The Raven's Gift (14 page)

She laughed and reached over to him. She took his hand and began pushing back his cuticles with her fingernail. “The kids are going to love you, Johnny. You care—they are going to see that from the first moment. From the sounds of it, they’ve had a lot of odd and shitty teachers. I think they’re going to appreciate your gentle heart.”

“My gentle heart. Ha. That’s a little presumptuous. You’re the gentle heart. I’m the one with the wolf-jaw snap.”

“I can’t win! Sorry for trying
and
hoping.” She got up and stormed to the door. “Screw you, mister!” She stopped and turned back and laughed. “How was that? Was I convincing?”

“Not at all convincing,” he said. “You need to turn a few desks over on the way.”

“I’m going back to my room to make some dinosaur mobiles to hang from the ceiling—you should make a few, too,” she joked.

“Yeah, dinosaurs, I’ll get right on that.”

She paused at the door, her eyes stopped on movement outside the windows across from her. She pointed. “Look.”

He stood up and watched as a father and son walked down the boardwalk between the village houses. The father carried a shotgun over one shoulder, and his other hand carried a handful of ducks by the neck. The boy’s back was covered in white, his hands clutching a long white neck at his chest, an Alaskan version of Leda and the Swan.

“What’s the boy carrying?” Anna asked.

“A bird. Swan, I think. Maybe a trumpeter swan.”

“That’s sad,” she said.

“Sad? No way,” he replied. “I bet they’re delicious.”

THAT MORNING the two of them left the village, with the girl riding in the sled to save her energy. Twice he glanced over his shoulder to check on her, and each time her head was turned back toward the village.

They hadn’t made it more than a mile or so along the river’s edge before she answered the question he’d never voiced.

“If there’s someone left, someone like us,” she said, “I think they’ll know.”

He stopped and rested for a moment. The sun had just started to lift above the long stretch of flat horizon, a grey cold sun that gave no heat or comfort.

“Know what?” he asked.

“They’ll know we’re not like the others.”

“Sick?”

“No. The other people, the outcasts. They’ll know we’re not like the outcasts.”

“How? How could they know that?”

Using his glove, he brushed some small clumps of ice collecting on his beard. The small thermometer clipped to his zipper read fifteen below. It felt colder. He clenched his toes in his boots. He couldn’t feel the little toes, and once feeling in the big toes left they would have to stop and try to get a fire going.

“How are your feet doing?” he asked.

“I can smell them,” she said.

“Your feet?” he asked.

“No. So dumb, John. The outcasts. I can smell them. But anyone else, anyone who spots us, even if they don’t know I can’t see with my eyes—they’ll know. They’ll see you helping me and they’ll know we’re not like them. They will know we’re not
tenguituli
, wild people, and they’ll know we’re not outcasts. Those outcast people don’t help no one but themselves.”

He started pulling again. After a while he stopped and asked her, “What if we were both outcasts? Wouldn’t we still travel together?”

She ran her mitten across the top of the snow and tasted it. He took off his glove and held his palms against his cheeks to warm them.

He tightened the rope about his waist and pressed forward, trying to ignore the hunger burning in his stomach and the cold fire scorching the tips of his toes.

“If we were, you would have killed me, to have the food you saved for yourself. Maybe eat me with salt and pepper. I jokes, John. I’m no good for one of those people. Besides, we’re not like them, are we.”

She said it like a statement. Not a question.

   14   

T
he figure stood in the doorway for a moment and moved toward the kitchen and then stumbled over the first bodies. A gasp came from across the gym and John watched as the person half-crawled, half-walked over the corpses toward him. He was no hunter.

John stepped back a little, waited for the right moment, and flipped on the flashlight, shining the beam straight into the man’s eyes. The man jumped to his feet and shielded his face.

“That’s far enough.”

The man, wearing a tattered fleece jacket and Sorel Packs, shuffled another step forward and pushed a woman’s leg out of the way.

He shone the light across the gym. A glint of steel by the door caught his eye. He shone the light at it and spotted two portable generators he hadn’t seen before.

“Start clearing the path to the door and I won’t shoot you.”

“That food’s going to make you sick. You can’t take it. I came to tell you to leave it. Going to make you both real sick.”

John shone the light on his pistol for a moment, for effect, and said, “Turn around slowly and start clearing me a path. I’m going to be right behind you. Try anything and you’re dead. I should have already shot you.”

The man turned slowly and started pushing bodies out of the way. John tilted the handcart back with one hand while holding the pistol and flashlight against the top box with the other. He started rolling
through the path of bodies. The flashlight and the pistol pointed at the man’s back.

The man began kicking the corpses out of the way with his boots. The sounds of his boots hitting them and the rough skin scratching against the floor made John’s stomach turn again. He swallowed hard and steadied his breathing.

“They’re going to get you,” the man said.

“Are there more people out there?”

“Not out there. In here.”

John flashed his light around the gym, suddenly paranoid.

“Who?”

“These people,” he said. “You’re stealing from the dead. That food is theirs. This is their grave now and you’re stealing from them. We don’t take from the dead.”

The man stopped pushing the bodies away and turned toward John. With the light shining into his dark brown eyes the man stared at him, unflinching.

“You shouldn’t have disturbed them,” he said.

“Why did
you
come in here, then?”

“I’m not the one stealing from them.”

“Yeah, but I’m not the one kicking their corpses. Come on, we’re almost there. Keep moving.”

“Out there, he’ll get you.”

“Who?”

He looked over his shoulder and grinned. “You know who.”

“Keep moving.”

Just before they reached the door he told the man to stop. He didn’t want to walk out into an ambush. He needed a moment to think. If a group of them were waiting in the hall, he and the girl would be easy prey. If he shot the man now, he wouldn’t be keeping his word. He didn’t want the girl seeing him lie like that. He didn’t know where the girl had hidden—he didn’t want to call her out yet.

He wheeled the handcart within three feet of the man. “Okay, once we get to the door I want you to stop. Then you’re going to turn around and wheel this cart in front of you. Don’t test me.”

Near the door he told the man to stop again. The man turned and took the cart and wheeled it out into the hallway, with John right behind him. John stopped at the door and looked down the hall in both directions. Nothing. The man set the handcart down and turned to him.

He was rail thin. Mid-thirties. A thin LA Lakers shirt with holes hung from his knobby shoulders beneath the fleece jacket. The man’s black hair, shoulder length and stringy, almost mangy, hung in clumps from his head.

“You going to blast me now?”

“Not if I don’t have to. Who’s waiting out there for us?” John asked.

“No one. There’s no one. Let me take a case of those chickens. Please. I’m so hungry. Come on, man. I helped you. One can. Just give me one can, dude. One.”

“What about them?” John said, gesturing to the bodies in the gym. “I thought you were afraid of them.”

“Too late for me now, too, I guess.”

“I’m leaving here with this food. When I’m gone, you can go back in and take all you want.”

John felt a hand on his back. It almost made him drop the pistol.

“Sorry, I couldn’t stay in there no more,” the girl said, her voice barely audible.

“It’s okay,” he said.

He watched as a smile spread across the man’s face.

“I know you,” he said to the girl.

Her face shifted. She took a deep breath and stepped back to the side of the door.

“I
know
you,” the man said again, and in the dim light of the hallway, John could see the raised burns on his neck.

AFTER THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL, in their little one-bedroom shack of a house, Anna cried. She curled up on the couch, which was made from two wrestling mats stacked on top of each other with a heavy flannel sheet covering them, and cried.

“What the hell are we doing here?” she asked between sobs. “Who are we fooling? Why did you let me talk us into this? It’s my fault, isn’t it? I wanted this so much for you, I should have known this would be too much for
me
to handle, shouldn’t I?”

The questions were building to a level of hysteria he hadn’t seen since the day before their wedding, when her mother insisted she hire a real florist and not leave the flowers to her hippie friends. He knelt down beside her and tried to soothe her. He knew better than to set foot into one of her spring-loaded questions.

“They hated me,” she said. “They looked at me, and stared at me like I’m some sort of hellish freak alien, and they hated me, John.
Hated
me.”

“I’m sure they didn’t hate you, Anna. They’re second-graders. They don’t even know hate yet.”

“Thanks. That’s so reassuring. Now I’m teaching them to hate! They weren’t excited or motivated or interested. They just sat there and stared at me and didn’t do or say anything. They wouldn’t answer my questions or do what I asked them. They just sat there. Some of them covered their faces! They couldn’t even bear to look at me!”

“I’m sure there’s an adjustment period, you know? You’re new here—new to their world—that’s a big thing to remember.”

“And I’m white.
White
.”

“And white. So what? You’re dealing with kids. This whole school thing is as foreign to them as their culture is to you.”

She looked up at him, her face awash in tears. “And you’re the expert now? Is it just because you had a great first day? Or did your Native roots suddenly kick in?”

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that,” he said. He got up and
went back to the stove and stirred the pot of chili. He tasted it, and added another dash of Mexican chili powder, more pepper, and two pinches of dried garlic, anything to make the tin-can taste disappear.

He tried his best to just answer the question. “It wasn’t great. I mean, after the first two minutes I threw the whole first day of lesson plans out the door. We spent the day getting to know each other. It took me about thirty seconds after the first bell to see that they weren’t ready to jump right into school mode.”

“So what did you do?”

“We talked. Scratch that—I talked, at least initially. They asked questions, and more questions, and all I did was answer them one right after the other.”

“Like what?” she asked.

“Where are you from? Do you hunt? Where have you been? Do you play basketball? Did I play college hoops? Why didn’t I play in the NBA? Where are you from? Again. When did you get married? Why did I marry you?”

“They asked about me? They asked why you married me? Even your students don’t like me?”

“Relax, Anna. They asked about everything. Then, when they couldn’t come up with any more questions, I started asking questions. And that’s what we did for the day. We just talked and got to know each other. Sometimes we just sat there and didn’t say anything.”

She stood up and let her hair down. She tasted the chili and poured herself a cup of hot water from the kettle on the stove and began to dip a green-tea bag.

“What sort of questions did you ask?”

“I started simple. Nicknames, favourite subjects, favourite sports. Then I asked about things they learned over the years in school, past teachers, and what they wanted to do in the future—but that’s the one thing that stumped them a bit, or something they couldn’t really answer.”