Hold the Dark: A Novel by William Giraldi Page B

but it was good while it lasted, you bet.”
    “Why was she here?”
    “No place else to be if you’re in these parts, I suppose. She wanted to see our Indian hunter for some reason. We call him that, our Indian hunter, as a joke, you know, but he’s just John, he’s been around here forever. He’s not a forty-eighter like the rest of us. He was raised on the Yukon, in a river tribe. He was here in this spot before a single miner showed up. And he’s still here.”
    “Where’d she go?”
    “Your girl there? Heck if I know. If she knew, she wasn’t saying it to me. I like to talk, as you might imagine, living in the country, but she didn’t want to hear any of it. This one stayed in the room, mostly. I cooked her food but she just stared out that window there, like she was waiting for something to come in and grab her. A pretty girl, too. But a bit odd, if I can say so, no offense. She had your same color hair. And nose, too, I think. Real pretty, but odd, like I say.”
    This photo in his fingers—her face just a week ago, a look of longing in it and something else not nameable, her irises all pupil. That green wool turtleneck was knitted by her two winters ago. She’d chopped her hair to her chin—it was waist-length when Slone had left. When he looked up he looked into the flashbulb of the woman’s camera and it sent bolts through his eyes.
    “You’re a handsome fella,” she said, trying to fix her hair. She rubbed lip balm across her mouth. Her lips were so thin they were barely there, eyebrow like an underline, whiskers in half sprout from her chin.
    “Another storm’s coming late tonight,” she said. “Or else by morning, the radio says. You staying with us?”
    Slone nodded, blinked the flashes from his eyes.
    “I don’t have any more bread, I have to warn you. Plane hasn’t been back in two weeks. We’re expecting Hank again any day now, if the storms slow. Last time he tried to land that ski plane in weather, he missed the runway and hit the bluff. We call it a runway, you know, but it’s just a bulldozed road tamped down.”
    He looked again at the photo of Medora.
    “Of course, there are some roads from the city to here, but you can’t get a big enough truck along most of them, and anyway it takes more than a day. Plus you better know how to drive in snow because if you get stuck in a storm on one of those little roads you can forget being found till breakup. So we don’t mind waiting for Hank and his plane. He takes supplies way beyond us even, where no roads go. Hank’s a real good man, you bet.”
    “I want to stay in the same room she stayed in.”
    “There’s only two rooms up there. You can have your choice, fella. No one’s fighting over those rooms. Honestly, I haven’t changed the sheets in there, if you don’t mind it.”
    Slone stayed fixed on the photo and said nothing.
    “Not sure what sort of battery you have in your vehicle but you might wanna pull it inside the garage there across the way. We call it the garage, you know, it’s just a big corrugated metal hangar on a concrete slab. But there’s a gas heater in there to keep the trucks from freezing up and it stays warm as the devil in fifty below. What’re you driving?”
    She bent to the window and with a sleeve wiped away the moisture to look out.
    “That a Ford? Hard to see. I used to have a Ford, owned nothing but American, and then my husband said to me one day, he said, We’re not American anymore, we’re Alaskan . Last year after breakup he drove off to the city in the Ford and a week later drove back in a Jap model, a Nissan truck, or one of those SUV thingies. It’s real roomy, better than the Ford, I have to say, what little I do drive of it.”
    “What’s the room price?”
    “Do you have any magazines?”
    Slone stared.
    “Magazines,” she said. “No magazines? You didn’t bring any with you to look at while you’re traveling?”
    “What magazines?”
    “I’m not real picky about