Downriver (4 page)

The sun was setting in Keweenau Bay, tinting the water orange and making black hairy fingers of the points of land and scrub pines stretched across it. Gulls congregated on the knuckles and took off in a dozen directions, dive-bombing the lake and looping back up in a sudden acceleration of wings, their shrill calls sounding like two boards mating. As the water cooled, a chill wind riffled the surface and found its way through our clothes to the skin, as it had with white and black mariners for two hundred years, and with the brown-skinned paddlers of dugout canoes for twenty thousand years before them. The lake was a continual awareness unaffected by eons, changing only when it chose and then lapsing back into the immutable calm it had known since the last glacier. Maybe it wasn’t so bad to be a prisoner on its shore. Doing time means nothing where time doesn’t exist.

We hoisted our worldly belongings under our arms and went in search of food and lodging.

T
HE MOTEL HAD EVERYTHING
except a Victorian mansion on the hill and a nervous taxidermist in the office. In his place was a woman of Coulee’s height and general age group in a curly blond wig and man’s canvas jacket turned back twice at the cuffs, who gave our waterstained luggage the fish eye and told me I’d forgotten to write my license plate number on the registration card.

“We came on foot.”

“Thirty-five dollars,” she snapped. “In advance.”

When I’d forked it over she directed us to one of six log bungalows on a dirt lot. The only vehicle nearby was a spanking new silver Ford four-by-four pickup with a snowblade on the front, parked under an outside light behind the office. I glanced inside at the tasseled pillow on the driver’s seat and the wooden blocks tied to the floor pedals and decided the old lady made her payments with her guests’ gold fillings.

DeVries was thinking the same thing. “If it’s okay with you I’m sleeping with the lights on tonight.”

Our bungalow had two double beds, an Indian rug made by the Taiwan tribe, an obese lamp, and a water closet worthy of the name. The plastic sanitized glasses on the ledge over the sink were the only things in it not nailed or bolted down. Everything was spotless, at least; what the Upper Peninsulans don’t spend on luxury goes into clean. I kicked one of the beds. “I guess sleeping with your feet hanging over the end is nothing new to you. Which one you want?”

He threw his bag onto the one nearer the bathroom. “I’m used to sleeping next to a toilet.”

I stripped the cellophane off a glass and drank some water. We’d eaten in a family place on the edge of Harvey, complete with red-and-white-checked tablecloths and friendly waitresses and enough garlic in the spaghetti sauce to float the Vatican; my upper tract had sworn a vendetta. When I came out of the bathroom, DeVries was still standing between the beds. He had a look on his face like a little boy at Disney World. “So when do we go see the Wakely brothers?”

“Who said we would?” I asked.

“We walked past three other places looked better than this. If what Axhorn told us is right we’re just a brisk walk from their shack.”

“
I
am. You’re a hundred miles away. If it comes to busting heads, I don’t have a parole to worry about. I thought that was why you hired me.”

“I been free six hours now. I’m ruint for staying put ’cause someone tells me to. Besides, you heard what the cop said.”

“I’m tougher than I look.”

“I got you beat there. I’m
just
as tough as I look.”

“You’re too big to argue with. Get some sleep. It’s coming on your bedtime and I need you fresh and dewy-eyed when we take on the Wilderness Family.”

He took his bag off his bed, stretched out on it fully clothed, and was asleep inside five minutes, snoring evenly. Sleeping when you’re not tired is one thing prison teaches you. I opened my valise on the other bed and got out the S&W Police Special I’d been carrying for eight years. It was dry in its holster and chamois leather wrap I used to keep it from bouncing around in the case, but just for luck I unloaded it and cleaned and oiled it from the kit and wiped off each of the cartridges before replacing them. Then I put it aside and lay on the bed and wished I had a cigarette until it was time to wake my client.

A light fog was rolling off the lake and collecting in the hollows when we turned off the highway and started on foot down White Road. My jacket was still damp; I moved my shoulders around inside it to generate some heat. Under a ragged milkwater moon the big man at my side looked like a shadow cast by me and was making about that much noise. Giants have more practice at being quiet than the rest of us.

The road was fine sand, which is all there is up there besides rock, flanked by sixty-foot pines as silent as cemetery monuments. It was too cool even for mosquitoes. We were the only things stirring in a cerecloth stillness that seemed unnatural. Each tree concealed another ghost clad in peacoat or breechclout, leggings or French tunic. It made me want to walk faster and whistle.

The distance seemed much longer than a mile. It was probably about that. A light hung in the trees like the last pear of autumn, disappearing as the trunks came between, then appearing again closer. We rounded a slight bend and then we were standing at the end of a rutted drive terminating in the sort of slant-roofed board-and-batten hovel that hunters used to build before the area became more popular with vacationers. The battered truck whose driver had tried to seal us off on US-41 was parked in front of it with its plank bumper pointed toward the road. An older white Buick sat next to it with one red fender and its wheel wells gone lacy with rust. No new black Monte Carlos here.

DeVries bent down and whispered, “Think they got dogs?”

“Everyone up here has dogs.”

We started up the drive, feeling the ruts with our feet before trusting our weight. The yard, really a bare clearing in the forest, was littered with rusting engine parts and empty oil cans. Keeping the Dodge going was costing them more over the long run than a new truck. Nearing the lighted window I gestured to DeVries to hold his position and covered the rest of the distance in a crouch.

I put an eye to a corner. The air was just cool enough to fog the glass and I cleared a peephole with my thumb. Inside, the place was all one room with a big quilt draped over a clothesline at the back, probably masking the beds. It had a new rug on the floor and some worn furniture and a black-and-white
TV
set with snow on the screen and a stereo in an expensive walnut cabinet that looked new. I wondered how long it would he before the downstater who belonged to the stereo visited his cottage and found it missing. But I was more interested in the girl who was watching
TV
.

She was a brunette of about twenty, very pregnant, in a housedress with sunflowers on it, sitting on a stiff kitchen chair with her hands folded on top of her massive belly and her legs splayed. She was barefoot, which seemed appropriate, and the nipples of her swollen breasts were plainly visible through the thin material of the dress. Although she was staring at the screen she didn’t appear to be paying attention to what was going on there. If the sound was on at all it was turned too low for me to hear it through the window. I waited until I saw her breathe, then withdrew to tell DeVries what I’d seen, keeping my voice low.

“The men must be around,” he said. “Their vehicles are here and I don’t figure them to be big for walking.”

“Keep an eye on the front. I’m going to get a look at what’s behind that quilt.”

I was almost around the corner of the building before I remembered what I’d said about dogs. A big shepherd with more wolf in it than domestic pet came bounding around from the back, dragging a chain and yammering fit to shake the needles off the pines. Ivory teeth flashed in its black muzzle. I drew the gun and backpedaled, aiming between its eyes. Just then it came to the end of its chain with a wham. It strained forward with its hackles standing, barking and snarling and collecting foam in the corners of its mouth.

“Walker!”

I was wearing my magic stupid ring that night. Walking past the truck I hadn’t noticed the open door on the passenger’s side, or the hulk passed out across the seat. Now he rose up and off it like some swamp monster, six feet and two hundred and fifty pounds of fat and muscle in overalls, scooping a shotgun off a rack below the rear window. But DeVries’s shout had startled him before he could level it at me, and as he was turning in the ex-convict’s direction I had six chances to drop him before he remembered me. So naturally I didn’t shoot. Instead I charged him.

For all his bulk and obvious drunkenness he had reflexes like a cat’s. I was halfway to him when the shotgun swung back around and I could see myself snatched off my feet by the blast, pieces of me flying all over and lighting in the trees. DeVries yelled again — just a yell this time, not a name or a word anyone would recognize — but Overalls wasn’t going to be distracted by that a second time. In the light from the window I saw his finger tensing on the trigger. All this time I was still running, my feet touching the ground in slow motion, a running dead man trying to gain as many yards as possible before the whistle.

DeVries’s next shout had a new quality: a killing edge. It made both of us stop what we were doing and look at him. He was standing on the sagging boards of the porch with one huge arm bent across the pregnant girl’s throat. Her bare feet were off the ground and from the position she was in he had his other hand around her wrist and her arm locked behind her back. She had come outside to see what the commotion was about and DeVries had acted with the speed that would have made him a basketball star if the law hadn’t beaten the scouts to him. The girl was grimacing, but in her eyes was the same blank look she’d been giving the television screen. I’d seen that look in hospitals and nursing homes, directed at the walls.

“Lurleen.” The name had a dull sound in Overalls’ mouth, like thumping a grain barrel.

“I’ll break her, man.”

I couldn’t tell if DeVries meant it. For a man his size, doing it was easier than saying it. I saw the fight go out of Overalls’ eyes. They were big and brown in a red face with dun-colored stubble. He looked to be in his late thirties. The shotgun came down.

Alter a beat I stepped forward and took it out of his hands. He stank of whiskey and caked sweat and dirt. I holstered the revolver.

“Burt?” said Lurleen. She had a little girl’s voice.

“Where’s your brother?” I asked Burt.

He was still thinking about that one when a man in an undershirt and patched jeans came to the shack’s open door from inside. He was as tall as Burt but not as broad. Light from behind him limned his slabbed solid frame and sparkled off the sight of the big automatic pistol in his left hand. He was black-bearded with a white streak in his rumpled hair, a birthmark. His feet were bare. He was younger than Burt.

“You’re Hank?” I trained the shotgun on him.

He gestured with the automatic at the bigger weapon. “It ain’t loaded. Burt can’t be trusted with no loaded gun. One beer makes him crazy.”

I swiveled the shotgun aside and squeezed the trigger. It clicked. I lowered the barrel.

“Put it down or I break her,” DeVries told Hank. He had moved to the end of the porch to keep both brothers in sight.

“Nigger, if you move I’ll shoot your eye out.”

We were like that for a while. There was something in the way he held the gun. I said, “ ’Nam?”

“Grenada. You?”

I nodded. “Cambodia too. Why the marines? That’s strictly volunteer.”

“I had some trouble here and walked into the first place I came to and raised my right hand. Next time I’ll take the trouble.”

“Give it time. It’ll fester out.”

“This here’s private property. Come in here, scare my brother, threaten Lurleen. Who the hell are you?”

“This afternoon somebody driving that truck cut us off on Forty-One,” I said. “I figure whoever it was was being paid by the man who tried to close the back door. He was driving a new black Monte Carlo.”

“That truck was here all day.”

“We’re not the law. All we want is answers.”

He said nothing. The automatic was cocked.

I said, “I know how things are up here. The farming stinks, the Indians have a lock on the commercial fishing because of the treaty, and the tourist season’s too short. The law’s spread thin. A man has to support his family, especially with a baby coming.”

“Lurleen’s our cousin Clyde’s girl,” Flank said. “He’s got six months left in the federal house in Milan. I promised him we’d look after her.”

“That was you in the truck.”

He made a decision. “I didn’t figure you drownded.”

“Family’s family,” I said. “The lumber business is tight. I figure you’re laid off to be free in the middle of the week. A man comes up from downstate with money to spend, he asks around and finds a couple of hard local numbers, who’s to tell them they’re wrong to listen? All we want is his name.”

“I don’t have to be talking. I can take my time shooting the nigger and then do you. Me and Burt will just haul your bodies back to the bog and dump you in. They won’t find you for a thousand years.”

DeVries said, “I’ll still break her before I hit the ground.”

“Let her go,” I said.

“No way, man.”

“Hank’s no killer or you’d be dead. You still will be if you make a move. I’ll help him.”

“You’re working for me!”

“Up to a point. You’re standing on it.”

After a minute he said, “Shit,” and lowered Lurleen to her feet. She ducked under his arm and huddled close to Hank. He made room in the doorway. “Get to bed.”

She fled inside. He stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door shut behind him. He was still holding the pistol. Without the light at his back he looked older; the kind of older that comes on overnight. I wondered if the white streak in his hair was a birthmark after all.

I said, “I’m going to reach inside my coat.”

“No, you ain’t.”

“The heat’s on my right side in back. Burt can have it. It’s not what I want to get.”