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It was only Teddy and John. The smell of beer preceded them into camp by a good twenty feet. “Oh hell,” she said, disgusted all over again.
“Let’s go,” John said shortly, brushing by her to head for a caribou haunch hanging from a tree. Teddy barreled after him. Both of them were pale of face and sweating. Both seemed a lot more sober than she had expected. “How much can we take with us?”
“I thought I was flying you out one at a time,” Wy said, standing with the shotgun hanging from the crook of her arm, muzzle down.
He looked at her. “Yeah. Right. Of course. Sorry.” He looked at Teddy. “You go in first.”
“No, you go in first.”
“Goddamn it, Teddy, I said you go in first!”
“And I say you do!”
They went toe to toe, glaring at each other, and it was a moment before Wy, watching stupefied from the sidelines, stepped forward to pull them apart. “Guys. Relax. Toss a coin or something. Whoever gets left behind is only going to get left behind for ninety minutes.”
They continued to glare. Teddy Engebretsen and John Kvichak had never been known to raise a hand or even a voice to the other. They stood shoulder to shoulder against all comers, but never against themselves. And now here they were fighting over who should go into town first?
Teddy broke the stalemate eventually. “Okay, John.”
Everyone heaved a sigh of relief.
“Good,” John said gruffly. “Help me load up.” He caught Teddy’s eye. “It’s okay, Teddy. I’ll be all right.”
“What’s going on?” Wy said.
“Lend me a hand with this line, will you, Wy?” Teddy said.
Old Man Creek, September 2
They ate salmon fresh out of the creek, sticky rice with generous helpings of soy sauce and steamed wild celery, the latter gathered by Amelia, who had finally gotten back out of bed. After di
Amelia blinked at her. “What am I doing here?” It was the first time she’d spoken all day.
She didn’t look good, Bill thought, surveying the girl with a critical eye. Her eyes had deep dark shadows beneath them, the natural warm brown of her skin had turned a pasty kind of yellow in between the big blue and purple bruises, and she kept pulling at her hair.
Bill looked at Moses. “Because you’re a damn fool, is why,” he said. “Shuffle the goddamn cards.”
The girl focused on him as if she were seeing him for the first time. “Uncle.”
“Yeah, what of it?”
“Where’s my husband? I want my husband.”
He looked at her, at the bruises blooming beneath her skin, at the swelling of her eye only now going down. Darren Gearhart had a mean right; short, stiff, packed a lot of power. Amelia wasn’t a pygmy but she wasn’t his equal in size. Moses remembered Joe Gould, the Newenham ambulance’s emergency medical technician, describe a head injury once over a lot of beer at Bill’s bar. Joe had just lost a patient to head trauma suffered when a fight at the small-boat harbor led to a fall between boats. “One of the guys told me you could hear the crack all the way up to the harbormaster’s office when the guy went in. Like breaking an egg.” He went on to explain, with a delivery that became more didactic as the drink in his glass dwindled, that the human brain floated inside the skull like a cork bobbing in the water. When something hit the front of the skull, the brain inside was knocked against the back of the skull, which was why so many blows delivered by fists caused injury to the back of the cerebrum, not the front.
Maybe, Moses thought, maybe I should have run her by the hospital before I packed her onto a plane to get her out here.
He consulted the voices on the subject. They were silent. Figured. Most of the time they wouldn’t shut up. Now, when he was actually looking for insight, they wouldn’t talk.
“I want my husband,” Amelia repeated. Her voice sounded more stubborn than whiny. If that stubborn could be harnessed for her own benefit, she might make it after all.
“No, you don’t,” Moses told Amelia, and snatched up the cards and began to shuffle them himself.
Later, when both kids were in bed and asleep, Bill and Moses moved to the porch. “What are we going to do with her?” she said.
“Come here, woman,” he said. She curled easily into his lap. One of his hands settled naturally on the rise of her hip, the other on the curve of her breast. She sighed a little and wriggled as if to press into both. He gave her a smack on the back. “Be still before I haul you down to the ground and have my way with you.”
“You mean you won’t if I stay still?”
“I will no matter what you do and you know that perfectly well.” He smacked her again, turning it into a caress. “I’m going to keep them isolated and safe for a few days. I’m going to teach them tai chi. I’m going to sweat the evil spirits out of them in the banya.”
“It won’t be enough for Amelia.”
She felt him shrug beneath her cheek. “It’s what I can do.”
“You told her not to marry him, didn’t you?”
“Nope.”
“I was there in the bar, I remember.”
“I didn’t tell her anything. She asked me if she should marry that little prick, and I said her father’s name.”
“That was all?”
“Yep.”
Bill sat up and looked at him. “Maybe you should have tried a little harder.”
He stood up, dumping her without ceremony or apology to the selfsame floor he had been giving serious thought to wrestling her to. “How many times do I have to explain it, Bill? How many times do you have to see it? They come to me for all the answers. They think the voices will speak through me and take them by their goddamn little hands and lead them through the goddamn wilderness. It doesn’t work like that, even if they do listen, which they most of the time don’t.”
She picked herself up to wrap her arms around him from behind. “I know.”
He anchored her arms against his belly with his own. “They talk at me, all the time they talk at me. They tell me what’s going to happen, they tell me flat out. I used to try to tell people what they were saying, but nobody wanted to hear. Nobody does now.”
“A prophet has no honor in his own country,” she said softly into that firm, erect back.
“Shit,” he said. “I can’t remember when I didn’t hear them. This man will abuse you if you marry him, this boy will leave the village forever if you let him leave once, this girl will die drunk beside the road in winter, this man will fall off his boat and drown next summer. At first I thought everyone heard them. When I was ten my Auntie Christine took me to a shaman in New Stoyahuk to ask him to drive the evil spirits from my brain. He told her he could do nothing, that the spirits chose through whom to speak and nothing we could say or do would change that. When I was thirteen she sent me to the Alaska Psychiatric Institute. They said I was delusional but functional and sent me home. That’s when I started drinking. When I was seventeen, I got Auntie Christine to sign me into the Air Force. I got posted to the Far East, where I learned to do form. First thing that helped.”
She’d heard bits and pieces of the story, but never before the story from begi