KS17.5 - Cherchez la Femme

T. Jefferson Parker, he of Charlie Hood fame, was putting together a collection of short stories about fishing, and he asked me for a contribution. The anthology was published by The Countryman Press, and all royalties from sales went to two charitable organizations, Casting for Recovery and Project Healing Waters, which both help cancer survivors on the road to recovery by taking them fly-fishing.

So, the story had to involve fishing. Mine does, several kinds, but only in the most glancing and peripheral way, in the vocations of the Balluta brothers. But mostly, I wrote this story because my friend Pati came home from one trip to the Interior with a true story about a man, a woman and a road grader.

It was just too good to pass up.

THERE IS ONE
in every village.

They don’t have to be young, they don’t even have to be pretty, but there is one woman in every Alaskan village whose very presence short circuits something in the nervous system of the male of the species, resulting all too often in events that spiral into intervention on the part of a professional peace officer.

In the case of Dulcey Kineen, the femme fatale came in a pleasant enough package, medium height, nice curves, regular features, but with Dulcey it was more attitude than pulchritude. Her hair was thick and black and she wore it long, in a shining cape she could toss around her shoulders, made a man think about wrapping it around his fist and hanging on for wherever the ride took him. Her eyes were a warm, wicked brown, and they had a way of peering from beneath already thick lashes so heavily mascaraed it seemed her lids couldn’t be strong enough to hold them up. She had a habit of using her tongue to toy with her teeth and the corners of her mouth, which she left open much of the time, as if she were about to take a bite out of whatever was nearest, fry bread, smoke fish, that sensitive spot beneath a man’s left ear.

Most women hated her as much as their men loved her, of course. Margaret Meganack had erupted into Bobby Clark’s house when Marvin, that morning’s guest on Park Air, had strayed from the advertised topic, which was the current red salmon run or lack thereof, to wax eloquent on what Dulcey hadn’t been wearing at the Roadhouse the night before. Dinah had banished both Meganacks from the property and interdicted Marvin as an on air guest ever again, and given the subsequent repair and replacement bills you could see her point.

And then there was the time Dulcey ran for Miss Niniltna and won, allegedly on the strength of the blueberry pie she baked for the talent competition. That was fine until Auntie Vi accused Dulcey’s cousin Norma Ollestad of baking the pie for her, which no way Norma would have done, given that little episode a while back involving Dulcey, Norma, and Norma’s boyfriend Chuck. Turned out Dulcey really had baked the pie but she was stripped of her crown anyway. Never a good idea to show up on the auntie radar, and Dulcey had made what Auntie Vi, with uncharacteristic restraint, had described as a nuisance of herself with more than one of the boarders at Auntie Vi’s B&B. Auntie Vi could give a hoot what Dulcey did with whom, but she resented the need to wear earplugs to bed every night in her own home.

Sergeant Jim Chopin said that fully a third of the local callouts to the Niniltna trooper post involved Dulcey Kineen in some way. Either she was enticing men at the Roadhouse to drink so she could drink with them, or she was seducing men away from their wives and sweethearts, or she was vamping men for cash, moose backstrap or a free ride to Ahtna with Costco privileges thrown in, or spurned suitors were getting drunk and wreaking mayhem and madness on a town too small to ignore either. The incident the previous winter involving Dulcey, Wasillie Peterkin and the road grader was still a painful subject to everyone concerned.

Dulcey and the Balluta brothers. Anybody should have been able to see it coming. But nobody did, until it was far too late.

There were three Ballutas, Albert, Nathan and Boris. Their father had been a commercial fisherman, their mother had worked as his deckhand until Albert was seven and big enough to take her place. She returned to their house at the edge of the rickety dock on the river and seldom left it again, the last time when they buried her next to their father out back. She’d been a quiet woman and her eldest, Albert, took after her. He was twenty-eight now, a steady, serious, capable, reliable man. He’d inherited the
Mary B
. outright, along with his father’s Alaganik Bay drift permit, and fished it every summer, coming in high boat two out of three years and piling up a healthy balance in the bank in Cordova. Winters he worked on the
Mary B
. in dry dock and on his gear in the net loft over the dock.

Albert inheriting the
Mary B
. was a source of friction with the youngest brother. Boris was twenty-two and self-involved, opportunistic, loud and lazy. He fished subsistence when he worked at all, but his smoke fish was the best on the river and, packed in fancy balsa wood cases, twelve eight-ounce jars to a case, sold at a hefty premium to the clientele of Demetri Moonin’s high-end lodge up in the Quilak foothills. He made a mouth-watering caviar from the eggs, too, for a list of subscribers from as far away as New York City, every batch sold out months before it was in the one-ounce jars. It was enough to keep him in beer and Edwin jeans. Boris was also a bit of a dandy, who had been known to fly all the way to Anchorage for the right haircut.

Nathan, twenty-five, was a typical middle child. He worked summers for Demetri, guiding Demetri’s clients to the best fishing streams in the Quilaks so they could beat the water for record kings. Winters he worked on the
Mary B
.’s moving parts, paid minimum wage by the hour, and kept all their vehicles running for fun. He was cajoling and conciliatory and could charm the most obstreperous client out of a sulk, which made him invaluable to Demetri, who paid him accordingly.

They all lived together in their parents’ house, managing to co-exist for the most part in peace, until Dulcey Kineen came along.

Well, Dulcey didn’t come along, exactly, she’d always been there, born a Park rat to a typical Park rat family, part Russian, part Aleut, part Norwegian. Her father fished and drank. Her mother had babies and drank. The eldest, Dulcey fell heir to the babysitting and housekeeping chores early on. When her mother died her father began to use her as a stand-in for other things as well. She stood it until she was sixteen, when Nick Totemoff told her loved her. It was the first time anyone had ever said that to her. She eloped with him to Cordova that night.

Nick had been motivated by what young men are usually motivated and he’d disappeared within a month, leaving her on her own. She got a job bartending at the Alaska Club and the tips allowed her to rent a tiny mother-in-law apartment. It was her own home, her first and as it turned out, her only, because her father came into the Alaska Club in the middle of the following fishing season and tried to haul her out across the bar. The damages included her job. The next day, Jim Chopin brought her the news that on the way back to his boat her father had fallen into the small boat harbor and drowned.

Her next oldest sibling was fourteen. There was no one else to take care of her three brothers and two sisters. She went back to Niniltna, sold her father’s boat and permit to Anatoly Martushev, and that and their quarterly NNA shareholder payments, their annual PFD from the state and their parent’s social security death benefits managed to keep the family together in the little log cabin with the loft. Cramped, crowded, with no running water and an outhouse out back, everyone took turns splitting firewood for the oil drum stove and no one went hungry.

Which didn’t necessarily turn Dulcey into a pattern card of respectability. There were men. There were a lot of men. She had been forced to a realization of her power early on, she knew how to use it, and it didn’t help that she was a walking, talking example of chaos theory.

And so, inevitably, Ulanie Anahonak, that self-appointed moral arbiter of village and environs, took exception to Dulcey’s behavior, and further, took it upon herself to call DFYS. They didn’t show for almost a year. When they did, they spent ten minutes evaluating the situation before scooping up the five minors and shipping them off to four different foster homes in Ahtna, Anchorage, and Valdez.

Dulcey didn’t fight them. Some said she just didn’t care. Some said she was relieved to be rid of the burden. Some thought she figured she couldn’t win against the state so why try. Instead, she got a job waiting tables at the Roadhouse, in spite of stiff opposition from Jim Chopin, who was already spending too many duty hours breaking up brawls between Suulutaq miners and Park rats fighting over the same girl. Putting Dulcey in the Roadhouse seemed to him like rolling a nuke into a firefight. The resulting explosion was predestined and the fallout would be toxic to everyone in range for a long time.

To his surprise, indeed, to the Park’s collective surprise, Dulcey managed to suppress whatever incitements to riot she had hardwired into her DNA for the hours she was on duty. Off duty was another matter, and most of her off duty hours were spent at the Roadhouse. Hard to tell when she first started hooking up with the Balluta brothers, and no one ever did figure out if it was serially or concurrently.

Everyone remembered the fight Nathan and Boris got into that April, though. It had already been a notable evening, what with Pastor Nolan having confessed his affair with Patsy Aguilar, and his wife sitting right there at the congregational table. Then there was the group of climbers who, having summitted Big Bump, had come in for their requisite shots of Middle Finger. It was always fun to see their expressions when Bernie took down the unmarked bottle of Everclear with the forefinger floating in it.

And then the fight had erupted and spread to engulf Pastor Nolan’s parishioners, the Big Bumpers and the quilting bee in the corner, where it upset three of four Irish coffees. The aunties were pretty pissed about that. So was Dulcey when she had to clean up the mess, and it then became blindingly obvious what the fight had been about, as Nathan and Boris vied with one another to rush bar rags to the scene and then got into another fight over who was allowed to carry the dirtied rags back.

Dulcey twitched her fine behind around the bar and fixed Bernie with a fiery glance. “I didn’t start that.”

“I saw,” Bernie said, and got out the baseball bat. Fortunately Albert walked in and broke it up before Bernie had to break any heads.

Now, you’d think that would have been it, spleen vented and honor satisfied, but instead things seemed to escalate. That spring Nathan guided a couple of salmon hunters to one of the secret streams where Kanuyaq River kings of trophy size came home to spawn, and found Boris there already, tromping back and forth in hip waders, muddying the waters and scaring everything with a fin two creeks away. He was carrying a dip net. Said he was fishing for female kings so he could make his caviar. Nathan’s clients, who had had the look of very good tippers, didn’t so much as get their lines wet.

A couple of weeks later Boris was fixing to set up his fish wheel. It was a lot of work and Boris didn’t put in that kind of effort unless he was certain of a return, so he’d spent the previous week watching the river, watching the reds run, and coming up with a pretty fair estimate of when they’d hit his beach. Once the fish wheel went into action it stayed in action until he’d caught his limit, when he packed up the whole shebang and brought it and the fish back to the house.

Only this time, once he’d loaded all the parts in his pickup, driven the forty miles to the trailhead, humped all those same parts down a mile of rough and more or less vertical trail to the gravel bank, and started to assemble the wheel, he found all the bolts missing.

There were other incidents, and the queer thing was that in between them Boris and Nathan maintained an outward civility. They would show up at the Roadhouse and take turns courting Dulcey, where under Bernie’s watchful eye they were as polite as ever they could be, to each other and to everyone else.

“It’s real amusing to watch,” Bernie told Jim, “but it feels like sitting on top of an unexploded bomb.”

Jim talked to Albert, who shrugged. “What am I supposed to do? Give ‘em a time out? They’re adults, they screw up you can lock ‘em up.”

“Maybe it’s Dulcey oughta be locked up.”

That earned him a sharp look. “Not her fault my brothers are making fools of themselves over her.”

Jim, ashamed, said, “I know. I’m just worried somebody’s going to get hurt.”

The
Mary B
. strained at her moorings. “Boys aren’t dumb. They’ll figure things out eventually. Meantime, I got a tide to catch tomorrow and too much to do between now and then.” Albert laid a hand on the gunnel and vaulted on board.

The Park waited, holding its breath.

· · ·

The very next day Jim was in his office at the post when he heard a commotion in the outer office. He got to his door in time to see Boris Balluta, covered in blood, yelling, “She’s dead! She’s dead, I’m telling you, she’s dead and he killed her!”