Cold Heart

by Chandler McGrew

  She felt like a rabbit.

  The shot still rumbled in her ears and tears leaked from her cheeks into the rock-hard ground beneath her palms.

  What set him off again?

  A noise in the alders?

  A puff of breeze?

  The North Fork was only a few feet through the branches to her right, and once again she considered making a break for it.

  He had missed with his first two shots when she ran from the cabin. But she didn't see how he could miss at this range if he spotted her. And the brush would slow her flight so much that he could unload the pistol at her before she even reached the creek. He'd probably reload before she made it to the safety of the far shore.

  If he didn't just chase her down and stab her to death.

  The handkerchief was still stuck to his right boot, glued on with blood and mud. She lowered her head and tried to make herself as tiny as possible. El flailed at the brush, peering this way and that.

  “Come on out, now,” he said, the calm in his voice even more terrifying than before.

  How could anyone do what he had done, be doing what he was doing, and act so calm?

  Suddenly she knew what it was about El that had always set her teeth on edge.

  There was never any emotion in his voice. As though there were no life going on inside him, just the automatic actions of a machine, just chemicals boiling inside his body and his brain.

  “Come on, Dawn. If you're hit, you're going to bleed to death in there and the little animals will pick your bones. You don't want to die like that. Come on out and you can be with your mother. I'll close up the cabin after you. That will be better. You'll be with your mom.”

  The mention of her mother made the tears sting again. Snot ran down her face, dripping like tears onto the ground, and it grossed her out but she was scared to wipe it away. She wanted desperately to blow her nose. She was afraid some weird instinct of El's would point her out to him and he would spin and fire a shot in her direction. She tried even harder to press herself into the ground.

  It seemed only an instant before that she had witnessed the horrible scene in the cabin. But it also seemed as though she had been crouching in the alders for hours, for days. She felt certain the horror would continue forever. That she would be hiding here for eternity, holding her breath, stifling the shivers, terror paralyzing her, waiting for the death blow to fall.

  El spun again and she stiffened, bracing for the killing shot. Her eyes were focused—her entire body was focused— on the scrap of bloody white cloth twisting beneath his boot.

  Why doesn't it come off?

  Is blood that sticky?

  She felt the mirror glasses searching the welter of brush. Felt them on her. Her breath came in involuntary gasps, none large enough to fill her burning lungs. She couldn't quell the shaking of her hands in the dirt.

  The boots finally turned away, upslope, and a tentacle of hope attached itself to her heart.

  But the damned handkerchief chose that instant to dislodge, just as El was taking his first step away, back toward the cabin.

  She saw him bend. His fingers plucked the bloodied square of cotton from the gravel. He lifted the handkerchief, inspecting it closely. Then he sniffed it, like a bloodhound might.

  “Got you,” he said in that same flat voice. “I knew I hit you. If you aren't dead, you need to come out, Dawn. You can't go up the trail without passing me. You're either going to bleed to death here or I can make it fast for you. Come on up to the cabin. I don't have all day.”

  He thinks the blood on the handkerchief is mine.

  If he thinks I'm dead, will he just go away?

  El tossed the handkerchief aside and vanished over the bank.

  12:45

  HOWARD MACARTHUR KEPT HIS ears open for another shot. He rubbed sweat off his brow with the sleeve of his blue-denim shirt. Blue-denim shirts were all Howard owned. He wore them summer and winter along with bluedenim pants.

  Not blue jeans.

  Trousers.

  At eighty-five his hearing was amazingly acute, although his vision required the aid of bottle-thick glasses and he didn't get around near as well as he let on. Rheumatism stiffened nearly every joint in his tall body but only Clive Cabel knew how much aspirin and Advil he ordered. Howard despised old age almost as much as he hated sympathy or pity. He had accepted all of both he cared to when his wife Elizabeth died in ’65. He'd been alone ever since her death and had given no one any excuse to feel sorry for him.

  The shots had come from near the Glorianus place.

  Howard was cleaning up around the outside of his tiny cabin, the smallest in town, even tinier than Marty Kiley's one-bedroom shack. Howard didn't need much room for frills. He'd spent most of his life living out of a pup tent in remote locations, working for Alaska Fish and Game. He was a silent, self-contained man and had been lucky early in life to meet a woman who didn't expect a man to be around every day. They'd had a wonderful marriage, although the Lord hadn't blessed them with children and Howard liked children.

  He liked Dawn Glorianus and had since she and her mother moved in, six years before. But he felt a little sorry for the girl.

  Not everyone was cut out for bush life.

  When the first two shots rang out, Howard was lifting a black-plastic bag of garbage that had mysteriously ended up beside the back stoop and not in the bin where it belonged. The bag had gotten buried under the winter snow and now shrews had gotten into it. He was shoveling it into another bag so that he could dispose of it by burning the entire thing in his fifty-gallon barrel incinerator when he got around to his spring fire.

  The shots were muffled, as though they were in very deep woods or the gun was covered somehow. He wondered if Terry had spotted a bear. But then it occurred to him that Terry didn't own a gun, wouldn't have one near the house. Howard understood why.

  Everyone in McRay knew about Dawn's father. And everyone in town sort of looked out for the mother and daughter. The pair were like a couple of orphaned cubs that couldn't take care of themselves no matter how much they figured they could. Howard had been glad when they took the cabin vacated by Harry Townsend, since it gave him someone new to wave to on his daily walks and it placed them in a central location so that there was someone living pretty much all around them.

  Of course their nearest neighbor was El Hoskins.

  Howard didn't like the man. But at least he was a man. Howard was of the firm opinion that women alone didn't have any business living out in the bush. But lately it seemed the town was filling up with them.

  He set the shovel down and moseyed around to face the bridge that led to Terry and Dawn's cabin. The sun was in his eyes but he wasn't really looking.

  He was listening.

  After a couple of minutes, when no more shots were fired and no one came screaming down the path, he decided that it was El, shooting at a hare, and went in the house to get a cup of coffee.

  He had no sooner poured one and sat down when the third shot rang out.

  That didn't sound like anyone rabbit hunting.

  For one thing this shot was too near. He knew that Terry wouldn't put up with anyone shooting around her house like that. Not unless it was an emergency. And if someone was having that much trouble with a grizzly, then Howard needed to get over there. No one in town had half as much experience as he did with the big bears and if it was El using that damned hogleg he carried on his hip, then the fool was probably getting ready to wound the animal and get himself and maybe someone else killed too.

  Howard set his coffee on the table and pulled himself painfully to his feet. He reached behind the door and grabbed a short-barreled Mossberg shotgun. The tubular magazine was loaded with alternating rounds of double-aught buckshot and solid lead slugs. It was a bear killer. Unlike his hunting guns, this was strictly a survival weapon, only good for short distances, the range at which bears attacked. It had enough power, in the right hands, to stop one of the nasty fellows dead in his tr
acks.

  He hurried down the trail to the bridge, not bothering to close the door behind him, feeling his old bones ratcheting in their sockets. It seemed like his whole body needed a good lube job. Before he even reached the bridge, he was panting. He forced himself to slow down a little. It wouldn't do anyone any good, his falling and breaking a leg or hurrying himself into a coronary.

  Wouldn't that just be something?

  El chases off a grizzly, then comes to tell him and finds him dead as a coffin nail in the middle of the bridge.

  He leaned on the rough-hewn railing of the bridge he had built. It was wide enough for two people to cross at once, or for Clive to drive his four-wheeler across, though most times, when the water wasn't too high, Clive made his way right across the Fork. Howard stared down into the crystal-clear water and thought for the millionth time how beautiful it was. Like liquid crystal. The melted glacier water had a blue cast that gleamed in the sun. It was a product of the erosion of solid stone, the eating away of the mountains that would one day be flat as the Texas prairies. But Howard didn't expect to live to see that and didn't want to.

  What the hell are you thinking, old man?

  He caught his breath and moved on at a fast walk, the shotgun cradled in the crook of his left arm. He wondered if Micky had heard the shots. Micky didn't like shooting around her place either and for about the same reason as Terry. Howard had mulled over the strange coincidence that brought two wounded women to live in such close proximity in so remote an area. He knew what had driven both of them to come but he sometimes wondered if it wasn't the beginning of a flood.

  Was McRay going to turn into some kind of haven for survivors of urban tragedy?

  He hoped not.

  Alaskan towns had always offered a kind of refuge. But until recent years, most of the people seeking solace in the remote villages had been men like himself, people who didn't fit anywhere else. Some came because of a hurt that had befallen them, others just couldn't stand civilization trying to press their round spirits into square holes. In places like McRay that didn't happen. In McRay a man could be himself. There were no time clocks or factory whistles. Nobody was underor over-dressed. You came and went as you pleased and no one stuck his nose into your business.

  But, unlike Micky Ascherfeld, Terry Glorianus didn't seem better for her move to McRay. Terry was friendly enough, said hi, even visited on occasion. But the woman was a closed book. She explained about her husband's murder and why she was in town. But she let it be known that as far as she was concerned his murder wasn't an isolated event. Terry hadn't moved with her daughter to McRay to get over their grief. She was here to bury herself and her daughter. She was besieged, making her stand by surrounding herself and her only surviving family with as much distance, as much wilderness as she could put between the two of them and the rest of the world.

  Howard felt sorry for her and especially sorry for Dawn. But he never tried to argue with Terry. People had their own ideas and their own lives to live. He didn't believe in saving folks from themselves. Maybe Terry would eventually come out of it or maybe she'd spend the rest of her life in the purgatory she had built for herself. Howard wasn't a psychiatrist and he didn't believe that one of those damned head doctors could have helped her either.

  We all create our own private hells.

  Micky, on the other hand, was more Howard's kind of woman. She made him wish he was forty years younger every time he talked to her. Howard had heard Micky's story from Damon. Micky had faced more terror and more heartbreak than Terry Glorianus could even imagine.

  Micky had been a part of the terror. Lived it firsthand. Maybe that was the real difference between the two women. Maybe it was harder for Terry because the horror for her was all in her mind. She hadn't seen her husband killed and maybe somehow that made it all the worse.

  Micky had come out the other side of her trauma and straightened out her life. Howard had come to accept Micky as a part of McRay in a way that he had never accepted Terry. Terry he thought of more the way a man thinks of an old stray animal he's caring for. He'd take care of it. But it was never really going to be his.

  Terry was a stray. And strays got hurt again and again. Even in places like McRay.

  Micky was more like a wolf. You could hurt one once, maybe twice. But the critters learned. They licked their wounds and they got cagey. Micky could take care of herself pretty much.

  But Howard also knew something that he wasn't sure Micky was aware of. He knew that El had a crush on her. Howard had caught El staring at her one day when El didn't realize anyone else was around, and the intensity of the look El gave her made Howard nervous. Since that day, Howard had made it a habit to watch El.

  The trail wound up a short slope with a ninety-degree turn through the trees and alder bushes, so that Terry's cabin was obscured by the brow of a small knoll. Howard kept his eyes on the underbrush. A bear startled by gunshots might likely eschew the easy track and move into the protection of the trees.

  More than once in his life Howard had been surprised by a grizzly. The big bastards could explode out of thick alders like runaway trains if they were startled. And fear turned a grizzly into a murderous machine that might weigh nearly a ton, with claws as long as a grown man's fingers and sharp as ice picks.

  Howard's best friend had died outside of Cordova when a big sow charged out of the woods. The man didn't have time to lift his shotgun before the beast was on top of him. Her claws hadn't killed him, although his chest and shoulders looked like shredded beef. He'd died when the bear took his entire head in her mouth and buried her huge canines in both temples.

  Every time Howard thought about it he couldn't help but imagine the sickening crunch as the animal's teeth sank in. Couldn't help but wonder if that had been the last sound his friend had heard.

  Howard whistled and clicked his tongue loudly to let any creature in the area know he was coming.

  Better a wary monster than a surprised one.

  12:50

  THE CLEARING AT CABELS’ Store was the largest open area in the valley. The big log structure sat in the center facing the path to Micky's place. Micky glanced across the clearing to her right, past the round telephone antenna toward the airstrip. To her left, the bridge crossed the Sgagamash and the trail led to Howard MacArthur's cabin.

  Clive's workshop was attached to the airstrip side of the store and covered with a low tin roof. The sliding door to the workshop was closed. Micky didn't see Clive's fourwheeler and she wondered if he was around. He might be out on a delivery. She reprimanded herself for procrastinating. If Clive couldn't get her glass to the runway today she was screwed.

  Micky climbed the steps onto the broad front deck. The heavy doors bore twin carvings of eagles, soaring over jagged mountains. Foot-tall letters, sculpted of the same native spruce, proclaimed that this was the site of the Cabel General Store. A painted handset from a telephone sign to her right announced the official AT&T Telephone Site for the area.

  The store was heated with wood and lighted with kerosene mantel lamps. But the telephone took power. On the roof, solar collectors fed a bank of marine batteries. A small windmill on the ridge helped too. The phone was McRay's only instant communication with outside and Clive maintained it zealously. He had explained to Micky that McRay had the last radiophone system in the state. All the other villages had gone cellular. But Clive was proud of being low-tech.

  Few people used the service. Anyone making a call was as likely to be one of the Inuits or Athabaskan natives, going to or from their traditional fishing camps. Clive also called in regular weather reports to Anchorage. Otherwise, the little glassed-in room in the store sat mostly empty.

  When Micky opened the door she was blanketed by the sweet, thick smell of fresh-roasted coffee and cinnamon, tobacco, and the salty, tangy aroma of the chunks of moose jerky and smoked salmon that hung on chains over the counter. The salmon reminded Micky of her glass piece awaiting shipment. The dried fish was ruby red
and had soft rounded contours along flesh that was leather hard and bled light in crimson rays. It was so salty that it was impossible to chew a piece without a beer to wash it down. Clive frequently used that as an excuse to get her to have a drink with him.

  Rita leaned on the counter. She looked up from the book she was reading, staring at Micky over the top of her glasses.

  “Hi, hon. Shopping?”

  Micky nodded. She sauntered over to the counter and turned the book around.

  “A romance novel?” she said.

  “I have my dreams,” Rita replied, laughing and shrugging. “How you been? Haven't seen you in a coupla weeks.”

  “I had to finish that last piece before Rich got in today or my agent is going to wring my neck.”

  “You done?”

  “I need Clive to come up and get it. I have it all packed up. I thought I could get him to haul some supplies up to my place and take the crate back. Is he around?”

  “Probably asleep in the back room,” said Rita. “Lazy bastard.”

  Clive's laziness was a standing joke in McRay. The Cabels’ store and their sleeping quarters upstairs were always spotless, the logs oiled and gleaming, the interior as Bristol-fashion as the exterior. Everyone knew that if they needed a hand, Clive would be ready to lay down whatever he was doing and help. Micky always insisted on paying him but she knew that most of the things she asked him to do, Clive would have been happy to do for free.

  Now he strode out of the room behind the counter with an oily piece of mechanical equipment in his hands, swabbing it with a rag, and tweaking something with a pair of needle-nosed pliers. He smiled when he saw Micky.

  “Thought you were asleep,” said Micky.

  “I do this in my sleep,” said Clive, nudging his wife.

  “Must have heard us and jumped,” said Rita.

  “Did I hear you say you needed a crate picked up?” said Clive, sliding in next to Rita at the counter. Rita went back to her reading but Micky knew that she was listening to every word.