“What magazines?”
“I’m not real picky about them,” she said. “Any kind with pictures. I like them all. I usually just get paid in magazines.”
* * *
Upstairs in the guest room—a compressed rectangle of wooded slats with the cold scent of stagnation—he looked in drawers, checked the closet, then beneath the bed. He peeled back the military-issue blanket and on his knees pressed his face into the sheet where Medora had slept. The vaguest outline of a fluid stain midway on the twin mattress—she slept nude no matter the month—and he thought he could smell her there. He breathed that way with his face to the sheet, then licked the stain.
He ignited the kerosene heater beneath the window, dimmed the lantern to a slow burn. Despite his hunger he stripped bare and reclined on the creaking bed as if his body could fit into the mold her own body had made. As if he could enter the morass of her dreams and learn her destination. He spent himself beneath the blanket, the first release in weeks, and fell asleep before he had the chance to clean his hand.
* * *
An ungodly night in some sere village east of the capital, the heat at ninety still, hours after the drape of dark. He’d been in the desert ten months and two days. A roundup of men now, shoulder to shoulder against the wall of a building chafed by sand and time. A score of bearded ghouls, hands zip-tied behind them, filthy bare feet, toenails like impacted corn. Molesting lights from the vehicles made their shadows on the wall as black as macadam.
Wet through with sweat and fighting to keep awake, Slone sat on a low porch step while others kept howling women at bay, ransacked more homes, guarded men at gunpoint. An inept translator spat gibber to these seized ones who shook their heads in ire and spat back. Shoddy rifles collected and stacked in a mound. Chickens in cluck on the road, a goat roped to a pole. Somewhere the skirl of an infant, and beyond the slap of spotlights a perplexing desert murk.
Now a chaos of conflicting reports, unabsorbed information. A corporal on the radio sucking on a clot of gum, getting no answer, none they wanted to hear. The man they sought was either among the seized or not, guilty or not. Eyes shut, Slone leaned back against the mud-brick wall of the house and sweated some more.
This undermanned platoon of twenty-two was from the start an errant brotherhood counting corpses and days. Half were drug and battery felons who’d been given waivers to enlist. They daily mocked those frayed others, those men in the news they heard so much about, men soothed by doctors in the States. Men who returned home cracked, only part of what they were before coming here. Ten months in now and Slone had not come close to the sunder, to the nightmares and the morning shakes. And he understood that he never would. That the eclipse in him had been there since his start. His was the nightly sleep of the exhausted sane.
His warped brethren could smell in Slone all he was capable of—a calmness masking an urge for carnage—and they feared him in a way they’d feared few before. His mere presence among these men seemed to turn them more lunatic, seemed to increase their will to ruin.
On the ground by his boot, partially hidden in rocks, lay a metallic object. A harmonica, nicked and dented. Slone blew bits of gravel from the air chambers and brought it to his lips. At the mounted .50-caliber gun behind the spotlight the gunner unloaded on the line of seized men, red-stained the wall behind them as they jolted from the impact, as women shrieked on soiled knees. Blood enough to course through dirt, holes in them to fit a fist.
Slone wanted to breathe a song into the harmonica but it made a clogged, rasping sound. He dropped it back into the yellow dirt and tried to sleep upright through the wail.
* * *
In the frozen night Slone woke to the hue of flame in the window, alight at the other end of the mining camp, something burning along the bluff. He dressed in the dark and descended the stairs by feel—the chatty woman nowhere seen or heard—and outside through the deepfreeze he made his way along the center road, huts and cabins now in arrant darkness. Some homes were no more than caves hewed into the base of the bluff, one with an oven door for a window, others with oval entrances wrapped in moose hide.
Slone saw the hunter, fifty or fifty-five years old, hardened by decades of walking and mining—he could see it in his stance. The hunter stood in the wide glow of the blaze: pallets, crates, boxes, pieces of tree. Donned wholly in gray wolf pelt, with white man’s skin and untrimmed hair still dark despite his age, he seemed a make-believe shaman. The wolf’s tail was still attached to his guise, its fanged head pulled low over his own for a hood.
When he saw Slone approach he turned to grin and welcome him to the heat. His teeth looked like stream-bottom pebbles beneath the still gallant fangs of the wolf he’d killed.
“I thought this would get your attention. Maud said we had a young traveler tonight. I knew it was you.”
“You’re not an Indian.”
“Not officially.”
“You’re not a priest.”
“In my own way I am, same as you and everyone.”
“I’m no priest.”
“Have it your way, then.”
Long laminated scars embossed his forehead and face—the admonition of a grizzly. The beast had taken a piece of his nose and upper lip as token.
“Why did she come to you?”
“Step closer here. It won’t hurt you, this fire. I like a big fire all after freeze-up. As reminder, you know. Breakup is still a long way off.”
Fixed to a vertical spit in the blaze was a haunch of lynx or wolf he rotated with a ski pole. Above, the firmament was masked by its floor of cloud. A new storm was coming by daylight. This fire augmented with dark the surrounding night. The lard of the haunch cracked in the flame and Slone’s airy gut yawned. The wind raised the bonfire and sent sparks in flight like insects aglow.
“I knew you’d be starved, traveling up from Keelut. Maud said you didn’t eat. We’re out of bread here, you know. Hank ain’t been in with the plane. But we got meat to go ’round. For now.” He paused to turn the spit. “Prey is real scarce this winter. Nothing I’ve seen before. You hungry?”
Slone looked at the meat in the blaze but said nothing.
“I got some potatoes too. I cooked them for us. You’re welcome to one.”
The roasting fatty scent of meat nearly stumbled Slone with hunger. With a hay pick the hunter unloaded the haunch onto a grease-stained square of plywood.
“Come eat,” he said.
His cave had been burrowed into the rock bluff by machine. It stayed lit with kerosene lamps that cast demonic shapes about the concave space, the air dense with the smell of wood smoke. His crude kiln was a steel drum torched open on one side, twelve feet of stovepipe snaking over to the entrance—Slone had to duck to enter—and fastened with wire and galvanized concrete nails hammered into the rock. It threw a dry sauna heat that engulfed the cave.
The hunter dwelled among the heaped and hanging bones of every beast born here, brown and black hides stacked like carpets at a market. A row of National Geographic and Playboy magazines, decades old, sat piled by a mattress gnawed on by rodents. A Ken doll in a string noose, hanging from a hook. On a wall the chasmal jaws of a bear trap. Wolf skulls by the score. Dozens of wolfish masks made of driftwood and dyed in ochre—they scowled from the wall and rounded vault. The masks were identical to what he’d found beneath Medora’s pillow.
The hunter stripped from his costume to socks and briefs, his bare body muscled and scarred. He had the torso and limbs of a swimmer, though his face proclaimed every day of five decades. Slone sweated fast in the rolling heat of the fire and removed his parka. He sat opposite the hunter, cross-legged on a grizzly skin, eating burned potato and lynx meat from an earthen plate.
There beside the bed of pelts were Medora’s boots, leather and fur, size eight, ordered from a catalog before freeze-up last season. The hunter saw Slone looking at the boots.
“I fixed her a new pair, mukluks with moose and wolf, water-proof lining, knee-hi
gh, real good ones. Those ones there are no good where she’s going.”
Slone chewed and nodded. The hunter’s two bolt-action rifles and a single-barrel shotgun poked out from a crate, hunting knives piled on a tree-stump table.
“She knows you’re coming for her. She told me that. She told me too what she did. That’s why she came to me, to answer your question. Counsel, you can call it. She had one of my masks. I don’t know how. I give them away to whoever comes through here and they seem to find who needs them. One way or another. You’re welcome to one. It releases the wolf in you, boy. The wolf we all have in us.”
They ate more in silence.
“How are you from this region, I wonder, with all that yellow hair? You look like a Nordic to me. The woman too. She has your same hair, but a whiter yellow, and she has your face too, I’d say. Ever notice how people who live together for a long while start to resemble each other? That’s why I live alone. I don’t want to look like nobody but me.”
“You let her go from here.”
“It’s not my business what she did. There’s no decree in the country. It don’t reach here. I help who comes asking me. What brings them here and where they go to is nothing to me. I’ve seen plenty of mothers kill their young. You see it out here a lot.”
He passed Slone a wooden jug of water with no handle, chill despite the warmth in the room. Slone drank it half gone and passed it back.
“I remember you, traveler. I remember your father too, when he came here with you. You were a little tyke then, maybe five or six. Don’t you remember that?”
“Why did we come here?”
“To see me. Your father wanted a wolf’s oil. He wouldn’t shoot one himself. So he came to me for the oil. It was for you, this oil. Did you know that? Your father said you were unnatural. Said you had unnatural ways about you. That was his word, unnatural. An Indian witch from your village told him a wolf’s oil could cure you, make you normal. Did it work? Are you normal now? I gave him the oil.”
He sliced off another portion of lynx and laid it on Slone’s plate.
“What’d your father mean, you were unnatural? What’s unnatural about you, boy? You look wholesome enough to me.”
“My father is dead. I am alive.”
“Me too. My ancestors on the Yukon worshipped the wolf as a god, you know.”
“Your ancestors are white like mine.”
“On the outside, that’s true.”
“It’s an odd people who will butcher their god.”
“Kill your god and you become your god. For survival, not sport, of course. Look at where you are.”
“I see sport here.”
“I trade them pelts with Hank. He can sell them at the city, mostly marten and lynx he wants. They fetch a good price for him, more than wolverine or wolf. He trades me provisions, brings whatever I might need for the season. That’s called a living, not a sport, I’d say.”
“Tell me where she is.”
“It’s not for me to tell. I’ll feed and clothe a traveler but I don’t meddle. Meddle is for others. There’s no meddle here. The animals and weather have their rules and I obey those.”
They finished their meal without words. The hunter pressed tobacco into a pipe and passed it to Slone. From a flagon he poured moonshine the color and scent of gasoline. When Slone drank from it the liquid hollowed his sternum, sprawled in flame across his stomach. They smoked in quiet. Slone looked to the large hide hanging behind him, a shape and texture and tint he’d never seen before, neither bear nor moose nor caribou. He asked about its origin.
The hunter grinned, flecks of meat packed between his teeth. “Do you like a story, traveler?”
“I like the truth.”
“The truth. Every story is the truth,” and he laughed the smoke loose from his nose. “Okay. I’ll tell you. It was ’85 when I shot it. Early winter just before freeze-up. About a mile west of here, coming down a ridge into a ravine. Everything dusted with snow but not that hard cold of January yet. The ravine still running. It looked like a brown bear from the crest of the ridge. They’ll stand on their hind legs, you know, to reach up a tree. And I saw it that way, standing. But then the path dipped down and around and when I had a clear view again, maybe eight minutes later, it was still standing. No brown bear stands that long. And through the glasses I saw it, its face gorilla, but not. A sagittal crest like one of them Neanderthals in the National Geographic pictures. Overall, I’d say, it was six hundred pounds easy but with the body shape of a human. You can see from that skin there behind you it was over seven feet in height.”
Slone turned to look, then handed the pipe back to the hunter.
“But it was the eyes that got me. They were human eyes. Larger, of course, but human in every way. Its gaze, I mean. It was aware, self-aware. It was the Kushtaka. I heard about it all through my youth and there it was, clear as the day around me. It had a young one with it. With her, it was a female, I could see the teats. Young one about five feet, less hairy. Its face like any child’s you’d see. A little monkey nose. But already muscular. Round with muscles, and it just a little thing. They were at the water drinking and it seemed she was teaching the young one something. About fish, I thought. And then pointing up into the tree at birds but I couldn’t see what kind. The son of a bitch had speech. The damnedest thing.”
He raised the pipe, took the smoke down deep into himself.
“This was a once-in-a-lifetime, as you can guess. I was a good eighty feet away but on my belly in thin snow and camouflaged real good in wolf down. Any wind there was in that ravine was against me, so they couldn’t smell a thing. I had a .308 Winchester then, you know, the finest rifle ever made. It took that young one’s head half off. The mother saw it before she heard it. Then she howled. Some sound, I have to tell you. Not like a wolf but a man’s howl. It was the damnedest thing: half in the water, she tried to hold the young one’s head together, where it was split, as if she could undo what been done. Of course she couldn’t. And she just howled, looking up and around like it was lightning that did it. I dropped her right there, with the young one in her arms, right through the heart. You can’t get a better shot than that.”
He paused to finger more tobacco from a pouch.
“I had a sled with me on the ridge top but I couldn’t fit them both on it. I mean, I couldn’t tote all that weight, heavy bastards. I tried going back that night for the young one but the wolves had their dinner of it. And I ate all winter of the mother. A pork taste, I’d say, not like moose or bear. Not gamy like wolf. The strength that meat gave me, the spirit of the Kushtaka in me . . . I can’t explain it. I had orgasms just standing here, not stroking myself, nothing like that at all. Just standing. I saved the eyes too, those amazing eyes. They’re around here somewhere.”
Slone drank again from the mug and they finished the last of the tobacco. Soon he rose and went slowly over to Medora’s boots. He squatted and brought one to his face and inhaled the sweat-strong fur.
“You’re welcome to the woman’s boots. They’re yours, really. I don’t meddle.”
Slone returned the boot and stood. On a low table there among bullets and tools was the key to Medora’s truck fastened to a key ring Bailey had made at school: a smiley-faced heart of fired clay painted over in scarlet gloss. Slone held up the key, dangled it in the jumping firelight for the hunter to see.
“Yes. I traded her trucks. She took my Ford. I got the better of the deal, I’d say, for that Chevy. But the Ford is a damn good truck too. She didn’t want her vehicle spotted on roads, I’m guessing. I don’t like to meddle. Told her just take mine, I’d trade her, an even swap. Plus the boots I made her.”
Slone removed the key ring, felt its polished flat weight in his palm, ran a thumb over its surface, then slid it down into a pocket. He said nothing.
Inching along the ribbed wall of the cave, he examined the wolf masks in museum display, each one crafted to look hellish and rabid.
“You’re we
lcome to any of them masks there. Have your pick of them. It’s not my business but I can see you need to let your wolf out a little. When’s the last time you showed the monster in you, boy?”
Slone chose the black mask with elongated snout and overlarge fangs. With the leather straps he fastened it to his face through his yellow wreath of hair.
The hunter was bent now over the stove, adding a wedge of wood, and when he turned he seemed ready to say something. But Slone was in the mask with a knife gripped by the blade, handle aimed at the hunter.
They stood that way regarding one another, their fire-thrown shadows towering about the cave. Seconds later the blade pierced the hunter’s chest to the handle, just above the aorta. Midway between them in the air the blade had caught the quick glint of firelight. In a gasp the hunter looked at the handle stuck to his chest, then at the upright animal across the cave. It seemed he wanted to ask yet another question he’d just lost the language for.
He needed both hands to yank out the blade. The coin-slot wound was black and withholding blood. He stood inspecting the knife almost in admiration of its design and the blood began seeping from the slot. Still gasping, he glanced at the monster in the mask. He stepped to the grizzly skin and collapsed on his back, waiting for what more would come.
Then Slone was above him, handgun aimed at the hunter’s hairline, his own breath wet within the wolf face. Through the eyeholes of the mask he could see the hunter blinking and breathing, asthmatic, his lips trying to speak to whatever god he claimed for his own. Slone put the bullet in the hunter’s forehead and watched the hole ooze a blackish blood.
He walked back into the polar night with Medora’s boots beneath his arm, the mask still fastened to his face.
VII
Cheeon started shooting as soon as Marium reached the line of vehicles in front of his cabin. He didn’t know the make of rifle Cheeon had in the attic but it was without stop, ripping cup-sized holes through the trucks. He could not fathom why a man would have a weapon like that, how he’d even go about getting one. He looked over to a cop to tell him to duck, duck lower, then saw a piece of his face and skull tear off in sherbet under his helmet. He ducked then and fell dead.
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