“No, I’m going now. I won’t be able to sleep.”
He hiked down with the chainsaw in the dark, reached the road at four in the morning. Cold. Below freezing he would’ve guessed. That distant, square-topped mountain shining silver under the moon. He walked out into the road and stood listening for a while.
The chainsaw motor seemed inappropriate at this hour. Like screams in a church. He decapitated the mailbox and carried it across the road and threw it down the mountainside.
Walking back up to the cabin, he rounded a hairpin curve and froze. Heart accelerating at what loomed just twenty feet up the road. It raised its enormous head, the giant rack pale and sharp in the predawn. He’d almost brought the shotgun, decided against it fearing his left arm couldn’t bear the weight. And so he watched the seven-hundred-pound elk walk off the road and vanish into the trees, wondering how long it might have fed his family.
* * * * *
BY midmorning, he had the off-grid power system up and running, water pumping in through the tap from the underground cisterns, and the water heater beginning to warm. They filled five plastic grocery bags under the faucet and tied them off and stowed them in the chest freezer. Tried not to acknowledge the fact that they were all skipping lunch.
Jack left Dee and Naomi to scour The Joy of Cooking for efficient bread recipes that jived with their ingredient list, and took his son with him into the woods.
He’d anticipated Cole wanting to fish, and since there wasn’t any spinning tackle to be had in the shed, surprised the boy with a provisional pole he’d fashioned that morning—an aspen sapling skinned of bark and fitted with an eight-foot length of nylon string and a ceiling screw hook with which Cole might only inflict minimal damage.
The knot tying went faster and the casting smoother, Jack sticking the fly in the vicinity of his intent almost every time.
He’d caught two fingerlings by three o’clock and his first grown-up fish by four—a twelve-inch Rainbow on a dry fly that had been loitering in a pool beside a cascade. Cole screamed with delight as Jack brought the fish ashore, both of them squatting in that pure fall light to inspect the reddish band and the black spots and the micaceous skin that faded into white at the edges.
“It’s really something, isn’t it?” Jack said.
“You did good, Dad.”
Jack set his rod in the grass and worked the hook out and carried the trout back across the stream toward the cooler in two hands and with as much care as he’d handled Naomi and Cole as squirming newborns.
They fished until the light went bad, Jack torn between the stream and his son who’d abandoned the aspen rod to construct a pile of polished, streambed stones on the opposite shore. Jack trying to ignore that thing that had been gnawing at him now for two days, that he wouldn’t ever be ready to look in the eye. How could a father? But he saw it—from a distance, an oblique glance—and for right now at least, that was as close as his heart could stand to be.
When they returned, the sun had just slipped below the desert and Dee and Naomi were hanging blankets over the windows and the cabin smelled of sweet, baking bread.
The women had carried in several armloads of firewood from the porch and stacked it around the hearth, and while Cole regaled everyone with the story of catching the fish, Jack built a base of kindling using a dozen of the pinecones stored in a wicker basket and an issue of USA Today.
The front-page headlines stopped him as he ripped out a sheet—six-month-old bits of news about the war, political infighting, Wall Street, the death of a young celebrity.
“What’s with the blankets over the windows?” he asked as he balled up the sports page and hoisted the first log onto the pyre.
“So our fire won’t be visible.”
Two more logs and then he struck a match, held it to the newsprint.
Jack lay in bed watching fireshadows move across the walls of the living room. Warm under the blanket. Hungry but content.
“We can’t have fires like this anymore,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“When we don’t need them. The winter here is going to be awful. We should save the firewood for blizzards. Nights when it goes below zero. I’m going to have to cut a hell of a lot more wood.”
“So you want to stay?”
“If we can get the food situation under control.”
“I don’t know, Jack.”
“What? You’d rather go back out into what we just escaped?”
“No, but we’ll starve to death here.”
“Not with a seasoned outdoorsman like me taking care of things.”
A tremor of laughter moved through her.
“You noticed any changes in Cole?” he asked.
“No. Why? What makes you ask that?”
“That man in the desert—the one you shot when he came after me? He and his wife had been camping with another couple. They saw the lights. The other couple slept through them. Afterward, they murdered their friends.”
“What does this have to do with my son?”
“You, me, and Naomi, we slept through the aurora. Cole spent the night at Alex’s. Their family went out to the baseball field with the neighborhood and watched. Remember him telling us about it the next day?”
Dee was quiet for a long time.
Jack could see the embers in the fireplace and he could hear his daughter breathing.
“It doesn’t mean anything, Jack, what that man told you. He’s our son, for chrissake. You think he wants to hurt us?”
“I don’t know, but this is something we should be aware of. Today, I caught him staring at himself in the mirror. For a long time. It was weird. I don’t know what that was about, but—”
“We don’t know that any of what’s happening is connected to the lights. It’s total speculation.”
“I agree, but what if Cole changes? What if he becomes violent?”
“Jack, I’m just telling you, if it turns out. . .I want you to shoot me.”
“Dee—”
“I’m not kidding, not exaggerating, just telling you that I do not have it in me to handle that.”
“You have a daughter, too. You don’t have the luxury not to handle shit.”
“‘Should we kill our son if he becomes a threat?’ Is that the question you’re dancing around?”
“We have to talk about it, Dee. I don’t want it to happen and us have no idea what to do.”
“I think I already answered your question.”
“What?”
“I would rather die.”
“Me, too,” Jack said.
“So what are we saying?”
“We’re saying. . .we’re saying he’s our boy, and we stay together, no matter what.”
* * * * *
AT dawn, Jack crept out of bed and dressed in the dark, grabbed the shotgun leaning against the bedside table and took it with him out into the living room.
He unlocked the front door and stepped outside.
Freezing. A heavy frost on the grass.
The desert purple. Still black along the western fringe.
He walked across the meadow into the trees and sat down against the base of an aspen. Everything still. Everything he loved in that dark house across the way.
His breath steamed and he thought about his father and he thought about Reid, his best friend in the humanities department, and the pints they’d put down Thursday nights at Two Fools Tavern. The remembrance touched something so raw he disavowed it all, on the spot. Focused instead on the coming hours, and all the things he had to do, and the order in which he might do them. Nothing before this cabin mattered anymore, only the given day, and with this thought he cleared his mind and scanned the trees that rimmed the meadow, praying for an elk to emerge.
He took the chainsaw and felled aspen trees until lunch. His stitches held, so he fished the rest of the day, taking three cutthroats and a brook trout out of a section of the stream a quarter mile upslope that boasted an abundance of deep pools. The water clear where it passed over rock and green where the sun hit it. Black in the shadows.