Northern Light

by Deb Davies

  She drew a deep breath. “How could I say no to that request?”

  “Thanks, hon. Bethanie would love a little something to show off. And to tell the truth, I’m going to be strapped on taxes, now that Jen’s out of school and I can’t claim her as my dependent. And there are the house payments. Us splitting up, huh, old girl? A good thing for you, maybe, but it set me back.”

  Arnie stood up. “Mr. Walker, you have to whine somewhere else. I need to you to leave now. Unless, Jen, you want some time with your father? I want Laurel’s thoughts on a case.”

  “You’re offensive, do you know that?” David glared at Arnie. “And how could Laurel help? She teaches basic literacy.”

  “I teach other classes too,” Laurel protested.

  Both men ignored her.

  Arnie’s mouth looked as though he’d swallowed raw nettles. “The fact that Laurel is not from this community reduces some bias. She’s a disciplined thinker and from what I know of her, judiciously fair.”

  “I think you’re overestimating her,” David said, “but I do have to get back soon. Raining, you know.” He slicked back his hair. “Jen, you and Laurel are always welcome to stop and meet Bethanie.”

  Jen sucked on her teeth before asking, “Hey, Dad? How old is she?”

  “She’s thirty-eight, darling.” He looked contemptuously at Arnie.

  “About halfway between Mom’s age and mine.”

  David nodded, seeming pleased Jen had worked this out. “It’s a beautiful age for women. She deserves a gorgeous ring. Give Claire my best wishes,” he added. “I guess things aren’t going well here in Bumfuck, Egypt.”

  “You’re making progress,” Jen said. “Aren’t you, Arnie?”

  Arnie didn’t reply, swept back into a memory of being unable to breathe, held facedown in the mud. He’d turned into a muscled teenager but had been chronically ill as a child, and he had come to hate bullies, which was one reason he’d gone to work for the police. Physical bullying, making fun of people, kicking dogs in the street—any and all of it made his blood pressure rise. Laurel could probably defend herself more eloquently than he could, but it was clear she was trying to keep the peace for Jen’s sake.

  He, on the other hand, wanted to kick David in the butt.

  “That’s odd,” David said. “It seems to me that someone is pissed at Claire and being quite up front about it.” He fished in his jacket. “I picked this up off the driveway. Didn’t want Laurel or anyone else to run over it, and then I was so happy to see Jen, I forgot I’d nabbed it. I don’t know what you’re dealing with, Arnie, but it’s my unbiased opinion that this is a clue.”

  He held out a laminated piece of printer paper.

  In black marker, in the center of the paper, the words were written in a broad printed scrawl that angled downward:

  Widow Woman

  Witch

  Cunt

  GET OUT

  I don’t get it,” Claire said to Charles. The rental car was not as comfortable as the Bentley, but took the slight curves of the road well enough. She could barely see the water of the Main Branch. “Why is your cabin on a creek instead of on a river?”

  Charles seemed more relaxed now that he was driving home. “Inheritance, mostly. My dad inherited a piece of property he didn’t want from his father, and my younger sister, Mary, didn’t want it either. So the cabin was literally free, if I wanted it. Well, taxes. Fifteen hundred a year, about, and there’s some upkeep. But I can live cheaply there. In the winter, I often travel. And it’s free in another sense, too. Rivers are part of the riparian rights system of law, which came from English common law. You can’t impede people from traveling on navigable water that their property borders. That’s even true for my part of Big Creek, so I can access the entire stream, and when you see my place, you’ll realize I only see a few diehard fishermen.”

  “Privacy, then. You’re a misanthrope. You like canoe races.”

  “No, not exactly. I can stand the Au Sable River Canoe Marathon. It’s probably the premiere canoe race in the world. What I don’t like are people who tube the rivers linked together, shouting ‘chug, chug, chug,’ and throw empty beer cans into stands of cattails. I want to see otters, not some drunk, half-naked girl standing up in a canoe, waving a plastic gin bottle, and pretending to ‘fall’ in shallow water. Then, some muscle-bound lout dives in to ‘assist’ her, scaring the fish as he does. If anyone is going to be concupiscent on an island in front of my house, it had damn well better be me!”

  “No argument,” Claire said. Her posture had almost imperceptibly softened, but Oscar noticed it.

  Oscar, like all ravens, was curious. Curiosity might kill the cat, but it had made ravens successful on almost every continent, where they ate food that would choke a goat. When the car started moving, he’d popped his head out of his stick nest in the wayback and foot-beaked his way to the top of the back seat. There, he assessed his situation. The moving box he shared with the beakless beings was made of material much harder than his nest box had been, and for all the two beakless ones had pale, grasping appendages, they had not gathered enough sticks and twigs.

  One of the beakless beings was being raucous. Probably male.

  “Sorry,” Charles said. “I’m not good at conversation. I’ll go a week without talking to anyone and be perfectly content. But then, when I’m with someone sensible, I talk on and on.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Claire assured him. “I like people with convictions. You don’t see Laurel being sweet all the time.”

  “That’s true. Jen can hold her own in conversations. We’ve had some good discussions about anthropology. She and I are both pro Neanderthal.”

  “Uh, what?”

  “Pro Neanderthal. They were human beings. The evidence—burials with flowers, that rock circle, handprints, so much more. We carry their DNA. They may have had rudimentary speech.”

  “Oh. I have read that. I guess I’m pro Neanderthal too.” She rubbed the corners of her eyes.

  The larger beakless being was male, Oscar concluded, and the female was responding, not turning her back, as she would have if she wanted no part of him.

  The hard box raced along. He could feel the sense of motion and even some sense of their direction. The moving box compensated for his companions being wingless, and they could, he supposed, see dead things and stop if they were hungry, but there was no swooping, soaring, or gliding, and very little chance to find newborn squirrels or late summer eggs.

  “I gave Oscar deviled eggs and some berries, and there are carrot sticks and mozzarella cheese sticks for us,” Charles offered. “Our food is in the glove box. Let me know if you want some. I got stuck in a cave once in a two-day November blizzard. I ate spruce cambium, the layer under the bark, which is high in sugar. Since then, I always travel with at least a little sustenance.”

  “What were you doing in a cave? And yes, I’ll get us cheese sticks. You know we could have taken any of the food I had at the house.”

  “I like caves, actually, though not for spelunking. There are bats in the caves in Dickinson County.”

  Actually, the large beakless being was not entirely beakless. He had a good-sized outcropping on his face, but like mammals and other lesser beings, he stuffed his food in a hole below. The protuberance, Oscar assumed, was sexual adornment meant to attract females.

  “I didn’t think of taking your food.” He took a proffered cheese stick. “God, these are tasteless,” Charles muttered. “The cheddar would have been better.”

  “Mmmm,” Claire said. It was a passive, reassuring noise.

  Oscar tut-tutted and preened cautiously, not liking the encumbrance on his wing. He’d almost made a grab at the cheese stick but was afraid he would overbalance. At least food didn’t seem to be a problem. There were blackberries and two strange-tasting eggs next to his nest. He wondered if the bird that had lain the eggs had been eating pepper plants.

  When he’d first awakened, feeling groggy bu
t rested, he wondered if he’d been feeding on fermenting cherries, but had quickly discarded the thought. Peering at his wing, he had seen it was pinioned with small, straight sticks and a membranous coating that kept it positioned. Now, he pecked one of the sticks, tasting it. Jarring the wing still hurt. Soaring could wait for a while. He’d seen birds with injured wings, and if no weasels trapped them on the ground, and they had food and water and the use of their feet, they healed.

  Boxes were not, however, ideal for raven hygiene. He, for one, was fastidious about droppings on his feet.

  He foot-beaked carefully over to the female. She made an eerie whooshing noise, but remained still as a woodcock with babies. Using the female for footholds, he worked his way up the firm perch where she rested her head. She moved to let him claim the headrest, which was the correct behavior since he, as a male, was dominant.

  Rain was starting, making it hard to see outside. He clacked his beak and went to sleep.

  By the time they got to the cabin, a drenching rain was falling, and the night had become surprisingly cold. Charles had gotten Oscar settled in a freshly papered and food-stocked box in the cabin’s loft, started a fire in the soapstone stove, and gone back to help Claire in. She was sound asleep and had barely registered him tucking her into bed, piling quilts over her, and throwing his belongings on the futon where he slept. She woke up in the morning when he went out and found he had left coffee waiting for her, and the small but recently remodeled bathroom was still warm from his shower. He’d left her a note, a scrawl that read, “Oscar ate canned corned beef hash! It’s going to be hot today, so don’t add wood to the fire.”

  She had a cup of coffee and watched out the back windows as Charles appeared with a ladder, a cordless drill, and a reciprocating saw. He disappeared up the ladder. Could Oscar use a bird door?

  She stepped outside when she heard a truck pull up in front of the cabin. A large man set a package down on a tree stump.

  “Saw your lights,” he rumbled, running his fingers through his beard. “Thought Charles could use these.” He peered at Claire, who was conservatively clothed in shorts and a T-shirt, then turned without waiting for her to answer and climbed back into the truck and left.

  Charles came down the ladder to inspect the package. “Breakfast! Fresh eggs and a trout!”

  “Who was that man who looked like a black bear?” she asked.

  “There aren’t many of us on this branch of the creek,” he told her, “so we look in on each other and make sure we’re at least hobbling and have coffee, canned milk, the basics. That was Ed who just now brought the hens’ eggs. He raises chickens. The eggs will be great for Oscar. The filleted brown trout—now, that wasn’t a good thing to do. The streams and rivers are heating up; catch and release gives the brown trout that are left more of a chance. But what’s done is done. Come back in for a minute, and I’ll fry this fish up, while it’s still right out of the water. I’ll remind Ed later he’s not supposed to bring me jigged frogs or trotline trout.”

  The trout, fried in bacon grease, was delicious. The smell of freshly brewed coffee and bacon and the trout made her feel at home.

  “Building a birdhouse?”

  “That wouldn’t help. But in a couple of days, that wing will be healed enough to let Oscar climb out into that scrawny apple tree and get back in when he wants.”

  “Then what? You have a hole in your house?”

  “I’ve been thinking. Summers are hotter than they used to be, at least in June and July. I’m making my raven exit the size to accommodate an air conditioner—a small one, once Oscar’s gone. Right now, he’s chewing up the apple branches I gave him. They’ve got some kind of fungus on them that he likes.”

  Charles went outside again, armed with a metal framing square and a tape measure. Claire went out barefoot to explore the creek. She stuck her toes in the icy water and promptly pulled them out again.

  She hadn’t gone down to the river in front of her house for months. The bottom was sandy, but the water—about five feet deep—was clogged with detritus from old maple trees that storms had brought down. Once George stopped fishing, keeping the pool cleared hadn’t been a priority. Heavy, waterlogged branches made the bottom treacherous for walking; others had jammed together on sandbars like oversized pickup sticks.

  Here, the creek was broad and mostly shallow. Sun-splashed water rushed around small islands, some the size of footstools, some the size of double beds. Some of the islands had clumps of white-tipped wheat grass. Tamarack trees clumped together along the bank, and white-cupped flowers with green veins grew on the bank. Upstream, there was a darker, shaded area that led back into a tangle of stream and swamp. Behind her, she could hear the noise of Charles’s saw.

  She gritted her teeth and went back to the creek, finding a place where it was easy to step in. The bones in her feet ached at first, but as she moved gingerly from sandy underwater bits to sunny sand spits, she got used to the water flowing around her ankles. She bent over to pick a caddisfly larva, house and all, out of the water. It seemed that, some time ago, a bead bracelet had broken, and the caddisfly had enterprisingly added red and purple glass beads to its house. She placed the larva—not much bigger than a fishfly—back in the water, wishing it luck in its brief life. Though maybe that brief life wouldn’t be brief to a caddisfly.

  She waded upstream and back for the better part of an hour before she heard the splash of feet in the stream and turned to see Charles. He was standing close enough that she could feel his body heat and smell his sweat mixed with the scent of the pine-stoked fire. He was wearing cut off shorts and a faded gray shirt, one sleeve streaked with bird shit.

  “Did you see the otter?” he asked her.

  “I didn’t think to look,” she said. “I saw a heron, though.”

  He stopped a foot away from her, looking like a deer by a salt lick, not sure whether to move forward or to turn and bolt.

  On impulse, she cupped her hands full of water and splashed him. He bent and brought one hand skimming across the water, drenching her hair and making her own T-shirt and shorts cling. After a few more minutes of deluging each other, he threw up his hands.

  “I give! No fair. I’m going to lose my glasses in the creek any minute. You people who see things without glasses cheat.”

  Claire caught her breath, her skin on fire with cold and exhilaration. How long had it been since she’d felt exuberant?

  “Cataract surgery,” she said. “I recommend it. That is, I guess you have an ophthalmologist?”

  “I have an ophthalmologist,” he said. “He said I’m not ready. For cataract surgery.”

  Claire was suddenly aware her nipples showed through her T-shirt. Rubbing her own arms, she felt duck bumps. She was getting cold feet.

  They looked at each other.

  “Let’s go get toweled off. You’re shivering,” he said.

  The coffee’s strength was cut by condensed evaporated milk and lumps of brown sugar. They sat side by side by the futon near the fireplace. Inside the stove’s glass door, embers still glowed with last night’s heat.

  “I’d stoke this up for you, but the day’s getting warmer.”

  “I know,” she said. “If a fire doesn’t draw, you just end up with smoke.” She pushed her hair back self-consciously. “I look a mess,” she said.

  He pulled back from her, surprised. “You look fine. More important, you’re curious and kind and funny. That’s an attractive combination. I’m not making a pass.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Jen told me about you,” he said. “How when she was little, you’d get down under the kitchen table and scribble-draw with her.”

  She took a deep breath. “You probably know more about me than I know about you. Mind you, I’ve never heard of a serial killer, or even a serial masher, who built bird nests.”

  “Don’t be too quick, my dear, to assume people are harmless.” His tone was joking, but his eyes were somber. “Jen says Laurel�
��except with her dad—is a skeptic’s skeptic, but that you trust too easily.”

  “I shouldn’t trust you?” She tried to turn the conversation to a lighter level.

  “If you and I see each other again, Arnie will check me out from gold fillings to toenail parings.

  After he’s done that might be better timing.”

  “It might be,” she said, pulling off her shirt.

  He sighed and slid down to kiss one, then the other nipple that now stood erect like berries on her breasts. She moved her hand to cup his penis through his shorts. He gasped but moved her hand away. “Move to the futon?” he asked. “It’s still warm from the fire.”

  She ran her tongue down the side of his sweaty neck as he lifted her by pressing his weight up against her. In a moment, they were both naked on the quilts. He pressed his penis against her thighs, wet with arousal. The hot, nudging pressure moved against her clitoris.

  For one brief second, she thought, oh Laurel, what am I doing? But her body carried her forward, overriding her qualms.

  He waited until she arched her back, drawing in her breath, then slid inside her, thrusting and pulling back, thrusting and pulling back, until he collapsed with a guttural exclamation. She felt his penis slip out of her, small now and limp. His left hand reached to stroke her hair back from her forehead.

  She moved his hand so he would touch one of her eyelids. She hoped he had enough experience to know why she had teared up with release. It had been close to two years since George had aroused her senses, and she hadn’t been sure her sexual responses still worked.