Raven Stole the Moon (17 page)

Yes. Put it behind us. Put it away. Don’t think about it. Don’t remember. Nothing is what it used to be. We must move forward, not backward. We must put it behind us.

The phone rang, a loud clanging that made Jenna’s heart jump. It rang again. She stared at it wondering if it could be someone calling to tell her all of this was a mistake. That they had taken the wrong boy. Bobby was on his way home and would be there soon.

She lifted the receiver.

“Hello?” she asked.

But there was nothing, only silence.

“Hello?” she said again.

Vast emptiness, absence of sound.

“Hello? Is anyone there?”

A
CRUISE SHIP HAD ANCHORED A FEW HUNDRED YARDS FROM
the island before dawn, and all morning orange and white skiffs shuttled tourists to and from the dock in front of the Stikine Inn. Jenna walked past a line of children selling chipped garnets and salmon jerky and threaded her way through town to the marina.

Eddie was down at the marina. The fishing boat he worked on that was usually up in Chignik had come back to Wrangell for a couple of weeks before the next halibut opening, and Eddie wanted to help out the guys as best he could. Jenna spotted the boat,
Sapphire Moon
, which was much smaller than she had imagined. The guys were sitting around on the deck drinking beers. Eddie had his shirt off and Jenna saw that the sun had baked him to a deep, brick red color. She walked up to the boat and said hello.

Eddie jumped up and offered his hand to help her onboard. The other guys, there were five of them, perked up and introduced themselves one by one. Marc, Chuck, Joel, Rolfe, Jamie. Jamie was the youngest and he was the only one to slip on his T-shirt when he saw Jenna. The other guys weren’t embarrassed to let their big, hairy bellies stick out over their pants.

“Beer?” one of them offered.

“No thanks.”

They all shuffled around a bit. Eddie pushed aside a lumpy plastic bag and gestured for Jenna to sit next to him. She did.

“Did you find Oscar?”

Jenna shook her head. “No. I looked everywhere. I hope the sheriff didn’t find him and shoot him.”

“He might shoot
at
him,” one of the guys said. “But he wouldn’t
hit
him. He’d close his eyes and pull the trigger and pray to God he didn’t shoot off his own foot.” They all laughed.

“He’ll turn up,” Eddie offered hopefully. He pointed to the plastic bag. “And if he doesn’t, that only means more halibut cheeks for us.”

“Halibut cheeks for dinner?” Jenna loved halibut cheeks. Sweet, chewy meat, simmered in butter and wine.

Eddie nodded. “Marc skimmed off a few pounds for the crew.”

Marc, the one with the grin, was a big guy with a big red beard. He leaned back and stroked his chest.

“Have to take care of the crew. One for us, two for them,” he explained, showing how he divided the spoils. “Hell, they’re only good when they’re fresh anyway. Had a couple right there in the Sound.”

“Raw?” Jenna asked.

“Sure, raw. The only way. Right, Rolfe?”

Rolfe was sitting back with a bigger grin than Marc, nodding his head. Wedged in his lips was a small joint.

Jenna looked around at the boat, an old white seiner. It smelled of oil and seaweed and the deck had been polished to a slippery rink by years of weather and wear. But despite its old age, the boat was comfortable and confident. Jenna had heard fishing stories from her uncles, about the dangers and rigors and how easy it is to lose men over the side in the rough seas. But judging by the way these men almost refused to get off the boat even though it was their vacation, she could imagine that the boat became more than a home away from home. It was home and mother all wrapped into one.

“What happened to your legs?” Jamie, the young one with the T-shirt, asked. He had noticed that Jenna was scratching her leg before Jenna did. Jenna looked down and saw how bad the scratches looked.

“I got lost in the woods and then I got scared. I thought someone was chasing me and I ran through some sticker bushes.”

“Heard footsteps?” one of the others asked.

Jenna smiled and nodded sheepishly. “I’m from the city. I’m not used to the sounds of the woods.”

“It happens all the time. When you’re alone in the woods, the footsteps always come.”

Everyone nodded in agreement.

“Maybe it was a kushtaka.”

Jenna spun around. The kushtaka. It was Rolfe, the guy with the joint, which was so small now it almost burned his lips. He was sitting on a tackle box, leaning against the winch mast. The sun was in his eyes and he squinted so much she couldn’t see if he had eyes at all. One leg was bent, with a beer can delicately balanced on its knee. The other leg had a long, skinny foot on the end of it, sticking out of wet jeans.

“The kushtaka?” Jenna asked.

He raised his eyebrows, took the joint out of his lips, and flicked it into the water.

“From ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night. Good Lord, deliver us!”

Rolfe reached into a cooler next to him and pulled out another beer. He cracked it open and the spray shot across the deck, hitting Marc, who laughed.

“What’s a kushtaka?” Jenna asked. She wanted to confirm the old woman’s legend. See if the five-dollar story was the real thing.

“Indian legend,” Rolfe answered. “They’re like werewolves.”

“But what
are
they?”

“They’re half man, half otter. They can change shape into anything. That’s why you should never follow a stranger in the woods. He might be a kushtaka, come to steal your soul.”

Okay, Jenna thought, that jibes. Half man, half otter. Lost in the woods. Footsteps. Changing shape. Very good. Like the old woman said. Like the man that Jenna met on Mount Dewey. Everyone’s in sync, here. No need to beat it to death.

“Rolfe, man, knock it off. Can’t you see you’re getting her scared?” Eddie put his arm around Jenna’s shoulder.

Rolfe shrugged unenthusiastically and slipped another joint between his lips. “I’m just saying . . .” He lit the joint with a lighter. “If you’re alone in the woods, and you hear footsteps, you better take care the kushtaka don’t get you. That’s all.”

“There are no kushtaka, man,” Eddie said with a snort. “I’ve been lost in these woods a hundred times and I know. It’s just a ghost story.”

“Oh, yeah? Tell that to Whitey Jorgenson,” Rolfe said.

“Who’s Whitey Jorgenson?” Jenna asked.

“You remember Whitey, don’t you, Eddie? His dad, Nils Jorgenson, had a piece of land out by the Institute? Had a few head of milk cows? Ol’ Nils, he was caught by the kushtaka.”

Eddie groaned and sat down on the rail. “Rolfe, man, you and your stories.”

“I’m not gonna tell no story.”

“Tell the story,” Jenna said.

“Well . . .” Rolfe cleared his throat. “If Jenna here wants to hear it, I’ll tell it. But not if Eddie’s gonna be all mad at me.”

“Just tell it,” Eddie groaned.

“Okay,” Rolfe said, ”I guess I will.” He looked around at everyone on the deck. “Ol’ Nils Jorgenson kept some milk cows, see, and he would sell the milk in town. He and his wife and Whitey, who was a baby at the time, lived out by the Institute. You been out there?”

Jenna shook her head.

“It’s the old Indian school, a couple miles past town. Anyway, they had a farm out there with no electricity or nothing. So, one morning, Nils goes out to milk the cows, and two of them are missing. Gone. And where they used to be standing was nothing but two puddles of blood.

“Nils figures it was Indian poachers, stealing his cows. So the next night, he gets his shotgun and waits for them to come back. He stays up all night, but around dawn he can’t stay awake anymore and he nods off. When he wakes up, two more of his cows are gone. Same way. Nothing but puddles of blood.

“Well, now Nils is mad. The next night he takes a stool and puts it on top of a real tall box and he climbs up there with his shotgun and he waits. Sure enough, around dawn, he falls asleep again, but this time he falls off the box and wakes himself up when he hits the ground. And you know what he sees? He sees four or five men on one of his cows and they’re chewing on the cow’s neck and the blood is going everywhere. And when the cow is finally dead, they drag it off and start on another one.

“So Nils stands up and points his shotgun right at the back of one of their heads and says, ‘You’re going to hell, poacher.’ And just as he’s gonna blow the stranger’s head off, the man turns around and it’s Nils’s brother. He’d drowned a couple years earlier out fishing. You can ask Eddie about that. He knows about Nils’s brother.”

Rolfe looked at Eddie, who rolled his eyes and shrugged. Rolfe went on:

“So, Nils says to his brother, ‘I thought you drowned.’

“ ‘Nope,’ says the brother. ‘These nice folks saved me. Come on, let me show you where I live.’

“And off ol’ Nils goes with his brother.

“Well, the next morning Nils’s wife is going crazy. Now all the cows are gone and her husband is gone, too. She’s afraid the poachers are gonna come after
her
next, so that night she sleeps with a butcher knife in her bed to protect herself.

“In the middle of the night, Nils’s wife wakes up because she hears a noise in the house. Someone’s broken in and she’s scared to death. But then she hears her husband’s voice. He’s come back.

“ ‘Honey,’ he says, ‘I’m back. I found my brother, he’s not dead after all. He took me to where he’s staying and it’s real beautiful there. I’ve come back to get you.’

“Well, the wife is so happy, she reaches for the lantern to light it.

“ ‘We don’t need a lantern,’ Nils says.

“ ‘I’ll trip and fall if I can’t see,’ his wife says, and she lights it. Well, when she turns the light on her husband, she see’s what’s going on. It’s her husband, all right, but he’s got beady little eyes and pointy little teeth and this look of evil about him so much that the wife almost has a heart attack. See, she’s heard the Indians tell the story of the kushtaka. She knows that they’re otters that can change into any form. But the only thing they can’t change about themselves is their eyes and their teeth.

“Well, the wife is so scared, she grabs the knife she has in the bed and stabs Nils with it. Stabs him right in the heart. Kills him on the spot. And she grabs little Whitey and runs out of that house screaming bloody murder all the way to town.

“When she gets to some folks, she tells them that she murdered her husband because he was a kushtaka. They all laugh. See, like Eddie, nobody believed in the kushtaka. So they all go out to the farmhouse to see what really went on, and when they get there, ol’ Nils is gone. But you know what they find?”

Rolfe leaned in to Jenna and looked her square in the eyes.

“They find a furry little otter laying on the floor next to the bed. And I’ll be damned if that otter ain’t got a big old butcher knife sticking right out of its heart.”

Rolfe leaned back, crushed his beer can, and tossed it into the water.

“That night, Nils’s wife burned that otter. That’s the only way to keep a soul from getting captured by the kushtaka. That’s why the Tlingit always burn their dead. So their souls won’t get stolen by the kushtaka.”

There was silence on the boat for a moment. Jenna looked around and sensed that everyone else had been sucked in like she was. Sucked into believing for a moment.

“Hey, Eddie,” Marc called out. “Show her your teeth so she don’t think you’re one of ’em.”

All the guys leaned back and laughed as the tension was released. Even Eddie grinned at Jenna, pulling his mouth open with his fingers and revealing his teeth and gums. But Jenna didn’t relax like the rest of them. Her mind was going fast. She knew something they didn’t. Otter teeth and otter eyes. Change faster than you can blink. A little hairy squirrel boy. A bear cub. A man. It can change into anything. But it can’t change its black eyes or its pointy teeth. She tried to shake herself out of it. Eddie touched her arm.

“You okay?” he asked.

She looked at him and smiled. “Yeah, I just get all scared at stuff like that. I had to sleep with the lights on for a year after I saw
The Omen.”

Everyone laughed. Rolfe leaned back into his stoned reclining position and Jamie got another beer. Jenna turned to Eddie.

“I’m going to look for Oscar some more and wander around for a while. Are we really having halibut cheeks tonight?”

“You got it.”

Jenna climbed onto the dock and turned to wave good-bye. Behind the boat she could see a small island in the middle of the bay. Tourists from the cruise ship milled about on the island, on which stood a large wooden house and several totem poles.

“What’s that?” Jenna asked, pointing to the island.

Eddie turned and looked.

“Shakes Island. Chief Shakes was the big Tlingit chief around here. Actually, I think the last one died only about twenty years ago, or something. You should check it out. It’s Wrangell’s big tourist attraction.”

Jenna nodded. “Maybe I’ll head over there. See you guys. Thanks for the story, Rolfe.”

Rolfe saluted her as she headed up the dock back to town.

J
ENNA WAS STARVING
so she decided to go into the diner on Main Street for some lunch. The diner was crowded with women smoking and drinking coffee. Jenna took a seat at the counter. She ordered a bowl of split pea soup, which was surprisingly good even though the croutons were a little too buttery.

About halfway through her bowl, a young man took the stool next to hers and ordered a cheeseburger. He was carrying a backpack with a sleeping bag and a guitar case. He was good-looking with a studied amount of scruff, like Jack Kerouac with a trust fund.

He ate his cheeseburger silently, though he threw a couple of looks over at Jenna. This part always bugged Jenna. Like riding on an airplane. Crammed next to someone, a complete stranger, forced by proximity and the greed of airlines into a senseless conversation. An old friend of hers actually met her husband that way. She sat next to her future mother-in-law, and they had such a wonderful, in-depth conversation, the woman just
had
to introduce Jenna’s friend to her son. The rest was, as they say, history.

“Excuse me,” the young man began.

Jenna looked up from her soggy croutons and forced a smile.

“I just got into town, and I was wondering if that was the only hotel.” He pointed toward the Stikine Inn.

“You know what? There
is
another hotel, up by the airport. But I don’t know what it’s like.”

He nodded and ate some French fries.

“You don’t know if I can pitch my tent there in the park, do you?”

“I’m afraid I don’t. I’m just visiting. You could ask someone else, though.”