Breakup (2 page)

The truck was an '84 Isuzu diesel with 150,000 miles on it that still got twenty-six miles per gallon on the straight stretch of former railroad roadbed between Kate's homestead and the village of Niniltna. She had high hopes of it going another hundred and fifty thousand, until either she or the truck died of old age. She sorted through the toolbox for a wrench, pausing when something halfway between a pig squeal and a jackass bray wafted into the clearing on a stray breeze. It wasn't the female this time. Probably the grizzly male one mountain over. Probably the father of the two cubs. She reached down to feel for the 12-gauge and found it right where she'd left it, leaning against the front bumper.

By ten a.m. she had pulled the battery and put it on the trickle charger, drained the water out of the fuel filters, checked the oil, checked the coolant in the radiator, checked the tire pressure all around and investigated the possibility of porcupines in the fan belt. Porcupines were pests damn near as bad as bears, born troublemakers; they would go for anything rubber for the salt in it-the fan belt, the tires, once Kate had seen a porcupine chewing through the track of a Nodwell tractor.

During the tune-up she managed to acquire a metal splinter under the nail of her right forefinger that looked about a quarter of an inch long and felt as if it ran all the way up to her elbow. She startled Mutt out of her nap with a loud oath and went into the cabin to perform emergency surgery. She daubed the resulting gash with antiseptic, and tried to remember the last time she'd had a tetanus shot. Niniltna had no health clinic. Each year the public health nurse came through with an immunization card fo r every student in Niniltna Public School, kindergarten through twelfth grade, but once you graduated, you were on your own. If Kate needed a tetanus shot, she'd have to drive to Ahtna. Convenient, if that was the right word, since she had to drive to Ahtna for supplies anyway.

The whistle of the kettle interrupted her reverie. A cup of hot cocoa sounded like heaven on earth. Unfortunately, she'd used up her last can of milk the week before, and this morning's coffee had been the end of the Starbucks Christmas blend, which she bought five pounds at a time, when she had money in December. She rummaged around for something else, surfacing eventually with an elderly box of Lemon Zinger. There was some honey left. Hallelujah. She spooned it into the thick white porcelain mug with a heavy hand. The resulting brew was tangy and sweet and scalded her insides.

It was noon and she was hungry, but she'd forgotten to get any meat out of the cache the night before. She added more honey to her tea and put Jimmy Buffett on the tape deck, forgetting how dangerous Jimmy was to listen to during breakup. Kate, too, wanted to go beyond the end, find one particular harbor, be somewhere over China, take another road, any road, especially today, preferably to a place where there were no bears. It was an act of self-defense when she replaced Jimmy with Cyndi Lauper. Girls just wanna have fun. Which of course brought Jack Morgan back to mind with an immediacy that set her teeth on edge. She changed Cyndi Lauper for Les Miserables, sat down on the couch and leaned back with a contented sigh. Mutt, who had overseen the operation with a critical eye, flopped down with an equally contented sigh.

Fifteen minutes later Kate jerked awake, the now cool tea sloshing over the side of the heavy white porcelain mug onto her hand and knee. Mutt was on her feet, nose to the door, a steady, rumbling growl issuing from deep in her chest.

"Oh shit," Kate said, and got to her feet.

The .30-06 slid comfortably into her hands, and she flicked of f the safety and took a step back as she opened the door. "Stay," she told Mutt, whose growl had grown in volume.

There was a bear in the yard, and to add insult to injury, it wasn't the sow she'd encountered that morning, it wasn't even the boar from the next mountain over. This was an entirely new neighbor, a youngster, two, three years maybe, and small, no more than three hundred pounds and change. His brown coat was long and thick and shining from six months of doing nothing but growing it out underground.

He had managed to bump into the cache, with the result that it was now on the verge of total collapse, so that the frozen meat inside had shifted enough to force open the door. Half a dozen packages littered the ground beneath, and a seventh was at present being finished off with a single gulp, two layers of butcher paper over two layers of Saran wrap and all. He lifted his lip in their direction and attacked another package.

Kneeing Mutt, who had expressed a sincere wish to rid the homestead of its uninvited guest and all his kin, back inside, Kate jacked a round into the .30-06's chamber. "Get out of here!" she yelled. "Go on! Git, you big pest, before I turn you into a rug!" Mutt raised her voice in agreement, sounding considerably more threatening.

The bear stood up on his hind legs and waved his claws, snarling. His mom had taught him that much before she booted him out, and it worked pretty well on other mammals and most humans. Kate shot a round into the ground in front of him. The bear let out a shriek of fear and dropped forward on all four legs, in the process bumping once more into the cache.

"Oh hell," Kate said.

The much-abused knock-kneed leg folded like a pleat in an accordion and the other three legs couldn't stand the strain and the cache began a graceful tilt forward, during which the rest of the meat store fell out and rained down on the grizzly's head-a roast, a package of ptarmigan breasts, another roast, a package of mooseburger, five pounds of caribou ribs. The bewildered grizzl y gave a bellow of consternation and bolted like lightning into the east.

A bear in high gear is a sight to evoke awe and admiration, and Kate would undoubtedly have experienced both those emotions but for one thing. The open door of the garage was in the bear's way. His right shoulder clipped it in passing and it ripped easily from its hinges, whirled merrily around on one corner and flopped down with a squishy splat as the grizzly, barely checking, crashed through a stand of alders and was gone.

Kate looked from the garage door lying flat on the ground to the cache crumpled up on the opposite side of the yard and sat down hard on the doorstep, the rifle clutched in her hands, waiting for her heart rate to drop below 200.

"Breakup" she said.

One bear encounter per life was one too many. Two in the space of eight hours seemed, at the very least, excessive.

Still, any number of bears in one's life was preferable to what waited for her on the kitchen table, a task she'd been putting off for three months, a task she could no longer delay.

That evening she took a deep breath, got out her self-control and marched over to the kitchen table, where the booklet entitled "Instructions for Form 1040" waited for her with a superior smirk on its government-issue face.

An hour later she felt as she always did on this day at this time of the year, frustrated and angry and convinced she was destined to spend the rest of her life in a federal prison in Illinois run by Ida Lupino.

"Income," as usual, was proving to be a problem.

On page 15 of the booklet the IRS had provided a helpful guide to just what kind of income must be reported. Earned income was easy; her brief but intense employment with RPetCo at Prudhoe Bay the previous year had pulled in $17,500 in fees and expenses. That went on line , no problem there. There was the mushroom money from last June as well, but it had been paid in cash and Kate decided what the IRS didn't know wouldn't hurt them, or her, either.

She tried to remember where the $17,500 was now. A big chunk of it had gone for Axenia's classes at UAA, although now that Axenia was married her husband would be taking over his wife's bills. She didn't approve of Axenia's choice of husband but at least he'd gotten rich at the government trough and would relieve her of the burden of Axenia's school fees. Or so Kate sincerely hoped.

Too much of it had gone for that damn dress-up outfit for that party in Anchorage last winter. The outfit was hanging in Jack's closet in town, encased in plastic, and if she had anything to say about it, never to be worn again. She still begrudged every dime.

Of course, once she'd put it on, Jack Morgan's chief object in life became a determination to get her out of it as quickly as possible, not necessarily the worst finale to a forced march through Nordstrom's. She smiled to herself, and then made an effort and pulled her wayward imagination back to the subject at hand. Most of what was left of the Slope income had financed Emaa's potlatch. The rest was in the one-pound Darigold butter can on the table in front of her.

Kate still wasn't sure if her grandmother had had legal title to the Niniltna house on the river, but whether she did or not Martha Barnes and her children lived there now, and possession was nine- tenths of the law. She decided the IRS didn't need to know about that, either.

Ekaterina's possessions had been distributed among family and friends at the potlatch. So far as Kate knew, Ekaterina had never had a bank account. For that matter, Kate didn't think her grandmother had ever applied for a Social Security number. She'd neve r had to pay for much; no family member or friend ever came to her house not bearing gifts. Kate had found seven hundred dollars in small bills and change in the butter can the twin of Kate's sitting on Emaa's kitchen table, a moose hindquarter hanging out back, a chest freezer stuffed with salmon in the round, ptarmigan breasts frozen a dozen per Ziploc bag and enough caribou to keep the entire village in stew for a week in the upright freezer next to it. The pantry had yielded up ten cases of salmon, plain and smoked and kippered, case lots of canned goods and pilot bread, a case of homemade nagoonberry jelly, another of strawberry jam, a fifty- pound sack of potatoes, a fifty-pound sack of onions and two fifty- pound sacks of flour. In the closet hung flowered house dresses, worn Levi's and half a dozen kuspuks, richly embroidered and trimmed with fur, all gifts from loving and/or grateful family, friends, tribal members and shareholders. Money and food both had gone to the potlatch, the kuspuks to female relatives of the right size, and now Kate was wondering if she'd inherited all of it and if she had, if she was supposed to pay taxes on it.

She decided the IRS would never know.

Farm income, now. Would that mean the potatoes Mandy grew and sacked and traded with Kate for salmon to feed Mandy's dogs? Or would that be farm income for Mandy and barter income for her? But it wasn't income if it was an even trade, was it? Kate consulted the booklet. Bartering income was defined as "fair market value of goods or services you received in return for your services."

What the hell was that supposed to mean? Salmon weren't services. Potatoes weren't services, either. They were probably goods, though. How much did potatoes cost nowadays? She had no idea. She never bought potatoes, she either grew them herself or traded with Mandy for them. She wondered if there was some way the IRS could find out about that. She wondered how Mandy had filled out her IRS form, if she had included Kate's salmon as income from barter.

The vision of the federal prison in Illinois faded, to be replaced by one of a chain gang in Mississippi, bossed by Strother Martin.

She made herself another cup of tea and dosed it liberally with the last of the honey. She sat back down at the table and drew a pad and pencil to her and started making out a grocery list, paperwork that was more her speed, but then Kate had always had a tendency to think with her stomach. Coffee, flour, butter, salt, seasonings, milk, canned goods, she was out of everything.

Breakup. If she could just go to sleep at the end of February and wake up on Memorial Day, the truck running and the cupboards full-and taxes filed-life would be so much easier.

She dawdled over the list until the sun had gone down and it was time to light the lamps. She drew out the task as long as she could, checking the fuel, trimming the wicks, polishing the chimneys until they shone like crystal. When she was finished, the interior of the cabin was filled with a warm and welcoming golden glow. She stood admiring it for a while, and her thoughts wandered to her next-door neighbor. She wondered if Mandy's parents had arrived on schedule. She wondered if Mr. and Mrs. Baker had tax problems. Probably not. They probably had a fleet of tax attorneys on retainer. Them that has, gets.

The distant whine of a jet engine broke the silence. Probably an F-14 on maneuvers from Elmendorf or Eielson. Even on a remote site in the Alaskan bush, you couldn't get away from the sonuvabitchin' feds. The reminder drove her back to the kitchen table, before they parachuted an IRS auditor down into her front yard.

She had just resumed her seat when Mutt, dozing next to the stove, woke up with a snort and lunged to her feet.

Startled, Kate said, "What's wrong, girl? What's going on?"

Mutt made a troubled sound halfway between a growl and a whimper. Her rangy body tense, she stood with her head cocked, ears up, yellow eyes narrowed, attention fixed on something Kate could neither hear nor see.

Kate didn't like it, not one little bit. Very carefully, she put her pencil down and rose to her feet. "What's wrong, girl?"

A second half-growl, half-whine was her only answer. It was a sound unlike anything else Kate had ever heard from Mutt, and a prickle of unease rippled up her spine. She walked to the window. Through it, the yard looked much as she had left it, a half-circle of buildings surrounding a clearing with a small, filthy red-and- white truck with a homemade toolbox in the back, a snow machine, a collapsed cache and a scattered woodpile, all well illuminated in that maddening half-light of an Arctic spring evening when the sun was down but not out. A breeze toyed with the tops of the trees, and far above cumulus clouds scudded across the sky, attesting to much stronger winds at the higher elevations.

"What is it, girl?" Kate said softly. "What do you hear? Did that baby grizz come back for more of what he got this afternoon?" She reached for the shotgun and eased the door open. This time she would just shoot the little bastard.