Page 47

“Yep.”

I picture a rodent that big crossing my path, and Nick lets me get all the way there before he cracks.

“Don’t joke about this stuff.” I shove him, but it’s like pushing a slab of concrete. “I need facts to be properly prepared for whatever’s around here.”

“Very true.” Pretending to be serious again, he marches off in the direction of the game. I stand beside him as he tosses the rings one after the other with barely a flick of his wrist. He watches the attendant between throws. Every one lands on the farthest bottles.

“Congrats.” I laugh. “Carnival game hustler was your original career choice, wasn’t it?”

“Not even close.”

“We have a winner!” the attendant announces, and he waves a long cane at the wall of prizes. “What’ll it be?”

“I’ll take the big guy.” Nick points to the beaver.

He lifts the giant beaver from the hook with his cane and hands it to Nick.

“The real ones are about half this size.” He gives it to me. “Now you have a reference point.”

“Thank you.” I give Mr. Beaver’s whiskers my full attention. No guy has ever won me a prize before. I’ve scoffed at this exact scene in about forty movies, and I’d like to revise my position.

And we aren’t even friends.

He’s stopped trying to make me quit, and he hasn’t taken back a word of what he said. And somewhere in the last few hours I stopped keeping score.

“You want to take a walk?” he asks.

I watch the throngs of people move around us. “Only if we’re not talking about the van.”

“We’re not talking about the van.”

We walk across a little arched footbridge at the bottom of the lodge grounds to the park by the creek. Couples share log seats in front of a bonfire, knitted blankets draped over their knees. There are thirty or so people here, enjoying cocoa and s’mores from a food cart.

A banner stretches above the arch of the gazebo: Legends and Stories of Ravenslight Creek. Up close, the carving is finer than the one at Marthe’s, less hurried, but the same artist. Three people are sitting on the gazebo deck, and I know two of them. Roslyn from the newspaper leans in to talk to a middle-aged man I’ve seen at the grocery store a couple of times, and they laugh. The third is Hazel, the gatekeeper of town hall.

Nick and I find seats near the front as Roslyn takes the microphone.

“Ravenslight Creek was founded on cooperation. Newcomers descended on this valley looking for a place to settle, and found a home alongside those already rooted in this land. Together, we built this town. Through this collision of cultures were born many stories, myths, and legends. Some of which we’ll share with you tonight. Hazel, would you like to begin?”

Hazel stands, taking the microphone, and launches into a story about the first family to farmstead here, long before it became a town. Next, the man, Lloyd Thomas, broad through the shoulders, gray at his temples, the Tanana Chiefs Conference logo embroidered over his breast pocket. He doesn’t stand up and doesn’t need the microphone to be heard, as he tells the history of his people on this water. His grandmother was born eleven miles upstream, and her grandmother before that, and neither of them called it Ravenslight Creek.

Thomas. I saw that name in the bicentennial article.

“There’s a longer version,” he says. “You’d have to know me better.”

He hands the microphone back to Roslyn. No one seems surprised except me.

She tells a myth about the dark ones and how they made an agreement with those already living around Ravenslight Creek for protection in exchange for stepping into the light. It’s all metaphor, and I’m hunting for the subtext.

“And so those condemned to walk in the dark could come into the light, and in return, protect the people of Ravenslight.” She looks in my direction, and it takes me a second to follow her eyes to the left, to Nick. “Trust and cooperation built the foundation of this town. Both sides have to keep choosing it.”

Roslyn pauses, a beat too long, still watching Nick. He hasn’t moved. Then she hands the microphone to Lloyd.

“People say we let them stay.” Lloyd doesn’t use the microphone. “We didn’t let them do anything. It was an agreement, not a gift.”

When the stories finish, we wait to get a cup of cocoa from the cart. “Do you know Roslyn well?”

“Yeah.” He watches the line move and doesn’t elaborate.