She thought about it. Tomorrow she was scheduled back at the processor. But her body felt so worn down. She flipped the pages of the manual with her thumb. Now that the tug was gone, what did it really matter? Then again, going into the woods with a man she didn’t know—a man Fritz said had a temper.
“The two of us will be fine,” Betteryear said, in a gentle voice. “Promise.”
“Okay,” she said, shouldering the rifle, starting for the door.
Flakes melted into the asphalt as they walked along the street. The cluck of chickens, a crumple of a tarp in the breeze, the smell of brown sugar and liquid smoke from fish brining on decks. Betteryear seemed to glide, his basket swinging an arc from one hand.
The faint disk of the sun hovered just above the mountains across the channel. The descent into darkness didn’t worry her as it had last year—she knew what was coming. This year she watched how everything seemed to draw in closer: objects, people. As if intent on sharing heat.
They turned onto a gravel road, which dead-ended into an unfamiliar trailhead. Kiksadi River chattered between the trees. She missed having the dog by her side.
“You are nervous,” he said. “Please, relax.”
He took a couple steps off the trail, then lifted a dome-shaped mushroom from the moss. Its cap looked like a burnt loaf of bread.
“It’s not only bears that can kill you in these woods. Galerina marginata. Poisonous. But luckily,” he said, swooping his fingers over the earth, reaping a handful of butterscotch stems, “galerinas are rare. This here is Craterellus tubaeformis, also called yellowfoot, or winter chanterelle. Look at the ridges on the underside. Ridges, not gills, like the poisonous variety. The winter chanterelle is your best friend.”
She held the chanterelles to her nose, smelling the damp earth. She walked by his side toward the river. The chatter of the water made her anxious again, how it drowned out nearby sound.
He picked a creamy white mushroom from the base of a tree, flipped it, and ran a finger over points along the underside. “Sweet tooth. Also called hedgehog.” He smiled as if they were both in on some great secret.
“Edible?” she asked. He dipped his head, shutting his eyes. “Oh, yes. And oftentimes close by . . .” He crouched and peered beneath a tree, gave a satisfied smile. “Reach beneath the hemlock here. I think there might be a surprise.”
She dropped to her knees, ignoring the wetness, and extended her arm into the root cave.
“Farther,” he said. “Lie down on your stomach.”
The order annoyed her, but she obeyed, reaching in until her shoulder pushed against the trunk, patting the dry dirt. She didn’t like this, having her right arm pinned. Her fingers touched soil, twigs, then a rubbery coldness. “Yes?” he said. The root gave with a soft tear. She brought the mushroom into the light, brushed dirt from the thick stem, and ran her fingers over the spikes along the bottom.
“Hedgehog?”
“That’s right,” Betteryear said, taking the mushroom from her, nestling it into the basket. It was, by far, the largest of the bunch.
“How’d you know it was there?”
He shrugged. “I had a feeling.”
They picked until the basket could hold no more. “Now that you know how to gather, you must learn how to cook. And then one day we’ll hunt with your rifle, and shoot a deer. Yes?”
The rifle had been for bear. But she wondered if she could do it, pull the trigger on a deer. She had heard stories of people hunting in upstate Pennsylvania. It would be an adventure. “I’d like that.”
She asked Betteryear to drop her at the docks. Before returning to the Bunkhouse she walked out to the transient, just to make sure the tug hadn’t miraculously reappeared. It hadn’t. Nothing but the sound of rigging against the masts, and the high-pitched screams of the buoy balls chafing against the bull rail.
35
WORK AT THE PROCESSOR slowed down. Chum salmon were finished. Now that she wasn’t clocking overtime, she felt antsy.
At the end of September, Newt took her aside in the break room and announced his plan to save money. “The woods, T. We’ll live in the woods. The price is right. Free.”
“No way,” she said, looking out over the floor. “I’m not living like some bum.”
“Stop thinking like a city girl,” he said.
She bristled. “Who around here has been charged by a bear?”
“Bears won’t pay us no mind.”
“Who’s ‘us,’ anyway?”
“Bailey. Maybe that crazy redheaded Frenchy, too.”
He meant Thomas, the lanky, fine-boned new arrival on the processor floor, who had a shock of red hair and freckles, and smoked cigarettes in the break room while squatting against the wall. He had been studying politics at a university in Paris, he told them, when he decided to travel. He ran out of cash in Alaska, found the job at the processor.
“Newt, you’re not making sense. It’s about to be winter.”
“What makes sense is you getting out of that shitty Bunkhouse and saving to buy a boat. And me getting Plume north. You’ve been through a winter here. It ain’t no worse than Kentucky—just a matter of holding your breath.” He started back to his station, tacking sea cucumbers up on the plywood. “Think about it, T. It’s a good one. And I think you know it.”
36
SHE KNEW HER FATHER WAS STEWING, furious, but couldn’t bring herself to call. On top of that she still hadn’t responded to Connor’s letter. It was tempting on the island to just shut off contact with the rest of the world, shove it away into a corner until she was ready to re-engage.
She had seen a card in the post office, an aerial view of Archangel Island with the volcano in the background. From above, the town appeared like a thumbnail along the coast, with ice fields and glaciers visible in the alpine. She bought it, then drew an X by the processor.
October 2, 1998
Dear Connor,
Here you can see Port Anna, and all the beauty that surrounds her. The mark is where I stay. Thank you for my early Christmas present. I sleep in them every night. They make me very happy.
More soon,
Tara
37
THE SUN TRACED A SHALLOW ARC over the mountains as Tara, Newt, and Thomas walked along the gravel road by the Kiksadi River.
“Just to look,” Newt reassured her. “But I’m telling you—it’s perfect.” Thomas walked ahead, bending his tall frame over to inspect mushrooms in the long shadows cast by the trees. Tara recognized them as galerinas—poisonous. “Although that kid, I don’t know. Comes off as dumber than two sacks of hair. You seen him sort fish? He’s got two speeds, slow down and stop.”
The trail ended at the river. A hopscotch of boulders made a crossing. On the other side a game trail. Tara stayed silent as they walked, stripping hemlock needles from a branch, crushing them between her fingers and breathing in the piney alcohol aroma. After days of rain and a few snow showers, cold sun filtered through the trees, casting shadows over the river, swollen with snowmelt and opaque with glacial deposits. It would be nice to be lulled to sleep by the sound of running water, she thought. But the idea of living with no shower nearby, no stove? It still seemed far-fetched.
After a couple miles Newt called out, “Hey, Frenchy! Hang a right up this hill here.”
They scrambled up the side, Thomas grabbing on to tree roots. At the top, spruce and hemlock circled a slight depression in the forest floor. Wood smoldered in the center, a glow of embers in the ash. Bailey emerged from a tent at the edge of a clearing wearing a sweatshirt with the sleeves lopped off. He eyed Tara, then Newt. “I thought we said man-town out here. That girl’s a pain-in-the-ass bitch.”
Before she could announce that she had zero intention of living in the woods, the skin on Newt’s cheeks drew tight. He settled his weight on his back foot.
“Whatever,” the big man muttered. “You fucks make your own goddamn site way over there. Way over there. And you said you’d bring a c
hainsaw, Re-Re. I don’t see that around.” He lumbered off toward his tent.
The three of them stood, listening to the babble of the river. “Why does he call you Re-Re?” Thomas asked.
But Newt was looking into the trees, his eyes moving from one to the next, and she knew he was planning something neither she nor Thomas could envision.
38
FOLLOWING THE TRIP INTO THE WOODS, Newt wouldn’t veer from the idea that they should build a platform. “Give it a couple months, T. Try it out. Trust me. I’ll make it watertight.”
“We’re not cavemen, for godsakes.”
“You need some vision, girl.”
Trunk gave them Columbus Day off. The Sunday before, they headed back to the clearing, this time with two-stroke oil, a mixing jug, and a thirty-inch used chainsaw Newt bought off an old-time logger.
Tara made a deal, mostly to get Newt to stop pestering her. If he could build a satisfactory home, then she would come back with her things. She already had her rifle, slung over one shoulder, a sleeping bag, and her half-used roll of duct tape. Thomas carried the chainsaw, the orange cowling over the engine a shade darker than his hair.
“That thing have bullets in it?” Newt asked her.
“Yes.” She had purchased 180-grain 30-aught cartridges from the hunting store.
“You ever pull the trigger?”
“Nope.”
“What about you, Pierre? You know how to use that chainsaw?”
Thomas held the tool in the air. “I will figure it out.”
Newt shook his head. “Jesus Christ.”
At the top of the hill Tara set the rifle against a tree trunk. Bailey was nowhere in sight.
“Go on then,” Newt said to Thomas. “Let’s see you try to fire it up.”
Thomas stooped over the saw, held the bar, flipped up the hood on his merino wool sweater, and pulled the cord. The engine turned over, coughed, and died. “Gimme that,” Newt snapped. He pulled out the choke, yanked the cord, and the machine wheezed to life. “Don’t teach ya that in gay Paree, do they?”
Thomas looked on, mesmerized, as the small man made a neat slice into the tree, then moved around to the other side. “Tim-burrrrr!” he crooned, branches snapping as the trunk crashed down. He shoved a wooden pole with a rusted hook on one end at Tara, showed her how to use the tool to roll the hemlock onto the rocks. He bolted the Alaskan mill to the chainsaw.
“Time to plank this bad girl up,” Newt shouted.
“I can try?” Thomas asked, as he watched Newt push the saw through the tree.
Newt let off the throttle. He turned to Tara. “That medallion protect you from chainsaw massacres?”
Thomas leaned in, pressing on the trigger. Curled yellow shavings caught in his sweater. He was handsome, Tara thought, watching a leather lanyard with a bone amulet bounce against his chest. When the chain got stuck at a knot, Thomas yanked at the saw, the toothy grin still on his face. Newt shook his head, undoing the bar with a couple twists of a brass key.
“You’re not the smartest peanut in the turd, are you?”
“What?” Thomas said.
“Watch out. C’mon. Vamonos, or whatever.”
After the planks were cut, Newt used scraps of cedar and the chainsaw to fashion four stakes. “Batter boards,” he explained, pounding them into the earth. “Mark out our perimeter. Look big enough?”
Tara shrugged. “Good with me.”
With a handsaw he made a notch in the top of each stake, then ran gangion through to make an outline. Despite his yelling and ribbing he was a patient teacher, demonstrating how to use sixteen-penny nails to fasten joists, posts, and the ripped boards. Clacks echoed through the forest. She noticed it took her about half as many hammer swings as Thomas to pound in a nail.
“It’s the boxing that makes you good with that thing,” Newt told her, flashing a grin. “All that training was good for more than getting hit in the head. Help you build a home.”
It was fun to see her friend excited like this. Newt gave Thomas the handsaw and told him to cut alder saplings from the riverside, demonstrating how to lash them together through the tarp grommets. Newt scampered up a hemlock and draped the alders in a collage of canvas and tarps. Tara marveled at her slight friend. He couldn’t spell worth a damn, but had some freaky engineer’s sense about how the physical world went together. He howled from high in the branches. “Tell me one of you brought duct tape!”
She tossed up her roll. He held it in the air. “If you haven’t learned yet, Frenchy, this is why Americans win wars while you guys keep getting rammed in the ass by the Nazis. It has a light side and a dark side and it holds the fucking universe together.”
When he finally came down, the trio retreated to a mossy hill. Newt wiped his forehead and looked back at the platform. Breathing hard, he set a hand on each of their shoulders.
“Well, dip my balls in sweet cream and squat me in a kitchen full of kittens. If we don’t have a cozy little home of our own making.”
39
THE NEXT MORNING she woke with the light, rose from her sleeping bag, and stretched. The air felt cool and clean, the sky white through the branches. Everything so quiet. Thomas was half out of his sleeping bag, stretched over the rough-hewn planks, head curled into one arm. As she lay there, listening to his soft snores, the chatter of the river moving over the rocks, she thought of her father. What day was it? Monday, October twelfth. Urbano Marconi would be in his billing office, trying to reach suppliers, cursing Christopher Columbus if they were closed. Tracking special orders to see what ingredients the bakery would need in the coming weeks.
She unzipped the sleeping bag, the denim of her jeans cold and damp on her thighs. The fire was down to embers. She pulled her hair back, arranged wood from Newt’s pile, and blew on the coals as she had seen people do on television. Her father’s heart would break, or perhaps harden even more, if he could see her in the woods like this, saving to buy a tugboat, starting a fire.
The sticks were slick with dew, but she was able to coax up a flame and get water boiling. “Look at you, scaring up fire at first light,” Newt said. His cheek still bore the print of his flannel cuff. “Fuck. I need coffee.”
He stared into the woods, the forest floor dappled with sunlight. “Interested in a run to town?”
They walked along the river. At the bookstore she found a card of a fishing boat framed by tree branches beneath the stars. The boat mast wrapped in Christmas lights, alone in a dark bay. While Newt went off for coffee, she wrote.
October 12, 1998
Dear Pop,
I just want you to know that I’m safe. The winters here are dark, day after day of rain, but it’s not cold. I’m sorry for hanging up on you.
Work has slowed down a bit so I’m making more friends. I don’t know when I’ll be back
She started to write home, then stopped. Thinking of her small room, with its rabbit-eared television on the dresser and knobby bedposts, then of the platform out in the woods with its freshly sawed plank scent. She dotted a period after back.
Your daughter,
Tara
That night in the clearing Newt’s flask went one way and Thomas’s pinky-sized joint the other. He had spread wool blankets over the platform, arranging their sleeping bags in neat lines, then pulling logs to the fire to sit on. Sticks of hemlock and alder hissed as they dried in the heat. She brought out her duffel and the rest of her things. Newt leaned back, evidently pleased with his success.
“Damn, Frenchy, that’s some good Alaskan bud,” he said, inhaling deep and holding it. “Makes my face feel like grape jelly,” he squeaked.
She thought of Keta back in town, imagining him curled up in the warmth by her side. It felt more like her first time camping than being a bum on the sidewalk.
Although he had moved his tent a good fifty yards from their new platform, the fire and weed drew Bailey, who banked chain-sawed branches against a rock, sat on a five-gallon bucket, and stared into
the flames. She was thinking of heading to her sleeping bag when Thomas reached for her hair. “So this is your mother or your father who is so beautiful?” he asked. She batted his hand away, glaring. Bailey snapped out of his trance.
“Hey, Re-Re. Check out Pepé Le Pew over here. He’s kicking game.”
Thomas rose and fetched a bottle of wine from his backpack on the platform. He removed his shoe and whacked the heel against the bottom of the bottle.
“The hell you doing?” Bailey said.
“Watch. It is a trick for the cork.”
“You gonna get her drunk, then make your move?”
A log popped, letting off steam. Thomas grumbled at the wine bottle. She thought of her rifle, wrapped in a garbage bag beneath the platform, box of bullets in a Ziploc.
Newt, hands held out to the flames, spoke in a flat voice. “I wouldn’t underestimate Tara getting the best of either of you boys. And if she doesn’t, well, there’s my skinny ass to deal with. I’m small, but I’m one mean motherfucker.”
The paleness of Newt’s head in the firelight, the coldness in his eyes and his voice, cut even Bailey short. Thomas quit with the shoe.
She loved her friend so deeply right then.
40
AFTER HALLOWEEN, work at the processor dropped to five or six hours a day. She arrived in the dark, nine in the morning, and packed spot prawns from Hoonah Sound, black cod, the few winter kings that came through. Newt did his best to keep things light.
“You just wait, T. You and me, we’re gonna run this town. I’ll be fishing my face off with Plume running gear, and you’ll find another boat to fall in love with. It’s gonna be peaches, just you wait and see.”
She was growing accustomed to life on the platform, and even found herself enjoying how the sound of rain dripping from the alder leaves grew louder the farther she got from the river. Hedgehog mushrooms popping out beneath hemlock stumps after a downpour. The slow flap of eagles, the commotion they made as they settled into the branches. Not that she wouldn’t have enjoyed a night on her bed with a tub of cream cheese, a box of Wheat Thins, and the ears on her television adjusted just right to watch The X-Files.
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