Squall

chapter six

MANDY SAID, "BETTER GET a move on, young man, or you're gonna miss your bus."

Cocooned in his pillowy red snowsuit, Steve came whisking down the hallway, his overstuffed school bag flopping between his shoulder blades. Though he wasn't a big fan of school, the little guy was excited about it today. His JK teacher always made a fuss about the kids' birthdays, and Steve had been chattering about it all morning.

"Miss Sutcliffe always makes a cake," he told her. "I asked for chocolate. And she puts money inside it in wax paper. It's not a surprise. She has to tell us so we don't crack our teeth. Timmy MacNamara got a Toonie last week and it wasn't even his birthday."

Mandy held the front door open and Steve barreled past her, stopping on the porch to watch his mom pull on a parka and trade her fuzzy slippers for galoshes. Then he was down the steps and running, skidding to a stop at the verge of the rural road just in time to meet the bus.

Earning a disgruntled "Mu-um!" for her efforts, Mandy lifted him onto that first high step and Steve tramped the rest of the way up, grinning shyly when the driver and some of the other kids shouted, "Happy Birthday, Steeeeeve!"

As the door hissed shut, Mandy felt a bright jab of pain in her side and thought Oh, shit; but it passed quickly and she turned to go back inside, watching the big yellow bus chuff its way along the ice-patched road.

She was in the foyer stepping out of her boots when she heard Tom's voice on the radio.

* * *

Tom spoke into the boom mike on his headset, his voice raised against the drone of the aircraft as he taxied toward the outpost cabin on Biscatosi Lake. "This is Quebec-Victor-Bravo on the ice at Outpost Three," he said. "I can see the damage from here."

Mandy's voice in the headset: "Acknowledge, Quebec-Victor-Bravo. Birthday boy. What do you see?"

"Branch through the window. A bunch of shingles blown off. Gonna be here a while."

"Roger that, QVB. Storm's still headed your way, though, so maybe you should tackle the window first so you can be ready to bolt if the weather starts bearing down on you. You know what you're like once you get started on something."

"Say again, Home Base? There's no one here fits that description."

"You heard me, wise guy. Don't make me come out there. I want you home in one piece and on time for Steve's party. Get that right and who knows, maybe we'll have a private party later on."

"Mission understood, but may induce labor."

"Let me worry about that. Home base out."

Smiling, Tom guided the Cessna to a stop twenty feet from shore and powered down. This past week had been unseasonably cold, even for the Sudbury Basin, temperatures plummeting to a frosty thirty-five below, some days even colder with the wind-chill, and many of the remaining birch trees in the area had been losing their branches, the heftier ones popping off the trunks with sharp pistol cracks. That appeared to be what had happened here, the ejected branch plowing through the front window, letting the weather in.

As Tom approached the cabin, bent against a freshening wind, he could see that it wasn't only the weather the shattered glass had allowed inside. A fair-sized animal, a lynx, maybe, or a restless raccoon, had gotten in there, too. God damn. Supplies torn up. Curls of frozen animal shit all over the place.

Oh, well, Tom thought. Cost of doing business.

He set about wrestling the heavy branch out of the window frame, deciding to cut down the parent tree in the spring and chainsaw it into stove lengths.

As the branch pulled free and Tom dragged it clear, trying not to topple himself in the knee-deep snow, he saw the amber eyes of a lynx, almost certainly the culprit, tracking him from the edge of the bush. He said, "I don't suppose you're going to help," and the skittish animal turned tail and bolted into the woods.

Tom thought, Beautiful.

After a quick look at the sauna shed, still mercifully intact, he unlocked the cabin door and let himself inside. He thought of getting a fire going in the wood stove, but with that frosty wind picking up now, setting off a low howl as it gusted through the open window frame, he could see little point in wasting the wood. He got the plastic garbage bin from the kitchen and started picking up the glass.

As he worked Tom realized that in spite of the occasional nuisance like this, his life was exactly as he'd always imagined it. He'd married his college sweetheart, fathered a beautiful boy—with another one ready to pop out and say howdy any day now; Mandy had refused the ultrasonographer's offer to tell her the baby's sex, but Tom had wanted to know—and the once flagging business that was originally his dad's had finally started to thrive. Tom had always loved the outdoors, so his transition into the family business had seemed a natural one. They owned a half dozen cabins on some of the most remote and well-stocked lakes in the North, hauled cargo to otherwise inaccessible mining sites, and ran a small, year-round flight school, which Mandy managed when she wasn't busy being pregnant. Life was good.

There were some scraps of plywood under the stilted cabin, left over from building the sauna shed, and Tom reckoned he could use those to board up the window until he could get a new piece of glass cut. He'd have to shovel a bit of snow to get at them, but that wouldn't take too long.

He got a shovel out of the storage bin on the deck and paused to study the sky in the direction of home: stormy all right, low and threatening, but still a long ways off. If he played his cards right, he could get the window boarded up, scrape the lynx shit off the floor, tack those shingles back on and maybe even split a cord or two of wood for the spring.

Shivering in the wind, Tom set himself to the tasks at hand.