by Неизвестный
Grasping roots and rocks, Kris pulled herself up the slope through the trees, angling sideways away from the stairs. It wasn’t as steep as the hillside at the end of Thane, but it was wet, heavy with the smell of earth; spruce needles and bits of twigs and dirt clung to her hands and knees. When she reached the pavement, rain-slickened and glistening black under a single street light, she peered around a tree back up the road to the Lambale turnout. Two squad cars, the Mercedes, and an SUV sat at the head of the stairs, deserted. She crept onto the pavement and ran down to where she’d left Justin’s car. A pickup raced around the curve in front of her, catching her in its lights; she turned her head. A thin drizzle wet her hair.
At the Subaru, she searched the ashtray for the keys, then her pockets; her hands shook and they felt clumsy and swollen. She found the keys and fumbled the correct one into the ignition; the engine ground, started on the second try, and she wheeled into the road back toward town. Kris gripped the steering wheel with both hands, trying to still them.
She stared out the window, her eyes not registering the oncoming headlights; Justin’s bloodied shoulder and lifeless hand lit up in her brain. She drove by instinct, unaware when she passed the ferry dock and the boat harbor at Auke Bay. It was the second time he’d saved her. She remembered his touch again, at the state office building, his finger on her cheek. It had felt like an intrusion, just his prick calling to him. Now she felt its tenderness and knew that he’d been trying to bridge the same gulf that separated him from the world that she’d stared into the night she dug up Corvus.
The car swept around a long curve; a pair of headlights pushed her tail, bouncing off the rearview mirror into her eyes. When the road straightened, the car behind pulled out and a kid, hanging out the passenger window, flipped her off as they accelerated past.
How did Barrett know she’d be at the Lambale’s? Was it Justin who figured out it was Alvilde? Kris’d never told him about Alvilde having her shoes repaired. And it was Ringer who’d clued her in when he’d pointed at the woman in heels picking her way through the snow at the Fairbanks airport. Jesus, Ringer’d crow when she told him that Alvilde’s heels had given her away. It had been her remaining heel that had poked the holes through the leaves that Justin had found by the stream. If she’d been wearing rubber boots like an Alaskan, instead of hanging on to her snotty Outside elegance, no one would’ve guessed.
The windshield wipers swept back and forth, alternately sharpening and blurring the lights of the city in front of her. On her right, like a hole in space, were the black waters of the channel. Nervous juices pooled in her stomach; she lifted her foot from the pedal, slowing. Did Ben know she was coming? Did he know why? Cars passed her, and she pressed the pedal again, letting the cars in front of her drag her toward the city.
If Ben had noticed that his pistol was missing, he’d know that she’d taken it and, if he knew that Lambale was missing—he’d put it together. For a moment, Kris was buoyed by a flash of anger: If Ben had told her that it had been Alvilde who had killed Evie, Lambale would still be alive and she wouldn’t be running from a life in prison.
She passed the lights of the AWARE shelter blinking through the screen of trees on her left. Had Lambale really built the new wing to make up for the rape? Weird he felt so guilty about it; in Evie’s world, there wasn’t a big difference between rape and straight sex. Men took what they wanted; sometimes someone bothered to ask first.
The road curved around the downtown boat harbor; below her, the boats floated in their stalls, patient and dumb as cows. She wouldn’t have much time. Barrett would be after her as soon as he got things under control at Lambale’s. He could’ve called ahead and had a cop waiting for her; but she didn’t think so. Barrett would want her for himself.
It was raining harder in town; the water spilled from the sky, cold and lifeless and as empty of drama as a dead TV. Kris parked in the lot behind the Bergman Hotel and, carrying Ben’s parka in her arms, walked up the hill to the foot of his staircase. She hesitated and looked up at his window, letting the rain fall on her. Smeared by the water, a dim light glowed behind the blank square of glass. He’d see her coming up. Or hear her. Did he know that she knew about Corvus? And about the four years he spent with Evie?
Kris started up the steps. When she reached Ben’s door, she rapped gently and opened it without waiting for him to let her in. He was sitting in his chair by the window; the flame of a kerosene lantern on a chair next to him flickered in the breath of damp air that followed her in. Their gazes touched, then Kris looked down while she levered her feet out of the shoepacks and hung the parka on the peg, the mittens stuffed in the pockets.
“Came by to return these,” she said, looking around for the sneakers she’d left two weeks ago. They were under the little table with the telephone, heels set neatly against the wall.
Ben was quiet. He looked wary. Kris lifted a chair out of the corner and set it in front of the window angled toward his, the lantern between them.
“You knew, Ben,” Kris said, quietly. “You knew it was Alvilde who killed Evie.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Kris asked. “Why did you feed me that fucking bear story?” Then suddenly, as she asked him, she knew the answer, and the heat of her anger vanished, like the warmth of a dying fire vanishing into the arctic night. She slumped in the chair; her energy drained out of her, and the hollowness of exhaustion opened in its place.
Ben’s eyes, as hard as she’d ever seen them, locked onto hers. “Evie didn’t need to have you, her own daughter, the police, the papers, proving to yourselves what you already believed, the only thing you could see—that she was just another drunk Indian.”
He breathed, shallowly, like it hurt. “Evie didn’t need vengeance,” he said.
He looked away. “She needed your love.”
“Bullshit, Ben,” Kris said, softly. “You didn’t tell me because you didn’t want anyone to find out you’d killed Corvus.”
“Corvus,” he said his voice airless.
“Yeah, Corvus.”
Ben looked stunned, as if he’d walked into a wall he couldn’t see.
“You were up the Alatna?” he asked, sounding distant, as far away as the river and the mountains he’d never return to. “At the cabin?”
“I dug up his grave,” she said.
Ben stared at her, his expression unreadable. Then he turned his head and looked out the window. Kris followed his stare. The night hadn’t changed: the darkness rent by the city’s lights, the ceaseless rain that dribbled down the blackened glass, the sea black and quiet in the channel.
“She missed you so much,” he said, lost in the night.
“Why did you shoot him, Ben?”
Ben pulled his gaze from the night as if he knew he could no longer run from his boy. His bald head, glossy in the low light, bent forward hiding his face.
“He wasn’t right in his head,” he said, not looking up. “He was almost five, still in diapers, wobbly, like a newborn caribou, just hanging onto my leg. He’d have to be taken care of all his life.”
His head rose. The wrinkles that nested his eyes had deepened and sagged. “He didn’t know my name.”
“You thought killing him was better than letting him live?” Kris asked. She waited, but he didn’t answer. “What did you think it would do to Evie?”
“I knew it would be better this way.” He looked at Kris again, his eyes threaded with red lines. “I was angry. Angry that she couldn’t let him go. I…” He took a breath. “Nothing I said could change her; make her see that it was what we needed to do. That he was better gone.”
“So you kidnapped him.”
“Nothing in the wild lives if it isn’t right. A wolf bitch will abandon a deformed pup; a grouse won’t feed a chick that ignores her call. Evie . . . she loved him anyway.
“And I took him from her.” Ben looked at her, his eyes, empty as glass, asked for nothing: not sympathy, not un
derstanding, not pity. “I didn’t want to stay up the Alatna that winter, but I had nowhere to go. Evie was gone to me. She’d guessed that I’d taken Corvus and turned on me before I left.
“I had to come out before breakup. When I got to Fairbanks, Evie was drinking again and wouldn’t talk to me. Once, when I tried, she screamed and screamed until I had to leave.”
He squeezed his hands shut. “I never got to tell her I was sorry.”
“So you followed her down here,” Kris said.
“There was nothing else for me to do.”
Kris understood then that this man, who’d spent fifty years alive and happy in his world of mountains and forests, had had his heart opened by her mother and then, the law of nature, the law of the weak and the strong, the only law he knew, destroyed the little human joy he had made for himself. Now he was lost to both worlds, the human and the wild: Evie was gone, and he could never go back to the Alatna. Even if he were still young, his heart expected too much from life for the hills and trees ever to fill it by themselves again.
Kris let him be. She looked out his window at the lights of Juneau. A car was climbing the steep hump of the bridge over to Douglas Island and the lights across the channel burned without warmth.
Barrett would be there soon.
After a while, Ben lifted his head and looked out the window, too. He sat still, but Kris felt a tension building in him. A muscle in his cheek jumped like it was being jerked by a string.
“What?” she asked.
“It wasn’t because of Corvus,” he said, his voice tight. “It was because of you.”
“What was because of me?”
A hand fidgeted, his lip trembled, and Kris felt the fear in him.
“When I looked at the tracks,” he said, speaking again to the night. “I saw a woman pushing Evie through the brush, rushing to get it over with, frightened, so nervous she’d forgotten to change her shoes. I saw Evie trip, grab a stalk of devil’s club, not feeling the thorns stab into her skin; I heard her wailing; like she’d wailed the morning Corvus disappeared and I saw her lift her hands to protect her face, and I saw her blown backwards by the shot, her dress snagging on a branch as she fell into the stream.
“Since she was a girl, everything she loved had been taken from her: her father, her mother to whiskey.” He paused. “You. And Corvus and, when she was happy with Vern, her life.” He spread his hands. “She’d had too much pain, and I was too tired, too guilty myself to care who killed her. I wanted her left alone.
“Then you came. And you wanted to know. And I knew I couldn’t keep you from it, but—”
“What?”
“Oh, Kris,” Ben groaned in a whisper so choked with pain that she looked at him in surprise. “At the funeral, when he handed you the card, I saw it in his nose and the line of his chin. And his walk, his left leg lifts high and circles out when he walks. Like yours.”
“Like my what?” Her ears popped and filled with static. The rain clicked on the windowpane, the lantern flame skittered and shrank, drawing the shadows out of the darkness.
“He was your father.”
The noise swelled in her head; she saw his lips move, but couldn’t hear him. She grasped for something to cling to, something to shield her from his words.
“He raped her,” she said. Her heart pumped air through her body.
Ben looked stricken.
“He told me he did.”
“Twenty-five years ago,” Ben said. His eyes, bloodshot, pleaded with her, wanting her to understand without him having to say more.
Kris felt like she’d stepped off a cliff. She opened her mouth; her eyes widened slowly as Ben’s words penetrated her, penetrated years of crusted anger and hidden loneliness.
“No.” She buckled. A sense of bitter loss and fear blew through her and she slipped out of time and place. She saw her mother, a teenager on the street with a little kid, she saw her collapsed on their apartment rug her hair fanned across her cheek, she saw the lonely bundle at the bottom of an arctic grave, and she saw Lambale crumpled around the big spruce tree, whispering as he died, trying to tell her he was her father.
Her next breath was ragged, her chest burned, and she struggled for control. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Lambale was going to—”
“No, he wasn’t,” she said. “I was in the car with him. He never . . .” His face had been speckled green by the dash lights, his gloved hands tight and nervous on the wheel, his lips struggling for words. And she’d beaten him into silence.
“It was Lambale who found you,” Ben said, his eyes lighted with fear and pity. “No one else could have. And he wouldn’t have searched for you unless he was going to tell you. That’s why Evie wrote you, that’s why she wanted you to come home. To meet your father.”
“Ben.” She gasped.
“But Alvilde fought it.” He pushed on. “I saw it at the funeral. She stood so cold, so angry at him. When she looked at you, I knew it was because of you.” Ben bowed his head.
“Ben.” Kris desperately wanted him to look at her. “You don’t understand.”
“I couldn’t tell you Alvilde killed Evie. It would’ve taken her from Lambale. And if it broke him, you would have lost him.” And then quietly, like wind rustling dead leaves, “Like I lost Evie.”
“Ben.” Look at me! “I shot him.” Her voice sounded outside her skin, empty and far away. “It was an accident.” She was pleading with him, wanting him to understand. “I thought he killed her, killed my mother.”
Ben didn’t move. He didn’t look up. His fingers stiffened against each other and then lay limp in his lap. In the lamplight, Kris saw a flash of silver drop from his hidden face and vanish into his open hands. Trembling, she stumbled out of the chair and knelt by his side and laid her head in his gnarled fingers.
“Ben,” she whispered. “Hold me.”
In his teens, Russell Heath hitchhiked to Alaska and lived in a cabin on the banks of the Tanana River; in his twenties, he lived in Italy and then traveled overland across the Sahara, through the jungles and over the savannas of Africa and into southern Asia; in his thirties, he sailed alone around the world in a 25 foot wooden boat; in his forties, he wrote novels; and in his fifties he bicycled the spine of the Rockies from Alaska to Mexico. He’s worked on the Alaska Pipeline, as an environmental lobbyist in the Alaska Legislature, and run a storied environmental organization fighting to protect Alaska’s coastal rainforests. Several years ago, he moved to New York City to dig deep into leadership development and coaching. He now coaches business and non-profit leaders intent on making big things happen in the world.
Leadership Unleashed
www.russellheath.net