Hold the Dark: A Novel (11 page)

This photo in his fingers—her face just a week ago, a look of longing in it and something else not nameable, her irises all pupil. That green wool turtleneck was knitted by her two winters ago. She’d chopped her hair to her chin—it was waist-length when Slone had left. When he looked up he looked into the flashbulb of the woman’s camera and it sent bolts through his eyes.

“You’re a handsome fella,” she said, trying to fix her hair. She rubbed lip balm across her mouth. Her lips were so thin they were barely there, eyebrow like an underline, whiskers in half sprout from her chin.

“Another storm’s coming late tonight,” she said. “Or else by morning, the radio says. You staying with us?”

Slone nodded, blinked the flashes from his eyes.

“I don’t have any more bread, I have to warn you. Plane hasn’t been back in two weeks. We’re expecting Hank again any day now, if the storms slow. Last time he tried to land that ski plane in weather, he missed the runway and hit the bluff. We call it a runway, you know, but it’s just a bulldozed road tamped down.”

He looked again at the photo of Medora.

“Of course, there are some roads from the city to here, but you can’t get a big enough truck along most of them, and anyway it takes more than a day. Plus you better know how to drive in snow because if you get stuck in a storm on one of those little roads you can forget being found till breakup. So we don’t mind waiting for Hank and his plane. He takes supplies way beyond us even, where no roads go. Hank’s a real good man, you bet.”

“I want to stay in the same room she stayed in.”

“There’s only two rooms up there. You can have your choice, fella. No one’s fighting over those rooms. Honestly, I haven’t changed the sheets in there, if you don’t mind it.”

Slone stayed fixed on the photo and said nothing.

“Not sure what sort of battery you have in your vehicle but you might wanna pull it inside the garage there across the way. We call it the garage, you know, it’s just a big corrugated metal hangar on a concrete slab. But there’s a gas heater in there to keep the trucks from freezing up and it stays warm as the devil in fifty below. What’re you driving?”

She bent to the window and with a sleeve wiped away the moisture to look out.

“That a Ford? Hard to see. I used to have a Ford, owned nothing but American, and then my husband said to me one day, he said,
We’re not American anymore, we’re Alaskan
. Last year after breakup he drove off to the city in the Ford and a week later drove back in a Jap model, a Nissan truck, or one of those SUV thingies. It’s real roomy, better than the Ford, I have to say, what little I do drive of it.”

“What’s the room price?”

“Do you have any magazines?”

Slone stared.

“Magazines,” she said. “No magazines? You didn’t bring any with you to look at while you’re traveling?”

“What magazines?”

“I’m not real picky about them,” she said. “Any kind with pictures. I like them all. I usually just get paid in magazines.”

* * *

Upstairs in the guest room—a compressed rectangle of wooded slats with the cold scent of stagnation—he looked in drawers, checked the closet, then beneath the bed. He peeled back the military-issue blanket and on his knees pressed his face into the sheet where Medora had slept. The vaguest outline of a fluid stain midway on the twin mattress—she slept nude no matter the month—and he thought he could smell her there. He breathed that way with his face to the sheet, then licked the stain.

He ignited the kerosene heater beneath the window, dimmed the lantern to a slow burn. Despite his hunger he stripped bare and reclined on the creaking bed as if his body could fit into the mold her own body had made. As if he could enter the morass of her dreams and learn her destination. He spent himself beneath the blanket, the first release in weeks, and fell asleep before he had the chance to clean his hand.

* * *

An ungodly night in some sere village east of the capital, the heat at ninety still, hours after the drape of dark. He’d been in the desert ten months and two days. A roundup of men now, shoulder to shoulder against the wall of a building chafed by sand and time. A score of bearded ghouls, hands zip-tied behind them, filthy bare feet, toenails like impacted corn. Molesting lights from the vehicles made their shadows on the wall as black as macadam.

Wet through with sweat and fighting to keep awake, Slone sat on a low porch step while others kept howling women at bay, ransacked more homes, guarded men at gunpoint. An inept translator spat gibber to these seized ones who shook their heads in ire and spat back. Shoddy rifles collected and stacked in a mound. Chickens in cluck on the road, a goat roped to a pole. Somewhere the skirl of an infant, and beyond the slap of spotlights a perplexing desert murk.

Now a chaos of conflicting reports, unabsorbed information. A corporal on the radio sucking on a clot of gum, getting no answer, none they wanted to hear. The man they sought was either among the seized or not, guilty or not. Eyes shut, Slone leaned back against the mud-brick wall of the house and sweated some more.

This undermanned platoon of twenty-two was from the start an errant brotherhood counting corpses and days. Half were drug and battery felons who’d been given waivers to enlist. They daily mocked those frayed others, those men in the news they heard so much about, men soothed by doctors in the States. Men who returned home cracked, only part of what they were before coming here. Ten months in now and Slone had not come close to the sunder, to the nightmares and the morning shakes. And he understood that he never would. That the eclipse in him had been there since his start. His was the nightly sleep of the exhausted sane.

His warped brethren could smell in Slone all he was capable of—a calmness masking an urge for carnage—and they feared him in a way they’d feared few before. His mere presence among these men seemed to turn them more lunatic, seemed to increase their will to ruin.

On the ground by his boot, partially hidden in rocks, lay a metallic object. A harmonica, nicked and dented. Slone blew bits of gravel from the air chambers and brought it to his lips. At the mounted .50-caliber gun behind the spotlight the gunner unloaded on the line of seized men, red-stained the wall behind them as they jolted from the impact, as women shrieked on soiled knees. Blood enough to course through dirt, holes in them to fit a fist.

Slone wanted to breathe a song into the harmonica but it made a clogged, rasping sound. He dropped it back into the yellow dirt and tried to sleep upright through the wail.

* * *

In the frozen night Slone woke to the hue of flame in the window, alight at the other end of the mining camp, something burning along the bluff. He dressed in the dark and descended the stairs by feel—the chatty woman nowhere seen or heard—and outside through the deepfreeze he made his way along the center road, huts and cabins now in arrant darkness. Some homes were no more than caves hewed into the base of the bluff, one with an oven door for a window, others with oval entrances wrapped in moose hide.

Slone saw the hunter, fifty or fifty-five years old, hardened by decades of walking and mining—he could see it in his stance. The hunter stood in the wide glow of the blaze: pallets, crates, boxes, pieces of tree. Donned wholly in gray wolf pelt, with white man’s skin and untrimmed hair still dark despite his age, he seemed a make-believe shaman. The wolf’s tail was still attached to his guise, its fanged head pulled low over his own for a hood.

When he saw Slone approach he turned to grin and welcome him to the heat. His teeth looked like stream-bottom pebbles beneath the still gallant fangs of the wolf he’d killed.

“I thought this would get your attention. Maud said we had a young traveler tonight. I knew it was you.”

“You’re not an Indian.”

“Not officially.”

“You’re not a priest.”

“In my own way I am, same as you and everyone.”

“I’m no priest.”

“Have it your way, then.”

Long laminated scars embossed his forehead and face—the admonition of a grizzly. The beast had taken a piece of his nose and upper lip as token.

“Why did she come to you?”

“Step closer here. It won’t hurt you, this fire. I like a big fire all after freeze-up. As reminder, you know. Breakup is still a long way off.”

Fixed to a vertical spit in the blaze was a haunch of lynx or wolf he rotated with a ski pole. Above, the firmament was masked by its floor of cloud. A new storm was coming by daylight. This fire augmented with dark the surrounding night. The lard of the haunch cracked in the flame and Slone’s airy gut yawned. The wind raised the bonfire and sent sparks in flight like insects aglow.

“I knew you’d be starved, traveling up from Keelut. Maud said you didn’t eat. We’re out of bread here, you know. Hank ain’t been in with the plane. But we got meat to go ’round. For now.” He paused to turn the spit. “Prey is real scarce this winter. Nothing I’ve seen before. You hungry?”

Slone looked at the meat in the blaze but said nothing.

“I got some potatoes too. I cooked them for us. You’re welcome to one.”

The roasting fatty scent of meat nearly stumbled Slone with hunger. With a hay pick the hunter unloaded the haunch onto a grease-stained square of plywood.

“Come eat,” he said.

His cave had been burrowed into the rock bluff by machine. It stayed lit with kerosene lamps that cast demonic shapes about the concave space, the air dense with the smell of wood smoke. His crude kiln was a steel drum torched open on one side, twelve feet of stovepipe snaking over to the entrance—Slone had to duck to enter—and fastened with wire and galvanized concrete nails hammered into the rock. It threw a dry sauna heat that engulfed the cave.

The hunter dwelled among the heaped and hanging bones of every beast born here, brown and black hides stacked like carpets at a market. A row of
National Geographic
and
Playboy
magazines, decades old, sat piled by a mattress gnawed on by rodents. A Ken doll in a string noose, hanging from a hook. On a wall the chasmal jaws of a bear trap. Wolf skulls by the score. Dozens of wolfish masks made of driftwood and dyed in ochre—they scowled from the wall and rounded vault. The masks were identical to what he’d found beneath Medora’s pillow.

The hunter stripped from his costume to socks and briefs, his bare body muscled and scarred. He had the torso and limbs of a swimmer, though his face proclaimed every day of five decades. Slone sweated fast in the rolling heat of the fire and removed his parka. He sat opposite the hunter, cross-legged on a grizzly skin, eating burned potato and lynx meat from an earthen plate.

There beside the bed of pelts were Medora’s boots, leather and fur, size eight, ordered from a catalog before freeze-up last season. The hunter saw Slone looking at the boots.

“I fixed her a new pair, mukluks with moose and wolf, water-proof lining, knee-high, real good ones. Those ones there are no good where she’s going.”

Slone chewed and nodded. The hunter’s two bolt-action rifles and a single-barrel shotgun poked out from a crate, hunting knives piled on a tree-stump table.

“She knows you’re coming for her. She told me that. She told me too what she did. That’s why she came to me, to answer your question. Counsel, you can call it. She had one of my masks. I don’t know how. I give them away to whoever comes through here and they seem to find who needs them. One way or another. You’re welcome to one. It releases the wolf in you, boy. The wolf we all have in us.”

They ate more in silence.

“How are you from this region, I wonder, with all that yellow hair? You look like a Nordic to me. The woman too. She has your same hair, but a whiter yellow, and she has your face too, I’d say. Ever notice how people who live together for a long while start to resemble each other? That’s why I live alone. I don’t want to look like nobody but me.”

“You let her go from here.”

“It’s not my business what she did. There’s no decree in the country. It don’t reach here. I help who comes asking me. What brings them here and where they go to is nothing to me. I’ve seen plenty of mothers kill their young. You see it out here a lot.”

He passed Slone a wooden jug of water with no handle, chill despite the warmth in the room. Slone drank it half gone and passed it back.

“I remember you, traveler. I remember your father too, when he came here with you. You were a little tyke then, maybe five or six. Don’t you remember that?”

“Why did we come here?”

“To see me. Your father wanted a wolf’s oil. He wouldn’t shoot one himself. So he came to me for the oil. It was for you, this oil. Did you know that? Your father said you were unnatural. Said you had unnatural ways about you. That was his word,
unnatural
. An Indian witch from your village told him a wolf’s oil could cure you, make you normal. Did it work? Are you normal now? I gave him the oil.”

He sliced off another portion of lynx and laid it on Slone’s plate.

“What’d your father mean, you were unnatural? What’s unnatural about you, boy? You look wholesome enough to me.”

“My father is dead. I am alive.”

“Me too. My ancestors on the Yukon worshipped the wolf as a god, you know.”

“Your ancestors are white like mine.”

“On the outside, that’s true.”

“It’s an odd people who will butcher their god.”

“Kill your god and you become your god. For survival, not sport, of course. Look at where you are.”

“I see sport here.”

“I trade them pelts with Hank. He can sell them at the city, mostly marten and lynx he wants. They fetch a good price for him, more than wolverine or wolf. He trades me provisions, brings whatever I might need for the season. That’s called a living, not a sport, I’d say.”

“Tell me where she is.”

“It’s not for me to tell. I’ll feed and clothe a traveler but I don’t meddle. Meddle is for others. There’s no meddle here. The animals and weather have their rules and I obey those.”

They finished their meal without words. The hunter pressed tobacco into a pipe and passed it to Slone. From a flagon he poured moonshine the color and scent of gasoline. When Slone drank from it the liquid hollowed his sternum, sprawled in flame across his stomach. They smoked in quiet. Slone looked to the large hide hanging behind him, a shape and texture and tint he’d never seen before, neither bear nor moose nor caribou. He asked about its origin.