William Giraldi - Hold the Dark

On the rubber floor mats of Cheeon’s truck: a hammer, a crushed coffee cup, a torn-open box of condoms, cigarette filters fallen from the ashtray, .22 rounds that rolled when the truck turned. His head back against the seat, Slone looked at the roads he knew so well, and as they approached town he searched for changes in storefront windows, in street signs, in front yards, every few minutes sipping from a water bottle Cheeon had handed him. A mother walking along a shoveled sidewalk with her boy—Slone sat quickly forward, turned his head to look at them as they passed. Electricity was everywhere outside the truck window tonight—the illumination of lives. Slone thought about protons, electrons, electrocution.

They were met in the dim hallway of the town morgue by two detectives, a lab-coated coroner, and by Russell Core, the wolf writer who had discovered his boy two weeks earlier, the one who had last seen Medora Slone. Core and the detectives tried to offer handshakes, attempt a feeble form of condolence, but Cheeon raised a finger to his lips, shook his head for them to remain quiet, to keep back, and he unlatched the steel door to the coldroom for Slone to enter.

He entered alone. He saw his son in an extended corpse drawer, the sheet folded to his waist, toe tag nearly the size of the boy’s whole foot and attached like a price. His cobalt boy had grown in the year he was gone, the boy’s face bones altered from either time or death. Hair longer than he’d ever seen it. Burgundy stain beneath the paper skin of his throat. Dark bulbs beneath slitted lids. He looked unfed and Slone wondered if this was a trick of death.

He breathed through sobs as a woman breathes through birth—solar plexus sobs, and he gave in to them, knowing this was his only time, his only chance for tears. He let them come and pass. For long minutes they rippled over him. Then he placed his palm on the boy’s pale chest, his birdlike ribs. He bent—his skull tight from weeping, a pressure through his neck and face. He touched his lips to the boy’s and whispered, “Remember me.”

In the break room at the morgue, dense with the scent of coffee, the detectives sat in craters on the sofa. Across from them Slone and Cheeon smoked at a table. Russell Core sat in an armchair to their left, staring into his cup. Donald Marium had asked him here; he said Core was the only link to what had happened in the village. On the wall in this room a painting of a moose in scarlet wig and lipstick. When they’d first entered, Cheeon considered this picture closely, as if it were a calculus equation.

The cop with the mustache said, “Do you have any idea where on earth that wife might’ve fled to, Vern? Any idea at all where she went to?”

“We’ll get her,” the fat one said. “She’ll pay for it, Vernon. We’ve got leads, a few of them.” He held a file folder, a sheaf of documents on Medora Slone: photos and maps and Slone could not guess what else.

The other with the mustache said, “We got her picture out all over the state. All over, Vern. Troopers looking high and low for the wife’s truck. But it’d be real good if you could give us some idea of where that woman might’ve fled to. Into Canada, maybe? We been in touch with the Mounties there. Dumb asses, all of ’em, but we been in touch.”

This cop drank from a miniature Styrofoam cup and seemed irked by the morgue’s coffee. “I know it’s a damn hard time for you, Vern, what that woman did.”

Most of the people in this town weren’t from here—they were willful refugees from the lower forty-eight. Slone and Cheeon both could instantly spot a forty-eighter. The fat one, Slone guessed, was northern California, maybe Oregon. The mustached one was most likely from Texas. Migrated here to dabble in policelike work when not cutting down moose out of season. This wolf man was a midwesterner. They felt needed now, Slone guessed. Important. Useful in this dark.

Slone’s left eyelid twitched as it often did when he went without sleep. He’d tried to nap on the plane but could not. He smashed out his cigarette and turned to see Core, his white wolf face and regal beard. He was sitting oppressed and silent in the armchair.

“You found my boy?” Slone said.

Core met his eyes, nodded yes, and glanced away. Slone half nodded in return, in his gratitude, his version of thanks said with the face. Core looked down at his feet, at the salt-stained boots that belonged to Vernon Slone, the boots Medora had let him borrow two weeks ago when he arrived. When Core realized he was wearing them his head lightened with embarrassment and he tried to cover one boot with the other but knew it was useless.

“Mr. Core was called here by your wife,” the fat cop said. “Damn woman told him a wolf took your boy. Can you imagine that, such a thing?”

At twelve Slone had shot dead a wolf in the hills above Keelut. For a live target to practice on, for fear and for fun. When his father found out, he took Slone’s rifle and slapped the spittle from the boy’s mouth. He could recall the old man’s sandpapered palm on the skin of his cheek.

Then his father gave him a just-born husky to care for, “to fix that hardness in you,” he said. And Slone cared for the animal for a decade until it lost vigor and grew lumps. At his father’s demand Slone put it down himself with the .22 rifle, then buried it in the hills of Keelut beside the ravine. He felt certain—he was twenty—that he’d not again in this life undergo such gutting grief. He saw the dog everywhere, smelled it on clothing, heard it in the cabin, dreamed of it. Haunted and bereft, he learned then, were an unforgiving pair.

The mustached one said, “We thought you’d have some questions for Mr. Core, Vern, since he was there, since he saw that woman last. He’s been a help to us so far.”

Slone turned again to Core in the armchair, sipped from his own coffee. He examined his knuckles, his wedding band, and under a thumbnail a blood blister that puzzled him. Each finger seemed a marvel of movement.

“Can you raise the dead?” he asked finally.

“No, sir, I cannot,” Core said.

“Then I’ve got no questions for you.”

“I’d like a cigarette, please,” Core said.

Slone looked. He did not understand.

“Can I get a cigarette from you?” Core asked again.

Slone passed the pack to him then, and Core, nodding thanks, fingered one free from the box—the same unknown brand Medora had shared with him when he first arrived in Keelut, a black dagger for a logo. He reclined again and lit it from Slone’s lighter and sat staring at its glow.

“You can’t think of where the wife’s gone to, Vernon? Anywhere at all?” the fat one asked. “A relative or friend, maybe? That woman have friends, any friends at all?”

Slone rose from the table then, bored by this, and Cheeon followed. Core stayed seated with the cigarette, his body still aching and warm from a flu that would not leave. The fizzing medicine he’d drunk an hour earlier had done nothing to quell the fever.

The detectives stood. The fat one said, “We need a statement when you could, Vernon, and a bunch of damn papers that need signing. At the station would be best, if you’re all set to go. Don Marium is there, you know Don? He asked us to meet you here and then bring you over to the station, if you wouldn’t mind it. Sooner would be better than later, most likely.”

Slone stared at the cop and said nothing.

“Shit, we know you just got back, Vern. We’re sorry as shit about all this. The more time we wait, the farther that woman gets, is what I’d say. We got them leads, a few we wanna go over with you, if you don’t mind coming on back now. I know it’s late. We got a map set up on the board there.”