Tim Green: Exact Revenge

Alexi is a thick-chested Russian with a full red beard and sharp green eyes. With his ship and his weapons he is a law unto himself in this region. The men who work for him are Chukchi natives, distant relatives to the Eskimos. They are here to take us to his northern base camp, the one they use to hunt polar bears, a hundred and fifty miles to the north. I shake his hand, then zip up my fur-lined parka. The sun is about to dip just below the horizon, so it’s colder than it will be in a couple hours, when the sun will reappear for the remainder of the long summer day. I tell my pilots to stay with the jet, and Alexi hands them a loaded Kalashnikov that he takes from one of his men.

“For wolf,” he says.

My pilots are both former navy fliers, so they do nothing more than shrug and accept the gun. I know wolves are a problem here, but also that the people in this forgotten corner of the former Soviet Union have become as desperate as the wolves themselves. We board the patchwork helicopter and strap in. Alexi flies the machine himself and soon we’re tilting away from the airfield to the deafening sound of the chopper blades. Alexi’s three men are grim-faced. They don’t smile and they don’t talk.

Even though the sun is down, its glow lets me clearly see the landscape below. The evergreens grow shorter and shorter until they give way to the low rocky brush and finally to the snow itself. After a time, a finger of jagged black rock appears up ahead, an island in the frozen plain. Just beyond it is the dark gray roiling Chukchi Sea. In the center of the windblown rock formation is a low cabin with smoke pouring up out of a galvanized pipe stack. We land in front of the rocks on a sheet of ice. The men hop out and make right away for the cabin. Alexi and I follow, in less of a hurry because we are outfitted in better gear.

The big Russian slaps his arm around me and hugs me to him as we walk.

“You make many people live good with this diamonds,” he says.

“Does he have any left?”

Alexi shakes his head no. He pats his coat and I hear the distinct crunching sound of a bag of small stones.

“When?”

He looks at the plastic watch on his wrist and says, “In morning. Five hours he no fire.”

“Alexi?” I say, grabbing his arm and looking up into his face.

“He no dead,” Alexi says, showing me a mouthful of yellow and gold teeth. “I tell my man, he no moving, you giving wood. When he coming here, one hour he no spending diamonds. Then, very very spending. He spending every diamond. Every food and every firewood we having. Big fire that day. Very stupid man.”

“Greedy,” I say to myself.

“Yes, very greedy like you say.”

“That’s what got him here.”

We reach the path that leads through the spiny rocks and the packed snow squeaks under our feet. The door to the cabin opens and I see Bert’s big round face in a halo of fur. His expression is as empty as those worn by Alexi’s men, and the only welcome he gives me is a grunt as he raises his heavy mitten. Alexi puts his hand on the door and offers me coffee.

“I’m fine,” I say. “Thank you. I want to see him.”

Bert grunts again and starts down another path that goes around the back side of the cabin. I follow him. There is a snowdrift piled up in the lee of the towering rock protecting the cabin, but a narrow path has been cut through it. When we round the rock, the wind hits us in the face and we have to lean into it until we come to a switchback path that takes us down into a small bowl in the snow whose lip is a semicircle of squat black rocks. White powder snakes along the ground like fast-moving smoke. In the center of it all is the blackened pit of a burnt-out fire.

Bob Rangle is burrowed down into the ashes as far as he can go. Beside him is the open Louis Vuitton suitcase. Every article of clothing that was inside is either on or somehow wrapped around his body. He looks like a homeless man you might see under a frozen bridge.

Bert stops at the lip of the bowl and looks out over the frozen wasteland. The pale disk of the sun is resting on the horizon like a child’s flashlight being shone through a bedsheet.

“I know now what kind of animal I was in my last life,” Bert says, his eyes narrowed at the sun.

“A turkey?”

“A bird, anyway,” he says without cracking a smile. “Maybe a hawk. Something that flies high and brings death like a lightning bolt. I have no stomach for this.”

“I know,” I say, patting his back.

But Bert only turns and heads back up the path, saying, “I’ll leave you to your game.”

I grab the sleeve of Bert’s parka and pull him around.

“Let me tell you something,” I say, looking up at him with clenched teeth. “That piece of shit down there put me in a place where men live like animals.”

“And this is what it taught you?”

“Yes,” I say. “Three rules, and the third was the most important. Without it, you were done. Exact revenge. Someone does you wrong, you exact revenge. You make it ten times worse for them. A hundred times. That’s what he taught me, Bert. He and his friends. And now that’s what he’s getting.”

I let him go and I tramp down the path into the bowl. Rangle can barely move, but when he hears his name, he rolls on his side, rattling the chain that is attached to a post Alexi has driven six feet down into the ice. Rangle looks up at me with empty eyes through a slit in the hat he has made out of six pairs of underwear and three pairs of tennis shorts. His mustache and eyebrows and lashes are white with crystals, and when I yank the clothes off his head I see that the end of his sharp nose, like most of his ears, is black and frosted with ice.

He makes a pitiful low groaning noise and tries to pick up his makeshift hat to replace it on his head. But when his hand appears from the folds of his clothes, I see that its long fingers are also frozen and black. A useless claw.

“Do you know why you’re here?” I ask him, checking the bile that has surged up into the middle of my throat.

He shakes his head.

“Do you know who I am?”

He shakes his head no again.

“Look at my eyes,” I say, kneeling down and moving close. “It’s me, Raymond. Raymond White.”

He groans and his eyes roll away.

“Look at me,” I say, grabbing his cheeks. “This is how my father died, you piece of shit. He froze to death. While you and Frank and Russo were toasting my life in jail, my father felt what you’re feeling now. Do you like it?”

He looks away, and I grab his ear and twist it until he shrieks and flops back and forth.

“Look at me! Do you like it?”

“No,” he croaks, his eyes glued to me now, welling up. “Please, no.”

“I did nothing wrong,” I say, standing up and trying not to choke. “My father did nothing wrong. You killed us both and now that you know how it feels, I’m going to save you. Not because you deserve to live. No, Rangle.

“It’s because you don’t deserve to die…”

I walk back up the path. In a ragged choking voice I hear him call the name of the man I used to be.

Raymond. Raymond White.

Back at the cabin, I sit down with the others around the potbelly stove and soak the heat out of my coffee cup with two hands. When they’re warm, I look at Alexi and say, “Your American client needs medical care. You have a hospital in Uelen.”

“Ten year was Soviet hospital,” he says. “Now maybe ten room. Doctor, yes. Animal doctor. But have army nurse good… medical.”

“I’d like you to pay them enough for him to live there,” I say. “He has no one to care for him in America, so he will stay here.”

“How long he stay?” Alexi asks, his eyebrows soaring.