Friday Morning, Bluff Cemetery, Chukchi
THEY CAME OUT OF the public safety building and inhaled involuntarily when the air hit their faces. In unison, they dived into the Suburban and slammed the doors.
"Jesus, what a day for a funeral," Silver said. "It must be twenty below. Not a new record, I guess, but at least the grave-side services should be brief."
"Let's hope," Active said. He started the Suburban and turned on the heater. The air it blew out was cold, but not quite as cold as outside. "How do they dig a grave after freezeup, anyway? They build a fire to thaw out the ground or something?"
"No," Silver said. "They dig them before freezeup."
Active twisted in his seat to look at the police chief. "Really? How many?"
"Usually about a dozen."
"How do they know how many?"
"I don't know how they know. Long experience, probably. Can we go now?"
Active put the Suburban in gear. It lurched forward, then died. "Needs to warm up more," he said, restarting the engine. "So, do they ever use all the graves up before breakup?"
"Geez, you're morbid," Silver said. "Yeah, sometimes they use them all up. Can we change the subject now?"
"But what if somebody else dies?"
"They put the coffins in a shipping van behind the hospital and pray the ground thaws before the departed do."
Active shuddered.
"Sometimes, it's better not to know the details," the chief said. He was silent for a moment, then chuckled.
"It did come in handy once, though," he said. "I had a guy who slashed his girlfriend's throat with her own ulu, but he didn't want to confess. So I arrested him, told him the jail was closed for repairs, and threw him into the van with her and a couple of other corpses that had piled up over the winter. Came back a couple hours later, and he was ready to talk."
Active shook his head. "Sounds cruel and unusual to me."
"Well, he didn't know enough to ask for a lawyer and I didn't offer," Silver said.
Active raced the engine of the Suburban. It sounded like it was ready to go. "Where's the service?"
"St. Mark's."
He put the Suburban in gear again. This time the engine stayed alive, and he pulled away from the public safety building. "No kidding. I didn't know the Clintons were Catholic."
"Yeah, going way back," Silver said.
"And they're giving him an official funeral? I thought suicide was kind of a touchy issue for the one true church." He turned onto Temple Avenue, jammed on the brakes to let a snowmachine cross, then drove on. St. Mark's was three blocks west, on Second Street.
"Father Sebastian is one of Annie Clinton's nephews," Silver said. "Besides which, if the Catholics got too persnickety about suicide around here, they'd be out of business. Like I said, sometimes it's better not to know the details."
"Speaking of details, George Clinton and Aaron Stone both worked at the Gray Wolf," Active said. "How many times..."
"Don't say it," Silver snapped. "How many times have two suicides in a row been people who worked at the same place? I have no idea. Never, probably."
"Plus, this is two suicides in a week," Active said. "That's a lot for a town of twenty-five hundred."
Silver put a big red weather-cracked hand on the trooper's shoulder. "Look, Nathan, there's always loose ends. But you've got to let this go or you'll end up as crazy as a white person who stays in the Bush too long."
He pulled the hand off Active's shoulder and punched him with it. "Anyway, here we are."
Active stopped the Suburban in front of a weathered gray two-story building. St. Mark's looked big enough for its work of saving souls, but perhaps too old and tired for the job. The lot in front was becoming crowded with snowmachines, four-wheelers, and a few cars and pickups.
"Come on," Silver said. "I don't know why, but I always go to these things."
They climbed the stairs to the second floor, slipped into the chapel, and stood along the back wall. Red-tinted windows bathed the mourners in a peaceful ruby light and the word "sanctuary" came into Active's mind.
Daniel and Annie Clinton, Julius between them, sat on a bench at the front. George's coffin, covered by a white parka, stood beside them in the aisle between the two banks of wooden pews.
"Where do you like to sit?" Active whispered.
"I don't," Silver said. "I just stand back here. Being an unbeliever, it's against my religion to take up a pew that should rightly go to one of the faithful."
The room was starting to fill. People crossed themselves as they entered, then took seats or stood along the back and side walls. Perhaps two hundred and fifty people were crowded into the chapel by the time an Inupiaq in priest's robes came out to stand before the coffin.
"That's Annie Clinton's nephew I was telling you about," Silver whispered. "Sebastian James."
Active studied the man. He looked young and serious. Active wondered how he could face the burdens of ministering to the human soul in a place like Chukchi.
"Comes from a village upriver, but he went to Notre Dame," Silver whispered. "Very smart guy. Chukchi's lucky to get him."
Active looked around the chapel as Father Sebastian led the congregation through the funeral service. Some of the young women had babies inside their parkas, signified by humps on their backs and scarves tied around their waists. One of the humps started to cry, and the mother jiggled in place in an effort to quiet the baby.
When the cries continued, she lifted up the hem of the parka and worked the hump around to the front. The cries ceased and Active surmised the baby had been hungry.
"We expect the old people to die," Father Sebastian concluded finally. "But when the young die, it hurts us. The young people are the hope of the future and the hope of the old people."
He switched to Inupiaq. As far as Active could make out, he said the same things as he had said in English.
Then the mourners sang hymns in Inupiaq and some took communion.
Father Sebastian opened the coffin, and people filed past for a last look. Several took snapshots. Daniel Clinton bent over the coffin and kissed his son good-bye. He straightened up and Annie Clinton bent down, then collapsed on her knees and made a high, keening sound. Daniel and Julius helped her up and led her away.
Active followed Silver downstairs. The people from the service were milling around in the parking lot. He saw Evelyn O'Brien from the trooper office sitting in a pickup with her husband, and Kinnuk Wilson watching from the edge of the crowd, an unreadable expression on his face. He glimpsed Pauline Generous and wondered where Lucy was.
Six young men brought out George Clinton's coffin and loaded it into the bed of a pickup at the door of the church. It pulled away and the crowd followed with snowmachines, four-wheelers and cars. Active steered the Suburban into line at the back of the procession.
"Have you had a serious talk with Carnaby about these theories of yours yet?" Silver said as they crossed the bridge over the lagoon.
"Not really," Active said. "What am I going to say, except that I'm investigating an unattended death that looks like another suicide?"
"Nathan, you're on thin ice here. Your boss needs to know if you think there's a problem at the Gray Wolf."
"Who says there's a problem at the Gray Wolf?" The bridge ended and Active steered the Suburban onto the rutted track that led towards the foot of the bluff. "Everything I know is in my reports. Besides, if he is mad, what can he do, send me to a remote location? I'm already here."
"What's the deal with Carnaby, anyway?" Silver said. "He's kind of senior to be in a Bush post like this. Punishment for the Howell bust?"
Patrick Carnaby had run the troopers' Central Investigative Unit in Anchorage until a raid on a crack house turned up one Clayton Howell, president of the Alaska Senate. A high-priced San Francisco lawyer beat the cocaine charges against the politician and the Central Investigative Unit was disbanded after the state senate passed a resolution denouncing its "gestapo tactics." A superior court judge barred the troopers from further investigating the senator and Captain Patrick Carnaby, the unit's commander, became Sergeant Patrick Carnaby, head of the Chukchi detachment.
"I think it's more for safekeeping, although I understand Senator Howell was led to believe otherwise," Active said. "One of my buddies from the academy works at headquarters. He hears the feds are going to take Howell down anyway. Then the honchos will bring back CIU and Carnaby too."
"Maybe, but I never heard of a cop yet who played dodge-ball with the establishment and won," Silver said.
When they got to the bluff, the pallbearers already had George's coffin out of the truck and were wrestling it up the hillside. Active and Silver followed and, when they reached the top, heard the priest finishing the Lord's Prayer. The coffin stood beside an open grave and a tidy pile of sand and gravel.
"That didn't come out of the grave," Active whispered.
"Nope," Silver said. "It's borrowed from the city's stockpile of road sand. They brought it up by snowmachine last night."
The pallbearers lowered the coffin into the ground. Then they lowered the vertical beam of a big white cross into the grave and positioned it at the head of the coffin.
Father Sebastian dropped in a handful of dirt, then the mourners followed suit.
"Daddy, could I help putting the rocks on?" a tot piped as the earth rattled onto the coffin. His father nodded and the boy threw in a handful of gravel from the pile.
Finally the pallbearers picked up shovels and the grave filled rapidly. Little groups of people stood chatting, occasionally laughing quietly, as the work went on. Off to one side, a group of women sat on the tundra in their parkas and recited the Hail Mary. "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death," they chanted. Then they switched to Inupiaq. It sounded like the same prayer.
"Which one's Emily Hoffman?" Active asked.
Silver scanned the crowd, then shook his head. "Don't see her."
"George's girlfriend doesn't come to his funeral? Doesn't that seem strange ?"
The police chief shrugged. "I hear she's drinking pretty hard. Maybe she's at the Dreamland."
"You ever interview her?"
"Never found her, and now I guess it doesn't matter." Silver hunched down inside his parka as a particularly icy gust whistled over the bluff.
"Well, if just hypothetically speaking George Clinton had been murdered and you couldn't find his girlfriend, wouldn't that..."
Silver nudged him and pointed back the way they had come. "Look, it's Tom Werner."
Active turned and looked down the trail. A man in a green-and-white Gray Wolf parka, the hood thrown back, was just coming over the brow of the bluff. A woman followed close behind on the steep narrow trail through the tundra.
The man had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and wore sunglasses with bright blue lenses. His black hair, just starting to frost with gray, swept back to his nape in a fifties-style ducktail. Some mixture of white and Inupiat genes had conspired to give him a smooth olive complexion and Levantine good looks that still surprised Active every time he saw the president of Chukchi Region Inc.
Werner and the woman topped the bluff and Werner flicked his cigarette into the snow. He spoke briefly to Father Sebastian, who listened intently, then nodded.
"Tom Werner wants to talk to us," the priest said.
Werner stepped up to the grave and put one hand on an arm of the cross. He stood quietly while the mourners gradually fell silent.
"I know it's cold and there's a basketball game on TV this afternoon, so I'll be short," he said. "My wife, Mae, is going to translate for me, and I know she'll poke me if I go on too long."
He smiled and Mae Werner smiled, raising her eyebrows. The crowd chuckled. "Good luck shutting that guy up, Mae!" someone called.
"You must have heard one of my speeches when I was in the legislature," Werner said. The crowd chuckled again, then was silent.
"What I want to say is that this"—Werner motioned to George Clinton's grave—"this doesn't have to keep happening. One would be too many, but this is two in a week. We have to stop it."
"That's right, Tommy," a woman in the crowd murmured. Active didn't see who spoke, but the voice sounded like Annie Clinton's. Werner paused as his wife spoke rapidly in Inupiaq. An ancient aana in a caribou parka standing a few feet from Active nodded vigorously at Mae Werner's words.
"I bet everyone here has had a loved one who went just this way," Tom Werner said, pointing again at the grave. This time someone in the crowd moaned. A man, Active thought.
"Just this way!" Werner boomed in a sudden, startling shout. "Just this way! Some of you remember when my own brother went." A few older people nodded. Mae Werner translated.
"Just this way he went!" Tom Werner continued in another shout. A girl near the front sobbed. Werner paused. A gust rolled up the bluff from the lagoon and rippled the wolf ruff of his parka. The crowd settled down.
Several miles east, the afternoon Alaska Airlines jet from Nome rolled onto the final approach for Chukchi and turned on its landing lights. The threshold of Runway 25 lay almost at the foot of the bluff a hundred yards down the lagoon from the cemetery. It looked as if the pilots planned to land on the funeral.
"We can stop it," Werner said. "Some people blame it on the white man, because he brought the liquor and gave it to our grandparents." The crowd murmured agreement.
"That's true, but the white man doesn't pry open our teeth and pour it down our throats. We do that ourselves!"
"That's right, Tommy!" several people in the crowd shouted. Werner paused for his wife's translation. The old aana near Active listened to the Inupiaq translation, nodded vigorously again, and muttered something to an equally old Inupiat man standing beside her.
"We do it ourselves!" Werner shouted when his wife was done. "Yes, we do it ourselves! But we can use the white man's own invention to stop this!" He paused as his wife translated. Behind the little gathering, the noise of the approaching jet grew.
"I'm talking about the vote," Werner said. "We have a chance in a few days to vote Chukchi dry and keep this liquor, this innukaknaaluk, out of our region."
He paused again for Mae Werner to translate, but the whine of the Boeing 737 drowned her out. She turned to watch as the plane roared past. Like all Alaska Airlines jets, it had a huge Inupiat face painted on the tail. The old Inupiaq gazed down at the little funeral with sympathy and encouragement, Active thought, but not much hope.
The jet's tires hit the runway with a screech and twin puffs of smoke, then the noise died off. Mae Werner translated her husband's last words, and he resumed in English.
"I know we can't stop all of the drinking, but we can stop a lot of it," Tom Werner said. "Maybe if we all go out and vote on Tuesday, we won't be coming to any more funerals like this."
As Mae Werner translated, he moved to the head of the grave and rested a hand on each arm of the cross.
"Boys like this one should be marrying their sweethearts and making their own families," Werner said. "And older men like Aaron Stone should be out hunting their caribou and playing with their grandchildren, just like we Inupiat have always done!"
He stood silently, as if thinking what to say next. The crowd waited expectantly.
"I guess I'm through now," he said. "You know what to do next Tuesday."
He bowed his head and looked at the grave as Mae Werner translated. When she was done, he shook hands with Daniel Clinton, then Annie, then Julius. He stared into the boy's eyes for a long time, then squeezed him on the shoulder and released his hand.
Julius just stood there, his hand still out, watching as Werner took his wife's arm and they started on their way. He didn't move until the Werners had dropped out of sight over the brow of the bluff.
"Hell of a show, huh?" Silver said. "Almost made me want to go up and get saved."
Active looked at Silver, annoyed for once by the police chief's cynicism. "You don't take him seriously?"
Silver grimaced. "Don't mind me. I'm too much of a smart-ass for my own good sometimes. We all owe a lot to Tom Werner. You should have seen this place before he got the Gray Wolf going."
The crowd began to stir again and the pallbearers went back to work with their shovels. When the coffin was covered, the Clintons—Daniel, Annie, Julius, and some others Active didn't know by name—gathered at the cross and took pictures of each other.
The crowd broke up. Active and Silver made their way down the hill and crossed the bridge back to Chukchi. At the public safety building, Silver climbed into the police van and went home. Active went back to his office, turned on his computer, and wrote his report on Aaron Stone.
He left a note for Evelyn O'Brien to call Mayor Crane at Nuliakuk and say he'd try to make the next city council meeting. He flipped through an issue of Wired and played a few rounds of solitaire on the computer. He went down the hall to the bathroom, came back, and dialed the phone on his desk.
"Pauline, it's Nathan," he said.
"Isn't it terrible about Aaron Stone?" the old lady said. "I hear at Senior Center he don't kill himself, somebody shoot him. Maybe Inukins steal his gun and shoot him with it?"
He groped for the word, then remembered. Inukins were the Inupiat version of gremlins, tiny people who lived in the tundra and caused mischief for the hard-working Inupiat as they hunted caribou, picked berries, or trapped fox and lynx. "I heard those rumors too, aana," he said. "But did you hear my statement on the radio? No evidence of foul play is what I said on the radio."
"No evidence of foul play? I know what that mean from Perry Mason. It mean it look like Aaron do it himself, or have accident. But I think Inukins can make it look however they want."
"Maybe so, aana," Active said. "Anyway, how was bingo the other night? You going tonight? I could take you in my trooper car."
"What you want, nalauqmiiyaaql I'm too old for young guy like you. You find girl your own age, like my granddaughter Lucy. She smart, pretty, work hard, cook good, I think be joyous in bed. Much better for you."
"No, no, aana," Active laughed. "I just want to ask you something about Tillie Miller. I was wonder..."
"You ask me about Tillie Miller before, nalauqmiiyaaq" Pauline interrupted. "How come you so interested in her? She too old for you too. You mental, Nathan? That's what happen, Eskimo boy adopt out to nalauqmiut parents. Live at Anchorage too long, go kinnuk."
"Wait a minute. Kinnuk is the same as mental?" No wonder Amos Wilson had insisted on calling his grandson Harold.
"That right," the old woman said. "Like that Wilson boy. Kinnuk is mental, just like you will be if you fool around with old lady."
"I don't want to bed Tillie, aana, I just want to talk to her," Active said. "But I don't know how. Does she ever talk to people? Does she have a friend or a granddaughter like Lucy that she talks to?"
Pauline was silent. "I find out, tell you tonight when you pick me up for bingo," she said finally. "But I call your aaka first, make sure you're not mental. If Martha say you are, I don't come out tonight, even if you turn on your flasher. I call police."