The Great Alone: A Novel (22 page)

She felt the schism in town, the disagreement that could easily become a fight for the soul of what Kaneq should be.

This could get ugly.

Leni knew what her father had done and the vandalism revealed a new side to his rage. It terrified her that he had done such a public thing. Ever since Mr. Walker and Large Marge had first sent Dad to the pipeline for the winter, Dad had been on his guard. He never hit Mama in the face, or anywhere that a bruise could be seen. He worked hard—beyond hard—at controlling his temper. He walked a wide, respectful berth around Mr. Walker.

No more, it seemed.

Leni didn’t realize that Tom Walker had come up beside her until he spoke.

“You look scared,” Mr. Walker said.

“This thing between you and my dad could tear Kaneq apart,” she said. “You know that, right?”

“Trust me, Leni. There’s nothing for you to worry about.”

Leni looked up at Mr. Walker. “You’re wrong,” she said.

*   *   *

“Y
OU WORRY TOO MUCH
,” Large Marge said to Leni the next day, when Leni showed up to work. For the past year, Leni had worked part-time at the General Store, stocking shelves, dusting supplies, ringing up sales on the antique cash register. She made enough money to keep herself well stocked with film and books. Dad had been against it, of course, but this one time, Mama had stood up to him, told him a seventeen-year-old girl needed an after-school job.

“That vandalism is a bad thing,” Leni said, staring through the window, down the street toward the ruined saloon.

“Aw. Men are stupid. You might as well learn that now. Look at bull moose. They ram into each other at full speed. Same with Dall sheep. This will be a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Leni didn’t agree. She saw what her father’s vandalism had done, the effects of it on the people around her. A few painted words had become bullets hurtled into the heart of a town. Although the party last night on Main Street had raged as it always did, clattering on until daylight began at last to dim, she had seen how the townspeople divided themselves into teams, one that believed in change and growth and another that didn’t. When the party had finally ended, everyone had gone their separate ways.

Separate. In a town that used to be about being together.

*   *   *

O
N SUNDAY NIGHT
, Leni and her parents went to the Harlan compound for a barbecue dinner. Afterward, as usual, they built a big bonfire in the mud and stood around it, talking and drinking as evening fell around them, turning the people into violet silhouettes.

From her place on Thelma’s porch, rereading Matthew’s latest letter by lantern light, Leni could see the adults gathered near the flames. A jug that
looked from here like a black wasp moved from hand to hand. She heard the men’s voices above the snapping, hissing flames, a din of rising anger.

“… take over our town…”

“… arrogant prick, think he owns us…”

“… next he’ll want to bring in electricity and television … turn us into Las Vegas.”

Headlights speared through the darkness. Dogs went crazy in the yard, barked and howled as a big white truck rumbled through the mud, parked with a splash.

Mr. Walker got out of his expensive new truck, strode confidently toward the bonfire, calm as you please, as if he belonged here.

Uh-oh.

Leni folded up her letter, jammed it in her pocket, and stepped down into the mud.

Dad’s face was orange in the firelight. His topknot had fallen, now lay in a lump of hair behind his left ear. “Looks like someone is lost,” he said, his voice pulled out of shape by booze. “You don’t belong here, Walker.”

“Says the cheechako,” Mr. Walker said. His broad smile took some of the sting out of the insult. Or maybe it added to it; Leni wasn’t sure.

“I’ve been here four years,” Dad said, his mouth flattening until his lips almost disappeared.

“That long, huh?” Mr. Walker said, crossing his big arms across his chest. “I got boots that have covered more ground in Alaska than you have.”

“Now, look—”

“Down, boy,” Mr. Walker said, grinning, although the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “I’m not here to talk to you. I’m here to talk to them.” He lifted his chin to indicate Clyde and Donna and Thelma and Ted. “I’ve known them all of my life. Hell, I taught Clyde how to hunt duck, remember, Clyde? And Thelma smacked me a good one for getting fresh when we were kids. I came to talk to my friends.”

Dad looked uncomfortable. Irritated.

Mr. Walker smiled at Thelma, who smiled back. “We drank our first beers together, remember? The Moose is
our
place. Ours. Hell, Donna, you guys got married there.”

Donna glanced at her husband, smiled uncertainly.

“Here’s the thing. It’s time we fixed the old girl up. We deserve a place where we can gather and talk and have fun without smelling like burnt wood and having soot all down ourselves when we leave. It will take a lot of work, though.” Mr. Walker paused, his gaze moving from face to face. “And a lot of workers. I can hire people from Homer, pay them the four bucks an hour to rebuild the place, but I’d rather keep my money here, in town, with my friends and neighbors. We all know how nice it is to have some change in our jeans come winter.”

“Four bucks an hour? That’s high,” Ted said, shooting Thelma a look.

“I want to be more than fair,” Mr. Walker said.

“Ha!” Dad said. “He’s trying to manipulate you. Buy you. Don’t listen to him. We know what’s good for our town. And it isn’t his money.”

Thelma shot Dad an irritated look. “How long will the job last, Tom?”

He shrugged. “Gotta be done before the weather turns, Thelma.”

“And how many workers do you need?”

“As many as I can get.”

Thelma stepped back, turned to Ted, whispered something to him.

“Earl?” Dad said. “You’re not going to let him do this?”

Mad Earl’s pale, wrinkled face squelched up, looked like one of those dried-apple carvings. “Jobs is scarce up here, Ernt.”

Leni saw the effect those few words had on her father.

“I’ll take a job,” Clyde said.

Mr. Walker smiled triumphantly. Leni saw his gaze cut to Dad, stay there. “Great. Anyone else?”

When Clyde had come forward, Dad made a sound like a tire blowing and grabbed Mama by the arm and pulled her across the compound. Leni had to run through the mud to keep up. They all climbed into the truck.

Dad hit the gas too hard and the tires spun through the mud before
finding traction. He shoved the pickup into reverse, lurched back, spun around, and hurtled through the open gates.

Mama reached over and held Leni’s hand. They both knew better than to say anything as he started muttering to himself, thumping his palm hard on the steering wheel to punctuate his thoughts.

Damn idiots … letting him win … g-damn rich men think they own the world.

At the cabin, he skidded to a stop and rammed the gearshift in park.

Leni and Mama sat there, afraid to breathe too loudly.

He didn’t move, just stared through the dirty, mosquito-splattered windshield at the shadowy smokehouse and the stand of black trees beyond. The sky was a deep purple-brown, strewn with pinprick stars.

“Go,” he said, his teeth gritted. “I need to think.”

Leni opened the door and she and Mama practically tumbled out of the pickup in their haste to disappear. Hand in hand, they slogged through the mud and climbed the steps and opened the door, slamming it shut behind them, wishing they could lock it, but they knew better. In one of his rages, he might burn the place down to get to Mama.

Leni went to the window, peeled the curtain aside, looked out.

The truck was there, puffing into the night, its headlights two bright beams.

She could see him in silhouette, talking to himself.

“He did it,” Leni said, standing close. “Vandalized the tavern.”

“No. He was home. In bed with me. And it’s not the kind of thing he would do.”

A part of Leni wanted to keep this from her mother, to spare her pain, but the truth was burning a hole in Leni’s soul. Sharing it was the only way to put out the flames. They were a team, she and Mama. Together. They didn’t keep secrets from each other. “After you fell asleep, he took the truck to town. I saw him leave, with an ax.”

Mama lit a cigarette. Exhaled heavily. “I thought for once…”

Leni got it. Hope. A shiny thing, a lure for the unwary. She knew how seductive it could be, and how dangerous. “What do we do?”

“Do? He was already pissed about losing his pipeline job, and now this thing with the saloon—with Tom—could push him over the edge.”

Leni felt her mother’s fear, and the shame that was its silent twin. “We are going to have to be very careful. This thing could blow up.”

FOURTEEN

April in Fairbanks was an unreliable month. This year, an unseasonable cold gripped the town, snow fell, the birds stayed away, the rivers stayed frozen. Even the old-timers began to complain, and they had spent decades in this town that was called the coldest in America.

Matthew walked away from the ice rink after practice, his hockey stick slung over his shoulders. He knew he looked like an ordinary seventeen-year-old in a sweat-dampened hockey uniform and boots but looks could be deceiving. He knew it, and they knew it, the kids he’d gone to school with for the past few years. Oh, they were friendly enough (no one judged anyone this far from civilization; you could be whoever you wanted to be), but they gave him a wide berth. Rumors of his “breakdown” had spread faster than a wildfire on the Kenai. Before he took his seat in his first class in ninth grade, he’d already had a reputation. High school kids, even in the wilds of Alaska, were still herd animals. They sensed when there was a weak member in their midst.

Ice fog, a gray heavy haze peppered with tiny particles of frozen pollutants, turned Fairbanks into a fun-house version of itself where nothing was
quite solid, no line distinct. The place smelled of trapped exhaust, like a racetrack.

The squat, two-story buildings across the street appeared to be holding each other up, forlorn in the fog. Like many of the buildings in town, they looked temporary, hastily built.

Through the gloom, people were charcoal drawings, lines and slashes, the homeless who huddled in doorways, the drunks who sometimes stumbled out of taverns late at night and froze to death. Not all of those Matthew saw now would survive the day or the week, let alone this unexpected cold in a town where winter lasted from September through April, and night lay across the land for eighteen hours. There were casualties every day. People went missing all the time.

As he walked to the pickup truck, night fell. Just like that, in a blink. Streetlamps created the only light there was—dots here and there—aside from the occasional snake of headlights in the glow. He wore a parka; beneath that, his hockey sweater, long underwear, and his hockey pants, and mukluks. It wasn’t that cold, not by Fairbanks standards. Barely below freezing. He didn’t bother with gloves.

It didn’t take long for the truck to start, not this time of year; not like in the deep midwinter, when you left your truck running while you were at the store or running errands, when the thermostat often dropped to twenty-five below.

He climbed into his uncle’s big extended-cab pickup and drove through town slowly, alert, always looking for animals or sliding cars or kids playing where they shouldn’t be playing.

A banged-up Dodge pulled out in front of him. It had a sign in the back window that read
WARNING. IN CASE OF RAPTURE, THIS CAR WILL BE UNMANNED.

There were a lot of bumper stickers like that out here, deep in Alaska’s wild interior, far from the tourist destinations of the coast or the majestic beauty of Denali. Alaska was full of fringe-ists. People who believed in weirdo things and prayed to exclusionary Gods and filled their basements with equal
measures of guns and Bibles. If you wanted to live in a place where no one told you what to do and didn’t care if you parked a trailer in your yard or had a fridge on your porch, Alaska was the state for you. His aunt said it was the romance of adventure that attracted so many individualists. Matthew didn’t know if he agreed (actually, he didn’t expend much energy thinking about stuff like that), but he did know that the farther away you got from civilization, the stranger things got. Most people spent one dark, bleak, eight-month winter in Fairbanks and left the state screaming. The few who stayed—misfits, adventurers, romantics, loners—rarely left again.

It took him almost fifteen minutes to reach the homestead road, and five more minutes to get to the house he’d called home for the last few years. Two decades ago, when his mother’s family had homesteaded out here, the land had been remote; over the years, town had crept closer, spread out. Fairbanks might be in the middle of nowhere, fewer than 120 miles from the Arctic Circle, but it was the second largest city in the state and growing fast because of the pipeline.

He drove up the long, winding, tree-shrouded driveway and parked in the huge, plank-sided garage/workshop between Uncle Went’s ATV and his snow machine.

Inside the house, the walls were roughly hewn planks that looked messy in the combination of light and shadow. His aunt and uncle had always intended to drywall them but never had. The kitchen was delineated by L-shaped polished wood counters set atop green cabinets that had come from an abandoned house in Anchorage, one of those “dream” homes built by lowlanders who couldn’t last through their first winter. A bar with three barstools separated it from the dining area. Beyond that was the living room; a big plaid sectional (complete with movable footrests) and two well-worn La-Z-Boy chairs faced a window that overlooked the river. There were bookcases everywhere, overflowing with books; lanterns and flashlights decorated almost every surface for when the power went out, and it went out often, with so many big trees and bad weather. The house had electricity and running water and even a television, but no flush toilets. Truthfully, no
Walker ever cared. They’d all been raised with outhouses and were happy to live that way. People down south had no idea how clean an outhouse could be if you took care of it.

“Hey, you,” Aly said, looking up from the sofa. She was doing homework, by the looks of it.

Matthew dropped his gear bag by the door and propped his hockey stick in the arctic entry—a corridor full of coats and boots that separated the outside from the inside. He hung up his coat on a hook and kicked off his boots. He was so tall now—six-foot-two—that he had to duck to enter the house.

“Hey.” He plopped down beside her.

“You smell like a goat,” she said, closing her textbook.

“A goat who scored two goals.” He leaned back, laid his head on the sofa back, stared up at the big wood crossbeams that traversed the ceiling. He didn’t know why, but he felt nervous, a little raw. He tapped his foot, played an arpeggio on the worn armrest with his fingers.

Aly stared at him. As usual, she had applied her makeup sporadically, as if she’d lost interest halfway through the process. Her blond hair was drawn back into a messy ponytail that hung a little to the left. He had no idea if that was intentional. She was beautiful in the natural, rough-hewn way of Alaskan girls, who were more likely to hunt on the weekends than go to a shopping mall or movie theater.

“You’re doing it again,” he said.

“What?”

“Watching me. Like you think I’m going to explode or something.”

“No,” she said, trying to smile. “It’s just … you know. Are you having a bad day?”

Matthew closed his eyes, sighed. His older sister had been his salvation; there was no doubt about that. Back when he’d first moved here, when he’d been unable to deal with his grief and been beset by terrible nightmares, Aly had been his steadying hand, the voice that could get through to him. Although it had taken time. For the first three months, he pretty much hadn’t talked at all. The therapist they sent him to was no help. He’d known from
the first session that it wouldn’t be a stranger’s hand he’d reach out to, especially not one who talked to him as if he were a kid.

It was Aly who had saved him. She never gave up, never stopped asking how he felt. When he finally found the words to express himself, his grief had shown itself to be bottomless, terrifying.

He still cringed at the way he’d cried.

His sister had held him when he cried, rocked him as their mother would have done. Over the years, the two of them had fashioned a vocabulary for grief, learned how to talk about their loss. He and Aly had talked about their pain until there were no words left to say. They’d also spent hours in silence, standing side by side on the river, fly-fishing, and hiking rough trails in the Alaska Range. In time, his grief had turned to anger and then drifted toward sorrow, and now, finally, it had settled into a lingering sadness that was a part of him, not the whole. Lately, they’d begun to talk about the future instead of the past.

It was big, that change, and they knew it. Aly had been hiding out in school, using the classroom as a shield against the hard realities of life as a motherless girl, and she’d stayed here, in Fairbanks, to be at Matthew’s side. Before Mom’s death, Aly had dreamed big, of moving to New York or Chicago, someplace that had bus service and live theater and opera halls. But, as with Matthew, loss had rearranged her from the inside out. Now she knew how much family mattered and how important it was to hang on to the people you loved. Lately she’d begun to talk about moving back onto the homestead with Dad, and maybe working with him. Matthew knew that his presence here was holding his sister back. It could go on this way forever if he let it, and a part of him wanted to do just that. But he was almost eighteen years old. If he didn’t push his way out of the nest, she’d stay next to him forever.

“I want to finish the school year in Kaneq,” he said into the silence. He heard the question she didn’t ask and answered it. “I can’t hide out forever,” he said.

Aly looked frightened. She’d seen him through the worst of times, and he knew that she was terrified of him sliding back into depression. “But you love hockey and you’re good at it.”

“The season ends in two weeks. And I start college in September.”

“Leni.”

Matthew wasn’t surprised that she understood. He and Aly had talked about everything, including Leni and how much her letters meant to Matthew. “What if she goes off to college somewhere? I want to see her. I might not get another chance.”

“Are you sure you’re ready? Everywhere you look, you’ll see Mom.”

And there it was. The big question. The truth was, he didn’t know if he could handle any of it—going back to Kaneq, seeing the river that swallowed his mother, seeing his father’s grief in Technicolor, up close—but he knew one thing. Leni’s letters had mattered to him. Maybe they’d saved him as much as Aly had. For all their separate miles, and their different lives, Leni’s letters and the photographs she sent reminded him of who he’d been.

“I see her everywhere
here
. Don’t you?”

Aly nodded slowly. “I swear I see her out of the corner of my eye all of the time. I talk to her at night.”

He nodded. Sometimes in the morning when he woke up, he had a split second where he thought the world was upright, that he was an ordinary kid in an ordinary house and that his mom would soon be calling him down for breakfast. The silence on mornings like that was awful.

“You want me to come with you?”

He did. He wanted her beside him, holding his hand, keeping him steady. “No. You don’t get out of school until June,” he said, hearing the unsteadiness in his voice, knowing she heard it, too. “Besides, I think I have to do this by myself.”

“You know Dad loves you. He’ll be thrilled to have you back.”

He did know that. He also knew that love could freeze over, become a kind of thin ice all its own. He and Dad had had a tough time talking in the past few years. Grief and guilt had bent them out of shape.

Aly reached out for him, took his hand in hers.

He waited for her to speak, but she didn’t say anything. They both knew why: there was nothing to say. Sometimes you had to go backward in order
to go forward. This truth they knew, even as young as they were. But there was another truth, one they shied away from, one they tried to protect each other from. Sometimes it was painful to go back.

Maybe grief had been waiting for Matthew to return all this time, waiting, in the dark, in the cold. Maybe in Kaneq he’d undo all this progress and break down again.

“You’re stronger now,” Aly said.

“I guess we’ll find out.”

*   *   *

T
WO WEEKS LATER
, Matthew flew his uncle’s float plane over Otter Point and banked right, lowered, touched down on the flat blue water below. He killed the engine and floated toward the big silvered-wood arch that read
WALKER COVE
.

His father stood at the end of the dock, his arms at his sides.

Matthew jumped off the pontoon and onto the dock and tied the float plane down. He remained that way, bent over, his back to his father, for a moment longer than necessary, gathering the strength he needed to really be here.

At last he straightened, turned.

His father was close now; he pulled Matthew into a bone-jarring hug that went on so long Matthew had to gasp for breath. Dad drew back finally, looked at him, and love took shape in the air around them, a regret- and memory-filled version, maybe, sad around the edges, but love.

It had been only a few months since they’d seen each other. (Dad made it a point to come to several of Matthew’s hockey games and visit in Fairbanks as often as the harsh weather and homesteading chores allowed, but they had never really talked about anything that mattered.)

Dad seemed older, his skin more lined and creased. He smiled in that way of his, the way he did everything in life, full tilt, no explanations, no regrets, no safety nets. You knew Tom Walker in a glance, because he let you in. You knew instantly that this was a man who always told the truth as he
saw it, whether it was popular or not, who had a set of rules to guide his life and no other rules mattered. He laughed harder than any man Matthew had ever met, and Matthew had only seen him cry once. On that day out on the ice.

“You’re even taller than the last time I saw you.”

“I’m like the Hulk. I keep tearing through my clothes.”

Dad grabbed Matthew’s suitcase and led him up the dock, past the fishing boat straining at its lines; seabirds cawed overhead, waves slapped the pilings. The smell of kelp baking in the sun and eelgrass beaten down by waves greeted him.

At the top of the stairs, Matthew got his first glimpse of the big log home with the soaring bowed front and wraparound deck. A welcoming light illuminated the pots hanging from the eaves, still full of last year’s dead geraniums.