Stabenow, Dana - Shugak 05 - Play With Fire

by Play

Dinah stared at the black braid hanging straight down a very straight spine. "Why me? Why me and not you?"

  Kate grinned without turning. "Because I wouldn't have to outrun the bear. I'd only have to outrun you."

  There was a moment while Dinah worked this out. When she did, she gave an unconvincing snort.

  "Ha ha ha. Very funny." She plodded along in silence for a moment.

  "I didn't even know there were bears around here."

  "You ain't in New York City anymore, Dorothy."

  "That's why Bobby hangs everything from that tree every night."

  "No bacon or sausage for breakfast, either."

  "Bears like bacon?"

  "Almost better than anything else." Kate could almost hear Dinah become a vegetarian for the duration in the sound of her footsteps.

  "Truthfully, bears will eat anything that'll sit still for it. They don't like to work for their food."

  "We'd have been work?"

  "Uh-huh. They'll eat anything or anyone that's within reach, whether it's been lying around for a day or a year, as long as it is just lying around." She added, "That's why you don't find any bodies near plane crashes."

  Dinah swallowed audibly. "Bears eat them?"

  "Uh-huh."

  A breeze rose up, keeping the remaining mosquitoes off, and Dinah nosed into it gratefully. Over the top of the next rise the black ash stopped abruptly, as if a line had been drawn beyond which the fire was forbidden to cross. As they approached, an actual line appeared in the form of a six-foot ditch, a fire break dug by the smoke jumpers the year before, one of many in an effort to direct the course of the fire away from the Glenn Highway, the main road between Anchorage and the Canadian border, and its sycophant settlements. On the other side of the ditch was a clearing, a small patch of new spring grass encircled by a stand of birch trees. Their white boles stood out against the rising ground of the blackened countryside, slender and strong.

  In the center of the clearing was a rock-lined fire pit. Two tents faced each other across it. A square of bright blue plastic tarpaulin was spread to one side, a dozen full five-gallon buckets on it, the rest of the day's harvest. Kate let her two buckets thud down next to them and mopped her brow. Her palm came away smeared with soot.

  "Oh Ward, I'm home!" The blonde hastened past her and into the ring of trees.

  "In here, June!" replied a deep male voice.

  The owner of the voice had installed fat, mountain bike tires on his wheelchair and it cornered around the rock fireplace like a '69

  Corvette. The 350-horsepower engine slammed to a halt at the sight of the blonde. The driver threw back his head and, in a stentorian voice that caused the tops of the trees to sway, bellowed, "BAY-bee!"

  "SWEET-heart!" In one movement Dinah shucked out of camera and duster.

  In a combined hop, skip and jump she leapt into Bobby's lap, flung her arms around his neck and smothered his face with kisses, all of which were returned with interest.

  It was enough to make a grown woman vomit. "It's enough to make a grown woman vomit," Kate said, and had to repeat it a second time in a louder voice when the lovers ignored it the first time around.

  "Why don't you run away and play, Kate," the blonde suggested around a mouthful of ear.

  Bobby sent her a lascivious grin and said nothing at all. Biting the inside of her cheek to hold back an answering smile, Kate got her pack out of her tent and went past them and down the hill to the creek a quarter of a mile beyond.

  The rush of spring runoff had carved a pool the size and depth of a tin washtub out of the side of the bank. Smooth, round stones slightly smaller than goose eggs shone up from the stream bed, fiddlehead ferns lined the bank, peat-colored water eddied around the edges of the little pool, and the whole scene looked like something out of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Mutt waded in as far as her ankles, buried her muzzle six inches deep and inhaled the better part of the volume of water.

  Exhausted from this gargantuan effort, she flopped down beneath a nearby tree and lapsed into a sated stupor. Mutt wasn't accustomed to and didn't approve of heat waves and had decided that the best way to endure this one was asleep.

  Kate shucked out of her clothes and waded in. The water was clear and cold and she gasped from the shock of it against her overheated skin.

  The pool was just big enough to get all of her wet at the same time and she sank beneath the surface, shaking her head so that her hair swirled around her face. She exploded into the air with a tremendous splash and a laugh. On the bank Mutt opened one eye, saw that a rescue was not in her immediate future and relapsed into unconsciousness. Kate couldn't resist. She brought both palms down on the water, hard, and it fountained up over the bank and splashed down on and around Mutt.

  Mutt leapt to her feet and let out a yip like an outraged dowager pinched on the behind, shook herself vigorously, gave Kate a reproachful look and relocated behind a tree well out of range.

  "You're no fun," Kate told her, and reached for the soap. It came in a plastic bottle, bought from REI in Anchorage during her stay with Jack that spring. She'd done a job for an oil company and they'd paid her obscenely well for it. She had done her best to spend every ill-gotten dime before she left town, and one of the places she'd done her best at was at REI. REI was going yuppie in its old age but it still had all kinds of fascinating and useless gadgets for the urban hiker. Kate had found the soap there and bought a bottle at once for the label, which announced that it contained

  "Dr. Bronner's Almond 18-in-l Pure-Castile Soap, Always dilute for Shave-Shampoo-Massage-Dental-Soap Bath! ... Use Almond Oil Soap for Dispensers-Uniforms Baby-Beach! Dilute for good After Shave, Body Rub, Foot Bath, Massage! Hot Towel Massage entire body, always toward heart!

  ... Mildest soap Made! God-made Eggwhite ph9."

  It was manufactured by All-One-God-Faith, Inc., and in the small space left over after instructions did its best to save sinners and convert the heathen. "Absolute cleanliness is Godliness! Teach the Moral ABC that unites all mankind free, instantly 6 billion strong &c we're All-one." Kate noticed that rhyme was attempted more than once, as in

  "Our Brother's Teacher of the Moral ABC Hillel taught carpenter Jesus to unite all mankind free!"

  Kate wondered who Hillel was. If they ever discovered who was nailing the biblical tracts to the trees, she might get an expert opinion.

  Uncapping the bottle, she sniffed cautiously. It was almonds, all right.

  Kate considered herself pretty much beyond redemption by now, but if cleanliness was next to godliness there might be hope for her yet. She washed her clothes first and then herself, soaping her hair twice and scrubbing her body three times, and only reluctantly waded out of the water when her feet began to lose all feeling.

  She paused on the bank. The sun was warm on her eyelids, on her breasts and belly. Pine needles prickled the half-numb soles of her feet and she dug in her toes, balancing her weight on spread legs. A wisp of a breeze tiptoed into the little glade and stirred her hair so that the ends tickled her waist. She stood still, palms out, eyes closed, water running down the cleft of her buttocks, the insides of her legs, dripping from the tips of her fingers. Her breasts rose on a deep breath. The faint, acrid smell of charred wood mixed freely with the clean smell of soap, the sweet aroma of running pine sap and the fresh scent of new cottonwood leaves.

  The rays of the afternoon sun slanted through leaf and branch to dapple the glade, her skin and the glimmering surface of the tiny pool and the murmuring creek. A bird sang, a clear, joyous, three note descending scale. "Spring is here," Kate sang with it in a husky rasp, aggravated by the scar on her throat. "Here is spring."

  Her arms lifted of their own volition, palms out to the sun, toes digging into grass. The earth's heart beat against her feet, her own kept time with it, and the power of their union seeped up through her soles, flowing into her blood and coursing through her body. Every sense was magnified; she could smell the slight, musty bitterness of the morels, t
aste the sweetness of the pine sap on her tongue. She heard the exultant scream of an eagle as she plummeted down, talons extended for the kill, the sense of it so vivid Kate felt the stretch of wings across her shoulders, the fan of tail feathers, the coppery taste of blood warm in her mouth. She opened her eyes and could see as far as the Quilaks and the Wrangells and beyond, to Prince William Sound and the rolling blue-green expanse of the mighty Gulf. Never had life seemed so rich with sensual promise. She felt ripe, ready to burst from her skin.

  A blade of grass tickled her ankle. The breeze turned cool. She shivered and blinked. A deep, shuddering breath and she was back in her body, senses dazzled by all they had seen. A chuckle escaped her when she realized her nipples were erect. "Lover come back," she said, only half jesting. Mutt opened one eye to give her a quizzical look.

  She dug in her pack for a bottle of Lubriderm (another result of the March shopping spree) and smoothed it on; hands, elbows, feet, luxuriating in the feel of it. One thing could be said for picking salmon out of a net: it was infinitely cleaner work than mushroom picking. She decided that in the future she'd take scales and gurry over soot and ash. "The next time Bobby gets a wild hair to go mushroom hunting," she told Mutt, "he can go by himself. Especially since he's so good at picking up casual labor."

  Mutt, by way of agreement, closed her eye.

  She strung a line between two trees, hung her wet clothes and put on clean ones. Sitting cross legged, she brushed her hair dry, a straight, black, gleaming fall. By then she judged it was safe to go back to camp.

  Her stomach was growling, so it was too bad if it wasn't.

  In the clearing the flap of Bobby's tent was zipped all the way down.

  Bobby was sitting on a blanket in cutoffs and no shirt, cleaning and sorting mushrooms.

  "About time you did some work around here," Kate said.

  He reached behind him and tossed her a package of Fig Newtons. "Not just a prince but a god," she said, ripping it open and shoving two in her mouth. He pursed his lips and blew her a kiss and went back to sorting as she rummaged in the cooler for a Diet 7-Up to wash the cookies down with. She popped the top and drank the whole can in one long swallow, submerged it in the melting ice until it refilled with water, and drank that, too. She eyed Bobby over the can, absorbed in his mushrooms.

  He was worth watching. Thick through the shoulders like most wheelchair jockeys, his arms were roped with muscle that bunched and flexed beneath smooth skin the color of espresso. His chest was hairless, leaving every rib clearly defined and ridged with muscle. His cutoffs, an inch shorter than his stumps and frayed at the hems, hugged his behind, faithful to every tight, taut curve. The sight was enough to make a grown woman drool.

  There was a rasp of a zipper, a rustle of fabric and the squeak of a rubber sole on pine needles. Bobby turned, torso straining, to reach for the bucket. "Yum," said a low voice behind Kate.

  "Enough to make a grown woman drool," Kate agreed.

  Dinah laughed and sprawled beside her. She was thin to the point of emaciation, had cheekbones to die for and wide, inquiring blue eyes that weren't as innocent as they seemed at first sight. The ponytail had been replaced by a mass of tangled strawberry blonde curls. She was glowing.

  Kate, years before having been taken up the same mountain and shown the view by the same guide, didn't blame her. She sternly repressed a pang of envy and bit into another Fig Newton. It didn't help much.

  Sublimation by any other name would taste as tame.

  Dinah got a can of pop from the cooler and copped a handful of Fig Newtons and curled up next to Kate, who saw with dismay that she had produced yet another reference work, this one a grimy, dog-eared pamphlet titled Fun With Fungi, A Mushroom Lover's Guide. Dinah opened it. And with illustrations, no less. O joy.

  "Morchella elata," Dinah said, "also known as the black morel. Edible," she added in an aside to Kate.

  Bobby threw one at her and she ducked. "The caps are yellowish-brown, sponge like bell-shaped, and vary in color from cream to brown. They're found in April, May and sometimes June in Alaska. Morels are often particularly abundant in burned over soil. Why, I wonder?" She turned a page. "Oh. It says here nobody really knows why, but the best guess is it doesn't like competition, from other vegetation, I guess. Hmm.

  You know why we're picking them?"

  Kate took a wild stab. "Two dollars a pound?"

  Dinah frowned at her. "Morels don't reproduce in captivity." "Me, either," Bobby said.

  Dinah paged forward and raised her voice. "Morels are perfect partners for sauces because of their ridged caps."

  Bobby examined a specimen. "You mean because it grows like something Dr.

  Frankenstein would transplant inside an empty skull."

  "I don't know why I waste my time on these people," Dinah told Mutt.

  "Me, either," Bobby said again, and Kate laughed.

  Dinah turned to the start of the book. "A Brief History of Fungi," she began the chapter, and had to duck again, this time from half a dozen incoming morels thrown from Bobby's direction, several of which scored direct hits. Deserting righteousness, she said, "Just listen, there's some neat stories in here about mushrooms. For instance"--she ducked again--"did you know that in ancient times the Greeks believed mushrooms were created by lightning bolts? In Scandinavia, though, it was thought that when Wotan ran from the demons, he foamed at the mouth and spit blood, and wherever it struck the ground a mushroom sprang up."

  "Yuk. Wotan spit. Jesus." Bobby paused for a moment in his sorting, regarding the mushroom he was holding with knitted brow. "Did you ever stop to wonder who ate the first mushroom?"

  "The first King crab?" Kate said, getting into the spirit of things.

  "The first oyster?"

  "He was a bold man that first to eat an oyster,"

  " Kate agreed, with a gravity of which Jonathan Swift would have heartily approved.

  "While the Chinese," Dinah said in a slightly louder voice, "considered mushrooms fit only for the poor, the Romans considered them fit only for the rich. They used special utensils to cook them and eat them with."

  She read further and gave a sudden shout of laughter.

  "Evidently the special pots for cooking mushrooms, they called them 'boletaria," anyway, they weren't supposed to be used to cook anything else. But this one pot was, and nearly died of the disgrace. Listen to what Martial says the pot says: "Although boleti have given me such a noble name, I am now used, I am ashamed to say, for brussels sprouts."

  " "Poor little pot," Bobby said sadly.

  "How humiliating," Kate agreed, just as sadly.

  Dinah, reading further, said, "And then there's a kind of fungus that kills grain, and the Romans had a festival each year on the twenty-fifth of April to propitiate the god Robigus, so he would intercede and keep the crops healthy. Everybody dressed up in their best bib and toga and marched out to a sacred grove and anointed the altar with wine and sacrificed a goat and ' the entrails of a rust colored dog."

  Mutt gave Dinah a wary look. "Oh, don't take everything so personally,"

  Dinah told her, and returned to her book. "In Europe in the seventeen hundreds and eighteen hundreds mushrooms were so popular that kings had to pass laws against setting forest fires to grow more mushrooms." She looked up to quirk an eyebrow at Kate. "Maybe that's what happened here."

  "No," Kate said. No one of her acquaintance had ever started a forest fire to grow mushrooms.

  Bobby laughed without pausing in his sorting. Dinah gave him a curious look but he didn't explain, and she returned to her book.

  "They didn't just eat mushrooms, either, they used them for medicine.

  Dioscorides prescribed them for colic and sores, bruises, broken bones, asthma, jaundice, dysentery, urinary tract infections, constipation, epilepsy, arthritis, hysteria and acne."

  "Acne? You mean like zits?" "That's what he says. Grind up a mushroom and mix it in with a little water and honey, and presto! b.c.

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