own dentist. She sure was awful quick to get us on a plane when I got my toothache.
Here’s the grossest picture I could find of a cavity on the Internet. Mine was a lot smaller.
So here we are in Anchorage, staying at Dad’s town house on Westchester Lagoon. Kate and Mutt are out for a walk on the Coastal Trail. There’s nothing on television and I don’t want to go anywhere until I don’t drool when I talk. Disgusting. So I’m sitting here writing a post for my twenty-seven followers (Bobby, you better not read this one over Park Air like you did the one about counting caribou with Ruthe Bauman. She didn’t speak to me for a week). We’d be on a plane back to the Park right now if the weather hadn’t socked in behind us. Van texted me that it’s blowing snow and fog and Mrs. Doogan strung a rope from the front door to the bullrail so everyone could feel their way to their vehicles. I checked the National Weather Service website and the forecast is for more of the same for the next day and maybe two.
I’d still rather be there than here. Too many people in Anchorage, going too fast in too many cars.
So would Kate, and Mutt. We’ve been weathered in in Anchorage before and they both get antsy and cranky and snappish. Mutt I can understand, but Kate doesn’t want to go to the movies or shopping or out to eat, she just keeps looking east, trying to get a bead on what’s coming next out of the Gulf, and if it’s flyable.
Okay, a few minutes later, they’re back and Kate got a call (she actually answered her cell phone!) and we’re going to go see somebody. Later …
Tuesday, October 25th, that evening, by Johnny
We have a case, and I get to help!
Well, I get to go along, anyway.
We went downtown to this old restaurant on Fifth Avenue, the Club Paris, and met this old fart named Max. He’s a retired state trooper (here’s the Alaska State Trooper website) and I mean really retired, he’s so wrinkled he looks like he shrunk in the wash and then got left in the dryer for a week. He’s kind of feeble, walks with a cane, but he’s even smarter than Kate and he sure can put away the martinis. The waitress, a total babe named Brenda, calls him by his first name and she never lets his glass get more than half empty before she’s got a refill on the table. Brenda gave Kate a funny look when Kate ordered a Diet 7UP. Real women drink martinis, I guess.
Best steak sandwich I ever ate. About halfway through it Max said, “Heard a weird story last week. Grandson of an old flying buddy from Red Run.”
“Red Run?” Kate said.
Max nodded. “I know, last village on the Kanuyaq before you hit the Gulf. Why I thought to tell you about it.”
“What’s his name?”
“He’s a Totemoff.”
“Which one?”
“Gilbert.”
Kate forked up a big hunk of New York strip and chewed with her eyes closed for a minute. She swallowed and opened her eyes and said, “Chief Evan’s grandson.”
Max nodded.
“What’s his story?”
“He got kidnapped.”
Kate actually stopped chewing. “What?”
Max nodded. I felt cold air on the back of my neck as the door opened and Mutt’s ears went up. “But I’ll let him tell you the story himself. Gilbert, you know Kate Shugak.”
Gilbert Totemoff was short and stocky with dark hair that had been cut under a bowl and big brown eyes like a cow’s. His Carhartt’s looked like they’d started life going over the Chilkoot Pass in 1898, and he smelled like woodsmoke and gasoline and tanned moosehide. His voice was so low I had to lean forward to hear him. He had a little bit of an accent, too, sounded like one of the aunties when they’re going all Native in front of a gussuk they don’t like. Village raised, for sure.
Max was right. Totemoff’s story was a weird one.
He had come to town on a Costco run the week after the permanent fund dividend came out from the state (http://www.pfd.state.ak.us/), the same week as the Alaska Federation of Natives convention (http://www.nativefederation.org/convention/index.php). He took his pickup on the fast ferry from Cordova, where he lived in the winter, to Whittier and then drove up to Anchorage.
“I met up with some cousins from Tatitlek and we went down to AFN and spent the afternoon there. That night we went to the Snow Ball to check out our old girlfriends.”
Kate grinned, Max laughed, and Totemoff blushed. “But there wasn’t much going on, so my cousin Philip said we should go somewhere else.”
“Where else?” Kate said.
Gilbert wouldn’t look at her. He mumbled something.
“Where?” Kate said.
He still wouldn’t look at her. “The Bush Company.”
Again he shut up. This time I think he was more embarrassed at telling a woman he’d gone to a strip club, especially a Native woman, especially a Native woman who was his elder. Brenda came over and gave us the fishy eye but Max winked at her and she went off and brought him back another martini. His third. Might have been his fourth.
Totemoff said that he and his cousins had a lot to drink, and between that and the lap dances they had their PFDs spent before midnight. Totemoff didn’t say all this, of course, but you can read a lot into a Native silence.
They were just about to leave when these two guys they knew showed up.
“What two guys?” Kate said.
“They were at the convention,” Totemoff said. “Not Natives, but hanging around the craft fair. One of them said he was looking for an ivory cribbage board for his mother. We got to talking, they asked us what tribe we were, and they seemed interested when we told them Eyak.”
So the two guys sat down at their table at the Bush Company and offered to buy them a round. One round turned into two and maybe more. Totemoff didn’t know what time it was when he got up to go to the john. When he stepped out of the door, somebody hit him, hard, a couple of times, and while he was trying to get his knees back up under him they threw a blanket or a bag or something over his head and carried him outside and tossed him in the back of a car.
“I was in and out,” he said. “Felt kind of sick. Maybe we drove for fifteen minutes. Maybe longer. Next thing, the car stops and they pull me out and toss me in the back of an airplane.”
“What kind of airplane?” I said. Totemoff stopped talking again. Kate frowned at me, Max said, “Shut up, kid,” and even Mutt gave me a dirty look. I could feel my ears turning red, and we had to wait until Totemoff started talking again.
“We flew about an hour,” he said. “I think. My head was hurting pretty bad and I barfed all over the inside of the blanket. They cussed me out and one of them hit me again and then I was out of it until we landed. They pulled me out of the plane and walked me into a cabin and pulled off the blanket. It was the two white guys from the convention who showed up at the bar.”
The cabin was one room, built of logs. “Looked pretty old,” Totemoff said. “The wind was whistling through the holes where the chink had fallen out.” There was a woodstove, the table a plywood sheet laid on a pair of sawhorses, some mismatched dining chairs, and a cot in one corner.
