When he entered she was upright in a chair at the mouth of the fire, rocking among distaff and debris, among cordwood, pelts, stacks of leather-bound books arrayed as furniture. In this single-room hut the heavy stench of wood smoke, of boiled moose, unwashed flesh. On the back wall an old wrinkled poster of a soccer player in mid-kick. No appliances, just that woodstove, a teakettle and pot on top of it. Slone closed out the mass of cold behind him and slid the serrated blade from his boot.
“Vernon Slone,” she said. “You came home, Vernon.” She looked to the blade in his hand. “You come now to punish the old witch. But I am no witch. I knew you’d come. You’re home now, Vernon Slone.”
He stepped toward her and considered her pleated neck, the fire’s light in her eyes, her jowls in divots from some childhood scourge.
She pointed to a crate overturned at her stumped feet. “Sit,” she said, and he did—he sat close enough to smell the filth of her.
“You think I could have saved the boy, me an old woman? You think I knew? I’ve known things since before your father’s birth. But nothing I know has mattered. Go to your father’s grave, ask him yourself. Ask the spirits. Take your wrath to the gods, to the wolves, not an old woman. Take it to yourself if you want to be rid of this, Vernon Slone.”
In her hands a fabric doll, without nose or mouth—something meant to hex or help.
“It was foretold in the ice, that boy’s fate. Hers as well, from the start. There was nothing an old woman could do. Punish yourself. The both of you. You left this place for war, Vernon Slone. You should have died there. There in the sand. That was your fate. You chose not to accept it. So this, this is what you come home to.”
She shook the doll at him, then placed it on a mound of books beside her. Wood snapped in the hearth and the fire flared against the polish of Slone’s blade. She pointed to a table near him. “My pills,” she said, and he passed her the prescription bottle, medicine brought once a month by a doctor in town. Her hands trembled as she uncapped the bottle, as she placed a pill on her tongue and swallowed without water.
“This wasn’t the first time the wolves came to Keelut. The elders here remember it as I do. We were children. What came before the wolves, the white man called it Spanish flu. We called it peelak. Half this village died in it. Half, I tell you. The sickness got the brain, the lungs, the belly. No one has told you this history, Vernon Slone, your own history here?”
He sat and said nothing.
“It was winter and some, like my father, those who held memories from the coast, they made snow igloos behind the hill. We kept the bodies there, protected there. A hundred bodies. Two hundred. No one would come here to help us. No one would dare come here to help. Each morning we’d wake to new death in the huts of this village. People drowned. Drowned in their own fluid. Their lungs filled with the sickness. Or their brains burned from the fever. They leaked from the bowels. They leaked day and night and were too weak to move.”
She leaned forward in the rocker.
“We could smell them. My father told me to stay away but I could see, see him carry a man, almost dead, this man, carry him to a sled. Pull the sled around the hill to the snow igloos they made there. This man I saw wasn’t dead. He looked at me shivering, his eyes very alive. My father and others, they stacked him in the igloo with the dead. He died there very soon. He died there with the dead, moaning in the cold with the dead. I could hear him over the hill.”
When she motioned for the jug of water on the floor, Slone passed it to her handle-first.
“The moans in the night were very bad. We stayed awake in bed listening, my sister and me, cuddled in the same bed, we listened. The blanket over our heads to keep the sickness out. And we listened, we did. Once when my father was trying to save a woman, he sent my sister and me, sent us to the creek to cut the ice for water. We hurried to do this. In dark and cold we hurried and chopped the ice for him. You know what we heard?”
Slone watched her face, the pencil-thin and chapped pale lips folded in on themselves.
“We heard them howling. Howling beyond the valley that night. We hurried and melted ice for my father as he told us. He stayed with this woman. He stayed until morning, giving her the water. He told us the water would save her. If she kept drinking it would save her. But she slept finally at the dawn and didn’t wake. She never woke. My father stacked her on the dogsled with the other dead and brought them to the igloos behind the hill.”
Slone, still intent on the old woman’s face, passed the blade slowly back and forth in callused hands.
“The next morning my father and others found what happened in the snow igloos. The wolves got in, they tore apart the bodies of the dead in the night. They feasted in gore on those many corpses, a hundred bodies. Their frozen blood and bones were all over the hillside, strewn. Scattered everywhere. Not a single body was spared by the animals. From the tracks my father saw the size of this pack. Over twenty wolves had come, had feasted that night. It seemed a fate worse than the influenza. Everybody then gathered the bones, all the bones they could find, gathered them in baskets for proper burial when breakup came. But there is no proper burial after such a thing.”
She took up the doll again and caressed its head as if it had life.
“That is the history here, our history, Vernon Slone. You cannot blame an old woman for that.”
Minutes later, his wrist and hand gluey with the old woman’s blood, Slone walked back into the brimming day. He stood breathing in the cold. If the villagers knew he was back they did not come from their cabins, neither to welcome nor damn him. Across the road he saw curtains part and close. He returned to his truck and looked over his home a final time.
Then he was gone from that place, fled down icy passageways that could not be called roads—paths through a wilderness forged long before his birth.
V
At this December dawn behind the town morgue Donald Marium saw ice crystals shine atop the newest snowfall, drifts rolling to a dun-hued horizon. He took in the men’s faces as they gazed upon the killed—shot dead, they lay frozen and twisted by the wheel of their truck. Snow had been dusted from their corpses to reveal splashes, rivulets of glassy blood. Across the open compass behind town, north toward the range, he saw snow-burdened trees bowed like penitents. The morning seemed made of muslin, the sun less than a smudge. The wind came in soughs and shook free a pine scent from trees, then sent snow aloft as mist.
Every one of these cops had seen deer and caribou and wolves like this, marten and muskrat, Dall sheep turned from white to red. A few had witnessed men dead of cold and wet in swollen rivers, or of long plunges from headwalls. Some had tried to rescue children yanked underwater, lost beneath capsized canoes, yoked to the bottom. But Marium understood that most here had never witnessed fellow men like this. He himself had seen such a mess only once before, and not in this town.
He spoke to the cop standing behind him. “What’s in the building?”
“Another one dead. Frank the coroner, we think.”
“You think?”
“Shit, Don, we can’t get near enough him to see. He’s in a whole lake of blood, in his office.”
“Dead how?”
“Dead all the way through, it looks to me.”
“You find the casings here?” he asked.
“The what?”
“Shell casings. How do you think these men were killed? With some tickling? Dig up that spot for the casings, please.”
“How do you know it’s this spot?”
“Those wounds are nearly point-blank. You see the faint star pattern of that wound? On that man’s face there? You’re standing on the shell casings.”
“Something from here did this?”
“I’d say a someone did it. Dig up the casings, please.”
“Feels like a something to me. First that village kid, and now this. What a goddamn shitty way to end the year. That kid’s gone, you know.”
“Gone how?”
“Not quite like this, no. Please find the casings.”
Marium stood smoking a cigarette in the cold as men continued this work. The ambulance sat silent and without use, its lights pointlessly in twirl. His dreams in the night had offered him no sign of what this day held.
The morgue’s waxed hallways squeaked beneath a racket of wet boots. A half-moon of cops stood at the cusp of the coroner’s blood. He lay facedown and Marium could see the stab wound was in the side of his head, through the ear and out the other side.
“You boys waiting for Frank to sit up and tell you who did it? Mop right up to him, please, and look for boot marks as you go.”
“What about forensics, Don?”
“About what?”
“The guys from the city.”
“You photograph this room?”
“Took a hundred shots.”
“Then you and a mop are as forensic as it’ll get right now. Look for a goddamn boot mark, please, and stop if you see it.”
“I thought the city guys were coming. Or troopers, something. How in the hell we supposed to handle this?”
Marium smiled at him. “Troopers. That’s a good one. I didn’t realize troopers even knew we were here, this town. Let’s think of this as our own mess for now. Stop touching things, please.”
His salmon-and-eggs breakfast sat half eaten on his kitchen table. He thought of coffee, Susan, his wife, in her bathrobe and nothing underneath, toenails the pink he liked. Twelve years younger, redheaded and lithe, she was a former dancer of ballet. Her breath stayed sweet even at waking. She was his promise of thaw in this place. She wanted children and kept Marium engaged in the task, early-hours coupling with an erotic unclean scent on her. He was prepared for kids, willing now at forty-eight.
At the rear of the hall he stepped into the break room. He could smell the cigarette smoke stuck on curtains and patted a jacket pocket for his own pack. He saw dents in the sofa cushions where heavy men had sat. Other rooms, offices down a second hallway, and the metallic coldroom at the end. He’d been to this morgue dozens of times over the years—to sign papers for old people dead from sickness, or young people dead from being dumb—but he’d never entered this coldroom. Never wanted to.
He grabbed the handle with a latex glove, pulled to open the door, then entered in the kind of caution born of superstition. The extended corpse drawer was empty, the sheet thrown aside. On the floor beneath it lay a toe tag in blue ink. He crouched to get it and read the name, read the numbers telling all of Bailey Slone.
Looks like your daddy’s home, boy.
* * *
Cheeon answered the knock, opened his front door and kept it open, a cigarette glowing to its stub, the heat from a cast-iron stove pushing at the cold. Marium’s coat was unzipped to show no weapon in his underarm holster. When he saw Cheeon’s cigarette he retrieved one of his own from a coat pocket. The men leaned against the doorframe smoking, looking fifty yards out in front of Cheeon’s two-level cabin where police vehicles sat arranged on the snow front to back, four of them. The men behind wore flak jackets and helmets, their rifles lowered, some sipping from cups of coffee hastily got.
“Was wondering when you’d show up here.”
“I told them I’d try talking to you, Cheeon. See if I could get you to come without any goddamn mess here. I’m not claiming to be a friend. I wouldn’t claim that.”
“If you say.”
“But we’ve talked over the years, when you were in town. Had coffee a few times, if memory serves. We’ve been friendly, anyway. Our fathers knew each other, I think. Your wife and girl were friendly with me. With Susan too, my wife. Would you agree with that?”
“If you say.”
“And that has to mean something.”
Cheeon spat, half in the snow, half on his boot.
“If you say. But I don’t think it means what you want it to mean right now, guy. Not even close.”
A scud of wind lifted loose snow from roofs and moved across open space in a white swirl. The late morning sun was just a peach smear.
“I’m from this place just like you.”
“You ain’t from this village.”
“No, not from here, but not that far from here.”
“You come to tell me your life story, guy?”
“We’ve got two cops killed out back of the morgue in town, Cheeon. Also the coroner inside with a knife wound through his head. And then there’s a missing dead boy. That’s what we’ve got here, Cheeon.”
He nodded and smoked but did not look at Marium.
“You list those dead in order of importance? Because a couple of dead cops is cause for a party around here.”
“No, I did not. I’m not saying that dead cops are something special, more special than anyone else dead. Dead all around is not a good thing, you ask me.”
“I can think of some sons of bitches that might do the world a bunch of good dead.”
“That’s fine. I ain’t disagreeing. I just don’t want anyone else dying here today if we could help it, please.”
“Looks like you came expecting it, though. All these cops out here.”
“Like I said, I told them I’d try talking to you first. See if we could prevent a mess here.”
“Come quietly, you mean. That’s the cop phrase, right? Come quietly.”
More silence while they smoked.
“Cheeon, most of these cops out here aren’t our redneck guys from town. They’re Feds, city boys, and they’ve got a fair amount of firepower they’re ready to use today.”
“I’ve got a fair amount of my own I’m ready to use.”
“I know it. That’s why we’re talking here, Cheeon. Your father was busted a few times for illegal firearms. You know what they say about that apple not falling far.”
“Nope. I don’t know nothing about that apple. But it’d be real smart of you, guy, not to mention my father again.”
“Okay. I won’t. It was either you or Slone who killed those men and took that child. Maybe it was the both of you. I know you boys have been tight since way back.”
“Vernon’s gone to the desert. There’s a war there. You got a radio?”
“Vernon Slone is home. You know that. And you helped him. I was just at his cabin. Looks like I missed him by five or six hours.”
“If you say.”
“Listen, Cheeon. Whatever happened, we’ve got to get it figured. The cops were shot with a .45 Springfield. You’ve got one of those registered.”
“I’ve got others not registered.”
“I figured that. Frank, the coroner, was retiring this year, moving to San Diego, I believe. Hell, he wasn’t even a real coroner. Just a doctor who did the job for us because no one else could do it.”
“San Diego, huh? Never heard of it.”
“He was stabbed straight through his head. Clear through, from one side to the other. Who’d do a thing like that?”
“You tell me.”
“You can probably guess he had some family who won’t be the same.”
Cheeon nodded more, smoked more, nearly smiled. His fingernails were piss-tinted from tobacco.
“Yeah,” he said. “There’s a bunch of that going around here lately.”
“Where is Vernon Slone, Cheeon?”
Cheeon turned to him, smoke funneling from his nostrils. His face—a crimped brow, the start of a smirk—said, You’re dumber than you look if you think I’ll tell you that.
“Yeah, okay,” Marium said. “Maybe you’ll tell me where that boy’s body is, then. It’s state evidence.”
“It’s what?”
“Evidence.”
“That boy’s body is nothing to you and your like. It’s not of this earth anymore. Put that boy out of your mind or he just might haunt you, guy.”
“Where’s Medora Slone?”
“She’ll be found. Not by you or them, thou
gh.”
“What happened to her? How does that happen to a woman?”
“How in the goddamn hell should I know? I ain’t a woman.”
A span of silence now. Cheeon pressed out the filter into ice with a boot toe, then lit another.
“What’s the temp today?” he asked. “Feels like a February cold is coming on and it ain’t even January yet.”
Marium pointed. “Thermometer says zero right there.”
Cheeon looked at the thermometer screwed into the outside sill of the kitchen window.
“That’s broken. It’s been stuck on zero all year, even last summer.” He stopped to pull in the smoke. “Maybe it’s not broken. I don’t know.”
“Is that why those cops were shot?” Marium said. “So no one but Slone would find Medora? So no one would interfere in his business? His revenge, whatever he wants. And Frank because the big galoot just got in the way?”
“What do I look like, like I enjoy all these fucking questions from you, guy?”
“I know your little girl was taken from here by a wolf. I know you don’t have a body to bury and that there’s nothing on earth worse than that.”
“You know that, huh? A lot of help you were for a guy who knows that. You come an hour across the goddamn snow for my sorry ass but you wouldn’t come for some kids dead in the hills.”
“We came.”
“You came and you left and you didn’t come back. Worthless as shit, you city boys. Though even shit can fertilize, right? What can you do?”
“We ain’t city boys, Cheeon, you know that.”
“You sure as hell are. I’ve been going there my whole life, I know what the goddamn city is.”
“We’re an hour closer to Anchorage than you. That don’t make us the city. Five thousand people is hardly a city, I’d say.”
Hold the Dark: A Novel Page 7