The Great Alone: A Novel Page 10

  “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.

  * * *

  “WHAT’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.”

  “Whaddaya mean?” Ted asked.

  Dad looked … different somehow. Taller. His shoulders were higher and more square than she’d seen before. “Nuclear war. A pandemic. An electromagnetic pulse. Earthquake. Tidal wave. Tornado. Mount Redoubt blowing up, or Mount Rainer. In 1908 there was an explosion in Siberia that was a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. There are a million ways for this sick, corrupt world to end.”

  Thelma frowned. “Oh, come on, Ernt, there’s no need to scare—”

  “Shush, Thelma,” Mad Earl snapped.

  “Whatever comes, man-made tragedy or natural disaster, the first thing that happens is a breakdown of law and order,” Dad said. “Think of it: No power. No communications. No grocery stores. No uncontaminated food. No water. No civilization. Martial law.”

  Dad paused, made eye contact with each person, one by one. “People like Tom Walker, with his big house and expensive boats and his excavator, will be caught off guard. What good will all that land and wealth do him when he runs out of food or medical supplies? None. And you know what will happen when people like Tom Walker realize they aren’t prepared?”

  “What?” Mad Earl stared up at Dad as if he’d just seen God.

  “He’ll come here, banging on our doors, begging for help from us, the people he thought he was better than.” Dad paused. “We have to know how to protect ourselves and keep out the marauders who will want what we have. First off, we need to put together bug-out bags—packs that are already packed for survival. We need to be able to disappear at a moment’s notice, with everything we need.”

  “Yeah!” someone yelled.

  “But that’s not enough. We have a good start here. But security is lax. I think Bo left me his land so I would find my way here, to you, and teach you that it’s not enough to be prepared for survival. You have to fight for what’s yours. Kill anyone who comes to take it from you. I know you all are hunters, but we’ll need more than guns when TSHTF. Impact weapons break bones. Knives sever arteries. Arrows puncture. Before the first snowfall, I promise you, each one of us will be ready for the worst, every single one of you—from youngest to oldest—will be able to protect yourself and your family from the danger that’s coming.”

  Mad Earl nodded.

  “So. Everyone line up. I want to assess precisely how good each of you is with a gun. We’ll start there.”

  EIGHT

  By the first of November, the days were shortening fast. Leni felt the loss of every moment of light. Dawn came reluctantly at nine A.M. and night reclaimed the world around five P.M. Barely eight hours of daylight now. Sixteen hours of darkness. Night swept in like nothing Leni had ever seen before, like the winged shadow of a creature too big and predatory to comprehend.

  Weather had become impossible to predict. It had rained and snowed and rained again. Now the late-afternoon sky spit down at them, a freezing mixture of sleet and rain. Water pooled on the ground, turned to sheets of dirty, weed-studded ice. Leni had to do her chores in muck. After feeding the goats and chickens, she trudged into the woods behind the house, carrying two empty buckets. The cottonwoods were bare; autumn had turned them into skeletons. Everything with a heartbeat was hunkered down somewhere, trying to get out of the sleet and rain.

  As she walked down toward the river, a cold wind pulled at her hair, whined across her jacket. She hunched her shoulders and kept her head down.

  It took five trips to fill the steel water barrel they kept at the side of the house. Rain helped but couldn’t be relied upon. Water, like firewood, could never be left to chance.

  She was sweating hard, scooping a bucket of water from the creek, slopping it across her boots, when night fell. And she meant fell; it hit hard and fast, like a lid clanging down on its pot.

  When Leni turned homeward, she saw an endless black expanse. Nothing distinguishable, no stars overhead, no moon to light a path.

  She fumbled in her parka pocket for the headlamp her dad had given her. She adjusted the strap and put it on, snapping the light switch. She pulled a pistol out of its holster, stuck it in her waistband.

  Her heart was hammering in her chest as she bent down and picked up the two buckets she’d filled with water. The metal handles bit into her gloved hands.

  The icy rain turned to snow, stung her cheeks and forehead.

  Winter.

  The bears aren’t in hibernation yet, are they? They are most dangerous now, feeding hungrily before going to sleep.

  She saw a pair of yellow eyes staring at her from the darkness.

  No. She was imagining it.

  The ground beneath her changed, gave way. She stumbled. Water sloshed out of the buckets and onto her gloves. Don’tpanicDon’tpanicDon’tpanic.

  Her headlight revealed a fallen log in front of her. Breathing hard, she stepped over it, heard the screech of bark against her jeans, and kept going; up a hill, down one, around a dense black thicket. Finally, up ahead, she saw a glimmer.

  Light.

  The cabin.

  She wanted to run. She was desperate to get home, to feel her mother’s arms around her, but she wasn’t stupid. She had already made one mistake—she hadn’t kept track of time.

  As she neared the cabin, the night separated a little. She saw charcoal outlines against the black: the sheen of the metal stovepipe poking up through the roof, a side window full of light, the shadow of people inside. The air smelled of wood smoke and welcome.

  Leni rushed around to the side of the cabin, lifted the barrel’s makeshift lid, and poured what was left of her water into the barrel. The split second between her upending the bucket and the sound of the water splashing in told her the barrel was about three-quarters full.

  Leni was shaking so hard it took two tries for her to unlatch the door.

  “I’m back,” she said, stepping into the cabin, her whole body shaking.

  “Shut up, Leni,” Dad snapped.

  Mama stood in front of Dad. She was unsteady-looking, dressed in ragged sweats and a big sweater. “Hey, there, baby girl,” she said. “Hang up your parka and take off your boots.”

  “I’m talking to you, Cora,” Dad said.

  Leni heard anger in his voice, saw her mother flinch.

  “You have to take the rice back. Tell Large Marge we can’t pay for it,” he said. “And the pilot bread and powdered milk, too.”

  “But … you haven’t gotten a moose yet,” Mama said. “We need—”

  “It’s all my fault, is it?” Dad shouted.

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it. But winter’s bearing down on us. We need more food than we have, and our money—”

  “You think I don’t know we need money?” He swiped at the chair in front of him, sent it tumbling and cracking to the floor.

  The sudden wildness in his eyes, the showing of the whites, scared Leni. She took a step backward.

  Mama went to him, touched his face, tried to gentle him. “Ernt, baby, we’ll figure it out.”

  He yanked back and headed for the door. Grabbing his parka from its place on the hook by the window, he pulled the door open, let in the sweeping cold, and slammed it shut behind him. A moment later, the VW bus engine roared to life; headlights stabbed through the window, turned Mama golden white.

  “It’s the weather,” Mama said, lighting a cigarette, watching him drive away. Her beautiful skin looked sallow in the headlights’ glow, almost waxen.

  “It’s going to get worse,” Leni said. “Every day is darker and colder.”

  “Yeah,” Mama said, looking as scared as Leni suddenly felt. “I know.”

  * * *

  WINTER TIGHTENED ITS GRIP on Alaska. The vastness of the landscape dwindled down to the confines of their cabin. The sun rose at a quarter past ten in the morning and set only fifteen minutes after the end of the school day. Less than six hours of light a day. Snow fell endlessly, blanketed everything. It piled up in drifts and spun its lace across windowpanes, leaving them nothing to see except themselves. In the few daylight hours, the sky stretched gray overhead; some days there was merely the memory of light rather than any real glow. Wind scoured the landscape, cried out as if in pain. The fireweed froze, turned into intricate ice sculptures that stuck up from the snow. In the freezing cold, everything stuck—car doors froze, windows cracked, engines refused to start. The ham radio filled with warnings of bad weather and listed the deaths that were as common in Alaska in the winter as frozen eyelashes. People died for the smallest mistake—car keys dropped in a river, a gas tank gone dry, a snow machine breaking down, a turn taken too fast. Leni couldn’t go anywhere or do anything without a warning. Already the winter seemed to have gone on forever. Shore ice seized the coastline, glazed the shells and stones until the beach looked like a silver-sequined collar. Wind roared across the homestead, as it had all winter, transforming the white landscape with every breath. Trees cowered in the face of it, animals built dens and burrowed holes and went into hiding. Not so different from the humans, who hunkered down in this cold, took special care.

  Leni’s life was the smallest it had ever been. On good days, when the bus would start and the weather was bearable, there was school. On bad days, there was only work, accomplished in this driving, demoralizing cold. Leni focused on what needed to be done—going to school, doing homework, feeding the animals, carrying water, cracking ice, darning socks, repairing clothes, cooking with Mama, cleaning the cabin, feeding the woodstove. Every day more and more wood had to be chopped and carried and stacked. There was no room in these shortened days to think about anything beyond the mechanics of survival. They were growing starter vegetables in Dixie cups on a table beneath the loft. Even the practice of survival skills at the Harlan compound on weekends had been suspended.

  Worse than the weather was the confinement it caused.

  As winter pared their life away, the Allbrights were left with only each other. Every evening was spent together, hours and hours of night, huddled around the woodstove.

  They were all on edge. Arguments erupted between her parents over money, over chores, over the weather. Over nothing.

  Leni knew how anxious Dad was about their inadequate supplies and their nonexistent money. She saw how it gnawed at him; she saw, too, how closely Mama watched him, how worried she was about his rising anxiety.

  His struggle for calm was obvious in a dozen tics and in the way he seemed unwilling to look at them sometimes. He woke well before dawn and stayed outside working as long as he could, coming back in well after dark and covered in snow, his mustache and eyebrows frozen, the tip of his nose white.

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