Dana Stabenow - A Fine and Bitter Snow

“I got it, Dan. I think I had it before I sat down.”

“Yeah, well, I just don’t want the Park to suffer because the secretary or one of her minions doesn’t happen to like the chief ranger. And hell, it’s not like I wouldn’t want my own people in charge if I were taking over.” He brooded. “Ah hell. I figure whatever happens, I’ll deal with it.”

“Good attitude. In the meantime, what’s going on?”

“What’s going on is that all the bears are asleep, the moose are bedded down by the rivers, conserving energy, and the Kanuyaq caribou will start getting thinned down”- he looked at the calendar-“in four days, which will considerably relieve my mind. Other than that, there isn’t much going on. Have to start going through applications for summer hires. Shovel some snow off the roof.”

“You lonely up here all by yourself?”

He shrugged. “No.” His grin was sly this time. “Course, I’m not up here all by myself all the time.”

Kate rolled her eyes. “Right. What was I thinking. How’s Christie?”

“Perfect.” But he didn’t look as smug as he ought to have when he said it.

“Trouble in paradise?” she said lightly.

He crumpled the paper bag and tossed it in the trash.

Then the in box needed straightening. “No,” he said. “No trouble.”

Okay. “See you at the potluck?”

His brow lightened. “I’ll be down.”

“Good. Because you know the fry bread was just an appetizer.”

It got a smile out of him, but Kate worried about him all the way down from the Step.

It beat worrying about herself.

She opened the doors to the gymnasium at precisely 12:00 p.m., and people began to stream inside. Dandy Mike had come early and helped her set up the long tables that lined the front of the cafeteria window. Fortunately, he also knew the secret to making the bleachers come out of the wall, because Kate certainly didn’t. The coolers were beneath the tables, loaded with six different kinds of pop. The tabletops were soon obscured beneath a layer of meat loaf, macaroni and cheese, blood stew, cinnamon rolls, seventeen different kinds of fruit bread as well as innumerable loaves of homemade white bread, caribou ribs, moose roast, and the last silver of someone’s fishing season, rescued from the cache and roasted whole. There were enormous bowls of mashed potatoes and boiled carrots, along with bean salad, macaroni salad, fruit salad, carrot salad, and five different kinds of coleslaw. There were sheet cakes and layer cakes, pumpkin, apple, and cherry pies, brownies, angel bars, and homemade butterscotch candy. They’d done Dina proud.

Kate kept up with the napkins and the plastic flatware while exchanging greetings with the people filling their plates on the other side of the table. Knots of people gathered on the bleachers, and more people streamed in, then more, and the hum of conversation became first a din and then a roar. It wasn’t long before the little kids found the basketball closet and began practicing free throws at the opposite end of the court.

At 1:30, the drummers assembled onstage and the room quieted momentarily. “Hey, everybody,” Wilson Mike said, raising drum and stick, and “Hey, Wilson,” everybody said back.

“We’re singing for Dina today,” Wilson said, “and you’re dancing,” and before he struck the second note and the singers got started on their first song, people were out in the middle of the gym floor, shoes off, feet moving and finger fans counting the beat. Everybody had on winter clothes, so it wasn’t long before they started sweating, too. It was noisy, and for the most part not very graceful, and filled with joy. It lifted Kate’s heart to see it.

She was behind a table, dispensing gifts. Well, one gift, the same gift over and over, a reprint of the group photo taken at the Kanuyaq Mine those many years ago. She’d gotten the owner of the Ahtna Photo Shop out of bed on her trip in to see Ruthe and had him make up a negative and run two hundred prints, then bullied him further into doing a rush order from Anchorage on some wooden frames. They weren’t all the same frame, but the picture was going over very well. “Ayapu,” Auntie Vi said. “That the time that man Smith, he flying tourists to the mine from Cordova.” She was silent, looking at the photograph. The frame she had picked was dark blue wood, and it set off the black-and-white photograph very well. “Ekaterina, she look so young. Dina, and Ruthe, too. And Ray Chevak, hmm, yes.” She cast Kate a sideways glance. “You know Ray Chevak?”

Kate, unruffled, said, “I met him in Bering this summer.”

Auntie Vi nodded. “I go dance now.”

“Knock ‘em dead, Auntie,” Kate said, and shooed her off. Billy Mike met Auntie Vi halfway and matched her steps into the circle.

One thing you could say for Park rats, they sure did love to dance. All ages, all sexes, all sizes, they were, to a man and a woman, dancing fools. There was no such thing as a wallflower in Niniltna, of either sex. It helped that most of the time the dancing was Native, en masse and the more the merrier. You could dance with one partner or twenty, but the one thing you never had to do was dance alone.

She turned, bumping into Pete Heiman as she did. “Well, hey, Pete, just the guy I wanted to see. I hoped you’d be here this afternoon.”

He laughed. “I’m afraid, very afraid.”

“Step into my office,” Kate said, and led the way through a side door.

Outside, the snow was falling in small soft flakes. Kate heard a plane take off but couldn’t see it. There were some men clustered together at the end of the building, sharing a bottle. Kate repressed the urge to glare at them and looked back at Pete.

Pete lit a cigarette. “What’s up, Kate?” Through the smoke, his eyes were watchful.

His eyes were always watchful. Pete Heiman was the duly elected senator for District 41, which included the Park, and, as such, every Park rat’s Juneau mouthpiece. He was also an old drinking buddy of Abel’s, and Kate had known him all her life. She liked him, but she didn’t trust him. Still, he was her mouthpiece, too. “Dan O’Brian’s been suspended as chief ranger for the Park. They’re trying to pressure him into early retirement.”

“Dan the ranger.” Pete drew on his cigarette. “Well, well. I hadn’t heard.”

“You’re a little slower than usual on the uptake, then, it’s all over the Park. No one wants him to go, Pete. Can you call someone?”

Pete had run for reelection that fall, and Kate had worked for his opponent, who had almost beaten him and would have if a couple of nasty little murders hadn’t gotten in the way, so technically he was under no obligation to grant Kate a favor. On the other hand, this was Kate Shugak asking him a favor. Kate could all but hear the gears ticking over between Pete’s ears.

“Whom would you suggest I call?”

He was stalling, and they both knew it. Pete Heiman had been a card-carrying Republican from his cradle; his father and his grandfather had seen to that. If he didn’t know whom to call, nobody did. “I’ve got people working the phones here, too,” Kate said.

“Which people?”

“Just people,” Kate said. “Come on, Pete. You know you have to. If you don’t, you’ll be the only one who doesn’t, and where does that put you? Better it sounds like it’s your idea.”

“Are you under the impression that I owe you anything?”

“No. No, I’m not.”

“So then you’d owe me.”

“Careful,” Kate said, opening the door. “The last person who said that to me is dead.”

Inside, he caught her arm. “Who’s that blonde?” He nodded at Christie Turner, who was dancing next to Dandy Mike in the circle.