Hold the Dark: A Novel (15 page)

Slone dropped him then. Medora felt the vagrant’s body thump against the floor. She looked at Slone rained-on with blood and heaving with breath from the run. She knew then that more trouble could not be stopped.

Slone and Cheeon mopped the mess. She watched from the bed. Before they drove the wastrel into the valley Slone gave her a handgun—it was the same gun he’d taught her to shoot with when they were ten years old, firing at pumpkins on a fallen tree. He instructed her to shoot the next person who came through their door. “If that person isn’t me,” he added. All the while she sat up in bed with the wolf mask in her hands, on her belly, feeling the points of its whittled teeth.

When the men left, she raised the mask to her face and tied it on.

* * *

The boy was born at noon in their cabin, Medora assisted by her mother and village midwives, one of them Yup’ik. Her given name, long and guttural, had been truncated to Lu. She ordered Slone and Cheeon and the other men outdoors, where they smoked and paced, wordless and put-upon, hours yet from celebration, heavy from the fatigue of cold and waiting.

Twenty-two below zero and Lu instructed Medora’s mother to open the windows and doors for the release of black spirits snared within these walls, to provide free passage for their ancestors, for them to enter, to bless, to aid in the arrival. In a corner, the hag rocked in a chair eating crackers, white crumbs stuck to her shawl, in one hand an amulet she’d fashioned from bone.

In front of the fire, on a woven circular rug covered with bedsheets, the six women knelt, crouched about Medora with white towels and basins of water, a sterilized straight razor and shears. They gripped her limbs. Lu knelt bare-handed at the center in the leakage, singing her language no one could sing but still seemed to comprehend. The hag said nothing through this long torment, only crunched her crackers, rubbed her amulet and rocked.

Medora’s mother had made a bone-colored paste of aloe and oils from a wolf’s organs. Lu daubed it now thickly on Medora’s center as the others talked her through this with directions to breathe and blow, the pressure in her anus like a phantom defecation.

The hearth heat and stink of fluid hung strong even with the open windows and doors. The women sweated prodding out the boy. Medora wept and yelled and looked to her mother as the bottom pressure built and would not abate. She thrashed her hair in their laps, crying she could not do it—it had been hours and she could not.

Lu motioned for two women to stand and each took a leg behind the knee and pressed it back toward Medora. The pressure in her rent, Lu’s naked fingers pulling her wide and shouting the same word no one but the hag knew. When the child crowned, Medora’s cries cut through the village and the men outside knew it was soon.

The boy’s oblong head was exposed now, turtle-like, slimed in silent squall. The birth cord was noosed about the neck, his body lodged there, bloodied in partial freedom despite Medora’s pushing. Still crooning, Lu motioned for the razor while Medora bucked with her head back in her mother’s lap, her eyes crimped closed. Another woman readied the morphine needle and plunged it fast into her hip.

Lu lifted, pulled at the child’s head. With the razor she opened Medora one inch more. A rush of bright blood and Medora dropped limp into blackness while Lu pried a finger beneath the looped cord and stretched it away enough to cut through.

The child was unstuck now and with a pinkie Lu hooked into his mouth, trying to clear his airway. She then rinsed him there in the basin—his first cry a pule—as the others stanched Medora’s bleeding with car-wash sponges and tied off the cord. When the placenta slid loose, Lu instructed a woman to place it in the hearth to burn as an offering to ancestors. The others sewed Medora closed.

“This child is cursed already,” her mother said, and she and Lu looked to the hag in the corner but she was gone.

Lu attempted to latch the boy to Medora but his cries came wild now for lack of milk. On the sofa Lu sat and put the child to her own full breast—wet nurse and mother of eight, she was never dry—and the boy fed weakly first and then in greed.

At the front door a constellation of men’s faces, Slone’s uncertain between joy and dread. Lu waved him in, only him, and he stood over his son and could not believe his ample hair—he’d always thought babies bald. He went to Medora, unconscious on the rug. The women mending her looked up and waved him away in a gesture indicating all was well or would soon be. Medora’s mother would not look at him.

When they finished, Slone carefully lifted Medora and carried her to their bedroom, where two women wrapped her in towels and down covers, then stayed with her through the day and night. Her mother stood at the window as if waiting, wanting something, some force to fly in and halt her daughter’s woe. In the main room on the sofa Slone held his slumbering boy, this wrinkled elf he’d made, intoxicated by the taintless scent of his head, his breathing in the swaddle no different from that of a newborn pup.

“It almost killed her,” her mother said to Slone. “Almost killed the both of them.”

“She’s alive,” he said. “We’re all alive.”

An immense fire raged in a stone pit at the center of the village, revelers dancing around its forked girth. Yup’ik supplicants chanted, drummed in celebration, pleaded to gods and ancestors for this boy’s weal. They tossed bags of tobacco into the flame for sacrifice, drinking from carafes of gin and joyous in the freeze. Sled dogs yelped at the noise. The crouching clouds promised more snow but the villagers danced undeterred. Women brought frozen char and bricks of caribou sawed from a meat pole. They cooked over barrels and soon everyone ate with blessings and thanks.

Slone would hold his boy daily, at daybreak and after twelve-hour toil in the mine, while Medora slept recovering, indifferent to the child who spurned her breast. Lu remained there in their cabin during daylight; Medora’s mother and a Yup’ik woman stayed till dawn. Slone whispered to his wife but she would not whisper back. Some sinister force had seized her, a sorrow fed by fear—it responded to no balm he knew. Her appetite was gone, her voice distorted, and at night came the inscrutable mumbling of the half possessed, even as the child wailed from his room till the wet nurse fed him.

On his monthly rounds a young white doctor arrived from town to see Medora and the boy, to inspect the suture, take notes on a clipboard. With his good haircut and teeth, his city-bought clothes and boots, he was clearly not of this village. He left blue pain pills, syringes, more vials of morphine. He told Slone to give her one week more to rebound—some women, he said, spiral inside themselves postpartum.

“It will pass,” Medora heard him say to Slone. She did not have the voice to tell this doctor that some afflictions can’t pass.

What infected her was beyond all ransom, some warp in the fabric of things. As she lay for weeks in bed, turned to the ashen winter light at the window, she could not know what had been loosed within her, how her covenant with the world had been cut. Her mother and Slone and others seemed just dark streaks streaming in and out of rooms.

What she saw, she saw with fogged eyes—eyes somehow clouded over in distortion of all she knew. She saw peculiar eddies of dark and day. Sitting on the toilet was an agonizing effort, brushing her teeth and changing clothes impossible, the baby’s pules very far from her, this new prison without clues of any kind.

Morphine plugged the rip in her, blocked all visions of the vagrant who had come to her in warning. Slone refused to give the morphine at night but Lu gave it twice daily while the baby slept. It was the only time Medora could stop staring at such pain. Her entire past seemed to point at this fray.

The vagrant failed to go away. She constructed false memories of him in her girlhood, could see him there in pockets of her past. Every wanderer who’d ever come through Keelut now had his gaze, his gait, his reek of wood smoke. Every one of them was now a harbinger of this day. In her opiate dreams she could see herself—at five with pigtails, at eight with a ponytail, at ten with hair pruned to her chin—see herself in the hills above the village. Rushing through green and white, fleeing or pursuing, she could not be sure.

She knew she didn’t want sleep to stop. Waking brought a dullness, a deadening she grated against. The baby’s howl and Slone’s voice too seemed to emanate from some other cabin, from some other season in her mind.

The midnight impulses began then: standing naked at the window, motionless before a winter dark punctured by moon. Her hand on the glass as if trying to press through it.

Months tarried on in this manner before she began a partial exit from this place, that suspension between living and something else. The first day she was alone with her child she fought an urge to toss him into the fire. She was convinced that his birth meant the death of her.

I
n the heated hangar at the mining camp, Slone packed his gear into the innkeeper’s truck. He checked to make sure the tire chains were tight, filled the tank with fuel from a can, then loaded the can into the hatch.

Medora’s red Blazer sat beside it, pocked and dulled beneath a solitary bulb dangling from a chain. Slone searched her truck, under the seats and floor mats, in the ashtray and glove box. Both back seats were folded down. He knew she’d slept here on her way to the mining camp and he ran his nose along the carpet, trying to smell hint of her.

Leaning against the truck, he smoked and watched the gray pall waft up and cohere inside the bowl of the bulb’s metal shade. The hunter’s blood remained flecked across the toe of his boot. He slid open the hangar’s entrance and stood looking beyond his breath at this castaway place, then got in the truck to leave.

In the headlamps just outside the hangar he saw her, the innkeeper in untied boots and eyeglasses, in a nightgown under a woolen overcoat with no hood. Her hair wild, rifle aimed at the windshield, her face like a starved convict. The first shot punctured the glass to the left of his head. He swerved to miss her, instinctively ducked over the gearshift, the night a dark mass beyond the reach of the truck’s high beams.

The shots came fast now into the truck, into the side windows and doors. He stretched for the pistol grip of the shotgun in the passenger’s footwell but could not grasp it. The front axle scraped over a drift of hardened snow and the grille scraped against a mound of cinder block beneath a tarpaulin tied by rope.

When he righted the truck and spun she was no longer there, but he did not slow. The shot entered from the left dark, just behind him, through the window and seat and into his shoulder blade. A spasm jagged into his neck. The singe of lead, the sudden pressure in his abdomen, the need to urinate.

Lamps were beginning to burn again inside these shoddy homes, a floodlight now in glare from the high gable of the inn. The silhouettes of men and barrels, their hollers at him. More rifle rounds into the rear of the truck. He sped slipping on the rutted street to the access road at the far end of the camp, and in the dark he found the path back toward Keelut.

* * *

Hours later he halted at a junction in the wilderness. To his right was a snow-canopied path like a portal, one that would in several more miles open to the road north of town. He knew where he was now. At thirteen years old he and Cheeon had stolen his father’s raised pickup and four-wheeled down this hidden byway, so muddied from spring’s thaw. The mud sprayed out from the tires in billows, spattered the truck end to end, the wipers waving on high, two boys high-fiving in glee.

He paused now and lifted his clothes to see the blood pooled at the waistband of his thermals and pants. His shirt was fused to the skin of his back. He stood in snow to his shins and relieved himself there, his face aimed at a sky unseen and speckled with flakes, his mouth open for the gelid air. The wind wheezed through skeletal boles and branches with snow atop like icing. Then the wind fled west and there came a heavy quiet.

He scooped a plastic jug through untouched snow and set it on the dashboard heater to melt. After he drank he scooped more snow, every bit as thirsty as he’d been in the desert. And he listened to the quiet. In this land everything listened. The wilderness within and without. His father had told him that wolves can hear one another across three miles.

They can hear each other howl?
he asked.

And his father said,
No, they can hear each other breathe.

* * *

Shan Martin’s place was south toward Keelut, twenty miles outside town, a fuel station, garage, and motel, nothing more. South the road connected to town and the highways, and north it led loggers, hunters, and fishermen farther into the bush. Shan and his father had left Keelut eleven years ago to run this business, for three hundred miles the last access to a bed or fixed transmission.

Slone arrived near ten p.m. and saw the two-bay garage lit inside, heard a radio singing. Through pulled drapes the motel rooms flickered with television light. In the lot sat a Mack semi, pickups salt-stained from highways, disabled cars cloaked in snow, a camouflaged four-wheeler with a frozen deer roped to a rack, its tongue in loll, eyes still looking.

Through a fogged window of the bay door he saw Shan smoking beneath the hood of a Jeep with knobby tires. He entered through the side door, entered into the wall of warmth, and said Shan’s name. When Shan turned it took him several seconds to say anything, and then “Jesus Christ” was all he could utter.

Slone smelled grease and oil, the rubber of new tires. The radio gurgled an awful noise, an anthem for cowhands. Eviscerated trucks, orphaned engine parts everywhere. A new Polaris snow machine strapped to a trailer, plastic gas cans strapped behind it. The orange warmth came from a radiant heater overhead. Hung crookedly above the workbench was a year-old calendar with a half-nude model astride a motorcycle.

Shan was rounder, shorter now than when Slone had last seen him, years ago. A shaved head, tattoo of something behind his ear—a spider. Silver rings on every finger.