But soon he woke again, and he saw the naked figure of Medora Slone silhouetted before the window. She’d pulled away the plastic sheeting and stood now motionless with her hand on the glass opaque with rime, moon-haunted, it seemed to Core, but there was no moon anymore. The firelight had died and the blue-white night was unnaturally intense around her. He saw the folds of her waist, the weighted breasts falling to either side of her rib cage, the tiny cup of flesh at her elbow. He lay unmoving in a kind of fear looking at her over his cosseted body, his breath stifled lest she hear him watching, lest he disrupt this midnight vigil.
“Is he up there? Or down there?” Her voice, no more than a murmur, came to him as if from across an empty chamber.
“Mrs. Slone? It’s late, Mrs. Slone. Are you all right?”
She turned to see him lying on the sofa. He could make out only half her face. If he sat up he could reach over the cushioned arm and stroke her hip, her breast, no more than a yard away.
He rose to stack more wood in the hearth, then wheeled the electric heater near the sofa. When she moved toward him, he instinctively peeled back the quilt and shifted to make room. She fit into him imperfectly, the sofa sank more, then he covered them in the quilt and clutched her quaking body.
With her back to him, she took his hand and brought it to her throat, folding it hard around her windpipe, trying to will his grip to squeeze. He tried to retrieve his hand but she held tighter, then slid it down and placed it between her thighs, on a woolly patch of yellow hair. Arms around her again, he held her till she passed into the twitch of a nightmared sleep.
II
On patrol through the western sector of the city Vernon Slone saw pyramids of tires flaming on street corners in their own weather of black smoke. A market bombed and abandoned, fruit on the stones like vivisected bellies, the buildings behind the market reduced to irregular mounds of rubble, some of them unrecognizable as former houses or places of ware. Another afternoon’s creep, the cool of dusk an impossibility only dreamed of.
Their vehicle crawled and stopped and crawled again, not knowing where it wanted to be in a spread-out train of trucks snaking through these streets. First his wishes of being in the snowed-over scape he knew, then his teary-eyed vision from the fires. He searched for movement, for men among the wreckage, anything with life left to end. On the road the top half of a man’s charred body, snipped through at the waist, entrails in a fly-feasting pile, his one arm outstretched as if trying to swim the torso back to his bottom part.
And then the rapid snaps from rifles on a rooftop. Or from the maw in a bombed building. He knew that one round had entered his right shoulder, had just missed his vest. He could feel the blood, the heated honey in his armpit hair. An explosion from under the vehicle in front of his. It lifted sideways from force of flame and burned there in front of him. A soldier on fire limped from the wreck, one arm missing like the jagged end of driftwood, his other waving somebody to come near, to extinguish this new thing upon him. But no one came and he dropped to burn in the road.
Slone scattered the .50-caliber rounds into bricks, into doors, into a disabled pickup with a missing front axle. Movement on a roof and he fired there. A face-wrapped man with a rifle darted from behind the abandoned pickup and tried to make the alleyway. Slone hit him before he reached it. The rounds punched his back and split his head, strewed the beige building with a flare of red. For an instant it looked to Slone almost like a painting, the lustrous spray of it something he once saw in an art book.
The other gunners in his line of trucks were unloading now in a din of machine gun fire. To his right behind a mound of rubble, another face-wrapped man. Slone trained on him as he moved, the rounds hacking off pieces of him as if from axe blows.
The burst in his neck then felt like the release of steam or gas—not even a spark of pain. When he slumped down expecting the mantle of black, he thought of Bailey in front of a television: Dad, look at this, look, and on the screen were trapeze artists breaking free of gravity, soaring, their bodies unnaturally elastic but strong. And then the trapeze artists were gone, the tent’s top blew off, dispensed in smoke, and the boy’s face turned an iced-over blue, mouthing slow words to Slone he could neither hear nor lip-read. But he imagined his son saying Remember me and he tried to reach out for the boy but could not.
Some time later—he couldn’t tell how long, each minute a grain of sand dropping in an hourglass—he awoke on a gurney, worked on by others, rough hands mending his shoulder and neck, a corporal grinning down, “You lucky fucker, you’re going home.” His said his son’s name and the corporal told him, “Soon, you lucky fucker, you’ll see him soon.” The small-caliber round had missed both his pharynx and spine.
“Nothing but a hickey, man,” someone said, and he felt the pinch of a syringe and sleep then lowered him into a grateful dark where he could not dream.
Core woke in this winter dark before a belated dawn, Medora Slone still asleep and nude beside him on the sofa, the electric heater and their bodies an able source of warmth, the quilt a caul he wanted to remain in. Soon he built a fire, started the woodstove. She dressed and cooked and watched him depart with the AR-15 rifle and a pack of provisions and snowshoes. He wore her husband’s boots and one-piece of caribou hide—a winter suit she’d crafted herself for the unholiest cold. She covered the end of the rifle barrel with masking tape. Core asked her why.
“To keep snow out of the gun,” she said.
“I won’t get snow in the gun.”
“You will when you fall.”
“I’m not planning to fall.”
“Everyone falls in the snow, Mr. Core. If you feel yourself starting to sweat, rest until you’re dry.”
“What’s wrong with sweat?”
“Nothing till you’re wet through. Wet and it freezes to your skin when you stop moving.”
“I’ve been in the cold before,” Core said.
“Not like the cold that’s coming here.”
She opened the door for him and he stepped outside, his face angled up into the flakes falling slant the size of quarters. She remained against the doorframe and tied her robe closed.
“I thought it might be too cold to snow,” he said.
“What’s that mean?” she asked.
“Too cold to snow. I’ve heard that. Though I’ve never understood it.”
“Maybe where you come from. But here it’s never too cold to snow. There’s something off, something wrong with the sky here.”
Core looked up into the dark, looked for whatever it was she might have meant.
“Do you know if the snow is coming heavy today?”
“I don’t tell the weather, Mr. Core. It will tell me.”
Core thanked her, left her framed in a soft glow at the door of her cabin.
He saw the lightening sky through a splayed reach of trees. At the perimeter of the village, in the copse near the hill where the path wound up and around, he suddenly spotted a back-bent Yup’ik woman with a circular face burning items in a rusted drum.
He glimpsed her through the spiderweb of tree limbs and twigs. He stopped on the path to see if she would notice him. When she did she waved him over to the fire. He saw the red-orange radiance on her jowls, her creature garment thick and soiled, pungent-looking in the firelight, an anorak a century old. Her feet and shins were sheathed in moose-hide mukluks. He could not tell what blazed in the drum. He guessed she was burning household trash, but why at this dead hour? Seniors the world over woke before first light as if to win some contest with the sun.