The Wild (22 page)

Dawson was bustling as Jack entered, and he drew only a few casual glances. He was one of many men and women returning from the wilds, and though he had seen more than most, his physical appearance at least seemed unremarkable. Indeed, the time he had spent with Lesya—able to shave, wash his clothes, and eat enough food to stave off hunger and illness—seemed to have fended off some of the worst effects of the wilderness, and some of the people he saw looked like little more than walking skeletons.

One man had a toothless mouth, lips rotted away by sores, one of his eyes milky white from blindness. Another had lost both hands to frostbite, and he wandered the streets muttering words to himself that no one seemed keen to hear. Jack passed them by and approached the Yukon Hotel, its familiarity both depressing and comforting: comforting because it was somewhere he had been
happy with his friends, if just for a moment; and depressing because entering seemed like turning his back on his own incredible adventures.

“Jack London,” he said to the man behind the counter.

“London,” the man said. “Huh. That's no easy name to forget. Sorry, friend, but the boy you seek is dead.”

Jack blinked several times, trying to keep a straight face. One second he felt tears threatening, the next, laughter. And then the man's face sagged and his eyes grew wide as he realized who he was talking to.

He was given one of the last rooms in the hotel, a small, dingy place that nonetheless had a bed and a basin. The hotel man brought him some food and arranged a line of credit for his stay.

“I'll only be here for a couple of days,” Jack said. “I'm heading home.”

“Well good luck to you,” the man said, and he sounded genuine. “Enough people make it this far and just stay.”

“Have many returned?”

“Some.”

“And gold?”

The man shrugged. “Some.”

“It's a fool's game,” Jack said, and as the man turned to leave he nodded in agreement. “Wait!” Jack called, suddenly remembering. “Do you still have my gear?”

“I…” The man stood in the open doorway, eyes averted, mouth working even though no noise emerged.

“You don't,” Jack said. “You sold it.”

“I thought you were dead.”

“And what gave you that idea?” Jack asked harshly. “A man goes for gold, and you steal everything he has to his name?”

“After you left, there were whispers around town about who'd taken you. You and your mates. And after so much time went by, I just assumed…”

Jack was angry, but he was also suddenly very tired. He waved at the man, closed his eyes, and said, “You can pay me back tomorrow.”

“I'll pay you what I can. And for the record, I'm glad to see you back. Good to know you're not the only one who got away from those murdering bastards.”

“Not the only one?” Jack said, eyes snapping open again.

“Your big friend, Sloper. Spends his days drinking in the Dawson Bar.”

“Merritt,” Jack said, and he did not even notice when the man shut the door and clomped downstairs.
Merritt is alive!
For a few heartbeats he could not move. Then he rose stiffly from the bed and stood swaying in the center of the room. He tried to cast his mind back to the Wendigo attack, the slaughter, the screaming and blood, and though he'd been
pressed down at the time—the wolf on his back, preventing him from going to try to help Merritt—he'd convinced himself since that he had seen Merritt killed. He could never remember the actual moment but had thought perhaps it had been his mind protecting him from the awful bloody truth.

“Merritt Sloper,” he said, and the name sounded good spoken aloud. He smiled. Then he went to the basin, splashed in some cold water from the jug, and swilled his face.

Above the basin was a mirror, and without thinking Jack looked at his reflection.

A stranger stared back at him. This stranger had the same wild hair, laughing eyes, and askew smile—a grin still on his lips at the thought of Merritt's survival—but he was someone Jack had never seen before. This was a far older man than he had last seen in a mirror. His skin was weathered, and grazed all down one side of his face. And those smiling eyes were also cautious, as if constantly expecting to see something terrible beyond the smile.

“I'm Jack London,” Jack said, and his reflection said the same.

Turning away from that version of himself, he shrugged on his coat and headed downstairs.

He crossed the street and paused outside the Dawson Bar. The last time he'd been here had been with Merritt, the same evening that Archie and William had jumped
them in their room and cracked them all across the heads. Then, the bar had smelled of desperation, a place between destinations where some people lived their lives in a state of perpetual suspension. He'd looked down on those people, swearing to Merritt that he'd never be like that, and he felt some satisfaction that he'd gone on to have such adventures, though such adventures had been brought on by events rather than choice.

What gave him pause now was what the hotel's owner had said.
Spends his days drinking in the Dawson Bar
. Merritt was a big man with an expansive heart, and Jack had no wish to see him reduced in such a way.

If worse came to worst, then it would be up to Jack to rescue him.

He barged through the doors into the bar. Looking around, he spied Merritt quickly, slumped over the same table in the far corner that he and Jack had occupied months before. A whiskey bottle sat on the table in front of him, half empty, and the man's grizzled features seemed somehow blurred by drunkenness. Jack recognized well enough the appearance of an alcoholic, but Merritt seemed to be cursed even more—here was a man driven to drink who did not enjoy it one bit.

Opposite Merritt sat Hal, the boy Jack had rescued from Archie and William. He looked up as Jack stood by the
doors, his eyes went wide, and he whispered, “Jack London.”

“Dead,” Merritt said. “Taken by the monster.” Several people close to Merritt groaned, and a couple even laughed, throwing casual abuse his way. “You'll laugh!” Merritt said, voice rising. “When it has you by the legs so it can chew on your guts, you'll…you'll…” He slumped to the tabletop again, mumbling something into the pool of dribble spreading from his mouth.

“No, Merritt,” Hal said. He stood up from the table and smiled. “Jack's here!”

Merritt looked up at Jack. A few other people seemed interested, but Jack only had eyes for Merritt, this wreck of his friend.

“Jack London's dead,” Merritt said.

“I'm here, Merritt,” Jack said. “And it seems to me you're the one who's almost lost.”

Jack sat at their table and accepted Hal's offer of a drink. The boy regarded him with wide-eyed fascination, hardly able to talk, and when he did, it was in hushed, almost reverential tones. Jack sat quietly for a while, letting Merritt examine him from a drunken distance. The big man had changed so much, but then Jack remembered that so had he. The stranger in the mirror still haunted him.

At last Merritt slipped into a troubled sleep, the hubbub in the bar around them went back to normal, and Hal
stared blinking at Jack.

Jack had to remind himself that Hal was only a couple of years younger than him. He looked like a kid—he
was
a kid—yet Jack was happy to see a friendly face.

“So what is it?” Jack asked at last. Though he spoke to Hal, he watched Merritt, hoping that his friend would wake with recognition in his eyes, but he was far gone. Perhaps tomorrow.

“Well…Merritt has such stories,” Hal said. “He talks about…”

“Monsters?” Jack said.

Hal nodded.

“Well, he'll find a lot of ugly things at the bottom of a glass.”

“He was talking about them as soon as he got back, long before he started on the booze.”

“Trail madness.” Jack took a drink, closing his eyes and savoring the harsh taste.

“Then he ain't the only madman from that trail,” Hal said.

Jack glanced at the kid. Held the glass up, breathed in the whiskey fumes.
I saw them all die!

“That bastard Archie's back in Dawson,” Hal said quietly. “Ain't nearly so brutish now—had that shot outa him, by all accounts. But he's hooked up with the same types, an' there's talk that they're goin' out again.”

“Archie,” Jack said. “You're sure?”
William shot him, left him for dead, the Wendigo killed William, and then…?
But the memory ended there.

“Sure I'm sure.” Hal nodded, but he couldn't hold Jack's gaze for more than a few moments.

Jack sat back, looked around the bar, and took another drink. It seemed his adventures might not yet be over. Hal poured him another, music played, men and women drank and smoked, and though depressing in many ways, the familiar surroundings managed to relax Jack at last. Merritt snored softly on the table beside him, and this could have been a bar anywhere.

Later, after Hal and Jack had all but finished the whiskey, Hal leaned in close.
Here it comes
, Jack thought.
Here's what he's been trying to say all evening
.

“So tell me what happened,” Hal said.

Jack frowned for a while, staring into an unseen distance, and he strove to hear a wolf howl that was far from there. Perhaps it was the whiskey, but he smiled.

“All right, Hal. I'm headed home, and once I leave Dawson, I'm never going to tell the story again,” he said. “So you'll be the only one to hear it. And it will be up to you what you believe.”

And into the early hours, Jack London told his tale.

M
ORNING BROUGHT NO EPIPHANY
. When he had learned that Merritt was still alive, he had wondered if the big man would still hold him responsible for Jim Goodman's death, or if the tensions that had strained their friendship in the days before the Wendigo's attack would remain. He could never have guessed that Merritt's reaction would be so much worse than anger or resentment.

When they encountered each other over breakfast in the hotel parlor, Merritt still did not recognize him. He continued to insist that Jack London had died that night in the slavers' camp. When Jack pressed him on it, the big man seemed to become confused and sad and angry in almost equal measures, and then his eyes grew distant in a way that had nothing to do with the alcohol in which he'd been stewing his brain for weeks. It wasn't madness,
however. Jack had met his share of madmen. Rather, he thought that a part of Merritt remained in the north, in the ruined camp on the bank of the creek, that he had never entirely returned.

Jack feared he never would, but he resolved to treat Merritt with care. Further shock might be more than the man could handle. Picking at the biscuits and gravy on his plate, Merritt tugged his bushy red beard and seemed to start at sounds no one else could hear. Still broad shouldered and imposing, he had thinned since their ordeal in the wilderness, and though only a few years Jack's senior, he now appeared much older.

Over the rim of his coffee cup, Jack watched his friend closely. Merritt needed to be woken out of his fog, the parts of his thinking self brought back together, but it had to be done with caution.

If
, Jack thought,
it can ever be done at all
.

 

After breakfast, he went to see the hotel's owner, who turned out to have the somewhat unlikely name of Mortimer Dowd. The man glanced up from the morning's mail—which he was sorting into piles for the hotel's guests—and a sheepish look came over his face.

“I supposed it was too much to hope that a decent night's rest would make you forget,” the man said, straightening
the bow tie he wore, seemingly to give the Yukon Hotel an air of sophistication—or even merely civilization—that it could never establish on its own merits.
Like a prostitute with a parasol
, Jack thought, but did not say.

“And a good morning to you, Mr. Dowd,” he said.

The man's gaze flicked down to the twin gun belts Jack wore. He had almost hesitated to don them again this morning but quickly decided they would be his companions on the journey home, along with the other weapons he had brought back from the slavers' camp. As it was, he felt uncomfortable leaving the saddlebags in his hotel room. He hadn't breathed a word about the gold he had found to anyone, not even young Hal the night before, but there were some men in Dawson who hungered for it so badly that he would not put it past them to somehow sense its presence.

“I'm truly sorry,” Dowd said, glancing at the guns again. “But the way your friend Sloper talked, and from the whispers I'd heard 'bout what went on up there…and it had been so long since you left—”

“I'll put it to you plainly, sir,” Jack interrupted. “I'm no stranger to bloodshed, and I can think of a couple of dozen ways to hurt or even kill you just with the things here in this room and with the blades and guns I'm carrying.”

Dowd swallowed, wetted his lips, and shook his head in a silent plea. Back in the spring, when Jack had first
encountered him, the man would likely have laughed and hurled him bodily into the street—or tried. This morning, he did not dare make the attempt.

“Come now, Mr. London—”

Jack laughed.
Mr.
London, indeed, and him still years off from twenty. The laugh must have had a hysterical edge to it, for Dowd dropped the mail he'd been sorting and moved to put a dark wooden table between them.

“I've done a little thinking, Dowd. I've had enough of blood and enough of trouble, so you can breathe easily.”

The man blinked warily, untrusting.

“Honestly,” Jack said. “I don't have the time or the inclination to give you the thrashing I'd like to deliver, or even to argue about how long you ought to have waited. My friends and I paid you to store our things. Instead, you sold them. I understand your reasoning, and can't really say I blame you, much. But that doesn't excuse the act.”

Dowd, now realizing no violence seemed likely to erupt, nodded cooperatively. “I agree. And again, I can't say how sorry I am. If I still had the money, I'd pay you back every cent, but I put it into improvements on the hotel.”

Jack cocked an eyebrow and glanced around. If any improvements had been made to the shabbily constructed and decorated establishment, he had not noticed them. But no matter….

“I'm going home,” Jack said, and the word felt strangely, and somehow wonderfully, unfamiliar on his lips. “I'm sure you'll be happy to see the back of me, so I want you to help make that happen as soon as possible. For the next couple of days, I'll be visiting several shops in town to put together the supplies I'll need to get me to Dyea.”

“Certainly,” Dowd said.

Jack smiled. “You'll be paying for everything.”

Dowd frowned, and it seemed as though he might suddenly find the courage to argue.

“The cost will be far less than what you garnered by selling my things,” Jack observed. “And the farther I am from Dawson, the easier you'll breathe.”

Now Dowd actually smiled. “There
is
that.”

“Then we're agreed?” Jack asked.

Dowd thrust out a hand to shake. Jack did not so much as glance at it.

“Not so fast. There's also the matter of my bill.”

Now that he believed he would be quit of Jack soon, and without any bullet holes or other wounds incurred in the meantime—and at a tidy profit, all things considered—the man stood straighter, almost magnanimous.

“Think nothing of it, Jack. If you'll be only a few days, there'll be no charge for your room or your meals. It's the least I can do.”

“It would be,” Jack agreed. “But you're also going to make Merritt Sloper's bill disappear.”

Dowd blanched. “For how long?”

“Is he paid up to today?”

“Until Friday,” Dowd replied.

Jack took a breath. Today could have been Sunday or Thursday, for all he knew, but he wasn't about to admit that.

“He doesn't pay you another dime until I leave Dawson. Not for a drink or a meal or a bed. Not even if he wants you to shine his shoes.”

Reluctantly, lifting his chin in slight defiance, Dowd gave a tilt of his head that Jack took as acceptance. “Will Sloper be leaving with you?”

“I hope so.”

After a moment, the man held his hand out again. This time Jack shook it.

“I didn't come here to make enemies, Mr. Dowd,” Jack said, softening a little. “I came for an adventure, and got more than I bargained for.”

“Consider yourself fortunate. Most get less.”

Before he could stop himself, Jack laughed. It broke the tension between them.

“I really didn't think you were coming back,” Dowd said.

“I know. For a long time, neither did I.”

 

Over the next few days, as Jack made his preparations, he saw Merritt half a dozen times in the street, on the hotel stairs, or in the Dawson Bar, but somehow Merritt could no longer see him. Twice Jack ventured to speak to him, but his words fell on deaf ears. Merritt did not acknowledge his presence with even the slightest twitch or glance, until Jack began to feel like a ghost haunting the shattered man and decided to leave him alone.

But when all his preparations had been made, his departure scheduled for the following morning, Jack knew he simply could not leave Dawson without talking to his friend. Merritt's mind had slipped. He gazed at some middle distance, never quite aware of the solidity of the world around him, and Jack feared that if he did not do something to bring Merritt back into the real world, he would be lost inside himself forever, just as gone as if he had died at the Wendigo's hands.

Yet Jack knew his previous efforts to get through to Merritt had been spectacularly unsuccessful. His chances, he determined, would be greatly improved if he had someone there Merritt
would
acknowledge.

Thus he found himself, that Monday afternoon, standing just inside the city's newspaper office. Hal sat behind a makeshift desk writing in longhand, his fingers stained
with ink from the printing press that sat somewhere in the rear of the building, silent for the moment. His dog, Dutch, lay on the floor beside the desk, ears pricking up at Jack's arrival.

“A pretty girl,” Jack said.

Hal glanced up, brightening instantly. “Jack!”

The boy—no longer a boy, really, if he even had been one before—jumped from his chair and rushed over. Dutch raised his head, watched them a moment, and then rested it on his forepaws again, utterly uninterested in that way only dogs can ever manage. But Hal had enough enthusiasm for both of them. He thrust out his hand with such energetic bonhomie that Jack could not have refused to shake it, despite the ink. Only after a moment did Hal frown at him.

“What's this about a pretty girl?”

“At the saddlery: blond hair, pale as winter—”

“Sally Corrigan.”

Jack nodded, noting the light flush that came to Hal's cheeks when he spoke the girl's name. “She told me where to find you. You hadn't mentioned working for the newspaper.”

“It's a recent development,” Hal said.

Jack took a deep breath, his smile faltering. “Can you spare a few minutes?”

“Of course. What—?”

“I'm leaving tomorrow. Before I go, I mean to talk to
Merritt. I thought it might help if you were there. A face he'll let himself see.”

Hal nodded, glanced back at his desk, and then reached into his pocket for a key. “Stay, Dutch,” he said to the dog, then looked at Jack. “He'll be at the bar by now. If we hurry, we can get him before he's too drunk to see
either
of us.”

 

Jack didn't expect Merritt to be the only one in the bar, not in a place as blanketed in lost hope as Dawson, but still it startled him to find the place murmuring with life, ale and whiskey flowing freely. It would be much louder, and much busier, when night came on and the darkness reminded lost souls, and even those still hopeful, how far they were from home. But, still, there were twenty-five or thirty people in the bar, a handful of them eating the meager fare the place offered because they couldn't be bothered to seek a proper meal elsewhere. They'd put down roots in the place.

Roots
. The word put images of Leshii and his beautiful daughter into Jack's head, and he shook them off like cobwebs. The sooner he left the vast emptiness of the north behind, the better.

“In the back,” Hal said, nodding toward the farthest corner.

It seemed strange to Jack that Merritt would take up a
post there, at a small round table on the opposite side of the room from the actual bar. He would have to get up and trek over to the counter to order himself another drink, and there were plenty of stools to be had within arm's reach of the bartender. He seemed almost to be hiding, there in the corner, and there in his glass, as well.

Hal led the way and they threaded through the tables, passing men mostly sullen and women falsely garrulous, all of them waiting for something to happen to shake them from their stupor and trying not to wonder what would become of them if nothing ever did.

Jack craved simple, unaffected, genuine laughter, and he knew he would find it back home in California. But he would not have earned it until he had thrown the heavy gray cloak of this place from his shoulders. He wanted an ordinary girl with bright, intelligent eyes and a smile both shy and full of promise. The Yukon held some of the greatest beauty he had ever beheld, but it was an uncaring place, and he yearned for a warm Pacific sunset.

But not yet.

“Merritt,” he began, as they approached the table.

Hal held up a hand to stop him from saying anything else. The kid who was no longer a kid slid into the chair opposite the man with the shaggy red beard, who had once been Jack's friend. Jack hung back, watching, and after a
moment, Merritt looked up at Hal.

“Thought you got yourself a job,” Merritt said. He cocked his head as if he weren't entirely sure Hal was there.

“I quit early today,” Hal said. “Figured I'd come over and see if you wanted to have some dinner with me.”

Merritt ran his fingers through his overgrown beard. “Bit early for dinner.”

“But not for whiskey?”

That actually got a smile out of Merritt, but it lasted only a moment before it became a sneer. “Never too early for whiskey. Not here, so far from the world.”

“This is part of the world, Merritt,” Jack said.

Hal shot him a look meant to silence him, but Jack had run out of time to wait for Merritt to recover from the trauma he had endured. He grabbed a chair from another table and dragged it over, and now the three of them sat together. Merritt, as always, seemed not to see him.

Jack rapped his knuckles on the table. Merritt flinched.

“There you go,” Jack said. “I'm not a ghost.”

“I don't know who the hell you are,” Merritt said. “But you watch yourself in here. Man could get a knife in the belly as easy as a drink in this place.”

Jack smiled. Progress. Merritt wouldn't look him in the eyes, acted like the chair had just dragged itself over and nobody sat there, but he had responded. That was a start.

“Merritt, you've got to stop,” Hal said. “You've gotta see. It's—”

“Hush,” Jack said.

Hal clammed up and gestured for him to continue.

Jack reached out and grabbed Merritt's arm. The big man recoiled at the touch, the chair scraping on the floorboards, and his chest started to rise and fall with ragged, panicked breaths. But Merritt didn't go for a weapon.