A Superior Death (2 page)

I’ll never be an old salt, Anna told herself. Sighing inwardly, she pushed right throttle, eased back on left, and sidled up behind the smaller boat. Together they sank into a trough.

The
Low Dollar
wallowed and heaved like a blowsy old woman trying to climb out of a water bed. Her gunwales lay dangerously close to waterline and Anna could see a bucket, a wooden-backed scrub brush, and an empty Heaven Hill bourbon bottle drowning in their own little sea on the flooded deck.

Two men, haggard with fear and the ice-slap of the wind, slogged through the bilge to grapple at the
Belle Isle
with bare hands and boat hooks. “Stand off, stand off, you turkeys,” Anna muttered under her breath. Shouting, even if she could be heard over the wind, would be a waste of time. These men could no more keep their hands off the
Belle Isle
than a drowning man could keep his hands off the proverbial straw.

There was a creak of hull against hull as they jerked the boats together, undoing her careful maneuvering.

The man at the bow, wind-whipped in an oversized Kmart slicker, dragged out a yellow nylon cord and began lashing the two boats together as if afraid Anna would abandon them.

She shut down to an idle and climbed up the two steps from the cabin. The fisherman at the
Low Dollar
’s starboard quarter began to tie the sterns together. “Hey! Hey!” Anna shouted. “Don’t you tie my boat to that—” “Piece of junk” was the logical end of the sentence, but a fairly recent lecture from Lucas Vega on the importance of positive visitor contact and maintaining a good relationship with the armies of sport fishermen that invaded the island every summer passed through her thoughts.

“Untie that,” she shouted against the wind. “Untie it.” The man, probably in his mid-forties but looking older in a shapeless sweatshirt and cap with earflaps, turned a blank face toward her. He stopped tying but didn’t begin untying. Instead he looked to his buddy, still wrapping loops of line round and round the bow cleats.

“Hal?” he bleated plaintively, wanting corroboration from a proper authority.

Anna waited, her hands on the
Low Dollar
’s gunwale. The old tub had enough buoyancy left that a few more minutes wouldn’t make much difference. And, by the sagging flesh of the man’s cheeks and his dilated pupils, Anna guessed he was about half shocky with fear and cold.

Hal finished his pile of Boy Scout knots and made his way back the length of the boat. He was younger than the man white-knuckling the stern line, maybe thirty-five. Fear etched hard lines around his eyes and mouth but he looked, if not entirely reasonable, at least able to listen.

“Hi,” Anna said calmly. “I’m Anna Pigeon. Hal, I take it?” He nodded dumbly. “Are you the captain of the
Low Dollar
, Hal?” Again the nod. “You’ve taken on a bit of water, it looks like.”

The commonplace words were having their desired effect. The life-and-death look began to fade from his pale blue eyes. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve as if turning on the switch that would allow his lips to function. “Yeah,” he managed. “Hit something in Little Todd. Didn’t pay much attention. Time we got here we were taking on more’n we could bail. We started radioing then. I think the propeller got dinged and we’re taking on water around the shaft.”

Normalcy somewhat restored—given the world continued to pitch in a colorless panorama of blustering cloud and billowing wave—Anna spoke again. “Here’s what’s going to happen, Hal. First put on life jackets. You got any?”

He dragged two disreputable-looking orange vests out from beneath a seat, and the men began buckling them on.

When Hal’s hands were free again, Anna said: “You’ll need to cut that bow line loose. You . . . ?” She looked at the second man, who was beginning to come to life.

“Kenny. Ken.”

“Ken. You untie the stern. Hal, I’m going to hand you my towline. Make it fast to the bow. Then the both of you get aboard my boat. The
Low Dollar
’s riding too low in the water. I’d just as soon nobody was on board. Got all that?”

Kenny started unlooping his line and Hal returned to the bow to tug and jerk at the knots he’d made. The boats climbed a slick cold hill of water, teetered at its summit, then slid down on the other side. Kenny screamed out that his hand was caught between the two hulls, but he was more frightened than hurt.

The yell did a good turn, convincing Hal that slicing through a $1.59 piece of rope might be worth the time saved fumbling with his desperate knots.

In another minute both men were on board the
Belle Isle
and Anna was powering slowly away.

The towline grew taut, was dragged above the churning of the
Belle
’s wake. When the full weight of the sodden
Low Dollar
hit, Anna heard her engines growl over the challenge, then dig deeper into the lake for purchase. The Bertram might not have the personality of a good horse but it had the power of a sizable herd. Anna was grateful: glad to have a good piece of equipment between her and the bottom of Superior, glad to be leaving the oceanlike expanse for the more protected channels and coves of the north shore.

To the right, amid the waves, she could see the rocky outcrop that was Kamloops Island. Had the water been flatter, or the
Low Dollar
less swamped, she might have towed the damaged vessel north of the little island to Amygdaloid Ranger Station where she had tools. Or even around to Rock Harbor where they had everything including telephones and hot and cold running seaplanes. Today, from the feel of the drag, the crippled boat would be lucky to make landfall.

Hal was stationed on deck watching his boat. Kenny sat on the high bench opposite the pilot’s, his fingers clamped around the handholds on the dash. Anna had ordered him inside the cabin where he could warm up. His pallor and the clamminess of his flesh as she’d handed him over the gunwale concerned her. Anna stayed standing, her knees slightly bent, her center of gravity forward over her toes, riding the deck like a surfboard.

The fog was lifting. Several miles of shoreline were coming into hazy focus. The twenty miles of cliffs and coves between Little Todd Harbor and Blake’s Point were now as familiar to Anna as the desert trails of the Guadalupe Mountains had been. Hoping to combat fear with knowledge, she’d spent her first two weeks as North Shore Ranger creeping about, chart in one hand, wheel in the other, her head hanging out of the window like a dog’s from a pickup truck. She had memorized the shape of every bluff, every bay, the location of every shoal and underwater hazard.

On still, sunny days when the lake was more likely to forgive mistakes, she blanked her windows with old maps and crawled from place to place, eyes glued to the radar screen, ears tuned to the clatter of the depth finder. Like most landlubbers, she was less afraid of shallow waters— coves full of stones and half-submerged logs—than she was of deep. Though the brutal cold of Superior would drown her a quarter of a mile from shore just as mercilessly as it would ten miles out, Anna seldom came in from open water without a sense of returning to safety. “Safe harbor”—a phrase she’d heard bandied about since childhood—had been given a depth of meaning with Lake Superior’s first angry glance.

“You’re new,” Kenny said as if he echoed her thoughts.

“You weren’t here last year.”

Anna refocused on her passenger. “Displaced desert rat,” she replied. “I haven’t been warm or dry since I left Texas.”

“It’s not like it used to be,” he went on as if she’d not spoken. “Used to be people on the lake took care of each other. You’d never pass a vessel in distress. Never. We could’ve sunk out there and nobody’d’ve so much as thrown us a line. People don’t care. All they care about’s getting a campsite before the next guy.”

“Did somebody pass you?” Anna asked, remembering the other blip on her radar. On such an ugly sea, it struck her as strange, though it was not uncommon. The brotherhood of sport fishermen, if it ever existed, was largely relegated to legend now; another link in the chain memory forged back to the mythical good old days.

“Not passed. A white boat with green—I didn’t see the name or I’d report it to the Coast Guard. They were out in the lake near where the
Kamloops
went down, headed east.”

“Maybe they didn’t see you. The fog’s been cat-footing around. Are you sure it wasn’t red and white? The
Third Sister
was heading this direction. They’re diving the
Emperor
tomorrow.”

“Green. And they saw us. They’d’ve had to. Not a sign.

The bastards left us sloshing up to our knees in bilge. They probably heard the rainbow were running in Siskiwit and couldn’t wait. When my dad used to bring me out here—oh, twenty years ago at least . . .”

Anna let him ramble, even remembering to grunt or sigh—listening noises her sister had taught her. “It comforts people,” Molly had said. “Besides, it beats me having to say, ‘Anna, are you still there?’ into the damn phone every five minutes.”

The noises turned out to be worth a thousand times what Molly had paid AT&T for the phone time to teach her. A ranger could get more information from a few well-placed “oh reallys” and “uh-huhs” than from an hour’s by-the-book interrogation. People wanted to talk. Chewing over betrayals, disappointments, and unrealized hopes seemed to do for humans what licking wounds did for animals: a cleansing of poisons, a soothing of hurts.

Anna let Kenny talk, and she made Molly’s therapeutic sounds, but she didn’t listen. She had her own wounds to lick, her own dreams and disappointments. At that moment she would have given a week’s pay for one good hot, dry day, for the sight of one small fence lizard, the scent of sage on the wind.

The moment these thoughts blew in, Anna closed her mind to them. The lake didn’t allow for dreamers, not when the waves were three meters, not when a dilapidated sea anchor hung off the stern. The desert, with its curtains of heat and scoured, star-deep skies, was for dreaming. This land of mist and dark water took all of one’s mind up with the day-to-day chore of staying alive.

In the lee of Kamloops Island the water flattened out reassuringly. Even so, the
Low Dollar
was beginning to drag down the
Belle
’s stern. Anna cut throttle to an idle. All forward motion stopped immediately. She went up onto the deck where Hal stood staring morosely at the streaming blue hump that was his boat.

“We aren’t going to make the dock at Todd,” Anna told him.

“You can’t let her sink,” he said pitifully. “She’s not paid for.”

For a moment they stood in silence, the deck rocking gently. There was scarcely any wind, but thin lines of foam whipping white on the water beyond the
Low Dollar
never let them forget they were only there on sufferance.

“I can’t tow it any further,” Anna said. “I’ve pushed my equipment—and my luck—more than I should have already. Let’s pull her up, untie the tow.” She pointed to the ragged shoreline where a finger of rock thrust out parallel to Isle Royale, the main island. In the directionless light it was almost indiscernible from the green of the cliffs and the gray of the water. “Behind that’s a cove with a sandy bottom. I think I can nudge your boat in there. It’ll settle in shallow water and you can salvage her when there’s more daylight.”

Having unloosed the towline, Anna took the Bertram around behind the
Low Dollar
and, bow to stern, rooted her into the cove like a pig rooting a bucket through the mud. The
Low Dollar
rested on the sand, keeled over on her side. Anna sent Hal wading ashore to tether the boat to a tree so the lake wouldn’t work her loose and lure her back to the deep during the night.

Watching him flounder through the frigid waters, Anna was unsympathetic. It was his boat. He could get his own shoes and socks wet. She looked out past Kamloops Island where waves rolled toward Canada, over the waters she had still to traverse before she would be “home.”

“I’m not used to so much water all in a row,” she said to Kenny, who had finally ventured out on deck.

He looked past her, then returned to the cabin without a word.

Hal scrambled back on board with an armload of canned goods. Their camp gear was all under a foot of water in the hold. “You won’t freeze,” Anna promised. There were half a dozen spare sleeping bags on the
Belle Isle
and as many army surplus woolen blankets. In hypothermia country it wasn’t excessive.

Halfway around the hump of land that separated the cove from Todd Harbor Camp, Kenny came out of his stupor and demanded they return to the
Low Dollar
to retrieve some “personal” things. After medication, food, and shelter had been eliminated, Anna guessed it was booze and, though she could empathize with the need for a good stiff drink, she refused to go back in the rain and growing dusk to fetch it.

Her refusal cost her any goodwill she might have earned for bringing them and their boat in off the lake. By the time they were settled in the shelter at Little Todd Harbor with her assurance that she would return with a Homelite pump in the morning, they’d grown almost surly.

Leaving them to deal with their damaged egos, Anna made her escape. Nine-fifteen P.M.: hers would be a late supper. She’d forgotten she was hungry. So far north, the sun was only just setting. It wouldn’t be full dark for another thirty minutes—later, had there been no overcast. In June the days seemed to go on forever.

“Three-zero-two en route to Amygdaloid from Todd Harbor,” Anna put in the blind call. The dispatcher in Rock Harbor went off duty at seven, but the call would be taped and, should she go down, at least they’d know where to start diving for the body.

Involuntarily, she shuddered. A body wouldn’t be alone down there. There were plenty of ships lying on Superior’s bottom. Nearly a dozen provided scuba-diving attractions in the park: the
America, Monarch, Emperor, Algoma, Cox, Congdon, Chisholm, Glenlyon, Cumberland,
the
Kamloops.
Off her port bow a buoy bobbed, marking the deepest of the wrecks: the
Kamloops.
Her stern rested at one hundred and seventy-five feet, her bow at two hundred and sixty. Divers were discouraged: too deep, too cold, too dangerous.