Village of the Ghost Bears (20 page)

has sent me adrift,

it moves me

like a weed in the great river,

Earth and the great weather

move me,

have carried me away

and move my inward parts with joy.

Kivalina was silent for a time, then was a man when he spoke again. “You move her inward parts with joy? That what she mean by a man with the great weather inside him. She always look for that man.”

“I never knew your sister.”

“Nobody really know her but me. We’re twins, ah?”

Active lifted his eyebrows. “I heard that.”

“But our
aaka
never know she got two of us in there. After Budzie come out, she think she’s all done, then I pop out too. Like a pingo, what she always tell people. So everybody always call me Pingo.” Kivalina smiled, and his face took on a distant look.

“Tell me more about your sister.”

“Ah-hah,” Kivalina said. “When we’re little, we have our own language. Nobody else can’t talk it, only us. You know what our
aaka
call it?”

Active shook his head.

“Twinupiaq, ah-hee-hee.”

Kivalina paused, waiting for Active’s response. Active smiled dutifully and, he hoped, encouragingly.

“You ever have a twin, Mr.—what your name again?”

“Active. Nathan Active.”

“You ever have a twin, Mr. Nathan?”

Active was about to correct Kivalina, then decided against it. “No, I only have a half-brother.”

“When we’re little kids in Cape Goodwin, that’s when we talk it, Twinupiaq.”

Active nodded, trying to think of a way to snap Kivalina back to the present again. “Are you sure it was the
qavvik
that killed Budzie? I heard she died in a plane crash.”

“Hah!” Kivalina snorted. “It was that
qavvik
, all right. She tell me.”

“She told you? How could she do that if she was dead?”

“I hear Dad-Dad barking while I’m asleep, then I dream I’m awake and she’s there and she say, ‘We never
katak
in that plane.’ Then I know that
qavvik
kill her, all right. That’s why we go up there.”

“Dad-Dad? Your father was bark—who’s Dad-Dad?”

“That’s our dog. Budzie’s and mine. Dad-Dad is dead, too.”

“Ah. So your sister came around with your dog?”

“Ah-hah, she come around while I’m dreaming, say, ‘We never
katak
in that plane.’ Then I know that
qavvik
kill her, all right. Her and Dad-Dad. That’s why we go up there.”

“You went up there?”

Kivalina lifted his eyebrows yes.

“You went up to where the
qavvik
killed her?”

Kivalina lifted his eyebrows again. “Ah-hah, that place they call Driftwood, where they never
katak
in that
qavvik
’s plane.”

Driftwood? It took Active a moment to remember. Driftwood was the oil-company airstrip Cowboy had identified as their best hope in the event of an engine failure in the Brooks Range. But why would Pingo Kivalina go where his sister had died? And how?

“You went to—” Active paused at the sound of the door opening behind him. Alan Long stepped in with a pair of the orange jail coveralls under his arm.

“Here ya go, Pingo.” Long dropped the coveralls onto the table in front of Kivalina.

Kivalina put a hand on the jailwear and looked at the two officers. “I have to do it with you guys in here?”

“We’ll give you some privacy.” Active motioned for Long to follow him out of the room.

Through the mirror, they watched as Kivalina peeled off the coveralls with the stain at the crotch and tossed them into a corner. He looked down at his boxers, then stripped them off, exposing the scrawniest butt Active had ever seen.

“Look at that,” Long said. “A real Eskimo, all right.”

Active looked. “What?”

“He’s got the blue spot. See, right there over his left cheek?”

Now Active saw it. A kidney-shaped patch the color of a faded ink stain in the small of Kivalina’s back. “That makes him a real Eskimo?”

Long raised his eyebrows. “The doctors call ’em Mongolian spots. We call ’em Eskimo spots. I have one in the same place. Don’t you?”

“Not there,” Active said after a moment’s reflection. “But I’ve got a blue birthmark under one arm. That count?”

Long raised his eyebrows again. “It does if it’s blue, I think.”

Kivalina had pulled on the fresh coveralls and was now attempting to sit back down at the table. But he overturned his chair and had to set it upright.

“What do you think?” Long asked. “Crazy?”

Active chewed his lip and studied their suspect, who had slid down in the chair and was leaning his head back, in apparent preparation for a nap. “Evidently.”

“There’s a lot of schizophrenia in Cape Goodwin,” Long said. “You know, they say it’s famous for—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Active said. “Everybody knows. And maybe they’re right, at least in Pingo’s case. He keeps talking about this
qavvik
who’s to blame for everything. The
qavvik
killed his sister. The
qavvik
killed their dog. The
qavvik
set the Rec Center on fire. Pingo even tried to kill the
qavvik,
he says.”

“You think the
qavvik
is Pingo’s other self?”

Active shrugged. “It seems to fit. Pingo did get burned in the fire. Maybe that’s how he tried to kill the
qavvik
.”

Long shuddered as he looked at Kivalina through the mirror. “And got all of those other people instead.”

Active was silent for a long time. “Maybe we can punch through it somehow, maybe talk to the
qavvik
himself.”

“How?”

“Maybe Budzie’s our lever.”

“The sister?”

Active nodded. “She seems to have been a kind of mother figure to him. Every thread eventually leads back to her.”

Long rubbed his chin and lifted his eyebrows. “You’re right. But how do we use her? She died what, over a year ago?”

Kivalina was tapping his long, dirty fingernails on the tabletop and looking around the room. He seemed suddenly more alert, less hung over, the nap forgotten.

“You ever hear the exact name of the spot where she was killed?”

Long thought for a moment, then squinted the negative. “Doesn’t seem like it, no.”

“Pingo says it was at Driftwood.”

“That old strip on the Utukok?”

“Uh-huh. Pingo says a wolverine killed his sister at Driftwood,” Active said. “Not a crash, but a wolverine. And then he went up there. Pingo and somebody else.” And then he went up there. Pingo and somebody “He say who the somebody else was?”

Active shook his head.

Long shrugged. “Driftwood, huh? Could be, I guess. Guys with airplanes go up there sometimes to hunt caribou. The herds come through there on their way south in late summer, early fall. But how would Budzie—”

“Tom Gage!”

“Sure,” Long said. “He was a pilot and—”

“Shit, maybe he’s the
qavvik
Pingo keeps raving about. There’s a crash, Budzie dies, Pingo blames Gage, and here we are.”

Long frowned. “But why would Pingo go up there afterward?”

“Maybe he just had to see the spot,” Active said. “Touch it. Take a memento back. Maybe talk to her. She and the dog apparently came to him in a dream and she told him there was no crash. Maybe he wanted to camp out up there, see if she’d put in a personal appearance.”

They turned and studied Kivalina, who had risen and was pacing the room.

“If you’re Pingo Kivalina, it probably makes perfect sense to barbecue eight or ten people alive to get the guy who killed your twin sister,” Active said. “And he was staying with Gage—”

“He told you that?”

Active nodded. “So he could have taken a wire twister.”

“Sounds right,” Long said. “But how do we get through to him?”

They studied Kivalina some more. “Look,” Active said at last, “you go to North Slope Public Safety; talk to the investigator on the crash; go through their files. We need everything they have. Especially pictures. The more graphic the better.”

“And what are you going to do?”

Active chewed his lip again. He needed the details of Budzie’s crash before confronting Kivalina again, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to leave him on his own for very long. He was still pacing and had begun shaking a finger in the air, as if lecturing an invisible audience. Was he rehearsing his story before trying it on Active? Or was he about to go over the cliff completely?

“I guess I should try to keep him talking,” Active said. “Just get back as soon as you can.”

Long nodded and started for the door of the observation room.

“Oh,” Active said. “And take those, would you?” He pointed through the glass at the soiled coveralls piled in the corner of the interrogation room.

“
Arii
!” Long said. But he walked into the room with Active and left with the malodorous apparel.

Kivalina, who had halted the lecture when they came in, was now huddled in a corner, his eyes skittering around the room.

“Come back to the table,” Active said. “Come on. No one will hurt you.”

Kivalina walked over and perched on the edge of the chair opposite Active, coiled like a spring.

Active sighed inwardly and tried to think how to get him talking again. But not about the crash, not now. Now they needed a neutral subject.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“I HEARD THERE’S A lot of polar bears in Cape Goodwin,” Active said finally.

“Ah-hah,” Pingo said. “Used to.”

“Used to? The bears don’t come into the village now?”

“Not so much since that
nanuq
eat my cousin Ossie Barton few years ago.”

“I heard that. He got it with a knife before it killed him?”

Kivalina raised his eyebrows. “He was a tough guy, that Ossie. After he’s kill, we start hunting them more, all right, try keep them away from town. Village council even have a bounty from their bingo game and Rippies for a while. Then the government hear about it, make ’em stop.”

“Mm-hmm. The white people Outside like polar bears.”

Kivalina raised his eyebrows. “Me and Budzie never quit, though. We always like to be out on the ice hunting, even if there’s no bounty.”

“Your sister was a polar bear hunter?”

“I thought you never meet her. How you know she hunt
nanuqs
?”

Active, nonplused, tried to think of something to say. Evidently Kivalina’s attention span was shrinking again. “Everybody talked about it,” he answered finally.

“Ah-hah,” Kivalina said. “She’s pretty famous hunter, all right. Me and her and Dad-Dad and Susie, we always hunt them
nanuqs
.”

“Dad-Dad and Susie?”

“You know about them already? They’re good dogs, ah?”

“Susie was a dog too?”

“I thought you know about them.”

“I might have heard about them.” Active shifted in his chair. The demented conversation was clouding his mind. He felt like he needed a nap.

“Dad-Dad, she’s the best dog in Cape Goodwin, all right. Big, strong, fast dog.”

“Dad-Dad was a female?” Active felt like a recorder, playing back whatever Kivalina said.

“Ah-hah,” Kivalina said with a lift of the eyebrows. “Budzie name her that because she’s born right after our dad die. Budzie think maybe he’ll come back in that pup little bit. That’s why she name her Dad-Dad. You know what?”

“What?”

“When we’re out on the ice, I never see that Dad-Dad asleep same time as Budzie. If Budzie’s awake, then Dad-Dad might take a nap. But if Budzie go to sleep, somehow Dad-Dad will know and she’ll wake up, keep watch.” Kivalina sat up straight, widened his eyes, and stretched his neck, presumably to portray a dog on alert. “That Dad-Dad, she’s Budzie’s dog. Won’t hardly have nothing to do with nobody else, not even me. But I got Susie, all right. You ever hunt
nanuq
, Mr. Nathan?”

Active shook his head in a largely futile attempt to clear it. “And Susie. Susie was a male?”

Kivalina recoiled with an indignant look. “Where you hear that? Susie was Dad-Dad’s sister. She’s not no male!”

“Right,” Active said. “I must have gotten her mixed up with another dog.”

“Ah-hah,” Kivalina said. “Susie isn’t no male, that’s for sure.”

“I’m sure she’s not.”

“You ever hunt
nanuq
, Mr. Nathan?”

“No, I don’t think they have them around Chukchi.”

“Not so much,” Kivalina agreed. “All those white people you got in Chukchi scare ’em away, I guess. We used to get lot of them around Cape Goodwin till Ossie Barton get eat up, though. You heard about that?”

Active decided it would be pointless to remind Kivalina they had already discussed this. “Yes, I think I heard of that.”

“That’s when Budzie and me start hunting them a lot. You ever hunt them, Mr. Nathan?”

Active, sensing the conversation heading for an endless loop, just said, “Mmmm.”

“It’s pretty easy with dogs, all right, at least when there’s not so many leads open and you can use a snowgo. Not so easy if there’s leads. Then you gotta use your dog team and take an
umiaq
to get across them leads.”

“Mmm,” Active said again.

“But with snowgos it’s easy. See, we just leave some old meats few miles out on the ice, maybe it’s a seal we catch or some real old whale meats, too stinky to eat no more. Then in about a day or two, we go back out there on our snowgos to see if there’s any bears. If
nanuq
is there, or if there’s any tracks around, we chase ’im on the snowgos till he’s kinda tire, can’t run so fast any more. Then we stop, and them dogs jump off the snowgos and get the bear for us.”

Active’s skepticism overcame his resolve to let Kivalina ramble without interruption. “Two dogs could kill a polar bear? I never heard of that.”

“Me neither,” Kivalina said. “Why you ask about that?”

“Well, you said. . . .” Active sighed. “What did Dad-Dad and Susie do when you caught up with the bear?”

“Dad-Dad, she’s the fast one. She can catch
nanuq
now he’s tire. So she run up, bite him on the ass.
Nanuq
, he hate dogs and he’s tire and now he’s mad too, so he stop to fight them dogs. Dad-Dad and Susie, they just run all around him, barking like hell. One of them will run in and bite his ass while he’s trying to get the other one. Pretty soon
nanuq
forget all about Budzie and me. So we just walk up and shoot him with our rifles.”

It made a certain amount of sense, but this was Pingo Kivalina talking. Surely it couldn’t be so simple to bring down the fearsome lord of the Arctic, the snake-necked emperor of the ice. “That’s it?”

Kivalina raised his eyebrows. “Pretty easy, ah? We just take his fur and his gallbladder, leave the meats out there. Maybe when we come back tomorrow, another
nanuq
is already eating him, so we’ll catch him too.”

“You took the gallbladders?”

“Ah-hah, we get lots of money selling them bladders and the fur, all right. Budzie’s our health aide in them days. She’ll use the money to buy stuff for the clinic, or if somebody’s real sick, maybe she’ll get them or their family a ticket to the hospital at Chukchi or Anchorage. At first I never like to do it, but then Budzie say, ‘Us Inupiaq always hunt that
nanuq
to live since early days ago. Now we just do same thing a different way when we use the money to buy medicine.’”

Kivalina looked sad and reflected for a long moment before speaking again. “She tell me them bears, they have their own village out on the ice where they go when they die. It’s right by a big polynya with lots of seals and birds to eat, and they’re real happy out there by theirself. A whole village with nothing in it but the ghosts of all them dead bears. You think that’s true, Mr. Nathan?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been out on the ice that much.”

Kivalina flashed him a look of pity before continuing. “Well, we never find that village, but it’s what Budzie say. Sometimes when I’m up on them cliffs by Cape Goodwin where we always get bird eggs, I look out to the northwest and I can see it, though.”

“The village where these ghost bears live?”

“Ah-hah. And I can see Budzie and Dad-Dad out there with all them bears. Must be nice, that village on the ice, ah?” Kivalina looked at Active with an air of expectation, as though inviting him to explore this theory of the afterlife.

Active gave his eyebrows the slightest twitch, more acknowledgment than agreement, he hoped. “Your sister sounds like quite a woman.”

The look of expectation vanished. “Too bad that
qavvik
kill her, ah?”

“You and Budzie sold the bladders to that Korean guy in Cape Goodwin?”

Kivalina looked away, as if the subject made him nervous. “Sometimes, I guess, till he go to prison. Now that
qavvik
kill him, too, ah?”

Active was tempted to name Tom Gage, in the hopes that Kivalina would explain Gage’s motive for killing Jae Hyo Lee at One-Way Lake. But he gave his head a mental shake.

Kivalina jerked his head up as the door behind Active slid open. “
Arii
, who’s that?” Then he relaxed as Alan Long came into the room, steam wafting up from a styrofoam cup in his hand.

“Thought you might like something to drink, Pingo. Nathan and I need to go outside for a minute.”

“Gotta piss, ah? Better not to wait so long like me, ah-hee-hee.” Kivalina took the cup and downed a gulp of coffee.

Active stepped into the hall, eyebrows raised in inquiry. “Back so soon?”

Long clicked the door shut. “You better hear this for yourself.”

He led Active into the observation room, where a short, fit-looking black man was watching Kivalina through the mirror. He wore a bristling salt-and-pepper moustache and a North Slope Borough Public Safety Department uniform.

Long made the introduction. “Sergeant Cave, Trooper Nathan Active.”

Cave put out his hand. “Johnnell. Pleasure to meet you, Nathan. I hear you think your fire may be connected to our crash at Driftwood last year?”

“Killed a Cape Goodwin woman named Budzie Kivalina?”

Cave nodded. “Viola Louise Kivalina. Only fatality. Only injury, in fact.”

“And the pilot was a guy named Tom Gage?”

Behind Cave, Long’s face took on an expectant look.

Cave shook his head. “Duane Paniuk McAllister.”

“Dood McAllister,” Long said.

Active was speechless for a few moments. “Dood McAllister was flying the plane that killed Budzie Kivalina?”

Cave nodded again.

“I knew you’d want to hear it for yourself,” Long said.

“So what—”

“We got a call from the Rescue Coordination Center in Anchorage a year ago August,” Cave said. “The seventeenth, to be exact. The satellite had picked up an Emergency Locator Transmitter squawking somewhere between here and Chukchi. We launched our rescue helicopter and basically flew down the airway toward Chukchi with our radio tuned to the emergency frequency. About the time we started picking up the signal, Rescue Coordination radioed to say the satellite had pegged it as coming from the Driftwood strip.”

“You went out on it personally?” Active asked.

“I like to see the country, and most ELTs are false alarms anyway. Some guy lands hard and it goes off, or he bangs it with a rifle butt while he’s unloading the plane. Usually we have a chat, maybe wet a line for grayling or Arctic char from whatever creek or lake he’s on, and then we’re on our way. But this one wasn’t a false alarm.”

“So what happened?”

“We do a flyover, and there’s this Cessna 185 in the Utukok River maybe a quarter mile downstream from the strip, basically crumpled up in a ball, just the tail sticking out of the water. And on the strip, there’s this guy standing over a fire he’s got going from those scrubby little willows that grow up there.

“The guy turns out to be McAllister. There’s a hell of a wind ripping through the valley, and he’s wet and shivering, so we give him some dry clothes, and he tells us the story. Basically, he and the Kivalina woman fly up in the 185 from his guiding camp on the Upper Katonak to knock down some caribou to feed these hunters he’s got coming in a few days. But McAllister’s wife starts—”

“They were married?” Active cut a glance at Long, who shrugged.

“That’s what he called her,” Cave said. “But her name was still Kivalina, so I don’t know if they ever made it official. Maybe she was his common-law wife.”

“And they were in a 185?”

“Yeah,” Cave said. “Is that a problem?”

“McAllister’s still flying one. How many did he have?”

Cave shrugged. “Beats me. But I think he said the one he rolled up at Driftwood was insured.”

Active nodded. Cave went on.

“So all morning, the Kivalina woman is complaining of a bad stomach, and they land at Driftwood to make some tea, maybe catch some grayling out of the Utukok and spend the night. But the stomach keeps getting worse, and she wants him to take her back to Chukchi to see a doctor. By now, they’ve been there a couple hours, and it’s really blowing. The way that strip lies, any wind coming down the valley rolls straight across it, and McAllister is a little antsy about trying a takeoff. But the Kivalina woman’s stomach keeps getting worse, she’s already thrown up everything she ate, and now she’s into the dry heaves, so they climb into the 185 and crank up.”

Cave tilted his hands to illustrate. “He lifts off with one wing low and lots of rudder to counteract the crosswind. They get a gust at the wrong moment, and, before he can compensate, the low wing catches some brush on the side of the runway and they’re in the river, being rolled along by the current. He gets out of his harness, starts to yank her loose, then he’s swept out of the plane and washes up several hundred yards downstream and on the opposite bank. By the time he finds a place to cross and gets back to the site, a couple of hours have passed and, anyway, the river’s too fast and deep, not to mention too cold, to go out to the plane. So he blows the water out of his Bic lighter, starts a fire, and sits down to wait for somebody to come by.”

“He was uninjured, you said.”

Cave nodded. “We check him over. He’s okay. But we don’t know if the woman is still in the wreck, or washed downstream, or what. So we take off in the helo and search down river four or five miles—nothing. We end up having to come back to Barrow for some divers and equipment to get a cable on the 185 and haul it out. And when we do, she’s in there, all right.”

“You had her autopsied?”

Cave paused, a look of unease ghosting across his face. “Several broken bones, including a skull fracture that killed her.”

“Any water—”

“No,” Cave said sourly. “No water in the lungs—”

“But if she was underwater—”

“The pathologist said the head injury probably killed her instantly. She could have gotten it in the plane before they hit the river.”

“And the stomachache? Any sign of—”

“Internal organs unremarkable,” Cave said.

Active sighed. “So you—”

“Yeah, we called it an accident. The evidence didn’t support any other conclusion.”

“I suppose not.”

This was the point where the conversation should have been over. Cave should have been offering his hand again, probably with a business card in it, and starting for the door, but he wasn’t. And Alan Long’s face had that expectant look again.

“And?” Active said.

Cave shot him a sour look. “And a couple weeks later, Pingo there”—Cave pointed through the glass at Kivalina—“comes into my office with a guy named Tom Gage. They’ve got this duffel bag. They pull out a dog’s head, and they plunk it down on my desk.” head, and they plunk “A dog’s head.”