Dana Stabenow - Whisper to the Blood

"Kate, what's wrong?" Jim said in a different tone. "Are you sick?"

"No. Go away."

The side of the bed sank beneath his weight and she felt the comforter pulling away. "Don't," she said, grabbing for it, but by then it was too late. She blinked up at Jim and Mutt, two pairs of eyes, one blue, one yellow, staring down at her with equal concern.

"What's going on?" Jim said. "You're never in bed during the day."

"None of your business. Leave me alone." She pulled the cover back over her head.

The weight of him on the bed didn't move. Neither did Mutt's.

"Oh. Has this got something to do with the board meeting this morning?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"I take it it didn't go well."

"I don't want to talk about it!"

"Okay." The bed heaved and she heard footsteps go downstairs. The bed heaved again as Mutt jumped down and followed, the ticky-tack of her claws sounding on the floor.

"Traitor," Kate said, her voice muffled by the comforter. Given Jim's come-hither presence downstairs, and given Kate's present mood, it was doubtful that Mutt would have returned even if she had heard Kate call her name.

Kate was, in fact, sulking. Nobody loved her. Everyone thought she was stupid. In fact, she was stupid, didn't even know what a quorum was. She'd looked it up in Webster's when she came home and it was the minimum number of members of the group meeting required to take a vote. She'd had the vague idea that it had had something to do with books, and how they were put together, but no. Thank christ she hadn't said that during the meeting.

The aroma of frying bacon crept beneath the covers, a sinuous and seductive smell.

Although she'd said plenty else that Harvey Meganack would be happy to repeat over the bar at Bernie's for months to come. If not years. She still couldn't believe they got paid for sitting on the board. And what the hell was a point of order, anyway?

Johnny's truck drove up and a few minutes later she heard the sound of his feet on the stairs. The door slammed. He said something to Jim. Jim replied, and both of them laughed. Probably laughing at her.

She'd looked for the U-Haul box when she got home. It wasn't in the back of Johnny's truck. It wasn't in the garage. It wasn't even in the woodshed. She wondered if maybe she'd tossed it onto the slash pile from the beetle kill the three of them had cleared at intervals this summer. The slash pile was a mile from the house and she didn't have the energy to navigate the three-foot layer of snow between, especially not in the cold and the dark.

There was more banging around in the kitchen, and other interesting smells began to waft upstairs.

Kate's stomach growled. It was getting very hot and humid beneath the comforter. She swore a ripe oath, extricated herself from the tangle of bedclothes, and stamped down the stairs.

"Hey, Kate," Johnny said with a grin.

"What's that supposed to mean?" she said. Maybe she snarled.

Startled, he actually backed up a step. "I… I…"

Jim, pouring a bottle of red wine into a pot, said, "It means hello." He gave her a look from beneath lowered brows. "At least it does in most of the cultures I run in."

"What's with the wine?" she said.

"Relax, the alcohol will boil off."

She knew that, he'd cooked with wine before and on occasion she'd been known to pour a dollop or two into a soup or a stew, but it left her with nothing to argue about. She stamped over to the couch and flung herself down and glared out the window.

Johnny withdrew stealthily backward, sidled into his room, and closed the door very gently behind him. He'd meant to introduce the subject of Greenbaugh-Gallagher!-into the conversation at the first opportunity, let Kate and Jim know the Park had acquired a good guy, but it could wait.

Meanwhile, back on the couch, Kate glowered at the view. It was clear and cold that evening, a dark sky glittering with stars and a waxing moon on the rise, a luminous, reflected glory in the snow-covered landscape beneath. The Quilaks bulked up on the eastern horizon, igneous bullies flexing their sedimentary and metamorphic muscles to intimidate the lesser beings cowering in their shadow. Angqaq towered above them all, the jagged, homicidal peak a reckless gauntlet flung down to every mountaineer worthy of the name. From the heights, the mountains and glaciers fell precipitously, interrupted only by an irregular shelf of land called locally the Step, before rolling out into a vast plateau seamed with rivers and carpeted with spruce and cedar and willow and hemlock and birch and cottonwood. Bordered on the south by the Gulf of Alaska, on the west by the Alaska Railroad and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, on the north by the Glenn Highway, and on the east by the Quilaks and the border of the Yukon Territory, the Park was twenty million acres in size, several steps out of the mainstream of Alaska life and a light-year away from the rest of the world. They got their news from satellite television, the state was bringing at least one Internet connection into every village with a school, and every adult and not a few children had a Costco card, but that didn't necessarily make them members of the global community. It frequently wasn't enough to make them Americans.

Alaskans had attitude, no doubt about that. They loved their land with a fierceness that bordered on mania, while freely admitting insanity was a prerequisite for living there. This might have been a partial explanation as to why, as a community, they voted Republican with an enthusiasm that continually overwhelmed Democrats at elections, disavowing anything that smacked of big government subsidies. At the same time they paid no state income taxes, instead accepting a check every year from the state in per capita payment of the gross annual taxes on oil produced in Prudhoe Bay.

And that, Kate thought, was why Global Harvest Resources Inc. was going to get the red carpet treatment from everyone involved, governor's office on down to the lowliest Park rat. Alaskans had grown accustomed to handouts. A whole generation of kids had been raised to believe it was the natural order of things, the permanent fund dividend, earmarks to congressional budget bills for big budget construction projects like schools in villages and bridges to nowhere, government subsidies at federal, state, and local levels to actually run the government. The federal government was Alaska 's biggest employer.

The Niniltna Native Association wasn't blameless in this, either. It handed out a quarterly dividend, one to every shareholder, representing half the Association's annual profits, the rest of the profits going back into the Association's operating capital account. The payments were legitimate, earnings from leases sold to companies like Global Harvest, though heretofore much smaller in scale, to exploit natural resources on Native land.

But it bothered Kate. It had been a bone of contention between Emaa and herself. "All this money coming at us, Emaa," she had said, "and we don't do anything to earn it. The state grades the road into the Park. Who pays for that? Not us. The village has running water and electricity. Who pays for that? Not us."

"You want to send money to the state, Katya," her grandmother had said dryly, "you go right ahead," and that was the end of that conversation.

"Supper's on," Jim said, and Kate looked up to see the table set and a pot of stew steaming on a trivet in the middle of the table.

She seated herself and Jim ladled out stew all around.

"Smells great," Johnny said. "What is it?"

"Coq au vin."

"Huh?"

"Chicken stew with bacon and mushrooms, you little cretin."

"Yum," Johnny said after the first taste, and for a while was heard from no more.

Kate took a bite. Johnny was right. The bread was store bought, but she knew what Jim would have said if she'd remarked on it. She'd been in no shape to bake any when she'd gotten home, so she didn't. She ate, silent while the men exchanged news. Jim had responded to an accident out at the Sheldons', a bad one. "They were digging a hole for a new septic tank."