Iron Lake (10 page)

“It’s not a question anymore of fishing,” Sam spoke up. “It’s a question of what’s right, Cork. We’ve bent like reeds in a river for generations, bent so far over we’ve just about forgot how to stand up straight. Look at us now. None of us has ever been so proud of being a Shinnob.”

Cork knew that was true. The feeling in the room of Blackwater’s trailer was sweeping all of them along toward some inevitability. Russell Blackwater had brought the possibility of power to the reservation, and everyone gathered was ready to follow him anywhere.

“We’re going to exercise our rights,” Blackwater said. “We expect you to do your job.”

“If you get your boats in the water with your gear ready tonight, I’ll have a couple of my men watch them to make sure nothing’s touched,” Cork promised. “When you get to the landing, you can move quickly to the boats and out onto the lake. Would you be willing to do that?”

Blackwater and the others exchanged glances. Sam Winter Moon gave a nod. “We’ll do it,” Blackwater said.

Jo followed him to his sheriff’s car. The sky was overcast, threatening rain. The night was very dark.

“You intend to be there, Counselor?” Cork asked her.

“We’ve come this far together.”

“You don’t have to. You’re not one of The People.”

“I’ll be there to make sure their rights are observed.”

“I’ll be there for that.”

She regarded him with the same skepticism Russell Blackwater had. “You’re divided. I’m not.”

“I have a duty clearly spelled out.”

“You have an electorate clearly at odds with you.”

“I’ll do my duty.”

“So will I.” She looked back toward the trailer. “It doesn’t have to turn ugly.”

“Blackwater wants it that way.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

“He’s not everyone.”

“It only takes one asshole, Jo.”

They stood in the dark under the threatening sky and seemed at a loss for words. Cork reached out to hold her, but it was as if they were too full of the responsibilities they both bore, and there was no comfort in it. “I guess I’ll see you in a few hours.”

She went back to the trailer. When she opened the door, Cork heard the sound of Wanda Manydeeds, a Midewiwin, singing words he couldn’t translate. He saw how they all welcomed Jo among them. Although she had not a drop of the blood of The People in her, she was more one of them at that moment than Cork had ever been.

Morning came gray and drizzly. Well before dawn, Cork had his deputies deployed along the path from the parking area to the boat landing. The small motorboats were tied up and waiting, their nets loaded. Cork was glad he’d talked Blackwater into that at least.

Some of the crowd had been there a good part of the night, but most had begun to gather an hour or so before dawn. A few barrels had been filled with wood and fires started, and people gathered around them warming hands and sipping coffee from thermoses. A couple of equipment trucks from television stations in Duluth and the Twin Cities were parked with their engines running, white exhaust mixing with the gray drizzle. Placards leaned against trees and the barrels, ready to be grabbed up when the moment arrived. There were some children in the crowd; Cork didn’t like that at all. He asked the parents to take the children home, but they refused.

At 5:35, he got word over the radio that Helmuth Hanover of the
Aurora Sentinel
had received a call from an anonymous spokesman for the Minnesota Civilian Brigade threatening some form of retaliation if the Indians fished. Cork had no time to consider this development. Less than a minute later, just as the drizzle seemed to let up and the faintest hint of morning light crept across the lake, Deputy Jim Bowdry radioed that the procession of vehicles he was leading from the reservation was only a mile from the landing. Earlier Cork had given instructions to his men to clear a corridor from the parking area to the lake as soon as he gave them the word. He told them now to get started. The crowd, who’d been quiet and had even seemed a little sleepy, came suddenly to life and began chaotically to gather behind the lines formed by the outstretched arms of the deputies. The morning had been still enough to hear the lap of lake water against the shore, but now shouts back and forth across the empty corridor shattered the quiet. Placards rose above the crowd, swinging back and forth like signals at a dangerous railroad crossing. The news teams had crawled out of their trucks and started their cameras rolling.

Cork had a bad feeling in his gut. And for the first time in years, he was so afraid he was shaking.

The procession of five vehicles—the patrol car, two old pickups, a station wagon, and Blackwater’s motorcycle—came slowly up the access toward the parking area. Jim Bowdry stopped his patrol car far short of the lot, where some of the crowd were waiting. Cork walked over and asked Blackwater to keep his people there a few moments. Then he hauled a bullhorn from his car, stood on a picnic table, and addressed the crowd.

“This is Sheriff O’Connor! Listen up, everyone!” He waited a moment for a quiet that never quite came. “This is Sheriff O’Connor! I want everyone to stay back of the lines my deputies have formed. I want a clear corridor for these fishermen to walk to their boats. Stay behind the deputies. I repeat, you will stay behind the deputies and keep the corridor clear.”

He set the bullhorn on the table, stepped down, and approached Blackwater. “This is what you wanted, Russ. Let’s do it.”

Cork led the way. Directly behind him, side by side, came Russell Blackwater and Sam Winter Moon. Jo was back with the others who followed, all of them keeping close together. The big yard light that illuminated the boat landing at the far end of the cleared corridor seemed miles away to Cork. The shouts of the crowd rose angrily on both sides. Cork had ordered his deputies to keep their firearms holstered, that if a situation arose they were to let him handle it. He didn’t want an incident. He recognized many of the faces in the crowd, but they were different faces than he’d seen in the shops and the quiet streets of Aurora. They seemed like twisted things, grotesque Halloween masks of anger.

A third of the way to the landing, Cork caught a movement to his left just out of the corner of his eye. He swung around quickly. An empty Pepsi can clattered onto the black asphalt of the corridor and Russell Blackwater kicked it as it rolled across. Cork realized that he was gripping the handle of his holstered revolver. He took a deep breath, turned back toward the landing, and moved on.

They’d come thirty yards safely and had less than a dozen to go to reach the boats. For a moment, Cork finally let himself think it was just about over; they were almost there. He felt how tight he was, all his muscles tensed in a way that suddenly seemed more painful than he could bear, and he let himself relax, just a little. It was only a moment, one brief instant, but it was enough for tragedy.

A small figure stepped into the hard glare beneath the light over the boat landing. He’d come around the end of the crowd, slipped past the last outstretched deputy’s arm. He stood at the end of the corridor, dead center. The light above him at his back cast his face in shadow, and Cork couldn’t see who it was. The shadowed mouth didn’t utter a word. The arms simply lifted a rifle and pointed it toward Cork.

Forever after, Cork remembered the next few seconds as if it all had happened in slow motion. He could see every detail. The drizzle-wetted hair plastered to the top of a balding little head. The dark outline of ears sticking out like handles on an urn. A moment of illumination as the face turned slightly, looking from side to side behind Cork. And finally the slow drawing back of the hand that operated the pump. Cork’s own movements seemed like something done underwater, nightmarishly slow. Reaching toward his holster. Fumbling with the strap over his revolver. Starting to draw the firearm clear. All of it too slow.

Fire flashed from the rifle barrel. There must have been a sound, but Cork in all his remembering never heard a sound. He expected to be hit, the impact to be like a log slammed into his chest, but he felt nothing and his arm kept moving, clearing his revolver from its holster. As the figure before him drew back the pump of the rifle again, Cork fired. The little man stumbled back. Cork fired again and again. The rifle discharged once more, but high this time, uselessly into the dripping sky; the little man collapsed. Cork followed him with his revolver, pumping the last of his rounds into the man even as he lay fallen.

Cork turned back. Behind him Sam Winter Moon lay sprawled on the wet black asphalt, his chest blown into a pulpy mess.

No one moved. In the deathly quiet of that moment, in the still Cork always would associate with terrible tragedy, the lake could be heard again, lapping peacefully against the shore.

The man with the rifle had been Arnold Stanley. All his life he’d held a safe job as an accountant in Chicago. But at fifty he’d risked his whole savings to buy the Bayside Inn, a small resort on a southern inlet of Iron Lake. He was a small, pop-eyed man, nervous. After the shooting, his wife told reporters that he’d been distraught at the prospect of the Indian fishing ruining his business. “He was afraid we’d lose everything,” she sobbed on camera. “He wasn’t a bad man. He was just so afraid.”

People said openly that putting six bullets into a scared little man was excessive. It was a hard statement to disagree with.

Russell Blackwater, speaking for The People, decried Cork’s incompetence. The sheriff had promised to protect the unarmed fishermen, who were only exercising their legal right. And once again it was the innocent who suffered when promises were broken.

*   *   *

The day Sam Winter Moon and Arnold Stanley died, the Anishinaabe didn’t spearfish or gillnet. Nor did they any other day. A negotiating committee that included Russell Blackwater, Jo O’Connor, Sandy Parrant, and several attorneys for the state of Minnesota convened in St. Paul a few days later. They reached an agreement, pushed quickly through the legislature by Sandy Parrant, requiring the state to pay a much increased annual reimbursement to the Iron Lake band of Ojibwe for not exercising their fishing rights on Iron Lake or any other lake in the state.

The county board of commissioners suspended Cork with full pay pending the findings of an inquest into the shootings. Arnold Stanley was the only man Cork had ever killed. Nervous, pop-eyed little Stanley, who’d only been scared to death that he was going to lose everything. Cork went over it again and again in his mind, replaying every moment leading to the fatal shooting. Was there something he could have done? Did people have to die?

The inquest proceeded smoothly, evidence showing that Cork had acted reasonably. But the county attorney, Warren Evans, who was a crony of Robert Parrant, asked Cork a question that tilted the whole world of the inquest.

“Why did you shoot six times, Sheriff? Shoot even after the man was down?”

Cork, in the witness stand, looked at his hands and didn’t answer right away.

“Did you hear the question?”

“Yes,” Cork replied. “I heard.”

“Please answer then. Why did you shoot Arnold Stanley six times?”

Although it was midday, midweek, the courtroom was full. Most of the spectators were white, but a number of Iron Lake Ojibwe, including Russell Blackwater, sat near the back off to one side. The quiet in the courtroom at that moment reminded Cork of the quiet at the boat landing after the shooting had stopped.

“Answer the question, Cork,” Ed Reilly, the judge, said.

Cork looked out across the waiting faces in the courtroom. He said, “I don’t know.”

“Is it possible,” Warren Evans suggested, “you simply panicked?”

Cork weighed this possibility. “Yes,” he admitted, “it’s possible I panicked.”

“I panicked!”

Helmuth Hanover used those fateful words as the headline in the
Sentinel
two days later. And in his editorial, Hanover expressed serious doubts about Corcoran O’Connor’s fitness as sheriff, posing the question to the voters of Tamarack County: Wasn’t a recall election in order?

In retrospect, Cork thought he might have been able to mount a decent countercampaign, but at that time it hadn’t mattered. He felt shattered, broken inside, unsure of everything about himself. Although the recall wasn’t a landslide, it was successful. In the special election that followed, Wally Schanno, handpicked by Judge Robert Parrant, stepped into office.

*   *   *

When he’d cleaned the old wax from the skis, he took a break, lit up a Lucky Strike, and stared across the lake toward the barren trees that lined the shore in front of the casino. In the morning sunlight, the distant copper dome flashed like a flame rising from the snow. Cork understood that, in a way, laying most of the blame for the tragedy on his shoulders had made the casino possible. Sandy Parrant could never have convinced the white population of Tamarack County to approve the land sale if they’d perceived the Anishinaabe to have been responsible for Stanley’s death. And Blackwater could never have convinced the tribal council to go forward in the first place if he hadn’t also convinced them that it was Cork’s incompetence rather than the greed and anger of the whites that had caused the death of Sam Winter Moon. Jo’s fortunes had risen with the Anishinaabe’s and through her association with Sandy Parrant, whose own political star was well on the rise. Cork tried not to be bitter over it. In the end, prosperity had come to almost everyone in the county—red and white. What was one man’s life, or two or three, compared to the welfare of so many?