The Raven's Gift (3 page)

She took another breath and held it. She reached over, grabbed his forearm and squeezed. John didn’t need to see her face, but he looked, and the sadness that pulled at her cheeks said enough.

“Cover your ears,” he whispered.

He waited until the man was only twenty yards from them. The tan jacket hung open, his brown chest a thin line of ribs, the stomach wasted and stretched drum tight. His black hair hung along his face in greasy strands, his brown eyes hiding somewhere in the shadows of his skull.

The girl screamed with the concussion. The shot reverberated against the hollow shell of a house above them and the man crumpled into the snow. She held her hands over her ears and buried her face in her chest.

He chambered another round as he swung the rifle back toward the house with the smoking chimney and waited.

“Quiet,” he said.

“But my ears hurt.”

“I know. I know,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

THEIR UNSIGNED CONTRACTS and the other papers were spread out on the floor. Anna rested on her stomach, her naked body across the
bed, with her feet dangling off. Her head and arms hung over the edge. She was enthralled at the contents before her.

“It’s almost like they want to scare us away. That’s fascinating to me, don’t you think? All this fuss about no running water, the brutal weather, the National Guard deployed—who cares if the nearest Starbucks is over four hundred miles away? Isn’t that the point?”

He propped himself up on his elbow. “I’m sure they just don’t want to have some yahoos who think they’re going to be teaching in, what was the name of that stupid TV show? The one with the doctor in Alaska from New York?”

“I can’t think of it. I know what show you’re talking about.
Northern Exposure!
”

He nodded. “That show was ridiculous.”

She sat up. “Are you staring at my crotch?”

“That’s such a harsh word for something so divine. Plus, isn’t crotch staring a rare privilege of my role as husband?”

She sat up and pulled a sheet over her body.

“You can take the girl from the Catholics, but you can’t take the Catholic from the girl,” he joked.

“Funny. I’m going to shower, and then we’ll call Gary and sign those babies. We’ll go eat somewhere nice, to celebrate our new jobs!”

“I’ll join you,” he said. “We better start practising those short military showers. If the only water supply is at the school, this could be our last shower together for a while.” He paused, and then said, suddenly serious, “Anna?”

She stopped halfway in the door to the bathroom. “Yeah?”

“No more about me, okay? People don’t need to know everything,” he said.

“If you’re part Eskimo then you’re part Eskimo, John. It’s okay to be a half-breed,” she said in a weak attempt at humour.

John looked down at one of the brochures; an old Yup’ik woman wearing a traditional fur parka stared back at him. “I just don’t want
it broadcast to the world, okay?” He stood up and turned his butt toward her. “Besides, no Eskimo has an ass this white.”

AFTER SEVERAL MONTHS he ventured outside the school for the first time. He’d spent days watching and listening for any sounds. Everyone in the village was either hiding out, had fled, or were, like so many others, dead.

He didn’t go far. Just out to get his bearings, get some air, and see if things were as bad as they looked from his peephole above the village.

They were worse.

Before the sickness, the weathered plywood houses stood without paint. Beside the houses rested the rusted carcasses of boat motors and old red three-wheelers and four-wheelers with flat tires, white five gallon buckets, shredded blue tarps that covered sheds and flapped in the wind. Even then everything possessed a worn appearance, as if the hand of a god brushed and burnished each item in just the right spots so that outsiders would know the irrelevance of time in such an ancient land.

That was before, and what was left was a nightmarish arctic wasteland. Many of the houses were looted and abandoned, or shot up. Windows broken. Snow machines and four-wheelers scorched or taken apart, the last vapours of gas from every tank in the entire village emptied, the tanks tossed on their sides and scattered about.

His survey was quick. He crept along the edges of buildings, his rifle in hand, and the pistol in his right parka pocket. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, just mostly deciding how he would leave the village at night with his supplies to make sure no one spotted him. If there was anyone left to spot him.

Nothing looked the same, which was an odd relief because, as he slipped from building to building, he didn’t want to think of Anna, of them together, their walks through the village. He wondered what had made people burn some of the houses. To stop the sickness or
cremate the dead? He thought about checking inside the ones that weren’t burned, to see if he could find any more supplies. That would be risky, and he wasn’t ready for that yet.

Something darted beneath one of the buildings and for a moment he was sure he’d spotted the bright red Bulls cap Alex always wore. He knelt to the ground, rifle ready, and peered around the edge of the building. Nothing moved. He wondered if he encountered one of them, one of his students, if he could do it, if he could pull the trigger.

The movement caught his eye. Low and stealthy, something beneath a house thirty yards away. He lifted the rifle and waited. More red emerged, and then a slender white and black–tipped nose. A skinny fire-red tundra fox flitted away.

He let out his breath and watched the fox dart from house to house. The rail-thin creature would lift its snout into the air and sniff, and then shoot over to a set of stairs and slowly creep up them. It avoided the burnt houses, and suddenly he realized the fox was looking for something in those houses too, and he took a mental note of which houses the fox avoided and which ones he tried to enter. Never staying long, but seeming to search each one in the row of the ten or so houses methodically. The fox feared nothing, as if he knew the village was now his; he would occasionally stop, lift a leg, and piss, staking his claim.

At the last house, the fox climbed the steps, slowly put his head in the door, and stopped. He turned and bolted down the staircase and toward the river in a streak of red. That was the house John told himself he would avoid at all cost. The fox was telling him something.

Countless months later he would enter that house and find the blind girl hiding beneath a mattress in a back bedroom.

   3   

T
he shot dropped the man mid-step. His body fell, splayed out on his side, his right foot in front of the left, his hand slipping from the side pocket of his jacket. Dirt and grease covered the exposed hand, and the black under his fingernails and around his lips had a look of either dried blood or gangrene. John wasn’t sure.

“What’s he look like?” the girl asked.

“Dead.”

“No, describe his face to me.”

“I’m not doing that,” he said, “not now. Someone might still be in there. We need to get inside and warm up.”

He started to follow the man’s tracks that led to the house. He watched for ski tracks and pulled her in the toboggan behind. He doubted the dead man had been alone and he wondered why the man left the house unarmed in the first place. She put her mittens down against the ground, and when he felt her resistance, he stopped pulling. She turned toward the dead man, her blind eyes staring out at him.

“Tell me just one thing.”

He stopped, not wanting to completely leave his back exposed to the house. To make sure no one was coming, he scanned the thin grey line of horizon surrounding them and then back toward the river ice at the edge of the village that stretched over a mile wide and ran north and south as far as he could see like some giant frozen highway.

“I want to know. I want to know if he’s my uncle,” she said.

“He’s not. Come on.”

“Does he have burns on his skin?” she asked. “Raised, thick? On his neck? Here?”

She slid the brown beaver fur mitten to the left side of her face and down her own neck. He dropped the sled rope and walked around her to the dead man, nudged him over with his boot, and tilted his head so he could see the brown skin of the neck. A thin string of half-frozen blood ran from the side of the man’s mouth, down his collar, and into the snow where it pooled in icy red clumps.

“Not him,” he said.

“Would you lie? I don’t want you to lie to me. I don’t care if it’s him. He used to live in our village. Our village council kicked him out because of something he did and he had to move here. It’s okay if it’s him. I won’t cry. Is it?”

“It’s not,” he said.

“Are you sure?”

“It’s not him.”

“This man smells like him, though—like one of them, but like my uncle, too,” she said. “The outcasts smell different. Not a bad smell, just different. Wrong. Like a flower that’s rotting. Sweet, but not a smell you want around you,” she said and rubbed her nose with the back of her hand. “That smell comes through their skin, like stinky alcoholic drunks. They can’t hide what they’ve done. It’s in their pores.”

He couldn’t smell the hunger, not like the girl could, but he imagined he would be able to see it in the lifeless holes they used as eyes. Their teeth wolf-sharp, their hungry mouths slowly taking over their faces.

Or maybe it was what someone couldn’t see. He imagined a person lost some little part of their soul when they consumed another. But he hadn’t looked into a mirror, so he could only imagine what his own brown eyes looked like.

THE JET FLIGHT from Anchorage, “from civilization,” Anna joked, revealed to both of them right away that the world they were headed to was different. They left from the farthest end of the terminal four hours after the scheduled departure, walked out on the tarmac with the other passengers, who were carrying boxes of diapers, bags of fruit, paper sacks of fast-food cheeseburgers and fries, video game consoles, stacks of DVDs, and cartons of eggs. The route to the aircraft consisted of a walk down the jetway, down a flight of stairs, and then out on the tarmac, around the wing of the jet, and then up a tall, narrow rolling staircase near the jet’s tail.

“This is something, isn’t it?” Anna said. “You can take the window. Can’t say I’ve flown on a full-size jet with only a dozen rows of seats. You?”

He pushed his backpack into the overhead compartment and pulled a pillow down.

“Want one for your back?” he asked.

“What do you think is up there?”

He looked toward the bulkhead in front of their seat. A mutely coloured carpeted wall separated them from the cargo taking up three-quarters of the jet.

“Our food, I hope.”

He took the seat next to the window and she settled in beside him.

“This is going to be some adventure,” she whispered. “Strange being packed in like this. You going to be okay?”

He nodded.

“You excited?” she asked, and he nodded again. “I’m a little scared, myself.”

“Why?” he asked.

“What if they don’t like us?”

He stifled a laugh. “Not like us? Has anyone ever not liked you? The most lovable person on the planet.”

She smiled and kissed his cheek. “You always know just what to say. Thanks.”

A rotund woman, breathing heavily and sweating at her temples and on her neck, squeezed into the aisle seat next to them. She buckled herself in and gave a giant sigh.

“Damn bush travel,” she said. “They can delay and delay our flights, but then when it’s time to go, you’d better be ready. I got sick of waiting and decided to go fabric shopping. They weren’t going to let me board.” She added, “I quilt.”

Anna smiled.

“You must be new teachers.”

They both nodded.

“I thought so—you have that new-teacher look.”

“Like a new-car smell?” John said. “What look is that?”

“Well, people new to the Bush have that half-terrified, half-excited look in their eye, but mostly it’s the shoes that give a rookie away. Look around. It’s fall out there. No one’s travelling in town shoes.”

She pointed to Anna’s feet, white canvas slip-ons, and then her own white-toed rubber slip-on boots. “See? Mine are tundra boots. I’m Cathy, by the way. I’m a nurse in Bethel.”