by Неизвестный
“You should’ve checked these too,” the guard said.
“Right. I forgot about them. I haven’t worn this in years.” He indicated the parka.
The guard weighed the package in his hand and looked at the woman behind the monitor. She shrugged. He handed them back to Barrett.
“Thanks.”
The plane was already boarding. Barrett got in line.
Kris had been at the Fairbanks PD yesterday looking through the file on Corvus. She’d copied down the address of the tannery where Ben had worked. Barrett called the tannery and talked to the owner. When he asked what Kris had wanted, the owner went silent, then said finally, “You know, Detective. I liked that girl. I’m keeping my mouth shut,” and he’d hung up. It didn’t really matter; Barrett knew what Kris wanted. She was looking for Ezekiel Damon and all she had was his post office address; she needed his street address. Barrett pulled up Damon’s DMV records and copied the address off the computer screen: 27.4 mile Elliott Highway.
It would be his first stop.
Saturday, November 21
Only her nose stuck out. Around it was a shaggy circle of frost.
The sleeping bag wasn’t worth shit. Kris rolled over. That hip ached too. Her chin was tucked into her knees and her arms hugged her chest. She was still bundled in the snowmobile suit and parka, and her feet were curled up inside two pairs of socks and the shoepack liners. She rolled back, not breaking out of her fetal ball. Both hips ached. No way in hell she was getting out of bed just to take a stinking piss.
She rolled over again, struggling against the pressure in her bladder, but she didn’t have much choice; it wouldn’t hold out until breakup. She ripped the zipper open. Air, intolerably colder, gripped her as she kicked the bag off her feet and slid over the edge of the high bed, stumbling when she hit the floor. Damn fire must have gone out hours ago. She fumbled for her boots in the dark, and forced her feet into them; the leather uppers had frozen and were rigid as stone. The cabin door was stuck; she tugged it open and scurried into the night, surprised that it could be even colder outside. The outhouse was in the trees off to the side; she’d found it the evening before. It didn’t have any Styrofoam insulation around the hole to sit on like Annie’s did, just a bare wooden board. She squatted over it, hell if she was going to frostbite her ass, and pissed into the void below.
Cold and shivering, she closed the cabin door behind her and built a fire. It started easily and she thanked Ben for his patience that day at the beach.
In minutes, the stove was drawing and the fire crackling.
Kris bustled around the cabin, singing a Mexican jingle she’d picked up at the shop, returning to the stove every few minutes to rewarm her fingers. She lit the lantern she’d found the previous evening. Its glass reservoir, full of kerosene, had been stoppered off with a wooden plug that Ben had whittled to keep the fuel from evaporating. It amazed her that he was so orderly and thought of such details. She’d pulled the plug out and screwed the wick assembly into the hole, letting the wick soak up the fluid before lighting it. Ringer had made her bring candles and a quart of kerosene in case there were none at the cabin. Winter nights twenty-two hours long, he’d told her, were impossible without light.
She finished unloading her pack and duffle, lining up the bags of food on the counter. Underneath it, she found Ben’s few pots and pans neatly stacked. She dug out the largest, packed it with snow, and set it on a metal plate that had been fastened to the curved back of the stove. The snow melted into just a few cups of water and, when it melted down, she added more, using a plastic bucket she’d found in the shadows under the counter to scoop up the dry snow. Every time she opened the door to go out, the cold outside air tumbled over her like avalanching snow. It frosted the moisture in the cabin’s air creating a thick mist, which swirled and eddied across the floor.
It took her a while to figure out how Ben cooked. There was no cook stove, but under the counter, she found a grill that fit inside the wood stove, on which she could put Ben’s small pots. In L.A., she never ate breakfast, but this morning she was hungry and she sorted through her Ziploc bags, surveying her options. She had one: Oatmeal. Oatmeal and powdered milk. With no instructions. Ringer must figure everyone ate this shit. What’s it got to take—water, heat, and oatmeal?
She burned it. Apparently it had to be stirred and for some reason, the powdered milk lumped up when she poured it in. But the honey and raisins were OK. In fact it was all OK, even though it looked like puke.
Out of deference to Ben, she cleaned up, and then she got started. She was convinced he’d brought Corvus here, and she wanted to know what he’d done with him. Kris took the cabin apart. It didn’t take long. For a person who had lived here for forty years, he didn’t have much, although, like the plug in the lantern reservoir, everything he had was functional and well crafted.
She found nothing, not even a diaper.
Narrow shafts of gray light were squeezing through cracks in the shutters when she’d finished searching the cabin. She suited up and went out to take shutters off. The cabin had three windows and she lifted the shutters off each, leaning them in the snow against the cabin walls.
The woodshed, just a roof supported by poles that kept the rain off several rows of split wood, was on the other side of the small clearing that contained Ben’s homestead. She loaded up her arms and replaced the wood in the cabin that she’d burned. Next to the woodshed was a food cache, a tiny cabin supported on poles far enough off the ground to keep bears out of it. Kris had seen pictures of caches on post cards and paintings done for tourists but never thought they really existed. Leaning against a neighboring tree was a ladder. Kris moved it over and propped it against the cache and climbed up. The door was closed with a board stuck between two brackets. She slid it out and pulled the door open. It was empty.
Kris was getting discouraged. Ben was so thorough that even if Corvus had been at the cabin the entire winter, Ben would have destroyed any evidence that she might be able to find.
She plowed through the snow to the remaining shed. Its walls were made from small logs set vertically in the ground like the stockades of forts in old westerns. The shed’s roof extended five or six feet past one of the side walls and sheltered a large bundle wrapped in a heavy green canvas. Under it, Kris found Ben’s snow machine. It was yellow and blockish, with none of the sleek, cat-like lines that Johnny’s had. Hanging from the roof above the snowmobile were two dog sleds. Kris stepped on the snow machine to look at them more closely. One was fastened with rawhide and had a wooden frame that was worn and cracked. The other was fastened with steel bolts and had plastic runners.
The door to the shed was locked with the same type of handmade latch that closed the main cabin. Inside were Ben’s tools: axes, saws, hammers, hand drills, and shovels. Dog harnesses hung from nails on one wall. Some were made from nylon webbing, but most were of leather that he had sewn himself; the seams were hand-stitched, and the edges were not machine-straight. On the facing wall were his traps, maybe a hundred or more hanging from nails by wires. There were different sizes and shapes; some she wouldn’t have guessed were traps if they hadn’t been with the others. Suspended from the ceiling were two pairs of snowshoes; one pair were small and oval-shaped, the other much longer, with steep up-turned toes and long tails. Both looked as if Ben had made them. Kris rolled out a heavy plastic barrel partly filled with bags of nails and stood on it to unfasten the smaller pair. The bindings were still on; thickly greased and spotted with dead mosquitoes and other bugs that had landed and not been able to escape the goo.
Lined up under a workbench were plastic fuel jugs. Kris shook them all; most were empty, but liquid sloshed in two and a third was full. She carried them outside where the light was better. Two red and a blue. The red ones were marked “premix,” but smelled like gasoline to her. The blue one smelled like kerosene. There was about a gallon left in it and Kris was relieved; Ringer’s quart wouldn’t have lasted long durin
g these twenty-hour nights. She hauled it to the cabin with the snowshoes.
The cabin was warming, but still not warm enough; Kris wanted to sweat. She fed more wood into the stove and stripped down to her long underwear. Ben had a single chair, one he’d made out of willow saplings, and Kris wondered where he sat when Ezekiel came to visit. She pulled it across the floor next to the stove and sat in it trying to figure out the snowshoe bindings. They were handmade, too, though they had metal buckles and her boots fit them without having to be readjusted; they were, after all, Ben’s boots. She buckled the straps and clomped around the cabin. When she had the hang of them, she suited up and went out and waddled in the snow. Where it was deep, the small snowshoes were worthless. They sank so far and so much snow fell on top of them, that she couldn’t lift a foot to take another step. But they worked OK where she’d already walked through the snow, and she retraced her trails to the outhouse and sheds, to flatten them out and make them easier to walk on.
The sun was up, but the trees were too high and the sun too low for it to be visible from the clearing. Behind the cabin Kris could see a hill which had a slice of golden light crowning its top. Moving fast, since the sun wouldn’t stay in the sky for long, she switched snowshoes, putting on the larger ones and then circling behind the shed and into the woods. A shallow mound of snow snaked through the trees. It looked odd and Kris followed it, realizing after a few minutes that it was a trail. It had been cut through the woods, and Kris noticed that the snow was deeper in it than it was under the trees because there were no branches overhead to catch the snow as it fell.
She walked for a few minutes, struggling through the deep snow with the snowshoes, before she found the dog yard. Twelve doghouses, tiny log cabins set in three orderly rows, faced the trail. In front of each was the stake their chains had been fastened to. It looked like a deserted town; each house was half-buried in gentle drifts of snow unmarked by paw prints.
The trail continued, staying level for a while and moving at an angle away from her hill. Thinking that it led in a different direction, Kris debated leaving the trail and cutting through the trees. Eventually, it turned and climbed a side ridge. Kris toiled up it and sweat started dampening her long underwear. She folded back the tunnel of her hood and unzipped her parka part way, letting in the desert-dry arctic air. Her breath steamed in large clouds, frosting her eyelashes and the hair circling her face.
When the ridge steepened, she zigzagged back and forth to keep the snowshoes from sliding backwards like skis. At the top of the hill, she found a single large spruce tree that had been hidden from the cabin. It was big around for a tree this far north, although not very tall. Under it, facing the river, was a flat area in the snow, which looked like a low table, too flat and too rectangular to be natural. Kris stepped on it and pushed the snow off with her snowshoes. They scraped wood and she stepped off and swept the rest of the snow away with her mittens, uncovering a wooden platform made of seven or eight saplings a foot or so off the ground.
It was Ben’s thinking tree, she realized, remembering his story of sitting under an old spruce and watching over his valley. Kris sat on Ben’s homemade bench, sitting awkwardly with her feet twisted to the side by the long snowshoes, and leaned back against the tree. The sun was half hidden behind a distant ridge of hills. As she watched, it disappeared behind them, moving quickly. Before her, the Alatna River wound through a thin forest of widely-spaced trees, which were black against the snow, and on the high bank overlooking the river below her Kris could see the cabin’s snow-covered roof and smoke from the stove smearing the air.
The cold had clamped into her as soon as she’d stopped moving. She pulled up the zipper and squirreled into the parka, determined to see the first star come out. There weren’t any stars in the sky in L.A. Or, if they could be seen through the city’s lights and dirt, she couldn’t remember ever looking for them.
The sky darkened slowly and Kris scanned it for points of light. Suddenly, she found one, low and bright and not far behind the sun. Did it have a name? She wanted to wait for more, but the bite of the cold had become too painful and uncontrollable fits of shivering shook her. When she slid forward to put the snowshoes flat on the ground before standing up, her parka stuck for an instant to the tree before releasing with a faint ripping sound. She twisted around to see what had snagged her.
Carved into the tree’s flesh a couple of feet above the wooden bench was a small cross. Kris touched it with her mitten, then drew out her hand and touched it with her fingers. During the growing season, sap had risen out of the bark and beaded up along the edges of the cut. Her warmth and weight had been enough to soften it and make it stick to the fabric.
Kris knew who the cross was for. She stood and gripped the log seat and tried to wrench it free, but it was anchored solidly in the frozen ground and didn’t move. She brushed away the snow in front of it and, bending down, peered beneath. Snow had blown in and she shoveled it out with her hand. When the ground was clear, she could see in the dim light that the sandy soil was smooth and level. Too neat to be natural. Neat like Ben.
Kris stood and stared down at the wooden bench, certain that it covered a grave.
Sunday, November 22
By the next morning, Kris knew what she was going to do. She closed the cabin door carefully behind her, the stove inside filled with wood and well damped down so the cabin would be warm when she returned, and walked to the tool shed carrying the snowshoes and kerosene lantern. Its dim light deepened the shadows and they flitted and wavered as she searched for a shovel and pickax. She found both in a corner, leaning against the wall with a sledgehammer, crowbar, and other tools she didn’t recognize.
The sky was black and littered with stars that stared down at her without warmth as she snow-shoed up the hill to Ben’s tree, the shovel and pickax over her shoulder. When Kris reached the cross she stood quietly before it and hesitated. It was white in the starlight, the frozen sap weeping from the cut; Ben would tell her that it was better to let him alone and maybe he was right, but she had to know.
She got to work.
The snow wasn’t as deep at the top of the hill as it was down at the cabin. Kris shoveled out around the log bench, then sat on it to take off her snowshoes. The bench rested on four legs set into the soil, soil so frozen, it rang like stone when she struck it with the shovel. The pickax was too heavy for her to swing well and it only bounced when it hit the ground. She reversed the shovel, sliding the handle under the seat, and pried upwards. A leg broke out. It hadn’t been set very deeply and after a struggle, she levered the other legs out as well.
She lifted the bench and moved it out of the way. Framed by the four leg holes was a narrow rectangle of sunken sand and dirt that was free of the rust-red spruce needles that carpeted the ground she’d cleared of snow. One of the roots of the spruce tree that had crossed the sunken area had been cut. It looked like Ben’s work: clean and competent. Kris lifted the shovel and slammed the blade into the ground. It hit without loosening a grain of sand. She lifted and dropped it loosely; the ground had to be thawed before it could be dug out. That meant a fire and that meant hauling wood up from the cabin. And that would be a major chore in snowshoes.
Kris looked out over the valley, still lit only by the stars. Counting today, she had three more days before Johnny came back for her. Might as well get started.
When she got back to the cabin, she searched for something she could load with logs and pull over the snow. Too bad there weren’t any dogs; she looked up at the sleds hanging from the underside of the roof, too big for her to pull. Below them, sitting under the army tarp, was the snow machine.
Kris pulled off the tarp. It was too stiff and heavy to fold neatly, and so she dragged it into the snow behind the shed, noticing, as she did, that a strip had been cut off one edge. The machine looked old and worn; there were dents and scratches in its yellow cowling, cracks in the vinyl seat, and the headlight was broken. She straddled it, feeling
the frozen seat bite into her rear, and looked at the controls. She hadn’t driven a snow machine since she was a kid, but she’d been on motorcycles in L.A. She found the throttle, the choke, and the pull cord. The gas cap came off easily, but the tank was empty.
She retrieved the half-empty jug of premix from the shed wondering if gas went bad. It was at least two years old, maybe older. She unscrewed the cap. Reversed in the opening was a pour spout which she screwed onto the threads and filled the machine’s tank, slopping gas onto the snow.
With one knee on the seat, she pulled the cord. It caught on something and stopped a few inches out. Grabbing it with both hands, she pulled again, harder. It came all the way out. She pulled the cord again and again until sweat broke her skin and she had to unzip her parka to cool down. The engine never coughed or sputtered.
She sat on the seat, discouraged. It could be broken, old gas, or the engine too cold. She couldn’t do anything about the first two, but she could do something about the cold. She got off the machine and looked at it. It was too wide to push through the cabin door. Lighting a fire under it or putting coals on the cylinders might work if it didn’t catch fire. She was on her way to the woodpile when she had a better idea. Excited, she jogged back to the cabin, ignoring the cold air cutting her throat, and stoked the fire in the stove. In minutes, it was blazing. Kris packed more snow into the pot sitting on the metal shelf. It disappeared quickly and she dumped in more as it melted. After the pot was full of water, it took forever for it to heat up. The cabin heated faster and Kris cracked open the door to cool it down.