Autumn's Fortune Read online

  One Man’s Island

  The Arizona Chronicles

  Autumn’s Fortune

  Volume 1 Issue II

  *********************

  A Serial series by

  Thomas J Wolfenden

  Copyright © 2016 Thomas J Wolfenden

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarities of peoples, places and events are purely coincidental.

  Forward

  Dear Reader,

  When I first sat down to write One Man’s Island, I had no idea how adored some of the characters would become. From Tim to Robyn, who I originally wrote as a boy, to Ensign Johnson and Petty Officer Suplee, who began as nameless fillers and by the time I was finished writing the first draft, I’d fallen in love with both, and they were a lot of fun to write.

  This being said, and after several positive fan emails, I decided to revisit all of them in a unique way. In One Man’s Island, the novel is split into two parts, Part 1 & Part 2, and there is a five-year gap between these parts.

  This monthly serial series, The Arizona Chronicles, will fill in that gap, and revisit all of your old favorite characters, and also introduce some new ones.

  So, dear Readers, sit back in your favorite reading space with your favorite beverage, relax, hold on and enjoy the ride!

  ~Thomas J Wolfenden

  II

  “No, damn it, it’s final! We’re not driving to Taos!” Tim shouted as he shoveled the last scoop of dirt onto the grave he’d dug that morning for the crazed woman he shot.

  Robyn ignored him and asked in a quiet voice, “Does she have a name?”

  “I don’t know. I know she was flipping out over me having her daughter, Adele. I guess when she saw us together, in her mind, you were her daughter.”

  “I’ll go inside and see if I can find anything,” she said and disappeared into the tiny house. Tim walked back to the Hum-Vee and threw the shovel in the back. Sitting on the front bumper, he lit a cigarette and took out a canteen, and chugged several mouthfuls of warm water before pouring the rest over his head.

  It was hot that morning, not a cloud in the sky and even though it wasn’t quite 11 O’clock, it was in the mid 80s. Even not being from around here, Tim knew that it wasn’t normal. The humidity was rising and his knees were telling him it’ll probably rain that afternoon.

  From what he’d read up on the area, he knew that the monsoonal flow from Mexico came up over the desert and brought rains from late June until August, and here it was late September. It should be cooling off now, only today felt like mid-summer.

  Robyn came out of the house after a while and came up to the vehicle and sat next to Tim. She was quiet and solemnly handed him a small card. He took it and saw it was an Arizona driver’s license. A smiling, attractive woman with light brown hair smiled back at him.

  “Karen Wiley, age 34,” he said, “At least we know who she was. And this was her house.”

  “I’ll tack the license onto a board or soothing as a marker,” Robyn said.

  “Good idea.”

  “I found what looks like a grave in the back yard,” she told him.

  “It’s probably her daughter, Adele. I wish I had known, I’d have dug the grave there.”

  “You didn’t though. It’s okay.”

  “I guess there are people like that all over, eh?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, look at me. The night of The Event, I lived, my mom died. It’s the same here, only opposite. The lady lived, her daughter died.”

  “I see,” Tim agreed, thinking of the neat and tidy grave that Paul had kept for his mother in his backyard back in New Hope, Pennsylvania.

  “I still think there’s a bunch of people who survived that night and some couldn’t handle it like we did. They’re crazy like this lady.”

  “As long as they keep a wide berth from us, they can go on being crazy.”

  “Dad, do you think there are more people here in town?”

  “No, I don’t. I think if there was more people here in town, Karen here would have met up with them a long time ago. I don’t even think anyone’s been through town stopping off I-40, since The Event,” Tim said.

  Robyn hopped down from the hood of the Hum-Vee and wandered around the side of the house, coming back with a hunk of wood that she planted at the head of the freshly dug grave. Taking a rubber band from her ponytail, she secured the driver’s license to the wood, finalizing the marker.

  “There,” was all she said, hand on her hips and long blonde hair hanging loose.

  “Okay, kid. Let’s get home,” Tim called out to her and climbing behind the wheel. She hopped into the passenger seat and Tim headed off back through town towards the road to their new home.

  Tim’s feelings were correct. After they both had lunch, Tim sat out on the wide porch sipping a Miller and watching a massive thunderstorm roll up from the south, lightning stabbing out of angry, dark and bloated clouds. The thunder rolled through the forest in low rumbles that seemed to last forever.

  As he sat and drank, he went over in his mind the things they’d need to do before winter set in again. He kept a pen and small notepad on a table next to him, and jotted down notes as he thought of them.

  Even though they had more than enough staples, like flour, dry yeast, grains and sugar, coffee and tea, canned fruits and vegetables, powdered eggs, powdered milk, non-dairy creamer, shortening, they still lacked fresh stuff. Sure, there was plenty of cans of beef stew, corned beef, spam and the like, hell, he’d even found a box of canned whole chickens and canned bacon although the thought of the latter sort of made him want to gag.

  What they needed was some fresh meat. He’d seen a huge herd of elk coming down from the tree line across the road the other night and thought if he’d kill one of those, it’d me meat for the both of them for an entire winter.

  There was plenty of other wild game here in the high ponderosas he had seen. Wild turkey, mule deer, duck, geese, rabbit, pheasant and dove were all over the place. If the rains stopped this evening, he’d go at dusk when the elk came down and get them a big bull.

  Then there was the fact about firewood. Yes, the house was completely powered my solar and wind, only if it snowed too deep, the solar panels would be buried in snow for a time, and they’d have to rely on firewood to keep warm. The house did have a backup generator, only that took care of the water well pump, refrigerator and chest freezer in the basement, not the central air/heat system he discovered.

  So he’d have to cut more firewood. The stove top and oven were propane, so no worries about stocking up on that, so that left firewood a major concern. There was only two cords on the back porch, and if the winter got bad, they’d need a lot more wood than that.

  As he finished his beer, Robyn came out on the porch and sat next to Tim in a matching rocking chair, handing him a fresh beer.

  “Thanks.”

  “I thought you might need another,” she said, looking out over the meadow and slowly rocking the chair.

  “Any more radio from Taos?”

  “No, the storm is interfering with the signal. I still think we should go and check it out.”

  “I agree, only not now. We’ve got too many things to do before winter sets in, and traipsing a few hundred miles east isn’t one of them,” he told her, handing her the pad with his scribbled notes.

  She scanned over them and then asked, “So we’re going to cut wood?”

  “Yeah, I figure another four of five cords should do us nicely.”

  “Well, there’s plenty of wood right here, all around us.”

  “Nah, not pine. Pine is the worst kind of wood to use. It needs to be hardwood, like oak or walnut.”
/>   “Where are we going to find that stuff?”

  “I think tomorrow I’m going to go in to town and scrounge around the Forest Service office and see where they say is a good place. I saw a sign at the Safeway that said something about applying for woodcutting permits and the dates for the cutting, so if anyplace would have the information, it’d be at the Forest Service.”

  “Probably. The stuff out back is all shaggy bark juniper,” she told him.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I found a brochure on it in the living room. Has a map and everything on where to find it,” she told him.

  He smiled as her warmly and said “Saves me a trip then, huh?”

  “You’d be lost without me, Dad,” she replied.

  The rain began to come down harder, and a lightning bolt came down and struck the ground on the far side of the meadow with a tremendous boom of thunder. The red dirt road was soon a small river, and as they watched, it began to hail.

  “I love storms. They make me feel so insignificant,” she said.

  “You’ll never be insignificant to me, Pumpkin,” he told her, and his mind drifted off to a time long ago. He was young, not quite out of his teens, before he enlisted in the army. He was with a chestnut haired beauty whose name eluded him right then. They had been walking in Pennypack Park back in Philadelphia and a sudden storm came through and forced them into a covered and deserted pavilion, and that was the first time he’d made love to a woman…

  “Dad, you’ve got this weird smile on your face!”

  Snapping out of his daydream, he looked over at Robyn and said, “It’s nothing, I was thinking about a time long ago.”

  “What was her name?”

  “That obvious, eh? Funny thing is I can’t recall. She was a lot shorter than me and had this chestnut hair…”

  “How old were you?”

  “Not much older than you are now. Like I said, it was a long, long time ago,” he told her, and then changed the subject. He didn’t want to talk about his old sex life with a 14 year old girl, “If this rain stops before dark, I’m going to try to bag us an elk for winter.”

  “Cool! Can I come too?”

  “Sure, I’m’ only going across the road. I saw the elk come out of the tree line at dusk the last few nights so I figure I’d set up right across the road, less than two hundred meters so it’d be an easy shot.”

  The rains did ease and stop about an hour before sunset. The ground was wet and their footfalls were silent on the wet pine needles as the pair made their way through the small stand of trees that separated the house and meadow from the road.

  Tim sat down under a huge pine tree and looked across the road and onto the adjoining meadow. The tree line was a good 500 meters or so, and if the elk came down and grazed in the middle of the meadow like they did the previous evenings, the shot he’d have to make would be no more that 200 meters, if that.

  Robyn sat down next to him silently, and they waited for the elk to appear. As soon as the sun had fallen behind some hills in the west, they started to come out, one by one, cow elk all of them, only this time Tim had his mind set for a big bull elk.

  Right before it was full dark, the elk herd and migrated to the center of the huge meadow, and finally a big bull came down out of the tree line and meandered towards the middle of the herd.

  When he thought he was close enough, Tim shouldered a Savage Model 110 .30-06 caliber bolt action rifle and peered through the Bushnell 3x9 scope. He could barely make out the big bull’s shape in the growing darkness and put the crosshairs right on the big animal’s shoulder, and inhaling once, and then slowly exhaling. At the last bit of the exhale, the crosshairs were perfectly aligned and he slowly squeezed the trigger…

  Bam!

  The recoil was stiff in his shoulder and he ignored it, racking another round into the chamber as fast as he could. Looking through the rifle scope again, he saw the big animal stagger, stunned by the heavy bullet, taking a few awkward steps, and dropping dead only a few yards from where he’d been shot.

  The rest of the herd was running in panic to the tree line, and before he and Robyn could get to their quarry, they were long gone. Tim and Robyn made their way across the road in the twilight to where the big animal lie in the wet meadow grass.

  “Jesus he’s big,” Robyn exclaimed.

  “Yeah, I wasn’t thinking about once I shot the fucker,” he said, “Go back and bring the Hum-Vee while I clean it.”

  “Drive the Hum-Vee?” she asked.

  “Yes, I know you’ve been wanting to. Now go on before it gets too dark.”

  He didn’t have to tell her twice. Robyn was gone across the meadow at a flat out run back to the house before he even had his knife out. Shit he’s big, he thought as he knelt down to cut open the elk. Like a deer, only four times the size!

  It took him only a few minutes to get the entrails and other organs out of the huge animal, and even though he took precautions to stay clean, he was covered in blood when he was finished. He saw the headlights of the Hum-Vee bouncing toward him across the meadow and he stood, waiting for Robyn.

  Robyn hopped out and came over to Tim, “Man, what a mess,” she said.

  “Yeah, messy and necessary. Grab the tow-rope and we’ll drag him to the barn. It was then he noticed he could see his breath coming out in great white wisps in the light from the headlamps, and realized the temperature had dropped dramatically after the sun went down.

  With the Hum-Vee, the two of them made short work or dragging the big animal to the barn, and Tim, using a block and tackle, hoisted their animal aloft on a barn rafter by the wide antlers.

  “Now what?” Robyn asked.

  “Now we let the carcass drain of blood overnight, and tomorrow I’ll skin and then butcher it the best I can.”

  “It’s getting cold,” Robyn said, starting to shiver.

  “Good. It’ll keep the meat from spoiling overnight. And I’ll shut the barn up good, to keep any predators out.”

  The next morning Tim arose to a landscape covered in frost. The rains that had fallen the day before had frozen overnight, and left everything covered in a white, glistening cover. Tim sat in his new kitchen, smoking a cigarette, waiting for the coffee to brew and looked out over the sight before him.

  When the pot was ready, he poured himself a large mug, added sugar and creamer and sat back down to contemplate the day. It wasn’t long before Robyn cam padding down the stairs, wearing a thick terrycloth bathrobe she’d gotten at the linen place, hair twisted into a towel like a turban.

  As she breezed by Tim she said good morning and then poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table with Tim.

  “I think I’m gonna like living here! It’s almost like before The Event! I actually took a shower for a half hour this morning, and I never ran out of hot water!”

  “I’ glad you enjoyed it, because it may not last,” Tim told her.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s like this. Everything is powered off of the solar panels and wind turbines up on the side of the hill. Once it snows, a good snow, not like this frost we have this morning,” he told her, motioning outside the wide window, “And when it does, we’ll lose the power until the snow melts.”

  “Isn’t there a backup generator?”

  “Yes, only it feeds the water well, freezer in the basement and refrigerator here in the kitchen. There’s also a few other auxiliary light fixtures it feeds and nothing else.”

  “So no long showers?”

  “And no central air or heat. Well, I may have to check out the water heater. That may be propane like the range top. Even so, we can’t be wasteful.”

  “Okay, understood, Sar’ Major,” she said, sipping her coffee, “Shit it was nice to take a shower in a real shower, not the tiny little one in the camper!”

  And Tim had to agree. The last two years have sort of sucked. Limited water, two minute ‘splash & dash’ showers… Using a real flushing toilet and not
having to clean out the black water tank on the camper will be a nice change. He even took a long hot shower the night before, so he shouldn’t be too hard on the girl.

  “I know it hasn’t been easy, with all the scrounging for food and all. Now that we’re here, we need to start being a little more self-sufficient. There’s no more farmers growing food, so we’re going to have to start growing out own.”

  “Okay Dad, whatever you say,” she told him.

  “Don’t be flippant!” he scolded.

  “Dad, I wasn’t being flippant. I understand. It’s why we need to cut more firewood.”

  “Exactly, so finish up your coffee and get dressed. I’m going to need your help butchering that elk.”

  Robyn finished her coffee, put her mug in the sink and disappeared up the stairs. Tim put his own mug in the sing, and for laughs turned on the tap and was pleased at the steady flow of water. Shutting off the tap, he grabbed a denim jacket and headed out to the barn, where he found the elk hanging right where they’d left it, huge puddle of congealing blood on the concrete slab floor.

  Taking his knife, he skinned the animal like he would a deer, only this was more like skinning a horse it was that big. He set the skin aside to tan later. By the time Robyn came out he’d quartered the animal, and now had a huge slab of meat sitting on the workbench along the side wall.

  “What can I do to help?” she asked.

  “Go down into the basement cupboard and see if there’s a stockpile of freezer wrap. If there is, bring me out a shitload, and look in the kitchen from a butcher’s knife and a cleaver. There’s every other goddamned gadget known to man there, there’s got to be a cleaver at least.”

  She nodded her head and was gone, and Tim went back to work. Several minutes later, Robyn came back with a huge roll of freezer paper, and not one, to two; she brought three different meat cleavers and butcher knives.

  It took both of them the better part of the day to get everything cut up and packaged for the freezer, and it took several trips to the freezer to get it all stored. Tim did save two nice big fat steaks for that night’s dinner, so for the most part, the freezer was full.