A Fine and Bitter Snow

7

Kate had given a potlatch for her grandmother. This would be her second, and she felt relatively experienced. The place-the gym-was set and the principal was declining rent. “Even if their, er, lifestyle wasn’t one that we would want to set up as an example for the children,” she told Kate, and since the woman hadn’t been in the Park even a year and was totally clueless, Kate forbore to snarl.

There had to be a lot of food, but everyone would bring a dish, so all Kate had to do was make sure there was pop and that it was cold. George had promised to fill up a plane and would only charge for freight. She had coerced the senior class into filling half a dozen coolers with snow.

There ought to be gifts to give away, things that would remind the guests of Dina. That was more difficult, especially since Ruthe was still hanging on to life by a thread in the Chief William Memorial Hospital in Ahtna, and Kate did not know which of Dina’s possessions Ruthe would want to keep.

Kate had flown to Ahtna two days before, to sit vigil next to Ruthe, a figure swathed in bandages, hooked up to enough machines to launch a space shuttle. One was breathing for her. The doctor, who was personally acquainted with Kate Shugak’s built-in bullshit detector, was very frank. “We’ve done all we can. It’s up to her now.”

So Kate settled into an uncomfortable armchair and read out loud for two hours, parts of Travels with Charley, The Monkey Wrench Gang, and even a few entries out of Alaska’s Wilderness Medicines. She thought Ruthe had given a tiny smile when she read the entry on devil’s club, but it could have been her imagination.

Her shift ended and Chick’s began. He had a nice mellow baritone and sang a pretty good folk song. Kate listened at the door to a few lines of “The Unfortunate Miss Bailey” before Mandy materialized in front of her with cups of coffee. They sat together in the lounge. “You headed back home?” Mandy said. She was a rangy woman with short, prematurely graying hair and skin weathered by long days in the Arctic sun.

Kate nodded. “I’ve got the potlatch to get ready for.”

“Yeah. We’ll be back for that.”

Kate looked at Ruthe lying in the bed, unmoving. “Is the whole Park coming to Ahtna in shifts?”

“Kind of looks like it. Auntie Joy was with her when we got here, but then, she lives right down the road.” In Alaskan terms, “right down the road” meaning within seventy miles. “I think people are just showing up. Dan O’Brian said he’d bring a copy of d-2 and read it to her.”

“That’ll bring her back,” Kate said, and both women smiled.

“What’s this I hear about Dan being forced to retire?”

Kate shook her head. “Not going to happen. I sicked Auntie Vi on it.”

“Well, if anyone can get the job done.”

“Yeah. Did I hear correctly-that he was standing over the bodies when Dandy walked in?” Mandy continued.

“Yeah. He’d stopped by to ask them for help with his job.”

“Wow.” Mandy expelled a breath. “He must have almost walked in on whoever did it.”

“I wish he had.” Mandy was avoiding Kate’s eyes. Now Kate remembered how Dandy Mike had stared at her, open-mouthed, as she had rushed by on her way to her snow machine. “What?”

Mandy shrugged uncomfortably. “Dandy’s been saying some stuff.”

Kate’s shoulders tensed. “About me and Jim Chopin?” she said, keeping her voice even.

“Yeah. At Dina and Ruthe’s cabin. He said you were fighting.”

Kate stared. “What?”

“He said you were fighting. Well, he said you were using Jim for target practice. And I saw Jim at the post office in Niniltna yesterday; he’s got a shiner. A beauty.”

“He does?”

Mandy smiled. “Yes. He does.”

Kate felt herself relaxing. “Oh. Ah. Well.”

“Why’d you hit him?”

“Because he deserved it,” Kate said swiftly, if inaccurately.

“What, did he try to make a move?”

Kate didn’t know what to say without giving herself away. Mandy had been too close a friend for too long. Fortunately for Kate, Mandy decided to answer herself. “Like he never did that before.”

“Right,” Kate said. “Did you mush into Ahtna?”

Mandy shook her head. “No.” She was still curious. She’d never heard of Jim Chopin pressing unwanted advances on anyone. He’d never had to-most women crumbled at the first long look, the first smile that said, I know you. Let me show you how well. And Mandy did know Kate Shugak better than most. Enough to know when the NO trespassing sign was out. “No place to kennel the dogs.”

“Who’s taking care of them while you’re gone?”

“Didn’t he tell you?”

“No,” Kate said, “no, he didn’t tell me anything.” She caught Mandy’s look and said, “I’m sorry. ”Who?“

“Johnny. Johnny’s stopping by on his way to and from school to take care of the dogs.”

“No kidding. He know what he’s doing?”

Mandy reflected. “More or less.”

“You paying him?”

“More or less. He wants to learn to mush.”

“He wants to learn everything,” Kate said.

They smiled at each other. The little lost boy, did he but know it, was lost no more.

On Saturday, before the potlatch, Kate went back up to the Step. Dan was sitting behind his desk. “Hey, Kate.”

She surveyed him critically as she took a seat. “You don’t look as peaked as you did the last time I saw you. The bruise is fading.”

“Yeah.” He rubbed his head. “That Dandy throws a mean door.”

Kate laughed and tossed him a bag. “Here, couple pieces of Auntie Vi’s fry bread. They’re cold, but you can nuke ‘em.”

“Marry me,” Dan said, and took her advice and popped them in the microwave. “Almost as good as right out of the pan,” he managed to say around a mouthful. “If you won’t marry me, I’m trying for Auntie Vi.”

“Have you heard anything?”

“About the job? I’m still suspended.”

“I notice you’re also still here.”

“Yeah,” he said, and grinned. It did her heart good to see it. “I got a couple of calls-none from my boss-saying I should stick it out and make ‘em fire me. The thing is, Kate…”

“What?”

He brushed crumbs from his shirt. “The Park Service subsists on a budget set every two years by Congress, just like every other government bureaucracy. The funds within that bureaucracy are allocated, allegedly, on a case-per-case basis, according to greatest need. Unless there are specific congressional requirements that set aside particular funding for any given project, the money goes into a general operating budget. And that budget is overseen by the secretary of the interior, who handpicks his or her staff members, one of whom is my boss. The secretary, you will note, is a political appointee, who serves at the whim of the president, a president who can fire his or her ass.”

“I got it, Dan. I think I had it before I sat down.”

“Yeah, well, I just don’t want the Park to suffer because the secretary or one of her minions doesn’t happen to like the chief ranger. And hell, it’s not like I wouldn’t want my own people in charge if I were taking over.” He brooded. “Ah hell. I figure whatever happens, I’ll deal with it.”

“Good attitude. In the meantime, what’s going on?”

“What’s going on is that all the bears are asleep, the moose are bedded down by the rivers, conserving energy, and the Kanuyaq caribou will start getting thinned down”- he looked at the calendar-“in four days, which will considerably relieve my mind. Other than that, there isn’t much going on. Have to start going through applications for summer hires. Shovel some snow off the roof.”

“You lonely up here all by yourself?”

He shrugged. “No.” His grin was sly this time. “Course, I’m not up here all by myself all the time.”

Kate rolled her eyes. “Right. What was I thinking. How’s Christie?”

“Perfect.” But he didn’t look as smug as he ought to have when he said it.

“Trouble in paradise?” she said lightly.

He crumpled the paper bag and tossed it in the trash.

Then the in box needed straightening. “No,” he said. “No trouble.”

Okay. “See you at the potluck?”

His brow lightened. “I’ll be down.”

“Good. Because you know the fry bread was just an appetizer.”

It got a smile out of him, but Kate worried about him all the way down from the Step.

It beat worrying about herself.

She opened the doors to the gymnasium at precisely 12:00 p.m., and people began to stream inside. Dandy Mike had come early and helped her set up the long tables that lined the front of the cafeteria window. Fortunately, he also knew the secret to making the bleachers come out of the wall, because Kate certainly didn’t. The coolers were beneath the tables, loaded with six different kinds of pop. The tabletops were soon obscured beneath a layer of meat loaf, macaroni and cheese, blood stew, cinnamon rolls, seventeen different kinds of fruit bread as well as innumerable loaves of homemade white bread, caribou ribs, moose roast, and the last silver of someone’s fishing season, rescued from the cache and roasted whole. There were enormous bowls of mashed potatoes and boiled carrots, along with bean salad, macaroni salad, fruit salad, carrot salad, and five different kinds of coleslaw. There were sheet cakes and layer cakes, pumpkin, apple, and cherry pies, brownies, angel bars, and homemade butterscotch candy. They’d done Dina proud.

Kate kept up with the napkins and the plastic flatware while exchanging greetings with the people filling their plates on the other side of the table. Knots of people gathered on the bleachers, and more people streamed in, then more, and the hum of conversation became first a din and then a roar. It wasn’t long before the little kids found the basketball closet and began practicing free throws at the opposite end of the court.

At 1:30, the drummers assembled onstage and the room quieted momentarily. “Hey, everybody,” Wilson Mike said, raising drum and stick, and “Hey, Wilson,” everybody said back.

“We’re singing for Dina today,” Wilson said, “and you’re dancing,” and before he struck the second note and the singers got started on their first song, people were out in the middle of the gym floor, shoes off, feet moving and finger fans counting the beat. Everybody had on winter clothes, so it wasn’t long before they started sweating, too. It was noisy, and for the most part not very graceful, and filled with joy. It lifted Kate’s heart to see it.

She was behind a table, dispensing gifts. Well, one gift, the same gift over and over, a reprint of the group photo taken at the Kanuyaq Mine those many years ago. She’d gotten the owner of the Ahtna Photo Shop out of bed on her trip in to see Ruthe and had him make up a negative and run two hundred prints, then bullied him further into doing a rush order from Anchorage on some wooden frames. They weren’t all the same frame, but the picture was going over very well. “Ayapu,” Auntie Vi said. “That the time that man Smith, he flying tourists to the mine from Cordova.” She was silent, looking at the photograph. The frame she had picked was dark blue wood, and it set off the black-and-white photograph very well. “Ekaterina, she look so young. Dina, and Ruthe, too. And Ray Chevak, hmm, yes.” She cast Kate a sideways glance. “You know Ray Chevak?”

Kate, unruffled, said, “I met him in Bering this summer.”

Auntie Vi nodded. “I go dance now.”

“Knock ‘em dead, Auntie,” Kate said, and shooed her off. Billy Mike met Auntie Vi halfway and matched her steps into the circle.

One thing you could say for Park rats, they sure did love to dance. All ages, all sexes, all sizes, they were, to a man and a woman, dancing fools. There was no such thing as a wallflower in Niniltna, of either sex. It helped that most of the time the dancing was Native, en masse and the more the merrier. You could dance with one partner or twenty, but the one thing you never had to do was dance alone.

She turned, bumping into Pete Heiman as she did. “Well, hey, Pete, just the guy I wanted to see. I hoped you’d be here this afternoon.”

He laughed. “I’m afraid, very afraid.”

“Step into my office,” Kate said, and led the way through a side door.

Outside, the snow was falling in small soft flakes. Kate heard a plane take off but couldn’t see it. There were some men clustered together at the end of the building, sharing a bottle. Kate repressed the urge to glare at them and looked back at Pete.

Pete lit a cigarette. “What’s up, Kate?” Through the smoke, his eyes were watchful.

His eyes were always watchful. Pete Heiman was the duly elected senator for District 41, which included the Park, and, as such, every Park rat’s Juneau mouthpiece. He was also an old drinking buddy of Abel’s, and Kate had known him all her life. She liked him, but she didn’t trust him. Still, he was her mouthpiece, too. “Dan O’Brian’s been suspended as chief ranger for the Park. They’re trying to pressure him into early retirement.”

“Dan the ranger.” Pete drew on his cigarette. “Well, well. I hadn’t heard.”

“You’re a little slower than usual on the uptake, then, it’s all over the Park. No one wants him to go, Pete. Can you call someone?”

Pete had run for reelection that fall, and Kate had worked for his opponent, who had almost beaten him and would have if a couple of nasty little murders hadn’t gotten in the way, so technically he was under no obligation to grant Kate a favor. On the other hand, this was Kate Shugak asking him a favor. Kate could all but hear the gears ticking over between Pete’s ears.

“Whom would you suggest I call?”

He was stalling, and they both knew it. Pete Heiman had been a card-carrying Republican from his cradle; his father and his grandfather had seen to that. If he didn’t know whom to call, nobody did. “I’ve got people working the phones here, too,” Kate said.

“Which people?”

“Just people,” Kate said. “Come on, Pete. You know you have to. If you don’t, you’ll be the only one who doesn’t, and where does that put you? Better it sounds like it’s your idea.”

“Are you under the impression that I owe you anything?”

“No. No, I’m not.”

“So then you’d owe me.”

“Careful,” Kate said, opening the door. “The last person who said that to me is dead.”

Inside, he caught her arm. “Who’s that blonde?” He nodded at Christie Turner, who was dancing next to Dandy Mike in the circle.

“Bernie’s new barmaid.”

The song was thundering to a finish. “Introduce us.”

“Bernie will kill me,” Kate muttered. “Not to mention Dan.” But she did as she was told, a down payment on the payback.

Christie accepted an invitation to dance, and since the drummers were taking a break, Pete guided her to a chair instead and brought her a plateful of choice morsels. Kate, watching from behind the gift table, saw the infamous Heiman charm begin to have its inevitable effect. Pete had a weakness for blondes, having married three of them. She hoped Christie had the backbone to resist, because Pete’s ego was already big enough. Plus, he had to be at least thirty years her senior, not to mention her prior relationship with Dan. Where was Dan? She looked around but didn’t see him.

“Kate.”

She stiffened. “Jim.”

“Thought I’d drop by to pay my respects.” It was politic for the resident trooper to put in an appearance at big ceremonial events, something in the way of a diplomatic mission. And he’d known and liked Dina. And he’d known Kate would be there.

He looked at the picture in its many frames. “Nice idea.” He picked a dark blue one and slipped it into an inside pocket. “I wondered how you’d get around the gift thing.”

She took a careful breath. “People seem to like them. And I didn’t want to give any of Dina’s stuff away. Have you talked to the hospital today?”

He nodded. “The same.”

When he looked at her, she saw a fading corner-shaped bruise on his left temple. She hugged her elbows, caught in a sudden draft. Or so she told herself. “How long can she stay like that?”

“She’s not in pain.”

“How do we know that?”

“We don’t.”

“Then don’t say it.”

“Sorry.”

There was a pause, broken by her stomach growling.

“Are you hungry?” he said.

“No.” Her stomach growled again.

“I’ll get us plates.” He walked away.

I’ll get us plates. I’ll get us plates. Whichever way you looked at it, the phrase made her nervous.

As if she had conjured him up, Ethan materialized in front of her, Johnny in tow. “Hey.” He leaned over to kiss her just as Jim came back. Kate turned so that she caught the kiss on her cheek. Ethan’s eyes narrowed. Jim handed one plate to Kate, and smiled at Ethan. Ethan didn’t smile back. “Kate,” Ethan said, “I’ve got to talk to you.”

“I’m kind of busy, Ethan.” Just then, the drummers started up again and circles formed on the floor. Johnny said hopefully, “Urn, will you teach me to dance?”

“Sure!” Kate said, and followed him to the floor, trying not to run.

Jim sat down and put the second plate to one side. “I’ll just keep this for Kate,” he said to Ethan, and began to eat under Ethan’s baleful glare. “You should eat, Ethan. There’s some great stuff on the table.”

“Stay away from her,” Ethan said.

Well now, Jim thought. It seemed that Ethan didn’t know that Jim had recently been where no Ethan had gone before. He wondered why Dandy Mike was holding his fire. Probably hoping that it would get him a job. “That’s her choice,” he said.

“Stay away from her, goddamn it.”

Jim smiled at him again, and it was about as friendly an expression as it had been before. “You’re still married, aren’t you, Ethan?” He watched with interest as Ethan’s fair skin flushed right up to the roots of his hair. “You thinking you can have your cake and eat it, too? If so, you don’t know your women.” He took a ruminative bite of macaroni and cheese casserole, then added in a voice as patronizing and as patriarchal as he could make it, “But then, I never thought you did.”

For a moment, he hoped he might have gone too far, but no. Ethan regrouped and gave him a contemptuous look. “Big talk from the man with the badge.”

Oh. Right. He was in uniform. “Happy to take it off for the duration, Ethan,” he said softly. “Just for you.”

“Fuck you,” Ethan said after a simmering moment, and stalked away.

“He doesn’t appear to like you,” said Pete Heiman, who was sitting next to Jim with Bernie’s new barmaid, whose big blue eyes were even bigger and bluer than usual.

“He sure doesn’t,” she said. Her voice was light and breathy, perhaps consciously so, and her gaze was languishing. Jim looked at her and, as an experiment, tried to exercise the inner muscle that always used to come into play when he was faced with a pretty woman. Nothing. He was appreciative but not covetous. Interesting. But not as alarming as it had been.

He returned to his plate, his appetite good.

Meanwhile, out on the dance floor, Bobby Clark had joined Kate and Johnny. As his wheelchair rolled back and forth to the beat, Dinah danced around all three of them with Katya, who was in a backpack, waving a rattle. Mandy and Chick were down the circle a bit, Mac Devlin was doing his usual lumbering grizzly bear impression, and Bernie and Edith were jitterbugging, which was an interesting, though obviously not impossible, exercise to the beat of Native drums.

The drums beat once, twice, three times, each time harder and louder than the time before, and a cheer went up from the gymnasium floor when the last one struck. Kate handed Johnny over to Auntie Vi, from whom he would learn the smoothest moves, and went to the microphone set up at one side of the stage. “Hello the Park,” she said.

“Hello!” the crowd shouted back.

“We’re here today to honor the memory of one of our own. You know who I mean.”

“Dina!” they answered with one voice.

“That’s right, Dina Willner. She died a week ago yesterday, and we’ll miss her. But we’ll never forget her. And this is why.”

Kate primed the pump by telling the story of Dina teaching her to rappel. She told it well, keeping it light and at her own expense, and everyone laughed.

She was followed to the microphone by Mac Devlin, who glowered out at the crowd from beneath wiry red brows and growled, “God knows, Dina and me hardly ever agreed on nothing. She was a greenie from the word go, and I think the best thing you can do with a tree is cut it down and make something out of it somebody can eat off of or sit down on. But”-he fixed the crowd with a gimlet eye- “she weren’t no stealth greenie. What she was and what she believed was right out front for everybody to see, and she fought clean. I won’t go so far as to say I’ll miss her, but I respected her.” He added gruffly, “And she was a good friend to everyone in the Park, whether you agreed with her or not. My house burned down and she was first to step forward and offer me a place to stay until I got rebuilt. She was a good friend to the Park,” he repeated. “Nobody can say better than that.”

Kate eased from the stage as Auntie Vi followed Mac. “Alaka, that Dina,” Auntie Vi said, and everyone laughed just from the expression on her animated face. “I remember that time of ANCSA and we all go to Washington, D.C., when Dina gets into a fight with the secretary of the interior. Ayapu, she thinks she’s Muhammad Ali, that girl-”

Kate moved over to lean against the wall. “Here,” Jim said, handing her a plate. “Eat.”

Kate’s stomach was still growling and the plate was heaped with all manner of good things, so she took it, but she managed to get her mouth so full that her “Thanks” was barely audible.

“You know that lockbox you beaned me with?” He watched her as he said the words. One of the minor annoyances with being hung up on someone with brown skin was she might be blushing and you’d never know it. “It had some interesting paperwork in it.”

“Oh?” Kate said, her voice uncompromising in the extreme.

“Private paperwork.”

“What kind?”

He looked down at her, mostly because he was almost two feet taller than she was. “Did you know Dina had been married?”

Kate choked on a mouthful of macaroni and cheese. She coughed, then coughed again. She was making so much noise, she was interfering with the current speaker, Bernie, who was telling the tale of Dina teaching him how to make a bean drink. “Dina insisted on celery salt,” he was saying, “and you had to pour a little of the water from the jar of pickled beans into the glass, too. The only trouble was that she was usually half in the bag by the time she developed an ambition to come around to my side of the bar, and she used about a half a fifth of Absolut while she was at it, which meant there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot of room left for the bean juice. So she’d drink off the vodka. And then, of course, she’d have to top off the drink.” He paused, then added, “She was without a doubt the worst bartender I’ve ever not employed.”

Kate took the same side door she’d led Pete through. Once outside, she coughed some more and then sneezed violently twice in succession. Her eyes were tearing when finally, wheezing, she said, “What?”

“I guess you didn’t,” Jim said, handing her a napkin. She mopped her tears and blew her nose. “I found a marriage certificate. You’ll never guess who to.”

She looked at him.

“John Letourneau.”

She gaped at him.

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“But I thought-Ruthe and Dina-”

“Yeah,” he repeated. “So thought we all.”

She remembered, and her eyes narrowed in a way that was reminiscent enough to put him on alert. “But you-”

“Yeah.” He refused to apologize. He and Ruthe had been consenting adults. Further, he refused to kiss and tell. “I was new to the Park. I didn’t hear they were a couple until after. She never said. There’s something else.”

Kate couldn’t begin to imagine what else. “What, Dina owned stock in Exxon?” It was about as believable. She remembered the two beds in Ruthe and Dina’s loft. But they were in their seventies. A lot of older couples chose to sleep alone, sometimes even in separate bedrooms.

He laughed. “No, nothing that bad.” He sobered. “Kate, I’m wondering about Higgins.”

“The guy you caught with the murder weapon in his hand?”

“I know,” he said, “I know. I’ve got him locked up in Tok. Would you fly up with me and talk to him, tell me what you think?”

Kate was taken aback. “You’re asking me for a consultation on a closed case?”

“Maybe it isn’t closed.”

“Oh, let me guess. He says he didn’t do it.”

“He says he doesn’t know, but, since I caught him with the knife, he figures he probably did.”

“How original.”

“The Carbondale chief sent me his sheet. There’s no history of violence, none, not ever.”

“What about his war record? His time in Vietnam?”

He shook his head. “None that they caught him at.” “Just talk to him,” Jim said. “I’d like to have your opinion.” He paused. “Please.”

The “Please” unnerved her, knocked her off balance. She opened the door and peered inside.

Pete was at the mike, talking about the time Dina lobbied the Juneau legislature to pass the permanent-fund dividend. “The woman never bought a drink,” he was saying; “she thought that’s what legislators were for.”

But the potlatch was winding down. Christie was sitting on the edge of the stage, holding court. Kate didn’t see Dan. A line had already formed in the cafeteria kitchen to wash the dishes, people were shrugging into coats, stamping into boots, and rounding up children, and the drummers had packed up. She could make sure Johnny didn’t go home without escort, ask Auntie Vi to oversee the cleanup. Avoid Ethan.

“I’ll get my coat,” she said.