HE FOUND LUCY AT the Dispatch console in the public safety building, highlighting passages in an accounting text. She wore white Levi’s and a white sweater today, and looked dazzling as usual.
“Got a minute?”
She didn’t look up. Today’s bullet dream had come just before dawn, leading to another fight before breakfast.
“Still mad, huh?”
Finally she raised her gaze from the book. “Still shutting me out?”
“I’d let you in if I could. But I . . .”
She closed the textbook and looked him in the eye. “But?”
“I can’t explain it. Someday, maybe I’ll get my mind around it and be able to talk about it. But not now.”
“Except with Nelda Qivits.”
He sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“But not sorry enough to talk about it.”
“Not sorry enough to apologize again, that’s for damned sure.” His voice was louder than he’d intended, and the words were out before he could stop them. “You’ve had two or three apologies already and that’s all you get for one bullet dream. The only question is, are you go—” He finally forced his mouth shut, shocked by his own rage and his self-indulgence in letting it out. And by the crushed look on her face.
“Now I really am sorry,” he said. “That was completely out of line.”
She turned away and touched her eyes, then faced him again with a shrug. “Maybe someday.”
“I’m trying, I really am.”
“I know that, somewhere inside, I think. I’ll try, too.”
He glanced around and, seeing no one near, kissed her quickly, picking up a slight taste of salt from compressed and unresponsive lips.
“Thank you,” she said with a stiff nod. “How did we get started down that road again, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It certainly wasn’t what I came to talk about.”
“Which was?”
It took him a moment to recall. “Did you ever hear any stories about a couple of old angatquqs named Natchiq and Saganiq?”
She thought for moment, then shook her head. “Don’t think so. You want me to ask Aana Pauline?”
He nodded and she slipped on her headset, then punched in her grandmother’s number on the Dispatch console. He listened as she asked Pauline Generous about the two shamans.
Finally Lucy slipped the headset off one ear and looked at him. “She says she’s heard the names a couple of times from some of the old people around here, but doesn’t really know much about them.”
Lucy concentrated on her headset for a few seconds, then looked at him again. “She was raised in the Nome area and they never talked about Saganiq and Natchiq down there. And Pauline never got back up here to Chukchi till she was a grown woman, so she wasn’t around when the people who knew them might have still been alive. But she’s on her way to the Senior Center, so she said maybe she’ll ask around over there.”
Lucy thanked her grandmother and disconnected the call. “Maybe your mother would know somebody who knows about them. Working at the school like that, she meets the elders when they come in for Inupiat culture classes.”
Active stared at her for a moment. Usually Lucy and his mother were immovable rivals. Neither would ever suggest he spend time in the other’s company, not ordinarily. Perhaps the bullet dream had brought them together. An alliance of the excluded.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll give it a try.”
He scanned the area again, then leaned over for another kiss. This time her lips were soft and full, seeming hungry for his, and her tongue flicked briefly against his own. She returned her attention to the accounting text with the tiniest of smiles as he said goodbye and headed for the door in a state of mild agitation.
MARTHA ACTIVE JOHNSON WAS sliding a tray along the serving line at the Chukchi High School cafeteria when he found her. “Got a minute?”
She beamed. “For you, sweetie? Always! Get a tray and we’ll eat in my office, ah?”
As he pulled a tray from the stack at the end of the counter, he marveled again at his birth mother’s youthfulness. Instinct told him a grown man should have a mother who looked a little gray, a little pudgy, like Carmen, his adoptive mother in Anchorage.
Not Martha. Martha had been only fifteen when he was born and was just now moving into her midforties. But she didn’t look even that. No sign of middle-age fat, black hair still glossy, smooth-faced except for the laugh lines around her mouth and sparkling black eyes.
They loaded up with meat loaf, mashed potatoes, green beans, applesauce in tiny plastic cups, and half-pints of milk in cardboard pyramids, then he followed her through the halls to her office. TEACHER AIDE COORDINATOR, a sign said on the door. Another one, in multicolored letters, said, GO HUSKIETTES! STATE 2A!
She put her tray on her desk blotter and cleared a space on the opposite side for him. He put down his tray, pulled up an ugly orange plastic chair, and applied himself to the meal. The food tasted better than he expected, especially the green beans. Maybe cafeterias had changed since his school days. Or maybe Chukchi High just treated its students better than Bartlett High in Anchorage had.
Martha speared a chunk of meat loaf with her fork, rolled it in the mashed potatoes, and popped it into her mouth. She grinned as she swallowed. “You came to tell me how much you miss me and what a great mom I am, ah?”
Active grinned back. “I’m moderately fond of you and you’re an adequate mother, up to a point.”
“Arii!” she said. “A woman who doesn’t want a broken heart should never have any kids. Just dogs.” She sucked some milk from her carton. “So, what you want? Did your washer at the bachelor cabin break again?”
“No, no, it’s not laundry this time, Aaka. It’s work.”
Her eyes turned serious. “Oh. You never find out who kill old Victor Solomon yet, ah? I thought it was that crazy Calvin Maiyumerak.”
He shook his head. “Probably not. But that’s what I came about.”
“You think it was one of our students?” She looked alarmed.
He waved a hand in dismissal. “No, no, of course not. But I need to know about a couple of old-time angatquqs, Natchiq and Saganiq. Did you ever hear of them?”
She was silent a few moments, frowning. “Seem like—yes, I think your grandfather talk about them sometimes when I’m little girl.”
“Jacob knows about them?”
“Seem like it, all right. But what do they have to do with Victor getting killed?”
“I don’t know yet. But apparently Victor was the grandson of one of them, Saganiq. What did Jacob say about them?”
She frowned again, then shrugged in frustration. “I can’t remember. In them days, I didn’t want to hear any Eskimo stuff. I was ashamed to be Eskimo. I wanted to be white.”
The conversation was taking an alarming turn toward the confessional. “Do you think he still remembers those old stories?” Active said. “I could go visit him at the Senior Center.”
“Probably,” Martha said. “His mind is still pretty sharp, at least about the old days. He just forgot his English after his stroke is all.”
“I know. I’ll need someone to translate. I can’t keep up with his Inupiaq.”
She misted up. “I can’t translate for you. He won’t see me.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t like to say.”
“Aaka, I need to know this.”
She wiped her eyes with a corner of the napkin from the cafeteria tray. “It’s because of you, partly. And Leroy.”
Leroy Johnson was Martha’s husband, Active’s stepfather, technically speaking, and the father of Active’s teenage half-brother, Sonny.
“Leroy and me? Why?”
“Your Ataata Jacob never like naluaqmiuts, Nathan. He think they ruin our country up here with their airplanes and booze and welfare. So he’s mad when I give you away to Ed and Carmen, because they’re white, then he’s mad again when I marry Leroy, because Leroy’s white. Finally he just stop talking to me. Won’t look at me if I go in there or anything.”
He should have known this, he realized, but somehow he hadn’t. He had seen Jacob Active a couple of times when his adoptive parents took him to Chukchi in largely unsuccessful efforts to keep him in touch with his roots. And he had visited the old man twice since being posted to Chukchi two years earlier. The visits were awkward and ceremonial, because of the language barrier raised by his grandfather’s stroke.
And Martha had always hovered in the background during these visits. He had never seen the two exchange as much as a word, in English or Inupiaq.
“Did he stop talking to you around the time he had his stroke, by any chance?”
“Yeah, I guess. But—”
“The same time he forgot how to speak English?”
She nodded.
“Well, maybe it’s just the stroke that makes him act this way. A stroke can change an old person.”
His mother looked doubtful as she toyed with a piece of meat loaf. “I don’t know. He was pretty mad about it, even before the stroke.”
There was a long silence. Then Martha applied the napkin to her eyes again and looked at him. “Sometimes I’m afraid you’re kind of like him, how you’re always mad at me about adopting you out.”
Active now found himself misting up. She was so isolated. Disowned by her father, her mother long dead, and blessed with him for a son, a son who couldn’t forgive her, couldn’t help her convince herself she had done the right thing in signing him over to Ed and Carmen. He rubbed his brow and sighed. How did she manage to remain so happy so much of the time? “I’m not mad, Aaka. It’s just that I, well—”
“I knew I was too young and wild to take care of you and you turned out all right, ah?”
“I know you did your best.” He leaned forward and touched her hand.
Her eyes narrowed and she studied his face. “You’re still having that dream, ah?”
He wrinkled his nose in the Inupiat squint of dismay and negation, and said nothing.
She sighed and dropped the napkin on her plate. “Anyway, I know you need a translator if you will talk to your ataata. How about that Lucy girl? Doesn’t she translate for the court sometimes?”
Active nodded, masking his surprise. Now Martha was suggesting he spend time with Lucy. They must both be terribly worried about him.
ACTIVE RETURNED to the public safety building and found Lucy still in the Dispatch booth. “You know my grandfather?” he asked.
“Little bit,” Lucy said. “When I was a girl, he’d come to school for Inupiat culture class and tell Eskimo stories or talk about whaling or sealing or how to keep alive on the ice. Why?”
“Martha says he knows about Natchiq and Saganiq. But I can’t keep up with his Inupiaq. She suggested you could translate for me.”
“Martha said that?” Lucy looked as surprised as he had been.
He lifted his eyebrows and said, “I know.”
Lucy frowned. “Jacob doesn’t speak English? He used to speak it pretty well, at least Village English, when he came to our classes. Otherwise most of the kids couldn’t have understood half of what he said.”
“He forgot his English when he had his stroke. That’s what Martha says.”
“Sure, I guess I can do it,” Lucy said. “Give me a minute to find somebody to take over here.” She turned and was saying,”Daphne, could you . . .” as she vanished through the door at the back of the Dispatch booth.
She returned with her parka and they started out as Lucy’s replacement, an Inupiat girl who looked like a teenager, slid into the chair at the Dispatch console.
“This could be awkward,” Active said as he steered the Suburban toward the Senior Citizens’ Cultural Center, which lay on the shore of the lagoon behind the village. The west wind that had closed the lead and driven the whalers off the ice the day before was still rolling in, driving wisps and eddies of snow before it, whipping clothes on the lines in backyards, and hunching the shoulders of the few walkers on the streets.
“Why’s that?” Lucy asked.
“Jacob doesn’t like my mother and I don’t think he likes me, either. I bet he hasn’t said more than twenty words to me all the times I’ve seen him.”
Lucy stared at him. “What’s the problem?”
“I only found out today when I asked Martha to translate. Apparently he’s got a thing against the naluaqmiuts for generally ruining life for the Inupiat, and against Martha for getting involved with so many of them.”
“Like Ed and Carmen.”
“And Leroy. And maybe me, too, because I grew up with white people.”
Lucy clucked her tongue sympathetically. “Old people.”
“Some old people,” he said
She snapped her fingers. “You know who Jacob does like?”
“Who?”
“My grandmother.”
“Pauline?”
“Yep. She talks about him all the time when she comes back from visiting people at the center. There’s even talk . . .”
“What talk?”
“I’ve heard she and Jacob had something going after his wife died.”
“She won’t discuss it?”
“Not really,” Lucy said. “She just kind of grins if I try to ask.”
“Well, that’s not like Pauline.”
“I know. She’s so earthy. Usually sex, grocery shopping, and the weather are all the same to her. I think the difference is, this might have been while my grandfather was still alive.”
“No.”
“Yes.” Lucy was grinning now.
“Your grandmother and my grandfather.”
“Hey, it’s a small town with long, dark winters. If it wasn’t for the tepee creeping, everybody would go crazy.”
“This is Eskimo country.”
“All right, igloo creeping.”
“Wait a minute, we’re not cousins or something, are we?”
She laughed. “No, no, this was when Jacob and Pauline were both in their fifties. Long after my dad was born.”
“Well, thank God for that.”
She laughed again. “Anyway, I think Pauline would probably help us. Her English isn’t good enough for her to be a real translator, but she can bail me out if I get stuck with the Inupiaq. And I think she’ll charm old Jacob right out of his . . . well, right out of whatever he knows about your old angatquqs.”