The Raven's Gift

by Don Reardon

  John leaned back to Anna. He covered the microphone on his headset and yelled over the plane’s engine, “We’re almost there!”

  The land travelled beneath them faster as they dropped. John tried to take in as much as he could. The giant river meandered off to the south, and the desolate-looking tundra reached out forever to the north. As they drew closer to the village, he could tell it had that same organized look, except at one edge, closest to the river, the houses looked older, more shack-like. The two rows of houses paralleled the river, and the runway sat just north of the village. Randy dipped a wing and banked in hard. John’s stomach lurched.

  “Like to give ’er a once-over before I land, just in case some kids are playing on the runway or if there’s another plane,” he said.

  Randy banked again at the far end of the village and dropped toward the strip of gravel. John was too enthralled to be scared as the ground raced up at them. This village looked smaller than the last. He could easily make out the school, and could see a red three-wheeler pulling a trailer bouncing its way toward the runway.

  “Looks like someone knew you were coming,” Randy said, pointing, and then quickly pulling his hand back to steady the plane as they hit once, bounced, and touched down.

  “Welcome to your new home, folks,” Randy said, pulling off his headset and spinning the plane around at the gravelled end of the strip. “Can’t say I could ever live anywhere like this. More power to you for trying it out.”

  THE GIRL WONDERED OUT LOUD how the two of them survived a whole summer in the same village without running into each other. He didn’t tell her that he’d only left the school a couple of times, that for weeks he didn’t really even leave the comfort of Anna’s sleeping bag.

  “Last summer, when it got real hot, I had a dream. Like maybe I was delirious from not enough food and water. In my dream I could see. I saw a different world. Not our village, but maybe an old village. Like the ancient Eskimo villages in the books at school. Or the ones the elders used to talk about. The houses were the old sod houses with tundra growing on top of them, like they were half buried, and the people were all dressed in our old clothings. Some of them had parkas and fur leggings, and some of them were almost naked and dirty with soot from the seal oil lamps. It looked like spring, like it was when I was plucking ducks and geese, except that the people were mostly dead or half-dead. Their faces were skinny and streaked with that dark black soot. So many dead, their bodies stacked in piles like wood for a steam bath, and kass’aqs, they were getting out of a long wooden boat and coming up the riverbanks carrying torches and crosses. White crosses. That’s what I saw. White crosses. And one man, he had only caribou-skin pants, he was fighting with them, trying to make them go away.

  “I wonder why I dreamt that. Even though I never saw your face, I think you were him, John. You were trying to make those men with the crosses leave. The Native man I saw was you. I remember the voice in the dream, too. It was your voice. Even though I never heard your voice before, I know it was you,” she said.

  11

  The girl’s screams filled him with the same dread Anna’s had when she realized no one was coming to rescue them.

  “Get back!” he said. “You’ve got to move your hands!”

  He tried to pull her hands away from the gap between the two doors. Her fingers tore at the metal. The girl stopped clawing and pressed her face to the crack, one milky white eye shooting her fear out toward him.

  “John, get me out! I can’t be in here with them. Get me out …”

  Her voice trailed off and she began a moan-like wail that sent shivers through him.

  “Stand back. I’m coming in.”

  He took the ice pick and slammed the sharp edge into the jamb. He slammed again and again. Sparks splintered into the dark gym. Nothing.

  “We shouldn’t have come in here,” the girl gasped. “Please get me out … get me out! Get me out!”

  He pulled the door open with his hands until the chain caught, and then he slid the blade of the pick against the space where the handle met the door.

  He pushed the heavy bar in, then pulled it back and slammed it home. The handle gave. He hit it again and again. Each time he swung harder than the last, each hit opened the gap. He didn’t have the strength he once had.

  He didn’t know how long he stood there slamming the pick, and he didn’t know that the girl had stopped screaming and crying, or that the angry cries that filled the hallway were his own until the pick crashed through and the chain clattered to the gym floor.

  The girl burst through the opening and grabbed hold of him. She pressed her face against his chest and she held herself there. He leaned the pick against the wall and wiped his wet cheeks with the back of a hand. He put his arms around her and then dropped them.

  “Please. Please get me out of here,” she begged.

  In the darkness of the gym he could see them, hundreds of desiccated corpses, the bodies of the entire village.

  ON ANNA AND JOHN’S first night in the village, they broke their house in, a personal ritual they did in all the new places they lived. They made love in each room. In their new accommodations, a little red aluminum-sided house behind the school, they didn’t have much breaking in to do. The bedroom barely fit a twin bed, and the kitchen and living area took up the rest of the twenty-by-twenty house. The toilet, a white five-gallon bucket complete with an almond-coloured toilet seat, sat in a closet-sized bathroom with an unplumbed vanity and sink. Anna loved that someone, perhaps the teachers who lived there the year prior, had written in black marker on the side of the bucket THE JOHN. A plastic gallon chocolate ice cream bucket sat beneath the sink’s drainpipe.

  They tried a few positions in all the rooms, except for what Anna had coined the poop closet, and after some prodding, he even persuaded her to slip out into the plywood-enclosed foyer that covered the entryway.

  As they stood there, her hand firmly holding the door closed, to keep anyone from seeing them, and with him standing behind her, they moved against each other, slowly, the cool, damp fall air raising their arms with gooseflesh.

  “I feel like we’re going to rock this little house off its blocks,” she said.

  He chuckled. “That would be kind of embarrassing.”

  He imagined the whole house falling off the treated timbers that held it up off the soggy tundra, listing to one side like a sinking ship, the spongy earth slowly swallowing them before they could escape.

  “What will be embarrassing is if we get caught like this,” she said.

  “What’s the name of this position, arctic entry?”

  “Funny. Are you done already?” She was joking when she said this, but to add emphasis, gave a slight Kegel squeeze that sent him over the edge. He groaned and leaned in to her, holding her close.

  “Just don’t expect me to do this out here in the winter,” she said.

  They slipped back inside. She pulled a robe on and he just slid under the covers, naked.

  “This is where I wish we had running water,” she said, dabbing between her legs with some tissue. “Remind me again why the school is the only place with plumbing in the whole village when this state has tens of billions of dollars in oil revenue?”

  NEITHER OF THEM had much energy to walk those first few days on the frozen river. His legs were out of shape and starved. The girl was in the same condition, if not worse. She walked thirty or forty feet behind him, a distance he chose to keep out of earshot of her questions.

  When he finally stopped to rest, she caught up and sat down on the toboggan and ate a handful of snow. “When we get to wherever we’re going, then what?” she asked.

  “Then what? What do you mean, then what?”

  “When we get away from here and if the rest of the world’s not sick. Then what’s next? Where will you go?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t waste my time thinking about it,” he said. “No use worrying myself about it until it happens.”

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nbsp; She took another scoop of snow and seemed to look back at their tracks, a long line of dark holes in the white drifts that stretched into the distant sky.

  “Well, I worry,” she said. “I don’t know anyone outside. I’ve got no place to go.”

  He took up the rope of the toboggan. “Well,” he said, “worrying isn’t going to get you there. Sit there, I’ll pull you awhile.” He began pulling her, wishing he could leave her worrying behind him.

  An hour later they crossed the ski tracks. He dropped to his knees and hunched low, swinging the rifle from across his back. He didn’t need to study the tracks. He knew what sort of tracks one person travelling alone on skis left.

  “What is it?” the girl whispered. He knew she sensed his fear. Perhaps she could hear his lungs tighten and his heart accelerate.

  “Tracks. A skier.”

  “Skier? People don’t ski here,” she said.

  “I know.”

  From the angle of the round holes the ski poles had poked into the crust, the distance between the holes, and the slight outward turn of the tracks, he could tell the skier was making good time. Moving. Fast.

  “Which way is he going? Toward Kuigpak?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Good,” she said. “Let’s get going. I don’t like to know someone has skis.”

  His eyes followed the two long, dark cuts in the snow, like twin frozen snakes stretching for as far as he could see to where the wide river turned east and out of sight.

  12

  He walked the girl to the principal’s office and sat her in the chair. He flipped the pad of paper over, even though he knew she couldn’t read it. Still, he could imagine her running her fingers over the impression the ballpoint had left, and just knowing.

  “Why are they dead in there? Why would they do that?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Just sit here. Okay? I’m going to go check the kitchen.”

  “Don’t leave me, John. Don’t, please?”

  “I have to. I’ll be right back,” he said, standing just outside the office. He’d turned and looked back at her. She had her legs pulled up with her arms wrapped around them. She kept wiping her nose against one sleeve and then the other. She hadn’t stopped shaking and her eyes were closed tight, as if she struggled to keep them closed against some horrible vision. He went back in and wrapped her parka around her.

  “You can lock the door if you want,” he said.

  “I’m not worried about anything that door will stop. We shouldn’t have gone in there. Don’t go back in there. Please …”

  He let her words trail him down the hall. At the gym doors he took out the pistol and the flashlight. He pushed the black plastic switch on the flashlight forward and the beam cut the darkness of the gym. He stepped forward, sweeping the walls with the light first.

  Handmade banners, written with sidewalk chalk on white and goldenrod butcher paper, still clung to the walls.

  Go Bethel Warriors! Get ’Em Tundra Foxes! Fight Falcons Fight! Beat ’Em Shaman! Three Cheers for the Aniak Half Breeds!

  The bleachers on one side of the gym had been pulled out. He passed the light once over them, wooden planks covered with the dead, as if they waited for the final game. Some bodies were hunched over. Some lying out flat. Others holding on to each other. He tried to look past their faces, but he couldn’t. The face of one woman caught his eye, her skin drum tight, almost freeze-dried from a combination of the cold, dry gym, perhaps the heat of summer, and decay. He swept the light toward his path to the kitchen. Bodies covered the floor all the way across the gym to the open kitchen door. He shone the light through the open serving window. He thought he could make out a shelf still full of the silvery USDA gallon cans. He had to steady himself. He blinked hard and tried to focus.

  Before he took a step he pointed the flashlight at his feet. A child, a boy, no more than three or four, stared up at him. The brown eyes dried, but still open, innocent. The look on the child’s face not one of terror or starvation, or any of the horrors surrounding him—just some sort of contentment. He stepped gently over the boy, and then stopped and looked back at him. Holding the light on him. His skin pulled back tight against his face, his mouth slightly open with his teeth peeking out. His black hair seemed to grow from the rigid skin on his skull as he watched.

  “What are you trying to tell me?” John whispered.

  He took another glance around the gym and saw that the lunch tables, the tables that his school also had, were down, and several large garbage cans sat full of the disposable cardboard lunch trays.

  “You didn’t starve,” he said to the boy.

  He leaned down and looked closely at the boy’s nose. The skin had tightened and shrivelled, but the boy’s nostrils were clear.

  “Not sick, either.”

  He aimed the light back toward the kitchen. He’d leave the mystery for someone else to unravel. If the kitchen had some food they could use he might be able to just let the kid and his eyes go. The fifty-odd feet across the gym could have been ten miles. The space seemed too far to travel, the walls too close, the bodies too near. He avoided allowing the light to stop moving, to hesitate for a second on any of the faces, but the arms and legs seemed to cover every couple of feet of gym floor. He had to step, twist, and step again to avoid crunching through a limb. He blinked hard again and bit at his lip. He wasn’t moving fast enough. The ceiling seemed to be pressing down, the walls pressing in.

  Halfway across he realized he was gasping, almost hyperventilating. He didn’t know if it was from overexertion, the hunger, or something else, maybe something inside him trying to deny that the bodies scared him. He stopped and tried to slow his breaths. He blinked hard again and tried to shake the sensation that the bodies were surrounding him and coming toward him.

  On one slow inhale he allowed himself to smell the air. Before, the warmer air outside had been rushing into the cool gym, but the air had equalized and was still. Perhaps until this moment his brain had known better than to test the atmosphere, to allow itself to calculate or quantify the stench of hundreds of human bodies confined to a single basketball court—but in that fraction of a second he smelled it; he smelled them. His empty stomach lurched. He sprang forward, four quick steps with the light searching for bare gym floor, to the door of the kitchen.

  He dove inside, found the deep aluminum washing sinks and vomited. The first heave brought up little more than a handful of reddish bile, the second a little more, the third something that looked like blood. He slid down to the floor, shaking, his back against the sink, his pistol in one hand, the flashlight in the other, still on and shining across the kitchen floor.

  ON THEIR FIRST FULL DAY in the village Anna and John decided to go for a walk. They hadn’t reached the bottom step of their new house before the first kid, wearing red basketball shorts, no shirt, and rubber boots, skidded to a stop on his green BMX bike and greeted them.

  “My name’s Yago,” the boy said. “Whatch yer names?”

  “I’m Anna. This is John.”

  “Where you guys going?”

  “We thought we’d go for a walk,” she said, waving her arm at the black cloud of mosquitoes that had descended on them.

  “Why?” the boy asked.

  “We want to see the village, maybe go down to the river.”

  “I’ll go, too. Okay?”

  “Sure,” Anna said.

  John bent down and pressed his hand into the tundra moss. The stuff fascinated him. Up close he could see countless species of intricate sponge-like plants all connected to each other: lichens and moss and grass, roots, berries, mushrooms, flowers of all colours, all in the space of his hand. He pressed his fingers into the cool wet sponge and held it there for a moment. The ground felt alive.

  They started down one of the boardwalks that connected all the village buildings with each other, like long, narrow wooden veins. Yago pushed his bike in front of them. John studied the two-by-eight wooden planks and then
noticed the small black rubber threads still sticking to the sides of the boy’s tires.

  “Got yourself a new bike, huh?” he asked.

  “No. It’s not mine. My brother’s. Mine’s so cheap. It has a flat tire. Maybe I’ll get a new one when dividends come.”

  The boy stopped and pointed to a house. “That’s where I live,” he said. “My bike’s under the house. There comes my cousin Roxy.”

  A young girl was speeding down the boardwalk toward them. She rode a boy’s BMX, wore a black baseball cap backward, and from the looks of it, was all tomboy. A second before she would have run into them, she skidded the bike sideways, blocking the boardwalk.

  “Hey, Yago,” she said. “Where you guys going?”

  “I’m showing the new teachers around,” he replied proudly.

  The girl reached into the back pocket of her jeans and removed a can of chewing tobacco. She opened it and offered some to them. Yago took a pinch of the dark grains and slipped it behind his lower lip. The girl did the same.

  “Aren’t you guys a little young for that?” Anna asked.

  “See those kids playing over at the playground, those little ones?” Yago said, pointing beside the school. “Those second-graders even already chew Copen. Everyone chews. Everyone.”

  The girl got off her bike and began walking it beside Yago.

  “You know it’s bad for you, right?” Anna asked.

  The girl spat. “So. Seems like everything’s bad for you. Stop the pop. No candy. No chips. No snuff. No, no, no—never anyone tells us what’s good. Native food is only thing good for me to eat, my mom says. And that’s so boring, always eating fish and ducks and things. You guys husbands and wifes?”

  “That’s Anvil’s store there,” Yago said, pointing to a building that looked like the rest of the village houses. A boxy one-storey plywood house, with ATVs and snow machines in various stages of disrepair parked outside.

  “Yeah, we’re married,” Anna replied.