by Blake Crouch
“Doesn’t look like much,” he said by way of greeting.
Dee looked up from where she sat on the kitchen floor, surrounded by cans and glass jars and packages. “How’d the car do?”
“Rough as hell, but I got it to the shed. Maybe I’ll play mechanic in a few days, see if I can fix what’s wrong.”
They spent the morning dividing out the food and trying to see what they might make from the staples like flour and sugar, assuming Jack could fire up the solar power system and get the stove working. In the end, rationing as frugally as they could stomach, they calculated enough meals to feed their family for thirteen days.
“That’s not good enough,” Dee said. “And we’re going to be hungry all the time before we actually begin to starve to death.”
“It’s more food than we had yesterday. I saw some fly-fishing gear in the shed, and there’s a stream out back.”
“You took one class, Jack. Two years ago. None of your flies at home ever touched water, and you think you’re going to go out there and catch enough fish for us—”
“How about sending some positive energy into this situation, dear-heart?”
She flashed a fake smile, batted her eyes. “I’m sure you’ll catch more than we can eat, Jack. I know you can do it.”
“You’re such a bitch.” He said it with love.
He assembled a six-weight fly rod in the shed, stocked his vest with an assortment of flies, and carried a small cooler into the woods toward the sound of moving water. Found it fifty yards in—a wide, slow stream that flowed through the aspen. He sat down on the grassy bank. The sun as high as it would be all day. Light coming down through the trees in clear, bright splashes. The sky cloudless. Almost purple.
He filled the cooler in the stream. Got the tippet tied on and chose a fly at random. Took him five attempts to cinch the knot, then walked downslope until he came to a shaded pool several feet deep and out of the ruckus of the main current.
His first cast overshot the stream and the fly snagged on a spruce sapling. He waded across, the water knee-deep and freezing, and clambered out onto the warm grass on the opposite bank.
An hour later, he felt his first tap.
Midafternoon, he hooked a fingerling, Jack tugging the green line and backing away from the stream. It flopped in the grass, and he carefully lifted the fish which torqued violently and then went still, gills pulsing in his hand. Silver. Spotted with brown dots. He unhooked the fly and walked back to the cooler and dipped the trout into the water, thinking, God, was it small. Two or three bites at most if he didn’t completely destroy the thing when he tried to clean it.
They dined at the kitchen table as the light ran out—two cans of cold navy beans split between the four of them, three pretzels apiece, water from one of the plastic jugs Dee had brought in from the Rover.
“How many fish did you catch?” Cole asked.
“One,” Jack said.
“How big?”
Jack held his pointer fingers five inches apart.
“Oh.”
“It’s still in the cooler by the stream. But I saw some big ones.”
“Can I come fishing with you tomorrow?”
“Absolutely.”
Middle of the night, Jack sat up in bed.
“What’s wrong?” Dee asked, still half-asleep.
“I should’ve cut down the mailbox.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The mailbox by the road. The one Naomi saw that led us here.”
“Do it first thing in the morning.”
“No, I’m going now. I won’t be able to sleep.”
He hiked down with the chainsaw in the dark, reached the road at four in the morning. Cold. Below freezing he would’ve guessed. That distant, square-topped mountain shining silver under the moon. He walked out into the road and stood listening for a while.
The chainsaw motor seemed inappropriate at this hour. Like screams in a church. He decapitated the mailbox and carried it across the road and threw it down the mountainside.
Walking back up to the cabin, he rounded a hairpin curve and froze. Heart accelerating at what loomed just twenty feet up the road. It raised its enormous head, the giant rack pale and sharp in the predawn. He’d almost brought the shotgun, decided against it fearing his left arm couldn’t bear the weight. And so he watched the seven-hundred-pound elk walk off the road and vanish into the trees, wondering how long it might have fed his family.
* * * * *
BY midmorning, he had the off-grid power system up and running, water pumping in through the tap from the underground cisterns, and the water heater beginning to warm. They filled five plastic grocery bags under the faucet and tied them off and stowed them in the chest freezer. Tried not to acknowledge the fact that they were all skipping lunch.
Jack left Dee and Naomi to scour The Joy of Cooking for efficient bread recipes that jived with their ingredient list, and took his son with him into the woods.
He’d anticipated Cole wanting to fish, and since there wasn’t any spinning tackle to be had in the shed, surprised the boy with a provisional pole he’d fashioned that morning—an aspen sapling skinned of bark and fitted with an eight-foot length of nylon string and a ceiling screw hook with which Cole might only inflict minimal damage.
The knot tying went faster and the casting smoother, Jack sticking the fly in the vicinity of his intent almost every time.
He’d caught two fingerlings by three o’clock and his first grown-up fish by four—a twelve-inch Rainbow on a dry fly that had been loitering in a pool beside a cascade. Cole screamed with delight as Jack brought the fish ashore, both of them squatting in that pure fall light to inspect the reddish band and the black spots and the micaceous skin that faded into white at the edges.
“It’s really something, isn’t it?” Jack said.
“You did good, Dad.”
Jack set his rod in the grass and worked the hook out and carried the trout back across the stream toward the cooler in two hands and with as much care as he’d handled Naomi and Cole as squirming newborns.
They fished until the light went bad, Jack torn between the stream and his son who’d abandoned the aspen rod to construct a pile of polished, streambed stones on the opposite shore. Jack trying to ignore that thing that had been gnawing at him now for two days, that he wouldn’t ever be ready to look in the eye. How could a father? But he saw it—from a distance, an oblique glance—and for right now at least, that was as close as his heart could stand to be.
When they returned, the sun had just slipped below the desert and Dee and Naomi were hanging blankets over the windows and the cabin smelled of sweet, baking bread.
The women had carried in several armloads of firewood from the porch and stacked it around the hearth, and while Cole regaled everyone with the story of catching the fish, Jack built a base of kindling using a dozen of the pinecones stored in a wicker basket and an issue of USA Today.
The front-page headlines stopped him as he ripped out a sheet—six-month-old bits of news about the war, political infighting, Wall Street, the death of a young celebrity.
“What’s with the blankets over the windows?” he asked as he balled up the sports page and hoisted the first log onto the pyre.
“So our fire won’t be visible.”
Two more logs and then he struck a match, held it to the newsprint.
Jack lay in bed watching fireshadows move across the walls of the living room. Warm under the blanket. Hungry but content.
“We can’t have fires like this anymore,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“When we don’t need them. The winter here is going to be awful. We should save the firewood for blizzards. Nights when it goes below zero. I’m going to have to cut a hell of a lot more wood.”
“So you want to stay?”
“If we can get the food situation under control.”
“I don’t know, Jack.”
“What? You
’d rather go back out into what we just escaped?”
“No, but we’ll starve to death here.”
“Not with a seasoned outdoorsman like me taking care of things.”
A tremor of laughter moved through her.
“You noticed any changes in Cole?” he asked.
“No. Why? What makes you ask that?”
“That man in the desert—the one you shot when he came after me? He and his wife had been camping with another couple. They saw the lights. The other couple slept through them. Afterward, they murdered their friends.”
“What does this have to do with my son?”
“You, me, and Naomi, we slept through the aurora. Cole spent the night at Alex’s. Their family went out to the baseball field with the neighborhood and watched. Remember him telling us about it the next day?”
Dee was quiet for a long time.
Jack could see the embers in the fireplace and he could hear his daughter breathing.
“It doesn’t mean anything, Jack, what that man told you. He’s our son, for chrissake. You think he wants to hurt us?”
“I don’t know, but this is something we should be aware of. Today, I caught him staring at himself in the mirror. For a long time. It was weird. I don’t know what that was about, but—”
“We don’t know that any of what’s happening is connected to the lights. It’s total speculation.”
“I agree, but what if Cole changes? What if he becomes violent?”
“Jack, I’m just telling you, if it turns out. . .I want you to shoot me.”
“Dee—”
“I’m not kidding, not exaggerating, just telling you that I do not have it in me to handle that.”
“You have a daughter, too. You don’t have the luxury not to handle shit.”
“‘Should we kill our son if he becomes a threat?’ Is that the question you’re dancing around?”
“We have to talk about it, Dee. I don’t want it to happen and us have no idea what to do.”
“I think I already answered your question.”
“What?”
“I would rather die.”
“Me, too,” Jack said.
“So what are we saying?”
“We’re saying. . .we’re saying he’s our boy, and we stay together, no matter what.”
* * * * *
AT dawn, Jack crept out of bed and dressed in the dark, grabbed the shotgun leaning against the bedside table and took it with him out into the living room.
He unlocked the front door and stepped outside.
Freezing. A heavy frost on the grass.
The desert purple. Still black along the western fringe.
He walked across the meadow into the trees and sat down against the base of an aspen. Everything still. Everything he loved in that dark house across the way.
His breath steamed and he thought about his father and he thought about Reid, his best friend in the humanities department, and the pints they’d put down Thursday nights at Two Fools Tavern. The remembrance touched something so raw he disavowed it all, on the spot. Focused instead on the coming hours, and all the things he had to do, and the order in which he might do them. Nothing before this cabin mattered anymore, only the given day, and with this thought he cleared his mind and scanned the trees that rimmed the meadow, praying for an elk to emerge.
He took the chainsaw and felled aspen trees until lunch. His stitches held, so he fished the rest of the day, taking three cutthroats and a brook trout out of a section of the stream a quarter mile upslope that boasted an abundance of deep pools. The water clear where it passed over rock and green where the sun hit it. Black in the shadows.
In the late afternoon, Jack stood across the stream from Cole watching the boy float aspen leaves into a cascade. He reeled in and set his rod down and waded across. Climbed up onto the bank and sat down dripping in the leaves beside his son.
“How you doing, buddy?”
“Good.”
Cole pushed another leaf into the water and they watched the current take it.
“You like being here?” Jack asked.
“Yes.”
“I do, too.”
“These are my little boats, and they’re crashing in the waterfall.”
“Can I sail one?”
Cole offered a leaf, and Jack sent another golden ship to its death.
“Cole, remember the aurora you watched with Alex?”
“Yes.”
“I want to ask you something about it.”
“What?”
“Did you feel different after you saw it?”
“A little bit.”
“Like how?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you have strange thoughts toward your mom and your sister and me?”
The boy shrugged.
“You could tell me, you know. I want you to know that. You can always tell me anything. No matter what it is. No matter how bad you think it is.”
“I just wish you had seen the lights, too,” Cole said.
“Why is that?”
“They were real pretty. More than anything I ever saw.”
They drained the cooler as the sun dropped and carried it back to the cabin, fish flopping inside against the plastic.
Jack and Dee sat in rocking chairs on the front porch drinking ice cold bottles of Miller High Life from a case that had been left behind. They were watching great spirals of smoke swirl up into the sky sixty miles northwest near the base of Grand Teton.
“What’s burning out there?” Dee said.
“I think that’s Jackson.”
They ate dinner and put the kids to bed. When they came back out onto the porch, the sun had finally crashed, leaving the flames of that distant, burning city to stand out in the darkness like an abandoned campfire.
Jack cracked open a new pair of beers, handed one to Dee.
Tired and strangely satisfied with the soreness in his body.
He’d been rehearsing how he would say it all day, the last two days even. Figured he might as well get on with it, though the phrasing had completely escaped him.
“Does it feel to you,” Jack said, “like we’re starting a new life?”
“Little bit. How many days have we been here?”
He had to think about it. “Three.”
“Feels longer. A lot longer.”
“Yeah.”
He could feel the good beer buzz beginning to swarm in his head. Didn’t know if it was the altitude or malnourishment, but he couldn’t think of the last time two beers had gotten him this close to drunk.
“I need to tell you something,” he said.
“What?” she laughed, “you’re seeing someone?”
None of the permutations of this conversation, as he’d imagined it, had involved Dee asking that question. His head cleared so fast it left him with a subtle throbbing at the base of his skull—a premonition of the hangover to come.
“Two years ago.”
Dee’s face emptied of the lightness of the moment and her bottle hit the porch and the beer fizzed out and drained through a crack between the two-by-sixes. The air suddenly reeked of yeast and alcohol.
“Lasted a month,” he said. “Only time I ever. . .I ended it because I couldn’t stand—”
“One of your fucking TAs?”
“We met in—”
“No, no, no, I don’t want to hear a single detail of any of it and I don’t ever want to know her name. Nothing about her. Just why you’re telling me this now. In this moment. I could’ve died never knowing and you took that from me.”
“When we left Albuquerque, our marriage was on life support. I mean, three nights ago was the first time we’d been together in. . .I don’t even know—”
“Seven months.”
“Dee, I know I’ve been checked out on our family, and for a long time. Because of guilt, depression, I don’t know. These last nine days have been the worst, hardest of our life, but in some ways, the best, t
oo. And now, it feels to me like we’re starting something new here, so I don’t want to start it with any lies. Nothing between us.”
“Well, there is now. And. . . . . . . . .why the fuck would you tell me this?”
She shrieked it, her voice bouncing back from the invisible wall of trees.
“At least I was always honest with you about Kiernan,” Dee said.
“Yeah, that was such a comfort as our marriage imploded.”
Dee jumped up from the rocking chair and walked off the porch and vanished into the meadow.
Jack slammed the rest of his beer, threw it in the grass.
Sat watching the horizon burn to the soundtrack of his wife crying out there in the dark.
* * * * *
5:15 a.m. and Jack rose up slowly, shouldered the shotgun. He took aim on the neck of the same giant bull he’d seen two mornings ago on the hike up from the road. The recoil drove a splinter of pain through his left shoulder, a thundering blast across the clearing.
The elk’s head dipped. It staggered.
Jack on his feet, bolting through the frosted grass as he pumped the Mossberg and fired again.
When he reached it, the animal lay on its side, eyes open, breathing fast and raggedly. Jack knelt beside it and held one of the spurs on the enormous rack while the blood rushed out across the ground.
He hadn’t field-dressed an animal in over twenty years, since the last time he’d hunted with his father in Montana when he was in college. But the anatomy and the method slowly returned to him.
Naomi and Cole looked on in semi-horror as he tied off the hoofs, heaved the animal onto its back, and with the bowie knife he’d been given in Silverton, Colorado, slit the elk from anus to throat.