The Great Alone: A Novel (11 page)

“I know.”

“You always said bad weather made him worse.”

Leni felt her mother pull away from her. This was a fact she didn’t want to confront. They both knew why. “It won’t be like that here,” Mama said, grinding out her cigarette in the rocks beside her. She said it again, just for good measure. “Not here. He’s happier here. You’ll see.”

*   *   *

A
S THE LONG SUMMER DAYS PASSED,
Leni’s anxiety faded. Summer in Alaska was pure magic. The Land of the Midnight Sun. Rivers of light; eighteen-hour days with only a breath of dusk to separate one from the next.

Light, and work; that was summer in Alaska.

There was so much to get done. Everyone talked about it, all the time. In line at the diner, during checkout at the General Store, on the ferry to town.
How’s the fishing going? Hunting good? How’s the garden?
Every question was about stocking up on food, getting ready for winter.

Winter was a Big Deal. Leni had learned that. The coming cold was a constant subtext up here. Even if you were out fishing on a beautiful summer day, you were catching fish for winter. It might be fun, but it was serious business. Survival, it seemed, could hinge on the smallest thing.

She and her parents woke at five
A.M.
and mumbled through breakfast and then set out to do their chores. They rebuilt the goat pen, chopped wood, tended the garden, made soap, caught and smoked salmon, tanned hides, canned fish and vegetables, darned socks, duct-taped everything together. They moved, hauled, nailed, built, scraped. Large Marge sold them three goats and Leni learned how to care for them. She also learned to pick berries and make jam and shuck clams and cure salmon eggs into the best bait in the world. In the evenings, Mama made them new foods—salmon or halibut in almost everything, and vegetables from the garden. Dad cleaned his guns and fixed the metal traps Mad Earl had sold to him and read manuals on butchering animals. Barter and trade and helping out your neighbor was the way they all lived. You never knew when someone was going to drive up your driveway and offer extra meat or some mildewed planks of wood or a bucket of blueberries in exchange for something.

Parties sprouted like weeds in this wild place. People showed up with coolers full of salmon and a case of beer and a call was made on the ham radio. A boat full of fishermen pulled up to shore; a float plane landed in their cove. The next thing you knew, people were gathered around a fire on the beach somewhere, laughing and talking and drinking well past midnight.

Leni became an adult that summer; that was how it felt to her. In September, she turned fourteen, started her period, and finally needed a bra. Pimples popped out like tiny pink volcanoes on her cheeks, her nose, between her eyebrows. When it first happened, she worried about seeing Matthew, worried that he would change his opinion based on her awkward adolescence;
but he didn’t seem to notice that her skin had become an enemy. Seeing him remained the highlight of her days up here. Whenever they got the chance to be together that summer, they ran off from the group and holed up and talked. He recited Robert Service poems to her and showed her special things like a nest full of blue duck eggs or a huge bear print in the sand. She took pictures of the things he showed her—and of him—in every light and tacked them into a giant collage on her loft bedroom wall.

Summer ended as quickly as it had begun. Autumn in Alaska was less a season and more an instant, a transition. Rain started to fall and didn’t stop, turning the ground to mud, drowning the peninsula, falling in curtains of gray. Rivers rose to splash over their crumbling banks, tearing big chunks away, changing course.

All at once, it seemed, the leaves of cottonwood trees around the cabin turned golden and whispered to themselves, then curled into black flutes and floated to the ground in crispy, lacy heaps.

School started, and with it Leni felt her childhood return. She met Matthew in the classroom and took her seat beside him, scooting in close.

His smile reawakened her in a way, reminded her that there was more to life than work. He taught her something new about friendship: it picked right back up where you’d left off, as if you hadn’t been apart at all.

*   *   *

O
N A COLD NIGHT
in late September, after a long work day, Leni stood at the window, staring out at the dark yard. She and her mother were exhausted; they’d worked from sunup to sundown, canning the last of the season’s salmon—preparing jars, scaling fish, slicing the plump pink and silver strips, and cutting off the slimy skin. They packed the strips in jars and put them into the pressure cooker. One by one, they carried the jars down to the root cellar and stacked them on newly built shelves.

“If there are ten smart guys in a room and one crackpot, you can bet who your dad will like best.”

“Huh?” Leni asked.

“Never mind.”

Mama moved in to stand by Leni. Outside, night had fallen. A full moon cast blue-white light on everything. Stars filled the sky with pinpricks and elliptical smears of light. Up here, at night, the sky was impossibly huge and never quite turned black, but stayed a deep velvet blue. The world beneath it dwindled down to nothing: a dollop of firelight, a squiggly white reflection of moonlight on the tarnished waves.

Dad was out there in the dark with Mad Earl. The two men stood beside each other at a fire burning in an oil drum, passing a jug back and forth. Black smoke billowed up from the garbage they were burning. Everyone else who had come by to help had gone home hours ago.

Mad Earl suddenly pulled out his pistol and shot at the trees.

Dad laughed uproariously at that.

“How long are they going to stay out there?” Leni asked. The last time she’d gone to the outhouse, she’d heard snippets of their conversation.
Ruining the country … keep ourselves safe … coming anarchy … nuclear.

“Who knows?”

Mama sounded irritated. She’d fried the moose steaks Mad Earl had brought with him; then she’d made roasted potatoes and set the card table with their camping plates and utensils. One of Leni’s paperback novels had been used to prop up the table’s bad leg.

That had been hours ago. Now the meat was probably as dry as an old boot.

“Enough is enough,” Mama finally said. She went outside. Leni sidled to the doorway, pushed the door open so she could hear. Goats bleated at the sound of footsteps.

“Hey, Cora,” Mad Earl said, smiling sloppily. He stood unsteady on his feet, swayed to the right, stumbled.

“Would you like to stay for dinner, Earl?” Mama asked.

“Naw, but thanks,” Mad Earl said, stumbling sideways. “My daughter will tan my hide if I don’t make it home. She’s making salmon chowder.”

“Another time then,” Mama said, turning back to the cabin. “Come on in, Ernt. Leni’s starving.”

Mad Earl staggered to his truck, climbed in, and drove away, stopping and starting, honking the horn.

Dad made his way across the yard in a mincing, overcautious way that meant he was drunk. Leni had seen it before. He slammed the door behind him and stumbled to the table, half falling into his chair.

Mama carried in a platter of meat and oven-browned potatoes and a warm loaf of sourdough bread, which Thelma had taught them how to make from the starter every homesteader kept on hand.

“Loo … s great,” Dad said, shoveling a forkful of moose meat into his mouth, chewing noisily. He looked up, bleary-eyed. “You two have a lot of catching up to do. Earl and I were talking about it. When TSHTF, you two would be the first casualties.”

“TSHTF? What in God’s name are you talking about?” Mama said.

Leni shot her mother a warning look. Mama knew better than to say anything about anything when he was drunk.

“When the shit hits the fan. You know. Martial law. A nuclear bomb. Or a pandemic.” He tore off a hunk of bread, dragged it in the meat juice.

Mama sat back. She lit up a cigarette, eyeing him.

Don’t do it, Mama
, Leni thought.
Don’t say anything.

“I don’t like all of this end-of-the-world rhetoric, Ernt. And there’s Leni to consider. She—”

Dad slammed his fist down on the table so hard everything rattled. “Damn it, Cora, can’t you
ever
just support me?”

He got to his feet and went to the row of parkas hanging by the front door. He moved jerkily. She thought she heard him say,
G-damn stupid
, and mutter something else. He shook his head and flexed and unflexed his hands. Leni saw a wildness in him, barely contained emotion rising hard and fast.

Mama ran after him, reached out.

“Don’t touch me,” he snarled, shoving her away.

Dad grabbed a parka and stepped into his boots and went outside, slamming the door shut behind him.

Leni caught her mother’s gaze, held it. In those wide blue eyes that held
on to every nuance of expression, she saw her own anxiety reflected. “Does he believe all of that end-of-the-world stuff?”

“I think he does,” Mama said. “Or maybe he just wants to. Who knows? It doesn’t matter, though. It’s all talk.”

Leni knew what did matter.

The weather was getting worse.

And so was he.

*   *   *

“W
HAT’S IT REALLY LIKE
?” Leni asked Matthew the next day at the end of school. All around them, kids were gathering up their supplies to go home.

“What?”

“Winter.”

Matthew thought about it. “Terrible and beautiful. It’s how you know if you’re cut out to be an Alaskan. Most go running back to the Outside before it’s over.”

“The Great Alone,” Leni said. That was what Robert Service called Alaska.

“You’ll make it,” Matthew said earnestly.

She nodded, wishing she could tell him that she’d begun to worry as much about the dangers inside of her home as outside of it.

She could tell Matthew a lot of things, but not that. She could say her father drank too much or that he yelled or lost his temper, but not that he sometimes scared her. The disloyalty of such a thing was impossible to contemplate.

They exited the schoolhouse together, walking shoulder to shoulder.

Outside, the VW bus waited for her. It looked bad these days, all dinged up and scraped. The bumper was duct-taped in place. The muffler had fallen off at a pothole, so now the poor old thing roared like a race car. Both of her parents were inside, waiting for her.

“’Bye,” Leni said to Matthew, and headed to the vehicle. She tossed her backpack into the back of the bus and climbed in. “Hey, guys,” Leni said.

Dad jammed the bus in reverse, backed up, and turned around.

“Mad Earl wants me to teach his family a few things,” Dad said, turning onto the main road. “We talked about it the other night.”

In no time, they were out of town and up the hill and pulling into the compound. Dad was the first one out of the bus. He grabbed his rifle from the back and slung it over his shoulder.

Mad Earl, seated on his porch, immediately rose and waved. He yelled something Leni couldn’t hear and people stopped working. They put down their shovels and axes and chain saws and moved into the clearing in the center of the compound.

Mama opened the door and got out. Leni followed close behind, her wafflestompers sinking into the wet, spongy ground.

A dented Ford truck pulled up beside the VW and parked. Axle and the two girls, Agnes and Marthe, got out of the truck and headed for the crowd gathering in front of Mad Earl’s porch.

Mad Earl stood on the eroding, slanted porch, his bandy legs spaced a little farther apart than looked comfortable. His white hair hung limply around his loose-skinned face, greasy at the roots and frizzing at the ends. He wore dirty jeans tucked into brown rubber boots and a flannel work shirt that had seen better days. He made a sweeping motion with his hands. “Get closer, come on in. Ernt, Ernt, come up by me, son.”

There was a murmur of sound through the crowd; heads turned.

Dad strode past Thelma and Ted, smiling at Clyde and thumping his back when he reached him. Dad stepped up onto the porch beside Mad Earl. He looked tall and rangy next to the diminutive old man. Super-handsome, with all that black hair and the bushy black mustache.

“We was talking last night, us boys, about the shit going on Outside,” Mad Earl said. “Our president is a certified crook and a bomb blowed a TWA jet right outta the sky. Ain’t nobody safe anymore.”

Leni turned, looked up at Mama, who shrugged.

“My son, Bo, was the very best of us. He loved Alaska and he loved the good old US of A enough to volunteer to fight in that damn war. And we lost him. But even from that hellhole, he was thinking of us. His family. Our
safety and security mattered to him. So he sent us his friend, Ernt Allbright, to be one of us.” Mad Earl thumped Dad on the back, kind of pushed him forward. “I been watching Ernt all summer and now I know. He wants the best for us.”

Dad pulled a folded newspaper from his back pocket, held it up. The headline read:
Bomb on TWA Flight 841 Kills 88.
“We might live in the bush, but we go to Homer and Sterling and Soldotna. We know what’s going on in the Outside. Bombings by the IRA, the PLO, Weatherman. Folks killing each other, kidnappings. All those girls disappearing in Washington State; now someone is killing girls in Utah. The Symbionese Liberation Army. India testing nuclear bombs. It’s only a matter of time before World War Three starts. It could be nuclear … or biological. And when that happens, the shit will really hit the fan.”

Mad Earl nodded, murmured his agreement.

“Mama?” Leni whispered. “Is all that true?”

Mama lit up a cigarette. “A thing can be true and not the truth, now shush. We don’t want to make him mad.”

Dad was the center of attention, and he drank it up. “You all have done a great job of preparing for scarcity. You’ve excelled at homesteader self-reliance. You have a good water-collection system and good food stores. You’ve staked out freshwater sources and you’re expert hunters. Your garden could be bigger, but it’s well tended. You’re ready to survive anything. Except the effects of martial law.”