I waved a hand. “Don’t much matter to me, and it ain’t my business. They love each other, they’re happy, and that’s all that really matters.” I pressed my hand as gently as I knew how against the small of her back. “Come on. Bast may look like a scary-ass mo-fo, but he’s nice as anything.”
She arched her back just slightly; enough to relate to me the fact that she didn’t want me touching her. So, I withdrew my hand and headed for the bar. We took seats near the service bar, where close friends and family tended to hang out.
Bast saw me, dropped off the four beers he’d pulled on the service bar, and extended a closed fist to me. “Ink, how’s it goin’, big guy?”
I tapped his fist with mine. “All right. You?”
Bast nodded. “Can’t complain. Wife is down on the mainland with her dad for the weekend, so I’m batchin’ it.” He glanced at my companion. “You resemble someone I know. Related to Liv Goode, by any chance?”
She nodded. “She’s my mom.”
Bast took a thick stack of cocktail napkins, laid the stack flat on his open palm, and twisted his knuckles into them to spin them into a fan. “You could be her, except for the blonde hair.” He stuck out his hand. “You can call me Bast.”
“I’m Cassie,” she said. “And the resemblance is in the eyes and the jawline.”
Bast just nodded, and eyed us, one and then the other. “Well, pleased to meet you. What can I get you?”
I looked to Cassie, who eyed the line of tap handles. “A light beer,” she said. “Light, but good.”
Bast nodded, glanced at me. “For you, Ink?”
I shrugged—I wasn’t much of drinker, but the situation seemed to call for a beer or two. “Surprise me, long as it ain’t that black shit you could stand a fork up in.”
Bast laughed. “Guinness is amazing. You just gotta drink a whole pint to really get the flavor.”
Within a minute, we both had pints of beer in front of us, and Cassie was eying the single-page laminated menu. “I’ll have…the entire appetizer section.”
Bast blinked. “Really?” When Cassie just stared at him silently, Bast shrugged. “Okay.” A glance at me. “The usual?”
I nodded. “Sounds good. Thanks.”
A few moments of silence ensued as Bast left to ring in our orders, during which time Cassie focused entirely on her beer, ignoring me completely.
“You’re judging me,” she finally said, without looking at me.
I sipped my beer—Bast had brought me something red and malty and rich. “Nope.”
“I just ordered the entire appetizer section.”
I took another sip, and then wiped the foam off my mustache with the back of my hand. “Must be hungry, is all.”
She eyed me, then. Her eyes were hazel—put gray, brown, and green on a Venn diagram and her eye color would be where the circles met. “Yeah, that’s it. I’m just hungry.” She tossed back her beer, finishing the pint in a startlingly short time.
I laughed. “If I was gonna judge you, it’d be for how fast you just downed that beer. But, you did tell me at the outset that you plan on getting blackout.” I figured I’d help her out, finishing mine just as fast. “There. Now we’re even.”
She just fixed those hazel eyes on me with unwavering intensity. “You don’t have to keep up, you know. Or babysit me. I can hold my own.”
I swirled the last bit of red beer and creamy foam around the bottom of the glass. “Cassie, darlin’, look at me. I can drink an almighty, unholy amount of liquor. Between my size and a freak accident of genetics, it’s damned near impossible for me to drink enough to get more’n nicely buzzed.”
“You are a freak accident of genetics,” she muttered.
I nodded. “True enough. But my tolerance is bananas, even for a guy my size.”
“What’s that look like? How much would you have to drink to get blackout?”
I bobbed my head to one side, running my fingers down through my beard. “This one time, me, Fox, Andrew, and Royal were out in the deep bush, hunting moose.”
“Clearly I know none of these people, but no matter. Carry on.”
“Just friends of mine. Fox is the only one you may ever see in town, though. Andrew and Royal stay as far from cities as they can get. Anyway. We were way the hell out there, couple days’ hike from where we’d left Royal’s floatplane, which was the only way you could even get close to where we were. Far as fuck from any damned thing. Course, Andrew bein’ Andrew, had packed a whole damn crate of booze with him. We’d hike out from the plane, which we were using as our base camp. We’d hunt and hike and camp, come back to base camp to resupply, drop off our kills, and then head back out.”
“How many moose did you kill?”
I laughed. “Well, you go out for moose, come back with deer, rabbits, turkeys, grouse, whatever.”
“Isn’t there some sort of law about what you can hunt and when?” Cassie asked. “I mean, I know literally nothing about hunting, but I just have that impression.”
“We’re all indigenous, and Fox, Royal and Andrew all have subsistence hunting licenses.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Well, you gotta know what subsistence means, yeah?”
Cassie nodded. “Sure.”
“There’s still rules and regulations to it, but basically it exempts us from those wider regulations about hunting, provided we are only hunting to provide for our families, which this was, by the way.”
“Hunting for survival, rather than mere sport.”
“Yep. Fox is a trapper by trade, and Andrew and Royal both hunt as their primary means of providing food for their wives and kids. I was just along for fun, although I do keep my license up to date.”
“When does this answer my question about you drinking?”
Bast came by and refilled our beers.
“Gettin’ there,” I said. “We’d been out there for about a week by this time, and we’d only indulged a little bit around the fire, but I’d heard a telltale clinking and rattling coming from Andrew’s bags, and I knew he was packing something with him, just biding his time to break it out.”
I paused to remember.
“Well, one night, we’d gone the whole damn day without seein’ a single animal worth shooting, and we was all frustrated. So Andrew says, ‘boys, I think it’s time we test the upper limits of Ink’s tolerance for booze.’”
Cassie grinned. “Oh boy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Especially if you take into consideration that Andrew is famous, or maybe it’s better said he’s infamous—for his moonshine.”
“Homemade moonshine?”
I nodded. “Ohhh yeah. The most potent white lightning you’ll ever taste. It’ll sear the taste buds right off your tongue. I’ve seen grown men, hard-drinking boozers at that, get hammered off a handful of shots of Andrew’s shine.” I sighed. “Now, don’t go repeating this, since it ain’t exactly a legal operation, mind you.”
“Can’t moonshine make you go blind?”