“Smells like dried bear dung.” I growled, retreating onto the porch for fresh air, his belly laugh following me.
I had expected mosquitoes, and dark, but there was neither, just a soft warm twilight. He stumped out onto the porch with me. “Want to sleep inside, or outside?”
“I’m too old to sleep on anything but a bed.”
“Hammock?”
“Seriously?” I was dumbfounded.
Raven nodded, his grin almost a leer. I sighed.
“Let me get my gear.”
Walking to the car taught me why there were no mosquitoes at the house. He was keeping them away somehow, whether magically or professional courtesy, I wasn’t sure. They swarmed me when I was a few paces from the car door, and I was swatting as I reached in and grabbed the small backpack that held everything I had brought along.
When I turned around, I could see him sitting on the porch laughing. I sighed. This was going to be a long process. Raven was known as a trickster, and I had put myself right in his talons. Too late to back out now, though.
I walked back, and the mosquitoes melted away as I got close to the house.
“Does it get dark?” I asked, not acknowledging the snickers he was still emitting.
“Yah, for a few hours. We aren’t that far North.” He stood up and pulled the seat of the bench he had been sitting on up, revealing a compartment. He tossed me a green bundle. “Inside, outside, up to you.”
“Since you have an arrangement with the bugs, and hopefully bears, I’ll doss out here.”
He pointed at bolts above both our head height, and vanished back inside, shutting the door. Then he reappeared with a sleeping bag, and a flashlight.
“Outhouse that way.” He pointed toward the rear of the cabin.
I looked down from where I was standing on the bench to tie up the hammock.
“Thanks.”
“Sleep well.” He cackled. I was left wondering what that was about when he shut the cabin door again.
It took me a little while to get settled and comfortable, but once I did, I feel deeply asleep. It had been a long day, and I had been tenser about coming to Raven than I’d realized until I got here. I wondered how Bella was coping, and drifted off.
I awakened to Raven shaking me. “Coffee, boy.”
I half-climbed, half-fell out of the hammock and followed him inside, surprised I wasn’t stiff and sore, as I had expected to be. Groggy, yes, but that ended when I took a sip of the coffee he handed me.
“Whoo! What is in that?”
With a cackle, “Strong enough to float a mule shoe, with the mule still attached!”
“No wonder you thought mine was weak.” I took another sip, wondering if this stuff would eat right through my gut lining.
“You make it next time, you get it right.”
He picked up a small bowl off the counter and stirred whatever was in it. He pulled a battered leaf out of it, and then poured it into a glass. It was a muddy green.
“Here, drink this.” He pushed it at me.
“Um, what is it?” I didn’t like the way it looked, and even less the way it smelled.
“It’s good for you. Shoot it, don’t taste, stupid boy.”
I glared at him, and went bottoms up with it, gagging slightly. He pointed at the door. “You gonna hurl, do it out there.”
I gasped. That was truly obnoxious, and left a burning aftertaste all the way down my throat. “Gah.”
I handed the glass back to him, and he nodded. “Medicine supposed to taste bad.”
“I don’t know why I trust you, old bird.”
He tipped his head back and laughed. “Because Bella would hurt me if I hurt you?”
“I’ll have to settle for that.” I pulled out a handkerchief and blew my nose. If nothing else, the stuff cleared my sinuses out a treat.
“I’ll cook breakfast, you can get the woodpile in order.”
He pointed at the axe hanging on the wall behind the door.
I looked at it, and back at him in disbelief. “What is this, Tom Sawyer?”
He shrugged. “You came to me. Gonna listen or not?”
I got up and got the axe, which was nicely balanced and sharp. The woodpile, it developed, was literally a pile on the edge of the yard, with a small neat stack that had been started on the side of the cabin under a lean-to roof. Most of it was small enough to not need splitting, but not all. I picked up an armload. It was dry and well-cured, at least. Green would have purely sucked.
This wasn’t a chore I’d grown up with, and I was feeling it after just a few armloads. I kept at it, though. Sore muscles were somehow reassuring. It could be worse, I kept telling myself as the sweat started. I could still be lying on my back in bed staring at a blank ceiling. Here...
I stopped, wiped my brow with the shirt I’d pulled off, and looked around a little. Raven’s cabin stood in a roughly circular cleared area, surrounded by thick forest. Only the narrow, rutted drive led out of it through the slender spruce trees that made up most of the boreal forest. A sprinkling of aspen, their leaves shivering with movement even though there was barely any wind broke the monotony of spruce.
A red squirrel scolded at me from a nearby tree, and I picked up another armload of wood. Raven appeared on the porch.
“Breakfast time, take a rest.”
I stacked the wood neatly and walked up the three steps onto the roughly planked porch. “Thanks.”
“Why thank me? You earned it.” He pointed at a chair. “Sit, before you fall.”
I remembered I’d left my shirt outside, and started back for it.
“Don’t worry about that, get some food in you,” Raven scolded.
I sat and ate, mechanically. When I was done, and had done the dishes, he waved at the couch. “Sit there for a minute, we need to talk.”
At this point I was too tired to argue with him. How long had I been stacking wood, anyway? The soft couch felt good. Raven took a step toward me and leaned in, looking at me intently. I watched his eyes, growing bigger and grayer...
I woke up to find myself stretched out on the couch with an afghan spread over me. Raven had hypnotized me again. I was not happy with this loss of control I seemed to be falling into over and over. I threw off the blanket and sat up.
Working for It
My anger was de-fused when I couldn’t find him in, or out, of the cabin. To channel my frustration, I went back to stacking wood. It did seem to help to work, and empty my mind. I’m not a navel-gazer, I prefer to keep busy.
I went back to work, thinking it had been at most an hour since he made me go to sleep. My muscles were a touch sore, but not too bad. I really was recovering. Making the wood neat was a satisfying job, seeing the stack progress up the length of the cabin.
He wandered out of the wood and I ignored him, as he stood watching me work. I was down to the bottom of the heap, having long since guessed it was dumped off the back of a truck for his winter use, and that there would be more. I hadn’t half-filled the open shed.
Raven finally broke the silence. “The leg of the cache is cracked, and it will fall this winter.”
I glanced at the tiny cabin on stilts. I knew what it was for, to keep meat out of the reach of scavengers during the long winter, when it would all be frozen. I hadn’t guessed he was still using it, with the refrigerator inside. But then again, I hadn’t seen an electric line or heard a generator, so who knew how he was powering it.
It stood a good ten feet off the ground, and I could see the damaged leg, now. I put the last few pieces on the stack and dusted myself off, walking over to it. I had bits of bark everywhere on me, and not a few splinters in me. The leg was a single log, no more than ten inches in diameter.
“Without taking the whole thing down...” I stared at it in thought.
Raven wandered off. I dropped into a squat and stared at it. This was a challenge to my ingenuity. He returned with a glass of water, with a few crushed berries in it. The resulting liquid
was very tart and quenching.
“I think if you splinted the leg with a new log...”
He clapped me on the shoulder. “Good, good idea, you can do it in the morning. Right now, dinner and bed.”
I followed him back to the house, still not sure how I had volunteered to do that job. I had only been thinking out loud.
“Shower is warm.” He suggested offhandedly.
“Glad you have one. I figured I’d just stink us out tonight.”
I handed the glass back and walked with him to the outdoor solar-shower. A small drum, maybe twenty gallons, painted black and with a shower head jutting out of one side, perched over a gravel pad. He went away, and I stripped down and rinsed off, with a little soap once I found the block. It didn’t lather well, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.
Dinner was tasty, but I was falling asleep over it, without Raven’s hypnotic intervention. I was asleep almost before I was fully in my hammock. The next morning, there was a big bow saw along with what I was already thinking of as my axe.
He fed me breakfast, topped with another glass of his vile green concoction. I shuddered and twitched and leaned over the railing for a few minutes outside, but managed to keep it down. He pointed in a northerly direction. “Go find a tree, not too close, but not too far. Make leg splint.”
I picked up the tools. “Do I need a bear gun?”
He shrugged. “You see bear, run.”
“Great.” I had a long-sleeved shirt on, as I knew I’d be attacked by mosquitoes as soon as I got fifteen paces away from his home. The cloud of them, and knowing I’d have to somehow drag the tree, kept me from wanting to go far, as much as he was starting to get under my skin.
In the first ring of undergrowth and trees, it was a fight to get through the various twigs and branches that seemed to want to scour the skin from my body. After that, it opened out somewhat, with a soft cushion of moss under my feet, and carpets of some plant with glossy dark green leaves. I bent to look when I noticed the red berries, and wondered what it was.
I decided that here, well out of sight of the cabin, was as good a place as any. The spruce had quite a taper to them, so it was hard to find one that was sufficiently large enough at ten feet up to support some weight. Cutting it down wasn’t too hard, although I had a bad moment when it hung up in other trees before settling all the way to the ground.
And then I needed a break, so I trudged back to the cabin. Somehow, while I was gone and without my hearing it, he’d had another truckload of wood delivered. There was a pile just a big as the first one, and this wood would need a lot more splitting. I sighed.
Raven had a pitcher with the berries and water. “What is this?” I managed to ask after the first glass.
“Just cranberries and water. Nothing magical.”
“Cranberries? It’s good.” I drank a second glass and sat on the steps.
“You see little red berries right down by the ground?” he held his fingers a couple of inches apart to indicate plant height. I nodded, that explained the berries I was looking at earlier.
“Take a bucket out and pick, I make sauce.” He smacked his lips.
“What about the log?” I wouldn’t mind a break, my arms ached, and dragging that thing out of the woods was going to take a block and tackle at the least.
“It’s not going anywhere.” Raven stepped inside. “Here you go. Watch for bears.” He grinned evilly, and I rolled my eyes at him.
I picked berries until I heard him calling for me, and carried a full bucket back to the house, where he showed me how he made cranberry sauce. He’d set up a meat grinder on the edge of the table, immaculately clean, although I suspected it was used for all manner of things, and had me spin the handle to grind berries, sugar, and two whole oranges, peel and all. We ran it through twice.
“Good tomorrow.” He put the bowl into the refrigerator. “We’ll feast on caribou roast and cranberry sauce.”
“I thought cranberries grew in bogs.” I had been sitting in soft moss, so I wasn’t complaining, but I was curious.
“Yah, these are cousins to cranberries. Swedes call them lingonberries.”
“Ah.” I had heard of lingonberries. But these did taste like cranberries. I went to wash my vividly red hands.
Over dinner of moose burgers, which I enjoyed just as much the second time, Raven mentioned something. “You want to return the rental car?”
“Well, depends on how long I’m going to be here, and how I’ll get home...” I hadn’t thought it through, to be honest.
“There’s no place in Tok, you have to go all the way to Fairbanks. Harve, he dropped the wood off?”
I nodded. “Yeah?”
“He’s goin’ to be up to town tomorrow, he say, give you a ride home.”
“That would be nice of him.” I wondered if this was yet another of Bella’s cousins.
Raven cackled. “Not nice, he wants a designated driver, he gon’ get good and drunk.”
Great, that meant a four-hour drive back with a strange drunk man.
“Get some sleep, you need to leave early.” The old bird suggested. “I’ll do dishes.”
“Thanks.” I staggered out to my hammock.
He wakened me with a hard shake in the morning, while it was still relatively dim and cool.
“Here’s a shopping list, boy.” He shoved a folded piece of paper into one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.
“Ugh,” I mumbled, not up to anything more coherent. I felt like I’d been beaten with a stick the day before. Maybe a day driving wasn’t such a bad thing. I squinted at him. “Did you plan this?”
“How could I plan? You show up out of nowhere, boy.”
Circus Freak
“How could I plan? You show up out of nowhere, boy.”
He had a point there. I drank the coffee and got in the car. It was a long, lonely drive. Once in town, I made the call and got Harve on the phone. He sounded like he was already half in the bag.
“Look, Raven told me to pick up a few things, can I drag you along so you can show me where stores are?” I asked him.
“Sure, sure. I’ll keep you company.” He sounded good-natured enough.
He met me at the rental return office, looking rather bloodshot, and handed me the keys to his battered red pick-up. It was a smaller truck, and had seen better days. I got in and he pointed. “Ok, bulk discount place is that way.”
“I need someplace to pick up jeans and flannel shirts, too.” I told him. I was aware that the two changes of clothes I had were already showing the wear I was putting on them.
“Gotcha, we’ll stop there next. I don’ wanna hit my places until evening, anyway.” Harve gave me a friendly leer. “But we can’t stay all night, I left my dogs at home.”
I was relieved to hear this, as I didn’t really feel like bar hopping at all, let alone a whole night of it. The shopping taken care of, he directed me to a greasy spoon restaurant where we ate in silence. He wasn’t interested in being terribly social, aside from pointing out buildings of interest, and any ‘great racks’ that walked by. I refrained from asking if he knew Bella, or mentioning her at all.
After the restaurant, he rubbed his hands together. “I think I wanna start at the Northern Lights. Best dam’ titty bar in town.”
I opened my mouth, and then shut it again. He was my ride back to Raven’s, I had to play along. From the outside, it looked like any bar, a rather dilapidated building with few windows. Inside it was noisy, surprisingly smoky, and better lit than I wanted it to be when I saw the girl on stage. Using the term girl loosely.
Harve led the way to the bar. “Beer!” he ordered cheerfully before looking down at me. “How ‘bout you?”
“I’ll have a soda, thanks.” I told the bartender, who looked down at me with incurious eyes.
“Coming right up.”
I turned away from the counter, drink in hand, and watched Harve. He was flirting with one of the waitresses, who weren’t serving beverages
so much as themselves. One approached me, grinning.
“Hey, honey, aren’t you a little cutie?”
“I’m only here to make sure he,” I indicated Harve, “gets home in one piece, so I’m afraid I’m a waste of your time.”
“But you’re just the right height to get a rest for my back.” Giggling, she cozied up and hiked her bosom on top of my head. Harve looked over and burst into guffaws.
“Hey, man, you get all the fun.”
The woman using me as a backrest relented as I smoothly ducked away from her without spilling a drop, and headed for a table. I had been hoping she would get a hint, but her antics had attracted the attention of another, and they both followed me when I sat down.
“So, big-boy, are you all the same size, or is part of you... bigger?” The second one breathed in what she no doubt fondly thought of as her sultry voice. It came in like a bandsaw shrieking on a fog of whiskey breath. I leaned back in my chair.
“As I told your friend, I’m only here until he’s done. Sorry, lady.”
She pouted. “But they say good things come in small packages.”
“Um,” I decided two things. One, she was dimmer than a forty-watt light bulb, and two, it was warm enough...
“Harve,” I called across the room to the lanky man with the blonde on his lap. He looked up. “I’ll be out in the truck.” I looked up at her. “Alone,” I added to be sure they all got the clue.
I debated locking the doors when I climbed in the truck, but fortunately no one followed me out. I tipped the seat back as much as I could, with Harve having gear stuffed behind it, and closed my eyes. He awakened me when he rattled the door handle trying to get in. I leaned over and popped the door. It wasn’t locked, but he was past the point of being functional on his own.
Fortunately, I didn’t need directions to find the highway, and even more good fortune when he fell soundly asleep, leaned against the door with his mouth hanging open. It was a long drive, but it could have been longer.
It was really and honestly dark when I pulled into Raven’s driveway at two am. I’d missed it on the first pass, and had to turn around and try again. Harve, snoring like a chainsaw, never even twitched.
Trickster Noir (Pixie for Hire Book 2) Page 15