The Tenth Circle Read online

Kingurauten was Yup’ik for too late. Daniel pulled down the neck warmer that covered his nose and mouth. “I think you’ve got me confused with someone else,” he began, and then realized that he knew the woman in the truck. “Daisy?” he said hesitantly.

  Crazy Daisy, that was what they’d called her when she used to run the mail out to the native villages by dogsled back when Daniel was a kid. She frowned at him. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Daniel Stone,” he said. “Annette Stone’s son.”

  “That wasn’t the name of Annette’s kid. He was-”

  “Wassilie,” Daniel finished.

  Daisy scratched her scalp. “Didn’t you bug out of here because-”

  “Nah,” Daniel lied. “I just left for college.” It was common knowledge that Crazy Daisy had gotten that way by running with Timothy Leary’s crowd in the sixties, and that she’d pretty much fried the functioning parts of her brain. “Did you happen to see a snow-go pass by here with a kass’aq girl and a Yup’ik boy?”

  “This morning?”

  “Yeah.”

  Daisy shook her head. “Nope. Sorry.” She jerked her thumb toward the back of the truck. “You want to come in and warm up? I got coffee and Snickers bars.”

  “Can’t,” Daniel said, lost in thought. If Trixie hadn’t come past Akiak, then how had he missed her on the trail?

  “Maybe later,” Daisy yelled, as he turned the ignition on the snow machine again. “I’d love to catch up.”

  Daniel pretended not to hear her. But as he circled around the truck, Daisy started waving like a madwoman, trying to get his attention. “No one’s passed by this morning,” she said, “but a girl and boy came through last night, before the storm hit.”

  Daniel didn’t answer, just gunned the engine and drove up the riverbank into Akiak, the town he’d run away from fifteen years earlier. The Washeteria-the place they’d gone with their laundry and for showers-was now a convenience store and video rental shop. The school was still a squat, serviceable gray building; the house beside it where he’d grown up had two dogs staked out front. Daniel wondered who lived there now, if it was still the schoolteacher, if she had children. If basketballs still sometimes started to bounce in the gymnasium without being set in motion, if the last one to lock up the school building ever saw the old principal who’d killed himself, still hanging from the crossbeam in the only classroom.

  He stopped in front of the house next door to the school, a shack with a slight pedigree. A snow-go sat in front of the building, and an aluminum boat peeked out from beneath a blue tarp. Paper snowflakes had been taped to the windows, as well as a red metallic crucifix. “Why are we stopping?” Laura asked. “What about Trixie?”

  He got off the snow machine and turned to her. “You’re not coming with me.”

  She wasn’t used to this kind of cold, and he couldn’t slow down for her and risk losing Trixie for good. And a part of him wanted to be alone when he found Trixie. There was so much he needed to explain.

  Laura stared at him, struck dumb. Her eyebrows had frosted over, her eyelashes were matted together with ice, and when she finally spoke, her sentence rose like a white banner between them. “Please don’t do this,” she said, starting to cry. “Take me with you.”

  Daniel pulled her into his arms, assuming that Laura thought this was a punishment, retribution for leaving him behind when she had her affair. It made her seem vulnerable; it made him remember how easy it was for them to still hurt each other. “If we had to walk through hell to find Trixie, I’d follow you. But this is a different kind of hell, and I’m the one who knows where he’s going. I’m asking you…I’m begging you to trust me.”

  Laura opened her mouth, and what might have been a reply came out only as a smoke ring full of what she could not say. Trust was exactly what they no longer had between them. “I can go faster if I don’t have to worry about you,” he said.

  Daniel saw true fear in her eyes. “You’ll come back?” she asked.

  “We both will.”

  Laura glanced around at the rutted street with snow-go tracks, at the public water receptacles at the base of the street. The community was silent, windswept, frigid. It looked, Daniel knew, like a dead end.

  “Come with me.” He led Laura up the set of wooden stairs and opened the door without knocking, entering a little antechamber. There were plastic bags stuck on nails in the frame overhead, and stacks of newspaper. A pair of boots toppled to the right, and a tanned hide was stretched on the back wall, beside the door that led into the house. Lying on the linoleum was a severed moose hoof and a half rack of frozen ribs.

  Laura stepped hesitantly over them. “Is this…is this where you used to live?”

  The interior door opened, revealing a Yup’ik woman about sixty years old, holding an infant in her arms. She took one look at Daniel and backed away, her eyes bright with tears.

  “Not me,” Daniel said. “Cane.”

  Charles and Minnie Johnson, the parents of Daniel’s one and only childhood friend, treated him with the same sort of deference they might have given any other ghost who sat down at their kitchen table to share a cup of coffee. Charles’s skin was as dark and lined as a cinnamon stick; he wore creased jeans and a red western shirt and called Daniel Wass. His eyes were clouded with cataracts, as if life were something poured into a body, a vessel that could hold only so much before memories floated across the windows of consciousness.

  “It’s been a long time,” Charles said.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve been living Outside?”

  “With my family.”

  There was a long silence. “We wondered when you’d come home,” Minnie said.

  The Yupiit did not speak of the dead, and because of that, neither would Daniel. But he had less practice with silence. In a Yup’ik household, ten minutes might pass between a question and the answer. Sometimes you didn’t even have to reply out loud; it was enough to be thinking your response.

  They sat around the kitchen table in the quiet, until a young woman walked through the front door. She was clearly Minnie’s daughter-they had the same wide smile and smooth hickory skin-but Daniel remembered her only as a young girl who liked to story-knife-using a butter knife in the soft mud to illustrate the tales she’d tell. Now, though, she held in her arms her own fat, squirming baby, who took one look at Laura and pointed at her and laughed.

  “Sorry,” Elaine said shyly. “He’s never seen anyone with that color hair before.” She unwound her scarf and unzipped her coat, then did the same for the baby.

  “Elaine, this is Wass,” Charles said. “He lived here a long time ago.”

  Daniel stood at the introduction, and when he did, the baby reached for him. He grinned, catching the boy as he twisted out of his mother’s arms. “And who’s this?”

  “My son,” Elaine said. “His name’s Cane.”

  Elaine lived in the same house as her parents, along with her two older children and her husband. So did her sister Aurora, who was seventeen years old and heavily pregnant. There was a brother, too, in his late twenties; Laura could see him in the only bedroom in the house, feverishly playing Nintendo.

  On the kitchen table was a hunk of frozen meat in a bowl-if Laura had to guess, she would have said it was intimately related to the moose parts in the arctic entry. There was a stove but no sink. Instead, a fifty-five-gallon drum in the corner of the kitchen area was filled with water. Dusty ice-fishing lures and antique hand-carved kayak paddles were suspended from the ceiling; five-gallon buckets filled with lard and dried fish were stacked beside the threadbare couch. The walls were covered with religious paraphernalia: programs from church services, plaques of Jesus and Mary, calendars printed with the feast days of saints. Anywhere there was a spare square of paneling, a photograph had been tacked: recent pictures of the baby, old school portraits of Elaine and Aurora and their brother, the boy Daniel had been accused of murdering.

  There was a curious irony to being left behind here, even if the very thought of it made Laura break into a sweat. She kept remembering what Daniel had said about the Alaskan bush: It was a place where people tended to disappear. Wh