From this side of Cheeon’s cabin he could see up the central road of the village. Sled dogs everywhere howled madly in their kennels. People stood in front of their doors and vehicles. He motioned for them to get back inside. They didn’t move at all. He thought for some reason that one of them might start shooting at him with a hunting rifle.
Cheeon’s rear door was locked. Marium waited for Cheeon’s gun to start again before elbowing through a pane of glass. One step in and his boot screeched wet on the pine flooring. He stopped, looked down to lever off the boots onto the mat. And he saw there in the weak gray light what looked like a fishing line strung taut across the room, a foot off the floor. It passed through an eye screw in the baseboard, up the wall and through another eye screw in the crown molding. Over to a pistol-grip twelve-gauge fixed into the corner above the door, behind him, angled down at his head. The trip line girded to its trigger.
The sight of that shotgun, knowing how close he’d just come, felt less like relief than loss. He snipped the line with scissors in a Swiss army knife and felt sure then that he’d be carried from this cabin in a bag.
He squatted there and tried to breathe but his breath would not come. He could hear and feel the gun above in the attic. It vibrated through the walls and floor beams—a buzz that came into his bones. He didn’t know if more men were being hit outside. He thought of the phone call to Susan that Cheeon assured him of when they’d spoken at his door. For many seconds he considered fleeing. Considered waiting for backup. Or else trying to burn this goddamn place to cinders.
There wasn’t anything else to be thought. He’d talked to guys about moments like these. Guys with him on the special unit down in Juneau. Guys from the service who knew. And everyone said the same thing to him: for all we pride ourselves on thinking, at a crossroads with the devil, thinking falls to feeling and feeling starts you moving.
As he squatted there he tried to stay the shakes in his limbs. Then crept in, quiet in his socks, to see where the stairs were. His coat made a nylon scratch beneath the arms when he moved. He peeled it off, let it drop. And there on a hook was a little girl’s pink-hooded jacket, some girlish cartoon thing grinning at him.
Out the front window he could see snow exploding where the rounds smashed the ground, could hear the thunking of lead on metal. Ten steps led up to the attic. Each one took him more time than he needed or wanted. He felt odd in his socks, as if a man had to be wearing boots in order to do this. He knew he couldn’t make the stairs creak. Cheeon had quit shooting—there wasn’t a sound anywhere in the cabin or out.
Three steps from the top he could see Cheeon through the spindles of the railing. He was there smoking at the window of this sharply angled space. The ceiling low enough to touch. The weapon fastened to a tripod bolted into the floor—an M60 machine gun, Marium thought, used in helicopters, on Humvees. Next to it a five-foot heap of ammunition, enough to shoot nonstop all day, into the night if he wanted. Hanging all through the room was the strong scent of the gun. A smell close to the clean oil on new engines, almost pleasant. Hundreds of spent shells scattered the floor, and many rolled to the stairs. Again he could not comprehend where this gun had come from or why.
Marium was level with Cheeon now, over the top step, the carbine trained on his back. He said Cheeon’s name. Cheeon did not tense with surprise, did not turn around right away. He stood there smoking, nodding, surveying all he’d done. He took his time with it.
“They didn’t do so well down there, guy.”
“Turn, Cheeon. Let me see your hands. Let me see ’em now.”
“My hands? Your voice sounds strange, guy. You okay?”
“Turn, Cheeon. Arms out.”
Marium thought: I will shoot you through the back, you son of a bitch. Honor, some code of conflict—they did not apply here now.
Cheeon turned then, still smoking, his hands not out. One held the cigarette, the other in a back jeans pocket. Marium had expected a crazed, sweaty face. But Cheeon looked just as he had earlier when they’d talked at his door. He looked like a man resigned to things. A man who had just ended ten or more lives and was okay with wherever that truth placed him on the spectrum before his unsaving god.
Marium knew Cheeon wasn’t walking out of this cabin. His legs quit quaking then because he understood that he himself wasn’t going to die here.
“You stopped that phone call for today,” Cheeon said. “That phone call to your wife. But it’s coming, ain’t it? That phone call’s always coming.”
“Your hands, Cheeon. Put them out. Now.”
When Cheeon took his right hand slowly from his back pocket, Marium saw the nickel of the handgun. Cheeon didn’t raise it at him. Just let Marium see it. Let it hang there at his side against his jeans, tapping it as if to a tune of his own making. The other hand still busy with that cigarette in his lips. His eyes squinting at Marium through smoke.
Marium shot at him full auto. It thrust him back into the open window. The handgun and cigarette dropped to Cheeon’s feet. Marium shot at him more until he fell through and landed on the snow in front of his door. He went to the window and looked down at Cheeon on his back. His eyes were open still and it seemed he was looking. Looking at a wan sky that would not receive him.
More men arrived—men he knew, some he did not. They searched the village for Slone, for hint of him, but the villagers told them nothing. They found an old woman in her hut, dead in a rocker, a knife wound clean through her throat. No one in Keelut would tell them anything about this old woman. They found no papers, no verification of her name or age, of who she was or had been.
They moved on through the village and found nothing. When they returned to the old woman’s hut to retrieve her she’d been stolen, spirited away for concealment. Or for what else Marium could not know. They checked the village again but could not find her or those who had taken her. He remembered Cheeon telling him, just one hour earlier, that they weren’t alike—not the two men, not this village and the town. Marium knew then that Cheeon was right and wondered what else he was right about.
Hours later, after dark, at the small hospital in town—confusion because nobody there had seen anything close to this before. Wounds they could not make sense of. To Marium it seemed a good thing there was nothing to be done because the staff wouldn’t have been able to do it. Those who died, died in a mess. Those who didn’t walked away unscratched on the outside. The dead had been frozen, stuck to the ground by their blood and entrails. They had to be scraped off the earth with shovels, or else pried up with pickaxes. Marium and the men loaded the bodies in bags into two pickup trucks. Half had been brought here to the hospital and the other half to the morgue, a mix-up he tried to explain.
Not all were back yet from Keelut. Family members of police paced the hospital hallways, unsure who was living and who not. Some spouses wailed, wolflike, when news reached them. Siblings saw Marium come through the emergency entrance in squeaking boots. They clung to him with questions.
“Christ, Don,” someone said, “they told us you were killed.”
He couldn’t guess what they he meant but showed this man he was alive by standing there and simply pointing to himself.
Arnie’s wife was there too. Marium reassured her and she thanked him, grabbed his hand hard, as if he had been the one who’d kept her husband living. Marium had to tell some of these family members to go to the morgue because that was where their husbands and brothers now were. Others he told to go to the station to wait because their guys would be there, alive, before long.