, calming breath and removed the boat hook from Kate's hand.

"But Uncle-"

"Go to the galley," he said. "Write fish tickets."

"But-"

"Go. Now."

Old Sam didn't sound calm that often, and when he did, it always presaged a force 10 storm. Johnny held on to his pew with both hands, watching with wide eyes as Kate obeyed orders, and spent the rest of the sunny August afternoon stuck at the galley table, writing fish tickets for fishermen who were always absolutely certain that they had delivered half a dozen more reds than Old Sam had counted when they were transferring them to the
Freyd's
hold. Even Mutt deserted her, preferring the open air on the bow to the claustrophobic confines of the galley. Miserable, Kate didn't blame her.

When the period ended and the last fisherman cast off, Old Sam fired up the engine and they left Alaganik Bay for the cannery in Cordova. Johnny hid out in the chart room, nose stuck assiduously in an beat-up paperback copy of Zenna Henderson's
Pilgrimage.
They could have used a Presence on the
Freya,
was what he was thinking.

Old Sam didn't say a word to Kate the whole way, even when she brought his lunch to the bridge. It was a corned beef sandwich, too, with lots of mayo and mustard and a layer of lettuce thick enough to choke a horse, served on homemade sourdough bread, his favorite sandwich in the whole entire world.

Still in silence, they delivered their fish, took on fuel, and found their slip in the boat harbor. Shitting Seagull waved from the harbormaster's shack and disappeared, leaving Kate to wonder why he hadn't come down to say hi like he always did. She had a bit of walrus tusk that she'd scored from Ray in Bering, part of a gift package she'd received from the Chevak family. She should probably head on out to Bering sometime soon, come to think of it, see if Stephanie was the youngest astronaut in NASA yet, and if she wasn't, to sit down and help her figure out a career path to get her there.

In the meantime, the walrus tusk would go to Gull, who carved ivory whenever he got his hands on some, and sold the results through a gift shop in Anchorage. If they hadn't already been presold to Andromedans who'd stopped in town on a joyride from the Great Spiral Nebula. Kate pulled the last knot tight and climbed the ladder to the wheelhouse.

"Hold it," Old Sam said. He was still sitting in the captain's chair, tilted back against the bulkhead.

She paused. "What's up, Uncle?"

He cranked his head around the door into the chart room. "You?"

"Me?" Johnny said.

"You. Uptown. Go visit your girlfriend."

"I don't have a girlfriend," Johnny said.

"Find one."

Johnny delayed long enough to mark the page in his book, and vanished.

Old Sam pointed at a stool. "You," he said to Kate. "Sit."

She sat. "What?" she said. She craned her neck to see Johnny hotfooting it down the float toward the harbormaster's shack. Probably going to ask Gull what alien ships were moored in transient parking this week. Last time they were there, it had been Cetaceans. Or maybe a bureaucrat from the Council of Planets on a regular inspection, driving Gull nuts with demands for colder water to cool the drives. She kind of lost track of Gull's hallucinations after a couple of trips into town.

"You've got to get a grip, Katya," Old Sam said.

The lack of the usual bombast and profanity, plus the use of her family name, pulled her gaze back to the old man. Honestly bewildered, she said, "A grip on what, Uncle?"

"You're gonna mother us to death, whether we want you to or not," he said. "And mostly we don't."

"I-what?"

"So we built you a house," he told her. "Ain't nothing we wouldn't have done for any of us in the same situation, specially if there was a kid involved. I know, I know," he said, holding up a hand to ward off her protestations, "you always pay your debts. If s one of the qualities that make you a marginally acceptable human being."

Overwhelmed by this unaccustomed amount of praise heaped all at once upon her head, Kate remained silent.

"The thing you don't get," he said, fixing her with a stern and piercing eye, "is that you don't owe us squat. Shut up."

Kate closed her mouth.

"One of our own lost her home. We, her family, friends, and neighbors, replaced it with a couple days' labor and, when it comes down to it very little cost to ourselves."