Dana Stabenow - A Taint in the Blood

When the period ended and the last fisherman cast off, Old Sam fired up the engine and they left Alaganik Bay for the cannery in Cordova. Johnny hid out in the chart room, nose stuck assiduously in an beat-up paperback copy of Zenna Henderson’s Pilgrimage. They could have used a Presence on the Freya, was what he was thinking.

Old Sam didn’t say a word to Kate the whole way, even when she brought his lunch to the bridge. It was a corned beef sandwich, too, with lots of mayo and mustard and a layer of lettuce thick enough to choke a horse, served on homemade sourdough bread, his favorite sandwich in the whole entire world.

Still in silence, they delivered their fish, took on fuel, and found their slip in the boat harbor. Shitting Seagull waved from the harbormaster’s shack and disappeared, leaving Kate to wonder why he hadn’t come down to say hi like he always did. She had a bit of walrus tusk that she’d scored from Ray in Bering, part of a gift package she’d received from the Chevak family. She should probably head on out to Bering sometime soon, come to think of it, see if Stephanie was the youngest astronaut in NASA yet, and if she wasn’t, to sit down and help her figure out a career path to get her there.

In the meantime, the walrus tusk would go to Gull, who carved ivory whenever he got his hands on some, and sold the results through a gift shop in Anchorage. If they hadn’t already been presold to Andromedans who’d stopped in town on a joyride from the Great Spiral Nebula. Kate pulled the last knot tight and climbed the ladder to the wheelhouse.

“Hold it,” Old Sam said. He was still sitting in the captain’s chair, tilted back against the bulkhead.

She paused. “What’s up, Uncle?”

He cranked his head around the door into the chart room. “You?”

“Me?” Johnny said.

“You. Uptown. Go visit your girlfriend.”

“I don’t have a girlfriend,” Johnny said.

“Find one.”

Johnny delayed long enough to mark the page in his book, and vanished.

Old Sam pointed at a stool. “You,” he said to Kate. “Sit.”

She sat. “What?” she said. She craned her neck to see Johnny hotfooting it down the float toward the harbormaster’s shack. Probably going to ask Gull what alien ships were moored in transient parking this week. Last time they were there, it had been Cetaceans. Or maybe a bureaucrat from the Council of Planets on a regular inspection, driving Gull nuts with demands for colder water to cool the drives. She kind of lost track of Gull’s hallucinations after a couple of trips into town.

“You’ve got to get a grip, Katya,” Old Sam said.

The lack of the usual bombast and profanity, plus the use of her family name, pulled her gaze back to the old man. Honestly bewildered, she said, “A grip on what, Uncle?”

“You’re gonna mother us to death, whether we want you to or not,” he said. “And mostly we don’t.”

“I-what?”

“So we built you a house,” he told her. “Ain’t nothing we wouldn’t have done for any of us in the same situation, specially if there was a kid involved. I know, I know,” he said, holding up a hand to ward off her protestations, “you always pay your debts. If’s one of the qualities that make you a marginally acceptable human being.”

Overwhelmed by this unaccustomed amount of praise heaped all at once upon her head, Kate remained silent.

“The thing you don’t get,” he said, fixing her with a stern and piercing eye, “is that you don’t owe us squat. Shut up.”

Kate closed her mouth.

“One of our own lost her home. We, her family, friends, and neighbors, replaced it with a couple days’ labor and, when it comes down to it very little cost to ourselves.”

“The house kit-the materials had to cost a lot,” she said immediately.

“Most of it was donated,” he said. He paused, the wrinkles on his face creasing and uncreasing as he fought an internal struggle. “The fact is, for whatever misguided reasons of their own, a lotta people in the state think they owe you, and most of ‘em were willing to kick in to get you under a roof again. Not to mention that it’s good politics for people who do business in the Bush to be nice to a Shugak from the Park.”

There was a long, weighty silence. Everything he’d said was true, and, what was worse, Kate knew it. Still.

“What?” he said.

She couldn’t help herself, she actually squirmed. “I hate owing anyone, Uncle,” she blurted out. “I hate it. Especially those people who helped out because I’m Emaa’s granddaughter.”

“Yeah, well, suck it up,” he said, unimpressed. “Stop trying to run everyone’s life and start taking care of your own, including that boy of yours.”

She looked up quickly. “Is Johnny in trouble?”

He said unblushingly, “What fourteen- going on fifteen-year-old isn’t in trouble? I’m telling you to start minding your own business instead of everyone else’s. Starting right now, with mine. I ain’t yet so goddamn decrepit I can’t pew my own goddamn fish.”

Kate turned as red as Harvey Meganack. “I’m sorry, Uncle,” she said in a small voice.

“You sure are,” he said, and cackled when her eyes narrowed. “Now I’m writing up my tender summary like I always do, and so far as I know, I ain’t yet lost the ability to perform long division. You got it?”

“I got it, Uncle,” she said, and slunk aft to her stateroom, changed into clean clothes, and slipped down to the float to hotfoot it up to the harbormaster’s shack, where Gull was regaling Johnny with an account of the eating habits of the Magelleni. They liked their food still trying to get away, it appeared. Neither of them seemed exactly overjoyed to see her, and after a few moments, she went uptown, where the streets seemed to be markedly empty in every direction she turned.

She looked down at Mutt, who looked back, ears up, tail waving slightly. Mutt didn’t look that intimidating. Well, as unintimidating as a 140-pound half husky, half wolf could look. Couldn’t be her clearing the streets.

Kate was forced to admit, if only to herself, that Old Sam might have a point.

She thought of the two-bedroom, two-bathroom home, now outfitted with electricity and running water, sitting where her cabin had been, before a murderer had set it on fire, hoping she was inside. The cedar prefab house was so new it made her teeth hurt, so clean she was afraid to let Mutt get hair on the rug, so large she imagined an echo when she spoke.

Well, okay, maybe it didn’t echo. But it sure as hell was big compared to what she was used to, with all the room in the world for her newly adopted son, Johnny, an orphan of his father’s death and his mother’s neglect.

She climbed the hill past the old high school and found a spot to sit and look at the view, narrow Orca Inlet, Hawkins Island, Hinchinbrook Island, outlined in orange and red and hot pink by the setting sun. To the east, tiny Mummy Island stood out in bold relief; to the west, the passage to Prince William Sound. It was beautiful, but suddenly she longed for her own place in the world, the clearing filled with a semicircle of buildings surrounded by wildflowers and diamond willow and spruce and alder and birch. Mutt sat next to her, leaning against her side, a warm, solid, reassuring weight. Kate knotted a hand in Mutt’s ruff and felt three months of tension begin to gear down, one ratchet at a time.

Three notes sounded in the still evening air, a pure descending scale. She cocked her head to hear them better when they repeated.

“Okay, Emaa,” she said softly in reply. “Time to go home.”

She’d see out the red season, but after that, it was back to the homestead. If it was an unfamiliar roof, a roof lacking in any family history whatsoever, at least it was hers.