He went to see Auntie Vi.
Auntie Vi lived in a big house that used to be filled with children and was now filled with guests who paid far too much for a bed, a bathroom down the hall, and an unvarying breakfast of cocoa and fry bread. It was good cocoa, Hershey’s, homemade, and superb fry bread, and Jim was lucky to be early enough to be offered some of both. He sat down next to a man in a nattily stitched denim pantsuit. The man took one look at Jim’s uniform and ate the rest of his meal with as much of the back of his head toward Jim as possible, and then sidled out at his earliest opportunity.
“A uniform does have a way of clearing out a room,” he said ruefully to Auntie Vi.
She laughed as she finished clearing the table. “This way, I didn’t have to serve him seconds. Ay, those bums, they eat me out of house and home if they have the chance.”
Just then, her other guests came in, a couple of state surveyors, who conversed in numbers, scribbling lines and formulae on a sheet of paper held between them. Jim wasn’t sure they’d even registered his existence. They left, too, after stuffing themselves and their pockets with fry bread, which immediately showed up in grease stains on the out-sides of their jackets. Jim noticed Auntie Vi made no objection, and he reflected on the state’s propensity not to dicker on a set price for Bush accommodation. Auntie Vi’s favorite customer, the state of Alaska.
Auntie Vi was about four feet tall and weighed maybe eighty pounds with her false eyelashes on. She was one of Ekaterina’s contemporaries and therefore had to be in her late seventies, if not her early eighties, but the years sat lightly upon her shoulders. She had her share of wrinkles around the eyes and mouth and the backs of her hands, but her spine was still straight, her step light, her hair as thick as a girl’s, although she had allowed the temples to go gray, giving her an elegant look that could only have benefited from a crown perched thereon. She had a wide smile filled with improbably square teeth, a pug nose, and bright brown button eyes that were naturally inquisitive.
She finished clearing the table and bustled the dishes into the kitchen, leaving him to enjoy the last piece of fry bread and the dregs of his now-lukewarm cocoa in solitary splendor. It was a rectangular room, big enough to hold a table that seated twelve, along with twelve chairs and a sideboard with a hutch on top of it. Flowery prints decorated the walls, which were covered with some tiny floral-print wallpaper in a delicate yellow. There were ruffles on the sheer white curtains hanging at the windows, and tatted tablecloths covered the surface of the table and sideboard and the backs of all twelve chairs. It was a very feminine room, but not so feminine that he felt uncomfortable in it.
He heard the hum of the dishwasher, and shortly Auntie Vi bustled back in. “Now,” she said, sitting down across from him and laying both hands flat against the table. On to business. “What you here for, Jim, eh?”
“Your cocoa and fry bread breakfast.”
She shook her head, although she couldn’t suppress her smile.
“It would have been worth the flight alone,” he said, “but you’re right, Auntie, I need your help.”
“Ah.” She folded her hands and tried to look impassive, but he was not deceived. Auntie Vi loved being asked for help, almost as much as she loved giving it. “With what?”
Her accent was that of a person who spoke English as a second language, a little heavy on the gutturals and a little light on the verbs, but she had no trouble understanding what he was saying. “Good idea,” she said when he finished explaining.
“What about office space?”
She shook her head. “Build your own.”
“Yeah, I was afraid of that.”
“Where you live?”
He met her eyes. “I’d be looking for a small place, probably.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “A cabin maybe.”
“Maybe,” he said.
“Maybe not in village. Maybe down the road a ways.”
“Maybe.”
He got the hell out of there.
She waited until the door had closed behind him before allowing the wide, all-encompassing grin to spread across her face.
Ayah, that Katya, her life was about to get interesting again. Auntie Vi gave a sharp nod.
Good.
Jim went to talk to Billy Mike, implying without actually saying so that Billy Mike was the first person he’d come to. Billy was notoriously easygoing, but he had his pride. Billy’s first question was, “You bringing your clerk with you?”
“I hadn’t thought,” Jim said. “Pretty much up to her. She’s pretty dug in in Tok. I don’t know that she’s going to want to pull the kids out of school. And then there’s the housing. I didn’t see any for sale signs on my way here.”
Billy gave a short, satisfied nod. “Let me know. I’ll set you up some interviews.”
No doubt he meant with some of his many relatives, but then, the only person who had more relatives in the Park than Billy Mike was Kate Shugak. Jim just hoped that if Billy tossed any of his daughters into the mix that it would be Lilah, who was quick and bright, if a little sharp around the tongue, and not Betsy, who was a major whiner-it was always God or somebody else’s fault. Since Lilah was never out of work and Betsy was seldom in, he didn’t hold out much hope.
The next thing Billy said was, “You’ll have to build.”
“I know.”
“The Niniltna native association owns a construction company.”
“I know.”
As he left, Jim reflected that his plans were having unforeseen side effects, which, all told, put him on even more solid footing in the Park than he had been before.
He went to Bobby Clark’s next, borrowing Billy’s brand-new Ford Explorer (the Eddie Bauer model, this year’s Park vehicle of choice at permanent fund dividend time) to get there. The large A-frame on Squaw Candy Creek was set in a densely wooded glen next to a rocky, burbling little creek, the whole frosted with a thick layer of snow so white it was almost blue. It looked like a place you would see from the seat of a sleigh on the way to Grandmother’s house, and Jim paused to admire it before crossing the little bridge and pulling up in front of the deck that extended the width of the house.
Dinah had the door open before he got to the top step, one finger to her lips. He kicked snow from his boots and stepped inside, to see Bobby seated in front of a transmitter, in the middle of a broadcast.
Park Air was not what you could call a scheduled radio show. Nor was it a show licensed or, for that matter, even sanctioned by the Federal Communications Commission. It had a tendency to wander up and down the bandwidth, forcing its listeners to search for it up and down the FM dial. Which would have been easier had Park Air had a fixed schedule and a regular broadcast. It wasn’t like Bobby sat down every night at six o’clock to flip switches and send Creedence Clearwater Revival out into the ozone.
And that was another thing: His play list was, well, to put it kindly, somewhat antiquated. Bobby had been born in the fifties and his musical taste had matured in the sixties, and when the seventies came along and brought the Eagles with them, he slammed the door to the tape player in all their faces. Nowadays, when during a broadcast the Park rats heard some John Hiatt, or a little Jimmy Buffett, or sang along to Mary Chapin Carpenter, they knew they had Bobby’s wife, Dinah, to thank. Dinah, born in the seventies, now and then liked a little calypso poet in her airtime, and she was not averse to slipping the occasional rogue CD into the pile at Bobby’s elbow. Nor was she completely averse to the right bribe.
During the school year, Bobby broadcast advertisements for senior class car washes and junior high bake sales and the school lunch menu for the day, or maybe the week. During an election year, candidates for local and regional offices made the pilgrimage to Bobby’s house for an on-air discussion of what the candidate promised to do if he or she was elected, which, since Bobby never believed a word they said and did not hesitate to say so, could get pretty lively. During fishing season, businesses from Cordova, Ahtna, and Valdez advertised nets and impellers and boat hooks.