Broken Angels

by Неизвестный

  Kris sat, buried in her parka, staring into the fire.

  Ben stretched out his hands to the flames and after a moment quietly told her of the fires that had cooked his beans and moose. Of their warmth and crackle, the only heat and sound in his frozen world. Of the light their flames had given him during nights too long to sleep through. Of how that dot of dancing light had anchored him beneath the black star-ridden sky alive with the green fire of the northern lights. And to himself, he remembered how, for many years after he’d given up his dogs, that handful of light was his only companion on the trail.

  Bubbles began to erupt in the thick soup. Ben poured it into mugs and handed one to Kris. He turned the buried potatoes with a fork, lifted his mug and blew into it, blowing billows of steam into the air.

  Lynn Canal lay before them, its waters slate blue and still in the low winter sun. Scattered randomly in the water were rocky islands carpeted with shaggy spruce. An eagle soared on the air and in the distance were the white dots of wheeling gulls. Across the Canal, maybe five or six miles away, the snow-covered Chilkats carved out the edge of the sky.

  “You can forgive Juneau weeks of rain for a day like this,” Ben murmured. He ran a finger along the jagged horizon and Kris lifted her eyes from the fire and followed it.

  “It’s like Mom,” she said, blowing into her soup. “Some guy’d beat on her for months. Then one day he’d give her a kiss or a trinket, or some nice word, and she’d be all over him. Nicest guy in the world, she’d say. And then the next day, he’d beat her again.” Kris touched her lips to the mug and risked a sip.

  Ben poked at a stone.

  After a pause, he pointed again to the Chilkats and told her about winter in the Brooks Range. How it comes sooner than you expect, even before you had thawed out from the last one. How one day, while you are still enjoying the warmth and greenness of summer, you look up and see the faint, almost transparent powder of snow on the distant mountains. You look at it with dread, almost exhaustion, knowing too well the months of cold and darkness that lie before you. But it comes. Relentlessly, winter creeps down from the mountaintops and seeps into the flats and river valleys. It settles in the streams, and soon, clear ice rims the rocks, reaching each day a little farther outward until its frozen fingers clasp in the middle of the stream and imprison the racing waters, stilling them until breakup, a lifetime away.

  “Then one day,” he said, “sometime late in the fall, you look at those distant peaks, now white with snow, and you’re…”

  Ben reached forward and stuck a fork through the ashes into a potato.

  “They’re almost done,” he said to Kris and then to himself he continued, and you’re reborn. Alive again to Alaska. Like God had lifted you, struck and rung you like a bell.

  “Anyway,” he said out loud, “Alaska is winter. The other seasons are just pauses, place markers to keep track of the years. If you don’t look forward to winter, if you don’t get that thrill when the snows come, then you’d have to leave. It would be too long to bear.” He checked the other potato, then carefully placed some green alder on the fire. When it was smoking, he lifted his makeshift grill and lowered the fish into the alder smoke over the coals, glowing orange now through a dusting of ash. Kris said nothing and Ben sat uncomfortably in her silence. Not even to Evie had he told what the mountains and streams, the long arctic nights had meant to him. He kept his eyes on the fish.

  Kris toyed with a smoking stick she’d pulled from the fire and then she asked him what had brought him to Alaska.

  Ben’d come up with the army after the war and had helped build the DEW line, a line of radar stations pointed over the pole at the Soviet Union. He’d worked with the surveyors out in front of the construction crews battling the cold in the winter and mosquitoes in the brief summer. When the project was over, he stayed. He wandered around the state with a gold pan for a few years, but when he was working the streams that flowed into the Alatna, it felt like home and he quit prospecting, built his cabin, and started trapping.

  “Been there ever since,” he said, “Until my joints ran me out.” The fish was sizzling, the white streaks of fat had melted, making the orange flesh glisten; grease dripped slowly, bursting into low flames when it hit the coals. Ben lifted it off the fire and cut into the thicker meat that had encircled the backbone and peered in. Another minute; he returned it to the fire.

  “That was five winters ago,” he said, almost to himself. He dug out the potatoes and put one on each plate. A minute later he sprung the alder twigs holding the fish to the branch and dropped the fillets next to the potatoes.

  “Five years. Do you miss it?”

  Ben spoke to the fire. “Life goes on.”

  “Didn’t you ever get lonely out there?”

  Ben shook his head and cut open his potato. Only the last time, he thought. Then he told her about his spruce tree at the top of the little hill behind his cabin, where in the summer he would sit in the evening watching the water chase itself down river, the ravens popping and corking in the air overhead and the whiskey jacks flitting through the trees and hopping boldly around his feet impatient for the crumbs he let drop. In the winter, just days after solstice, he would snowshoe up to the tree at midday to cheer the sharp edge of the returning sun cutting above the horizon.

  Ben chewed slowly, letting the salmon fall apart in his mouth and coat his tongue with its oils.

  “Did you have any friends there?” Kris persisted.

  Ben wondered why she was so curious. This girl, so independent, so unconnected, what did she care about friends and loneliness? He told her about Ezekiel who’d moved into the Sixtymile in the early ‘60s. One of Ben’s trap lines had run up Mettenpherg Creek, which was only fifteen miles or so over a low pass to the Sixtymile. Every couple of months during the winter one of them would cross over for a visit. There would be the times mushing back to the cabin, cold and tired after a week out on a line, when the dogs would start yapping and pulling harder in their traces and he’d wonder what they’d scented. Soon, he’d smell wood smoke and know that Ezekiel was at the cabin waiting for him to come off the trail. It meant a cabin already warm, hot water on the stove, biscuits ready to go, and a hand feeding and watering the dogs.

  Ben set his plate to the side and put another piece of driftwood on the fire. They crouched close to it; the flames were small and the heat did not carry far.

  “He doesn’t trap anymore either.”

  “Too old?”

  “Too crowded,” Ben said. The Sixtymile flows into the John and there’s a winter trail that goes up the John from Bettles to Anaktuvuk. Lots of snow machines come and go all winter. Then in the summer, ever since they made the National Park, there are canoers and kayakers coming down the John. A couple of times his cabin was broken into even though you can’t see it from the river. The streams and the river were his home. Ezekiel’d almost never come out and the hordes of people coming into his country inflamed him. In the end, it was easier for him to move out than to watch his land be overrun.

  “Were you ever married?”

  Ben didn’t answer for a while, uncertain why she was probing and uneasy talking about things other than his dogs, trap lines, or the winter’s wood. With a smile he told her that she reminded him of the weasel that used to live around his cabin who wouldn’t give up once he’d gotten scent of something. He’d come right in the door when it was warm enough to be open and when the bugs weren’t too bad and pillage any food Ben had forgotten to lock away. He’d gnaw at the cupboard doors, break glass jars by rolling them off the counter, and climb into the rafters to attack the jerky hanging from them. Ben would run him out of the cabin with a broom, but the weasel’d be back in a flash unless he shut the door.

  “Why didn’t you trap him?”

  “Oh, we were buddies.” Ben’s eyes crinkled and he set another stick on the fire.

  “So what did you think of Martha?”

  “Who?” Ben asked.

  “The
cashier, at Foodland, who checked us out.”

  Ben looked at her blankly. Then he remembered the name tag pinned to her apron.

  “Well, was she cute?”

  Ben turned back to the fire. “Kris,” he said. “Let me tell you about my women.”

  For years, there had been a grizzly sow that had shared his river valley with him. Regular as breakup she’d have two new cubs every third year. Ben would watch them chase the retreating snow up the mountainsides in the spring and then run before it as the snow came back down the slopes in the fall. He and the bears shared the blueberries and crowberries on the hillsides, the wild celery roots and cranberries in the river bottoms. And the fish in the bright streams—she putting on fat for winter and he—running willow wands through their tails and hanging them on fish racks by the hundreds—putting up his winter dog feed.

  Ben paused a moment, his plate empty; wondering how much he should tell her. He rinsed the soup pot, poured in fresh water for tea and, feeding the fire more sticks, set it on the stones. He watched her. She was staring quietly into the fire, waiting for him to continue. The tunnel of her hood was folded back and he could see her face. It had the same sharp chin as her mother’s; and like Evie’s, her nose didn’t dip as deeply from her brow nor were her eyes as dark as a full-blooded Native. Her face was ringed by Evie’s halo of coarse black hair—so black that blue shimmered in it, like the blue in gunmetal. Her eyes, though, were different; Kris’s were harder, sharper—guarded and more impatient. Evie’s had been alive, coy and, sometimes, hungry. And Evie laughed, bubbling like a stream gurgling around rocks, while Kris was silent or angry like the mountains when the snow avalanched off them.

  Ben looked again at the snow-covered Chilkats across the water and finished his story. One fall, coming back along the Alatna with a sack of fish tied to his pack frame, he stumbled into the sow’s cubs. They squalled in terror and crashed into the brush. Before Ben could move, he heard the old sow galloping through the bushes behind him. He spun around, firing his rifle from the hip. The bullet ripped out the back of her head killing her instantly, but her momentum carried her into him, knocking him onto the ground and pinning him underneath her.

  “I thought bears were reasonable,” Kris said.

  “She was. It was my mistake; I got between her and her cubs.” As Ben saw it, all nature asked of you was your utmost attention. She had her laws, and if you knew and abided by them, then she would support and sustain you; if you failed to learn and follow them, you would die. Those were nature’s only terms, and she didn’t offer many second chances—almost never in the arctic—but in return she gave you life, a home, and the opportunity to touch or be touched by something beyond your day-to-day existence.

  Ben finished his story. The cubs didn’t survive the winter and the valley didn’t have any bears in it, other than the odd bull that roamed through, for several years. Then one spring, when ice still rimmed the river’s banks and heavy corn snow lay in hollows hidden from the sun, a sow with a single cub appeared on the mountain slopes across from the cabin. She was an inexperienced mother, not quite sure how to handle the energetic cub that bounced and tugged at her.

  “I knew she’d stay and it was good to have a bear in the valley again.”

  “How’d you know she’d stay?”

  “It was her home. She’d grown up in the valley. Her mother had been the old sow.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “I knew that old bear like I knew Kobuk. I’d watched her for fifteen, sixteen years. And this one, she walked, she fished, she woofed and sniffed the air just like her mother.”

  Ben had finished his tea and the mug was getting cold. He put it in the pack and started to collect the dishes.

  “Ben?”

  Her tone had changed; it was softer and maybe there was something plaintive in it. Ben looked at her; she was squatting on her heels, gazing into the little flame, prodding a coal with a twig of alder.

  “Tell me about Evie.”

  Ben kept gathering up the dishes, the empty soup can and scraps of food from around the fire. This is what she had been working up to all day; skittish as a fox around a baited trap Ben’d left his scent on. She’d used her questions to him to carve herself a space of safety so that she could ask this one. His silence grew, and he didn’t know how to break it. Finally, sitting back down beside her, he said, “She was a good person, Kris.”

  “She was a drunk,” Kris blurted, her bitterness raw.

  Ben pulled back, surprised at the anger that burned so near her surface. He fell silent, not knowing how to respond, and watched the dying flames flicker weakly. Then, not wanting to fight her, he asked gently, “What are you going to do now, Kris?”

  “Find out who killed her.” Her bitterness had been replaced by a harder edge.

  “Why, Kris?” He hadn’t expected this; her anger at Evie was so great that he’d thought she’d pack up and leave, returning to her life in L.A. glad to bury her mother, to put her last connection to her life in Alaska behind her.

  “What do you mean why?” she turned toward him, angry, frustrated. “You want to let the shit that killed her get away?”

  “What about Evie?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “What would she have wanted?”

  “Ben, what’s with you?”

  “Sometimes winning your fights is worse than letting things lie. Think of the pain in her life, in yours, why pick at it, why make the wounds bleed again? Let her be.”

  “Because people jacked her around her whole life.” Kris jabbed the twig into the fire. “It’s enough. I’m not going to let them get away with it anymore.” The twig snapped and Kris flung it away. “I’ll find out who did it. Evie’s dead, it won’t make any difference to her, and I don’t care who gets hurt.”

  “Nine years, Kris. Why now?”

  Kris looked at him, stunned. Then she whispered, “Damn you, Ben.”

  The fire had died and the cold was working in around his jacket. He took a breath. He released it. And he dropped into a great emptiness and watched Kris shrink away from him. With the certainty of the coming snow he knew that she would find what she was searching for; no one could keep her from it.

  “Well, let’s go,” he said heavily, rocking forward to lever his legs under him. As he rose, he twisted to pick up the pack and something tore; he gasped as pain ripped through his back. He stood, staggered, took a breath, and then looked at Kris. She was kicking pebbles into the coals, her back to him. He forced himself to walk up the beach, barely lifting his feet. At the truck, he opened the door and waited, leaning on it with his eyes dropped, for Kris to slide in. They didn’t talk much on the way back to town. At the bottom of the Third Street stairs, he told her not to bother coming up. Kris looked at her feet still in Ben’s shoepacks, and kicked at the gravel.

  “OK,” she said, “See you.” She turned and Ben watched her walk down the hill.

  __________

  Kris did not look back. She kicked a stone and watched without interest as it bounced down the street. Nine years. She kicked another, it lifted and put a dent in somebody’s Honda. Was the old man accusing her of abandoning Evie? Of walking out on her, of leaving her to fight the world alone? Kris turned left onto Fifth. Hadn’t she? Nine years without a note, a card, nothing, to let Evie know that she was even alive.

  She turned right on Gold and hiked up the steep slope to Chicken Ridge. At the top she stopped and looked down at the cold, still water in the channel. She’d come back, she thought defiantly. Back to Alaska. That counted for something. But only after she’d spent a month making up her mind. If she’d come back right away, as soon as she’d gotten Evie’s letter, would her mother still be alive? Was that her fault, too?

  She turned away from the water and walked up Seventh, her eyes on the pavement in front of her feet.

  Justin’s apartment was in the basement of a house that overlooked the park around Gold Creek; outside stairs led down to his
door. Through it, she heard the murmur of a TV and, after she knocked, a thump. A second later Justin pulled opened the door. He hadn’t shaved and he was wearing glasses that had fingerprints on the lenses.

  “Hey great, come in.” He stood back and Kris stepped in. Clothes, magazines and toys—roller blades, skis, an ice ax, a hundred-dollar pair of sneakers—littered the apartment; dishes were piled in the sink and on the TV Jean-Luc Picard was lecturing something that wasn't human. Justin picked up a pile of clothes and loose CDs from one end of the couch and dumped them on the floor behind it.

  “Here,” he said. “Sit down.” He pointed the remote and killed the sound. In a kitchenette that lined the back wall, he clicked on the stove and put on a kettle. “Sorry, no Lipton’s.” He sat at the other end of the couch, lifted his leg and with a stockinged foot touched her parka at her thigh. “Where’d you get the parka?”

  “It’s Ben’s,” Kris said, pulling her arms out of it and throwing it on the back of the couch.

  “He gave it to you?” He rubbed her jeans with his toes.

  With her thumb and forefinger, she pinched his big toe, lifted his foot and dropped it over the edge of the couch. Justin grinned, and in spite of herself, she grinned back, forgetting for a moment, the pain and loneliness she’d felt standing on the ridge. “Just for the day. We had a picnic, out the road.” She told him a little about the picnic; then about Vern and wanting to look for him out on Montana Creek.

  “That’s all you’ve got? Just a pickup with a busted window?” he asked.

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Well maybe. Not too many people live back there, but everybody there has a pickup with a broken window.”

  “So it’ll take a while.”

  “Do you want to go now?” He glanced at his watch, then at the TV before looking back at her.

  “No, I got that dinner with the Lambale’s tonight.”

  “Mr. Sanctimonious.”

  “Let’s do it tomorrow.”