“What?”
“Winter.”
Matthew thought about it. “Terrible and beautiful. It’s how you know if you’re cut out to be an Alaskan. Most go running back to the Outside before it’s over.”
“The Great Alone,” Leni said. That was what Robert Service called Alaska.
“You’ll make it,” Matthew said earnestly.
She nodded, wishing she could tell him that she’d begun to worry as much about the dangers inside of her home as outside of it.
She could tell Matthew a lot of things, but not that. She could say her father drank too much or that he yelled or lost his temper, but not that he sometimes scared her. The disloyalty of such a thing was impossible to contemplate.
They exited the schoolhouse together, walking shoulder to shoulder.
Outside, the VW bus waited for her. It looked bad these days, all dinged up and scraped. The bumper was duct-taped in place. The muffler had fallen off at a pothole, so now the poor old thing roared like a race car. Both of her parents were inside, waiting for her.
“’Bye,” Leni said to Matthew, and headed to the vehicle. She tossed her backpack into the back of the bus and climbed in. “Hey, guys,” Leni said.
Dad jammed the bus in reverse, backed up, and turned around.
“Mad Earl wants me to teach his family a few things,” Dad said, turning onto the main road. “We talked about it the other night.”
In no time, they were out of town and up the hill and pulling into the compound. Dad was the first one out of the bus. He grabbed his rifle from the back and slung it over his shoulder.
Mad Earl, seated on his porch, immediately rose and waved. He yelled something Leni couldn’t hear and people stopped working. They put down their shovels and axes and chain saws and moved into the clearing in the center of the compound.
Mama opened the door and got out. Leni followed close behind, her wafflestompers sinking into the wet, spongy ground.
A dented Ford truck pulled up beside the VW and parked. Axle and the two girls, Agnes and Marthe, got out of the truck and headed for the crowd gathering in front of Mad Earl’s porch.
Mad Earl stood on the eroding, slanted porch, his bandy legs spaced a little farther apart than looked comfortable. His white hair hung limply around his loose-skinned face, greasy at the roots and frizzing at the ends. He wore dirty jeans tucked into brown rubber boots and a flannel work shirt that had seen better days. He made a sweeping motion with his hands. “Get closer, come on in. Ernt, Ernt, come up by me, son.”
There was a murmur of sound through the crowd; heads turned.
Dad strode past Thelma and Ted, smiling at Clyde and thumping his back when he reached him. Dad stepped up onto the porch beside Mad Earl. He looked tall and rangy next to the diminutive old man. Super-handsome, with all that black hair and the bushy black mustache.
“We was talking last night, us boys, about the shit going on Outside,” Mad Earl said. “Our president is a certified crook and a bomb blowed a TWA jet right outta the sky. Ain’t nobody safe anymore.”
Leni turned, looked up at Mama, who shrugged.
“My son, Bo, was the very best of us. He loved Alaska and he loved the good old US of A enough to volunteer to fight in that damn war. And we lost him. But even from that hellhole, he was thinking of us. His family. Our safety and security mattered to him. So he sent us his friend, Ernt Allbright, to be one of us.” Mad Earl thumped Dad on the back, kind of pushed him forward. “I been watching Ernt all summer and now I know. He wants the best for us.”
Dad pulled a folded newspaper from his back pocket, held it up. The headline read: Bomb on TWA Flight 841 Kills 88. “We might live in the bush, but we go to Homer and Sterling and Soldotna. We know what’s going on in the Outside. Bombings by the IRA, the PLO, Weatherman. Folks killing each other, kidnappings. All those girls disappearing in Washington State; now someone is killing girls in Utah. The Symbionese Liberation Army. India testing nuclear bombs. It’s only a matter of time before World War Three starts. It could be nuclear … or biological. And when that happens, the shit will really hit the fan.”
Mad Earl nodded, murmured his agreement.
“Mama?” Leni whispered. “Is all that true?”
Mama lit up a cigarette. “A thing can be true and not the truth, now shush. We don’t want to make him mad.”
Dad was the center of attention, and he drank it up. “You all have done a great job of preparing for scarcity. You’ve excelled at homesteader self-reliance. You have a good water-collection system and good food stores. You’ve staked out freshwater sources and you’re expert hunters. Your garden could be bigger, but it’s well tended. You’re ready to survive anything. Except the effects of martial law.”