“Alright, let’s go see how we can do this.” Evan stepped through the bodies to the back. It was darker the deeper they went into the garage, and the bodies that lay towards the far wall were no more than silhouettes in the dim light.
The friends remembered exactly which person lay where, the circumstances around their death, and the day they brought them to this unfair and uncertain industrial tomb. Both thought of the spring to come, of the necessity of digging twenty-three plots by hand, and burying each person in the rez cemetery. It would be a daunting, traumatic task.
Evan sighed. “Well, let’s move them all a bit closer together to make more room at the front.”
“Yeah, that’s probably the best way to do it,” Tyler agreed. “If we just move them all a little bit to the side, that’ll open up some room on the ends.”
Evan nodded. Tyler continued, “And I hate to say this too, but there’ll probably be at least a couple more people who won’t make it out of this winter alive.”
Evan didn’t want to think about this so instead he said, “Help me over on this end,” and walked carefully to the far corner, where they positioned the winter’s first fatalities. He stopped at Jenna Jones’s feet to face Tyler, who stood at her head. Tyler grimaced and shrugged. They squatted and Evan patted the sides of the young woman’s stiff, frozen legs to find a good grip. His gloves and the few blankets around her buffered his hands from her dead limbs. This is only her body, he thought. Her spirit is gone. We will return her to Mother Earth as soon as we can. He cupped his hands under her Achilles tendons and nodded to Tyler, who shoved his hands under her shoulders. They heaved her frozen frame off the floor. It seemed lighter than when they had put her here.
Evan told himself it was like lifting a few sheets of drywalclass="underline" long, heavy, and unbending. He tried to chase the memories of the night of her death from his mind. He couldn’t. He felt her petite heels — the flesh of her feet now hard as stones — on the outsides of his palms, and remembered her face as he stared down into the dark cloth that wrapped her legs.
Jenna had been beautiful. Her high cheekbones accentuated the natural tan of her face and her almond-shaped eyes were nearly black. She had exuded a confident intelligence. As they set her down lightly just a foot from where she had originally lain, Evan wondered who she would have become.
“Next one?” Tyler asked. Her cousin Tara was next. They picked her up, stiff and heavy as ice, and moved her the same distance, turning quickly to the next one. The lingering misery of the community’s tragedies was suffocating.
They moved down the line methodically, trying not to acknowledge or remember the people they rearranged and the subsequent dead that were still to come. They finished squeezing together the corpses in the first row, leaving space on the end for another.
Then they hoisted the corpse closest to them and moved it into the cleared spot at the end of the first row. The young men went through the three rows, squeezing the rest of the bodies tightly together. They stood back to look at their work before moving Aileen into place.
“Wait a second,” Evan said. He did a quick count. “Weren’t there twenty-one here before?”
Tyler counted. “… nineteen, twenty. Yeah, there’s twenty there.”
“Yeah, remember? Johnny Meegis was the twenty-first.”
“Fuck, I don’t remember.”
“Someone’s missing.”
Tyler stepped back and counted again. He took off his cap and pulled on a braid. “So what do you think?”
Evan lowered his head and took a deep breath. “I think it was Scott.”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“Scott took a body.”
“Come on, man. That’s crazy. What for?”
Evan paused. There was a heavy stillness in the big room. “To eat.”
Tyler stared at him. He opened his mouth to speak but couldn’t, and he left it agape. He finally whispered, “How are we gonna prove that?”
Evan turned to his friend. “We’re gonna have to go search his house.”
“What? If we show up at his place, that crazy fucker is gonna shoot us.”
“That’s what he meant in the food lineup when he said we were going to need him. I think he knows we have stories and stuff that say we can’t do that, so he has to start it. Shit.” He didn’t want to think about the dream he had at the tipi.
“What?”
“Let’s make sure Auntie Aileen is in place here first. Then let’s go find whoever we can and go over there.”
Evan stepped over to Aileen’s body and waited for Tyler to follow. His mind swirled as they fitted her into place at the end of the row. She blended in, already anonymous. It didn’t feel right to either of them to just leave her there.
Where’s her spirit? Evan thought. Is she on her way to the spirit world? Is she stuck here? She needs to be on her journey. This isn’t right. His throat tightened and his eyes watered.
He shook off grief, and anger returned. “Let’s go see Scott,” he said.
“Shouldn’t we go talk to Walter or someone?” asked Tyler.
“No, they won’t listen to us. They’ll just call another damn meeting and do nothing. This is up to us.”
Thirty
The smell of wood burning reached them as they approached the row of duplexes. The snow swelled through their snowshoes with each step. Evan was focused on the patterns his snowshoes made. Anything not to think about what lay ahead.
“Whatever you do,” he said to Isaiah and Tyler, who had come with him, “keep your gun on your shoulder. Don’t walk in pointing it at him. He’s a shoot-first kinda guy.”
“He’s a fuckin’ psycho,” said Isaiah. “We don’t know how fast he can draw a gun.”
“As long as there isn’t one in his hands, we’ll be one step ahead.”
“Goddamn it,” Isaiah sighed and turned his head away. Tyler glanced at Evan, whose gaze went cold.
Evan cocked his head toward the duplex that Scott and his cronies occupied. “See that smoke? It looks like there’s a fire out back.”
“Shit, yeah. They must be working on something back there,” said Isaiah.
“Alright, well let’s just go around and make like we just wanna talk,” said Evan.
“Isn’t that what we want to do?” asked Isaiah. His voice cracked at the end of his question.
“Yeah… it is.”
The plan was to confront Scott about the missing body. When they had found Isaiah at his house to tell him, he hadn’t needed much convincing and had agreed with Evan. So Tyler had come along reluctantly. Over the course of this terrible winter, they had become an unbreakable alliance.
Anxiety hummed in Evan’s ears as he walked towards the house. Isaiah followed, watching for an ambush. In the rear, Tyler scanned the windows of the building for any sign of the people who lived there. There was no activity.
They walked around the corner of the building and the smell of smoke grew stronger. Their hearts beat faster as they neared the back. They didn’t feel the freezing temperatures stinging their bare hands, cracked and calloused after the long winter.
Evan heard the fire crackle as he rounded the duplex and entered the backyard, which was sheltered by green pine and spruce trees. Three snowmobiles were parked along the back wall of the building. Scott, Brad Connor, and Alex Richer stood around a large firepit made from an old oil drum. A large black pot rested on top of the rusty makeshift grill. Scott’s back was to them but Connor stiffened and Richer raised an eyebrow as he saw the three men approach. Scott continued to stare into the fire without turning around.