Cold Heart

by Chandler McGrew

  Except for Scooter.

  Scooter had appeared one day on the front porch of the store.

  He was a rat-thin, Siberian husky with scars on his haunches and muzzle that were fresh from fighting and a limp on his right front leg that never quite healed. He had a unique white slash of fur down the middle of his back, between his shoulder blades. Clive knew right away that wherever the dog had come from he had traveled a great distance to find humans. And it didn't take Aaron to tell him that the scars were from the wolves that routinely ate huskies stupid enough to wander away from the safety of hearth and home.

  Scooter moved into the store and Rita slowly nursed him back to health.

  He became a fixture on the front porch during the summer and in the winter he claimed a special place by the woodstove, where he was certain to find any scrap that happened to drop from anyone sitting in the rockers. He grew fat and sassy, though his scars never completely covered with fur. All in all, Scooter looked like the perfect mascot for McRay. Old, tough, and worn, but not worn-out.

  Scooter had the habit, about five o'clock every day, of going for a tour of the valley. Even in the winter, people would find his tracks, on a regular route, up to Micky's, past Damon's place, then nearly up to Aaron's. But the dog always turned around before completing the trip to Aaron's cabin, as though he were checking on the old man but knew better than to disturb him.

  Then the dog would head back down the trail to Terry's place looking for a handout, crossing the creek below El's cabin, so as not to have to pass across El's property.

  Everyone in town loved Scooter.

  Everyone but El.

  From that day four years ago, when the two first laid eyes on each other, there'd been unmistakable enmity.

  El hadn't been in town two days before he sauntered into the store with the big gun on his hip and the mirror glasses covering his eyes. That day, standing in the doorway with the sun at his back, he looked like a man trying to look like a cop. El's left hip was cocked, his right hand rested on the pistol butt, his head back, staring down that beak of a nose at the interior of Clive's store.

  Clive had met El the day before, but this was Rita's first exposure to him, and when Clive glanced over at her he saw something he had never seen in her eyes before.

  Fear.

  Scooter rose from his perch beside the stove and Clive noticed that his hackles were vertical. The dog's eyes were slitted and focused tightly on the silhouette in the doorway. A low, guttural growl rumbled from his throat. Clive was afraid the dog was about to leap on top of El and he hurried to place himself between them.

  El was a few inches shorter than Clive, thinner and wirier. He glanced around Clive, staring at the dog, and Clive knew instantly that for whatever reason, there was a natural hatred between the two.

  “Rita,” he'd said, sharply, “put Scooter in the back room.”

  She shooed the dog ahead of her around the counter. But Scooter fought the maneuver all the way, backing up but trying to see around her pant legs, his head weaving and bobbing like a boxer trying to get around a referee, the low growl almost but not quite turning into a bark. When Rita had Scooter in the shed she closed the door and returned to the counter.

  “Sorry,” said Clive. “I don't know what got into him.”

  “I don't like dogs,” said El.

  “Scooter's never done anything like that before,” said Clive.

  “Mmm,” said El, his hand still on the pistol.

  The man definitely made Clive nervous.

  After that, whenever either Clive or Rita saw El approaching they locked Scooter in the shed and there was no trouble.

  A year ago Scooter hadn't returned from his walk. Clive went searching for him the next morning.

  He discovered that the dog had made it as far as Micky's place. She told Clive she'd given the dog some biscuits and bacon and watched him head off up the trail on his appointed rounds.

  Damon wasn't home, so Clive stopped at Aaron's, but the old man hadn't seen the dog. That left the downhill side of Scooter's route. The side that took the dog past El's place. The closer Clive got to the little ford across the Fork near El's cabin, the more apprehensive he grew. Clive was certain that with Scooter's feelings for El and El's hatred for the dog, Scooter must have shied around El's cabin like a skulker in order to get down to Terry's place.

  That day Clive stood staring at the inch-deep water in the creek where the runoff was almost gone. It had been a dry spring and the snow had melted early. He knew instinctively that the dog had gotten at least that far. There was no sign of Scooter in the woods and he didn't believe wolves had gotten him.

  Wolves did come into the valley and Scooter often went out on the front porch on bright moonlit nights to listen to them howling. The dog would shiver beneath Clive's hand but Clive sensed that there was more to Scooter's anxiety than just fear of old enemies. There was an eerie attraction for Scooter in the sound. Scooter realized that the wolves were dangerous, but they exerted a powerful fascination as well.

  Still, Scooter was a damned smart dog. If he hadn't come home, something far more insidious than wolves was at work and Clive was pretty sure what it was.

  He waded across the shallow stream and scrabbled his way up to the trail, turning back toward El's cabin. He was angry already, though he had no proof of any wrongdoing.

  As he came out of the woods, into the clearing around El's place he wasn't surprised by the mess. He'd seen it before, but it did touch something inside.

  This was wrong.

  People lived pretty much anyway they wanted in the woods.

  But most of the people in McRay were neat. They kept the inside of their small cabins clean and tidy because they were in them for hours or days on end. And come spring, they raked around the house, picked up the winter garbage, pushed fallen limbs back out into the brush and made repairs.

  El's cabin had sat abandoned for years, moldering and uncared for, and at first Clive had been happy to know that a new owner was taking up residence. Rather than having the place rot away to the ground and the forest reclaim it, someone would be taking care of the house.

  Only El never did.

  There was a broken pane in one window that El had stuffed with rags. The stovepipe, hit by a high wind one winter, still hung half-busted, the smoke rising not from the top, but through a twisted opening in the lower joint. And, though firewood was stacked neatly enough against one wall, bags of garbage were piled beside it and one was torn open. Paper and cans and trash littered the clearing and Clive could see clearly enough that bears would be back to take care of the rest.

  Maybe El thinks the big animals are his disposal service.

  Is he that stupid?

  Clive wondered then if the bastard was baiting the bears. If the animals were rummaging around his cabin, it would give El a perfect excuse for shooting one of them.

  Suddenly Clive wished that he had brought along a gun himself.

  Standing there in the trash-covered clearing, Clive had the terrible fear that inside the shadowy darkness of the house, El was pointing that big.44 magnum right at his chest. He could feel the sights centered on his breast-bone and suddenly he felt naked. Exposed. He pictured Scooter, sauntering down the trail across the creek, his nose in the air, eyes alert. Sensing the same thing that Clive did.

  Eyes.

  Clive strode on out into the clearing and El stepped out of the cabin, closing the door quickly behind him.

  Just as Clive had suspected, El had been watching him all along.

  El stopped on the top step and Clive walked up as casually as he could.

  El had on the pistol and those glasses. He looked down his nose as Clive approached.

  “Have you seen Scooter?” said Clive, stopping at the foot of the stoop, knowing that El had. He suspected that El had watched the dog, just as he had been watching Clive, from the cavelike protection of his darkened cabin.

  El shook his head.

  Clive
looked around the clearing and then up and down the trail.

  “He got to Micky's place,” he said, trying not to sound accusing.

  “Didn't come by here,” said El. “I don't like dogs. I told you before.”

  El's hands rested on either side of the porch rail, as if he half expected Clive to come charging up the stoop at him and try to get into his house. Clive wondered what El would do if he did. Suddenly he wondered just how dangerous El really was.

  He could tell that El was afraid of him, though he couldn't figure out why. Clive had never been anything but perfectly polite to the man. But he sensed real fear behind the glasses, masquerading as bravado, and he wondered if it hadn't been there all along.

  Is that why El always wears the big gun and the glasses, to hide his fear?

  Suddenly a lot of things made sense.

  And just as suddenly Clive knew that the fear in the man could turn equally quickly to violence if El thought that he was being pressed.

  Clive had taken a step back away from the stoop. He noticed that El's hands were gripping the porch rail so tightly that his knuckles had turned white. The man was like a coiled snake and Clive realized that he had come within a hairbreadth of finding out just what El was capable of.

  “Don't know where he got off to,” Clive had said, still backing away.

  El watched him, his lenses glinting in the sun.

  “Mmm,” he'd said.

  As he wound his way along the path that led to Terry and Dawn's cabin that day, Clive knew in his heart that El had killed Scooter. And everyone else in town came to believe El had done it. It was just one more reason to exclude him, although El did a pretty good job of excluding himself.

  Clive shook off the memory. But the old anger returned as he stared down at the Fork, knowing that the bastard was right across the creek. He unstrapped the bungee cords on the back basket of the four-wheeler and tossed them onto the ground beside it. He was thinking about El as he opened Micky's door.

  1:30

  THE SOUND OF CLIVE'S four-wheeler blasted through the trees above Dawn. It sounded like he was heading toward Micky's place. Dawn was closer to the store now than to Micky's and the engine noise faded fast into the forest.

  Her intuition told her that El was right across the creek. Though he had said he was going to wait for her at the cabin, she thought he was lying. Maybe he just wanted to frighten her into staying in one place while he killed everyone else.

  She couldn't get his words out of her head.

  “You all have to die. You can't stay here anymore.”

  El wasn't talking about her and her mother. He'd killed Howard, too. When he said all, he meant everybody.

  She could beat him to the store if that was where he was headed next but she knew she had wasted valuable time in hiding. While she'd crouched, paralyzed with fear, he was making his way past Howard's place and down to the bridge. He might well be there already.

  She forced herself up out of her new hiding place and stood shivering in the trail.

  She hated the thought that her fear had given El time to beat her to the store. She needed to warn Rita.

  She raced down the gravel path until her lungs burned like fire.

  Ahead, the trail widened, sunlight streaming through the trees. She was almost to the clearing. When she reached it she stopped.

  The store lay to her right, thirty yards ahead, the windows brilliant in the sun.

  To her left she could just see the sun-bleached wood of the bridge.

  What if El is already inside the store?

  What if he's on the trail just across the Fork?

  She stood there for long moments, undecided, prepared to race back up the trail and into the woods at the slightest provocation. But a pair of ravens exploded out of the trees on the other side of the creek, screeching and complaining. The big black birds flittered above the spruce trees and alders on the far bank.

  El's on the trail.

  Dawn threw caution aside and ran.

  1:45

  THE TRAIL SLOPED EVER upward, barely wide enough in some places for Micky to squeeze through the alder branches. Then it would suddenly widen again and open into a small mountain dell or a deadfall run where an avalanche had cut a swath through the brush and trees. Shrews skittered under pine needles and squirrels chattered angrily at her when she disturbed them.

  The clouds were lowering. No longer high cirrus, they grazed the peaks overhead and the temperature dropped with her every step. She began to wonder if a trip to Aaron's was such a good idea.

  Getting snowed in with the old man wasn't Micky's idea of fun. But the thought of turning back filled her with dread too. She couldn't banish the irrational anxiety she felt for Aaron's safety. The darkening day seemed ominous.

  Where the trail ran beside the North Fork, the rush of the creek obscured all other sound. But whenever she moved back into the trees, the gathering wind whoofed and gusted.

  Where the Fork neared Aaron's cabin, it was no wider than a yard and barely four inches deep. The glacier water ran clear as glass, between polished gray-green stones. Any day now trout would appear in the narrow waterway. The fish would wriggle crazily upstream, their shiny silver backs—glistening like sequined silk—exposed to the air.

  The tundra beside the Kuskokwim was mostly muskeg, that strange symbiosis of water and mosses and lowlevel plants. But here in the high valley, the ground was rock hard and covered with grass, brown from the long winter. Soon this grass would turn green and blue seas of fireweed and purple monk's hoods would dazzle the senses.

  A hundred yards higher and Micky was able to look back down the valley and see the roof of the Cabels’ store below. Beyond that, the river wound like a giant gray snake, on its way to the Bering Sea. A pair of eagles, pinpoints in the blue blanket of the sky, swooped and twirled over the shallows two miles away.

  Aaron had the best view of any homestead in McRay and that was fitting. After all, McRay was Aaron's town. From his front porch he could look down on the metal roofs of all the other cabins, except for Marty's, which was too deep in the woods. Aaron could sit in his rocker with his coffee any afternoon and survey his domain.

  The rising wind jostled Micky toward Aaron's and the diminished creek gurgled alongside. The path grew steeper as she neared the spot where the cabin would come into sight.

  The wind whipped around suddenly, rushing back down the valley. Micky caught the sweet-sour smell of woodsmoke and burning garbage.

  So, Aaron was home, anyway. She'd been worried that he might be out prospecting.

  She smiled, imagining what the old man would say when she showed up.

  “Grab a shovel.”

  Or something equally pleasant.

  He no longer tried to offend her. And he wouldn't force her to work. But he didn't waste much time on conversation. She could either help him with what he was doing or sit and watch.

  She shifted the books under her arm and hurried up the final yards to the clearing.

  The smoke was thicker here.

  But it was already dissipating. The gusting wind held it close to the ground and buffeted it away in gray puffs, up the ravine.

  The paperbacks thumped to the ground at Micky's feet.

  What was left of Aaron's cabin—charred beams, sootstained glass, and the dark-metal mass of his big old cookstove—had collapsed in upon itself. The smell was more pronounced here.

  Not garbage.

  What she smelled was Aaron's world, vanishing.

  “Aaron!” she screamed.

  This was high valley. A notch in the jagged mountains. Aaron's clearing consisted of a half-acre shelf of flat land. Beyond the house, the valley narrowed to a steep ravine. The outhouse and toolshed still stood, pressed back against the rocky slope, behind the remains of the ruined cabin. The rest of the clearing was covered in dry grass as tall as Micky's knees. Luckily it was still damp with dew from the cool night before or the fire might have become a conflagration.
r />   “Aaron!”

  She rushed across the clearing but the timbers were still so hot she couldn't get within twenty feet of the giant embers.

  She glanced beyond the cabin toward the ravine. A half mile ahead, the narrow gulch opened into a high pass. Micky squinted, searching for movement.

  But the smoke was carrying that direction.

  If Aaron had gone that way, he would have smelled the fire and hurried back.

  He wasn't in the clearing. And she hadn't passed him on the way up.

  “Aaron!” she screamed again, staring at the unholy pile of rubble.

  Think.

  If he isn't up the trail and you didn't pass him, maybe you missed him.

  That was possible.

  Aaron came and went as he pleased and the valley was spiderwebbed with trails.

  On a day like today he'd most likely have gotten up early. He was probably out looking for that damned mine.

  But what if he isn't?

  How long did it take for a fire to burn a log cabin to the ground?

  One hour?

  Four?

  Flames barely flickered on wood turned to ash and hot charcoal.

  Did the fire start in the night?

  Was Aaron overcome by smoke?

  She paced the edges of the cabin, approaching as close as she dared to the heat. On the downwind side she had to cover her nose and mouth with her jacket. The smoke stung her eyes and scratched her lungs.

  Nothing in the debris looked like human remains. But the beams and logs and melted metal roofing were heaped like broken PickUp Sticks. Anyone inside the cabin would have been cremated or crushed.

  “Aaron!” she screamed, glancing feverishly around the edge of the clearing.

  Did he make it out of the blaze but succumb to the smoke?