Raven Stole the Moon

by Garth Stein

  “What’s up?”

  Robert drew a blank. How was he supposed to do this? Ask her on a date?

  “I had a really good time last night,” he said. ”I haven’t done that in years.”

  “What? Coke?”

  “You know, the whole thing.”

  “It was practically all speed. I was up all night grinding my teeth. I have to go to the dentist and get a bite plate.”

  Robert fiddled with the buttons on the cigarette machine next to the telephone. All the colored buttons, bright and pretty. It reminded him of when he was a kid. They sure make smoking attractive to kids, don’t they?

  “Anyway,” he said, “I didn’t know if you’d be interested in getting together again. I’d love to talk some more. Maybe we could go out for dinner.”

  “Dinner?”

  “Yeah, tonight, if you’re free. On me.”

  “A date?”

  Robert laughed. He felt the same way. A date? What are you, crazy?

  “You could call it that, I guess.”

  Erin thought it over briefly.

  “I kind of have plans tonight.”

  “Oh. What about tomorrow?”

  “I, uh, I have a study group on Sunday nights. Um . . . Robert? Why do you want to go on a date with me?”

  That caught him off guard. His heart rate picked up. Now he had to explain himself? He hadn’t expected that.

  “I don’t know. I thought it would be fun.”

  “Is it about your wife?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you didn’t want to fool around last night because of your wife, but now you want to go on a date. Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Robert stammered. “I thought it over, I guess. You gave me your number. You said to call if I wanted to talk more.”

  “Do you want to talk, or do you want to go on a date?”

  “Well, you talk on a date.”

  “Don’t be clever, Robert.” She paused. “Look, my boyfriend is coming into town tonight for a few weeks, so I’m booked date-wise. Sorry.”

  She’s booked. Date-wise.

  “If you want to get a cup of coffee, I can meet you this afternoon . . .”

  A cup of coffee. That’s not what Robert had in mind. She wasn’t saying her lines. She was improvising. Oh, life is never what you want it to be. That’s why they have movies and magazines and other entertaining ways for a person to control his or her environment. Eliminate the variables from your life. Get married, have a kid, know that things are all a certain way. Count on things. Be boring. Then watch the whole thing crumble.

  He hung up with barely a good-bye. What does good-bye mean between strangers? Bad-bye. Bad-fucking-bye. For fifty cents extra, billed to Robert’s telephone credit card, the computer lady at Information connected him directly to Alaska Airlines. Once there, a human lady booked Robert onto the six thirty a.m. flight to Wrangell via Juneau on Sunday morning. That would put him in the same town as his wife at around ten thirty or so.

  But that was too much time that he would have to spend by himself. He needed something to do in the meantime. Something to keep himself from becoming self-destructive. He left Mike’s and walked up Fourth Avenue to the Coliseum. He would witness someone else’s destruction. Artificial carnage. Cheap, controllable, full-scale rioting. That’s right. There would be an action flick at the Coliseum. There always is. And Robert could sit through it two or three times before he got hungry and had to worry about the next step. He wouldn’t have to deal with himself until then.

  GIVEN THE CHOICE, Jenna takes the front seat. If she’s going to fly in a little plane, she might as well go all the way. Field checks knobs and dials, he pushes buttons, finally hitting the one that’s painted red. The propeller jumps to life and the engine spits clouds of smoke. Field waves to the guy on the dock, who unties the plane and gives the float a shove with his foot, setting them free in the water. The engine coughs and then the plane starts moving forward, away from the land.

  The first time Jenna was in an airplane this size, she had sworn that it would be the last time she would ever be in an airplane this size. She was eight weeks pregnant and nobody knew but Robert and her. They decided to take a vacation, a romantic getaway, since it would be the last time they would have the chance for the next nineteen years. So they decided to go to St. Barth’s. It was funny, Jenna thought, they kept getting into smaller and smaller planes. First a 767 from Seattle to Dallas, then a 737 from Dallas to St. Martin, then a twin-engine twelve-seater for the last leg of the journey. She remembered the pilot and copilot looking like they were thirteen, wearing surplus Cuban army uniforms. The plane looked as if it had been flying for about eighty years. It took the combined strength of both pilot-boys to slide forward some levers that hung down from the ceiling and were obviously necessary for flight. Then they made everyone shift around so the weight on the plane would be more evenly distributed and they wouldn’t fall out of the sky. All of these things made Jenna very nervous. But the worst was the landing on St. Barth’s. Apparently the landing strip is well known. Famous, in fact. And apparently someone is supposed to warn you about it before you try a landing. The plane circled around a mountain, almost clipping the treetops. Jenna could see lots of little white crosses planted on the mountainside, obviously marking fatalities from airplane crashes in the past. But when the plane suddenly dove full throttle, dropping straight out of the sky at an angle of far more than forty-five degrees, picking up speed and descending at a frightening pace, Jenna stopped breathing. Other passengers were indifferent. The pilots didn’t seem to care. But Jenna freaked out. She would have screamed if she could have caught her breath. With the ground shooting up at her through the windshield, she thought they were dead for sure. And then the plane pulled up and landed with a bang but didn’t seem to slow down as it skittered down the runway, and Jenna, looking white as a ghost, saw that the runway wasn’t really a runway at all but more of a dead end with the end being the ocean that they were hurtling toward. And the thirteen-year-old boys laughed, one of them seeing Jenna’s face and nudging the other; they seemed not to care, almost forgetting about the watery deathtrap that awaited them in only a few yards. And then they jammed the engine into reverse and the passengers jerked forward, bags sliding down the aisle, the engine groaning with metal fatigue, and the plane slowed down enough that the boys could save it from the water, only five feet away, turning around and coasting back up the runway to the designated spot of disembarkation. They took a boat on the return trip.

  Field powers the seaplane across the water and it reluctantly lifts off, as if it would just as soon have stayed on the water but was forced to succumb to the laws of aerodynamics, what with an airfoil strapped to its back and all. And they’re off. Fifty feet, a hundred feet, two hundred, climbing, banking, the round dial with the blue on the top and the brown on the bottom turning, or rather, the plane turning around the dial, the white needle spinning, five hundred, six, gauges good, everything fine, the putty-colored double-U with the red dot in the middle of it between Jenna’s legs turning by itself, mimicking the same double-U that responds to Field’s commands. It’s not too bad, just don’t look down.

  Eddie taps Jenna on the shoulder and points down. She doesn’t want to look; she hasn’t looked yet. She figures if she stares at the dashboard she won’t even know they’re in the air. Her grip tightens on the armrest, and she gives a peek and sees Elephant’s Nose below her. Pretty nice, actually.

  They’re at a thousand feet and Jenna has taken a fancy to the sights below. There are islands, hundreds of them, dark with trees, connected by an intricate web of black water. It looks like the Florida Everglades, she thinks, remembering the images from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom on Sunday nights. Like the Everglades but bigger. They stay over the water, which guides them through the wilderness like a road below.

  Field taps her arm and smiles. “There’s something I have to show you.”

  The plane suddenl
y banks to the right and Jenna flails. She didn’t like that move; that was too much, too steep. They’re turning and then straightening out. She relaxes. They’re on a side road now, a river, it looks like, a thin rope that winds through the trees. The plane drops. It’s okay, she’s getting used to the movements and isn’t afraid they’ll die anymore.

  “This is the Stikine River,” Field shouts over the engine noise. “Back in the gold rush days there was a ferry that went up the river all the way to Canada. The Indians were afraid of this river. They thought that up the river is where souls went when people died, so they refused to take the white men up the river. When the whites went anyway, the Indians thought they had special power because they came back alive.”

  “It’s always something like that, isn’t it?” Jenna says.

  Field laughs and reaches into his jacket, pulling out a bottle of whiskey. He breaks the seal and hands it to Jenna.

  “Take a swig of this to calm yourself down.”

  Jenna puts up her hands in a gesture of refusal, but Field insists. Eddie leans forward and talks into Jenna’s ear.

  “You’d better,” he says. “I think he’s going to buzz the glacier for you.”

  Shit, Jenna doesn’t like the sound of that buzzing the glacier thing. She doesn’t know what it is, but she’s not sure she wants to find out. She takes a swig and hands the bottle to Eddie, who drinks and caps the bottle.

  “What about me?” Field asks.

  “You’re driving,” Eddie answers and pockets the bottle.

  The plane has been going down for a while; it’s at about three hundred feet, and it feels as if they’re in a big valley. On both sides of the river are mountains, capped peaks that climb high above the plane. Jenna liked it better when they were out over the islands. She senses something about what they are doing now and she’s afraid.

  “I don’t want to buzz the glacier,” she says to Field.

  “Oh, it’s nothing. You’ll like it.”

  They round a corner, which seems strange to Jenna, but that’s the only way she can visualize it, a corner in the sky, and in front of them is a wall of ice. It’s filling a valley, so much ice, brown and blue, she feels the coldness hitting her in waves. It’s more ice than she’s ever seen before, and as the plane dips down, the wall appears to soar above them until they are a little speck before a huge mountain. Field flies the plane straight toward the wall without fear. She recognizes the sly smile on his face; it’s the same smile as the boy pilots in St. Barth’s. He knows where they are going and she doesn’t. The glacier is getting closer and Jenna is afraid of what she doesn’t know. She fears the worst, but she feels safe. Field wouldn’t commit suicide, and he’s not going to kick her out of the plane. They’re very close now, not changing course or speed, heading straight for the wall. Then, when Jenna thinks Field might fly them straight into the wall, it happens. Field guns the engine and pulls back as hard as he can on the stick, pitching the plane up and to his left. Jenna feels a darkness descend on her, a heaviness in her eyelids like a blanket being pulled over her brain, making her dizzy and forcing her to close her eyes. Through a gray fog she can see the sky. The plane seems to be sideways, but she’s having a hard time figuring out which end is up. The pressure from above is not letting her get her bearings. She feels someone touch her. It’s Eddie, tapping her shoulder and pointing to the left. She looks past Field out the window. The ice is there, but it’s moving. A sheet of ice is moving in slow motion, breaking free from the glacier and sliding down. Smoke seems to shoot out of the ice wall. White powder sprays out from the crack in the ice, and the sheet breaks free and crumbles down the glacier. Field tips the plane to the left, and Jenna can see the ice chunk slide into the river below, crashing into the water with tremendous force; a terrible beauty is born.

  Field lifts the plane higher into the air, above the hills, up to fifteen hundred feet. He smiles over at Jenna. “Don’t worry. No more surprises,” he says.

  Jenna is in a daze now, not concerned with flying but struck by the pain of the ice and the rage of the water below that was forced to make room for the huge piece of frozen time, the glacier, trapped in a solid state for centuries, melting into the ocean and becoming one with its future. She feels small and insignificant in the face of such a display of nature. She is moved by the event that Field made for her, the ease with which he showed her how momentous the world is and how small she is, how simple but how frightening, a glacier plowing through the mountains, making valleys that won’t be finished for millions of years, and she saw how fragile it was. How fragile.

  She settles back into the seat and counts the islands she sees below as she waits for Klawock to come to her.

  THE TOWN WASN’T what Jenna had expected. She thought it would be like Wrangell, fair-sized, built up, with a feeling of bustle and commerce. Or at least a feeling that it was in contact with the outside world. But that wasn’t Klawock. Klawock wasn’t really anything. There was a dock sticking out into the bay, up to which Field guided the floatplane. The dock was next to a giant, seemingly lifeless, wooden warehouse built out over the water. A dirt road followed the shoreline to either side of the dock. To the right, the road ran up a hill that arched away from the water. On the hill was uncut grass and a couple of dozen totem poles. That was it. That was Klawock. Or what they could see of it.

  Eddie and Jenna headed up the hill and around a bend. They turned when they heard the growl of an engine and watched Field’s plane climb into the sky; Jenna suddenly felt very far away from Wrangell.

  On one side of the road was a general store and a post office. On the other side was a bar or a restaurant, Jenna didn’t know which. They decided to go into the general store to ask for help. Any kind of help: how to find Livingstone, where they could stay. The man behind the counter, a middle-aged Indian, looked at them suspiciously, then told them that the bar across the street had rooms upstairs and they could stay there. When Jenna asked how they could find David Livingstone, the man paused.

  “Is he expecting you?” he asked.

  “No,” Jenna answered. “We hoped he would be able to see us.”

  “Are you writing an article?”

  “No, we need some help. Do you know where we can find him?”

  “It would help if I knew a little more about why you need to find him.”

  Jenna was startled. This guy obviously knew Livingstone. Why wouldn’t he tell her? She wasn’t going to do anything bad to him.

  “It’s kind of personal,” Jenna said.

  The man shook his head skeptically, as if that were a line he’d heard before. She sighed. What difference did it make who knew? It was time to take the skeletons out of the closet.

  “Look, it has to do with . . . um . . . my grandmother was a Tlingit, and . . . well, see, these things have been happening to me . . . and I’ve been led to believe that it may be some kind of Tlingit spiritual thing . . . some kind of supernatural thing . . . and a couple of years ago this thing happened at this resort . . . Thunder Bay . . . it happened to my son . . . and apparently this Livingstone man had something to do with the resort, and—”

  “Yeah, I know about it. The drowning.”

  Jenna stopped talking and looked into the man’s eyes. He knew about it. It was called the Drowning. Everybody here knew about it, probably. It was a serious thing. They talked about it after it happened. But how would they know? Why would they know?

  “So, do you know how I can find David Livingstone?”

  “I’ll get ahold of him for you.”

  Jenna stood before the man. That wasn’t quite enough for her. She wanted more. Proof of purchase. A receipt or something. The man knew.

  “If he’ll see you, it won’t be until morning. So, the only thing you can do is go get a room and wait. There are rooms across the street. I’ll leave word for you at the bar.”

  Jenna nodded and backed away from the man.

  “Well, thanks. I appreciate your help. It’s pretty impor
tant to me, really, this whole thing, and I think he’s the only one who can do anything for me. Tell him, whatever he needs, if he needs some money or something, whatever his fee is, that’s not a problem, really, I’ll take care of it.”

  The man looked at Jenna, his face unchanged.

  “Go get a room,” he said. And she backed out of the screen door, following Eddie and Oscar out onto porch.

  The bar across the street had “Motherfish” painted over the door and a big, blue girl-fish holding a knife and fork in her fins painted on the front window. Eddie, Oscar, and Jenna crossed the street and went into Motherfish to ask about rooms. The inside was dark and sweet-smelling, decorated like the hold of a ship. The floor and walls were wide planks, big barrels were mingled among the tables, and smaller barrels acted as stools at the bar. The ceiling was strung with fishing nets that held lots of little trinkets: Japanese floats, buoys, starfish and crab shells, and on and on. A cool breeze blew through the room and reminded Jenna of waiting in line for the Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland. A young man sat behind the counter reading a book, and he didn’t look up when the bell above the door signaled Jenna and Eddie’s entrance.

  They walked up to the bar and Eddie knocked on it loudly.

  “Hey, barkeep!”

  The kid looked up at Eddie with obvious annoyance. He was very good-looking, with the wide, round face that Jenna had seen in other Alaskan Indians, but with cheekbones that peeked through, giving him a unique, sculpted look.

  “The guy across the street said you had rooms.” Eddie continued his invasion.

  “Yeah,” the kid answered, bristling at Eddie. Jenna sensed that there was some dynamic going on that she clearly didn’t know about, and she certainly didn’t like.

  “Well,” Eddie said, testily, “we’d like a couple, if that’s okay with you.”

  “Sure,” the kid said. “You folks here for the festival?”

  “The festival?” Eddie asked. “What kind of festival?”

  “We don’t have a festival,” the kid answered flatly.