The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [56]
“We’ll need her. She knows things we don’t know.”
He nodded, but said nothing.
He started walking again, but when he didn’t hear her footsteps behind him he glanced back over his shoulder and stopped. She had already started in the other direction, and somehow she was heading straight for the village, and at a pretty fast pace. The thought of leaving her, them, made sense enough. There was plenty of food in the school. Maybe even enough for them to make the spring. Without the girl he could travel quickly and efficiently.
She didn’t falter in her progress. He had no doubt she could make it back to the village on her own. She didn’t need him. Or at least that was what her display of independence told him—but he knew better. An old woman and a blind girl were not going to improve his chances, and their odds of making it weren’t that great either. Travelling alone would afford one other luxury. He wouldn’t be responsible for anyone any longer, and he wouldn’t have to deal with the girl constantly hounding him to go find her cousins.
He thought about calling out to her, to give her one last chance, but decided against it. She was far enough away. She wouldn’t hear him if he tried. He spun back around, pulled the rope tight, and continued on, his back to the village and the blind girl.
He bit at his lower lip as he marched on through the snow. Using his left mitten he brushed the freezing tears from the corners of his eyes and tried to convince himself he would be better off without the girl, and that the tears were from the cold winds and not her decision. He pushed the memories of first finding her and her voice from his thoughts and tried to replace it all with images of Anna, of his students, of anything but her. Then the ice pick caught a hard ridge of snow and he suddenly remembered the heavy steel there in his right hand.
One glance at the pick was enough. In his mind he saw the girl swinging it, smashing into the man in the gym and then nearly crushing his throat. She still had fight in her, and despite everything, she would continue to fight. Her uncle was still there hiding in the village somewhere. Maybe he watched them leave. He might even be watching her return.
And then there was the old woman’s hunter. If he was a hunter, he would find the old woman and the girl, and then, if they were still alive as the girl insisted, he would find the children.
John made a small arc to avoid having to jerk the sled around and started back toward the village. His strides were long and brisk, the wind at his back. He could catch her before she reached the riverbank.
HE SAT ON THE cold green linoleum floor of their house, clicking away at the keyboard of a school laptop. He was commenting on Alex’s online journal. The kid had zero understanding of grammar or writing conventions, but his writing had a unique voice. The kid’s bitterness cloaked a sense of despair and hopelessness.
“Listen to this,” he said, reading to Anna. She stood at the stove heating oil for their nightly popcorn snack. “‘Most nights I sleep on a foam pad, if I’m lucky enough to sleep. The TV stays on all day and all night. There is always someone watching movies or shows. I’ll put the pad down, on our plywood floor, somewhere I can still see the screen. I don’t see little houses like mine on those shows, and I never once seen someone sleeping on foam mats in houses with no water, only one or two bedrooms. Thirteen maybe fourteen people. Babies crying. My sister and her boyfriend humping, like no one knows what they are doing under those blankets. I don’t never see real life like that on the TV. That world is supposed to be the real world. I hear teachers say that. “Back in the real world,” they say. I’ve never seen their real world, just TV. I probably never will live to see it. Don’t really want to. I don’t think I would fit in there, it would be like trying to find space to sleep for me here, me and my sleeping pad and nowhere quiet. It’s funny that the outsiders who come here call that the real world, and they don’t even know what Yup’ik really