Starfish_ A Novel - James Crowley [4]
Lionel slowly made his way toward the silent figure. “Are you all right?”
Lionel knew the answer to his question before he had even asked it. The kneeling man was frozen. Frozen solid. His exposed skin was the fading gray color of the morning, and a silver layer of frost covered him from head to toe. In one hand, almost as though he were handing it to Lionel, was a string of bear claws; in the other hand was a green glass bottle.
Lionel looked around, unsure of what to do. He knew that he should run immediately, right now, and find the captain or Brother Finn, but he didn’t move. Lionel was frozen. Frozen like the man. Frozen to the man.
“Mister?” Lionel’s voice cracked as he pulled off his mittens. He reached his arm toward the man’s outstretched hand, toward the string of bear claws.
The claws felt smooth beneath Lionel’s fingers, and the warmth of his skin immediately melted the frost that covered the shiny black of each claw and the intricate beading on the woven leather straps that held them together. Something within Lionel told him to take them. They seemed to be offered. He actually didn’t see it as taking so much as liberating the claws from the cold, frozen hand.
Lionel pulled at the string, but was surprised to find that the small tugs did little to release the necklace. Something within spoke again, telling him to pull harder, so he did. He yanked at it with a short, quick motion, freeing the bear claws but not without a price. Lionel felt the necklace break, and stumbled backward, holding what had once been a circle, but was now a long string of bear claws.
“Say, there.” A voice from behind startled Lionel. “Say, boy, what the hell ya doin’ over there?”
Lionel spun around, slipping the claws into his coat pocket. There stood Sergeant Haskell Jenkins.
“Who you got with ya in the snow there?” Jenkins spat. His words had a slight slur to them.
“I-I-I don’t know,” Lionel stammered, stepping back from the Frozen Man. He hoped that Jenkins hadn’t seen him slip the claws into his pocket.
Jenkins moved closer, until he stood above Lionel and the frozen corpse. Lionel looked up into Sergeant Jenkins’s face. A jagged scar started at his pointy chin, snaked up and over the left side of his mouth, then continued until it disappeared beneath a coarse black leather patch that covered his left eye. The mark pushed the good side of Jenkins’s mouth into what looked to be a permanent sneer, and the patch was crossed with a hobnailed X. Jenkins liked to tell people, especially the ladies at Gorence Trading Post, that he had received his alteration at the hands of “fierce savages” in the “defense of this Great Nation.” In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. The scar that took one eye and slurred Jenkins’s speech was actually the result of a drunken debacle with a log-cutting machine at the wyoming State Fair. The machine ran a long chainlike blade off of a steam driven engine, and the moment that Jenkins, who offered to demonstrate the contraption, laid the blade on the log, the chain kicked back, buckled, and broke, taking a good chunk of Jenkins’s face with it.
Jenkins pulled his wool cap from his head and kicked at the Frozen Man with his shiny black boot. “Aw, hell boy. Don’t be scared. It’s just a dead, drunk Indian.”
Lionel watched as Jenkins reached down and rifled a few coins from the man’s pockets, then pried a hunting knife from the Frozen Man’s belt. Jenkins turned and raised a crooked finger to his snarled lips.
“That’s our little secret, you understand?” Jenkins said this while drawing the sheathed blade of the Frozen Man’s hunting knife across his neck. “Understand?”
Lionel nodded his head as Jenkins pocketed the coins. He was suddenly overcome with a feeling of shame for having taken the Frozen Man’s necklace. He thought about what Beatrice had told him about where his father and mother had gone, versus where Brother Finn said they had gone when they died. He wondered where the