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Don’t Go Punching Caribou
It is probably a mistake, coming north. For one thing, it’s pretty empty. Even here at the Prince George International (Seriously) Airport, it’s quiet.
Too quiet, Bucky says. His eyes are wide and restless. He puts his back to Steve’s and the restlessness vibrates there, through the stolen German uniform. Bucky’s low chuckle vibrates through Steve too. Steve angles his head to ask him what's so funny, but Bucky is gone.
Definitely a mistake to go north. He didn’t anticipate how much the smell of it—the scribbled forests at the edge of the airfield, the sharpness of diesel and jet fuel—would put him back in the dark places, falling silently on a black parachute, creeping unseen behind the lines into the confusion of shadows and trees. But this place hasn’t seen a war. The low mountains circle it protectively round the horizon and, in the near ground, there’s a parking lot half-full of pick-up trucks, a lone yellow taxi idling at the curb. Inside it, a Sikh guy in an orange turban is talking loudly into his radio about getting back in time to take his kid to soccer practice. This is Canada. No place safer than Canada.
Toto, we’re not in Brooklyn anymore, Bucky mutters.
As he turns to go back through the sliding doors into the terminal, Steve cocks an eye at the sky and its curdled grey cover of cloud. He considers waving at the watchdog that he knows is tracking him even here. He’s too valuable an asset for ROR. Hunching his shoulders and keeping his eyes on his boots, he goes inside.
Coffee, Bucky says.
“Coffee,” Steve agrees.
“The cantina here makes a good cup,” a voice says.
“Yeah, if you’re not too particular about the definition of ‘coffee’ or ‘good’,” another adds.
On good days, Steve has a hard time keeping his feet in the present, convincing himself that it is the 21st century. Looking at the guy in front of him makes his brain lose its footing all over again.
Your brains got feet now? Bucky says. You gotta lay off the Vitarays.
Steve doesn’t tell Bucky to shut up, in case he does. Instead, he concentrates on the guy in front of him.
He’s almost as tall as Steve, wide across the shoulders, except not in a muscled, super-serum kind of way, softer, but still squared up like he wouldn’t do parade rest on principle. Steve doesn’t figure he’s wearing a uniform under his plaid shirt, but he doesn’t rule it out. It is the flat-brimmed Stetson that makes Steve come unhitched from the present, though, puts him back in a darkened Brooklyn theatre in 1937. The same colour as the sketchy spring grass on the hills outside, the eyes under the Stetson are friendly, curious, assessing.
“Sergeant Renfew, I presume,” Steve says.
Huffing out a laugh, the man ducks his head and runs a thumbnail over his eyebrow before meeting Steve’s gaze again. “Fraser, actually. Does it show?”
“Of course it shows, ya freak,” the other man says.
This one makes Steve wonder if Canada has its share of mutant villains, too. If so, Steve would bet some of his candy-coloured Canadian dollars that he’s called something like The Human Porcupine. He’s tall, too, but somehow seems shorter, probably because of the scrappy, small-dog belligerence he’s projecting from his scuffed workboots to the spiky tips of his hair. If a person could raise hackles, this guy is doing it. He stands with his shoulder against Fraser’s and cocks his head sharply.
“Don’t mind him,” Spiky says. “He got some rebar installed in Mountie school and can’t get it out.”
“Ray.”
“Fraser.” Ray shows his teeth in a grin and goes back to bristling, which seems to be his resting state.
“The cantina?” Steve asks, by way of initiating some kind of exit strategy, not because he needs directions. He can see the entire terminal from where he’s standing and the coffee shop is right there on the other side of the Budget Rentacar kiosk.
Fraser takes off his hat and uses it to point to the coffee shop, then falls into step with Steve as he moves in that direction. “Are you going northward?” When Steve raises an eyebrow askance at him, Fraser points with the hat at the parka hooked through the handles of Steve’s duffel bag and the Coast Mountain Air boarding pass sticking out of the side pocket. “Good to come prepared. Still likely to get snow.”
“In June,” Ray says. “Welcome to Canuckistan, where it snows in June.”
“Only in the northern climes. Not here down south,” Fraser corrects him.
“South,” Ray mutters. “Says the esk—inuit.” Fraser’s mouth quirks up in an approving smile and Ray smiles back before bristling again and shouldering past Steve into the coffee shop. “You gotta learn a lot of stuff, like what to call things. They get touchy. Canadians are touchy.”
“I can see that,” Steve agrees.
“Oh, Ray isn’t Canadian,” Fraser says hastily, stepping in to defend the honour and repute of friendly Canada. He waves Steve ahead of him into the shop. “He’s from Chicago.”
“That explains a lot,” Steve says.
Grinning a shark grin at him over his shoulder, Ray says, “Damn straight,” and leans on the counter to order a large double-double and three doughnuts. “You guys want anything?”
While they wait for coffee—Fraser orders chamomile tea—Fraser pokes again at Steve’s plans.
“Honestly,” Steve sighs and squints out the window at the sun making small novas on the windshields and chrome bumpers of the pick-up trucks in short-term parking. The clouds have crumpled up against the distant mountains and the sky is blue. He can feel the mechanical gaze of a S.H.I.E.L.D satellite picking out his anomalous heat signature through the roof of the building. “I don’t know where I’m going. I just—” He glances at Fraser, who is watching him with his head tilted, that assessing look in his eyes. “I just wanted to go look at something that hasn’t changed.”
Nodding, Fraser also turns to the window, but he’s looking somewhere else. “You’ve come to the best place for that. There are glaciers up in Yukon where the snow is a thousand years old. It’s a good place to come to rest.”
“And freeze your nuts off,” Ray interjects around a mouthful of doughnut.
Fraser tilts his head side to side, conceding, “That too, although extremities are more vulnerable to cold than the testicles, which, due to their proximity to the body’s core—”
“Drink your tea, Fraser.”
“Thank you, Ray.”
Come to rest in a glacier, Bucky says, in case Steve’s somehow missed it. That’s what you need, a healthy injection of irony.
Drink your beer, Steve says.
If only.
If only.
Steve wants to lean into the space where Bucky is—isn’t—but Fraser is there. When Fraser meets Steve’s eyes, it is like he can see Bucky too, somehow, inside him. Fraser shifts, takes a step away. Not leaving. Making room. In his chest, Steve feels some weight shift, too. He finds himself nodding his thanks. Fraser dips the brim of his hat.
“If you have time, I would recommend following the migration path of the Porcupine caribou herd,” Fraser offers. He lifts his cup toward the north. “They travel over 3000 kilometers through the Northwest Territories and Yukon and Alaska to Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit. It means ‘The sacred place where life begins.’ If you’re looking for something, the caribou have a lot to teach you.”
“Don’t punch them, though,” Ray advises. He stuffs his third doughnut into his mouth.
Steve is pretty sure he doesn’t want to punch anyone. He’s on vacation. “Don’t punch who?”
“Caribou.”
“Ray.”
“You’re not supposed to punch them.”
“Ray.”
“But you’re gonna want to.”
“Ray.”
“Because they’re sons of bitches. Like a river of a million sons of bitches. Shiv you for a rock with lichen on it.”
“That was one caribou, Ray. You can’t characterize an entire species on the basis of the behaviour of one outlier.”
“Why not?”
“It’s racial profiling.”
Ray glares at Fraser for a long moment. “You gotta stop reading books.”
“Unlikely.”
Bucky laughs. Are these guys married?
“It’s Canada, so probably,” Steve says.
“I beg your pardon?” Fraser asks.
“What?” Ray demands.
Steve hangs his head and chuckles. It feels good. Then he raises his hands in front of him, surrendering to whatever is happening to him in Canada. “I promise I will not punch any caribou, even if they really deserve it.”
“They will.”
“Ray.”
“Fraser.”
Over the PA an apologetic Canadian voice comes on and apologetically instructs passengers on Central Mountain Air’s flight to Terrace to make their way through security. Around them, people start gathering up their carry-ons and gulping dregs of coffee and cold French fries.
“That’s me,” Steve says, sticking out his hand for Fraser to shake. “Thanks for the tips.”
“Our pleasure. Stay safe.”
“Change your mind,” Ray says, but he grins that shark grin again to show that he’s at least partly joking.
As Steve’s moving toward the door, Fraser puts his hand on his elbow. “It’s hard up there,” he says. “It can look empty and harsh, but if you sit with it, you’ll learn how to see the beauty in it, all the life going on where you think it couldn’t possibly survive.”
Steve nods and throws his duffel bag over his shoulder, heading north.
A Country for Old Men
Ray pulls off the highway onto the forest service road. The washboard rattles his teeth and probably does something hinky to his spine that he’ll bitch about 30 years from now when it rains, but right now, on this high-blue, sunny day in Wherethefuck Canuckistan, it makes him grin. The shitty road means he’s only got another bone-jarring 8 kilometers to go. He doesn’t even do the math anymore to convert that into miles. His spine knows how far 8 kilometers is. He knows it in his rattling teeth.
The truck crests a hill on a plume of dust and for just a moment the mountain is visible through the gap in the tree scribble, but Ray has to stop looking at it to keep from fishtailing in the gravel as he rounds the next corner. He keeps his eyes on the road, but he’s honed in on the mountain now like it’s magnetic north. He can feel it moving around in his subjective space as the road winds through the forest around the mountain’s ankles, something inside him keeping a bead on it. The CB radio on the dash squawks and he hits the gas to make it to the pull-out before the logging truck comes round the bend like a runaway train. Gary in the cab has his elbow out the window and lifts two fingers to say hi. Ray scrambles to wind the window closed but is too slow and the cloud of dust and stray bits of gravel roll over him and into the truck like a tidal wave.
Fuckin Canuckistan. He’s grinning so hard his face is starting to hurt. “Fuckin Canuckistan,” he says out loud, then sings it, bellows it, over the roaring, pinging, crackling sound of pickup tires on gravel. Five kilometers. The mountain waits for him, patiently as always.
As always, he misses the driveway and has to go way down to the bottom of the next hill to do a 45-point turn and double back, so the “Fuckin Canuckistan” song has a bit more heat in it by the time he stops with the bumper passive aggressively close to the cabin’s porch steps.
He sits and listens to the engine knock for a bit and waits for the vibration in his teeth to settle before he shoves the door open and goes round to the bed for the groceries. It’s not cold out, but he can feel autumn lurking already, hanging out for now in the shade with Dief, who’s flopped out on his side under a Doug fir. He looks at Ray out the top of his head and flaps his tail against the ground a couple of times. Ray lifts his chin at him.
“Hey there, old man.”
Another tail flap.
“Don’t get up on my account.”
Flap.
“Good talk.”
The cabin looks like the cabin always looks, shake roof that comes down to the ground, shake siding where there aren’t windows, weathered gray and fading into the forest like if a house could wear a gilly suit. Mostly it looks like it should’ve fallen down 100 years ago and it also mostly looks like the kind of heaven made up by a kid who spent his formative years reading too many Boy’s Own Adventure omnibuses. Omnibi. Whatever. Behind it, the mountain is looking somewhere else, as mountains do.
With two bags of groceries hooked on one hand and a case of beer braced against his hip, Ray catches himself in the truck’s side mirror and the grin looks idiotic so he trades it for glowering that lasts until he’s trying to shimmy around the pickup bumper to the steps and then it turns into an irritated snarl.
“Who’s the jerk who parked too close to the stairs again?” he asks. “That would be you, Ray,” he answers himself at the same time Fraser says it.
Fraser’s leaning on the porch rail in that blue flannel shirt with the frayed collar that Ray likes and jeans and hiking boots. His hair is shiny wet and sticking up in the back. When Ray takes the steps two at a time, Fraser turns and puts himself in Ray’s path, an immoveable object with a crooked smile creasing one side of his face. Ray comes up with a jerk as close as he can get what with the groceries and the 2-4 and just stands there and breathes the clean smell of the lake on Fraser’s skin. Up close, the gray at Fraser’s temples is visible, the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes.
“You go swimming?”
“Yes.”
“Freak.” Ray leans forward and kisses Fraser on the corner of the mouth, where the crease is, and then on the crow’s feet. He tastes like cold and moss and home and Ray has to force his face to glower again because he’s getting soft in the brain. “You wanna make a hole? My arm’s gonna fall off.”
Taking one of the bags from Ray’s hand, Fraser steps aside so Ray can shoulder his way into the cabin. Inside, like always, he’s got to take a second to let the mountain slap him in the eyes. The whole front of the A-frame is glass and the mountain looks like it’s cut out special to fit the windows. It’s not one of the real pointy ones with the snow on it all year round, but there is a glacier hanging off of a cliff near the summit and the forest laps up against its sides like waves slowed down to geological time.
Ray slides the 2-4 onto the kitchen island and slings the bag after it, then stands stretching and clenching his fist to get the blood back in his fingers.
“Heya, Monte,” he says to the mountain. As usual, the mountain doesn’t answer.
He toes his boots off and kicks them in the general direction of the tack room door. They only make it as far as the little living room, so he takes two long strides and punts like a CFL player. One is a nice two-pointer, but the other bounces off the doorjamb and back onto the oval of the braided rug. On the way to get it, Ray clocks his shin on the corner of the coffee table and has to hop around shouting unCanadian things at the universe for a bit before cocking the mad-eye at Fraser, who is unpacking the groceries on the other side of the island.
“Whose bright idea was it to move the coffee table?” Ray says, checking his shin for life-threatening injury.
“Dief’s.” Fraser tips his head toward the front sliding doors and Dief’s bed pulled up close to the glass, taking up most of the former location of the coffee table.
Fraser ducks his head, but Ray can see his mouth turned down and the thumbnail stroking across his eyebrow and Ray’s chest squeezes in a weird way. The bed’s usually upstairs in the loft next to theirs.
“Little Prince can’t be bothered to do the stairs?” Ray says, trying to joke the sad out of the moment but Fraser only shakes his head once and goes back to re-alphabetizing the canned goods to fit the new stuff in the cupboard with his bottled rodent or whatever he eats when Ray’s away.
Straightening with his fists curled into his kidneys to ease the long-drive cramps in his back, Ray goes to the sliding doors and stands on Dief’s bed to look out at the yard. Not much has changed while he was gone except there’s a new fuzz of purple asters blooming at the edge of the long grass right against the forest. Oh, that, and there’s the dude in a t-shirt ripping logs in half by the woodshed.
“How did it go at the IRCC?” Fraser says super casual-like with his head inside the cupboard as if he doesn’t care at all about Ray’s trip to Whitehorse and the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada office. “Did they approve Express Entry?”
“No. No, they said to go through the Skilled Worker Program on account of the offer from the RCMP. I’m one step closer to becoming a CanuckiStanley.” Ray lifts two fingers to point at the muscles in the yard making kindling with his bare hands. “Fraser.”
“Yes, Ray.”
“Are you aware that Captain America is making kindling in our backyard?”
There’s a long silence and Ray looks over his shoulder to see Fraser with his hands braced on the kitchen island. Fraser straightens like he does when he’s going to confess some mortal sin like passing on a double-yellow line or taking his laundry out of the dryer before the buzzer. “Ah, yes.” He gestures at the yard. “Steve—Mr.—The Captain needed someplace off the grid—”
“This is off the grid. Our front yard is definitely off the grid,” Ray agrees. He’s still pointing with those two fingers, so he points harder like that will redirect some of the steam he can feel putting pressure on the back of his eyeballs. “And are you also aware, Sergeant Benton Fraser of the RCMP, that he’s wanted by—”
“Everyone. Yes.”
“So you thought you’d let him stay here.”
“Yes.”
“The international felon.”
Coming around the island, Fraser tugs at his earlobe and Ray narrows his eyes at him like he’s expecting the blow-back dust cloud from a logging truck which, in this case, is Fraser in explain-it mode. “That’s not precisely accurate. He hasn’t been convicted of anything as of yet.”
“He hasn’t been convicted of anything because he’s ‘off the grid.’” Ray uncocks the pointing fingers to makes bunny ears that enclose the phrase, the cabin and their until-now tidy life arrangement. “That guy’s ‘off-the-grid’—” More bunny ears. “—is going to put us—you and me and Dief—on somebody’s radar. You know what happens to regular people who get on that kind of radar?” Ray makes a jabbing, twisting gesture meant to mime a super-powered asshole ripping some schmuck’s house off the foundations for the purpose of dropping it on the handsome arrangement of muscles currently walking toward said soon-to-be destructed house.
“It’s just for a few days.”
“A few days.”
“Yes.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
Ray tries to stab Fraser with his eyebeams but Fraser’s doing that crooked almost-smile thing and the stabbing turns to a sort of warm jelly feeling that convinces Ray that his head is going terminally mushified. He lets the wires uncoil inside him and crosses the living room—clocking his other shin on the coffee table—to stand nose-to-nose with Fraser so he can look him in the moss-and-cloud-coloured eyes and smell the lake on him and remember why he just drove 2700 hours round trip to fill out a hundred pages of forms. “Okay.” He twitches his head, half in a “come at me” way and half in a “you had me at hello” way. “Okay. I guess you super-powered freaks gotta stick together.”
Fraser’s eyebrows knit and Ray rubs his thumb against the lines that form between them before deking around him and into the kitchen to crouch and drag Dief’s supper bowl out from under the sink.
“Who has super powers?”
Steve Rogers, America’s first superhero and current persona-non-wanna, is standing on the other side of the screen door looking like a recruitment poster, except he’s got the last grocery bag from the truck and Ray’s duffel kit thrown over one shoulder, and is holding Diefenbaker, the full-sized wolf, on his hip like a toddler with Dief’s paws around his neck and his big, fluffy wolf-head resting on a shoulder muscle that Ray’s pretty sure no other human being has. It’s not right that Ray feels an itch of jealousy in his sinuses, since Steve Rogers is being nice helping the old man up the steps, but the itch is there anyway, so Ray wrinkles his nose, twitches his head again, and yanks open the freezer to look for Dief’s meatcicles. Turncoat wolf.
Fraser goes to open the screen door for Steve. He takes the grocery bag and Ray’s duffel and aims his face at the dog bed by the windows. “He’s fine there, if you don’t mind.”
“Whose super powers?” Steve asks again, not even grunting a little bit in deference to the regular unenhanced human males in the room as he settles Dief on the dog bed.
Steve sounds like someone who’s idly interested in a conversation in progress, but Ray can hear the tension in it. Behind the freezer door, Ray makes the house-destructing gesture again, pulls out a meatcicle and unpeels it from its wrapper. The meatcicle slides onto a plate and off of the plate again so Ray has to chase it around inside the sink before he can wrangle it and the plate into the microwave.
“Fraser’s,” he answers.
“I don’t have super powers.”
“Right. Sure you don’t.”
“Do you?” Steve’s on the other side of the island now, looking interested and trying not to look too interested.
“I don’t,” Fraser says to Ray and then repeats it for Steve.
“Yes you do,” Ray insists. “You do that thing.”
“What thing?”
“The thing with your brain.”
“Do you mean reading?”
His hand in the bag of secret Dief loyalty bribes, Ray glares at Fraser. “No, I do not mean reading, Fraser. I can read.” He blocks Fraser’s view of the bag with his body and sneaks the raspberry donut onto the counter. “Reading is not a super power.”
“I think the denizens of Sesame Street would disagree.”
Shooting another glare over his shoulder, Ray almost takes the tip of his thumb off with the knife, so he pays attention to his hands slicing the donut into quarters. He adds one to Dief’s bowl. “This is not a Muppet-related conversation. A lot of them are or should be Muppet-related, I get that, but this is not one.” He adds a second quarter to the bowl, eats a third and, after a half-second’s consideration, drops the fourth into the bowl with the rest. “I’m talking about the thing you do with your brain and the angels.”
“Angels?” Now Steve looks interested interested. “You do a thing with angels?”
“No.” Fraser is looking perplexed. “Ray, have you been struck on the head?”
The meatcicle defrosted and deposited into the bowl with the donut pieces, Ray turns to confront the twin mountains of good looks framing the mountain of mountain in the window. It’s a lot of handsome in one place. Steve’s got that blond-haired, blue-eyed, perfect specimen bulging under his t-shirt thing going on, and he’s laser focused on Ray in a friendly neighbourhood supersoldier kind of way. And Fraser’s all blue-plaid mountain guy looking at Ray like he’s an important, beloved thing that got cracked in the moving van, and it makes Ray feel defensive and soft all at the same time, and that makes him itchy all over. So he takes the bowl over to Dief and waits with his hand on the wolf’s head while the old guy gets himself rearranged so he can eat without standing up. Dief leaves the donuts ’til last because he’s a class act.
“He does this thing where he bends reality,” Ray explains while Dief eats. “He goes into a dicey situation and he assumes everybody’s got an angel of their better behaviour.”
“Nature,” Fraser says. “The phrase is ‘better angels of our nature.’”
“Yeah. So, he assumes everybody has this angel of their better behaviour—nature, whatever—” Ray pushes himself to his feet again and looks out across the lawn at the pile of torn-in-two logs by the woodshed and the asters fuzzing against the darkening forest and the mountain looking elsewhere. “—and by the time he’s done with them, they do. Have a better nature, I mean.”
“That’s not a super power,” Fraser says gently. “It’s just faith.”
When he looks back at the kitchen, Fraser’s got his head ducked and he’s smiling at his hiking boots and Steve is looking thoughtful.
Steve folds his arms—somehow not bursting his shirt at the seams—and also smiles at his boots. “I knew someone like that, once,” he says. “Only he tried to do it with a serum.”
For a long moment, there’s no sound but the refrigerator running and Dief’s tongue licking the chrome off his bowl.
When Fraser shakes himself a bit and heads down into the cellar to grab something for their supper—“No moose testicle!” Ray hollers after him and grins when Fraser hollers back, “Understood!”—Steve comes to hunker down on his heels next to Dief and Ray.
When he’s sure Fraser’s out of earshot, Ray says quiet and intense, “Look, Captain.” He leans down a bit to get his face closer to Steve’s. “You’re a golden retriever.”
Perfectly sculpted eyebrows climb up Steve’s Greek statue-perfect forehead. “Thanks?”
“You’re pretty and silky and friendly.” The words are nice but there are shark’s teeth in Ray’s smile, and not the friendly ones.
Like he can see the uppercut coming after the feint, Steve leans back a bit, shifts his weight so he can move fast. It’s subtle, that shift from easy to sharp, but it makes Ray straighten up and step back. What kind of life does this guy lead, Ray wonders, that allows him to flip the switch smooth like that? Same life Ray’s led, he figures, only on a different scale. But Ray doesn’t let up, goes on talking low and fast.
“You guys are man’s best friend until you start tearing up the furniture and chewing up my favourite mukluks. I watch the news.”
Steve’s shoulders lose some of their right-angle tension and settle into a resigned slope as he lowers his gaze to watch his fingers threading through Dief’s fur.
“But Fraser, he’s a law-and-order guy, straight up, and not in a tough-guy way. In the way that puts a man on a path, a certain path. And if he brought you in here, here into our home, it’s ’cause he’s seen your angel.” Ray points at the muscled pec over Steve’s heart. “He’s got faith in people. Me, I’m not so sure. But I have faith in him, so I’m rolling with it.”
Nodding, Steve raises his eyes to look at the sun balanced on the hip of the mountain before meeting Ray’s gaze. “I appreciate that.”
“Good,” Ray says. “Because if you make him regret it, you’ll regret it, and not ’cause I’ll kick your ass because we both know that’s not gonna end well for a normie like me. You’ll regret it ’cause the world needs faith like Fraser’s. Don’t fuck with that.”
“No sir.”
“No sir.”
“I hope you like caribou pie,” Fraser says, swooping into the kitchen with a frozen caribou pie balanced on each hand.
“Love it,” Ray and Steve say together.
With a long look at Steve, Ray puts his hands in the pockets of his work pants and grins a slightly less sharky grin. “Hey, Captain America. You like beer?”
“Maybe Steve would like to try some bark tea—” Fraser says, like anybody’s ever said yes to bark tea.
Ray bends down so he’s close to Steve’s face again. “Say no to bark tea,” he whispers.
“I can hear you, Ray.”
“Told ya. Super powers.”
As Ray’s pulling two bottles of beer out of the carton on the counter, Fraser’s warm hand falls on the back of his neck, squeezing a question into him.
“I’m good,” Ray answers. “I am good. We’re good.” He squeezes Fraser’s fingers in return before twisting caps and snapping them into the recycle bin by the door.
Steve collects his beer and settles back down on the rug beside Dief’s bed. The wolf squirms around a bit until he can rest his head on Steve’s knee. Leaning on the counter with his bottle dangling from his fingers, Ray listens to Fraser chopping vegetables and watches the old men watching the old mountain fading against the old sky.
A Bag of Fluff and Bones
The forest service road is well-marked, which is good because the landscape looks different from the last time he was here. Although the trees are bare now, there’s an almost subliminal green hovering inside them. The sun is still up, even though Steve’s been driving all day and it should be night by now. As he slows down to skirt a washout, he wonders what it does to a guy, living in the dark for months and then in the light that thins but never quite fades. But he has to stop wondering because the road is rougher than he remembers and, although he can leap from a plane without a parachute, and do all kinds of things with a shield or a knife, he’s not all that good at driving on loose gravel, it turns out. Another washout, this one big enough that he has to ease right into the scrub on the side of the road to get around it.
He would’ve missed the driveway except for the FOR SALE by OWNER sign tacked to a tree. The sign isn’t new and Steve huffs out a little laugh. Not a lot of drive-by interest in a place this far into the bush. And besides, folks don’t really buy houses these days. They just sort of move in. The car’s reactor sings a little as he coasts down the incline and stops well short of the porch. The cabin looks the same. The mountain looks the same, only white with late spring snow on its flanks. But there’s something about the place. Maybe it’s the bare trees and the gloom of the forest leaning in close. He puts on his sweater before he gets out of the car.
He’s behind the open rear door, hiking the duffel bag onto his shoulder, when he hears the bolt being pulled back and looks up over the doorframe into the steady gaze of a double-barreled shotgun. Behind the gun, another steady gaze, the spikes of greying blond hair.
Holding up his hands, Steve steps out from behind the cover of the door. “It’s okay. It’s just me, Steve.”
“I know who it is,” Ray says from the porch. He doesn’t lower the gun. “What I wanna know is what you’re doing here. If you’re looking for something that hasn’t changed, you’re in the wrong place.”
Steve can see that Ray’s wearing the standard RCMP bomber jacket with a fur collar and insignia on the shoulders. There’s a service piece on his hip, but the shotgun makes more of a statement, Steve figures.
“I’m looking for Benton,” Steve says.
“Me too.”
And there it is, the thing that’s different about the place.
Steve nods, pauses to let that piece of reality settle into its place in his head. He’s getting better at getting through this moment, but he’s not getting used to it, watching people navigate around ghosts of the disappeared. The almost-hidden FOR SALE sign makes sense now, the way it signals an intent hovering between staying and going. Steve’s having a hard time with this one, though. More of an archetype than a person, Fraser should have been impervious to the snap, somehow. Steve had actually expected to find that it was Ray who’d gone, since he always seemed on the edge of vibrating into dust at the best of times. He can feel that static around Ray now, but Ray’s aim is steady, as if all his usual jittery energy has ramped up to an unwavering hum.
“I’m sorry,” Steve says, like he’s said hundreds of times, on camera, in church basements, to Nat, to the sky, to the mirror. Like all those times, it’s a piece of Scotch tape laid over a breach below the waterline.
Ray twitches, neither accepting nor rejecting the apology. “You going door-to-door with that? Apology tour?”
Steve smiles and looks past the cabin at the woodshed in the overgrown yard. It looks pretty empty. “No. Yeah.” Huffing out a laugh, he lifts his hands in a shrug. “Maybe.” He takes a step toward the porch and stops when Ray’s attention ticks up another notch. “I was hoping to ask for a favour.”
“Sorry. All out.”
“It’s not for me. I’m going to open my bag, okay?” Making a show of going slow, Steve pulls the zipper on the duffel bag and pushes the fabric open. Two eyes, one ice blue and the other brown, look out. Then, two black ears pop up and, with a bit of squirming around, the puppy pokes her head out, her nose already taking in the new place, the new smells.
The barrel of the shotgun wavers and then lowers.
“Nat brought her back from Russia.” Steve gathers the dog up and keeps her in the crook of his arm. Her sides heave against his as she sniffs the air. “Her name’s Pearson, after the Prime Minis—”
“I know who Pearson was,” Ray says. The familiar prickliness in his voice is a bit of a relief. “I passed my citizenship test.”
“Nat read that he established the Blue Berets.” Steve lets the dog lick his neck before shifting her around to sling her under his other arm. “She needs someone to look after her. Someone who understands her.”
“I don’t speak Russian. Talking to the animals, that’s—that was—Fraser’s thing.”
“I guess I’d better get him back, then.”
A long pause and that hum around Ray is almost loud enough for Steve to hear it. He swears the hair on his arms rises like he’s standing next to a transformer.
Finally, Ray shifts his weight, angling into the idea. His glower sharpens. “How?”
“TBD. But Pearson will need someone to look after her while we make that happen.”
“We who?”
“The ones who are left.”
Another suspended moment while Ray starts moving pieces around in his head, making a little bit of space for hope. His stance eases and he breaks the shotgun barrel and hooks it over his arm. The static seems to discharge and a flock of small, brown birds leaps into the air. Ray flinches, mostly on the inside, but Steve can see some struggle happening there. Pearson watches the birds while they circle and settle again.
“You still like beer?”
“Yep.”
“Good,” Ray says, coming down the steps. “I hope you brought some.”
He takes Pearson from Steve and waits while Steve pulls the case of beer out of the trunk of the car, along with a bag of puppy kibble, various leashes and harnesses, and a stuffed alligator.
“Kibble,” Ray snorts. “You need new parents, Little P. This guy is unfit.” He leads Steve into the cabin and lets Pearson jump down before he ejects the shells, puts the shotgun into its rack behind the door and slings his coat onto the end of the sofa. “I think I got some meatcicles left in the back of the freezer.”
“Mmmm, meatcicles,” Steve says.
Pearson ignores him. She’s too busy sniffing the old dog bed by the front windows. Having read all she can on it, she climbs on, turns three circles, slumps down in a furry donut shape, and is instantly asleep.
“What about you? Hungry?” Ray’s head is deep in the freezer. “I got moose testicle.”
“Mmm, moose testicle,” Steve says without quite as much enthusiasm. “Love me some moose testicle.”
“Good,” Ray says, closing the freezer door with his shoulder. He has a wrapped meatcicle in one hand and a flat box in the other. The shark grin is back. “More pizza for me.”
Three Cords
It takes only a few minutes to unload the three cords of wood from the back of Gary’s truck, thanks to the supersoldier assist, plus some extra time because Little Pearson’s assistance is less assistful. Ray pitches in but mostly just tries to dodge the barrage of birch rounds. This is good stuff. Birch burns hot and sweet. It also makes a shit-ton of work. Thanks again, Captain America, for ruining Ray’s plan to just let the wood supply dwindle until the cabin frosted over with Ray in it. But there’s Little P, now. With Ray’s luck, she’d take him for a meatcicle.
The day’s one of those low days, when the cloud cover sits right on the crowns of the trees and the mountain goes incognito. The bugs will be arriving soon—cloudy means buggy—but it’s still early in the season yet. By the time Gary heads back up the driveway, one brown elbow out the window as always, the ankles of Ray’s workpants are soaked with dew and he’s already sweating.
Captain America, looking older and wearier around the eyes than the last time Ray saw him, doesn’t sweat at all. He at least has the class not to rip the rounds in half with his bare hands this time and swings the maul in a smooth arc, waiting between strikes for Ray to deke in and grab the splits. Ray’s doing the log pile like Fraser showed him, one layer facing north-south, the next east-west, to keep the wood dry. Little P stages the occasional heist and is over in the long grass in the hem of the forest chewing a split into slivers. On another day, Ray would find the rhythm of it soothing, something to smooth the spikes and valleys in his brain. Today is not that day. Today, he’s all spikes.
The woodpile is higher than his knees now, and he’s standing in the alley between the row against the wall and the one closing up the open side of the shed. It’s like a bunker. Without thinking about it much, he’s picked out lines of fire, cover.
“I’m coming with you,” he says. “To get Fraser back.”
There’s a thock of the maul into wood, the muted thumps of the splits hitting the grass, and then silence.
“I got more than 25 years on the force. I spent five straight undercover. Thugs, syndicates, my own friggin’ department. My first week on my beat here.” Ray waves a hand at the forest and all the people squirreled away in the crannies of the old mountains. “First week, I get a call from a guy has a grizzly in his living room. Five days on the job I’m in a guy’s living room facing a bear.”
“Did you kill it?”
Ray aims a glare at Steve, who is standing with the maul hanging from one hand, a round of birch against his hip. “Kill it? No. No. No, I—We came to an agreement. Point is, I’m not some innocent civvie—”
Steve’s shaking his head and every “listen, son” degree of that movement adds another spike to Ray’s brain. Ray focuses on the forest, on the greendark of it, imagines snipers, ambushes, feels the muscles in his back and his neck winding up, winding up, winding up.
“Ray—”
“Shut up.”
“You can’t—”
“The hell I can’t. Shut your mouth. I swear, I’m gonna—”
“This isn’t your fight. It’s ours. Let us do our—”
Ray stops looking at the forest and, head down like a bull, turns on Steve and says, low and hard like the words are a fist. “He’s my husband.”
Steve’s shoulders slope a little and he gusts out a breath that makes him a little hollow in the gut, behind the abs.
“I quit Chicago. I quit the CPD and I came here and I got citizenship and I married him. I married him and he’s a freak and I wanted to strangle him five days out of seven but he’s inside me, like a… like a vital organ.” Ray opens his hands and looks down at himself, at his chest, his mostly ab-less stomach. “And I know that my story ain’t special—there’s four billion people out there walking around with the same sucking chest wound—but you didn’t come to their houses. You came to mine. You came to my house and told me you are gonna get him back, and if you think I’m gonna sit here on my ass in the bush, if you try to make me, I will knock your enhanced head off of your enhanced shoulders, super serum or not, so—”
“Where was he?”
The question stops Ray’s headlong verbal charge like he’s hit a picture of a tunnel painted on a cliff wall that he thought is a real tunnel going through a cliff wall. “What? Who? What?”
“Fraser. Benton. At the snap. Where was he?”
It’s not a tunnel or a painting of a tunnel. It’s a hole. Ray takes a step back, like that ever helped, like that has ever made a difference. He slides into the hole, skree and flailing. He points. He points at the big fir round that is the chopping block at Steve’s feet. “He was there,” he says. His mouth is full of debris, his throat is full of dirt and debris, choking him, and wants to brace his hands on his knees and puke but he doesn’t. He doesn’t. He points. “He was right there where you’re standing. Splitting rounds.”
Ray was in the cabin, at the window. He was standing on Dief’s old bed that Ray’d dragged out of the crawlspace because Gary found a litter way up and gone round the mountain, all tied up in a garbage bag, and there was one of them, a scrawny one, a runt, and Ray’d put on the kettle for tea so that he could sit Fraser down and tell him about the litter and the runt and he was watching Fraser swinging the maul and the maul getting stuck in a round of birch and Fraser straightening and looking at him there in the window, and, at first, Ray thought there were birds, that there were bird-shadows, like a flock of them heading across the sky in front of the sun and that Fraser was in the bird-shadows but it wasn’t birds. It wasn’t birds. And he spent three years of RCMP-mandated therapy, sitting in an office with 1970’s wood paneling on the walls like a basement rec room, refusing to talk and finally talking about how he gets spooked—“triggered” the shrink says—spooked by birds, by fucking birds. It was three years until he could figure out how to retell that moment to himself, so that he could see birds and tell himself and believe it, at least some of the time, that every flock of birds wasn’t erasing somebody, wasn’t erasing the world.
“He looked right at me,” Ray says. ‘He knew.”
And Ray tried to go out through the sliding door but it was stuck and he thought it was locked so he locked it trying to unlock it and couldn’t figure it out in his panic and so he went out the back and launched himself off the porch and ran on his sprained ankle around the cabin to the woodshed.
“By the time I got there—here—there wasn’t even ash.”
Steve nods and, if he says sorry again, Ray is going to kill him. Ray is going to kill him all the way to deceased.
But Steve decides to save his own life and says, instead, “Chances are, if this plan—”
“TBD.”
“—if whatever the plan we come up with works, Fraser’s going to come back here.” Steve puts the birch round on the block, leans the maul up against it.
“When? When?” Ray can feel the wires inside him winding tight again. There’s a low hum somewhere, maybe inside his head, maybe not. “You give me an ETA and I’m on it, I’m here. But I been staring at this woodshed for five years, and I got a job, I got a beat. People didn’t stop doing dumb, dangerous, nefarious shit just because half of them disappeared.”
“Exactly.”
Ray stares at Steve.
Steve looks at Ray, smiling that sad smile when Ray gets it, gets that he’s just argued himself into Steve’s corner.
Ray kicks over stacked firewood. He kicks over more stacked wood and he keeps kicking over wood until the low palisade is demolished and lying scattered in the grass he never mows, and the humming is louder and the wires are tighter, so he grabs the row of firewood against the woodshed wall and heaves and topples it and then he picks up a split in each hand and hurls them at the greendark and the invisible mountain and the clouds and the hum and the birds, the fucking birds, and Little P jumps up and pounces on the splits and worries them into submission while Ray paces from one end of the woodshed to the other, his hands clenched in his hair, tripping himself up on fallen wood, and he goes back and forth and back and forth until finally he stands panting with this head down and his hands on his hips and says, dully, “Fuck you, Steve Rogers.”
Steve lets that one settle a minute before he says, “People here are going to be scared and confused. They’re going to need someone like you with a good heart and a level head.”
The chuckle sort of falls out of Ray like rocks through a hole in his pocket. “Now I now you’re blowing smoke. I have never in all my existence on this earth been described as level-headed.”
And Ray wonders what kind of superhuman strength it takes for someone to keep looking at all the rubble and the tangle, to stand there looking at the rubble of Ray and the tangle that is Ray and still find that smile that curls up one side of Steve’s mouth and makes Steve’s eyes soft and unblind, unblind and open like the lake on the other side of the screen of aspen and fir. Ray knows that this whatever-it-is that makes Steve keep wading into the hurt of things is what that doc in the war, whatsisname, Erskine, saw. That’s what he was trying to bottle.
The wire is loosening and Ray feels tired, like the wire was all that was holding him up all this time, since forever, before Fraser and after Fraser, but the hum is still there, louder.
“It’s a mad world,” Steve says, like that explains everything, which it does, in a way.
Twitching his head, Ray surprises himself by grinning. “If that makes me the new baseline for normal, this world is doomed.”
“No,” Steve says. “Not yet.” He turns and looks up at the clouds. “This is my ride.”
The hum has congealed into a jet kind of helicopter thing that is bulging through the overcast. The jeticoptor, helijet, whatever, hovers for a few seconds, whipping the trees around and sending Little P on a bee-line for the woodshed where she can observe from behind Ray’s legs. Then the ship settles on the grass against the forest. After a moment, the back hatch whines open.
Steve holds out his hand and Ray takes it. Ray considers making a run for the jeticoptor and digging into the mission like a tick but Little P is poking her head between his knees and he can feel her vibrating, scared and out of her depth, so he doesn’t.
“Tell Benton I said hi,” Steve says.
“Tell him yourself,” Ray says. “But bring better beer next time. This is Canada. We got standards.”
A quick ruffle of Little P’s ears and Captain America jogs toward the aircraft.
“Hey! What about your car?” Ray shouts after him.
“Keep it! Sell it. It’s a Stark original,” Steve shouts back.
The jeticopter is already lifting off, so he has to jump for the ramp. It closes after him and Ray and Little P are alone.
Ray spends the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon restacking the firewood until his back is cranked and the spikes in his brain are mostly worn smooth. Then he leads Little P up the driveway and tears the FOR SALE sign off the tree.
Before That It Was Summer
The swing of the maul is a kind of grace, where muscles and math and all the weak and strong forces of the universe harmonize in a smooth transfer of energies, potential, kinetic, the pull of the earth, the firing of neurons, the sun’s light transformed through iteration after iteration from waves in space to leaf to body to the arc to the wood through the wood to the earth. Fraser loves splitting firewood. He shifts his weight onto his back foot, lets the heavy head of the maul begin the downward journey, gather the momentum that his arms and his shoulders then ride up along the smooth circumference of the invisible circle, up to the top of the arc that lifts him to the balls of his feet and then down again into the crown of the birch round. He hits a knot, the maul sticks, and the energy rebounds up through the bones of his arms to his shoulders. He pictures it shooting out through his back like the startled unfurling of wings.
The day is hot and blue and desaturated by the perpetual sun that is a white disc poised at the crest of the mountain. Here, in the narrow bit of shade in front of the woodshed, the mosquitos have taken shelter. When he’s working he hardly notices them, but they cloud around him if he pauses. They buzz lazily around his mouth and his nose and hum into his ears but they’re not biting, just musing aloud about small things, so he doesn’t bat them away.
He straightens, letting the rattle rattle free of him, stretching his back. He’s almost done. They’ll be set for the winter for firewood. Ray’s disappeared somewhere and the split logs are piled haphazardly in the grass waiting to be moved into the shed. Another day, then. The summer is short but the days are long.
Fraser looks across the lawn that is late-summer green, the kind of green that is golden inside, and finds Ray among the tree reflections in the cabin window, highlights where his cheek and brow catch the light, the angular shadow of his body enclosing his tense energy that makes stillness a prelude, always, to motion. Ray looks like some kind of genius loci or faun, emerging or retreating into the greendark of the forest. It’s beautiful. Ray is beautiful, Fraser thinks, as the undoing undoes him.
The cold
The cold coalesces
The cold coalesces between his cells
Molecular
He is (re)made
cold
Fraser’s breath rushes out of him as a cloud, condenses and hangs in the air in front of his face.
Vertigo.
He reaches to steady himself on the maul handle stuck in the birch round and lurches into the space where the maul isn’t. Another breath. A cough, a hacking cough that tastes of ash and dust and dry fir needles, like the hollow under a fallen tree, like late-summer grass, like, like… like…. There is no word for the taste of the air that escapes him. Something touches his face, a cold pinprick, another, another another another another. He tips his head back, opens his eyes to the blank grey sky and closes them to the sleet that falls on his eyelids and his cheeks and his lips. The cold seeps out of him and into him. He shivers. The mosquitos are silent. The forest is silent except for the wind bowing an ancient song from the leaning trunks of fir and bare aspen. A dog barks.
He straightens his neck and looks at the woodshed, the neat rows of split birch, interlayered east-west, north-south. He looks at the scum of frozen rain greying the brown grass at his feet. He looks for the sun, but it is gone from the crest of the mountain and the sky is the colour of granite and the wind is northcold, wintercold. He looks inside his head and there is a space the colour of granite and the colour of… the colour of…. He shivers again.
The tree shadows lean on the darkened cabin windows between the slate sky and the mirrored white of the new almost-snow.
A light comes on, in the kitchen, the one over the sink.
Ray.
Fraser’s legs are his legs but they feel new and he slips and slithers on the frozen grass as he runs toward the cabin. He’s in a hurry. The winter is long and the days are short. Hurry, hurry. Oh dear. Where has the time gone?
Where has the time gone?
When he rounds the corner onto the gravel of the driveway, he hits the front fender of the car parked there. He slams into it hard and bounces back onto the wet, freezing grass. Whose car is this? The insignia over the wheel well says, “Stark.” The car’s windows are glazed with freezing rain and the sill where the wipers sit is full of aspen leaves and fir needles like it’s been sitting a long time. Beyond it, the pickup truck is ticking away the heat in the cooling engine.
A dog is barking, urgent, in alarm. Intruders.
He clambers to his feet, looks up the driveway and back the way he’s come and sees no one. On the back of his neck, the hair prickles, hackles rising. He turns his back on the cabin and wills his pupils wider to see into the deepening greendark. There’s no one there. Who is barking? At whom?
The sound of the screen door cracking back against the wall of the cabin startles him and he slips on the slick gravel as he turns, goes down on his knee so he’s almost eye-to-mismatched-eyes with the young husky who is crouched low and growling at the foot of the steps. He’s startled again when Ray, one arm in his coat, boots unlaced, careens out the door and collides with the porch railing and then half-runs, half-falls down the stairs. Ray skids on the frozen gravel and crashes down and knocks Fraser back and catches him in the same motion, arms drowning-man-strangle-tight around Fraser’s neck, stubbled cheek pressed against his, and Ray is saying, “Jesus, Jesus fuck, Jesus fuck Fraser” fast and breathless against his skin.
And then Ray is sobbing, ugly and jagged, with his head ducked and pressed hard against the front of Fraser’s shoulder and they’re sitting there tangled together on the ground as the sleet needles them and the dog, this strange dog, paws at Ray’s back and pushes her nose between him and Fraser, jealous and anxious. Fraser holds Ray and rocks them both and he doesn’t know what has happened, or where the sun went or who this new little dog person is. He knows only that Ray is here now, and before that there was a space he has no word for and that has no words in it, and before that it was summer.
Postcard from the Edge
“Who’s Bucky Barnes again?” Ray asks, angling the paper into the firelight and squinting at the hand-written note.
Fraser glances up from his dad’s journal and narrows his eyes, flipping through the card catalogue in his head. “He was the Winter Soldier, I believe. I don’t know what he calls himself now.”
“Why is he writing to us?” Fraser’s already disappeared into the Canadian tundra on the trail of a nefarious poacher and doesn’t answer, so Ray wiggles his toes under Fraser’s thigh. “Fraser.”
“I wrote the remaining Avengers a letter to thank them for their efforts in returning us,” he says.
“Fan mail. You slay me, Fraser. I am married to a freak. You probably wrote it on paper.” Ray imagines the mail carrier walking up to the crater that used to be the Avengers compound.
“It is the polite thing to do.”
“You’re a caveman.”
“I’m not sure cavemen—well, now that I think about it, I suppose there is a chance that petroglyphs are a species of correspondence—”
“You’re a species. Of what I do not know.”
“Hmm,” Fraser says, half-gone to the tundra, but then lifts his eyes again to peruse some dusty head-tome. “Genus, homo. Species, sapiens. What does he say?”
“Who?” Ray’s still thinking about caveman mail carriers.
“Mr. Barnes.”
“Oh, he says thanks for your note and that Steve Rogers is unavailable, which means, I guess, that he’s been kidnapped by space aliens. So much for getting some good beer outta the guy. I’m selling that car.”
“I’m sure it’s quite collectible.”
“He said keep it or sell it. I’m selling it. We can retire on it.”
“Understood.”
“Understood.”
Ray’s got paperwork spread out on his lap, case files mixed in with the endless forms related to making an undisappeared person into a regular person again. He doesn’t bother telling Fraser that the government’s been depositing death benefits from Fraser’s Canada Pension Plan into their joint account for three years and now the bean-counters want it back. He never spent any of it on principle, and good riddance so far as he’s concerned. It’s ghost money.
They sit together, Fraser reading and Ray watching the firelight pushing the shadows around the room. The darkness settles into the hollows of Fraser’s eyes, under his jaw, and suddenly Ray is gone from the living room, lost in the drift of ash and the shadows of birds. Because sensing Ray’s panic is one of his super powers, Fraser grips Ray’s ankle and draws soothing circles on the top of his foot with his thumb until Ray presses the heels of his hands into his eyeballs and says, “I’m okay. I’m good. It’s all good.”
He knows that Fraser’s looking at him with that guilt and compassion and tenderness, and that combination is sure-fire gonna crack Ray open right down his sternum, so he wipes his stupid tears off of his stupid face with his stupid hands and gets up off the couch, letting all the papers slide off and flutter across the braided rug. He does some tight laps across the living room and back, repeating, “I’m okay. I’m good,” while Fraser on the couch and Little P on her bed follow him with their eyes. On circuit number five Fraser blocks his path.
“Are you?” Fraser asks.
“I’m good. I said I’m good. It’s all—”
“Greatness.”
“—greatness.”
Fraser’s five years younger than Ray now. Ray peers at his face in the shifting light of the fire—not floating ash, not birds—and wonders if Fraser would even notice five years on Ray’s face if they’d lived them together, if they’d grown into them together, and that line of questioning makes his chest hurt again for reasons that are too slippery to get a grip on, so he slumps forward lets Fraser hold him together until Fraser’s steady heartbeat steadies Ray’s too.
“You’re standing on my mug shots,” Ray says into Fraser’s neck.
“My apologies,” Fraser says into Ray’s neck.
They stand there, leaning on each other, until the sound of tearing paper forces Ray to chase Little P into the kitchen to retrieve the envelope with Bucky Barnes’ polite if somewhat cryptic letter in it. He comes back to the firelight with the soggy envelope and hands it to Fraser.
“Missed something.”
Fraser pulls out an old photograph, pocked now with tiny holes from Little P’s teeth. The Post-it note stuck to the back reads: “Steve says Hi.” Fraser frowns, flips the photo over and raises his eyebrows. “It’s my father,” he says. He turns the photo so that Ray can see it.
In the picture, there’s a Quonset building backed up against a river, and, on the other side of the water, the sloping low mountains Ray recognizes from his trips into Whitehorse. In the foreground, two men are leaning against a car, late-50s Ray figures by the looks of the silhouette, and it has the white doors and the RCMP crest, so he pegs it at 1954 at the earliest. The men are laughing. The one in the flat Stetson and a bulky parka, pointing at something outside the frame, is Fraser Sr. The other, the one in shirt sleeves who is looking right at the camera from under blond hair ruffled by the wind, is Steve Rogers.
“And Captain America,” Fraser adds.
Ray shakes his head. “Can’t be. Steve was in the ice in the 50’s.”
“Thanks for the assist, Captain,” Fraser reads from the back of the photo. “It’s dad’s handwriting.”
“He looks happy,” Ray says. “Steve, I mean.”
“He does.”
Fraser hands Ray the envelope and the photo and heads down into the basement. A few minutes later, he’s back with a file box labeled “1950-59.” He clears a space on the floor and starts unpacking Fraser Sr.’s leather-bound journals.
They lean back against the couch with their legs under the coffee table and their socks pointing toward the fire and spend the rest of the night searching for the lost adventures of Steve Rogers.
Outside, the snow falls silently and the old mountain tells no tales.
The end