She looked at him closely to see if she could tell whether he was putting her on or not.
“You’re not kidding, are you?”
“No.”
“But marijuana’s illegal, isn’t it?”
“What’s legal and what’s illegal anymore?” he asked.
She looked back at the plants. “That’s true,” she said. “What are you growing them for?”
“Historically, weed’s been used because it has some medicinal qualities. It’s been used for pain relief, insomnia, and things like that. It’s also has recreational uses; probably more of that than medical applications. So, lots of people have uses for it, especially now, because of the ice age. It makes a great barter item.”
“You’re supposed to smoke it, right?” she asked.
“You can smoke it or you can eat it—especially after cooking it into something.”
“Do you smoke it or eat it?”
“I never really liked it. I don’t particularly like the high from it. I prefer booze. But I’ve had raging insomnia ever since I was a little kid and about five years ago I discovered it helps me to sleep. Doesn’t take much, either, so a little goes a long way.
“So, do you smoke it or eat it?” She ran her fingers over the leaves of one of the plants. It was kind of exciting to her to be here with something she knew people used to go to jail for.
“I smoke it.”
“What parts do you use?” she asked.
“I smoke or barter with the buds and leaves, I use the stems to make a marijuana wine, I keep some seeds to replant and, because I always get more seeds than I’m ever going to plant, I use the rest of the seeds for bird feed.”
“You make wine with them, too?”
“Yeah.”
She looked back at him for a moment then she turned back to the plants. She was fascinated.
“It should never have been illegal in the first place,” he said.
“Really? Why not?”
“It’s my body. I should be able to do what I want with it.”
She reflected on that for a moment. “I like the way you think.”
He liked the way she thought.
“But I’d grow it now, anyway,” he said, “even if I didn’t use it, just because other people want it and it’s such a great barter item. There are other people here in these hills who use it. But for one reason or another they either can’t grow it like I do, they don’t have the time to grow it, they can’t grow enough of it, or what they grow is of poor quality. A lot of them have used stuff they get from me as barter with the troops to get gas, ammo, or food.”
“They trade it with the Army guys?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s really illegal, isn’t it?”
“It’s a capital offense, nowadays.”
She leaned over to smell the plants.
“Kinda smells like…”
“Skunk?”
“I couldn’t think of it for a second, but yeah, skunk.
“What makes yours so good?”
“In the old days,” he said, “people used electric lights—they called them grow lights—to grow the best stuff they could. Nowadays, no one around’s got enough electricity to power grow lights for very long. Plus, when the lights burn out, you can’t replace them anymore. So, compared to the stuff from the old days, what I grow isn’t the highest quality, but I’ve started saving the seeds from my best plants to develop a strain that grows well under these conditions. Folks around here have told me what they’ve gotten from me is good stuff.”
“I’m sorry,” she said without turning to him.
“For what?”
“What I said about you…murdering your family?”
“Do me a favor?” he asked.
“What’s that?”
“Get me the fireplace poker.”
She laughed. “I’ll take that as forgiveness. Thank you,” she said and, before he could say anything, she asked, “What’s this?” She was in front of another group of plants.
“That’s sweet basil. The ones next to it are oregano, and the two after those are rosemary. I grow my own herbs, too. I dry them, I cook and can with them, and I use my herbs as barter, too. Life is hard, but people still want food to taste good.”
She went back to the biggest pot plant and touched it again. Then she leaned over and smelled it. He could see she was fascinated.
“I like the smell of it,” she said.
“Yeah, it’s an odd but seductive smell.”
She came back to the stove and looked in the direction of the second pot. “You put a bunch of bones in there. Are you canning bones, too?”
“I make my own soup stocks and broths. I extract all the flavor and nutrients I can and put it up in jars. Then I grind the bones up. They make good fertilizer for my plants.”
“Where do you put the stuff you can?” she asked looking around.
He looked at the floor.
“Downstairs?”
He nodded. “It’s cool down there, but it won’t freeze. I keep lots of stuff down there.”
“You’ve got it all figured out, haven’t you,” she said.
He swept the meat he’d minced onto a saucer and got a small spoon from a drawer and handed the whole package to Danielle. “Here, see how much more she eats.”
“Is it okay?” she asked skeptically with one eyebrow raised in a circumflex. “You’re beginning to scare me with all this talk about botulism and toxins. It’s not going to make her sick, is it?”
“It’s cooked completely through. All the bad stuff is dead. The only things in it now that can hurt her are the fats, so she may have a heart attack eighty years from now.”
“Should I risk that?” she asked facetiously.
“Gamble. Take a chance.”
She took the meat and went back to her chair and fed Whoops.
After a while, and without turning to her, he asked, “Why are you going back to the road?”
It was an unexpected question. “We’ve got to find our family,” she said. “Besides, my Dad said, pretty soon, nothing’s going to be able to live up here.”
He didn’t comment on that and the cabin became quiet except for the hiss of the canner when the water inside began to boil and the baby talk Danielle made to her sister as she fed her.
She was casually aware of him going into the other rooms doing whatever it was he did. She still didn’t understand his routines and she wasn’t going to be here long enough to learn them. Her prime concern, she reminded herself, was her sister.
But she felt moody. She knew it was going to be tough on Whoops when they went back to the road and she didn’t even know if the family she was setting out to find was still alive. The more she thought, the darker and more threatening the world became.
Inexplicably, she started crying, again, and tried to stop, but she couldn’t.
He came back into the living room. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nothing,” she said firmly. “There’s nothing wrong. Just leave me alone.”
He wanted to tell her, again, that he was sorry for hitting her, but he didn’t think that was what was bothering her.
He’d seen this before in his wife. He began to think he’d made a mistake; maybe he should have left her on the road. “I’m sorry I made you come back,” he finally said.
“Just shut up,” she sobbed.
“I’ll take you back to the road, tomorrow.”
“I said shut up!”
He went back to the kitchen.
She stared at her sister who stared back as she ate, pausing occasionally to smile.
But Danielle knew why she was crying. For the first time since leaving Yakima, she felt as though she and her sister were safe. And, now, she had to go back to the road. She thought she was starting to go crazy.
Suddenly, he was standing over her. In his hand he had some of the empty wrappers th
e tampons had come in. “I found these in the old bathroom on the counter. This explains a lot.”
For a second she was dumbfounded. Then she said, “Oh,” and looked away shaking her head in exaggerated exasperation.
“Remember outside you said I’m a typical guy?” He shook them at her. “Well, you are a typical woman, too.”
She began to laugh. He shook his head and took the wrappers to the fireplace insert where he threw them in the box where he kept tinder. From there he went back to the stove.
So, he could be funny, she thought. But it was true: Part of what was happening with her was because it was that “time of the month,” part was because she was worrying about her family, and another part was knowing she had to go back to the road and risk herself and her sister.
“You know,” he began without turning to face her, “I didn’t keep track of Sandra’s periods. So, sometimes she’d be a real bitch and I didn’t know why. And, this was before the ice age. Often, a few days later she’d apologize and tell me she’d bitten my head off because she’d started her period. After that happened a few times, one day she started off on me and I asked her, in the calmest and most considerate manner, if she was upset because she’d started her period, and she really went off and told me not to start writing her moods off because of her periods and to think about what I might have done to upset her.
“Well, a few days later she asked, ‘Do you remember how I got so upset the other day because you asked if my bad mood was because of my period…’”
Danielle interrupted, “And she said it was.”
He turned his head to look at her. “So you know.”
Danielle smiled. “You deserved what you got. You never attribute a woman’s mood to her period, even if you know that’s why she’s acting that way—unless you like flirting with death, in which case you should take up juggling with running chainsaws; it’s safer.”
He turned back to his work smiling and shaking his head.
“Anyway, I’m sorry,” he said.
“I’m sure she’d forgive you.”
“No, I’m still sorry for what I did to you. I know you don’t want to talk about it anymore, but I want you to know it’s not something I’ve ever done before and I promise it’ll never happen again. I’m sick about it.”
“Apology accepted,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“You’re pretty smart,” he said for what appeared to be no reason. “I like that about you.”
“I don’t know anything,” she said. “There are no schools.”
“I’m not talking about education; I’m talking about native intelligence. I hope you know the difference.”
“I do. Thank you,” she said. She liked hearing it.
And suddenly she realized she had to be careful. She didn’t want to complicate her life by getting to like him.
Chapter 19
August 31
The following morning was sunny and cloudless and, though it seemed to hold the promise that some of the snow might melt, in reality the lack of cloud cover let the earth’s precious heat reradiate back into space and made the day much colder.
Whoops lay on the floor at Danielle’s feet, and she and the dog watched each other with genuine curiosity. Danielle liked that he was comfortable with her sister. She sat in her chair and read a book of short stories she’d found.
Zach had been up since before dawn canning more of the bear, but he now sat on the couch. She glanced at him from time to time as he alternately watched Whoops and the dog, then disappeared back into some recess of his own mind, preoccupied with his thoughts. Without saying anything, he suddenly got up and put on his winter gear. She watched as he grabbed his M1 and skis, and went to the door.
The dog met him there and Zach stared at him as if surprised. “You want to go?” he asked.
The dog wagged his tail expectantly.
Zach opened the door and let the dog out first but he paused and said, “I’ll be back in a while.”
He didn’t wait for a response.
She went to the window and watched him put on his skis. With his rifle slung over his shoulder he took off across the field, in the direction of the road, and disappeared into the forest with the dog in pursuit.
Now alone, she walked around the room looking up at the rafters. She realized it was a morbid fascination, but she tried to imagine where Sandra must have been the day he walked through the door and found her hanging. She looked for telltale signs, but if there were any, they weren’t obvious. He hadn’t said where he’d found his children. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. She shivered. It must be creepy to go on living where all the people you loved had died.
“Maybe he’s not so crazy,” she confided to Whoops. She was beginning to feel sorry for him and stopped herself.
Whoops began to fuss. She’d woken early and Danielle knew she was tired. She picked her up and walked the floor with her.
After a while, Whoops’s head started to bob back and forth until she finally planted it on Danielle’s shoulder and she carefully laid her back on the blanket on the floor.
She went to the window again and looked out at the field. She had no idea where he’d gone. She wished she knew when he’d be back.
She didn’t like being a snoop. Or maybe she just didn’t want to be caught being a snoop. But she started inspecting all the candles. She wanted one that had already been lit and found the one she’d used before and got the lighter from the mantel over the fireplace insert. She kicked the rug away and exposed the trapdoor in the floor. She hesitated.
She went back to the window. She checked Whoops, who slept soundly. Taking a deep breath, she opened the trapdoor and stared into the ebony abyss below. She lit the candle and put the lighter in her pocket. Once she was sure the candle was burning okay, she started down the ladder.
As her eyes acclimated themselves to the dim light thrown by the candle, a myriad of pinpoints of light surrounded her. Soon she realized there were hundreds…no, thousands…of jars on shelving that stretched along the walls of the cellar. She got closer to one of the shelves. There were jars labeled “tomatoes” with dates on them. There were too many for her to want to count. She walked slowly along the shelves until she came to jars labeled “squash.” There were quite a few of those, too. There were labels that read “venison,” “venison stew,” “blackberry jam,” “carrots,” “green beans…” She hadn’t seen this much food since before the supermarkets all closed.
She came upon wine bottles and read the labels: “dandelion wine,” “tomato wine,” “blueberry wine,” “blackberry wine,” “marijuana wine,”—he wasn’t kidding—and more.
Beyond that were several dozen jars that read “kochujang sauce.” Beneath those words, in parenthesis, were the words “Korean hot sauce.”
Further along she saw jars labeled “applesauce.” The dates on those were a few years old, and that made sense since the seasons, this far north, were no longer long enough for apples to ripen. He wouldn’t be canning applesauce ever again unless he—no, apple trees weren’t tomato plants and he wasn’t going to figure out how to grow them.
Another group was jars of soup of different kinds, some with old dates while others had dates as recent as the current year. Another bunch was stews and the dates were similar.
All the jars were labeled with their contents and dated.
On the floor there were sacks of rice, sacks of beans, salt, some large cylindrical boxes that read “potassium chloride.” This guy could feed himself for years.
There was a table with old bunched-up newspapers. Hundreds of them. She put the candle down and picked one up. There was something round inside. She opened it: a green tomato. She examined a few more—all tomatoes. So, he did grow them. She continued down the line. There were squash—not canned, but whole squash. She hadn’t seen a fresh tomato or squash in three years. There was a thermometer. She read the temperature: sixty-one degrees.
There was a do
or on one wall. She hesitated before it. She didn’t know if she wanted to know what was on the other side. But unable to contain her curiosity, she opened it. The door was thick and on the other side of it was another room, much smaller and noticeably colder. There were small carrots stacked on one table. Another was piled with potatoes. A third had cabbages. There was a thermometer on the table. She picked it up and held it close to the candle to see what it read: Just over thirty-four degrees. She wondered why he wanted it this cold. There was another instrument she picked up and it read “humidity,” whatever that meant. It read “90.”
She went back to the other part of the cellar and closed the door behind her.
There were more jars all with dates: “bear meat” …“wild turkey”…”salmon,” there were many of those…“butter/ghee”… Butter? She looked at the jars in disbelief and leaned closer to examine them. She didn’t know what the word ghee meant, but somehow, he had canned butter. She hadn’t had any in three years. Then there was “cheese.” She couldn’t believe her eyes. But, if nothing else, the stuff in the jars did look like cheese. At the next section of jars she recoiled…“dog.” Those had a fairly recent date.
“Shit,” she said aloud. “He is crazy.”
Then there was…she had to lean close to see what they were…cans—store-bought cans—of corn and other vegetables. There were cases filled with boxes of macaroni and cheese. The next thing she discovered was something her father had acquired, just before they left: a reloading bench. This guy made his own ammunition.
She stepped back away from the bench. She didn’t know if the candle, this close to the cans of gunpowder, was dangerous.
Stacked against the wall were more boxes. Some were empty, others were not. She opened one of the latter and there were empty jars; the kind he used to can. And there were packages of lids. There were hundreds of those.
Beside them were two large plastic cases. She set the candle down and opened the first one. It was filled with medical supplies: Bandages, tubes of ointments, prescription drugs, and more. She closed it and opened the second one. More medical.
Next to them was another table. She got closer. There were boxes and tubes. She leaned closer to them with the candle to see what they were. Suddenly she shrunk back. She didn’t have to be told what she was looking at. The word “Dynamite” was written all over the tubes.
Danielle Kidnapped: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Ice Age Page 21