The Raven's Gift (11 page)

“You two are headed to New-num-chuck,” he said with a slow southern accent. “I gave up trying to pronounce these village names a year ago, ’bout the time I got here. You ready? Grab your gear and let’s start flapping. I’m Randy.”

The two of them stood up, grabbed their bags, and followed Randy out the door. As they walked out on the tarmac, Anna mouthed to John, “How old?” He smiled and shrugged.

Randy stopped at a blue and white Cessna 185. He opened the back and looked at their bags. He lifted each one carefully and then started stuffing them in. “You can hop right in that seat there, Missy. I’ll need
the big guy up front with me, in case I need to take a nap mid-flight. From the looks of it you guys never flown in a small plane before.”

They both shook their heads.

Randy took Anna’s hand and helped her step up into the plane. “Me neither.”

Before they had any more time to be nervous about their young pilot, they were taxiing down the runway. John sat in the co-pilot’s seat staring at the controls, while Anna looked from side to side out the windows. Bethel stretched off in the distance on one side of the runway, and on the other the lake-pocked land seemed to have no end. The little plane picked up speed, and Randy pulled back on the yoke. The plane lifted off the runway and banked hard right, the earth falling away beneath them, flattening and stretching out all around them for as far as his eyes could see. John’s stomach dropped as they gained altitude.

Randy pointed at a pair of headphones hanging on the console. John took them and slipped them on his ears. The pilot’s voice crackled over the headset.

“Ever laid your eyeballs on anything like that?” Randy asked.

He pointed at the horizon, a panorama speckled with lakes and rivers that extended in every direction. “See that drive-in movie screen–looking thing? That’s White Alice, Cold War radar, meant to catch invading Russkies. Quite a view from the top of it. Almost like flying. Out there, to the west, that’s the Bering Sea. You can just barely see it. That shimmer there, that’s the sea. Off to the left here—that giant bitch of a river, that’s the Kuskokwim—a mile wide in some places and well over five hundred some miles long. Those mountains out that way, south, are the Kilbucks, the Alaska Range on the other side—nothing but mountains forever that way. Nothing but bare open tundra to the north for a long, long ways. You can sort of see the Yukon River over there. That river’s even bigger than this bugger. You’re really in the middle of nowheres.”

They flew along the edge of the Kuskokwim. John looked back at Anna. She grinned and widened her eyes to show her excitement.

“Whatcha think?” Randy asked. “Pretty damn desolate, eh? First time I saw it, I just kept saying to myself, Why, there ain’t nothing here. Ain’t no reason anyone, even Natives, oughta live in a place like this. Now look at me.”

John nodded. He didn’t know what to say. So he just smiled.

“It’s great flying, though. I get plenty of hours, and don’t have to worry about running into too many mountains.”

John spotted a cluster of plywood shack-like buildings at the river’s edge.

“Is that a village?” he asked, pointing at the decaying structures passing beneath them.

“Fish camps,” Randy said. “The folks here set up camps in the summer and prepare salmon. Those are smokehouses and camps. There’s one village, right there. Yours is a couple more down.”

He pointed to a settlement at the confluence of a small river and the huge greenish-brown swath of the Kuskokwim. The two rivers mixed together like a thin stream of creamer in coffee. “That’s Kwik-pak, as I like to call it. Had an old girlfriend from there. I can’t even pronounce its real name.”

The houses stretched in two rows away from the river. A small runway sat west of the village, and John guessed that the larger structures were the school buildings. The entire layout of the village seemed to be organized around the school. What surprised him most, at least from the air, was the starkness of it all. A few big satellite dishes, a few winding paths through the village, with a pickup or Suburban, boats along the river, but that was it. A few dozen homes packed together within a hundred yards of each other with no backyards, lawns, or individuality. From the air, the place looked half planned, like some strange form of Alaskan urban sprawl but without the garages, fences, or pools.

The village had hardly passed them and Randy pointed at the horizon. “There she is,” he said. “You’re twenty minutes by air, probably forty minutes by boat or snow machine from Kwik-pak. An hour or two to Bethel.”

John leaned back to Anna. He covered the microphone on his headset and yelled over the plane’s engine, “We’re almost there!”

The land travelled beneath them faster as they dropped. John tried to take in as much as he could. The giant river meandered off to the south, and the desolate-looking tundra reached out forever to the north. As they drew closer to the village, he could tell it had that same organized look, except at one edge, closest to the river, the houses looked older, more shack-like. The two rows of houses paralleled the river, and the runway sat just north of the village. Randy dipped a wing and banked in hard. John’s stomach lurched.

“Like to give ’er a once-over before I land, just in case some kids are playing on the runway or if there’s another plane,” he said.

Randy banked again at the far end of the village and dropped toward the strip of gravel. John was too enthralled to be scared as the ground raced up at them. This village looked smaller than the last. He could easily make out the school, and could see a red three-wheeler pulling a trailer bouncing its way toward the runway.

“Looks like someone knew you were coming,” Randy said, pointing, and then quickly pulling his hand back to steady the plane as they hit once, bounced, and touched down.

“Welcome to your new home, folks,” Randy said, pulling off his headset and spinning the plane around at the gravelled end of the strip. “Can’t say I could ever live anywhere like this. More power to you for trying it out.”

THE GIRL WONDERED OUT LOUD how the two of them survived a whole summer in the same village without running into each other. He didn’t tell her that he’d only left the school a couple of times, that
for weeks he didn’t really even leave the comfort of Anna’s sleeping bag.

“Last summer, when it got real hot, I had a dream. Like maybe I was delirious from not enough food and water. In my dream I could see. I saw a different world. Not our village, but maybe an old village. Like the ancient Eskimo villages in the books at school. Or the ones the elders used to talk about. The houses were the old sod houses with tundra growing on top of them, like they were half buried, and the people were all dressed in our old clothings. Some of them had parkas and fur leggings, and some of them were almost naked and dirty with soot from the seal oil lamps. It looked like spring, like it was when I was plucking ducks and geese, except that the people were mostly dead or half-dead. Their faces were skinny and streaked with that dark black soot. So many dead, their bodies stacked in piles like wood for a steam bath, and
kass’aqs
, they were getting out of a long wooden boat and coming up the riverbanks carrying torches and crosses. White crosses. That’s what I saw. White crosses. And one man, he had only caribou-skin pants, he was fighting with them, trying to make them go away.

“I wonder why I dreamt that. Even though I never saw your face, I think you were him, John. You were trying to make those men with the crosses leave. The Native man I saw was you. I remember the voice in the dream, too. It was your voice. Even though I never heard your voice before, I know it was you,” she said.

   11   

T
he girl’s screams filled him with the same dread Anna’s had when she realized no one was coming to rescue them.

“Get back!” he said. “You’ve got to move your hands!”

He tried to pull her hands away from the gap between the two doors. Her fingers tore at the metal. The girl stopped clawing and pressed her face to the crack, one milky white eye shooting her fear out toward him.

“John, get me out! I can’t be in here with them. Get me out …”

Her voice trailed off and she began a moan-like wail that sent shivers through him.

“Stand back. I’m coming in.”

He took the ice pick and slammed the sharp edge into the jamb. He slammed again and again. Sparks splintered into the dark gym. Nothing.

“We shouldn’t have come in here,” the girl gasped. “Please get me out … get me out! Get me
out!
”

He pulled the door open with his hands until the chain caught, and then he slid the blade of the pick against the space where the handle met the door.

He pushed the heavy bar in, then pulled it back and slammed it home. The handle gave. He hit it again and again. Each time he swung harder than the last, each hit opened the gap. He didn’t have the strength he once had.

He didn’t know how long he stood there slamming the pick, and he didn’t know that the girl had stopped screaming and crying, or that the angry cries that filled the hallway were his own until the pick crashed through and the chain clattered to the gym floor.

The girl burst through the opening and grabbed hold of him. She pressed her face against his chest and she held herself there. He leaned the pick against the wall and wiped his wet cheeks with the back of a hand. He put his arms around her and then dropped them.

“Please. Please get me out of here,” she begged.

In the darkness of the gym he could see them, hundreds of desiccated corpses, the bodies of the entire village.

ON ANNA AND JOHN’S first night in the village, they broke their house in, a personal ritual they did in all the new places they lived. They made love in each room. In their new accommodations, a little red aluminum-sided house behind the school, they didn’t have much breaking in to do. The bedroom barely fit a twin bed, and the kitchen and living area took up the rest of the twenty-by-twenty house. The toilet, a white five-gallon bucket complete with an almond-coloured toilet seat, sat in a closet-sized bathroom with an unplumbed vanity and sink. Anna loved that someone, perhaps the teachers who lived there the year prior, had written in black marker on the side of the bucket THE JOHN. A plastic gallon chocolate ice cream bucket sat beneath the sink’s drainpipe.

They tried a few positions in all the rooms, except for what Anna had coined the poop closet, and after some prodding, he even persuaded her to slip out into the plywood-enclosed foyer that covered the entryway.

As they stood there, her hand firmly holding the door closed, to keep anyone from seeing them, and with him standing behind her, they moved against each other, slowly, the cool, damp fall air raising their arms with gooseflesh.

“I feel like we’re going to rock this little house off its blocks,” she said.

He chuckled. “That would be kind of embarrassing.”

He imagined the whole house falling off the treated timbers that held it up off the soggy tundra, listing to one side like a sinking ship, the spongy earth slowly swallowing them before they could escape.

“What will be embarrassing is if we get caught like this,” she said.

“What’s the name of this position, arctic entry?”

“Funny. Are you done already?” She was joking when she said this, but to add emphasis, gave a slight Kegel squeeze that sent him over the edge. He groaned and leaned in to her, holding her close.

“Just don’t expect me to do this out here in the winter,” she said.

They slipped back inside. She pulled a robe on and he just slid under the covers, naked.

“This is where I wish we had running water,” she said, dabbing between her legs with some tissue. “Remind me again why the school is the only place with plumbing in the whole village when this state has tens of billions of dollars in oil revenue?”

NEITHER OF THEM had much energy to walk those first few days on the frozen river. His legs were out of shape and starved. The girl was in the same condition, if not worse. She walked thirty or forty feet behind him, a distance he chose to keep out of earshot of her questions.

When he finally stopped to rest, she caught up and sat down on the toboggan and ate a handful of snow. “When we get to wherever we’re going, then what?” she asked.