Bad Blood (10 page)

Or he would have, if Roger’s skiff hadn’t started to sink out from under him.

Eight

THURSDAY, JULY 12

Farther down the river

The young men had set out downriver in two skiffs loaded to the gunnels with all the essentials. Their plan was to take four days to travel to the mouth of the Kanuyaq, camping nights along the way, drinking, swapping stories, maybe scope out where the moose were congregating in anticipation of the hunting season opening next month. They would arrive in time to work the Monday opener in Alaganik, if there was one.

At least that was what they had told their parents. It was the truth, mostly.

But only mostly.

They left Kuskulana shortly after the trooper departed, the skiffs traveling side by side. Somebody had his iPhone hooked up to battery-powered speakers, and they shouted the lyrics to Maroon 5 and Flo Rida and Neon Trees and Fun from boat to boat. A “Call Me Maybe” cover (Get this net a rollin’ / Reds schooling up the ocean / High boat is what we’re wanting / Where you think you’re going, salmon?) ended in mild hysteria and a near-grounding of one of the skiffs, but by then they were at their first stop and no harm done. The tiny gravel beach was overhung with willow and alder and cottonwood and thickly lined with beach grass. Camouflage from land and river both.

It was also on the wrong side of the river but they pulled in anyway. All the boys but Ryan got into the bigger skiff, taking everything except a single tent, two sleeping bags, and two days’ worth of food and water for two people, plus Ryan’s duffel.

They stood around in awkward silence afterwards. “You sure about this, Ryan?” one of them said in a low voice.

“Never been so sure about anything in my life,” Ryan said.

The note of deep certainty in his voice opened their eyes a little, but the other boy only nodded. “All right, then. We got your back.”

Ryan shook hands with all of them. “Thanks. Have a good time on the river.”

They laughed. “You should talk.”

They pushed off and he stood watching as they started the outboard. Ten minutes later, he raised a hand in farewell as they went around the next bend and out of his sight, probably for the last time. He pulled his skiff up under cover of the trees and settled in to wait.

The first time he’d seen her, they would have been about ten, him on his side of the river scraping the bottom of his father’s skiff, her on her side helping her father on the fish wheel. Their eyes had met, holding, until her father spoke sharply, drawing her attention away, and Ryan had gone back to scraping the hull, although all he could see was her face.

There had been other glimpses over the years, at potlatches up and down the river, at Costco in Ahtna, at the Park Basketball Tournament in Niniltna. He could walk into a room and know if she was in it before he saw her. Always there would be that first, long glance, always interrupted by her father or mother or a friend, turning her attention elsewhere. Nothing else, no lingering glances, not a word spoken between the two of them.

And then the Kushtaka school closed, and her parents moved her to the Kuskulana school. Her beauty garnered its share of attention from the boys, but she favored none of them, at least so far as he could tell. She did her work, an A student who answered when called on by the teacher but who didn’t volunteer. She played guard on the women’s basketball team, with fast hands, quick feet, and an ability to score three-pointers when they were really needed. She was pleasant but made no friends. Her confidence and self-possession kept her apart. Sometimes he thought the other students were a little afraid of her.

He wasn’t, but he wasn’t going to be so stupid as to alert anyone in either village to his interest. And then came that away game last October. Men’s and women’s teams both to Ahtna, playing in the regional tournament on the Ahtna high school gym floor by day and sleeping on it by night. Even then it didn’t seem as if there would be any chance to talk to her. Late the second night, burningly aware that she was in her own sleeping bag on the other side of the gym, he sneaked out alone, only to find her sneaking out right behind him.

He smiled.

That was the beginning.

If nothing went wrong, she should have heard his message this morning, and they would be away before anyone knew. A few hours’ head start was all he asked.

His smile faded. The death of Tyler Mack was going to complicate things. He thought back to Tuesday morning on the river, and shuddered, remembering the meaty thunk of metal hitting flesh. A horrible sound.

He remembered, too, Chopper Jim’s eyes fixed steadily on his face at Kuskulana landing before he and his posse had left. But what could the trooper know? Only what everyone did, that Kuskulana and Kushtaka were at each other’s throats and had been for years. He couldn’t know anything else, because no one on the Kuskulana side of the river would ever tell him anything.

Especially not Ryan.

Nine

THURSDAY, JULY 12, EARLIER

Niniltna

Kate left her phone in the house and worked off frustrated sexual tension by a morning spent splitting wood. After lunch, the hammock and Peter Lovesay’s latest beckoned, but she was still restless. She and Mutt drove back into Niniltna, through it, and five miles down the older and even less well maintained Roadhouse road. There she turned left on the track that led to the one-lane wooden bridge over Squaw Candy Creek, pausing to give prior right of passage to two young bull moose whose half-grown racks were covered in rich velvet and who had their eye on a stand of young alder they had somehow previously overlooked, stopped again on the other side of the bridge for a big fat bristly porcupine who was superbly indifferent to Kate, Mutt, the moose, fire, famine, or flood, and continued up to the A-frame with the 212-foot steel communications tower looming up behind it. The yard was covered in shorn green velvet and western columbines, and rugosa roses bloomed promiscuously everywhere Dinah had fought the brush to a standstill and freed up a small patch of ground.

Kate parked and got out to hold the door for Mutt, who brushed past her without so much as a backward glance. “Faithless bitch,” Kate said in her wake, and followed her to the A-frame’s front door at a far more leisurely pace.

The spruce bark beetle had visited Bobby’s property, too, so that for the first time in the decade she’d been visiting him here, Kate could see the blue flash of a few mountains between the few still-standing trees. As on her homestead, as all over the Park, there seemed to be even more light than usual everywhere she looked, and during an Alaskan summer when there was already enough light to keep everyone up all night, the result was almost blinding.

The door stood wide open to the second warm day in a row, and Kate abandoned the busy hum of happy bees for the cool of the relative darkness inside.

Bobby was sitting at the center console of the A-frame, back to the door, when Kate walked in. His wife, Dinah, was nowhere to be seen, nor was the ball of fire also known as his daughter, Katya. Kate’s namesake and goddaughter, Kate had also delivered her one memorable August day five years before, about an hour after she had acted as best woman and officiator at her parents’ marriage. A fraught occasion.

She admired his broad shoulders with appreciation. Long before Dinah came into his life, back when Kate herself was in the middle of a long, painful recovery from five and a half years working the front lines of sex crimes in Anchorage, she had cause to know those shoulders and everything affiliated with them in intimate and delicious detail.

His back was bare and muscled, a trim waist disappearing into a pair of cutoff jeans, from which two legs emerged, both truncated at slightly differing lengths just below the knee, the missing pieces having been left behind in a rice paddy in Vietnam. A wheelchair with the parking brake on put him within easy reach of every knob and switch of the custom-made electronic Frankenstein sitting on the custom-made table that circled the twelve-by-twelve beam running straight up to the ridgepole of the roof. Wire and cable snaked up all four sides of the beam, connecting Frankenstein with the antennas and dishes on the tower out back.

All to support the NOAA observer in the Park. Allegedly. It was not the done thing to inquire too closely into how Bobby really supported himself and his lifestyle, which included a hefty portion of alcoholic refreshment imported by the case direct from Tennessee, his once and never again home state. Kate could make a good guess, but she didn’t. Dinah probably knew, but she wasn’t talking. Nobody else, if they knew what was good for them, was prepared even to speculate out loud, and Jim didn’t care so long as Bobby was retired. Which he appeared to be.

Headphones were balanced precariously one ear on and one off, and he was speaking into a microphone dangling from a segmented metal pole. “Yeah, been a long cold one, but the sun’s finally out and so am I, Bobby Clark, your very own silver-tongued Bard of the Big Bump and all we survey, coming to you live from—never mind.”

Sometimes Bobby broadcast for four hours every night, usually during an election year, and sometimes for fifteen minutes once a week in the morning, usually during fishing season. Park rats had to divine the correct frequency pretty much telepathically because it changed every day and sometimes twice a day. Park Air was, unsurprisingly, FCC-unapproved and certainly unlicensed.

“Got a couple of screaming deals for you today, fellow rats,” said that basso profundo, which registered on a visceral level with everyone in the Park with an X on both chromosomes, and not a few with XY, too. “A PSA before we get to them. Listen up. Red Run wants their safe back. They know who took it, they know you can’t open it, just bring it back and no questions asked. No reward, either, and no whining about it or they call in Chopper Jim. You know how he gets when he has to fill out all that paperwork. And won’t you just love being on the inside during the first above-sixty days we’ve seen this year. Sober up, morons, and get that safe back in the Red Run city hall offices pronto.”

Bobby had a tendency to editorialize his public service announcements, but the entertainment value was worth the risk to most Park rats who wanted them broadcast. It certainly ensured that everyone would be listening.

Bobby adjusted a knob. “Scott Ukatish is dragging up, which is not surprising, considering he’ll probably be the last one left to turn out the lights when he leaves the ghost town of Potlatch, for what I understand is a nice little one-bedroom condo in Sag Harbor, corner unit, top floor, good bar on the ground floor, frequented by a lotta local talent.” A verse from “Looking for Love” rose and fell briefly in the background. “Scott says he’s outta here September first, as he don’t want to hit any snow on the Alcan going south. Between now and then, everything he can’t fit into the back of his pickup is for sale, list price the day you show up or best offer by August fifteenth and it goes without saying you haul it away yourself. There’s a list of the stuff he’s got for sale on parkair-dot-radio, and it also goes without saying that you’ll be bidding against me for the vintage collection of
Playboy
s, which Scott tells me goes all the way back to the December 1953 first edition, yeah, the one with Marilyn Monroe on the cover, the one every guy my age remembers locking himself in the bathroom with.”

If possible, his voice dropped even lower. “Just don’t tell Dinah.”

Bobby let Elton John’s “A Candle in the Wind” drown him out while he shuffled bits of lined notebook paper, most of them scribbled in his own hand in scrawling black Sharpie. Elton muted, Bobby back at full volume. “Herbie Topkok needs a mechanic. Someone versed in the mysteries of everything from Evinrude to Honda to Ski-Doo to Fix Or Repair Daily. Full-time, hourly wage to be negotiated, and if you’re any good, that includes straight through the winter, Herbie’s word on it. Method of payment also negotiable, cash, check, or money order.” Bobby laughed, a laugh that lived up in every timbre to the bass profundo voice. Kate was sure she would have heard it in the fillings in her teeth, if she’d had any fillings.

“Apply in person, preferably not loaded, last house on the left but one on your way to Ahtna.

“Okay,” he said, looking down and shuffling more paper, “Boris Balluta wants to sell his Honda Rancher ATV. Four years old, been to the river and back a few times but in good shape overall. Yeah, I’ve see Boris running that four-wheeler hell-for-leather through town. She does look rode hard and put away wet, but she sounds sweet, and while Boris may always be looking for the easiest out in a room filled with bill collectors, he knows his way around an engine. He should be banging down Herbie’s front door, and if he didn’t mind getting his hands dirty with actual work, he would be, but we all know that’s not happening, don’t we?

“Ruthe Bauman is looking for a print of Machetanz’s
Eighty Winters.
A print, she says, not the original, doesn’t have to be matted and framed, but she’ll pay more if it is, save her doing it herself. Leave a message for her at the Roadhouse.”

He pushed a slider over an inch, pulled another one back two inches. “Couple of personals now.”

This was what the Park rats really tuned in for, or did before cell phones. Kate wondered how many were listening now.

“‘Carol Sweeney, we’re in Anchorage, due in on George tomorrow on the nine
A.M.
flight. Love you, see you soon.’ Ha. Must be Carol’s folks in from West Virginia. Welcome almost back, Sadie and Bert. Showing me something, coming back after last time and that whole moose collision incident.

“‘J, I’ll be at the usual place this afternoon and I’ll wait.’ Hmm. Short, to the point, sure hope J knows where ‘the usual place’ is.” Bobby sat up, his back still to Kate, and popped his neck. “Okay, going out on a piece of big juicy gossip. Kermit the Clark here, with Park Air News, deet-te-deet-deet-deet. Listen up, folks.” The sound of typewriter keys clicked and clacked over the speakers. Kate wondered how many of Bobby’s listeners even knew what a typewriter was. “You know that new film incentive law they wished on us down in Juneau? Well, your intrepid reporter has heard a rumor that the Park—yes, our very own Park—is being scouted as a film location.”