Hold the Dark: A Novel (13 page)

Cheeon’s rear door was locked. Marium waited for Cheeon’s gun to start again before elbowing through a pane of glass. One step in and his boot screeched wet on the pine flooring. He stopped, looked down to lever off the boots onto the mat. And he saw there in the weak gray light what looked like a fishing line strung taut across the room, a foot off the floor. It passed through an eye screw in the baseboard, up the wall and through another eye screw in the crown molding. Over to a pistol-grip twelve-gauge fixed into the corner above the door, behind him, angled down at his head. The trip line girded to its trigger.

The sight of that shotgun, knowing how close he’d just come, felt less like relief than loss. He snipped the line with scissors in a Swiss army knife and felt sure then that he’d be carried from this cabin in a bag.

He squatted there and tried to breathe but his breath would not come. He could hear and feel the gun above in the attic. It vibrated through the walls and floor beams—a buzz that came into his bones. He didn’t know if more men were being hit outside. He thought of the phone call to Susan that Cheeon assured him of when they’d spoken at his door. For many seconds he considered fleeing. Considered waiting for backup. Or else trying to burn this goddamn place to cinders.

There wasn’t anything else to be thought. He’d talked to guys about moments like these. Guys with him on the special unit down in Juneau. Guys from the service who knew. And everyone said the same thing to him: for all we pride ourselves on thinking, at a crossroads with the devil, thinking falls to feeling and feeling starts you moving.

As he squatted there he tried to stay the shakes in his limbs. Then crept in, quiet in his socks, to see where the stairs were. His coat made a nylon scratch beneath the arms when he moved. He peeled it off, let it drop. And there on a hook was a little girl’s pink-hooded jacket, some girlish cartoon thing grinning at him.

Out the front window he could see snow exploding where the rounds smashed the ground, could hear the thunking of lead on metal. Ten steps led up to the attic. Each one took him more time than he needed or wanted. He felt odd in his socks, as if a man had to be wearing boots in order to do this. He knew he couldn’t make the stairs creak. Cheeon had quit shooting—there wasn’t a sound anywhere in the cabin or out.

Three steps from the top he could see Cheeon through the spindles of the railing. He was there smoking at the window of this sharply angled space. The ceiling low enough to touch. The weapon fastened to a tripod bolted into the floor—an M60 machine gun, Marium thought, used in helicopters, on Humvees. Next to it a five-foot heap of ammunition, enough to shoot nonstop all day, into the night if he wanted. Hanging all through the room was the strong scent of the gun. A smell close to the clean oil on new engines, almost pleasant. Hundreds of spent shells scattered the floor, and many rolled to the stairs. Again he could not comprehend where this gun had come from or why.

Marium was level with Cheeon now, over the top step, the carbine trained on his back. He said Cheeon’s name. Cheeon did not tense with surprise, did not turn around right away. He stood there smoking, nodding, surveying all he’d done. He took his time with it.

“They didn’t do so well down there, guy.”

“Turn, Cheeon. Let me see your hands. Let me see ’em now.”

“My hands? Your voice sounds strange, guy. You okay?”

“Turn, Cheeon. Arms out.”

Marium thought:
I will shoot you through the back, you son of a bitch.
Honor, some code of conflict—they did not apply here now.

Cheeon turned then, still smoking, his hands not out. One held the cigarette, the other in a back jeans pocket. Marium had expected a crazed, sweaty face. But Cheeon looked just as he had earlier when they’d talked at his door. He looked like a man resigned to things. A man who had just ended ten or more lives and was okay with wherever that truth placed him on the spectrum before his unsaving god.

Marium knew Cheeon wasn’t walking out of this cabin. His legs quit quaking then because he understood that he himself wasn’t going to die here.

“You stopped that phone call for today,” Cheeon said. “That phone call to your wife. But it’s coming, ain’t it? That phone call’s always coming.”

“Your hands, Cheeon. Put them out. Now.”

When Cheeon took his right hand slowly from his back pocket, Marium saw the nickel of the handgun. Cheeon didn’t raise it at him. Just let Marium see it. Let it hang there at his side against his jeans, tapping it as if to a tune of his own making. The other hand still busy with that cigarette in his lips. His eyes squinting at Marium through smoke.

Marium shot at him full auto. It thrust him back into the open window. The handgun and cigarette dropped to Cheeon’s feet. Marium shot at him more until he fell through and landed on the snow in front of his door. He went to the window and looked down at Cheeon on his back. His eyes were open still and it seemed he was looking. Looking at a wan sky that would not receive him.

* * *

More men arrived—men he knew, some he did not. They searched the village for Slone, for hint of him, but the villagers told them nothing. They found an old woman in her hut, dead in a rocker, a knife wound clean through her throat. No one in Keelut would tell them anything about this old woman. They found no papers, no verification of her name or age, of who she was or had been.

They moved on through the village and found nothing. When they returned to the old woman’s hut to retrieve her she’d been stolen, spirited away for concealment. Or for what else Marium could not know. They checked the village again but could not find her or those who had taken her. He remembered Cheeon telling him, just one hour earlier, that they weren’t alike—not the two men, not this village and the town. Marium knew then that Cheeon was right and wondered what else he was right about.

Hours later, after dark, at the small hospital in town—confusion because nobody there had seen anything close to this before. Wounds they could not make sense of. To Marium it seemed a good thing there was nothing to be done because the staff wouldn’t have been able to do it. Those who died, died in a mess. Those who didn’t walked away unscratched on the outside. The dead had been frozen, stuck to the ground by their blood and entrails. They had to be scraped off the earth with shovels, or else pried up with pickaxes. Marium and the men loaded the bodies in bags into two pickup trucks. Half had been brought here to the hospital and the other half to the morgue, a mix-up he tried to explain.

Not all were back yet from Keelut. Family members of police paced the hospital hallways, unsure who was living and who not. Some spouses wailed, wolflike, when news reached them. Siblings saw Marium come through the emergency entrance in squeaking boots. They clung to him with questions.

“Christ, Don,” someone said, “they told us you were killed.”

He couldn’t guess what
they
he meant but showed this man he was alive by standing there and simply pointing to himself.

Arnie’s wife was there too. Marium reassured her and she thanked him, grabbed his hand hard, as if he had been the one who’d kept her husband living. Marium had to tell some of these family members to go to the morgue because that was where their husbands and brothers now were. Others he told to go to the station to wait because their guys would be there, alive, before long.

In the men’s room of the hospital he knelt and wept, holding the sink for balance. Bent over a water fountain, he drank hungrily for more than a minute, the water too cold over his throat. He could see the snow melting pink beneath his boots, ice pellets of blood crammed in the soles.

Through a clutch of nurses, of doctors, he saw her auburn hair on a bench. When the clutch dispersed he saw her sitting, not blinking at the wall opposite, her face licked by grief, faint mascara trails over her cheekbones. It was only the two of them at that end of the hallway now. She seemed to sense him standing there because she turned. And what came from her then was a quick snort and a smile, almost a laugh, a quick shake of her head before she turned away again and sobbed.

He sat beside her and held her. She didn’t say anything. He buried his face into her hair while she pounded his chest and shoulders. And she kept pounding as they sat there.

“I tried calling. I couldn’t get you.”

“Goddamn it, we need you, goddamn it.”

He knew then the
we
she meant, and he held her again and said, “I’m here.”

* * *

Later that night as she lay sleeping, he sat in his chair and smoked by the cracked window, watched her in the quarter light. He could not know if she was dreaming or how she felt to have such life inside her. But it seemed also the only possible cure for what had happened this day. He’d heard others talk of the numbness after such things, but he felt no numbness now. What he felt was tired through to the marrow, thick through the head as if a cold were coming on. But not numb. Numb would have let him sleep, but sleep just then seemed a peace he’d not soon have again. It was a rare kind of torture, he knew, to be so tired and unable to sleep. He smoked for an hour, waiting for yawns that never came.

That old woman in the village, upright in her rocking chair: Slone had cut her throat straight through to the spine. And that was Marium’s dread as he looked at his sleeping wife and the child inside her. The dread that there are forces in this world you cannot digest or ever hope to have hints of.

There was somebody’s whispered voice in his head, in the quiet of their bedroom, keeping him awake. He thought it was Cheeon’s voice. He had not wanted to do what Cheeon made him do. Killing a man can mean more for the killer than it does for the man killed. Cheeon had let his pistol dangle there in his hand, in the attic of the cabin he’d built with that hand. He let Marium see it, didn’t even have to raise it at him—he just knew. He’d prepared, waited for this, with that machine gun, the tripod bolted to the floor. And it all played out as he had wished. Marium gave him what he’d wanted. And for that he felt shame.

A
strong late summer rain seemed to signal the end of morning. Slone and Bailey were barefoot, shirtless in the cooling shower, single file on narrow hill paths, side by side on wider ones. They wound up and down the trail to stand on shaded boulders at the banks of the storm-gorged creek. The risen current rushed, its surface in full boil. Mosquitoes chased away by storm. They sat on the rock overhang, dangled their legs knee-deep in the creek. In minutes the downpour softened through the sheaved tops of trees and the dripping world grew silent again.

“Mama said you’re going away,” the boy said.

“In a few months. Not so soon.”

“Mama said a long time.”

“A year, maybe a little less. Deployment is that long. You remember deployment?”

“No.”

“It means work. It means money for us.”

“We need money?”

“Yes.”

“Mama said money doesn’t matter.”

“We don’t need much. But we need it.”

“She said you can get money here.”

“Not lately I can’t. No one can. It’s my duty to go there.”

“What’s duty?”

“It means when you’re good at something, and something needs to be done, you have to go do it.”

“For my birthday I’ll be seven.”

“I know. It seems a long time. It’s not so long. I’ll be back when you’re seven and a half.”

Normally clear to its sand bottom, this water had turned dark, dense in its quick swell downstream. A tree limb bobbed closely by like an arm reaching out for rescue. Bailey reached forth his own arm to touch it and Slone held the boy’s belt loop.

“I can swim.”

“I know you can swim. It’s moving fast today.”

“Mama said men kill people in war.”

“You have to, yes.”

“You killed a person before. When I was in mama’s belly.”

“Who told you that?”

“Somebody.”

“Okay, somebody. Somebody who?”

“Somebody.”

Clamor of thunder and then the shuffling of it behind them, so muted it might be above the Yukon or else far into the core of Canada.

“It’s bad to kill people but not bad to kill the caribou.”

“Yes. The caribou keep us alive. Sometimes it’s necessary to kill a person too, if you have to keep alive.”

“What’s necessary?”

“If you have no other choice.”

“You had no other choice.”

“No.”

“You did it to keep us alive?”

“To keep us safe, yes.”

“Who did you kill?”

“A man who would hurt Mama and you.”

“But he didn’t hurt us?”

“No. I hurt him first.”

“And no one missed him?”

“I don’t know that. It wasn’t my job to ask that. Only to protect you and Mama.”

“No one told on you?”

“No one told on me. No one would dare. The village is our family. Do you understand what that means?”

“Yes.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“It means you can count on them. If something’s wrong, or if you have a secret to keep, you count on them to help. That’s what it means.”

“Who?”

“Who what?”

“Who did you hurt?”

“A man who came into our village. He was a drifter.”

“What’s drifter?”

“Like driftwood. See there? That driftwood? It means a wanderer without a home.”

The current’s cool swiftness on their calves came close to massage. The whey sky seemed to sharpen all the green around them.

“How?”

“How did I hurt him, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“With a knife.”

“You like your knife,” and he turned to smile up at his father. He then smacked the water with a stick and Slone held tight to the boy’s belt loop.

“Mama said Cheeon helped you.”

“Cheeon helped me.”

“He’s my family?”

“Yes.”

“He’s my friend?”

“Always. You’re full of questions today.”

Across the creek a buck and its doe moved through alders dripping in the storm’s stay. Slone pointed for the boy to look and, not speaking, they looked until the deer ducked from view.