Dark Tiger (10 page)

Calhoun went up to him. “I'm looking for Mr. Swenson.”

The man nodded. “I'm Swenson. Who're you?”

“Calhoun. I hope you're expecting me.”

“Yeah, okay,” said Swenson. “Good. Glad you're here. Hoped I wouldn't have to wait for you. Soon's we get these supplies loaded, I want to take off. I don't like the looks of this sky.”

“Can I help?” said Calhoun.

Swenson shook his head. “Me 'n' Eddie here know what we're doing. Got it down to a science. Whyn't you bring your gear down.” He looked at Ralph, who was sitting on the wooden dock beside Calhoun. “The mutt yours?”

“His name's Ralph,” said Calhoun, “and he's not a mutt. He's a Brittany.”

Swenson dismissed the issue of Ralph's parentage with a wave of his hand. “You planning on bringing him on the plane with you?”

“Yes.”

“He gonna be all right with the noise? What about air sickness? Will he sit still? I can't have some dog puking all over the seats or moving around while—”

“Ralph won't be a problem,” said Calhoun.

Swenson cocked his head, then shrugged. His face was deeply creased and sunburned, and his eyes were a washed-out blue. He looked like he'd lived hard. Calhoun guessed he was somewhere in his late fifties.

Swenson turned his back on Calhoun and resumed taking the stuff Eddie handed to him and stowing it in the cargo hold of the plane.

Calhoun gave Ralph a whistle and headed back to his truck. He hefted his duffel and his gear bag and lugged them back to the plane. He dumped them on the dock, then went back to the truck and got the rest of his stuff.

By the time he piled all his gear on the dock next to the plane, Eddie was behind the wheel of the Stop & Shop truck, and Swenson was talking to him through the window.

After a minute, the truck started up and rolled down the dock to the parking area, and Swenson climbed into the cargo hold of the plane. “Hand your stuff to me,” he said to Calhoun.

So Calhoun passed his bags and aluminum fly-rod tubes to Swenson, who stowed them away. Then he closed the cargo door, went up to the front of the plane, and said, “Well, let's get going. You sit up front with me. Your dog can sit behind us if he'll stay quiet.”

Calhoun climbed into the front seat on the right. Ralph scampered onto the seat behind him. Swenson cast off the lines, then took the pilot's seat beside Calhoun. He turned and held out his hand. “I'm Curtis Swenson,” he said.

Calhoun shook his hand. “Stoney Calhoun,” he said.

“Your seat belt,” Swenson said. He buckled his own.

Calhoun buckled up.

“You're taking Bud Smith's place while he's off tending to his family, I understand,” said Swenson.

Calhoun nodded. “I'm just filling in.”

“Nice opportunity for you.”

Calhoun shrugged. “It should be interesting.”

“Bud's a pretty good guide.”

“So'm I,” said Calhoun.

Curtis Swenson handed a headset to Calhoun. “Put this on. Then we can talk. It gets pretty damned noisy up here.” He clamped his own earphones on over his Tigers cap, then turned and looked at Ralph. “You gonna be all right, pooch?”

“He'll be fine,” said Calhoun.

Swenson leaned forward and squinted up at the sky. “I figure we got an hour before this settles into something serious. Let's do it.”

He started the left engine, then the right one. The plane's cab filled with the roar, only partially muffled in Calhoun's ears by the headset. Swenson fiddled with some switches, then put the plane in gear and began taxiing out onto the lake. Calhoun watched what Swenson did, and he realized that there was a
memory in his body and his brain of how the stick felt vibrating in his hands, and how his feet could feel the air pressuring the fuselage when they worked the rudder pedals, and he knew he'd flown a plane such as this one low and fast over woods and lakes. This memory, like all of his memories from the time before he was zapped by lightning, was imprecise and refused to be pinned down, but Calhoun could feel it in his fingers and toes.

Swenson taxied about half a mile down the lake, then pivoted the plane around so that it was headed into the north wind. “Ready?” he said. His voice crackled through the earphones.

“I'm ready, Captain,” Calhoun said.

The plane began moving forward. As it accelerated, the roar of the engines became louder. Pretty soon they were skimming across the top of the wind-rippled water, and then they were aloft.

“We got about an hour's flight,” said Swenson. “You gonna be all right?”

“I'm fine,” said Calhoun. He turned in his seat to check Ralph, who was sitting there looking out the window as if they were riding in Calhoun's pickup truck.

“You ever been to Loon Lake?” said Swenson.

“Nope.”

“Fancy place,” he said. “Awfully good fishing. You like fancy places?”

“Not particularly. I like good fishing, though.”

“They got a Russian couple staying there now. Rumor has it he used to torture political prisoners for the KGB. She's about forty years younger than him. There's a country singer and her boyfriend. She's a big star, they say, and he's a heroin addict. Some actor's there with his two teenage boys. An outdoor writer
and his wife, some rich couple from Texas, pair of CEOs from Chicago. That's how it is. A lot of big shots. You or I, we couldn't afford the place.”

“They're having good fishing?” said Calhoun.

“The salmon are bitin' like snakes, they say. I couldn't tell you from personal experience.”

“You don't fish?”

Swenson turned and looked at Calhoun. “I'm an employee. I'm not invited to fish.”

“You like to fish, though, huh?”

“Sure. Who doesn't?”

“You can come out with me sometime,” said Calhoun.

“Get yourself in trouble with management,” said Swenson, “hobnobbing with the help.”

Calhoun smiled. “I can live with that. Hell, I'm the help, too.”

They fell silent for a few minutes. Below them it appeared to be all pine woods, with the occasional stream or pond. Now and then Calhoun glimpsed one of the sandy roads that had been cut out of the woods by the lumber companies for their big trucks to haul the logs. The roads looked like pale scars on the green landscape.

“How long've you been flying?” said Calhoun, mostly by way of making conversation.

“Choppers in Vietnam got me started,” said Swenson. “When I got out, I flew the bush in Alaska for twenty-five years, and I'm not prepared to say which was more dangerous. Crashed and burned in both places. This here is sort of my retirement. Compared to Alaska, Maine's easy.”

“The weather?”

“Exactly,” said Swenson. “Well, in Nam, of course, we had people shooting rockets at us. In Alaska you have a different
weather system in every river valley. You never know which one's going to show up where you're flying. Nobody can predict them. The pilots understand the weather better than anybody, because their lives depend on it, but nobody's perfect. Sooner or later, everybody goes down. Then it's a matter of if you survive it.”

“You went down?”

“More than once,” said Swenson.

“Ever go down up here?”

“In Maine?” Swenson shook his head. “Nope. Not yet.”

“That's comforting,” said Calhoun.

“In Maine the weather's more predictable. You can understand it if you pay attention. Like today. I'm pretty sure we got a good hour before these clouds drop down too low for safe flying.”

“
Pretty
sure?”

“Sure enough to be flying,” said Swenson.

“My life is in your hands,” said Calhoun.

“You watch what I do,” said Swenson. “If I have a stroke or a heart attack or something, it'll be up to you to bring us down.”

“I'm watching,” said Calhoun. “I'd just as soon you stayed healthy, though.”

Calhoun understood that he didn't need to watch. He'd flown planes before, and if he had to, he knew, the muscle memory of it would click in and he could do it again.

They were quiet for a little while as the wooded landscape passed under them. Then Calhoun said, “Did you know McNulty?”

“McNulty,” said Swenson.

“He was a guest at the lodge.”

“I know who he was,” said Swenson. “What's your interest in McNulty?”

“Nothing, really. I just heard about him is all.”

“What'd you hear?”

“That he got killed.”

“You want some advice,” said Swenson, “my advice is, don't say anything about McNulty and that girl getting shot.”

“When I'm at the lodge, you mean.”

“Yes, sir. That's what I mean.”

“They're sensitive about it, are they?”

“Management is,” said Swenson.

“Meaning Marty Dunlap.”

“And his wife. And his son.”

“Tell me about them.”

Swenson gave his head a little shake. “Not much to tell. The wife's in charge of the kitchen help and the chambermaids. June's her name. She's pretty interested in religion. The son—Robert—he does the booking and tends to the guests. You don't want to cross Robert. Marty oversees everything and deals with the guides and the other help. He's a pretty straight shooter.”

“Robert's not a straight shooter?”

“Robert's ambitious. He'll run you over if he has to.”

“So what's their problem with McNulty?”

“Obvious,” said Swenson. “McNulty was a guest at the lodge, and he got killed. Embarrassing. The guests aren't supposed to die at Loon Lake. We had the sheriff up there interrogating everybody, including the guests. Not exactly the image they're looking for. So now it's over and done with and hopefully forgotten, and I'm giving you good advice when I tell you not to bring up the subject of Mr. McNulty.”

“I'll keep it in mind,” said Calhoun.

 

 

 

 

From the air, Loon Lake reminded Calhoun of a lumpy half-deflated football. It was the biggest of seven lakes, which were all connected by thin silvery ribbons of water like a string of odd-sized, misshapen pearls. Some of the streams that ran between the lakes appeared to be several hundred yards or more of boulder-strewn whitewater. Others were just the narrows linking the foot of one lake with the head of the next. This system of interconnected streams and lakes was, Calhoun understood, one long riverway meandering its way to the Atlantic Ocean.

Curtis Swenson dropped the plane so that they were flying just a few hundred feet above the treetops. “Big Hairy,” he said as they swooped over one of the lakes. Then, pointing to another, smaller lake, “Little Hairy. Don't ask me who named them. They all have old Indian names, too, but at the lodge, they use these American names. This one here is Drake Pond. Loon's the biggest, almost three miles long. Down there you can see Muddy Pond and Crescent Lake and June's Pond. Marty named that one after his wife, I know that. Fishing's good in all of them. The
rivers, too. And don't overlook the currents in the narrows at the head and foot of every lake.” A minute later, he said, “There's the lodge.”

Swenson made a turn over the lodge. It was perched on a knoll overlooking a cove on Loon Lake where an E-shaped dock stretched into the water next to a big boathouse. Another float plane, this one smaller than the Twin Otter, was tied up at the dock.

The lodge was sided with raw cedar. It featured a lot of glass. It was a big rambling many-angled structure with ells on both sides. It seemed to crouch on the knoll like a native animal. There were a couple of other smaller buildings, and snuggled into a grove of pine trees on the lakeshore was a cluster of cabins.

Swenson flew to the south end of Loon Lake and turned the plane so that it was heading north into the wind. “Here comes the tricky part,” he said. “Landing and taking off. You've got to watch out for logs and boulders just under the surface. A chop like we've got here, they're hard to see.”

“Where do the logs come from?”

“They still cut a lot of lumber around here,” Swenson said. “They load the logs in trucks to take 'em to the mills. They used to run logs down the lakes, but that's illegal now. Still, sometimes a big rogue log finds its way into a river or lake, and it gets semiwaterlogged and drifts along just under the surface, and if you hit it with your pontoon, it will blow up your airplane.
Boom
. Quick as that.”

Comforting
, Calhoun thought.

Swenson brought the plane down. Calhoun held his breath. The water seemed to zoom up to meet the pontoons, but it landed so lightly on the corrugated surface of the lake that Calhoun couldn't tell exactly when the pontoons touched the water.

They taxied up to the dock. Two men were there to help
bring the plane alongside and tie it off. One of the men was Marty Dunlap. The other was younger, somewhere in his late twenties, Calhoun guessed. Both were wearing khaki pants and green flannel shirts. The younger man had his face jutted forward at Marty, and his hand gripped Marty's shoulder. Calhoun read anger on the man's face and in the tension in his neck and shoulders.

Marty shrugged the younger guy's hand away and turned to help ease the plane alongside the dock. The other guy stood there for a moment glaring at Marty's back before helping with the plane.

Calhoun stepped onto the dock, turned, and gave a whistle, and Ralph came bounding out of the plane. The dog headed for dry land. Calhoun knew what he had in mind.

Marty Dunlap came up to him, clapped him on the shoulder, and gave his hand a shake. “Stoney,” he said. “Great to see you. Glad you could make it.” Calhoun saw that his green shirt had the triple-
L
logo, the same one that was on the fuselage of the float plane, stitched onto the left breast pocket.