Billy and Annie Mike had adopted a Korean baby and named him Alexei, for Annie’s grandfather. “My god,” Dina said in disgust, “the woman had seven children of her own. Wasn’t that enough?”
“Evidently not,” Ruthe said.
Dina had the grace to look slightly ashamed. “Sorry,” she said gruffly. “Never been a kid person.”
“Yeah, you never could stand having me around,” Kate said, and Ruthe laughed out loud.
Mandy and Chick were in training for the Yukon Quest. “Every day at noon, like clockwork,” Kate said, “I hear dog howls coming down the trail. I open the door and to what to my wondering eyes should appear but Chick, stopping by for cocoa and fry bread.”
Ruthe and Dina laughed. “Thinks with his stomach,” Dina said. “What I call a proper man.”
Ruthe refilled their mugs. “I saw John Letourneau putting the moves on Auntie Edna,” Kate said, stirring in evaporated milk. The quality of the silence that followed her remark made her raise her head.
At her curious look, Dina said, “Yeah, I saw that, too,” and added with a sneer, “He’s probably after her for that property she owns on Alaguaq Creek.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Ruthe said immediately. “I think Auntie Edna has more than enough charm to explain John’s interest.”
“Charm, schmarm,” Dina said. “That man never does anything without an ulterior motive.”
“That’s not true, Dina, and you know it,” Ruthe said, this time with an edge to her voice.
Kate stepped in to defuse the tension a little, although she was intensely curious as to why it had sprouted up in the first place. “He got a little tangled up in your cane, Dina, there on the dance floor.”
“He sure did, didn’t he? Can’t think how that happened.” She looked sharply at Kate. “Didn’t see you out there.”
They must have left before the conga line, Kate thought. “I don’t dance.”
“Hell you don’t. Many’s the time I’ve seen you whooping it up at a potlatch.”
“That’s a different kind of dancing.”
“And why not dance them all? Dancing’s good for what ails you. Kick up your heels and it lifts your spirits.”
“It’s good for your soul,” Ruthe said.
Kate mumbled something, but by now the two old women were on the warpath.
“How’s Johnny?” Ruthe said.
Like everyone else in the Park, Dina and Ruthe had a vital interest in the well-being of Johnny Morgan, who had come to the Park to live following his father’s death. It was natural for them to ask, as Johnny was Jack Morgan’s son, and Jack had been Kate’s lover. “He’s fine,” Kate said.
Dina fixed her with a penetrating eye. “How are you?”
“I’m fine, too.” Even if she did still wince at the mention of Jack.
Dina’s fierce eyes saw an uncomfortable amount. “Huh,” she said, lighting another cigarette. “Miss him?”
Kate took a deep breath. “Every day,” she managed to say.
“But you’re learning to live with it.”
“Yes.”
“And without him,” Ruthe said.
“Yes.” If the joy she found in sunrise over a world without Jack Morgan in it was not as strong as it had once been, it was no one’s business but her own.
“That Ethan Int-Hout still sniffing around?”
“I—”
“The boy’s got the look of someone who knows his way around a bed, I’ll give him that.”
To her acute embarrassment, Kate felt herself turn a brilliant red.
“That might be none of our business, Dina,” Ruthe said.
“Oh balls! Everything in this Park is our business,” Dina said, and pointed her cigarette at Kate again. “Shit or get off the pot. It’s not like there aren’t men waiting around the block to step up if you’d look at them twice.”
“I suppose,” Kate said in a desperate bid for one-upmanship, “you would know.”
Dina only cackled again. “You bet your ass, I would, sweetie. Whether I took ’em up on it or not.” She looked at Ruthe and her eyes softened. “You bet I would.”
Ruthe put her hand over Dina’s.
Kate stood. “Time for me to mosey on home.”
“Say hi to Johnny for us,” Ruthe said. “I like him, Kate. He values his elders.”
“He’s been up here?” Kate said, surprised.
Ruthe chuckled. “On half a dozen occasions. Seems like old times.”
“And give Ethan our love,” Dina said, and cackled as Kate climbed back into her down overalls and parka and headed out the door.
3
The two gentlemen in question were both at her cabin when she got there. Mutt knocked Johnny off the doorstep and wrestled him across the snow, growling in mock anger. Ethan stood in the doorway, watching as Kate ran the snow machine into the garage. “I’ll be in in a minute,” she called, and after a moment she heard boyish laughter and fake growls fade as the cabin door was closed.
She topped off the snow machine’s gas tank, checked the oil, looked at the treads. The ax needed sharpening, and so, too, it seemed, did the hatchet. She checked the rest of the tools hanging in neat rows from the Peg-Board while she was at it. The truck had been winterized and was parked as far out of the way as possible at the back of the garage. The woodpile was down to four cords, and although it had been a mild winter thus far, it wouldn’t hurt to haul in a few more trees from the woodlot and replenish it. She visited the outhouse—plenty of toilet paper and lime—and the Coleman lantern hanging from the planter hook on the wall was almost full of kerosene.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see Ethan, and it wasn’t that she didn’t want to spend time with Johnny. She just wasn’t used to anyone waiting for her when she got home. She kicked the snow from her boots and stepped inside.
It was a cabin much like the one she had come from, twenty-five feet on a side, with an open loft reached by a ladder. The logs had been planked over with a light pine and were sanded smooth and finished. The ceiling was Sheetrocked and painted white, making the interior much lighter than that of many Bush cabins. There was a large picture window to the right of the door as you faced in, and another large window over the sink, to the left of the door. Both windows faced southwest.
There was an oil stove for cooking, a woodstove for heat, a small table that looked leftover from the fifties with a Darigold one-pound butter can sitting in the middle of it, stuffed with paper money and change. An L-shaped couch had been built into one corner, covered in blue denim that looked as if it had been pieced together from old Levi’s. The kitchen counter held a shallow porcelain sink mounted with a pump handle; open cupboards above and below were filled with canned goods and sacks of flour, sugar, and rice. Shelves ran all around the walls, filled mostly with books, but there were also decks of cards, board games, and a cassette deck with tapes. A .30-06 rifle and a pump-action 12-gauge shotgun were cradled in a rack over the door, ready to hand, boxes of ammunition on a shelf nearby. There were no family pictures, although there was a large, thick photo album sitting on one shelf. A tiny ivory otter, perched on his hind legs, thick fur ruffled from the water, looked at the room through gleaming baleen eyes.
There was a basketball rolled into the crease of the couch, and a guitar hung from a hook next to the door, but otherwise the room was a reflection of someone who liked to cook, read, and listen to music. Someone self-contained, self-sufficient, content with her own company, having no need in her day-to-day life for a telephone, cable TV, or Net access.
Someone, perhaps, who placed a high value on the qualities of solitude and silence.
Every lantern was lit, and the kettle was steaming on the woodstove. Dirty dishes had been washed and put away in the cupboard and the counter swept free of crumbs. The loaves of bread from that morning’s baking were wrapped in tinfoil and the kettle of last night’s stew had been removed to the cooler on the porch outside the front door. The cushi
ons on the couch were plumped up, the books on the shelves were lined up. The cassette tapes were stacked in neat piles, labels out. Except for on the guitar, there wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t a notorious neatnik. It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate someone doing her chores for her. It was just that she was used to doing for herself. It made her inexplicably uneasy to be done for.
Still, she managed a smile for both man and boy. At face value, they were both well worth it. Ethan looked like a Viking, tall, broad-shouldered, long-limbed, pale skin, blond hair, blue eyes; his forebears could have come from anywhere so long as anywhere was Norway, Sweden, or Denmark. Johnny was at that ungainly stage of adolescence when his limbs were growing out beyond his control, but he would be tall, too. He bore a striking resemblance to his father, thick dark hair over a heavy brow, deep-set blue eyes, firm mouth, strong chin. He would never be handsome, but his face, once seen, would never be forgotten.
“Hey,” she said, shrugging out of her parka.
“Hey,” Ethan said, catching it and leaning down to kiss her at the same time.
Johnny was sitting at the table, hunched over a book, and Kate instinctively pulled back. Ethan maintained his smile, but there was a frown at the back of his eyes. “Had dinner?”
“Yeah, I had dinner up at Ruthe and Dina’s.”
Ethan’s lips pursed in a long, low whistle. “Lucky girl. They have pie?”
“Rhubarb and something extra.”
“I’m jealous.”
“It was good,” Kate admitted. She pulled her bibs down and hung them next to the parka. The coat hook was crowded with Johnny’s and Ethan’s parkas and bibs, and hers were elbowed onto the floor. She picked them up and jammed them on the hook again. This time, they stayed.
“I was about to make some cocoa.”
“I’d like that. It was a long ride home.”
Ethan turned to the kettle. “What were you doing up at the old gals’ place?”
“I went there to ask them to help with Dan.”
“Ah.” He was silent for a moment, measuring cocoa and honey and evaporated milk into three mugs. “I wasn’t expecting you to charge off that way this morning when I came galloping over with the news.”
Kate raised one shoulder. “He’s a friend.”
“Um.” He brought her a mug. It had miniature marshmallows in it. She repressed a shudder.
He gave a second mug to Johnny, who grunted a thank-you without looking up, and came back to sit next to where she was curled up on the couch. He stretched out his long legs and propped his feet on the burl-wood coffee table, about the only piece of furniture in the room that had any pretension to style. “What did Dina and Ruthe have to say?”
“Well, they weren’t surprised. They said the current administration wants to drill for oil in the Arctic, and it follows that they—the administration—will try to get rid of every bureaucrat who thinks otherwise.”
“They don’t have the votes in Congress, do they?”
“Ruthe says they don’t.” Kate tried to drink some cocoa without allowing her lips to come into contact with the marshmallows. It wasn’t easy. “But I don’t think she or Dina have a lot of confidence that the situation is going to stay that way.”
“You for it or against it?”
“What? Drilling in ANWR?” Kate thought about it. “I don’t know. I’ve gone back and forth on it. I’ve been to Prudhoe Bay; they did a good job there. Then I think of Valdez, and how badly they did there. And then I think—” She stopped.
“What?”
“Well…well, it’s just that maybe, once in a while, we should let a beautiful thing be, you know?” She looked at him. “What else is left like that?” She looked at Johnny, still hunched over his homework. “What do we leave behind when we’re gone if we move into it now with D-nines?”
Ethan finished his chocolate. “I’m for it.”
“You’re for drilling?”
“Yeah. There’ll be jobs, Kate. It’s easy for you to say let it be, but I’ve got kids to support and educate.”
“Your father raised four sons single-handedly before there was an oil patch.”
“I’m not my father.”
They were both angry, both aware of it, and both made a conscious decision to pull back from that anger. Ethan leaned forward to place his mug on the coffee table. “Where’d you get this table, anyway?”
“Buck Brinker made it for Emaa,” she said. “I brought it home when she died.”
“Thought I recognized the work. Nice piece.”
“I like it. What did you do today?”
“Chopped wood.”
“Filled up your woodshed?”
“Nope.” He stretched, his joints popping, and gave her a lazy grin. “Filled yours.”
“Oh. Ah. Well. Thanks.”
“Thank me later.”
She gave Johnny’s back a warning glance.
Ethan’s grin faded. “We’ve got to talk about this, Kate.”
“Not now.”
“It’s always ‘Not now.’ When?”
Johnny sat up and closed his book with a decisive thump. “There!” He swiveled in his chair. “Done!” He fixed Kate with a hopeful eye.
“What?” she said.
He looked at the guitar.
So did she. Dust lay over it like a shroud.
“You said you would,” Johnny said.
“I know I did,” Kate said, reflecting on the un-wisdom of making promises to adolescents. They were worse than elephants. It never occurred to her to renege, though. She set her mug next to Ethan’s and got to her feet, ignoring the stifled sigh she heard Ethan give.
The guitar was an old Gibson that had belonged to Kate’s father, who had left it behind when he died, along with an extensive collection of folk songs from the fifties, some with musical notation, some with only the chords penciled in over the stanzas, some just with the lyrics scribbled on a page torn from a school notebook. Collected in a black three-ring binder so old that the plastic cover was peeling away from itself, they were as foreign to Johnny as Bach was to Kate. She got the binder down and opened it on the coffee table, motioning Johnny to her side.
“Well,” Ethan said with a lightness that was obviously forced, “I’m heading for home. See you back at the house, Johnny.”
“Yeah,” Johnny said.
“Or he can sack out here on the couch,” Kate said. “Our Jane DEW line hasn’t gone off in a while, so it should be safe.” Jane was Johnny’s mother and Jack’s ex-wife, and a roaring bitch into the bargain. The good news was that she hated Kate with every part and fiber of her being. The bad news was she was trying to find her son in Kate’s keeping so she could charge Kate with kidnapping.
All this stemmed from Johnny’s father’s death the previous year. Jane had taken Johnny to Arizona to live with her mother, who was seventy-three and lived in a retirement community. Johnny had hated Arizona, hated the retirement community, and had nothing in common with his grandmother, who was into golf in a major way and who had considered her child-rearing days over once she got Jane out of the house. One morning, he’d put a couple of peanut butter sandwiches, a liter bottle of Coke, and a copy of Between Planets into his knapsack, swiped forty bucks out of his grandmother’s purse, and hitched a ride on a semi loaded with lettuce. A Volkswagen van full of antiglobalization activists took him as far as Eugene, where he hooked up with a defrocked cop who was moving to Coeur d’Alene and who dropped him in Spokane. He walked across the border under the noses of Canadian immigration, hitched a ride on a U-Haul van full of furniture belonging to a family whose man was transferring from RPetCo Lima to RPetCo Prudhoe Bay, the driver of which was looking for a free ride to Alaska and didn’t mind having company to keep him awake during the thousand-mile-plus journey. He dropped Johnny at the entrance to the Park on his way down the Glenn Highway to Anchorage. Johnny walked the rest of the way, appearing on Kate’s doorstep tired, angry,
and determined to stay.
Kate, who had weaseled the story out of him one leg at a time, was surprised that her hair hadn’t turned white in the telling. Before she had time to formulate a plan, Jane had showed up in the Park, looking for Johnny. A Park rat who had no love for Kate had pointed Jane toward Kate’s homestead, and Jane had materialized on the doorstep, breathing fire and smoke. Mutt had gotten rid of her for the moment, but she had legal custody of Johnny, and now she knew where Kate lived. She didn’t know Ethan, however, nor did she know where he lived, and since Ethan’s wife had walked out on him and he had room and practice as a father of two, Kate had worked out an arrangement whereby Johnny lived for the most part on Ethan’s homestead, safely out of Jane’s reach, for the time being at least. This arrangement had the tacit, if not overt, sanction of the law, in the form of Trooper Jim Chopin. Ergo, Johnny was currently on the lam and the entire Park was in on the conspiracy to keep him that way until he was of age and could legally tell Jane to take a flying leap.
“Whatever,” Johnny said, turning the pages of the notebook.
Not that he seemed overly worried about it.
He squinted at Stephan’s writing. “Who’s Woody Guthrie, Kate?”
Kate didn’t want to look up, but she felt it would be cowardly not to. Ethan nodded at the door, his mouth set in a determined line. “I’ll be right back,” she said to Johnny.
“Yeah,” he said again. He picked up the guitar, leaving fingerprints in the dust. He sneezed once, and a second time, and got up to dampen a dishcloth in the sink.
She shrugged into her parka and followed Ethan outdoors. His snow machine was parked to one side of the clearing, next to Johnny’s. “How long is this going to go on, Kate?”
She gave a craven thought to saying, How long is what going to go on? but then thought better of it. Ethan’s expression was very clear in the moonlight. “I’m just—I’m a little—I don’t know, uncertain.”
“What’s this uncertain? You want me; I want you. I’m here, so are you. Jesus, Kate, this is just like college all over again.”
Her head came up. “‘Just like college?’ Who you going to sleep with instead of me this time, Ethan?”
A Fine and Bitter Snow Page 5