How many more paintings could he produce of the wolf he’d slain? The walls of his library were already covered with such creations. Always, it seemed, of the same wolf. Always the yellow strands of cloth pasted into her bloodied mouth. He could not paint her back to the living. He could not will his own living back.
Thousands of titles stood in his library, gathered and read over a lifetime. Each morning he’d stand in that space, bracketed by books. Touching, fanning through volumes, smelling the poems in their pages, but without the urge anymore to read. A random stanza or paragraph was all he could manage. That pine desk, where he’d written his own books, had once belonged to his father. The chestnut leather armchair was a gift from his wife after they were married. In the foyer of their house an undusted crucifix kept watch upon galoshes and gloves, a parka and cowl hooked where she had hooked them a winter ago. A WELCOME mat worn down to COME. His painting studio in the attic, once so organized, was now a havoc of canvases and paint tubes, of brushes and easels and drop cloths. The washing machine broke last winter and he left it that way.
Through the cotton blanket he felt for his wife’s foot and grasped it in some unsure gesture of goodbye. He thought of his estranged daughter, far off in Anchorage, a college history professor, what she would say when she saw him, when he arrived unbidden. He took his duffel bag and went. In the hallway a female attendant in a red sweater wished him a merry Christmas, handed him a candy cane broken at its curve. Core looked at his watch: Christmas was still three weeks away. He’d forgotten about Thanksgiving. In the parking lot of the nursing home, in the day’s gaunt sun, sat idling the same white cab that had delivered him.
Outside the desert city an urgent wind whisked up sand. Dark mustard gusts passed before a buffed sun and looked like blots of insects sent to swarm. Their vehicle made plumes of tawny dust as they sped after a pickup rusted red and packed with men. Perched at the .50-caliber gun, Vernon Slone heard the sand pepper his face mask. This late in the day and the temperature stayed fixed at one hundred.
Back home he knew it was snowing—a winter he would not see. Behind him the city smoldered. If he turned he could behold the smoke and flames of this Gomorrah they’d made. But before him he could see just the windswept sand and the twirling dust of the truck fifty yards ahead. No one was shooting now. No one could see. Every few seconds, between horizontal gusts of sand, Slone spotted the truck’s tailgate.
He watched the truck catch the gulley and overturn four times in near silence, in a storm of sand and dust. He’d seen pickups and snow machines flip in fluffed snow the same way: no sound. The men—what faction were they from? what region?—were tossed from the truck’s bed like bags of leaves. The truck slid, smashed to a halt on top of them. Some limped from the tinfoil wreck and shot at Slone’s vehicle. The lead dinged against the armor.
When the .50-caliber rounds hit them they tore off limbs or else left dark blue holes the size of plums. He fired into those on the fuel-damp sand and those still crammed inside the truck’s flattened cab. Their blood burst in the wind as wisps of orange and red. Curious how orange, how radiant blood looks beneath a desert noon, in the dull even tinge of its light.
The truck ignited but did not explode. They let it burn there for fifteen, twenty minutes and then finally approached with extinguishers.
The boy inside was Bailey’s age. The unburned skin of his face shone of caramel. Shirtless, without shoes, his feet so singed they seemed melted and remolded—feet fashioned from candle wax. Spalls of rock made piercings in his neck and chin, the jugular ripped unevenly by broken glass, below it a gown of blood to his kneecaps. Slone looked into the liquid gray eyes of the man beside him—a man whose simple name, Phil, did not seem to fit the darkness Slone knew he had within.
Who issues orders here? What foul game’s pieces are we? They sat smoking on their vehicle. Slone watched the others search pockets and packs. Some clicked shots of the wreck, showed each other, and laughed. Phil bent to knife out the eyes and tongues of the dead—these would be his keepsake.
Core arrived in Alaska in the faint hold of early dusk. He’d slept on the flight, was winched down deep into the vagueness of dreams where he saw the bleared faces of his wife and daughter, and of someone else in shadows, someone he suspected was his mother. At the airport he asked a man the way to the rental car counter and the man simply pointed to the sign directly in front of them, the company’s name shouting inside a yellow arrow. In a shop he stood before a magazine rack, made-up faces grinning on covers but he could not name a single one. Alaska papers proclaiming weather. He bought a candy bar.
He rented a four-wheel-drive truck to go the one hundred miles inland to the village of Keelut. The truck had a GPS suctioned to the windshield but he’d never used one before, and the attendant told him that where he was going could not be found on GPS. He gave Core a road map, “one of the more accurate ones,” he said, and in red marker traced Core’s path from the airport to Keelut. But Core was lost immediately upon leaving the terminal, on a road that brought him to the hub of this odd city. He saw bungalows hunkered beside towers, Cessna seaplanes parked in driveways, cordwood piled in front of a computer store. Filthy vagrants loping along with backpacks, groomed suits on cell phones.
When he found the right road the city shrank behind him, the December-scape unseen beyond the green glow of the dashboard. He saw old and new snow plowed into half-rounded wharves along the roadside. The red and white pinpricks of light that passed overhead were either airplanes or space vessels. He felt the possibility of a close encounter with discoid airships, with gunmetal trolls from a far-off realm descending to ask him questions he’d not be able to answer. Half an hour of careful driving and the snow came quick in two coned lanes the headlamps carved from darkness. What would he tell Medora Slone about the wolf that had stolen her child? That hunger is no enigma? That the natural order did not warrant revenge?
He’d seen his daughter only once in the last three years, when she came home the morning after her mother’s stroke. Three crawling years. Life was not short, as people insisted on saying. He’d quit cigarettes and whiskey just before she was born. He wanted to be in health for her and knew then that ten years clipped from his life by drink and smoke were ten years too many. Now he knew those were the worthless years anyway, the silver decade of life, a once-wide vista shrunk to a keyhole. Not all silver shines. As of this morning he had plans to return to cigarettes and whiskey both. He regretted not buying them at the airport.
Highways to roads to paths, towns to wilderness, the wider and wider dispersion of man-made light. One lost hour in the opposite direction, in a deepening dark of forest that seemed eager to ingest him. Then a trucker at a fuel station who gave him a better map, who pointed the way, although he wasn’t certain, he said. An eagle was tattooed in black above his eye. “I’m just looking for the easiest roads,” Core told him, and the trucker said, “Roads? This place doesn’t have roads.” He laughed then, only three teeth in a mouth obscured by an unruly beard. Core could not understand what he meant. The snow stopped and he drove on.
Hours later, Core made it to an unpaved pass without a mark to name it. This was the pass to Keelut, a right turn where the hills began to rise close to the road, just past a rotted shanty the trucker had told him to watch for. In four-wheel drive he bumped along this pass until he came to the village. He could count the cabins, arranged in two distinct rows. Most were one-level with only a single room. Some were two-level with sharply slanted roofs and radio antennae stretching into the cold. The hills beyond loomed in protection or else threatened to clamp.