Avoid damp or green wood was the first hint in the little gray box in the margin. Stu slapped his forehead. Half his wood was directly from trees, and the other half had been rained on the night before, and who knew how many other nights.
Stupid.
He took another trip outside to find drier branches, and was soon crouched at the pit and at it again. This time the wood caught, sending a promising white wisp up the sheet metal hood. Better. Stu stacked some of his damp wood on the dry layer.
Now this stuff will catch, he thought. And it did.
The smoke drove him from the cabin, and he stumbled to the ground beside his rat victim, gasping and wheezing. The space inside was so small that he’d noticed the black cloud gathering on the ceiling only moments before it descended to try to kill him. The wasps hadn’t liked it either, and they’d come stampeding out right behind him, looking for something to sting. He’d avoided all but one by throwing his hood over his face and pulling his hands up into his sleeves until they gave up and wandered off.
The crude chimney hadn’t worked, he realized, as he unwrapped his face and climbed to a kneeling position. And the small hole he’d shot in the ceiling certainly hadn’t provided enough ventilation. Stu stared up at the roof as the wasp sting on his cheek started to swell. He didn’t think he was allergic, and hoped to God he wasn’t; there was no way he could get a shot of whatever stopped people from dying when they got stung. The chimney atop the cabin was a shorn plastic tube with a coffee can thrown over it upside down. The smoke coming from it was barely a trickle. It was blocked, obviously. Stu glanced down at the dead rat. Its grimace looked more like a grin now.
“Laugh all you want. I have to go up there to fix my bullet hole anyway.”
His fire was still burning, still producing gouts of black smoke, which rolled out the door. He’d left it open to air out, but guessed that there was still another hour’s worth of wood burning in the pit.
I definitely got a fire going.
He’d thought about dashing in to feel around for his packs, but dying from carbon monoxide poisoning would be stacking stupid on top of stupid, as he used to say about criminal defendants who skipped their court appearances hoping their problems would go away.
And Edwin’s probably has a chapter warning against running into a smoke-filled room.
The tree against which the cabin leaned had no lower branches to climb, but Stu was able to wedge himself between the stump and the wall. He placed his feet on the top half of the rounded logs, pressed his back against the tree, and inched his way up until he could grab the edge of the low roof, where he hung like a plucked chicken.
“Shit.”
He kicked his legs to swing back and forth, and finally pressed them against the tree to boost himself up onto his belly atop the cabin roof. He inched his way up and found the bullet hole first. It wasn’t difficult to locate; a steady stream of smoke the width of a dime streamed up from it.
Got you. He wedged a flat piece of bark beneath the upper shingle and tapped it into place with a stick he’d tucked in his pants for the climb. Done. Stu nodded, satisfied. It felt good to accomplish something after a night and morning of screwups and debacles.
He crawled up to the makeshift chimney. The can sat tilted on top. He removed it. Beneath, the pipe was filled with small woody debris. A nest. A smooth brown object was nestled in the center. And breakfast! Stu reached in and removed the smallish egg. He couldn’t hold it in his hand and crawl, so he slid it into his mouth. The stick served to clear out the PVC pipe. Twigs and mud had been packed into the pipe ingeniously. Instinctively, Stu thought, and he began to plunge them out, careful to keep his face away from the opening to avoid the inevitable rush of smoke that would burst through.
Soon a thick abrupt stream of smoke poured out. Stu replaced the coffee can and sat back on the mossy shingles. He hadn’t worked with his hands since he and Katherine had fixed up their home on William Street four years earlier. They’d poured a lot of sweat, and memories, into the place; he still recalled carrying her across the threshold when the floor was cracked mustard-yellow linoleum. It was a good place for them, practical, manageable, and scheduled to be paid off well before he retired. He’d forgotten the satisfaction of fixing things. Nothing he did in the law seemed to fix anything. He simply absorbed other people’s problems like a conflict sponge. It felt good to set a shingle and repair a chimney.
Stu turned to look out over the valley, the lake, and the endless blue sky, his new domain. Perhaps doing guy stuff in the wilderness for a week wasn’t so bad.
I fixed a goddamned roof and found some food, he thought. And without any help from a book!
He heard a creaking sound, and then the deeper groan of straining wood. He froze but it didn’t matter. A loud crack was followed closely by a sudden feeling of weightlessness as the roof collapsed, and he watched the endless blue sky recede as he fell.
CHAPTER 13
Stu spat gooey egg whites and yolk out onto the dirt floor amongst broken shingles and green clumps of moss. There were injuries—a cut on his arm where he’d grazed the wooden cot, a lump on his head, and nasty soft-tissue bruises he’d certainly discover later. No concussion symptoms, it seemed—no loss of consciousness, no ringing ears or seeing stars, he knew who he was, and he was painfully aware of where he was. That was good. But when he sat up, his ankle screamed in pain.
Oh God, don’t be broken, he thought.
Stu dragged himself up onto the cot, where he prodded his rapidly swelling flesh, and grimaced. He was annoyed to look over and see his fire innocently blazing away, its smoke drifting happily up through the new and improved hole in the roof.
His backpack had a Great Beyond deluxe emergency kit in a large outer pocket, hopefully with some gauze to stabilize his ankle, whether broken or sprained. And his cut would need to be cleaned. Untreated, an infection could start. Stu limped two steps to his pack and hauled it back over to the cot.
The kit contained a cloth wrap, and Edwin’s advised him to use it to immobilize and compress the ankle. It hurt, but soon he had his lower leg wrapped like a mummy’s.
The emergency kit also contained three plastic tubes, the contents of which was not apparent at first glance. Perhaps an antibiotic ointment. Stu removed one. It was labeled GREAT BEYOND GOOP. The first ingredient listed was dried soybeans. They were “water activated,” it said. He read the fine print; the package boasted enough calories and nutrients to keep a man alive in the wild for one day for each tube.
Food!
He was not yet starving, but he was injured and he’d missed breakfast. Waiting for a lunch that might not arrive seemed unnecessary. Better to get something in me, he thought. The directions said that the contents formed a paste when mixed correctly. Easy. His pack had a one-liter water bladder built into it. He poured a bit into a collapsible plastic cup and squeezed in a tube of Goop.
It looked like russet-colored toothpaste and tasted like what he imagined baby food might taste like; that is, if the baby food was plasticized and pumped full of preservatives. Stu wondered if the brownish Goop would be better fried into a Goop fritter. Everything tastes better fried, right? He forced down the paste and chased it with a hearty swig of water. Then he checked the time on his receptionless cell phone. He was surprised to find that less than an hour had passed. The sun was still just peeking over the ridge to the east.
Time feels different out here. Slower.
He didn’t feel like walking anywhere, so he let the treacherous fire smolder, and sat on the cot, reorganizing his pack and duffel. His clothes were jumbled and smelled like smoke. He pulled them out, shook them, and refolded them. It was quick work; he did the laundry at home, while Katherine mowed the lawn and paid bills. Stu did the dishes too. She didn’t want the chores to feel like they were assigned by gender. She was proud that way, and she’d made it clear before their wedding that their union would be an equal partnership. She’d even written her own customized vows. Sh
e certainly wasn’t going to obey him, she’d laughed.
It didn’t seem like a good idea to hang the clothes to air out. He already had his sleeping bag hanging, and if the weather changed suddenly, he didn’t want to have to scramble around on his injured leg trying to retrieve his underwear. One corner of the cabin was still protected from the large hole in the roof, and he stored the duffel there. He emptied the backpack, which contained the majority of his gear and supplies.
It didn’t look like much when it was all laid out. The absence of the items he’d thought Dugan’s cabin would provide was obvious and distressing. Many of them were on Edwin’s “must-have” list. He had no food beyond the Goop. No cooking gear. And he couldn’t cook in his collapsible plastic cup. No container for water except his one-liter bladder, which meant frequent trips down the mountain to the lake.
He was going to have to hunt. Or fish. That much was clear. He laid the .30-06 and a box of ammo down with the supplies. Plenty of bullets for a week of killing. Heck, he’d already bagged a rat. There was also a roll of fishing line and three hooks. Promising. No fry pan, but he could carve a spit to cook small game or trout over the fire. He had fished as a kid on the ocean once. Not so much on lakes.
How different can it be? Stu thought.
Edwin’s highly recommended that he stay hydrated, so he sipped at the water regularly, which, in turn, meant a trip to the lake was the first priority. He’d take the gun, he thought, in case he saw game on the way, and he’d find a long branch to whittle and use as a fishing pole when he got there. A regular white-collar Huck Finn. The Great Beyond pack had a detachable mini-pack, into which he inserted the water bladder, the fishing line, and the hooks.
The walk down to the lake should have been pleasant. Stu imagined that people from metropolitan areas paid big money to enjoy such peace and solitude. But mostly, his foot hurt. He concluded that it wasn’t broken before he left the small clearing, but by the time he had shuffled halfway down the hill, it was complaining with every step, sending vengeful little jolts of pain up his leg as punishment for putting it to work so soon after its traumatic encounter with the cabin’s dirt floor. The need to carefully watch where he placed every footfall on the steep slope made it hard to scan for game. He saw squirrels as he approached the water, but he did not yet have an appetite for rodent meat. Besides, after seeing the devastation wrought on the rat by the .30-06, Stu didn’t think there would be much meat left on a squirrel if he shot one.
Better to try for a fish, he told himself. He just needed to find some worms. No problem.
He turned over rocks for ten minutes, but nothing squirmed beneath them except tiny black beetles, so he moved to another area and pushed over a downed log, hoping to find some worms in the rotting earth. Nothing. He didn’t have a shovel, so he dug with a stick, which was painstaking work. The earth turned reluctantly, and again he found no worms.
Perhaps a different type of insect.
There were huge flies, but they proved savvy and vengeful. Whenever Stu tried to swat them out of the air with a pine bough, they eluded its needled limbs and went for the exposed skin of his neck and face, which was still swelling from the wasp sting.
After several painful bites, he gave up and stuck his hook through the largest of the small beetles. It broke in half. The next three also broke in half. He finally had to start experimenting with locations for inserting the point into the squirming bugs, which felt a bit like animal torture. Five beetles later, though, he had one suspended like a tiny entomological science exhibit in the middle of the oversize hook. Stu held it up, staring doubtfully.
Perhaps the fish aren’t too observant, he thought.
When he tied the hook on and pulled to test the fishing line, he found that it was difficult to get the tiny knots to hold. The line was smooth and slick, and the knots slipped loose under the slightest pressure. He tied it several times before he gripped the hook at the wrong angle. The needle-sharp hook punctured his thumb, sliding neatly beneath the skin just past the barb. Stu bit his lip and held back a yelp as he stared at the hook in his flesh.
I caught myself, he thought stupidly.
Fortunately, it did not penetrate deeply, and the shaft was near the surface. But the barbed hook wasn’t coming back out the way it went in. He removed his knife and, after several moments’ debate, pressed the blade against the skin atop the shaft. His flesh popped open, releasing the hook and leaving a small bloody trench. Adding insult to actual injury, his beetle snapped in half again.
Eventually he constructed a solid granny knot twice as large as the eye of the hook, and rigged up another beetle. Then he went to work on the pole. A downed four-foot branch nearby would serve nicely, he decided. He set it against a rock and pressed his foot on each limb to snap it off. It hurt to balance on his injured left foot, so he switched to standing on his right and tried using the left to break the branches instead. But the sudden jarring of the first snap sent an unbearable jolt of pain through his ankle, and he decided that there was no reason a fishing pole couldn’t have a few branches. He tied the line around the end and laid twenty feet of neatly coiled slack behind him. Then he stepped to the lake’s edge.
His first cast made clear the reason fishing poles didn’t have branches. Without sufficient weight, the line didn’t fly out into the lake but instead lurched forward only a few feet and tangled itself amongst the limbs.
“Dammit!”
His profanity echoed across the water, bouncing back to mock him. He shook his fan-shaped fishing pole in frustration, causing the line to foul even more severely, and by the time he stopped shaking the pole to work on the tangle, the line looked like an asymmetrical spider web strung between the limbs.
The untangling took patience, and he was running low, but he eventually had the line coiled neatly again. He needed a weight to cast, and settled on a small pinecone. More beetles had to be split, broken, decapitated, and otherwise mutilated, but he finally landed one out in the water far enough from shore that a fish might venture from the depths to at least investigate. Then he laid the gun across his lap and sat down to wait.
There was a comfortable grassy spot on the bank where he could sit and prop up his foot, which was beginning to feel tight in his two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar boot. With a light wind, the cold Alaska water was rippled glass. It reflected the encircling mountains, showing Stu a distorted and inverted parallel world. The day was warming, and a sapphire sky had draped itself overhead like a bright canopy pinned to the jutting peaks and stretched from ridge to ridge. He’d never seen such a deep color.
Blue skies.
It had been the color of his future in the DA’s office, once upon a time. His senior assistant position in the major crimes unit had been a whirlwind. More cases than he’d had time to juggle—ten per week. But somehow he’d done it, lining them up for court dates and backing down bluffing defense attorneys who threatened to overload him with trials. Most cases pled out—95 percent, according to the office manager’s stats. He threw others together for trial in a few days, prepping on weekends while Katherine grumbled, although she hung on every word as he argued each case to her for practice. And when trial day came, it was game on. He flipped a switch and became a performer, a salesman, a preacher, and a professor all rolled into one, giving opening statements and closings that were somehow both carefully crafted and spontaneous. He grilled defense witnesses in between with questions carefully designed to trap them in lies, and he drew ugly facts from reluctant victims like a healer drawing poison from a wound. During multiday trials, he’d stay up until one a.m. poring over his notes from the day, and he’d rise at five the next morning to revise his witness questions in accordance with the previous day’s revelations.
And there were always revelations.
A pastor accused of molestation had once cursed him from the stand in the name of God, and was convicted. A robbery victim was caught lying about a computer the defendant had stolen from him at gunpoint, beca
use he’d shoplifted it from a store in the first place. Stu had convicted that defendant too, surprisingly. In another case, a juror was thrown out for drinking on the job. Evidence got lost once in the middle of a trial—a pound of pot from the evidence cart. Newly discovered videotapes proved people absolutely guilty or suddenly innocent. Cops forgot details or changed their stories. Rape victims stuck up for their abusers. And people were devastated or vindicated based upon ten-second breath-holding verdict pronouncements. It had been his crazy, exciting, uncertain life full of risks and rewards, and it was difficult now to remember what it felt like to be that person. He wondered if professional athletes who were injured and never stepped onto the field again felt the same.
Stu frowned and threw a pebble out into the lake, watching the splash he’d made settle into ripples and then fade away. Why he’d been reduced to chasing down deadbeat clients to collect fees for their tedious, routine landlord-tenant disputes was still a bit of a fog. Sure, he objectively knew how it had happened to him, but he still didn’t understand why.
The fishing pole branch twitched. Stu froze. It had been ten minutes or maybe thirty; without a watch, it was hard to tell. After a moment of surprise, he scrambled to grab the pole and jerked upward, hard. There was resistance, and then the line came loose. He pulled it in with his hands, and it came easily. Too easily. When the hook swung dripping out of the water, it was empty. The beetle was gone. No indication of whether it had been a bite. The hook might have just snagged on the bottom, he had to admit to himself. He held the hook and stared at it, wondering. Should he stay and try his luck indefinitely? Should he move on? New bait? He sighed. The worst part was not the idea that he might have lost a fish; it was not knowing whether he’d ever had one at all.
Impasse Page 8
