The Raven's Gift (9 page)

John shook his head. “No, not yet,” he said.

“Maybe they’ll learn you someday. Good luck out there, John.”

The old man gave a slight nod of goodbye and disappeared down the aisle, his red plastic basket swinging at his side.

SINCE HE’D DISCOVERED the girl his dreams were unlike any he’d ever had before. Not the normal dreams of daily life, of interactions with other teachers and students, not scenes from his youth, and not of Anna.

Instead, his dreams contained the atmosphere and darkness of a world without light. A combination of some horrific vision of what might be happening to the outside world, filled with the creatures and images from the girl’s stories of the ancient Yup’ik world.

He would find himself enveloped in a stark, bleak, lifeless void. He would walk down empty black streets in desolate and dingy towns. Sometimes towns he’d travelled to, sometimes just generic towns from books he’d read or films he’d watched. In all the dreams he walked. Just looking, listening, searching for life, sometimes looking for a letter from his grandfather that would explain everything.

And sometimes there were signs of struggle. Blood. Smeared tracks and tiny handprints. A small creature, half-human, crawled about in the shadows, devouring survivors before he could find anything more than a crimson trace.

Not in a single dream did he walk down along one of the frozen paths between the village houses, carrying his rifle, afraid of the life he might find. The dreams seemed to have nothing to do with him now, except for the desolation and that heavy feeling that the world was as empty and soulless as those small towns. He expected to encounter any one of her monsters or the blue-eyed gunslinger he’d dreamt of before, but perhaps even they were dead.

The dreams differed only in how they ended—with each dream stopping so abruptly it would rip him from his sleep. Heart contracting in his chest. Fists clenched. The grit of freshly ground bits of molars and incisors sticking to his dry tongue. And each time the girl would whisper, “It’s okay. Don’t cry. It’s okay, John.”

   9   

H
e pulled the pistol out and held it out in front of him as he moved along the hall, past the display cases full of basketball and wrestling trophies. No broken glass.

The building, aside from having no lights or heat, looked as though school let out for the day, the janitors vacuumed the blue hallway carpet and shut the doors. Of all the burned and wasted buildings he’d been in, he’d seen nothing so normal. He hadn’t been in a school building, village store, house, or fish camp that hadn’t been picked clean.

He peeked into the main office area. Also clean. A phone, off the hook. From the soft winter light coming in through the window he spotted a yellow plastic flashlight, standing at the edge of a bookshelf. He tested it. The light snapped on, and he stared at the glowing bulb for several seconds before he shut it off. A working flashlight! He opened a few desk drawers and found more batteries. A pack of gum. Some Aspirin. He pocketed it all.

He would check all the drawers more carefully, but first he had to look through the kitchen and storage rooms. If no one had cleaned the office out, there still might be food somewhere.

He stuffed the flashlight in his pocket with the gum and Aspirin and started toward the gym. He held the pistol out in front of him, still not sure what to think about the untouched school.

The kitchen would be off the side of the gym, which, as in all
the village schools he’d been to, would also serve as the cafeteria, the largest, darkest part of the building, the last place, really, he wanted to enter, but the possibility of shelves loaded with canned fruits, vegetables, and even a canned chicken or two made his stomach tighten. He stopped at the heavy double doors to the gym and turned on the flashlight.

He pushed the latch to open the door, but it wouldn’t budge. He tried again. He looked around for something to pry the door with, but the empty hall offered no ideas. As he walked back to the office he poked his head into the classrooms. They too were in order. A locked gym almost made sense.

Back in the office he opened drawers, looking for keys. All he could find was a Phillips screwdriver, not enough to break the lock on the door. In a small room off the side of the main office, he sat down at what he figured was the principal’s desk, rummaged through the drawers, and then tried to think where someone might hide a master key for the school. He felt around under the desk, imagining he might find a key taped underneath. Nothing.

He sat, resting for a moment. Thinking. Then he saw the legal notepad. The black pen that had written the scrawled message sat, with the cap off, to the side of the three words:

For the children
.

THE MORNING OF THEIR FLIGHT the rain came shooting sideways from the west with gale-force winds that shook the mud-covered school district Suburban delivering them to Gary Air. The vehicle pulled up to an oblong office building attached to a hangar on a road with half a dozen other small airline companies.

“Don’t suspect you’ll be flying out today,” the driver said through a full blond and grey beard that John guessed he’d been cultivating for the last decade. The driver pulled up to the door of the airline and stopped. He turned the wipers off and slipped the vehicle into Park.
“If you get stuck, tell ’em to call Ross—they got his number. He’ll find you a place to stay tonight.”

“Thanks,” John said.

“Stuck?” Anna asked.

The driver turned to the back seat, where Anna sat, tightening the knot on her raincoat hood. “You can expect to be stuck or delayed at least every other time you fly around here, if’n you’re lucky. I hope you get out. But if you don’t, well, that’s how it goes. You’re
stuck
.”

“Thanks again,” John said, and he stepped out into the torrent.

Inside they stood at the counter, a chipped Formica construction that looked as if it had been taken from an old kitchen and slapped on a plywood frame. A Yup’ik boy, fourteen or fifteen, sat behind the counter playing a hand-held video game. He wore a black knit AND1 stocking cap pulled down tightly around his head.

“We’re flying out to Nunacuak today,” Anna said.

The boy didn’t look up from his game. “Maybe not today,” he said.

“Do you work here?”

He paused his game and looked up at them. “Not today, if the weather’s staying like this.”

“We’re supposed to leave at nine, I think?”

“I’ll get a weather update at ten. There’s coffee.”

He pointed to a coffee pot with a stack of white plastic cups sitting beside it. The phone rang. He went back to his game and picked it up on the fifth ring.

“Gary Air,” he said curtly. “Weather delay. Maybe we’re not flying. We’ll know more at ten or eleven.”

He hung up the phone and went back to his game. John shrugged, leaned his pack against the wall, and started for the coffee pot. He stopped at the small table that held the pot, cups, creamer, and sugar packs.

“Did we send any coffee filters?”

“I don’t remember,” Anna said. “Coffee is your ball of wax.”

“Crap. I don’t remember either. You think they sell coffee filters out there?”

“You could use an old sock.”

He poured himself a cup, took a sip, and grimaced.

“Tastes like
his
sock,” he whispered, thumbing toward the kid behind the desk.

And so they sat all day, drinking coffee, listening to the kid play video games and tell callers to check back in another hour to see if the planes were flying. The two of them knew they weren’t going anywhere.

The wind splattered the rain in sheets against the finger-marked window that looked out to the soaked black tarmac. A fleet of planes, mostly Cessnas, spanned a quarter mile of asphalt-covered tundra.

“I’m kind of scared to fly in one of those,” she said.

“I don’t think you’ll be flying in one today.”

“Why aren’t you ever afraid of dying?” she asked.

“Who said I’m not?”

“Well, those little planes look spooky. I wish there was another way to get out there.”

“We could find someone to take us in a boat.”

“No, thanks. Not in this weather. Where are we going to sleep tonight? Here?” she asked.

“At this point, I don’t really care. I just want to get there already.”

He took what must have been his hundredth sip of coffee. She reached over and took his hand.

“Can you believe we’re doing this?”

“Waiting for our first Alaskan storm to go away?” he asked.

“No, this. This move. It’s crazy, isn’t it? Are we crazy?” she asked, running her hand through her hair and pausing to look for split ends.

Anna always second-guessed herself. Sometimes it annoyed the hell out of him, but on this day, as he stared out past the planes, past the runways, and out to where the impossibly flat tundra just blurred into
a wall of wind and rain, he tried to think of something reassuring. He took another sip of coffee, and bit at the plastic foam. “Yeah,” he said, “pretty crazy.”

“You think so? I mean—are we making a mistake? Should we have taken normal jobs?”

“Only crazy people want normal jobs,” he said. “We wanted something different in our lives anyway, right? Get away from the mortgage, two point five kids and a flat-screen, right? Figure out if a quarter of me belongs here. I’m getting hungry. You?”

“Don’t change the subject,” she said. She traced a finger around a small greasy handprint on the window. “I’m excited,” she whispered, “but I’m also scared. I mean, what if the kids hate me? What if they can’t understand me, or I can’t understand them? What kind of teaching materials am I going to have? Christ—there are a million questions slamming around my skull.”

“I’m wondering if we can order up some of that Chinese food, like the kid there did.”

“Don’t be a jerk. Everything can’t just always be so simple for you. So cut and dried. Food. Sex. You must wonder what it’s going to be like.”

“Sure I wonder,” he said. “But I can imagine and wonder and worry all I want and it’s not going to do me any good, us any good. What’s that saying about wishing in one hand and shitting in the other?” He paused and smiled. “Did you say sex?”

She punched him in the shoulder. “Tell me one thing you wonder about—then you can ask the kid about ordering some food. We might as well enjoy dining out while we can, but I’m sure it’s going to cost a small fortune.”

“Well, I wonder about friends,” he said. “Will people like us? Will they want to hang out with us? And I guess I wonder if anyone will take me hunting.”

“I should have known it would come down to hunting. Why do you wonder if we’ll have friends? Why wouldn’t we make friends?”

“Would you quit worrying? You’re going to be fine. You’ll be the life of the village. We’ll have to do what that one old bag said and make a signal that lets people know when it’s okay to visit because we’ll be so popular.”

“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Tell me one thing you worry about, too,” she said.

He scratched his chin as he tried to unravel his thoughts. “I guess I’m worried I won’t be brave enough to step outside of my comfort zone, but part of me is really excited to maybe learn about where I might have come from. There’s a whole new world that I could be a part of, and that’s exciting and worrisome all at the same time.”

“How so?” she asked.

“That world just might not want me.”

“It will, John. I know it will.”

He set his coffee cup on the windowsill and scratched the thin stubble on his chin. He hadn’t shaved in a few days and the sparse bristles added something to the sense of adventure awaiting them.

SOMETIMES, WHEN THE GIRL grew tired of asking questions, she would just talk while twisting and braiding the three strands of yellow grass over and over and he would watch and listen. He never told her to shut up because he didn’t like the silence of the night either. Once in a while, especially on those nights before they left Nunacuak, he would just say, “Shh,” and just listen for a moment or two. He didn’t want to become so lost in her tales of life before the sickness that he wouldn’t hear someone or something approaching.

The night before they left the village to start their trek up the river, as they curled up in the sleeping bags, she told him something he wished he’d never heard.