The Boy in the Snow

by M. J. McGrath

  21

  The radio signal from the checkpoint flared, then Sammy Inukpuk’s voice came back on.

  ‘Say what?’

  Derek Palliser cleared his throat and tried hard to enunciate. The comms centre at the Nome HQ was always so busy it was sometimes difficult for people at the other end to hear.

  ‘The new dog booties you wanted? I got them dropped off on today’s supply. They’ll be at Anvik.’

  ‘Huh.’ Sammy sounded distracted.

  ‘Something up?’

  ‘No, no. Everything’s fine. Team’s running real well. I guess I’m just tired is all.’

  There was a pause. Aileen Logan’s deputy, Chrissie Caley, came by and tossed Derek a smile. Aileen was down in Anchorage for the day giving press briefings but Chrissie seemed admirably unflustered at having to take over. Derek waited for her to move on before returning to Sammy.

  ‘You hear that?’ Sammy’s voice came in again, sounding thin. There was a pause while Derek searched for something to say. Since returning from his lowlights tour of Anchorage, he’d been distracted, finding it hard to get the young skinny girl out of his mind. Or, rather, her baby. He’d only spent ten minutes in their company, exactly ten, but those few minutes had been some of the most soul-destroying of his life. He thought about that little kid almost constantly. What chance did he have growing up in a box room listening to his mother being balled for money next door? Over the years he’d seen plenty of kinds of hell, but that kid, the life he had to look forward to, that was a whole new one on him.

  ‘Sorry, Sammy, I missed it.’ Doing his best to get himself together. Not making such a great job of it.

  ‘I said I’m OK, just tired.’ There was a pause while both parties swallowed thier disappointment, and then Sammy piped up, ‘Has Nancy been in touch at all?’ Nancy was Sammy’s on-off girlfriend back in Autisaq. He’d wanted her to fly over to support him but she said she needed a new pair of snowshoes and couldn’t spare the money. When he’d offered to pay for her out of the sponsorship kitty, she’d said she couldn’t spare the time. Being quite the optimist, Sammy was convinced she was sulking about something and would come out of it soon enough. Derek suspected there were other, darker, reasons she hadn’t called, reasons to do with Sammy’s neighbour, Apiuk, whom he’d spotted sneaking out of Nancy’s house the night before they left for Alaska.

  ‘I’ll bet she spoke to Edie,’ Derek lied. ‘And Edie forgot to pass on the message.’ He was struck, once again, with a strong sense of wanting Sammy to get through the race, to be there when he and his team mushed over the finishing line. He certainly didn’t see any point in undermining Sammy’s morale by telling him the truth right now.

  ‘She there? Edie I mean.’

  ‘Uh nuh, she’s in Anchorage, like we agreed,’ he heard himself say. He knew he was being evasive, but didn’t see that he had much choice. Last thing Sammy needed right now was a pile of worries. ‘But hey,’ he added in what he hoped was an encouraging tone, ‘we’re both psyched. You’re doing real great. Think you’ll make it inside two weeks?’

  ‘Reckon so,’ said Sammy. There was a slight pause, as though he was waiting for Derek to say something, then: ‘OK, then, well I guess I’d better get back on the trail.’

  Derek wished him good sledding. The moment the call ended, he was filled with the regret of having let his friend down, and wishing they could have the conversation over again. Sammy had travelled nearly 500 miles across some of the toughest terrain in the world with nothing more than a frame race sled, a tiny pack of supplies and sixteen – now fifteen – dogs for company. He’d been on the trail day and night, sleeping upright in his sled, if he’d got any sleep at all, eating on the fly; all his life focused on that thin, icy skein of the trail. Barring any emergency, the conversation they’d just had would be the last time Sammy would be in direct contact until he reached the Safety roadhouse a few miles outside Nome. From now on, Derek and Edie would have to make do with a sketchy outline of his progress drawn from his position on the GPS tracker and from whatever snippet might be emailed by the stewards at the various checkpoints.

  After they’d finished their conversation, Derek wandered down to Zach Barefoot’s place. At the top of the unnamed street in which the Chukchi Motel stood, he stopped. It wasn’t yet dark and wouldn’t be for a few hours, but the motel sign was lit up. As he stood and watched a big man with an elongated, snouted face strode out and down the steps, got onto a snowmobile and sped off. Not long afterwards, he noticed, the motel light went out. He thought about the young woman in the forest outside Meadow Lake who had carved IIIaXTa, mine, on the car windshield. Then, bracing himself, he strode down the street towards the unlit sign.

  The same toothless Inupiaq man was at reception. He was whittling at a piece of walrus ivory with a knife.

  ‘I’d like a room,’ Derek said.

  The man looked up at him. He had tundra skin: thick, brown and as hummocky as muskeg. His eyes, Derek noticed, were rheumy with cataracts. He could tell by the way the eyes blinked through him that the old man couldn’t see much.

  ‘We’re all booked up,’ the old man said.

  Derek stood his ground, repeating himself. The old man nodded.

  ‘You’ll need to come back at nine,’ he said, ‘or maybe ten.’

  Derek leaned in and picked up the piece of walrus ivory.

  ‘You have trouble seeing or are you just paid to look the other way?’

  ‘I seen all I need to see in this world,’ the old man said, reaching out and taking back his carving.

  The door to Zach’s house was open. Derek called out and a woman’s head appeared around the corner of one of the bedrooms. He recognized Megan Barefoot from the photos scattered around and was immediately struck, in a way he hadn’t been before, by how much like Edie she looked. Same high forehead, arched brow, same look of barely constrained energy. She was holding a finger up in front of her mouth and looked as though she’d only just woken.

  ‘Zoe’s sleeping.’

  Derek introduced himself in a whisper. Megan smiled and said Zach had already told her all about him. He thought about the baby in the next room, and the kid in Anchorage and felt a pulse start up in his temple.

  He’d managed to get this far in Alaska without thinking too hard about his kid. Denial, Edie Kiglatuk would say, if she’d known he had one. Kept it to himself just so she wouldn’t find out. How long had it been since he’d seen Serena? Nearly four years now. She’d be five. Her mother certainly wouldn’t be keeping his memory alive. She was at least part of the reason he hadn’t kept in touch, why he didn’t talk about it. The woman had made it too difficult and painful and expensive. But that was no excuse really, and he knew it. He had a satellite connection to the Internet in the detachment office in Kuujuaq. It’d been connected for nearly two years. He didn’t even know where Serena and her mother were living these days. He could have tracked her down and eaten whatever shit she wanted him to eat and begged to have contact with Serena again. He could have offered her mother regular money in return. Hell, he could be Skyping with his little girl right now. Instead, he didn’t even know what she looked like.

  Then the door swung open and Zach appeared with a six-pack in each hand. Seeing Megan, his face lit up like an ice crystal in the sun. He put the beer down, strode over to his wife and took her in his arms. Hand in hand they crept into the room where the baby was sleeping.

  Derek went over to the sofa and cracked open a beer. A while later, he wasn’t sure how long, Zach came back into the room alone, his face lit with the kind of love you didn’t see enough of. He noticed the open can of beer. ‘The man don’t waste time,’ he said, amiably. Fetching a beer for himself, he came and sat on the sofa and held up his can. ‘I salute your style.’

  Derek gave a low laugh and hoped it didn’t sound too bitter. If it did, Zach didn’t notice.

  ‘They look so cute, lying there together, fast asleep,’ he said. He gulped his beer, wiped
the back of his hand across his lips and sighed contentedly.

  ‘They sure do.’ Derek lifted his hand to his mouth and bit hard down on his thumbnail. ‘Zach, you doing anything around ten tonight?’

  Zach sat up, intrigued, and reaching for another beer, said, ‘Why, you got plans?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Zach put down his can.

  ‘Should I hold off on another beer?’

  Derek grinned and gave him a pat on the shoulder.

  ‘No sir,’ he said, ‘we’re gonna need all the beer we can get.’

  Five hundred miles away, in downtown Anchorage, Edie Kiglatuk was meeting Aileen Logan in a pioneer-themed drinking hole named Klondyke, east of downtown. Aileen had called her earlier in the day, saying she wanted to know more about the way folk trained their sled dogs up in Autisaq and suggesting they hook up. The place itself was a dank smelling room with a low ceiling and dim lighting which looked cheap rather than intimate. There were life-sized portraits of women on the walls. In fact, there were women everywhere.

  A barmaid with elaborate facial piercings came over, greeted Aileen by name, and asked them what they’d like to drink. The clue was in the name of the place, Edie realized. Klondyke.

  ‘Jack Daniel’s OK with you?’ Aileen smiled.

  ‘I had a coke in mind,’ Edie said. She’d fallen off the wagon once too often, wasn’t eager to repeat the process.

  Aileen watched the waitress leave then said, ‘So how long you been sober?’

  Edie frowned. Hadn’t Aileen asked her there to talk about sled dogs? ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’m a simple kind of a person. I like the old silent comedy greats, I like meat and I love my family. What I don’t like is people I hardly know asking personal questions.’

  Aileen lifted her palms in mock surrender.

  ‘Phoowee,’ she whistled, mockingly, ‘I’d kill to see you when you’re really angry.’ With that she gave a great guffaw.

  They talked for a while about the Iditarod, just chit-chat mostly.

  ‘You got a good guy in the race, Sammy is it? Aileen said. ‘I seen him at the start. He’s got pluck.’

  ‘Where we live, that kind of comes with the territory.’

  ‘Tough up there on Ellesmere, huh? I guess Alaska must kinda feel like the south to you.’

  ‘Furthest south I’ve ever been.’

  The drinks showed up in glass tankards coated in a thin layer of rime frost. Aileen drank hers off. The woman could pack away some beer.

  ‘We Alaskans like to think of anywhere out of state as the Outside,’ Aileen said. ‘We can be tough on Outsiders.’ She said this in a way that left Edie in no doubt that she was sending some kind of message.

  ‘Outsiders can be tough back.’ she countered. Being an outsider had nothing to do with geography and everything to do with the landscape of the mind.

  ‘Like your pal Sammy,’ Aileen said. There was an edge to her voice.

  ‘Yeah, like Sammy.’ The two women glanced at one another. In that moment they acknowledged without having to say anything that Aileen was sending Edie a friendly warning not to get any further mixed up in investigations into the deaths of Lucas Littlefish and Jonny Doe. But why? What did any of it have to do with her?

  The woman excused herself and went to the bathroom. While she was away, the waitress bustled up again. She said, ‘Your first time here?’ and when Edie nodded, she added, ‘Like the decor? Most folks go crazy over the decor.’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  The waitress continued as though she hadn’t heard. ‘This lady here’– she indicated a mural of a small woman with a regal face – ‘this is Alaska Nellie. She was tiny, like five foot three, but she hunted big game. Can you believe that?’

  Edie, five foot two, said, ‘I’ll try.’

  After the waitress left, Edie allowed her mind to drift back to the old days. The old days! How uncomplicated everything seemed then. If she wanted a drink, or a meal or a fuck for that matter, she had one. When the spirit – or her belly – moved her, she went out onto the land and killed something. It seemed so simple then to take a life. You took a gun and a komatik, a sled, and a dozen dogs and you came back with some meat. She had thought of herself as liberating animals from their bodies so they could be born again. The act of killing had felt less like taking a life and more like releasing a spirit.

  Thinking about herself now, it was hard to imagine that she once saw things in such black and white terms. Simplicity was the luxury of youth. The older you got, the more you realized nothing was that simple. Even death. Especially death.

  Aileen returned and sat back in her seat.

  Edie looked up. ‘What you said, before? Do you have a reason to think I might be in trouble?’

  Aileen flung her arms behind her head. The effect was one of absolute confidence. ‘It’s like I said, Edie. We can be tough on Outsiders.’ She drained off her beer and signalled to the server to bring another. ‘Now, about those huskies of yours. I take my hat off to you folks. You sure as hell breed a tough sled dog. If it’s not a personal question, what’s your secret?’

  Edie shrugged. ‘We say either the dogs have the right ihuma, like heart, for it or they don’t. Same as people.’ This, too, sounded simple. And yet ihuma made a labyrinth of even the most basic action.

  Aileen laughed and leaned in, hands on the table. Her breath was wet and hoppy. She had the kind of hands you could kill kittens with.

  ‘So what do you do with the bad dogs, Edie Kiglatuk? The ones with the wrong ihuma?’

  Edie looked at the hands, then back at Aileen’s face.

  ‘We make them into hats.’

  22

  Derek Palliser crept up the stairs at the Chukchi Motel, with Megan Avuluq’s police issue Glock 22 unholstered and at the ready. He reached the half landing, felt a lurch in his stomach and with his free hand held on to the handrail. Gathering himself, he glanced back to check on Zach’s whereabouts, received an encouraging lift of the eyebrows and continued on down the corridor. What they were about to do was very probably ill-judged. It was certainly illegal. Plus they were drunk. In theory they still had the option to go back down the stairs right now, get a few hours’ sleep and think things through more rationally in the morning. But who gave a shit about theory?

  Zach had his own reasons for wanting to take action, reasons he’d explained over a few beers. Back in the late nineties just after the Bering border opened up he’d sprung a smuggling ring. Young native girls from Chukchi mostly. One of the girls got sent back to Russia, where the gangmasters caught up with her, raped her with a hunting knife and left her to bleed out. Her mother had sent an angry letter to the State Troopers in Anchorage, which had eventually found its way up north to Nome. The letter had played right into blue-shirt prejudices, that the Alaska Wildlife Troopers, the ‘brownshirts’, were aptly named: they couldn’t get shit done without covering themselves in it.

  Derek gripped the Glock, collected himself and moved forward till he was outside room number 26. He hadn’t used a hand weapon for years. A rifle was different, more removed somehow. It felt odd to be so close to all that power, but exhilarating too. The old man at reception had a hard time remembering which room number to direct them to, but he’d recovered his memory the moment he saw they were packing. Folk never said no to a gun.

  He put an ear to the door then nodded to signal to Zach that he’d heard noises inside. Zach took a deep breath and acknowledged him with a blink. The two men rested their shoulders on the door. Derek held up a three-finger count. On zero, they peeled back to gain force, then all at once thrust forward. In an instant, the lock caved, the door sprung open and the two men tumbled into the room.

  Before he saw anything, he heard the girl screaming. When he steadied himself and looked up, he could see she was on her knees. Her hands were tied behind her back and she was wearing a blind. A middle-aged bald man stood facing her, grasping his cock in both hands. Blood trickled between the fingers. The skin on
his face wasn’t far off the same colour. He hadn’t quite registered what had happened. His eyes were wide open and fixed, his mouth locked in an expression of amazement. Then something gave and he began to roar. The sound of his screams silenced the girl. For a second the four of them just froze as though wondering what to do next. Derek barked at the guy to show his hands, but the A-hole seemed unable to hear through the pain. He was clutching himself with both hands now, chanting the words ‘She fucking bit me, the bitch fucking bit me’ like a lucky tune. And then, just as suddenly, his brain clicked into gear. Derek saw him clock the two weapons aimed at his head. Immediately, he grew quiet. His eyes widened in terror. Slowly, he raised his hands in the air.

  Looking at him now, his pants down around his ankles, cock tiny and red, made Derek want to laugh. It also made him want to make a clean sweep of it and shoot the asswipe in the balls.

  He glanced at Zach.

  ‘Police.’

  The girl sat back, noisily spitting pink saliva on the cheap hotel carpet. Derek went over to her and removed the blind and hand ties. She sat for a moment blinking and rubbing her wrists where the ties had cut into the skin. She was very young. Derek didn’t like to think how young. Then she stood up, went over to the man and spat.

  The man screwed up his eyes, trying to block out his humiliation. His legs shifted about in an effort to reorganize his pain. He opened his eyes again and squinted, taking in first Derek then Zach.

  ‘You gotta get me to a doctor.’

  A dry smile flickered across Zach’s face. ‘What do you think, sergeant, do we?’

  The man picked up on the word ‘sergeant’ and groaned some more.

  Derek smiled and gave a little shrug. ‘I’m in no hurry,’ he said, then, looking round, ‘hey, this is a nice room. Faces east too. I’ll bet you get a great view of the sunrise in a room like this.’

  ‘We could get room-service breakfast,’ Zach said. He went over to where the man was standing, head bowed, clutching his groin and flipped his chin with his weapon so the man had no choice but to meet his eye. ‘Or maybe that was what you already thought you were getting, you piece of shit.’