Run - Blake Crouch [41]
BY midmorning, he had the off-grid power system up and running, water pumping in through the tap from the underground cisterns, and the water heater beginning to warm. They filled five plastic grocery bags under the faucet and tied them off and stowed them in the chest freezer. Tried not to acknowledge the fact that they were all skipping lunch.
Jack left Dee and Naomi to scour The Joy of Cooking for efficient bread recipes that jived with their ingredient list, and took his son with him into the woods.
He’d anticipated Cole wanting to fish, and since there wasn’t any spinning tackle to be had in the shed, surprised the boy with a provisional pole he’d fashioned that morning—an aspen sapling skinned of bark and fitted with an eight-foot length of nylon string and a ceiling screw hook with which Cole might only inflict minimal damage.
The knot tying went faster and the casting smoother, Jack sticking the fly in the vicinity of his intent almost every time.
He’d caught two fingerlings by three o’clock and his first grown-up fish by four—a twelve-inch Rainbow on a dry fly that had been loitering in a pool beside a cascade. Cole screamed with delight as Jack brought the fish ashore, both of them squatting in that pure fall light to inspect the reddish band and the black spots and the micaceous skin that faded into white at the edges.
“It’s really something, isn’t it?” Jack said.
“You did good, Dad.”
Jack set his rod in the grass and worked the hook out and carried the trout back across the stream toward the cooler in two hands and with as much care as he’d handled Naomi and Cole as squirming newborns.
They fished until the light went bad, Jack torn between the stream and his son who’d abandoned the aspen rod to construct a pile of polished, streambed stones on the opposite shore. Jack trying to ignore that thing that had been gnawing at him now for two days, that he wouldn’t ever be ready to look in the eye. How could a father? But he saw it—from a distance, an oblique glance—and for right now at least, that was as close as his heart could stand to be.
When they returned, the sun had just slipped below the desert and Dee and Naomi were hanging blankets over the windows and the cabin smelled of sweet, baking bread.
The women had carried in several armloads of firewood from the porch and stacked it around the hearth, and while Cole regaled everyone with the story of catching the fish, Jack built a base of kindling using a dozen of the pinecones stored in a wicker basket and an issue of USA Today.
The front-page headlines stopped him as he ripped out a sheet—six-month-old bits of news about the war, political infighting, Wall Street, the death of a young celebrity.
“What’s with the blankets over the windows?” he asked as he balled up the sports page and hoisted the first log onto the pyre.
“So our fire won’t be visible.”
Two more logs and then he struck a match, held it to the newsprint.
Jack lay in bed watching fireshadows move across the walls of the living room. Warm under the blanket. Hungry but content.
“We can’t have fires like this anymore,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“When we don’t need them. The winter here is going to be awful. We should save the firewood for blizzards. Nights when it goes below zero. I’m going to have to cut a hell of a lot more wood.”
“So you want to stay?”
“If we can get the food situation under control.”
“I don’t know, Jack.”
“What? You’d rather go back out into what we just escaped?”
“No, but we’ll starve to death here.”
“Not with a seasoned outdoorsman like me taking care of things.”
A tremor of laughter moved through her.
“You noticed any changes in Cole?