They smiled self-consciously the decision away. The main thing to do now was to get all food items back into the boat—minus the Michelobs, of course—and keep the fire burning. “You got any night-time routines?”
~5~
~6~
~7~
Harriet glanced around. Vernon would not likely swoop in like a caped crusader—not for causes Vietnam, let alone the stalemates of childhood. “He’s… around.”
“Is he mad at me?”
“Who was that lady?”
“And she isn’t here, either.”
“Then why are you in this chair?”
“Jeremy went out to check, ’bout ten minutes ago. I’m actually looking at storm data right now.”
The heart is anyone’s most resilient muscle, as compared to those that ‘lift oneself’ by some mythic bootstraps, idiom that blushes and pales as Americana decades unfold. Peyton had never been strapped to anything—not on his body, not in a hospital, not at a court of law. His boots were merely functional and never something he’d associate with perseverance, pride, a human side.
His heart was strung to some Christine, and that’s the hill he’d die on, if only the rest of life would let him be.
Harriet had propped up his head and sponged out the puddles in the boat. The sun was working hard to the dispel the lagging post-storm cumulus, and fabric was drying fast. “You okay by yourself for five minutes, Pey? If so, I’m gonna root out Vernon.”
From his hip, a thumbs-up. A muted part of his brain would have him try to get up, shake off this embarrassment, join their common rescue of themselves. He was utterly exhausted, though, and sunk into the cushion and resorted to a memory always on replay.
“Vern!” Harriet called a second time from forty yards or so, through the untrailed evergreens. He tilted his head yet didn’t look her way. “You see somethin’ out there, or what?”
He kept his gaze southwest as if he didn’t want to lose a certain landmark. When Harriet had come within a quieter range, he turned to her to offer more reception, but didn’t have a ready thing to say. “It’s, ahh…, well,”
“It’s not Isle Royale, just guessin’.”
“No, not this,” Vern smiled, “nor even that,” pointing directly across the sound, “or that”—an islet to the left—“or that or that,” further south. “But my gut says the separation channels are narrower than this. We could get to the mainland by noon, the way we’ve been paddling.”
“Is it swimmable, you think?”
“For you or me? No, that’s not such a good idea. No offense—”
“None taken. There’s bound to be some undertow. Just tryin’ to imagine how one of us could go for help; the main island’s got to have trails back to Windigo, where they’d send a boat—or even a helicopter.”
“Yeah, I suppose that could happen.”
Harriet cocked her head a little bit. “Well, what d’you want to have happen?”
Vernon dropped his eyes and messaged his left palm with his right thumb. “I don’ know, other than the obvious.”
“Which is what? I’m not sure I know what ‘obvious’ means here.”
“Practically,” tracing toward his wrist, “it means Peyton getting the help he needs.”
“Uh, yeah. That’s like, the whole she-bang.”
“Philosophically,” tracing more toward each finger, “it means us dealing with the definites as they apply to the unknowns.”
Harriet didn’t want to smirk at that, but involuntarily did. “You’re scaring me, Backwoodsman—or Captain Ahab, as recent days have shown ya.”
Both took in the risks of epithets, and each sought the other’s retinas. Speaking does so much, and decades of doing so (or doing the opposite) sift the main from the mist like those flour sieves that loved to convert a trigger grip to rotary result, making soft the raw-milled grain. Anyone who’d made bread before the 1980s would fist-bump with this aluminum marvel. Nostalgia aside, let alone rehashes of suspect archetypes, the two friends of Peyton wanted to do well for him, of course, and not have to plan otherwise.
Peyton was technically having palpitations instead of a new case of cardiac arrest, though nothing would matter in the fiberglass shell of his speedboat, casket without its trickle of oil. His vision was up—how could it be otherwise?—and the cumulonimbus fluffed his sense that dying or not was not a major concern at this moment, lovely leeway such a passing left him.
‘Physician heal thyself’ is all that trickled to his brain. “It’s your own speedboat after all!” the nether cloud announced, mockery he’d always have at hand inside his head. “Of course it’s mine,” he said out loud, “and by mine I mean the—“ and here he didn’t have a single thing in mind.
“Y’know, Harriet,” the Wart tried out, “I’ve always fantasized this scenario.”
He knew ten seconds would have to wait, and a dozen came more naturally, and then a dozen more before she would respond to that, to whit: “the fantasy is not so interesting. We all could do that for a living.”
They walked back toward the speedboat, slowly and at imagined oar’s length. In each mind was the wonder of this moment, the Möbius strip that made it. She suddenly wanted to ask him about the loons at Greenwood Lake, and where they’d likely winter when the open water iced over. ‘That’s a Holden Caulfield question’, he’d say, and almost hearing that, she’d affirm, ‘that’s why I thought of it, but also…’. Also never came. Unconsciously, they walked as slowly as wouldn’t be so noticeable, as if they had an audience of moralists.
Vernon decided to give the pleasant silence some voice. “So Peyton’s, um, in okay spirits?”
“Yeah, y’know… all things considered.” She took a moment before considering to add, “my favorite radio show, by the way.” She surveyed the peeking sky through the pine canopy. “NPR—wonder if those waves would come out this far.”
“I s’pose they would. Boaters gotta have their news and talk shows.”
“You listen to ’em, too?”
“Not everyday. Have to turn the world off sometimes. I’m kinda more a Lake Woebegone fan, anyway.”
“You know where Garrison got his inspiration, for ‘Prairie Home’, at least?”
“God?”
Harriet tittered at that. “Maybe. God has lots to do with everything. But traceably, at least, there’s a ‘Prairie Home Cemetery’ in Moorhead…”
“’s that so?”
“Got my Aunt Bibi buried there.”
“Bibi?”
“Short for Beatrice, a name she never liked.”
“Why not? It’s angelic.”
“She maybe wasn’t all that. Good person, though.”
Vernon nodded, choosing to say nothing about the associative property.
~19~
Sans ranger hat, Deborah strided the path north of the Interpretive Center to speed up the need for the last twenty-four hours to be forgotten, erased, washed away with the storm. The flagstones encouraged hikers to start certain trails, if muddy rocks and roots would meet them in a hundred yards or so. Deborah had good boots for any kind of trekking and was quite used to slick stretches. Nonetheless, a couple minutes into the woods, she lost her footing and landed hard on her tailbone. She looked up to a Uranian sky, feeling that loneliness more than a backside pain. No one will see me for a while, she calculated, no one will go looking for me, or stumble upon. She willed herself to sleep.
Nap, more like it, done with no discernable difference in the sky. No dream woke her, let alone a lover asking how she slept. Sometimes she invented that and stretched an answer: oh, y’know—like a baby, Baby—you tell me! And then she’d imagine dribs and drabs of banter and a playful kiss, perhaps a foot massage. And that would do it for a day.
She lay for a minute more until remembering she needed to pee, wondering if that had unconsciously happened to rub in the humility. She elbowed her body half-way to check, then rolled to her stomach to lever her knees to get up, go off the slippery path, pull down her pants like a human to let nature call, as if the earth craved our sewage.
On the mainland, Jinny watched her kids sleep like the truer babies they still were. By instinct on a workday, she couldn’t slumber past a certain pierce of the morning sun; she slithered to the loft’s safety fence and considered what she’d do next. Call in sick, for one—that should’ve happened an hour ago, to give the secretary time to find a sub.
While she had her phone right next to her—Harriet’s, too, for comfort or clues—Jinny went downstairs to dial her school. She coughed a few times to adopt a theatrical rasp: “hi Fern,.. yeah, it’s Jinny… Well, not the best—thought a gargle of hot lemon would do it, but,... No, I’m still… north. Don’t think I can make it in today. Tomorrow? Um… yeah, thanks, if someone’s available for both days… If not, Fern, I can, y’know… Oh, thanks—you’re an angel. Sorry again for— Ok, I’ll get right back to bed. Thanks, Fern.”
The red button on the phone pressed in the guilt. What if her mom was found dead somewhere, and the funeral would be Monday? Would she call in with the same stupid rasp? Yeah, you’re an angel, Fern, just one I’d rather lie to. No, today’s the truth, Thursday’s was deceit. Might as well keep that sub for the long haul—I don’t got the mettle. She wondered how she’d spell that in a text, so much easier to spill honesty in a hundred-some characters, then green button the thing off your own screen. She’d toy with that, maybe, texting her mom’s phone to see what it’d look like, received.
A rap on the curtained window of the door startled her. She shot a glance to the loft in fear of more Flat Stanley trauma, then tip-toed to see whose figure this might be. Not the ranger’s, by the slighter frame, or her mother’s, taller by half-a-head. Not Peyton’s, who slumped more than this apparent man. “Who is it?” she semi-whispered.
“Eddie. Officer from last night.”
Eddie. So that’s who copped a high school smoke. Turned him into a cop. “What do you want?” Jinny winced at how that must have sounded—“I mean, did you find anything out?” She slid the little curtain to see him, soft-eyed and stoic.
He shook his head almost indiscernibly. “Wanted to see how you’re doing,” pursing his lips before adding, “if that’s okay.”
The paths on Isle Royale were equally adept at clarifying one’s direction and imagining abandon, where no set goal was needed and—heart of hearts—a body couldn’t really get so lost, a view of water never farther than an hour this way or that, if still the axis stretched into a fair oblivion. Deborah landed this position because she was so good at reconnoitering; Gary, training her from Houghton, told her so: “Deb, you’ll do good doin’ just the way you’re doin’—lettin’ paths just come to you and noting why they did.” He wasn’t flattering or (God forbid) flirting with this new recruit. She was ready to ranger, and he was eager to have exactly that on Isle Royale, ideal for those who didn’t mind a modicum of exile.
And as she walked, relieved of some embarrassment and knowing more would shadow in the years and hours to come, she walked into a semblance of plan: she’d motorboat to where the damn thing started anyway—no one would call foul on that—and reconstruct the wolves, the relocation, the registration of one Peyton Elsruud and his blushing kinda bride, Christine, whose daughter would be proud of what this rangering might do: ‘let those paths just come to you’, and yes, the rest should follow.
Jeremy or Heidi in the mix? That would be a gambit. Maybe Heidi, as she saw Deb discombobulated and the reason would be—yes, the reason would be… that—that skirting all of Isle Royale to seek a lost sheep, let alone a pair, would take a toll on anyone, and what else should a ranger be than take that toll upon herself, obsess as Jesus’ parable suggests and find the wayward sheep. Heidi, with her pretty pug nose would agree. Jeremy? Well, he’d feel something, having searched Grace Island once again. And maybe they were there, sleeping safe and sound. Crisis lifted, maybe, and everyone would go back to her post, recording eco-data and whatever else the island would require, from human purview, anyhow.
~20~
“How come you’re out of uniform,” Jinny spoke softly, as Eddie had come in and, at her behest, taken Archie’s chair. She had thought about waking the kids to prevent redux nightmares, but figured the daylight would view this visitor more kindly.
“Off duty. Technically can’t wear a uniform.”
“Hmm. So… is this like a little high school reunion?”
Eddie faked a small smile, hurt that an effort to flirt years ago was all he had to show for a memory. “You didn’t ever really talk with me then, a class below—I mean, not like you were stuck up, but—”
“I get it. I was a junior and you were a sophomore at a party for legal people.”
“Legal people? Drinkin’ age has been twenty-one since we were both babies.”
“But other things, too. Well, you know it, being a law enforcer an’ all.”
“That came by accident. Ran outta military tours. Had to have something to do.” He stared out to the sunburst lake, and added in Jinny’s silence, “to keep me straight an’ narrow.”
She got up to boil some water. “Green tea ok? I’m kinda coffeed out.”
“Yeah, sounds perfect. If I can ask, were you able to get any sleep?”
Don’t cry. Don’t say anything about Flat
Stanley or that ranger butch or—“maybe I’m sleepwalkin’ right now.”
“An’ sleep talking, too?”
“Maybe.”
Eddie left questions at that. He hadn’t a strategy here, or didn’t want one. The drive from Grand Marais was just over a half hour, not much time to think, let alone craft an agenda. He’d be back on duty tonight, and filling day hours in such a small town was nothing he wanted to think too much about. His better friends were in Two Harbors, or further down the road Duluth; Grand Marais was the only place hiring during the recession—mostly for a modest house the precinct could lease him for practically free. The Minnesota Rust Belt had been going ramshackle for decades now, and while property taxes were still so high, rent and mortgages had to encourage folks to stay. Eddie didn’t say any of this to Jinny, pouring tea and finding Fig Newtons not yet opened. She’d know, though, most of what he’d be thinking on a Thursday in Grand Marais. “How ’bout them Vikes. Got some promise there in Cousins.”
“Which cousins you mean?”
“Kirk.”
“I know—was just testing you.” She tossed him the Fig Newtons and brought over the mugs of tea, then sat in the Edith chair. She glanced up to the loft then looked into Eddie’s eyes a dozen seconds before mouthing, ‘Can you help me find Mom?’
He blinked—nothing Morse Code—and jutted his chin as a kind of nod.
She closed her eyes, feeling that was good enough.
The serendipity had conjured needed energy, and Deborah circled back to the Interpretive Center with a plan. Jeremy was elbows on the countertop, listening to Heidi tell an anecdote, which stopped the moment Deborah came through the door. “Hey, boss,” Jeremy said, now stretching to a stand. “Nothing new to update on Grace Island.”
“That’s too bad.” Deb said, then asked Heidi, whose eyes darted to a desktop screen, “Still no reports from Houghton or Duluth?”
She scrolled and clicked some tabs, shaking her head in cadence to her flitting eyes. “Nope,” she concluded, “and I don’t think ‘no news is good news’ fits this situation.”
“Well, we’ll have to see. My idea now is to boat over to Grand Portage, knock on Mr Elsruud’s door”—Deb glanced for doubting looks, which so far didn’t come—“and, if no response, call the sheriff. All we can really do.”
“Could do that now,” Jeremy offered.
“Mmm, no. Give it its due. Gary knows we’re concerned and can request extra air canvassing of the lake. It’s the speedboat we’re looking for, right, not only the campers. That’s why I wonder if they took it home, leaving their stupid tent for a sunnier return.”
“Good thinking, Deb,” Heidi scrunched her too-often grin. “And Jer and me can, y’know, cover things here—not that a Thursday throng is comin’ right after a storm!”
“Who knows?”
“Yeah, who knows?” Jeremy thought to repeat.
Apples and oranges, Tara felt no need to scream at this other odd visitor at her grandmother’s cottage, waking up on a schoolday. She’d seen Eddie, of course, in the shadows of the uniformed interview he and his fellow cop had with her mom. Before the dragon lady had come—probably the one who had taken her grandma and come back for ransom. Eddie, as she heard her mom call him, would hunt down that dragon and slay, and bring grandma back from that cave—
—“so is that what you think we should do?” Eddie spoke in soft deference.
Tara waited for her mom to say something sarcastic, playful or otherwise. Instead, unaware of her daughter’s ears, Jinny whispered, “I do.”
Eddie let the unhinged part of the plan go, as he’d likely have to call in late—or falsely sick—no brainburst there, one high schooler to another, but the stakes being Harriet’s actual whereabouts, Jinny’s veiled desperation, probably also his own… He knew he’d have to voice something anyway, so why not “let’s do this, then.”
This, as Tara and Tommy rose to realize in the not-so-rough-and-tumble, would entail a rented boat from the Grand Portage marina, an amiable Captain Eddie making sure all life vests were strapped on (even Mom’s), a launch into the biggest lake in the world, a laugh or two about skipping school, a hidden grim reality that Grandma’s fate was what this outing presupposed. Jinny floated dutifully between her little Ts and thankful high school dirtbag with experience now in theatres of war.
They motored out of the marina, no less scared than uninformed. And somehow this remarked upon a semblance of family, not that analogues could here and now be conjured, killing all.North Government Island was less than a mile from Isle Royale, though to drift there—if the currents of the sound cooperated—would cover more likely three miles. Three miles of hard paddling, as the current would likely swirl them back out to sea. Vernon and Harriet scoured the stony beach head for driftwood that would serve better oars than the slats of cabinet doors. Bungy cord might combine a slat to a fallen branch; Peyton, lying on his back, lent moral support as his friends weighed this option and that.
“And like a terd of hurtles,” Vernon announced by wry habit, “we’re off!”
Not that he was part of a plurality so often—something Peyton’s upward glance seemed to remind, appreciating that this moment was both extraordinary and familiar enough.
“Sea turtles,” Peyton mused, “like them in Finding Nemo.”
“Never saw it,” Vernon said. “Do they find Nemo?”
Harriet smiled at her counterpart paddler. “Now that would be a spoiler, Vern. You wouldn’t want us to say. But come on over after this whole adventure is done with and we can put in the DVD. My grandkids love it.”
Peyton tried to nod, his neck stiff in the constraints of his prone position. “You gonna tell them about this… adventure?”
Harriet shot disapprobation, then surveyed the channeled horizon. She thought of Tara and Timmy not as recipients of anything she could effect (DVDs doing that job with better élan), but good kids in an ill-fated generation. Probably she held some blame for Jinny’s bad choice of husband, his empty-shell gunslinging that never once asked how another one felt, all-too-ready to fill in that blank with a half-sense of humor and a fidgeting eye, thinking of somebody else by the unhappy rise in the ‘birthday, dear [who cares]’, grandkids confused by the glory and gore of it all—they gotta be, by now. Jinny doing the best that she can, but coming home weekends in winter, shoving those cherubs into the loft, taking an Irish coffee into her dead father’s chair, then staring beyond what the tv replaced, never imagining once I’d be there, with Peyton, no less, and a blown-up pontoon…
“How’s your side doin’,” asked Vernon.
Much easier than mouthing a wedding vow, Harriet smiled to affirm, “all’s good.” She paused in what couldn’t be pregnant by now, wanting equally to know, “and yours?”
“Mine’s good,” Vernon said, avoiding the sideways look he’d assume from the hull, paddling just to verify ‘good’.
Deb needed no permissions. She fueled up the oblivious boat to do everything as routine. But instead of veering west of Grace Island, she turned to the northeast, up the coast of Isle Royale. The boat was not steering itself, nor was the rogue ranger overly-directive in its destination. Remotely, perhaps, the call of the other morning’s wolves pulled her along—the less-than-one-percent of improbable that wolves would plunge into a human throat, but the lore that given any open window, they would.
Perhaps that’s what Christine and her dullard boyfriend wanted on this enterprise—a private dance with wolves that Grace Island, at least, would never entertain. Truth be told, there weren’t too many of these wild canines on the isle. The elder moose kept them largely at bay, swimming out with their calves just enough to thwart attacks. Deborah tracked these trends with fair interest, if that job was more what Jeremy and Heidi and itinerant researchers were here to do.
What if she were a wolf? Lone, of course—a pack mentality was never her thing. Would she go after moose, separating cow from calf? Or scramble for squirrels, or scavenge the shores for washed-up fish? Maybe she would find a campsite and plunge into a human throat, after all.
Had they a map at hand, Vernon and Harriet (and maybe Peyton, seeing only the sky) would have known of Merritt Lane Campground a couple sounds from where they paddled. Not that anyone was camping there, necessarily, or that an actual ‘lane’ could provide an efficient overland transport. Hiking trails led to and from Windigo—fifty miles, with twists and turns, away. Who knows, maybe there’d be an SOS box, like those occasionally along the Interstate. For the lack of a map, however, the plan was just to keep paddling south.
“Sorta like Huck ’n Jim, we are,” Vernon ventured, immediately self-conscious that a third passenger on the raft hadn’t come to mind.
Harriet also thought that and waited a half-minute for Peyton to reply, if he wanted to. Since he didn’t, she decided to add, “good thing we don’t got fog to fool us. Or slavecatchers to flee.”
“Yeah, that must’ve been big in Twain’s imagination, writing it a generation after Emancipation.”
“Is that so?” Peyton voiced, with strain he hoped to veil.
“Published, at least. Had it with me on the pontoon—some trout’s reading it now, I hope.”
Harriet smiled at his spirits. She didn’t look down at Peyton but waited another half-minute for him to have his chance to utter something else, if it were better just to rest. “Slavecatchers will never go away from the world as we know it. When slavery ever ceases to exist, there’ll be new schemes to net the vulnerable. I shouldn’t’ve said we don’t have them to flee.”
Vernon nodded and swiveled his glance across the water, ambivalent to their plight. “You know,” he offered, “we can switch sides any time.”
“Yep. Saving some energy, too, in case we gotta fight some flow.”
Peyton, hearing this, stiffened up his left arm, fearing another heart attack coming on, not that he felt the first when it occurred. Behind his closed eyelids he knew he could blurt anything and be instantly attended to, no matter how unequipped this aqua-ambulance. He knew he should blurt, but wouldn’t—not in this moment of gently paddling, Jim and Huck, down a mississippi dream, merrily, merrily, maybe not, but lovely to cast that thought out there, anyway.The Rock of Ages lighthouse—decommissioned since forever by the looks of it, still guided boats from the Minnesota coast toward the mouth of Isle Royale. Eddie pointed at the obelisk and taught the kids to say ‘starboard’ for the right side, as opposed to ‘port’, where they’d need to turn to enter the miles long Washington Harbor. Jinny hadn’t asked by now if he had ever boated here, assuming in his even-keel confidence that this was all old hat, his extended stomping grounds as a patroller, sportsman, whatever he was.
“No, actually. Always wondered about this place. You?”
“Me? Yeah, Mom and Dad took me here when I was little,” Jinny looked back at her kids, sitting each to a seat as if buckled in. “About Tara’s age, probably. Took a tour boat then, I remember.” Then, quietly, “must’ve put the hooks in Mama to buy the cottage after Dad died.”
“Say, you wanna drive this in?”
“No, you’re doin’ it fine.”
“Or how ’bout..?” tilting his head toward the kids.
“You trust em, just like that?” Jinny said loudly enough to get their attention. “Which of ya rug rats wants to be co-pilot?”
At first neither one moved, processing the chance; then both blurted “me!”
“Well,” Eddie figured, “one of ya’s gotta steer, and another’s gotta be on the throttle here. Who wants what?”
“What’s a throttle do?” Tommy asked, following in the shadow of his sister, who rushed to the wheel.
“Speed,” Eddie explained, giraffing his body to let them share the captain seat while keeping an index finger and thumb on both controls. “It only takes a bit of push to go a little faster—not so much—or back again. Same with the steering, left and right—”
“Port and starboard,” corrected Tara, biting her lip, “I think it was.”
Half a hundred heron miles away, Harriet stopped paddling on the starboard side and used her mock-up oar as a rudder against the current’s pull away from the big island’s shore. Vernon doubled up his efforts to try to keep the nose of the speedboat hinged to their southwesterly course. Coming on to Scoffield Point, he wracked his memory of the map—was this an island head or the end of a peninsula? If the latter, the inlet could become a long dead end, literally, for his friend. He expressed a mild abbreviation of this and glanced down at Peyton’s tightly closed eyes. “Yeah,” replied Harriet, “then let’s skirt the outer side.”
“Then ya better join me here, to keep us from floatin’ all the way to Michigan.”
Easier said than done, as Harriet hoisted her oar over the prow and had Vernon hold its end so that she could have both hands free to clutch the windshield, then Vern’s shoulder, stepping gingerly over Peyton’s long torso. Vernon was kneeling behind the pilot’s chair and, for a second, Harriet thought of taking that as her rowing spot. But the windshield wrapped too far for digging into the water. She ducked under Vernon’s arm to maneuver behind him, then took the oar he offered back to her. “Easy-peasy,” she chuckled.
The boat listed, naturally, and Peyton roused a bit to keep from sliding into his friends’ legs. A few times, for a few seconds each, Harriet grabbed Vernon’s right ribs, the flannel that covered them. For his part, Vernon paddled harder and with as wide a swath as could be, without leaning dangerously toward the lake. It was a dance, really—the strokes as an adagio with contrapuntal waves and choreography at least from the kneeling pair. Peyton may have been the rapt audience—hard to tell what he was thinking through the clench of his face.
Of course Eddie watched the throttle and the wheel, as well as the placid, parallel shores of the harbor. Jinny watched all that, too, and at the same time tried to reconstruct her impressions a quarter-century ago. They hadn’t seen a moose—that fact, she remembered, put a slight pallor on the trip for her father, who had described the majestic animal in teddy bear terms with an element of grizzly, a velveteen beast that could deceive in slow motion or stay true in the natural contract—you and yours have your turf, I and mine have mine. The civil understanding of being wild.
“Can I try steering?” Tommy wasn’t bored with his task, but envied Tara’s.
“Gotta ask the captain,” Eddie pointed with his chin.
Tara evidently didn’t want to switch, but did—sliding over after Eddie lifted Tommy from that side of the seat. For a few seconds, no one helmed the rental boat and Jinny measured how that fact would affect her daughter. Tara hadn’t cried in months—a whole year, maybe—before last night’s Flat Stanley episode. How absurd that story was: a bulletin board! hooked above his bed like a guillotine. Go figure, third-graders: you can organize yourself to death. Or maybe worse—flatness. The summer had been nondescript after an April finalization of divorce. A lack of drama was exactly what Jinny wanted and deserved going into the school year, and suddenly…
“You okay, Mary Anne?” Eddie’s voice was like a mourning dove.
“You mistaking me for your girlfriend?”
“Don’t got one. Didn’t want to call you ‘Gilligan’.”
“Oh, so that’s it. And who are you, the Millionaire?”
His irises glinted a bit like diamonds, but, “no. He’s not interesting.”
“Then who?”
Eddie checked with Tommy, then Tara, to see if they had any questions. They assured him they had this—the minuscule adjustments to both devices were more fascinating than all-out shifts and turns. He regained eye-contact with Jinny. “The Professor, naturally.”
Jinny nodded with a grinning frown. “And that way, if we get stranded here, you’ll rig up a radio with coconuts or somethin’?”
“Yeah. Or just use this—” He fished from his pocket his mobile phone and fumbled it, catching low with his other hand.
“Close call, Professor.”
~23~
The National Park Service had policies about how their boats would operate and look, standardization being an important part of the milieu—a world within and standing apart from… the world. Deborah couldn’t exactly paint her preferred boat in military camouflage, but added waterproof stickers of cattails and lily pads to the side. She twined some pine branches to the edges of the windshield and bargained for a black Mercury outboard motor instead of the white Evinrude she’d inherited. The called it ‘the Camouflage’ to Heidi, Jeremy, anyone else, just to distinguish it from the others in the boathouse—not a nickname, really, at least in her own mind. What, was she going to chummy up to the thing and give it a ‘Susie Q’ moniker, or ‘Anchors Aweigh’? She’d probably spell it wrong—throw those anchors away—anyway. Or add a random apostrophe, or risk a charming backstory on why she had that in mind. If anyone admired her cattails and pine garnish, they didn’t require context, let alone charm.
She checked the fuel gauge another time, as if the morning fill up would have drained discernably. She could get to Houghton and back on this tank, maybe crash Gary’s place—all business, of course, to debrief after the storm. She could claim to be on posse duty; no lie in that. She felt more like a rustler, though, a poacher of other people’s groundedness. If this Peyton and Christine wanted to romp through the wilderness like teenage kids, why not let ’em?
Was this jealousy? She recalled 11th grade English class, staring out the window as the teacher beat that question on the board—“Where does that green-eyed monster reside? Is it inside Othello or outside?” And then some suck-up raises his hand and reminds the teacher, as if it were a private chat, “Iago tells him, ‘I do repent me that I put it to you’—so that means it’s an outside force—” “—but now inside, right?”
Was this envy? You’re only jealous of what you have—Desdemona, case in point—fearing it will vanish. What did Deborah have? This island? Dreams of a Christine someday… But that would be envy, kidnapping her from Peyton. Wouldn’t have to do that with her daughter, just woo her and not terrify her kids up in that loft, her ‘cherubs’, she called them. Guardian angels. Jealous in their own right. Envious of nothing at such an innocent age. Shame that life can’t stay that way…
“You okay down there, Peyton?” Harriet’s voice tried to hide her anxious eyes.
Peyton opened his, blinking to focus on her face, which almost leaned against Vernon’s back. Straining to hold in a cough, Peyton, pressed a meager grin and, to prove he could utter something, offered to “tag team me when one o’ yas gets tired.”
“Now, now, then,” Harriet replied. “Currents’ doing most the work, anyhow.”
“That,” Vernon added, “and somebody’s prayers. We’re gonna make it to Windigo, I’d say, by… well… by—”
Seeing that his calculations weren’t instilling confidence, Harriet jumped in with “—soon enough. Main thing is for you to say what you’re needing. Water, for instance?” Immediately upon that suggestion, she realized they had nothing potable. The plastic half-gallon they’d brought from Grace Island had been passed around since before their short stop at North Government, and while they had a Bic lighter in the boat’s glove compartment, they didn’t have a metal receptacle to boil lake water.
“Yeah,” Peyton graveled, “a li’l H-two-O would…”—knowing he didn’t have to complete the idiom, pushed out the pride to—“hit… the spot.”
Now Vernon’s calculations took on this other dimension, aware that they weren’t exactly in the Ancient Mariner’s shoes, where water, water, everywhere did not mean not a drop to drink. Lake Superior in their bellies wouldn’t necessarily kill them, but, “we can pull over, Pey—I see a favorable crag over there that…”
But Harriet jolted at what had been forgotten: the cooler had ice for the Michelobs they’d expended (the empties occasionally rattling in the stern) and that would be better than stopping for a campfire that still wouldn’t magically create a kettle. She went back to open the cooler—lo and behold, a lone last Michelob bobbing in the shallow pool of melted cubes. “Got your choice here, Pey: H-two-O or a warm beer?”
Peyton either didn’t hear or want to respond. Harriet reached for the plastic carton and tilted the styrofoam cooler to deepen the puddle. She thought about asking Vernon over to hold one or the other—cooler or carton—to drain all that was possible, but Vernon was visibly fighting to keep the boat straight and somewhat hugging the shoreline of Scoffield Peninsula.
The water smelled rancid when Harriet swirled it like the carton was a wine goblet. “This can’t be good,” she whispered to herself, but still put the aperture to Peyton’s lips and levered carefully. To no avail—he gagged and coughed the liquid out. “I’m sorry,” Harriet said, while Peyton looked contrite as if he’d done something wrong.
“Maybe the brewsky would be better,” Vernon advised without breaking his stride.
Having tended bar in her day, Harriet stretched her mental catalogue as to beer ever making anyone better. A shot of vodka, sure, if stopping at that. “Maybe,” she decided, and clicked open the top. Since it would be impossible to cleanly lean the can to Peyton’s lips, she took a fair swig herself and stretched her arm toward Vernon to do likewise.
“What’s this, like the ‘Last Supper’?”
Harriet smiled. “Nope. More like high school.”
“Well, back then,” Vernon deadpanned, “the Wart was known to hold his liquor. Aint that so, Peyton?”
Peyton had closed his eyes, but twitched the corners of his mouth to agree. “Don’t call.. yourself… Wart.”
Paddling still, but turning toward his floorbound friend, Vernon assured, “I’ve owned it by now, don’t worry. Now why’n’t you take a sip o’ that.”
~24~
The docks at Windigo came into Tara’s sight—“up ahead,… starboard,” she uttered with a fun sense of modesty.
“Good. Keep ’er steady then.” Eddie advised, then, turning to Tommy: “How’s the throttle, Engineman?”
“Same. Should I slow it?”
“Just a little. Still got a stretch to cover.” Eddie watched him use two hands as if the pull back needed more than a finger of strength. “You guys are doin’ great.”
They bit their upper lips by instinct, maybe having seen their mom do so in whatever praise she ever received, recall of which would take their eye off the road, so to speak. Jinny, for her sake, smiled too wide to bite her own upper lip, then walked it back in reflection of why they were really here. She drew close to Eddie’s ear—starboard ear, she heard inside her mind—and queried as soft as she could, “what d’we do when we get there?”
Eddie nodded not because he knew. A measure of training as a soldier and cop could go through the protocols, even as he was decidedly off duty. Only a measure, though, in deference to the kids and what they imagined this venture to be. “Let’s see,” he spoke just as muted over his shoulder. “What would you want?”
“To erase this week, start it over.” She suddenly wanted a cigarette, first craving in years. By Eddie’s breath and other fresh aspects about him, he’d done away with the cancer sticks as well. “Or at least erase yesterday,” Jinny corrected herself.
“Every day’s interconnected,” Eddie offered, “tomorrow depends on today and so on.”
“Isn’t that backwards? Like time goin’ backwards?”
“I don’t know. Didn’t do so good in physics class.”
“You
had your eye on Mary Anne?”
He worked his glance further
over his shoulder, into her own side-eye. “Could say that. She wasn’t in the
classroom though.”
Bringing the rental boat to dock required Eddie’s hands on the controls, but the kids still clung to their roles below his hands. Jinny looped the mooring rope and tugged the vessel to its settle. The crew climbed out and sized up the gentle slope that led to the ranger station—or the Interpretive Center that fronted the humble cluster of other buildings. Heidi and Jeremy were on opposite sides of the counter, making little effort to work.
“Hi there, folks,” Jeremy straightened up, “welcome.”
Since he wasn’t in a particular uniform, Jinny nodded less at him than at Heidi, who was. “Thanks. We’re, um, just off the boat.”
“Yeah, could see ya—” thumbing a window with a arbor-veiled view of the harbor. “Good learning, kids.”
Eddie spoke for the shy, “teachers, actually—I was learning from them.”
“Not true!” Tommy thought to correct, shushed instantly by his sister.
“True enough,” Jeremy said, “teachers are learners, too. I’ve been learning a lot about the animals around here—you guys interested in fish or birds or four-leggeds?”
“What about millipedes?” Tommy asked. “They got a million legs.”
“No they don’t!” Tara now wanted to assert accuracy.
“Well, they got a lot, for sure, and—you’re right, we have some of those on the island, too. We’re real careful about turning over rocks, ’cause that’s where they might be—”
“—and they’re poisonous,” Tara warned.
“Say,” Eddie asked, “do you have a display case for some of those?”
“So happens we do,” Jeremy curled his arm like Clayton Kershaw to get them moving to the kitty corner of the room.
Not knowing whether to follow them, Eddie sought Jinny’s eyes, which told him to stick beside her. Then she spoke quietly to Heidi. “We’re here to look for my mom. Harriet Anderson. Did she register here?”
Heidi furled her brow. “We’re not at liberty to divulge information about—”
“Can you just nod, then? Or blink twice for yes? Isn’t she in your system.”
Heidi clicked the keyboard and, after some seconds, said, “she’s not.”
“How ’bout Peyton Elsruud?”
More clicks, deeper furl. Two blinks.
Eddie slid out his badge and gently placed it on the counter. “I’m here to support a missing person report,” he all but whispered. The kids were well out of earshot, preoccupied with an insect display. Still, Eddie beseeched Heidi without words to click more data for them. “Was Mr Elsruud with anyone?”
Heidi looked between this couple to see if, somehow, she was being had. “You say she’s your mom?”
Jinny nodded, feeling her bottom eyelids well. “Looks like me, everyone thinks.”
“I haven’t seen any campers the last couple days, and no one looking like you come ’round. I’m kinda just holding the fort—my boss maybe has…”
Jinny flinched at the imagination of Heidi’s boss. She had wrestled with this woman, disentangled, served her coffee, heard the name ‘Christine’, watched her flee, apparently, back to this island. “Is your boss around?”
No blinks, but a heavy sigh. “She’s… on her rounds.”
Eddie, who had gathered an idea of the night visit—Jinny shaking her head about it more than completing sentences—pocketed his badge. “Think you could call her for us. Tell her we’re here.”
“I’ll… see what I can do.”
To give her that space, Eddie wandered over to Jeremy and the kids. “So the island has a kind of different food chain,” Jeremy was explaining, “as not all the same kind of weasels and birds are here to eat the insects that are pretty much the same population as on the mainland.”
“How did they get here, then,” wondered Tara. “Boats?”
Tommy laughed at that. “Tiny boats—for millipedes!”
“That’s a great question, really,” Jeremy stroked his chin. “How does any land creature come across a wide span of water, and what do they hope to find as a result?”
“Maybe they were running away from something,” Tara conjectured.
“Like what, you think?”
“Like,..” Tara sought Eddie’s eyes, “like, I don’t know. Maybe humans?”
Tommy harrumphed. “Humans don’t eat millipedes, dummy!”
“They stomp on ’em, though.”
~25~
If it weren’t a paradox, Deborah’s camouflage boat was on auto-pilot without such speed and helm controls. She, as actual pilot, must have been thinking and reacting to her line on the lake. The past half-hour, then forty minutes, then fifty, blurred into a nebula unlike she’d experienced before—not daydreaming or blanking out, exactly.
Not calculating, at any rate. Canada geese were migrating now, their molting period over. Deb looked at their formation and imagined being last in the longer splay, tempted at any moment to abandon the cause. Not planning to, but tempted. Glide with the gravity, flap without needing a destination, a flock-endorsed reason to keep going, goslings affected or not by their possible witness.
The boat slowed to the spot it seemed to remember thirty hours earlier, when Deborah had first spotted Peyton’s speedboat. The shotgun she used to disperse the wolves remained ready in its tailored compartment. A Remington 20-gauge, the same type that did Cobain in, not that she’d followed him, being just eight years old when it happened. She was more a Robert Smith groupie, anyway, the emo frontman for The Cure. If she had a favorite song—debatable, that—it might be “The Forest”. The one summer she tried to jog herself into shape, their album Staring at the Sea had worn itself out with looped replay in her Sony Discman. Who knows, from one title to another, if this magnetic circle of plastic might have nudged her to this very place, her fate as curator of Isle Royale.
Forest and sea weren’t the problem; people were. And no walk in life could really shake that reality.
The last tips of Michelob seemed to be doing the trick. Peyton was breathing more comfortably through his nose and managed to adjust his life-preserver pillow by himself. “Can I turn on my side,” he asked Harriet, who looked at the back of Vernon’s head for advice.
“I guess so,” she decided. “Which way?”
He’d already twisted to his left, which would look toward the shore if the wall of his boat weren’t in the way. Harriet tugged his plaid shirt to follow the turn and snuggle him in better.
Vernon kept paddling, using a particular tree a football field or two away in order to motivate the closing of that stretch of shore. He’d counted fourteen trees that way—stations of the cross, he thought, in this Via Dolorosa. He remembered in the navy a yeoman named Smitty who was a devout catholic and felt the need to invent such stations on the USS Higbee. Maybe it helped, as he lay dying after the attack, a couple weeks after Easter, 1972. Vernon didn’t witness his final breath, battling his own injury below deck. But he remembered Smitty talking to him about station number 6. “That’s maybe where you got your name, Vern,” he said, “after ‘Veronica’, the lady who swabbed Jesus’ face. It’s my favorite, you know—probably shouldn’t have a favorite, but…”
“Penny for your thoughts,” Harriet dug into the water and Vernon’s concentration.
“What? Oh…, um, well… a guy in the war… named Smitty…”
Deborah could see there was no evidence of Peyton and Christine’s return to their rogue campsite—the speedboat wasn’t there, for starters—but she felt drawn to shore up and explore. If nothing else, she could reconnoiter the area for wolves and justify a professional reason for taking this departure from duties otherwise. Jeremy would appreciate the data, she imagined. She took the shotgun from its compartment and stepped out of the boat, pulling the mooring rope with her to the same tree Peyton had used to secure his.
She circled around where their tent had been. No traces—not enough grass to be matted down, and the dirt didn’t show any stake holes. Deb imagined how they slept, the palpable air inside their tent, creating a common aroma. In the middle of the night, one or the other would need to unzip and step out to pee—probably Peyton, she had read about night habits of men, statistically. He’d head over there, to that stand of pines.
Or perhaps, beyond any practical need, one or the other (now in her mind was Christine) would just want to walk, provided a measure of moonlight, to take in the most ineffable sense that you were alone in the absolute center of the continent—for all sense of proportion, the whole world—and the island itself was the an impenetrable fortress, its moat deep and wide to keep intruders away.
Like me.
Deb tried to change the tone of that—just don’t hate me—but felt worse for idea of massaging language, inner thoughts, whatever these were. Sometimes they came in this fashion while she sat in the back row of church, waiting for one of the pastor’s ‘please rise’ occasions to exit unnoticed.
She trudged toward the trees that would make for a good midnight pee and slid with her back down the rough of one trunk. She clutched the forestock of the shotgun and used the butt as a crutch to complete the sit. What should come first—to kill or devour? She drove off other options, even the distinction of ‘devour’ and ‘eat’; of course there was more than a chance she’d do neither, but why, in such a cradle of isolation, would she have to cast a net for more options? For whose satisfaction? Christine’s daughter? Who’s pushing me over the edge? Given an inch, I’ll take a foot, enough rope to hang myself, patting the shotgun for security’s sake.
She sat against the tree long enough to fall asleep, despite the pummeling pain from the back of her skull. As on the camouflage boat, no dreams bothered to fill in the cracks of her consciousness, all but wiped out by the day, night, and day. There’d be no further night to worry about, if only this would all work out. This. This. Th
~26~
Though the Interpretive Center wasn’t large, the interactive displays could occupy a visitor for a solid hour or two. Tara liked the choose-your-own-adventure touchscreen, ‘with Mosie, the moose calf’. Tommy gravitated to the maps he could color, making Lake Superior as purple as possible. He added fangs to the mouth of the wolf seen from space, otherwise known as the Keweenaw Peninsula. The wolf’s eye, of course, was Isle Royale, and Tommy colored that blood red for the southwest half he was in, dilating the dot of Windigo where he sat to a black-hole pupil. Jeremy commended the artwork, then shifted over to Tara’s screen to show her the lens by which moose of all sizes see their world, above and below the waterline.
Jinny and Eddie, meanwhile, snuck outside to plan what they could of the day. “When’s your shift actually starting tonight?” she asked him.
“Don’t worry about that.”
“But I’m clueless about what we can really do—I mean, this island is ginormous, and Mom could be anywhere, if she’s even—”
Eddie intercepted her hand, rising to join her other already on her forehead. She squeezed his thumb like a baby would. “So from what I understand,” Eddie acted the detective, “this ranger who crashed your place was the last to see her and—Peyton is his name?”
“Yeah.”
“—at a campsite on Grace Island, just up the harbor—”
“How do you know where it is?”
“From the map on the counter. We could’ve stopped there on our way in, had we known.”
“Let’s go, then.”
“What about the kids?” Eddie asked.
“What about ’em? They could stay here with these… deputies, or whatever they are.”
“You’re not worried about the ranger’s return? What you said about Tara’s reaction?”
Jinny weighed that and muscled her lips sideways. “Ok,” she decided. “Sneaking off wouldn’t be a good model, anyway. Should’ve sent that memo to my mom.”
Jeremy joined the adult huddle at the counter. “But I just came from Grace Island a little while ago,” he informed. “No one’s there.”
“But their tent was, right?”
“Yeah—just like Deb said it would be.”
“Deb?” Jinny asked, “is that the ranger’s name?”
Heidi shot Jeremy a look, then nodded. “Ranger Wilcox, if you will. You probably passed her on your boat ride over. She was going to check Grand Portage—”
“Last night?” Jinny pressed.
“No, this morning. Camouflage boat—you had to see her if you were coming from Grand Portage.”
Eddie filled in a five-second silence. “Big lake. And, you know, camouflage…”
Jinny turned to the laminated map on the counter. “Is there any town on this island? Like another place they’d possibly go?”
“Town? No. Mott Island has a dozen buildings, maybe, over here. Near Edisen Fishery. But nothing’s active, especially by summer’s end.”
“What do you do,” Jinny measured her phrasing, casting a glance at her occupied kids, “when people go missing?”
Heidi turned to a larger map behind her. “Houghton,” she pointed inside the mouth of the cosmic wolf , “is the command center for Isle Royale—the whole lake, really.” She went on in quiet detail about networks and search protocols. Eddie took mental note of how National Parks, the Department of the Interior, 911 dispatchers, National Blue and so on might make quick work of things or, just as likely, a maelstrom as worthy as Veterans Affairs. Jinny interspersed questions at various levels of urgency, nudged sometimes by Eddie to whisper less loudly. He could see that the kids were headlong focused on their tasks, and Jeremy was loping over to run interference, anyway.
Over the years, well before her mom and dad’s separation, Tara had become bat-like in her sense of hearing. While through the night and morning she had guessed enough about her grandma’s absence, she was presently taking mental notes more meticulously than Eddie, albeit clueless about most references. She prayed in her own way that this Jeremy would tend to Tommy and allow her to hear more from the trio at the counter.
Faith worked, though Tara couldn’t exult in what she was finding out. Mr Elsruud’s speedboat was the concern, especially if it weren’t near their campsite or safely harbored on the Minnesota shore. She knew what the seacraft looked like—had taken a ride in it with him and Grandma and Tommy as recently as July; a little smaller than this morning’s rental, she imagined steering it, now that she knew how. She shuttered at the whispered speculation that, out in the open water during yesterday’s storm, a small boat like could flip over, making it very hard to detect from fly-overs or GP trackers. Here Tara heard her mother talk about mobile phones: how grandma forgot hers at home, so that meant her GP wouldn’t be accurate. The lady named Heidi nodded with a frown. Eddie asked how they might help—not only him, he suggested, but Grand Marais PD. Jinny dug her face into his windbreaker, and things got instantly quiet.
Jeremy was now coming over to talk moose. “How’s Mosie holding up,” he asked.
Tara didn’t want to pretend. “I want to see my grandma now.”
“Well,” he looked to Heidi, whose frown was starting to flutter.
“What we’re gonna do,” Eddie declared, “is boat over to Grace Island and, at least, leave Grandma a note. Can you an’ Tommy put that together?”
“To say what? Where is she?”
Jinny rubbed her eyes and came over to Tommy’s table. “That’s a question we’ll put in the note. C’mon,” flipping over one of the map outlines.
Somewhere in the maze of Tara’s brain, the Lambchop optimism squeaked approval of this idea. If Stanley could mail himself to visit a far-away friend, or become a kite to see a vaster span of earth—if he could use his tragic circumstances to catch a thief, or vanish himself at just the right pivot—maybe this wasn’t an endless nightmare after all. Maybe.
~27~
Vernon spoke about Vietnam like it was the dark side of the moon—the solar system phenomenon first, then the Pink Floyd album. “I barely set foot in the place called ‘Vietnam’. The only terra firma for my squadron was the Cat Lo base near Saigon, and that was place for R&R. Didn’t even see Saigon, for that matter—or Ho Chi Minh City, as it’s now named.”
“That bother you?” Harriet asked, paddling in synchronicity behind him.
“What, that the Viet Cong won? Nah, not really. It was never my fight, personally. Thought about it lots when I was wrapped like a mummy in the Philippines: there’s Warts and Smittys and girlfriends back home on any side of any battle. I read about a year ago an obituary for Nguyen Van Bay, the ace pilot who bombed us. From all accounts a decent man, happy to grow old. I’d like to think he’d read an obituary of me and make the same conclusion.”
“You’re
not dead, Vernon. Twice now revived.”
“Oh, more’n that, prob’ly.”
“So, what’s the other ‘dark side’ association you were thinking about?”
Vernon stopped paddling a second to sing in muted tenor, “quiet desperation is the English way. The time is gone, the song is over—thought I’d something more to say.”
Harriet waited until he started paddling again. “Pretty. That’s Pink Floyd?”
“Yep. Gilmour’s voice through Waters’ lyrics through an allusion to Thoreau’s Walden. Heard it about a year after I came back and thought it resonated Vietnam, or as little as I knew of the place.”
“I know ‘Us and Them’—same album, right?”
“Richard Wright. Side 2, after ‘Money’.”
Half-chuckle. “You remember flippin’ records? B-sides that never got radio time.”
“Some did. Best songs are sometimes nestled in.”
They rowed in silence for a stretch, Vernon no longer counting trees that pulled them forward. Instead, for him at least (Harriet, too, he could only imagine), selected b-sides swirled in his memory. ‘What ever happened to this season’s losers of the year? Well every time I got to thinking where’d they disappear.’ Cheap Trick, surrendering again to the time motif. Live at Budokan, side 2. Performing there just six years after the Higbee hit. Sure, the same distance as Anchorage to L.A., but somehow in the neighborhood. Pacific blue beyond ubiquitous horizons in a dozen time zones. Vernon looked left toward the same blue horizon of Lake Superior and blinked away any undue sentimentality—this is supposed to be Peyton’s Higbee, dammit!
“Hey—a boat over there!” Harriet broke in, “and if I’m not mistaken, this is the little bay we camped at—holy smokes, could it have been yesterday?”
Peyton groaned in blind recognition. “Day… before…”
Vernon altered his stroke to push perpendicular to port side and aim the stern toward the shore. “Holy smokes, indeed. Let’s get this.” He didn’t want to think as he tripled his exertion. Not like Hemingway’s protesters of thought—those Nick Adams, Jake Barnes types who could never become shell unshocked, thus curling into their own kind of shell; no, that’s not what he wanted to think of for a desire not to think. Just funny this week: a sudden one-eighty from wanting to float away from the civilized world to a desire, time being, to consort with it. Invariably, there’d be questions and troubles to face—starting with the ecological damage for the pontoon he managed to blow up. Evasions, then, would add to the stack. Saving Peyton—Harriet’s deed, really—might mitigate things. But you said not to think, Wart, now stop it! “You okay… back there?” he sputtered.
Harriet, breathing like the occasional jogger she’d been through the years, piped optimism: “Damn straight…. Think Smitty’s prayin’ for us?”
Vernon searched for a rejoinder even as energy would be better spent with clenched-teeth resolve. Besides, he’d talked reams more in the past hour than probably the summer and Indian summer combined. Time to be quiet, if the desperation was looking to imminent relief, God and this camouflage boat willing.
“Say,” Harriet realized, “I know this boat. It’s the Ranger’s. Hey, Peyton! What was her name again?”
Peyton tried to moisten his lips to speak better. “Deborah, I think.”
“Yeah. Kinduva piece o’ work, but… beggars can’t be choosers...”
They toiled to the part of the inlet that had no discernable current and, for the first time in miles, waves to actually carry them in. Harriet switched to her original side and paddled to guide their speedboat between the ranger’s and a boulder that somewhat shielded the slap of the lake. Twice she hallooed, “Debbie?” to no response.
“Maybe..., she’s…” Peyton began, but didn’t complete for the exhaustion or the lack of idea, or both.
Vernon stepped onto to the covered bow and short-hopped to the boulder. He gestured for the anchor rope and Harriet looped about twelve feet of it to add bulk to the throw. From that, Vernon pulled the slack and speedboat snug into the wedge of rock and camouflage. Harriet saw that Peyton wanted to rise. “You need to pee?”
“Nah,” he strained. “Just... gettin’ a backache.”
“Tell ya what—we’ll find the ranger and then help you up. How’s that sound?”
“You’re.. the boss… I mean,” grinning self-consciously, “… the best.”
“We’re back here in a jiffy,” Harriet grinned back. She clambered out and called Deborah’s name again, if more of an ‘indoor voice’ in the intuition they were half-way home. The absence of an echo bothered her, though, and her mind it with the wolf howls they woke to on this very spot. She hadn’t told that to Vernon—nothing, in fact, of tenting she shared with Peyton. Why would she? Or wouldn’t?
“Hare,” she heard Vernon hiss, “c’mon over here.”
He was crouching and clinging to a birch trunk. “What?” Harriet whispered when she tender-footed to him. “Wolf?”
“No, but—” he pointed a line to a bodily slump of camouflage against a distant pine.
Harriet gasped, “Deb!”
~28~
The note was hard to write, exacerbated by the fat, unsharpened crayons. Tara had lightly drawn lines like empty sheet music to fill in, a prospective symphony of maybe six or eight measures. ‘Dear Grandma,’ she started in orange and slid it to Jinny, who picked up a black and block-printed ‘WHERE ARE U?!’ with a minus sign under the punctuation dots. Tara wasn’t pleased with that choice, nor the color combo—“it looks like a Halloween card. Let’s not make this scary.” She selected a stubby teal from the tub and wrote, ‘We are here to.’ Jinny couldn’t tell if she intended a dangling infinitive or simply misspelled the last word.
Instead of explaining how they were here, Jinny asked Heidi if a little business card of the ranger station might be stapled to the bottom. “I really wish she had her phone, but at least… I don’t know, she’d at least know that enough of us are—” she was going to say ‘worried’ but changed to “anxious.”
“What’s that mean, Mom?”
“Eager to see her.”
A few more phrases and they signed it, ‘love Tara and Jin’ and passed it to Tommy to do likewise. He added his and walked it over to Eddie, who had just come in after speaking with Jeremy, now headed to the harbor. “Here,” Tommy directed, “you gotta sign it here.”
“Thanks, Cap’n, but my name might confuse her.”
“Why?”
Jinny followed and pinched the letter. “Tom, Tara, go use the washroom before we go.”
They went into the separate doors. Eddie scanned Jinny’s eyes to see what else she needed. “After Grace Island, you’d want to go—”
“I don’t know. You’d have to be gettin’ back—”
Eddie cupped her shoulders. “I promised you I don’t. Erase that unnecessary… anxiety, will ya? I mean, if you want me to split off to double the coverage, that’s an option.”
“We just got the one boat. And anyways, Heidi said the northwest side has constant surveillance on it from Thunder Bay. It’s the southeast side that’s more in the dark.”
“Well then, let’s do that. I’ll ask Jeremy if we can top-off the tank—he says that’s maybe what stranded your mom in the first place—simply runnin’ outta gas.”
Jinny reached in her pocket and pulled out a twenty dollar bill, which Eddie waved off. “Better use that for cans of spam or whatever they got in stock,” he advised, then called over to Heidi, “is it open, that general store?”
“It is when I unlock it. Plenty o’ bandits around here, y’know,” she tried to inflect some irony, “but yeah, let’s get you set up. Kids must be starving by now.”
In fact, the afternoon was quickly escaping them. Heidi convinced them at the store to buy some cookable items for a butane burner she wanted to lend them. “There’s a couple campsites around Siskiwit Bay—you took a map, right? And, you know, it gets darker quicker on that side, so you gotta pace wisely. You can always come on back to the station and,” Heidi leaned in to keep this on the down-low, “we got a little bunkhouse if need be.”
They motored out of Windigo with grim resolve. Tara and Tommy didn’t initially gravitate to their piloting roles, but hung at Eddie’s side to see how the extra speed might be something they could handle. Jinny demurred at the switch, a half mile into the harbor, but once the boat got back to the cruise tempo Eddie had set (and audited, an arm’s adjustment away), she appreciated the gift of distraction.
At Grace Island, Eddie took over to glide the boat ashore without the depth of a dock. He requested the other three to sit atop the covered bow and transfer some weight off the stern, an effort to protect the propeller. “You callin’ us elephants?” Jinny ribbed.
“Elephant seals—baby ones! Cute as a California beach. Now, if you guys can pull that rope when you slide off—be sure you keep you shoes dry—good.”
Jinny waited until Eddie killed the engine and took her extended hand. “I am not an animal, I’ll have you know.”
“Oh, but we all are. Learned that in biology class.”
“Thinkin’ of Mary Anne.”
“You betcha.”
The tent was nothing Jinny or the kids had seen before—nothing they’d imagine Harriet would want to sleep in, given a choice. Inside were a couple sleeping bags, a flashlight, a cardigan that must have been Peyton’s, a duffel of fresh socks and underwear. “For both of them,” Jinny answered Eddie over her shoulder, “together.”
Tara and Tommy explored the little island as encouraged, keeping an eye on each other. Eddie went another direction to let Jinny have time enough alone. She joined him in a minute, however, little else to do. “It’s a beautiful spot they picked. Sunrises must be gorgeous.”
Jinny shrugged. “Same as from Mom’s living room, more ’r less.”
“You know, we could come back here when it’s dark. You ’n the kids could sleep in the tent; I could bundle up in the rental.”
“Or maybe we could undo the tent and bring it with us up the coast. That may buy even more time.”
“Good
thinkin’. But you’d leave the note here, yeah?”
“Could attach it to their
duffel, string it up from a branch like a distress flag. Might even attract
helpful attention if anyone else stumbles by, widening the search party.” Jenny
brought the heels of her hands to her eye sockets. “Can not believe I’d ever have to say that regarding my mom.”
Eddie waited for one of her eyes to open before offering an embrace. “We’re doin’ this well, Jinny. And that makes me think she and—what’s his name again?”
“Peyton. Like that quarterback.”
“Manning, hmm. Makes me think she and Peyton are also doing alright.”
They stood like that awhile, then headed toward the tent to take it down.The gasp woke her up, but Deborah remained shut-eyed and frozen in her slouch. Faking a state of sleep was a practiced skill for her—from teenage mornings when insomnia was the truer reason for ‘sleeping in’, to afternoons at the Interpretive Center when small talk (or deep, for that matter) could be avoided by leaning back in the swivel chair and breathing with a dainty snore. Sometimes she’d be on the phone with her mother, whose assisted living facility encouraged such communication; while Deb’s mother was just as shy as her, she’d talk for an hour if Deb would stay on so long. Ten minutes in, more likely, the call would end on that practiced snore and patience for the phone’s unique disconnect signal, Deb’s favorite tone beyond what nature could produce.
“Why does she have a gun?” she heard a man whisper, after counting twenty seconds of the gawkers’ incredulity.
Harriet sunk her neck as a kind of shrug. “Don’ know—is she… dead?”
“Christine?” the ranger uttered, without moving otherwise.
Harriet shot a look at Vernon, who continued to stare at the seemingly disembodied voice. “Um, yeah, it’s… me. Are you okay, Debbie?”
She lifted her hatless head and snarked, “bear shit in the woods?” Her reddened eyes begged them to get the joke.
Harriet’s smile complied. “This here is Vernon”—instantly swallowing regret at not providing him a cover name, as Peyton had done so quickly on his feet a mere million hours ago.
Vernon didn’t seem to mind being named. “Can we help you out with anything?”
Funny, that, both women thought in synch. Deborah voiced first: “I’m the ranger of Isle Royale. I mean, it’s kind to offer assistance with…” shifting her eyes to Harriet, “whatever you… have in mind.”
“Well,” Harriet cut to the chase, “we actually need your assistance. You see, Peyton—who’ve you met—is… not well.”
Deb lifted herself up, pulling at the flagstaff of the gun’s barrel as a crutch. “Where is he?”
“Over in the boat, near yours.”
“This aint,” the ranger studied Vernon’s physiognomy, “a trick, is it?”
Forty miles southwest, traveling toward them at thirty knots, the rental was buzzing by the easiest coastline to eyeball for Peyton’s speedboat. Eddie piloted on his own, cutting into the rougher waves and deciding when to come closer to shore for what Jinny or the kids pointed at. White fiberglass with red trim was the only object necessary to find, but if there happened to be herons or moose, that would be worth a moment’s awe.
Jinny thought about her father, perhaps to drift away from where her mother’s fate presently resided. Archie, she liked to label him, less for Norman Lear’s character than the goofy, good-natured red-head in the comic books she lapped up as a kid. Her dad wanted so badly to be a grandpa, maybe for the desire to have more than one child, as Jinny was a ‘miracle’, he said, letting his wife fill in the details of their endless pregnancy trials. Tara’s nursery, a month before she was born, was painted by Archie multiple hues of pink and garnished with a zoo of stuffed animals—several of which now looked out from Harriet’s loft. His death the day Jinny’s water broke was chalked up as an aneurysm no one saw coming; doctors a floor and a wing away from OB/GYN worked feverishly to save him, keeping Jinny in the dark about his prognosis—her own labor was not without complications. Harriet paced a spider web of waiting rooms, steeling herself for the news of one, two, three losses after a lifetime of asking for not so much—just to keep what already was, or what was due.
Eddie bumped her arm tenderly and throttled down. “There,” he softly told her first, before pointing for the kids to also see: a rackless moose knee-deep in an eroded inlet. Behind her, as their vantage point eventually allowed, stood her calf, apparently nervous about the relative depths they were in. “See,” Eddie kept his voice to Jinny’s ear, “that’s a promising sign.”
Deborah, shotgun angled to steps she was about to take, followed Vernon and Harriet to the boats. When Peyton saw her, he offered a frail “sight for sore eyes,” which she had to think about before politely nodding.
“So it all comes full circle,” she decided to say to this marooned crew, bemused by what ‘it’ might mean. She pat the shotgun stock and declared, “wolf-free, though they have more right to an undesignated campsite than humans do. Just sayin’.”
Harriet smiled to help out. “Yeah, they gave us the heebie-jeebies, that’s for sure.”
“It’s a big reason we can’t have renegades ’round here,” Deborah leveled in Vernon’s direction. “You still haven’t explained your part in this little drama.”
Oh, to be a loon right now, Vernon flashed in his energized mind, to dive away from anyone’s prediction where or when I’d surface again. “I’m, so happens, stranded as well. Had to, um, bail out of a sinking.…” He stopped, hearing Harriet’s silent, lawyerly plea not to divulge everything. “A sinking situation,” he felt it safe to conclude.
“That doesn’t tell me much,” Deborah dug. “Like, who isn’t in one o’ those, more often than not?”
“A fuller explanation can follow,” Harriet interceded, “but Peyton here really needs a doctor’s attention. Think we could, um—”
The ranger moued at the prospects, one boat and both. “Tell you what: gonna be fifty miles to the closest road—that’d be Eagle Harbor, Michigan.”
“Closer than Grand Portage, or even Thunder Bay?”
“Yep. And wind’s in that direction, too. I think the best way to do it is to tug yours with mine.”
Vernon risked an idea: “Wouldn’t it make more sense to syphon off some of your fuel? That’s all we need, really, is—”
“Nope. Got an inboard tank and no suction tubes. Besides,” she winked, “I’m duty-bound to keep an eye on you.”
~30~
The kids were pretty pumped about the moose, and the fringe benefit was that they studied the shoreline with telescope intensity. Eddie had returned the speed to about thirty knots and now, at the turn into Siskiwit Bay, he and Jinny had to make a crucial decision. The bay cut backwards more than ten miles of shoreline that could turn up Peyton’s boat but also lose them remaining daylight to continue north, where being stranded would have more dire circumstances. For that matter, to get into the bay they had to six islets, none of which they bothered to circle in order to ‘leave no stone unturned’—the total shoreline of all 450 islands totaling a galactic distance.
“Let’s go toward Malone Bay,” Jinny advised, pointing out on the map a fair amount of coves that would require more pressing exploration. “There’s a camp area there, too, as we’ll need a break eventually.”
The lake breeze was exhilarating over the wide open water; Tara and Tommy seemed to have forgotten the somber purpose of this trip, caught up in the fast-moving adventure. Jinny, despite constant cognizance of the purpose, pressed her lips to prevent a relieved look on her face—that somehow what they were doing was wholesome, no matter how grim the pragmatics or prospects for success. Eddie’s eyes indicated the same, and while he was subtly bopping to some driving tune in his head, nothing but Jinny and her family was on his mind. His shift would be starting three hours from now in Grand Marais, which was more than three hours away at full throttle; he had meant to call in at Grace Island, but let that go as if to ensure he’d not be lured back. He learned in Afghanistan when hearing any talk of a ‘higher call’: a focus needed focus, with one or the other (or both) a capital ‘f’.
“Can I drive, to give you a break?” Jinny asked.
“Sure.” He London-Bridged his arm for her to get to the throttle, then take hold of the steering wheel. “I hope I wasn’t losing—”
“Focus? No way. That’s why I’m tapping in, to get some o’ yours.”
Now that the elders had set foot on Isle Royale—even Peyton, who responded to the nature’s call with some propping up by Vernon—they had to fight the fading afternoon light to launch back into the lake. There was still some debate on which direction made more sense—Michigan seeming so remote in, especially, Harriet’s estimation. Deborah emphasized that Houghton HQ was already apprised of the situation: a missing couple, at least. “I have no idea who may be looking for you, Vernon,” she qualified. “Seems you just surfaced from… Loch Ness or somethin.”
The joke allowed him a little levity himself. “Yeah, that’s about accurate. Still adjusting, though, to my faithful fan base.”
“Say, you have a phone, right? In case you need to tell me to slow down, speed up, whatever.”
Vernon looked at Peyton, who displayed his empty palms. “Nope. Guess I’d have to send you smoke signals.”
“Can’t we just all fit in your boat, Debbie?”
“An’ leave this one abandoned? No. Besides, you can see that yours has more room for lyin’ down.” She uncoiled the speedboat’s anchor rope from their mutual tree, then walked it over and into to stern of the camouflage boat. The heavy swivel fangs of the anchor fit snug into a utility bar embedded for such purposes. “Thing is,” Deb calculated, “we’d be better off distributing the weight. Vernon, you stay with Peyton; Christine, you ride with me.”
Harriet’s face fell. She hoped one of the men would speak to another arrangement, but they were already easing themselves into the speedboat. “Maybe it’d be better if—”
“It would be better if we follow established protocols. I may need your yeoman help, anyway, looking over our payload and all.”
“Peyton as ‘payload’,” Vernon snickered. “Let’s hope we get this mission right.”
Malone Bay was garrisoned by Wright Island, shaped like an open lobster claw. Eddie eased the boat into this lagoon and took advantage of an empty dock near what seemed to be an abandoned house. “Bathroom break, anyone?”
The kids ran off with scant regard for Jinny’s admonition to stay safe; their exploration of Grace Island had emboldened their sense of purpose. “If you were my mom—” Jinny glanced around, “and I know you’ve never met her—would you pick this kinda place to disappear?”
Eddie nodded mirthlessly. “She hasn’t disappeared, exactly, Jinny. We just haven’t discovered where she’s at yet.”
“Knowledge, you’re saying, is a matter of perspective.”
“Yes, and a bit o’ faith. No one but you knows where I’m at right now—they wouldn’t guess right in a thousand tries. Speaking of,” he dug into his pocket, “should claim my sick day by now.”
“I’ve already practiced my deceit, if you want me to do the honors on your behalf.”
Eddie, sliding his fingers on his screen, beamed at that: “hey, boss, I got my nurse here to fill in the facts! That would lower suspicions, I bet.” Then, as he put the phone to his ear, he changed expressions. “Well, that figures—‘no network coverage’. Maybe yours has better reach?”
Jinny took out her phone and slid her fingers in like fashion. “Who should I call? Hey—my mom’s phone is back at the house.” She speed-dialed. “Maybe she found her way back… Shit! same blockage. I guess we’re pretty remote, huh?”
“I guess. Maybe that’s why whoever lived here bailed out. They were probably happy as clams before the world became wireless.”
“Whatcha gonna do about your shift?”
“Rick can handle it. The precinct has reinforcements when needed.”
“I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
Eddie drew out his arms and raised his chin. “I took an oath to protect those in trouble, not to trouble things more. It’s all good.”
“No. But you’re good.”
Almost as an afterthought, Deborah sheathed the shotgun in its compartment and turned the key. Whenever asked if she had actually shot any wolves—or anything else on the island—she turned the notion around. “I’m here for their protection, to keep their diminishing population from vanishing altogether. Wolves I’m not worried about, and certainly not the moose they need to eat.”
“Then why—”
“Humans. They’re worth worrying about.”
And while Deborah could replay this kind of conversation in her mind, she didn’t at the present moment. Nor were Harriet or the men asking her about the gun or the nature of her worries.
Harriet made sure that Peyton was well enough pillowed in the bottom of his floating gurney. Vernon took his position in the swivel opposite the pilot’s chair; he promised to give a thumbs up or sidewise or down whenever Harriet requested a status check, which she said she’d do every ten minutes or so using a Joshua tree gesture. “Sounds good, Hare,” he voiced as Deborah pushed them to deeper water.
“Who’s ‘Hare’?” she mumbled as she held Harriet’s arm to ease her into the camouflage boat.
Harriet scowled at Vernon on the sly, then turned to Deborah as if she hadn’t heard the question, which Deb repeated. “Oh, it’s just… a nickname. Like the rabbit. I used to run a fair bit.”
“Hmm. I’m kinda a tortoise myself, as you mighta noticed. Anyway, I like ‘Christine’ better. Sounds… pristine.”
The anchor rope sunk between the boats, forty, now fifty feet from each other. “What’s optimal distance?” Vernon asked across the water.
“Depends on the speed,” Deb voiced above her started engine. “Faster we go, further you should be in the wake. But don’t sweat it—no time, no need for such adjustments. I’ll start ’er slowish and open up when the rope’s above the surface.”
“Okay.”
Pulling away from land mass was not the hardship for Harriet, in the lead boat, and Peyton lying blind in his own, impotent craft. The notion of help-on-its way (or rather, travelling to their own rescue) was clearly a reason to rejoice. On the other hand, heading back into the vortex of Lake Superior—even under stormless skies—put a damper on things. Vernon upheld a poker face, having committed himself to the idea of being an old Odysseus, come what may. Debbie, also, had her own kind of maskless disguise.
She was sure her pristine passenger was going to inquire about their route, who’d receive them at Eagle Harbor, where they’d sleep, and so on. She’d want these questions for the attention, if every response would add to her duplicity. Like Gary knowing they were headed to his domain, for instance—Deb was prepared to reassure Christine with even his real name, what he looked like, how he held the left side of his beard when he wanted to talk some more or think something out with a fellow ranger. Of course, no call to Gary had been made, not in the recent hour or two that mattered. And, unlike cell phones and their fragile reliance on ‘network coverage’, she had a CB radio that would always work—no excuses on that front. So far, though, Christine gave no second guesses. Vocally, at least.
For her part, she approximated many mississippis to be as close to the 10-minute checks as possible. Vernon must have been doing likewise, as he always looked down to talk with Peyton a half-minute before Harriet’s Joshua tree, and so his thumbs up was already readily informed. He’d hold his gaze in Harriet’s direction well beyond her acknowledgement—bringing her hands together in a namaste that wished she could be there, walk the tightrope between boats, ask how this all looked two days ago from his pontoon.
‘Oh, thanks for asking,’ he’d sheepishly say. ‘It was, um, slower for sure. Lonelier. Not as cold—had that pine box buffer to the wind, you know. And lantern heat, you also know. My eyes were more in folds of novels than what the lake was tryin’ to say. Truth of the matter, I had counted on more time to observe the vacancy of everything and, of course, the foolishness of that conclusion. Like bein’ a teenager in reverse. But no more feelin’ sorry for myself. Purposes being what they are, we got each other to keep our capillaries flowin’. Peyton’s passin’ fair in that regard, all things considered.
The lake itself, one could imagine, was neutral to the escapades upon its surface, and maybe just as much below. Like an epidermis, the waves flashed just a fraction of the inner essence, the systems circulatory and neural and endocrine.
There was a story, if the voice box of the lake could tell it, of a waterspout that formed in what would be the brain of the wolf, twenty-some miles further on from the tip of Keweenah Peninsula. Many times the power of an F-5 tornado, the spout didn’t move from its spot and, instead, drilled into the ebony depths of the water, roiling the fish and clams and coppery clay. Humans, if they had capacity to witness, would understand their future vessels would not stand a chance against such flushing force.
And then, as if its own Moses figured the turmoil was enough, the whirling storm subsided and the flow from bed to middle fathoms to the surface that would float birch logs, at first, then canoes, then rudimentary pontoons, ships eventually made from taconite that logic says should sink. The surface seemed to encourage these, if the churn of that great waterspout retained its memory and lashed out on occasion.
As much as Deborah was a ranger of the land, her jurisprudence necessarily claimed the lake—surface and below. That churn was not a myth to her like Ojibwa legends of water panthers per se. At any moment it could swallow decades of preparation in a single gulp.
By coincidence perhaps, Deb’s stomach growled.In the span of a half hour or so, the kids covered the three-quarter mile length of the southern lobster claw of Wright Island. White spruce and balsam fir spotted the open grass and moss, looking like a summer version of ‘the Island of Misfit Toys’. At least that’s the impression Jinny had, finding a lush patch of moss on which to lie down. She patted the space between her and Eddie, still standing. “A cat nap will keep us more alert,” she suggested.
Eddie looked east with some concern that Tara and Tommy were not in sight. “You don’t wanna trail them or nothin’?”
“Look at the map,” Jinny said with eyes closed. “Do you think they could get lost here?”
“Probably not.” He sat for ten seconds, then leaned as long on one elbow before succumbing to Jinny’s pull on his shoulder. To her mock snores, he shook his head. “I’m just jittery, I guess.”
She reminded him, “neither of us got much sleep last night.”
“Good point.”
Ten minutes of yawns and pillow-testing one bicep and then the other, their eyes blinked finally open at the same second. Jinny laughed through her dimples. “How come tomcat isn’t napping?”
“Cuz puss ’n’ boots aint either.”
“I got reasons.”
“So do I.”
Jinny suddenly reflected on the gravity of her reasons. She squeezed her eyes not clownishly, but like a flash image of someone shooting heroin. And like the instinct to turn away—squeeze the eyelids tighter—she couldn’t ‘unsee’ it or replace the image with something anodyne. Now the vision of her mother’s body bloated with lake water, floating like a dust bunny somewhere in the Metrodome, which—even worse—had been demolished years ago. You can turn over stones today, but not know what was or wasn’t there yesterday. Her eyes now were sealing up the tears that begged to burst; Eddie slid towards her and they did into his chest. Ten minutes like that he held her, and, when breathing synched, they feel asleep.
Tommy had bought into his sister’s upper hand in any clue of what was happening today. How they navigated Wright Island had the earmarks of how they organized the loft each time they visited Grandma, or (more subliminally) how they coped during weekends with their dad, which hadn’t happened for a while. Memories were mixed for awhile; drives down to the Twin Cities to see a Minnesota Wild hockey game—where Dad even knew one of the players!—were exhilarating, but also exhausting by the middle of a Saturday night, when they’d get back to his tiny apartment in Duluth. A stop at Denny’s was always welcome, with permission to order the mini-grandslam breakfast at 11pm; a stop on the shoulder of the interstate was often bewildering, with Dad taking a whizz (“either o’ you guys need to? Now’s the time!”) or downright frightening, with blinding blue lights and Dad’s failure in a breathalyzer test. A social worker sat with Tommy and Tara in the back seat of a police car to assure them they were not in trouble and would be back with Mom in Two Harbors soon. “Is Daddy in trouble?” Tommy bleated. The social worker, experienced this way, waited the five seconds or so that an older sibling would supply an answer, and Tara’s “he’ll be okay, Tommy—he just can’t drive us” was script-perfect. At least to satisfy her little brother.
Tara had no illusions; there was no ‘just’ anything regarding her father. Hockey, with such fast pounding of bodies into the boards and the inevitable third-period fight, when the Target Center roared differently than when the Wild scored a goal, beguiled her to imagine some analogy in her second-grade mind. Even the players who fought shook hands at the end of the game, and maybe that was what her dad hoped would happen with Mom.
They had reached the southeasternmost corner of Wright Island and circled back toward the rental boat with a business-like gait that they were being of some help. Nonetheless, Tommy was getting irritable. “Why Grandma would come way the heck here when we wanna visit her? Is she playing hide an’ seek?”
Tara sighed and waited those five seconds or so. “We don’t know where she is, so we can’t ask her what’s going on.”
“Well, what do you think’s going on, huh? And is Eddie… Mom’s friend?”
She bit her lower lip and didn’t answer beyond his ‘huh’ a bunch more times.
He had lapsed into disgruntled silence for their trek to the harbor side until he looked toward a mound of clothes in the distant grass and shrieked. “What!” Tara grabbed his raised forearms, then swung toward the mound that was now jostling with the aural shock. “Wait! Tommy—it’s… it’s…” But she wasn’t sure.
“Hey,” shouted Eddie, now discernible as the darker part of the behemoth.
Jinny framed her face within the triangle of his arm and torso.
“Were you? I mean,” Tara regretted launching an uncertain question at such volume, even in a theatre of no one else listening. “Were you… playing… dead right now?”
“No, no, Tara honey,” Jinny crawled through the tent of Eddie and, like a slow sprinter, gained her footing from four limbs to two. “Didn’t mean to frighten you—Tommy, we’re alright—just fell asleep—grass so soft here, doncha think?”
“I thought
you were dead!” he yelled, squirming out of her embrace to cry in some
makeshift corner. “Like Grandma is!”
“What?” Tara whimpered, “where
is he getting that?”
Jinny moved to her like that parti-colored parachute she sometimes was afraid of in P.E. “Nowhere,” Jinny whispered to calm her down, “he’s not getting that from nowhere!” She sought Eddie as she hugged Tara tightly.
De-escalation flashed in Eddie’s mind, but he bristled at resorting to the protocols of training. “It’s important we listen,” he announced, “reason we got two ears. You can talk, Tommy—we care what you need to say…”While Tommy eked out general frustrations about Tara being bossy, he didn’t repeat anything about Grandma being dead. Jinny held his hands and asked him directly if he saw anything, “even in, like, a dream?” Tommy’s reddening eyes glistened an Are you crazy? then blinked rapidly as if to transition himself to a better mood.
Tara, for her part, gathered harebells and large-leaved asters and swatches of moss. “Eddie,” she asked, “is there some string on the boat?”
“Um, don’t know. What you got in mind?”
“To make a… what do you call this?”
Eddie sized up the clump she was trying to assemble. “A bouquet?”
“Yes. And it needs string to hold it together.”
“Well, let’s see what the boat’s got. Maybe even a vase, in case they get thirsty.”
Jinny and Tommy walked more slowly behind. They’d need to shove off anyway to take advantage of remaining daylight. The rest stop had been welcome, notwithstanding the frayed nerves—better to out them on terra firma than keep them hostage in the boat.
The best Eddie could come up with was tourniquet tubing in the first aid box. He helped Tara scrunch the stems and coil the tubing with garnishes of moss to hide the rubber. “So, who’s the lucky guy?”
“Huh?”
Eddie blushed at the need to explain. “Um—it looks like for a wedding.”
Tara glanced at her mother, who had settled into the swivel near the pilot chair. “Well,” she wagged her head, “if maybe Mom wants it—”
“Tara!” Jinny pretended to scowl.
“I made it really for Grandma,” Tara admitted, “if we find her.”
Tommy held his elbows and hooked them over the harbor side of the boat, now floating free from the dock. Eddie started the engine and affirmed, “when we will”, before revving to circle around and out of the lobster claw. Peering toward the xanthous west, he swallowed hard the tall order he had just proposed.
Some twenty miles northeast, still within the reach of many breaker islands, Harriet studied the same western sky, having shifted her closed-circuit gaze on the helpless speedboat. Jinny came to mind—it would have been natural to call her or be called every couple of days at least. And here it had been, what, four days since Vernon’s pontoon meteor? five? She’d have a belly laugh at this, now that it looks more… hopeful. “Deb?” Harriet called out, still staring where the sun would set, basically between her cottage and Jinny’s house in Two Harbors. “Debbie?” she repeated with more volume.
“Yeah, Christine, wha’s the matter?”
“Could we slow down?”
Deborah turned to gauge urgency, then throttled down at increments that wouldn’t send the speedboat crashing to her stern. “You need to pee? or vomit?”
“Huh?”
“I won’t look—Vernon back there shouldn’t either.”
“No. No! I
just wanted to… ask a favor.”
The camouflage boat kept an
idling rumble, in part to keep the request just between them—women’s business
the men needn’t hear. “Sure,” Deborah reached to find the brim of her nonexistent
hat, pinching the short hair above her left temple instead. “What’ll it be?”
“Can I borrow your phone,” Harriet instinctively made a weave with her fingers, just below the outer knuckles, “to contact my daughter.”
It was less a request, in Deborah’s mind, than a crash visit from a ghost. She levered her jaw like an excavator and pretended to swallow a burp. “Ah,” she finally let out, “no really can do.”
Harriet drew her eyebrows down and then raised them in appeal. “Wh..Why not?”
“Just ’cause,” patting her breastpockets and pants, “I don’t got one. And I don’t s’pose your daughter has a CB radio.”
“Wait, you had it yesterday—I’m sure you did.”
“No, I advised you to have some communication device—I’m sure of that.”
Vernon piped up from a drifting thirty yards. “Any problem?”
The wind whistled for a few seconds above the grumble of the engine. Harriet locked her eyes on Deborah’s face, flinching self-consciously. “No,” she uttered, “Christine’s just… lonely.” With no response from either, she added, “reasonably so.”
“You wanna switch, H—Christine?”
Deb answered on her behalf. “Now how would that even be safe, playing chinese firedrill out here in the open water?”
“I’m fine, Vern,” Harriet said, trying to give him some sort of wink. “And, yeah, a touch lonesome.”
After Wright Island, Eddie maneuvered the rental around the north rim of Malone Bay and further up the coast of Isle Royale. He, Jinny, and Tara kept their eyes peeled on the port side; Tommy, still with folded arms, perused the starboard endlessness of purple (the lake and sky having lost the day’s innocence of blue). He felt like throwing Tara’s bouquet, lying neglected on the deck, as far into the water as possible. They’re gonna die without water, anyway. But some counter-impulse prevented him from pulling that trigger.
At the mouth of Chippewa Harbor, two miles long and narrow as a cobra, Eddie cut the engine to consult with Jinny and the map. To do the search justice, they’d need to cross this sinewy enclave off the list of possibilities, especially since it would entice distressed sailors in a storm. There was a campsite a half-mile in, and maybe they wouldn’t reach another one before nightfall. While there was little to debate, Jinny thought a vote might do the posse good. “All in favor—‘aye’.”
Tara and Eddie said theirs, and Jinny would make a majority, but wished Tommy would come back to them. “No,” he simply muttered.
“Well, what would you prefer then?”
“Going back to Grandma’s house.”
“You know that’s too far now today.”
He didn’t know. Eddie suggested that he and Tara could resume the captaining of this ship when the calmer harbor waters allowed. Tommy instead turned his back on the harbor. ‘Let him be,’ he heard his mother whisper.
He remained silent in his sulk, even about those two tiny boats on the horizon.
~34~
“How’s Gitche Gumee doin’?” Peyton’s question rose to Vernon’s ears with surprising clarity, despite the return of the dull roar that the camouflage boat made.
“The lake that Lightfoot sang about?”
“Oh, way before him.” Peyton paced his phrasing to suit his still-strained breathing, but his desire to converse compelled Vernon to slide closer beside him. “Plus,” Peyton continued, “if you’re referring to the Edmund Fitzgerald,” that infamous shipwreck almost forty-five years ago, “ya better knock on wood.”
Vernon smiled and knocked on the gunwale. “Fiberglass will have to do! But all’s smooth sailin’ now, ’s far as I can tell.”
“I thought you might… think ‘Hiawatha’ first,… for all the readin’ you do.”
“Longfellow’s poem? His ‘song’ that nobody sings? No, I didn’t pack that for the pontoon. Probably should’ve. Sink that naïve wiseman once again; keep that lethal legacy alive!”
“Thought he… flew up…”
“Threw
up?”
“No!” Peyton chuckled. “Flew up… purple mist of… sunset, was
it?”
“Think you’re mixing Jimi Hendrix into it—’xcuse me, while I touch the sky!”
“Ha!... You’re right…. Purple is the polar… opposite of sunsets, anyway.”
Vernon surveyed the sky from the goldenrod fringe atop Isle Royale to the cloudless gray of what had been azure to the navy blue that Peyton now peered from the inside bottom of his boat. Further east, color was less the designation than the steeliness the sky defined, as if funeral bunting for the Edmund Fitzgerald, desperate to get to the haven of Whitefish Bay and away from the grip of Gitche Gumee.
The feldgrau of the camouflage boat bled into the steely atmosphere. Harriet’s light green windbreaker distinguished her figure, at least, from the shadow that had become the ranger. “How did you first receive this… Deborah person the other day?” Vernon quizzed his friend, to keep both of them awake.
Peyton described the waking up to curious wolves, the shotgun blasts to disperse them, the guilt trip she had leveled for camping on the sly. “Not that we were looking… to break the law…”, to which Vernon grinned in similar regard. Then the following behind the ranger’s boat to Windigo—“well, sorta like we’re doing now,… I guess…”—to register and camp on Grace Island, “on the up… and up.”
“And that’s when Harriet became ‘Christine’?”
Peyton
tried to laugh at that. “We were… confused, coming out of the tent… to wolves
and gunfire… I knew my boat would trace back to my name… but Harriet…. Just
wanted to protect her identity…, you know?”
“Like a fugitive, almost.”
“Well,.. not really. We had nothing… to hide.”
Vernon let his friend rest. Speaking over the rushing wind and motor buzz was exhausting enough, and whatever qua confessions about any/nothing to hide put potential straw on this camel’s back. Both men loved Harriet for her goodness—they loved each other the same way. Neither would want to think much further than that, even privately. Still, as the escaping sun seemed emblematic of their back-and-forth mortality, the longing to be in love—just once more before the Hiawatha hour—was as stark as a stomach cramp. You run through it, any athlete knew. Pain is not the same as injury. “Camping’s a wholesome thing,” Vernon opined, “registration seems kinda counterintuitive.”
“We weren’t trying… to skirt the system,” Peyton felt the need to reiterate. “National Park Service is… ’xactly that—a service… we should support.”
“Yep. Especially when we muck up the rest of the planet.”
“Damn straight.”
Ground Control to Major Tom entered Vernon’s mind for some reason. He had hummed it once on the pontoon—‘here am I sitting in a tin can’—happy for the ‘nothing I can do’ but, naturally, melancholic. Like Tom, he apparently had a choice in the matter to exit human society; unlike Tom, he had no Ground Control to call. “If you were staked in at Grace Island,” he asked Peyton seemingly out of the blue, “why would you go out on the lake again, especially with a storm brewin’?”
“Seriously?” Peyton smirked, then coughed in an effort to quickly assert the obvious. After his pal patted his chest to calm him, Peyton opened his hand for an Indian shake. “We were only intent… on lookin’ for you.”
Vernon gently clasped the raised hand. “Worried about the Wart, huh?”
The men fell asleep like that, holding left hands like tee-pee poles above Peyton’s chest. Vernon had waved to Harriet with his right—like a puppeteer, he supposed—and a thumb up to assure her that being out of view was not a worry. He simpered that it may have resonated a hitchhiker’s combination of dread and hope and come-what-may. Story of my life, he wafted in his weary mind.
Peyton’s slumber came a minute after Vern’s, as he was aware of specific soft snores he occasionally heard throughout the years. Not in Vietnam, of course, but days in the life sandwiching that formative scourge. A marine and a seaman go fishing one day… He had read Tim O’Brien’s set of stories about soldiers carrying the weight of their own worlds, crushing them sometimes more than the actual enemy. The narrator—presumably Tim—considers dodging the draft and gets as far north as Rainy River, where he encounters old Elroy as maybe a future ghost of himself, compelling him to decide his own fate.
‘Have I been a good enough Elroy to Vern? Peyton problematized, or vice versa?’ They hadn’t really each other’s backs as much as the notion held water. Then again, here they were, clutched in a rush to a doctor to stitch one or both of them up. Harriet, there, an incentive to live—to cooperate, at least. If we ever get there—wherever the ranger was going…
… go fishing one day… If maybe he’d done more of that on Greenwood Lake. Or lightened up on the Michelob, … A marine and a seaman… caught in the drink … go fishing one day… to get hooked….
“Hey, a beaver!” Tara blurted from the captain’s chair, clutching the wheel as Eddie controlled the throttle. They had just passed the Lake Ritchie stream bed and narrow channel to the windless backwaters of Chippewa Harbor.
Jinny crunched in between left and right shoulders of Tara and Eddie. “Well, I’ll be. All these years, I’ve never seen one! Are you sure it’s—”
“—it could be an otter maybe, or a muskrat,” she chanced, not having seen any of these in the wild.
Eddie had reduced the engine hum to almost nothing. “Interesting—could be any o’ those, but I’ll bet your first instinct is right. See the tail kinda like a pancake?” The glide was thick like a log of firewood, steady at a nonchalant speed, mesmerizing.
Tommy finally ventured over. “A beaver needs to have a home of sticks.”
“Good point,” Eddie whispered. “Let’s see where he’s swimming.”
“Or she,” Jinny jabbed.
The beaver practically trawled the rental boat, a couple lengths behind, through the length of the bay. It disappeared on seemingly no impulse, and Eddie cut the engine altogether. The crew held a collective breath and scanned the surface with some anxiety that, absurdly, the beaver might be in duress, drowning, terrified of these stalkers. Or maybe playing cat-and-mouse. Eddie, who had seen these before and—trying to repress the thought—participated in blowing up dams and dens with dynamite in his pre-police freelancing work, figured the beaver was aiming for a tunnel that ramped into the land. Theirs was a public/private existence, ambivalent to their effect on the world, not unlike human engineers. Jinny was thinking of this analogue, too, intrigued by their calm wiliness, forgetting her mother for this follow of the unseen until—slap!
There she was (the beaver, not Harriet) a hundred yards perpendicular to the boat. The kids let out their muted excitement; Jinny covered her mouth as if she needed to throw up. It was so relieving—cathartic, goddammit!—that the animal was in such aesthetic control, the opposite of lost or drowned or…
Eddie opened his arms like he was showing how big the fish was that got away. Jinny flashed a look at the back of her babies’ heads and fell into Eddie and wept as silently as she could.
Dusk descended tangibly as the rental boat circled back toward the mouth of the harbor. A dock like the one on Wright Island allowed Eddie to sidle up and talk over the evening. The kids disembarked with less energy than before, Tommy still intent on being a grump-a-lump. Tara noticed a ring of charred stones from a campfire and announced she’d look for marshmallow sticks. “Don’t go too far in those woods,” her mother called out, deciding not to correct her impression that they actually had marshmallows. “Tommy, keep an eye on her, yeah?”
Tommy didn’t ‘yeah’ back, but trudged like an orangutan. He stalled at a gap between trees to eyeball the distant lake—his vision threading through those trees and a channel islet and rocky coast into the murk where he had seen that tow of boats heading further into the swallow of the darkness. They wouldn’t there by now, logically, but worth the lookout anyway.
“Wonder what he’s thinkin’,” Jinny spoke to Eddie, still in the boat. “Poor kid—not ready for this.”
“Are you?”
“What, camping here?” Jinny turned to sit on the dock and let her legs dangle just above the water.
“Facing another uncertain night.”
Smirking, not too much, Jinny sought his own take on the question. “Well, what the hell else to do? I mean,” gnawing her lip, “I’m more lost than my mom.”
Eddie didn’t move on that. “You go to church ever, if I can ask?”
“You just asked. And once in a blue moon. Is that gonna rise tonight?”“The moon? A sliver, I think—been pretty dark this week. I sorta soured on church myself, since… fifth grade, maybe?”
“How would I know? Anyway, you suggesting we, um…”
“I was reading something this summer about Noah’s Ark. Finding the lost animals that didn’t come on by twosies, twosies or come off by threesies, threesies—you sang at camp, didn’cha?”
“No,” belying her wag at his rhythm. “And don’ tell me about animals that drowned in the flood.”
“Won’t do—the book didn’t go there. But—and this is where I thought I heard it in church one time—Noah sends out a raven that doesn’t come back, then a dove that does, but empty-handed, then another that brings a twig as evidence of good land, then another that sort of disappears—”
“—like the raven.”
He nodded, “like the raven, I guess, and Noah then, after all that, knows it’s gonna be okay to finally get back to dry earth.”
Jinny leaned back on her elbows. “So why are you still in the boat? Are we the doves and ravens here?”
Eddie stepped out with the rolled bundles of tent and sleeping bags. “I’m not sure why that came to mind.” He covered the dock in six strides, whistling the animals, they came on, they came on by twosies, twosies…
Jinny joined him in a minute, already staking a good spot for the tent. “Maybe try callin’ your precinct,” she reminded, reluctantly.
“Tried that already—same ol’ Model T of technology. Good riddance.”
“If you get fired over this, I’ll be pretty pissed.”
“If I get fired, I’ll exile to this here island—live off the land like Captain Fantastic!”
“Doesn’t the mom go crazy in that film?”
“Well,” he guffawed, “don’t have to be locked to that script.”
Tara came with an armload of sticks and cones, “for a fire—you got matches, right?”
“Where’s Tommy?”
“Just over there. He’s looking out at the lake, in case of invaders, he says.”
“Not bad,” Eddie affirmed. Jinny fetched food from the boat, and in no time they had a roaring fire.Heidi and Jeremy, colleagues for a couple years on Isle Royale, hooked up every once in a while. Nothing illicit, really—the nature of the job meant that being off-duty usually kept them on the island, and what they did for R & R was their unpronounced business. Heidi had a bunk in the attic space above the store, and Jeremy had his off the boathouse. They preferred venturing al fresco, though, both for the extra risk and range of options.
Since the departure of Deborah in one boat and the search crew for Harriet Anderson in another, they’d had three bouts of intercourse. They’d waited an hour at the Interpretive Center for mainland visitors until shrugging that prospect off. Heidi insisted on their aardvarking behind the tall counter, however, in case a message buzzed from Houghton or Debbie’s CB radio. But nothing disturbed, and they fell asleep thereafter.
Guilt must have woken them around noon, when data from the weather station needed to be sent to Houghton. Jeremy fetched those indicators while Heidi scrolled a variety of screens. Still no update on the missing campers, to her pursed cheek consternation. She was tempted to type in the fact that another boat was on the lookout, though she couldn’t find any information of anyone actually on the case—not Deb, not a pontoon plane from Houghton, not the police department from… where did Eddie say he’s from? She wanted to ask Jeremy as he returned, but forgot in the licking of his lips.
There were other duties to fill the afternoon. A half-dozen visitors came in the regularly scheduled ferry from Grand Portage, all intending to shuffle around for three hours before the regularly scheduled return. They bought some items at the store, hiked a modest loop in hopes to see a moose and hid their disappointment in a flip through of photos that paled in comparison to postcards. Someone always asked a hundred questions when a dozen would suffice, and Jeremy tagged-teamed with Heidi on this afternoon’s someone.
When the ferry finally departed, they were again alone and ran off to the mossiest patch they knew, near the mouth of Washington Creek. The overcast sky didn’t auger rain, but they quite wished to get caught in a cool drizzle—to keep them awake in the afterglow, if for no other reason.
The dusk woke them, drunk for an unimbibed and groggy moment. “Holy crap, Jer—we gotta get back!” Heidi’s nostrils flared when she was anxious or amused, or both.
“Back to the grind?” Jeremy deadpanned.
“I’m serious! Deb’s probably gonna be there and, and then what?”
Jeremy bobbed his head and frowned in no great thought. “I guess we say we’ve… been looking, too.”
Heidi lightly swat his beard. “You mean lie? Like pretend we’re actually helping with the emergency?”
“Well,” tapping her back, “what else can we do? I mean—how could it hurt to say that? It isn’t getting them in worser shape. And who’s to say they aren’t off on their own moss mound, anyway?”
Now she slapped him for real. He fumbled a couple apologies as she zipped her jacket and race-walked toward the Interpretive Center. The light sensor went on as she approached, startling her as if it would have been Deborah with a flashlight. She went in—cursing the fact that they had left the place unlocked—and dashed behind the counter and the computer that took a quarter-minute to restore its screen. Nothing new. She typed some cursory search phrases and then more deliberately into a message box.
Jeremy opened the door and raised his eyebrows. “What’s the world saying?”
Heidi grimaced. “Nada. And I don’t wanna go above Deb’s head—she’d be the one to send this to Houghton, logically…”
“Well, try calling her again,” Jeremy suggested, pulling his phone from his pocket. “Here—I’ll do it.” He pressed her contact and held it obliquely to his ear, having already heard a couple hours earlier the brash disconnect tone. When that sounded again, he wondered, “how ’bout her CB?”
Heidi was already fiddling with the dials. “It must be off, or…”
At the risk of sounding dismissive, Jeremy coughed into his hand and opined, “ya know, maybe she needed a day to herself. I mean, we just sorta did.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Her ‘me time’ equals our ‘we time’? And this during a missing person search? Are you nuts, or just plain—”
“Yep, guess so,” Jeremy glummed. He thumbed toward the boathouse. “You know where to find me in case…”
Heidi stayed a long time at the counter and ended up sending several messages with subtle shades of S.O.S.: ‘waiting here in Windigo’; ‘haven’t heard from search teams’; ‘here again is Mr Elsruud’s registration’. She thought about referencing the Minnesota policeman to cast the net farther—an all hands on deck sort of spark in effort to light up the lugubrious tech. As a last resort, she could call her mom and get some advice.
Instead, she called Jeremy to bring her some bedding—she’d sleep behind the counter tonight.
Jeremy came with that and a bottle of wine. “Just threw a couple pizzas in the oven.”
“I don’t have an appetite,” Heidi pouted. “These jerks from Houghton…”
“They’re probably at the pub. It’s too dark now for the day to have something to show.”
“So what about Deb, huh? Where the hell is she?”
Jeremy sighed an I dunno. “She mighta boated down to Grand Marais, stop in her own place for a change. Hell, she’s off-duty, too.”
“But she could say so! Leaving us to—”
“—to do exactly this: hold the fort.” Jeremy unhinged a corkscrew from his Swiss army knife and squinted underneath the counter. “See any cups around here?”
Heidi grabbed the bottle, squeaked it open and glugged a mouthful straight. “We got each other’s germs already,” she mumbled.
Jeremy took a long swig himself and smoothed out the bedding.
The nature of a tugboat is to be inconspicuous—never haughty about its pack-a-punch power or diminutive leadership. Just fast enough to build momentum, then tortoise enough to keep that steady, modest speed. The captain of a tugboat is always aware of the comatose weight behind, and thereby needs to guard against being lulled to that same coma—especially in the open sea, where there are no obstacles or reasons to turn this way or that.
On Deborah’s mind, barely budging the mid-set throttle or steering wheel, was Andreas Lubitz. Though this airline pilot en route from Barcelona to Dusseldorf peered into a bright morning sky, the opposite of Deborah’s, his day aimed to eradicate all optic nerves in his power, asap. And not, like a preschool teacher, modeling nap time for the pupils to follow—this is the way we go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep, (then more slowly) this is the way we go to sleep, go to sleep, go… No, the crew on the towed tanker usually stayed awake, played cards, looked out the portholes, relaxed; the cabin of that Germanwings had, among its 150 passengers, a group of high schoolers who’d more likely swap seats to bluetooth photos and laugh at last night’s after-party. These, also, were the optic nerves Lubitz craved to crash. His breathing in the locked cockpit remained as indecipherably calm in the ten-minute descent, arrowing lugubriously into the stony face of a stoic Alp. The chief pilot, who had stepped out to use the toilet, pounded incredulously on the cockpit door, never imagining Lubitz to be, well—‘out of control’ couldn’t possibly apply—to be so… inhuman.
Behind Deborah, everyone had fallen asleep. She had been conscious of Christine’s occasional shouts to Vernon if all was fine, and though she didn’t turn to see if he raised a thumbs up, she could tell that he had settled into the bowels of the boat to keep warm and—who knows?—to snuggle up with Peyton. As for Christine, she had coiled within her arms and raised knees, as comfortably as could be in the cushioned chair diagonal from Deborah. Her almost imperceptible undulation showed that she had abandoned her watch and succumbed to sleep. Slowly, then, the ranger decelerated the camouflage boat.
She no longer thought of Lubitz—she was not him, nor he her. A sliver of moon barely made a dent in the charcoal sky, and any shadow of the sunset behind her had by now slipped away. The headlight on the boat only illuminated a football field of lake—wedged in the shape of a hammerthrow. No, not Lubitz, but The Police somehow entered in; the cover of her Synchronicity CD had cracked years ago, but the disc itself was still able to play “King of Pain”—with the world turning circles running ’round my brain I guess I’m always hoping that you’ll end this reign… It was as if KQDS had sent it out to her turned-off radio: ‘next song’s dedicated to Deborah Wilcox from a secret admirer—keep on rockin, Deb!’ She recollected the fullness of almost five minutes to bring the boats to a standstill, the rope between them floating on the surface like an emaciated anaconda.
The work was stealthy, lynx-like, devoid of voices or visions in her head. She tip-toed past Christine and knelt down to the bar that pressure-gripped the anchor of Peyton’s boat. The rope needed to slacken a bit more to undo the hold, so Deborah pulled to close the gap between the boats by a few inches. The lack of light slowed her efforts, but if all remained relatively quiet, there was no real hurry. The engine still murmured with the harmony of wind and wave-break, but Deborah was careful not to clank the galvanized steel against the body of the boat.
She knew that the weight of the anchor sinking quickly would jostle the speedboat and potentially wake Vernon. To avoid that, the plan needed to risk the potential waking of Christine. Fingers crossed, neither would happen. She balanced the shank and flukes on the corner of the transom, ensuring nothing would rehook.
Any hesitation was really only to keep the procedure slow. She returned to the captain’s chair yet didn’t sit immediately, preferring to stare for a minute at the opaque scene, the womblike imagination of the speedboat with its unsnipped umbilical cord. There was no ceremony in this—God forbid any witness—and with the minute over, Deborah slid into driving mode and geared gently forward. She heard the scrape of the anchor and its subsequent splash; she didn’t hear Christine react, though, knock on fiberglass. She gradually accelerated to the same speed as before “King of Pain”—there’s a red fox torn by a huntsman’s pack, out of these woods, out of these woods…
The faux of the plan nearly went according to plan: Deborah slouched forward and jerked her forehead up as methodically as the tick on a slowly set metronome. This way, whenever Christine woke up, it would seem as if Deborah was nodding off. In fact, she did several times, shaking in panic each time she came to. A vague question in her mind, among others, was the direction she should veer, as she’d want nothing to do with Gary’s Upper Peninsula, Michigan. Likewise, a line back to Windigo would face the firing line of Jeremy, Heidi, reports to file, a life unlivable. Just as it would be in Canada, if at least she could kill time in the eking toward that nautical border.
Then, what to do with Christine? Force a thing or two, abbreviate a tale from the darkside, act drunk, slow dance a promise all will work out, slide her off the corner of the transom, now that she had the practice. Join her, if the spirit led—whatever such nonsense meant.
Or just keep going. ‘Yep,’ she could straight-face to colleagues, ‘sure got lost out there.’
~38~
The stones of the fire ring were at the right height to prop roasting sticks for bratwursts, and Jinny also rigged a grill out of wire hangers she ‘borrowed’ from the Interpretive Center’s coatrack at Windigo. On this grill she broiled some peeled potatoes and warmed the hot dog buns, then pop tarts for dessert. “And an apple to brush your teeth,” she said.
“Plenty of bottled water in the back of the boat,” Eddie reminded. “It’s important to stay hydrated out here. Kind of deceptive with so much water around.”
“Is it true,” Tara queried, “that our bodies are mostly made out of water?”
“Hmm,” Jinny hugged her arms to stop from spilling out. “Kind of like Frosty the Snowman?”
Tara shook her head. “He’s all water. And we’re hotter inside.”
“These are good questions, kiddo. I remember thinking the same thing in Afghanistan,” Eddie recollected, poking at the fire, “and sometimes being thirsty as heck out on desert duty, like anything we drank… evaporated, it seemed, inside us.”
“I thought it was cold in Afghanistan,” Jinny shivered for effect, “like here.”
“Mountains, maybe. But my deployment was in Farah, which is low and blazin’ hot.”
“Why were you there?” Tommy asked, softening his ire for the evening.
Eddie breathed in what might have been a prepared response. “Kinda the same as I do now. They need policemen there, too.”
Tommy scrunched his eyebrows but didn’t follow up. Tara positioned herself to hear more, which Eddie provided in harmless anecdotes—feeding baby camels; helping an old lady out of her collapsed house; earthquakes in that country, natural and otherwise; stars you could study all night long, sometimes to keep awake. “Which we’re not gonna do tonight, right?”
“Right,” Jinny agreed. “Can you guys get the extra life preservers from the boat. That wool blanket, too—be careful, yeah? Take the flashlight.”
Eddie watched them scamper with admiration. “You’ve raised them well—they’re…”
“They’re rugrats at night—gonna be rollin’ all over the tent. If you had designs on sleeping, maybe cut ’em in half.”
“I said I could sleep in the boat—tent barely made for three, anyhow.”
“Nonsense. Could rain. Too cold—the tent’s gonna hold in everyone’s body heat.”
“Melt us like Frosty,” Eddie joked, “times four.”
“Plus,” Jinny risked, “I might have nightmares about… that stupid beaver.”
“Wasn’t stupid. Just using instincts we don’t really understand.”
The unzipping of each sleeping bag allowed for more flexibility in spreading them out as wide, fluffy combinations of mattress and blanket. Tara curled kitten-like into one corner of the tent and her brother sprawled in a less disciplined yang from the pillow he made of her knee. Jinny arranged the top sleeping bag to tuck them in and cover her, too, and Eddie overlapped that with the wool blanket that he rolled into on the far side of the tiny tent. He and Jinny caressed hands as they waited for the soft snores of kid slumber.
That corresponded to a gradual whistle of a western wind. “Did’ja pound the stakes in deep enough?” Jin whispered, not at all worried.
“Don’t worry,” Eddie returned at the same pitch. “We’re in Noah’s Ark, remember?”
“Twosies, twosies?”
They listened to the eggshell energy and let the other be the first to go to sleep. When it became apparent that neither would for a little while, they talked. Deeper context about that baby camel, about the reasons Jinny drove to Grand Portage on a weekday afternoon, about Flat Stanley as a generational fixture in the elementary curriculum. About the blessings of a tent.
“Somebody told me that the Czech word for tent is ‘stan’.”
“Hmm. And?”
“And so, for a while, I lived in Afghani-tent.”
“As a bohemian guy, right?”
“As disturbingly numb, most of the time.”
They snuggled closer and chanced a couple kisses. In a general kind of way, they lofted an unelaborate prayer for Harriet, that tomorrow would find her safe and sound. They pinky-promised not to let the unknown be enemy of eventual truth. Then they sank into the dreamworld of the other creatures on the ark.
By the crack of dawn, the night-long gale had subsided and the overcast sky promised to behave for the purposes of the search. Tommy was up first to run into the woods to pee, then Tara followed when he returned. The adults smiled at the irony of sleeping in on a school day, even as Eddie admitted he often watched tv after shifts to this very hour—last night’s NBA or pundit shows debating the country’s divided direction. Sleep came better after a measure of mind muck, he said, a feeling of getting caught up and being that much more informed before the evening shift.
Breakfast was another box of pop tarts—blueberry, this time, “good for brain cells, I’ve heard.”
“Really?”
A shrug ‘why not?’ before supplying, “the additives can’t be too helpful, so we won’t make a habit of this…”
Eddie stacked the rolls of sleeping bags and blanket on top of the life preservers and uprooted the tent stakes. “Gonna miss this site,” he mused, “glad to have met ya!”
“We can come back here, right?” Tommy wanted to be sure of something in this strange journey.
Jinny looked at Eddie, who pointed his eyebrow back as ‘your call’. She sighed at the prospect. “We’re gonna keep going up the coast—got enough food for lunch and dinner—and head toward Windigo to see what’s what. Maybe even back to the marina and Grandma’s house.” She gauged how this was being received before concluding, “so, no—I don’t think we’re coming back here, nice as it is.”
With that, they folded up the tent and checked the site “to leave it cleaner than we found it, right?” Tommy took his post between the trees, surveying the lake's horizon, barely different than the light gray hem of sky.
He jerked when he heard Tara’s scream: “Mom! Where’s the boat?!”
~39~
There’s a thought that floats about Jonah, encapsulated by the giant, Mediterranean fish: conscious or not, he requires a larval stage to undergo a reincarnation; instead of entering as worm and leaving as butterfly, however, he doesn’t change his form at all. At Nineveh, in fact, he demonstrates the same intractable disposition as he had before entering the watery womb. His three moribund days don’t change him much; he hasn’t had a ‘come to Jesus’ moment, really. If anything, he’s like a hockey player thrown into the penalty box for highsticking, planning a less discernible revenge the minute he’s out. Jonah is the mirror image of…
Vernon had to think this out; of mirror images, he decided. At an uncertain point, his dreaming phase that may have had a place for Jonah (or not) gave way to waking knowledge of the baby-rocker boat. Peyton’s speedboat, going nowhere. Peyton sleeping—rosy enough to prove he wasn’t dead. Vernon had shared his body heat with him, the closest either had come to having a spouse, at least this side of being over-the-hill. They’d gone on fishing trips together, sleeping in the pickup’s slide-in camper, each to a thin bunk. The bottom of this boat was different—something like the belly of a fish.
It was time to get up. “Rise and shine,” Vernon drolled to his friend, who kept his eyes closed but raised his brows to make his characteristic worry lines. Vernon chuckled at his groggy mug. “We’re back in the military, buddy. Gotta get more done by 9am than most people do all day.”
Peyton groaned, “says who?”
“Well,” Vernon levered his elbow, “that ranger lady, probably. Wonder why—” He suddenly changed his tone. “Wonder why we stopped.”
“Whad’ya mean?”
Vernon contemplated their
unseen options, or, as he tried to poker-face, the lack thereof.
“Whad’ya mean, Vern?” Peyton repeated. His worry lines smoothed out in the energy required to squint against the morning light.
“Well,” Vernon pushed himself up to peer above the gunwale. The expanse of opal waves and overcast was blinding; nothing varied but the hint of sun unhinged from the horizon, landless and aloof. “Got ourselves,” he weighed his words, “a pickle of a situation, see.” He looked down to try to make it easier to say. “Not so much in danger, I guess, as just danged lost.”
Peyton strained to get his stiff body up, pulling on Vernon’s shoulder. “Harriet?” he wisped before his line of vision would make that question moot. “Are you…?” His jaw quivered and his throat tightened against the reflex that something in him would spill—even emptiness, like dry heaves. Vernon, trying to be more valiant, likewise felt this siege upon his senses. He instantly busied himself with the cushions to make them suitable for sitting upright, as much into the tuck of the impotent helm to guard against the wind.
“Let’s just sit awhile, huh? Kinda… let some minutes pass.”
“As opposed to what, Wart?”
The anchor line tempered some of the speedboat’s bobs upon the ten-inch waves. Vernon climbed atop the cabin roof and bellied over to assess the situation. The rope disappeared straight down, barely tilting toward the direction of the wind, which Vernon assumed would be from the west-northwest. The ratcheted spindle had the lion’s share of rope still coiled—the fifty feet released for the tow would not, of course, come anywhere near the bottom. Though Canada’s Great Slave Lake was deeper, Lake Superior boasted more volume of depth; Vern had read somewhere that all its water spread out would flood the land mass of both American continents to at least twelve inches. The weight of such a blanket would crush life forms worse than any Ice Age fantasy. Water, being the source of life, constantly reminds of the need for equilibrium.
The Goldilocks ‘just right’ theory, thought Vernon. And at this moment, Gitche Gumee was as Papa Bear as he could imagine. He wondered whether to release the pawl to drop more rope and slow down their drift, or crank the anchor up to let the wind have freer reign. He decided to do neither, deferring to Peyton’s armchair take on things. Before he’d ask, though, he envisioned where the camouflage boat would have been and how Harriet would look in this morning’s pall. Without the engine roar, they could talk, tell a joke about loons popping up wherever your eyes weren’t. Update Peyton’s vitals and the ranger’s plan to get him to a hospital. As grim as it was that none of this could happen now, Vernon smiled at the imagination.
“So,” he slid back down to Peyton, “it looks like the anchor didn’t hold onto the ranger’s boat.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that… we’re on our own.”
Peyton swallowed what little spit he had. He didn’t want to exacerbate their straits and rather deliberated if this were right to say: “On your own is what you wanted all along.” He cast a glance to see how that would be received. Vernon was listening but didn’t take the bait. So Peyton continued, “to say ‘we’re on our own’ is rich: Harriet and I sure as hell didn’t need to come out here, fetch you from this teenage angst you always seem to have.”
“Then why did you?”
“Why did we?” Peyton doubled his volume. His worry lines returned to ask through an imperative: “you tell, me, Vernon. Why indeed did we?”
Vernon responded with a tacit, minute-long regard for his friend, whose accusation of immaturity, in whatever tone, was not for the first time. “What’s weird,” he said at last, “is that now we need to fetch Harriet, or hope she can fetch us. I s’pose thereafter we can figure everything out. If you’d still be talking to me by then.”
The men remained silent a stretch of thirty swells of wind. “Talking with you,” Peyton corrected. “I hate talking to someone. Like Bad Company’s ‘Feel Like Making Love’, but—”
“I get it.”
~40~
In ways, being stranded on the northeast half of Isle Royale was as dire as being stranded in the middle of Lake Superior. Jinny and Eddie came running to Tara’s discovery of a boatless dock and all but dropped the vests and sleeping bags they had casually scooped up before the shriek. Tommy approached more warily and decided to report, “I saw yesterday somebody stealing a boat.”
“What?!” Jinny now put down the vests. “What are you talking about, Tom?”
Tommy pointed to the mouth of the harbor, puffing out his little chest unconsciously for all the energy he put to being on look-out. “There, when we were coming in here, I saw it.”
“Saw what?”
“A boat—like ours—pulling another one, like ours.”
“You saw that… when?” Jinny was now holding him by the biceps. “And, like, how come we didn’t?”
His face flushed—heroic feelings suddenly felt betrayed. Eyes glistened with too old to cry yet started to well, glancing over to Tara, bawling now and leaning into Eddie’s attempt to comfort her. “I… I… didn’t mean to… keep…it—”
Now Jinny embraced him to let him be less accountable. “It’s okay, it’s okay, Tommy. It’s okay…” She swiveled her head to gauge Eddie’s thoughts, as if he had collected them. “We’re not in danger—we’ll figure things out.”
From Tommy’s look-out to the open waters of the lake was a little over a half mile; the craggy shoreline added another quarter mile of winding bedrock level enough to walk. Eddie led a brisk pace and eventually ran ahead in fading hopes he’d see the rental boat at any retrievable distance. Jinny brought up the rear to make sure the kids wouldn't slip or freak out about this nervous turn. Truth be told, she tried not to tell herself, preventing them from freaking out is just a tactic to not do that myself. Being stuck out here—as it seemed the day or looming weekend had in store—would be survivable, but wouldn’t make a dent in their goal to find her mother, whose survival may have already run out the clock. Don’t be thinking that, Dummy!
“Mom,” Tara stopped to catch her breath, “what… if we… don’t—”
Tommy kept following in Eddie’s direction until Jinny ordered him to stop. “Nobody panic, okay?” They’d heard her speak with this tremulous calm on some occasions when their dad had come over, drunk or discontent or both. Siblings have a tacit code to let parental arguments boil over, at least until they’ve read beyond Flat Stanley kinds of things. “Nobody panic,” Jinny repeated in slower syllables, nodding a strange kind of yes?
“Is Eddie gonna come back?” Tommy needed to know. “Let’s not lose him!”
“We’re not,” now his mother’s nods turned to shakes. “Not going to lose him. He’s…” and she wasn’t sure she knew what to say.
Tara thought through what she wanted to ask and rehearsed it one last time in her mind before blurting: “he’s trying to be our new dad, isn’t he?”
Jinny gravitated to a boulder the size of a yoga ball and sat down, rehearsing her response. “He’s trying to find Grandma.” Not what she was rehearsing, as Tara’s staredown seemed to know. “I mean… that’s what we all need to be doing right now.”
“Maybe Dad took her.”
“What? How? Why would you think that, Tara?”
She wanted to say ‘ransom’, but wasn’t sure what that word really meant.
Eddie reached the promontory that hinged the mouth of the harbor to the wide expanse of Lake Superior. A thousand boats could have been upon its surface now and none would necessarily be in sight of any other. He squinted not because the sun had pierced the overcast, but to try to find a mote of difference from the endless shades of blue.
Gears engaged within his brain. Could the boat have floated inland, toward that beaver? The wind made that unlikely. Would anyone steal it? He pat the soft foam of the key ring in his pocket—a thief would only have the motor of the wind. Might he be dreaming this vanishing act? Then dreaming that Jinny was dreaming it, too. He always hated those David Copperfield illusions about things outside a theatre—the disappearance of the Statue of Liberty, for instance, and stupid oohs from those who witnessed on behalf of TV viewers. How magicians make us doubt what we believe, and vice versa—entertainment, after all—but send those wizards to a war: make the Taliban disappear; restore the Twin Towers; bring back this boat; play god with things that matter, instead of sleight of hand….
He realized every second standing here would cost another minute of operative action. He had come to Harriet’s door as a cop—a least that evening responding to her daughter’s call. Gotta stay a cop, not a stream of consciousness, a guy who always had a crush on that older girl in high school, who had copped a cigarette and seeded his imagination.
The children would need an answer, too. Losing the boat might strangely be of graver concern than losing their grandmother, who at this stage in a missing person search was statistically more likely to be dead than alive. Getting back to Windigo, or further to the mainland, would only really happen with another boat. Perhaps they could reset camp upon this promontory, take cues from Tommy and his watchful instincts to flag down a passing vessel. Tara could… keep on being a big sister, even as a little kid.
“The good news is,” he rehearsed and uttered upon his return, “there’s a clear viewpoint over there that will act as our lighthouse for a boat that’s sure to come on by.”
All three faces tried to process what that meant. The whisper of a breeze supplied some lag time for their silent wonder. Then Tara ventured to voice what Eddie hadn’t crafted yet: “And the bad news?”
~41~
Harriet blinked confusion—a random Morse code sequence to the overcast that had drifted and obscured heaven through the night. She swung her head left and right to remind herself of the absurd immensity of the lake, then remembered the task they had been on to tow Peyton’s speedboat. Completely gone, like the mirage of an oasis. “Deb!” she shrieked before turning to the sleeping ranger, now jostling awake. “Where are the men?”
The motor had been extinguished, the camouflaged boat bobbing like a huge piece of flotsam. Deborah flinched at the instant thought she needed to steer, avoid some watery ditch, answer to her negligence. “Whoa,” she puffed and followed with a shallow cough. “Looks like—”
“Looks like you dropped off! And lost your…” Harriet felt the incipience of heaves, implausibly dry.
Deborah shifted her girth and reached out to offer assistance. “Now, Christine, breathe easy.” She maneuvered toward her by kneeing the floorboard and aiming to clasp Harriet’s shoulders. The latter slid off her cushioned chair and toward the bilge and the bar where Peyton’s anchor should have been hooked.
“Where?” she snarled, “the hell are they?!”
With some honesty, Deborah shrugged. She pushed her upper lip into a pout and shook her head. “Dunno. Must’ve shaken loose.”
“Shaken loose?”
Both cast their eyes to the barren endlessness of beer can blue. There were no gulls or leaping lake trout; no exhaust trails from airplanes seven miles up—well above the cloud cover, anyway. The lapping of waves against the army green sides of the boat, fooling no one for its reedy decals, beat in the stark reality of their utter isolation.
“Yeah.” Deb decided. “Must’ve.”
Both women turned inward for a while. The boat swung gently as a hammock and, whatever physics were involved, inched the two closer to the middle. Occasional mist from an ambitious little white cap added to the modest chill—September seemed Octoberish away from anything to shield the wind. Harriet calculated the hours she’d been upon the lake in recent days, envisioning an abacas that needed several metal rods of colored beads. In moving them in her mind, one became the head of Vernon, another—on a level just below—Peyton’s. Her own, or this hulking ranger’s, she couldn’t conjure. Or wouldn’t, for sanity’s sake.
Deborah, for her part, was all but penning her suicide note. She emblazoned the imaginary page of legal pad with a title: ‘Anchors Away’; she wondered if an apostrophe was due—like an anchor (or two) possessed the quality of ‘away’. Or if this Christine and herself were strictly nominative: two anchors in the shiftless world who, go figure, got away. Like Mr Snuffleupagus and his sister Alice—the most interesting plotline of Sesame Street. ‘Big Bird was telling the truth, you goddam grown-ups’ became the next line on Deb’s legal pad. Everyone needs invisible friends—far, far better than the ascertainable… “Christine,” she interrupted her own inchoate manifesto, “did you ever… have…” She couldn’t craft a completer, realizing she hadn’t an actual thing to ask.
Harriet considered clearing up the whole Christine business, for what would duplicity serve in present circumstances? Instead, she honored the probable notion that Deborah would not do well with extra layers of complication. “Have I… what?”
“I don’t… really….” She slumped like a turtle and stared at the seat Harriet had slept upon. “I mean,” attempting a restart, “this aint what we thought the week would hold, right?”
Harriet waited a couple beats, providing a chance for the turtle to try any eye-contact. The assertion merited a swallowed chuckle, a no-shit-Sherlock; at the same time, the desperation between the uttered lines couldn’t be a joking matter. “No, Deb. Not at all what we woulda thought.” She gauged some response, not forthcoming. “And,” pacing out the risk, “first round of Michelobs on me… when we get back to shore.”
Deborah appeared to grunt, albeit noiselessly. “You want the shore or your men?”
Biting her lip, Harriet knew those dry heaves would reassemble in the form of tears. “B-both,” and gulping fast to follow with, “why… not?”
“Fuel,” Deb spoke more to the gauge she clambered to check, “gets us to shore—not to the middle of the lake again.”
“Well, we have to! Can’t let them drift, with no provisions—”
“—I have no idea where they’d be. It’s far more likely a surveillance plane would find them, anyway.”
Harriet stood up and slung her index finger out like a pistol. “Well, you better radio that plane right now! You can’t just—”
“Cool it, Christine!” Now Deborah’s face reddened with the same, sudden fury. “You want so badly to make that call? Huh?” The ranger grabbed the CB handset off its hook and, with her other hand, ripped the end of the coil from the consul. She threw the mess at Harriet’s bemused face with both hands: “Then you do it!”
Time out. Ageless, that concept, even as decades had passed since either had it applied. Oh, maybe Harriet had to discipline a surly Tommy that way once in a while (Tara, even more rarely). Jinny deserved a grounding every couple of months as a high schooler, way back when. Who didn’t? Deborah, too, reflected on how relatively bad or unbad she’d been through life. Never homicidal to her recollection. Never seriously, at least.
But back to that legal pad, and somehow Harriet from twelve feet away joined in. ‘If Big Bird needed an imaginary friend, you goddam adults, then he also had a need to give that friend a partner, with dreamy eyelashes and a bow in her butch haircut.’
‘And what do you need, Deb, right now?’ Harriet tacitly relayed, her face clenched in supplication.
The ranger bore into the opposite direction. ‘What does Snuffy need, you mean?’
‘Okay. Go with that.’
The wind probably snatched away the idea. Likewise, Deb tore the phony page from the legal pad, balled it up and tossed it overboard.
~42~
“The bad news is…” Eddie sought Jinny on whether to comply with such yin yang expression; Jinny subtly shrugged, so he continued: “we left our excess water and food on the boat. So we gotta—”
“Are we gonna starve?” Tara asked, strangely as a matter of information.
“No! No.” Again Eddie begged Jenny wordlessly to intervene. “Won’t let that happen, and,” nodding for emphasis, “someone’s bound to come by.”
“If they notice us,” Tommy added, adult-like.
“That’s right. So we have to be seen, and be patient, and—”
“—be lucky,” Jinny uttered. “Maybe find some berries.”
Late September, this far north. The flora wouldn’t be a resource. Fauna would be just as truculent—to catch a fish or squirrel without equipment was frankly not going to happen. There was no good news, in Eddie’s quick recalibration, though he put some brave creases on his handsome face. Jinny did likewise.
“Let’s light a fire first,” Tara suggested, “so a passing boat can see the smoke.”
“Um,” Eddie responded after a cough into his hand, “kinda early for that. Jumping Jacks would attract attention better. You guys go with your mom to hunt for berries, while I’ll take first watch at the viewpoint, sound good?”
Their brusque nods weren’t convincing, and Jinny read the duplicity. She knew there’d be no fire as the box of matches remained with the boat—a deliberate choice to ensure they’d stay dry and not forgotten under a campfire stone. In fact, she reflected, maybe even Eddie’s stepping into hull to store stuff for the night had loosened the mooring rope. You’d think a cop would check the mooring rope. Oh, shut up, Jinny! she ground her teeth to stop such thoughts, leading her ducklings away from vast improbability that the lake would take notice of them, let alone care.
Forty nautical miles east southeast, Vernon had rigged up a rudimentary bimini to guard his friend against chill and ultraviolet exposure that, so far, had been mitigated by the sea of unbroken stratus clouds above them. Some handfuls of lake water had to suffice for parching thirst, and Peyton tried to energize himself once or twice to participate in these efforts—even wanting to pee for himself, which Vernon had to prop him up for. No shame in that, of course, but Peyton asserted he wouldn’t burden this mothership much longer.
“Hey now, c’mon—don’t be that way.” Then Vern voiced a modest “oorah” to jog his memory: “a marine doesn’t fall on his sword—”
“—I’m long decommissioned, Wart.” Peyton still labored his phrasing and wanted to follow right away with, “I shouldn’t call you that,” which he eventually managed to Vernon’s tender protestations not to worry.
“Let’s jus’ let the day take its course. Rescue’s gotta be on its way.”
“If not,” Peyton took pains to say, “take… my house.” His eyes were more bloodshot than tearful. “And take… good care of…”
“Go easy, buddy—everything’s gonna be cared for—”
“Harriet. Ask her…”
Instant on Vernon’s mind was whether she could be any more alive than they at this very moment. “Okay—you’re going to ask for yourself, but go on…”
“… to marry you.”
Peyton could have said almost anything else. The topic had been about as common as the Vikings winning a Super Bowl—coulda shoulda kind of talk that laughed off losing (or losing out). Minnesota bachelors as an easy trope for Garrison Keillor, worth owning to uphold the culture. But not about Harriet. That would smack of a therapy session, an intimacy unnatural for as close as they’d been all these years. When Harriet moved to Grand Portage eight years ago, perhaps then the conversation could be tried. Abstractly, as a gentle tease. Then, to know Harriet would be to respect her privacy: not to put her in such straits, to have her worrying about a next door neighbor or his backwoods friend. “Now hang on there, Peyton—you got a better chance for her affirming. I’ll be your best man, no worries about that.”
“Not… joking, Vern…. Because—”
“Cuz why? C’mon,” Vern rushed to his friend’s fading aspect, “keep talking, man—cuz why?”
Eighty nautical miles east northeast, well into Canadian waters, the camouflage boat bobbed as if abandoned. Though still too far from shore for gulls, their view from above the boat would find two women slumped in the inertia of the passing hour. The ranger, instead of holding a legal pad and ballpoint pen, clutched the barrel of the unlocked rifle. The hostage, instead of facing that threat, cocked her head toward what would have been the boat’s wake.
“So you aint gonna try to talk me off this bridge?” Deborah barely asked, her tone belligerent and hollow at the same time.
Harriet counted to thirteen in her mind—the baker’s dozen she always appreciated to combat the trappings of superstition. “I don’t have anything left to say,” she suggested, even though she had plenty.
“Then you basically want this trigger pulled.”
“No.”
“Twice.”
“Another no.”
“Double negative. I figured you’d be smarter than this, Christine.”
Harriet almost looked her in the eye but kept her shoulder up as a pathetic shield. “That’s not my name, by the way.”
“Naturally. Why would it be? And now I’m supposed to say my name isn’t really Deborah, and then we brush each other’s hair and talk about boys and how we glitter up our notebooks and blush away our zits.”
Another count to thirteen. Harriet decided the name thing wasn’t worth explaining. “I’m a grandmother, you know,” seemed more of an in.
Deborah of course knew. She wanted badly to describe her house—the Archie chair, the loft where those grandkids slept until the nightmare kicked in. The curl of steam from the elegant blow across the surface of a coffee cup. A mouth she’d never get to kiss, unless… “I can’t imagine, Christine. Still gonna call you that, for the time being.”
~43~
The old fashioned phone rang on the far end of the counter at the Interpretive Center, jostling Heidi to get out from under Jeremy’s deadweight arm. “Huh?” he uttered when she grunted her way up. Then, like a flash of lightning, he realized the oven in the boathouse had been on all night. “Shit! be right back—”
Heidi’s attention was only on the phone. “Hello? Yes, Gary—oh my God, I’m glad… What?”
Jeremy grimaced at the locked door and gestured for the keys. “Hurry,” he whispered, “the pizzas!”
“Huh? Oh, wait—no, not you Gar—” She flit her eyes to the floor and bent for the tarantula of metal legs. Tossing them to Jeremy, she repositioned the phone to the shrug of her shoulder and right left ear to enable her to type into the computer. “Yeah, I’m here, Gary, just checking the overnight info.” She clicked a few keys but stopped at what she was hearing. “You mean, you haven’t been in contact either?” She bit her lip, swollen somewhat. “And her CB is also unresponsive—I just don’t get it. Unless…”
Evidently the ‘unless’ had floated in the Houghton consciousness by now. Gary verbalized what the screen, with a few more clicks, now displayed: a dispatch of the Stinson floatplane to Windigo, due within the hour. Washington Harbor would be its landing strip, if any ferry or other boats needed to stay clear.
“Nothing on the schedule this morning,” Heidi confirmed, “but I’ll send Jeremy out to the mouth just in case.” She hung up the phone, realizing too late she had neglected any kind of goodbye or even whether Gary would be on that plane. Bon voyage, she mouthed before scrambling to the door to follow up with Jeremy.
The boathouse hadn’t burned down overnight. The pizzas on the oven rack had shrunken to a petrified char, and putrid smoke hung stubbornly as Jeremy tried to whisk it out with a dishtowel. “Hungry?” he half-joked, then coughed at his exertion.
“You gotta secure a landing of the Stinson. I’ll take over this mess.”
“When is it due?”
“Takin’ off from Houghton just now.”
Jeremy rested his weight upon folding table where they would have feasted. “Wouldn’t they do a loop around the island? What d’ya think they want from us?”
Heidi pugged up her face. “Info, maybe. Support. How should I know?” She opened another window and pulled Jeremy outside. “Just like a social smoker—the room’s gotta breathe last night out.”
They walked toward the dock. “What’s your own take on all this?”
“All this… what?”
Jeremy held her hand, natural by now if also the first time in such an open space. “Deb. Missing campers. Gary coming over to inspect.”
Heidi feigned a pout. “I thought ‘all this’ was a boyfriend proposal.”
“Sure. That, too.”
“Back to business, I’m not sure actually if Gary’s actually in the search crew.”
“But anyway…”
“Anyway, I’m worried about Deb. Have been for a while now.”
Jeremy slowed the pace almost imperceptibly. “Me, too.”
“Why you?”
“Well, why you?”
“I asked you first.”
“But you expressed your worry first.”
Heidi didn’t want the banter. She took some seconds to decide to say, “it’s a woman thing.”
“—that a guy like me wouldn’t
understand?”
“I didn’t say that.” She
brushed her pinkie around the heel of Jeremy’s hand. “Deborah’s quite lonely,
you know.” She waited for a no shit,
Sherlock that didn’t come. She wondered if she would use the word ‘surmise’
and how that would sound. “This is only surmising—I’m not any closer to her
than you.”
“I hope you’re closer to me than to her.” Jeremy instantly regretted saying so, fumbling with, “I mean,”
“—I know what you mean. And she sees that, too, with everyone, I think.”
They were now at the dock, dithering with the patrol boat that didn’t need to launch just yet. Heidi didn’t elaborate much on what she meant, but dropped a few f’r’instances: Memorial Day last year, when Gary had treated them with a BBQ party already prepared on the deck of the biggest boat they had in Houghton, floating to Windigo unannounced with most the office staff aboard. Some had brought their families—their day off, in most cases—and everyone had a great time. Deb simultaneously tried to blend in and hide.
“Don’t we all?” asked Jeremy.
Heidi barely nodded. Kids jumping off the boat when it was allowed by the somewhat buzzed adults, some of whom jumped in as well. And Debbie got body-language upset that someone was going to drown—not that she took to lifeguarding the situation—and sort of tumbled in from the deeper side of the boat, out of sight but conspicuous enough. Minutes later, when someone noticed she hadn’t made her way to the hook-ladder on the stern, she must have pushed from the hull to do the dead man’s float.
“I remember,” Jeremy added, “that she called it the ‘manatee’.”
She did, but after the drama was over. Gary dove in to flip her airways upward and hauled her to the ladder, where others hoisted her to the deck. The scramble was professional—rangerlike—and just as Gary got to her chest to pump life back into her, she opened her eyes and spoke as if nothing had happened. “So what’re you waiting for? Permission granted for CPR.” Someone laughed at that, but certainly not Gary.
“Yeah, but they made it up by the end of day,” Jeremy recalled. “He even chuckled at the manatee self-dig.”
Heidi scanned the harbor’s channel west of Beaver Island, where the plane would typically skid to a safe speed. “I think she was practicing that day.”
“For…?”
“Your turn to surmise, Jeremy.”
“Not even sure I know what that means.” He blushed at his lie and busied himself with a check of the motor oil.
“It means people like us have hoarded what she dreams about.”
“Sex?”
“If only.”
~44~
If Vernon had been on his pontoon, alone and unconcerned about a heart on the blink, he’d be hankering for a mid-morning nap. He’d take one of his paperbacks and read a chapter or two before nodding off, maybe using the splay of those pages as a face tent against the sun. Or, as in the case of today, the glaring overcast. The absence of books on Peyton’s speedboat made him think of how their present drama might play out.
“You ever read Lord of the Flies, Pey?”
The question was a tactic, Peyton knew, to keep him conscious. “Can’t… recall.” He raised his bloodshot eyes to supply a measure of ‘do tell.’
“It’s not our present situation, exactly. The opposite, probably.”
Peyton forced a smirk. “In’resting. Now… I re—”
“Hey, don’t strain yourself.”
“…member. Opposite.”
“Well, yeah. They’re kids stranded on an island and we’re…”
Peyton made a shallow cough before supplying, “the same.”
“Come to think of it, maybe true. Anyhow, they want to get rescued, see, at least at first. And their plan was to keep a fire burning on the mountain—plenty of wood, or ‘creepers’ they kept referring to. Problem was the igniter. Only one kid had glasses—”
“Piggy,” Peyton lightly puffed.
“That’s right! You do recall, then, after all. When I first read it I related to Simon, the loner who gets mistaken for the beast they collectively create—the boar’s head on a stick.”
Another puff: “Piggy.”
“Hmm. Never thought about that. Piggy dies another way.” Vernon tightened up his face. “Probably shouldn’t have brought it up. Only for the opposites.” He let that thought settle before remembering why he had it on his mind in the first place. “Just that—and you may slug me for the suggestion—a signal fire might do us a favor out here.”
Peyton grunted out a “hell no,” but mused at the absurdity that saved Vernon from his own immolation.
They fell asleep on that note, cradle-rocking with the waves. Conceivably, the boat had properties of an islet in the south Pacific—a mound of sand with a single coconut tree. No coconut, of course. The question of cannibalism would enter a mind at a certain point, right? Only to dry heave it away. But if one or the other had already died, wouldn’t pragmatics kick in? One or the other might have drifted to the consideration, trying to stay asleep or wake from wicked dreams.
The buzzing of the prop plane opened their eyes at exactly the same time. Evidently, by the angle of its wings, the pilot was circling them in recognition. The cloud layer forced it to fly relatively low, but not close enough for Vernon to see the face of the pilot. He dropped his view to the altitude of waves and imagined how a water landing would handle the white caps, let alone how the plane would build enough speed for a takeoff. He’d seen these in Thunder Bay, even his own Greenwood Lake once for a plane in distress. Much calmer water, though.
Tipping the wings like a weighing of options, the pilot was practically reading Vern’s thoughts. A closer, lower round enabled the copilot to open his side window and wave, compelling a response to gauge urgency. Vernon mimed a heart attack and pointed overtly at Peyton, still lying on his back but showing his palms so as to say, ‘I’m not dead yet’. The copilot pointed to his watch and then swirled an ellipse to suggest they’d come back in a little while.
“Or send a tugboat!” Vernon shouted through the cone of his hands. The plane tipped its wings as a way of understanding.
Peyton waited for the sound to fade before protesting in his wispy voice: “Fred… Sanford… you made… me… seem.”
Vernon slid down beside him. “Rest easy, buddy. I think we’ll be outta these woods soon enough.”
“Woods?”
“Good point. Back into the woods where we belong.”
An hour passed, then part of another. “Maybe my mime wasn’t Sanford enough,” Vernon mumbled. “Or maybe they lost our coordinates.”
Peyton didn’t move. His slight breathing movements proved he was still alive, but this waiting game couldn’t be good. Perhaps the plane had been just a mirage—a tease intended to buy a half-day of hope.
It came in a ranger boat that, except for the lack of camouflage, resembled the one Deb had driven. “You know who I’m talking about?” Vernon asked this new ranger after he and his deputy helped position Peyton more comfortably into their boat.
“Of course we know Ranger Wilcox,” he said. “Do you have info of her whereabouts?”
Vernon blinked at that question, envisioning Harriet (not that damn Deb) blue in the face at the bottom of the lake. “I... I don’t…. Her boat had towed us this far, and—”
“We’re going to have to leave yours floating for now. We’ll fetch it later.”
“Of course, of course.” Vernon’s voice trembled.
The ranger conducted a final check of things before shoving the boats apart and starting the engine. The deputy squatted beside Peyton, taking his pulse. After jotting it down on a spiral pocket pad, she assured, “you’ll be okay, Mister…”
“Peyton,” Vernon answered for him. The instant roar of the ranger boat prevented further introductions. He managed to ask where they were headed, however.
“Eagle Harbor,” the deputy practically yelled. “Ambulance there will get you guys to Houghton.”
So that part was true, Vernon reflected. Don’t think badly of good intentions. But then, back to the lake bed. He would never forgive himself if she were there right now. He’d repudiate any forgiveness from Peyton, assuming he’d extend such a hand. How could a stupid pontoon stunt involving no one else maim one friend and murder another? How could this go so belly up?
The deputy read his worry lines. She avoided eye contact but reached for his hand, another pulse if need be.