"My cooking? De veras? And here I thought it was because my brothers were going to kill me and the worthless mallate cowboy I'd taken up with!"
"Now, honeybunch, you know it was your momma I was frightened of," he said, mock-penitent.
Then he looked over at the cleared area, brightly lit with half a dozen big lanterns. "Oh, sweet Jesus, no, no! Spare us, Lord!"
Havel glanced that way himself, and snorted. Eric Lars-son had a feed-store cap on backward, and a broomstick in his hand, evidently meant to be a mike stand; he was prancing around-
"Christ," his father said. "A capella karaoke rap! How could it come to this? How did I fail him?"
"That boy may be able to jump some," Hutton said dourly. "But Lord, Lord, please don't let him try to sing!"
Luanne Hutton leaned against the wagon behind Eric, holding her ribs and gasping feebly with laughter. A few of the other young Bearkillers were making stabs at dancing hip-hop style, and doing about as well as you'd expect of Idaho farm kids with no musical assist.
Hutton surged upright. "C'mon, Angel. We got to put things right; let's find Zeppelt and his squeeze-box."
Havel looked at Ken Larsson. "What gives with you getting your vineyard guy from Oz of all places?"
"Australia has a lot of fine winemakers," Larsson said defensively. "Hugo Zeppelt is first-rate. Smart enough to hide out in that old fallout shelter my father built, too, and get our horses into the woods when the foragers from Salem came by."
The chubby little Australian and his tall gangling blond wife had pushed Eric out of position with the Huttons' help, and they were warming up on their instruments- accordion and tuba. Oom-pa-oom-pa split the night, already familiar from the trip back; Josh and Annie Sanders started organizing the dance-they had no musical talent to speak of, but she'd helped at church socials a good deal in her very rural Montana neighborhood.
"Do-si-do, turn your partner," Havel said. "Not only an Aussie with an accordion, but an Aussie who's obsessed with polkas!"
"He's from the Barossa valley in South Australia, and it was settled by Germans," Larsson said defensively. "And Angelica likes it."
"She's Tejano," Havel said. "San Antonio and the Hill Country used to be lousy with krauts. The oom-pa-pa beat spread like the clap. Put Zeppelt and Astrid together, and in a generation we'll all be wearing lederhosen to go with the pointed ears. the Tubas of Elfland, going oom-pa, oom-pa."
"C'mon," Pamela said; she'd been quiet that evening. "Let's dance, oh fianc?Mike's in one of his grumbling moods. Signe and the dog have to listen but we don't."
They wandered over to where couples were prancing to the lively beat. Signe sipped at her own whiskey; her cheeks were a little flushed. For a moment they leaned shoulder-to-shoulder; then Louhi crawled between them, licking at hands and faces.
"All right, that settles it. I christen thee Louhi, and you can start learning manners. Been ten years since I had a dog."
Signe smiled, tousling the young hound's ears. "I'd have figured you for a dog sort of guy, Mike."
He shrugged. "I was, when I was a kid. Had this German shepherd called Max-very original, hey? From the time I was eight until just before I graduated high school."
He smiled, looking into the flames: "He used to sleep on the foot of my bed, bad breath and gas and all, and I even took him hunting."
"It's odd to take a dog hunting?"
"Max? Yeah, sort of like taking along a brass band. He saved a lot of deer from death. My dad couldn't stand it- the mines were always laying people off with about a week's warning, and there were four of us kids, so a lot of the time we needed that venison. But Max, he'd howl something awful if you tied him up when you got in the canoe."
"Canoe?"
"Yeah, we had this creek that went by our place, and ran through some marshland-man, when I remember what my mom could do with wild rice and duck-then into a little lake with some pretty good hunting woods. Even better if you took a day or two and portaged a bit. White pine country before the loggers got there; lots of silver birch, and maple. We had a good sugarbush on our land, in the back of the woodlot."
"It sounds lovely," she said. "In fact, it sounds like Sweden-we visited there a couple of times, Smaland, where our family came from originally."
Havel's mouth turned up. "Yeah, the Iron Range country is the grimmer parts of Scandahoofia come again-it's even more like Finland. Makes you wonder if our ancestors had any brains at all-those of present company excepted, of course."
"Que?" Signe said.
That was one of Angelica's verbal ticks, and a lot of people had picked it up while he was gone.
Havel mimed wonder: "Like, did they say to themselves: Ooooh, rocks and swamps, crappy soil, mosquitoes bigger than pigeons, blackflies like crows, and nine months of frozen winter blackness! Just like what we left. To hell with pushing on to golden, mellow California-let's settle here!"
Signe laughed and wrinkled her nose: "I saw the Larsson home in Smaland, and you could grow a great crop of rocks around it. Oregon probably looked really good by comparison. I mean, Sweden's a pretty nice place to live now-or was before the Change, you know what I mean-but back in the old days, you could starve to death there."
"And in 1895 the Upper Peninsula of Michigan didn't have a lot of Russians trying to draft you into fighting for the Czar, yeah, point taken. Anyway, Max, he would have starved to death if he'd had to hunt on his own-what the shrinks call poor impulse control. He got his nose frostbit a couple of times trying to track down field mice in winter; he'd go galloping across the fields with his muzzle making like a snowplow. I was too young myself to train him properly when he was a pup."
Louhi crawled further up, stuck her nose into Mike's armpit and promptly went to sleep.
"I'll do better with Louhi here. Hounds scent-hunt anyway."
Signe considered him for a while, head on one side: "What happened to Max?"
"Besides scaring the bejayzus out of deer and squirrel, getting into pissing matches with skunks, and shoving his face into a porcupine's quills once a year? He used to get into the maple-sap buckets in the spring, too, pretty regular. Ever tried to get that stuff out of the fur of a hundred and ten pounds of reluctant Alsatian?"
"In the end, I meant."
"In the end? Got run over a little while before I graduated high school," Havel said. "Broke his back; I found him trying to crawl home. I had to put him down."
And he kept expecting me to make it better, Havel remembered. Right up to the second I pulled the trigger.
"That must have been terrible," Signe said, laying a hand on his.
He turned his over, and they linked fingers. "Yeah, I missed him."
To himself: I couldn 't have proven in a court who did it, but then, I didn’t have to.
A flicker of grim pleasure at a memory of cartilage crumbling under his knuckles: Beating me out with Shirley was one thing, but killing my dog…
"Is that why you didn't get another dog?"
"Nan, didn't have the time, and it's not fair on the animal if you don't-they're not like cats," Havel said. "Now things are different."
Signe nodded, and looked over to the open space; it was square-dancing now.
"That fiance thing seems to be breaking out all over," she said. A pause: "You… you've been sort of quiet since you got back, Mike. I… there wasn't anything with this Juniper woman, was there? Eric won't talk about it at all."