“Lucky for you, we cook with gas. Otherwise, there would be nothing hot for you,” she said. She turned to the back counter, took out a tiny dish with a ball of butter, and placed that next to the bread. “Even though the power was out, the stew and the bread are both fresh.”
Cara and Linus had been married almost eighteen years. They met at a party just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, while Linus was stationed in Germany in the Army. She was a college student from Norway who, for some reason Marcus never understood, was totally enamored with his friend. Even now, all these years into their marriage, she continued to gaze at her husband as if he was some kind of ancient Greek deity. Marcus had served as best man at their wedding in Norway, where he had been training with commando teams of the Norwegian Coastal Rangers.
To Marcus, Cara was like the little sister he had always wanted growing up. While he was serving in the Marines, she wrote to him regularly to keep him apprised of the news in Salt Jacket. Cara and Linus’s two children—Connor, age twelve, and Tia, age eleven—referred to him as Uncle Marcus. They loved to spend time playing games with him whenever he came to visit.
In 1998, when Marcus went missing in action for six months, Cara took care of his mother, who had a stroke after being informed he was presumed dead. Tahana Johnson, a beautiful Athabaskan native woman who looked much younger than her fifty-two years, died in the hospital only three days before Marcus managed to get to safety at the US Embassy in Guinea.
Cara was also the first to tell him of his father’s accidental death last winter, when he had been trampled by a startled moose as he came out of the hay barn early one morning. By the time Marcus came home to stay, the cost of repaying the medical bills for his mother’s care had taken all but fifty acres of the three-hundred-acre homestead originally started by Marcus’s grandfather in the 1940’s.
The Johnson homestead was one of six original plots of free land granted by the US government in hopes of developing the area into a thriving agricultural center. Through the fifties and sixties, the Johnson homestead supplied good quantities of oats, barley, potatoes, cabbage, and beets that fed the city of Fairbanks, as well as the hay that fed the goats, horses, and cattle of the region. With the arrival of chain supermarkets in the eighties, the agricultural businesses quickly died out. Most of the remaining homesteads were now little more than self-sufficient estates.
Linus and Cara had done all they could to hold on to what land was left for their friend so he could come home to something. For this, Marcus was indebted to them both. They were the closest thing to family he had left in the world.
A young girl’s voice called out from the living quarters in the back of the store.
“Mommy! Connor’s messing with me while I’m trying to do my homework!”
“Am not!” A boy’s voice shouted in response.
There was a loud thud, and Connor hollered in pain. “OW!”
“Well,” Cara said, “looks like I have to go to my other job. Enjoy the stew.”
She walked through a doorway marked “private” on the side of the kitchen. The men smiled as they heard her start to discipline the children. Whenever she got upset, Cara’s accent always got stronger. The door to the house slammed shut, and the voices of the arguing children and their Norwegian mother became muffled through the walls.
Marcus turned back to his dinner. As he enjoyed the first steaming-hot spoonful of the, rich, thick, brown stew, the man at the soda cooler approached the front counter.
The man was Caucasian, average height, about Marcus’s age. He appeared physically fit, but as he drew near, Marcus noted that he walked with a limp. Black slacks, a white shirt, and a cheap black tie made him look like a Geek Squad computer technician. He glanced over at Marcus.
“How ya doing?” the man asked.
“Fine,” Marcus replied.
“Former military?”
“You can tell?”
“Yeah, I would guess Marines by the way you carry yourself.”
“Right again. Yourself?”
“I tried the Marines back in the eighties, but ended up with two broken ankles and a quick ticket home right out of boot camp.”
“Ow.” Marcus scrunched his face in sympathy. “That sucks.”
“Yeah, well, fate, I guess.” The man reached out his hand in greeting. “Name’s Aaron Michaels.”
Marcus responded with his own name.
Michaels continued, “When I’m not fixing computer networks, I also happen to be a Staff Sergeant in the Alaska State Defense Force. It’s the state-run militia. If you’re ever interested in getting back into some military activities, you should give us a call.”
“Militia?” Marcus was wary. He recalled the trouble with private militias in the Midwest in the 90’s.
“Well, sort of,” Michaels replied. “We’re actually a state-run agency under the Alaska Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, so we’re not a Timothy McVeigh kind of group. We’re always on the lookout for men just out of the military to help fill our ranks.”
Linus joined the conversation. “You guys are the ones with ALASKA on your uniform pockets instead of US ARMY, right?”
“Yep, that’s us,” Michaels said. “I’m the NCO in charge of the 492nd Coastal Scouts. We work with the Coast Guard and the troopers doing terrorist interdiction patrols in Cook Inlet and Prince William Sound.”
“Terrorist interdiction, huh?” Marcus asked. ‘Found any terrorists yet?”
Michaels grinned. “No, but if they do ever show up, there’s a bunch of us old guys waiting to give them the what-for.”
“Oh, yeah? And just what would you do if you found some?” Marcus said with a hint of sarcasm.
