Play With Fire (18 page)

The woman in line in front of Kate was short and blocky with hair like gray steel wool. She wore a black T-shirt with a picture of the American flag on it. Below the flag was the message, "Try to burn this one, asshole." The man in front of her at the Safeway check-out counter was tall and thin and had mousy blond hair pulled back into a ponytail that hung down his back to his belt, longer than Brad Burns's.

His T-shirt was blue. It had a picture of Planet Earth on it, with the message

"Good planets are hard to find" lettered beneath.

Looked like a fairly representational cross-section of the Alaskan population to Kate. "Not lying, Jack," she said. "She's a bureaucrat.

If, by some cosmic error, bureaucrats are not at birth exposed on a hillside with their ankles pierced"--the woman in the flag T-shirt turned to give her an approving, gap-toothed grin--"they mature into government employees adept in the disclosure of just so much of the pertinent data as reflects non pejoratively upon themselves."

"Say what?"

The man in the Planet Earth T-shirt refused paper or plastic and loaded bean sprouts, a bag of chickpeas and a quart of Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia into a canvas bag. The woman in the flag T-shirt snorted audibly and turned to say in a voice reduced to a coarse husk of sound from three packs of unfiltered Camels a day, "They lie like snakes."

"Thank you," Kate told her. "They lie like snakes," she told Jack.

"Thank you for clearing that up," Jack told the woman in the flag T-shirt.

"Any time." She opted for plastic and the checker loaded two cartons of Camels, three packages of Ding Dongs and half a dozen roast beef TV dinners inside. She paid in very used fives and ones, winked at Jack and left.

They paid for their groceries and drove back up University Avenue to park at the Chena River wayside. The smoke haze had cleared to reveal wisps of high cloud, the sky was a very pale blue and the temperature had dropped all the way down to seventy-five degrees, too hot. "I knew there was a reason we went to school in the winter," Kate grumbled. She took the rubber band that held the butcher paper around her deli special and used it to fasten her hair up off her neck. She tore the paper off a beef bone and gave it to Mutt, who took it and retired beneath the table.

Jack unwrapped his meatball sandwich, opened the bag of Olympic Deep Ridge Dippers, placed bags of green grapes, red grapes and Rainier cherries at strategic intervals, set the package of Pepperidge Farm Soft Baked Chocolate Chocolate Walnut cookies within reach, and sat back to survey the scene through critical eyes. For a moment Kate feared they were going to have to return to the store, and then he raised one finger upright in inspiration and went to the truck, returning with a six-pack of Heineken, for him, and one can of Diet 7-Up, for her. He settled on the bench across the picnic table with a long, satisfied sigh and set to, reminding Kate of nothing so much as a vacuum cleaner in overdrive, but she knew better than to get between him and food and concentrated on her own meal. It wasn't the handiwork of the North Star Bakery, but in either Jack or Kate's case it was a simple matter of putting the hay down where the goats could get at it and staying out of the way.

"This is nice," Jack decided when he came up for air. "Peaceful.

Pretty."

It was. Kate closed her eyes and took it in through her ears. The river gurgled placidly by. At the next table a toddler took her first shaky steps, to the great delight of her proud parents. A slight breeze, just enough to keep off the mosquitoes, rus tied the leaves of the birches and alders that overhung the water. A couple floated downriver in a canoe. Miracle of miracles, no one roared up on a Jet-Ski, and no one else turned Janet Jackson up to nine on a boom box. The most noise came from the traffic on University Avenue, and at eight o'clock there was little of that. Like Toledo, Ohio, Fairbanks, Alaska rolled up the sidewalks precisely at ten.

"You haven't been here in a while, have you?"

Kate came back into her body and opened her eyes. She looked across the table at him, wiping mustard from his mouth. It was a good mouth, firm-lipped, crooked up a little in one corner, ready to break into an easy grin. He had shaved his full, luxuriant mustache and beard the year before. "Felt like a change," he'd said vaguely when she'd asked why, but something in the way he said it told her that wasn't it. At least he hadn't been hiding anything. He had a chin, his teeth were straight, his skin was clear. And then she thought how superficial that sounded, and tried to feel ashamed of herself.

"Have you?" he repeated.

Recalling the question with an effort, she shook her head. "No. This is the first time I've been back to Fairbanks since I graduated."

"Why?"

Her eyes returned to the river. The canoers had stopped in mid-paddle to nuzzle. Nuzzling isn't an activity best undertaken in a canoe and they disentangled to head downstream again at a more rapid pace. "Not much worth remembering in those four years."

He ignored the hands-off sign. "Why? What's wrong with Fairbanks?"

She shrugged. "No mountains, and the only water around was that filthy river." She nodded at the Chena. "I came from Prince William Sound and the Quilaks to this. I hated it."

He waited, patient. It was his best quality, and one that served him well with Kate.

It worked this time, too. "It was Abel's idea, college." It was the first time in a long time Jack had heard Kate speak of her dead foster parent without pain. "Emaa, too, she thought it was a good idea. She didn't think it was so great when I didn't come back to the village after I graduated, but that was after, and she couldn't do anything about it then." She took another bite of sandwich, and Jack watched her and waited.

"So, the two of them pretty much decided I would go, and I went fishing with my Uncle Kenty that summer and made enough for resident tuition and books, and one day in late August in 1979 we got in the truck and drove to the railroad. Abel waved down the Fairbanks train and put me on board. When we got to Fairbanks, they slowed down enough for me to jump off across from the university."

She looked up and he was jolted by the look in her eyes. "I was terrified. I'd never been out of the Park before in my life, never had to meet new people all on my own. I'd never talked on the phone, I'd never watched television, I'd never seen a movie, I'd never driven down a paved road or in traffic." She gave a short, unamused laugh. "I'd never even seen traffic. There was a two-lane highway between the railroad tracks and the campus. There were three cars on it, one going west, the other two east. I was almost hit by all three of them. One of the drivers yelled out the window at me, called me a stupid fucking Native."

A warm pressure settled on her foot. She looked under the table and saw Mutt's chin resting on her instep, yellow eyes gazing up at her.

"They'd sent a map with the rest of the registration paperwork, and I figured out where Lathrop Dorm was, where I'd been assigned a room. A double room. On top of everything else, we couldn't afford a single room for me, and I had to share a room with a total stranger. I was terrified," she repeated, and shook her head. "Terror. It's just a word.

I can't explain, you can't possibly understand what it felt like."

"No."

His slow, deep voice affected her as it always did, steadied her, calmed her. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "I checked in with the resident advisor and they took me up to the fourth floor and let me into a room. My room. Mine and some stranger's. She'd be in the next day, they explained, and then they left me alone."

She examined her can of Diet 7-Up as if she'd never seen one before.

"All evening, all night, I could hear voices outside my door, in the hall, going in and out of the bathroom, the showers, answering the phone. It rang all the time, nonstop. The voices were strangers' voices.

Mostly women's voices. Sometimes men's. People I'd never met, people I didn't know, people I was going to have to learn to live with." She paused, and the struggle to get the words out was almost too painful for him to watch. "I was so scared I couldn't even go across the hall to the bathroom."

She raised her head and it was all there, as if the intervening fifteen years had never happened, the paralyzing fear, the bitter, enduring shame.

"I peed in the wastebasket."

On the river a duck quacked. The couple with the baby got into their car and drove off. A mosquito hummed past Jack's ear. He ignored it.

He would have ignored a thousand of them. With every ounce of self-control he possessed, he kept his eyes down, kept himself from offering sympathy, or worse, pity. Kate Shugak might forgive a display of sympathy; pity, never.

When he said nothing, she went on, more easily now, Mutt's head warm and heavy on her foot. "The food was weird, no moose, no caribou, no seal, no fish, just a brown lettuce salad bar and mystery meat in gloppy sauces and too much grease. It took all semester for my stomach to settle down." She shook her head, mouth twisting. "Once I got brave enough to go to meals. I dropped twenty pounds that semester; Emaa called me a skeleton at Christmas and wanted to force-feed me fried bread morning, noon and night."

He found what might pass for a voice in certain circles. "It's what's she's best at."

She gave an abstracted nod. "I was so lonely," she said with a sigh.

"My roommate was okay, but she was white and her father was a colonel or a general or something in the Air Force and she'd never been in the bush in her life. I couldn't talk to her. I didn't talk much at all, that first year, and never in class." She met his eyes and almost smiled. "It upset some of the teachers."

"What if they called on you?"

"The first time? I wouldn't answer. The second time, I'd drop the class."

"Why didn't you just drop out completely, if you were that miserable?"

Her eyes slid past his, to the river, brown water chuckling serenely past, indifferent, uncaring. "Quitter just wasn't in Abel's vocabulary.

And Emaa--" She gave another of those short laughs. "My dropping out would have been a disgrace to her personally and to the family as a whole, not to mention our entire tribe. If I wanted to be able to go home again, I had to finish." He thought of that frightened, lonely eighteen year-old, sacrificed to the ambition of her elders, and felt anger knot into a hard, hot lump at the pit of his stomach.

She shifted on the bench. "Sleighter asked me if I was one of the Molly Hootch plaintiffs. I was."

"Were you?" Jack said in surprise. "You never told me."

She shrugged. "Subject never came up."

"How'd that happen?"

A corner of her mouth quirked. "Mostly because Emaa said that nothing but drunks and mothers came back from Mount Edgecumbe and that none of her grandchildren were going there if she had anything to say about it."

"And of course she did."

"Of course. So I was. One of the plaintiffs, and one of the beneficiaries. Because of Molly Hootch, Niniltna got its own public school, grades one through twelve, and I didn't have to go away for my high school diploma like my mother did."

"Your father didn't?"

"He was twenty years older than her. They weren't doing that to bush kids, or maybe they didn't have the enforcement capability, when he was in school. He never finished. I don't think he ever started." She drained her pop. "Mom did. They sent her to Chemawa, in Oregon. She said it got so hot she nearly died. She'd spent most of her life on the Kanuyaq and Prince William Sound. Seventy degrees and she started to whine."

"Like you."

Her face lightened a little. "Like me."

"But you didn't have to go."

"No, I didn't have to go. At least not for four more years."

He uncapped another bottle of Heineken. He felt he deserved it, and a dozen more after it. "Almost would have been better if you had gone Outside for high school. Wouldn't have put you into so much culture shock when you went to college."

She shook her head. "No. I made it through, barely, at eighteen. At fourteen, I wouldn't have stood a chance. Most of the kids they sent away to school did quit. The drop-out rate in the Alaska bush has fallen to about twelve percent since the kids started being able to stay home for school."

A seagull flew downstream, gliding low on outspread wings, until its beak was nearly skimming the water. They both watched it until it was out of sight. "You know how parents in the bush make their kids mind?"

He smiled. She didn't. "In the village, even today, parents tell a child who misbehaves that they'll give him away to white people if he doesn't shape up."

He stared at her, all humor gone. "You're kidding."

She shook her head. "No. And they believe it, too, the kids, because it wasn't that long ago that their parents did get sent away. They remember, in the villages."

"Poor little shits," he muttered, thinking of Kate's experience in Fairbanks and multiplying it by thousands. "No wonder they dropped out."

He finished his third Heineken and pitched the bottle into the garbage can. "Things ever get any easier? For you, I mean? Here?"

She shrugged. "You tough anything out long enough, it has to get better."

"Been down so long, it looks like up to me?"

She nodded. "By my sophomore year, I'd made a few friends. I met Winklebleck and took his class. That helped. I learned to read, and after that I was never lonely. Well. Not very."

A swallow of beer went down the wrong way and he choked and wheezed and gasped for air. "You didn't know how to read when you went to college?"

She shook her head. "It's a long story. Anyway, after a while maybe the newness wore off, or maybe my calluses got thicker. Maybe both."

They fell silent, Jack finished the last of the cookies. He chewed stolidly, masticating without taste. No wonder you don't need me, he thought. You're determined not to need anyone ever again as bad as you did that first year away from home.

When he judged that enough time had passed to make the question tolerable, he said, "What made you decide on justice? That's what your degree is in, isn't it? I don't remember exactly."