Boundary Waters

For Diane, a promise kept;

and

for my parents, Marilynne and Krueg,

who taught me not to be afraid to adventure or to love.

1

H
E WAS A TOUGH OLD BIRD
, the redskin. Milwaukee allowed himself the dangerous luxury of admiring the old man fully. He was smart, too. But way too trusting. And that, Milwaukee knew, was his undoing.

Milwaukee turned away from the Indian and addressed the two men sitting by the campfire. “I can go on, but the Indian’s not going to talk. I can almost guarantee it.”

“I thought you guaranteed results,” the nervous one said.

“I’ll get what you want, only it won’t be coming from him.”

“Go on,” the nervous man said. He squeezed his hands together and jerked his head toward the Indian. “Do it.”

“Your ball game.” Milwaukee stepped to the campfire and pulled a long beechwood stick from the coals. The end of the stick glowed red, and two licks of flame leaped out on either side like the horns of a devil held in Milwaukee’s hand.

The old Indian hung spread-eagled between two small birch trees, secured to the slender trunks by nylon cords bound about his wrists and ankles. He was naked, although the night was cool and damp enough to make his blood steam as it flowed down his skin over the washboard of his ribs. Behind him, darkness closed like a black curtain over the rest of the deep woods. The campfire lit the old man as if he were a single actor in a command performance.

Or,
Milwaukee thought as he approached with the burning stick,
a puppet who’d broken his strings.

Milwaukee grasped the long gray hair and lifted the old man’s head. The eyes flickered open. Dark almond eyes. Resigned but not broken.

“See.” Milwaukee brought the angry glow inches from his face. “Your eyes will bubble. Just like stew. First one, then the other.”

The almond eyes looked steadily at Milwaukee, as if there were not at all a flame between them.

“Just tell us how to get to the woman and I won’t hurt you anymore,” Milwaukee offered. Although he meant it, he’d have been disappointed in the Indian if he broke; for he felt a rare companionship with the old man that had nothing to do with the business between them but was something in their spirits, something indomitable, something the nervous man by the fire would never understand. Milwaukee knew about the old man, knew how he was strong deep down, knew the information they were after would never come from him. In the end, the living would still be ignorant and the important answers, as always, would reside with the dead.

The second man at the campfire spoke. “Gone soft?” He was a huge man with a shaved head. He lit a fat Cuban cigar with a stick much like Milwaukee held, and he smiled. He smiled because next to himself, Milwaukee was the hardest man he knew. And like Milwaukee, he tolerated the nervous man only because of the money.

“Go on,” the nervous man commanded. “Do it, for Christ’s sake. I’ve got to know where she is.”

Milwaukee looked deeply into the eyes of the old man, into his soul, and wordlessly, he spoke. Then he tipped the stick. The reflection of the fire filled the old man’s right eye.

The old man did not blink.

2

W
ENDELL WAS THREE DAYS LATE
. The woman’s anger had passed and worry had set in, a heavy stone on all her thinking. Wendell Two Knives had never been late before.

In the early afternoon, she stepped from the cabin and walked along the little creek down to the lake. Like many of the lakes in the Boundary Waters, it was small. Long and narrow—a hundred yards wide and little more than half a mile long—it lay in a deep trough between two ridges of gray stone capped with aspen. A week ago, the aspen leaves had been yellow-gold, every tree like a match head struck to flame. Now the branches were mostly bare. The scattered leaves that still hung there shivered in the wind over the ridges, and one by one, they fell away. The water of the lake was very still. Even on days when the wind whipped the aspen trees high above, the narrow slit of water remained calm. Wendell told her the Anishinaabe called the lake Nikidin, which meant vulva. She often looked at that narrow stretch of calm whose surface reflected mostly heaven and smiled at the sensibility of Wendell’s people.

But now she stared down the gray, rocky corridor with concern. Where the hell was Wendell?

He’d come ten days before, bringing her, as always, food and the batteries for her precious tape recorder. He’d told her his next visit should be his last; it was time for her to go. He said if she stayed much longer, she risked a winter storm, and then it would be hell getting out. She’d looked at the aspen, whose leaves had only just turned, and at the clear blue sky, and at the calm water of the lake that was warm enough still for a brief swim in the afternoons, and she’d laughed.

Snow?
She’d questioned.
But it’s absolutely beautiful, Wendell.

These woods,
he’d cautioned darkly,
this country. No man can ever say for sure. Better to be safe.

She was almost finished anyway with the work that had brought her to that secret place and so she agreed. On his arrival the following week, she would be ready. She gave him a letter to mail, as she always did, and watched his canoe glide away, silver ripples fanning out behind him like the tail feathers of a great bird.

Now there were thin, white clouds high up in the blue, and along the ridges a constant wind that she couldn’t feel but could plainly see in the waving of the aspens. She pulled her jean jacket close around her and shivered, wondering if the smell in the air, something sharp and clean, was the approach of the winter storm Wendell feared.

For the first time since she’d come to that lost lake and its old cabin, she was tight with a sense of urgency. She turned and followed the thread of the creek back through a stand of red pine that hid the cabin. From its place on the rough-hewn wood table near the potbellied stove, she took her tape recorder and turned it on. There was a red light in the lower right-hand corner that blinked whenever the batteries were getting low. The red light was blinking. She lifted the recorder near her mouth and held it in both hands.

“Saturday, the fifteenth of October. Wendell still hasn’t come.”

She sat in the empty cabin a moment, aware of the silence of the afternoon, terribly aware of her aloneness in the great wilderness.

“He said he would be here and he’s the only man who’s ever kept his promises to me,” she said into the recorder. “Something’s wrong, I know it. Something’s happened to him.”

The red light blinked off. But she left the recorder on, not knowing if it captured at all her final confession: “Jesus Christ, I’m scared.”

3

C
ORK WAS BREATHING HARD
and feeling great. He’d been running for an hour and he was nearing home. Each stride landed on a mat of fallen leaves and each breath filled him with the dusty smell of a long, dry autumn. He kept to a gravel road that paralleled the Burlington Northern tracks. The tracks ran through the town of Aurora, Minnesota, and in doing so, shadowed Iron Lake. In the late afternoon of that mid-October day, the lake was dead calm, a perfect mirror of a perfect sky, blue and piercing. The trees along the shoreline were ablaze, bursts of orange and russet that exploded again on the still surface of the water. In boats here and there, solitary fishermen cast their lines, shattering the mirror in brief silver splashes.

Cork cleared a small stand of gold-leafed birch and aspen that surrounded the ruins of an old foundry, and Sam’s Place came into view. It was a Quonset hut, second world war vintage, that had been turned into a burger stand by an old friend of Cork’s named Sam Winter Moon. The front of the hut was decorated with pictures of burgers—Sam’s Super Deluxe, especially—and fries and ice cream cones. Cork lived in the back part of the long hut. He’d inherited the place a couple of years earlier after his old friend was killed by a scared little man with a big rifle.

As he crossed the tracks, he heard a scream come from Sam’s Place. He kicked into a sprint and ran.

Behind the sliding screen of the serving window, his twelve-year-old daughter, Annie, jumped up and down wildly.

“What is it?” Cork called.

Annie ripped the headphones of her Walkman from her ears. “Notre Dame just scored! Yes!”

She was tall, athletic, and very freckled. She had red hair kept austerely short. At the moment she wore blue-jean cutoffs and a T-shirt with colorful block letters that spelled out
LOVE KNOWS NO COLOR
. Her enthusiasm for Notre Dame was long-standing and legendary. Annie was more Catholic than the pope. There were times when Cork envied her profound and simplistic faith because it was not a thing he shared anymore. On that afternoon, however, the perfection of the day had given him a sense of spiritual peace as profound as anything that came of Christian prayer.

Straight is my path.

Straight is my mind.

Straight is my heart.

Straight is my speech.

Kind will I be to my brothers and sisters.

Kind will I be to beast and bird.

He remembered the words of the drum song old Henry Meloux sang. That seemed to just about cover it all as far as Cork was concerned.

“Where’s Jenny?” Cork asked. He’d left his two daughters in charge while he went for his daily run. Annie had stayed at her post. Jenny was nowhere to be seen.

“She said it was too slow and she went for a walk.”

Cork could tell his daughter disapproved. To Annie, authority was important, rules existed for good reason, and any breach in protocol was always to be viewed with a disapproving eye. She was a wonderful Catholic.

“Has it been slow?”

“Dead,” Annie admitted.

“Good for you, though,” Cork observed. “You’ve been able to listen to the game without being bothered.”

Annie grinned and put her headphones back on.

“I’m going to shower,” Cork said. The salt in his sweat was crystallizing and he felt gritty.

Before he could move, a delivery truck bounced over the railroad tracks, kicked up dust along the unpaved road to Sam’s Place, and pulled to a stop a half-dozen yards from where Cork stood. The truck was painted gold and bore a big green shamrock and green lettering that read
CLOVER LEAF POTATO CHIPS
. Charlie Aalto, a large, potbellied Finn, stepped out, wearing a gold shirt and gold cap, both of which bore the same green shamrock logo as the truck.

“What d’ya say dere, O’Connor? Training for another marathon, looks like.”

“One a year is enough, Charlie,” Cork said. He’d run in the Twin Cities marathon only a week before. His first. He hadn’t broken four hours, but he’d finished and that had been just fine. “What’re you doing out here? Monday’s your usual drop-by.”

“On my way in from Tower. Figured I might as well save myself a trip. How’s business?”

“Been good. Slow at the moment, but the best fall I’ve ever seen.”

Charlie opened the back of his truck, where boxes of potato chips were stacked. “Gonna pay for it,” Charlie said. “Snow by Halloween, betcha. Bunch of it. And one tough bastard of a winter after that.” He pulled down two boxes, one regular, one barbecue.

“What makes you think so, Charlie?”

“I was just shootin’ the breeze with old Adolphe Penske. Over to Two Corners, you know. Runs a trapline up on Rust Creek. Says he ain’t seen coats on the muskrats in years like what they’re gettin’ now.”

“Means good ice fishing,” Cork considered.

“Yah,” the Finn said, nodding. With a look of envy, he eyed the nearest fisherman on the lake. “Been a busy year. Ain’t had near enough time in my boat. Like to be on the lake right now, fishin’ like dat son of a gun out dere.” He watched a few moments more. “Well,” he decided, “maybe not like him.”

Cork glanced at the fisherman on Iron Lake. “Why not?”

“Hell, look at ’im. Don’t know squat about fishin’. Usin’ a surface lure, looks like. You know, a topwater plug. Supposed to hop the dang thing across the surface, fool them Northerns into believin’ it’s a frog or somethin’. Dat guy’s lettin’ it sink like it was live bait. Ain’t no fish dumb enough to hit on that.” He shook his head in misery. “God save us from city folk.”

“Come to think of it,” Cork said, “he’s been out there the whole day and I’ll be damned if I’ve seen him pull anything in.”

Charlie handed Cork a pen and a receipt to sign for the chips. “Now you tell me why any fisherman, even a goddamn dumb one, would stay in the same place the whole day if the fish ain’t bitin’.”

Another scream burst from Sam’s Place.

“Dat Annie?” Charlie asked.

“She’s listening to the Notre Dame game. They must’ve scored again.”

“Still plannin’ on bein’ a nun?”

“Either that,” Cork said, signing for the boxes of chips before Charlie took off, “or the first female quarterback for the Fighting Irish.”

Sam’s Place stood on the outskirts of Aurora, hard on the shore of Iron Lake. Sam Winter Moon had built a simple, sturdy dock where the pleasure boats that supplied most of his business tied up. Directly north was the Bearpaw Brewery, separated from Cork’s property by a tall chain-link fence. Cork didn’t much like the brewery, but, in fact, it had been there longer than Sam’s Place, and in the hard economic times before the Iron Lake Ojibwe built the Chippewa Grand Casino, it had sustained lots of households in Aurora. So what could he say?