Hold the Dark: A Novel (8 page)

She was ready to read his expression:
Use this next time
.
Kill any man, any person who tries to bring you harm.
And she took the knife from him then. This gift. For a reason known only to her, she brought it to her nose to sniff its metal and hilt. She stood from the table and tucked the knife into her unclean garb. She looked to the body at her feet and spat onto it. She reached for Slone’s right hand, tarry with the soldier’s blood, and turned it over to inspect his palm. With her index finger she traced an invisible letter or sign no one but she would ever know.

Then she limped barefoot from the rear of the house and disappeared into roving smoke.

* * *

Russell Core’s motel room smelled of two weeks of sickness, a
DO NOT DISTURB
tag warning away eager maids from the doorknob. Take-out food plastic from the one Chinese restaurant in town. Damp towels over chairs, a bed disrupted. Newspapers fallen on a floor more concrete than carpet, crinkled bottles of springwater in the trash. Torn packages of flu medicine, balled tissues, mugs of tea for the burn in his throat. On the dresser a chipped ceramic figure of a grinning Hawaiian girl in grass skirt and lei—Core could not decide if this was a joke or not.

For three days after the hunt his legs and back had ached, painful even to step to the toilet—an insistent reminder of his unfitness and age. His sleep was long and hazy with sickness. He’d wake not knowing the day, fight to recall which month this was. After several minutes not moving he’d remember: the dead boy, Medora Slone, his own wife no longer herself. A daughter he needed to see.

Since finding the boy he’d waited for two weeks for the return of Vernon Slone. He waited for a call that would finally tell of his wife’s death. But no one knew where he was. He slept away those shortened days, mildly frightened of a sky that gray, of whatever impulse had led him to this place.

Back from the morgue now, he understood that he had waited for nothing. His daughter’s phone number and address were folded in his wallet like a invitation sent to the wrong man. There was nothing Vernon Slone wanted from him, not another fact he could feed this family’s horror.

And if Slone had asked him for an explanation? Would he have accepted the facts Core had to tell, the facts he knew of the wild? Those facts he had learned were no help here—no help to Slone and no help to himself. Awake in the night, the memory of Medora Slone’s scent strong in him, he studied starlight from the window. What Medora had done was observable in nature. He’d seen it himself among starved wolves in the north. It was a fact he knew. But a fact that could do nothing to describe this.

The stale motel room around him, and the end or start of something else now, a new direction he couldn’t gauge. Core unlatched the window, an eight-paned iron relic he had thought long extinct, ferns of frost on its glass. He swung it open into the outer black to let the cold clean this room. He knelt before the dark, his tears consumed now by a chaotic beard. He attempted his prayer but the words would not come to him, so completely had he lost them, so surely was he numbered among the damned. He stayed there at the open window until the night’s cold turned to novocaine, until he found exhaustion enough to sleep again.

* * *

Behind the hills of Keelut, Slone and Cheeon dug at the rear of a graveyard hidden in a clearing between two expanses of wood. A wolf keened from deep in the valley beyond, and from low branches of cedar, owls watched this midnight’s work. They dug sideways into the embankment of snow with shovels and pickaxes, clearing a temporary tomb. Without equipment the ground was impossible to pierce now. Their labor was illuminated by the truck’s headlights, snow swirling in the beams as if insects at a lamp in summer. The dark beyond seemed more than night, seemed a deliberate negation of day.

As boys they’d hunted here in autumn and winter, lynx and grouse, even though they’d been forbidden by their fathers to take game where the dead lay. Proper burial for the boy would have to wait till after breakup when the ground softened. For now Slone’s son belonged in this ancient earth of the village with his forebears. The boy’s grandfather, Slone’s own father, was buried just yards from here, in a hole chiseled down into the earth by these same two men. All the graves and gravestones concealed now by drifts of new fall.

They swung the pickaxes into the bank of snow. Side by side they seemed railway workers who have absorbed each other’s rhythm. They did not stop for water or smoke. Slone’s neck and shoulder wounds ached with each swing. The boy lay on the snow in his bag, in hushed witness to his father’s work.

Halfway through the thickest layer, Cheeon left the grave to Slone and went to the truck’s bed to carpenter the boy’s coffin. Three sheets of plywood, a handsaw and hammer, a tape measure and a score of tenpenny nails, pencil behind his ear, lantern perched on a toolbox giving some light. What he fashioned so quickly was just a box. But it was even and tight and all they could offer till they had more light and time, till the thaw came.

Slone stopped five feet into the bank. Out of the hole, he drank from the thermos Cheeon had taken from the cab and tossed to him.

They unzipped the boy from the bag and placed him in the box. Slone touched his face, turned away, and could not resist a second time. He then hammered on the lid, twenty-two nails. Over the coffin Cheeon grabbed for Slone’s left arm, rolled the sleeves to the elbow, and slid a pocketknife blade diagonal across his forearm. He squeezed until globs of blood pooled like wax at the head of the box, then with a naked finger inscribed a glyph that looked part wolf, part raven—a symbol taught to him by his Yup’ik mother. Slone did not ask what the marking was meant to ward off or welcome, but trusted his boy was protected beneath it.

They carried and slid the box into the cubby they’d made, then took up shovels again to conceal what lay within.

* * *

His home, the cabin he’d built, was girdled in police tape. Slone stood at the front door and looked. The boy’s sneakers by the portable heater, his tiny snow boots. Winter coat on a hook. The lightbulb above him blinked and dimmed. He stepped in, the bones of the cabin made taut by cold, by the absence of human warmth. They creaked beneath his feet. He clicked on the electric heater, pulled wood from under the tarp on the rear porch, stacked it thick and high in the hearth. Then he started kindling in the stove, blew the flame to life until he could no longer see his breath.

He stepped toward the sofa still in his coat. A whirling, a rocking on feet half numb. The black snap of the bulb above him. Then Slone was falling, asleep before he could feel the sofa catch his weight.

Awake before dawn, he poured boiling water on freeze-dried coffee. He knew that at first light the dead men behind the morgue would be found, and then he’d have scant time before police arrived here for him. Three or four hours in this weather, five tops. He stood in the root cellar to see the hole where the wolf writer had found his boy. He moved near to touch it, to smell the cold of it.

A meal of old eggs and hardened bread—he tasted nothing—and at the table he opened the folder of documents on Medora. A police report in faded ink. Photographs of his boy on the floor of the cellar. Where the Chevy Blazer might have been seen. Map of the highway between cities and east toward Yukon, a single blacktop artery with paved and unpaved roads branching off like capillaries.

On the map red dots indicating a possible direction. Many roads, he saw, were not marked, were unknown to townsfolk and cops, most no more than paths trimmed through a hide of birch and alder, unseen from the air. Both he and Medora had been on those hidden paths since childhood, since they’d first learned to ride snow machines, four-wheelers, dirt bikes. Wherever she’d fled, she’d fled, he knew, on those paths. He lit the folder at a corner, blew on the flame till it rose, then dropped it in the hearth to burn.

Aspirin for the ache in his shoulder, then more coffee. He stood at his wife’s bureau and turned over each sheet of paper, each envelope. Unwashed laundry in a wicker basket by his foot: he brought her socks and underthings to his nose and mouth and inhaled the dank scent of her. At the bottom of the basket was the boy’s T-shirt, a red race car with a bumper face that smiled—it still held his child’s smell. Slone slipped it into his jacket pocket. In the bedroom he emptied her dresser and stripped the bed. Beneath her pillow an Inuit shaman’s mask made of driftwood and pelt—the face of a wolf.

He sat on his son’s bed. He looked and looked more and did not blink. Outside, the morning moved without him.

He began filling duffel bags. Socks and gloves, thermal leggings and insulated overalls. A hunting knife, ammunition, clips, cartridges. Compound bow and quiver. Maglite and rope. Field glasses. From the bathroom: ibuprofen, antibiotics, aspirin, bandages, peroxide, razor blades, stool softener. In the hollow floor of the closet a compartment of firearms: 9mm handgun, twelve-gauge autoloader, Remington rifle that had belonged to his father. The AR-15 semiautomatic he found near the back door: what the wolf man had taken on his hunt.

Cheeon had disentombed his Bronco from snowfall, changed the battery and fluids, filled the tank, draped the engine with an electric blanket to warm it back from death. Into the back hatch Slone loaded the duffels and guns. Blankets, a pillow, two containers of gas, snow boots. Pickaxe, shovel, chain saw. A sack of nonperishables with peanut butter, crackers, chocolate. The truck turned over with the first crank of the key and Slone let the engine rev and warm, the windshield and rear defrosters droning on high. He loaded the pistol and tucked it into his belt, then the shotgun and placed it beneath the seat.

Then he made for the old woman.

* * *

The village’s main road was vacant this soon after dawn. In the year he’d been gone nothing he could see had changed here. The men and boys had left already for hunting, or to check their lines in the holes they’d drilled at the lake. Women tended to children and chores inside their cabins. A team of sled dogs staked beside a home stood in silence when they saw him and lay down again as he passed. The old woman’s hut sloped beside the generator shack. It had been there since long before he was a boy, behind the well house—a place they’d all avoided as children.

When he entered she was upright in a chair at the mouth of the fire, rocking among distaff and debris, among cordwood, pelts, stacks of leather-bound books arrayed as furniture. In this single-room hut the heavy stench of wood smoke, of boiled moose, unwashed flesh. On the back wall an old wrinkled poster of a soccer player in mid-kick. No appliances, just that woodstove, a teakettle and pot on top of it. Slone closed out the mass of cold behind him and slid the serrated blade from his boot.

“Vernon Slone,” she said. “You came home, Vernon.” She looked to the blade in his hand. “You come now to punish the old witch. But I am no witch. I knew you’d come. You’re home now, Vernon Slone.”

He stepped toward her and considered her pleated neck, the fire’s light in her eyes, her jowls in divots from some childhood scourge.

She pointed to a crate overturned at her stumped feet. “Sit,” she said, and he did—he sat close enough to smell the filth of her.

“You think I could have saved the boy, me an old woman? You think I knew? I’ve known things since before your father’s birth. But nothing I know has mattered. Go to your father’s grave, ask him yourself. Ask the spirits. Take your wrath to the gods, to the wolves, not an old woman. Take it to yourself if you want to be rid of this, Vernon Slone.”

In her hands a fabric doll, without nose or mouth—something meant to hex or help.

“It was foretold in the ice, that boy’s fate. Hers as well, from the start. There was nothing an old woman could do. Punish yourself. The both of you. You left this place for war, Vernon Slone. You should have died there. There in the sand. That was your fate. You chose not to accept it. So this, this is what you come home to.”

She shook the doll at him, then placed it on a mound of books beside her. Wood snapped in the hearth and the fire flared against the polish of Slone’s blade. She pointed to a table near him. “My pills,” she said, and he passed her the prescription bottle, medicine brought once a month by a doctor in town. Her hands trembled as she uncapped the bottle, as she placed a pill on her tongue and swallowed without water.

“This wasn’t the first time the wolves came to Keelut. The elders here remember it as I do. We were children. What came before the wolves, the white man called it Spanish flu. We called it
peelak
. Half this village died in it. Half, I tell you. The sickness got the brain, the lungs, the belly. No one has told you this history, Vernon Slone, your own history here?”

He sat and said nothing.

“It was winter and some, like my father, those who held memories from the coast, they made snow igloos behind the hill. We kept the bodies there, protected there. A hundred bodies. Two hundred. No one would come here to help us. No one would dare come here to help. Each morning we’d wake to new death in the huts of this village. People drowned. Drowned in their own fluid. Their lungs filled with the sickness. Or their brains burned from the fever. They leaked from the bowels. They leaked day and night and were too weak to move.”

She leaned forward in the rocker.

“We could smell them. My father told me to stay away but I could see, see him carry a man, almost dead, this man, carry him to a sled. Pull the sled around the hill to the snow igloos they made there. This man I saw wasn’t dead. He looked at me shivering, his eyes very alive. My father and others, they stacked him in the igloo with the dead. He died there very soon. He died there with the dead, moaning in the cold with the dead. I could hear him over the hill.”

When she motioned for the jug of water on the floor, Slone passed it to her handle-first.

“The moans in the night were very bad. We stayed awake in bed listening, my sister and me, cuddled in the same bed, we listened. The blanket over our heads to keep the sickness out. And we listened, we did. Once when my father was trying to save a woman, he sent my sister and me, sent us to the creek to cut the ice for water. We hurried to do this. In dark and cold we hurried and chopped the ice for him. You know what we heard?”