Cold Heart

by Chandler McGrew

  Rita grimaced and Micky laughed.

  “He really isn't so bad,” she protested.

  “Have it your way,” said Rita.

  Micky opened the heavy door and stepped out onto the porch. The breeze blowing down the valley buffeted her and she was surprised by the chill in it. The clouds were still high cirrus and the sun shone beneath them. But by the time she reached the edge of the clearing and headed back up the trail toward home, she realized that she had better stop and grab a heavier jacket and gloves and maybe a hat. One of the things that Aaron had taught her was that only Cheechakos went out unprepared for bad weather. If the weather changed abruptly and took you unawares, it was no one's fault but your own.

  Aaron had taught her a lot things.

  How to bank a fire so it would burn all night.

  How to bake bread in a pressure cooker on top of a woodstove.

  How to walk in snowshoes.

  How to live today and not yesterday.

  That was the most important thing that she had learned from Aaron. The hardest for him to teach. The most difficult for her to learn.

  Four months after the incident at her woodpile, she and Aaron were sitting on his porch, watching the mountains turn a thousand shades of blue in the distance. A pair of ravens played aerial tag over the needle tops of the spruces and Micky was feeling almost at ease.

  “Quit living with dead people,” said Aaron.

  She glared at him as though he had two heads. How dare he say something like that to her? How dare he intrude on her grief in that manner?

  And how did he know I was thinking of Wade?

  “Now you're going to stomp off and say what an old shithead I am. But you know I'm right.”

  “I'm getting better,” she said.

  “No, you're not.” His grizzled gray beard jarred with blue eyes that seemed far too young for his wrinkled brow and gnarly old hands.

  “Are you just trying to start something today?” she asked, prepared to do just what he said, stomp right off.

  “Look around.” He waved his hand around the valley. The sun was high overhead, fireweed burned blue in the grass, and the Kuskokwim was wide and gray with spring runoff. “This whole damned planet is filled with life. Think about it. Think how much more life there is than death.”

  She turned away from him.

  “And yet you waste your time on the dead side,” he said. “You know what happens then?”

  She waited.

  “Wonderful people like me, that you could have been thinking about, by the time you get around to doing it, are dead.”

  She laughed, knowing that that was exactly what he had aimed for. He laughed too.

  But it had been a serious lesson and she knew it.

  Whether it had been well taught, or whether she had been about ready to step over the threshold of recovery anyway, she never knew. But McRay started to feel more like home after that, and, though she still thought of Wade often, they were fond memories. The image of him in the cruiser, the memory of her parents, facedown in pools of their own blood, were mercifully blurred and seldom recalled.

  That was Aaron's gift to her.

  She was almost to her cabin when she thought of the hare again. She slipped silently off the trail and with a stealthy tread, crept around to the far side of the huge spruce. But the snowshoe rabbit was gone. She glanced through the deep woods; the sunlight filtered amber and gold down into the thick carpet of pine needles. Aaron might have been able to figure out where the animal had wandered off to, but tracking a rabbit across soft forest bottom was still beyond Micky's abilities.

  She thought she heard something splash in the creek and immediately turned downslope. But the forest between the trail and the Fork was dense. She couldn't see the creek and no further sounds came from that direction.

  But something about the noise set her nerves back on edge.

  The shots.

  The nervous rabbit.

  Her intuition about Aaron.

  Now the splash.

  Singly, they were all easily explained and nothing to worry about. Put them all together and they added up to a huge mass of feminine neurosis. Aaron would have a fit.

  She was sweaty from the brisk walk and chilled by the rising wind. She hurried into the cabin to get her heavier jacket, stopping to give the crate a once-over, jiggling it from side to side, although she knew that it was perfectly boxed.

  She replaced her Thinsulate jacket with the goose-down one, making sure her gloves were in the pockets. She grabbed a wool cap from a peg beside the door and pulled it on. Her hair barely showed beneath it. She kept it closecropped now. Easier to take care of. There weren't any hairdressers in McRay. Every few months she paid Rita to cut it and she didn't spend any time admiring it in her one mirror. Rita wasn't a butcher. But she'd better not give up her day job, either.

  Micky thought again of the shots and the possibility that a bear was moving around, then fetched the Glock from the table beside her bed. She checked the chamber, then set the gun down on the worktable, trying to remember where she'd put her holster. She hadn't worn it since leaving Houston. She finally found it on the shelf beneath the kitchen washbasin. She held it in both hands, staring at it. The feel, the weight, the smoothness of the jet-black leather instantly bringing back the ugly memories she had rigorously exorcised under Aaron's tutelage.

  She placed the holster on the table beside the Glock and backed away. Suddenly she didn't want to handle it. She glanced at her wristwatch, hanging on a nail on the wall, and thought how the gun and watch were symbols of life past.

  Time.

  And violence.

  Time meant little in McRay.

  A day could last forever or she might glance up from her worktable and wonder where it had gone.

  And violence, the violence of the gun, was a thing of her past.

  She grabbed a couple of paperbacks she had ordered for Aaron and stepped back out into the sun, closing the door behind her.

  Better without the gun.

  Aaron always said the Glock was a girly pistol fit for nothing but target shooting anyway.

  If there was a bear in the vicinity, she'd stick to whistling and snapping her fingers.

  When she reached the creek, she glanced upand downstream. She could see fifty yards in either direction before the creek meandered around a bend. But there was nothing unusual to be seen. No bear. No one cavorting in the creek. It was a normal spring day and the stream was running just as it had run for a million years before she got here. No one was shouting on the far shore. No one running through the brush.

  But a terrible sense of foreboding gnawed at her.

  The wind died for an instant and the forest grew utterly still.

  She considered hollering across to Terry. But a hand seemed wrapped around her vocal cords and she remained silent.

  Her shout might frighten Terry. Micky had spoken to Terry and Dawn on numerous occasions and Micky knew their story. Terry was afraid of the air around her. The woman was like a small bird that was so frightened it could die of a heart attack before any hunter got it. Micky would have loved to help Terry but couldn't figure out just how to do it. She sensed that the brusque technique that Aaron had used on her would be a decided failure against Terry's fears. She'd broached the subject with Aaron and he'd agreed.

  “You can't fix someone like Terry,” he said. “She isn't damaged. She's broken.”

  “She's just afraid,” said Micky, shaking her head. “I know about being afraid.”

  “Like you were in Houston?” Aaron was the only one in town, other than Damon, who knew the whole story.

  “The fear comes back,” she said.

  “But that afraid? So afraid that you can't move? That you piss your pants?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that's how afraid Terry will be for the rest of her life. Afraid that if she leaves the protection she thinks she and Dawn have here, even for an instant, it will cost them their lives.
She spends her entire time trying to find a way to keep Dawn here after she reaches legal age and it's killing her because she knows she can't.”

  “How in the hell do you know all this?”

  “The difference between you and Terry,” said Aaron, “is that deep down you want to be better. Terry doesn't. She doesn't want to be not afraid because to not be afraid would mean that she's wrong. It would mean that the world wasn't an evil place. That it hadn't singled out her husband for a sacrifice. That his death was just a fucking meaningless tragedy. The worst thing is, if her kid don't get out of here pretty soon, she's going to start catching her mother's fear and be too scared to.”

  Micky knew exactly what he meant.

  To accept the fact that the men who had callously murdered her parents and her lover and the girl in the strip joint were simply criminals who had just happened to cross their path denigrated their memories. She wanted there to be reasons for their deaths where she knew there were none. And once she finally accepted that there were no reasons, she'd reached the road to recovery.

  And what Aaron said about Dawn was true, too.

  Terry would never recover. The best thing that Dawn could do was get away before her mother's sickness infected her as well.

  Still burdened by foreboding, Micky turned uphill. Aaron's cabin was a mile and a half up the winding valley, but just around the bend ahead she would be able to see El's place. His cabin sat down close to the water, and she'd passed it countless times but never without wondering how anyone could live there.

  Even El's property was forbidding somehow. It seemed as though the cabin itself would have liked to get out of that clearing as fast as possible. And Micky was already edgy.

  Passing by El's cabin would be bad enough.

  The last person she wanted to see that afternoon was El.

  1:10

  IF MICKY HAD TURNED and walked toward the store when she reached the creek at the foot of her cabin, she would have found Dawn, cringing in the alders. Dawn had finally steeled herself and made the dash across the North Fork, while Micky stood in her cabin, looking down at the gun she could not force herself to carry.

  Dawn had made more noise than she expected, splashing across the narrow creek. When she clawed her way up the shallower slope on the far side, she had instantly burrowed down deep into the brush again. Now, all she could make out was a few feet of trail out in front of her and scattered glimpses of the far shore.

  It had been almost impossible to get the nerve to stand up and sprint across the stream.

  Then she heard Howard MacArthur's voice and something snapped in her brain.

  Without thinking she'd scrabbled her way upward, mouthing words that made no sound. Trying to scream without success. She wanted to run to Howard, to throw herself in his arms, to tell him to save her. At the same time, another part of her brain kept asking who was saving whom.

  She had to warn Howard that El was killing people. Her fingers ripped at the loose gravel and her head was just over the top of the bank when she saw the surprised look on old Howard's face, just a few feet ahead of her.

  El's gun roared and a bright splash of blood plumed on the front of Howard's crisp blue shirt. He dropped hard onto his back, his head twisting from left to right as though he was telling himself that this wasn't happening.

  But Dawn could have told him that it was.

  She hung there, her hands gripping the lip of the bank like a man clinging to the edge of a cliff, as El leaned slowly over Howard and pointed the long black barrel down into his face. Mesmerized, she watched El cock the hammer with his thumb, but twisted her head to the side just as he pulled the trigger again.

  The gunshot thundered down the valley.

  Dawn whimpered. She let her hands slip and her body slid halfway back down the bank. She hung there, motionless, unable to move, her face buried in the rich-smelling soil, her body trembling, waiting.

  Is he coming now?

  It seemed two eternities before she gathered the courage to claw her way upward once more. She raised her head and looked quickly all around the clearing, fighting down the sobs that choked her.

  Howard lay sprawled in the sun. There was something odd about his left eye but at that distance she couldn't make it out.

  He wasn't moving.

  And El was nowhere to be seen.

  Which way did he go?

  Has he crossed the bridge to Howard's place?

  She would have heard him if he'd gone back up the path to his own cabin, and more than likely he would have taken one last look down into the creek and discovered her.

  Or is he in our cabin again?

  The idea that El was inside their house again, with her mother's body, sent a shudder of revulsion up her spine.

  She slid back down to the creek, squeezed her eyes shut.

  But she knew in her heart she couldn't stay there. At any minute he was going to come back looking for her.

  So she ran.

  The icy runoff caught at her pant legs, slowing her down, splashing noisily. She gasped as jagged tendrils of pain shot from the tips of her toes to her knees. Slipping on the rocks she threw frightened glances back over her shoulder, expecting to see El come charging down the bank after her at any moment.

  But she made the far shore and clawed her way up, across the narrow trail and into the waiting alders, digging in like a wolverine. Her face was scratched, her hands and arms were raw and bleeding, and she was soaked through to the skin over most of her lower body. The wind picked up, chilling her. She had to get someplace warm and soon, or she would die of exposure.

  What did El mean by “You all have to die?” All didn't sound like he was talking about her and her mother.

  He was crazy.

  Could he be crazy enough to kill everyone in town?

  Suddenly she had a premonition. She saw El striding across the clearing toward the store. Saw Rita and Clive standing innocently on the front steps. Watching him come…

  If El was headed for the bridge that led across to the store she had to hurry. She was already across the creek. She could beat him to the Cabels’.

  She wrapped her arms around her, gripping her shoulders tightly, trying to gain any warmth she could against the increasingly icy breeze.

  She edged out into the exposed trail, glancing up and down like a terrified bunny.

  Then she ran.

  1:25

  YOU GONNA GET THAT thing fixed or not?” Rita leaned on the doorjamb, her book dangling in her hand. Clive glanced across the top of the four-wheeler. “Something wrong?”

  “Micky needs that crate picked up.”

  He set his pliers on the seat and stood up, wiping his hands on his pants.

  “So?”

  “You told her you'd go get it. That's all.”

  Clyde frowned, glancing at his watch. “Rich won't be here for three, maybe four hours. I'm almost done. What's the hurry?”

  Rita tapped the book against her leg before she replied.

  “I don't like what Micky said about those shots.”

  “You want me to go check it out?”

  “On foot?”

  Clive made a face, gestured at the carburetorless fourwheeler. “Well, what do you want?”

  “I don't know,” said Rita, glancing nervously back into the store. “Just hurry up. Okay?”

  Clive shook his head and went back to work. All he had to do was set it on the new gasket on the Honda and tighten the bolts. He wiped it clean and put his tools away. Then he stuck his head through the doorway.

  “I'm done,” he said. “I'll run to Micky's now.”

  “Be careful,” said Rita.

  “Jesus, Rita,” he said, taking a half step into the store. “What's the matter with you today?”

  “It's stupid,” she said, tossing the book onto the counter. “Micky's got me itchy. Take your rifle. All right?”

  “Sure.”

  He opened the sliding door and pushed the Honda out onto the
grass. The wind was picking up, the high clouds lowering. He zipped his jacket and slipped on a pair of gloves. He punched the starter button on the four-wheeler and revved the motor with the thumb throttle. Rita stepped out onto the porch and waved at him and he shot her an okay sign, rocking off down the trail toward Micky's cabin.

  He drove fast, wondering if he'd catch Micky before she reached her cabin. Not that it mattered, he was just having a race with himself, giving his mind something to do on a track that he had driven dozens of times. The Honda bounced and bucked and he let the handlebars slip between his fingers, balancing expertly on the balls of his feet on the pegs.

  The engine had a throaty but high-pitched whine that echoed through the trees and could be heard for a mile or more up and down the valley. Aaron never failed to bitch about the noise when Clive delivered supplies up to his cabin. But the old man always ordered more and Clive had noticed that with each passing year Aaron seemed to load fewer of his necessities into his backpack.

  Micky, on the other hand, never commented about the noise. Clive got the feeling that she kind of liked to hear it. He suspected that the four-wheeler represented civilization to her and to others like Terry Glorianus, reassuring them that they hadn't exactly fallen off the edge of the earth by moving to McRay.

  He pulled up close to Micky's cabin stoop and turned off the machine.

  The sudden silence seemed ominous, as though the surrounding forest had been deadly quiet before he arrived. He glanced around the clearing and then down the trail to the Fork. The wind stirred the trees and he had the strangest feeling that he was being watched. It gave him the creeps, but he shook it off.

  There was nothing to be afraid of in McRay. Even the bears shied away from the noise of the four-wheeler. It was better than barking dogs for driving bears away.

  The thought of barking dogs reminded him of Scooter.

  In the entire village, Scooter had been the only fourlegged inhabitant.

  Unlike most Alaskan towns, McRay was not overrun with stray dogs. Aaron had never gotten into the habit of raising them, never been a dog sledder, and the people who moved in later had come either to hunt or to mine. They weren't interested in keeping pack or sled animals since they used either snow machines or their feet for conveyance and it wasn't that far from the airstrip to anywhere in McRay. So, there had always been a more or less unspoken agreement between all inhabitants that the town didn't need any dogs.