The Great Alone Page 9

  He twisted the throttle and they were off in a cloud of dust, the engine making a high-pitched whine, rocks flying out from beneath the wide rubber tires. Matthew drove through town, rumbled over the bridge, and onto the dirt road. Just past the airstrip, he veered into the trees, thumped over a ditch, and hurtled up a trail she didn’t even see until they were on it.

  They drove uphill, into thick trees, onto a plateau. From there, Leni saw a crook of blue, seawater carving into the land, waves crashing onto the shore. Matthew slowed the vehicle and expertly guided it over rough terrain, where there was no trail beneath their tires. Leni was thrown about; she had to hold tightly to him.

  Finally he eased to a stop and clicked off the motor.

  Silence enveloped them instantly, broken only by the waves crashing on the black rocks below. Matthew dug through the bag on his three-wheeler and pulled out a pair of binoculars. “Come on.”

  He walked ahead of her, his feet steady on the rough, rocky terrain. Twice Leni almost fell as rock gave way beneath her feet, but Matthew was like a mountain goat, perfectly at home.

  He led her to a clearing perched like a scooped hand above the sea. There were two handmade wooden chairs positioned to face the trees. Matthew plopped down in one and indicated the other for her.

  Leni dropped her backpack onto the grass and sat down, waiting as Matthew peered through the binoculars, and scanned the trees. “There they are.” He handed her the binoculars, pointed to a stand of trees. “That’s Lucy and Ricky. My mom named ’em.”

  Leni peered through the binoculars. At first all she saw was trees, trees, and more trees as she panned slowly from left to right, and then, a flash of white.

  She eased back to the left a few degrees.

  A pair of bald eagles perched on a bathtub-sized nest built high in the trees. One of the birds was feeding a trio of eaglets who jostled and lurched, beaks up, to get the regurgitated food. Leni could hear their squabbling, squawking cries over the crash of water below.

  “Wow,” Leni said. She would have pulled her Polaroid out of her backpack (she never went anywhere without it), but the eagles were too far away for the clunky camera to capture.

  “They’ve been coming back here to lay eggs for as long as I can remember. Mom first brought me here when I was little. You should see them making the nest. It’s amazing. And they mate for life. I wonder what Ricky would do if something happened to Lucy. My mom says that nest weighs almost a ton. I’ve watched eaglets leave that nest my whole life.”

  “Wow,” Leni said again, smiling as one of the eaglets flapped its wings and tried to climb up over its siblings.

  “We haven’t come out here in a long time, though.”

  Leni heard something in Matthew’s voice. She lowered the binoculars and looked at him. “You and your mom?”

  He nodded. “Since she and Dad split up, it’s been hard. Maybe it’s ’cuz my sister, Alyeska, moved to Fairbanks to go to college. I miss her.”

  “You guys must be close.”

  “Yeah. She’s cool. You’d like her. She thinks she wants to live in a city, but no way it will last. She’ll be back. Dad says we both have to go to college so we know all our options. He’s kind of pushy about it, actually. I don’t need college to tell me what I want to be.”

  “You already know?”

  “Sure. I want to be a pilot. Like my Uncle Went. I love being up in the sky. But my dad says it’s not enough. I guess I need to know about physics and shit.”

  Leni understood. They were kids, she and Matthew; no one asked their opinion or told them anything. They just had to muddle along and live in the world presented to them, confused a lot of the time because nothing made sense, but certain of their subterranean place on the food chain.

  She sat back in the splintery chair. He had told her something personal about himself, something that mattered. She needed to do the same thing. Wasn’t that how true friendships worked? She swallowed hard, said quietly, “You’re lucky your dad wants the best for you. My dad has been … weird since the war.”

  “Weird how?”

  Leni shrugged. She didn’t know exactly what to say, or how to say it without revealing too much. “He has—nightmares—and bad weather can set him off. Sometimes. But he hasn’t had a nightmare since we moved here. So maybe he’s better.”

  “I don’t know. Winter is one big night up here. People go batshit in the dark, run screaming, open fire on their pets and friends.”

  Leni felt a tightening in her stomach. She had never really thought about the fact that in winter, it would be as dark as it was light now. She didn’t want to think about that, winter dark. “What do you worry about?” she asked.

  “I worry that my mom will leave us. I mean, I know she built a house and stayed on the homestead, and that my folks still love each other in some weird way, but it’s not the same. She just came home one day and said she didn’t love Dad anymore. She loves Cal the creep.” He turned in his chair, looked at Leni. “It’s scary that people can just stop loving you, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I wish school lasted longer,” he said.

  “I know. We have three more days before summer break. And then…”

  Once school ended, Leni would be expected to work full-time at the homestead and so would Matthew at his place. They’d hardly see each other.

  * * *

  ON THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL, Leni and Matthew made all kinds of promises about how they would keep in touch until classes started again in September, but the truth shouldered in between them. They were kids and not in control of anything, their own schedules least of all. Leni felt lonely already as she walked away from Matthew on that last day and headed for the VW bus waiting on the side of the road.

  “You look down in the dumps, baby girl,” Mama said from her place in the driver’s seat.

  Leni climbed into the passenger seat. She didn’t see the point in whining about something that couldn’t be changed. It was three o’clock. There was an ocean of daylight left; that meant hours of chores to do.

  As soon as they were home, Mama said, “I have an idea. Go get us that striped wool blanket and the chocolate bar in the cooler. I’ll meet you down on the beach.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  “What? Dad will never agree to that.”

  “Well, he’s not here.” Mama smiled.

  Leni didn’t waste a second. She ran to the house (before Mama changed her mind). She grabbed the slim Hershey’s chocolate bar from the cooler in the kitchen and the blanket from the back of the sofa. Wrapping it around her like a poncho, she headed for the rickety beach stairs, followed them down to the curl of water-stippled gray pebbles that was their own private beach. To the left were dark, enticing stone caves, carved by centuries of hurling water.

  Mama stood in the tall grass up from the beach, a cigarette already lit. Leni was pretty sure that, to her, childhood would always smell like sea air and cigarette smoke and her mother’s rose-scented perfume.

  Leni spread out the blanket on the uneven ground and she and Mama sat down on it, their legs stretched out, their bodies angled into each other. In front of them, the blue sea rolled forward ceaselessly, washing over the stones, rustling them. Not far away an otter floated on its back, using its small black paws to crack open a clam.

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “He went fishing with Mad Earl. I think Dad’s hoping to ask the old man for a loan. Money is getting pretty tight. I’ve still got some of the money from my mom, but I’ve been using it for cigarettes and Polaroid film.” She gave Leni a soft smile.

  “I’m not sure Mad Earl is good for Dad,” Leni said.

  Mama’s smile faded. “I know what you mean.”

  “He’s happy here, though,” Leni said. She tried not to think about the conversation she’d had with Matthew, about how winter was coming and winter was dark and cold and crazy-making.

  “I wish you remembered your dad from before ’Nam.”

  “Yeah.” Leni had heard dozens of stories of that time. Mama loved to talk about Before, about who they’d been in the beginning. The words were like a much-loved fairy tale.

  Mama had been sixteen when she got pregnant.

  Sixteen.

  Leni would be fourteen in September. Amazingly, she’d never really thought about that before. She’d known her mama’s age, of course, but she hadn’t really put the facts together. Sixteen.

  “You were only two years older than me when you got pregnant,” Leni said.

  Mama sighed. “I was a junior in high school. Christ. No wonder my parents threw a clot.” She gave Leni a crooked, charming smile. “They were not the kind of people who could understand a girl like me. They hated my clothes and my music and I hated their rules. At sixteen, I thought I knew everything, and I told them so. They sent me away to a Catholic girls’ school, where rebellion meant rolling up the waistband of your skirt to shorten the hem and show an inch of skin above your knees. We were taught to kneel and pray and marry well.

  “Your dad came into my life like a rogue wave, knocking me over. Everything he said upended my conventional world and changed who I was. I stopped knowing how to breathe without him. He told me I didn’t need school. I believed everything he said. Your dad and I were too in love to be careful, and I got pregnant. My dad exploded when I told him. He wanted to send me away to one of those houses for unwed mothers. I knew they’d take you away from me. I’ve never hated anyone more than I hated him in that moment.”

  Mama sighed. “So we ran away. I was sixteen—almost seventeen—and your dad was twenty-five. When you came along, we were flat broke and living in a trailer park, but none of that mattered. What was money or work or new clothes when you had the most perfect baby in the world?”

  Mama leaned back. “He used to carry you all the time. At first in his arms and then on his shoulders. You adored him. We shut out the world and lived on love, but the world came roaring back.”

  “The war,” Leni said.

  Mama nodded. “I begged your dad not to go to Vietnam. We fought and fought about it. I didn’t want to be a soldier’s wife, but he wanted to go. So I packed my tears with his clothes and let him go. It was supposed to be for a year. I didn’t know what to do, where to go, how to live without him. I ran out of money and moved back home with my parents, but I couldn’t stand it there. All we did was fight. They kept telling me to divorce your father and think about you, and finally I left again. That’s when I found the commune and people who didn’t judge me for being a kid with a kid. Then your dad’s helicopter got shot down and he was captured. I got one letter from him in six years.”

  Leni remembered the letter and how her mother had cried after reading it.

  “When he came home, he looked like a dead man,” Mama said. “But he loved us. Loved us like air. Said he couldn’t sleep if I wasn’t in his arms, although he didn’t sleep much then, either.”

  As always, Mama’s story came to a stumbling halt at this point, the fairy tale over. The witch’s door slammed shut on the wandering kids. The man who’d come home from war was not the same man who’d boarded the plane for Vietnam. “He’s better up here, though,” Mama said. “Don’t you think? He’s almost himself again.”

  Leni stared down at the sea, rolling inexorably toward her. Nothing you did could hold back that rising tide. One mistake or miscalculation and you could be stranded or washed away. All you could do was protect yourself by reading the charts and being prepared and making smart choices. “You know it’s dark up here for six months in the winter. And snowy and freezing cold and stormy.”

  “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.”

  * * *

  AS 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.

  * * *

  ON 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.

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