A Fine and Bitter Snow

3

The two gentlemen in question were both at her cabin when she got there. Mutt knocked Johnny off the doorstep and wrestled him across the snow, growling in mock anger. Ethan stood in the doorway, watching as Kate ran the snow machine into the garage. “I’ll be in in a minute,” she called, and after a moment she heard boyish laughter and fake growls fade as the cabin door was closed.

She topped off the snow machine’s gas tank, checked the oil, looked at the treads. The ax needed sharpening, and so, too, it seemed, did the hatchet. She checked the rest of the tools hanging in neat rows from the Peg-Board while she was at it. The truck had been winterized and was parked as far out of the way as possible at the back of the garage. The woodpile was down to four cords, and although it had been a mild winter thus far, it wouldn’t hurt to haul in a few more trees from the woodlot and replenish it. She visited the outhouse-plenty of toilet paper and lime-and the Coleman lantern hanging from the planter hook on the wall was almost full of kerosene.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to see Ethan, and it wasn’t that she didn’t want to spend time with Johnny. She just wasn’t used to anyone waiting for her when she got home. She kicked the snow from her boots and stepped inside.

It was a cabin much like the one she had come from, twenty-five feet on a side, with an open loft reached by a ladder. The logs had been planked over with a light pine and were sanded smooth and finished. The ceiling was Sheetrocked and painted white, making the interior much lighter than that of many Bush cabins. There was a large picture window to the right of the door as you faced in, and another large window over the sink, to the left of the door. Both windows faced southwest.

There was an oil stove for cooking, a woodstove for heat, a small table that looked leftover from the fifties with a Darigold one-pound butter can sitting in the middle of it, stuffed with paper money and change. An L-shaped couch had been built into one corner, covered in blue denim that looked as if it had been pieced together from old Levi’s. The kitchen counter held a shallow porcelain sink mounted with a pump handle; open cupboards above and below were filled with canned goods and sacks of flour, sugar, and rice. Shelves ran all around the walls, filled mostly with books, but there were also decks of cards, board games, and a cassette deck with tapes. A.30-06 rifle and a pump-action 12-gauge shotgun were cradled in a rack over the door, ready to hand, boxes of ammunition on a shelf nearby. There were no family pictures, although there was a large, thick photo album sitting on one shelf. A tiny ivory otter, perched on his hind legs, thick fur ruffled from the water, looked at the room through gleaming baleen eyes.

There was a basketball rolled into the crease of the couch, and a guitar hung from a hook next to the door, but otherwise the room was a reflection of someone who liked to cook, read, and listen to music. Someone self-contained, self-sufficient, content with her own company, having no need in her day-to-day life for a telephone, cable TV, or Net access.

Someone, perhaps, who placed a high value on the qualities of solitude and silence.

Every lantern was lit, and the kettle was steaming on the woodstove. Dirty dishes had been washed and put away in the cupboard and the counter swept free of crumbs. The loaves of bread from that morning’s baking were wrapped in tinfoil and the kettle of last night’s stew had been removed to the cooler on the porch outside the front door. The cushions on the couch were plumped up, the books on the shelves were lined up. The cassette tapes were stacked in neat piles, labels out. Except for on the guitar, there wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t a notorious neatnik. It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate someone doing her chores for her. It was just that she was used to doing for herself. It made her inexplicably uneasy to be done for.

Still, she managed a smile for both man and boy. At face value, they were both well worth it. Ethan looked like a Viking, tall, broad-shouldered, long-limbed, pale skin, blond hair, blue eyes; his forebears could have come from anywhere so long as anywhere was Norway, Sweden, or Denmark. Johnny was at that ungainly stage of adolescence when his limbs were growing out beyond his control, but he would be tall, too. He bore a striking resemblance to his father, thick dark hair over a heavy brow, deep-set blue eyes, firm mouth, strong chin. He would never be handsome, but his face, once seen, would never be forgotten.

“Hey,” she said, shrugging out of her parka.

“Hey,” Ethan said, catching it and leaning down to kiss her at the same time.

Johnny was sitting at the table, hunched over a book, and Kate instinctively pulled back. Ethan maintained his smile, but there was a frown at the back of his eyes. “Had dinner?”

“Yeah, I had dinner up to Ruthe and Dina’s.”

Ethan’s lips pursed in a long, low whistle. “Lucky girl. They have pie?”

“Rhubarb and something extra.”

“I’m jealous.”

“It was good,” Kate admitted. She pulled her bibs down and hung them next to the parka. The coat hook was crowded with Johnny’s and Ethan’s parkas and bibs, and hers were elbowed onto the floor. She picked them up and jammed them on the hook again. This time, they stayed.

“I was about to make some cocoa.”

“I’d like that. It was a long ride home.”

Ethan turned to the kettle. “What were you doing up at the old gals’ place?”

“I went there to ask them to help with Dan.”

“Ah.” He was silent for a moment, measuring cocoa and honey and evaporated milk into three mugs. “I wasn’t expecting you to charge off that way this morning when I came galloping over with the news.”

Kate raised one shoulder. “He’s a friend.”

“Urn.” He brought her a mug. It had miniature marsh-mallows in it. She repressed a shudder.

He gave a second mug to Johnny, who grunted a thank-you without looking up, and came back to sit next to where she was curled up on the couch. He stretched out his long legs and propped his feet on the burl-wood coffee table, about the only piece of furniture in the room that had any pretension to style. “What did Dina and Ruthe have to say?”

“Well, they weren’t surprised. They said the current administration wants to drill for oil in the Arctic, and it follows that they-the administration-will try to get rid of every bureaucrat who thinks otherwise.”

“They don’t have the votes in Congress, do they?”

“Ruthe says they don’t.” Kate tried to drink some cocoa without allowing her lips to come into contact with the marshmallows. It wasn’t easy. “But I don’t think she or Dina have a lot of confidence that the situation is going to stay that way.”

“You for it or against it?”

“What? Drilling in ANWR?” Kate thought about it. “I don’t know. I’ve gone back and forth on it. I’ve been to Prudhoe Bay; they did a good job there. Then I think of Valdez, and how badly they did there. And then I think-” She stopped.

“What?”

“Well… well, it’s just that maybe, once in a while, we should let a beautiful thing be, you know?” She looked at him. “What else is left like that?” She looked at Johnny, still hunched over his homework. “What do we leave behind when we’re gone if we move into it now with D-nines?”

Ethan finished his chocolate. “I’m for it.”

“You’re for drilling?”

“Yeah. There’ll be jobs, Kate. It’s easy for you to say let it be, but I’ve got kids to support and educate.”

“Your father raised four sons single-handedly before there was an oil patch.”

“I’m not my father.”

They were both angry, both aware of it, and both made a conscious decision to pull back from that anger. Ethan leaned forward to place his mug on the coffee table. “Where’d you get this table, anyway?”

“Buck Brinker made it for Emaa,” she said. “I brought it home when she died.”

“Thought I recognized the work. Nice piece.”

“I like it. What did you do today?”

“Chopped wood.”

“Filled up your woodshed?”

“Nope.” He stretched, his joints popping, and gave her a lazy grin. “Filled yours.”

“Oh. Ah. Well. Thanks.”

“Thank me later.”

She gave Johnny’s back a warning glance.

Ethan’s grin faded. “We’ve got to talk about this, Kate.”

“Not now.”

“It’s always ‘Not now.” When?“

Johnny sat up and closed his book with a decisive thump. “There!” He swiveled in his chair. “Done!” He fixed Kate with a hopeful eye.

“What?” she said.

He looked at the guitar.

So did she. Dust lay over it like a shroud.

“You said you would,” Johnny said.

“I know I did,” Kate said, reflecting on the unwisdom of making promises to adolescents. They were worse than elephants. It never occurred to her to renege, though. She set her mug next to Ethan’s and got to her feet, ignoring the stifled sigh she heard Ethan give.

The guitar was an old Gibson that had belonged to Kate’s father, who had left it behind when he died, along with an extensive collection of folk songs from the fifties, some with musical notation, some with only the chords penciled in over the stanzas, some just with the lyrics scribbled on a page torn from a school notebook. Collected in a black three-ring binder so old that the plastic cover was peeling away from itself, they were as foreign to Johnny as Bach was to Kate. She got the binder down and opened it on the coffee table, motioning Johnny to her side.

“Well,” Ethan said with a lightness that was obviously forced, “I’m heading for home. See you back at the house, Johnny.”

“Yeah,” Johnny said.

“Or he can sack out here on the couch,” Kate said. “Our Jane DEW line hasn’t gone off in a while, so it should be safe.” Jane was Johnny’s mother and Jack’s ex-wife, and a roaring bitch into the bargain. The good news was that she hated Kate with every part and fiber of her being. The bad news was she was trying to find her son in Kate’s keeping so she could charge Kate with kidnapping.

All this stemmed from Johnny’s father’s death the previous year. Jane had taken Johnny to Arizona to live with her mother, who was seventy-three and lived in a retirement community. Johnny had hated Arizona, hated the retirement community, and had nothing in common with his grandmother, who was into golf in a major way and who had considered her child-rearing days over once she got Jane out of the house. One morning, he’d put a couple of peanut butter sandwiches, a liter bottle of Coke, and a copy of Between Planets into his knapsack, swiped forty bucks out of his grandmother’s purse, and hitched a ride on a semi loaded with lettuce. A Volkswagen van full of antiglobalization activists took him as far as Eugene, where he hooked up with a defrocked cop who was moving to Coeur d’Alene and who dropped him in Spokane. He walked across the border under the noses of Canadian immigration, hitched a ride on a U-Haul van full of furniture belonging to a family whose man was transferring from RPetCo Lima to RPetCo Prudhoe Bay, the driver of which was looking for a free ride to Alaska and didn’t mind having company to keep him awake during the thousand-mile-plus journey. He dropped Johnny at the entrance to the Park on his way down the Glenn Highway to Anchorage. Johnny walked the rest of the way, appearing on Kate’s doorstep tired, angry, and determined to stay.

Kate, who had weaseled the story out of him one leg at a time, was surprised that her hair hadn’t turned white in the telling. Before she had time to formulate a plan, Jane had showed up in the Park, looking for Johnny. A Park rat who had no love for Kate had pointed Jane toward Kate’s homestead, and Jane had materialized on the doorstep, breathing fire and smoke. Mutt had gotten rid of her for the moment, but she had legal custody of Johnny, and now she knew where Kate lived. She didn’t know Ethan, however, nor did she know where he lived, and since Ethan’s wife had walked out on him and he had room and practice as a father of two, Kate had worked out an arrangement whereby Johnny lived for the most part on Ethan’s homestead, safely out of Jane’s reach, for the time being at least. This arrangement had the tacit, if not overt, sanction of the law, in the form of Trooper Jim Chopin. Ergo, Johnny was currently on the lam and the entire Park was in on the conspiracy to keep him that way until he was of age and could legally tell Jane to take a flying leap.

“Whatever,” Johnny said, turning the pages of the notebook.

Not that he seemed overly worried about it.

He squinted at Stephan’s writing. “Who’s Woody Guthrie, Kate?”

Kate didn’t want to look up, but she felt it would be cowardly not to. Ethan nodded at the door, his mouth set in a determined line. “I’ll be right back,” she said to Johnny.

“Yeah,” he said again. He picked up the guitar, leaving fingerprints in the dust. He sneezed once, and a second time, and got up to dampen a dishcloth in the sink.

She shrugged into her parka and followed Ethan outdoors. His snow machine was parked to one side of the clearing, next to Johnny’s. “How long is this going to go on, Kate?”

She gave a craven thought to saying, How long is what going to go on? but then thought better of it. Ethan’s expression was very clear in the moonlight. “I’m just-I’m a little-I don’t know, uncertain.”

“What’s this uncertain? You want me; I want you. I’m here, so are you. Jesus, Kate, this is just like college all over again.”

Her head came up. “ ‘Just like college?” Who you going to sleep with instead of me this time, Ethan?“

He blew out an explosive breath. “That’s not what I meant.”

Anger was a good refuge. She thought about ducking into it for maybe ten seconds. “I know,” she managed to say.

“We’ve been dancing around sleeping together for, what, three months now?”

“No,” she said in a low voice. “I’ve been dancing around it.”

“Well,” he said. “Okay.” His smile flashed again.

She smiled in return, relieved. “I’m sorry, Ethan. It just hasn’t felt right. I’m not ready. I don’t jump into these things.”

“Jack must have been one hell of a guy in the sack.”

“It’s not that,” she snapped.

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m a little edgy around you.”

She shoved her hands into the parka’s pockets. “I’d better get inside.”

“Hold it.” He stepped forward to pull her into his arms and kiss her. He raised his head. “Feel that?”

Her response was instinctive, her legs opening a little to cradle him between diem. “Who wouldn’t?”

He kissed her again, this time with enough force to press her up against the cabin wall. He kneed her legs apart and rubbed himself between them. “I’ve wanted you for nearly twenty years. Jack is dead. Margaret left me. There’s no reason not to. Unless you don’t want to.”

“It’s not that. I-oh.” His hand had worked its way inside her parka, and she arched into his hand. This was Ethan, high school heartthrob, very nearly her first lover. He was smart, he was funny, and, above all, he was capable, a quality she had always found irresistible in men. If his voice wasn’t as deep as Jack’s had been, as rough-edged in its desire, well, he wasn’t Jack.

No one was.

He kissed her again. But he sure as hell could kiss. When he raised his head, her lips were swollen, her head was buzzing, and her knees were weak. And the smug grin on his face told her that he knew it. “More of that where it came from,” he said, straddling his snow machine. “One bedroom over.”

She stayed where she was, leaning up against the cabin for support, as he raised a hand and roared off into the night.

Back inside, she hung up her parka and worked the pump to fill up a pitcher of cold, clear water from the well located directly beneath the cabin. The well, fed by the water table created by the creek out back. Yet another example of her father’s foresight and ability on this property he had homesteaded before she was born, like the handmade cabin and outbuildings, made of logs carefully fitted together, and as carefully chinked with moss and mud. Stephan Shugak had finished the inside of the cabin the same way, working a winter in Ahtna for a builders’ supply company in exchange for insulation, Sheetrock, and nails, and the hammer to pound them in with. He had sanded the wall paneling by hand after cutting the planks from carefully selected trunks of Sitka spruce that he had felled himself on Mary Balashoff’s setnet site on Alaganik Bay.

It had taken him six years to finish the job; in the process, he had sweated out the last of the memories from the months he had spent in the Aleutians as one of Castner’s Cutthroats. When the last nightmare of the hand-to-hand combat on the beaches of Attu had faded into an uneasy memory, he had judged himself able to take a wife. He chose Zoya Swensen, a lithe woman of his own age, whose family came from Cordova, but like his had originated in the Aleutians, relocated first to Old Harbor on Kodiak Island and from there to Cordova where, it must be said, the first generation of expatriates complained bitterly of the warm climate.

Zoya and Stephan had wanted a house full of children, and instead they got Kate, just about the time they had given up hope of any children at all. This might have explained why first Zoya and then Stephan began drinking. Or it might not. They died so early in Kate’s life that there was much she didn’t know about them. She remembered her father more than she did her mother. He’d taught her to hunt, to use tools to construct and repair buildings and machinery, to chop wood, and to fish. They had built a wooden skiff together, more or less, in the garage the winter she turned five. He’d gotten two bears that winter, too, and they’d tanned the skins.

He hadn’t taught her anything about love. Neither had Abel, Ethan’s father, her guardian after Stephan died. That, she was still struggling to figure out on her own.

A mirror hung on the wall over the sink, and the grave woman reflected there, with the narrow, tilted hazel eyes and the very short dark hair beginning to go a little shaggy around the edges looked tired. Her summer tan had faded, too, leaving her skin looking sallow and stretched over her high cheekbones. Her wide mouth was unsmiling, a tight-lipped line of repudiation and denial. Ruthe and Dina had made that woman laugh. When was the last time she had laughed out loud?

A discordant jangle interrupted her reverie, and she looked over at the couch to see a frustrated expression on Johnny’s face. “Here,” she said, crossing the room and extending a hand. “I’ll show you.”

The guitar was in serious need of tuning, and she got out the tuning fork. It was a tedious process, but Johnny stuck with it. Afterward, she took him through the C and G chords, threw in a little practice on B7 just to keep things interesting. He liked the song “Scotch and Soda,” and she located the Kingston Trio tape and played it for him so he’d know how it was supposed to sound. She tried him on “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” but although he liked the tune, he made a face at the lyrics. “Blowin‘ in the Wind” was okay, and so was “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which he misplayed with gusto.

“Okay, enough,” Kate said at nine o’clock. “You going to Ethan’s or you bunking here?”

“Here,” he replied, which meant she didn’t have to roll out the Arctic Cat again to follow him home, and she was grateful. She made more mugs of cocoa with Nestle’s, evaporated milk, and hot water from the kettle, but no marsh-mallows.

“My fingers hurt,” he said.

She took his left hand and looked at the tips of his fingers. They were red and felt warm to the touch. “If you keep it up, they’ll hurt worse. And then you’ll work up calluses and they won’t hurt anymore.”

Unexpectedly, he took her left hand and looked at the tips of her fingers. “You don’t have any.”

“Not anymore.”

“Because you quit playing.”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I couldn’t sing anymore, so there didn’t seem to be much point.”

His eyes went to her throat, to the scar that bisected it almost from ear to ear. “Because of that?”

“Yeah.”

“How did you get it?”

“A guy had a knife. I took it away from him.”

“But he cut you before you did.”

“Yeah.”

“When you were working for Dad.”

“Yes.”

“Does it still bother you?”

“The scar, or not being able to sing?”

“Both.”

“Both,” she replied, “although not as much as they used to.” She put down the mug and picked up the guitar from where it was leaning against the coffee table. The weight of the body on her thigh felt familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, and the neck settled into her left palm with a tentative feeling. She gave the strings a few experimental strums, and without stopping to think about it, launched into “Molly Malone.” Mutt, stretched out on the bearskin in front of the woodstove, raised her head, her ears going up, and fixed Kate with a steady gaze.

Kate’s voice sounded husky to her hypercritical ears and she had to change octaves to hit the high notes. “Yesterday” was even harder to reach, but when she came to the end of the last verse, Johnny said, “That sounded fine. You can sing, Kate.”

Her fingertips were tingling. She stood up and hung the guitar on its hook next to the door, making a mental note to oil the wood before Johnny’s vigorous playing split the instrument in half. She looked over at Mutt, who had lowered her head back to her paws and appeared dead to the world.

“Can I learn to do that?”

“You can learn to do just about anything,” Kate said. “It takes practice, is all.”

He was about to reply, when a yawn split his face. She fetched sheets, blankets, and a pillow, and, in that unnerving fashion of adolescents, he was asleep before she smoothed the blankets over him. Shadows gathered as she turned off three of the kerosene lanterns, turning down the one hanging in the kitchen corner to leave a soft, dim glow in case he needed to get up in the middle of the night. Shadows moved with her across the floor and on the walls.

The book Johnny had been reading was a history textbook. School wasn’t in session for another week. Kate sighed. Johnny was studying as hard as he could because it was his avowed intent to pass his GED when he turned sixteen, thereafter to walk away from school and never go back. She was hoping against hope that he’d fall in love with a girl whose avowed intent was to graduate high school in four years and go on to college afterward.

She stoked the fire in the woodstove, checked the oil stove to see that the pilot light was still burning, and refilled the wood box. After brushing her teeth and washing her face with the last of the water in the kettle, she refilled the kettle and set it on the back of the stove. She climbed the ladder to the loft and lit the lamp that hung next to the bed, undressing by its light, pulling on a nightshirt, and sliding beneath the thick down comforter. She was rereading My Family and Other Animals for what was probably the twenty-seventh time, but she had only lately gone back to full-time reading, and for the present, her preference was for books she had already read and enjoyed, ones with no surprises in them.

But even ten-year-old Gerry Durrell and his scorpions in matchboxes couldn’t keep her attention this night. She put the book down and turned off the light to stare at the ceiling.

Jack Morgan had been dead for over a year now. She missed him, missed having him in her life. She missed his voice, she realized suddenly, that slow, deep bass voice that had made every feminine nerve she had stand up and salute every time she’d heard it.

Ethan’s voice wasn’t as deep, but that wasn’t necessarily enough to deny the man her bed.

Jack had been brawny, a bruiser with the muscles of a prizefighter and a face that could most kindly have been described as interesting.

Ethan could have made a living modeling clothes for Brooks Brothers.

Only now did she realize how patient Jack had been, how long-suffering, how much he had put up with. When she had left Anchorage six years before, fresh out of the hospital, unable to form words clearly for four months-never mind sing-she had left the job and the man at one and the same time, vowing never to return to either. Eighteen months later, Jack had showed up in the Park with an FBI agent in tow and a missing person’s case in hand. Eighteen months, during which she had tried to find his substitute in two other men, to no avail, both of whom she had made sure Jack knew about. If it had bothered him, he had never shown it. Much. He had waited for her-waited for her to heal, waited for her to come back to him-like he’d taken a vow to the Church of Kate Shugak and would not allow himself to become apostate.

He’d irritated her, bewildered her, astounded her, and charmed her. He had wooed her with Jimmy Buffett and seduced her with chocolate chip cookies, and in the end, he had saved her life at the expense of his own. “I love you, Shugak” had very nearly been his last words to her, and it was only after his death that she realized what they had meant.

She ached for him, suddenly, fiercely. They had been well matched sexually, coming together like thunder and lightning. She ran her hands down her body, remembering.

No. There was a perfectly good man not ten miles away. Why was she hesitating? Jack was dead, she was needy, and Ethan was eager. Love would never come again unless she gave it a chance. Wasn’t that the way it worked? What was the matter with her?

She gave up on sleep, got up and dressed again, and crept down the ladder. Johnny didn’t move. Mutt was waiting for her. She opened the door and slipped outside, catching it before the spring slammed it shut.

The trail around the cabin led to the A-shaped stack of six fuel drums. A fainter trail branched off from it and led through the trees, emerging at a cliffs edge. The boulder at the edge was as high as her waist, with a cleared spot on it worn smooth, just the size of someone’s butt. Mutt sat at its foot, her shoulder at Kate’s knee.

Below the snow-covered landscape was a crystalline palace, and above the stars seemed even brighter than they had before. The moon had a big smudged white ring around it that filled up half the sky. The northern lights were out, though only faintly and without much movement or color to them, long pale streaks across the northern horizon.

She’d turned thirty-five in October, and had been a sovereign nation unto herself pretty much from the age of six. It wasn’t like she needed a man in her life. It was a matter of simple biology. And after all, she was Kate Shugak-she recognized no rules but her own. She could be chaste. Chaste by choice, by god, even Chaste by Choice-she could start a movement. Everything she wanted, everything she needed, it was all right here on this homestead. She had even, she reminded herself with awful sarcasm, managed to have a child without ever having given birth or having changed a single diaper. Now there was a miracle of modern parenting for you.

She could still feel the imprint of Ethan’s mouth, hand, body. She could still taste him. How long had it been?

Somewhere very far away, or perhaps quite close, a songbird gave forth with three pure descending notes. Kate’s laugh was half sob. “Oh, Emaa,” she whispered, leaning her head on her knees, “these white boys are going to be the death of me. Where have all the Aleut boys gone, long time passing?”

Unbidden, the memory of those few moments in that bunk in Bering in July flashed into her head, and Jim Chopin’s muffled curse rang in her ears. And later, the gentleness of his hands and lips and the-she could only call it the kindness in his eyes, the comfort of his arms just before he flew back to the Park.

“No,” she said, jumping to her feet. Mutt, ears tuned to the rustle of a ptarmigan beneath a spruce tree thirty feet east, leapt up and barked an inquiry.

“No, no, no” Kate said, and marched back to the cabin.