He breathed in and out, watched his expelled breath hang in the air like its own little meteorological event, listened to the incessant drip of the rain.
At least Star was dry. He tried to picture her curled up on one of the couches in the big house, listening to records and gossiping with Merry and Lydia and whoever else had come in out of the wet, or maybe in the kitchen, whipping up a little dish of veggie rice or pasta for forty. She was a good cook, good with spices. She could do Indian, and he loved Indian. And she must have been in the big house, because she wasn't here. Clearly. Nothing here but an abandoned longhair in a wet sleeping bag.
She'd complained of a headache the night before, and he assumed she'd gone back to the treehouse to crash, but when he climbed up the ladder in the stone soup of dawn, the sleeping bag was empty. And so he further assumed she'd spent the night in the big house, as she sometimes did, in the room Merry and Maya had partitioned with a pair of faded Navajo blankets strung across a length of clothesline. Marco had been in there once or twice-this was an open society, after all, and theoretically there was no private space-but it made him uncomfortable. The room smelled of women, tasted of them, of their perfumes and balms, their scented candles and incense and the things they wore close to their bodies, and it was orderly when the rest of the house was in disarray. And dark, dark and candlelit, even in the middle of the day, with sheets of cardboard and posters nailed up over the windows. Norm called it the seraglio. The big orange tom, no fool, liked to nest there among the bedclothes and have his ears rubbed.
Did he miss her after one night? Did he resent the fact that she hadn't slept beside him? Was he worried? Jealous? Possessive? He didn't know. But he peeled himself out of the clammy sleeping bag, stepped into his jeans and climbed barefoot down the ladder to cross the muddy yard to the big house and find out.
He went round back so as not to track mud through the house, and came up the rear steps thinking about boots-he was going to need a new pair, a pair of work boots from the Army and Navy store, if he expected to survive a winter up north-and he paused a moment to rinse his muddy feet in the fan of water shearing off the eaves. Inside, the teapot was going and the windows were steamed over. It wasn't cold, not really, but he found he was shivering as he pushed open the door on a wall of cooked air and a complex admixture of scents: fresh-baked bread, coffee, basil, vegetable stock simmering in a bright scoured pot on the stove.
Star was there, leaning over the pot, her child's hands cupped beneath a load of chopped celery. She gave him a smile, dropped the celery into the pot and crossed the room to hold him briefly and give him the briefest of kisses. “Where were you?” he breathed. “I missed you.” And she said, under her breath, “With the girls.”
Verbie was there too, with her sister, a long-faced girl with a bulge of jaw and eyes set too close together, and Merry, Maya and Lydia, all of them hovering around the stove with coffee mugs cradled in their hands. The two yellow dogs lay on the floor at their feet. “You eat yet?” Star wanted to know, and then she was back at the chopping board, scooping up vegetables for the pot.
“I feel like I'm in a Turkish bath or something,” he said, and found himself a seat at the table, smoothing his wet hair back with the palm of his right hand. He parted it in the middle, like everybody else, but the parting always seemed ragged, as if his head wasn't centered on his body, and unless he made a conscious effort with comb and brush there wasn't much hope for it. “No,” he said, in answer to Star's question, “not yet-but what time is it, anyway, you think?”
Merry answered for her. “I don't know-two? Two-thirty?” She poured a cup of coffee, two teaspoons of sugar, a float of goat's milk, and brought it to him. “What time did you turn in last night?”
He made a vague gesture. “Norm,” he began, “I was with Norm,” and they all-even Verbie's long-faced sister-burst out laughing. He liked that. Liked looking at them, at their small even teeth, brilliant gums, eyes squeezed down to slits. The laughter trailed off into giggles. “Say no more,” Star said.
And then he was dipping warm bread into his coffee, wrapped up in the cocoon of the moment, not quite ready to start anything yet. The conversation flowed round him, soft voices, the rhythmic heel-and-toe dance of the knife on the chopping block.
“The goats are going, right?”
“I don't know. Yeah. I guess.”
“Do they need like a special, what do you call it-a wagon? Like horses, I mean?”
“Oh, you mean a goat wagon.” More giggles. “We can just go out to the goat wagon store and get one.”
“I'm serious.”
“Okay, so am I. What are we going to feed them?”
“The goats?”
“Yeah.”
“I don't know-grass?”
“In the winter.”
“Hay?”
“Where're we going to get hay in the middle of Alaska?”
“Buy it.”
“With what?”
“Barter for it, then. Like we do here. You know, dip candles, string beads, pottery, honey, that kind of thing.”
“Who's going to want beads up there?”
“The Eskimos.”
“There aren't any Eskimos where we're going. It's more like woods and rolling hills. Like Minnesota or something. That's what Norm said, anyway.”
“So Indians. They've got Indians up there, haven't they?”
“Indians make their own beads.”
“Teenagers, then. Teenagers dying to escape the grind. We'll start a revolution. Flower power on the tundra!”
“Yeah, right.”
Star was the one concerned with the goats. They were her domain now-nobody else seemed to bother with them. She even smelled of goat, and he didn't mind that, not at all, because it was a natural smell, and that was what they were getting here: nature. And if they could keep it together long enough to get to Alaska, they were going to get a whole lot more of it.
“I wouldn't be worried about goats, I'd be worried about long underwear-I mean, what are we supposed to wear up there? Mink coats? Mukluks?” Pause. “What _are__ mukluks, anyway?”
“We'll just go to Goodwill or something. Get a bunch of sweaters and overcoats. And knit. We could knit, no problem-”
“Layers, that's how you do it.”
“I hear if you get overheated the sweat like freezes on your body and you wind up like dying of hypothermia or something.”
“I don't sweat.”
“You will, once we get you your mink panties and ermine bra.”
They were laughing. They were happy. They'd go to Siberia, Tierra del Fuego, Devil's Island-it was all the same to them. It was an adventure, that was all. A lark. They were the women. They were the soul and foundation of the enterprise. And sitting there in the kitchen with the rain tapping at the windows and the stock simmering on the stove and the women's voices casting a net in the air around him, Marco couldn't help but feel that everything was going to work out after all.
It was late afternoon and raining still when the dogs lifted their heads from the floor and cocked their ears-a vehicle was coming up the drive, something big, preceded by a rumble of wheels or maybe treads and the stuttering alien wheeze of a diesel engine. Marco was still in the kitchen, sitting at the window with a book, feeling confined and constrained, but in no mood to go back and crouch over a wet sleeping bag in a leaky treehouse for the rest of the day. He was bored. Anxious to get started, to do something, see to details, arrange things, get this show on the road-Alaska, Alaska or Bust, and all he could see was a log cabin in a glade overlooking a broad flat river so full of salmon you could walk across their backs to the other side, and moose, moose standing in shallow pools with long strips of vegetation decorating their antlers. But it was raining, and he had a book, and he was going nowhere. As for the rest, the cast of characters had changed somewhat-Reba was at the stove now, making a casserole to go with the soup, and Alfredo was hunkered over a game of solitaire at the kitchen table while Che and Sunshine hurtled in and out of the room in a sustained frenzy that might have been called tag or hide-and-go-seek or gestalt therapy. Star and Merry were making piles of things in the corner-_Six teapots, do we really need six teapots?__-and Maya was sliding jars of preserves into a cardboard box with the grudging slow imponderability of a prisoner. The light was a gray slab. Things were slow.