The Spirit

The Indian’s snowmobile bounced in swishing heaves, like a boat fighting waves. He felt himself to be on a planet that hated him, an insane world rippled with bone-­shattering ridges of ground. The storm tried to entomb him into a block of ice as an oyster coats an irritant with the smooth glossy shell of pearl. The physical anchors of the engine’s heat, the pull of the handlebars, and the red glint of Jason’s taillight kept him oriented.

His faith was all but smashed to pieces. It had survived Jason’s assaults in the bungalow this morning, but the girl’s casual remarks had pried it a bit looser. The most savage blow had come from the words of the red-­haired man minutes before. His spirit did not kill people! Jason would turn and ambush him at any moment. This was all an accident. His spirit had mistakenly led him into a place where devils dwelled. The cold, the storm, the night ride over this spine-­compressing land was all a trap. The vanful of passengers was safe in town.

Yet the strongest assault came from his grandfather’s words. His faith could not sustain a betrayal. He would not believe that his “spirit” was a natliskeliguten—a devil. Everything—his life, his soul, his sanity—depended on what they found at the river.

They crossed the road well back from the bridge and headed down the lip of the gorge. Jason switched on his spotlight and swept it from side to side.

They stopped at the edge of the black river. Jason’s light found a brassiere swept up against a jutting rock. They forged up the shoreline into the gorge, the lights picking out pants, shirts, underwear, sweatshirts with Colby emblems, spilled toilet cases and flight bags mixed with toothpaste and ski poles.

A girl’s body undulated half in the water, half on shore, her arm wedged between rocks. The van lay on its back in the middle of the river, square columns of water gushing through the punched-­out windows. Some bodies were still wedged in them; others lay against the rocks in the water as though being scrubbed clean for their final journey.

Jason dismounted and walked up to the concrete pillars in which bridge supports had been sunk. The base surfaces had been chipped away. Some holes were gouges, some mere pits, but Jason now knew what Lester’s apparition had been doing down here that night.

He ran his light over the concrete. Pointed tools had been used. This was the result of many patient hours of night work.

They used tools. Jason’s imagination again reeled with horror. Iron tools, probably, maybe even pickaxes left behind in the Limerick. Perhaps through the years they had glimpsed men chopping wood or digging in the ground and in their huge dim brains the human spark had connected that activity to this bridge.

Jason ran his light over a man lying splayed against the rocks of the opposite shore. The passengers were scattered among the luggage like thrown rags. Faces, some mangled, some peaceful, swam down the beam of his flashlight. Over all was the foaming rumble of the river.

Abruptly Jason could stomach no more. He walked back to Moon, who was kneeling beside the girl, face stony-blank, his thumb rolling back an eyelid.

“Moon, forget it!” he shouted. “They’re all dead. Let’s get out of here.”

The Indian moved his hand from the girl’s eye to her wrist, feeling for a pulse. Jason shook his shoulder.

“You hear me? We’ll call the Rangers from the lodge.” The Indian lowered the girl’s arm. He stared motionlessly into the river, with such concentration that Jason involuntarily looked to see if anything was there.

Then the Indian stood up with a slow movement, like a fish laboriously surfacing. He opened his coveralls and untied his medicine bundle.

He took out the toe and handed it to Jason. Without a word, he walked down the embankment to the snow­mobiles.

“Moon? Moon?” Jason examined the precious toe in the light. “What’s going on?”

The Indian climbed onto his snowmobile and pointed it up the slope. Jason stumbled down the gorge after him.

“Wait a minute, Moon! Why are you giving up your talisman? Answer me, will you?”

Moon roared up the slope toward the road, leaving Jason alone.

With trembling fingers, Jason slipped the toe into a zippered pocket next to his gun and climbed onto his own machine. He shouted at Moon as he drove up, but the wind and the sound of his motor whipped away his voice.

The Indian set a tremendous pace into the wind, but Jason did not mind. All his aches and pains—his sore neck, his injured arm—left him as though exorcised by the toe in his pocket. The greatest of anesthetics is elation, Jason decided. Next to tension, of course. The Indian had given him the toe. It was his.