Bonechiller (16 page)

Small towns have strange acoustics. Whispers at one end of town are heard sharp and clear at the other end. If somebody gets caught screwing around on their husband or wife, gets pulled over for drunk driving, gets caught shoplifting at the Red and White, gets fired, gets pregnant, gets head lice—then you can be sure the news will whip through Harvest Cove like a tornado on steroids.

But that’s for the small stuff. The everyday embarrassments and misdemeanors.

For the big stuff, it’s like the whole place has gone deaf. The way Fat Bill could prey on young guys for years undetected. The way nobody knew Jan Sorenson, the old man who’s been running the Harvest Cove gas station forever, had also been beating his seventy-year-old wife for forever. Not till after she died from internal bleeding, and the cops pulled her records at the Royal Victoria Hospital. They showed she’d been treated for breaking just about every bone you can break, going back nearly forty years.

Everybody hears whispered gossip and rumors clear across town. But nobody hears the scream next door.

“Man, this town is a hole,” I say, looking at the pages and pages of research Howie printed off for me, like it’s a school assignment.

“A black hole,” Ash agrees.

I’m in her room, with my “homework” spread out on the floor. She’s sitting beside me on her workout bench, going over the evidence.

Ash’s room is so
Ash
. With free weights scattered on the floor waiting to stub your toes, dirty laundry covering every surface, and posters from slasher movies and punk bands as wallpaper. A bulletin board on the back of her door shows her workout stats, body weight and mileage. Hanging off a nail in the wall is an army helmet.

I point it out. “One of your dad’s?”

“Yeah.” She takes it down and shows it to me.
CPT ANIMKEE
is markered on the canvas sweatband inside the rim. “See that?” She pokes her finger at the coating of dust on the metal. “That’s real authentic Afghanistan desert dust.”

Ash, with a small smile, rubs the gray chalk between her fingers. Proud of her dad.

My headache has died down to a dull throb. The heat’s still bothering me, but I don’t mind so much now that I’m alone with Ash.

There’s a knock at the door.

“Yeah?” Ash calls.

Her mother pokes her head in. “Dinner’s ready. Are you staying to eat, Danny?”

“If that’s okay,” I say.

“Of course. Come while it’s hot.”

Dinner turns out to be meat loaf and mashed potatoes. The loaf is huge and there’s a mountain of taters, enough for a whole platoon. But when Ash and her dad start chowing down, it goes fast. They eat like somebody’s got a stopwatch on them. No talking. No coming up for air.

Ash’s mom, Laura, has strawberry blond hair, bright hazel eyes and a spatter of freckles across her nose and cheeks. I don’t see any of her in Ash. Those Indian genes were way too strong for the pale, freckled Whitey genes.

“I picked up a bunch of those pocket warmers,” Laura says to Ash’s dad.

“Don’t need them,” Nick says.

“I’m not going to have you losing a finger to frostbite. I’m very fond of those hands.”

“Mom,” Ash says. “Trying to eat here.”

“Nick’s going on patrol,” Laura tells me. “Up in northern Ontario, with the Second Rangers. What are you guarding us against up there, anyway?” she asks her husband.

“Hell if I know. Terrorist polar bears?” He forks a baseball-sized scoop of potatoes into his mouth.

“The Second Rangers is made up of Cree and Ojibwa,” Ash says. “They work better with the locals up north. You know, show them some friendly faces.”

“Red faces,” Nick adds.

“Yeah,” Ash says. “And, they know the land.”

“That’s not my land,” Nick puts in. “I’m no Inuit. I was
born and raised on the Grassy Narrows reservation, west of here. And I got the hell out of there fast as I could. That’s why I joined the army—my ticket off the
rez
.”

The loaf is quickly reduced to its dry end-bits, and the mountain of taters to a speed bump on the way to dessert.

“I was telling Danny before about your Windigo ghost stories,” Ash says.

“Not stories,” he corrects her. “They’re real as rain. If a Windigo catches you, he’ll swallow you whole.”

With a peach pie heating up in the oven, everybody pushes back from the table, making room for their expanded guts.

“You want a Windigo story?” Nick looks at me and stretches his legs out. “I got one for you. The Windigo who liked white meat.”

“Nick,” Laura says. “Not everyone gets your sense of humor like we do. We’re your family, so we have to. But Danny’s a civilian.”

He grunts in pretend disgust. “You want to hear it or not?” he asks me.

“Sure.” I mean, what am I going to say? I just hope it doesn’t end with him jumping up, shouting “Kill Whitey!”

“Way back, at the beginning of the white invasion …,” he starts off.

“Here we go,” Laura mutters, touching his hair as she passes by, making him grin up at her.

“Way back, there was a great shaman who could see the future. He told his people when the snows would come, when a child would be born, when another tribe was planning to attack. One day he was struck down by a dark
vision. He had looked deep into the future and seen the end. End of the tribe, of the manitou—”

“Spirits,” Ash explains.

“End of the land itself,” he keeps going. “A great evil walked the world. And it had a white face. The shaman saw that these white men would cover the land, infesting it like lice. And feed off it till there was nothing left but the bones of the earth. So he went into the woods and asked the manitou if they would join him and fight for the land. But they told him that the only thing that could defeat such a great evil was an even greater one. And the shaman knew there was no evil greater than the Windigo.”

Ash is slouched down and stretched out just like her father. She must have heard this story before, but she’s soaking it up like I am.

“So,” Nick says. “The shaman decided to make himself a Windigo from scratch. Taking in a newborn whose mother had died in labor, he raised it to be his child, a child of the night. The shaman went out in the dark of a new moon to one of the invaders’ settlements and caught himself a white man. Then he cut him into pieces and fed him to the child. He had to chew the flesh himself because the baby had no teeth, then spit the meat in its mouth.”

“Pie’s ready.” Laura closes the oven. “How big a slice you want, Nick?”

He holds his hands wide apart.

“Danny?”

“Just a sliver, please,” I say, this story being kind of an appetite killer.

She passes out the plates.

“So,” Nick continues around a peachy mouthful. “The baby grew fat and strong, fed only on the palest of flesh. When its teeth came, they were like a wolf’s. Its fingers grew claws long as a bear’s, and white fur ran in a mane down its back. It became Windigo. When it was big enough to hunt on its own, the shaman set the Windigo loose on the white man. And its hunger had no end.”

“Sounds familiar,” Laura says, kissing the top of his head.

“But there was no end to the whites either. They bred like rats, spreading disease and death where they went. The Windigo feasted on them. But when the invaders learned the nature of this beast, they organized a hunt and set a trap for it. Using a pink-eyed, pale-skinned albino man, they lured the Windigo into a clearing in the woods. They had been chasing it for days, and the Windigo was starving. Blind with hunger. It could smell the delicious flavor of that flesh, white as new snow, and could not resist.”

Nick pauses to fork in another hunk of pie. I’ve barely touched mine.

“The Windigo ran into the clearing, toward the albino, who was tied to a post in the center. Then the men hiding in the trees opened fire, shooting the Windigo so many times its white fur ran red with blood. It escaped the clearing, and got away from the hunters. But now
Death
was chasing it through the night. Before, Death had been its hunting companion, ready to share in the feast of the Windigo’s victims. Now Death was the hunter. The Windigo returned to the shaman, its father.”

Nick licks his fork.

“And the shaman, seeing the future—the end of his tribe, of the manitou and the land itself—gave one last gift to his child. From his medicine chest, he took out the skin of a white man he had taken years ago, when his dark vision of the end-times had first come to him. Stripping off his clothes, he dressed himself in the white man’s skin. And he gave himself to his starving, dying child. One last meal before Death took them both.”

Laura starts to clear the table. “And what’s the moral of that story?”

As she passes Nick, he gives her butt a pat.

“The moral is—stick to red meat,” he says. “Better for you.”

She laughs. Ash smiles, shaking her head.

Nick gets up and stretches.

“Danny,” he says. “Grab your boots and come on out back with me. I want to show you something.”

So me and Ash go join him on the back porch.

“No, just Danny,” he tells her.

“Dad,” she says, in a warning tone. Then she speaks in Indian, something quick and tongue twisting.

Nick responds with more Ojibwa, sounding like he’s trying to reassure her. She doesn’t look convinced, but he grabs a flashlight, puts a hand on my shoulder and guides me across the backyard to a wooden shack with a small chimney.

“Finished it in October. Before the ground hardened.”

I hurry to keep up, shooting nervous glances to the dark edges of the snowy yard. Where anything could be hiding.

The thought strikes me, as Nick leads me into the darkness, that this guy has actually killed people. Ash told me he shot some Taliban guys over in Afghanistan. She said he got pretty twisted up over it, which is why he transferred from active duty after his last tour ended and came to CFB Borden. Where the only killing you do is killing time.

So I’m a little nervous about what he wants to show me. And why Ash had to stay behind.

He reaches the shack and flips a wooden door latch. “Watch where you step. Floor’s kind of rough.”

Nick gestures me in first, shining the light into the cramped interior. I find benches jutting out from the walls.

“Sit.” He squeezes in and sits on the bench opposite me. It’s tight in here and our knees are touching. There’s a strong pine smell in the shack, undercut by a deep smoky odor.

“What do you think?” He plays the light around.

“I think … I don’t know. What is it?”

“A sweat lodge. A midget one. But still, up to Ojibwa code.”

I see a pit at the rear and some large flat rocks. There’s a big empty pot next to it.

“Ash uses it when she needs to make weight, or work out some knots. I use it to … clear my head.”

He switches off the flashlight but leaves the door open. I can make out the bulk of his shadow, but not his face.

“So,” he says after a brief silence. “You and Ash? What’s that?”

“I—I don’t know,” I mutter, half wishing I could see his face, half glad he can’t see mine.

“I see how you look at her. She feel the same?”

“I guess so. Maybe.”

His knees bump mine as he shifts on the other bench, making me flinch. I can feel his eyes on me. Does he call this a sweat lodge because he brings people out here to sweat them?

“What’s said in the lodge stays in the lodge,” he says. “Clear?”

I nod, then realize the gesture is invisible in the dark. “Sure.”

He’s quiet for a long moment, sweating me.

“I always wanted a boy,” he says, finally. “Laura wanted a girl. But instead, we got Ash. I took her hunting, took her to the fights. Put her to bed with war stories. Laura got cheated, never got the girl she could go shopping with, dress up and do—you know, female stuff.”

It’s so close in here, maybe it’s better not being able to see each other. Like confession.

“So,” he goes on. “I was getting worried I’d messed her up. Hadn’t let her be a girl. But now you show up. She’s never done that before. Brought a guy home.” He taps the flashlight on the bench. Then he chuckles. “Heard she knocked you out, first time you met.”

“She knocked me stupid. My brain didn’t clear for days.”

“Yeah.” I can hear him smiling. “That’s good. So you know who’s boss?”

“Like she’s going to let me forget?”

Nick snorts, then gets to his feet. The flashlight comes to life. He’s shaking his head, grinning.

“She’s going to eat you alive.” He laughs, reaching over to squeeze my shoulder. “Hey, you’re freezing, Danny. Better get you in, get you warmed up.”

“Yeah.”

Stepping out into the snow, I feel a blast of winter wind. I’m sure the wind chill’s subzero, but for me it’s like a summer breeze.

I’m a stubborn guy, but there’s only so long I can stay in denial. Something’s definitely wrong with me. Howie asked if I felt
changed
. But changed into what?

What did that freaky thing do to us? And why?

Pike said maybe it was just playing with its food.

As I follow Nick’s boot prints in the snow, I look up to see Ash and her mother moving around in the warm light of the kitchen.

If I’m going to get eaten alive, better if Ash does it. I can think of worse ways to go.