The Raven's Gift (13 page)

“The Earth is melting away,” Yago said.

“So stupid you are, Yago! The Earth’s not melting. The ice is melting and the water’s swallowing up the land.” She jerked her thumb at Yago. “He’s only in third grade.”

“My reading level’s higher than yours,” Yago said.

“My math level’s higher than yours, dummy.”

John looked downriver. He slipped his arm around his wife and
watched a large flock of slender-bodied birds rise off the river and turn in a wide circle toward the grey eastern sky.

“Cranes,” Yago said. “Wish I had my 20-gauge.”

“You don’t got no 20-gauge,” the girl teased.

“Shut up. I can use my brother’s.”

Another large block of dirt crashed into the water downstream. The dirt disappeared beneath the surface, leaving only a ring of small ripples that shifted and vanished in the current.

Yago turned his bike around, unamused. “Seems like one of these days my dad will be able to park his boat right in front of my house if the world keeps falling into the river.” He started riding off and yelled back to the girl, “Then your house will float out to China! The school, too!”

THE GIRL AND JOHN awoke to the tarp flapping and smacking against their heads. He grabbed the edge of the tarp and pulled it down over them and held it tight against the frozen tundra with his forearm. Above them the early light of morning lit the blue plastic that popped and snapped with each gust.

The chill in the air the night before was gone. The warm winds worried him, but he welcomed the change from the previous days of sub-zero temperatures and constant cold. He peeked out from beneath the plastic sheeting and could see nothing but white. There was no distinguishing the sky from the ground.

“Sounds like a blizzard,” the girl said, lifting her hand out from her sleeping bag and holding the tarp off her face. She pulled her other hand free and began feeling around her bag. “My grass. Oh, no! Do you see it?”

John sighed and sat up. The tarp snapped open and a rush of wet snow and wind whipped against her face and against the back of his neck. She squinted and bolted upright and began feeling frantically around her.

“Don’t let it blow away! Please, John.” He spotted the bundle ten feet from them, poking out from a drift. Another gust hit and the bundle threatened to go flying across the open tundra.

“Grab the tarp and my bag!” he yelled as the next gust blasted them with a sheet of snow. He jumped out from the warmth of his sleeping bag and took two long strides. The snow and ice cut at his bare soles. He snatched up the grass just as another gust hit, and dove back under the tarp.

“Did you get it?” she asked.

“Yes. Of course,” he said, stuffing his numb, wet feet back down into the depths of the bag. “Next time you can get it yourself,” he said, slipping the grass bundle into her hands.

She lifted the bundle and held it to her nose and inhaled. “Thanks, John. Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think it would storm like this.”

He said nothing and reached into his backpack and put a gallon can of tomato paste on the inside edge of the tarp to hold it down. He waited for a moment to see if the can could keep the edge from flying up with the next blast of wind. It held, but to be sure he set the entire pack on the windward edge and pulled the tarp over the backpack at their heads. With the sled at their feet, he made a small blue human burrito.

John turned over on his back and stared up at the blue plastic, inches from his face. The tarp shook and crinkled with each wind burst.

After a while she asked, “Are you mad at me?”

“No.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“For what?”

“For saving it. For saving me.”

“Well, if I didn’t save your little handiwork you’d just keep asking me more questions now, wouldn’t you?”

She giggled. “Probably,” she said, taking the bundle out again and
resting her cheek against it. She fell silent and he thought she’d fallen

back to sleep when she asked, “We’re not travelling today, are we?”

“No.”

“What day do you think it is?” the girl asked.

He wanted to tell her how many days it was from the day he made his promise to Anna, but that would mean nothing to her, so instead he simply said, “I don’t know.”

And he didn’t.

The tarp popped and snapped with another gust that seemed to last for several minutes.

“Do you think we can have some breakfast to celebrate?”

“Celebrate what? Another storm?”

“Maybe it’s my birthday today. I’m twenty. If not today, one of these days. My birthday is December seventeenth. Sometimes in December we get warm winds like this. Big blizzards that never want to end. Then after my birthday, January comes. You know what the Yup’ik word for January means?”

“No.”

“The bad month. It’s not the bad month yet. Still a while away. That’s how I know. But it’s coming. I can feel it. Cold. Dark. Not long after my birthday. Can we have something to eat?”

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll open a can of peaches for your birthday.”

“You don’t need to. We should save what we have. We’ll celebrate some other day.” She reached toward him and touched his shoulder and softly patted her hand up to his cheek. Her warm fingers moved across the thin beard on his jawline and over his nose, lips, and chin. “How old are you, John?” she said, taking her hand away and holding it against her own lips and under her nose.

He rolled on his side and stared at her. His muscles ached. His back felt rigid and tired from pulling and walking. His feet were tired, still wet, but warm. “Thirty-one going on eighty,” he said, adding, “I’m old.”

“Well, except for that fur on your face, you don’t feel that old,” she said.

The wind ruffled the tarp, as if to punctuate the girl’s statement. The gales were picking up momentum. The snow crystals tinkling against the plastic were strangely soothing, but he worried the storm would blanket them entirely, and as she said, “never want to end,” he wondered if that wouldn’t be so bad.

   13   

W
hen the panic wore off he puked one more time and then took a paper towel from a roll on the kitchen shelf, ripped it, and stuffed a wad in each nostril. It didn’t help hide the stench.

With one glance in the storeroom, the smell no longer mattered. The shelves were stocked, untouched. Gallon cans of USDA peanut butter, pears, corn, peas, green beans, fruit cocktail, and orange juice.

He opened a few cupboards and found cans of whole chickens and ham. There were boxes of Sailor Boy Pilot crackers, dry cereal, and chocolate chips. He tore into a restaurant-sized bag of chocolate chips and stuffed a handful into his watering mouth. He didn’t chew them. He knew his stomach wouldn’t handle the sudden flush of sugar. Instead he just stood there for a moment and rolled the chips around his mouth.

“John?”

The echo startled him—for a second the voice sounded like Anna’s. He aimed the flashlight across the gym and peered at the thin outline of the girl standing in the doorway. Between them, a twisted maze of bodies.

“I’m over here. Just stay put.”

“What’s taking you so long?” she asked just loud enough for him to hear.

“We’re saved. It’s incredible. There’s food here. Lots of food. I just
need to figure out how we get enough out. Go back to the office and wait for me. I won’t be much longer.”

“I want to wait here.”

“Fine.”

He turned back to the kitchen and stopped at the freezer door. He didn’t need to look inside, but he found himself pulling the handle and swinging the door wide. Cases of beef patties, chicken, frozen corn dogs, and frozen vegetables lined the walls of the cooler. From the soggy-looking boxes he guessed everything had thawed over the summer and then cooled, so he knew the meat was probably spoiled.

He stepped out of the cooler and saw the solution to getting out enough food quickly. A handcart loaded with green plastic dishwashing crates stood behind the door of the kitchen. With the flashlight lying on the counter he could see enough to work. He pulled the handcart over to the shelves and quickly began loading the crates with all the food the cart would hold. He loaded it to the top and wheeled it to the kitchen door. He grabbed the flashlight and aimed it across the gym toward the girl. She sat in the doorway, with her legs pulled up to her and her hands covering her nose.

He took a deep breath through his mouth and bit at the edge of his lip. He had almost forgotten the wad of chocolate tucked in his cheek. His teeth crushed the melted chips and he swallowed the sugary remains. He left the food behind and started across the gym, pushing arms and legs away. He needed a path, just enough room to get the food through. The bodies felt light. Stiff, but light. He expected more substance to them. The dead should weigh more, he thought. They felt more like shells or exoskeletons than bodies, and he pushed them away with his feet. He was about halfway when he heard the sound come from the girl, something just short of a gasp. He flashed the light on her as she dropped her hands from her face and her head whipped toward the entrance of the school.

“He’s here! The hunter is here!” she whispered across the gym.

He reached for the pistol in his waistband, but it wasn’t there.

He flashed the light toward the sides of the door where the girl stood.

“Take three steps into the gym and then walk along the wall to your left. Sit down there against the wall. Do it now. Go. Don’t get up until I tell you. Go!”

He didn’t wait to see if the girl had listened. He sprinted to the kitchen, pulled the food back from the doorway, and dove inside. He whipped the light around the room, searching for the pistol, and then remembered getting sick and sitting on the floor by the sink. He grabbed the pistol off the floor and slipped back to the kitchen door, clicking the flashlight off as he did. He stopped at the entry to the kitchen and tried to let his eyes adjust as a figure appeared in the gym doorway.

THEIR CLASSROOMS were high-tech. Every student had a laptop, and each of Anna’s second- through fourth-graders shared a desktop computer. He had big plans for the LCD projector—his lectures would be funny and educational for the history and the English class. He wasn’t so sure about the science, though. He didn’t know much about teaching science at all. The idea of teaching in an area he wasn’t interested in and couldn’t even feign passion for scared him.

“Maybe you can just study things around here,” Anna suggested. “You know, for biology stuff dissect some fish and ducks or whatever. See if someone will bring in a moose heart or something.”

“A moose heart? Where do you come up with this stuff?”

“I’m a generalist. I teach second grade,” she said, and laughed.

“Guess I’m going to have to learn to be more like you,” he joked. “Christ, nine through twelfth grade, everything but math? They might as well make me teach math, too.”

“It’s going to be fun! Now get to making this classroom comfortable and inviting for your new students.”

“This is strange to be in my own classroom, you know. I think I’d rather move around, like a college professor. That way I’m not responsible for making the place all comfy and inviting and stuff.”

“You’re being a real Johnny downer. What’s this about?” she asked.

She sat down on his desk and scratched at a mosquito bite on her temple. She’d been leaving her hair back in a ponytail since they arrived in the village, and he suddenly wondered who would cut their hair while they lived there. Would they have to wait until they flew out at Christmas, and could they even afford to fly out over the holiday?

“Come on. Are you worried about your new students? They’re going to love you, John. Who doesn’t love John Morgan? They have to love at least a quarter of you.”

“Funny. What if that first day doesn’t go well? Don’t you worry about that? We’re stuck here. If I have some punk-ass kid and his dad is school board president—how do I deal with that? I’ve never taught in a small school before. Don’t you see? The school is the centre of the community. Its heart. Everything good and bad starts here or ends here. If I screw up, or someone turns the village against us? Then I’m the bad guy until further notice. No amount of blood quantum can fix that. It’s just scary, that’s all.”