“Mama said you’re going away,” the boy said.
“In a few months. Not so soon.”
“Mama said a long time.”
“A year, maybe a little less. Deployment is that long. You remember deployment?”
“No.”
“It means work. It means money for us.”
“We need money?”
“Yes.”
“Mama said money doesn’t matter.”
“We don’t need much. But we need it.”
“She said you can get money here.”
“Not lately I can’t. No one can. It’s my duty to go there.”
“What’s duty?”
“It means when you’re good at something, and something needs to be done, you have to go do it.”
“For my birthday I’ll be seven.”
“I know. It seems a long time. It’s not so long. I’ll be back when you’re seven and a half.”
Normally clear to its sand bottom, this water had turned dark, dense in its quick swell downstream. A tree limb bobbed closely by like an arm reaching out for rescue. Bailey reached forth his own arm to touch it and Slone held the boy’s belt loop.
“I can swim.”
“I know you can swim. It’s moving fast today.”
“Mama said men kill people in war.”
“You have to, yes.”
“You killed a person before. When I was in mama’s belly.”
“Who told you that?”
“Somebody.”
“Okay, somebody. Somebody who?”
“Somebody.”
Clamor of thunder and then the shuffling of it behind them, so muted it might be above the Yukon or else far into the core of Canada.
“It’s bad to kill people but not bad to kill the caribou.”
“Yes. The caribou keep us alive. Sometimes it’s necessary to kill a person too, if you have to keep alive.”
“What’s necessary?”
“If you have no other choice.”
“You had no other choice.”
“No.”
“You did it to keep us alive?”
“To keep us safe, yes.”
“Who did you kill?”
“A man who would hurt Mama and you.”
“But he didn’t hurt us?”
“No. I hurt him first.”
“And no one missed him?”
“I don’t know that. It wasn’t my job to ask that. Only to protect you and Mama.”
“No one told on you?”
“No one told on me. No one would dare. The village is our family. Do you understand what that means?”
“Yes.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“It means you can count on them. If something’s wrong, or if you have a secret to keep, you count on them to help. That’s what it means.”
“Who?”
“Who what?”
“Who did you hurt?”
“A man who came into our village. He was a drifter.”
“What’s drifter?”
“Like driftwood. See there? That driftwood? It means a wanderer without a home.”
The current’s cool swiftness on their calves came close to massage. The whey sky seemed to sharpen all the green around them.
“How?”
“How did I hurt him, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“With a knife.”
“You like your knife,” and he turned to smile up at his father. He then smacked the water with a stick and Slone held tight to the boy’s belt loop.
“Mama said Cheeon helped you.”
“Cheeon helped me.”
“He’s my family?”
“Yes.”
“He’s my friend?”
“Always. You’re full of questions today.”
Across the creek a buck and its doe moved through alders dripping in the storm’s stay. Slone pointed for the boy to look and, not speaking, they looked until the deer ducked from view.
“It felt good to kill my first deer,” the boy said.
“You’re a good shot with the Remington.”
“It felt good and bad at the same time.”
“Don’t feel bad. You fed two whole families that night.”
“My teacher said people aren’t deer because people are equal. She said to kill any people is bad.”
“You’ll hear that a lot.”
“My teacher said that.”
“I know. It’s what they say. It’s a lie.”
“It’s not a lie.”
“There are good people who won’t hurt you and there are bad people who will. Ask your teacher if those are equal, if good equals bad.”
“It’s good to kill bad people?”
“If you have to.”
“Like that man who wanted to hurt Mama?”
“Like him, yes. The creek is cold today.”
“My feet are cold.”
This spot on the rock at the water was where the boy would come to think of his father.
“I’ll be with you while I’m gone. Do you know what that means?”
“Yes.”
“Do you really?”
“No.”
“It means that even when we’re not together I’ll still be with you. I’ll be right here with you.”
He placed two fingers on the boy’s pale bird chest, his skin a see-through sheath.
“When you’re away you’ll still be with me?”
“Yes.”
“No you won’t,” the boy said. “Don’t lie.”
And soon the hard shower began again.
* * *
The wastrel, another vagabond, appeared in Keelut one winter afternoon from where no one could know. Refugee from the pipeline, from a boarded-up mine or bust highway plan. Scrounger who still dreamt of gold in some missed gulch of this land. Backpack and blanket an earthen hue from the earth itself. Wind-lashed skin and a mane part mullet, hands coarse from the weather this wild place gave. Footwear fashioned from a hide no one recognized and tied down with twine.
The loamed-over face was creased from winter toil but his eyes beneath thatched brows kept the burn of youth, an unnamed liquid shade on pause from blue to green. Impossible to guess age in such a patchwork face. He carried with him a lever-action relic with a duct-taped leather strap and scope. Some of his clawed-at clothes looked sewn shut with dental floss.
At the hem of the village before the first snowfall he stood at the line of spruce and could barely be seen but for his breath. At night his campfire shone through the boles and at the first glow of day he could be seen loitering in the village as if waiting to be asked an inquiry or else handed meat.
On the second afternoon the vagrant sat against a boulder twenty yards in front of the Slones’ cabin and watched the door. Slone and Medora studied him from a window, Medora eight months round and long past ready to have their child out. Each morning she woke with knowledge of her body’s new districts. Knowledge of what she soon must do and the doubt of whether or not she could do it. The terror of what it would do to her.
“Another drifter,” she said. “On his way west, probably.”
“He ain’t west enough yet.”
“He looks hungry too.”
“That look on him is more than hunger.”
“Bring him something, Vernon. It won’t hurt to give him bread and maybe some cheese.”
“He’s got that rifle. He looks able to hunt for himself.”
They stood looking for many minutes, the child heeling against the walls of her womb.
“Bring him something so he’ll go.”
Slone approached the vagrant with slices of cheese and bread in a bag. This close he could see the discolored sections of skin on his fingers and nose, the scars of frequent frostbite—they looked part bruise, part burn. Hands slightly swollen from constant freeze and thaw. The smell on him was pungent campfire, something charred. His pants were sealskin, made on the coast in another time
, worn through in places as testament to a thousand miles of amble. The loose ruff of wolf hair at the top of a ragged parka drooped from his throat to show a necklace, a white stone rune of a horse.
“This home interest you, guy?” Slone crouched to him eye-level and passed the bag of food. The man placed it onto his lap without looking inside.
“A new boy arrives next month,” he said.
His teeth looked like cubes of shattered plate glass, ill-fit as if each tooth had come from a different skull.
“Someone tell you it’s a boy? No one told us.”
“Feels like a boy to me.”
“You and whatever you feel need to move on from here. There’s bread and cheese for you. It’s dropping low tonight and the first snows are coming.”
“Termination dust won’t come on tonight. We got a night or two more before that.”
“You’re a weatherman too?”
“You could say I know a little something about weather and what’s coming. Do you have a name?”
“My name’s got no meaning to you.”
“Not yours. Do you have a name for the boy?”
“That’s got no meaning to you either.” He leaned in toward the man. “You eat that bread and cheese and then you and that rifle are gone from here. I don’t care where you go, but you go there. If you’re needing a ride to town or beyond to the city you wait on the road. Someone will be going that way before long. Stick out your thumb and someone will stop for you.”
“It looks warm inside,” he said, not looking at Slone.
“You should think about a home for yourself, then.”
“I mean your woman. Looks warm inside her. Makes me miss the womb.”
Slone turned to see Medora half veiled by a curtain at the window, her belly protruding, and he turned back to the vagrant.
“I want you to look into my face now. Look good. I want you to believe me when I say this: I will end your every day. Do you believe me? Do you believe me when I say that to you?”
Above them a passel of ravens erupted from the keep of trees like black memories freed, their wings in wild applause.
“I believe that boy has got a short life.”
“Mention my child again and you’ll see how short your own is.”
The vagabond took a toothpick from a pocket and began working it between his cuspids.
“My granddad was on the Skagway trail,” he said. “Up in the White Pass, back in 1897. He was fourteen, trying to get to the Klondike. Trying to pass over to the Yukon before freeze-up.”
“They were after gold,” Slone said.
“You bet they were. Sweet gold. They all were greedy with it. Thousands of men were on the trail at once, just a narrow footpath, with thousands of horses and mules too. More than fifty miles of narrow switchbacks, over rivers and them mean summits, through some godforsaken mires. And that trail was just clogged right up. No one could move, all those horses and people. They sat there for days at a time, not moving, some freezing to death, some starving. Disease too.”
He pressed one nostril shut and fired a nub of snot from the other. It landed on his knee and he picked it off and scraped it into his mouth.
“Place there called Devil’s Hill,” he said. “The trail on the cliffs was just a few feet wide. Wide enough for a man only. Them bastards tried to bring the horses and they just dropped straight down, fell real fast from all the pack weight. Hundreds of feet down, crashed dead onto the rocks. Fifteen, twenty at a time. What do you think about that?”
Slone said nothing.
“You know how many of them thousands of horses survived the Skagway trail that year?” the wastrel said. “Zero. Granddad told me about piles of dead horses, huge stinking heaps of them, all their eyes pecked out by ravens. Fell into crevasses, worked right to death. Broke legs or drowned in them rivers. And they rotted there among them people. Just rotted right in front of them. A god-awful stink.”
With a black fingernail he picked at his nostril for another nub of snot.
“You know what Granddad said to me? Said most of them horses were committing suicide. Imagine that. Them horses were throwing themselves off cliffs two hundred feet high, hurling themselves over to end their torture from that trail. He could see it in their eyes, their will for death, for self-destruction. Now, can you believe something such as that?”
Slone studied his face a final time and stood. “You’ve got till night to be gone from here. Remember my words.”
“You remember too,” the wastrel said.
In from the clamp of cold, Slone bolted the door. He went to Medora at the window.
“He’ll leave soon,” he said.
“He was staring at me. What does he want?”
“Just food. He’ll eat and leave.”
“He’s not eating,” she said. “He’s staring.”
* * *
At dusk they saw the shine of the vagrant’s campfire through trees. Medora stayed at the window as if held by hypnosis, summoned by the spell of a mage, her child low in her and still heeling for exit.
Hours later in bed Slone waited for her to pass over into sleep. He left soundlessly through the rear door and moved through the timber toward the vagrant’s camp. In the clearing a World War II Army tent canted sharply at the sides. The hide of a hare splayed across sticks to dry before the crackling blaze. From the black of the woods he watched for movement, steadied his breath, watched more. He crept toward the tent and for minutes listened low to the ground. He could see or hear nothing of this man.
Avoiding shadows, he peeled the back side of the tent just enough, the hunting knife cocked to spear. But the tent was empty, the rank sleeping bag thrown open. He entered on his knees. The vagrant’s rifle lay atop a blanket. Painted crudely on the inner fabric of the tent like Paleolithic cave art were horses disemboweled and eyeless. He felt the pictures with a finger and when he squinted closer saw that they had been limned in some prey’s blood.
He dumped the vagrant’s shoulder bag. Fouled socks and sweater. Jackknife, sardines, coffee. Ammunition, wooden matches, candles. Gun oil, compass, fishhooks. The mummified head of a marmot. A Mickey Mouse key chain without a single key. No paper or card telling of this man, of how he knew about Medora and their coming child. There beside the sleeping bag he found a figurine whittled expertly from driftwood—a woman gravid with child, breast-heavy and fanged. It was the fertility symbol of some predatory she-beast. It was, he somehow knew, meant to be Medora. And the nausea of dread lifted from his guts to his throat.
He sprinted then back to their cabin, bounding over fallen trees through a moonless night.
* * *
She lay half asleep, a dream mostly recollection:
The women of the village called her fortunate to be eight months at the start of winter instead of in the ninety-six degrees of last summer’s heat, an August stifle they’d never known before in Keelut—a heat whose source seemed intent to maim them. Mosquitoes came in clouds and the villagers greased themselves in oils from wolf organs or beaver fat to keep the hordes of them at bay. They stood in the shade of poplars and simply looked at one another astonished, sweating as if some blight had been unleashed upon them. They went into the hills and down into the flume beneath canopies of cottonwood and sat in the cooling streambed for refuge from the heat and bugs. They didn’t have memory, language, or myth for this heat, had never heard hint of it. The elderly whispered of curse, of punishment sent for the sins of the village.
Her eyes opened now and saw Slone’s silhouette there in the bedroom doorway. She smelled campfire on him and something else, something raw, she could not say. She wondered why he had gone out in the cold at this witching hour of night. She said his name but he did not respond. The fear started then in her upper chest. She leaned for the lamp and as sudden as gunshot its light found the vagrant there, steady there in the room.
What unlatched in her just then was not terror, but an awareness of a riddle, or of cause and effect—of how
the dawn cannot possibly know the plot of day’s coming dark. Instinctively she put a hand on her belly, as if drawing his attention to two lives would rally his will to preserve them both. She questioned the protocol here, who should speak first or else if words had become altogether useless.
“There’s food,” she said. “There’s money. In a jar. By the stove. There’s fifty dollars in the jar.”
“This boy can’t live. Someone sent me to warn you.”
She heard her odd words—mere creaks in the floor beams—asking who he was, what he wanted.
“The hag sent me to warn you,” he said, his voice womanlike, almost calming. “This boy can’t live. Stop his life and go back to the place you came from.”
The questions she had for him would not find sound. Who had sent him? How did he know of them and their coming child? She looked to the window, thought of how quickly she’d have to move, to tear aside the curtains. To raise the pane and climb out. It wasn’t cold enough yet for plastic sheeting on the windows but soon it would be.
His complexion was reddish in the orange shine of lamplight. He looked part Inuit: the straight bridge of nose, eyes pinched at their ends, mane a silken black. And because he did not advance, because he held no weapon, she had the smallest understanding that he had not come to harm her.
“What do you know about us?”
“I know what I need to know to warn you,” he said.
From inside his parka he retrieved a painted object carved of driftwood. He turned it toward the lamplight for her to see—a shaman’s wolf mask painted with red ochre. He advanced by careful steps and reached the mask to her but she would not take it, would not remove her hands from her belly. He placed the mask on the bed beside her and returned to the doorway.
“That mask is yours,” he said. “Someone made it for you.”
She looked to the mask rimmed with real wolf hair. When she was a girl her father told her that to kill a wolf was to kill a messenger from the gods who protected them.
“Wear the mask,” the wastrel said, “and then you’ll know what you have to do. That’s what I was sent to tell you.”
She felt the wood of the mask, traced the teeth with a finger. When she looked again to the vagrant she saw the flash of blade rise from behind him. It spiked up beneath his chin at an angle deep into his head. His eyes strained but stayed fixed on her, stubbornly alive. Slone twisted the blade and a gout of blackish blood broke from the vagrant’s throat and mouth. It dumped onto the rug in wet clumps. His whole weight went limp on the hilt of the knife, then Slone pulled it sideways and severed his throat through to the spine.
Hold the Dark: A Novel Page 11