Breakup. Part 22

Kate felt disoriented, frayed at the edges, and in self-defense she withdrew, took a step back, out of herself. It changed her perspective, as if she were perched on her own shoulder.

"At the very least, aggravated a.s.sault," Jim added. "With intent. So let's go."

Kate's second self whispered in her own ear. "I've got a better idea,"

she said.

Bobby was inspecting Dinah for wounds over her exasperated protests when the tone of Kate's voice got through to him. His head snapped around.

"Kate?"

The second self whispered again. Kate got to her feet and smiled across the room at Mark Stewart. "Mr. Stewart? Would you like to come with me?"

She sounded like Mae inviting Cary to come up and see her 208 sometime, like Circe convincing Odysseus to stay an extra year on Aeaea, like Eve encouraging Adam to take just one bite.

Dan sighed.

Bernie s.h.i.+vered.

Jim Chopin, not a fanciful man, felt the hair rise on the back of his neck.

"Jesus, Kate," Bobby muttered.

"Down, boys," Dinah said, and wondered if Kate was aware of the power she had, when she bothered to use it.

Jackie Webber gave Kate a dirty look.

As the events of the past forty-eight hours-of the past year- had demonstrated, Mark Stewart was not a stupid man. Careful, methodical, a planner, he was a man who did nothing on impulse, a man with no nerves to speak of and no conscience to bother him after the fact. He had to know what Kate suspected, why the trooper had asked him to return to the mine, that they had learned at least some of the truth and guessed at the rest. But they had no proof, and as long as he continued to say as little as possible, they never would have. It would be foolish to go anywhere but back to Anchorage by the first available transport, and sheer madness to accompany this woman anywhere else.

But he was still a man who saw himself reflected in every woman he met, and the challenge in Kate's invitation made his hunting instincts sit up and howl.

As she had been certain they would. "I think you might enjoy it," she added, and smiled, a lush, lavish smile that promised him everything.

"Kate," Bobby repeated, this time a wealth of warning in the single word.

Her second self stopped her ears. "Stay," she said to Mutt, and sauntered to the door. She turned to look over her shoulder at Stewart, and smiled again. "You coming?"

No fool, Mark Stewart wasn't a coward, either.

And she was only a woman, after all.

He picked up her gauntlet and followed her into the night.

209.

The road wasn't much more than a tractor trail, full of deep ruts, yawning potholes, treacherous glaciation and the occasional malevolent washout. It didn't help that it was now full dark before moonrise, but by that time Kate's second self had firm hold of the scruff of her neck and was whipping her unrelentingly onward. Lights flashed in the rearview mirror, showing one vehicle faint but pursuing. Branches sc.r.a.ped against metal. Tires cracked through thin layers of ice to splash into puddles beneath. The cab of the truck rocked back and forth.

In the pa.s.senger seat Mark Stewart rode silently, one hand braced against the dash. A thread of tension, taut and humming, quivered between the two of them, but he didn't speak. Neither did she. The challenge had been made and accepted, and they were both infected with a kind of reckless madness.

210 Twenty minutes later the convoy pulled up in front of a snug little cabin next to a two-story barnlike structure at the base of a hill.

Halfway up the hill was the timbered entrance to a mine; from the entrance ran a wooden sluice that was falling apart, one twelve-foot plank at a time. The sluice ended in a creek, next to where an old steam engine stood, shedding flakes of rust into the water.

Bobby's truck pulled up next to her, and people literally poured out of both doors. Kate walked past them as if they weren't there, marching up to the large building like she owned it and tugging at the doors. They gave but wouldn't open all the way. Her second self noticed the Yale padlock hanging from the hasp, and whispered to her that the key was probably in the cabin.

The cabin door was unlocked, the cabin itself unoccupied, Mac Devlin probably away on a mission to strip-mine an especially scenic part of the Park. Inside, a key rack hung from the wall next to the door. She sorted through them until she found a Yale key and brought it back to the barnlike structure. The key slid smoothly into the padlock and turned without a hitch. The padlock snapped open, and she folded the double doors back one at a time.

Her second self began to hum the "Hallelujah Chorus."

It was a D-6 Caterpillar tractor. The body was a bright and gleaming yellow, the ten-foot blade a ton of s.h.i.+ning silver steel. Two, almost three years before, Mac Devlin had been enjoined from excavating mining claims on Park lands, grandfathered or otherwise, and since then this gleaming monster had not been used for its original purpose. Mac never failed in the hope that one day restrictions would ease, or in cursing the memory of Park Ranger Mark Miller, whose murder had been, in Mac's view, timely, if not downright providential. In the meantime, the Cat paid for its keep by building access roads and digging foundations for construction.

The perfect weapon, and in excellent repair. Kate checked the gas tank.

Full. Her opinion of Mac Devlin rose. She went back to 211 the cabin, traded the garage key for the ignition key and clambered up into the Cat's roomy seat.

Mark Stewart stood next to the right tread. She held out an imperious hand. "Well, Mr. Stewart?"

A smile spread slowly across his face, a smile that, again, physically jarred her with its appeal. It was almost enough to kick her second self out of the driver's seat, but not quite. "It's Mark," he said, and took her hand, following her up.

Lined up outside the barn, waiting for what they hoped might be a little less than Armageddon, Bobby, Dinah, Dan, Bernie and Chopper Jim watched Kate and Stewart settle into the cab of the Cat.

"I want to make one thing perfectly clear," the trooper said. "Which is?" Bobby said. "I am not here."

"s.h.i.+t, Jim," Dan said, "none of us are."

The key in the master switch turned easily and just in time Kate remembered to preheat for thirty seconds. The engine turned over on the first try and a cloud of black smoke issued from the exhaust. A great throaty bawl rattled the rafters in the roof and the teeth in Kate's head. Her heart thumped in her breast, and there was such a rush of blood to all the extremities of her body that she felt even more light-headed than she had before. All she could feel was the shuddering, rumbling beast beneath her, straining at the leash. The sense of power that comes with sitting up on a Caterpillar tractor is absolute. At the controls of 31,000 pounds of metal with the power of 140 horses behind it, you become unstoppable, invincible, omnipotent. In a day you can alter the course of a river, in a week you can demolish an entire forest, in a month you can move a mountain. You can reshape your entire physical world with the s.h.i.+ft of a lever, the roll of a track, the bite of a bright, sharp blade. It is the ultimate toy in the biggest sandbox of them all.

With a D-6 Caterpillar tractor and enough gas, you might even be able to demolish a blood feud by building a road to nowhere 212 and back again. In the driver's seat of this growling yellow monster, neither Kate nor her second self had any doubts. She reached for the master clutch. There wasn't one.

Kate had driven a Cat only once before in her life, the summer she was sixteen, when Abel had apprenticed her and his third oldest son to a miner outside Nizina for casual labor. The miner had been in the process of shoving the bottom of a creek down the maw of a sluice box with a D-5. At first he wasn't going to let Kate drive it, but he needed Seth to cut supports for the tunnel he was digging into the hill above the creek, so, mumbling and cursing and spitting a lot of tobacco juice, he put Kate up on the D-5. She learned to drive it and drive it well, because the old miner had a habit of shoving her off the seat and taking over himself whenever he was displeased with her performance. It wouldn't have been so bad if they hadn't usually been in the middle of the creek at the time, but then she wouldn't have learned so well or so quickly if they'd been on dry ground, either. Kate really did hate getting her feet wet.

Cat skinning was not a skill forgotten in a moment, or even in years, but an old D-5 was not a new D-6, and it took some time to figure out the controls, long enough for some of her audience to become restive.

"Kate," Bobby said, raising his voice over the sound of the engine, "maybe this isn't such a good idea."

"Yeah, Kate," Dan said, "maybe we ought to-"

Jim said nothing, because he wasn't there.

Dinah said nothing, because she knew it wouldn't do any good.

, Bernie said nothing, because he was beginning to have an idea of what Kate was going to do, approved Wholeheartedly and wasn't about to do anything that might cause her to think twice.

Her second self scoffed at all of them and instructed Kate to pay no attention. She obeyed without question. It seemed there was no master clutch on this Cat. A pedal in front of her right foot acted as a decelerator and allowed her to change gears. There were 213 still two tracks, right and left, and two steering levers, one for each, and two brakes, one for each. The hydraulics on the blade control lever took some getting used to and after she dropped the blade for the second time she was glad Mac hadn't put a floor under his tractor shed.

She stepped on the decelerator, raised the lockout bar to put the tracks in gear and let out the decelerator. The wide metal tracks began rolling beneath the bright yellow body of the machine, right out the door. She found a switch for the lights. In the sudden glare people scattered like marbles.

"Shugak," Bobby yelled, "you are out of your f.u.c.king mind!"

The Cat rolled forward, in a direct line for Mandy's truck. After all it had been through during the last two days, Kate could almost hear it give a pitiful moan. At the last possible moment she stopped grabbing for the nonexistent master clutch, stepped on the decelerator, thought her way into a left turn, pulled back a little on the left track lever and pushed forward a little on the right lever, took her foot off the decelerator and started forward again. The Cat swerved abruptly away from the truck and onto the tractor trail leading from the mine, leaving no more than a six-inch gouge down the right-hand side of the pickup.

Not fatal, not even serious, and she accepted her second self's congratulations with pride.

Everyone else ran for the trucks. They all thought she was insane but n.o.body wanted to miss a minute of it, not even Chopper Jim, who removed his hat and jacket and tie so as to be less identifiable as the enforcement arm of the law.

Choking from the exhaust, deafened by the engine, eyes straining to see beyond the floodlights mounted on the cab, Kate took the Cat down the tractor trail that separated Devlin's mine from the road and roared into an enthusiastic left turn that doubled the size of the intersection with one swipe.

The light-headed feeling persisted. She laughed once, a mad sound that should have alarmed her but didn't. It should have 214 alarmed Stewart, too; instead, he laughed back at her, a husky, deep-voiced sound of pure male enjoyment. "Jesus," he said. "You really are something."

A responsive s.h.i.+ver traveled up her spine. The aches and pains of her various wounds were hushed. She didn't question what put her in the Cat's seat, she didn't try to rationalize inviting Stewart along for the ride, she didn't attempt to talk herself out of any of it. She couldn't bring Carol Stewart back to life; worse, she couldn't bring Carol's murderer to justice. Ben and Cindy Bingley might kill each other before the solution she had set in motion this evening reached them. She couldn't unwreck George's plane, she couldn't give Margery and Richard Baker the society babe daughter they had always wanted, she couldn't make the jet engine not fall off the 747, she couldn't make spring be over and summer begin.

She couldn't bring her grandmother back to lighten her own increasingly heavy load.

But there was something she could do to make things a little safer for her family and friends and neighbors, to restore a little order to the Park.

She laughed again.

Stewart's deep voice was amused. "Ride 'em cowgirl."

A bright, slas.h.i.+ng smile was her reply. His grip tightened on the dash.

It was two miles up the old railroad roadbed to the turnoff to the homestead area, and along the way Kate practiced moving the enormous steel blade on the front of the machine up and down, remembering as she did most of the vocabulary required to skin a Cat, some of which would have put George Perry to the blush. She even tried her hand at grading a section of the roadbed, digging up fifty feet of it before she got the hang of just where the bottom edge of the blade was in relation to the controls.

"She really is out of her f.u.c.king mind," Bobby said, wrestling his pickup over one of the speed b.u.mps Kate had inadvertently left behind.

215 Dinah and Dan did not disagree.

Jim, right behind him in Kate's truck with Bernie riding shotgun, had an inconvenient attack of responsibility and wondered if perhaps, after all, he ought to stop this before it went any farther. "Think I should stop her?" he asked Bernie.

"Think you can?" Bernie said.

They looked at each other. "Nah," they said in unison.

The turnoff to the homestead area appeared and Kate cautiously negotiated the Cat onto it. By then it was purring beneath her hands, the purr of a Bengal tiger, one prepared to turn on her the minute her attention was distracted, but a purr nonetheless.

She remembered pretty much how the homestead area was laid out and who owned what from the flyer the state had mailed everyone in the Park. The sixteen forty-acre lots were crazy-quilted over a short, broad valley and a gradual rise ending in a small plateau. The plateau dropped off to the Kanuyaq River, into which all the streams in the area drained. The Jeppsens were lower down and on the left, the Kreugers a little higher and on the right. The only place their properties touched was northeast corner to southwest corner. According to the terms of the sale, the disputed road was supposed to have right-of-way over both borders, as was standard in state land transactions-Kate was pretty sure that it was in fact the law-but the Jeppsens had in their infinite wisdom decided to deny the Kreugers access to their own property; that is to say, access over the portion that belonged to them, right of way or no. This would have entailed the Kreugers building an entirely new road from some other access point, an access point located on Park land, a plan to which Dan O'Brian could be expected to take instant and vociferous exception.

It was obvious where the Jeppsens' land ended and the Kreugers' began, even in the lurching light of the Cat's floods. As soon as the one-lane track crossed into Kreuger territory, the scenery changed from overgrown Alaskan bush to near lunar desolation. Kate stepped on the decelerator and paused to size up the situation, the Cat rumbling a protest.

216 The Jeppsens had dug holes big enough to float a boat, and a winter's worth of snow had melted inside them, the water in several coming up almost to the top of the Cat's treads. Breakup, with its twenty-four-hour freeze-and-thaw cycle, had nibbled around the edges of the original holes and doubled the size of some of them. Entire trees, not an a.s.set frivolously uprooted in the Bush, had been felled across the track, trunks splintered by an inexpert but indisputably thorough hand. Several crooked manmade ditches traversed the width of the road, and in one stretch the floodlights winked off a scattering of metallic objects. Kate didn't stop; if someone had sprinkled a handful of screws or nails-galvanized steel, from the silver reflection-across the path, it wouldn't matter to the Cat's metal treads. She hoped.

Even in a Caterpillar tractor the ride was rough and rocky, as much because of the attempts made at repair as the initial sabotage. The Kreugers had used the felled trees and what loose, unfrozen gravel they could find to fill in the holes, rerouting the track around the ones that weren't stable enough to drive over, but it looked as though they were fighting a desperate rearguard action against a superior and much more destructive force, with little hope of victory.

"No wonder they went to the mattresses," Kate said out loud, a fine phrase she'd picked up from Mario Puzo.

Stewart chuckled, and again she felt that s.h.i.+ver of response ripple up her spine. She dropped the Cat's blade with a solid CHUNK! and let out the decelerator.

The enormous blade scooped up mud, snow, dirt, boulders and trees regardless of size, weight or shape, filled in holes and tamped them down again beneath the crus.h.i.+ng weight of the tracks. This continued all the way up the gentle incline past the turnoff for the Jeppsens'

homestead and well into the Kreugers' front yard, where Kay and Wayne Kreuger, one holding a rifle, s.h.i.+rt bulging from the bandaged shoulder beneath it, the other with a bandage around his head, stood on their front porch, faces white with shock.

217 Kate swept into the yard, taking out a corner of garden fence along the way, and remembered just in time where the decelerator was. The Cat rolled to a halt, shuddering and shaking unhappily in neutral, tugging at the reins. Raising her voice over the noise of the engine, she shouted, "This is the end of it, do you hear? You've got a road now.

This fight between you and the Jeppsens is over, as of today."

Wayne, a stocky, olive-skinned man with a jutting chin and a scowl, recovered from his shock and yelled, "That depends on the Jeppsens! They started it!"

"I'll take care of the Jeppsens! You've got your road! Put away those frigging guns and start acting like civilized human beings, or I'll be back with this Cat and I won't stop until this valley has been returned to its natural state!"

The Cat made known its intentions to start forward again, with or without Kate, and she grabbed the controls and hung on for dear life.

The right side of the blade ripped the rear b.u.mper off the old International pickup parked in front of the porch and the tractor swept out of the Kreugers' yard and back down the trail, nearly sideswiping Bobby's blue pickup.

It was a lot smoother going back, Kate noted with satisfaction. Her second self radiated warm approval.

The turnoff for the Jeppsens came so fast she almost missed it, and it was considerably wider than it had been once the Cat pa.s.sed through. She kept the blade down, mowing down everything that got in the way, including a raspberry patch, an empty drum of thirty-weight and a boy's bike, right into the Jeppsens' front yard.

Stewart laughed again. He sounded excited, even aroused, and why not? He would revel in outlawry, in destruction.

In murder.

As Kate herself was reveling in this very moment. The realization should have stopped her, at the very least given her pause. Instead, she pushed both levers forward with a cry that raised an answering yell from the man next to her.

The sound of the Cat's 140 horses must have been audible for 218 miles, because the floodlights caught Joe and Cheryl Jeppsen standing on their front porch with much the same expression on their faces as the Kreugers had had on theirs. The Cat gave Kate just enough time to notice that Cheryl's twin s.h.i.+ners had achieved a yellowish purple of truly historic hue.

More practiced now, she drew the tractor around in a magnificent sweep, barely nicking the bottom stair of the porch steps, and stepped once more on the decelerator. The engine idled and the yellow monster slowed to a reluctant halt, its menacing growl muted.

"What the h.e.l.l do you think you're doing, Kate?" Joe yelled. He was a thin, bony man with a cadaverous face and dark, burning eyes. One calf was in a cast, one hand held a shotgun. Cheryl had a rifle. The edge of the lights reached just far enough to illuminate Petey on the throne of the one-holer outhouse, reading a copy of Road and Track. Stunned, he gaped through the open door.

"I think I'm building a road," Kate yelled back. "You people have taken enough shots at me in the last forty-eight hours to run out my luck for a lifetime! You put those G.o.ddam guns away and start trying to get along with your neighbors!"

"They started it! They-"

"I don't give a rat's a.s.s who started it! It stops today!"

Forever after, Kate would swear she hadn't meant to do it, that she'd once again forgotten the lack of a master switch and the subst.i.tution of a decelerator, not to mention that it was pitch black at the time and she couldn't really see where she was going. No one ever believed her, but whether she meant to or not, the Cat took the turn too wide. Petey, with a front-row seat, so to speak, recovered from his stupefaction in time to leap for safety, although it was difficult for him to move very fast with his jeans around his knees. His a.s.s flashed white in the Cat's mercilessly bright halogen floodlights, denim hobbling his steps as he hopped awkwardly out of the way, as the wide steel blade mowed down the thin walls, the tracks crunched over them and the aromatic fragrance of the outhouse filled the clearing.

219 To Kate's profound relief the Cat did not founder in the hole left behind. She pulled back on the left lever and pushed on the right and the Cat turned left. Joe and Cheryl, joined by Petey, pants up now, stood watching in open-mouthed silence as she pa.s.sed in review before them and rolled out of sight. No one shot at her, probably, she decided, because of the two truckloads of people following her, not that that had ever stopped the Jeppsens before.

The air was cool on her cheek. A few stars were beginning to peer warily through the torn wisps of April clouds. The now full moon emerged from behind Angqaq and threw the peaks of the Quilaks into jagged relief against the eastern horizon. Deaf from the noise of the engine, hoa.r.s.e from shouting over it, Kate was exhilarated and drunk with power.

"I love breakup," she told the full moon rising up over the Quilaks.

The noise of the engine overwhelmed the words, and Kate half stood and shouted out to the entire Park, "I love breakup!"

A warm, firm hand settled on the back of her neck. She didn't so much as jump, merely turned her head to meet Stewart's eyes. He smiled at her, his teeth a white slash in the dark cab. She smiled back.

If anything, the trip back to the Cat's garage was even faster and more reckless than the trip out. Kate knocked down three cottonwoods and graded a five-hundred-foot section of roadbed along the way. She pulled into Mac Devlin's yard with a grand flourish and drew to halt in front of the open doors of the garage.