by Неизвестный
It was a strange question. Life was something you punched through, something that turned on you if you didn’t keep on top of it. Excitement wasn’t a choice.
“No?” Jen asked, misreading her silence. “Nervous?”
“No. It’s just something I got to do,” Kris said. “That’s all.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Jen so quietly that the mike barely picked it up. Then, when Kris was silent, she asked, “For you or for your mother?”
Kris felt uncomfortable. Jen was starting to ask questions like Annie did. It confused her; questions were the bullets fired by social workers and ministers and cops to control or humiliate you: What are you doing here? Do you want to live on the street all your life? Do you know what you’re doing to your body? How can you let the devil take your soul?
“I don’t know,” she said, evasively. “You just got to fight back.” Then, more sadly than she realized, she said, “Evie never did.”
They flew on. The plane was steady; Jen’s hands never touched the controls. Kris looked again for the star, but it had disappeared. The night and the drone of the engines wrapped themselves around her and she relaxed into her seat letting the stress of the last few days fall away. Then, from the darkness, memories she’d pushed out of her head scuttled back into it like roaches. Lambale. How long before they found his body? Could they tie her to it? Her puke, fingerprints left on Lambale, the truck that tailed the Mercedes, its lights blasting the back of her head. What would it take? Scenes from that night began to drive her mind: the explosion, the scream, the inhuman shape charging her, the shots, his eyes in the dying beam of the flashlight. The images rushed at her; Kris pushed herself back in the seat, her eyes wide, too frightened to blink.
“You OK?” Jen asked, looking at her, her face spotted by the instrument lights.
“Yeah,” Kris said. “Yeah, I’m fine.” She breathed; trying to force the tension out of her. The gun had just gone off. He slapped her hand and it fired. It wasn’t what she had wanted to do. But no one would believe her; not with five bullets in him.
Justin had to be wrong. There must’ve been an hour on Tuesday when Lambale was able to sneak off with Evie. He could’ve said he was going out for lunch or slipped off in the morning when everyone was scrambling to set things up; no one would have noticed in the confusion. Lambale killed her; it was the only possibility that made sense: the money, the phone number, the connection with AWARE, the woolen fibers in the bushes. Paying for the funeral was a perfect cover; no one would suspect him.
And he’d raped her. He hadn’t denied it.
An hour after leaving Fairbanks, the plane began to descend on its own. A little while later, Jen pointed through the windshield and in the distance, Kris saw a tight bundle of lights floating in a motionless sea of blackness. As they neared, the lights separated, but there weren’t many. Jen clicked a button several times with her thumb and twin rows of blue lights marking the runway flashed on. They had dropped fairly low before Jen took the controls and brought them down, with focused ease, on a gravel strip. The plane decelerated quickly and they bounced up to a small, spottily lit building. Standing in the light and shadows were small groups of people watching the plane approach.
Jen killed the engine on the side of the plane that had the door. Kris looked out of the window while Jen finished shutting the plane down. Snow crystals, sparkling blue and gold in the electric lights, whirled and flowed in a stream a foot deep across the strip. Jen unclipped, wiggled into her parka, and squeezed between the seats into the passenger compartment. When she opened the door, cold air filled the plane and Kris pulled the parka zipper up to her throat. She struggled with the buckle until she found the release button and when the last of the passengers had climbed down, she followed them out.
The wind wasn’t strong, just a breeze, but it bit into her checks and tugged at her hair and she felt her ears and nose begin to sting in the cold. But she left her hood down, not wanting to limit her vision. The steady howl of the far engine blotted the sounds of the people and idling trucks bunched around the plane. The baggage was already piled on a hand-pulled cart and bags from a second cart were being loaded through the cargo hatch in the plane’s tail. Jen was off talking to a man with a clipboard. She looked professional and assured and Kris felt a pang of difference. Jen was in her own world. Angry with herself, Kris turned away, scanning the milling people for Johnny. She found him in the distant shadows in front of a chain link fence, leaning his knee on the seat of a purple-black snow machine that looked like a resting cat. He was watching her and when he saw she’d spotted him, he came toward her. They met at the baggage cart.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi, Kris Gabriel.” Kris stuck out her mitten and he shook it, shyly.
“This is mine.” Kris pointed at the pack on the baggage cart, hoping he’d take it. She pulled her duffle out from the bottom, leaning into the bags stacked on top of it so they wouldn’t fall over as she worked it free. Johnny slung the pack over a shoulder and walked back to his machine. A sled was hooked on behind and was already loaded with a couple of red plastic gas jugs and a nylon bag. He pulled an insulated one-piece suit out of the bag and handed it to her.
“Just try this on,” he said. He had one on under his parka. It had zippered legs so Kris could step into it without taking off her boots. While she struggled with its zippers in her mittened hands, he lashed her pack and duffle behind the jugs. They finished at the same time. Johnny mounted the machine and turned the ignition key; it started without a cough.
“Kris.”
Kris jumped. Jen stood by her.
“Good luck.” She wrapped her arm around Kris’s shoulders and gave her a sideways hug. “See you in four days, huh?”
“Yeah,” said Kris barely louder than the noise of the snow machine. “Thanks.”
Jen squeezed her arm and then was gone. Johnny handed her goggles and a neoprene face mask; just holes for the eyes and smaller ones around her nose and mouth to breathe through. She climbed on behind and squeezed the edges of the seat, holding on tightly as he accelerated through the gate and into the snow-covered street. They flashed by small houses, still new-looking, all built, Justin had told her, after the flood. They sped up to a big log cabin with bright lights in the windows. Through them, she saw shelves lined with cans and cartons of food. Johnny stopped in front of a gas pump and filled the jugs. Kris stood off to the side watching; when he’d finished, he nodded at the cabin and she went inside to pay. While she had her money out, she counted off another five twenties and handed them to Johnny when she returned.
He was ready to go. Kris got on behind him and gripped the edges of the seat between her legs. Johnny reached around, loosened her hands, and placed them around his stomach. Kris felt uncomfortable being so close to him and held his sides instead. He gunned the engine and they shot off.
They flew past the last house and into the darkness. The machine’s light stretched into the night, illuminating a heavily used trail. It turned and twisted down the riverbank onto the Koyukuk. Across the river she saw the lights of another village and then the lights were behind them and the darkness ahead was unbroken except for a handful of low stars. Ten minutes later Johnny turned left onto a narrower trail, which cut across the river. When the bank closed in on their left, he turned his head over his shoulder and shouted. All Kris could hear was “Alatna.”
The wind lanced into her. It drew the warmth out of her hands and feet and the cold stung her knees and butt where her clothes were stretched tight over her body. She pulled the draw cord of her hood as tightly closed as she could and shrank into Johnny’s back, pressing her parkaed cheek against his shoulder. The cold could not be escaped and she tried to disengage her mind from her hurting body.
Johnny pushed the machine and it sped over the snow. His body lifted and weaved, always anticipating the bucking and bouncing machine while Kris hung on, lifelessly absorbing the pounding of each bump and dip. The light grayed and
soon she could see, through the narrow opening of her hood, the skinny, widely spaced spruce that lined the river. Their branches grew down their sides, barely extending a few inches from their trunks as if they were hugging themselves, shivering in the cold as uncomfortable as she was. And the winter had just begun.
Ringer had showed her the Alatna on a map. It bowed to the west before turning northeast and then north again into the mountains. Following the Alatna north from Mettenpherg Creek, she guessed that Ben’s cabin was just at the start of the high foothills of the Brooks Range. Kris’d found the John River, which flowed into the Koyukuk to the east of the Alatna, and the Sixtymile where Ezekiel had his cabin. With her finger she’d traced the route he and Ben would have had to travel on their rare winter visits. It went over a high pass between the Mettenpherg, which flowed into the Alatna and the Sixtymile, which flowed into the John. Ringer couldn’t see how they’d gotten a dog sled up the slope on the Mettenpherg side; the contour lines were stacked so tightly together.
When the sun had risen into the treetops behind them, Johnny stopped and unwrapped a thermos from his nylon bag. He poured two cups of coffee, handing her one. Kris wanted a cigarette, but didn’t want to pull her mittens off to get the pack out of her pocket. Frustrated, she drank her coffee too fast and held her empty cup, unwilling to ask for more.
“Good time,” Johnny said.
“How much farther?” she asked. But he only shrugged.
The sun was a brassy gold; its top edge skimmed above the tips of the spruce. The sky overhead was still whitish with a thin haze, though in the north it was blue. Against the blue, the distant peaks of the snow-covered Brooks shone in the low light. Their summits and ridges were sharp and crystalline against the sky.
The coffee hadn’t warmed her and standing without moving hadn’t either. She was ready to go. Johnny finished his coffee and wrapped the cups and flask back in the bag, tucking it under the lashes in the sled. When it started, the mutter of the snow machine was a sudden intrusion in the quietness, but she soon lost herself in its whine as they continued north.
Johnny stopped again when they reached the cut-off to Mettenpherg. He pointed up the stream. “My uncle traps up that way,” he said. “He set his traps last week.” He rooted around in his nylon bag and brought out some candy bars and jerky. Kris’s fingers were too weak from cold to pull open the zipper on her duffle and Johnny had to do it for her. Kris dug out a Power Bar that Ringer had given her, but she couldn’t get her teeth into it, it was as hard as concrete. She walked up and down the trail hunched in her parka, trying to warm up.
“It’s going to be slow now, breaking trail,” Johnny said as they got back on the machine. The sky had cleared in the last hour and Kris could feel the temperature dropping.
The snow machine bucked and fought against the unbroken snow. Sometimes the snow was light and fluffy and they powered through it like a boat ripping through quiet seas, shooting the snow into the air like a wake. Other times it had been packed by the wind and Johnny had to wrestle the machine through it. The river began to enter the foothills and then the lower mountains of the Brooks and the ice underneath the snow was pushed up into ridges and hard bumps. They crashed into overflows, and Johnny gunned the machine as he felt it break into the water that had been squeezed up through the ice and, insulated by the snow, had not yet frozen. There were still open leads in the river and when they passed them she could see the waters of the Alatna tumbling south, steaming in the cold air.
The sun had set when Johnny yelled over his shoulder and pointed up into the woods. Kris followed his hand and, in the dusk, saw a cabin set back in the protection of the trees on a high bluff on the right side of the river. Johnny drove past it to a point where the bank dropped closer to the water’s surface and muscled the machine up the bank. He turned sharply and followed a path cut through the trees up the small hill to Ben’s door.
She didn’t have time to look around. Johnny left the machine idling and, wading knee deep in the snow, hurried back to the sled and quickly untied her pack and duffle. He set them by the door, pulled out a gas jug, refilled the tank, and retied the jug in the sled. Kris watched him helplessly, trying to keep feelings she couldn’t name at bay.
When he had finished and was scrubbing spilled gasoline off his mittens with loose snow, she asked hesitantly, “Would you like to come in and warm up?” Silently she pleaded for him not to leave yet.
Johnny shook his head. “Game tonight. I’m already late.” Basketball, Kris knew, ruled bush villages. Johnny knelt on the seat and revved the engine, thick leather mittens were fastened to the handlebars. Grinning, he looked up at her. “See you next season.”
An unimaginable weight of loneliness settled on her. Johnny squeezed the throttle, spun in a tight circle, and shot back down the trail. Kris tracked the whine through the trees and when he appeared on the river below, she followed him through the tiny opening in her hood as he raced back down their trail, disappearing finally behind a bend in the river. The sound of his machine faded slowly until she wasn’t sure whether she was just hearing its echo in her ears.
__________
The silence closed in on her. It blocked her ears; she swallowed and listened again. Distantly, she heard the murmur of her own pulse. Her breath burst from her in a little gasp and she began to shiver. Her teeth clattered, the muscles in her legs jumped, her feet and toes were wooden blocks, and the piece of skin dividing her nostrils burned beyond belief even when she breathed through her mouth. Her body, clenched and tight for hours, loosened, and the cold sank into it remorselessly.
She clamped her jaw to keep it still, waded through the snow to the door, and lifted the simple wooden latch with the edge of her mittened hand. The door creaked open and the snow piled up against it spilled inside. She forced an arm under a strap, heaved the pack through the door, and kicked the duffle in after it. Both windows were shuttered; the only light fell through the door. She left it open.
Kindling by the stove, Ben had said to Justin.
The wood stove was made from a fifty-five gallon drum with a door cut into one end and the stack coming out of the other. It sat on homemade legs against the back wall. Kris knelt before the door, took off her mitten, and grasped the metal stud, trying to pull the door open; but her fingers, too weak with cold, slipped off. She forced the vee between her thumb and forefinger under the stud and pulled back. It creaked open; her skin froze to the rusted metal, but when she peeled off her hand, she didn’t feel the pain.
Stacked carefully to the side of the stove was a small pile of finely split wood, white in the darkness, and a curved piece of birch bark. She lifted the bark between her palms and ripped it into strips with her teeth. She picked the strips up with her fingers, but they were clumsy and scattered the strips on the floor of the stove. She brushed them into a pile with her hands. The little sticks of split wood would not stay in her fingers and she cupped a palm under her hand to catch ones she dropped. The stove door was in her shadow; she couldn’t see into it. Blindly, with trembling hands, she placed the sticks where she guessed the pile of birch bark was. In her concentration, she unclenched her jaw and her teeth chattered wildly.
Lighters were better than matches, Ringer had told her. He’d given her a handful of disposable ones, which she’d dumped into a zippered pocket. She bit the zipper’s tang with her teeth and pulled it open, but her thumb was too rubbery with cold to spin the wheel. She forced the snowmobile suit open a few inches and thrust her hands under her shirt into her armpits, but there wasn’t enough warmth there to bring her fingers back.
She peered into the gloom; there had to be matches. On the counter against the side wall, she saw the outline of a jar. Stumbling to her feet, her arms crossed on her chest and her hands still pressed into her armpits, she hurried over to it. Kitchen matches. She pulled out her hands, but couldn’t unscrew the top. She knelt on the floor again, squeezed the jar between her knees and, pushing her palms on either side o
f the lid, twisted it. It loosened; she spun it off, letting it rattle across the floor. She spilled the matches in a heap. She picked up two, squeezing the ends between her palms. They sparked and flared when she swiped them against the rough metal of the stove. With both hands, she pushed them through the stove door. By their light, she saw the muddled disarray of her sticks and bark and remembered her failure to light the fire that day with Ben.
Kris dropped the burning matches into the stove and used their light to build a pyramid of sticks over the strips of bark. The matches died and she lit more, dropping them by her little pile. When it was built, she searched for bigger sticks to feed it once it got going. She found, stacked against the wall behind the stove, a day’s worth of wood and she loaded up her arms with split lengths and carried them to the front of the stove.
This is it, she thought, and struck another match squeezed between her palms. It flared. Steadying her shaking arms against the side of the stove, she touched it to the bark. It took. A tiny flame and greasy black smoke curled up from its edge. The flame grew, twisting up through the kindling and flickering in the hollow belly of the drum. Kris added sticks and each caught quickly. Smoke began backing out the stove door. She stumbled up and opened the damper on the stack.
The fire grew. Kris fed it larger lengths of wood until it roared and air was visibly sucked into it through the open door. Its heat burned her cheeks and the blood rushed back into her fingers. They burned with a wild, itching pain. Sobbing, she beat them against her legs, then raced into the snow, and buried her hands until they numbed again. Then, pushing hard against the snow that had fallen onto the floor, she shut the cabin door and crept cautiously to the outer edge of the stove’s warmth.
Slowly, painfully, the circulation returned to her fingers.
__________
Barrett lifted his overnight bag onto the conveyor and watched it disappear into the maw of the x-ray machine. He emptied his pockets onto the plastic tray and walked through the detector. It alarmed. The security guard frisked him with the hand-held unit, which squealed when it passed above the parka slung over his arm. Barrett worked his hands through its pockets and pulled out a cardboard box of nine-millimeter slugs. The security guard looked disgusted, but before he could say anything, Barrett handed him the bullets and pulled out his badge. “I checked my pistol at the front counter,” he said.