Abandon

They arrived at the entrance to the hotel, the door starred with snowballs—the handiwork of bored children. Across the street, there was light in the saloon and they could hear the sound of Christmas carols being played on a broken piano. They entered the dark lobby. There hadn’t been anyone at the front desk since the own er had left town three months ago. Gloria brushed the snow off her cape and followed Ezekiel up the staircase.

The corridor was empty, completely dark. They stopped at number six, the only room with light sliding under the door.

Ezekiel knocked. They waited. He knocked again.

“I don’t reckon she’s gonna answer,” Gloria whispered.

“Mrs. Madsen,” Ezekiel said through the door. “It’s Zeke and Glori Curtice. We’re leaving something for you. Merry Christmas.”

Gloria set the basket on the floor. It contained two oranges, a can of sardines, and a piece of chocolate cake from the town feast. On a scrap of parchment, Gloria had written, “Merry Christmas and a happy New Year from your friends the Curtices.”

They went back outside and trudged on through the snow.

“Saw Oatha Wallace today,” Ezekiel said. “He was in the benzinery this morning. Told him my brother’s over two months short now.”

“What’d he say?”

“What he says every time. That Nathan and the others decided not to go last minute, since the weather looked ominous. I called him a black liar.”

“What do you think happened?”

“Don’t know, Glori, it’s past me, but that man’s bad medicine. Snaky.”

“What if it turns out Nathan was with him?”

“I may be sheriff, but it won’t be settled in no goddamn court a law.” They turned onto a side street and followed a path beaten down in the snow, saw families huddled before fireplaces in those cabins on the hillside that were still inhabited—tiny islands of warmth and light in the storm.

“Need to warn you, Ezekiel,” she said. “I wanna say something about our little whistle.”

Ezekiel stopped, faced his wife. It was so dark outside, he could only make out the whites of her eyes.

“Told you. We don’t talk about it.” The tremor in his voice was grief, not anger, and it made Gloria’s throat tighten.

“I just need to say something, Zeke. You don’t got to talk—”

He grabbed her arms. “Said I don’t wanna hear it.”

“But I need you to,” she said, and her eyes burned as they flooded. “I can’t go on tonight and tomorrow pretending it’s like it’s always been. Only been a year, and I miss him. That’s all I wanted to say. That I miss Gus so much, I can’t breathe when I think about him.” Her husband’s eyes went wide. He turned away from her, his nose running. “I’m empty, Zeke, ’cause we don’t talk about him. That don’t make nothing better. Just makes us forget, and do you wanna forget your son?”

Ezekiel sat in the snow. “I ain’t forgot Gus. Ain’t nothin in this whole god-damn world make me forget my boy.”

She knelt behind him, Ezekiel wiping his face and cursing.

“You reckon we’ll see Gus again when we die?”

“Glori, if I believed that, I’d a blowed my goddamn head off a year ago. This is above my bend. Why you doin this to me?”

“ ’Cause I don’t remember what he looks like! He’s just a blur in my head. Remember that day I wanted to get our picture made and you wouldn’t?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, goddamn you for that, Zeke.”

The wind had changed directions and the snow needled Gloria’s face. She turned her back to the barrage of ice. Ezekiel was saying something, but she couldn’t hear. She moved forward, their faces inches apart. She asked him what he’d said.

“Said he came halfway above my knee. Close your eyes, Glori, maybe you can see him. His hair was fine, color a rust, and his skin so white, we used to say it looked like milk. He had your eyes.” Ezekiel cleared his throat and wiped his face again. “And when I . . . Jesus . . . when I kissed his neck, my mustache would tickle him and he’d laugh so hard, scream, ‘No, Papa!’ ”

Gloria had closed her eyes. “Keep going, Zeke.”

“And he called my knee his horsey, and he named it Benjamin.”

Ezekiel had stopped. Gloria opened her eyes. Her husband was shaking. He leaned forward into her cape and wept.

“It’s okay,” she whispered. “It’s all right.”

“Naw, it ain’t,” he said. “I lie in bed sometimes and try to picture what Gus would a looked like at ten or fifteen or thirty. I imagine him turned out a man. We was robbed, Glori. It ain’t never gonna be all right again.”

Ezekiel picked himself up and then lifted Gloria in his arms, both covered in snow. She bawled as Ezekiel carried her up the hill toward their dark cabin in the grove of spruce.

TEN

Bart Packer glided through the darkness in his sleigh, the whisper of the runners drowned out by the clinking of chain loops and the singletree groaning in the cold. A half mile south of town, and with the snow blowing in every direction, he could hardly see beyond the horses.

He’d have missed it, but the horses knew the way, making the turn just past the grouping of snow-loaded firs. They pulled the sled up a series of switchbacks and after awhile slowed to a walk, their legs punching through the snow, their nostrils flaring like bellows, Bart slapping the reins against their rumps, hollering, “Get up there! Go on, girls!” They climbed several hundred feet above the floor of the box canyon. The trail leveled out. “Now get on!” he yelled, and he worked the reins furiously until the horses trotted in the powder.

He wasn’t rushing them out of meanness or impatience. Nothing riled Bart like the mistreatment of horses, but they were approaching the most dangerous section of the ride home, where the trail passed through a gap between steep slopes that produced slides every winter. If caught in an avalanche tonight, he’d have almost no chance of survival.

When the sled had passed safely through the gap, Bart drew up the reins and brought the horses to a halt. He stepped down into the snow. It rose to his waist. He unfastened an ax from the side of the sleigh and waded over to a pool of ice the size of a wagon wheel. He hacked at the mouth of the spring, chipping away the ice until he could see water flowing down the rock. He let the horses blow. While they drank, he climbed into the sleigh and pulled a flask from a pocket of his wool overcoat, then leaned back, wrapped in the buffalo robe, sipping brandy, listening to the pair of horses slurp the icy water.