Alaskan Fire (70 page)

I stared at that cursor for over
half an hour.  The noise was still a problem, but even more than that, now, was
my mood.  A good word for me right at that moment would have been ‘incensed’. 
And an expression?  ‘Fit to be tied’ seemed accurate.  Not nearly in the right
frame of mind for generating pillow talk.

The blaring gaiety next door
seemed to be reaching its peak, and I finally abandoned my laptop to see what
shenanigans could possibly require such a decibel level.

I didn’t see the answer to my
question.

What I
did
see was two
drunken assholes carrying my light-weight Kevlar canoe toward the water.  The
last time I’d let someone borrow my canoe, it had come back decorated with
bullet holes, after I dredged it from the lake.  And those guys hadn’t even
been drunk.  Of course, ‘those guys’ had been my brothers, and they were in a
category all their own.

“Ah,
hell
no.”  I ran back
through the house, shoved my bare feet into a pair of boots, and clomped down
the front steps.  I flew across my little yard and down the three steps to the
rocky beach.  The light was dying outside as I ran up to the two men.  They
were just starting to shove the canoe into the water before climbing in.

“Stop!” I bellowed.

They jumped a bit and looked up
with big, sloppy-drunk smiles on their faces.  “What’s up, pretty girl?” one of
them slurred.

“That is
my
canoe, and I
do
not
give you permission to use it,” I said, stopping a few feet away
with my hands on my hips.  I was going to give intimidation a try before I got
into an all-out tug-of-war with them.  Two men against one woman, with my
precious canoe as the rope—yeah, I didn’t like them odds.

One of them—he had floppy blonde
hair, and looked and sounded suspiciously like a surfer—glanced at the tree
line, and then back at me.  “It was on Gary’s property,” he said.

So
that’s
the Devil’s
name.
 
Gary
.  I turned it over in my mind, villainizing it.

“No,” I said, drawing out the
word, “it was on
my
property.  See that tree over there?  The one with
the orange tape on it?  That’s the edge of
Gary’s
property.  So I’d appreciate
it if you’d leave
my
canoe, which you found on
my
property,
alone.”

They looked a little stunned by
my vehemence.  Or maybe it was the alcohol—one lifted a fifth of whiskey and
took a long chug as I watched.  A hundred dollars said that bottle would either
be left in my canoe, or at the bottom of the lake.  Or—

I winced as it slipped from the
blonde idiot’s grasp and shattered on the rocky shore.  “Whoops,” he said with
a chuckle.

“All right, no need to get
upset,” the darker one said.  “You wanna come party with us, pretty girl?”

What I wanted was to beat the
hell out of the blonde for littering on my beach, and then smite the brunette
for calling me ‘girl’, when he looked barely old enough to drink.  “No,” I
gritted, “I really don’t.  Now unhand my canoe, and get off my beach.  And tell
Gary
to turn it down.”  I was proud of all the spots in those sentences
I’d managed to omit the F-bomb.

They laughed—which didn’t sound
like consent—but then turned their sloppy-drunk selves around to wander back in
the direction of my evil neighbor’s cabin.  They shot glances back at me as
they walked and laughed, leaving me with an almost-launched canoe and a beach
full of broken glass.

I grimaced as I felt my emotions
tip toward self-consciousness.  I cleaned up okay, but as a general rule, I
wore whatever I wanted when I was at my cabin, the more comfortable the
better.  Today I was wearing a baggy, tie-dyed T-shirt without a bra, and
fleece pajama pants dotted with purple hearts, the ragged hems of which gathered
over my mud-stained leather boots.  I wasn’t a fashionista by any means, but I
was aware enough to know my clothing couldn’t have been less in style, or
clashed harder, if I’d been trying.

As for the rest of me:  My long
blonde hair—undyed, un-highlighted, and most recently trimmed by yours
truly—was up in a messy ponytail, and I had no makeup or jewelry on, not that I
usually wore any.  My nails were short, un-manicured, and unpainted, on fingers
that no one would call graceful; damaged by water, burned by fishing lines, and
ripped by hooks.

Of course, in the Alaskan bush,
style didn’t matter.  The goal was simple functionality.  Keep it covered, keep
it warm, keep it dry.  The old folks next door—even my neighbors
downriver—hadn’t made me feel self-conscious a day in my life.  They understood
the score.  But these young dicks?  They had no clue.

Cussing them for making me feel
awkward, I pushed the canoe the rest of the way out into the water, and then
pulled it along the shore toward my cabin.  There, I walked out onto my little
dock and looped the bow line around a mooring cleat.

When I straightened to cast one
last glance at the neighbor’s partying cabin—every light in the house was on,
and judging by the off-key howling, I suspected someone had hooked up a karaoke
machine—I saw the would-be canoe thieves talking to someone on the lawn.  They
turned and pointed at me.

I returned their regard across
the couple hundred feet of water separating them from my ire.  I couldn’t see
much in the way of detail, but everything female in me acknowledged that the
third man was beautifully shaped.  Besides being terminally drunk and stupid,
the first two hadn’t been bad-looking, but this one…

He was tall, with broad shoulders
and an athletic, narrow waist perfectly complemented by jeans and a green
T-shirt.  He had black hair that ate the light, and a wide stance that said ‘I
own this land’.

My girly parts stood up and took
notice.  But every other part of me—and they definitely had the
majority—really, really wanted to slap him.

That Devil personified had to be
the infamous Gary, and if that was the case, I may as well go drown myself in
the tub now.  I turned around before my lady bits got any more excited, and
climbed back up to my cabin.

I didn’t want a hot fucking neighbor. 
Or a fucking hot neighbor, or fucking a hot neighbor.  I didn’t want it any
which way.  I didn’t want or need a distraction, particularly in the form of a
man
.

What I
wanted
was a sweet
old couple who called more than they visited, and were quiet as church mice
when they did appear.  What I
needed
was to write. 

It was already past my bedtime,
and I had to get up early in the morning.  Luckily, I had earplugs.  I’d just
sleep with them in.  They couldn’t possibly keep this up more than a night or two.

Clinging to that thought, I let
my dog, Mocha, in for the night and brushed my teeth.  I climbed up into the
loft, flopped down onto the queen-sized mattress lying on my unfinished plywood
floor, and drifted into a fitful sleep.

I don’t know how long I slept
before I was awoken by a
boom
heard even through my ear plugs.  I shot
upright, blinking in the darkness as a loud crackling was followed by another
explosive
boom
.

Were they
shooting
?

Groggily, I dragged myself out of
bed.  I stumbled down the ladder and burst out onto the deck.

This being the Land of the
Midnight Sun, the sky was a dim blue even in the dead of night.  Every light
was on next door, rippling and reflecting across the surface of the dark
water.  Most of the drunken revelers were on the lawn looking up, while a
couple hunkered down.

There was a high-pitched whistle,
and then ker
blam
!  The firework exploded overhead, sending a shower of
golden sparks over the lake.

For a moment, just the barest
moment as all those little golden lights reflected off the lake, I didn’t mind
having been woken up.  For that tiny, perfect sliver of time, as I watched all
those little lights sparkle and begin to fall to earth, I didn’t even mind that
I had a neighbor.  As long as he brought sparkly things.

Then the next one went off in the
trees halfway between our two cabins.

And a tiny flame licked to life.

My whole chest clenched with
sudden terror.  Fires were a huge problem in Alaska in the summer.  They caught
in dry grasses and leaves and brush and ate hundreds of thousands of acres of
forest every year.  Lightning was the number one culprit, followed by campfires
and
fireworks
.  I’d loved the cool shadows of the old, gnarled trees
around my cabin, so I had made a conscious decision not to cut a firebreak
around it.

And now, there was a flame in my
side yard, growing into a small fire.

“Fire!” I yelled across the
lake.  Shouts rang out across the water as I dashed back through my sliding
door.  I stomped into my shitkickers and hurtled the three steps to the
ground.  From my generator shack, I grabbed two shovels and a stack of
five-gallon buckets.  Then I vaulted down to the shore, and ran along it as
fast as my legs would take me.

Distantly I acknowledged my polar
fleece pants weren’t the best to wear into this kind of work—synthetics tended
to melt onto the skin.  But at the moment, I was weighing my cabin against my
hide… and my cabin was winning.

A group of people met me along
the lake shore, not far from the broken glass.  Without a word, the green-shirted
bastard took one of my shovels, and handed the buckets off to his friends. 
Then he was off through the woods, taking the slope up from the lake as though
it were nothing.  I was right on his heels, headed grimly toward the
brightening glow, grateful for his help but absolutely determined that this
would not be a bonding experience.

Not no, but hell no
, I
thought, realizing the spot he’d set on fire was my blueberry patch.  Now, to
someone from the Lower 48, this might not sound like much.  Someone from the
Lower 48 might even be thinking, ‘what’s the big deal, just grow some more’. 
But that wasn’t an option.

These were wild Alaskan
blueberries, blueberries so wild and so Alaskan, some of them weren’t even
technically blueberries.  They were better, darker, more flavorful, and yet
more elusive, defying every attempt to cultivate and farm them.  They’d been
growing in that spot when I bought the land, and over the years, I’d managed to
encourage their growth.  Every year my beloved blueberry patch grew just a bit
larger, and every fall, I enjoyed rich, tart blueberry pies and muffins.

And now?  They were on fire.  My
neighbor had set my blueberries on fire.

Thank God the fire was still
relatively small—less than a dozen feet across.  I ducked low to avoid the
billowing smoke as I beat at the flaming forest floor with the flat of my
shovel.  I cringed with each delicate blueberry branch I stomped on, each
blackened, charred stem that caught at my pants.  My eyes teared up, and my
throat grew tight, and I knew it was from more than just the smoke.

One of the Devil’s minions
splashed water on the fire ahead of me, and I jumped over the plume of steam to
attack the other side.  I continued slapping out the flames, vaguely seeing the
shape of my nemesis beating and stomping on the other side of my blueberry
patch.  My lips curled into a snarl, and again, I was grateful—but at the same
time, I wanted to kick his ass. 

Trying to steal my canoe? 
Littering on my beach?  Small potatoes compared to burning down my blueberries.

To keep from flinging myself
across my dead bushes to show him the broad side of my shovel, I focused on my
work.  My arms ached, and I felt sweat running down my spine from the heat and
terror and exercise.  I coughed as another couple buckets of water sprayed out
across the blackened patch.

We were winning.  I didn’t
realize it, though, until a green shirt materialized directly ahead of me,
breaking me out of my blueberry-bereft daze.  He was hard to see in the smoke
and the dark, but my stupid girl-senses seemed able to recognize him even when
blinded by darkness and tears.  Unwilling even to look at him, I veered aside
to make sure the fire was entirely out.

A few minutes later, after
splashing a last couple buckets onto the charred and steaming ground myself, I
stumbled back out of the woods.

I’d been self-conscious earlier. 
Now, picture me in the same clothes, but covered with dirt and soot and reeking
of smoke.  My hair had come mostly down, and I’d singed a couple pretty
good-sized hanks of it.  I had a bucket in one hand, and a shovel in the other,
and my eyes were full of crazy.

My furious gaze found my
neighbor.  I threw the shovel down—the temptation to hit him with it was too
great—and made a beeline for the bastard in the green shirt.

“Gary?” I demanded.

He turned toward me.  He had
thick black hair, rugged good looks, and a nose that looked like it’d been
punched one too many times—but not nearly enough.  The low light worshiped the
strong planes of his face, particularly that stupid, pussy-liquefying dent in
his chin. 
Damn him.

“Yeah?” the Devil said.

I slammed the bucket against his
chest, making him stumble back a step.  “What the
fuck
?”

He grabbed the bucket, preventing
me from repeating the move.  “It was an accident,” he said.

“It was
carelessness
and
stupidity
,”
I spat.  “I’ve been living here four years, and do you know how many times I’ve
set the woods on fire?”  I slapped the bucket from between us, making it bounce
across the rocks with a satisfying clatter, and I stabbed my finger into his
chest.  Which was very firm, I was very irritated to notice.  But nothing could
stop me from my tirade.  Not even his gorgeous green eyes, which I spent a
moment too long noticing were very, very green.  Beer bottle green.