a Night Too Dark (2010) (26 page)

The Suulutaq Mine had a lot to answer for and it wasn’t even in production yet.

Nineteen

The next couple of days were quiet and uneventful. Jim talked to Lyda Blue’s people and discovered that the pistol had belonged to her mother and that so far as they knew Lyda had never shot it. “Probably never cleaned it, either,” Jim told Kate. “Allen’s lucky it didn’t blow up in his hand.” He added, “And if that damn bear had left enough of his hand we could have tested it for gunshot residue and proved at least part of your theory.”
“Are you interviewing people at the mine?”
“Yeah.”
“It going anywhere?”
“No.”
With each passing day, and no new clues in the death of Lyda Blue, Kate knew a steadily increasing sense of failure.
And the summer had begun with such promise. Of course, her downturn in spirits could also be attributed in part to the approach of the dread NNA board of directors meeting. Kate and Annie had put together an agenda, and had discussed weapons and tactics. It was summer, after all. Maybe Demetri would be up at his lodge, and Old Sam down Alaganik way. Maybe someone would have
burned Ulanie Anahonak at the stake. Her heart warmed at the thought.
Yes, maybe they’d have the minimum quorum allowed by amended bylaw, so as to produce the maximum peace.
She could only hope.
How many designs for the new NNA logo now, Ms. Mike?” Kate said.
Annie Mike, sitting erect at the small table in the corner, tapped some keys on her computer. “One hundred and thirty-seven. Fifty-two of them are from the same three shareholders.”
There was a rustle around the table, but everyone was too afraid that Dominatrix Kate would rule them out of order if they spoke and so they maintained a prudent silence. With the exception of Old Sam, who said, “Yeah, and how many are worth the board looking at ’em? Five? Wait, what am I saying. Any?”
“Out of order, Mr. Dementieff,” Kate said, but her voice lacked the edge it did whenever anyone else spoke without being recognized. He grinned at her, unapologetic.
Besides, he was right. Kate had seen the submissions, and the art displayed therein was, well, amateurish at best. She looked down at the mug sitting at her right hand, which boasted the current logo, a Rorschach blot of barely distinguishable Alaskan icons in busy black. “I move that we commission a professional artist to come up with a design for a new logo,” she said. “I have a name in mind, and I have a sample of his work.” Annie got up and passed out Gaea brochures. McKenzie had made good on his promise to send her the artist’s name, who by a miracle had turned out not only to be local but to be Alaska Native as well. She wasn’t Aleut and she wasn’t an NNA shareholder, but you couldn’t have everything.
Demetri looked up from the brochure. “You turning into a radical environmentalist on us, Kate? These folks can get pretty extreme,
and they’re saying a lot of not very nice things about the Suulutaq Mine.”
“For the moment, let’s focus on the logo. It’s the kind of thing I was hoping we’d get from the contest, a single clean image that feels familiar and universal and is beautiful in its own right.”
“Second,” Auntie Joy said. She had loathed all the prospective logos they had received, a very un–Auntie Joy reaction.
This was the second meeting of the Niniltna Association board of directors following the January shareholders meeting and the successful vote to increase the board’s size from five to nine. Alas for Kate’s hopes, all members of the board were present, and when she looked around the circular table in the upstairs room at board HQ in Niniltna, she still didn’t know what new kind of dynamic she had been the proximate cause of producing for this quarterly meeting, or for the future of the association. On the whole, she had to admit things were going a lot more smoothly than she had anticipated. Which only made her spider sense tingle in anticipation of disasters yet to unfold.
On her right sat Auntie Joy. One of the four aunties and the only one on the board, Joyce Shugak was in her eighties, a subsistence fisher on a creek that emptied into Alaganik Bay, where all the other Park rats fished commercial. Married young, widowed young, and childless, she regarded everyone in the Park as one of her own, be they Native or white, squareheads or roundeyes. Aided by a spiritual nearsightedness that allowed her to see only the good in them no matter how badly they behaved, she beamed out upon the world with an impartial benignity and a cheerfulness viewed by more crotchety beings as interminable. On one hand, she was every Park rat’s grandma. On the other, it was sometimes hard to credit that she was actually of this world.
Next to Auntie Joy sat Marlene Colberg, one of the newly named board members. Marlene, midfifties, was a commercial fisherman,
with a set net site on Alaganik Bay next to Mary Balashoff’s that she had inherited from her father. Her siblings had wanted nothing to do with it, decamping from the Park and some of them from the state as soon as they were old enough, so she fished it alone. She was six feet tall, broad-shouldered, and weighed over two hundred pounds, none of it fat, a heritage from her Norwegian father, so she was certainly up to the physical challenge. There wasn’t that much to be seen of her Aleut mother in her features. Her blond hair was cut shorter than Old Sam’s, her eyes were deep blue, and her mouth a straight, firm line over a square and equally firm chin. Her hands, large-knuckled and scarred from a life spent picking fish and mending and hauling gear, were folded on the table in front of her. They looked unaccustomed to inaction. Her expression betrayed a little impatience, as if she had better things to do than waste five minutes talking about something as unimportant as a company logo. Kate remembered that Marlene had protested her nomination to the board, and had only acceded to it when overwhelmed by support from other shareholders. She was the least interested in governing of the new bunch, and probably the best of them.
Between Marlene and Harvey Meganack was Herbie Topkok. Herbie ran Park Sled and ATV out of his garage, which was the local parts store for Honda, Kawasaki, Arctic Cat, Yamaha, Polaris, Suzuki, and whoever else made a snow machine or a four-wheeler. Kate was pretty sure that Herbie had a backdoor arrangement with Howie Katelnikof in the matter of spare parts, and she thought he might also have been the source of the four-wheelers the Suulutaq Mine workers were using to get back and forth into town. He was maybe five four, also in his midfifties, and a relatively new Park rat, as his parents had met at Chemawa in Oregon and had settled there to raise their family after graduation. Herbie, the eldest and a mechanic for a Ford dealership in Portland, had been the only regular visitor to the Park of the four children, traveling to Alaska every summer and
working one log at a time on a cabin on the Kanuyaq just north of Niniltna on his parents’ ANCSA land allotment. When his third and last child graduated from high school, he made the move permanent. His wife had lasted one winter before heading back to Oregon. Herbie made enough out of the business to support himself in the Park and his wife Outside, and other than nonconjugal visits over the holidays, also Outside and with the children and the growing brood of grandchildren in attendance, they both seemed content with the status quo.
Herbie, skin the color of toast, eyes black and a little protruding, stocky and taciturn, looked less than enthralled by the subject of the logo, too. On his right, Harvey Meganack glowered at Kate, but she was used to being glowered at by Harvey and it didn’t bother her. She even carried the battle forward into the enemy’s camp. “Anything to add, Mr. Meganack?”
He ground his teeth, and it was obvious that it pained him when he had to agree with the board’s chair. “No. Branding is important. We need a new logo.”
Harvey was as usual clad in neatly pressed charcoal gray slacks and a white, long-sleeved, button-down Oxford shirt that looked lonely without the maroon silk tie that Harvey didn’t quite dare wear with it, not in the Park. A commercial fisherman like many of the people seated at the table, a registered guide like Demetri, the proud holder of a two-year engineering degree from the University of Alaska, and the boon companion of State Senator Pete Heiman, Harvey was a boomer of the first water. He owed his mop of dark hair, his round cheeks, and his incipient second chin to his Aleut mother, and his medium height, his five o’clock shadow, and his middle-aged spread to an Italian great-grandfather. Like many shareholders, he owed his Park rattery to a stampeder ancestor.
“Good,” Kate said briskly, and smiled at Demetri Totemoff, on Harvey’s right. Without moving a muscle Demetri managed to look
faintly amused. Born in the Park, married in the Park (his wife was Auntie Edna’s daughter, Edna Jr.), raised his kids on the Park, hunter, trapper, and proprietor of an increasingly high-end hunting lodge in the southern foothills of the Quilak Mountains within sight of the Alaskan coast, he was pro-business only insofar as it didn’t impact the wilderness experience of his clients. Of course, this particular wilderness experience included daily maid service and a four-star gourmet chef. His clients arrived in Anchorage on private jets and were whisked directly to Demetri’s eyrie in a scrupulously clean and perfectly maintained Beaver, which landed on the lake the lodge was built on and which taxied right up to the lodge’s dock so the clients never even got their feet wet.
Demetri, in fact, had clients who never left the lodge, and he was ambivalent about the prospect of an open-pit mine that had the potential to spoil the perfect view of mountains, glaciers, and wildlife they had hitherto enjoyed. The mine wasn’t anywhere near within eyesight of his lodge, but he had wondered out loud if once completed it could be seen en route between the lodge and Niniltna.
Well, the jury was still out on that, and since Demetri was declining to comment on the logo issue, Kate’s gaze moved to the woman sitting at Demetri’s right, last seen at the Suulutaq Mine on the arm of Vern Truax. Thin, tense, she had thick eyebrows always pulled together in a frown over eyes that sat too close on either side of a long, bony nose, with a tip that flattened against her short, hairy upper lip in a way that bore an irresistible resemblance to the beak on a seagull. Her skin was sallow, too, which only heightened the resemblance.
For a woman who was mostly Athabascan, she was surprisingly unattractive. Kate thought how much it helped when someone she was destined to dislike anyway was physically unlovely to boot. She was still trying to work out how Ulanie Anahonak had been voted onto the NNA board. For one thing, Ulanie behaved like a dry drunk,
impatient, rigid, intolerant, and pompous. Essentially as though Ulanie were the only person in the room, Kate thought. For another, she appeared to be a functioning illiterate. She never seemed to find time to read the minutes of the previous meeting that all board members received from Annie weeks before the next meeting, and she appeared incapable of sticking to the agenda, jumping some items and ignoring others. She’d been hostile to Kate from the beginning. In that respect she reminded Kate a little of Axenia.
Ulanie wasn’t well liked within the Niniltna Native Association. It was a mystery where her votes had come from, one Kate thought it might be worth solving one day, when she had time.
On Ulanie’s right sat Einar Carlson, another blond, blue-eyed Aleut by way of a Swedish immigrant who had worked at the Kanuyaq Copper Mine and married into the Park. Einar fished summers and worked construction in the winters. In his forties, a confirmed bachelor, he was tall, spare, and mostly silent. He lived in a one-room cabin across the river from Niniltna, a cabin built by his grandparents when they were first moved from their village in the Aleutian Islands by the military after the Japanese invasion in World War II. Like many Aleuts dispossessed in that war, they had never moved back, choosing instead to make a home in the Park and to raise their children there and in the fullness of time to be absorbed into the Niniltna Native Association. There were fifteen years between Kate and Einar and she didn’t know that much about him, but in the hothouse atmosphere of the NNA board there would be no avoiding getting to know each other very well indeed.
Between Einar and Kate sat Old Sam Dementieff. His grin was razor sharp, his bright eyes all-knowing. No point in trying to fool herself that he couldn’t read her like a book. Kate wondered who had nominated him for the board and why he’d accepted. He wasn’t exactly a political animal.
Old Sam was Eliza and Quinto Dementieff’s son, although Kate
had overheard the aunties speculating about that once when she was very small. Eliza had given birth too soon after marrying, One-Bucket McCullough had disappeared shortly thereafter, and Quinto had stared everyone down and raised Sam as his own. Old Sam and Abel Int-Hout, the homesteader next door who had raised Kate, had been good friends, and at least in her eyes they resembled each other a great deal. There wasn’t a rock or a tree in this part of Alaska either man couldn’t find again blindfolded. Abel had married and had three sons, Old Sam had remained single and childless so far as everyone knew, in his later years taking up with Mary Balashoff. They’d probably been together as long as they had because they were so often apart, Old Sam wintering in the Park and Mary, with the exception of occasional booty calls to Niniltna, the lone year-rounder on Alaganik Bay.
Old Sam was an outlaw, that much Kate knew. The taste of illegal king still lingered pleasantly on her tongue. She smiled back at Old Sam, who let’s face it put the rat into
Parkus rattus
.
The motion to contract the services of the Gaea logo artist for a new corporate logo was carried by a unanimous voice vote and Annie Mike was authorized to contact the artist and inquire as to price and delivery date. “All right, under old business, the board will recall the suggestion made at the last meeting to encourage shareholders living in Anchorage to have regular meetings in Anchorage, so as to foster tribal unity and to disseminate news from the board to the shareholders. I would like to report that I have spoken to my cousin, Axenia Shugak Mathisen, and she has agreed to organize the meetings, one a month for the next six months. I propose we revisit the situation at that time to estimate the program’s success and to decide if it warrants extended funding.”
She had a moment to marvel at her own pomposity before Old Sam said, “I still think it’s a bad idea. Who knows what kind of trouble they’ll get us into over there?”