The Great Alone

Mama ran after him, reached out.

“Don’t touch me,” he snarled, shoving her away.

Dad grabbed a parka and stepped into his boots and went outside, slamming the door shut behind him.

Leni caught her mother’s gaze, held it. In those wide blue eyes that held on to every nuance of expression, she saw her own anxiety reflected. “Does he believe all of that end-of-the-world stuff?”

“I think he does,” Mama said. “Or maybe he just wants to. Who knows? It doesn’t matter, though. It’s all talk.”

Leni knew what did matter.

The weather was getting worse.

And so was he.

* * *

“WHAT’S IT REALLY LIKE?” Leni asked Matthew the next day at the end of school. All around them, kids were gathering up their supplies to go home.

“What?”

“Winter.”

Matthew thought about it. “Terrible and beautiful. It’s how you know if you’re cut out to be an Alaskan. Most go running back to the Outside before it’s over.”

“The Great Alone,” Leni said. That was what Robert Service called Alaska.

“You’ll make it,” Matthew said earnestly.

She nodded, wishing she could tell him that she’d begun to worry as much about the dangers inside of her home as outside of it.

She could tell Matthew a lot of things, but not that. She could say her father drank too much or that he yelled or lost his temper, but not that he sometimes scared her. The disloyalty of such a thing was impossible to contemplate.

They exited the schoolhouse together, walking shoulder to shoulder.

Outside, the VW bus waited for her. It looked bad these days, all dinged up and scraped. The bumper was duct-taped in place. The muffler had fallen off at a pothole, so now the poor old thing roared like a race car. Both of her parents were inside, waiting for her.

“’Bye,” Leni said to Matthew, and headed to the vehicle. She tossed her backpack into the back of the bus and climbed in. “Hey, guys,” Leni said.

Dad jammed the bus in reverse, backed up, and turned around.

“Mad Earl wants me to teach his family a few things,” Dad said, turning onto the main road. “We talked about it the other night.”

In no time, they were out of town and up the hill and pulling into the compound. Dad was the first one out of the bus. He grabbed his rifle from the back and slung it over his shoulder.

Mad Earl, seated on his porch, immediately rose and waved. He yelled something Leni couldn’t hear and people stopped working. They put down their shovels and axes and chain saws and moved into the clearing in the center of the compound.

Mama opened the door and got out. Leni followed close behind, her wafflestompers sinking into the wet, spongy ground.

A dented Ford truck pulled up beside the VW and parked. Axle and the two girls, Agnes and Marthe, got out of the truck and headed for the crowd gathering in front of Mad Earl’s porch.

Mad Earl stood on the eroding, slanted porch, his bandy legs spaced a little farther apart than looked comfortable. His white hair hung limply around his loose-skinned face, greasy at the roots and frizzing at the ends. He wore dirty jeans tucked into brown rubber boots and a flannel work shirt that had seen better days. He made a sweeping motion with his hands. “Get closer, come on in. Ernt, Ernt, come up by me, son.”

There was a murmur of sound through the crowd; heads turned.

Dad strode past Thelma and Ted, smiling at Clyde and thumping his back when he reached him. Dad stepped up onto the porch beside Mad Earl. He looked tall and rangy next to the diminutive old man. Super-handsome, with all that black hair and the bushy black mustache.

“We was talking last night, us boys, about the shit going on Outside,” Mad Earl said. “Our president is a certified crook and a bomb blowed a TWA jet right outta the sky. Ain’t nobody safe anymore.”