William Giraldi - Hold the Dark

“San Diego, huh? Never heard of it.”

“He was stabbed straight through his head. Clear through, from one side to the other. Who’d do a thing like that?”

“You tell me.”

“You can probably guess he had some family who won’t be the same.”

Cheeon nodded more, smoked more, nearly smiled. His fingernails were piss-tinted from tobacco.

“Yeah,” he said. “There’s a bunch of that going around here lately.”

“Where is Vernon Slone, Cheeon?”

Cheeon turned to him, smoke funneling from his nostrils. His face—a crimped brow, the start of a smirk—said, You’re dumber than you look if you think I’ll tell you that .

“Yeah, okay,” Marium said. “Maybe you’ll tell me where that boy’s body is, then. It’s state evidence.”

“It’s what?”

“Evidence.”

“That boy’s body is nothing to you and your like. It’s not of this earth anymore. Put that boy out of your mind or he just might haunt you, guy.”

“Where’s Medora Slone?”

“She’ll be found. Not by you or them, though.”

“What happened to her? How does that happen to a woman?”

“How in the goddamn hell should I know? I ain’t a woman.”

A span of silence now. Cheeon pressed out the filter into ice with a boot toe, then lit another.

“What’s the temp today?” he asked. “Feels like a February cold is coming on and it ain’t even January yet.”

Marium pointed. “Thermometer says zero right there.”

Cheeon looked at the thermometer screwed into the outside sill of the kitchen window.

“That’s broken. It’s been stuck on zero all year, even last summer.” He stopped to pull in the smoke. “Maybe it’s not broken. I don’t know.”

“Is that why those cops were shot?” Marium said. “So no one but Slone would find Medora? So no one would interfere in his business? His revenge, whatever he wants. And Frank because the big galoot just got in the way?”

“What do I look like, like I enjoy all these fucking questions from you, guy?”

“I know your little girl was taken from here by a wolf. I know you don’t have a body to bury and that there’s nothing on earth worse than that.”

“You know that, huh? A lot of help you were for a guy who knows that. You come an hour across the goddamn snow for my sorry ass but you wouldn’t come for some kids dead in the hills.”

“We came.”

“You came and you left and you didn’t come back. Worthless as shit, you city boys. Though even shit can fertilize, right? What can you do?”

“We ain’t city boys, Cheeon, you know that.”

“You sure as hell are. I’ve been going there my whole life, I know what the goddamn city is.”

“We’re an hour closer to Anchorage than you. That don’t make us the city. Five thousand people is hardly a city, I’d say.”

Cheeon bent with laughter, coughed on his smoke. Laughed more, his teeth as stained as his fingers.

“You come here today to argue with me about the definition of a city, guy? You must have goddamn nothing else in the whole world to do.”

“I’m not arguing, Cheeon. No one’s arguing. I’m just talking. And I’m saying: we’re not that different from all of you here.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. That’s one of the places you’re wrong. You went to college and you’re dumber than dog shit.”

“Okay, then. I’m wrong and dumb, I don’t deny that. I’m just saying. We’re not all bad. We helped get the plumbing set up in this village five or six years back. Helped put this place on the grid.”

“And now you want a goddamn trophy for letting these people take a shit in their own house. Ain’t you something.”

“I don’t want anything, Cheeon. I’m just saying.”

They looked at each other then, held one another’s eyes for half a minute until Marium glanced away. What he saw in Cheeon’s face just then was more than a mingling of rage and grief. It was a fundamental otherness that frightened him.

“Some of these cabins are still dry.”

“Some old-timers didn’t want electric and plumbing. That’s not our fault, Cheeon.”

“Feels good when you say that, don’t it? It’s not our fault . You really are goddamn something.”

“Okay. I know it’s bad here right now. I’m not disagreeing with that.”

“You know a lot of stuff, I gotta hand it to you. But it’s way past bad. There a word for way past bad? You learn that word in college?”

“There might be one for let’s not make it worse. You’ve got a wife who probably needs you, I’d say.”

“She’s gone from here.”

“She’ll be back. It’s her home, ain’t it?”

“She won’t be back. No one wants to come back to what happened here. This village will be a ghost town in a year, just watch.”

More quiet, a cigarette lighter shared, more smoke between them, thick white in the cold.

“I’m sorry for all this, Cheeon. I really am.”

“I’ve been thinking about it. Them dead sons of bitches at the morgue? Bastards like you and me? When we’re killed the past is killed, and the past is dead already, so no big deal. But when kids are killed? That’s different. When kids are killed the future dies, and there ain’t no life without a future. Is there?”

“We have futures.”

A look now, more smirk than smile. “You’re wrong again there, guy. Our futures end today. The raven follows the wolf, and the wolf has come for you and me. Look there.” He pointed to a snowed-in spruce, a raven in a branch like an ink blotch with eyes.

“You can blame starved wolves for what happened to your little girl but you can’t blame a person.”

“You can always blame a person. The world ain’t nothing but persons, every goddamn one of them starved for something.”

From behind the bulwark of vehicles police spied through field glasses. One on a satellite phone. A sniper in white camouflage on the ground beneath hanging slats of snow-heavy pine. Minutes more of quiet and smoke.

“Those boys look like they’re not sure whether to shit or piss.”

“I won’t lie to you, Cheeon. Most haven’t taken part in anything like this before, not that I know of anyway. But that’s bad for you, not good. Because when you’re scared you’re stupid. And stupid doesn’t go too well with guns.”

“I’d bet they’re stupid no matter what. What’d you all expect? Me to walk on out with my hands in the air? Some shit like that?”

“I’m just trying to prevent as much stupidity as I can here. If you come with me today I’ll make sure everything’s fair. I’ll assure you of that.”

“Everything’s what?”

“Everything’s fair.”

His laugh was a nasal sound caught between a chuckle and a snort. He looked at his cigarette to find it sucked down to the filter.

When he was a boy he told his father he’d grow to become a doctor. He could recall the doctors from town who came to Keelut when called, bright and hale, their forehead mirrors like coronets. He recalled the command, the godliness of them. At fourteen he was beset by the migraines of viral meningitis—some sickness from the white world. The doctor, a white man with the braided mane of an Indian, sank a tall syringe into his spine and pulled the milky fluid. He returned daily for a week to shoot him full of medication and nutrients, a liquid red B12 that made a body-wide inner burn and high.

“I ain’t going with you, guy. You can forget that.”

“It’ll be a long dragged-out day, Cheeon. Into the night and morning, maybe. Phone call after phone call. Right now police are clearing these cabins behind yours, and those across the way there.”

“Police can’t clear these homes. These people won’t move an inch for you sons of bitches.”