“Police can’t clear these homes. These people won’t move an inch for you sons of bitches.”
“Well, we’re trying. And there’s police in the trees, and behind the house. I don’t know about you, but I’m goddamn tired today, slept like shit last night. The wife had me up all hours trying for this baby she wants pretty bad. I’m not complaining of it, just saying.”
“Well. I sleep like shit every night. Then sleep half the day gone.”
“What about work?”
“Shit, there ain’t been work. Every mine for fifty miles around is closing, you know that. We trawled the gulf for two straight weeks a while back and couldn’t catch a goddamned halibut. Caught a sneaker.”
“Things should improve.”
“Hauled some cords of wood into town last month. Just once, though. There’s a famine here. Some kind of famine I never heard of before.”
“I never understood why you didn’t join the service with Slone. You’ve done everything else together since birth.”
“Do I look like someone who takes orders?”
“It’s a paycheck.”
“Do I look like a desert suits me? Because if you joined up these last ten years, you were going to the desert, guy.”
“Slone didn’t mind it.”
“Well. Vernon’s not like you or me. He has a… I don’t know what to call it. A cunning on him. A way of making you think he’s taking your orders when really he’s doing exactly what he set out to do. But that takes a kind of cunning I don’t got.”
From inside his jacket pocket he took a flask and drank from it, then handed it over to Marium, who despite this morning hour drank too and passed it back to Cheeon.
“Where’s your wife, Cheeon?”
“It don’t matter. Not no more.”
Marium lit another cigarette and shifted his body against the doorframe.
“I was on a raid one time, down in glacier country, outside Juneau. Before I came back up here for good, when my first marriage went to shit. A guy shot dead his wife in their hunting cabin. He wouldn’t come out. A rich city fucker. Owned a company, cell phone towers, I think. After we were out there two straight days around the cabin he finally started shooting at us, shooting like crazy. We had to burn the place. We shot back for a while and then just burned it. Both of the bodies were nothing but charcoal stains when we went in.”
“A rich fucker and his rich bitch wife, both of them dead. And the world is a better place.”
“You know what bothered me the whole time? The goddamn boredom of it. Standing out there for two whole days. I can deal with bloodshed when I have to, but boredom I just can’t stand.”
“Don’t worry,” Cheeon said. “I’ll give you the bloodshed long before the boredom.”
Marium dropped the unfinished cigarette into the snow. He zipped his coat to the neck and stretched on gloves, then pulled the wool hat over ears flush from cold. “I’m sorry it has to be this way, Cheeon.”
“I’m not.”
“Think about what I offered you, please.”
“And you think about that phone call your wife will get today. Imagine her there on the line when she hears it, hand on her belly. There’s nothing on earth will stop that phone call now. You think about that, guy.”
He walked back into the heat of his cabin, leaving the door unlatched behind him.
VI
Slone entered an old mining camp that had morphed into a shadow town without name, a commune pushpinned into the base of a bluff, mostly inaccessible by road. Beyond this place lay so many miles of tundra whole states could fit on its frozen breadth.
All the day before he had crawled through wilderness, on paths beneath canopies of cottonwood and birch that held most of the snow from recent fall. Only a six-inch pad of snow on these paths, but even in four-wheel drive with tire chains he had to crawl. He could tell that others from the village had recently crossed these trails: in trucks, on snow machines, on four-wheelers. Hours after nightfall he’d parked off the path and let the engine idle through the night for warmth. He ate from the food he’d taken from home, drank melted snow and wished he’d remembered to bring whiskey. Podded in a quilt across the back seat, he pressed his boy’s T-shirt to his face and, inhaling its scent, he slept till light.
When he entered the mining camp the following day it was already near dark, the snow coming slantwise in sheets. The bluff above blocked the sinking sun and brought on early night. A memory stabbed at him then: he and his father here for a purpose he didn’t know, nor could he know if the memory was even real. He left the truck between a bulldozer and a thousand-gallon fuel tank on four squat legs like a white rhino. In the onset dark, firelight began to burn in rude cabins and wood-frame buildings.
He walked along the unplowed center road, on snow waffled by truck tires. He saw snow machines in various states of dismantle, drays with wheels deformed by rust, truck tires in a heap. Empty pallets stacked for firewood. Lynx pelts splayed on racks, a pyramid of car batteries, sleds of birch, the well house to his right. Fifty-five-gallon drums everywhere, a slouched wanigan. Across the road a Quonset hut collapsed at its center, and beside it a full-sized school bus, its morning yellow gone beige, the windows shattered, gaping like kicked-out teeth.
He found a two-story inn with steel kerosene cans piled under the porch awning next to pole wood. Inside, an inky shadow spilled through rooms. With a fingernail he tapped the door’s glass pane, then tapped again. The woman waved him in without turning to see what illness had just walked out of this winter night.
She was bent before a woodstove. “Very late in the season for travelers,” she said, and turned then to look at Slone.
She wore men’s snow boots and clothing of odd design, a project of marmot, caribou, and wolf. A storm of brittle hair to her waist, eyeglasses missing a lens. She jabbed into the flame with a brass poker. Halfway up the wall were drums of condensed milk, fifty-kilogram sacks of sugar, flour, rice, cans of apple butter and spinach in shrink-wrap. Against the opposite wall stacks of ammunition, .22- and .223-caliber, bird shot and buckshot. On a nail hung a model human skeleton from some school’s anatomy class—it wore a red Santa’s hat, a cigarette crammed between its teeth.
“I was here once,” Slone said. “As a child.”
The woman moved from the stove to the corkboard behind the front counter, a collage of photos tacked to it, most dulled sepia by the decades, some more recent with robust color.
“Well, then your picture might be here. We take every traveler’s picture who comes through. What year was it, you say?”
“I was a kid here with my father. Why were we here?”
“He might’ve had a gold or silver claim. Most all of us came for that, unless you were scientists from the college or else hunters or trappers. Them scientists have been coming steady for the past decade, I’d say, on their way north. Every week there’s something on the radio about glaciers melting and the world heating up. I told them scientists: last year it was fifty below and the year before that fifty-eight below and you can take my word, fellas, they feel the same in the lungs.”
“That’s my father,” and he pointed into the mix of photos at a bearded man whose features told of neither place nor age, his eyes with no trace of the blue Slone recalled from youth. His father had long ago left off appearing in his dreams. He’d catch himself going weeks or months without remembering the man. Without wanting or needing to.
She removed the partially concealed photo from the board. “If this is your father, then this must be you here next to him. Handsome little fella.”
She handed the photo to Slone. “That’s probably twenty-five years ago,” she said. “Judging from the film. They don’t make that kind anymore, haven’t for a while now, or at least I haven’t been able to order any of it from the catalog. I miss that kind of film.”