by Неизвестный
The pot never boiled, and finally Kris gave up trying to get it any hotter. She damped down the stove and carried the pot to the shed. Steam rose out of it in a swirling cloud that blinded her, frosting her eyebrows and eyelashes. She lifted the front cowling and when she poured the hot water over the cylinders it froze in a clear glaze, but as she poured more, it melted and the metal warmed. When the pot was empty, she could put her bare hand on the cylinders.
Quickly she grabbed the cord and began pulling. After the third or fourth pull, she heard a sputter. She pulled again and the sputter lasted a little longer and after a few more pulls, the engine caught. It idled rough and she pressed the throttle and the machine lurched forward and stalled. Kris cranked the cord again and it started on the first pull. More gently this time, she pressed the throttle and the machine moved forward, climbing up the deeper snow outside the shed and into the yard.
Kris shouted as she raced in a tight circle in front of the cabin, but the cold air whipping into her hood lacerated her cheeks and she slowed it to a walk. She parked it in front of the shed and lowered the dog sled with the plastic runners. With rope that she found coiled and hanging on a nail, she tied the sled to the snow machine and towed it to the woodpile.
By the time she’d filled the sled with wood, the sky was gray and the stars had disappeared. The snow machine wasn’t strong enough to make it up the final ridge to the top of the hill while towing the wood. She unhooked the sled, broke a trail to the top with the machine alone, and then dumped half the wood and hauled it up in two trips. She started a fire and, when it was large enough to leave, Kris went back for another load. After she’d returned and had unloaded the sled, she took the shovel and scraped the fire to one side of the rectangle and dug out the thawed dirt. The soil was sandy and dry and even though the fire had been burning for thirty minutes or so, only the top few inches had thawed. It took a while, but Kris learned that the thawed ground insulated the frozen soil below and if she moved the fire and dug out the heated earth more frequently, the hole deepened faster.
The day lightened and the sun, cold and distant, drifted into the sky. The fire was hot and Kris stripped off the snowmobile suit and worked with her parka unzipped, moving in and out of the fire’s heat. When the bottom edge of the sun rested again on the horizon, the hole was several feet deep, and Kris squatted at its edge, warming herself in the hot air that rose from the flames, wondering how deep it went. Periodically she probed beneath the fire with the shovel, feeling for something that felt different than frozen sand.
The sun was gone and the daylight a darkening gray when she found it. A different vibration traveled up the shovel’s wooden handle as she twisted it below the ashes and glowing coals of the fire. Quickly, she shoveled the fire out of the pit, piling the burning logs and glowing coals to one side and adding more wood to it to keep it going. The pit was almost four feet deep, making it difficult to shovel up the loose sand while standing on the lip. Kris brought up what she could and then jumped in. She touched the bottom with an unmittened hand; she didn’t want to melt the soles of her boots. The sand was still hot and she shoveled it out. As she scraped with the shovel, a fabric appeared. She knelt, brushing the loose sand away. It was the same green tarp that had covered the snow machine.
Carefully, Kris worked her shovel along the sides, loosening the sand. The bundle was a little more than two feet long. It looked tiny to her. She stepped up the sides of the pit, pressing her feet into the walls to keep from standing on the tarp and forced the shovel’s blade underneath it, trying to break it out of the frozen ground. Slowly she worked at it until she’d freed one end and then she squatted, wrapped her arms around it, and heaved upwards. The tarp ripped loose and she cradled the bundle in her arms. It had no weight, no substance; it was too light to be a body.
She lifted it out of the hole and laid it on the bank, scrambling up after it. The fire had shrunk to a few small flames that cast their weak light against the gathering darkness. Kris fed it more wood and pulled the tarp into its glow. She paused for a moment, scared suddenly of what she would find.
Would he look like Evie? Like Ben?
It had only been a week since she’d learned she had a brother. For a few days she’d hoped that she would have someone to touch, someone who needed her. It was a lost hope, she knew it now, maybe she knew it a week ago, but when was the last time she’d hoped for anything—hoped hard?
The tarp was cold and stiff, but dry; no ice sealed it shut. Kris found an edge and forced the rigid canvas apart. It separated with a ripping sound. When at last she pulled it away, his face slipped out of the darkness.
Her heart faltered, caught, and raced. Empty eye cavities stared up at her. His teeth, baby tiny, were clenched and his lips had pulled away in a grimace of pain no four-year-old should know. Trembling, Kris folded the tarp back from his head. Pressed into his scalp was long, rusty-brown hair, the color of the fallen spruce needles that covered the ground circling his grave. Was it Ben’s color, or was it a mixture of his and Evie’s? She lifted him, cradling him in her arms, and turned him to the fire. His skin was brown and papery like dried grass. She turned him further and the light of the fire flickered over his face.
Then she saw it.
Her breath clogged in her throat and she hugged him in terror. At the edge of an eyebrow, was a bullet hole.
__________
Barrett had taken over Ted Osgood’s office. Osgood was Outside visiting family for Thanksgiving. Barrett had worked with Osgood on a couple of cases; he was an old Alaskan hand who would have been royally pissed if Barrett hadn’t moved in and messed up his desk. The Lambale file and the new one he’d started on Kris Gabriel were open and their papers spread across the desktop between pictures of Osgood’s kids on one side and pictures of a fishing trip on the other. On top of the papers was a yellow legal pad with a list of every hotel, motel, bed and breakfast, and nameless dive in Fairbanks that rented a bed. Kris hadn’t checked into any of them—under her name or anyone else’s. Barrett was certain that she was staying with someone she knew, but trying to track down her old friends would take too long and he wasn’t going to try.
Damon had been no help, either. He’d stood there staring down at him, an ax in his hand, his damn dogs howling behind him. But Barrett knew that Kris had been there. It was in his eyes; they were too wary, too instantly hostile when Barrett entered the clearing. Funny how Ezekiel and the man at the tannery had protected her. She was so damn prickly, he hadn’t expected she’d make any friends.
But he was stuck; he had no clue what her next move would be. What had Damon told her? Why he’d forged Stewart’s signature? Barrett already knew that—so he could pay Evie’s rent after Stewart had left. But that wouldn’t have gotten her any closer to her brother. What else did she have?
He stared at the papers littering Osgood’s desk.
The Alatna.
Stewart had gone up to his cabin on the Alatna after Corvus had disappeared. That’s what she had. Barrett signed into his cell phone and searched for flights into Allekaket.
There were two. He started with the first.
__________
Kris sat on a spruce round in front of the cabin, her back resting against the door. The sun had set hours ago. She’d returned the snow machine to the shed, stoked the fire in the wood stove, watching for hours the flames consume the wood that gave them life, and then she ate one of the spaghetti dinners that Ringer had made up for her. When she’d finished washing the dishes and refilled the pot on the stove with fresh snow, there’d been nothing else to do. The tiny cabin and the darkness lurking at the edges of the weak lamplight pushed in on her until finally she’d suited up and had come back outside. The cold bored through her arctic gear and the sleeping bag wrapped tightly around her body. She couldn’t stay long.
How did Ben stand it, the endless nights? Day after day. The shortest day of the year was still a month away, yet the sun wasn’t above the horizon for more tha
n two hours now. Two hours of feeble sunlight, four hours of grayness and eighteen of black night. Why did he come back, year after year?
She exhaled; her breath froze into a cloud of mist that moved slowly across the clearing toward the trees. Above her, the stars were brilliant, like silvered dust tossed against the sky. Beneath the stars, pulsing faintly in a green ribbon, the northern lights curved down from the mountains behind the cabin, arced across the night and curved north again, disappearing over the trees. The night air was crystal-still. When she listened, Kris heard the blood pulse in her ears. Nothing could be more different from Los Angeles: from its hard, unwinking lights; the ceaseless, restless movement of cars and people; the background rumble of engines and brakes and tires rolling on hot pavement; and the city’s grit blown against your skin, plugging your nose, coating your mouth, and sticking to your sweat.
She ached; a hollow longing for something she didn’t understand burned in her gut. What was it she missed? Was it the bustle of strangers—people passing her in the streets—handing her things over counters, or standing before her in line? That was all she had in L.A., and she never ached there. She worked, sometimes late, and when the day ended she went home, ate dinner, watched TV, and did it again the next day. The guys at work spoke Spanish to each other and, except for the company Christmas party; she didn’t do anything with them. Save Our Sisters would invite her to special events—she was one of their success stories—but she’d stand to the side, watching the others laugh and drink, and slip away when no one was looking.
Kris pulled the sleeping bag around her, burrowing deeper, trying to ease the ache. Suddenly, she realized that she was as isolated as Ben; except he had his dogs and his bears and weasels; his mountains and streams and his thinking tree.
And he’d had Evie.
Then Kris understood: Ben would have died here; sore joints hadn’t run him out of the bush. He would have been content feeling the life drain out of him, sitting under his tree watching the ravens and whiskey jacks—but a bigger love, Evie and Corvus, had pulled him into the dust and dirt of Fairbanks, into a miserable apartment, and the job at the tannery. He went happy, and it was most likely his love for Evie that had taken him to Juneau, following her, hoping….
Why did he kill Corvus?
There had been no blood around the wound. Ben had wiped it clean once it had stopped bleeding. Not believing he could shoot his son in the face, she turned the feather-light body over and found the entry hole in his hair under the bulge of his head. It too, had been cleaned of blood, although Kris didn’t look closely.
She unwound the rest of the tarp. He looked tiny, Ben had curled him up, his knees at his chest, though Kris didn’t know how big a four-and-a-half-year old should be. He was wearing woolen pants with a leather belt circled with bear and caribou carvings, something Ben had made, several heavy shirts, and little, hand-stitched mukluks. The police report had said that Corvus’s cold weather clothes were still in the apartment; did Ben make the mukluks and the belt before burying him?
Before she rewound the tarp, she noticed that the fingers of one hand were clenched in a fist. Clasped in his fingers was a small ball. The fingers were frozen and brittle; Kris tugged, but was afraid they would break if she pried them open. She pushed her finger down the hollow of his fist and forced the ball out. It was hard and, in the firelight, milky white. On an impulse, she put it to her nose and inhaled. Spruce sap. Involuntarily, Kris looked up at Ben’s tree, searching for a wound he could have taken the sap from.
Had he cut the cross yet?
Kris pushed the ball of sap back into Corvus’s hand and rewrapped him tightly in the tarp, before lowering him into his grave and filling it back in. She dug shallow holes for the legs of the bench, leveling it as best she could. There were a few unburnt logs left, which she reloaded onto the sled along with the pickax and shovel. The coals of the fire steamed and hissed when she kicked snow on them and the darkness filled in as the last embers were smothered.
The snow machine engine had cooled and it needed a few tugs of the cord until it fired. Kris put her knee on the seat and surveyed the hilltop before leaving. It was a mess, but the first snowfall would cover everything, returning it to the undisturbed whiteness it had been before she’d come. Kris didn’t know how to say good-bye and so she just left, carefully working the machine down the steep sections of the ridge until she was on the level path leading back to the cabin.
The vast curve of northern lights had grown. The lights were starting to lift, rising high into the sky in green sheets. When she’d lived in Fairbanks, the lights had been part of the winter night, but since moving to L.A., she’d forgotten them and now they seemed strange and unreal.
You killed my brother, Ben. Are you a monster? Or is there something I don’t know?
Alone. The name for the ache she felt bloomed in her mind. She was alone. Evie was gone, Corvus was gone. There was no one else. Her father. Maybe he was still alive, maybe he’d changed. If he knew about her . . . A spark of hope flashed, but spent itself and she turned away from it—twenty-five years had passed and no way to find him. He’d blown through their lives like trash blowing in the street.
Kris folded the tunnel of her hood back and gazed again at the sky. The lights were tinged with red now and starting to writhe, rippling curtains reaching unimaginable miles into space. How could they be so violent and so silent? It was as if they were screaming—screaming in terror of the blackness and of the emptiness—and there was no air to carry their cries.
Mom. You didn’t get my letter. You never knew I was coming.
Kris gazed down the snow-covered river, bright in the starlight. Ben thinks I deserted you. She squeezed her hands into fists in the parka’s pockets and pushed against the fabric.
I couldn’t come back. I . . . It hurt so much.
She slumped, then loosened her parka, unzipping it and pulling it away from herself. The sleeping bag fell off her shoulders and, with bare hands, she opened the snowmobile suit letting the warmth it held flee into the night. The air ground into her exposed skin like broken glass, cutting between her breasts and searing her belly. Blood withdrew from her feet and hands and they began to throb in cold too remorseless for life to withstand. Kris shuddered as if struck and began to shake.
Mom. Did you love Corvus?
Did you love me?
Monday, November 23
The snow in the snow machine track had set up hard like Styrofoam and Kris hiked back to the hill without snowshoes. On the steep section, where the trail followed the ridge to the top, Kris kicked steps in the hardened snow to keep from skidding backwards. From one hand dangled a cushion she’d found hanging from a rafter, out of the reach of mice, and in the other she carried a broom made from stiff grasses, which Ben must have cut one fall before they had been softened by the snow. Curled up in her sleeping bag the night before, waiting for sleep, Kris had decided that she didn’t want to leave Corvus’s grave so dirtied, even though it would soon be covered with fresh snow.
The snowmobile and her own feet had torn and trampled the snow in front of the spruce tree. Ash and soot from the fire had blackened it and it was pocked with the sandy dirt she’d dug from his grave. Kris braced the cushion against the bench and began to sweep fresh snow over the ashes, her footprints, and snow machine tracks. The broom’s grasses kinked and broke as she swept and she realized that the shovel would have done a better job. Throwing back her hood and letting her hair swing free, she warmed as she worked and overhead the sky lightened, turning a pale cloudless blue.
When she’d finished, and the dirt and charcoal had been covered, and new snow spread around the tree, she dropped the cushion in front of the bench and sat down, leaning back against its rough wood, beside Corvus. The valley fell away before her, opening onto a sea of black trees, white snow-covered lakes, and hills that rolled toward the red-orange glow spilling into the predawn sky. Slowly, the colors turned gold and, as she watched, the sun slid abo
ve the horizon and its light, weak and heatless, splashed across her face. Without squinting, she watched it curve into the sky.
She heard a sudden wiffling sound and a raven, its wing feathers pushing hard against the air, flew past her. It soared out over the river, and a second raven rose from below to join it. They spiraled around each other, cawing as they climbed. It was the first sound on the river Kris had heard that she hadn’t made. The birds played in the icy air. In the distance beyond them, flew another, a black speck against the blue. The two over the river plunged into the trees and vanished from sight. She waited for them to rise again, then searched the sky for the third, found it and watched, waiting for it to wheel from its rigid path as the others had.
Instead, it arrowed toward her, never wavering. It grew wings and landing gear and turned from black to white and came noiselessly toward her. For one excited moment, Kris thought Jen was coming to visit. But it couldn’t be; no one she would want would come for her.
The plane’s drone slowly penetrated the silence. Kris crouched, ready to spring down the slope and into the trees. It swerved; the pilot had spotted the cabin, or the smoke rising from its stovepipe. It banked hard and flew in a tight circle. The lower wing pivoted in space above the clearing and a pair of dim faces floated behind the windshield. The single prop thrashed the air. It was a small bush plane, a tail-dragger, and under its wheels were short, fat skis.
The plane broke out of its circle and dropped down over the river behind the trees. Between the branches, Kris saw flashes of aluminum speeding down river until it emerged into the open only feet above the snow. It rose steeply, banked, reversed direction, and came in slow, its flaps lowered and the noise of its engine dropping in pitch.
Kris jumped up, grabbing the broom and cushion, and raced back down the hill, her shoepacks punching through the hardened snow, until she was halfway back to the cabin. She cut off the trail, dropping the broom and cushion behind a tree, and pushed through the snow toward the river. Without snowshoes she was slowed to an awkward walk, stumbling over branches and downed trees hidden in the snow. Before she reached the riverbank, the plane’s engine quit and the silence flooded back.