by Неизвестный
The group opened and eddied around him when he reached the grave. His head stood above the others and swung around taut with impatient authority. A woman Ben did not recognize made a discreet motion with her hand and the priest’s head turned toward Kris, who was standing off by herself. The priest beckoned her over, taking her wrist when she approached, and pulled her to his side. He surveyed the gathering again and then opened his Bible.
Heads bowed and the priest’s lips moved, but Ben could hear nothing. Kris stood on the far side of the priest from Ben. She was tall, almost his own height; her hands were thrust into the pockets of her jeans and her head grudgingly bowed so that her black hair, flat and stringy in the rain, swayed forward to hide her cheek. Her skin was browned by the Athabascan blood of her mother and perhaps by the southern sun as well. She wore the same dull red jacket she had worn the day before when she’d come to visit. It was the only spot of color among the somber clothes surrounding her. Over the jacket was her plastic poncho. The previous summer, Princess Tours had passed them out by the thousands each time one of their cruise ships arrived in the rain.
Ben wondered how Kris had gotten out to the cemetery. It was in the Valley ten or eleven miles from town. He cast around and spotted Justin sitting in a Subaru in the parking lot. This was odd. He’d have expected Justin to be leaning over the grave, peering into its depths. Had Kris made him stay in the car? Ben understood keeping one’s pain to oneself.
Other than Kris, there was no one Ben recognized. Two women on Kris’s right looked like they belonged there. The one who had pointed out Kris to the priest had the nervous manner of a person in charge but not in control. Next to her was another woman standing with the deference of an employee.
Across the hole, their backs to Ben, was a couple that did not belong. The woman was tall, thin, and very erect. She stood with her head bent stiffly at the neck, her shoulders square and unbowed. Below her calf-length raincoat, her legs stood rigidly in a pair of black high-heels. As he watched, she raised her head and glared sharply at Kris and then again at the ground.
The man at her side stood more piously, with deeply bowed head and rounded shoulders. Under his black raincoat, he bulged at the waist and rear. It was an expensive coat; even at this distance Ben could see the luster in the material. Like the coffin, it was not a coat he had expected to see at Evie’s funeral.
As Ben watched the bowed heads, Kris slowly lifted hers and their eyes met. No sign of recognition flashed in her face and she lowered it again. The priest closed his Bible and made some motions in the air over the casket. There was a small whine and it sank into the grave. The group stepped back from the edge and milled about uncertainly. There weren’t enough ties among them to bring them together. Ben saw the priest bend to talk to Kris. Her brown skin glistened amid the pallid whiteness of the others who circled her at an uneasy distance. The priest straightened, glanced at his watch, nodded to the circle of faces, and left.
The two women offered their condolences and hastened away, leaving only the erect woman and the man in the expensive raincoat. The woman acknowledged Kris and then stood off while the man approached her. As he moved toward her, Ben felt his attention sharpen, his old eyes squint. It was a movement he had seen before. He watched carefully. The man in the suit bent over Kris. But unlike the priest, whose posture had been distant and superior, this man lowered his shoulders like a dog curling its tail between its legs.
He talked longer than he needed to for a condolence from a stranger. When he’d finished, he reached into his breast pocket and, pulling out a wallet, he offered her a card. She took it in her fingers without looking at it. He straightened, said a final word, and touched her shoulder before glancing around for his wife. Reaching out an arm, he steadied the tall woman as she walked on her toes to keep her heels from sinking into the soft earth. When they reached the pavement, she dropped his arm and, shoulder to shoulder, they walked across the lot to a black Mercedes.
Kris walked to the grave and looked down. She stuck her toe into the dirt at its edge. Ben stepped behind the tree leaving her alone. When he looked again she was gone. In the distance, he heard an engine kick to life and in a moment a small backhoe lumbered across the lawn. The operator climbed out and disassembled the winch, fastening it to the backhoe. In a few short minutes the pile of dirt had been dumped back into the hole. With quick and careless precision, the operator squared and smoothed off the mound with the bucket of the backhoe. Then he curled up the hydraulic arm and the machine headed back the way it had come.
Ben waited for the noise to fade away. In the silence, he could hear the soft hiss of the rain as it fell through the air. Turning to the spruce tree, he pulled out his pocketknife and in his slow and methodical way, began to collect the beads of sap that oozed from the wounds left by the severed limbs. He warmed the pieces of sap in his hand and then slowly rolled them into a ball. When the sap began to stick to his skin, he scraped bark dust from the tree and worked it into the sap as he would work flour into sticky sourdough.
He stopped adding sap when the ball was the size of a ptarmigan egg. He brought it to his nose and inhaled. The scent of spruce had filled almost every day of his last sixty years. It evoked the sparse black spruce forests, the racing clear water streams, the winter sky ablaze with the frozen fire of the northern lights and the silent mountains. Ben breathed in deeply and felt the vastness of Alaska. And then, because it was lost to him now, he felt a melancholy too bitter to bear.
Ben had plenty of time.
He walked slowly in the rain across the yellow grass and knelt at the head of her grave. He placed the ball of spruce sap on the muddy, rain-pocked earth and gently patted it below the surface.
“Oh Evie,” he said, saying good-bye.
__________
“Do you want a glass with that?”
Kris nodded without looking up as she slipped into the chair. A minute later, the waitress put an opened bottle of beer and an empty glass in front of her. Kris pulled out a few ones and let the waitress drop the change onto the table.
The glass was wet and she made circular patterns on the table with it until they swarmed together into a senseless mess. She wiped them away with the flat of her hand and poured a few inches of beer into the glass. Behind her came the crack of billiards and a rise in the background murmur as the balls found their places on the table.
When she was small, her mother would take Kris with her when she went drinking. If the bar help wasn’t cool with a kid sitting next to her mom, she’d be tucked in a corner of the booth, hidden in the dark. She knew the drift of blue smoke; the enfolding clamor of raised voices, of jukeboxes and unwatched TV’s. She knew the sour yeast smell of beer and the comfort of pressed bodies.
When Kris grew older, her mother left her behind.
Bubbles clung to the inside of the glass, let go, and streamed to the surface. She swirled the beer, wiping them away.
Damn. Damn. Damn.
Behind her, balls clattered into pockets, someone cheered, voices rose and then sank again into the embracing murmur.
__________
The Glory Hole served dinner at 6:30. The meal line had already curved around the dining room and doubled back on itself when Kris arrived. Homeless shelters begin filling up in the fall in Alaska when people drift into town from fish camps or a summer’s smoke jumping, though maybe in Juneau, they began filling when the tourists leave.
The line moved slowly forward. Eyes rested on her curiously, but darted away when she caught them staring. Up ahead, two women moved through the line together; one was older, maybe in her mid-forties—after a while it gets hard to tell. They loaded their trays and sat at a table in the back. A few minutes later, Kris picked up a tray and was handed a plate of mashed potatoes, stew, old bread and something pink. It looked familiar, not much different from shelter food in Fairbanks or Los Angeles. Kris headed toward the back table weaving around people hunting for a place to sit.
“Hey, can
I squeeze in here?” Kris asked. The table was filled up. “I’d like to talk to you.” She looked at the older woman.
“We can do that,” said a scraggy man with thick glasses. He scraped his chair to one side and waved at the others to squeeze down. Kris pulled a chair over from another table. The woman across from her was probably closer to fifty. Black framed glasses hid her eyes and the skin of her face was chalky and lifeless; the victim of bad food and sunless summers. She stared blankly at Kris as if all interest in the world had drained out of her. The woman at her side was younger, though her hair was flecked with gray. She scrutinized Kris, leaning close to the older woman as if for protection.
“I’m looking for someone who knew Evie Gabriel,” Kris said, flattening the mashed potatoes with her fork. The table quieted and eyes turned toward her.
“The police have already been here asking about her,” someone said.
“What’d you tell them?”
He shook his head.
“She was my mother,” Kris said.
“Oh,” said the woman across from Kris.
“Did you know her?”
“Kind of. She was in and out of here most of the summer up until October. I only started coming in when the weather turned. But I’d eat with her when she was here. She said you might be coming. What was your name?”
“Kris.”
“Yeah. Kris.”
“Bad deal her getting killed and all,” said the younger woman.
“So what do you want to know?” asked the first.
“Who killed her.”
The young woman sniggered. A man on Kris’s side of the table, who had been leaning over his plate to listen, clanked his knife against his glass and yelled, “Anyone here know who killed Evie?” The room quieted and heads turned to look at the table for a moment and then the murmur rose again.
“It was that man she went away with,” said the younger woman.
“What man?” Kris asked.
“Vern,” said the other.
“What was his last name?”
“I don’t know nothing about him.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
“All I know is what she told me,” she said. “She came down from Fairbanks with this guy last spring. Maybe he had a job or something, but I think it was a scam he had going. She was certain they would do OK by it. But you know, she was the type that’s always thinking things will get better.” The woman had fixed her eyes on Kris and spoke without much inflection. She stopped and took a bite. A few of the men from the other tables had come over with their plates and were standing around listening as they ate.
“So what happened?”
“This is what she told me,” the woman continued heavily. “She told me that this guy, Vern, got picked up on a DUI and since it’s not his first, he pulls time, four or five months, in Lemon Creek.”
“So she’s lost her sugar-daddy and she’s back on the streets,” a man said who was standing behind the younger woman. He lifted his plate to his mouth and scraped food into it.
“Shut up, Joe.”
“Yeah, it’s true.” Joe looked down at the head of the old woman and nodded at it.
“So shut up.” The old woman looked at Kris. “You know, they only let you in here,” she circled her fork once, “if you’re sober. She wasn’t always sober. She’d sleep in Vern’s pickup, which she had parked down at the Indian village. It never moved; she didn’t have any money for gas.”
“Regular hotel it was, too,” said Joe.
“Shut up, Joe.”
“Flophouse,” he said.
“You telling me she was turning tricks in the truck?” Kris asked.
Joe grinned, the teeth he had left were gray and there were sores on his lips.
“Christ, she was in her forties,” Kris said.
“She was OK.”
“Oh yeah, so you know?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“So you fucked my mother.” Kris put down her fork, her face hardening.
“She got paid for it.”
“Get away from me, little shit.”
“Did her a favor; kept her in whiskey for a couple of days.” He lifted the plate to his mouth and scraped a piece of meat into it with his fork. He chewed with his mouth open smirking. The room quieted and Kris felt the pressure of eyes build on her back. She had spent lots of nights huddled on the floor under thin blankets while some man did his thing to her mother in the bed. It’s how you get by. Sex buys you liquor, drugs, food, a place to crash, sometimes clothes, and protection. It takes only a couple months on the street before your own cunt isn’t part of you anymore. You lie there and count the cracks in the ceiling while some wine-soaked body grunts and grinds on top of you. After a while, you don’t even whimper.
So it was Evie. So it was her mother. Who was dead, lying at the bottom of a muddy hole in a gray city hundreds of miles from home. What did she care?
Kris glared at Joe. “Get out of my face.”
“Nah. I got my rights,” he said, pointing his fork at her.
Kris stood. She picked her fork off her plate. She was beginning to tremble. “Out of here.”
He laughed.
Kris leapt on the table, scattering plates and glasses, and lunged at him. Joe lurched away, dropping his plate. Kris jumped off the table, fork low, aiming for Joe. Somebody grabbed her, wrapped his arms around her from behind and held her tight. “Back off,” he whispered. “They’ll kick you out.” Kris struggled, but the arms didn’t give. Two men seized Joe, doubling him over, and marched him down to the end of the tables and out the front door. Kris relaxed; the man behind her dropped his arms. The shelter’s den mother bustled out of the kitchen, but someone intercepted her. There was sharp whispering and after a hard look at Kris, the woman retreated to the kitchen.
Plates and silverware were picked up and straightened. Kris walked around the table to her chair and scraped the food that had spilled onto the table back onto her plate.
“She did it, though,” the old woman said without sympathy.
“I don’t need my face rubbed in it.” Kris pushed her fork into the potatoes and stared down at them, unable to look at the old woman across from her or at the other faces crowded around the table staring at her. Turning tricks in a pick-up. There had been a hundred men like Joe, more maybe, but suddenly the shame and desolation that Evie must have felt seeped through the anger that Kris carried toward her mother. Evie never fought for herself and she had no one to do it for her—not, at least, when she’d been alive.
“She got beat sometimes, too,” the old woman said. “A couple times it was bad enough the cops took her to the AWARE shelter.”
Kris picked at a chunk of meat.
“What else do you want to know?” the old woman asked.
“What did you tell the police?”
“Nothing. That she was here during the summer. That she came and went.”
“Did you tell them about Vern?” Kris looked up to watch the woman’s eyes.
“No.”
“How come?”
The old woman looked around at the other faces. A man spoke up. “The cops don’t work for us.” Some heads nodded.
“So which one of you guys beat her?” Kris asked.
There was an uncomfortable silence.
“It wasn’t nobody here,” the woman said. “And it wasn’t him what killed her. It was too complicated a thing for him, to think about it and to take her all the way down to Thane. When a drunk kills you it happens in the middle of the street and he’s too stupid drunk to run.”
“Is Vern still in jail?” asked Kris.
“No, he got out in October. Evie quit coming around then and the truck wasn’t in the village anymore. I didn’t see her for a while. Then one day, she comes in and has dinner here, just to visit. She has this new dress—”
“Green?” Kris asked.
“Yeah. She looked good, real good. Like a million. She’s got this new dress an
d shoes. She’s cleaned up, her hair cut. She says they got a regular place out on Montana Creek. After dinner, he pulls up in the truck.” She pointed out the window into the street. “And she takes off. Last I ever see of her.”
“What’d the truck look like?”
“Just a truck.”
“Well, was it big or small? Was it a Ford, or Dodge?”
The woman watched Kris through her thick lenses. Her face hadn’t changed expression all evening. “This is important, right?”
“Yeah, it’s important,” Kris said. “How am I going to find this guy, if I don’t know what his truck looks like?”
The old woman shook her head. “It wasn’t a big truck, but not real small either. It could have been blue, or maybe it was green. It was old, though.” She looked up, certain. “It was rusted around the wheels, I remember that.”
So were half the trucks in Alaska. Most were so rusted they wouldn’t be street legal in California. “Any dents, or marks?”
“I remember now. The glass was gone. It was patched with plastic.”
“Window glass? Which window?”
“He was going up the street.” She made a swinging movement with her hand pointing up Franklin. “So the passenger window.”
“It was him what killed her,” said the other woman, leaning over her empty plate toward Kris.
The other woman gazed somberly out at Kris from behind her black frames. “She looked good,” the old woman said. “Like a million.”
__________
Kris stopped halfway up the stairs to finish her cigarette. The city lights reflected dirty orange on the black clouds hanging low between the mountain ridges that walled the channel. The rain was cold and the drops, thickening with ice, were larger and heavier now than they’d been during the funeral. They spattered relentlessly on her plastic poncho, gathering in its creases and running off the hem in little streams. She shivered, dropped the butt through the metal grating of the stairs, and hurried up the rest of the steps to Ben’s.
He was smiling when he opened the door and the light in his eyes didn’t fade as she walked in. He got another chair from the corner and set it opposite his at the window. The woolen shoepack liners that hung loosely from his feet whispered against the floor as he shuffled back into the kitchen to fill the pot and put it on the stove.