Dana Stabenow - Whisper to the Blood

She batted her eyelashes. "But you know I'm worth it."

Johnny opened his mouth for the third time and Jim said, "You got a mouth on you, Shugak, I'll give you that. A disease for which there is only one known cure." He leaned forward and kissed her.

Johnny made the obligatory gagging noises and departed for less saccharine climes, otherwise known as his room.

It was furnished in a style Kate called Late American Adolescent, which is to say that the original of no horizontal or vertical surface showed through the clutter of clothes, shoes, boots, books, toys, posters, gadgets, CDs, DVDs, truck parts, snow machine parts, four-wheeler parts, notebooks, X-Men comic books, but only the ones written by Joss Whedon, used bowls containing leftovers in a communicable state of congealment, and many different varieties of shampoo, deodorant, shaving cream, pimple unguent, and cologne, all of which had been used once before being tossed aside in favor of the next new thing.

Not on view was the pile of Penthouse and Playboy magazines that both he and Kate pretended she didn't know were under the head of his bed. Not that she ever came in here anyway. "Your room, your mess," she had said cheerfully when they moved in. "My prime request, which I do last pronounce, is that anything that breeds in there? Stays in there."

He cleared his bed by the simple expedient of lifting one corner of the tangled spread and shaking it. Everything on it fell, slid, or crashed to the floor, and he flopped down on his back to stare at the ceiling.

So Doyle-Dick-had scored a job with Talia Macleod. That was good. "It is good," he said to the ceiling.

He tried to remember some of the stuff they'd talked about over the night and day they'd spent in the cab of that semi, more than two years ago now. He'd been homesick and filled with longing for the clean, cold air, the lack of crowds, the empty roads, the silence. Yes, he'd raved about Alaska, he remembered that much, and evidently Doyle-Dick!-had believed every word. Well, why not? Johnny hadn't lied.

He was worried, though. Alaska wasn't easy. It was beautiful enough to break your heart, but there was a price. It didn't tolerate fools gladly. "Suicide by Alaska," Kate called it whenever a cheechako did something particularly stupid that got them killed, like planting a tent on a known bear trail, or moving into the backcountry with no experience in a subsistence lifestyle, or climbing Denali without a radio, or taking off in an overgrossed chartered floatplane for a fishing trip that ended with the people inside as bait.

Dick was tough, though. You didn't spend years driving an eighteen-wheeler across country without learning how to take care of yourself.

Johnny still hadn't told Kate about Dick being in the Park, much less about him changing his name. That was partly because she went into orbit every time he mentioned his hitchhiking home that August. But he'd had to do it, there was no other way to get home, and he'd had to get home.

If he'd still been living in Anchorage he could have tolerated living with his mother, too, but Jane had dumped him with his grandparents. He'd met them twice in his life before that, and they lived on a golf course, for crying out loud! Who lived on a golf course? Nobody under seventy-five, that was for sure. It might not have been so bad if he'd been old enough to drive, the country looked interesting farther out, but there he was, stuck between the golf course and school. He had nothing in common with the kids in his classes, he wasn't into sports or shopping. In the summer you couldn't even go outside or the heat would come down on you like a sledgehammer. You couldn't even breathe in heat like that.

It wasn't like he hadn't asked his mom, repeatedly, if he could come home. His appeals had gone unanswered, and his grandparents hardly spoke to him. The three of them never sat down to a meal together except when they went out to Denny's for the senior special. There had been a bunch of Stouffer's frozen dinners in the freezer, cereal and Top Ramen in the cupboard, milk in the refrigerator, and bananas in a bowl on the counter, and that was it. He'd felt like he was starving to death.

That August night he had left the house well after midnight, a daypack over his shoulder filled with clean underwear and every penny he had. It wasn't much, and, he was ashamed to remember, the sum had included two twenty-dollar bills he'd stolen out of his grandmother's purse. The first thing he'd done after Kate gained legal title to him and it was okay to tell them where he was was to borrow forty bucks from her and enclose it with a card, apologizing for the theft.

They hadn't answered. That was okay with him, because it indicated a reassuring lack of interest in having him back.

He got his first ride on a pickup full of Hispanic day laborers, heading up to Wickenburg looking for work. His second ride had been the drunken car salesman, and the less remembered about that brief ride the better. His third had been Doyle Greenbaugh-Dick Gallagher, dammit-at that truck stop just outside Phoenix on Interstate 10. They'd swung right through Utah, left and up through Idaho, cut across the northeastern corner of Oregon, and he'd gotten off in Seattle. There had been a lot of stops, it seemed as if Dick- that's right, Dick-couldn't see a truck stop without stopping to say hi to somebody. "Half a mo, kid," he'd say, shoving the semi into neutral with a grind of gears, yanking on the parking brake, and giving Johnny a broad wink. "I see a friend I hafta say hi to."

After that, it was easy. He'd taken a bus to the border, walked into Canada, and hitched a series of rides on RVs. Most of them were with older retired couples, which got tricky a couple of times when they'd ask where his parents were. It was lucky he was tall and looked older than he was. Mostly they believed him when he told them he was eighteen, although one woman had demanded to see some identification. He pleaded time in the John and skinnied over the KOA campground fence just in time to hitch a ride with another trucker, this one hauling building materials to Fairbanks. He was an incurious, middle-aged man who sang along to country-western music, which got tiresome after a while.

He walked into Alaska, avoiding the border crossing at Beaver Creek by sneaking around through the woods and catching a ride on the other side with a couple of moose hunters, who gave him a ride and a meal and let him sleep in the cab of their pickup in exchange for chopping wood for their campfire that night. In Ahtna, the fuel truck had been making its fall run into the Park, and he caught a ride on it to the turnoff to Kate's cabin.

And he'd been here ever since.

But it was that long ride Dick Gallagher-say it again, Dick Gallagher-had given him that had set the tone of his journey home. He owed Dick a great deal. They weren't best friends or anything but nevertheless Johnny felt the heavy responsibility of a debt unpaid.

He wasn't proud of thinking it, but he hoped the nut with the gun really had been aiming at Mac.

Jim and Johnny left early the next morning, one for work, the other for school. Kate busied herself with packing up for the trip, extra clothing, food, tent. She didn't know how long she'd be gone, and while she expected the usual Bush welcome mat, if things got awkward she wanted to be able to survive a night or two out on her own.

Rifle, ammunition. A lot of ammunition.

Then she traded the rifle for the 12-gauge pump action. If the highwaymen-excuse her-if the assholes on snow machines wanted to rob her, they'd have to get close to do it. Nobody got close to the business end of a shotgun, not if they were sane.

She loaded everything into the trailer, hooked it to the sled, donned bib overalls, boots, parka, and gloves.