Impasse (11 page)

He didn't feel like walking anywhere, so he let the treacherous fire smolder, and sat on the cot, reorganizing his pack and duffel. His clothes were jumbled and smelled like smoke. He pulled them out, shook them, and refolded them. It was quick work; he did the laundry at home, while Katherine mowed the lawn and paid bills. Stu did the dishes too. She didn't want the chores to feel like they were assigned by gender. She was proud that way, and she'd made it clear before their wedding that their union would be an equal partnership. She'd even written her own customized vows. She certainly wasn't going to obey him, she'd laughed.

It didn't seem like a good idea to hang the clothes to air out. He already had his sleeping bag hanging, and if the weather changed suddenly, he didn't want to have to scramble around on his injured leg trying to retrieve his underwear. One corner of the cabin was still protected from the large hole in the roof, and he stored the duffel there. He emptied the backpack, which contained the majority of his gear and supplies.

It didn't look like much when it was all laid out. The absence of the items he'd thought Dugan's cabin would provide was obvious and distressing. Many of them were on
Edwin's
“must-have” list. He had no food beyond the Goop. No cooking gear. And he couldn't cook in his collapsible plastic cup. No container for water except his one-liter bladder, which meant frequent trips down the mountain to the lake.

He was going to have to hunt. Or fish. That much was clear. He laid the .30-06 and a box of ammo down with the supplies. Plenty of bullets for a week of killing. Heck, he'd already bagged a rat. There was also a roll of fishing line and three hooks. Promising. No fry pan, but he could carve a spit to cook small game or trout over the fire. He had fished as a kid on the ocean once. Not so much on lakes.

How different can it be?
Stu thought.

Edwin's
highly recommended that he stay hydrated, so he sipped at the water regularly, which, in turn, meant a trip to the lake was the first priority. He'd take the gun, he thought, in case he saw game on the way, and he'd find a long branch to whittle and use as a fishing pole when he got there.
A regular white-collar Huck Finn
. The Great Beyond pack had a detachable mini-pack, into which he inserted the water bladder, the fishing line, and the hooks.

The walk down to the lake should have been pleasant. Stu imagined that people from metropolitan areas paid big money to enjoy such peace and solitude. But mostly, his foot hurt. He concluded that it wasn't broken before he left the small clearing, but by the time he had shuffled halfway down the hill, it was complaining with every step, sending vengeful little jolts of pain up his leg as punishment for putting it to work so soon after its traumatic encounter with the cabin's dirt floor. The need to carefully watch where he placed every footfall on the steep slope made it hard to scan for game. He saw squirrels as he approached the water, but he did not yet have an appetite for rodent meat. Besides, after seeing the devastation wrought on the rat by the .30-06, Stu didn't think there would be much meat left on a squirrel if he shot one.

Better to try for a fish,
he told himself. He just needed to find some worms.
No problem.

He turned over rocks for ten minutes, but nothing squirmed beneath them except tiny black beetles, so he moved to another area and pushed over a downed log, hoping to find some worms in the rotting earth. Nothing. He didn't have a shovel, so he dug with a stick, which was painstaking work. The earth turned reluctantly, and again he found no worms.

Perhaps a different type of insect.

There were huge flies, but they proved savvy and vengeful. Whenever Stu tried to swat them out of the air with a pine bough, they eluded its needled limbs and went for the exposed skin of his neck and face, which was still swelling from the wasp sting.

After several painful bites, he gave up and stuck his hook through the largest of the small beetles. It broke in half. The next three also broke in half. He finally had to start experimenting with locations for inserting the point into the squirming bugs, which felt a bit like animal torture. Five beetles later, though, he had one suspended like a tiny entomological science exhibit in the middle of the oversize hook. Stu held it up, staring doubtfully.

Perhaps the fish aren't too observant,
he thought.

When he tied the hook on and pulled to test the fishing line, he found that it was difficult to get the tiny knots to hold. The line was smooth and slick, and the knots slipped loose under the slightest pressure. He tied it several times before he gripped the hook at the wrong angle. The needle-sharp hook punctured his thumb, sliding neatly beneath the skin just past the barb. Stu bit his lip and held back a yelp as he stared at the hook in his flesh.

I caught myself,
he thought stupidly.

Fortunately, it did not penetrate deeply, and the shaft was near the surface. But the barbed hook wasn't coming back out the way it went in. He removed his knife and, after several moments' debate, pressed the blade against the skin atop the shaft. His flesh popped open, releasing the hook and leaving a small bloody trench. Adding insult to actual injury, his beetle snapped in half again.

Eventually he constructed a solid granny knot twice as large as the eye of the hook, and rigged up another beetle. Then he went to work on the pole. A downed four-foot branch nearby would serve nicely, he decided. He set it against a rock and pressed his foot on each limb to snap it off. It hurt to balance on his injured left foot, so he switched to standing on his right and tried using the left to break the branches instead. But the sudden jarring of the first snap sent an unbearable jolt of pain through his ankle, and he decided that there was no reason a fishing pole couldn't have a few branches. He tied the line around the end and laid twenty feet of neatly coiled slack behind him. Then he stepped to the lake's edge.

His first cast made clear the reason fishing poles didn't have branches. Without sufficient weight, the line didn't fly out into the lake but instead lurched forward only a few feet and tangled itself amongst the limbs.

“Dammit!”

His profanity echoed across the water, bouncing back to mock him. He shook his fan-shaped fishing pole in frustration, causing the line to foul even more severely, and by the time he stopped shaking the pole to work on the tangle, the line looked like an asymmetrical spider web strung between the limbs.

The untangling took patience, and he was running low, but he eventually had the line coiled neatly again. He needed a weight to cast, and settled on a small pinecone. More beetles had to be split, broken, decapitated, and otherwise mutilated, but he finally landed one out in the water far enough from shore that a fish might venture from the depths to at least investigate. Then he laid the gun across his lap and sat down to wait.

There was a comfortable grassy spot on the bank where he could sit and prop up his foot, which was beginning to feel tight in his two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar boot. With a light wind, the cold Alaska water was rippled glass. It reflected the encircling mountains, showing Stu a distorted and inverted parallel world. The day was warming, and a sapphire sky had draped itself overhead like a bright canopy pinned to the jutting peaks and stretched from ridge to ridge. He'd never seen such a deep color.

Blue skies.

It had been the color of his future in the DA's office, once upon a time. His senior assistant position in the major crimes unit had been a whirlwind. More cases than he'd had time to juggle—ten per week. But somehow he'd done it, lining them up for court dates and backing down bluffing defense attorneys who threatened to overload him with trials. Most cases pled out—95 percent, according to the office manager's stats. He threw others together for trial in a few days, prepping on weekends while Katherine grumbled, although she hung on every word as he argued each case to her for practice. And when trial day came, it was game on. He flipped a switch and became a performer, a salesman, a preacher, and a professor all rolled into one, giving opening statements and closings that were somehow both carefully crafted and spontaneous. He grilled defense witnesses in between with questions carefully designed to trap them in lies, and he drew ugly facts from reluctant victims like a healer drawing poison from a wound. During multiday trials, he'd stay up until one a.m. poring over his notes from the day, and he'd rise at five the next morning to revise his witness questions in accordance with the previous day's revelations.

And there were always revelations.

A pastor accused of molestation had once cursed him from the stand in the name of God, and was convicted. A robbery victim was caught lying about a computer the defendant had stolen from him at gunpoint, because he'd shoplifted it from a store in the first place. Stu had convicted that defendant too, surprisingly. In another case, a juror was thrown out for drinking on the job. Evidence got lost once in the middle of a trial—a pound of pot from the evidence cart. Newly discovered videotapes proved people absolutely guilty or suddenly innocent. Cops forgot details or changed their stories. Rape victims stuck up for their abusers. And people were devastated or vindicated based upon ten-second breath-holding verdict pronouncements. It had been his crazy, exciting, uncertain life full of risks and rewards, and it was difficult now to remember what it felt like to be that person. He wondered if professional athletes who were injured and never stepped onto the field again felt the same.

Stu frowned and threw a pebble out into the lake, watching the splash he'd made settle into ripples and then fade away. Why he'd been reduced to chasing down deadbeat clients to collect fees for their tedious, routine landlord-tenant disputes was still a bit of a fog. Sure, he objectively knew
how
it had happened to him, but he still didn't understand
why
.

The fishing pole branch twitched. Stu froze. It had been ten minutes or maybe thirty; without a watch, it was hard to tell. After a moment of surprise, he scrambled to grab the pole and jerked upward, hard. There was resistance, and then the line came loose. He pulled it in with his hands, and it came easily. Too easily. When the hook swung dripping out of the water, it was empty. The beetle was gone. No indication of whether it had been a bite. The hook might have just snagged on the bottom, he had to admit to himself. He held the hook and stared at it, wondering. Should he stay and try his luck indefinitely? Should he move on? New bait? He sighed. The worst part was not the idea that he might have lost a fish; it was not knowing whether he'd ever had one at all.

It was early, but he was hungrier than he was when he skipped breakfast at home. The tube of disgusting soy paste hadn't filled him up—it only promised to keep him alive at one day per tube. He'd give fishing another hour, he decided, then try something else.
Edwin's
had other suggestions for food.

Fishing had just sounded so easy. It should have been relaxing and fun, too. It always was on the TV fishing shows. He'd grown up one hundred miles inland in Hartford, and his accountant father had only taken him fishing once, when he was seven. An ocean charter. The crew had rigged the lines, and he'd merely sat in the chair. He caught one, a sea bass—a dark spiny monstrosity from the cold depths that he was scared to touch. They bludgeoned it in front of him, laughing while it gasped for breath, and then they “cleaned” it, slicing it open and spilling its blood and guts all over the deck, a lot like Stu imagined Marti Butz must have gasped for breath while being strangled, and how she had her entrails spilled out on the deck of the
Iron Maiden
. He'd wanted nothing to do with eviscerating living things as a boy after that, and didn't like it any more as a grown man.

Saddled with that image for the remainder of the hour, he was almost grateful when there were no more bites, or even phantom bites.

He drank deeply from the lake until he couldn't drink any more. The water was ice-cold and crystal clear. Then he loaded up his one-liter and began his trip back up the mountain.

He had no watch. Clay had forbidden it. He could check the time on his cell phone when he returned to the cabin. It was back in the bottom of his bag. He'd had to turn it off to save the battery. No use leaving it on without reception. Judging from the sun, it was still before noon.

The walk up was painful, harder than the walk down. He limped, picking his way through the trees and underbrush. It was a trudging chore, and he stared into the hill, purposefully placing every step. Halfway, he stopped to rest and looked back at the lake through the foliage. The view of the calm water nestled in the bowl of the mountains was breathtaking. It was a bit like looking back at his youth; his perspective was better now, and he appreciated the beauty of where he'd been, but he was moving away from it, the path ahead was uphill, and it hurt to keep walking. The wilderness wasn't helping him relax or rejuvenate, he decided. It just reinforced that he was getting old.

Forty sucks,
Stu thought.

Forty had not arrived suddenly. The date on the calendar had, but the feeling of swimming through unflavored oatmeal had been building through the last years of his thirties. It wasn't the sharp, severe depression he'd experienced after Butz, but a dull, longer-lasting version of the same thing. Struggle. Failure.

And a throbbing foot.

Clay had helped him through Butz. Katherine had too. He had both of them to thank for his current life, though it was not the one he'd chosen or one he embraced. He wasn't the type to develop a drug problem or burden others with his issues. Instead he'd checked out. He buried himself in his work. No more fund-raisers. No more hand-shaking or meeting important people.
America's Unsolved
had returned like ghouls to broadcast the death of his career to every friend and complete stranger with a cable subscription—rising star to fallen star in one season of reality television. They seemed delighted; couldn't have scripted it any better. For a time even a trip to Market Basket was painful. He imagined everyone eyeing him with either disgust or pity.