Raven Stole the Moon (18 page)

He nodded thoughtfully again and took a sip of his Coke. Jenna hoped that was it, but she feared the worst. More obligatory conversation. She should have taken a booth.

“Are you off the cruise ship?” he asked.

“No,” Jenna answered, trying not to show her impatience.

“Are you staying at that hotel?” he asked, pointing, again, toward the Stikine Inn.

“No,” she answered. Where was she staying? “I’m staying with a friend.”

“Oh. That’s the best way to go. That’s what I try to do always. Save a buck.”

He laughed and took another bite of his burger. Jenna turned back to her soup and tried to finish quickly.

“Sorry I’m talking so much,” the young man said, apologetically. “I’ve been traveling alone for such a long time, I love to talk to anyone I can.”

Jenna felt bad for the kid. He seemed nice enough. But she wasn’t really too interested in his life. She had something else on her mind. Actually, about three other things on her mind, and she didn’t want to become caught up in any distractions. On the other hand, she was always a sucker for being polite to strangers, so she offered the young man an opening.

“Where are you from?”

He beamed at her attention and tried to swallow his bite so fast it got stuck in his throat. He drank some more Coke to get the wad of burger and bread down his gullet.

“Oklahoma. I rode my motorcycle all the way up to Skagway on the Alcan Highway. Then I sold it. That kind of broke my heart. It was the first bike I had that was good enough to get me from Oklahoma to Alaska. It was an old BMW job with a sidecar. Those Germans sure can build things.”

“The ultimate driving machines.”

“Yeah, the commercial. Anyway, I sold it for a ticket on the ferry back to Bellingham. Then I guess I’ll get a job for the winter and continue my journey.”

“Where is your journey taking you next?”

“Point or points unknown. Me and my guitar, making music and poetry on the highway of life.”

She signaled for her check. That was her good deed for the day. Talk to some slacker kid who was trying to live in somebody else’s romanticized vision of life.

“Look,” Jenna said, getting up, “it was good talking to you. Good luck on your adventures.”

She started toward the cash register.

“Thanks a lot. Hey, I didn’t get your name. I like knowing everybody I meet who was nice to me so I can thank them all when I get my first Grammy.”

“That’s sweet. I’m Jenna.”

“Jenna,” he repeated, taking her hand and looking into her eyes. “It’s been good talking to you, Jenna. I’m Joey.”

Jenna paid her bill and left the diner, turning right and walking past the windows toward Shakes Island. Joey watched her go, then quickly paid his check and asked the waitress where he could find the nearest pay phone.

A
NARROW, WOODEN FOOTBRIDGE LED ONTO THE SMALL ISLAND.
Stagnant water gathered brown foam at the base of each trestle that secured the bridge, and the sour smell of rotting fish hung in the air. Jenna quickly crossed the bridge and stepped onto the burnt grass of the island, mingling among the tourists, who busily snapped endless photos of each other in similar poses.

Directly in the middle of the island stood Chief Shakes’s house, about fifty feet wide and a hundred or so feet long. It was encircled by eight tall totem poles. A brass plaque mounted to a large piece of granite in the center of the island explained that the island was a national landmark and had been restored to its pristine state a few years earlier. The totem poles were actually duplicates of the originals, kept in the museum in Juneau to protect them from the elements.

The front of Chief Shakes’s house was painted with an elaborate black and red face. Each detail of the face was made up of smaller faces, and so on, until it was too hard to find the smallest element. It was like looking into opposing mirrors: the reflection goes on forever. The only entrance to the house was a small hole, just big enough for a person to crawl through hunched over. A red blanket was draped over the opening from the inside.

Jenna pushed the blanket aside and stepped into the building. Inside, it was cool and dark. At each corner was a post: an elaborately carved totem pole, covered with different faces from top to bottom. Some of the faces were adorned with mother-of-pearl eyes, animal teeth, or human hair, which Jenna found pretty creepy. Although most of the house had a floor of cedar, the center was sunken into the dirt, and the clay pots that were resting on the dirt suggested that it was the fire pit. Above the fire pit was a small hole in the roof to allow the smoke to escape. Various other carvings and decorations were laid out around the perimeter of the house.

Jenna looked around, hoping to find the kushtaka somewhere in the carvings, and she was surprised that it came to her so quickly. The face she wanted to see. The face that she expected to find with a great deal of difficulty, like scouring the Cathedral of Notre-Dame for the one gargoyle that’s winking. But it wasn’t hard at all. It popped out at her. Near the floor, on the post at the northeast corner of the house. She could see it from across the room, as if she had some kind of special radar to guide her. It was the kushtaka.

She moved to the post swiftly and crouched before the carving. The body of a fish, with two faces, one upside down and one right side up, interlocked in some kind of battle. The image was almost hidden among all the other ornamentation, as if it were an afterthought or a begrudged obligation. Jenna took off her silver necklace and held it up to the carving. It was a match.

Logically, of course, it all made sense to Jenna. The Tlingit have a finite number of images, faces that represent different animals and creatures. Different faces, used in combination, mean different things. They tell a story. It’s only natural that she would see the same symbol over and over again. But why did the kushtaka keep popping up? Why not the killer whale or the frog? Why did Debbie, the girl on the boat, randomly select the kushtaka charm for Jenna? Why did Rolfe know some strange story about it? Some man with black eyes and pointy teeth chased Jenna in the woods. Was he after her necklace?

Jenna turned and scanned the room for someone who might be connected to the place, someone who could give her some answers. She found him. He was a little old Indian man wearing a Snapple T-shirt, sitting behind a table with a coffee can and a sign that read
DONATIONS
. She crossed to him, pushing through some amateur photographers and dropped a ten-dollar bill in the coffee can. A bribe.

The old man smiled at Jenna, and she set her silver necklace on the table. He picked it up and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. He examined the figure carved on its face. Then he set it back down.

“What is it?” Jenna asked.

The man stared at her blankly. Then he pointed to the corner where Jenna had found the same image carved on a post.

“You already found it,” he said.

“But what is it?”

“It’s the kushtaka.”

Well, Jenna knew that already. But the way the old man said it kind of nailed it home. Now it actually meant something. It was solid and heavy, a word that was attached to an object, even though Jenna had no idea what
kind
of an object.

“What
is
the kushtaka?” she asked him.

“It’s a Tlingit Indian spirit. The spirit of the land otter. All animal spirits have power, but the kushtaka is the spirit a shaman covets the most. Without the power of the kushtaka, the shaman is not complete.”

He wasn’t getting Jenna anywhere. He wasn’t telling her anything that made any sense. She didn’t have time to work out riddles; she needed an answer.

“But why? Why is the kushtaka so powerful?”

“Raven gave the kushtaka the power to change shape and to rule over the land and the sea.”

Jenna was getting a little exasperated. ”I thought they stole people.” She snorted.

The man laughed softly and shook his head.

“Yes, the kushtaka steal souls. They
convert
them. They make them into kushtaka. The kushtaka were given the power by Raven to watch over the woods and the seas and to rescue lost souls who are weak and on the verge of death and convert them into kushtaka.”

“And that’s bad?”

“Yes, that’s very bad. The Tlingit soul is born many times. When a person dies, the Tlingit burn his body so he can pass safely to the Land of Dead Souls. From there, his soul will return to his family. If he is saved from drowning by the kushtaka, his soul will be trapped with them forever.”

Jenna stared at the little man a moment.

“Saved from drowning?” she asked.

The old man nodded. “That’s the most common way. A fisherman is overturned in his canoe. He clings to it, but as he gets tired, the kushtaka appear to him in the form of family members and try to trick him into following them. Finally he cannot resist their powers, and he gives up.”

He sinks into the water. He calls out. She watches him disappear under the waves.

Jenna felt she had to move away from the old Indian. She was too close. She could see him too well, even in the dim room. He knew that Jenna had something to hide and he was looking inside her. She took a couple of steps backward, just to put a little distance between them, just so she could be a little more comfortable.

“The kushtaka will cast a spell over its victim. It will make him drowsy and tired; it will sap his strength so he can’t move.”

She couldn’t move her arms. She watched as he sank into the darkness.

“And when the kushtaka has prevailed, it will take its victim to the kushtaka den, where the conversion is completed and the victim is made into a kushtaka forever.”

The dangerous tide. The sandy bottom. Body not recovered.

Jenna took another step backward, but the floor had ended. Her foot dropped off into the fire pit. She heard a pop when her ankle hit the dirt floor sideways, bending her foot up in a grotesque way, and she stumbled backward onto the ground.

The old man got up from his table and tried to help, but several tourists had already come to Jenna’s aid. She sat up and looked at the old man, crouched above her, asking if she was all right. She climbed to her knees, a little disoriented.

“How do you save someone? Someone who’s been converted?”

The man looked at Jenna silently, questioning her question. She grabbed for his shirt, to shake him, to make him answer, to force him to tell her the truth, but she missed his shirt and fell against the floor, wrapping her hand around his ankle instead.

“How do you save someone?” she cried out.

Looking down at her with his shriveled-up little face, his face like an apple doll, a dried-up green apple, his teeth brown and crooked, he understood, finally, that Jenna needed to know, she had to know the answer because the rest of her life depended on it.

“Only a shaman can rescue a soul. Only a shaman.”

Jenna stood stiffly, her twisted ankle throbbing. People around her, all trying to help, stood back in amazement as she scrambled toward the hole in the room. She had to get out into the sun and the fresh air. She couldn’t stay in there, crammed into a wooden box, a coffin, a hot, sweaty room of breathing people. She shoved her head through the entrance hole and bumped into someone. She couldn’t stop to apologize; she didn’t have time.

“Hey!”

She turned. It was the kid from the coffee shop. What was his name? He looked like an actor. Jenna felt sick. She was woozy and in a daze, staggering toward the bridge, limping on her newly sprained ankle. But that wasn’t what was making her sick. It was the truth. It was the truth that churned violently in her stomach. Unadulterated, pure knowledge that was so clean, so harsh in its message, it was like getting punched in the stomach. It was the truth that twisted and turned and yanked at her insides, demanding that she turn herself inside out. When she reached the bridge, the smell of dead fish sealed the deal. She leaned over the railing of the footbridge and vomited into the stagnant stream.

She finished her business and turned to see a massive group of well-intentioned people coming toward her, shouting words of encouragement and concern. She panicked. She lurched across the bridge and headed toward Eddie’s house as fast as she could. She had to hurry. She couldn’t face those people. She couldn’t look them in the eye and tell them that everything was okay. Because she knew the truth. She knew what had happened.

Bobby wasn’t dead. Her son hadn’t drowned.

Her boy was with the kushtaka.

T
WENTY YEARS AGO
, S
HERIFF
L
ARSON THOUGHT OF HIMSELF AS
Andy Griffith in Mayberry. With nothing more than an old beat-up police car and a couple of jail cells, he was the law and order in a crime-free environment. His chief duty was to break up the occasional barroom fight between drunks. The punishment meted out was always the same: sleep it off behind bars and clean the cell for the next weekend.

Things sure had changed in Wrangell. It’s not the good old days anymore. At one time, beer cans were the garbage cleaned up after kids got together in the woods. Now it was crack vials. New drugs, cheap and quick, had spread through Alaska, converting law-abiding citizens into addicts. Young transients actually broke into people’s houses to steal things, something never before heard of in Wrangell.

Other things had changed, as well. Sheriff Larson had a new car. A fancy Mustang with a snappy paint job and those V-shaped lights on the roof designed for aerodynamics. The town bought it for him, hoping it would intimidate lawbreakers into toeing the line. It didn’t work.

The town also bought Sheriff Larson three deputies with 9mm pistols. That didn’t help, either. He tried to explain to them that crime is like disease. If you only treat the symptoms, you will not conquer the sickness. Western medicine as well as Western law were both sorely lacking in their insight. You must treat the body as a whole. You must start from the first step, the first building block, and grow healthy. If a tree grows crooked, you may be able to straighten it out after years of work, but, deep down in its roots, it is still a crooked tree. The same with a sick society.

Sheriff Larson was taught all of this by a girl he loved dearly back in the jungle. A beautiful Vietnamese girl who taught him how to be a man. The Marines had taught him to be an animal in three short months. It took Mai two years to teach him how to be a man. Two years, and her life. It took her sacrifice to a little defoliation chemical for Larson to really understand what she was saying. A painful death from a cancer that killed her from the inside out. A chemical in a canister that he had dropped against his will, came back to take away what he loved. Ironic? No. Irony is an American invention. This was a lesson learned. A man must stand up for his beliefs. Everyone is put onto this earth to learn a lesson. Larson was lucky enough to recognize that. And, lesson learned, he returned to his hometown to work in the public sector, making an attempt to heal the sickness in his society.

Every day in the early morning hours, Sheriff Larson would cruise toward town in his sleek hot rod. He lived way out on the highway, past where the pavement stopped and the gravel began, alone on a point overlooking the water. His was the only house within miles, which was how he liked it. And every morning at six he allowed himself the small pleasure of opening up all eight cylinders of the V-block engine and tearing down the highway at a hundred. He felt he owed it to the town to keep the car ready for action, in case something exciting
did
happen one day.

The road was always empty. Larson took care around corners, as he had almost T-boned a deer one morning, something that could have killed both him and the hapless animal. But in the straights, which were plentiful, he really let the car unwind, until the turbo-boost filled the cab with its delightful, satisfying whine.

It was on this dewy morning at 5:53 a.m., that, accelerating to eighty-three miles per hour, Sheriff Larson suddenly crunched down so hard on his brake pedal he thought his foot would go through the floor and hit the pavement. It was on this morning that the Mustang’s automatic braking system kicked in for the first time, pumping the brakes on and off at such a rapid-fire rate that the car stopped in a straight line, never once locking up its wide Eagle tires on the damp pavement. It was in this moment that Sheriff Larson opened his eyes and saw, frozen in the road less than three feet from the front bumper, not a frightened doe but a child. A young, white, male child, approximately six years old, four feet tall, weighing fifty pounds, medium-length, dark curly hair, and dark eyes opened wider than one would think humanly possible. Frozen. Like a deer in the headlights.

Sheriff took a deep breath and shifted into
PARK
. His heart raced as he wondered what the hell would have happened if he had flattened this little boy on the pavement. Another road pizza for the maggots and birds. He stepped out of the car and looked at the child, who stood there without moving.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

But the child didn’t answer. The child was scared out of his wits. He moved his head like an animal, the Sheriff thought, snapping his attention from the sheriff to the front bumper to the woods off to the right of the car. Sheriff looked to the woods and saw the other object of the boy’s attention. It was a German shepherd. Crouched and growling, just off the road. He recognized the dog. It was the same dog that woman had at the Stikine Inn. The dog barked sharply and ran onto the road. The boy reacted by retreating quickly to the opposite side of the road, to the edge of the woods.

“Wait, hold on.” Sheriff Larson wasn’t clear on the dynamic of the situation yet, but there was really only one obvious possibility: the kid was running from the dog. “Hey, boy, come here,” he called for the dog, who barked more viciously at the boy.

Sheriff Larson turned to the boy.

“Are you all right, son?”

He moved toward the boy, figuring he could get between the two of them. The boy flinched, and the dog went straight for him, bursting across the road and lunging, snapping at the boy’s arm. The boy dodged out of the way and swung his fist at the dog’s head, hitting him square. The blow didn’t seem to be hard, but evidently it was in the proper place to force the dog to pull back. The boy turned and bolted into the woods just as Sheriff Larson dove for the dog and grabbed his collar. The dog howled and struggled against the sheriff but could not free itself. Sheriff Larson was a big man and he picked the dog up and carried it to the car, flinging it onto the backseat and slamming the door.

Sheriff Larson looked into the woods for the boy, but he couldn’t see him. He called out for the boy, but there was no response. On the backseat of the car, the dog was going crazy. It was throwing itself at the window, trying desperately to get out. The sheriff ventured into the woods slightly, calling for the child but always keeping the car in sight, not wanting to get lost. He knew how tricky these woods could be. Full of deception. The woods could draw a person in and turn him around and around until there was no way he could find his way out.

The boy was nowhere to be seen, and the sheriff was uneasy about the whole situation. What was the boy doing out here in the first place? He went back to his car. The dog had calmed down, but the sheriff was still glad there was a wire barrier between the back and front seats. As he drove to town, he figured he’d send a couple of deputies out to scour the area, but he didn’t expect to find anything. The kid was quick and he didn’t look hurt at all, so he was probably already safely home and that was the end of that. Now he had to figure out what to do about this damn dog.