Though Not Dead

by Dana Stabenow

  He woke up when the credits were rolling to peer out the door at the foot of snow that had accumulated on the deck and the stairs. Kate, whose weather sense he knew to be pretty acute, was most likely sitting out the storm in Ahtna. “Probably eating one of Stan’s steak sandwiches right now,” he said to the storm, and had to close the door hastily before any more snow blew inside the house.

  If Kate had been home, she would have nagged him to do his homework and he would have bitched and moaned and whined and complained before allowing himself to be forced to the books. He didn’t feel like it would be fair to take advantage of her absence, so he settled down at the dining room table with a martyred sigh he was sorry no one was there to hear. Could have been worse, could have been civics. It was history, American history from 1900 to the present day, with the new teacher, Mr. Tyler, who was kinda cool. He wasn’t much taller than Kate and he wasn’t much older than his students, and he crackled with energy in the classroom. Every class period was a performance. Nobody ever dozed off in one of Mr. Tyler’s classes.

  His list of required reading was interesting, too. It was mostly novels, one a week, and some of them really old novels, too, like The Great Gatsby, All the King’s Men, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Native Son. Right now they were reading The Magnificent Ambersons, although there was a rumor that somebody had made a movie out of it, albeit in black-and-white, which Jessica Totemoff was said to have put on her Netflix queue.

  They were supposed to write a one-page report on every book, identifying things that happened in the book with events that had happened in real life. There was a timeline of events in their lone textbook. Mr. Tyler had already been discovered to be a stickler for spelling and grammar—at the beginning of the semester he’d threatened to fail anyone who screwed up lay and lie—so Johnny found Kate’s copy of The Elements of Style on the shelves in the living room and set to work.

  An hour later he had a paper that wasn’t too bad. The book hadn’t been that hard to take, either—surprising since it was almost older than Niniltna. He looked at the copyright page of his paperback edition. Nineteen eighteen. Two years older than Old Sam. He wondered if Old Sam had read the book. Would have been interesting to have asked him what he’d thought of it.

  He put the book down and thought about that tough, stringy old man who had hounded him from bow to stern of the Freya his first summer on board. Pitching fish, swabbing decks, scrubbing pots—Old Sam kept him moving every moment he wasn’t actually asleep, and he rolled him out of his bunk pretty early every morning. He’d never dared complain.

  He smiled. The first time Old Sam had let him take delivery on his own was one of the proudest moments of his life. He could remember the details of his first boat as if he’d caught the bow line yesterday, Hank Carlson on the Annie C., eleven kings and a hundred seventeen reds with an average weight of seven-point-nine pounds.

  He looked at the Model 70 in the gun rack. There was another proud moment. Old Sam wouldn’t have left his pride and joy to Johnny if he hadn’t thought Johnny could and would take care of it. Then and there, he made a vow to himself that he would never use it without cleaning it immediately afterward. And that he would do his best to shoot straight and clean, to wait for the shot, never to be in so much of a hurry that he would shame himself or his weapon by not taking the time to zero in on the heart or the lung.

  Johnny was going to miss the hell out of the old man, and at the same time he was excited at the thought of getting his first moose with his new classic rifle. He thought Old Sam would have understood.

  He looked at the clock. It was half past ten, and he stood up, stretching and yawning.

  At that precise moment the door opened, spilling a drift of snow onto the floor and Mutt into the room with it.

  “Mutt!” he said. “Where’s Kate?” He went to the door and peered out. “Kate? Kate!” He grabbed the flashlight next to the door and shined it around the clearing. He couldn’t see anything so he postholed through the snow to the edge of the deck. “Kate!”

  Still nothing—no pickup looming against the drifts, no headlights gleaming through the dark and the blowing snow. He went back inside. “Mutt, where’s Kate?”

  Mutt whined, and for the first time he noticed the shape she was in. Her feet were clumps of ice and she looked tired. In his life, in her life, he’d never seen Mutt look tired. He got a towel and got down on his knees to clean her feet. When he was done she went to the door, looking over her shoulder at him, yellow eyes wide and urgent.

  “Kate’s in trouble?” Johnny said.

  Mutt whined louder at the sound of Kate’s name.

  “Shit,” Johnny said, and stood where he was, towel dangling from one hand.

  Kate must have gone off the road in the pickup somewhere between here and Ahtna. She must have been hurt or Mutt would never have taken off, to come here, to get help.

  Mutt would lead him back to Kate.

  He looked at Mutt, her yellow eyes wide and anxious, her whining devolving into an impatient and demanding yip. He looked out the windows. Through the driving snow he could see the railing at the edge of the deck, barely. “We can’t go out in this, girl; we’ll just get lost ourselves,” he said. “We have to wait till morning, see if the storm blows out by then.”

  Something in the tone of his voice told her they weren’t going anywhere just yet and she didn’t like it. Her lips peeled back from her teeth and she growled at him.

  He reacted as instinctively as she had. “Knock that crap off,” he said, raising his voice.

  To the surprise of both, she did.

  He went down on his knee and put his arm around Mutt’s neck. “We’ll leave at first light, Mutt,” he said, hoping she would hear from his tone that they would be doing something as soon as it was safe to. “We’ll take the snowgo and the trailer. You’ll take me right to her, I know.”

  He half coaxed, half bullied her over to the crumpled quilt in front of the fireplace, and built up the fire that he had meant to let die down. He found some moose in the freezer and nuked it and chopped it up and fed it to her, along with a large bowl of water, which she virtually inhaled. She had barely enough energy after that to paw the quilt into an acceptable heap, go around three times in a circle, and flop down. Sixty seconds later she was snoring.

  Johnny forced himself to his own bed, knowing the chance of finding Kate was a lot less if he wasn’t rested. On the way to his room he paused to look at the thermometer fastened outside the window. Twenty-seven degrees. He remembered the winter survival kit Kate had insisted he carry in his pickup—food, bottled water, a parka, a sleeping bag, a knife—and knew she had one just as well-equipped with her. So long as she was conscious enough to make use of it.

  His night was restless, and Mutt shouldered through his door to whine in his face at first light. The wind had stopped and the snow had eased off. The sky wasn’t clear but it didn’t look anywhere near as dark and threatening as it had the day before. The temperature was down a degree.

  Mutt was whining, nosing at the small of his back, trying to drag him to the door first by the hem and then by the seat of his sweats. Although he wanted to be on the road as badly as she did, he refused to let her rush him. He ate a large breakfast, made another one for Mutt, made some instant soup and put it in a thermos, donned bibs, parka and Sorels, got the snowgo out of the garage and checked the gas and oil, hitched up the trailer, checked that the emergency kit for the snowgo had all the necessary items, stowed a spare can of gas on the trailer. He lashed and tarped everything down and then went for the Model 70, which he loaded. He snicked on the safety and stowed it in the scabbard on the snowgo.

  He frowned at the rig, at all the supplies he’d packed into it. He had to be thinking for both him and Kate. Was he missing anything? That one vital piece of equipment that could mean the difference between life and death? They had serviced the snowgos together the previous week; he had to trust that they’d done the job well enough to get him wher
e he needed to go and back again.

  “All right, girl,” he said, and climbed on the seat. The engine started at a touch, Mutt leapt up behind him, her nose over his shoulder, and they set out down the trail. Once on the road he followed the fluorescent yellow road markers, keeping his speed at forty miles an hour, knowing Mutt would hurl herself headlong from the seat as soon as they were near Kate and not wanting to be going too fast when she did so. He would far rather Kate be hurt herself than have to answer to her for getting Mutt hurt finding her.

  There was no other traffic and no sign that there had been any. In spite of his worry and the urgency of the situation he was almost enjoying himself—a capable, fully equipped man on a rescue mission, alone in the middle of a wilderness with only himself to rely on. He could almost hear the William Tell Overture playing in the background.

  He slowed down for Deadman’s Curve, twenty-four miles from the homestead, a lethal-looking turn even when its edgy grade was softened by snow.

  Mutt barked once, sharply, right next to his face.

  He winced and took his thumb off the gas. “Okay.” He slowed down almost to a stop, but Mutt had dropped off long before then and was loping out ahead of him, her enormous feet skimming the surface of the snow. He followed her, around the curve and then off the road through a thicket of alders that showered him with more snow as he pushed through. There he found a snow-covered mound. Mutt was pawing at it with urgent whines.

  The snow had done such an effective job of camouflage that he did not at once recognize an upside-down pickup truck. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he said, and his hands went slack and the snowgo stopped with an abruptness that nearly pitched him over the windshield. She’d flipped her truck. There were a couple of horrible, dragging seconds when all the ways she could have been hurt, unconscious, incapable of securing herself against the storm, flashed through his mind. She could have died of exposure while he was asleep in his bed.

  Then, before he could vault from the snowgo and join Mutt in her efforts at excavation, the snow heaved. For one heart-stopping moment he wondered if his eyes had deceived him, if this wasn’t her truck, if Mutt had led him instead to a bear den. In the next, a parka-clad Kate had crawled from behind what looked like a snow-encrusted army blanket, to be immediately knocked on her back. She landed soft in the new-fallen snow and Mutt planted both feet on her chest and laved her with an enthusiastic tongue.

  Kate was laughing, trying to hold her off. “I’m okay, girl. I’m all right. Mutt! Knock it off!”

  She got to her feet, sinking to her knees, and pushed the hood of her parka back from her head, a smile on a face that looked unsurpassingly beautiful to him, in spite of the twin shiners that had now faded from royal purple to a bilious green. “Heard you coming,” she said. “What took you so long?”

  He killed the engine, which gave him a second to gulp back unmanly tears. Until this moment he hadn’t realized how frightened he’d been. “Yeah, well, you know. Didn’t want you to think I was worried or anything.” He assessed her fitness with a critical gaze, and saw the blood on the knees of her jeans. Unlike Gunn, he recognized it for what it was. “Jesus, Kate, what’s that? Are you hurt?”

  Her smile faded. “Not my blood. I got another lump on my head is all. I was out for a while. When I woke up Mutt was gone. I crawled out to look for her but it was snowing so hard I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face, so I figured I’d better stick with the truck and hope she’d gone for help.” She looked down at Mutt, whose tongue was lolling out of the side of her mouth in a big doggy grin, whose tail was wagging hard enough to stir up a small flurry from the snow in back of her. “Yeah, yeah, I owe you. Again.” She dropped to one knee to give Mutt a rough hug. “My girl. Sunshine on a cloudy day.”

  “You banged your head?” he said. “Are you seeing double or anything?”

  “It’s sore, but I think I’m okay. I even slept some.”

  “I brought hot soup.” An out-of-context aroma reached his nostrils. His brows came together and he sniffed the air. “What’s that smell?”

  She laughed again into Mutt’s gray fur, and looked up at him.

  “Pineapple.”

  “Pineapple,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said, “Stan says it cures black eyes.”

  He stared at her.

  “Papaya, too,” she said.

  “Okay,” Johnny said. “What the hell happened in Ahtna?”

  “Later,” she said. “Let’s clean up what we can here while we’ve still got daylight.” She looked at the southern horizon, an ominous and encroaching dark. “And while the weather’s on our side. There’s more storm coming.”

  Thirteen

  Johnny took Kate back to get her own snowgo and a jack and the two of them spent what was left of the daylight ferrying the supplies from the back of the pickup to the homestead. The last trailer full was safely under cover by nightfall. Kate and Johnny and Mutt trooped up the stairs and into the house. Kate kept going straight up to her room, shedding boots, parka, and clothes as she went. “You’re up for dinner. I’m taking a bath.”

  “Be happy to cook,” he yelled after her. “Thanks for asking.”

  Content, he shed his own outer gear, hung it and hers where it wouldn’t drip melting snow all over the floor, and set to work on fried Spam and eggs and hash browns and toast. “Pineapple,” he said to himself. “Huh.” Maybe they’d have it for dessert.

  Water gurgled in the pipes as he built a fire in the fireplace, and he was putting laden plates on the table when she came downstairs again, flushed and damp, attired in navy blue sweats with the UAF nanook across the chest and blue and gold stripes running down legs that ended in feet encased in thick wool socks.

  “I love you,” she said, and fell to.

  He sent her to the couch afterward, a mug of hot, sweet cocoa in hand, while he cleared the table and did the dishes. Then he joined her in the living room. “Okay. What the hell happened?”

  “I got run off the road.”

  He looked stern, a neat trick on a seventeen-year-old face. His height had long since outstripped his weight, making him a gangling six-footer, all knuckles and knees and bony shoulders. His brown hair was as thick as his father’s had been and much more carefully tended. His blue eyes were wide and clear and a little older than they should have been, in an iron-jawed, eagle-beaked face full of irregular features that worked together to form a heartbreaking reminder of his parentage.

  He’d lost his father too young, had been abandoned by a mother who had conceived him in the first place primarily as a lever against his father, and had survived a hitchhike from Arizona to Alaska at the age of twelve that still frightened the living hell out of Kate every time she thought about it. Particularly when she remembered who had followed him home.

  But he was safe now, and he was here, and his experiences had matured him in a way his years had yet to do. He was intelligent and courageous, with a sense of the ridiculous that on occasion out-distanced her own, and a practical view of life worthy of a man twice his age.

  Johnny was a gift, the last gift his father had given her before he died, but it wasn’t the only reason to treasure him, or even the most important one. Johnny was himself the gift, more precious even than Jack’s act in giving him to her. That had not always been true. She wasn’t a mommy, as she had once told Jack. But Johnny had grown from an obligation, a responsibility, a debt of honor to be paid in full, to an essential part of her life. She would resist most strenuously any attempt to remove him from her sphere of influence.

  Fortunately, his mother was no longer a problem. Kate smiled at her cocoa. She looked up to see him watching her from the other end of the couch, one quizzical eyebrow raised. “What the hell happened?” he said again.

  A clear, fresh eye on current events would be most useful. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, then. “I got run off the road.”

  “So you said. Did you see who did it?”

&
nbsp; She shook her head. “The storm had reached whiteout conditions and it happened so fast.”

  He leaned forward, intent. “What happened, exactly?”

  “We were coming up on Deadman’s Curve, where you found me.” Her hand dropped for a brief moment on Mutt’s head. “I saw the Towers and I knew the curve was coming up. I don’t think I was doing twenty, maybe not even fifteen. Probably what saved us. All of a sudden, there were oncoming headlights on my side of the road. Yes, my headlights were on, and I laid on the horn, but they kept coming. And they were coming fast.”

  “No way to recognize the vehicle?”

  She shook her head again. “It was big, at least a full-size pickup. It was pushing a lot of snow in front of it. If I had to guess, I’d say it was a dark color. Blue, maybe black.” She thought about it, and added, “And something tells me a newer model. The shape of the cab, maybe. But I can’t be sure about either. The snow was just too thick.”

  “Okay, you don’t know who it was,” he said. “Who do you think it was?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, her mouth pulling into such a grim line it made him nervous. “Any more than I know who it was who walloped me upside the head at Old Sam’s cabin. Let me run it down out loud, okay? All of it, even the stuff you know.”

  He was sitting on the floor, his legs stretched out, feet just touching Mutt’s back. The fire crackled. He drained his mug and said, “Okay, go.”

  “Old Sam dies.” Kate spoke for twenty minutes, keeping the story chronological and her opinions to a minimum.

  Once Johnny said, “I been thinking how I shouldn’t have taken that job at the mine. That I should have gone ahead and deckhanded for him like usual.”

  “You think I haven’t?” she said. “That’s six, eight more weeks I didn’t have with him, and I can never get them back. But you know he’d tear a strip off us both for saying so, so let it go.” She paused, and added, “Try to, anyway.”