"Whisper to the Blood" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stabenow Dana)

TWO

The following weekend Kate and Johnny were under the hood of a 1981 Ford F-150 short-bed pickup truck, acquired from the son of one of Auntie Balasha's childhood friends, who had died in Ahtna at the age of ninety-seven after a life spent smoking like a chimney, drinking like a fish, and marrying seven times, which, as the son told Kate, "should be a lesson to us all." The truck had less than 75,000 miles on it and the son had sold it to Johnny for $2,500. It was dark blue, the bed offered up only a few rust spots after the most minute inspection, and Kate had thought on the day of purchase and thought now that it was a steal. She had even made a half-hearted attempt to offer the seller more money, an offer the son, an affable man in spite of being named Zebulon Porkryfki, had waved off. "I think Gramps'd like to see it go to a young man all full of juice and go. No, $2,500'll do."

Kate shrugged. "Okay," she said, and Johnny had whooped for joy. He passed his driving test at the Ahtna DMV that afternoon and she let him drive the whole way home. It was his first time behind the wheel over the Lost Chance Creek Bridge, seven hundred feet long, three hundred feet high, the width of one vehicle-barely-and no railings. He made it across, very slowly and very carefully, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. His father had been afraid of heights, too. "He puked on me once when we were at the top of a mine shaft," she told Johnny when they were safely on the other side, and Johnny had laughed so hard he stalled out the truck.

Today they were looking at the engine, a superfluous activity because in operation the pickup sounded like a contented tiger. Kate had had Rachel in Anchorage send up a Chilton's manual for Ford pickups from 1965 to 1986, which had immediately replaced Jim Butcher as Johnny's preferred recreational reading.

Mutt was pacing the perimeter, nose to the ground, picking up a scent for lunch. She was first to hear the vehicle coming down the track from the road. She raised her head and gave Kate a heads-up by way of an advisory yip.

Kate recognized the sound of it almost immediately, and swore beneath her breath. Next to her Johnny went still, frowning at the distributor cap. He said tentatively, "Auntie Vi?"

"Sounds like." She ducked out from under the hood of the pickup and beheld the powder blue Ford Explorer as it emerged from the trees. It drew to an impatient halt, and Auntie Vi, a round, brown little woman of indeterminate age and defiantly black hair, bounced out and stormed in their direction. "Katya!"

Kate recognized the signs. "Have I screwed up anything lately?" she said out of the corner of her mouth.

"Not that I've noticed," Johnny said. "Hi, Auntie Vi!"

"Hi, Johnny! Almost tall like your father now. Stop that."

Johnny grinned. "Yes, ma'am."

Mutt trotted over and paid her respects. Other than Kate, females of any species were usually beneath the notice of the 140-pound wolf/husky mix but Auntie Vi was accorded the respect of a sister sovereign, coequal in power and authority. "This the new truck then?" Auntie Vi said, patting Mutt's head absently as she looked it over with a critical eye. "Those tires need rotate, Katya."

"We'll get right on that, Auntie," Kate said, while Johnny dived cravenly back beneath the hood.

The tires were, in fact, new-bought, mounted, and balanced the day of purchase.

Auntie Vi dismissed the subject of the truck. "You hear, Katya?"

"Hear what, Auntie?"

"About dock."

"What dock?"

"That Katalla dock."

"What Katalla dock?" Kate said. "There's barely a dozen pilings left of the old dock there, and they're rotting and covered with barnacles."

Auntie Vi clicked her tongue, looking impatient. "The state say they starting survey to build new dock."

"What for?" Kate said, and then she said, "Oh. What kind of a dock? Deepwater?"

Auntie Vi was thrown off her stride. "How you know?" she said, suspicion darkening her face.

"If it's a deepwater dock, they're doing it for the bulk carriers that will be coming in to ship the ore out from the Suulutaq Mine."

"There," Auntie Vi said, pointing at Kate. "That! What they do!"

Kate, skewered by the finger, perceived that she was at fault, and found herself at something of a loss. "It only makes sense, Auntie," she said placatingly. "They have to ship the ore to market once they pull it out of the ground. That is the object of the exercise." She stripped the gloves from her hands and started toward the house. "Come inside. It's about time for lunch anyway."

"Grilled cheese!"

Kate grinned without turning around. "In your dreams, kid. Moose liver pate if you're lucky."

Johnny made gagging noises beneath the hood. Mutt departed in search of her own lunch. Auntie Vi followed Kate up the stairs to the deck and into the house. It was still hard for Kate to accept that she had a deck, never mind a house. Both had been a gift of the Park, a product of a Park rat house raising, what, almost two years ago now. She and Johnny each had their own bathroom and bedroom, and what was most amazing of all, she had a refrigerator. And electricity. And a whole bunch of other stuff that even if she thought about it for too long didn't weigh her down as much as she thought it ought to.

Comfort could be corrupting, she thought darkly. What she didn't have was the log cabin her father had built on that same site, the one he had brought her mother home to nearly forty years before, the one she'd been conceived in, had been born in, had grown up in. That cabin had been burned to the ground by someone who had thought to solve all his problems by burning Kate alive. That Johnny had also been living there by then appeared not to have concerned him. He was now a guest of the state in a maximum security prison in Arizona, where Kate cordially hoped he was rotting slowly away, one putrefying limb at a time.

She made coffee and seated Auntie Vi at the table with a mug and cream and sugar, and busied herself with the makings for lunch. "Why are you so upset about this dock, Auntie?"

"Not dock." Auntie Vi looked up from her coffee and said with bitter emphasis, "Mine."

"The Suulutaq Mine?" One grilled cheese for her, half of one for Auntie Vi, and three for Johnny. "That's past praying for, Auntie. Global Harvest bought the leases fair and square from the state, and that's state land."

"We hunt there," Auntie Vi said fiercely. "We fish there." She surged to her feet and thumped her breast with one fist. "We live there!"

"They gave us most of Iqaluk in the settlement, Auntie. Just not that part."

"And you think they don't know that gold there when they did!"

"Well," Kate said. "This is the state of Alaska we're talking about here."

Auntie Vi took in a visible gulp of air, became aware that she was on her feet, and sat down again. "You see plans for this mine?"

Every Park rat with a post office box had gotten the flyer, and just in case they hadn't Global Harvest had blanketed every public place in every town and village in the Park as well, from the Club Bar in Cordova to the Niniltna School gym to the Costco in Ahtna. It was a glossy production, color pictures of salmon spawning in streams, moose browsing in lakes, and caribou calves frolicking in the foothills. There was a map of the proposed mine, fifteen miles square, a tiny gold-colored splotch crowded between grids and graphs of different colors denoting the borders of three federal parks, one state park, two national forests, three marine wildlife refuges, and four separate Native land allotments belonging to four different Native tribes. Towns and villages were dots on the landscape and the map's scale was too small to distinguish the minimal amounts of private property. It was an excellent way to illustrate just how small the acreage in question was.

On the flip side of the flyer, an attractive man displaying a perfect set of teeth in a friendly smile was identified as Global Harvest CEO Bruce O'Malley. Next to his head a conversational balloon quoted O'Malley as saying, "Global Harvest is fully committed to ensuring the healthy stocks of fish and wildlife and all the natural resources of the Iqaluk region so essential to the lives of the people who live there. The Suulutaq Mine can only succeed if Global Harvest Resources becomes a working partner with the people who live next door. We will apply the best available science and technology to ensure an environmentally friendly operation that will coexist with and within the community. Our employees will be drawn as much as possible from that community, and since most estimates have the Suulutaq Mine in operation for a minimum of twenty years, at minimum an entire generation, we expect the relationship to be long and profitable for everyone concerned."

"Yeah, I saw the flyer, Auntie," Kate said. She poured a dollop of olive oil into a hot frying pan and tossed in a chunk of butter after it, and assembled sandwiches made of homemade white bread buttered on both sides, slices of Tillamook Extra Sharp, and green chilies. When the butter melted, the first two hit the pan with a loud and aromatic sizzle. She went to the door, opened it, and yelled, "Lunch!"

"I don't like mine," Auntie Vi said.

She sat there, a round dumpling of rage and, Kate thought, some bewilderment. Auntie Vi had seen a lot of change in her eighty-plus years, and now more of it was bearing down on her like a freight train.

Other Alaskan villages had tribal councils. Some even had mayors and city assemblies. The Park had the four aunties. They were its backbone, its moral center, its royalty. They were all widows, Auntie Vi serially, four or, if Kate's suspicions were correct, possibly five times. They had all been born in the Park, and Auntie Vi was the only one who had ever been farther away from it than Anchorage. This was due to her third husband, an enthusiastic gambler who had introduced her to the illicit joys of one-armed bandits in Vegas before he keeled over of a heart attack after a successful run at the craps table.

The aunties knew the Park and they knew everyone in it chapter and verse, birth to death, white, black, Aleut, Athabascan, or Tlingit, male or female, old or young, married or single, gay or straight, atheist, agnostic, or born -again Christian. They could be found most nights at the Roadhouse, working on the most recent quilt and knocking back Bernie's Irish coffee in quantities that would have had anyone else facedown on the floor. They called it a quilting bee, but everyone else called it holding court. If a kid was a serial misbehaver, he or she was hauled before the aunties when the parents and the schoolteachers threw up their hands. If a husband was beating on his wife, as a last resort before calling in the trooper the wife could complain to the aunties, who would deputize the four Grosdidier brothers to haul him up in front of them. Since the four Grosdidier brothers were also Niniltna village's first responder EMT team, this solved the punishment and the 911 call afterward with neatness and dispatch. If someone let his dog team run wild, to the detriment of another neighbor's ptarmigan patch, and upon protest refused to restrain said team, the neighbor could complain to the aunties, one of whom was always related to the offender's mother and all four of whom had probably babysat him at one time or another.

A summons before the aunties was something no Park rat could ignore. As each individual case demanded, Auntie Joy would look sorrowful, Auntie Balasha would cry, Auntie Edna would glare, and Auntie Vi would fix the offender with a basilisk stare that, combined with the other three aunties' disapproval, generally reduced the Park rat with even the stiffest spine to a gibbering, knee-knocking wreck, sobbing their contrition and swearing on his or her negligible honor never, ever to do it again.

Most of the time it was enough for the offender to slink off beneath the stern admonition to go and sin no more. The aunties were remarkably evenhanded in their dispensation of Park justice, dealing fairly and with very little favoritism with all who came-or were forcibly hauled-before them. Jim Chopin, while taking no official notice of this ad hoc court of civil justice, had been heard to say that the four aunties halved his caseload.

Although even the aunties had their blind spots. Willard Shugak was one. And to Kate's considerable surprise, Howie Katelnikof was another, or had become one lately. Perhaps they had decided that now that he was out from under the influence of Louis Deem, Howie deserved their best redemptive effort. If so, Kate didn't think turning a blind eye to Howie's repeat offender status was quite the right tack.

Kate had her own issues with Howie Katelnikof. However, she knew that Howie wasn't smart enough to stay out of trouble for long. She could wait.

"I don't like mine, Katya," Auntie Vi said again, and Kate was recalled to the present.

"I don't, either, Auntie," Kate said, "but you can't stop it."

Auntie Vi's expression became, naturally, even more obdurate. "Why not?"

Johnny clattered in the door and headed for the kitchen with the single-minded voracity of the average adolescent. "Fuggedaboutit!" Kate said. "Wash those hands or you go hungry."

Johnny rolled his eyes and muttered something about Kate's anal attention to personal hygiene and stamped into the bathroom. Kate served the sandwiches cut in halves with a bowl of tortilla chips and another of salsa. Johnny dived in like he hadn't eaten in a month, and Kate, a notorious feeder, tucked in with only marginally less appreciation, while Auntie Vi nibbled around the edges of her half of a sandwich with the air of someone who seldom ventured beyond the realm of PBJ on pilot bread, and who liked it that way just fine, thank you. An occasional desecration of mac and cheese by diced ham was about as far into the culinary wilderness as any of the four aunties cared to go.

Afterward Johnny cleared the table and washed up and Kate walked Auntie Vi to her car. "Look at it this way, Auntie," Kate said. "We're Alaskan citizens. We'll get royalties. More, as citizens of the region, we'll get jobs. If there's steady work, maybe some of the kids will move home from Anchorage. Maybe some of them won't leave in the first place."

Auntie Vi closed the driver-side door and Kate thought she might have gotten away clean, until Auntie Vi rolled down her window. "That what you say at meeting?"

Kate's heart sank. "The board meeting?"

Auntie Vi gave her an impatient look. "What other meeting there is?"

The board of directors of the Niniltna Native Association met quarterly, in January, April, July, and October. Last year, board president and NNA CEO Billy Mike had died, leaving a vacancy. Without even running, indeed over her strong objections, Kate had been nominated to fill out the rest of his term, largely at the instigation of the diminutive woman at present fixing her with the beady eye through the car window.

Kate had missed her first NNA board meeting in July by virtue of the fact that she had been deckhanding for Old Sam Dementieff during the salmon season. Disapproval of her dereliction of duty was ameliorated by the fact that three other board members, Demetri Totemoff, Harvey Meganack, and Old Sam himself, were also fishing. Impossible to argue with the fact that everyone needed to make a living, and that in Alaska much of the time that meant working through the summer. So it was with a reasonable certainty that she would not be scolded, at least not for that, that Kate felt she could say, "I'm not Emaa, Auntie."

"Nobody say so," Auntie Vi said.

"Like hell," Kate said.

Auntie Vi looked away, scowling to hide what Kate knew was a beginning smile. Kate was the only one who dared to lip off to Auntie Vi, and though she'd never admit it, Auntie Vi enjoyed the fight.

"I'm not Emaa," Kate said again. "Don't make the mistake of thinking I am. Running the Niniltna Native Association for the rest of my life is not on my agenda. I've got a life, I have a job that pays pretty well, I have Johnny to provide for, and I have a home to look after. Don't say it!" She held up a hand, palm out.

Auntie Vi did her best to look wounded. "Not say nothing."

"Yeah, but you were thinking it." They both looked at the house, a virtual palace by Park standards, built in three days and change by a volunteer army of Park rats. "I'm grateful, I always will be, but not to the point of indentured servitude."

"You not coming to meeting?" Auntie Vi said sharply.

Kate sighed. The next meeting was October 15th, a month away. "Of course I'm coming. I said I would, and I don't make promises I'm not going to keep."

"So you saying what, then?"

"I'm saying I'm not Emaa," Kate said, meeting Auntie Vi's eyes without flinching. "I am not my grandmother. Don't think I'm going to lead an effort against the Suulutaq Mine. I'm not against progress. I'm not against change. I'm not against industry coming into the Park, especially if it's going to bring jobs with it."

Auntie Vi was staring at her with a stony expression, and Kate smiled, a little grimly. "Kinda sorry you forced me onto the board now, aren't you, Auntie?"

Auntie Vi snorted, and thereby avoided a direct answer to a simple question, a skill all the aunties were famous for. "You say mine bring jobs. Hah! Jobs for Outsiders, maybe. No jobs for us."

"Auntie," Kate said. "The mine workers are going to need a place to wash their clothes. They're going to want to buy potato chips. They're going to want to mail packages. Sometimes they're just going to want a night away from camp, out on the town, even if that town is dry. They can buy a burger and a latte at the Riverside, cookies at one of the basketball team's bake sales. They could even have a beer at Bernie's if they can score a ride that far. Two thousand workers during construction, Auntie. Niniltna will be the closest community to them." Kate shrugged. "We've even got a road out. Well. For half the year anyway."

Auntie Vi leveled an admonitory finger. "What about road, Katya? Not good enough for big trucks. They pave it, then what?"

The thought of semi-tractor trailers running in and out of the Park a quarter of a mile from her doorstep did not please Kate at all. "Hah!" Auntie Vi said, triumphant. "Everything change with mine, Katya. Everything! Not just digging big hole in some land away far from here." She started the engine. "You be at that meeting."

"I said I would be, Auntie."

"October fifteenth!"

"Yes, Auntie."

"That on a Wednesday!"

"Yes, Auntie."

"Ten A.M.!"

"Yes, Auntie."

Auntie Vi nodded, a sharp, valedictory movement. "You be there."

"Yes, Auntie."

Auntie Vi held up a finger. "Forgot." She jerked a thumb backward. "I bring something to you."

Kate opened the rear passenger-side door and found a small U-Haul box. "What's this?"

"Association stuff. You take."

"I've got the newsletter, Auntie, I don't need-"

"You take!"

Kate took, and without further ado or admonition Auntie Vi stepped on the gas. The Explorer wheeled around in something approaching a brody, narrowly missing Mutt emerging incautiously from the brush. She yelped and affected a kind of reverse vertical insertion, levitating up and back so that Auntie Vi's tires just missed her toes. She looked at Kate, ears straight up and yellow eyes wide.

"You got off lucky," Kate said. She turned to see Johnny had come out on the railing of the deck.

"So," he said, "you going to that meeting next month?"

Her eyes narrowed.

He leaned on the railing and grinned. "You know. The one on Wednesday?"

She dumped the box in the back of his truck and started for the house.

"On the fifteenth?" He started to back up. "You know, the one at ten a.m.?"

She hit the bottom stair and he ran for his life.