Play With Fire (4 page)

She had the truck half unloaded when the sound of her name halted her.

"Katya."

She looked around. A massive figure, square shouldered and big-bellied, clad in a dark blue house dress Kate would have sworn she'd seen her wearing when Kate was in kindergarten, stood planted in front of her as if she'd grown there. "Emaa." She hadn't seen her grandmother since April. She smiled. It was less of an effort than it used to be.

Ekaterina Moonin Shugak regarded her out of calm brown eyes, her brown face seamed with wrinkles, her black hair pulled back into a neat bun at the nape of her neck. "You are picking the mushrooms."

"Yes." Kate nodded toward the road. "I'm here with Bobby. We're camped a couple miles past Chistona. Just above the Kanuyaq."

"The fourth turnoff?"

"The fifth."

Ekaterina nodded. "Cat's Creek." Kate, surprised, said, "I didn't know it had a name."

Not by so much as the lifting of an eyebrow did Ekaterina betray that she lived to show up her grandchildren, but Kate knew, and with difficulty repressed a smile. If it hadn't been named Cat's Creek before, it was now.

Kate nodded at the mushroom buyer standing on the back of the flatbed.

"You cut a deal with him?" Ekaterina said nothing.

"How much are we getting off the top of every pound? A dime?" Ekaterina still said nothing, and Kate said, "More?" Her grandmother said, in a knowledgeable manner that reminded Kate irresistibly of Bobby in all his newfound mycological expertise, "It is known that the mushrooms sell for twenty-five dollars a pound or more in stores and restaurants Outside, and up to forty dollars a pound in Europe and Japan."

"We're getting a piece of the retail?" Ekaterina permitted a slight smile to cross her face, equal parts satisfaction and triumph, and Kate said respectfully, "Not bad, Emaa. The last buyer was saying before he left for Tok that he figured he'd shipped thirty thousand pounds in twelve days. Not bad at all."

Ekaterina gave a faint shrug. "They are tribal lands."

"And tribal mushrooms," Kate agreed gravely, and laughed. So that was why Ekaterina was here. She would be on the scene, watching over the tribal investment, ensuring full payment in cash on the barrelhead. It was no more than Kate expected. Ekaterina never did anything for only one reason, especially when it benefited the bank account of the Niniltna Native Association, of which Ekaterina had at one time been chairman of the board, and the direction of which she still guided with an unseen but very firm hand.

Dinah was waving violently to catch Kate's eye, and when she did, she waved just as violently to beckon Kate closer. To her surprise Ekaterina accompanied her, and to her even greater surprise allowed Kate to introduce her. The fleeting thought occurred that they were both feeling their way through this new relationship, and that Ekaterina was trying as hard as she was to lay the ghost of the years of antagonism that lay between them.

"Wow," Dinah said, interrupting Kate's words without apology, swinging the omnipresent video camera to her shoulder, "Kate's granny. I could tell from fifty feet away; there's a strong family resemblance. You have the most fabulous face, Mrs. Shugak. Do you mind if I shoot a few feet?

Turn your head a little to your right, that's it, we want the light to fill up those wrinkles. Has anyone ever told you you've got the greatest wrinkles?"

Ekaterina, formal words of welcome on her lips, was stopped in her tracks with her mouth open, and in spite of their new understanding Kate had to struggle against a certain inner glee. "Nope," she said out loud,

"I don't think anyone's ever told Emaa that before. This is Dinah Cookman, Emaa. Dinah's a photojournalist," she explained to her grandmother in a kind voice. "She ran out of gas and stopped to pick mushrooms so she could buy enough to get her to Anchorage. Dinah, this is my grandmother, Ekaterina Shugak."

Ekaterina regarded the wide lens of the camera, about all she could see of Dinah except for the mass of strawberry blonde curls billowing out behind it, with a fascination bordering on horror that nearly upset Kate's gravity for the second time.

"It's great to meet you, Mrs. Shugak. Is that right, Mrs. Shugak?"

"Yes, it is," Ekaterina replied with a readiness that surprised Kate.

"Were you born in Alaska?"

"Yes."

"In Chistona?"

"No, Atka."

"Is that another village nearby?"

"No, it is an island in the Aleutian Chain." "Wow," Dinah said in hushed tones. "The Aleutians. How come you still don't live there?"

"My family moved here when the Japanese invaded Attu and Kiska."

"Wow!" Dinah said. "You mean you were expatriated! I read about that!"

She struggled, one handed, with her duster, eventually producing a book Kate saw was a paperback copy of Brian Gar field's The Thousand-Mile War. Someday when Dinah's back was turned Kate was going to inventory the pockets of that duster, just to reassure herself there wasn't an aperture to the fourth dimension secreted in one seam.

"Ah yes," Ekaterina said, nodding, "Mr. Gar field's book. Yes, we were among those people."

"It must have been an awful experience," Dinah said soberly, focusing the lens on Ekaterina's face, "forced out of your homes, moved hundreds of miles away from everything you knew."

"I was only a child," Ekaterina said (she had probably been close to Kate's present age, Kate thought), "and it was war."

"Why didn't you go back, after?"

Ekaterina shook her head. "There was nothing to go back to. Our village had been bombed, either by the Japanese or by the Americans so the Japanese could not use it for shelter. And we had relatives in Cordova and in Chenega. So we stayed."

Kate hadn't heard this many words come out of Ekaterina's mouth all at once in years. "Enough, Dinah," she said. "People are going to think that thing is permanently attached."

"Okay." Dinah lowered the camera. "This tape is almost full, anyway."

Her eyes were bright and excited. "There's stories all over this place just walking around on two legs. See that girl over there? She quit her job waitressing to pick mushrooms. Said she could make more money.

And that guy? He builds log homes. He says the rain made them stop, so he's picking mushrooms instead. That guy cuts and sells firewood, but he said he can always cut wood. He says it's been two good years for Chistona, the first year they made money fighting the fire for the BLM, and now they're picking mushrooms for two bucks a pound."

She hesitated, shooting Kate a doubtful glance, and said hesitantly, as if suggesting something she knew to be in dubious taste, "Kate, nobody around here sets fires on purpose, do they?"

"Good heavens, no," Kate said. "Who's that guy?" She nodded at a tall, spare man with a high, smooth forehead and a full head of pure white hair.

Diverted, as Kate had meant her to be, Dinah said, "The guy who looks like an Old Testament prophet? I don't know. Kid next to him looks like a choirboy, though, doesn't he? Say, that's the same kid, isn't it?"

It was. The boy was back, standing at the old man's elbow, his fair, soft curls clustering around rosy cheeks and blue eyes. He looked positively cherubic, and at the same time the family resemblance between the two was evident in the broad brows, in the firm chin, in the expressive blue eyes that in the boy's face were wide and curious and in the man's, stern and curiously grim. Kate wondered how long it would be before the boy's eyes became like the man's.

The boy looked up suddenly and their eyes met. He didn't blush or duck his head or grab his grandfather's leg or do any of the things children do when confronted with the interest of strangers, and Kate revised her estimate of his age upward, to ten, maybe even eleven.

Fortunately the transformation of the boy's eyes from curious to grim was no concern of hers. "Look, it's our turn. Help me lift the buckets up on the flatbed. Emaa? Are you staying with Auntie Joy?" Ekaterina nodded, and Kate said, "Tell her I'll come visit on my way home. Come on, Dinah, tote that barge, lift that bale."

Bobby cooked lavishly that evening, roasting caribou in a Dutch oven over hot coals, stirring up a raspberry vinegar-white wine sauce in the interim out of the two crates of supplies he had insisted were essential to civilized life as we know it, at home or in the bush. The smell made Kate's mouth water, and was almost enough to make her forgive him for coercing her into hauling the crates up the hill to the campsite. The roast was served with a morel garnish, or rather, as Bobby explained,

"We like a little meat with our mushrooms." Dinah, her mouth full, said indistinctly, "It tastes so good I don't want to swallow. Bobby? Marry me."

"You only want me for my cooking."

"Damn straight. And there's no 'only' about it." Kate didn't say anything at all. Afterward, the three of them lay around the fire in the setting sun, too stuffed to move, listening to thunder rumble at them from the edge of the horizon.

They could see the rain come down from where they were, thin gray sheets of it hanging between the campsite and the Quilaks, turned to silver gilt by the slanting rays of the sun. "Well," Dinah said, burping without excuse, "that beats anything I ever bought out of the produce section at Safeway. Agaricus bisporus has nothing on Morchella elata."

Nobody asked but she told them anyway. "Agaricus bisporus is the cultivated mushroom. The one you get at your local grocery store for two-ninety-eight a pound."

Kate stirred herself enough to say, "Did you bring that desk encyclopedia you said you had in the van?"

Dinah waved a hand in the general direction of her backpack. With a burst of energy that left her exhausted, Kate snagged the pack by one strap and dragged it to her. The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia was on top of the pile inside. "Oh God," Bobby moaned, hiding his eyes, "not you, too."

"What you looking up?" Dinah said.

"Hillel," Kate replied absently. "Here he is. Hillel, flourished--I love that word, who knows now if he flourished or he withered on the vine?--from thirty b.c. to ten A.D. Born in Babylonia, he was a Jewish scholar and president of the Sanhedrin, which fostered a systematic, liberal--I wonder what liberal was in thirty B. C.?"

"Probably advocated crucifixion over burning," Bobby said lazily.

"--liberal interpretation of Hebrew Scripture, and was the spiritual and ethical leader of his generation. Shammai opposed his teachings."

"Who the hell was Shammai?"

Kate, taking that as an invitation, turned to the S's. "Shammai was a leader of the Sanhedrin who adopted a style of interpretation of Halakah that opposed the teachings of Hillel."

"So Hillel flourished in spite of Shammai," Dinah suggested.

Unheeding, Kate said, "And what, you ask, was the Halakah? It just so happens--" she turned back to the His. "Aha. Halakah, or halacha"--she spelled it for their edification--"refers to that part of the Talmud concerned with personal, communal and international activities, as well as with religious observance.

Also known as the oral Law, as codified in the Mishna." Kate turned to the M's. "Mishna, Mishna, sounds like a Hari Krishna chant. Here we go.

The Mishna's the basic textbook of Jewish life and thought, covers agriculture, marriage and divorce, and all civil and criminal matters."

Dinah said, "So if you wanted to know when to plant your corn, sing a psalm, party hearty, get hitched or hang a thief, you consulted the Mishna and it told you."

"I guess."

"Sort of like the Marine Bible," Bobby said admiringly, and at Dinah's questioning look added, "The Marine Battle Skills Training Handbook.

You're issued one in boot camp. Covers everything from digging latrines to kissing brass ass. Where'd you hear about this guy Hillel?" he asked Kate.

"I was reading about him on my soap bottle," Kate replied blandly, and Bobby, after one incredulous stare, flopped back with a theatrical groan, but not without grabbing Dinah on his way down.

"May I ask you a personal question, Kate?" Dinah said, snuggling into Bobby's embrace with what Kate considered a disgustingly content expression on her face.

"No," Kate said.

"Where'd you get that scar on your throat?"

There was a brief silence. "A knife fight," Kate said finally. "Three years ago. Almost four, now."

"Tell me about it?"

Another silence. "I caught a child molester in the act. He had a knife."

Dinah winced. "Ouch."

Kate's mouth curled up at one corner, and Bobby, watching curiously, was surprised. "I'll say."

"What happened to him?"

"I took the knife away from him."

"He in jail?"

Kate shook her head. "Dead."

Dinah didn't ask how; she didn't have to.

Kate stared at the fire for a moment, and then raised her eyes, meeting the blonde's with growing awareness. "You're good."

"You sure as hell are," Bobby agreed. He'd heard that story once, the first time he'd seen the scar. Then it had been new and swollen and red and angry, especially angry, but it had paled by comparison to Kate's barely restrained, all-consuming rage. By virtue of their long friendship he had been owed an explanation. She had given one, in short, terse sentences, every word of which cost her more than she could afford to pay, and Bobby had a strong enough sense of self-preservation and a high enough value of Kate's continuing friendship never to raise the subject again.

And now this blonde, from Outside no less, the rawest of cheechakos, the most innocent of Alaskan naifs, a literal babe in the woods, had asked a few simple questions and gotten the whole story, all of it, simply and succinctly and more, gotten it without attitude or resentment. "Real good," he said.

She nodded, taking the compliment as simple fact, without a trace of false modesty. "I know. It's what I do." She looked beyond Kate and her face lit up. "Oh! Look!"

Kate turned and beheld a full rainbow, a slender arch of primary colors stretching from the Canadian border to Tonsina. It was a delicate, perfect thing, and the three of them were held captive by the sight.

Bobby had a slight smile on his dark face, Dinah looked dazed with delight, and Kate, after a moment, recognized a feeling of proprietary pride.