Broken Angels

The plane dropped out of the clouds into the afternoon dusk. Rain streamed across the window and Kris pressed her face against the cold glass, shielding her eyes with a hand to see past her reflection. Below her was a dull sea and opposite, not far off the wing, were steep mountains, their tops hidden in the clouds and their sides blanketed with spruce, dark and still in the fading light. Snow clung to the trees on the upper slopes and cars streamed along a road cut into the mountainside above a line of houses standing at the water’s edge.

The jet banked into a sharp dogleg turn and its flaps whined into their full position. The trees cut away and the plane raced low over a salt marsh matted with dead and broken grasses. The wheels touched the wet runway, rainwater exploded in a cloud of spray, and the plane braked hard, pressing Kris against her seatbelt. The brakes released and, as they taxied toward the terminal, the cabin speakers hummed. A voice, indistinguishable from the others that had herded her north, welcomed them to Juneau and thanked them for flying Alaska Air. The plane stopped, seatbelts clicked open, and people stood, murmuring among themselves and unloading bags from the overheads before filing slowly forward.

Kris sat. She stared without seeing at the men in industrial raincoats outside the plane unloading baggage with silent efficiency. What was her mother doing in Juneau? She’d been south of Fairbanks only a few times in her life. And only once as far as Anchorage, which had been too big, too spread out for her. “You’ve got to have a car just to take a piss,” she’d said. Juneau, even farther away, was another world.

Evie’s letter had appeared in her mailbox a month ago. Kris turned it over in her hands, disbelief mixing with muted fear. How had she found her? Evie’s clumsy scrawl stared up at her and Kris stared back, awash in uncertain currents of feeling and memory. Nine years. And she was still alive? Kris’s fingers worked the envelope open. Nine years since she’d last seen Evie—nine years since she’d stepped over her mother’s unconscious body and walked out the door of their

two-room apartment into the sub-arctic night, leaving, she’d promised herself, Evie and Alaska forever.

The cabin had emptied. The cleaning crew was moving down the aisle gathering trash, checking for left bags, and tucking magazines back into seat pockets. Kris reached into the overhead and pulled out her canvas duffle. She stepped out of the plane and felt the sting of the cold air spilling in through the crack between the plane and the jet way. The lights in the arrival lounge were bright and harsh. Night-blackened windows looked blankly at the empty seats, the glass display cases of stuffed animals and the retreating backs of people bunched up around the exit.

She moved off to the side and searched the mass of people talking loudly, laughing, and touching as they moved through the glass doors. They drained quickly out of the lounge and in another minute she was alone. She heard a click, and the sign announcing the arrival of her flight turned off. A uniformed woman stepped from behind the counter, flashed Kris a smile, hiked the strap of her bag higher on her shoulder, and hurried out. Kris waited, her back to the lounge doors. She stared out the big windows, lightly pocked with rain, at the blue lights rimming the runway.

Returning to Evie and to Alaska was like picking at an old scab; even the letter had irritated sores she was upset were still there: “I’ll be so happy to see you!” Yeah, right.

A security guard, reflected in the lounge window, stared through the glass doors behind her, hesitating briefly before moving away. Taking a breath, she turned and walked out of the lounge, pushing through the security doors, into the greeting area where the last of the arriving passengers were hugging friends and relatives. She retreated into a corner next to a glass case with a yellowish polar bear standing in it and scanned the crowd.

There was no black-haired woman waiting for her. No lady with the dancing, unreliable eyes that would slide from yours to a burst of laughter across the room. No one with the silvered laugh that cigarettes had begun to darken even before Kris had left. Evie wasn’t there, and Kris wasn’t surprised.

She walked downstairs to the baggage claim area. A single carousel snaked into the room. Not much was left on it: a pack, some suitcases, and a cardboard box wound with duct tape. Already a uniformed man was pulling them off and stacking them in a corner.

Her mother wasn’t here either. Kris walked past the Alaska Airlines ticket counters to the other end of the terminal. It was tiny. It looked like only Alaska Air flew jets into Juneau. The other counters were for local airlines flying charters and small planes out to the villages. She climbed the stairs back up to the restaurant. The man behind the bar glanced up from his book without interest. All the tables were empty. It wasn’t Evie’s kind of place anyway: too bright, too clean.

Irritation masked a rush of relief that the meeting had been put off a few more minutes. She walked slowly back down the stairs to the baggage area. Nine years ago Kris had walked out and not once in those years had she sent Evie a note or a postcard letting her know where she was or that she was OK. Nine years had dulled Kris’s anger and now, in grudging moments, she allowed some excuses for Evie. Evie had grown up hard. Her father, an Athabascan who’d wandered out of the bush and into Fairbanks in the late sixties, had been killed when she was a teenager. He’d rolled his truck one winter, crushing the roof, trapping himself inside. When they found him, he was frozen hard as river ice. Evie’s mother, Kris’s grandmother, had left her Athabascan village just before she married and Kris remembered stories she’d told of her first ride in a car, her first taste of an orange—which she’d spat out and never tried again—and her fear of the white men who ran the shops in Fairbanks with cold indifference to anything except the coins in her pocket. It was a rough way to grow up—raised by a mother with bad English in a city that had, only a few years before, taken the “No Natives” signs off its hotels and restaurants and whose only offered comfort was whiskey.

Alcohol had racked their lives. It had killed Evie’s mother when Kris was still a girl and Kris was surprised it hadn’t killed Evie by now. Evie’s first drinks—the ones that started an evening—vaulted through her. They lifted her, flushing laughs from her throat, igniting sparks in her eyes, which teased and flirted and pulled people—men—to her until she was circled by bodies lured by her glow. She would be gone, lost like a queen bee in her swarm, and Kris, when she was still a kid, would slink into the shadows at the edges of the lamplight and pick at the gum stuck to the undersides of the tables or play with a bottle-cap, an empty cigarette package, her resentment brushed by fear, knowing that Evie’s drinking would end with a man in her bed, usually drunk, sometimes violent, and always a stranger, even if he stayed for a month. Evie attracted them, helplessly. “You’re a bitch who doesn’t know she’s in heat,” Kris had yelled at her when Kris was older and anger had scabbed over the hurt and resentment.

Kris’s father had been one of those men. Evie didn’t even remember his name.

She stepped off the stairs and back into the baggage area. No Evie.

“Damn,” she whispered.

The only people left in the baggage claim area were a couple poking through the bags and boxes stacked in the corner, a short man in jeans leaning against a counter by the exit and a girl behind the Hertz counter.

The man leered at her. She glared back. He smiled and touched his hat. Kris turned away and went up to the Hertz girl. She was young and pale with fading spots of red on her cheeks.

“May I help you?” the girl asked. Her fingernails were painted purple.

“Can I get a bus to town?”

“You sure can. The bus schedules are right over there.” She pointed to the counter against the far wall where the man was leaning. Kris walked over. On it was a sign saying Juneau Chamber of Commerce and next to it was a rack of hotel and tour brochures. Off by themselves, lying on the counter, were two stacks of bus schedules, one red the other blue. She took one of each.

“Need a ride somewhere, missy?” the man asked her.

“Not from you, buddy,” Kris said and walked away, trying to make sense of the schedules.

“Suit yourself,” he said.

She ignored him and went back to the girl, pulling out Evie’s letter from her jacket pocket. The return address was a post office box.

“I need to get to the AWARE shelter,” she said. “Does the bus go near it?”

“Right past it.” The girl took a schedule, pointed her pen at the map, and traced a long blue line. “This is Glacier highway and the shelter is just outside downtown. Ask the driver where to get off.”

Kris tucked the schedule into her pocket, picked up her bag, and walked toward the door. The man in jeans had disappeared. Her face, hollowed by shadows, was reflected in the glass doors as she pushed them open and walked into the night. The air was cold and heavy with moisture. She stopped at the curb and lit a cigarette. She drew in the smoke, then held the cigarette down by her thigh to let her eyes adjust to the darkness.

The airport terminal looked smaller from the outside. No cars were parked in front of it. Across the street were a couple of flagpoles and a small parking lot with a few scattered cars. Overhead, the airport strobe pulsed rhythmically. She could see a distant glow of lights and hear the slick of car tires on a hidden road, but nothing else.

Unseen clouds pressed down on her. A drizzle fell out of the blackness and into puddles crowded with rain-rings. A breeze slapped the ropes against the metal shafts of the flagpoles and pushed itself, cold and slimy, through her clothes and against her skin. She shivered, took another drag on the cigarette, and stepped off the curb. Only fucking lunatics would live here. She tossed her butt and walked toward the glow.

__________

That same afternoon, Ben Stewart drove his truck the five miles down to the end of Thane Road. It was as far south from Juneau as he could get in a vehicle with wheels. He parked, slid stiffly out of the cab, lifted the door slightly to align it with the frame, and leaned into it until the latch clicked. The rusted panel rattled loosely.

It wasn’t cold enough to snow, but the air was so heavy with moisture his breath misted. He sidestepped cautiously down the muddy slope at the beginning of the trail. The hoarfrost that had been there a few days ago had melted away in the rain. Point Bishop trail ran along the steep side of the mountains fifty feet or so above the slate water of Gastineau Channel. It ran under great trees of Sitka spruce and hemlock, trees monstrously larger than the sticks of black spruce that grew in the interior. He straightened his curved spine and gazed up through the drizzle at their distant tops, black against the clouds. Their size seemed unnatural, as alien as the arctic spring seemed when it came to the south slopes of the Brooks Range, creeping northward up the Alatna. After eight months of the black and white of winter, the fresh golden-green of the new aspen leaves and the first spikes of sedge poking through the snow didn’t look like they belonged to this world.

Ben straightened and headed down the trail, glad to feel the wet bite of the air and the scent of the spruce in his nostrils after a day indoors. He liked the Point Bishop trail. It was close to town, and not that crowded; few people hiked it once the fall rains started in September. And it was flat. Most of the trails close to Juneau climbed up the mountains that pressed against the town and, at this time of year, disappeared under snow before they broke the tree line twelve or fifteen hundred feet above the channel.

The trail went all the way to Point Bishop, farther than he’d ever been able to go. This late in the day, there wasn’t enough light left for him to make the mile and a half to Dupont Point, where the AJ mine had stored its dynamite before the war.

It was dryer in the forest; the trees soaked up the drizzle. Ben moved slowly, alert to any movement, but the woods were quiet. In a patch of mud, he bent to study the tracks of a squirrel, each print delicately traced in the mud: four toes on the forefeet, five on the hind. The prints disappeared under a shallow footprint, partly filled with water. So someone else had been down here recently. It was a small print, a woman’s perhaps, or a child’s, without any tread on the sole and with too much weight in the toes, as if the person had stumbled.

The path turned a corner into the cut made by Little Sheep Creek. The water crashed into the rocks as it fell down the slope. Ben had never seen it so full before. It seemed strange to have the streams high in November, instead of in the spring when the June sun melted the snow. A wooden bridge crossed the stream. He leaned on its railing, watching the water tumble out from beneath it, rushing toward the channel. The stream flattened here. The steepness of the mountains gave way to an easier grade before leveling out at the beach. His eye followed the water down to where the stream tumbled around a curve. It caught on something.

He watched it for a few seconds. It was too green for this time of year. He ran his eyes along the opposite bank. A little upstream, the brown and leafless stalks of the brambles were bent and broken. Something big and clumsy had moved through there, and not long ago. The inner piths of the broken stalks, not yet weathered brown, were still tan and yellow.

The slope down to the stream was too steep by the bridge. Turning back, Ben searched for a way down to the water. He stepped between the thorny stalks of devil’s club as he climbed down to the stream and then walked along its edge until he came to the patch of green. It was a piece of material snagged on a branch that was stuck under a rock. The tip of the branch had pierced the cloth. It needed some force to do that, more force than the driving power of the current. He looked downstream.

Below him, thrown into the shallows by the pounding water, lay a body.

Ben scrambled down the stream, his feet slipping off the rocks and into the water. He grabbed at the grasses on the bank for balance. He came to it, his feet wet and his heart thudding against his chest.

It was a woman.

She lay on her back, legs twisted in the rocks, her head bobbing in deeper water. An arm fished back and forth in the current. Under her open coat was a bright green dress, shapeless in the water. Over her face floated long black hair.

Squatting at the stream’s edge, Ben reached out and lifted the hair. He started, inhaling through his teeth. Her face was gone. The flesh was chewed and mangled; only ragged edges of skin and shards of broken skull stuck through. It was fungus-white, washed bloodless by the stream.

He dropped the hair, which filled and floated back down over her face, the longer strands reaching past her chest. She had been shot with a shotgun. Both barrels at close range, no more than a couple feet away, the shot string had still been tight. He lifted an arm out of the water. The fingers were shattered stumps. She’d held them in front of her. For protection? Mercy?

The water washed over her rhythmically, like a pulse. Slowly, as he watched her, sitting on his heels in the water, his face tightened and the roar of the stream faded away. Ben let the arm slip back into the water. With great care, he lifted the hem of her dress, pulling it up against the current over her twisted legs to her waist. High on her left thigh was the scar, thick and puckered against her bloodless skin. The dress dropped from his fingers. It tangled in the current. After a moment, he gently tugged it back down over her knees.

Water had seeped into his boots and his feet were cold. He waded back up the stream until he reached the spot where she and her killer had stumbled out of the brush. He studied the tracks carefully, moving aside the broken stalks and soggy brown leaves. Then, working his way back up to the trail, he slowly and methodically erased all sign of their passage.

Kris stepped off the bus into a puddle of black water. Behind her, the bus whined and drove away. The blocky building of the AWARE shelter was bigger than she’d expected. Off to the side was an addition still sitting in the mud of new construction. The driveway down was steep and the front door locked. She pushed a bell and it was opened by a girl about her age, but shorter and with a softer face.

“Can I help you?” she asked, glancing up at Kris.

“I’m looking for Evie Gabriel.”

The girl pursed her lips. “We can’t release the names of the people who are staying here.”

“She’s my mother.” Kris pulled Evie’s letter from her pocket and pointed at AWARE’s address in the corner. “She told me to meet her here.”

The girl fingered the letter, reading the address. “Come in.” She left Kris standing inside the door while she disappeared into a side office. A minute later she was back, following an older woman with probing eyes, white, clean skin and a blouse with shoulder pads.

“So you’re Kris,” she said. “Evie talked about you.” She came forward, smiling, and shook Kris’s hand, speaking her name, which Kris immediately forgot.

“Is she here?” Kris asked.

“No, she left about a month ago.”

“Do you know where she went?”

The woman’s eyes became assessing. “When was the last time you saw your mother?”

“I know she’s a drunk,” Kris said.

“Yes,” the woman said carefully as if there were more to it than whiskey. “I don’t know where she is. She’d been staying at the Glory Hole before she came here.”

Kris shook her head.

“It’s a homeless shelter downtown,” the woman said.

Kris came back to Alaska for this? “Where is it? Can I call from here?”

The woman pointed to a phone on the desk that faced the entrance.

Kris pushed the buttons as the woman recited the number. She talked to the man who answered. In the background people were talking, chairs scraped on linoleum, and knives and forks clinked on plates. He yelled into the noise without putting his hand over the receiver. “Anybody here named Evie Gabriel?” A couple of voices answered and the man said to Kris, “No one’s seen her for a while. More than a couple of weeks, I think.” Kris hung up.

“I wrote my mother at this address,” Kris said. “Did she get my letter?”

“Letters are kept in the advocate’s office.” The women picked up the phone, pressed a button and spoke briefly into the receiver, waited and then thanked the person before hanging up.

“We have nothing here for her,” she said. “If the letter got here, either she got it, or we sent it back to you. We only keep letters a few weeks.”

The woman regarded Kris with concern and Kris stared back, not wanting any part of her pity. She reached down and picked up her duffle.

“Do you need a place to stay tonight?” the woman asked.

“Yeah,” Kris said.

“There’s a hostel in town. It’s not expensive and it’ll be fairly empty this time of year. It’s on the corner of East and Sixth.”

Kris climbed back up onto Glacier Avenue and turned right toward town. It probably wasn’t seven yet, but the street was empty. Yellow streetlights shone through the drizzle and reflected off the wet street. Cars sped by on a highway partly hidden by trees to her right, on her left were houses. Her sneakers were wet; the cold was starting to sting her toes and the strap of her duffle cut into her fingers. Kris switched hands, balled the cold one in her jacket pocket to warm it up. She’d be on the next plane out of here. She wasn’t going to piss away one minute trying to find Evie. It’s not like you can look a drunk up in the phone book.

The sound of tires came up behind her and she moved off the road onto the gravel shoulder without glancing back. Suddenly, the vehicle dropped a gear and wheels screeched against the asphalt. Headlights pinned her, throwing her shadow into the night. Kris jumped to the side. The truck’s mirror hit her shoulder, spinning her onto the ground. The truck skidded, reversed, and roared back at her. She threw herself off the embankment and rolled down the steep slope into wet leafless bushes.

The truck door slammed and a man, short and stringy, ran around the front through the lights. He paused at the top of the slope looking down into the darkness. She sank into the shadows. He hesitated only a second and then raced down the slope. Kris leapt to her feet and tore into the trees. Bushes slapped her face and grabbed at her clothes. The body crashing through bushes behind her came closer. Then his hand was in her hair. He grabbed it and yanked her back. The bones in her neck popped, her feet flew forward, and she fell hitting the ground hard. He jerked her head back and a blade snicked open.

Kris pivoted away, her hair twisting hard in her scalp. Digging her toes into the ground, she rammed her head into his gut. He rocked back a step, dropping her hair. Before he could swing his knife, she fell to the ground, wrapped her arms tight around his ankles, and slammed her shoulder into his shins. The man toppled backwards. He grunted, swore, and kicked free of her grip. Kris clambered into the wet brush, struggling to escape. His body hit her, she twisted, and then he was on top of her, his cheek pressed against hers, his breath hot and harsh on her neck.

He lifted his head to gloat. Kris rose up and snapped her teeth into his lip. He stiffened and wrenched his head back. She held on, grinding her teeth into the flesh. Blood ran into her mouth. A fist pounded into the side of her head. Where was the knife? Hands locked onto her throat. She heaved and they rolled over, she was on top, her knees between his legs. She stretched a leg and slammed her knee into his balls. He blubbered, spraying hot blood and spit into her face. His legs scissored against her knees. She hit him again. He convulsed. Through his lip, her teeth touched.

Kris let go and raced back through the trees. She struggled up the slope, slipping on the wet grass. The truck was there, lights on and engine idling. She ran to the driver’s side, flung open the door, and searched wildly for the parking brake. With both hands, she twisted it. It snapped in. Pushing against the door frame and twisting the wheel with her hand, she turned the back end of the truck off the road. The rear wheels found the slope and it accelerated down the embankment, crashing into the bushes below. The lights shot up into the trees across the street.