Leni went to the window, peeled the curtain aside, looked out.
The truck was there, puffing into the night, its headlights two bright beams.
She could see him in silhouette, talking to himself.
“He did it,” Leni said, standing close. “Vandalized the tavern.”
“No. He was home. In bed with me. And it’s not the kind of thing he would do.”
A part of Leni wanted to keep this from her mother, to spare her pain, but the truth was burning a hole in Leni’s soul. Sharing it was the only way to put out the flames. They were a team, she and Mama. Together. They didn’t keep secrets from each other. “After you fell asleep, he took the truck to town. I saw him leave, with an ax.”
Mama lit a cigarette. Exhaled heavily. “I thought for once…”
Leni got it. Hope. A shiny thing, a lure for the unwary. She knew how seductive it could be, and how dangerous. “What do we do?”
“Do? He was already pissed about losing his pipeline job, and now this thing with the saloon—with Tom—could push him over the edge.”
Leni felt her mother’s fear, and the shame that was its silent twin. “We are going to have to be very careful. This thing could blow up.”
FOURTEEN
April in Fairbanks was an unreliable month. This year, an unseasonable cold gripped the town, snow fell, the birds stayed away, the rivers stayed frozen. Even the old-timers began to complain, and they had spent decades in this town that was called the coldest in America.
Matthew walked away from the ice rink after practice, his hockey stick slung over his shoulders. He knew he looked like an ordinary seventeen-year-old in a sweat-dampened hockey uniform and boots but looks could be deceiving. He knew it, and they knew it, the kids he’d gone to school with for the past few years. Oh, they were friendly enough (no one judged anyone this far from civilization; you could be whoever you wanted to be), but they gave him a wide berth. Rumors of his “breakdown” had spread faster than a wildfire on the Kenai. Before he took his seat in his first class in ninth grade, he’d already had a reputation. High school kids, even in the wilds of Alaska, were still herd animals. They sensed when there was a weak member in their midst.
Ice fog, a gray heavy haze peppered with tiny particles of frozen pollutants, turned Fairbanks into a fun-house version of itself where nothing was quite solid, no line distinct. The place smelled of trapped exhaust, like a racetrack.
The squat, two-story buildings across the street appeared to be holding each other up, forlorn in the fog. Like many of the buildings in town, they looked temporary, hastily built.
Through the gloom, people were charcoal drawings, lines and slashes, the homeless who huddled in doorways, the drunks who sometimes stumbled out of taverns late at night and froze to death. Not all of those Matthew saw now would survive the day or the week, let alone this unexpected cold in a town where winter lasted from September through April, and night lay across the land for eighteen hours. There were casualties every day. People went missing all the time.
As he walked to the pickup truck, night fell. Just like that, in a blink. Streetlamps created the only light there was—dots here and there—aside from the occasional snake of headlights in the glow. He wore a parka; beneath that, his hockey sweater, long underwear, and his hockey pants, and mukluks. It wasn’t that cold, not by Fairbanks standards. Barely below freezing. He didn’t bother with gloves.
It didn’t take long for the truck to start, not this time of year; not like in the deep midwinter, when you left your truck running while you were at the store or running errands, when the thermostat often dropped to twenty-five below.
He climbed into his uncle’s big extended-cab pickup and drove through town slowly, alert, always looking for animals or sliding cars or kids playing where they shouldn’t be playing.
A banged-up Dodge pulled out in front of him. It had a sign in the back window that read WARNING. IN CASE OF RAPTURE, THIS CAR WILL BE UNMANNED.
There were a lot of bumper stickers like that out here, deep in Alaska’s wild interior, far from the tourist destinations of the coast or the majestic beauty of Denali. Alaska was full of fringe-ists. People who believed in weirdo things and prayed to exclusionary Gods and filled their basements with equal measures of guns and Bibles. If you wanted to live in a place where no one told you what to do and didn’t care if you parked a trailer in your yard or had a fridge on your porch, Alaska was the state for you. His aunt said it was the romance of adventure that attracted so many individualists. Matthew didn’t know if he agreed (actually, he didn’t expend much energy thinking about stuff like that), but he did know that the farther away you got from civilization, the stranger things got. Most people spent one dark, bleak, eight-month winter in Fairbanks and left the state screaming. The few who stayed—misfits, adventurers, romantics, loners—rarely left again.
It took him almost fifteen minutes to reach the homestead road, and five more minutes to get to the house he’d called home for the last few years. Two decades ago, when his mother’s family had homesteaded out here, the land had been remote; over the years, town had crept closer, spread out. Fairbanks might be in the middle of nowhere, fewer than 120 miles from the Arctic Circle, but it was the second largest city in the state and growing fast because of the pipeline.
He drove up the long, winding, tree-shrouded driveway and parked in the huge, plank-sided garage/workshop between Uncle Went’s ATV and his snow machine.
Inside the house, the walls were roughly hewn planks that looked messy in the combination of light and shadow. His aunt and uncle had always intended to drywall them but never had. The kitchen was delineated by L-shaped polished wood counters set atop green cabinets that had come from an abandoned house in Anchorage, one of those “dream” homes built by lowlanders who couldn’t last through their first winter. A bar with three barstools separated it from the dining area. Beyond that was the living room; a big plaid sectional (complete with movable footrests) and two well-worn La-Z-Boy chairs faced a window that overlooked the river. There were bookcases everywhere, overflowing with books; lanterns and flashlights decorated almost every surface for when the power went out, and it went out often, with so many big trees and bad weather. The house had electricity and running water and even a television, but no flush toilets. Truthfully, no Walker ever cared. They’d all been raised with outhouses and were happy to live that way. People down south had no idea how clean an outhouse could be if you took care of it.
“Hey, you,” Aly said, looking up from the sofa. She was doing homework, by the looks of it.
Matthew dropped his gear bag by the door and propped his hockey stick in the arctic entry—a corridor full of coats and boots that separated the outside from the inside. He hung up his coat on a hook and kicked off his boots. He was so tall now—six-foot-two—that he had to duck to enter the house.
“Hey.” He plopped down beside her.
“You smell like a goat,” she said, closing her textbook.
“A goat who scored two goals.” He leaned back, laid his head on the sofa back, stared up at the big wood crossbeams that traversed the ceiling. He didn’t know why, but he felt nervous, a little raw. He tapped his foot, played an arpeggio on the worn armrest with his fingers.
Aly stared at him. As usual, she had applied her makeup sporadically, as if she’d lost interest halfway through the process. Her blond hair was drawn back into a messy ponytail that hung a little to the left. He had no idea if that was intentional. She was beautiful in the natural, rough-hewn way of Alaskan girls, who were more likely to hunt on the weekends than go to a shopping mall or movie theater.