The Raven's Gift (35 page)

The darkened eye sockets of half-buried skulls stared out at them from the passing snowdrifts. At one point he thought he saw a hand reaching up out of the ice. He slowed and saw it was just a stick with branches.

A frozen River Styx, he thought to himself as the river turned north and then east and then west. Winding and winding, circling and circling, the underworld somewhere in the distance.

John kept looking back. Checking to make sure the old woman was okay, but also worried about the other, faster machine that would be coming for them.

The roofs and hoods of several pickup trucks and taxi cabs poked through the river ice in places they’d gotten stuck or run out of gas on the frantic arctic exodus from Bethel. He passed a set of four tires poking up through the ice, the ridiculous long undercarriage of a stretch limo.

The sun moved across the southern sky as he manoeuvred carefully around the metal corpses that stretched for as far as he could see from each twist in the river. He expected the steel carnage to begin thinning out, but then wondered if the wreckage stretched on forever.

ANNA JUST SMILED her lovely smile. She knew. He didn’t know if she knew it would be that night, or if she just knew there was no reason left to hope. She knew.

“Come here,” she said. “Hold me.”

He pulled off his parka and crawled beneath the covers and wrapped his arms around her. The cool air burned at his nostrils and his breath froze against the nylon sleeping bags over them.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Sorry for what? I should be the one who’s sorry. I should have found a way out.”

“I’m sorry for bringing us here,” she said. “We shouldn’t have come. We didn’t belong here. I didn’t belong here. I just thought maybe we should connect with your heritage for our children. I was wrong, John.”

“That’s not true. The regular life isn’t for us. And don’t give up on me. I don’t like your tone. You can’t give up on me, okay? Okay?”

“You’re not mad that I made the decision to bring us here?”

“That was our decision. We made it together,” he said.

“Yeah, but I was the one … I just wanted you to know where you came from.”

She stopped and coughed. The air crackled deep within her chest and the phlegm and mucus seemed too thick for her to bring up. She coughed again, harder, and then rested her head on the pillow, her eyes wet with tears from the effort.

“I was the one,” she whispered, “who pushed for it.”

“It’s okay. Who is to say this isn’t happening everywhere? This could have happened to us anywhere. No matter where we chose to live. Besides, where else could we live?”

“Do you really think it’s like this outside?”

“I don’t know. I hope not.”

“John?” she asked. “I want you to promise me something. You’ve got to promise me this one thing, okay?”

She pulled him close and whispered her impossible demand into his ear. He closed his eyes and tried not to listen, but it was too late.

“Promise me,” she cried. “Promise.”

“Promise,” he said, trying to forget what she’d asked him. “I promise.”

He wrapped his arms around her and held her sick, frail frame against his, hoping that her coughing, the snot, the tears, her breath— anything—would find its way into his body as they slept so that in the morning he would wake with his own shivers and chills, sick.

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A
t dark, they set up the tent Red had given them. The four-person shelter was made from a strange foam-like material and John didn’t like how bright the orange stood out against the snow, so they moved it back off the river into the willows.

Rayna didn’t ask him what happened when he went back to Red, but he expected she would, and when she didn’t that night, he wondered if she knew how scared he was or if she had sensed him looking over his shoulder all day—if somehow she could see into his head and watch the scene that kept playing and replaying in his mind. Over and over. Red lying at the steps of his bunker, a pistol in one hand, the AR15 at his feet in the blood-clumped snow. If she could see it the way he had, she would know Red did all that he could for them.

She cuddled close, but stayed in her own sleeping bag. He half wished she would climb in with him so that he could just hold her, but she didn’t. He wondered if it was because it was almost too warm with the miniature aluminum woodstove and narrow chimney pipe. Or if it was because she sensed him struggling for air. Or perhaps she could see in her mind’s eye Red lurch forward and then topple into the snow, the shadow of the hunter, of a wind turbine spinning over his body, blood trickling from Red’s nostrils, and his blue eyes trying to fix themselves on the Colt revolver’s barrel lodged in the snow near his face.

The old woman had said little except that she would have only waited one more day for them. And then she told them about a strange
dream. “During one of those nights,” she said, “I made a shelter in the brushes, and was sleeping on a bed I made from willows and my caribou skin. I got real cold and started seeing a man and a woman walking across the tundra. They were the only two people left in the world, and they were so sad.”

John sat up and opened the shoebox-sized stove, slid in another piece of driftwood, closed the door and shut the damper down. It was dark, so he felt smoke wouldn’t give them away any more than the snow-machine tracks leading straight to their tent. If the hunter hadn’t caught them by now, then maybe he wasn’t going to bother following them. He checked the airways to make sure the tent could breathe, as Red had insisted. Then he stretched out on his back and stared at the peak of their warm new shelter.

The old woman coughed once and continued her story. “The man wanted to maybe turn into animals and quit living like people, but that woman, she wanted to have a family and start a new village. Then they met a thing, the thing was part wolf, part bear, and part human. That thing told them he was once human and life was too difficult so he wanted to become a wolf, and then when he was a wolf he was not happy and he wanted to be a bear. As a bear he was too lonely and wanted to become human again. That was how he became that horrible thing. He never was happy with what he had or where he was. The thing went away alone and that man started building a new house and the woman started collecting grass to weave their new bed.”

The old woman fell silent. John felt as if she’d been talking directly to him, but he didn’t know what she meant. He wanted to ask, but didn’t know where to start. How long had he been like the
thing
?

The girl rolled on her side, facing him. She pulled her sleeping bag down and slipped her hand into his. She gave a soft squeeze and he closed his fist and held her hand tight.

“It’s almost ready,” Rayna whispered.

“What is?” he asked.

She said nothing and closed her eyes.

He wanted to lie and to tell her that he rode back and told Red he couldn’t do it. He thought that might help her not think of him as someone who could kill a friend. But then again, he still didn’t believe what Red had told him before he died. What bothered him most was that after all Red had done for them, he still couldn’t believe his story.

“It’s okay,” she whispered.

“You know?”

“I couldn’t smell any gunpowder on your gloves. But he’s dead. The blood. Red hurt himself?”

“No.”

“The hunter?” she asked, in whisper he could hardly hear. “He’s coming for us.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Probably.”

“I know,” she said. “I know he is.”

She squeezed his hand back and rested her head on his shoulder. Her hair smelled clean, and he nuzzled his nose and lips against the top of her head and inhaled deeply through his nostrils. The scent of apple shampoo brought back a flash of almost foreign memories of Anna and carefree college days, cheap shampoo and long hot showers, but then the memories were gone and he only smelled Rayna.

He thought of Red again and wondered why he’d left the safety of the tank. Why he had sacrificed himself like that for them.

The girl turned her face toward his, as if she could hear the tears building at the edges of his eyes.

“Did he tell you?” she asked.

“Tell me what?”

“Where they are hiding,” she said.

“No. Rayna, I don’t think your cousins are alive. I’m sorry.”

“But they are, John. I think he told me where.”

John sat up on his elbow and from the small bits of light coming from the woodstove, he could see her white eyes. “He told you?”

She nodded. “He gave me an idea. If we’re lucky, we’ll take the sno-go there tomorrow,” she said.

“Where? What did he tell you?” John asked, suddenly feeling strange. Warm. Something that felt like hope flooded his body.

“He said I would find gold where I’m going. There’s only one place where the kids here ever went to find gold.”

“Where? Tell me where,” he whispered.

“I said I would never ask you to promise me anything,” she said.

“WILL YOU GET something for me?” Anna asked in a hoarse whisper. “There,” she said, weakly trying to pull a hand out from beneath the covers to point to the one-drawer nightstand on her side of the bed. “In the back, a plastic bag,” she wheezed, using the last bit of her energy before she collapsed on the pillows.

He pulled the drawer open and dug through the letters, photos, lotions, and massage oils. Behind all of it he found a sandwich bag, with a white plastic object inside. He held it up to the last of the evening light coming in through the frosted window.

She watched him as he opened the bag. As he began to pull it out, his hands started to tremble. He turned the thin white plastic device over and over in his hands, but he didn’t need to see the blue + to know what it was, or what it meant.

He sat beside the bed and held her.

“I wanted to wait to be sure,” she said. Tears streamed down her cheeks and her sobs turned to coughing that came from somewhere so deep inside her chest he thought she might burst in his arms.

He didn’t know why she had bothered to tell him. Or why she’d waited to tell him. Or why, when they had the chance to leave, she didn’t say something. Now it all meant nothing. It could mean nothing. He couldn’t think of it, or allow himself to be angry with her. Not now. Not ever.

The white plastic cracked inside his trembling fist.

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