Ian Mackenzie Jeffers The Grey by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers Read Free Book Online Page B

the snow, that’s what most of them are worrying about when they stare across the bar, when they try to fall asleep.  That’s the look they have now, only a good bit worse.  If they die here, they’ve failed their loved ones, they’ve fucked up, mortally, and no remedy.  We sit there, thinking, unused to that as we are, because what we’re used to doing is either worrying or resenting, and most of us are thinking about what ties us to this earth, or doesn’t. 
    I look for my watch suddenly, but it’s gone.
    “What time is it?”  I say.  Reznikoff looks at his.
    “Nine o’ clock,” he says, shrugs. “Little after.” Like it matters.   We sit quiet, another moment. 
    “It feels later, doesn’t it?”  I say. 
    They stare at me, then Tlingit laughs his funeral laugh.
    “It fucking does,” he says.  “I thought it was quarter-after fucked.” 
    Then all of us are laughing our marooned dead asses off.  Three hundred dead guys not counting us, we’re hanging on like ten little ghosts, laughing in the wind.  I remember some poem my wife would say, on sad days, something about somebody dying and dying, into the hands of the wind.  Like we are.   We fall quiet again.  I see Henrick looking at Lewenden, and the other dead, sitting around us.  We’re sitting with corpses, and barely thinking of it, till now.  I see the others looking too.
    Reznikoff looks at Ojeira and the other two, Cismoski and Feeny, passed out or sleeping, again.  He goes and puts his hand on Cismoski suddenly, touches his face.  Then he looks up.
    “He’s dead.”  We all look over at him, shine the light.  Cismoski’s blue-white. 
    “I thought he was going to be OK.”  Bengt says.  Ojeira wakes up, looks around, so does Feeny.  They see us staring, realize Cismoski’s dead, next to them.  Nine ghosts, then. 
    “So did I .”  Knox says, staring at him.  Everybody’s staring at Cismoski.   We should be expecting this kind of thing to happen but we aren’t.  We haven’t understood where we are.  I look at the guys.
    “We should move him outside, maybe.  Lewenden too, and the rest.”    They look at me.  Feeny looks uncomfortable, next to a corpse.  Ojeira does too. 
    “Yeah?” I say.  “Then we look for food, OK?”  Nobody wants to pick up the dead and carry them, but we don’t want to spend the night with them, either.
    We move them, carry them out one by one, as gently as we can, past the fire, out to the snow.  Henrick and I take Lewenden out, and as I tilt to get down the slope through the opening Lewenden’s head rolls just like he’s decided to turn his head and look up at me.  I look at him like I’m sorry, and I am.  I don’t know if he was married, or had kids, I didn’t think so, and I should have said something when he was going if I had thought of it, like ‘ We’ll make sure so-and-so is OK, ’ or ‘ We’ll tell so-and-so you love them, ’ but as he was going I didn’t think of it, I only do now, carrying him.  We get him laid down and get all of them all out, lay them in the snow as decently as we can, and it makes us feel better.
    We come back and everyone stands, more silent than before, back by the fire to feed it and get warmer again. 
     “Anybody see any food?”  I ask.
    “Must be something,” Henrick says. 
    We pull ourselves away from the fire, which is not easy to do, and look for what food there is, by what light there is.  We find frozen dinners, pieces of sandwich, power-bars, juice-cans, water-bottles, frozen, bits and pieces.  A couple of dozen bags of fucking peanuts and pretzels.   We count and divvy and try to figure how long we can make what we have last.
    “Maybe we can hunt, somehow,” I say.  “Stretch this out.”  What we’ll hunt, and what we’ll hunt with, I have no idea.  Water isn’t a problem, we’re walking on it.  We take a little food to Ojeira and Feeny, make sure they aren’t freezing.  Then we get back