The Raven's Gift (12 page)

“Then what? What do you mean, then what?”

“When we get away from here and if the rest of the world’s not sick. Then what’s next? Where will you go?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t waste my time thinking about it,” he said. “No use worrying myself about it until it happens.”

She took another scoop of snow and seemed to look back at their
tracks, a long line of dark holes in the white drifts that stretched into the distant sky.

“Well, I worry,” she said. “I don’t know anyone outside. I’ve got no place to go.”

He took up the rope of the toboggan. “Well,” he said, “worrying isn’t going to get you there. Sit there, I’ll pull you awhile.” He began pulling her, wishing he could leave her worrying behind him.

An hour later they crossed the ski tracks. He dropped to his knees and hunched low, swinging the rifle from across his back. He didn’t need to study the tracks. He knew what sort of tracks one person travelling alone on skis left.

“What is it?” the girl whispered. He knew she sensed his fear. Perhaps she could hear his lungs tighten and his heart accelerate.

“Tracks. A skier.”

“Skier? People don’t ski here,” she said.

“I know.”

From the angle of the round holes the ski poles had poked into the crust, the distance between the holes, and the slight outward turn of the tracks, he could tell the skier was making good time. Moving. Fast.

“Which way is he going? Toward Kuigpak?” she asked.

“No.”

“Good,” she said. “Let’s get going. I don’t like to know someone has skis.”

His eyes followed the two long, dark cuts in the snow, like twin frozen snakes stretching for as far as he could see to where the wide river turned east and out of sight.

   12   

H
e walked the girl to the principal’s office and sat her in the chair. He flipped the pad of paper over, even though he knew she couldn’t read it. Still, he could imagine her running her fingers over the impression the ballpoint had left, and just knowing.

“Why are they dead in there? Why would they do that?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Just sit here. Okay? I’m going to go check the kitchen.”

“Don’t leave me, John. Don’t, please?”

“I have to. I’ll be right back,” he said, standing just outside the office. He’d turned and looked back at her. She had her legs pulled up with her arms wrapped around them. She kept wiping her nose against one sleeve and then the other. She hadn’t stopped shaking and her eyes were closed tight, as if she struggled to keep them closed against some horrible vision. He went back in and wrapped her parka around her.

“You can lock the door if you want,” he said.

“I’m not worried about anything that door will stop. We shouldn’t have gone in there. Don’t go back in there. Please …”

He let her words trail him down the hall. At the gym doors he took out the pistol and the flashlight. He pushed the black plastic switch on the flashlight forward and the beam cut the darkness of the gym. He stepped forward, sweeping the walls with the light first.

Handmade banners, written with sidewalk chalk on white and goldenrod butcher paper, still clung to the walls.

Go Bethel Warriors! Get ’Em Tundra Foxes! Fight Falcons Fight! Beat ’Em Shaman! Three Cheers for the Aniak Half Breeds!

The bleachers on one side of the gym had been pulled out. He passed the light once over them, wooden planks covered with the dead, as if they waited for the final game. Some bodies were hunched over. Some lying out flat. Others holding on to each other. He tried to look past their faces, but he couldn’t. The face of one woman caught his eye, her skin drum tight, almost freeze-dried from a combination of the cold, dry gym, perhaps the heat of summer, and decay. He swept the light toward his path to the kitchen. Bodies covered the floor all the way across the gym to the open kitchen door. He shone the light through the open serving window. He thought he could make out a shelf still full of the silvery USDA gallon cans. He had to steady himself. He blinked hard and tried to focus.

Before he took a step he pointed the flashlight at his feet. A child, a boy, no more than three or four, stared up at him. The brown eyes dried, but still open, innocent. The look on the child’s face not one of terror or starvation, or any of the horrors surrounding him—just some sort of contentment. He stepped gently over the boy, and then stopped and looked back at him. Holding the light on him. His skin pulled back tight against his face, his mouth slightly open with his teeth peeking out. His black hair seemed to grow from the rigid skin on his skull as he watched.

“What are you trying to tell me?” John whispered.

He took another glance around the gym and saw that the lunch tables, the tables that his school also had, were down, and several large garbage cans sat full of the disposable cardboard lunch trays.

“You didn’t starve,” he said to the boy.

He leaned down and looked closely at the boy’s nose. The skin had tightened and shrivelled, but the boy’s nostrils were clear.

“Not sick, either.”

He aimed the light back toward the kitchen. He’d leave the mystery
for someone else to unravel. If the kitchen had some food they could use he might be able to just let the kid and his eyes go. The fifty-odd feet across the gym could have been ten miles. The space seemed too far to travel, the walls too close, the bodies too near. He avoided allowing the light to stop moving, to hesitate for a second on any of the faces, but the arms and legs seemed to cover every couple of feet of gym floor. He had to step, twist, and step again to avoid crunching through a limb. He blinked hard again and bit at his lip. He wasn’t moving fast enough. The ceiling seemed to be pressing down, the walls pressing in.

Halfway across he realized he was gasping, almost hyperventilating. He didn’t know if it was from overexertion, the hunger, or something else, maybe something inside him trying to deny that the bodies scared him. He stopped and tried to slow his breaths. He blinked hard again and tried to shake the sensation that the bodies were surrounding him and coming toward him.

On one slow inhale he allowed himself to smell the air. Before, the warmer air outside had been rushing into the cool gym, but the air had equalized and was still. Perhaps until this moment his brain had known better than to test the atmosphere, to allow itself to calculate or quantify the stench of hundreds of human bodies confined to a single basketball court—but in that fraction of a second he smelled it; he smelled them. His empty stomach lurched. He sprang forward, four quick steps with the light searching for bare gym floor, to the door of the kitchen.

He dove inside, found the deep aluminum washing sinks and vomited. The first heave brought up little more than a handful of reddish bile, the second a little more, the third something that looked like blood. He slid down to the floor, shaking, his back against the sink, his pistol in one hand, the flashlight in the other, still on and shining across the kitchen floor.

ON THEIR FIRST FULL DAY in the village Anna and John decided to go for a walk. They hadn’t reached the bottom step of their new house
before the first kid, wearing red basketball shorts, no shirt, and rubber boots, skidded to a stop on his green BMX bike and greeted them.

“My name’s Yago,” the boy said. “Whatch yer names?”

“I’m Anna. This is John.”

“Where you guys going?”

“We thought we’d go for a walk,” she said, waving her arm at the black cloud of mosquitoes that had descended on them.

“Why?” the boy asked.

“We want to see the village, maybe go down to the river.”

“I’ll go, too. Okay?”

“Sure,” Anna said.

John bent down and pressed his hand into the tundra moss. The stuff fascinated him. Up close he could see countless species of intricate sponge-like plants all connected to each other: lichens and moss and grass, roots, berries, mushrooms, flowers of all colours, all in the space of his hand. He pressed his fingers into the cool wet sponge and held it there for a moment. The ground felt alive.

They started down one of the boardwalks that connected all the village buildings with each other, like long, narrow wooden veins. Yago pushed his bike in front of them. John studied the two-by-eight wooden planks and then noticed the small black rubber threads still sticking to the sides of the boy’s tires.

“Got yourself a new bike, huh?” he asked.

“No. It’s not mine. My brother’s. Mine’s so cheap. It has a flat tire. Maybe I’ll get a new one when dividends come.”

The boy stopped and pointed to a house. “That’s where I live,” he said. “My bike’s under the house. There comes my cousin Roxy.”

A young girl was speeding down the boardwalk toward them. She rode a boy’s BMX, wore a black baseball cap backward, and from the looks of it, was all tomboy. A second before she would have run into them, she skidded the bike sideways, blocking the boardwalk.

“Hey, Yago,” she said. “Where you guys going?”

“I’m showing the new teachers around,” he replied proudly.

The girl reached into the back pocket of her jeans and removed a can of chewing tobacco. She opened it and offered some to them. Yago took a pinch of the dark grains and slipped it behind his lower lip. The girl did the same.

“Aren’t you guys a little young for that?” Anna asked.

“See those kids playing over at the playground, those little ones?” Yago said, pointing beside the school. “Those second-graders even already chew Copen. Everyone chews. Everyone.”

The girl got off her bike and began walking it beside Yago.

“You know it’s bad for you, right?” Anna asked.

The girl spat. “So. Seems like everything’s bad for you. Stop the pop. No candy. No chips. No snuff. No, no, no—never anyone tells us what’s good. Native food is only thing good for me to eat, my mom says. And that’s so boring, always eating fish and ducks and things. You guys husbands and wifes?”

“That’s Anvil’s store there,” Yago said, pointing to a building that looked like the rest of the village houses. A boxy one-storey plywood house, with ATVs and snow machines in various stages of disrepair parked outside.

“Yeah, we’re married,” Anna replied.

“What do they sell in there?” John asked.

“You know, store things,” Yago said. “Pop, chips, gum, frozen pizzas.”

“They got movies to rent there, too,” Roxy said.

“Movies?” Anna chuckled.

Yago said, “My brother said they got dirty naked kind of movies in the back behind the curtain, too.”

Yago looked at the girl and the two laughed. The girl covered her mouth with her hand, as if to keep the laughter contained.

The two kids reached the end of the boardwalk, at the edge of the ten-foot-high riverbank. From a distance, it looked to John as if
the wooden walkway just went right off the edge of the bank, and standing at the edge he could tell why. The bank was eroding and had taken a portion of the walkway with it.

The girl shot a dark ball of saliva over the embankment and into the swirling rusted-brown water below. “How long you guys going to live here? Will you leave at springtime?”

Anna smacked a mosquito against the soft skin of her neck. “We just got here! Who knows,” she said. “How can you not have a shirt on, Yago? Why aren’t the bugs eating you like they are me?

“’Cuz he stinks!” the girl said with a laugh. Yago slugged her in the arm.

“So dumb you are, Roxy.”

John looked down over the bank as a large wall of dirt upstream calved and splashed into the water. “Wow,” he said, “the water is really eating the bank up.”

“See that house down there?” Yago pointed to a rusting Quonset hut hanging over the edge of the bank. Wood, sheet metal, and weathered pink insulation dangled down the bank and dipped into the water. “That was my uncle’s house. Last summer, after they made him leave the village, most of it fell in the river.”

“We might have to move the whole village, like those villages on the coast. They have to move. Even the graveyards,” the girl said. “So scary, ah? To have to dig up those bodies? I bet they’ll be haunted.”

“Why are they moving villages?” Anna asked, pulling up the hood of her green fleece sweatshirt to keep the bugs off.