The Shaman's Knife (19 page)

I told him about Maxine, how her journalism course had led to free-lance translating in court cases, then to the CBC. “Maybe there are things you can do here to earn a shot at the kind of jobs you want. You know these parts. There are all those committees involved with northern ambitions. Self-government is going to come eventually. The settlements need people to write speeches, negotiate, use the kind of languages background you have. Get noticed so when a job comes up somebody will think of you.”

His eyes brightened. “I've filled in once in a while to help Lewissie in the hamlet offices. Did okay. But that's Lewissie's job, and if there's one man in town who can do it better than anybody else, it's Lewissie. You know him?”

“Just by name.”

He nodded his head in the direction of an Inuk I'd noticed in the crowd around the TV: taller and heavier than me. His neatly trimmed hair was parted so that a strand fell across his forehead. He had a thick mustache above a small beard, and his eyebrows were so thick that they almost met in the middle. “That's Lewissie,” he said. “He helps me out when he can, any job that's going.”

A scruffy boy smoking a cigarette, never still, was among the youngest there. Sometimes he mingled with the hockey crowd and other times I thought he might be panhandling. He was approaching people, speaking sometimes jokily, sometimes being turned away, sometimes seeming to be involved in some transaction.

“Who's that kid?” I asked.

“Andy Arqviq,” Byron said. That was the boy who'd been seen near Jonassie's house before the unsolved disappearance of the shaman's knife.

“Younger than the rest,” I said.

“He's fifteen,” Byron said, and immediately left. I wondered whether his leaving was coincidence, or whether maybe he felt uneasy sitting with me in the sight of everyone. Some might suspect that whatever we were saying would not be casual socializing.

Or maybe my innocuous question about Andy had made him think that this was question time about things he didn't want to answer. If he'd stayed I would have tried to put names to some of the others, young men especially, but also to some of the middle-aged and old Inuit. Usually when one of those happened to pass me he'd nod briefly but distantly, and not stop to pass the time of night.

Andy Arqviq did it differently. He came up to me grinning, a wiry boy in a thin jeans jacket. He projected calm insolence.

“Want cigarettes, policee?” he asked. “Fifty cents each. Or anything else, soft drink? Gimme the money and I'll get.”

“No thanks.”

He shrugged and moved on. Then there was a break in the hockey action, and the big man Byron had pointed out to me came over and sat where Byron had been sitting.

“I'm Lewissie Ullayoroluk,” he said affably. I knew from what Byron had said that he was the town administrator, the custom in many settlements being to have someone who spoke English well handle correspondence and other matters, assisting the mayor.

“Matteesie Kitologitak,” I replied.

He smiled. “Everybody here knows that. And wonders.”

He left it at that. “Wonders.” I wondered how many people here knew some of the things I wanted to know.

We talked. It turned out that Lewissie coached the Sanirarsipaaq hockey team, sat on the liquor committee, and was married to the librarian, who had been Jane McLeod before she came here from Nova Scotia. She had arrived to teach school and stayed to marry.

“How you making out?” he asked finally, the question the whole settlement was asking.

I told him not great.

“That boy you were just talking to,” he said, “if anybody knows what goes on around here, including in the rec hall that night, he'd know. He try to sell you something?”

“Just a cigarette,” I said.

“That's not all he deals in,” he said. “Whether he can deliver or not, I don't know, but once last winter a men's hockey team from Inuvik was in here for a game. The coach is a man I know. He told me that young Andy there was offering to get girls for his players. When one guy strung him along to see how far he'd go, Andy said he knew where he could get booze, too, and the player said how about hash, and Andy said he could get that, too, and then, maybe just boasting but maybe not, sometimes cocaine.”

I was not especially surprised. Part-time dealers could get in and out undetected, with some legitimate job as a cover. There had been at least one cocaine bust in Sanikiluaq, some woman bringing it in from Great Whale on the Quebec coast, and other busts in Iqaluit and elsewhere. I didn't think any fifteen-year-old would be running deals himself. He'd have to be a runner for someone else. But as the Arctic version of a street kid, with access to a lot of things, Andy looked the part.

“If there's anything I can do, just ask,” Lewissie said. “Those murders and then your . . . your own other sad thing, the whole community feels bad.”

By the “other sad thing,” of course, he meant my mother, but didn't say it because we do not speak directly of the dead if it's at all avoidable, which it usually is. I looked into his honest eyes and thought that I'd consult him more from now on when I needed straight answers.

“I don't wish you anything but quick success getting this thing settled,” he said. “But maybe you'll be here for the big party next Friday.” He waved at the poster. “Good drum dancers. Good throat singers, maybe you heard 'em on radio, the ones from Cape Dorset? And the knuckle-hopper, he's the best I seen. You were just talking to Byron—he'll do the disc-jockey job for the modern stuff. Davidee used to have and I guess still has some rock and roll tapes. The idea is that Davidee, Byron, and a couple of others are supposed to set up the sound system if Davidee is back from hunting by then . . .”

That would be next Friday. A week from now. If I was still here.

As Lewissie turned away, Andy Arqviq appeared in the doorway to the outer lobby, off which branched toilets and stairs to the township offices and meeting rooms above. Some kind of a meeting was going on up there. I'd seen men and women taking the stairs when I came in. Andy didn't worry about where he had to go to find customers for one of his fifty-cent cigarettes. He was coming from there and dashed straight for me, his languid man-of-the-world manner, which I'd thought so ludicrous, given the rest of him, now abandoned.

“Sir!” he said. “You are wanted on the phone upstairs by”—the tone of voice was one of awe—“CBC Inuvik!”

I slid down off the stool. “Thanks, Andy,” I said.

He looked surprised. “How you know my name?”

“I asked.”

“Oh.” He followed me up the stairs. I'm sure he would have stayed to listen to my side of the phone call, but some of the elders jerked their heads at him and pointed to the stairs.

“Hey, Andy,” I called as he turned reluctantly to leave. “Thanks again!”

He shot a “take that” look at the elders and seemed to fumble for a proper reply. I thought he probably wasn't thanked for anything all that often. “
Amiunniin!
” he said. Meaning “it's okay” or “you're welcome,” or maybe in this case, both.

“Matteesie here,” I said into the phone.

“Hi,” Maxine said softly, her voice teary. Her fondness for my mother was something we both knew. I thought of how Maxine and I had been for years, together so often, never often enough or for long enough, having a drink or two, laughing over one thing or another, comfortable as friends and lovers. If Lois knew Maxine existed, she'd never said so, but I think she would have, and maybe then would have divorced me.

“I've been talking to the funeral director about your plans,” Maxine said, then, with spirit, “I wish to hell he'd stop referring to ‘the remains.' But my problem is that I can't get off on Sunday for the funeral, just can't, we're so short-staffed, stretched so tight. Everybody takes their holidays around Easter when the kids are out of school here
and
it's my Sunday to be the lone hand in news. Anyway, I've got something worked out. I called
News/North
about something and our friend Erika was telling me she's in a bind, supposed to fly to Cambridge tomorrow morning to do a wrap up on that case Charlie Litterick has. Erika had a sitter all lined up for her two boys, and then it turned out the sitter couldn't come until Sunday. So I said I'd come there tomorrow morning and stay with her kids until Sunday and come back here for when I start my shift.”

“You're a genius!”

“I thought so, too.”

“See you tomorrow, then.”

I had not been looking forward to spending that day alone. We didn't string out the farewells, just thought them.

When we hung up the elders were carefully not looking at me, as if they'd heard nothing and anyway it was none of their business. My people are like that. At least on the surface.

The next morning, Bouvier drove me to the airport. I carried shaving stuff, the clothes I'd been wearing when I left Ottawa, a feeling that I hadn't slept at all, nothing else. The storm was gone but a new snow was beginning to fall, not a lot yet, not too thick yet. The windshield wipers were pushing at big wet flakes.

Bouvier used part of the trip to recap his plans for the day. “I'll start out with the Co-op and check the money, as soon as it opens. Then I'll round up the three local girls, separately.” He chuckled. “Tomorrow's Easter Sunday, services at the church and all. I'll tell 'em to come clean for the Lord.”

The snow was falling heavier. I was thankful to see that the Citation had been sent for me, meaning a fast trip.

“Besides them,” he said, “I'll get a line on Davidee and his hangout guys, the ones Barker had down as hanging out with Davidee a lot.” He stopped, then turned to me and said, “You know what, Matteesie?”

“What?”

“We're going to get 'em. This is the week.”

“You sound like a guy who has just bought a lottery ticket. Like, this is the week you get rich.”

 

So I flew to Yellowknife. At the airport there I was told there would be no flight to or from Holman until the next day, Sunday, so my brother hadn't arrived. At the funeral home I laid my cheek for a few minutes against my mother's cold face. She was lying on a slab, looking at peace. I talked to the man with the quiet voice, who was named Albert and who came originally from Holland. Everything was in readiness to fly me and my mother's body and Albert to Holman tomorrow.

Albert said, “Somebody named Maxine, a friend of yours, asked us to let her know when you arrived, which we did. I hope that's all right.”

She was waiting in the lobby area when I came out. We hugged, her soft black hair against my cheek. “Like your haircut,” I said. It had been long and thick and now was short and stringily curled. “I figured twenty years the old way was enough,” she said. The years had fled by so fast. We stepped into the raw cold of the street. I held her arm hard against my side. Big wet snowflakes fell on our shoulders and stuck. We walked a bit toward the center of town.

“Where to?” I said.

She said, “Maybe you'd like a drink.”

I sure did. I was feeling very tired. I didn't know what arrangements she might have made about keeping an eye on Erika's sons, but I could go to the liquor store and we could have a few drinks in my room. The last thing I wanted was to be alone.

“How about the hotel?” I asked.

“Ah, come over to Erika's place. Her kids will be just starting to watch hockey. I bought some of that Mount Gay rum . . .”

“A mind-reader!” I said. She laughed.

A little later, more quietly, abashed, almost to herself, she said, “In different circumstances you could call this the silver lining.”

I couldn't think of anything to say to that, but it was true.

Erika's two kids, fifteen and fourteen, both fair-haired, Gabe and Peter, were watching a hockey playoff between the Los Angeles Kings and the Calgary Flames. Afternoon game, for a change. They got up and shook my hand. Even took their eyes off the screen for a few seconds to do so. Maxine poured me a very large slug of rum, turning her eyes toward me, smiling, “Ginger ale or Coke?”

“Ginger ale.”

I was glad there was a game on. Maybe Maxine was, too. It meant we didn't have to talk much. The four of us, the boys and I on the couch, Maxine in a chair at my end, sat together and watched. I was so comfortable, getting relaxed, a state not hindered by the rum, that I almost forgot to call Bouvier. When I did think of it, the hockey game was near the end of the first period so I decided to wait for the intermission. The phone was in the same room as the TV. Somehow, I didn't want to interrupt the fun in favor of the reality.

The lively cries of the boys—“Fake! It was so in! What a body-check!”—filled and somehow soothed me through the next few minutes. Then the period was over and Maxine handed me the phone. I was thinking, two periods to go, lots of commercials providing many opportunities for pouring new drinks, I think I'm going to survive. As I heard the phone ringing in Sanirarsipaaq I hoped something good was happening, as Bouvier had forecast.

I thought of him alone, probably at the detachment, in that oppressive atmosphere I'd temporarily left behind. Oppressive because of all the parts of it that were weighing on my mind—my mother, Margaret, the wraithlike man who was Debbie's father and had been taken through hell by Davidee. I was glad that when we did have the murders wrapped up, I would leave and not go back for years, if ever . . .

Bouvier answered. He said that in his interviews with Leah, Sarah and Agnes, all admitted being in Dennissie's room from time to time while Thelma slept but otherwise said nothing that we didn't know. He said Sarah and Agnes were quite forthcoming but Leah was sometimes silent and hostile. Maisie had come back that morning and he had seen her in the hotel at lunchtime and thought from her eyes that she had been crying. Pelly had called to say that another urgent case had come up and he probably couldn't give us a final report for a few more days.

“And there was an interesting thing,” Bouvier said. “Hard Hat came in here to see you. He didn't know you'd gone.”

“What did he want?”

“I guess he wanted to repeat, emphasize, some of the things he told you yesterday. Like, that the day we saw them at the airport, he'd thought at the time that Davidee had changed while he'd been in prison and was a different guy than the one he had been, and they'd been friends in school, and so on. But soon Davidee was starting to push him and others around like he used to. Frankly, he was afraid. Didn't want to get involved. Was doing okay, he's a welder, and could see the whole pattern coming at him again, Davidee manipulating people. He said he wanted us to know that whatever we'd heard, he had tried to stay out of Davidee's way, and repeated that the night he'd been at Davidee's place, the night of the murders, he'd got out and gone to the rec hall and after our search there had gone home by himself, didn't hear about the murders at all until the next morning.”

More or less what he'd told me, with some exclusions.

“I've done a report on it,” Bouvier said. “But that's about it.”

“You believe him?”

A pause. I could imagine him pondering. “Let's put it this way: true or not, he's trying to distance himself from Davidee.”

“How about the money check at the Co-op?” I figured there'd been nothing sensational or it might have been his lead-off item, taking precedence over Hard Hat.

It was sensational, all right. In reverse. “Drew a blank,” he said.

“The manager, Nelson, is an officious bastard. He says we'll have to have a search warrant.”

“
What?
”

It must have been a pretty good “what?” Both of Erika's boys stared at me. “What's his number?” I said. “I'll call you back.”

While I dialed I tried for a second or two to see Nelson's side of things, thinking I maybe should wheedle if necessary, be polite. So much for good intentions. “Nelson,” I said, “I hear you want to see a search warrant?”

“It's company regulations!” he said. “Nobody looks at our books or our cash without head office permission!”

“
Bullshit!
” I said.

“Pardon me?” he said icily. Co-op managers are big deals in small settlements, not used to having their bullshit identified as such.

“I said,
bullshit!
”

“You don't have to yell,” he said aggrievedly.

“I figure otherwise,” I said, not yelling but not whispering either. “But I'll tell you what I'll do. I will get a search warrant sent to you by fax right now from Cambridge Bay, where Judge Charlie Ferguson Litterick has a case going. If we have to do that! Go to that extra trouble! We'll make sure that it gets in the paper that through
you
the Co-op, with many stores in the north, blocks a simple police request that might have helped in the murder case.”

Of course, I didn't know if Charlie was still in Cambridge, or had gone home for the weekend, or what. But Nelson didn't know, either, and besides that, he was definitely on the run, a state not unknown among little tin gods.

There was a pause of a few beats, then a grudging “Okay, you can look.”

I called Bouvier. He went straight to the Co-op and phoned me back a few minutes later. “Nothing,” he said. “Also, I forgot to tell you, I got the pictures back of the crowd at the rec hall on the murder night. They don't tell us anything we didn't know.”

That pretty well covered, we agreed, what we could do for now.

I put down the phone to find Gabe and Pete regarding me with somewhat more interest.

“You really told that guy!” Pete said. “‘
Bullshit!
' . . . wow.”

They both worked on shouting the word and laughing until they fell off the couch. Then Maxine told them okay, okay, we got the message. She also brought me a new drink, my second.

Earlier I had gathered by the trend of their cheering and groans that Gabe and Pete were Los Angeles fans and hoped they'd wipe out Calgary in the playoffs.

“Why Los Angeles?” I said.

“Because that's who Wayne Gretzky plays for,” Gabe said.

They said, almost in unison, “We were Edmonton fans until Gretzky went to L.A.”

“I'm a Marty McSorley fan myself,” Pete informed me, with a sideways look. “That lunk!” said Gabe. “Pete just likes his body-checking, not his skating or shooting or anything else. That's the way Pete plays. But Pete is even dirtier than McSorley!” This last caused Pete to look rather pleased.

“There are a lot of McSorley brothers, in about four different leagues,” Pete offered, his eyes lighting up. “Once they were all serving suspensions at the same time!”

Then he sneaked one in. “I'd really like to hear Marty McSorley yell ‘
Bullshit!
'” he said, and collapsed laughing.

The game went on, tied until the final seconds when Gretzky's pass to Jari Kurri set up a goal that won the game for Los Angeles, which was shorthanded at the time (Marty McSorley was shown on TV cheering from the penalty box). At the goal, the boys jumped and yelled and pummeled one another joyously. They kept cheering as the replay showed the sheer majestic skill of Gretzky luring defenders toward him until an apparently loafing Kurri went into overdrive, took Gretzky's dead-on lead pass, and shot high and in, all in one motion.

Another drink, the third (or was it fourth?), and I was feeling much better. The four of us stood at the window looking at the snow and traffic and talking about Florida and California, where this kind of weather didn't happen. Maxine told the boys about a case I'd been on where I shot a guy, a murderer, out in the bush south of where she'd come from, Fort Norman. They listened, a bit wide-eyed. Obviously they were more than a little proud to be hearing such things from the inside. Kids are like that. I thought of Andy Arqviq and winced at the comparison—these two missing a father, Andy missing the whole damn shooting match.

They hung on other cases we talked about, inside anecdotes. They mentioned haltingly that they were sorry about my mother. All the warm things Maxine said about her then got me reminiscing. An hour or two went by, with approximately one drink per hour, before I switched to beer. Maxine broiled musk-ox steaks to go with french fries done in the microwave. From time to time, somewhat fuzzily, but never mind that, I was thinking that, in addition to everything else, she's a good friend, Maxine. In company like this there would seem to be nothing between us except friendship and a kind of joking back and forth, a certain awareness of one another, our gratitude to Erika for this chance to spend this time together. As the evening wore on, Maxine and I decided quietly in the kitchen that I would go back to the hotel for the night, rather than spell out our relationship to two boys neither of us knew very well. Might not matter, but might.

It occurred to me, walking back to the hotel, that if Erika showed up in Sanirarsipaaq later to cover this case, I'd probably find her a royal pain in the ass, which turned out to be true. But her home's warm family atmosphere had helped a lot that night.

It was a melancholy day, Easter Sunday. On the flight from Yellowknife to Norman Wells and then Inuvik (where Maxine had to get off and go to work), we talked quietly. The final leg to Holman I spent with my mother's body in its coffin in the cargo compartment. The Irish co-pilot, Kieron O'Kennedy, had saved all his jokes that day. I imagined him valiantly resisting on the grounds of good taste the vast stock of Irish burial stories that I was sure lurked behind those usually merry eyes. At first I simply leaned against the bulkhead near my mother's coffin. Then Kieron produced a folding camp stool and the stewardess (same one) brought me tea and a box lunch. I didn't leave mother's side except on takeoff and landing, when I had to find a seat and a seat belt.

Father Lovering had boarded in the brief stop at Inuvik. Last night late I'd sat in the hotel room writing a few notes I thought might be a help to him. I handed them to him when we were landing at Holman. My brother Jopie met me coming down the steps and we hugged for a long time. We are the only two of Mother's many offspring who were born to our father, Mother's last husband, who had drowned during a hunting trip when we were very young.

Then I was in a dense throng of sorrowful friends and relatives and people I'd never seen before, all brought together to bid farewell to someone they had long valued. Some, including Annie and Jonassie, had flown from Sanirarsipaaq to Cambridge Bay to meet a charter from Igloolik that had made pickup stops at Gjoa Haven and Spence Bay before reaching Cambridge. I was told that two major native meetings, one an all-parties election meeting, had been canceled so people could come to pay their last respects to my mother.

The weather was raw and cold, about normal for mid-April, minus twelve Celsius, as the procession formed up for the drive to the nearby settlement where mother had lived. Every van in town and a few pickups and cars had been pressed into service to handle those from afar.

Jopie's musk-ox co-op four-by-four, carrying the coffin, led the long procession of vehicles, snowmobiles, three-wheelers, and four-wheelers to the burial ground. Babies rode in the hoods of their mother's
amautiks
. Little children were cuddled warmly, patted on the head or backside by passersby as we unloaded and walked up to the gravesite in a high place overlooking the sea. To the unknowing, it might have looked like merely an isolated place of stone cairns and wooden crosses set among tundra grass peeping through the snow. There were no flowers. As we gathered around the grave, Father Lovering, not using my notes, did a better thing. He led the hymns, all sung in Inuktitut, “Rock of Ages” (cleft for me), “0 God Our Help in Ages Past” (our hope for years to come), “Eternal Father Strong to Save” (whose hand doth guide the restless wave). I thought that last one was a little odd, having heard it before mainly in funerals with nautical connections. On the other hand, if the choice of that hymn had been somehow an oblique bow to the pervasiveness of sea animals and the fish-woman goddess Sedna in our tribal beliefs, would it not have been “Eternal Mother Strong to Save”?