The Singing of the Dead (14 page)

“Out of town where?”

“They didn't know.”

She reported on this happy state of affairs to Kenny Hazen.

His response was predictable. “I really do not like this, Kate. I really do not like it at all.”

Five days later, or maybe it was thirteen, Kate had lost track of time, Anne and Company were back in Ahtna for yet another appearance, this one the opening game of the basketball season in which the Ahtna High School was heavily favored to win the Class-B state championship, at which Anne tossed up the jump ball. The game was followed by yet another rubber chicken dinner, although this one was rubber salmon, with the Chamber of Commerce, only this one was with the Kegturyaq Native Association's board of directors. Kate checked out the gym and the dining room for the usual suspects, as usual didn't find any, and ducked out early for the hotel with the uneasy feeling that she was not earning her keep. There had been no more letters, no one had so much as sneezed in Anne's direction, unless you counted the drunk in the Alaskan Bar in Cordova who pinched her ass and propositioned her with her husband standing right next to her, and nobody did.

Darlene hadn't said anything about letting her go, though.

And here she was again, in beautiful downtown Ahtna, once again checking into the Ahtna Lodge. Tony simply beamed when he saw her coming, and this time he was ready for Mutt, a package of beef jerky open and waiting. Mutt accepted a piece, laid it down carefully on the floor, trotted behind the counter to rear up, place both paws on Tony's shoulders and give him the traditional salutary tongue bath. “You are so cheap,” Kate said when she came out again. Mutt wagged her tail furiously and went for the jerky.

“How's life out on the campaign trail?”

“Pretty dull,” Kate said, signing the receipt he handed her.

“Probably you'd like to keep it that way.” By now Tony, an inveterate gossip, knew more about Anne Gordaoff's campaign than Anne did.

“Probably,” Kate agreed. “Is the water hot?”

He pretended to be puzzled. “Hot water? What would you need with hot water?”

“Don't toy with me,” she told him, and he laughed and gave her a key. “Same wing, same room. Restaurant's pretty full this evening, might be a wait.” He cocked an eyebrow. “I could bring a sandwich to your room.”

By this time Kate had met and bonded with Tony's cook, Stanislav, who was also his partner, in business and in life. She shook her head. “Forget it. I've been looking forward to one of Stan's steaks for . . . how long have I been gone?”

“Eight days,” Tony said, grinning.

“Whatever. I'll stand in line for Stan.”

“Be our guest.”

She dumped her bag in the room with the two twin beds, television, and communal bathroom down the hall. “You coming?” she said to Mutt, who gave her a look of disdain and curled up on the second bed in the room with her beef jerky.

At the restaurant a waitress said,“Do you mind sharing a table?” and without waiting for an answer grabbed a menu and led the way to a table against the far wall, next to a window that overlooked the river. “Do you mind sharing a table?” she said to the woman already sitting there, and also without waiting for an answer slapped the menu down in front of the seat opposite her before heading at high speed for the bar.

“I guess I don't,” the woman said, looking up at Kate.

“I guess I don't, either, ” Kate said, and they both laughed. Kate held up a book. “We don't have to talk.”

“Good,” the other woman said, indicating a three-subject notebook with the pen she held in her hand. “Sit down, it doesn't look like my date's going to show.”

They smiled at each other again, and Kate sat down. Eventually the waitress came back with water and took Kate's order, and went away again.

Kate didn't open her book immediately, as the moon had risen and was painting pictures on the surface of the river as it flowed past. It was low and slow at this time of year, all the fish up the creek, all the meltoff out in the Gulf, but it was still beautiful. Kate had grown up next to it, on it, sometimes in it, and still it never failed in its allure. One of her favorite books as a child— it was still one of her favorite books, she reread it every spring— was The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. Now there was a writer who understood rivers.

She wondered if Johnny had read it, or Life on the Mississippi . The last time they'd had a civil conversation on the subject of books, he'd been head down in the collected works of Robert Heinlein.

Her steak came, a porterhouse with garlic mashed potatoes and steamed broccoli topped with toasted almonds. Kate had difficulty in repressing a moan of ecstasy. The other woman had been served before her, and they ate in not incompatible silence. Other people finished meals and adjourned to the bar, which got even noisier as the restaurant emptied out. Music started from somewhere and the four-by-eight dance floor filled up.

Kate pushed back from her empty plate with a satisfied burp, and raised her eyes to see the other woman smiling at her. “You were hungry.”

“I was starving,” Kate admitted. “I think I'll live now.”

The other woman's notebook was open. It looked to be almost used up, as well as stuffed with scraps of paper and envelopes and flyers, all with notes written on them.

The waitress appeared. “Coffee?” she said, gathering up their plates.

“Yes, please, ” Kate said. “With cream.”

“Twice,” the other woman said.

“All we've got is creamer,” the waitress said, and was gone.

The other woman went back to her notes, Kate to her book, a novel set on another world where the human settlers left their ship in orbit to control the weather and had bioengineered angels to fly up to talk to it. The only problem was that hundreds of years had passed, and the people on the planet had come to believe the ship was a god. It was a terrific book, and Kate was going to look for more by the same author as soon as she possibly could, but it was failing to hold her attention this evening. Maybe it was the noise from the bar. Maybe it was the woman sitting across from her. She was a large, untidy woman with eager, inquisitive eyes, carelessly dressed in blue jeans a size too large and a teal turtleneck sweater a size too small. She wore no makeup and no jewelry that Kate could see.

The woman said abruptly, startling Kate, “I'm a writer.”

Kate had never been one for small talk, but a writer was interesting. “What do you write?”

“Books.” The other woman flushed, laughed a little. “Well, I'm writing one book.”

“A novel?”

“Yes.” She nodded at the book in Kate's hand. “Not science fiction.”

“You don't like science fiction?”

“I like just about anything,” the woman said. “You should see my library. My trailer is mostly books.”

“My cabin's insulated the same way,” Kate said.

The woman grinned. “Wonder what the R factor is on books. My name's Paula.”

“I'm Kate.”

“Where do you live?”

“Niniltna. You?”

She jerked her head. “Right here. Ahtna.”

“You writing a book about Ahtna?” The idea amused Kate.

“Yes. Well, no, only sort of.” The other woman gave a selfconscious laugh. “That sounds like I really know what I'm doing, doesn't it?”

Kate looked up to see Mutt standing outside the door with her nose leaving prints on the glass pane. Evidently the allure of beef jerky had worn off. She only hoped Mutt hadn't scared the maid who must have let her out of the room too badly to make the bed the next morning; they were staying two nights in Ahtna. She let Mutt in, and Mutt followed her back to the table, sitting next to Kate's chair and looking at the other woman with inquiring yellow eyes.

“God, he's gorgeous,”Paula said.

“She,”Kate said, knotting a hand in Mutt's ruff and giving it an affectionate tug. “Don't tell her that, she's already got enough ego for ten.”

“She looks like a wolf.”

“Only half.”

The woman's eyes widened. “You trust her around people?”

“She's very well trained.”

“I guess.”The woman looked doubtful but didn't run screaming for the nearest exit, either. She pulled her notebook toward her as the waitress showed up with the coffee pot. “We'll be closing soon,”the waitress told them.

“Leave the pot and bring us our checks,”Kate suggested. Mutt stirred beneath her hand. Hunting birds along the Kanuyaq was lousy in September, and lousy in Ahtna all the time. “Have you got a steak left back there?”

“What kind?”

“Raw.”

The waitress looked at Mutt. “Sure.”She smiled for the first time. A dog person. “And maybe some bones.”

Mutt got a slab of prime rib and a nice little pile of bones besides, and lay down to munch with a contented expression. The waitress charged Kate only for the cost of the meat, not the full dinners. Kate doubled her tip. What the hell, it wasn't her money.

The lights in the restaurant, never bright to begin with, dimmed. The crowd at the bar began to mellow, and the songs they danced to got slower and sexier. A short plump man in the standard Park uniform of jeans, checked flannel shirt, and boots drifted over. “Would you like to dance?”he asked Kate.

She shook her head. “No, thanks.”

He looked at Paula. “Sorry,”she said.

He drifted off again mournfully, to be received back at the bar by his friends with commiserating backslaps and another round of Heineken. Kate's eye moved down the bar, checking faces against a mental database of known felons, the invariable habit of the practicing policeman and one she had never bothered to break once she left Anchorage. There was the usual assortment of people wanting to fall in love for the night, a man bundled in a down parka too hot to wear inside, and—she backed up a couple of faces. Tom Gordaoff was bellied up to the bar with his arm around the shoulders of a girl who looked like she ought to have been carded at the door and turned away. They clicked glasses and drank, after which Tom leaned in for a long, slow wet one, his body crowding hers against the bar, one knee forcing her legs apart. Her hands settled on his hips, pulling him in. Perhaps not that young after all, Kate thought, and left them to it.

Her dinner partner was writing in her notebook, hasty scribbles that Kate, usually a good upside-down reader, couldn't decipher. She wondered if she and Mutt were going down into literature as the woman with the wolf. The other woman looked up to see her watching, and colored. “Sorry. I have to write the ideas down as they come to me or I'll lose them.”

“You must go through a lot of notebooks,”Kate said. This one looked like it was on its last legs, held together by two enormous rubber bands.

“I buy them in bulk on Costco runs into Anchorage. I've got one everywhere, on the kitchen counter, in the bathroom, next to my bed. And two or three pens each. You never know when you're going to run out of ink.”

Kate didn't usually waste a lot of time on strangers, so she surprised herself by asking, “Tell me about this book you're writing.”

The woman's big brown eyes brightened, making her look like a ten-year-old. She had about her that childlike quality of instant, innocent enthusiasm, although she had to be in her midto-late forties. “It's an historical novel about Alaska, featuring three generations of women. One comes up with the stampeders during the Gold Rush, her daughter is an Army nurse who flies medivacs to the Aleutians during World War II, and her daughter is a roustabout on the North Slope during the oil boom.” She hesitated. “It's sort of a history of the last hundred years of Alaska, seen through their eyes.”She hesitated again. “They kind of are Alaska, if you know what I mean.”

Kate nodded.

“Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

“You can ask,”Kate said.

“Are you Native?”

Kate laughed. “Like you couldn't tell.”

The other woman blushed. “I'm sorry, that was rude.”

Kate shrugged. “Asked and answered. I'm Native. Aleut, mostly. Why?”

“Aleut? Was your family evacuated out of the Aleutians during the war?”Kate nodded. Paula's eyes gleamed. “Wow. So now the family lives in Niniltna.”

“All over the Park, some in Prince William Sound, a lot of us in Anchorage.”

“Do you think. . . .” The woman paused.

“What?”

“I wanted Natives in my book, but I'm having a hard time getting a handle on what they've been doing in Alaska during the past hundred years. I mean before ANCSA. I mean original source material from actual Natives. All the records are written by whites. Even the records of Castner's Cutthroats. It's irritating as hell.”

“No Alaska tribe had a written language. The Native tradition is oral. And given the way many of them were treated, there were a lot of mixed-race kids who didn't admit to their Native blood if it didn't show on their faces, so a lot of the oral tradition was lost.”It was Kate's turn to hesitate. What the hell. “My father served under Castner.”

“No kidding!”

“No kidding.”

“God. Did he go ashore at Attu?”Kate nodded. “God,” Paula said again, with reverence. “I've read about that. The Japanese didn't give ground easy.”

“Nope.”

“Is he still around, your dad?”

“No.”

“I'm sorry,”the other woman said automatically, although it was obvious that she was sorrier not to be able to interview Stephan Shugak than she was for Kate's loss. She looked up and caught Kate's eye. She flushed again. “Truly, I am sorry.”

“It's okay. It was a long time ago.”

“It still hurts, though,”the other woman said, and when Kate's expression changed, repeated, “I'm sorry. There's nothing worse than unsolicited sympathy.”

“No, there isn't, but it's still okay,”Kate said, and was surprised to find that it was true. Sympathy for something other than Jack's death was almost a relief.

They sat in silence. The moon was high in the sky now, and through the window some of the brighter stars could be seen, Rigel, Betelgeuse. Kate craned her neck to see if the Pleiades were in sight. They were, keeping always and ever just out of Orion's reach. An exquisite torture devised by the goddess of the hunt, one of whose followers Orion had raped. Kate wouldn't have minded Artemis sitting on the parole board when a few of the people she'd arrested came before them. No GET OUT OF JAIL FREE cards for them. She pointed at the notebook. “What was your big idea?”