William Giraldi - Hold the Dark

Leaning against the truck, he smoked and watched the gray pall waft up and cohere inside the bowl of the bulb’s metal shade. The hunter’s blood remained flecked across the toe of his boot. He slid open the hangar’s entrance and stood looking beyond his breath at this castaway place, then got in the truck to leave.

In the headlamps just outside the hangar he saw her, the innkeeper in untied boots and eyeglasses, in a nightgown under a woolen overcoat with no hood. Her hair wild, rifle aimed at the windshield, her face like a starved convict. The first shot punctured the glass to the left of his head. He swerved to miss her, instinctively ducked over the gearshift, the night a dark mass beyond the reach of the truck’s high beams.

The shots came fast now into the truck, into the side windows and doors. He stretched for the pistol grip of the shotgun in the passenger’s footwell but could not grasp it. The front axle scraped over a drift of hardened snow and the grille scraped against a mound of cinder block beneath a tarpaulin tied by rope.

When he righted the truck and spun she was no longer there, but he did not slow. The shot entered from the left dark, just behind him, through the window and seat and into his shoulder blade. A spasm jagged into his neck. The singe of lead, the sudden pressure in his abdomen, the need to urinate.

Lamps were beginning to burn again inside these shoddy homes, a floodlight now in glare from the high gable of the inn. The silhouettes of men and barrels, their hollers at him. More rifle rounds into the rear of the truck. He sped slipping on the rutted street to the access road at the far end of the camp, and in the dark he found the path back toward Keelut.

Hours later he halted at a junction in the wilderness. To his right was a snow-canopied path like a portal, one that would in several more miles open to the road north of town. He knew where he was now. At thirteen years old he and Cheeon had stolen his father’s raised pickup and four-wheeled down this hidden byway, so muddied from spring’s thaw. The mud sprayed out from the tires in billows, spattered the truck end to end, the wipers waving on high, two boys high-fiving in glee.

He paused now and lifted his clothes to see the blood pooled at the waistband of his thermals and pants. His shirt was fused to the skin of his back. He stood in snow to his shins and relieved himself there, his face aimed at a sky unseen and speckled with flakes, his mouth open for the gelid air. The wind wheezed through skeletal boles and branches with snow atop like icing. Then the wind fled west and there came a heavy quiet.

He scooped a plastic jug through untouched snow and set it on the dashboard heater to melt. After he drank he scooped more snow, every bit as thirsty as he’d been in the desert. And he listened to the quiet. In this land everything listened. The wilderness within and without. His father had told him that wolves can hear one another across three miles.

They can hear each other howl? he asked.

And his father said, No, they can hear each other breathe.

Shan Martin’s place was south toward Keelut, twenty miles outside town, a fuel station, garage, and motel, nothing more. South the road connected to town and the highways, and north it led loggers, hunters, and fishermen farther into the bush. Shan and his father had left Keelut eleven years ago to run this business, for three hundred miles the last access to a bed or fixed transmission.

Slone arrived near ten p.m. and saw the two-bay garage lit inside, heard a radio singing. Through pulled drapes the motel rooms flickered with television light. In the lot sat a Mack semi, pickups salt-stained from highways, disabled cars cloaked in snow, a camouflaged four-wheeler with a frozen deer roped to a rack, its tongue in loll, eyes still looking.

Through a fogged window of the bay door he saw Shan smoking beneath the hood of a Jeep with knobby tires. He entered through the side door, entered into the wall of warmth, and said Shan’s name. When Shan turned it took him several seconds to say anything, and then “Jesus Christ” was all he could utter.

Slone smelled grease and oil, the rubber of new tires. The radio gurgled an awful noise, an anthem for cowhands. Eviscerated trucks, orphaned engine parts everywhere. A new Polaris snow machine strapped to a trailer, plastic gas cans strapped behind it. The orange warmth came from a radiant heater overhead. Hung crookedly above the workbench was a year-old calendar with a half-nude model astride a motorcycle.

Shan was rounder, shorter now than when Slone had last seen him, years ago. A shaved head, tattoo of something behind his ear—a spider. Silver rings on every finger.

“Jesus Christ,” Shan said, clicking off the radio. “Vernon Slone.”

“One of those is right. I need your help.”

“Christ, Vern. You’re hurt?”

“I need you to get Cheeon for me.”

“Cheeon? Jesus, where’ve you been, Vern?” He crushed his filter into a can full of them, then took up a stained newspaper from the workbench. “A trucker brought this paper through this morning.”

He showed Slone the headline, Cheeon’s photo there beneath it. Slone could remember the afternoon this photo was taken by Cheeon’s wife. The afternoon they’d returned from the first big caribou hunt, August three years ago. Cheeon wearing a full beard then, his hair short and spiked, the rifle strapped aslant his torso. Flannel shirt damp with caribou blood, knife in his belt. In the original photo Slone was standing right there beside Cheeon but the newspaper had cropped him out of existence.

“Good ole Cheeon caused a real bloodbath back home,” Shan told him. “I’m real sorry, man, I know you boys were tight.”

Slone skimmed the sentences. He could not focus on them but understood the story they told.

“Them cops came looking for him and he just wasn’t having any of it,” Shan said. “Cheeon never did like them cops.”

Slone needed to sit, but there was nowhere. He squatted with elbows on his knees, and between his boots examined a shape greased into the concrete floor—the shape of a running wolf. He stood then and took the cigarette and mug of coffee from Shan. For many minutes neither spoke, Shan shifting from foot to foot, suddenly interested in the grime stuck under his fingernails.

“You’re shot?” Shan said.

Slone nodded with the coffee.

“Christ, Vern. Your upper back there?”

He was beginning not to feel the lead in his shoulder blade. He knew this was the start of not feeling his arm. A bullet aims to make a man aware of his body and then it aims to make him forget.

“Who shot you?”

“A woman.”

“Shit, who ain’t been shot by a woman?”

They finished their cigarettes in silence.

“They’re looking for you, Vern. Medora too. They got rewards. Cops were here a week ago, I guess, or ten days ago, asking if she’d been through, for gas or anything else. What-all in the name of Jesus happened to that village?”

“Nothing in his name. Some things in the name of the other. I need your help.”

Shan felt his shaved scalp, scratched at his ears. His forearm tattoo was now just a splotch of purple melanoma.

“Help how?” he said. “Because, shit, man, you’re in this mess pretty deep, far as I can see it.”

“I need this bullet out.”

“Yeah, well, I thought that’s what you were gonna say.”

Slone did not move his eyes from him.

“Well, Christ, Vern. We grew up together, I haven’t forgot it. I’m sorry as shit about your boy, I am. But I’ve got trouble enough my own self, with the cops too. And with my ex-wife. You remember Darcy?”