Free Early Thaw by Curt McDermott Page A

and rapidity until the man’s sunburned face boiled to an even deeper shade of red. Exasperated, she’d run to the locker room then, stripped off the outfit of authority she’d been only too happy to don several months before, and began looking for something sharp.
     
    The metallic stink of burning fructose brought her back to the present. She took the bubbling pot off the wood stove, set it down on the pine countertop. The surface was so knotted and gouged, she knew the resulting scorch mark would only add to its “rusticity”— her favorite euphemism for the general Spartan shittiness of the cabin’s interior.
     
    “Wanna let it burn, wanna wanna let it burn,” she sang to herself, and involuntarily wondered if anyone else on the entire planet might be humming the same song.
     
    “Not fucking likely,” she answered, slapping a lid on the pot of mush.
     
    She lifted her head to the kitchen window. By any account, the view that met her was one of bitter beauty. The cabin had been built at the confluence of two backcountry trails, on the leeward side of a foothill. Where she stood, Val could see six or seven miles to the southeast, the land neatly crushed and parted by mountains of ice long since melted. Below, the smooth curve of the hill flattened to a valley slashed through with streams and pockmarked with pools the color of dandelions, of summer skies. Even as the ground was covered now in a few feet of snow, that water burned its way to the surface. Smoky mist hung in the air, a bizarre reproduction of the gloomy landscapes she’d grown tired of reading about in her Brit. Lit. class— here was an American moor.
     
    In fact, the water was the only thing that made their life in the cabin possible. The hot springs that flowed past powered an electric turbine and—thanks to a cheapo geothermal system installed years ago by Uncle Sam— kept the cabin’s only room at a balmy 62 degrees. The stream supplied them with potable water for drinking, though the mess of steaming liquid corn reminded Val of the “adjustment period” she and Leslie had endured after their first sips…the water carried off some of their waste, too. A deep trench they’d dug near the foundation even diverted and cooled enough water for bathing; they could control water levels in the culvert by means of a gate system they’d created from sheared-off car doors. The resulting runoff flowed into a pool a little over three feet deep.
     
    Because safety demanded close proximity to the cabin, though, baths had always been a little weird. Their first month bunking together, she’d caught Leslie watching her undress for one, the yellow circle of his eye barely visible in the window corner. She’d never really thought of herself as an object of desire—she was athletic, sure, but her legs always seemed a little too thick to be called attractive, her shoulders too “butchy”— so her initial freak out quickly mellowed to ambivalence, even something that felt like pride. Besides, impotent old creeper that he might be, Les was also lonely. Most girls nowadays carried a particularly nasty STD, after all.
     
    Not that she let him off easy. A skinny stick of a man in his forties—she had enough creepers to worry about outside the cabin. She instituted the curtain rule the next day, after ripping him several new ones at regular intervals throughout the night. It was the first time she felt much of anything toward Leslie except pity, and strangely, her rage made him seem a tad more masculine. He listened to every word and apologized for his sins with the fervor of a religious convert, even promising to build a separate cabin for himself in the spring.
     
    She told him it wasn’t necessary. Besides, she doubted if he knew how to hold a hammer.
     
    The grisly reality of their new lives, though, overshadowed any initial awkwardness they felt around each other. In those first few weeks, each hike from the cabin felt like a funhouse funeral