The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [97]
They cruised past the dump, where the ravens circled by the hundreds, riding the breeze that whipped up against the ridges of dirt and trash. The birds dove and swooped, and tucked their broad black wings, plummeting toward the ground and then opening their wings at the last moment to sail up into the grey sky again. He watched the ravens as he passed, and not once did one of them roll over and dump luck in his direction. Had Red not stocked them with everything they would need, he would have considered stopping and picking around the black-speckled expanse of snow, garbage, bones, and ravens.
Just before the looming river bluff east of town he stopped the machine and killed the motor. He sat for a moment, and then turned back to look at the city behind them.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
“Just stopping for a second, that’s all.”
“You don’t have to do it,” she said. “Nobody should have to do something like that.”
He wanted to know how she knew, but there was no point. She knew, just as she knew most everything he thought or said. He wondered if she knew about Red’s tears, and then he wondered if those tears were because Red knew John didn’t have it in him.
“I think we owe it to him,” he said.
The girl thought for a while and nodded.
“He would do it for us,” John whispered.
A bent figure emerged from the brush near the base of the bluffs. John lifted his rifle, but then realized the person was small, old, hunched, and carrying his ice pick the way the old woman carried her shotgun, in one hand like a cane.
“I’ll be damned. There she is,” John said.
“I knew she would wait for us,” the girl said.
They both still sat on the machine, the girl’s arms still wrapped around his waist, her body pressed against his back. John took off a glove and held his fingers against his cheek, where the icy wind burned at his skin. “You start walking. That way,” John said, turning and touching her cheek with his fingers. She turned her head in the direction of the old woman.
“It’s okay if you don’t go back, John. Red would understand.”
John slid his rifle back under his legs and squeezed the handlebars as tight as he could. He leaned forward and rested his head between the bars and with his face turned sideways, relaxed his eyes until the ocean of pallid flat earth to the north of them blurred. He felt Rayna lean forward as well and rest her head against his back, her arms still around him.
They sat that way for a while, and then the girl let go and slid off the seat. The cold air rushed to fill the space against his back where she had been. She pulled off her glove and put her hand on his back, followed his spine to his neck, and then knelt down and held her warm palm to his face. Her icy irises seemed to search for his eyes and then stopped, as if they had found something important. The bright sunlight against the snow turned her pupils into two black pinholes, smaller than any he had ever seen, but at the same time he felt as if he could crawl into one of them and hide himself from the world.
“I made a promise to her,” he said, not sure if his voice was audible over the wind. “And I made a deal with Red.”
He felt his voice wither and he blinked hard and felt his tears beginning to freeze against his cheeks. She wiped away a tear with her thumb and then leaned in and touched her lips to the freezing tear, and then kissed the new pools forming at the edge of his eyes.
“My grandmother used to tell me to never ask for a promise if I knew it wasn’t fair. Maybe Anna made you promise something, but Red didn’t. He doesn’t expect you to return.”
She kissed his cheek again, and then stood. He sat up and gave the starter handle a quick tug. The machine fired, and he pumped the throttle lightly and let it idle.
“I’ll be back. I need to at least tell him I can’t do it …”
She lifted her eyebrows slightly and turned in the direction of the old woman, who had covered half the distance to the bluff.
John gunned the machine, turned in a wide half arc, and eased the sled back toward