Dana Stabenow - So Sure Of Death

The second book in the Liam Campbell series, 1999

“Now, there is the sound of someone not flying his own plane.”

“Shut up and breathe.”

Wyanet Chouinard sank obediently into a modified Horse Stance as the float plane roared overhead. She was a grown woman, the owner and proprietor of her own air taxi service and the mother of a soon-to-be-adopted son. She didn't have to take orders from anyone, but she would from this one old man.

The old man was Moses Alakuyak, short, thick through the chest and shoulders, with his Yupik mother's brown skin and flat cheekbones and hints of his unknown Anglo father in his height, in the high bridge of his nose, the roundness of his eyes, the suppressed curl and color of his hair. Some called him a shaman. Some called him a drunk. On occasion, he was both, and neither.

This morning he was a teacher of tai chi, a sifu, and he demanded his student's full attention and submission. He got it, too, the little despot, Wy thought without rancor. He was standing to her left and a step behind. She could feel his eyes on her, checking the level of her hands, the depth of the cup of her palms, the tilt of her chin, the angle behind her bent knees, the straightness of her spine, the focus of her eyes.

“Lower,” he said. “How'n hell you supposed to strengthen your thigh muscles for the real work if you don't push them in Horse Stance?”

She made a silent and anatomically impossible suggestion as to where he could put his Horse Stance, and bent her knees, which after ten minutes were starting to tremble, to a deeper angle. Her center of gravity seemed off, and she swayed back an inch or so. There. She was supposed to feel the balls and heels of her feet rooted to the earth, the crown of her head suspended from a string. Root from below, suspend from above. Her breathing deepened. Her eyelids lowered, her gaze unfocused on the horizon.

The sneaky little son of a bitch waited until she was completely engrossed in the first position of the Yang style of tai chi chuan before he brought out the big gun. “How long you gonna wait before you talk to Liam again?”

She couldn't control the start his words gave her, but she could-and did-bite down on her verbal response. She said nothing, trying to recapture the peace of mind that had been hers only moments before.

“It's going on three months, Wy,” Moses said. He stood upright and walked around to face her. “Too stubborn, is that it? Too damn proud to make the first move?”

She stayed in position, staring straight ahead as if she could bore through his skull with her eyes. If only.

He waited. He was good at it. It was six a.m. on a sunny Sunday morning in July. The birds were singing or honking or chirping or croaking. At the foot of the cliff the massive Nushagak River moved by with stately unconcern. Wy had a six-week contract to fly supplies into an archaeological dig ten miles west of Chinook Air Force Base. Moses had volunteered to take Tim to his fish camp upriver for the silver run, away from the rough crowd of boys he had fallen in with during the school year. He'd learn to run a fish wheel, salt eggs, fillet and smoke salmon and, she hoped, realize what a rush it was to earn money of his own. Best of all, he'd be out of the reach of his birth mother, who was prone to fly in from Ualik and, after a night at the bars, shove her way into Wy's house and demand Tim's return, even if the last time he'd been in her custody he'd wound up in the hospital, broken, bruised and bleeding.

All in all, the next month looked positively rosy, especially when she compared it to the previous three years. She was marginally solvent, content in her work and her family, and if the lawyer handling Tim's adoption called a little too frequently for more money, it was summertime and the flying was frantic. She could hear the cash register ringing on every takeoff and the cash drawer sliding out on every landing.

So what if it was three months since she'd spoken to Liam Campbell? There were other fish in the sea, and in particular, there were a whole hell of a lot of other fish in Bristol Bay, with and without fins. The small voice that pointed out that she had allowed only Liam to swim up her stream and spawn could and would be ignored. She was content. She used the word like a mantra. She didn't need anything more-or anyone else-to complicate her life.

Wy became aware that her teeth were clenched so hard that her jaw ached, and made a conscious effort to relax.

Moses, naturally, persisted in attempting to suck the well-being right out of her. “You want him. He wants you.” Her sifu snorted. “And it sure as hell ain't like you're getting it anywhere else.”

“I have Tim to consider.” Her voice had a pronounced edge to it.

Moses pounced. “Give your menfolks a tad more credit than that, Wy. Liam's a grown man, and he had a son of his own. He knows how to handle kids. And as for Tim, hell, having a man- the same man-around on a regular basis would be a new experience for him. Would teach him all men don't get drunk and hit. A good thing for him to learn, I'd've thought. Of course, that's just me.”

Wy felt her teeth clamp together again. “I didn't mean it that way.”

“Oh, really? How did you mean it, exactly?”

Her neck got warm. “I meant that I have to look good to the adoption board. They look at your lifestyle, at your habits.”

“Ah.” Moses gave a judicious nod. “I see. So the adoption board won't let kids go to prospective parents who have the audacity to have healthy, normal lives of their own.”

The warmth seeped from her neck up into her cheeks.

Moses' eyebrows, thick and black, rose into interrogatory points. “Anything to say about that? Besides ‘I'm sorry for trying to bullshit you, Sifu’?”

She hadn't.

“Good,” he said briskly. “On your feet.”

She rose shakily to her full height, five feet eight inches; five inches taller than Moses, not that it ever seemed like that much of an advantage. Her dark blond hair, streaked with gold by the summer sun, had come loose from its ponytail. Thankful to have something to do with her hands, she made a business out of tying it up again. That done, there was nowhere to run. She blotted her forehead on her sleeve and sought refuge in work. “I've got an early morning flight, I'd better get going.”

“You said some harsh things to each other in May,” Moses said to her retreating back. “Hurtful things. Especially you.”

That did it. She spun around, her face furious with anger, shame and guilt. “I handed him my heart and he ate it for lunch. I am not on the dinner menu!”

Pleased with what she felt was a splendid exit line, she turned to march up the stairs and into her house.

From behind her she heard Moses' voice, acerbic and irascible as always. “How about dessert?”

The slam of the door was his answer.

The old man sighed and shook his head. “Youth is wasted on the young.”

He waited for the voices to kick in. For a change, they didn't. Mostly they were insistent, forceful, regular spiritual bulldozers, determined to make him a legend in his own time.

He stepped to the edge of the cliff and looked at the beach below, strewn with boulders and tree trunks, the occasional fifty-five-gallon drum, the odd Styrofoam cooler. It wasn't that far down, but far enough. He could shut the voices up for good. That option had always been open to him, from the time he first heard them when he was twelve and they made him tell his mother that his father was going to kill her. She didn't listen, of course, no one ever did, but that didn't make the voices let up any.