He disembarked in Haines and rode motorcoaches through the Yukon Corner: a half dozen isolated towns, most named for animals: Whitehorse, Beaver, Chicken. The highway was gravel, occasionally chipped out of cliff sides, and the bus windows were soon pasted with an oily grime. Mosquitoes traveled the aisle hunting passengers.
The driver indicated highlights as they slid past. Abandoned mining dredges; midnight-sun gardens (like gardens on steroids: inflated cabbages, colossal pumpkins). Vast islands of spruce. A road-killed caribou the size of a dairy cow.
Thirty hours of bouncing in that seat and near the end of it Winkler could feel the minute dissociations between each vertebra. He was the last passenger. A trio of cabins marked the end of the route.
Eagle: population 250. He disembarked on traitorous legs. It was 8:40 P.M. and there was still plenty of light in the sky, shadows reaching across the unpaved street, two boys in a Radio Flyer wagon harnessed to dogs watching the bus turn and start back toward Tok.
He started with them: “Naaliyah Orellana? Dark skin, a scientist?” They picked at paint on the wagon walls. “Hello? Do you speak English?”
They nodded.
“But you don’t know her?”
They shook their heads, then mushed the huskies and the wagon started off, creaking up the street.
He could barely read the phone book (thirty or so sheets of paper, clipped together) but there did not seem to be any Naaliyah listed. Out of habit he reached to adjust his glasses but pawed at air.
No one knew her at the Texaco, or the rental cabins, or the propane dealer, or the beadwork shop. He offered the station mechanic a hundred-dollar bill but the man only shook his head: “Can’t summon her out of thin air.”
The sky was huge and purple and the town was tiny beneath it. Nobody seemed to think his plight was all that urgent. It didn’t take long to run out of buildings: a warped box of a bar where a bartender was fast-forwarding a pornographic videotape; the old frame-building custom house; the trading company with its dusty fluorescent lights and neon bags of potato chips shining in plump rows. In his eyes everything was hazy and smeared with light. His ankle ached steadily. Have you seen Naaliyah Orellana? A young woman? Haven’t seen her. Anybody? Nobody.
It was September 20 and he’d been in the United States less than seven weeks. The street ended at a series of sad-looking docks where a few houseboats were tied up. Beyond them the vast, khaki current of the Yukon River slid past, a quarter mile across, like some final and insuperable boundary.
“The airstrip,” a canoe-rental man told him. “I think I saw a gal like that out there. A couple months ago, maybe? Heading to the university land up there.” He waved toward an enormous bluff.
The airfield was less than a mile from town. He trudged the road in half darkness. Off to his right the Yukon rolled on, driving its immeasurable payload of silt northward. He could hardly believe its size: it was a sleek prairie, pocked with boils; it was an avalanche turned on its side.
He felt something uncoiling within him. Brent had warned him—sometimes things only heal partway, or heal wrong—but Winkler had been feeling stronger, his eyes recovering, his pains withdrawing. Now a cold wind came up, and Winkler stopped a moment smelling the night. Another town, another empty pocket. Where would he sleep? All of a sudden his ankle could not hold him. He teetered, and fell.
The Yukon pushed on and on. Winkler tried to hold his head up. There was a sound in the air like women’s voices. “Grace?” he called. “Grace?” He had a vision of her at the bottom of a lagoon, languid, a grown woman, bound in weeds, her hair a sea fan nodding in the current. But the voice came and went, and with it the vision, and then there was only the incessant glide of the river.
He staggered to his feet and went forward in his tattered suit and borrowed tennis shoes. The airstrip appeared abandoned, the shells of two Cessna 207s, cannibalized for parts, parked beside a barn.
The barn door was not latched. Inside it was hushed and beamy as a church, random debris in most of the stalls: tires, drums, bags of shingles, a row of ruined ten-speeds, a rusted snowplow. At the back of the hayloft rose a large, perpendicular trilancet window, looking over a trembling island of birch. There was an ancient mattress below the window and he climbed onto it and lay down and listened to the wind against the panes.
A spring, broken somewhere inside the mattress, groaned weakly. What did he have left? A sense of where the moon was coming over the trees, the wispy silhouettes of clouds. And this feeling, permeating every waking minute, that he had made too many wrong decisions, that he should have gone down to the house from the top of Shadow Hill and waded inside to see if his daughter was there. He should even have taken her in his arms and tried grappling her up the flooded street.
But there was a worse feeling: the possibility that it didn’t matter what he had done, that outcome was independent of choice, that action or inaction, no decision mattered, and his entire attempt at family was now dead and nobody was left to care whether he gave up or kept on.
He draped his arms over his head and peered up at the clouds. The troposphere, at that latitude, was about seven miles thick: a booming, swirling ocean of air. The clouds blowing through it were nimbostratus—made of ice, improbably blue in the moonlight, a collection of crystals so thin you’d feel nothing, only a chill inside your pores, if you could reach up and pass a hand through one.
Already snow was gathering, flying over the trees.
In his injured foot a dull pain pulsed. The shivering of his body had become something he did not quite understand, something far removed from him, as if the single, lukewarm kernel of his being had been set inside a quivering basket of muscles not its own. Leaves sailed toward the glass. And above them—among them now—the first snowflakes.
The wind assumed its voice: moaning against the window, humming around the roof corners; hissing through drafts. It whispered about darkness, about the coming shadows. Let go, it said, let go. A solitary snow crystal struck the pane and held there and expired. Then another. And another.
I have already been reduced, he wanted to say. Leave me be.
Who among us, in our lowest hour, can expect to be saved? Have you loved your life? Have you cherished each miraculous breath?
In a dream a rider came to him through the barn, the horse blowing twin rods of vapor from its nostrils. The rider dismounted and knelt on the boards beside him.
“Can you walk?” A woman’s voice. A hood shading her face.
He did not answer; he realized he was incapable. He watched things from a distance. The rider was not a rider at all; she was a woman in a parka, leaning over the mattress. She lifted him by the belt and collar and heaved him into her arms, his head lolling forward. “Is that your bag?” the voice asked.
But she had a horse, didn’t she? The two of them were gliding down the hay ladder, floating past empty barn stalls, past the ghosts of horses quarantined there, snuffling and pawing in their beds. He swayed in her arms like a drunk, the skin on his lips sloughing off, his eyes nearly rolling back, spectra blooming across the eyeballs and racing into the corners.
Down the stairs. A first breath of air. She—or was it the horse?—grunted beneath him. The wind swept the crowns of the trees and leaves flew among the snowflakes and the horse raised water as its hooves cleaved the mud.
But there was no horse. He was being carried to a truck. Snow gusted across the windshield. Heated air whisked through vents in the dashboard. Rescue was not a thing, he knew, that should happen to him. He reached down and felt the horse’s flank—skin flexing over a rib. The warmth of it beneath his palm.
“Naaliyah?” he asked. “Did you lift me?”
“Ssshh,” she said. “Hush now.”
The horse stepped down through the trees. She folded him onto the bench seat of the truck and fastened the seat belt around him. The snow came harder.