Downriver (3 page)

“I know about all that. I read.”

“Reading it and seeing it,” I said.

“Yeah.”

She returned with the printout — a grainy reproduction of the Marianne picture — and I paid for it and she put it in a manila envelope for us. The sympathy had gone from her face, leaving cool untouchability in its wash. Back in the car I turned on the radio. The game had finished. I had to wait for the announcer to dispose of all the other scores in both leagues before learning that Detroit had dropped it with two errors and a base on balls in the ninth. I flipped the knob. “Where to?”

“Detroit. I got an appointment with my parole officer Friday.”

“Today’s Wednesday. They don’t give you much rope.”

“What’s rope?”

The way to US-41 took us along a broad, sun-sloshed main stem with fresh pavement ruled in bright yellow. It was lined with clean store windows and parking meters against the buildings to clear the curbs for the plows that removed twelve-foot drifts in the winter. A few tourists were out pushing the season in tank tops and shorts and blue knees and elbows. Hope and pneumonia spring eternal in the breasts of Michiganians.

We were four hundred miles from home as the crow flies, if it flew across the Great Lakes. Our route was considerably less direct and half again longer. The Upper Peninsula, which belongs geographically to Wisconsin, was Andrew Jackson’s left-handed gift to Lansing in return for surrendering Toledo to Ohio. There had been some hollering about it at the time because a port on Lake Erie was worth twice as much as a rocky wilderness, but Ohio had more voters. Then the lumber industry started up and copper and iron were discovered in abundance and the hollering stopped. The war with our neighboring state goes on, however. There’s no sense in wasting a good hate.

Two miles outside Marquette we passed through Harvey — two blocks of boarded-over storefronts and depressed tourist trade — and turned away from the lake. DeVries never looked back at it. The road opened up and so did I. The only other vehicle in sight was a dot of color in the rearview mirror.

“Marquette’s for incorrigibles,” I said. “What’d you do that made you too hot to hold in Jackson?”

“Cut my hand.” His domed profile was sharp against the evergreens striping past his window.

“That shouldn’t have done it.”

“I cut it on a guard’s front teeth.”

“Bad move. They use angry young men for warm-up exercise inside.”

“What do you know about it?”

“I’ve been in jail a time or two. It’s the same neighborhood.”

“You was just visiting. I lived there.”

I said nothing. He tipped his head back against the padded rest.

“I feel like shit. I thought I’d be happy when I got out.”

“That’s normal.”

“There was guys inside didn’t want to leave. One of them had to be dragged out when his time was up. I never figured that to happen to me.”

“Freedom’s scary. You’ll get used to it.”

It was his turn to say nothing. The dot of color in the mirror had become an old maroon Dodge truck with a plank for a front bumper. It was making good time for the amount of smoke it was laying down behind it. The driver must have put in oil as often as he filled the tank.

“There’s something to be said for knowing tomorrow’s going to be just like today and yesterday,” I said. “We’re all looking for that. Living on the edge is too hard on the heart.”

“It’s noisy out here. That’s the first thing I noticed. You don’t know quiet till you been on the block. Some nights you can hear the hopes drop.”

The truck flashed its lights. I let up on the accelerator and crowded the shoulder to give it room. It swept past with a swish and a click and a clattering of lifters. Smoke tangled around us.

“Guess I got out just in time,” DeVries said. “My ears are institutionalized.”

“Hang on.”

Sixty yards ahead the truck swung into a sliding turn across both lanes, rubber scraping the pavement like nails on steel and gushing black smoke into the gray. It hinged up on its inside wheels, hung there for an instant, and came back down bouncing. By then I was already turning in the opposite direction. My tires wailed and the rear end came around with a snap that sounded and felt as if the car had bent in the middle. DeVries’s palm smacked the windshield. When the nose was pointing back the way we’d come I squashed the pedal to the floor. The front wheels spun, grabbed, and lashed us ahead. The steering wheel yanked my arms straight.

The third vehicle, a new black Monte Carlo that had been exposed for the first time when the truck pulled out to pass, was turning, but I’d reacted too fast for the driver and he had only one lane blocked when I tore around in front of him, slinging two wheels up the grassy bank. Just then the fuel injector cut in with a deep gulp; the inertia broke the catch that held my seat in place and it slid back in its track and from then on I was reaching with all four limbs to maintain control from the back seat.

“Hell’s going on?” DeVries was gripping his door handle.

I couldn’t answer and drive like an idiot at the same time. In the mirror the Monte Carlo had engineered its turn into a U and was coming on. From the amount of smoke I saw behind it, the truck was following suit. Harvey flashed past like a subliminal commercial and then I had a turn coming up and a sign advising me to slow down to thirty-five. The sign wobbled in my seventy-mile-an-hour wake.

I felt the wheels leave the road and knew the instant when they decided not to come back. Gravel sprayed, grass swished, and then we were hurtling down a grade with nothing in front of us but blue Superior.

I
T WAS ONE
of those county sheriff’s departments with brass hats and military titles and enough gold braid to hogtie a Democrat. We drew a major.

Not that he acknowledged the title, engraved on a brass bar on his chest along with the name
R. E. AXHORN
. He was a big Ojibway with iron gray in his short black hair and black eyes in a broad pitted face the color of old blood, wearing a brown leather jacket over a buff-and-brown uniform and a revolver with a cherrywood grip in a holster behind his right hip. He shook my hand and then DeVries’s and took a seat in the wing-backed chair facing the sofa we were sitting on, leaning forward to keep his weight off the gun.

The living room was in back of a rock shop belonging to an old man named Coulee who had waded in up to his hips to help tie a rope to my rear bumper and the other end around a tree to keep the car above water until the wrecker came. DeVries and I had managed to rescue the big man’s overnight bag and my valise containing changes of clothes and now we were wearing them, growing warm and drowsy in the heat of a small woodstove, our hands wrapped around two man-size porcelain mugs full of steaming coffee laced with bourbon. The coldest winter I’d ever spent was twenty minutes in Lake Superior in late spring.

We were alone with Axhorn and a Corporal Hale, six feet and a hundred and forty pounds of elbows and Adam’s apple in a neat uniform, smoking a cigarette at a window overlooking the lake. Coulee was in the shop polishing the largest collection of Petoskey stone north of—well, Petoskey. He had gone up to Eagle River from his home in Dowagiac before the Depression to mine copper, moved to Harvey after the market bottomed out, and hadn’t been off the peninsula in sixty years. He had told us all this while we were diving for Chevies.

For a minute Axhorn sat without speaking, bent forward with his elbows on his thighs, circling the brim of his Stetson through his fingers Gary Cooper fashion. Then he looked up at me from under his brows. “You told Corporal Hale you were run off the road?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “I lost it on the curve while we were being chased.”

“Sure it was a chase?”

“Not if you don’t want one.”

He stopped circling his hatbrim. “What might that mean?”

“I saw what looked like a trap closing and reversed ends and got out of there. They turned around and followed, scratching up asphalt. Could be both drivers remembered something they’d left behind at the same moment and were in the same hurry to go back and get it. Could be they were in so much of a hurry they both kept going after we went into the water. It doesn’t have to be that they heard Hale’s siren and rabbited. If the paperwork’s easier that way we won’t yell.”

After a space he said, “Which one of you is the convict?”

“Ex,” DeVries said. “Ex-convict.”

Axhorn went on looking at me. “That makes you the private eye. I figured.”

“What might
that
mean?”

“On
TV
the big-city eye is always breaking down in some hick county with a crooked sheriff that wants to see the eye on his way. City cops are always clean, it’s the counties got their fingers in some pie. Some do, I guess. If you watch enough
TV
ou think they all do.”

“Sorry, Major. I guess you didn’t pick out all that brass.”

“Yeah.” He glanced down at his nameplate. “County work’s hell. The higher you get the more metal they hang on you and the closer you are to unemployment every time a new sheriff gets elected. Either of you grab a license plate number?”

I shook my head. “The truck was smoking too much and we never saw the back of the Monte Carlo.”

“Describe the truck.”

“A maroon Dodge beater with a board mounted up front in place of a bumper. Needs new rings bad.”

“That’s Burt Wakely’s rig,” Hale said.

“Who’s Burt Wakely?” I asked.

“Burt and his brother Hank are old customers at County.” Axhorn studied his hatband. “This don’t sound like anything they’d get tangled in, though. They’ll get drunk and bust up a place or take somebody’s car for a spin without exactly asking for it, but road piracy’s outside their specialty, or was last I heard. If you’ll sign a complaint we’ll bring them in for a talk.”

“They the kind that talks?”

“In a bar maybe. Not to the law.”

“Forget it then. What about the Monte Carlo? Black, this year’s model?”

“Probably a transient. The year-rounds in this county like to eat. You can’t do that and own a fifteen-thousand-dollar automobile up here. The summer people, maybe. You might have noticed it isn’t summer.”

“I noticed.” I inhaled some whiskey fumes and felt the amber glow spreading through me.

“Maybe you got some idea why Burt Wakely might want to turn hijacker.”

I met his polished ebony gaze. “No.”

“Your friend don’t talk much.”

DeVries said, “Where I come from you don’t talk till someone talks to you.”

Axhorn looked at him. “What’s a convict —
ex-convict
, excuse me all to hell — want with the company of a private cop two hours after he’s released? I never been, but if I was to make a list of the people I’d care to spend time with straight off the block, that one wouldn’t make the first fifty.”

“I been in twenty years. Somebody has to show me around.”

The Indian waited for more. His profile belonged on a penny. The telephone rang then on the stand next to his chair. He waited politely for Coulee to come in and answer it, then picked it up on the fourth ring.

“Hello? Bob Axhorn, who are you? Okay. That bad, huh? Yeah, I’ll tell him.” He hung up and looked at me. “That was Andy at the garage. They’ve got to gut your car and pump out the tank and fuel line. It’ll be ready Monday.”

“I’m due in Detroit Friday,” DeVries said.

“There a car rental place around here?” I asked.

“Marquette.” Axhorn glanced at the big watch on his wrist. “They’ll be closed now. Long hours are for the tourist season. You can try them in the morning. Lots of vacancies in the motels now.”

“You want us to check in when we get registered?”

“I’ll find you if I need you. I don’t know why I would. It’s just another accident involving a crazy downstater as far as the department’s concerned. I ought to have Corporal Hale ticket you, but you might take it into your head to fight it, and what I most don’t want is to see you hanging around here any longer than it takes to get your car fixed and go home and stay there.” He rose in one smooth movement and put on his Stetson. It made him look like a cavalry scout.

I put down my mug and got up. “It’s not you, Major. It’s just neater this way.”

“I don’t want to hear it.” He looked down at DeVries, hunkered over his coffee in a gray flannel shirt and stiff new jeans that left his ankles bare. “The speech don’t change. Whatever you did that took you down don’t matter to me. What does is you take it out of this county.”

“I hear you.”

“Where do these Wakelys hang out?” I asked.

Axhorn regarded me. “They got a shack a mile down White Road off Twenty-eight east of Harvey. You don’t want to mess with them, though. They wrestle them big flatbeds for the lumber company and they’re both as strong as black bears and twice as mean. Your big friend might take one of them if he don’t turn his back on the other. They eat running backs like you for breakfast.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

“Don’t bother. I’m paid to keep the peace.”

Hale put out his cigarette in an ashtray made from a hunk of raw green copper and followed his superior out. We heard Axhorn talking to Coulee, then the front door slammed. I groped in my shirt pocket, remembered I’d drenched my last pack of Winstons in the lake, and let my hand drop. “Any ideas?”

DeVries rolled his mug between his big palms. “Andrew or Albert.”

“Would he know you were getting out today?”

“One phone call would of done it.”

“It might not have been you they were after. I’m not as popular as I look. Or it could have been an honest hijacking. The world’s changed, like I said.”

“It ain’t changed so much I’ll buy that one.” He stood. I winced, but his head fell an inch short of the exposed oak rafters. “Let’s go see if your money’s dry and find a restaurant. I’m hungry enough to eat the asshole out of a skunk.”

“More fast food?”

“I ain’t
that
hungry.”

Coulee was a short wide gnome with a cap of white hair and blue eyes like glass shards in a face nearly as dark as Axhorn’s. He was as deaf as driftwood, but he got our meaning finally and gave us back our things, only slightly damp now that they’d been spread out near the stove. Some of the ink had run along the edges of the library printout, but the picture was intact. I offered the old man fifty dollars for his help and hospitality. He surprised me by accepting it.