I stared at the cabin tucked up against a rocky cliff that was crowned by enormous pines. Sitka pines they were called. Loblolly pines and evergreens. We were high enough in elevation that no deciduous trees grew, only coniferous.
The cabin was the size of two large RVs. The roof was steeply pitched and must have made the placement of solar panels a real bitch. The barn and the woodshed also had steep roofs and solar panels. The wood shed was easily twice as big as the cabin.
The house was built from real logs. It had windows across the front with steel bars, a front porch that wrapped around three sides of the cabin. The door was a thick slab of oak and it too, had steel grates in front of it that locked in place. The windows had thick wooden shutters. It looked more like a fortress than a hunting cabin.
There was an outhouse, too. Close to the cabin but far enough away so that you couldn’t smell the stink.
A battered jeep of no color sat idle in the gravel driveway which was also the road and had been for the last ten miles. A real-live cowboy complete with hat, boots and a pistol leaned against the fender. When he saw us drive in, he straightened up, watching as we exited the equally dirty SUV.
“Mr. Launceston,” he held out his hand to Matt. I wasn’t sure if he was calling Matt that or Launceston was his name.
“I’m Pepper Cussler, Mr. Levinger’s caretaker. The place is clean, stocked and the heat’s on.” He held out a key. “There’s a Colt .45 on the sideboard, loaded and there are rifles in the gun rack. Bear have been spotted in the area along with cat.”
I knew that he didn’t mean house cat or even bobcat but mountain lion. Crispin’s memories warned me to be wary of them.
“Thank you, Mr. Cussler,” Matt said. He took the key. Cussler came around and started to help unload our stuff.
“Call me Pepper,” he said.
“Mitch. Jimmy. This is Christopher.”
“Howdy, Asus, Bobby, Andy and my uncle Jonathon.”
Between the three of them, they had the SUV unloaded in a few minutes. I walked between them and up to the four steps, waiting as they piled our gear on the porch. Matt unlocked the metal gate and then the wooden door.
“Keeps the bears from tearing off the door,” Cussler said nonchalantly. “Had to replace it several times before we put the gates up. They’re after food. Damn fool tourists leave garbage around where the bears can find it.” He gave us the ‘stink-eye’. “Bury all the garbage, burn it or haul it out. Don’t let it pile up or lay around. It’s not a good idea to teach bears where food is.”
He looked around again. Pointed. “There’s the woodshed. It’s stacked enough to get y’all through the winter, till next season. Don’t burn any pine y’all find dead, it makes too much creosote which can plug up the chimney and start a chimney fire. The cabin will burn down long before any fire trucks get here. If y’all run out of wood, call me. I have access to seasoned cords of oak.
“Snowplow in the barn, four-wheeler and an underground 500-gallon tank of gas. That’s buried down by the gravel pit.” He pointed towards the road we’d driven in on. “Generator is in the shed with a 50-gallon drum of gasoline. Crank pump. Barn has a pretty good workshop if one of y’all likes to tinker. Loft is semi-finished, y’all can hunker down in there if y’all get cut off from the cabin. There’s also a root cellar to keep stuff cold. The keys for everything are on a ring in the kitchen.” He ticked off a finger as he recited his mental list.
“Y’all need anything minor, call me. Major stuff I can do but if it’s life threatening ̶ call the Ranger station. They have access to a helicopter. Mr. Levi said that he left y’all a SAT phone and there’s a two-way in the cabin. I think that’s everything.”
He paused. Nodded. Matt made as if to go for his wallet, but Cussler stopped him. “No sir. Y’all don’t owe me nothing. Mr. Levi took care of everything.”
He shook Matt’s hand, Jake’s and mine. His palm was hard, horny like a horse hoof. He looked me in the eye, a small smile just touching his lips.
“Y’all get bored, whistle me up. I play a mean game of chess, checkers and poker. I also know all the trails for a hundred miles around here.” His last warning was not to leave the cabin without some kind of firearm. Better to be armed and not need it than to need it and not have one.
His eyes were smoke gray. Calm and there was a touch of Native American in his cheekbones. I sensed that I could trust him, thanked him in Abenaki and he looked startled. He nodded as he returned to his jeep. We watched from the porch as he drove off before we returned to the chore of moving in.
I tried to help but wound up getting underfoot and in their way until both men told me to find a bedroom and make serious acquaintance with the bed. I stared at them. Really? Who talked that way?
The inside was all honey pine tongue and groove, an open floor plan with a staircase leading up to a loft divided into two sleeping nooks. A bed, dresser, desk and closet were the only things in the open space. There were handmade quilts on the bed ̶ both double mattresses. There were no photos, clothes or evidence of anyone living or sleeping in the cabin.
I sat down carefully, kicked off my boots and curled up under the black and jeweled colored quilt. I was asleep even though I had just spent hours in the car in the same state.
Matt woke me for my pills. Groggily, I remembered talking to him but then he tried to get me up to eat dinner. I didn’t want to get up. He gave up after a few tries. I didn’t wake up until the smell of eggs, bacon and coffee roused me from the deeps of dreaming the next morning. I crawled out from under the covers wearing only my underwear. I remembered falling into bed dressed so Matt must have peeled my things off. They weren’t on the floor but there were clean ones atop the dresser.
I had to pee really bad, so I ran down the stairs and out the front door before I did anything else. Jake and Matt yelled at me. I only went as far as off the porch before I peed, my clothes still half on. It steamed in the brisk air and I realized that it was cold. Really cold. I could see my breath, too. I ran back inside almost as fast as I had run out, looking for my socks and shoes. And a coat.
Once I was back inside, I sat down at the small round table closest to the big metal stove that was hissing and popping from wood. I ate whatever Matt put in front of me. They’d already had several cups of strong coffee but had waited to eat with me. Now finished, Matt asked me if I had any plans for the day.
“Like what?”
“Check out the barn, the woods or did you want to relax?”
“I don’t know how,” I said. “To relax. I always had to be doing something. Scrounging to make ends meet for my mom.”
“What did you do for fun?” Jake interrupted. He seemed…sad at my non-response. Truthfully, I hadn’t had time or energy for ̶ fun.
“Tell me about your mom,” Matt encouraged. I shrugged.
“I don’t really remember much about her. Because of the accident. I think she was blonde. Tiny with incredible blue-green eyes. She looked like a Barbie doll, people said. A pocket Venus. I’ve never seen a Barbie doll, have you? I mean, I know she was pretty, she used to make males drool, but she was my Mom, you know?”
Both nodded. “My sister had a dozen when she was little,” Jake added. “They’re not anatomically correct, you know.”
“Huh?” I looked at him.
Matt laughed. “Their boobs would be like basketballs on a real woman and she would have to have a waist like a wasp. The Barbie doll defined for generations of American men what the ideal woman was supposed to look like. Sexy, though.”
I grimaced. Nobody likes to be told that their mom was found ‘sexy’ by strange men and boys. That was…gross.
“You’ll get the hang of it when you’re older,” he promised. “Now, we can take a walk around the property or we can start on your schooling.”
“I’d like that,” I said which brought me some strange looks.
The rest of the day I spent helping him go through the school material and taking the equivalency tests to see what level I was in and what I knew. What I needed to bring me up to my age level. Jake spent his time exploring the barns, woodshed and the loft, coming in occasionally to tell us his new discovery. He was like a kid at the Christmas tree. When I had time for an idle thought, I wondered when Christmas was.
“Matt, what day is this?” I popped out of the blue.
“October 29th. Why? Thinking about Halloween?”
“Christmas, actually.”
“Don’t worry. We’re up on that, too,” he smiled.
“That’s not what I meant…Dad. And don’t take this the wrong way. I don’t want your pity. But we didn’t usually have money for Christmas.”
We broke for lunch. Canned tomato soup and grilled cheese that Matt made. He was a pretty good cook for a guy on his own.
I was college level grade in English, History, Geology and Geography. Fifth grade in Math. Not so good in Music and art although I liked both subjects. I played chess, backgammon, cribbage, and a few other games that Matt or Jake had never heard of‒ like Quoits.
Before I knew it, the day was over, and I hadn’t been bored once. I cooked supper for them, a meal I called Hobo stew made from canned veggies, canned beef and noodles. It was much better than Dinty Moore in the can. We had tons of that on the shelves. I washed up with water pumped in from a well that was under the cabin. It was one of those old-fashioned hand pumps that went directly into the huge cast iron sink. If I wanted hot water, I had to warm it on the propane stove or atop the old metal cook stove that gave us both heat and food. It was very familiar to me ̶ I must have used one in a previous lifetime.
The days passed routinely. A month went by. Two. They began to talk about driving into the town of Cortez to replace our supplies. I was more than ready for fresh fruit and vegetables. A greasy hamburger, French fries and an ice cream shake. I asked to go with expecting the answer to be no, but he surprised me by saying yes.
The SUV hadn’t been driven in the last 60 days, but they’d started it at least once a week to keep the battery up. It was topped off with gas down at the gravel pit where the tank was buried. Jake tested the volume with a stick and said that it was still nearly full. He came out to the car with a paper sack and had just shaved his scruff.
I was pretty excited about going to town, even when they warned me that it wasn’t likely to be bigger than say ̶ Unadilla. It took two hours through falling snow on a dirt road and Matt drove no faster than 30 mph. That was the safest speed he could maintain on the icy road.
Following the directions on his GPS, we finally reached a paved road, highway 160. This one was up and down, lots of curves with posted caution speeds of 20-25 mph, not like the 65-mph posted on the straightaways and there weren’t many of those.
The town was called Cortez and it wasn’t large enough to hide in like New York, but it was big enough that three more tourists wouldn’t be noticed. It was large enough to have a Walmart and hundreds of tourist shops. The highway we’d taken into town was State Route 160 and ran all the way to Durango. That was the nearest big city to us.
I saw Whole Foods, HEB and Tom Thumb Paige, all chain grocery stores. Every fast food restaurant you could name. Pawnshops everywhere. When we passed gas stations, there were Native Americans hanging out in the parking lots drinking from cans and bottles wrapped inside brown paper bags.
“I thought those were clichés,” I said sadly. Jake saw them, too and told me that alcoholism, poverty and despair were still major problems on and near the reservations.
“They are some of the poorest Americans in the country,” he said. “Even with the casinos coming in. As usual, the top people get richer and the poor suffer.”
“Same as when Crispin was alive,” I muttered. “Where are we going to shop?”
“Somewhere where there aren’t any cameras watching,” Matt answered. “Which rules out the chain places. And the smaller shops would remember us too easily.”
“You can order stuff on line at Walmart and pick it up without going inside,” I said. “I saw it on TV in the hospital.”
“Let’s make a list but don’t you need a computer to do that?”
“Or a cell phone. Of which we have neither,” Jake pointed out. “At least, not with us. We left out laptops back at the cabin. The safest one to go in would be me,” he added. “I’m the least seen in the media over Cris.”
“The Feds have descriptions of all of us,” Matt said. “And your ugly face is memorable.”
“I brought something to change that,” he said and opened the brown paper sack at his feet. He pulled out a blonde wig, red blouse, black skirt and black leggings. Sneakers. I doubted that he could have found and worn ladies’ shoes in his size. He rubbed his cleanly shaven cheeks. Not that he had much facial hair to begin with.
“No way!” I said. “You’re gonna dress like a…girl?”
“Worked for you, didn’t it?” he grinned. “I brought your girl clothes, too if you want to come with me?”
I looked at me, pleadingly. “Can I?”
He hesitated. “I guess it’s okay. Does this mean that I have to stay in the car while you ladies have all the fun?”
“I brought you a disguise, too,” Jake said. He handed over a wig with braids, cowboy hat, boots and jeans with a Carharrt jacket. Matt just shook his head.
“I’ll be the getaway driver. Nobody would believe that I was a cowboy. You two be careful, stay away from the cameras.”
We dressed in the backseat and giggled as we appraised each other. Jake made an ugly but believable lady. Once ready, we walked confidently to the entrance. Matt called his back before we had gotten very far.
“Jackie,” he called. “Less macho, more girly. Swing your hips more.”
“My nuts are squished in these leggings,” he complained. I laughed so hard that I snorted. Almost peed my panties. Choking, I grabbed his hand and dragged him up to and through the automatic doors. I could almost hear Matt laughing at us as the doors closed on Jake’s butt.