Hold the Dark: A Novel

by William Giraldi

  The mustached one said, “We thought you’d have some questions for Mr. Core, Vern, since he was there, since he saw that woman last. He’s been a help to us so far.”

  Slone turned again to Core in the armchair, sipped from his own coffee. He examined his knuckles, his wedding band, and under a thumbnail a blood blister that puzzled him. Each finger seemed a marvel of movement.

  “Can you raise the dead?” he asked finally.

  “No, sir, I cannot,” Core said.

  “Then I’ve got no questions for you.”

  “I’d like a cigarette, please,” Core said.

  Slone looked. He did not understand.

  “Can I get a cigarette from you?” Core asked again.

  Slone passed the pack to him then, and Core, nodding thanks, fingered one free from the box—the same unknown brand Medora had shared with him when he first arrived in Keelut, a black dagger for a logo. He reclined again and lit it from Slone’s lighter and sat staring at its glow.

  “You can’t think of where the wife’s gone to, Vernon? Anywhere at all?” the fat one asked. “A relative or friend, maybe? That woman have friends, any friends at all?”

  Slone rose from the table then, bored by this, and Cheeon followed. Core stayed seated with the cigarette, his body still aching and warm from a flu that would not leave. The fizzing medicine he’d drunk an hour earlier had done nothing to quell the fever.

  The detectives stood. The fat one said, “We need a statement when you could, Vernon, and a bunch of damn papers that need signing. At the station would be best, if you’re all set to go. Don Marium is there, you know Don? He asked us to meet you here and then bring you over to the station, if you wouldn’t mind it. Sooner would be better than later, most likely.”

  Slone stared at the cop and said nothing.

  “Shit, we know you just got back, Vern. We’re sorry as shit about all this. The more time we wait, the farther that woman gets, is what I’d say. We got them leads, a few we wanna go over with you, if you don’t mind coming on back now. I know it’s late. We got a map set up on the board there.”

  Cheeon stood before the painting, once again inspecting the moose in wig and lipstick, somebody’s idea of a gag in a morgue, this abomination he could not comprehend. When Russell Core began snoring in the armchair all four men turned to look at him.

  * * *

  In the lampless parking lot behind the morgue, Slone and Cheeon stood at the detectives’ truck and watched the wolf man drive off into whatever night awaited him, whatever fate was ready to claim him. His headlights showed sideswept flurries that by first light would thicken into a scrim of snow.

  They turned to piss shoulder to shoulder in the plowed berms at the edge of the dark lot, streams of yellow slapping into hardened snow. Slone could see the white and orange lights of town, the blinking red eye of the radio tower beyond the rails.

  The fat one spoke behind them. “You boys wanna follow us on over? We have coffee waiting there, good coffee, warm you right up. Put a splash of bourbon in there and you’re all set.”

  Slone zipped his fly and took the .45 from Cheeon in the dark. He turned and shot the fat one through the face from a yard away.

  He shot the other through his forehead.

  They dropped near their car and Slone stood above them and shot each again through his earhole, then braced the handgun in his belt. Cheeon passed him a flashlight and Slone saw fragments of skull and brain stuck frozen to the side door of their car. He bent with the light to gather the fallen papers on Medora—a black-and-white photo of her face drizzled with blood and specked wet with snow—and slipped them back into the file folder. He looked again at the bodies, hardened blood like rubies scattered across a canvas of white.

  Cheeon took the flashlight and folder from him and started the truck. Slone reentered the morgue through its rear loading door—inside an unlit hallway and the red glow of an exit sign. Minutes later he emerged with a body bag in his arms like a bride. At the back of the pickup, tailgate lowered, Cheeon held one end of the boy. They set him lovingly into the bed of the truck, where he sank several inches into a one-foot pad of snow.

  An hour’s drive to Keelut and the men did not speak. Cheeon smoked and drove as Slone reclined, his head turned to the bleached world he knew: houses, cabins, buildings, outside of town the numberless acres of land, not even the pledge of light in miles of such sable stillness.

  The memory of alien sand, that slamming sun, the sheer exhaustion of those memories. Slone slept, the truck’s tires a lullaby on asphalt.

  * * *

  Those first days towns or sectors of the city were always in smolder. Planes gave ruin. After, teams wheeled in block by block to find what still had breath. They crept door to door while buildings burned, smoke like night that made moon of sun. The men they sought seemed never to be where they should. Most were not in uniform. It was hard to know who should be shot, who would shoot. Families huddled in basements. Street dogs deafened and concussed, their ribs hunger-sharp. Gunfire on the next block, east or north, impossible to know.

  Slone turned and found himself separated. Ducked into a doorway, squatted there for air. He swilled from a canteen, wiped sweat and filth from his brow. Voices, American, in a rubble-packed alley. Smoke like walls in the street.

  When he stood in that entranceway he saw into the glassless window, through one rounded room into another: a soldier with a scalp of honey down, wearing Slone’s own colors, his flag, from his company or not—his eyes still burned from sweat and smoke. A girl beneath this man’s weight on a table, her bottom garb twisted aside. Slone watched him, a tattooed piston between her legs.

  He entered the house with a voyeur’s crawl. And he watched. The girl was very young, he saw now, sixteen or seventeen. Umber skin aglint with both her sweat and his. She did not struggle. She did not yell. She could not look away. She studied the soldier’s face as if needing to remember it for some future use. Or else stunned by this adder, astonished that this shaitan could have honey-colored hair and such straight teeth. But for the quiet drip of tears she seemed almost partner to this.

  More gunfire on the street. Rapid explosions nearby that sent a tremor through the floor of this house. The hissing of steam he could not guess the source of.

  And then Slone was behind them. He saw nonsense hieroglyphs etched into the soldier’s biceps. A medieval cross inked into his nape, and inside the cross a question: Why hast thou forsaken me?

  He unsheathed the knife from his belt. The hand, the forearm, the shoulder—they can know their aim independent of mind. He stabbed this soldier through the right ear. A centimeter of the knife’s tip poked through his left temple and Slone felt the body go limp on the blade. He held the man’s drooped form upright with the knife so he would not topple onto the girl. He then thrust him quickly back and yanked free the blade in the same even motion. The serrated side of the knife was crammed now with bone and brain. On the dusty stone floor the man’s blood puddled about his head more in black than red. His tattoo’s useless question died with him.

  Why has he forsaken you? Ask him yourself.

  The girl sat up, leaking blood from her center. She covered her bottom half, crossed her legs on the table, wide-eyed at Slone not two feet from her. The bleeding blade still tight in his grip. He hadn’t thought light-colored eyes a possibility among these people, but the girl regarded him now with a teal astonishment. Unsure what else that blade would thirst for. Unsure if another yellow-haired man would pry into her now too.

  I can’t hurt you, he thought. I won’t. Do not fear me. And she seemed able to read these thoughts, to find in his face something she could not find in the other’s. She did not tremble or flee—her tears had abated—and she could not look away from him. On the inner thigh of his pants Slone wiped the matter from the blade and held out the knife hilt first.

  She was ready to read his expression: Use this next time. Kill any man, any person who tries to bring you harm. And she to
ok the knife from him then. This gift. For a reason known only to her, she brought it to her nose to sniff its metal and hilt. She stood from the table and tucked the knife into her unclean garb. She looked to the body at her feet and spat onto it. She reached for Slone’s right hand, tarry with the soldier’s blood, and turned it over to inspect his palm. With her index finger she traced an invisible letter or sign no one but she would ever know.

  Then she limped barefoot from the rear of the house and disappeared into roving smoke.

  * * *

  Russell Core’s motel room smelled of two weeks of sickness, a DO NOT DISTURB tag warning away eager maids from the doorknob. Take-out food plastic from the one Chinese restaurant in town. Damp towels over chairs, a bed disrupted. Newspapers fallen on a floor more concrete than carpet, crinkled bottles of springwater in the trash. Torn packages of flu medicine, balled tissues, mugs of tea for the burn in his throat. On the dresser a chipped ceramic figure of a grinning Hawaiian girl in grass skirt and lei—Core could not decide if this was a joke or not.

  For three days after the hunt his legs and back had ached, painful even to step to the toilet—an insistent reminder of his unfitness and age. His sleep was long and hazy with sickness. He’d wake not knowing the day, fight to recall which month this was. After several minutes not moving he’d remember: the dead boy, Medora Slone, his own wife no longer herself. A daughter he needed to see.

  Since finding the boy he’d waited for two weeks for the return of Vernon Slone. He waited for a call that would finally tell of his wife’s death. But no one knew where he was. He slept away those shortened days, mildly frightened of a sky that gray, of whatever impulse had led him to this place.

  Back from the morgue now, he understood that he had waited for nothing. His daughter’s phone number and address were folded in his wallet like a invitation sent to the wrong man. There was nothing Vernon Slone wanted from him, not another fact he could feed this family’s horror.

  And if Slone had asked him for an explanation? Would he have accepted the facts Core had to tell, the facts he knew of the wild? Those facts he had learned were no help here—no help to Slone and no help to himself. Awake in the night, the memory of Medora Slone’s scent strong in him, he studied starlight from the window. What Medora had done was observable in nature. He’d seen it himself among starved wolves in the north. It was a fact he knew. But a fact that could do nothing to describe this.

  The stale motel room around him, and the end or start of something else now, a new direction he couldn’t gauge. Core unlatched the window, an eight-paned iron relic he had thought long extinct, ferns of frost on its glass. He swung it open into the outer black to let the cold clean this room. He knelt before the dark, his tears consumed now by a chaotic beard. He attempted his prayer but the words would not come to him, so completely had he lost them, so surely was he numbered among the damned. He stayed there at the open window until the night’s cold turned to novocaine, until he found exhaustion enough to sleep again.

  * * *

  Behind the hills of Keelut, Slone and Cheeon dug at the rear of a graveyard hidden in a clearing between two expanses of wood. A wolf keened from deep in the valley beyond, and from low branches of cedar, owls watched this midnight’s work. They dug sideways into the embankment of snow with shovels and pickaxes, clearing a temporary tomb. Without equipment the ground was impossible to pierce now. Their labor was illuminated by the truck’s headlights, snow swirling in the beams as if insects at a lamp in summer. The dark beyond seemed more than night, seemed a deliberate negation of day.

  As boys they’d hunted here in autumn and winter, lynx and grouse, even though they’d been forbidden by their fathers to take game where the dead lay. Proper burial for the boy would have to wait till after breakup when the ground softened. For now Slone’s son belonged in this ancient earth of the village with his forebears. The boy’s grandfather, Slone’s own father, was buried just yards from here, in a hole chiseled down into the earth by these same two men. All the graves and gravestones concealed now by drifts of new fall.

  They swung the pickaxes into the bank of snow. Side by side they seemed railway workers who have absorbed each other’s rhythm. They did not stop for water or smoke. Slone’s neck and shoulder wounds ached with each swing. The boy lay on the snow in his bag, in hushed witness to his father’s work.

  Halfway through the thickest layer, Cheeon left the grave to Slone and went to the truck’s bed to carpenter the boy’s coffin. Three sheets of plywood, a handsaw and hammer, a tape measure and a score of tenpenny nails, pencil behind his ear, lantern perched on a toolbox giving some light. What he fashioned so quickly was just a box. But it was even and tight and all they could offer till they had more light and time, till the thaw came.

  Slone stopped five feet into the bank. Out of the hole, he drank from the thermos Cheeon had taken from the cab and tossed to him.

  They unzipped the boy from the bag and placed him in the box. Slone touched his face, turned away, and could not resist a second time. He then hammered on the lid, twenty-two nails. Over the coffin Cheeon grabbed for Slone’s left arm, rolled the sleeves to the elbow, and slid a pocketknife blade diagonal across his forearm. He squeezed until globs of blood pooled like wax at the head of the box, then with a naked finger inscribed a glyph that looked part wolf, part raven—a symbol taught to him by his Yup’ik mother. Slone did not ask what the marking was meant to ward off or welcome, but trusted his boy was protected beneath it.

  They carried and slid the box into the cubby they’d made, then took up shovels again to conceal what lay within.

  * * *

  His home, the cabin he’d built, was girdled in police tape. Slone stood at the front door and looked. The boy’s sneakers by the portable heater, his tiny snow boots. Winter coat on a hook. The lightbulb above him blinked and dimmed. He stepped in, the bones of the cabin made taut by cold, by the absence of human warmth. They creaked beneath his feet. He clicked on the electric heater, pulled wood from under the tarp on the rear porch, stacked it thick and high in the hearth. Then he started kindling in the stove, blew the flame to life until he could no longer see his breath.

  He stepped toward the sofa still in his coat. A whirling, a rocking on feet half numb. The black snap of the bulb above him. Then Slone was falling, asleep before he could feel the sofa catch his weight.

  Awake before dawn, he poured boiling water on freeze-dried coffee. He knew that at first light the dead men behind the morgue would be found, and then he’d have scant time before police arrived here for him. Three or four hours in this weather, five tops. He stood in the root cellar to see the hole where the wolf writer had found his boy. He moved near to touch it, to smell the cold of it.

  A meal of old eggs and hardened bread—he tasted nothing—and at the table he opened the folder of documents on Medora. A police report in faded ink. Photographs of his boy on the floor of the cellar. Where the Chevy Blazer might have been seen. Map of the highway between cities and east toward Yukon, a single blacktop artery with paved and unpaved roads branching off like capillaries.

  On the map red dots indicating a possible direction. Many roads, he saw, were not marked, were unknown to townsfolk and cops, most no more than paths trimmed through a hide of birch and alder, unseen from the air. Both he and Medora had been on those hidden paths since childhood, since they’d first learned to ride snow machines, four-wheelers, dirt bikes. Wherever she’d fled, she’d fled, he knew, on those paths. He lit the folder at a corner, blew on the flame till it rose, then dropped it in the hearth to burn.

  Aspirin for the ache in his shoulder, then more coffee. He stood at his wife’s bureau and turned over each sheet of paper, each envelope. Unwashed laundry in a wicker basket by his foot: he brought her socks and underthings to his nose and mouth and inhaled the dank scent of her. At the bottom of the basket was the boy’s T-shirt, a red race car with a bumper face that smiled—it still held his child’s smell. Slone slipped it into his
jacket pocket. In the bedroom he emptied her dresser and stripped the bed. Beneath her pillow an Inuit shaman’s mask made of driftwood and pelt—the face of a wolf.

  He sat on his son’s bed. He looked and looked more and did not blink. Outside, the morning moved without him.

  He began filling duffel bags. Socks and gloves, thermal leggings and insulated overalls. A hunting knife, ammunition, clips, cartridges. Compound bow and quiver. Maglite and rope. Field glasses. From the bathroom: ibuprofen, antibiotics, aspirin, bandages, peroxide, razor blades, stool softener. In the hollow floor of the closet a compartment of firearms: 9mm handgun, twelve-gauge autoloader, Remington rifle that had belonged to his father. The AR-15 semiautomatic he found near the back door: what the wolf man had taken on his hunt.

  Cheeon had disentombed his Bronco from snowfall, changed the battery and fluids, filled the tank, draped the engine with an electric blanket to warm it back from death. Into the back hatch Slone loaded the duffels and guns. Blankets, a pillow, two containers of gas, snow boots. Pickaxe, shovel, chain saw. A sack of nonperishables with peanut butter, crackers, chocolate. The truck turned over with the first crank of the key and Slone let the engine rev and warm, the windshield and rear defrosters droning on high. He loaded the pistol and tucked it into his belt, then the shotgun and placed it beneath the seat.

  Then he made for the old woman.

  * * *

  The village’s main road was vacant this soon after dawn. In the year he’d been gone nothing he could see had changed here. The men and boys had left already for hunting, or to check their lines in the holes they’d drilled at the lake. Women tended to children and chores inside their cabins. A team of sled dogs staked beside a home stood in silence when they saw him and lay down again as he passed. The old woman’s hut sloped beside the generator shack. It had been there since long before he was a boy, behind the well house—a place they’d all avoided as children.