by Craig Dirkes
The anticipation was excruciating. I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Get on with it, you shit fuck!” I roared in a strange, guttural, hysterical voice I’d never heard myself conjure before. “WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?”
He dropped to one knee and pointed his rifle at me.
Piss cascaded down my legs. My entire body rattled. I shut my eyes, waiting for the shot.
It didn’t come.
I opened my eyes. The shooter had resumed trampling toward me through the snow.
Why didn’t he take me out? I wondered. He must want to say something to me before he shoots me point-blank, execution style.
I figured I had thirty seconds to live. I thought about my dad, Max, and Taylor. When they learned I’d been murdered, they’d be just as devastated as they would be baffled. They’d wonder, just as I did, Why did Eddie have to die?
I hoped the shooter would tell me what I did to deserve this. That would give me some bit of peace, and a clue about the reasons for my demise that my family and Taylor might come to know.
If not, what if the guy never got caught and the case went cold? My family and Taylor would never have answers. They might assume I’d been living a secret life. Their memory of me would be stained.
Even though I kind of had been living a double life in Kusko, I didn’t deserve this. The bad things I’d done warranted nothing more than a couple days in the clink, a fine, maybe some community service, and a stern talking to. If I’d known that selling herb would lead to this, I wouldn’t have done it. I would have listened a lot closer to Nicolai Vawter when he said that in the end, it all comes back.
The shooter trudged through the snow about forty yards away, taking longer to arrive than I’d originally forecast. Joanie lay motionless a few steps from me, with blood still trickling out of the hole in her lung. The ground beneath her looked like a cherry sno-cone. Biff licked the top of her head, concerned that his best friend wouldn’t wake up.
Biff stopped licking and fixed his eyes on the shooter, releasing a low, steady growl. Diesel and Lenny grumbled at the shooter too. The rest of the dogs stared at me, whimpering and whining. It was as though they were looking to me for guidance, waiting for me to take action.
I again glanced at the bodies of Joanie and Lunchbox. Boris sat near Joanie, licking the gunshot wound in his back right leg. I stared at Joanie next to him, my lower lip quivering, wishing I could take back the last hour of my life.
I looked back toward the shooter. He was ten yards away, his rifle still pointed at me, bobbing up and down with each step he took.
I’m really, actually, surely about to die, I thought. This is happening.
I became desperate. I turned toward the trail in the direction of Kusko, jumping between Lenny and Kuba to make a break for it. But that’s as far as I got. I tripped on the gangline connecting the dogs and fell onto my face. When I rolled back over, I was staring down the barrel of a gun, two feet from my eyes. I threw my hands up. “Please don’t kill me.”
The shooter pointed the gun upward, indicating I should stand up. I did as instructed, while he took three steps backward.
The dogs went silent again, as if they knew they’d die next if they raised too much of a stink.
The shooter stood five feet in front of me. The furry scarf covered most of his face, but I could see his dark blue eyes. They were icier than the sub-zero temperatures and meaner than a wolverine’s.
“Turn around,” he said bluntly.
This guy wasn’t Cal, and he wasn’t Native. I could tell that much. A small part of me wondered if he might even be Bronco, but that wasn’t possible. I’d never know who he was or why this was happening.
“On your knees,” he ordered.
So it was going to be execution style after all.
I dropped to my knees, facing the dogs. They stared at me, motionless, whimpering softly.
“I’m sorry for the bad things I did,” I said, attempting to rattle off everything I wanted the world to know before I died. “I’m sorry to you, God. I’m thankful for the nice friends I had. I’m happy for the good things I did. I love my mom. I love my dad. I love — ”
The light went dark.
CHAPTER 25
HEADACHES
For the first few seconds, I couldn’t tell if I was alive, dead, conscious, or unconscious. I stopped wondering once I felt pain inside my head. I heard something humming, but I couldn’t open my eyes because my eyelashes were frozen together. My left cheek, my chest, and the fronts of my legs felt numb from pressing against the frigid ground. Frozen piss glued my legs and snow pants together. I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes.
I pried my eyes open with the backs of my mittens. The sunshine was gone. Snow fell, and I could see only a hundred yards in any direction. I didn’t know if that was because of the snowflakes, or because my brain had partially shorted out. I felt as though I were inside a freshly jostled snow globe.
I tried rising to my knees. I collapsed back onto the ground; my icy limbs wouldn’t function properly.
My head pounded like house music. I brushed my right mitten across the back of my cranium. Even through the mitten, I felt a sizeable lump. Touching the lump produced indescribable agony.
I rolled onto my back gingerly. My front side began to warm immediately, feeling like it was being pricked by a thousand needles. I stared up at the gray sky for a while to allow my strength to return. Snowflakes fell on my face, but I couldn’t feel them land. The humming grew louder.
Finally, I summoned the strength to rise to my feet. I looked around in every direction, on spaghetti legs. Nothing but flat white tundra, snowfall, and clouds. I could see a full two hundred yards now. But there still wasn’t much to see.
My memory of the shooter came rushing back. Until now, my encounter with him hadn’t crossed my mind because there were no dogs around — live ones, anyway — to have reminded me of it.
The team was gone, and enough snow had fallen that I couldn’t see their tracks. I wanted to know which direction they went on the trail — back to Kusko, or onward to Napakiak.
I replayed the awful episode with the shooter to retrace its events. I bumbled near the trail, looking for any disruption in the snow that might give me a clue to Joanie’s and Lunchbox’s whereabouts. I kicked around in the snow, and my boot found them. They were buried next to each other under a pile of snow six feet off the trail. The shooter must have cut them from the gangline and tossed them together.
My heart began to throb worse than my head. Seeing the dead dogs sickened me. It was wholly nauseating to think that Joanie and Lunchbox were murdered and tossed aside as if they never mattered. They were good dogs, and I believed they would have been willing to die for me. They deserved better. And I was to blame.
I heard the humming again. The sound wasn’t a symptom of getting cracked in the skull with the butt of a rifle. It was man-made.
I looked in the direction of Kusko but didn’t see anything. I turned southwest, toward Napakiak, and made out the twinkle of a headlight flickering through the snowfall. I bent over and scooped snow onto Joanie and Lunchbox to cover their bodies before I wobbled back onto the trail toward the snow machine. The driver spotted me and began to slow down. He drove a black Polaris and wore a black snowsuit and yellow full-face helmet, its shield tinted black.
The driver motioned for me to get on the back of his ride, never even stopping completely. He must have known it was an emergency, that there was no time for introductions.
“Kusko!” I shouted above the high-pitched crackling sound of the two-stroke engine.
As we sped away, I looked back at where I last saw Joanie. The tip of her tail poked above the snow.
Joanie, home! I thought.
* * *
As Kusko approached in the distance, I pointed over the driver’s shoulder, to the rig
ht, the southwest side of town. He veered off the trail onto the thick snow, gliding across the tundra like a water-skier on a glassy lake. The sun hung low in the sky, casting golden light onto the flat white landscape. I guessed it was around three o’clock. I’d been out cold for a while.
I pointed right again as Dalton’s and Finn’s houses came into view. A minute later, the driver dropped me off where the tundra met Finn’s backyard.
I hoisted myself off the sled, took off my mitten, and shook the driver’s hand. “Thank you,” I said, trying to catch any hint of his face through the dark helmet shield. He only nodded, then punched the throttle.
I wasn’t surprised that the driver never said a word to me. So many fucked up things happened in the YK Delta. Like everyone else, he’d already seen it all.
As quick as the driver sped off, my mind raced way faster. I had a million things to think about, all with one thing in common: I was screwed. Soon, Finn would know I’d lost his weed. Dalton would find out that Joanie and Lunchbox were dead and the rest of his team was — where? I had no idea. Together, the dead dogs and Finn’s weed were worth thousands of dollars.
Then again, financials were the least of my worries. The bigger issue: I’d officially become a shady scumbag. A certifiable asshole. A selfish, dodgy bastard. I could kiss goodbye my relationships with Finn, Dalton, and Taylor.
I took a deep breath to collect myself. I glanced at Finn’s house and could see the silhouette of him through the big window in his living room. He appeared to be pacing back and forth.
* * *
I arrived at Finn’s front doorstep. I heard him yelling inside. I looked to my left and saw that Dalton’s pickup wasn’t in our driveway. He doesn’t know about the dogs yet, I thought.
When I knocked on Finn’s door, he opened it while screaming obscenities into his cell phone and motioned for me to come in, never taking his voice off the gas.
“Don’t give me that shit. You fucking know something!” he roared into the phone.
I took my boots and jacket off and wobbled toward Finn’s couch. As I walked past his bathroom, I glanced at my reflection in the mirror and saw terrible things. My face was beet-red, ice crystals hung off my eyebrows, and globs of frozen snot stuck to my cheeks. I looked like I’d just walked across Siberia and back.
I flopped down on the couch. Finn, wearing a heavy brown sweater and blue jeans, paced around the kitchen table, fuming. The person on the line wouldn’t stop fighting him. “Fuckin’ suck it, nerd!” Finn shouted, throwing a saltshaker across the room. “Next time I call, you better have answers! Got that?”
Finally, he hung up in a huff. He couldn’t find anything else to throw, so he chucked his phone. It bounced off the couch cushion next to me and smacked my thigh. I tossed the phone back to him.
“Sorry,” Finn said. He sat down, propped his elbows up on the kitchen table, then put his head in his hands and sighed. “Eddie, whatever this is about, I can’t handle it right now.”
Here goes nothing, I thought.
“I know you can’t, Finn,” I said, mustering courage.
Finn dropped his hands from his face and looked at me. “Why do you look like a frozen shit-cicle?”
“Listen closely,” I began, calmly and deadly serious, like an army officer about to tell a wife that her husband was killed in action. “I’m in a lot of trouble. And you’re all I’ve got. I need you to be cool.”
His curious look morphed to rage. “You stole my weed,” he said, swallowing loudly.
“Yes,” I replied.
“And you sold it in a village near Kusko.”
“Tried to. Yes.”
“I specifically told you never to sell around here.”
“Yes.”
“But yet you did. And you did it with my weed.”
“Yes. And the weed was stolen from me.”
Silence. Except the ticking sound of the clock above the kitchen sink.
Finn palpitated in his chair, anxiously, like a rodeo bull itching to break out of a bucking chute.
He couldn’t contain himself any longer. “You motherfucker!” he screamed, kicking away his chair and charging toward me.
He picked me up and slammed me against the wall. Before impact, I tilted my head down to protect the lump. Whatever pounding he was about to inflict, I deserved. Finn grabbed a fistful of the front of my shirt and cocked his right arm, ready to punch me in the face.
Time seemed to pause. I got lost in Finn’s snarled expression. In his crazy eyes I saw the ripple effects of the bad decisions I’d made. I pictured Dalton. He’d probably have to sell some valuables to buy new dogs. He’d spend hundreds of hours — time he didn’t have — on training them. I pictured my dad. He’d wonder where he went wrong raising me. He’d blame himself for working so much after my mom died. I pictured my mom. Somewhere, she was ashamed. I saw Finn before me. I pictured him selling more drugs to make up for what I’d done. He’d get caught, go to jail, and lose everything. He’d get out of jail, not find work, and repeat the same process. I saw myself. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I did right, and I did wrong. I didn’t know how to always do right. I had no identity. I was all over the map.
Finn held his fist there, cocked and ready, but seemed locked in his own spiraling thoughts over whether he should drive that fist into my face.
“I’m sorry, Finn,” I said, my voice docile and earnest. “Please don’t hit me. I need you right now. I need your help.”
He unloaded his punch, but it landed on the wall next to my head. He retracted his fist and punched the wall three more times in quick succession.
* * *
We didn’t know where to begin. Under different circumstances, I’d have left his house so we could both decompress. But I didn’t have that option. I had nowhere to go. Finn retreated to the kitchen table, and I went back to the couch.
I blurted the first thing that came to mind. “This is the worst thing I’ve ever done. I’m going to make it right.”
“You’re damn right you’re going to make it right.”
Silence again until Finn finally spoke up. “So, then, what happened?”
I told him everything: I’d wanted to sell the weed and split the earnings with him. A guy shot at the dogs and me. I thought I was going to die. Joanie and Lunchbox were dead. The other dogs were missing. Finn had an I-told-you-so look on his face during my entire story.
When I finished, he said, “Now you know why I said not to sell in villages near Kusko. That territory is spoken for, and if you mess with it, you get trouble.”
“I know you said that, but I didn’t know it’d be a matter of life and death.”
“We sell weed, dumb shit,” he replied. “People in this line of work don’t fuck around. You should have known that.”
He gave me the whole story then, even poured himself a bowl of generic frosted flakes as he talked. My friend with the gun had been his dealer — the guy he bought from and, in a one-degree-removed way, the guy who’d been supplying my deliveries to the distant villages. Finn said the guy was the exclusive seller in all six nearby villages, from Napakiak on up to Akiak — all of which didn’t absolutely require air travel from Kusko. The guy didn’t mind supplying Finn because the Kusko market was too big for him alone. He didn’t care if I sold in far-off villages because he never traveled to them. But the villages near Kusko, those were his babies.
“Why would he shoot at me when he’d already made his money off the same weed I was holding?” I asked.
“He didn’t know you’d lifted my weed,” Finn said. “For all he knew, you were a new dealer moving in on his turf.”
But, I wondered, how could he have known the exact moment I’d be traveling to Napakiak? Less than two hours had passed between the time I called the buyer and the time I left Kusko with the dogs.
Finn shoveled up ano
ther mouthful of cereal. “Remember when that VPSO in Russian Mission almost busted you?”
“Yeah.”
“Just like Bronco had connections, this guy does too. I’m sure your guy told my guy what was going on. In return, my guy gave your guy a free sack of smoke for his loyalty. To sell weed out here, you need strong networks in place.”
I paced the room, attempting to warm myself. The house couldn’t have been warmer than fifty degrees. “But why would he kill the dogs?”
“To send a message. He wanted to give you a good scare to make sure you never tried selling in one of his villages again. I know how he rolls. Last winter, he shot out a guy’s four-wheeler tires when the dude tried selling in Kwethluk.”
I told Finn it seemed more like the guy wanted me dead, because I easily could have frozen to death. I’d been knocked out, in the sub-zero cold, for who knows how long. Another hour or two and maybe I’d have died.
“Wrong,” Finn said. “He wasn’t going to let you freeze. In fact, I’d bet money the guy who gave you a ride here was him. Black snow-machine? Yellow helmet?”
After Finn finished his last spoonful of cereal and drank the milk from the bowl, I asked if he might have an idea where the dogs were.
“You’re on your own with that one,” Finn said, wiping milk from his chin. “But I’m sure you’ll find out soon enough.”
Thinking of Dalton, I went to the window by Finn’s front door and looked outside. His truck was parked in the driveway next to mine. Either he knew the dogs were missing, or he figured I’d taken them for a run.
“Dammit, Finn,” I said. “Dalton has no idea I ever sold weed. I can’t believe I have to go have this conversation with him.”
“I know,” Finn said from inside the kitchen. “Total Pearl Harbor job.”