Thelma looked at her father. “Come on, Dad. You guys are making a mountain out of a molehill. There are no roads over here, no services, no electricity. All this complaining is counterproductive. Just let it go.”
“I don’t want to complain,” Dad said. “I want to do something, and by Christ, I will. Who’s with me?”
“Damn right,” Mad Earl said, his voice a little slurred.
“He’ll raise the price of drinks,” Clyde complained. “You watch.”
“I didn’t move out into the bush so I could have a hotel nearby,” Dad said.
Mad Earl grumbled something, took a long drink.
Leni watched the men come together, each one clapping Dad on the back as if he had said the perfect thing.
Within moments the women were left sitting alone in the muddy center of the compound.
“Ernt is pretty worked up over a little fixing-up of the saloon,” Thelma said, watching the men. You could see them ingesting righteous anger, puffing up with it, passing the jug from one to the other. “I thought he’d let it go.”
Mama lit a cigarette. “He never lets anything go.”
“I know you two don’t have much influence with him,” Thelma said, looking from Mama to Leni. “But he could start a shitstorm up here. Tom Walker may have a new truck and own the best land on the peninsula, but he’ll give you the shirt off his back. Last year when Mop was so sick, Tom heard about it from Large Marge and showed up here on his own and flew her to Kenai.”
“I know,” Mama said quietly.
“Your husband’s going to rip this town apart if we aren’t careful.”
Mama gave a tired laugh. Leni understood. You could be as careful as a chemist with nitroglycerin around Dad. It wouldn’t change a thing. Sooner or later, he was going to blow.
* * *
ONCE AGAIN, Leni’s parents got so drunk she had to drive them home. Back at the cabin, she parked the truck and helped Mama into her room, where she collapsed into bed, laughing as she reached for Dad.
Leni climbed up to her own bed, to the mattress they’d salvaged from the dump and cleaned with bleach, and lay beneath her army surplus blankets and tried to fall asleep.
But the incident at the saloon and the meeting with the Harlans stayed with her. Something about it was deeply unsettling, although she couldn’t quite put her finger on any one moment and say, There, that’s what bothered me. Maybe just a sense of imbalance in her dad that was, if not new, a magnification.
Change. Slight, but apparent.
Her dad was angry. Maybe furious. But why?
Because he’d been fired from the pipeline? Because he’d seen Mama and Tom Walker together in March, seen Mr. Walker sitting at their table?
It had to be something more than what it seemed. How could a few businesses in town upset him so much? God knew he liked to drink whiskey at the Kicking Moose more than most men.
She rolled over for the box by her bed, the one that held Matthew’s letters from the last few years. Not a month had gone by without word from him. She had each letter memorized and could pull them up at will. Some sentences never left her. I’m getting better … I thought of you last night when I was out to dinner, this kid had a huge Polaroid camera … I scored my first goal yesterday, I wish you’d been there … and her favorites, when he said things like, I miss you, Leni. Or, I know it sounds lame, but I dreamed of you. Do you ever dream of me?
Tonight, though, she didn’t want to think about him and how far away he was or how lonely she felt without him and his friendship. In the years he’d been gone, no new kids had moved in to Kaneq. She had learned to love Alaska, but she was lonely a lot, too. On bad days—like today—she didn’t want to read his letters and wonder if he would ever come back, and she worried that if she wrote to him, she would accidentally say what was really on her mind. I’m afraid, she might say, I’m lonely.
Instead, she opened her latest book—The Thorn Birds—and lost herself in the story of a forbidden love in a harsh and inhospitable land.
She was still reading well past midnight, when she heard the rustling of beads. She expected to hear the clank of the woodstove door opening and closing, but all she heard were footsteps moving across the wooden floor. She eased out of bed and crawled to the edge of the loft and peered down.
In the dark, with only the woodstove’s glow for light, it took her eyes a moment to adjust.
Dad was dressed all in black, with an Alaska Aces baseball cap pulled low on his forehead. He was carrying a big gear bag that clanked as he walked.
He opened the front door and stepped out into the night.
Leni climbed down the loft stairs and went quietly to the window and peeked out. A full moon shone down on the muddy yard; here and there, stubborn patches of crusty brown snow caught the light. There were piles of junk all around: boxes of fishing tackle and camping supplies, rusting metal crates and contraptions, a broken gate, another bicycle Dad had never gotten around to fixing, a stack of blown-out tires.