The Dogs of Winter by Nunn Kem

Author:Nunn, Kem [Nunn, Kem]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2013-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

18

With the coming of the morning, Kendra saw the men clearly for the first time. There were three of them and she saw that they were Indians. One was no older than a boy, dressed like a cholo. She believed she had seen him before, in town, or around the reservation. The others were strange to her. One was skinny with a narrow, pointed face and long white hair. The other was big. Not tall, but thick-chested and thick in the arms and thighs and neck. His hair was long and braided. He wore a long drooping mustache and a patch of hair beneath his chin, and she knew he was the one who had surprised her at the trailer.

When she had seen him on the landing, she had run. She had not gotten far. She had been taken quickly and with great force. The other way she was taken did not happen then and there, but later, on a filthy mattress in the back of the homegrown camper. Which was where she was just now, the vantage point from which she viewed the men.

They were hunkered about a small fire from which gray smoke spooled away into a wet gray morning. There was coffee that they laced with alcohol, and someone had apparently made a run into town because there were Egg McMuffins and Tater Tots and biscuits and sausages that she could smell wafting through the cracks in the bare plywood walls and through the sliding glass windows which had been left open to the chill morning air. She could smell the trees on the air as well as the food, and this came as a kind of perverse reminder that indeed another world continued to exist beyond these warped and splintered walls, thought it seemed to her now, in light of what had transpired, that her entrance to that world must surely have been revoked and would remain so from here on out.

No one thought to offer her any food, although she did not believe she could have eaten anyway, as her mouth was still sour with rancid jissim and her throat sore and her body bruised and bleeding. Eventually she was given to understand that what they were talking about was her. They were trying to decide what to do with her, now that they had her.

The boy apparently favored pushing her off a cliff.

“Everybody knows she walks in the woods at night.”

“You pumped enough paste into her. They’ll see what happened before she got pushed.”

“You pumped some into her yourself.”

The skinny one favored taking her deeper into the woods where no one would find her.

“That’s deep.”

“Deep like I was up her ass with it.”

“Yeah, all three inches.”

At length, however, the big man, who till now had been squatting on his haunches and poking at the fire with a stick, said what he wanted and she saw right away that that was how it would be.

“We take her,” he said.

The skinny one seemed to like the idea.

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