The Great Alone: A Novel (21 page)

Mr. Walker moved toward Dad, and people came with him, stood close,
drinks in hand. Mr. Walker looked casual until you saw his eyes and the way his mouth tightened when he looked at Mama. He was pissed.

“Come on, Allbright. Don’t run off. Be neighborly,” Mr. Walker said. “There’s money to be made, man, and change is natural. Unavoidable.”

“I won’t let you change our town,” Dad said. “I don’t care how much money you have.”

“Yes, you will,” Mr. Walker said. “You have no choice. So let it go and lose gracefully. Have a drink.”

Gracefully?

Didn’t Mr. Walker know by now?

Dad wasn’t one to let things go.

THIRTEEN

All the next day, Dad paced and fumed and railed about dangerous changes and the future. At noon, he got on the ham radio and called for a meeting at the Harlan family compound.

For the entirety of the day, Leni had a bad feeling, a hollowness in the pit of her stomach. The hours passed slowly, but still they passed. After dinner, they drove up to the compound.

Now they were all waiting impatiently for the meeting to start. Chairs had been dragged out of cabins and unstacked from sheds and set up in a haphazard fashion on the muddy ground facing Mad Earl’s porch.

Thelma sat in an aluminum chair, with Moppet sprawled uncomfortably across her, the girl too big for her mother’s lap. Ted stood behind his wife, smoking a cigarette. Mama sat beside Thelma in an Adirondack chair with only one arm, and Leni was beside her, sitting in a metal fold-out chair that had sunk into the muck. Clyde and Donna stood like sentinels on either side of Marthe and Agnes, both of whom were carving sticks of wood into spikes.

All eyes were on Dad, who stood on the porch, alongside Mad Earl.
There was no sign of whiskey between them, but Leni could tell they had been drinking.

A dreary rain fell. Everything was gray—gray skies, gray rain, gray trees lost in a gray haze. Dogs barked and snapped at the ends of rusty chains. Several stood atop small doghouses and watched the proceedings in the center of the compound.

Dad looked out over the crowd gathered in front of him, which was the smallest it had ever been. In the last few years, the young adults had ventured off their grandfather’s land in search of their own lives. Some fished in the Bering Sea, others rangered up in the national park. Last year Axle had impregnated a Native girl and was now living in a Yupik settlement somewhere.

“We all know why we’re here,” Dad said. His long hair was a dirty mess and his beard was thick and untrimmed. His skin was winter pale. A red bandanna covered most of his head, kept his hair out of his face. He patted Mad Earl’s scrawny shoulder. “This man saw the future long before any of the rest of us. He knew somehow that our government would fail us, that greed and crime would destroy everything we love about America. He came up here—brought you all here—to live a better, simpler life, one that went back to the land. He wanted to hunt his food and protect his family and be away from the bullshit that goes on in cities.” Dad paused, looked out at the people gathered in front of him. “It’s all worked. Until now.”

“Tell ’em, Ernt,” Mad Earl said, leaning forward, reaching down for a jug hidden beneath his chair, uncorking it with a
thunk
.

“Tom Walker is a rich, arrogant prick,” Dad said. “We’ve all known men like him. He didn’t go to ’Nam. Guys like him had a million ways to dodge the draft. Unlike me and Bo and our friends, who stood up for our country. But, hey, I can get over that, too. I can get over his holier-than-thou attitude and his rubbing his money in my face. I can get over him leering at my wife.” He stepped down the rickety porch steps, splashed into the murky water that pooled along the bottom step. “But I will
not
let him destroy Kaneq and our way of life. This is our
home
. We want it to stay wild and free.”

“He’s fixing up the tavern, Ernt, not building a convention center,” Thelma said. At her raised voice, Moppet got up and walked away, went over to play with Marthe and Agnes.

“And a hotel,” Mad Earl said. “Don’t forget that, missy.”

Thelma looked at her father. “Come on, Dad. You guys are making a mountain out of a molehill. There are no roads over here, no services, no electricity. All this complaining is counterproductive. Just let it go.”

“I don’t want to complain,” Dad said. “I want to
do
something, and by Christ, I will. Who’s with me?”

“Damn right,” Mad Earl said, his voice a little slurred.

“He’ll raise the price of drinks,” Clyde complained. “You watch.”

“I didn’t move out into the bush so I could have a
hotel
nearby,” Dad said.

Mad Earl grumbled something, took a long drink.

Leni watched the men come together, each one clapping Dad on the back as if he had said the perfect thing.

Within moments the women were left sitting alone in the muddy center of the compound.

“Ernt is pretty worked up over a little fixing-up of the saloon,” Thelma said, watching the men. You could see them ingesting righteous anger, puffing up with it, passing the jug from one to the other. “I thought he’d let it go.”

Mama lit a cigarette. “He never lets anything go.”

“I know you two don’t have much influence with him,” Thelma said, looking from Mama to Leni. “But he could start a shitstorm up here. Tom Walker may have a new truck and own the best land on the peninsula, but he’ll give you the shirt off his back. Last year when Mop was so sick, Tom heard about it from Large Marge and showed up here on his own and flew her to Kenai.”

“I know,” Mama said quietly.

“Your husband’s going to rip this town apart if we aren’t careful.”

Mama gave a tired laugh. Leni understood. You could be as careful as a chemist with nitroglycerin around Dad. It wouldn’t change a thing. Sooner or later, he was going to blow.

*   *   *

O
NCE AGAIN
, Leni’s parents got so drunk she had to drive them home. Back at the cabin, she parked the truck and helped Mama into her room, where she collapsed into bed, laughing as she reached for Dad.

Leni climbed up to her own bed, to the mattress they’d salvaged from the dump and cleaned with bleach, and lay beneath her army surplus blankets and tried to fall asleep.

But the incident at the saloon and the meeting with the Harlans stayed with her. Something about it was deeply unsettling, although she couldn’t quite put her finger on any one moment and say,
There, that’s what bothered me
. Maybe just a sense of imbalance in her dad that was, if not new, a magnification.

Change. Slight, but apparent.

Her dad was angry. Maybe furious. But why?

Because he’d been fired from the pipeline? Because he’d seen Mama and Tom Walker together in March, seen Mr. Walker sitting at their table?

It had to be something more than what it seemed. How could a few businesses in town upset him so much? God knew he liked to drink whiskey at the Kicking Moose more than most men.

She rolled over for the box by her bed, the one that held Matthew’s letters from the last few years. Not a month had gone by without word from him. She had each letter memorized and could pull them up at will. Some sentences never left her.
I’m getting better … I thought of you last night when I was out to dinner, this kid had a huge Polaroid camera … I scored my first goal yesterday, I wish you’d been there …
and her favorites, when he said things like,
I miss you, Leni.
Or,
I know it sounds lame, but I dreamed of you. Do you ever dream of me?

Tonight, though, she didn’t want to think about him and how far away he was or how lonely she felt without him and his friendship. In the years he’d been gone, no new kids had moved in to Kaneq. She had learned to love Alaska, but she was lonely a lot, too. On bad days—like today—she
didn’t want to read his letters and wonder if he would ever come back, and she worried that if she wrote to him, she would accidentally say what was really on her mind.
I’m afraid,
she might say,
I’m lonely
.

Instead, she opened her latest book—
The Thorn Birds
—and lost herself in the story of a forbidden love in a harsh and inhospitable land.

She was still reading well past midnight, when she heard the rustling of beads. She expected to hear the clank of the woodstove door opening and closing, but all she heard were footsteps moving across the wooden floor. She eased out of bed and crawled to the edge of the loft and peered down.

In the dark, with only the woodstove’s glow for light, it took her eyes a moment to adjust.

Dad was dressed all in black, with an Alaska Aces baseball cap pulled low on his forehead. He was carrying a big gear bag that clanked as he walked.

He opened the front door and stepped out into the night.

Leni climbed down the loft stairs and went quietly to the window and peeked out. A full moon shone down on the muddy yard; here and there, stubborn patches of crusty brown snow caught the light. There were piles of junk all around: boxes of fishing tackle and camping supplies, rusting metal crates and contraptions, a broken gate, another bicycle Dad had never gotten around to fixing, a stack of blown-out tires.

Dad tossed the gear bag into the bed of the truck, then slogged over to the plywood shed where they kept their tools.

A moment later he came out carrying an ax over one shoulder.

He climbed into the truck and drove away.

*   *   *

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Dad was in a good mood. His shaggy black hair was drawn into a weirdo Jesus-samurai topknot that had fallen to one side and looked like a puppy’s ear. His thick black beard was full of wood shavings, and so was his mustache. “There’s our sleepyhead. Did you stay up reading last night?”

“Yeah,” Leni said, eyeing him uneasily.

He pulled her into his arms, danced with her until she couldn’t help smiling.

The worry she’d had since last night slowly released.

What a relief. And on the first Saturday in April; one of her favorite days of the year.

Salmon Days. Today the town would come together to celebrate the upcoming salmon season. The festivities had begun under another name, started by the Native tribe that had once lived here; they had come together to ask for a good fishing season. Now, though, it was just a town party. On today of all days, the unpleasantness of last night would be forgotten.

A little after two o’clock, after all their chores were done, Leni loaded her arms with containers of food and followed her parents out of the cabin. Blue sky stretched as far as the eye could see; the pebbled beach looked iridescent in the sunlight, with its broken clamshells scattered like pieces of wedding lace.

They loaded food and blankets and a bag full of rain gear and extra coats (the weather wasn’t reliable this time of year) into the back of the truck. Then they squished into the cab’s bench seat and Dad drove off.

In town, they parked by the bridge and walked toward the General Store.

“What in the world?” Mama said when they rounded the corner.

Main Street was crowded, but not in the way it should be. There should have been men gathered around barbecues, grilling moose burgers and reindeer sausage and fresh clams, swapping fish tales, drinking beers. The women should have been by the diner, fussing over long tables set up with food—halibut sandwiches, platters of Dungeness crab, buckets of steamed clams, vats of baked beans.

Instead, half the townspeople stood on the boardwalk on the water side of town and the other half stood in front of the saloon. It was like some weird O.K. Corral showdown.

Then Leni saw the saloon.

Every window was broken, the door had been hacked to bits, left as sharp shards of wood hanging from brass hinges, and white spray-painted graffiti
covered the burnt walls.
THIS IS A WARNING. STAY AWAY. ARROGANT PRICK. NO PROGRESS.

Tom Walker stood in front of the ruined saloon, with Large Marge and Natalie standing to his left and Ms. Rhodes and her husband on his right. Leni recognized the rest of the people standing with him: most of the town’s merchants and fishermen and outfitters. These were the people who’d come to Alaska
for
something.

Across the street, on the boardwalk, stood the off-the-gridders; the outcasts, the loners. Folks who lived in the bush, with no access to their property except by sea or air and who had come here to get away from something—creditors, the government, the law, child support, modern life. Like her dad, they wanted Alaska to remain wild to her fingertips forever. If they had their way, there would never be electricity or tourists or telephones or paved roads or flush toilets.

Dad walked confidently forward. Leni and Mama rushed to keep up with him.

Tom Walker strode out to meet Dad in the middle of the street. He threw a can of spray paint onto the ground at Dad’s feet. It clanged in the dirt, rolled sideways. “You think I don’t know it was you? You think everyone doesn’t know it was you, you crazy asshole?”

Dad smiled. “Something happen last night, Tom? Vandalism? What a shame.”

Leni noticed how powerful Mr. Walker looked beside her father, how steady. Leni couldn’t imagine Tom Walker ever stumbling around drunk or talking to himself or waking up screaming and crying. “You’re worse than a coward, Allbright. You’re stupid. Sneaking around in the dark to break windows and spray-paint words on wood I’m going to tear down anyway.”

“He wouldn’t do that, Tom,” Mama said, taking care to keep her gaze downcast. She knew better than to look at Tom directly, especially not at a time like this. “He was home last night.”

Mr. Walker took a step forward. “Listen closely, Ernt. I’m going to let this go as a mistake. But progress is coming to Kaneq. You do anything—
anything
—to hurt my business from here on out, and I’m not going to call a town meeting. I’m not going to call the cops. I’m coming for
you
.”

“You don’t scare me, rich boy.”

This time Mr. Walker smiled. “Like I said. Stupid.”

Mr. Walker turned back to the crowd, many of whom had drawn in close to hear the argument. “We’re all friends here. Neighbors. A few words painted on wood don’t mean anything. Let’s get this party started.”

People reacted immediately, rearranged themselves. Women drifted over to the food tables while men fired up the barbecues. Down at the end of the street, the band started up.

Lay down, Sally, and rest you in my arms …

Dad took Mama by the hand and led her down the street, bobbing his head in time to the beat.

Leni was left standing alone, a girl caught between two factions.