“I just don’t think we should call it breakfast any more,” George was saying as we tromped along with our work detail. The Mess dwindled away behind us as the train of poolies wound its way into the woods.
“Just because it’s rice?” Caden responded incredulously. “Lots of people eat rice for breakfast.”
George waved his hands. “Not because it’s rice, but because it’s always rice around here. We eat rice in the morning. We eat rice at noon. We eat rice at sundown. Why call these meals breakfast and lunch and dinner when they’re always the same? We should call them rice and rice and rice.”
“Well the kitchen tries to change things up,” my son moderated. “Rice balls, loose rice, rice pilaf. And they put different stuff in the rice balls: bean paste, that garlicky stuff, sometimes fish or even goat–“
George caught my eye and grinned. “You catch that? He’s sticking up for his old man, hard at work in the kitchens.” He clapped Caden on the shoulder. “It warms the heart to see such a display of filial loyalty and devotion.”
“He’s his father’s boy,” I answered with a smile. “I tried to mitigate it as much as possible, but–”
“Hey Caden!” came a shout, and then bounding up after it came Zoe Cole, freshly showered and wearing bright colors undimmed by lived-in grime. She leapt up alongside the line of drab poolies, her bright smile focused on my son.
He turned, awkward and uncertain. “Um. Hey, Zoe. What’s up?”
The Director’s daughter came to a stop, feet balanced on two hefty rocks defining one side of the trail, and set her fists on her hips. “Not much. What’re you doing, pouring concrete?”
Caden stepped out of the line to answer. “Yeah, for the… cabins, I think?”
I continued on for a few yards, then stepped out of line to the other side. The poolies passing between my son and I gave both of us looks ranging from the curious to the annoyed to the plainly jealous. I tried to ignore the looks as I looked past the lookers, watching the exchange as surreptitiously as I could.
George watched me with warning in his eyes but kept moving.
The two kids kept chatting, mostly about nothing: which work detail was Caden’s favorite and had he hiked up to the far end of the walipinis and how disappointing breakfast had been. With a faint smile, Caden suggested all the meals should be renamed “rice.” She laughed far too loudly at the joke.
“What’s the hold up, Susan?” asked Teddy as he lumbered down the line to stand behind me.
I gestured lamely at my son. “Flirting teenagers.”
The big man snorted. “Zoe’s no teenager. She’s twenty-one.”
I winced. “Sometimes, Teddy, I hate being right all the time.”
Before he could ask what I meant, the end of the poolie line tromped past us and Zoe spied him. “Hey, Teddy,” she grinned and laid a hand of Caden’s forearm. “I’m going to borrow Caden for a bit, okay? I’m sure you can do without him, right?”
The Hawai’ian waved, half in greeting and half in agreement. “Yeah sure, Miss Cole. Whatever you say. We’ll be fine.”
Zoe grinned at my son and spun him around, facing back down the hill. Before I knew it, they were speeding away, chatting amicably. Caden never looked back.
“C’mon, Susan,” Teddy grunted as he turned. “We’ve still got work to do.”
I said something vaguely agreeable and took the smallest steps backwards. My heart was trying to climb out my throat. My eyes were riveted on my son’s back. I could hear the dwindling sound of their conversation and laughter for another minute or so.
She took him so fast I hardly saw it happen. I had meant to say something to Caden, to warn him, to be careful, to guard himself and his all too vulnerable heart (because he was his father’s child). Why hadn’t I? The daily exhaustion? The lack of any private moment to talk? The ever-complicated and complicating relationship between parent and teen? Regardless, it was too late, now.
“Susan!” Teddy called from up the path. “Let’s go. This foundation is not going to pour itself.”
—
Mixing concrete is a very complicated, labor-intensive, and tedious affair. First there is the sorting of rocks: limestones in one pile, igneous glass in another, and filler in the last. This sorting was performed inexpertly by poolies arguing over whether a given rock had the parallel lines of sedimentary limestone, the sparking specks of volcanic glass, or could safely be discarded into the filler pile. As looking at rocks was light work, the sorting crew’s arguments always grew fierce, everyone there was desperate to be right, and thereby keep their comfortable place at the sorting table.
The limestone was carted off to the kiln, which sounds more elaborate than the iron cage supporting a soot-black cauldron that it was. The limestone was broken down with hammers and picks—the less desirable counterpoint to the rock-sorting—and placed in the cauldron. Wood was stacked all around the frame and set alight. The result, a few hours later, was quicklime. This was mixed with water to make a slurry.
Meanwhile, the flaky and prone-to-shatter igneous rocks were delivered to a broad granite outcropping. In the center of this huge stone a small depression was forming, aided by the sledgehammers pulverizing the volcanic glass within it. Those stones which would not crumble or splinter were discarded as “not igneous after all” and diverted to the filler pile. But the volcanic rocks were smashed, shattered, and finally ground down with rounded granite pounders. The last of these were actually a poolie innovation, making use of the stones scattered around the great boulder’s base. The constant use and abuse had already rounded the bottoms of the stones down to match the rounded depressions in the stone “floor.”
There was much debate among panting poolies whether breaking hard limestone into chunks or grinding the more-brittle igneous rocks was the more grueling task. But as no one besides Teddy chose their assignment, the entire argument was more a means of passing time and venting well-deserved gripes than coming to any real conclusion.
The lime slurry, the ground volcanic glass, and a good deal of water were then mixed together in deep wheelbarrows using three wooden paddles and an array of deadwood branches found nearby. The result was cement–rough, lumpy, discolored, and thick. As soon as each batch was finished, it was dumped out onto a bed dug out of the ground, sided with wooden planks, and filled with the filler rocks. The haste was necessary: the cement hardened quickly. No one wanted to chisel out a wheelbarrow full of a day’s hard work gone to waste. Not a second time, at least.
The end result of all this industry–aside from a nearly-level cabin foundation growing section by section–was a good number of poolies standing around. Either the kiln was still too hot to decant or the ground glass crew was finding too many “not igneous after all” rocks, or yet another argument arose over which pile a given stone should be sorted into. Teddy was nearing apoplexy, but no amount of exhortation or intimidation could make the process go faster.
“I think he’s going to burst,” Jackson observed from his perch. George, Jackson, and I had carefully arranged filler rocks in the next bed so that the next deluge could easily seep between all the gaps. That deluge was waiting on quicklime slurry, which couldn’t be made until the cauldron cooled down from the 800 degrees required to burn rock.
“Don’t be unkind,” I chided heartlessly, and was about to elaborate when an entirely uncharitable snort escaped me. “Oh my. I think Teddy’s day is about to get even worse.”
Up the path behind the big Hawaii’ian came none other than Director Cole.
“Should we look busy?” George asked diffidently.
Jackson bent down to tidy up the fill pile behind us. “Can’t hurt.”
I caught Teddy’s eye and nodded behind him, then bent to help George and Jackson with their useless labor. As I herded stones back into a neat hump, I wondered why I had warned the would-be foreman. I certainly didn’t owe him any favors or even friendship. If I had been thinking strategically I might have tipped him off just to earn some of his good graces—but the thought hadn’t really crossed my mind.
I had just warned my fellow poolie about an incoming threat–automatically, instinctively. I had closed ranks, because my gut said that, no matter what complaint I might harbor against the man, he was one of “us” and Cole was one of “them.”
I scowled at the rocks before me. Us-versus-them was not how I wanted to see the world, but there it was.
“…as you can see, we’re just about ready for the next pour,” Teddy was saying as he guided the Director our way.
“Waiting on quicklime or powder?” Cole asked with no small measure of amusement. “Oh, hello, Miss Soza.”
I straightened and gave the man a nod. “Good morning, Director.”
“All settled in?” he asked conversationally, folding his hands behind his back. Beside him, Teddy looked unsure if he should answer Cole’s hanging question about the work holdup.
“Yes,” I answered, bit back a harsh rejoinder, and then moderated, “as well as one can settle into a garage full of bunkbeds and hammocks.”
Teddy’s eyes looked like they might pop from their sockets and his face went red.
But the Director merely nodded. “It’s unfortunate we have such a shortage of housing. But I’m glad to see you and so many subscribers hard at work fixing that problem.” He looked back and forth, surveying the work site. “Although–it does seem like you’ve got too many hands and not enough tasks, Teddy.”
“There are–this is a very difficult workflow,” the big man stammered. “You’ve caught us at a slow moment.”
Cole nodded again, slow and unhurried. “I know how it can be, Mister Mahone. You don’t need to make any excuses.” He nodded to the next bed over, which featured a deep pit dug into the ground. “Looks like you’re about ready to sink the loop?”
Teddy glanced over and nodded. “Um, yeah, soon as this bed is filled—”
“And it’s not yet noon,” the Director went on, looking up at the bright blue sky. He clapped a hand on the Hawai’ian’s shoulder. “Listen. You don’t need a whole crew to sink the loop. It’s a two, maybe three man job. Everybody else is just going to be sitting on their hands.”
“We’ve split our attention across two beds,” Teddy started to say, but Cole just shook his head, slow and steady.
“No, why don’t you take your crew up to the walipinis,” the Director suggested, “after this bed is filled. Pitch in on digging out the next one on the east end. I’ve got a couple sweeties up there leading crews already. They’ll welcome your help.”
“Um,” Teddy answered, flustered. “I was—we were—assigned to this task…”
“And you’ve done a great job, Mahone,” Cole assured him. “I doubt they expected you to get all the way to the loop before lunch. I guess what I’ve been hearing about you is true. You run a good crew.”
“Thank you, sir.” The big man looked left and right. “I’ll go round everyone up.”
“You do that,” Cole nodded. “Leave Miss Soza here, though. She’s done this before so she knows what she’s doing. Right, Soza?”
“Um. Right,” I stammered uncertainly at being roped back into the conversation. “I watched the installation for Beaver Lodge and helped out when we retrofitted the Mess.”
“There we go,” smiled Cole, and turned to Teddy. “Did you know you had such an experienced hand on your crew, Mahone?”
“I… did not,” the big man confessed for lack of anything better to say. “She’s a hard worker, though, I know that.” He gave me an unreadable smile. Genuine? Pained? Panicked? No telling, and then he was gone, calling for poolies to return tools.
No one was happy about leaving a job where half their time was spent sitting and waiting, but Cole’s presence kept the griping to a minimum. Soon Jackson and I were left alone at the work site with Director Cole.
Sinking the Loop is a straightforward, if finicky, process of lowering a loop of copper pipe into a twenty-foot-deep, four-foot-wide pit in a building’s foundation. Fill stones are then piled in after it, carefully placed and positioned to keep the loop upright. The biggest rocks can not be dropped for fear of damaging the loop, so one worker crawls down the pit and places them one by one. The other worker passes the fill stones down by rope while holding the top of the loop steady.
Once the entire shaft is filled, it is topped off with a cement plug and seamlessly incorporated into the rest of the foundation. Only two copper pipes rising from the floor betray the loop’s presence. Later, those leads are coupled with the upper loop of pipes, which run through the walls of the cabin.
The pipes are filled with water and hooked up to a solar-powered pump to keep the contents flowing down into the ground, up through the walls, and back again. No matter the time of year, the water comes up from the loop below at a consistent 65 degrees. In the summer, this cool water running through the walls brings down the temperature in the building. In the winter, the reverse occurs, and 65 degree water warms the rooms they circulate through.
“I’m surprised we’re even bothering with air conditioning,” I told Cole as he climbed down the shaft. “Doesn’t this increase the build time for each cabin?”
“A couple days,” he answered up the shaft, holding up his hands for the loop. Jackson and I carefully lowered it down into his grip. “But I’ve always said, if you’re going to do something, might as well do it right the first time.”
I passed a pair of two-by-fours between the two pipes now rising up from the pit, securing them in place. “You never struck me as a perfectionist,” I told him, “more a pragmatist.”
“Well,” he grunted. The tops of the pipes shifted, one pipe popping up as the other dipped down, as Cole adjusted the bottom of the loop in the cool soil at the bottom. “Put it this way: why try to make subscribers happy by building them housing that they’ll complain about being too cold a couple months later?”
I made an agreeable sound and began lowering a basket of stones down the pit. I chose my next words carefully. “You know we’ll just find something else to complain about instead.”
The Director laughed at that. “Inevitably. You wouldn’t, but others will. Nature of the Beast. Can’t make everybody happy. So I figure I’ll just focus on making everybody safe and warm, instead.”
There was not much to say to that, but I wanted to keep the man talking. I went with a compliment, the universal lubricant to men’s pride. “Well we’re lucky to have you at the helm, sir.”
“Oh, call me Greg,” he said quickly. He was bent over at the bottom of a deep hole so I could not see his face, but by his voice I could tell he was smiling. Direct hit. “It hasn’t been easy, but I like to think that we’ve done pretty well, given the circumstances.”
“Those circumstances being the apocalypse?” I led on. I reeled the empty basket back up. Suddenly it occured to me that I could find the heaviest stone in the pile and drop it on the head of this recklessly oblivious man. No one would question if it had been an accident. With a shudder of revulsion, I thrust the thought from my head.
He grinned up at me, and apparently my murderous thoughts did not show on my face. “See, you get it,” he told me. “Most people, especially rich folks who were born to money, which is… a whole lot of the subscribers here. They don’t know–they can’t comprehend–just how bad things can get out there. Or how much work it takes to create and maintain and protect a safe place like this. A sanctuary.”
An angry retort leapt to my lips, commenting on the “safety” I had found in Cole’s sanctuary. I bit it back. Instead, I said, “It must be a… difficult management problem. When your workers don’t understand how herculean the project is.”
“We’re getting there,” he replied confidently. “Mavis–Miss Clark, in Beaver Lodge–calls it building our local culture.”
I paused in pulling the basket back up. “That’s… a lot more intentional than I would have expected,” I said truthfully.
“Well to my mind, it’s just a fancy way of saying, ‘team-building,'” he laughed, but then he coughed, his voice suddenly sobering. “But it is necessary. We’re not going to make it through this unless we work together, and some of the folks here… they’re not so good at that. Yet.”
I bobbed my head and then realized he couldn’t see the gesture. “Yeah, I’ve… encountered the phenomenon around the refuge.”
“Sure you have,” he agreed, quickly and with enough force behind it that he clearly meant more than he had said. With a chuckle calculated to disarm and invite, I asked him what his tone of voice meant. “Well you’re in Ponderosa,” he elaborated. “Your lodge is sort of the black sheep of the Tall Pines family.”
“Mister Abernathy mentioned something about us being the least productive lodge,” I offered, hoping it would spur him to more talking.
The comment made him laugh. “Oh, Joe,” he sighed. “I guess I’m glad he’s finally doing something about his members, but making that kind of announcement to the whole lodge is… not the best way to go about it. You run the risk of your group starting to identify as the under performer. There’s a certain kind of person who’ll take that up as a badge of honor, and once they’re proud of a shitty work record, there’s not much you can do to fix that.”
I refrained from telling Cole that Abernathy had confided in me over dinner, not made some sort of public address to the whole lodge. I wanted to keep him talking. “What would you do differently?”
He made a sound in the back of his throat that was somewhere between thoughtful consideration and heaving a large rock into place. “Well, your friend Teddy, for instance.”
“The big guy?” I asked needlessly to cover my sudden panic. Friend? Had Cole seen me make a hand off to the Hawai’ian?
He took no notice of my anxiety. “I use the term loosely, of course. I’m sure he’s not very well-liked in Ponderosa’s pool. But he’s a talented leader. He should be in a suite.”
“Even though he’s not very well-liked?” I asked, amused. Of course Cole would promote the bully.
“That’s because he’s a poolie.” The Director squinted up the shaft at me, and took a moment to put his answer into words. “People react poorly to a man overstepping his authority. He smells like a fraud and they pray he’ll get his deserved comeuppance. But Mahone isn’t a fraud. He’s misplaced. Were he a sweetie, he’d be respected for the same reasons he’s disliked now. And he’d be way more effective than anyone on Abernathy’s current crew.”
“Speaking of whom,” I said, passing another load of stones down, “who gets booted from the lodge to make room for Teddy?”
He laughed at my challenge. “That’s the real question, isn’t it? And this is why I’m not about to micromanage Joe’s lodge. He’d know better than I would who’s not pulling their weight. Or at least he should.” He paused again and looked up at me. “And that’s the thing. I don’t get any sense that Abernathy keeps track of his sweeties at all, or fosters any sense of responsibility within his lodge. No faster route to corruption than lack of accountability.”
I couldn’t actually argue with that. “Well I keep hearing them talk about numbers,” I offered weakly. “But they don’t share that sort of thing with poolies.”
“Maybe he should,” Cole shrugged. The top of his head was now just an arm’s length from the lip of the shaft, our handiwork already filling it up halfway. “Or not. I don’t know. Damned frustrating. I don’t want to step in, because once I do, any authority he had becomes reliant on my good graces, which would only cripple him further.”
“You’ve thought this over a great deal.”
He sighed, his shoulders deflating to his sides. “It feels like all I do is think this through. Joe’s a friend. But he just–” He clapped his hands to his sides and shook his head helplessly. I let him stew, waiting for him to complete his thought. “If I could just see any sign that he’s… instilling in his people the sense of responsibility that we need to… make this work.”
“Building culture,” I provided, and he threw one rhetorical hand up at me.
“Yes. That. Exactly. But he just seems to be… coasting.” He ran a hand through his hair. “And meanwhile, his people–all our people–are suffering from the lack of his example.”
I frowned at that, and then with sudden inspiration suggested, “And then they steal from you.”
The Director leveraged a stone into position, jammed between the loop and the shaft wall, instead of answering. “Isaacs,” he sighed when done. “I didn’t like having to do that.”
I tried to hide my surprise at this sudden admission of regret. Was there some moral core hidden in this proud and brutish man that could be appealed to? Very carefully, I broached the subject as I lowered the next basket. “In retrospect, do you think you were… too harsh?”
He guided the heavy load down to rest at his feet. “Harsh? No, I–” and here he paused, and looked up at me with a curious appraisal in his eye. “Is there anybody else up there?”
I shook my head. “No, Jackson’s fetching another wheelbarrow of fill. Why?”
“Isaacs didn’t steal food,” Cole said flatly. “Or rather, that’s not all he stole. He’d also squirreled away a drum of ammonium nitrate.”
“From the walipinis?” I frowned. “What could he possibly want with fertilizer?”
“The Golden Eagle Lodge’s library is also missing a book,” he went on, “which details how to make explosives.”
“What?” I gasped, gobsmacked.
“Isaacs wasn’t a thief,” Cole said flatly, “he was a saboteur. He’s lucky I didn’t just disappear his ass.”
I frowned. “Then why punish him like a thief?”
“First off, to avoid a panic among the subscribers,” he said, turning back to his work. He placed a few more stones and then gingerly stepped up on top of them, testing their stability. “More importantly, though, we don’t think he’s working alone. We still haven’t found that book.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“So Susan,” Cole was saying, and I managed to focus my attention back to him. “If you see something, or you hear something suspicious, bring it to our attention, huh? The last thing anybody in here needs is a home-made bomb.”
I nodded mutely. He was right, of course. Bomb-happy would-be freedom fighters would be a menace to everyone. But I also couldn’t stop thinking along the opposite line. Somewhere in the refuge, there were more people organizing against the Hosts and Sweeties. They might be dangerous, but we were not alone.
—
Work detail ended after dinner. Poolies were free to amuse ourselves however we liked once the day’s work–and the day’s light–was done. After a long day of grueling labor, though, most of our amusements lay behind closed eyes in our bunks and hammocks. There were occasional exceptions, though, and so it was that after a day spent sorting rocks, I had enough energy to linger in the Mess with the boys.
They had found a board game hiding in a back cupboard–hexagonal tiles and cards for lumber, bricks, and sheep. The game required at least three players, and while they did not say so explicitly, I suspect they wanted to try it out with me before sharing it with their friends. Knowing Caden, he planned to figure the game out and then crush all comers with his superior strategy.
Arthur, plainly exhausted, bowed out of the invitation, and none of us argued. He’d be asleep before his head hit the rolled-up jacket that served as his pillow.
Third Mess drained out of the place as the view outside the bay windows darkened to pitch. The stars twinkled in the clear night sky, and the deck outside was bathed in the silvery light of a full moon. Kitchen staff turned off three of the four banks of lights above us and then busied themselves in the kitchen proper, cleaning up dinner and prepping breakfast.
As the boys and I built imaginary roads and swapped cards, the clatter of pots and spray of water faded away and eventually ceased. The kitchen light snapped off.
“Time to lock up,” Chef called to us from behind the buffet line.
Caden looked up from his hand. “We have to clear out?”
“You don’t have to go home,” Chef recited wearily, “but you can’t stay here. Food stores need to be secured.”
I put down my cards and muttered to the boys, “And we dirty poolies might be thieves.”
Jackson smirked. “Certain.”
But Caden waved his cards at the double doors leading out to the moonlit deck. “Can we move this table outside so we can finish the game, Chef? I promise, we’ll come back in the morning to move it back inside.”
Chef shrugged. “Sure, why not.”
It took more time to figure out how to disengage the table from its mates than to wheel it outside. Chef locked the door behind us to our, frankly, excessive thanks. The game resumed; Caden lost his lead when Jackson made a few savvy moves to prevent his win, and the moon rose high in the sky.
I was only one point away from winning when a crash sounded through the quet night.
“Whuzzat?”
Jackson rose with a curse. “Raccoons, getting into the supply cabinets out back.” He put his cards down. “C’mon, they’ll fuck everything up looking for food that isn’t there. Again.” He stalked off around the Mess.
We trooped along after my eldest, intent on shooing away pests, when the sound of voices came around the next corner of the building. Two, maybe three men, arguing with each other. We stopped in our tracks.
“Thieves?” Caden whispered to us. “What should we do?”
“Confront them,” Caden answered with the moral determination of a young man unconcerned with consequences. “If we show our faces, they’ll probably take off.”
“It’s in one of these,” one of the voices insisted. “Keep looking.”
“They’re not after food,” I whispered. What were they looking for? Material? Tools? Might these be the bomb-makers [Does this thread ever get resolved?], the rest of poor Isaiah’s conspirators? Did I want to interfere? Did I want to introduce myself?
“What if they’re sweeties?” Jackson demanded of his brother.
Caden crept towards the corner of the building. “You afriad of getting into trouble?”
“I’m afraid of their fucking guns,” he snapped back.
I reached forward to put a hand on Caden’s shoulder, exerting all of my material authority to hold him back. “Let me,” I whispered. “I look like less of a threat.” And there was no way I was letting my boys step into the line of fire.
Caden gave me a short nod, and I took a deep breath before stepping past him. The back of the Mess was dimly lit by an emergency light slowly draining its solar battery. Half the long line of storage cabinets yawned open; supplies littered the ground.
Three men stood in the midst of the mess they’d made. Two of their heads were buried inside cabinets, rummaging through the contents. The third looked up from scowling at his compatriots to my sudden appearance. Guilty surprise was written across his face.
No guns at their hips. Unshowered. Sweat-grimed clothes. Poolies.
I squared my shoulders. “Can I help you gentlemen?”
The other two looked up from their cabinets. The third man sneered. “What are you, some kind of sales clerk? Can you help us? Sure. Turn around and go home. This doesn’t concern you.”
I took a step forward. “I don’t know, you’re making quite a mess. The way things work around here, I might have to clean it up tomorrow.”
“I said fuck off!” he answered, voice rising.
The boys came barreling around the corner. Jackson shouted, “Don’t talk to my mom like that!” I tried to grab their shirts as they passed, but they were determined to defend my honor despite my preferences.
The men immediately closed ranks, standing tall and puffing out their chests. Their hands balled into fists. “Calm down, kid. Both of you. We’re here by order of Jameson–”
One of the other men hissed at that, and the three of them fell into a conversation of looks and stares. Finally the first one continued, his voice straining to sound moderate. “We’re looking for a box. It… doesn’t belong here. Jameson wants it–”
“Does Jameson want you cursing at my mom?” Jackson demanded, trembling just slightly with the adrenaline. His brother stood at his side, wavering left and right as he shifted weight from foot to foot. Jackson goaded again, “You’ve got a dirty mouth for a Lion of God.”
They had entered the most tedious part of a fight, the uncertain dance of intimidation and provocation. I watched the brewing confrontation fearfully.
One of the others leaned forward to put in his barb, calling Jackson “boy” and stressing “we” to underscore that there where three of them against just two (discounting my presence entirely, of course). Judging they would be distracted, I eased open the last cabinet.
If Jameson wanted a box and he was sending poolies to fetch it in the middle of the night, I could only assume the box wasn’t his. Given their search, they didn’t quite know where to find it, either. And Delores, bless her fervent little heart, had been with us when we found the spirit house.
There was no way I could excavate the boxy shrine without being noticed, so I hooked my foot under the pile of baskets stacked in front of it. Then I used my mom voice. “Jackson! Caden!”
The show of posturing stalled. One of the men smirked in superiority. “Momma’s calling.” But the third man looked my way and I could see his eyes widen as he realized I’d opened a cabinet.
I shouted: “Boys! Run!”
I heaved, toppling the haphazard tower of baskets out onto the floor, and dove down to scoop up the spirit house. I heard curses and scuffling behind me, and then the solid smack of a body hitting the concrete. Cradling the shrine, I spared a look back at the men. One was on the ground, on his back. The other two were staggering, grabbing for my boys, with as much luck as I had in restraining them in the first place. Jackson and Caden pelted into the night. I gave the men my best cab-hailing whistle, made sure they saw the spirit house in my arms, and ran back around the corner of the Mess.
Behind me I could hear the men redouble their cursing, then kicking their way through the fallen stacks of baskets and buckets. I dashed back around the Mess, hugging the wall, and then pelted across the deck. A few cards from our abandoned boardgame fluttered to the ground in my wake. I hoped my footfalls on the wooden deck wouldn’t give me away.
But the lights in the eaves above the deck gave out just beyond the far railing, and I plunged into darkness without looking back.
I fled through the night, downhill and off trail, exactly as I had been taught at a Combat Survival seminar at this very refuge. It was not long before my pursuers’ voices dwindled into the distance. From their shouts, it was clear they had no idea which direction I had gone. Moments later, more shouts joined theirs; no doubt they had awoken sweeties in Grey Wolf and Golden Eagle lodges. I was safe.
I stashed the spirit house in an equipment locker inside the water reclamation building and plodded back uphill towards the Ponderosa barracks. Caden and Jackson were waiting for me on the porch. They rushed forward and we embraced.
After I assured them that I was fine and double-checked that they were, too, I sat them down. “You are both nearly grown men,” I began, “so I feel comfortable telling you two contradictory things.”
Caden smiled at being called grown; Jackson knew enough to grimace at what was coming.
“So first, thank you for stepping up and defending me.” Jackson nodded in acknowledgement; Caden rather suddenly realized that there was a “but” coming.
“Secondly, don’t you ever do that again.” I speared them both with as furious a look as I could muster. “It is not, never was, and never will be your job to defend my honor. That’s my job. And if you throw yourselves into danger again on my account, you will find you are in ten times more trouble with me afterwards. Do I make myself clear?”
They mumbled acknowledgement.
“Okay, inside and into bed. You’ve got to be up early in the morning.”
Caden looked back at me with a quirked eyebrow. “Why do we have to be up early?”
“You promised Chef you’d put that table back before First Mess.”
