Hold the Dark: A Novel

by William Giraldi

Core nodded. “Look at his throat,” he said. “She strangled him.”

  “Someone did.”

  “It was her,” Core said.

  “One thing at a time, please, Mr. Core. When you came back here today after your hunt she was gone?”

  “She was gone. Look at her bedroom, the back room up there. She packed. Her truck is gone. She’s gone. She must have left me here to find the boy.”

  “Left you here to find the boy. Why would she do that, Mr. Core?”

  “Why? Are you the police? You tell me why.”

  “We’ll find out why. We’ll get everything figured out.”

  “Someone has to tell the father,” Core said.

  “Vernon Slone is at the war.”

  “You know Vernon Slone?”

  “If you live around here, you know of Vernon Slone.”

  “Someone has to tell him,” Core said.

  “Would you mind waiting upstairs please, Mr. Core? I’m sorry to ask that. Would you mind?”

  “I put that blanket on him,” he said, and did not move. “I covered him.”

  “We’ll take care of this boy,” Marium said. “Don’t you worry. We’ll take good care of this boy.”

  Core made to leave.

  “And, Mr. Core?” Marium said. “Please just have a seat up there. Please don’t touch anything.”

  Core went upstairs to the armchair and sat on his hands.

  * * *

  Hours later Marium and the men laid Bailey Slone in the bed of a police pickup. They walked cabin to cabin throughout the village, looking for the parents of Medora and Vernon Slone. Core remained by the police truck in the road and watched them, smoking from Marium’s pack, taking sips of whiskey when the cold cut through him. Keeping solemn watch over the boy. Retreating to the Slones’ cabin to feed the fire when he could bear no more cold.

  In the back room he looked at the messed bed of Medora Slone, the boy’s tiny bed beside it, on the sheets superheroes faded from washing. He kept rubbing his wrist for the missing watch, kept feeling turned-around without knowing the time.

  When Marium finally returned, Core was almost asleep again in the armchair.

  “I’m going back to town,” he said. “My guys are staying here. You should follow me back, to a motel there. It’s way too easy to get lost in the night. And more snow’s coming soon. You can’t stay here.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s better you don’t.”

  “But why?” Core said. “These people think I have something to do with this?”

  “I didn’t say that. But you can’t stay here.”

  “What’d you find?”

  “Nothing yet.”

  “Her parents? Or the husband’s parents?”

  “Nothing yet. Follow me back.”

  “No one knows anything?” Core said.

  “We’ll know something soon.”

  Core started his truck, let the engine warm, saw his breath frozen on the windshield from the day before. For sixty slow miles he stayed trained on the taillights of Marium’s truck, two eyes ashine on a face of unbroken black. He fought to keep his own vehicle from slipping across unplowed roads, fought to stop sleep from slamming onto him. The window half open to let the frozen air slap him awake. The radio loud, an upset singer complaining of heart pain. Hard to tell how close the hills and trees came to the road. Impossible to know if there were humans in that darkness. He remembered nothing of this route from the day before.

  At this hour of night he could have no accurate notion of the town. He’d expected some lesser oasis at the center of this dead world but the town seemed barely that. In its sickly fluorescent light the motel beckoned from the road without a sign to welcome. He followed Marium into the parking lot, then went to his driver’s window to cadge a cigarette.

  “How long you staying?”

  “I don’t know,” Core said. “How long should I?”

  “A few days, I’d say. At least. Until we get this figured. You can’t remember anything she said to you about where she might go to?”

  “She didn’t say anything to me about leaving. We talked about wolves and we talked about this place. That’s all.”

  “You’re sure she did this, but tell me how.”

  “With a rope. I don’t know.”

  “I don’t mean what’d she do it with. I mean how.”

  “I’m not prepared for this, Mr. Marium. You have to talk to the people of that village.”

  “A tiny old woman came to me when I arrived tonight, as soon as I got out of my truck. She was just standing there. She told me Medora Slone was possessed by a wolf demon. She called it a tornuaq. That’s what you get when you talk to the people there.”

  “I’m not prepared for this.”

  “You see this main road out here?” He pointed with his cigarette. “Our station is at the end of it, on the left down there. Across from the market. Come talk tomorrow please. You should go catch some sleep now.”

  But sleep would not come. He stretched on the bed in this dank room, hungry without the energy to eat. And he imagined Medora Slone’s face in the dark above him. He remembered the flesh of her from the night before, her naked form quaking against his own body.

  He could name the facts of nature.

  A quarter of all lion deaths are the result of infanticide. A male bass will eat his offspring if they don’t swim away in time.

  Female swine and rabbits will stifle their young if the young are sick or weak, if resources run low. It’s called “savaging.”

  Prairie dogs kill so many of their own young it’s practically a sport for them.

  Rats eat their own young if they are hurt or deformed. But they are rats.

  Wasps. Sand sharks. Sea lions. Tree swallows.

  Those dolphins we so admire for their intelligence: they’ve been recorded ramming calves to death, nose-first, like football players.

  Over forty species of primates kill their own young. Our ancestors? Darwin doubted they participated in such barbarity: they weren’t that “perverted,” he wrote. Goodall observed female chimps killing and eating baby chimps.

  Thirty percent of infant deaths among certain baboons are the result of infanticide.

  Postpartum depression will cause a human mother to murder her child. But scientists have said that most human infanticide is caused by social or economic woe. The mothers are almost always very young. If there’s a choice between children, a boy and a girl? The girl goes.

  An Aborigine tribe has been documented killing a child to feed it to another. In the New Guinea Highlands, mothers kill their daughters and then try again for sons. !Kung mothers will walk into the forest with an unwell newborn and then walk back alone.

  There is not a culture on earth in which a parent has not killed a child.

  What was in Medora Slone’s nature that day when she twisted a rope around the throat of her own boy in a root cellar? Look to the woods, he knew, not the books. The annals of human wisdom fall silent when faced with the feral in us.

  On this motel bed at the rim of the world, Core could feel himself forgetting how to know, how to believe.

  IV

  Vernon Slone landed in Alaska after dark, not in uniform but in dungarees fitted around combat boots, a baseball cap without a logo, a wool parka from a dead man at the military hospital in Germany. A patch on his neck, another on his shoulder. His sandy mane gone long and a blondish beard of weeks, lips hidden by mustache.

  He’d been days in Germany, or a week, he couldn’t know for sure—the pills, blue and pink. Surgery to remove the lead in his shoulder and neck, some of it lodged in bone. Then the unclear flight to a base back home. Kentucky, he was told. News about his boy. News about his wife.

  An Army doctor spoke at him. No one contacted you? Someone was supposed to contact you. Slone couldn’t bring his face into focus; his voice came as if from underwater. It’s been two weeks—He looked at papers in a folder. It’s been nearly two weeks. You should hav
e been told this.

  A shock wave softened by science, by more blue and pink. Another distorted voice from underwater. A woman this time, in civilian clothes. A counselor. Gold crucifix nestled in her jugular notch. She sat in a chair opposite him, at a table in his room, by a window. Her individual words were English, he knew, but her sentences seemed something else altogether. She kept asking if he wanted to pray. Slumped in a chair, Slone looked out the window at the uniforms passing on the walkway. In another minute he was asleep with his forehead on the table.

  Pulse felt everywhere in his body, in ears clotted with blood or clogged shut with cotton. Mention of a Purple Heart by a pock-faced officer he’d never seen before. Mention of a ceremony to honor him. Still more pills and the weighted sleep of the sick. He fell into some netherland of shade and vapor where faces are more creature than person, blurred screams stretched across silence. His son’s name in his mouth.

  In the sun outside. Someone pushed him in a wheelchair, though there was nothing wrong with his legs and the pain in his shoulder and neck had gone. A redheaded teenager dressed as a candy striper handed him a bundle of yellow roses, still in green cellophane—her breasts too large for her age, a face splattered with freckles, a mouth grotesque with metal, braces refracting sunlight that stung his eyes. She spoke a tongue he didn’t know and nobody explained. He needed to weep but could not find the strength to do it.

  Beams of sunlight segmented the room in cryptic patterns, from windows both west and east, it seemed. He could not understand this abeyance of order. Shadows from branches and twigs brushed the wall like bone arms. At evening the lamplight covered the corners in malign misshapes he tried to decode but could not. His son spoke to him in dreams and when he woke he found he’d been sobbing as he slept.

  The waking world had an awkward way with time now. Alaskans, he’d been told, had the skewed circadian rhythm of arctic things, tuned in to a half year of dark and ice. In those nebulous corridors between wake and sleep he saw his father, that chapped man, skin like shale, fractured by tobacco and cold. Each time he woke he remembered the facts anew.

  Days ago someone had given him printed pages of the news article, black-and-white photos of Medora and Bailey. Photos that were three years old, he saw, partial and faded from the printer’s low ink. Only the top halves of the sentences were visible, so that it seemed as if they were only half true—seemed as if he himself might be in charge of making those sentences whole, of completing the details of this story.

  By the time he boarded the plane home he had flushed the blue and pink pills. He was beginning now to emerge from that gauzy lair.

  His boyhood companion Cheeon met him at the gate. Slone saw him there among the colorful others eager to greet family—six feet tall, half Yup’ik, a fixed expression of grief and resolve. He recognized his drab winter clothes, his boots, the strong tobacco scent of him. Black hair pouring from beneath a camouflaged hunter’s cap. His five-year-old daughter was the second child taken from the village by wolves, but he said nothing of this to Slone.

  The men did not speak a word, did not clasp hands or embrace, only met each other’s eyes and nodded. Cheeon took Slone’s duffel bag, then handed him a cigarette and Zippo, a bowie knife in a black leather sheath. Slone moved briskly through the airport with Cheeon beside him keeping pace. Once through the double doors he lit the cigarette, fit the knife into his belt at the small of his back, and looked to Cheeon, who nodded the way to the truck across the road in the parking deck.

  The temperature was two degrees now and would drop toward twenty below by dawn. His visible breath and the sharp scent of winter—Vernon Slone knew he was home.

  For the eighty minutes it took them to arrive at the town’s morgue the men did not speak. Cheeon drove and smoked and smoked again, his window cracked an inch for vent. The raised white scar jutting from the corner of his mouth told of the autumn morning when fishing on the lake in the valley. Fourteen years old, Slone cast his lure, not looking, and hooked him clean through the mouth. A quick yelp and Cheeon grabbed for the line so Slone wouldn’t cast. Slone snipped off the barb with side cutters and threaded out the hook, holding down his laughter as the blood leaked onto their boots and Cheeon cursed him with his eyes and teeth.

  This reticence between them, both instinct and ritual, was a lifetime old. Squalling babes the same age, they’d become instantly quiet when brought together, each a balm for the other in some way no one could explain. Bow-hunting elk or deer from adjacent stands in spruce, they’d pass twelve hours in uncut quiet, hand signals between them a superior tongue.

  The winter hunt required an uncommon silence when the cold killed the sounds of summer, when ice muffled the earth and caribou a mile off could hear a man move through snow. They passed whole weekends of fishing for king salmon and trout without a single sentence on the river for fear that the fish could hear. All through November nights in their tent they wrapped around one another for warmth and never thought to wonder about an affection this natural.

  On the rubber floor mats of Cheeon’s truck: a hammer, a crushed coffee cup, a torn-open box of condoms, cigarette filters fallen from the ashtray, .22 rounds that rolled when the truck turned. His head back against the seat, Slone looked at the roads he knew so well, and as they approached town he searched for changes in storefront windows, in street signs, in front yards, every few minutes sipping from a water bottle Cheeon had handed him. A mother walking along a shoveled sidewalk with her boy—Slone sat quickly forward, turned his head to look at them as they passed. Electricity was everywhere outside the truck window tonight—the illumination of lives. Slone thought about protons, electrons, electrocution.

  * * *

  They were met in the dim hallway of the town morgue by two detectives, a lab-coated coroner, and by Russell Core, the wolf writer who had discovered his boy two weeks earlier, the one who had last seen Medora Slone. Core and the detectives tried to offer handshakes, attempt a feeble form of condolence, but Cheeon raised a finger to his lips, shook his head for them to remain quiet, to keep back, and he unlatched the steel door to the coldroom for Slone to enter.

  He entered alone. He saw his son in an extended corpse drawer, the sheet folded to his waist, toe tag nearly the size of the boy’s whole foot and attached like a price. His cobalt boy had grown in the year he was gone, the boy’s face bones altered from either time or death. Hair longer than he’d ever seen it. Burgundy stain beneath the paper skin of his throat. Dark bulbs beneath slitted lids. He looked unfed and Slone wondered if this was a trick of death.

  He breathed through sobs as a woman breathes through birth—solar plexus sobs, and he gave in to them, knowing this was his only time, his only chance for tears. He let them come and pass. For long minutes they rippled over him. Then he placed his palm on the boy’s pale chest, his birdlike ribs. He bent—his skull tight from weeping, a pressure through his neck and face. He touched his lips to the boy’s and whispered, “Remember me.”

  * * *

  In the break room at the morgue, dense with the scent of coffee, the detectives sat in craters on the sofa. Across from them Slone and Cheeon smoked at a table. Russell Core sat in an armchair to their left, staring into his cup. Donald Marium had asked him here; he said Core was the only link to what had happened in the village. On the wall in this room a painting of a moose in scarlet wig and lipstick. When they’d first entered, Cheeon considered this picture closely, as if it were a calculus equation.

  The cop with the mustache said, “Do you have any idea where on earth that wife might’ve fled to, Vern? Any idea at all where she went to?”

  “We’ll get her,” the fat one said. “She’ll pay for it, Vernon. We’ve got leads, a few of them.” He held a file folder, a sheaf of documents on Medora Slone: photos and maps and Slone could not guess what else.

  The other with the mustache said, “We got her picture out all over the state. All over, Vern. Troopers looking high and low for the wife’s truck. But it’d be r
eal good if you could give us some idea of where that woman might’ve fled to. Into Canada, maybe? We been in touch with the Mounties there. Dumb asses, all of ’em, but we been in touch.”

  This cop drank from a miniature Styrofoam cup and seemed irked by the morgue’s coffee. “I know it’s a damn hard time for you, Vern, what that woman did.”

  Most of the people in this town weren’t from here—they were willful refugees from the lower forty-eight. Slone and Cheeon both could instantly spot a forty-eighter. The fat one, Slone guessed, was northern California, maybe Oregon. The mustached one was most likely from Texas. Migrated here to dabble in policelike work when not cutting down moose out of season. This wolf man was a midwesterner. They felt needed now, Slone guessed. Important. Useful in this dark.

  Slone’s left eyelid twitched as it often did when he went without sleep. He’d tried to nap on the plane but could not. He smashed out his cigarette and turned to see Core, his white wolf face and regal beard. He was sitting oppressed and silent in the armchair.

  “You found my boy?” Slone said.

  Core met his eyes, nodded yes, and glanced away. Slone half nodded in return, in his gratitude, his version of thanks said with the face. Core looked down at his feet, at the salt-stained boots that belonged to Vernon Slone, the boots Medora had let him borrow two weeks ago when he arrived. When Core realized he was wearing them his head lightened with embarrassment and he tried to cover one boot with the other but knew it was useless.

  “Mr. Core was called here by your wife,” the fat cop said. “Damn woman told him a wolf took your boy. Can you imagine that, such a thing?”

  At twelve Slone had shot dead a wolf in the hills above Keelut. For a live target to practice on, for fear and for fun. When his father found out, he took Slone’s rifle and slapped the spittle from the boy’s mouth. He could recall the old man’s sandpapered palm on the skin of his cheek.

  Then his father gave him a just-born husky to care for, “to fix that hardness in you,” he said. And Slone cared for the animal for a decade until it lost vigor and grew lumps. At his father’s demand Slone put it down himself with the .22 rifle, then buried it in the hills of Keelut beside the ravine. He felt certain—he was twenty—that he’d not again in this life undergo such gutting grief. He saw the dog everywhere, smelled it on clothing, heard it in the cabin, dreamed of it. Haunted and bereft, he learned then, were an unforgiving pair.