A fine and bitter snow (7 page)

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.