“It’s good to kill bad people?”
“If you have to.”
“Like that man who wanted to hurt Mama?”
“Like him, yes. The creek is cold today.”
“My feet are cold.”
This spot on the rock at the water was where the boy would come to think of his father.
“I’ll be with you while I’m gone. Do you know what that means?”
“Yes.”
“Do you really?”
“No.”
“It means that even when we’re not together I’ll still be with you. I’ll be right here with you.”
He placed two fingers on the boy’s pale bird chest, his skin a see-through sheath.
“When you’re away you’ll still be with me?”
“Yes.”
“No you won’t,” the boy said. “Don’t lie.”
And soon the hard shower began again.
The wastrel, another vagabond, appeared in Keelut one winter afternoon from where no one could know. Refugee from the pipeline, from a boarded-up mine or bust highway plan. Scrounger who still dreamt of gold in some missed gulch of this land. Backpack and blanket an earthen hue from the earth itself. Wind-lashed skin and a mane part mullet, hands coarse from the weather this wild place gave. Footwear fashioned from a hide no one recognized and tied down with twine.
The loamed-over face was creased from winter toil but his eyes beneath thatched brows kept the burn of youth, an unnamed liquid shade on pause from blue to green. Impossible to guess age in such a patchwork face. He carried with him a lever-action relic with a duct-taped leather strap and scope. Some of his clawed-at clothes looked sewn shut with dental floss.
At the hem of the village before the first snowfall he stood at the line of spruce and could barely be seen but for his breath. At night his campfire shone through the boles and at the first glow of day he could be seen loitering in the village as if waiting to be asked an inquiry or else handed meat.
On the second afternoon the vagrant sat against a boulder twenty yards in front of the Slones’ cabin and watched the door. Slone and Medora studied him from a window, Medora eight months round and long past ready to have their child out. Each morning she woke with knowledge of her body’s new districts. Knowledge of what she soon must do and the doubt of whether or not she could do it. The terror of what it would do to her.
“Another drifter,” she said. “On his way west, probably.”
“He ain’t west enough yet.”
“He looks hungry too.”
“That look on him is more than hunger.”
“Bring him something, Vernon. It won’t hurt to give him bread and maybe some cheese.”
“He’s got that rifle. He looks able to hunt for himself.”
They stood looking for many minutes, the child heeling against the walls of her womb.
“Bring him something so he’ll go.”
Slone approached the vagrant with slices of cheese and bread in a bag. This close he could see the discolored sections of skin on his fingers and nose, the scars of frequent frostbite—they looked part bruise, part burn. Hands slightly swollen from constant freeze and thaw. The smell on him was pungent campfire, something charred. His pants were sealskin, made on the coast in another time, worn through in places as testament to a thousand miles of amble. The loose ruff of wolf hair at the top of a ragged parka drooped from his throat to show a necklace, a white stone rune of a horse.
“This home interest you, guy?” Slone crouched to him eye-level and passed the bag of food. The man placed it onto his lap without looking inside.
“A new boy arrives next month,” he said.
His teeth looked like cubes of shattered plate glass, ill-fit as if each tooth had come from a different skull.
“Someone tell you it’s a boy? No one told us.”
“Feels like a boy to me.”
“You and whatever you feel need to move on from here. There’s bread and cheese for you. It’s dropping low tonight and the first snows are coming.”
“Termination dust won’t come on tonight. We got a night or two more before that.”
“You’re a weatherman too?”
“You could say I know a little something about weather and what’s coming. Do you have a name?”
“My name’s got no meaning to you.”
“Not yours. Do you have a name for the boy?”
“That’s got no meaning to you either.” He leaned in toward the man. “You eat that bread and cheese and then you and that rifle are gone from here. I don’t care where you go, but you go there. If you’re needing a ride to town or beyond to the city you wait on the road. Someone will be going that way before long. Stick out your thumb and someone will stop for you.”
“It looks warm inside,” he said, not looking at Slone.
“You should think about a home for yourself, then.”
“I mean your woman. Looks warm inside her. Makes me miss the womb.”
Slone turned to see Medora half veiled by a curtain at the window, her belly protruding, and he turned back to the vagrant.
“I want you to look into my face now. Look good. I want you to believe me when I say this: I will end your every day. Do you believe me? Do you believe me when I say that to you?”
Above them a passel of ravens erupted from the keep of trees like black memories freed, their wings in wild applause.
“I believe that boy has got a short life.”
“Mention my child again and you’ll see how short your own is.”
The vagabond took a toothpick from a pocket and began working it between his cuspids.
“My granddad was on the Skagway trail,” he said. “Up in the White Pass, back in 1897. He was fourteen, trying to get to the Klondike. Trying to pass over to the Yukon before freeze-up.”
“They were after gold,” Slone said.
“You bet they were. Sweet gold. They all were greedy with it. Thousands of men were on the trail at once, just a narrow footpath, with thousands of horses and mules too. More than fifty miles of narrow switchbacks, over rivers and them mean summits, through some godforsaken mires. And that trail was just clogged right up. No one could move, all those horses and people. They sat there for days at a time, not moving, some freezing to death, some starving. Disease too.”
He pressed one nostril shut and fired a nub of snot from the other. It landed on his knee and he picked it off and scraped it into his mouth.
“Place there called Devil’s Hill,” he said. “The trail on the cliffs was just a few feet wide. Wide enough for a man only. Them bastards tried to bring the horses and they just dropped straight down, fell real fast from all the pack weight. Hundreds of feet down, crashed dead onto the rocks. Fifteen, twenty at a time. What do you think about that?”
Slone said nothing.
“You know how many of them thousands of horses survived the Skagway trail that year?” the wastrel said. “Zero. Granddad told me about piles of dead horses, huge stinking heaps of them, all their eyes pecked out by ravens. Fell into crevasses, worked right to death. Broke legs or drowned in them rivers. And they rotted there among them people. Just rotted right in front of them. A god-awful stink.”
With a black fingernail he picked at his nostril for another nub of snot.
“You know what Granddad said to me? Said most of them horses were committing suicide. Imagine that. Them horses were throwing themselves off cliffs two hundred feet high, hurling themselves over to end their torture from that trail. He could see it in their eyes, their will for death, for self-destruction. Now, can you believe something such as that?”
Slone studied his face a final time and stood. “You’ve got till night to be gone from here. Remember my words.”
“You remember too,” the wastrel said.
In from the clamp of cold, Slone bolted the door. He went to Medora at the window.