Black Otter Bay (3 page)

The wrinkles around Red's eyes creased up with humor. He glanced across the counter to be sure Marcy was listening. “Summer finally got here because I wasted twenty bucks last Saturday tuning up my damn snowblower.”

Owen suppressed a grin while drumming the fingers of one hand on the counter. “That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard,” he said. “Nobody tunes up a snowblower in May.”

“Hey, the way this winter was going, a fellow couldn't be too sure.” As if suddenly realizing how ridiculous it sounded to be fixing a snowblower in May, Red shot a defensive frown at Marcy and added, “Anyway, at least it's all ready for next year.”

Marcy folded the newspaper she'd been reading and dropped it on the counter. Grabbing a dishrag out of the sink, she swiped at coffee stains while directing her blue-eyed smirk at Red.

Marcella Soderstrom had worked in the café most of her adult life. In her mid-thirties now, Marcy's world seemed to revolve around the ebb and flow of customers. She opened the diner most days, started the coffee pots percolating while turning on the lights and heating up the griddle, then spread the bundle of Duluth newspapers along the counter for the morning regulars. She found something comfortable and affirming about this ritual. In a way, Marcy felt she played an integral role in the lives of the townsfolk of Black Otter Bay. The café gave her a sense of purpose, and she took pride in being there to greet the early-morning risers.

“How come you weren't out fishing for the opener instead of working on your snowblower?” she asked.

“Bah!” Red snorted. “The opener is for amateurs. All them yahoos from Duluth and the Cities with their fancy rigs. They just get in the way.” He leaned over to Owen, as if about to impart some secret knowledge. “Water's too cold, anyway,” he explained. “Walleyes haven't even spawned yet. I'll wait a couple weeks for the commotion to settle down a bit.”

Marcy said, “I heard some of the lakes aren't even open yet.”

“They would be if that clipper hadn't blown through. Day like today, though, they'll open up real quick.”

Owen looked up from his cards. “Speaking of warmer weather, when are your folks coming home?”

Marcy smiled. “Who knows? I talked to them last weekend, but when they heard it was snowing again, they didn't mention anything about coming home.”

Marcy lived with her folks. Since retirement, they'd been migrating to Phoenix for the winters, and it seemed they stayed a little longer with each passing year. They'd begun by heading south after New Year's. The next year it had been Christmas, then Thanksgiving, until last year they were gone by Halloween, and they never returned before the trees budded out and summer was in full swing.

“Well, you can give them the all-clear now,” Red piped up. “Tell them I tuned up my snowblower, so it won't snow anymore this year.”

Marcy laughed as she turned to stack dishes in the dishwasher. She was a tall, strong woman. What she lacked in beauty she more than made up for with personality and energy. She was big-boned, and that meant she constantly struggled with her weight. Her worst fear was that she'd gradually grow larger and dumpier as she aged. “Oh, Lord,” she often prayed to herself. “Don't let me become like all the old, boring, work-worn women of this town.”

Her complexion was that of a fair-skinned Scandinavian and she had nondescript features. Her goals were as modest as her appearance, and she was more than satisfied with her job in the café. If she'd admit it to anyone (which she wouldn't), her greatest aspiration would be to one day own and manage the restaurant herself. Another thing she'd never make public is that she was convinced her Prince Charming would one day walk through the café door. She no longer daydreamed about either of these fantasies like she did ten years ago, but the conviction remained that in one way or another, her future was linked to her involvement with the diner.

While she took her responsibility to the café and the townsfolk very seriously, Marcy was part of that younger generation that changes hair color as easily as changing clothes. And not your normal, everyday colors, either. On St. Patrick's Day, you could bet her hair would be a brilliant lime green. Stripes of red, white, and blue for the Fourth of July. She'd
painted hearts on her cheeks for Valentine's Day, and wore a Santa Claus hat on Christmas. The old-timers in town got a kick out of it. Anybody else and they'd say she was crazy, probably on drugs or something. But Marcy was one of their own, and they embraced her eccentricities as they would a favorite daughter.

“Hey, Marcy,” Red had called out one time, loud enough for all the morning regulars to hear. “If I asked you to marry me, would you get a tattoo or dye your hair a special color for the wedding?”

“If I had to marry you,” she'd retorted amid the catcalls and laughter, “I'd shave my head and join a convent.”

Marcy glanced across the diner at the large picture windows facing Highway 61 and Lake Superior. It was the middle of May, but the trees along the highway had only recently leafed out. Their soft green hues glowed against the indigo blue background of Lake Superior. She acknowledged that Red had been correct about one thing: last weekend the café had been hopping with out-of-town fishermen. The small gravel parking lot had been packed with pickup trucks and boats.

The Black Otter Bay Café had been in existence in one form or another for over one hundred years, ever since Agda Hjemdahl began serving home-cooked meals to commercial fishermen outside her back door. By the turn of the last century, when the lumber business expanded across northern Minnesota, she'd added a small lean-to on the back of her house to accommodate the hungry foreigners passing through to the newest logging areas. A staunch Norwegian Lutheran, Agda wouldn't allow the bachelor Finns or Swedes, and especially the dark Slavic and Italian loggers, to take a meal inside her own house. When she served up kettles of stew in the little back room, however, the ribald roar of foreign tongues could be heard throughout the town.

By the 1920s, a road was punched through the woods from Duluth, and the tourist industry began in earnest. Worn out
from long days of cooking and washing dishes as well as laundry for the bachelor laborers, Agda retired and sold the name of her café to businessmen from Duluth. In the terms of the sale, she'd insisted on a lifelong stipend, and thereafter Agda served graciously as the village matriarch until her death in 1968, at age ninety-nine.

Marcy maintained that Agda's spirit still occupied the premises. Whenever something turned up missing, or fell over for no apparent reason, or a door closed or a light suddenly turned on, Marcy jokingly blamed Agda. And even though she'd passed away years before Marcy was born, the self-reliant, hard-working founder of the café had been a mentor and spiritual colleague for much of Marcy's adult working life.

After buying the café from Agda, the businessmen erected a huge log structure with rooms to rent as well as a large dining area and saloon. The new establishment became known as The Black Otter Bay Roadhouse. During Prohibition, liquor arrived on boats from Canada, and the Roadhouse became a popular hangout for the rich and not-always-legal business community. Al Capone was rumored to have stayed there, and in the back rooms, business transactions and poker games went on sometimes until dawn.

In 1970, the old building burned down, and once again it became a legitimate mom-and-pop café and store. The rebuilt diner was modern and boasted state-of-the-art kitchen facilities. The décor was rustic but plush, the food hardy and reasonably priced, and soon the Black Otter Bay Café was a daily Greyhound and charter bus tourist stop. But that was four decades ago, and with no further updates or remodeling, the old furnishings were wearing out. The linoleum floor was worn bare, with hardly a vestige of its black-and-white checkerboard design still visible. Tables were scratched and further marred by cigarette burns.

To the local customers who ate at the café every day, however, the decline had been slow and unnoticed. The same
patrons used certain tables and stools each day, as if reserved signs had been posted for their convenience. Tourists more commonly used the booths, although someone like Red might occasionally take a booth for a rare meal out with his wife.

Marcy's gaze swung back inside from the picture windows and landed on the giant lake trout mounted over the cash register counter. Weighing thirty or thirty-five pounds, the huge laker had hung on the wall for as long as Marcy could remember. A thick coat of grease and dust lined the back of the enormous fish, a fact that irritated Marcy to no end. Whenever she looked at it, she vowed to get the stepladder and climb up there to clean the old relic. So far, however, that task had gone undone. As the thought crossed her mind again, she spotted the county sheriff's squad car pulling into the parking lot. A moment later, Sheriff Marlon Fastwater stepped through the café's door. Red and Owen called out their greetings while Marcy grabbed a coffee cup and placed it on the counter in front of the sheriff's customary stool. By the time he sat down, Marcy was pouring coffee, and with a free hand grabbed a napkin to set near the cup.

“Afternoon, Sheriff,” she said. “Who's winning the battle today?”

The sheriff smiled while trying to stick a thick index finger through the coffee cup's handle. Failing that, he grabbed the handle between two fingers and lifted the cup to drink. His massive hand made the cup look like a dollhouse accessory.

Marlon Fastwater was as tall as Owen Porter, and broader than Red Tollefson. When he placed his trooper hat on the counter, thick waves of glistening black hair highlighted the shimmer in his eyes, which were so dark they were almost black. At fifty years old, he'd been the sheriff of Black Otter County for over twenty years, ever since the time when, as a young police officer, he'd walked in on a late-night robbery of the local municipal bar. A transient had a gun pointed at the bartender. Fastwater locked eyes with the young man while instructing
him to drop the gun. Most folks considered the sheriff's intimidating size and fearless, calm demeanor to be as effective a weapon as the .44 Magnum he carried in a hand-tooled leather holster on his hip.

After the incident, Fastwater reported that when he looked into the drifter's eyes, he knew the young man wasn't going to pull the trigger, even after the robber spun around to direct his aim squarely at the sheriff's chest. Instead of pulling his own weapon, however, Fastwater riveted his piercing black eyes on the would-be assailant. After closing the gap between them with a couple of surprisingly quick and quiet strides, he simply reached out and snatched the gun from the young man's hand.

The story made all the regional news media outlets, and Fastwater's picture even appeared on the front page of the Duluth newspaper. All the fuss seemed overblown to him. He'd been quoted as saying, “If a man pulls a gun and doesn't shoot you outright, well, you know he just doesn't have the heart for it.” Shortly thereafter, he ran for county sheriff, winning by a wide margin, and he'd held the position ever since.

Fastwater's ancestors had lived on the shores of Lake Superior since long before the first white settlers arrived. When the Norwegian commercial fishermen, and later the farmers, loggers, and finally the miners came ashore, his family had been here to help them establish a community. In the early days, the fact that his people were Native Americans had never been an issue. Everybody was poor, and everyone worked together to survive in this beautiful, unforgiving country. It wasn't until the mining industry came in that life became a little easier. By that time, some of the native peoples had succumbed to the new white man's diseases, while others had moved to reservations, but as the sheriff would tell you, many of the settlers had died, too, or given up the struggle and returned to more civilized, populated urban areas.

Throughout it all, though, his family had stayed on. They were buried side by side with the white folks in the local
cemetery up on the ridge. That's why Fastwater never saw any irony in the fact that he held the highest office in town while being the only non-white resident. He belonged here, and these were his people, no matter their color or nationality.

His older sister Arlene, a tireless, liberal, cause-oriented district attorney, lived in Duluth. Arlene was everything flamboyant and overstated that her brother was not. While Marlon earned respect with his commanding size and quiet self-assurance, Arlene was simply loud and large. She wore flowing, floral-printed caftan-style dresses, accented with bright, gaudy jewelry, and when she swept into a courtroom everyone sat up, compelled to take notice.

The men in the café turned to look at the door as the sheriff's nephew, Leonard, came in. Arlene's son worked part-time as a police officer in Black Otter Bay under Marlon's tutelage. Matthew Simon, just off his day shift at the taconite plant, accompanied him.

“Hiya Leonard, Matt,” Owen said. All three had been classmates in high school with Marcy more than fifteen years ago. Even though Leonard lived in Duluth now, they remained close friends.

“Hey, it's Marlon Junior,” Red called out. Leonard's father had run off soon after his birth, and folks often joked about how Leonard seemed to have inherited his character traits from his uncle rather than his own mother or father. Soft-spoken, tall, slender, and handsome, Leonard braided his thick black hair in a single long plait. Agile and strong, with big hands like his uncle, he devoted much of his free time to the study of spiritual and personal growth and harmony. He'd traveled far and wide, from remote Cree Indian villages in northern Canada to reservation outposts on the Great Plains, in search of spiritual teachers and wisdom.

One big difference between the two men was that while Marlon carried the heavy .44 Magnum everywhere he went, Leonard didn't even own a gun. He knew how to use one—he'd grown up hunting and trapping with his uncle—but as he'd matured into
adulthood, he'd gradually left the guns behind, much to the chagrin of his uncle and others in law enforcement. Fortunately, in a quiet village the size of Black Otter Bay, with a population under five hundred, there wasn't much need for lethal firepower.