The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [81]
The singing began as another group filed in, and for a brief moment a pretty younger woman caught his attention. She looked straight at him and almost through him with whitish eyes. He glanced away, not wanting to stare, and then back and she was gone in the crowd. A man entered carrying a star on a wooden spinner covered with shiny red Christmas garland. The contraption looked like an oversized pinwheel, complete with sparkles and a stick to hold it up.
Someone led a prayer to bless and keep the troops overseas safe, and then a man began to spin the star and everyone started to sing.
The song, a Yup’ik version of “Silent Night,” caught him off guard. He looked over to Anna again, and she was singing too. Smiling and singing. He took a deep breath and tried to relax a little. Tried to feel the spirit of the season. An atmosphere of joy and excitement was building in Carl’s diminutive house, and he could feel it. It was that or claustrophobia about to kick in with the warm crush of bodies. For once he just went with it and tried as best he could to join in the song.
FOR ONCE HE UNDERSTOOD the girl’s sensitivity to smell. They made camp beneath the riverbank a quarter mile from the fish camp where he’d shot the men, but the horrible smoke was still there, lingering. He rubbed snow in his nostrils and wondered if the girl could smell it on him. In his clothes. On his breath. In his mind.
When he shut his eyes he was again behind the smokehouse door and one man emerged, then another, and another. And he shot them all. The girl’s screams echoed in his ears and mixed with the gunshots.
He hadn’t said anything about what he saw in the smokehouse or how many men he’d killed. He knew the girl was formulating her nightly questions, and when the first one came he breathed a sigh of relief.
“How old were you when you first, you know? Did it?” the girl asked.
He understood she was doing this for him, asking inane questions and then answering them in her own way.
She rolled over and spoke to the back of his head, the campfire at her own back. He couldn’t tell if she was still playing with her grass weaving. The wind changed direction, blowing their campfire smoke toward them. He coughed and wiped at the smell of burnt flesh somehow in his nose again.
“I don’t count the first time,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about or even think about that. Later on, you know. I almost tried it. Seems like everyone I knew had humped before. They would go out at night right before the village curfew and do it in empty steam baths, in those covered porches, or even under the school. Sometimes if everyone was at open gym or bingo games, the boys would try make me go to their house. I thought maybe if I let someone be with me they would maybe want to be my boyfriend. My cousin told me I would find someone to love me that way. I was too scared, though. I didn’t want to be blind and pregnant and alone, you know?”
He sat up and stared out into the dark back toward the fish camp. He imagined the men he’d left in the snow slowly coming back to life. A finger or two moving at first. Eyelids fluttering. Maybe he hadn’t killed them after all.
“So,” she continued, “if you don’t count what my uncle did, I’m still one, I guess. A virgin. Probably going to die that way now, too. Never got to love someone.”
The men’s eyes were open. Lips moving.
He sank back into his sleeping bag and turned over on his back. Above them, the sky swirled dark with clouds. She was trying so hard to help him leave the smokehouse behind.
“You’ve got a long life ahead of you. There will be love for you someday,” he said.
The first of the men sat upright. Then the next.
“Was your wife? You know, when you married her?” she asked.
“Sex and love, the two are different. Don’t equate the two. No