by Неизвестный
“I also don’t think he raped Evie. You misinterpreted his silence. Plenty of lawyers, doctors, and bank presidents abuse, murder and rape, but not Lambale. It’s not in him.”
Kris felt the water again. Close enough. She lifted the pot, felt in the darkness with her foot for the plastic bucket, and poured the water into it.
“And I don’t believe, not for a second, that you’d let a man you thought had killed your mother get away from you.”
Kris set the bucket on the floor between the stove and the door, leaving the handle up.
“Lucky you got your fuck before you decided I was a killer,” Kris said. She lifted her parka off the peg by the door and put it on.
“Did you kill him, Kris?”
Kris walked to the bed and looked up at Barrett. In the light from the open stove, she could see the whiteness of his body outlined against the dark. He was sitting naked, leaning against the wall, his legs drawn up, both forearms resting on his knees, looking down at her, supremely confident.
“I did not kill him.” She held his hidden gaze, then turned and walked away. As she passed the stove, she closed its door, cutting off the only light in the cabin. Without slowing, she lifted the bucket and, reaching the cabin door, lifted the latch and pulled it open.
“I got to take a leak,” she said.
“Again? Have you got a urinary infection?” he asked.
“The clap,” she said and pulled the door closed.
The hot water steamed in the cold, frosting her sleeve and hair. She set the bucket in the snow and put on her mittens; picked it up again, grabbed her sleeping bag as she rounded the corner, tucked it under her other arm, and ran awkwardly to the tool shed. Barrett wouldn’t wait in the bed for his bath and she had maybe two minutes before he figured out she’d taken his boots.
The tarp was stiff and heavy; she dropped it behind the snow machine and stuffed the sleeping bag with the snowmobile suit under the rope lashing the gas jug and snowshoes. In the cabin the flashlight snapped on, its beam lit the window; Barrett was searching for his boots. She pulled out the gun and pushed the safety off and levered a round into the chamber, then transferred it to her left pocket; her right hand would be on the throttle. She took off her left-hand mitten, stuffed it in the pocket underneath the gun, and pushed the parka hood off her head, feeling her ears instantly sting in the cold.
The bucket of water steamed. Resting it on her knee, she tipped it over the cylinders, pouring the water in a steady stream. When it was gone, she flung it aside and yanked on the cord. The engine cranked, violently loud in the stillness. She yanked again, pulling the cord with her entire body. Again. Nothing. Again. It sputtered. Again. It sputtered and caught.
Barrett came pelting around the corner of the cabin. Kris gunned the engine and shot out of the shed, racing toward him. He was hidden behind the flashlight; it shone at her like the headlight on a locomotive. She hurtled towards it, blinded; it was all she could see. Then it swung back; he was winding up to knock her off the snow machine. The gun was in her hand; she pointed it to the side and fired. She pointed it over his head and fired. She pointed it at him and he dove into the snow. The machine screamed past him, raced around the cabin, across the clearing, and down the trail.
__________
The wind sliced into her face. It blasted into her hood, flattening the fur ruff and stunning the breath out of her. The throttle was pressed flat out; the machine bucked and swerved on the edge of control and she struggled to keep it in Johnny’s track with a single hand on the handlebars. Her other hand was jammed in a pocket wrapped around the pistol barrel trying to absorb its heat; she’d used both hands to muscle the machine down the hill and onto the river and her left hand had been naked to the air slicing into it. The high points of her cheeks, her nose, and the ridge of her brow grew heavy, freezing solid and sagging on her face like lead weights. But she didn’t stop—she felt Barrett standing on the bluff behind her, in his bare feet, watching her disappear down the river and she didn’t want him to see her hurt.
The river curved behind a bank; it curved again. When she was out of sight and could no longer withstand the pain, Kris stopped, leaving the engine idling. She pulled off her other mitten and, pressing both hands open against her face, pumped her breath, ragged with pain and the shock of the cold, into them. Warmed by her body, the air spread over her frozen skin, but it took a long time before the frostbite in her cheeks and nose thawed, and the returning blood made her face itch and burn. She turned her head inside the hood to wipe off the moisture her breath had left on her face before it froze, then she pulled the sleeping bag out from under the ropes lashing the gear and climbed into the snowmobile suit still warm from the heat of the cabin.
She wrapped the sleeping bag around herself, opened the snow machine’s cowling and draped herself over the engine, wrapping her hands around the cylinders. When her fingers had warmed enough to be used, she put on the mittens and fumbled at the lashings on the gear. She needed Johnny’s face mask; the wind in her face would be painful without goggles, but without a mask, it would be almost impossible, unless she drove at a walk. When she’d freed the pack she began pulling things out and laying them on the seat, careful not to lose anything in the dark. She had about half of her food, two days’ worth, although there was a lot of oatmeal; all of her cigarette lighters, no cigarettes, a big metal cup, both water bottles—empty, some clothes, her duffle, and the sleeping bag. No toothbrush, but searching again she found the face mask in one of the duffle’s side pockets.
Kris kept out a bag of nuts and dried fruit, stuffed the sleeping bag back into the pack, and retied everything on the rear of the seat. With the face mask on, she pressed the throttle and moved slowly forward. She wasn’t interested in speed now; it was too cold.
The trail was hard and clear; there had been no wind since she and Johnny had driven north, and the going was easy. Kris tried to figure when she would get to Allakaket. She had five gallons of fuel, minus whatever she’d burned the day before hauling wood up the hill. If Ben’s machine got ten miles to the gallon, that was fifty miles, and it was seventy to Allakaket. A twenty-mile hike. She could do that, though she’d probably run into another snow machine she could hitch a ride into the village with. But if this thing got fifteen miles to a gallon, she recalculated, she could be in Allakaket in four to five hours, early enough to catch Frontier’s afternoon flight back to Fairbanks and maybe the last flight out of Fairbanks to Juneau.
It sounded good, but after thinking about it she changed her mind. She had no place to hide in Juneau; it would be safer to spend the night in Fairbanks with Annie again; Barrett couldn’t have found Annie, Kris’d never mentioned her to Justin. Justin. Barrett probably leaned on him and he caved like a junkie begging for a hit. If she stayed at Annie’s tonight, she could get Ringer’s gear back to him, then blast through Juneau tomorrow—not even leave the airport—and be in L.A. by tomorrow evening.
L.A. Kris leaned into a curve. It sounded very nice. Warmth, light, sun, warmth, food, warmth, her own bed. It wouldn’t take Barrett long to track her down, but she’d have a few days to get organized. Fake IDs were cheap in L.A. and she’d have about a thousand dollars left over from Vern’s stash—enough to set her up on a beach in Mexico while she figured out what to do next.
Kris lost herself in the engine’s whine, maneuvering the snowmobile easily over Johnny’s trail, which was lit by the stars overhead. She motored past animal tracks left in the snow, past the dark silent trees, and past the leads they’d seen on the way up, still open after three days of serious cold.
And then she realized she couldn’t leave right away; she had to see Ben. She needed to find out why he’d shot Corvus; it would nag her forever, not knowing. Screw Barrett; she’d get around him. Bet he thinks a lot of himself now, sitting alone in that little cabin—without her, or his gun, or his boots. Kris laughed. It rolled up from her belly and out the holes in the face mask. God, he has to be really pissed
off. How long is he going to have to stew there until his plane shows up?
Damn.
If it came today, he’d beat her to Allakaket. Kris let go of the throttle and the machine stopped. She got off and walked behind it and into its track, where she didn’t sink into the snow, and tried to think. The noise of the idling engine confused her and she went back and turned it off. The absoluteness of the arctic silence settled over her.
She could wait until Barrett cleared out and then go back to the cabin. Then what? If he hadn’t taken the food she’d left, she’d still have only a few days’ worth and the cops would still be waiting for her in Allakaket. Kris’s pacing became more agitated. There had to be another way out other than through Allakaket. Kris tried to picture Ringer’s maps. There wasn’t a whole lot out here. She couldn’t remember what was down the Koyukuk from Allakaket. Up river was Bettles and then the haul road. The road was fifty miles from Allakaket, one hundred twenty from the cabin; it would take more than five gallons to get her there and no way could she get past Allakaket or up the Koyukuk, without being seen—there would be way too much snow machine traffic on the river around Allakaket.
How was she going to get out without getting caught? A rut was forming in the trail behind the snow machine as she stomped her feet in the packed snow trying to stay warm. Then she had it. If she could get over the pass between Mettenpherg Creek and the Sixtymile, the route Ben and Ezekiel used when they visited each other, she could get onto the John River, which runs into the Koyukuk just below Bettles. No one on the John would know who she was, and Bettles was big enough that she could sneak into it without anyone noticing her. That would fix Barrett. She’d disappear, and he’d think that she’d died on the trail, fallen into an overflow or something.
She looked at the snow machine. Five gallons wouldn’t do it and it’d be a long hike into Bettles if someone didn’t come by and give her a ride. So what was her choice—a long walk or meeting Barrett in Allakaket. Kris started the engine.
The cutoff up the Mettenpherg was sharp and clear in the starlight. Kris turned up the trail as carefully as she could, trying not to make her tracks too obvious. She got off the machine to brush fresh snow over the track the machine had cut making the turn. When it looked good enough to fool someone in a plane, she sped up the trail broken by Johnny’s Uncle Harold when he’d laid out his trap line the week before.
Mettenpherg Creek was narrower than the Alatna and Harold’s trail wound and twisted between rocks and falls in the stream. Sometimes it left the stream all together and went along a bank or cut across wide expanses of treeless snow, to pick it up farther along. Kris learned to rock and weave with the machine, rising and falling as it climbed and fell over the bumps and dips, and her movement kept her warm enough not to shiver. She kept her eyes on the wall of mountains to her right, looking for the pass over to the Sixtymile. Ringer’s map had not been very detailed; only a single page covering hundreds of miles of the northern section of the state and she had no idea how far up the Mettenpherg she had to go, or how far it was over the pass to the Sixtymile, or how far it was from there to Bettles.
Sunlight was shining on the mountain peaks to the north when she found the pass. The ridge that she’d been following on her right dipped low and opened wide. The stream, too, had narrowed and rose more steeply and Kris didn’t think that Harold’s trail could go that much farther unless he’d left his snow machine and gone on foot. She stopped and stood on the seat, surveying a route up to the pass. There were a few scrawny and widely-spaced trees between the stream and the mountains; they wouldn’t be difficult to get around, but the slope to the pass was steep, steeper than the hill to Corvus’s grave and no obvious route led to the top.
At a low point in the bank, Kris gunned the snow machine; its belt spun for second, unable to grip the loose snow, then it caught and thrust the machine over the rim. It was easy picking her way through the trees; enough snow lay on the ground to cover dead falls and fallen branches. When she reached the start of the slope, she turned and cruised slowly along its base looking for a route up. She couldn’t see how Ben got a dogsled, much less a snow machine, up it. Then, at one end, Kris noticed a fold that ran like a ramp across the face of the slope. It was steep, and she couldn’t tell how far up it went, but there was a chance that she could power the old machine up it. She circled around and opened the throttle as far as it would go. The machine blasted through the snow and launched itself up the ramp. As soon as it hit the incline, it started struggling and the belt began kicking out snow behind it. Less than fifty feet up, it quit.
To lighten the load, Kris kicked a shelf in the snow and put the pack, gas jug, and snowshoes on it. She drove off the ramp onto the steep hillside to turn around; leaning into the slope, her shoulder brushing the snow, as she turned it out of the fall line, anxiously trying to keep it from rolling over. She motored back down to the bottom, turned around, and raced back up. Each time she ran it up, she punched another ten or twenty feet higher on the ramp, but she was a long way from the top when the ramp vanished into the hillside and the machine could go no farther.
She ran the snow machine down to the bottom again, turned, and came up to where she’d left the gear. Lashing it loosely, she hauled everything to the top of the ramp, dumped the gear in the snow, and sat limply on the seat, the machine idling quietly. There was a comfort to its heat and noise and she didn’t want to leave it. It could cover in an hour what would take her a long day to do on snowshoes. How had Ben and Ezekiel gotten up this? She scanned the snow above her, but saw no way up.
There was no choice. Kris killed the engine, knowing that if she came back in an hour, she’d never be able to restart it. Then, with a snowshoe, she shoveled snow over it, hiding it, even though her trail up the slope was obvious. She pushed her boots into the snowshoe bindings and buckled them tightly. The pack wasn’t as heavy as it had been in Fairbanks, but now she wished there were more in it. She heaved it onto her shoulders and cinched the waist belt tight, pulling down on the parka skirt so it covered her rear.
Ready. She glanced around to be sure she had everything and then stepped into the snow above the trail. When she put her weight on it, the snowshoe shot out behind her like a ski, throwing her face down in the snow. The pack pinned her and for a second she panicked, breathing snow into her mouth and nose and thrashing her arms in the bottomless powder, trying to push her face up for air. Forcing herself calm, she unclipped the waist belt and twisted out from under the pack and lay, panting in the snow.
The cold air she was gasping into her chest began to frost her lips and freeze her lungs. She closed them and, quieting her breathing, breathed through her nose. She shook the snow out of her mittens, lifted and resettled the pack on her shoulders and started again, this time at an angle to the slope. It was hard, her uphill leg had to do most of the work and loose snow fell on top of the snowshoes doubling their weight.
Within minutes, her chest was heaving and the arctic air tore at her throat, but she began to overheat, an unexpected luxury, and, when she turned to cut across the slope in the other direction, she stripped off the snowmobile suit and left her parka open. Every few feet she had to rest, her throat sore, her heart thumping madly, and the pile of snow covering the snow machine never seeming to get farther away.
The sun had set when the slope leveled out and she could walk up the pass without traversing. She stopped, dropped the pack in the snow, and sat on it to rest. Her heart took a long time to settle down, and before it had quieted the cold had cut into her again. The height of the pass was still in front of her, how far away she couldn’t tell, but the way toward it was clear; mountains rose on both sides and no trees or scrub blocked her way. The snow machine would’ve screamed up this part of it.
Swinging each foot wide so that the snowshoes didn’t bump into the other leg, she headed into the narrow valley. Even with the pack on her back, her feet did not sink far into the snow. It was denser here, packed and scoured by t
he wind, and the snowshoes rode near its surface. She trudged forward, her eyes on her feet, her mittened hands crossed on her chest. When she raised her eyes to look at the top of the pass, it never seemed any closer. And when she finally reached what had looked like the top, she found higher ground beyond. The first miles were difficult. Every few hundred feet she would stop and rest, hitching her pack high on her shoulders and leaning her hands on her knees, and look back down her tracks at the confused snow where she’d last stopped not far behind her. The pack straps rubbed her shoulders raw, and the waist belt bunched up the bulky parka and rode painfully on the seams of her fleece pants. The muscles in her calves ached, and the tendon anchoring her heel stung every time she lifted a snowshoe to move it forward.
If she did one mile an hour, and it was one hundred miles to Bettles, that was one hundred hours—four straight days—eight if she walked only half a day. Maybe she was doing two miles an hour. That meant four half days to Bettles. Maybe Bettles is only… She reworked the calculation over and over, but the conclusion stayed the same: She couldn’t do it. She’d die if she didn’t go back and give herself up. They’d probably catch her anyway. All Barrett had to do was tell Alaska Airlines to call the cops when she bought a ticket in Fairbanks. Then she put one foot in front of the other and slogged on.
Kris’s pace didn’t slow when the gray light turned black and the snow glowed in the light of the stars. The slow, rhythmic crunch of her snowshoes breaking into the wind-crusted snow and the rasping sound of her breath lulled her into a stupor that dulled the pain of the pack sores on her shoulders and hips, the ache of her thigh and calf muscles, and the bite of the cold in her unmoving fingers clenched tightly in her mittens. The snowshoes, heaped with snow, became stones she struggled to lift with each step. The air was harsh and dry as desert sand, and every breath she exhaled spewed a cloud of moisture that she could not replace, and her throat felt rough and scaly like spruce bark on an old tree. The water bottles were empty, and there were no trees, no brush to make a fire to melt snow, and the snow was so cold and so dry that when she put a handful into her mouth it had numbed her lips and tongue and had melted into a trickle too small to swallow. Her stomach twisted with hunger and, without water, her nuts and raisins mucked up and stuck in her throat.