Hold the Dark: A Novel

by William Giraldi

  Cheeon bent with laughter, coughed on his smoke. Laughed more, his teeth as stained as his fingers.

  “You come here today to argue with me about the definition of a city, guy? You must have goddamn nothing else in the whole world to do.”

  “I’m not arguing, Cheeon. No one’s arguing. I’m just talking. And I’m saying: we’re not that different from all of you here.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. That’s one of the places you’re wrong. You went to college and you’re dumber than dog shit.”

  “Okay, then. I’m wrong and dumb, I don’t deny that. I’m just saying. We’re not all bad. We helped get the plumbing set up in this village five or six years back. Helped put this place on the grid.”

  “And now you want a goddamn trophy for letting these people take a shit in their own house. Ain’t you something.”

  “I don’t want anything, Cheeon. I’m just saying.”

  They looked at each other then, held one another’s eyes for half a minute until Marium glanced away. What he saw in Cheeon’s face just then was more than a mingling of rage and grief. It was a fundamental otherness that frightened him.

  “Some of these cabins are still dry.”

  “Some old-timers didn’t want electric and plumbing. That’s not our fault, Cheeon.”

  “Feels good when you say that, don’t it? It’s not our fault. You really are goddamn something.”

  “Okay. I know it’s bad here right now. I’m not disagreeing with that.”

  “You know a lot of stuff, I gotta hand it to you. But it’s way past bad. There a word for way past bad? You learn that word in college?”

  “There might be one for let’s not make it worse. You’ve got a wife who probably needs you, I’d say.”

  “She’s gone from here.”

  “She’ll be back. It’s her home, ain’t it?”

  “She won’t be back. No one wants to come back to what happened here. This village will be a ghost town in a year, just watch.”

  More quiet, a cigarette lighter shared, more smoke between them, thick white in the cold.

  “I’m sorry for all this, Cheeon. I really am.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it. Them dead sons of bitches at the morgue? Bastards like you and me? When we’re killed the past is killed, and the past is dead already, so no big deal. But when kids are killed? That’s different. When kids are killed the future dies, and there ain’t no life without a future. Is there?”

  “We have futures.”

  A look now, more smirk than smile. “You’re wrong again there, guy. Our futures end today. The raven follows the wolf, and the wolf has come for you and me. Look there.” He pointed to a snowed-in spruce, a raven in a branch like an ink blotch with eyes.

  “You can blame starved wolves for what happened to your little girl but you can’t blame a person.”

  “You can always blame a person. The world ain’t nothing but persons, every goddamn one of them starved for something.”

  From behind the bulwark of vehicles police spied through field glasses. One on a satellite phone. A sniper in white camouflage on the ground beneath hanging slats of snow-heavy pine. Minutes more of quiet and smoke.

  “Those boys look like they’re not sure whether to shit or piss.”

  “I won’t lie to you, Cheeon. Most haven’t taken part in anything like this before, not that I know of anyway. But that’s bad for you, not good. Because when you’re scared you’re stupid. And stupid doesn’t go too well with guns.”

  “I’d bet they’re stupid no matter what. What’d you all expect? Me to walk on out with my hands in the air? Some shit like that?”

  “I’m just trying to prevent as much stupidity as I can here. If you come with me today I’ll make sure everything’s fair. I’ll assure you of that.”

  “Everything’s what?”

  “Everything’s fair.”

  His laugh was a nasal sound caught between a chuckle and a snort. He looked at his cigarette to find it sucked down to the filter.

  When he was a boy he told his father he’d grow to become a doctor. He could recall the doctors from town who came to Keelut when called, bright and hale, their forehead mirrors like coronets. He recalled the command, the godliness of them. At fourteen he was beset by the migraines of viral meningitis—some sickness from the white world. The doctor, a white man with the braided mane of an Indian, sank a tall syringe into his spine and pulled the milky fluid. He returned daily for a week to shoot him full of medication and nutrients, a liquid red B12 that made a body-wide inner burn and high.

  “I ain’t going with you, guy. You can forget that.”

  “It’ll be a long dragged-out day, Cheeon. Into the night and morning, maybe. Phone call after phone call. Right now police are clearing these cabins behind yours, and those across the way there.”

  “Police can’t clear these homes. These people won’t move an inch for you sons of bitches.”

  “Well, we’re trying. And there’s police in the trees, and behind the house. I don’t know about you, but I’m goddamn tired today, slept like shit last night. The wife had me up all hours trying for this baby she wants pretty bad. I’m not complaining of it, just saying.”

  “Well. I sleep like shit every night. Then sleep half the day gone.”

  “What about work?”

  “Shit, there ain’t been work. Every mine for fifty miles around is closing, you know that. We trawled the gulf for two straight weeks a while back and couldn’t catch a goddamned halibut. Caught a sneaker.”

  “Things should improve.”

  “Hauled some cords of wood into town last month. Just once, though. There’s a famine here. Some kind of famine I never heard of before.”

  “I never understood why you didn’t join the service with Slone. You’ve done everything else together since birth.”

  “Do I look like someone who takes orders?”

  “It’s a paycheck.”

  “Do I look like a desert suits me? Because if you joined up these last ten years, you were going to the desert, guy.”

  “Slone didn’t mind it.”

  “Well. Vernon’s not like you or me. He has a . . . I don’t know what to call it. A cunning on him. A way of making you think he’s taking your orders when really he’s doing exactly what he set out to do. But that takes a kind of cunning I don’t got.”

  From inside his jacket pocket he took a flask and drank from it, then handed it over to Marium, who despite this morning hour drank too and passed it back to Cheeon.

  “Where’s your wife, Cheeon?”

  “It don’t matter. Not no more.”

  Marium lit another cigarette and shifted his body against the doorframe.

  “I was on a raid one time, down in glacier country, outside Juneau. Before I came back up here for good, when my first marriage went to shit. A guy shot dead his wife in their hunting cabin. He wouldn’t come out. A rich city fucker. Owned a company, cell phone towers, I think. After we were out there two straight days around the cabin he finally started shooting at us, shooting like crazy. We had to burn the place. We shot back for a while and then just burned it. Both of the bodies were nothing but charcoal stains when we went in.”

  “A rich fucker and his rich bitch wife, both of them dead. And the world is a better place.”

  “You know what bothered me the whole time? The goddamn boredom of it. Standing out there for two whole days. I can deal with bloodshed when I have to, but boredom I just can’t stand.”

  “Don’t worry,” Cheeon said. “I’ll give you the bloodshed long before the boredom.”

  Marium dropped the unfinished cigarette into the snow. He zipped his coat to the neck and stretched on gloves, then pulled the wool hat over ears flush from cold. “I’m sorry it has to be this way, Cheeon.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Think about what I offered you, please.”

  “And you think about that phone call your wife will get today. Imagine her the
re on the line when she hears it, hand on her belly. There’s nothing on earth will stop that phone call now. You think about that, guy.”

  He walked back into the heat of his cabin, leaving the door unlatched behind him.

  VI

  Slone entered an old mining camp that had morphed into a shadow town without name, a commune pushpinned into the base of a bluff, mostly inaccessible by road. Beyond this place lay so many miles of tundra whole states could fit on its frozen breadth.

  All the day before he had crawled through wilderness, on paths beneath canopies of cottonwood and birch that held most of the snow from recent fall. Only a six-inch pad of snow on these paths, but even in four-wheel drive with tire chains he had to crawl. He could tell that others from the village had recently crossed these trails: in trucks, on snow machines, on four-wheelers. Hours after nightfall he’d parked off the path and let the engine idle through the night for warmth. He ate from the food he’d taken from home, drank melted snow and wished he’d remembered to bring whiskey. Podded in a quilt across the back seat, he pressed his boy’s T-shirt to his face and, inhaling its scent, he slept till light.

  When he entered the mining camp the following day it was already near dark, the snow coming slantwise in sheets. The bluff above blocked the sinking sun and brought on early night. A memory stabbed at him then: he and his father here for a purpose he didn’t know, nor could he know if the memory was even real. He left the truck between a bulldozer and a thousand-gallon fuel tank on four squat legs like a white rhino. In the onset dark, firelight began to burn in rude cabins and wood-frame buildings.

  He walked along the unplowed center road, on snow waffled by truck tires. He saw snow machines in various states of dismantle, drays with wheels deformed by rust, truck tires in a heap. Empty pallets stacked for firewood. Lynx pelts splayed on racks, a pyramid of car batteries, sleds of birch, the well house to his right. Fifty-five-gallon drums everywhere, a slouched wanigan. Across the road a Quonset hut collapsed at its center, and beside it a full-sized school bus, its morning yellow gone beige, the windows shattered, gaping like kicked-out teeth.

  He found a two-story inn with steel kerosene cans piled under the porch awning next to pole wood. Inside, an inky shadow spilled through rooms. With a fingernail he tapped the door’s glass pane, then tapped again. The woman waved him in without turning to see what illness had just walked out of this winter night.

  She was bent before a woodstove. “Very late in the season for travelers,” she said, and turned then to look at Slone.

  She wore men’s snow boots and clothing of odd design, a project of marmot, caribou, and wolf. A storm of brittle hair to her waist, eyeglasses missing a lens. She jabbed into the flame with a brass poker. Halfway up the wall were drums of condensed milk, fifty-kilogram sacks of sugar, flour, rice, cans of apple butter and spinach in shrink-wrap. Against the opposite wall stacks of ammunition, .22- and .223-caliber, bird shot and buckshot. On a nail hung a model human skeleton from some school’s anatomy class—it wore a red Santa’s hat, a cigarette crammed between its teeth.

  “I was here once,” Slone said. “As a child.”

  The woman moved from the stove to the corkboard behind the front counter, a collage of photos tacked to it, most dulled sepia by the decades, some more recent with robust color.

  “Well, then your picture might be here. We take every traveler’s picture who comes through. What year was it, you say?”

  “I was a kid here with my father. Why were we here?”

  “He might’ve had a gold or silver claim. Most all of us came for that, unless you were scientists from the college or else hunters or trappers. Them scientists have been coming steady for the past decade, I’d say, on their way north. Every week there’s something on the radio about glaciers melting and the world heating up. I told them scientists: last year it was fifty below and the year before that fifty-eight below and you can take my word, fellas, they feel the same in the lungs.”

  “That’s my father,” and he pointed into the mix of photos at a bearded man whose features told of neither place nor age, his eyes with no trace of the blue Slone recalled from youth. His father had long ago left off appearing in his dreams. He’d catch himself going weeks or months without remembering the man. Without wanting or needing to.

  She removed the partially concealed photo from the board. “If this is your father, then this must be you here next to him. Handsome little fella.”

  She handed the photo to Slone. “That’s probably twenty-five years ago,” she said. “Judging from the film. They don’t make that kind anymore, haven’t for a while now, or at least I haven’t been able to order any of it from the catalog. I miss that kind of film.”

  It had been so long since he’d looked upon his father’s face, and upon his own as a child, that the somber pair in the photo seemed holograms, ghost-town twins of themselves. His stomach tore at the top. He could make out Bailey just barely in his own boyhood stare.

  “I can keep this?”

  “It’s more yours than mine,” she said. “I only click a button. Your face belongs to you, fella. It’s a good-lookin’ face.”

  “That one too?” He pointed to the newest photo, pinned to the far right corner of the corkboard.

  “You know this one? She was just here. You missed her by a week and a half. She stayed a few nights. Strange thing is she shrieked a little when I took that picture. That was something new to me, I’d say. Who’s she to you?”

  “My family.”

  “That’s an odd family traveling apart this far out, if I can say so. But you’re welcome to the picture. I make duplicates. I was a photographer before I came into the country. Where’re you in from?”

  “Keelut.”

  “There’s no road from there to here. Not directly.”

  “Not directly.”

  “Been here thirty years or more and I can say there’s no easy road from there to here. My husband and me came up into this country from the lower forty-eight, to stake our claims. And here we still are. Most others are gone except for the twenty-odd of us. We like it, though. The others left for oil, when they were saying oil was the new silver and gold. Nothing quite matches precious metals, you ask me. We did mine this place bare, but it was good while it lasted, you bet.”

  “Why was she here?”

  “No place else to be if you’re in these parts, I suppose. She wanted to see our Indian hunter for some reason. We call him that, our Indian hunter, as a joke, you know, but he’s just John, he’s been around here forever. He’s not a forty-eighter like the rest of us. He was raised on the Yukon, in a river tribe. He was here in this spot before a single miner showed up. And he’s still here.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  “Your girl there? Heck if I know. If she knew, she wasn’t saying it to me. I like to talk, as you might imagine, living in the country, but she didn’t want to hear any of it. This one stayed in the room, mostly. I cooked her food but she just stared out that window there, like she was waiting for something to come in and grab her. A pretty girl, too. But a bit odd, if I can say so, no offense. She had your same color hair. And nose, too, I think. Real pretty, but odd, like I say.”

  This photo in his fingers—her face just a week ago, a look of longing in it and something else not nameable, her irises all pupil. That green wool turtleneck was knitted by her two winters ago. She’d chopped her hair to her chin—it was waist-length when Slone had left. When he looked up he looked into the flashbulb of the woman’s camera and it sent bolts through his eyes.

  “You’re a handsome fella,” she said, trying to fix her hair. She rubbed lip balm across her mouth. Her lips were so thin they were barely there, eyebrow like an underline, whiskers in half sprout from her chin.

  “Another storm’s coming late tonight,” she said. “Or else by morning, the radio says. You staying with us?”

  Slone nodded, blinked the flashes from his eyes.

  “I don’t have any more brea
d, I have to warn you. Plane hasn’t been back in two weeks. We’re expecting Hank again any day now, if the storms slow. Last time he tried to land that ski plane in weather, he missed the runway and hit the bluff. We call it a runway, you know, but it’s just a bulldozed road tamped down.”

  He looked again at the photo of Medora.

  “Of course, there are some roads from the city to here, but you can’t get a big enough truck along most of them, and anyway it takes more than a day. Plus you better know how to drive in snow because if you get stuck in a storm on one of those little roads you can forget being found till breakup. So we don’t mind waiting for Hank and his plane. He takes supplies way beyond us even, where no roads go. Hank’s a real good man, you bet.”

  “I want to stay in the same room she stayed in.”

  “There’s only two rooms up there. You can have your choice, fella. No one’s fighting over those rooms. Honestly, I haven’t changed the sheets in there, if you don’t mind it.”

  Slone stayed fixed on the photo and said nothing.

  “Not sure what sort of battery you have in your vehicle but you might wanna pull it inside the garage there across the way. We call it the garage, you know, it’s just a big corrugated metal hangar on a concrete slab. But there’s a gas heater in there to keep the trucks from freezing up and it stays warm as the devil in fifty below. What’re you driving?”

  She bent to the window and with a sleeve wiped away the moisture to look out.

  “That a Ford? Hard to see. I used to have a Ford, owned nothing but American, and then my husband said to me one day, he said, We’re not American anymore, we’re Alaskan. Last year after breakup he drove off to the city in the Ford and a week later drove back in a Jap model, a Nissan truck, or one of those SUV thingies. It’s real roomy, better than the Ford, I have to say, what little I do drive of it.”

  “What’s the room price?”

  “Do you have any magazines?”

  Slone stared.

  “Magazines,” she said. “No magazines? You didn’t bring any with you to look at while you’re traveling?”