Jessi Gates
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An extract from the novel Muskeg
The Search
Lars Nelsen saw his first dead body after moving up to Alaska.
The woman had slid off the road while descending into the Copper Valley. She was suspended in the inverted truck, held aloft by her seatbelt, and her hair hung down from her scalp as though she had been electrified by gravity. Lars cleared more frost off the windshield with his ice scraper to get a better look. He shined his flashlight through the glittering glass. Her lips and forehead were swollen and discolored. Her eyelashes, white with frost, framed her focused eyes.
“She’s been here a long time,” Henry Linder surmised, leaning over Lars’s shoulder and peering through the windshield.
“Why do you say that?” Lars wondered if this was the State Trooper’s professional opinion, or if he was just making conversation.
Henry, uniform obscured by a shapeless down jacket, brushed off the snow that had accumulated on the front bumper. “There’s at least six inches here,” he said. “She crashed before the last big snow.”
Other men arrived to help pull the corpse out of the car, bending her frozen limbs until they creaked and gave way, threading her through the driver-side door. Lars watched, his hands in his pockets. Then Henry had fastened her to a child’s plastic sled behind his snow machine and pulled her up the steep embankment back to the highway and the waiting ambulance. The sled jostled and bounced up the hill. Lars had wanted to shout for Henry to slow down, to be careful.
Although that had happened a long time ago, Lars couldn’t help but thinking of that woman, long hair flopping with each jarring rut, skin tinged blue and then red by the light of the silent ambulance. Because now, three winters later, it might be Craig and Danny Patterson on that plastic sled.
The eight snow machines roared down the trail as the team rode hard, out to the search site. Lars brought up the rear, driving more slowly and squinting against the bright sun. He had Annie Patterson on his machine, and the rough trail was bound to be hard on her frail frame. It was just as well; Lars was unable to make himself keep up with the reckless pace that the other men had set.
“Life is about risks,” his wife, Meg, had said to him more than once. “You are going to kill us with your carefulness.”
Annie rested her forehead on Lars’s back to protect her face from the wind. Her short arms couldn’t reach around even his gangly frame, so she held on to the pockets of his parka with her mittened hands. She was seventy-three and would not be much help on this search party, but she had a right to be there. They were looking for her grandsons.
They headed out to the Bowl – a flat, wide field surrounded by mountains, and the most logical place to begin looking for the boys. The Bowl was a favorite spot among local snow machiners: the treacherous, steep inclines challenged even the most advanced rider and the long valley invited an open throttle.
Lars had seen boys like Craig and Danny take their machines far up the mountainside until the slope was almost perpendicular to the valley, before swinging around with a deft turn of their handlebars into a descent of breakneck speeds. Riders would look at the tracks they had left to determine who had gotten the highest, like a game of chicken against physics. Occasionally gravity would win out over momentum, and a machine would tumble engine over tailpipe down into the Bowl, throwing its stunned rider into the snow.