“When’s the last time you saw a black man in the Park besides me?” he snapped.
Never.
“So yeah, it’s his first trip in.” He fixed her with a piercing gaze. “This won’t be pleasure, Kate. It’ll be business. Family, yes, but business. He wants something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”
Kate looked over his head to see Dinah standing on the other side of the screen door. She raised an eyebrow. Dinah shrugged her shoulders and shook her head. Kate looked back at Bobby. “So your brother’s coming and it won’t be fun. Sounds like your ordinary, run of the mill Park family to me.”
He gave a short bark of laughter. “I wanted to warn you,” he said, and she thought she saw an unusual trace of color beneath his skin. Robert Washington Clark might just be embarrassed, for probably the first time since Kate had known him.
She might have paused to savor the moment had he not been so obviously uncomfortable. “Warn me about what?”
He shifted in his chair. “He’s a bigot, Kate. A bad one. He’s my father all over again. He doesn’t know where I live, who I live among, who my friends are, or-”
“Or, perhaps, to whom you are married?” Kate said delicately.
Bobby cast an involuntary look over his shoulder, but Dinah had moved away from the door. “That, too. I didn’t even know he knew where I was. I don’t know how the hell he found me. God knows I’ve had no truck with those people since I joined the army.”
Kate detected some Tennessee in Bobby’s speech, which only appeared in times of acute stress. “What do you need me to do?” He looked up and she gave a faint smile. “Anything, Bobby. You want me to run him out of town the minute he gets here? I’ll meet his plane.”
He laughed again, but this time it was genuine. “What I wouldn’t give to see that, old Jeffie hustled back into a plane by an unblack female half his size.” He sighed. “Much as I’d like that, no.”
“Then what?”
“I’ve got him over at Auntie Vi’s. I don’t want him here. The man has no manners.”
Kate understood. Bobby had a lot of good will going on in the Park. He was afraid his brother was going to step all over that, and he wanted her to make sure it didn’t happen. “No problem,” she said, sliding to her feet.
He looked at her, worried. “Sure?”
“I’m sure,” she said, and looked at him affectionately. There wasn’t much she wouldn’t do for Bobby Clark.
“No,” he said, “I meant are you sure you can keep it together when he starts insulting the slant of your eyes and the color of your skin.”
She laughed. “Oh Bobby,” she said, still laughing as she went down the steps, Mutt at her side. “If a whole country full of white folks hasn’t managed to irretrievably piss me off, one lone black man isn’t going to, either. I’ll spread the word.”
“Thanks, Kate,” he said, raising his voice as she climbed into her truck. “I owe you one.”
“Don’t kid yourself, Clark, you owe me all!” she yelled out the window, and headed down the road.
The Hagbergs’ homestead was one of the oldest in the Park, though the Hagbergs themselves were relatively new to it, having moved there only in the late ‘70s. It was the old Barker place, Kate remembered as she drove down the narrow track from the road. The Barkers had originally come north in the gold rush, taking the route up and over from Valdez via mule train, and by the time they got to what would become the Park they’d gotten tired. Mrs. Barker, according to legend, had tied up her skirts to show a prettily turned ankle and served pancakes hot off a griddle she’d hauled to Alaska from San Francisco. Mr. Barker played the squeeze box and sang sea chanties. By the time the rush had dwindled to a trickle, they’d amassed a sum large enough to homestead. They’d been good pioneers, so it was said, until Mrs. Barker decided seven children were enough and ran off to Fairbanks, where it was said she and her ankles prospered on the Line. Mr. Barker held down the home fort, raised the kids, and on his deathbed enjoined his daughters to be true to their husbands and his sons never to trust a woman. Two of the sons joined Castner’s Cutthroats and both died on Attu in World War II. The third son stayed home to marry off his sisters. This wasn’t difficult, as women were in even shorter supply in Alaska during the war than they were in normal times. The third son, name of Ezra, stayed single and made a living trapping beaver and wolf. He’d died suddenly of pancreatic cancer in 1976, and his sister, Telma, who had married a Norwegian fisherman from Valdez, moved in that same summer with her husband, Virgil.
Virgil and Telma Hagberg were in their fifties now, although Kate thought they looked older, especially Virgil, with his stooped shoulders and his thinning strands of ash gray hair. He didn’t talk much. Telma spoke even less than Virgil. She smiled a lot, though, which held within it the memory of a once-startling beauty, now faded, almost overgrown, as if the weeds had overtaken the rose too soon.
Virgil was known for the wooden toys he carved from birch and spruce, models of airplanes and trucks and bulldozers and the like, finely crafted with moving parts, sanded to a deep, satiny finish, and sold to Park rats at the school’s Christmas bazaar for next to nothing. Telma, so far as Kate could remember, sat in the background and never sold anything.
Situated on a south-facing slope on the opposite side of the road from Kate’s homestead, it was about halfway between Kate’s place and Niniltna and the sun was still up, so it seemed efficient to stop there on her way home. Kate knew the Hag-bergs to say hi to at the post office, but that was about it. It was one of the Park’s greatest attractions, the ability to disappear into the undergrowth if you wanted to. It was also, Kate reflected on the doorstep of the Hagberg home, one of the greatest disadvantages to the practicing detective.
“Kate,” Virgil said when he opened the door to Kate’s knock.
“Hi, Virgil. How you been?”
He was surprised to see her but his manners were too good to ask her what she wanted. He invited her in. She told Mutt to wait on the porch, and followed Virgil inside. They passed a room with two workbenches and a set of shelves filled with hand-carved objects. “Still working at the carving, I see,” she said.
He stopped and smiled. “Oh, yes. I make the toys for the children. They like them, and it makes a little money for Telma.”
He led the way into the kitchen and Kate took the chair offered at the kitchen table. “Telma,” he said, raising his voice. “We have company.”
Telma came in and smiled at Kate. “Hello, Kate.”
“Hi, Telma.”
“Would you like some coffee and cookies?” Telma’s voice was perfectly normal but her eyes were off, just a little, exactly how Kate couldn’t quite figure. They were a washed-out blue and placid as a pond, but unlike the pond they were all surface and no depth.
“Sure, Telma, I’d love some,” Kate said, and cringed to hear the note of false heartiness in her voice. Just so did one speak to the simpleminded.
Virgil seemed not to notice. He kissed Telma’s cheek, a quiet salutation in the manner of one making willing, worshipful obeisance to a god. It might not have grated so much if Kate hadn’t just come from Bobby and Dinah’s, where the kisses were loud and lusty and generally led to something horizontal, or looked like they would as soon as the kissers got rid of their company. Virgil’s kiss was just too damn reverential for Kate’s taste.
She thought back to the last time Jim Chopin had kissed her. Nothing reverential about Jim’s kisses, nosireebob. But best not to think of it, or of what happened after, and who was she to dictate how people kissed one another, anyway? She shook her mind free and settled herself to being as pleasant as she could possibly be.