The Northwoods Chronicles (13 page)

And speaking of sex . . . it was time for
Margie.

He drove home with a song in his heart.

But when he got there, what he found was a
tearstained Margie and an emergency at the paper.

The Northern Aire Motel had caught fire while he
was out at the dump, and the paper’s publisher wanted to know who
was covering it.

“Mrs. Atkisson was my mother’s best friend,”
Margie said. “She came into the diner all the time. What could have
caused this?”

Jimbo was a little bit confused as to which
metaphorical fire he should put out first. Console Margie, call his
boss, call his reporter, or run out to the fire. He decided to sit
down and tend to his wife first. “It was an old building, honey.
These things happen. Wiring, propane, lightning, who knows? Did
Mrs. Atkisson die? Do you know that for certain?”

“No,” she sniffed, then wiped her nose. “But
even if she didn’t, that place was all she had.”

“I’m sure she had insurance. Are you all right?
I’ve got to get somebody out there to cover the story.”

“I’m okay,” she said. “You can go.”

Jimbo got back in his truck and headed for the
Northern Aire. He could see the glow in the sky from the blaze.

Paulie met him at the drive. “The firemen are
just letting ’er go,” he said. “They’re watching the trees to make
sure we don’t have a forest fire on our hands.”

“Mrs. Atkisson?” Jimbo asked.

“Don’t know yet. Probably inside, along with her
guests. Seemed to come on real sudden like.”

“Jeez.”

“Where were you tonight?” Paulie asked.

Defensive fear grabbed hold of Jimbo’s chest.
“Why? You ask that like I was a suspect.”

“Just asking,” Paulie said.

“Don’t treat me like I’m an arsonist.” Jimbo
pulled a reporter’s pad from his glove box. The blue plastic of the
Smith & Wesson box seemed to glow neon in the light. “Do you
suspect arson?” he asked in his best reporter voice, hoping the
switch of subject would bring Paulie back to the task at hand.

“Got yourself a new gun?” Paulie asked.

“Yeah, Jason and I are going to do some target
shooting.”

“Let me see.”

“Let’s talk about the fire,” Jimbo said.

Paulie leaned down and put his official police
face in Jimbo’s window. “Let me see the gun, Jim.”

Jimbo pulled it out of the glove compartment,
opened the box and handed the gun to Paulie. Paulie opened it, slid
open the chamber and sniffed. “Were you at the dump tonight?”

Jimbo felt strangely ashamed. “Yeah,” he said
with what he thought was righteous why-shouldn’t-I-be-at-the-dump?
calm.

“How many rats’d you kill?”

Jimbo shrugged. “A few.”

Paulie nodded, handed the gun back to him.
“There’s not going to be a story here until the thing burns down,
cools, and we can get inside to determine the casualties, if any,
and the cause of the fire.”

Jimbo nodded. “I’ll grab a few hours of sleep
and come back.”

Paulie rapped his knuckles twice on the roof of
Jimbo’s car and walked off.

Jimbo drove away, feeling guilty as hell, and he
didn’t know why.

By the time he’d driven five miles toward home,
his guilt had turned to righteous indignation. What the hell, he
thought. Why should Paulie be asking me what I was doing? What kind
of a friend suspects the editor of the newspaper of arson, for
cripes sake? His fingers gripped the steering wheel until they
hurt. And then they automatically turned the wheel toward the dump,
where Jimbo knocked off two more rats and felt vastly better
afterward. Then he went home, showered, shaved, took Margie for a
tumble in bed, set the alarm for two hours hence, and took a
nap.

The full story didn’t come out until mid-day.
Eight people killed in the fire itself, including Mrs. Atkisson. A
blazing tree fell on two firemen trying to keep it from spreading,
bringing the total to ten.

Jimbo printed a Special Edition.

For the next week, he was busy keeping the local
folks apprised of the situation out at the Northern Aire,
documenting the funerals, the human-interest stories of who had
been killed, and dogging the ongoing investigation into the cause.
By the time he could actually go home with a desk cleared of urgent
work, he was exhausted.

All he wanted to do was go to the dump.

Odd, he thought, as he sat at his desk and
loaded his .22. It used to be when he was this tired, he’d want to
go home, have a beer and snuggle on the couch with Margie. Guess
those days were gone. The years had given him enough of a security
envelope in his marriage, and now what he wanted was a little
adrenaline rush.

He drove slowly by the police station, but
Paulie’s truck was gone. He was a little disappointed. He thought
he could probably do a little bit better in competition with him
now. So he drove on out.

But Paulie’s truck was blocking the drive. Just
inside the gate, Paulie had pulled it up diagonally, and Jimbo
couldn’t get past. So he parked in the ditch, got out, stuck his
pistol in his pocket, and walked on in.

Paulie was walking back to his rig, nothing more
than a sauntering shape in the thin moonlight. “Hey,” Jimbo
said.

“Hey, yourself.”

“You blocked the gate.”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the deal?”

“It’s either you or me, Jimbo,” Paulie said. “We
can’t both do it. I don’t know why I ever brought you out here. It
was stupid. Unless . . . unless maybe it’s time for me to quit.
Maybe you ought to take over. My sister’s kid . . . drowned the
other night.”

Paulie’s big, meaty, healthy face looked hollow
and gaunt in the unfiltered light. Jimbo chalked it up to the fire
and the ensuing investigation.

“Yeah, maybe. I took over for Lars Boynan, and
maybe now it’s your turn. I’m pretty tired of it.”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking
about.”

Paulie clamped a big paw on Jimbo’s shoulder.
“One a day, that’s all, Jimbo. You want to control the population,
not eradicate it. One a day.” Then he climbed up into his big
truck, blinded Jimbo with the headlights, turned around and drove
off.

“Jerk,” Jimbo said. Paulie took all the fun out
of coming out here and blasting away. He walked toward the moonlit
mass of confusion, pulled his gun from his pocket and planned to
kill his one for the day. He wanted a good shot, a steady aim, he
wanted to blast its damn rat brains all over somebody’s discarded
sofa. Nothing left for the crows to eat.

He was mildly surprised at himself for that
attitude. He’d always been such a pacifist.

But look at that. Right there, standing on the
top of what looked like the corner of some appliance protruding
from a sea of busted black garbage bags. One big rat, staring right
at him.

Jimbo kept walking toward it, and it didn’t
twitch a whisker. He stopped, raised his pistol, took careful aim,
and thought it was a little bit too easy. If he was only going to
shoot one, why the easy one?

Yet it begged to be shot, the way it stared at
him with its beady eyes shining like ball bearings. This rat had
attitude. Jimbo motioned at it to go away, but it stood its
ground.

The rat dared him to shoot it.

Jimbo felt his lip curl up in distaste, aimed
again and fired.

Between squeezing the trigger and seeing the
little body flip into the air, Jimbo had a terrible feeling in his
gut, a recognition of sorts. It was a horrible, wrenching,
sickening elevator-drop feeling. He turned and ran back to the
car.

The next day when he heard that Paulie had
dropped dead from a heart attack, he was barely surprised. That rat
had reminded him of Paulie in its last nano-second of life. Jimbo
just sat at his desk in the newspaper office, waiting for the kid
to finish Paulie’s obituary, where it would go right next to
Paulie’s nephew’s obituary in the weekly paper. Jimbo sat there
with sudden wisdom and an ageless feeling of responsibility,
cleaned his gun and resolved that one a day would be all he would
kill. One a day. No more, no less. Until the day he saw Jason’s
face or Margie’s face in the balance he was to keep. And then he’d
get rid of the gun, walk straight away and damn the
consequences.

Doc stepped into his bass
boat just as the sun was coming up over the treetops to the east. A
light mist covered the lake, the brisk air smelled October-fresh.
He set the thermos of sugared and creamed coffee and a Styrofoam
cup of worms next to the extra gas tank, then motioned for Cane,
his Samoyed, to join him if he wanted. He wanted.

Doc turned the key, pushed the button, and the
motor caught immediately. He inhaled the smell of the gasoline, the
lake, the morning, and the dog. He didn’t stop to savor it, that’s
what the fishing was for. Savoring. He was in his element. He was
home, and he was grateful every day of his life for it.

The dog settled in the passenger seat, where he
could look out the windshield. Doc untied the bowline, engaged the
motor, and they putted away from the dock and out toward the far
side of the lake. When far enough from his neighbors, he pushed on
the throttle, and they raced across the glassy surface. He looked
back and saw his house and lawn recede, the picnic table and
barbecue standing where he’d last left them. Home was a comfort,
though it was a lonely place without Sadie Katherine, and the
prospect of being alone all winter was not a good one. Sadie
Katherine was good for many, many things, but one of her best
qualities was her skill at games. She played chess, Scrabble,
cribbage, gin rummy, and poker, and she played them about on a par
with Doc, which always meant fierce competition, all winter
long.

He missed that. Good god, he missed that. He
couldn’t imagine a winter without her.

Doc put those thoughts aside and concentrated
instead on the tackle he was going to need. This was a walleye
morning, and he had about two hours on the water before he had to
get back, eat breakfast, shower, dress and drive into town to open
the tackle shop.

When he reached the right spot, he killed the
engine, then sat in the gently rocking boat, listening to the
awakening morning as he rigged his line and then poked the weighted
hook three times through a nightcrawler. Cane got down from his
seat, sniffed the cup of worms, then took his customary place
forward, next to the trolling motor. He sat, his white fur fluffing
in the slight breeze, sniffing the air and looking natural and
regal. A tug of affection pulled on Doc. Cane was not a young dog.
One day Doc would be fishing without Cane, too.

Doc dropped the line over the side of the boat,
and immediately it felt as if a giant hand had grabbed his hook and
pulled it down. He jerked the rod back to set the hook, but it
didn’t budge. It was like a snag, but they weren’t moving. There
was nothing for the hook to snag on.

Then it released, and Doc reeled it in, an eerie
feeling of déjà vu accompanying it.

He felt life on the end of the line, and, when
it came up, he had a white fish on the end. It was a Northern Pike,
a long one, close to thirty inches, its markings faded and
yellowish but still visible on its queer white scales, and it was
giving him no fight.

He’d hooked the fabled albino pike, and this was
the second time he’d caught it or one of its kin.

He didn’t want to touch it. He remembered what
had happened the last time he’d touched it. He brought his line up
taut, but let the fish undulate slowly in the water. It ought to
have red eyes like a normal albino, but this one had golden eyes.
Golden eyes that looked right at him.

He looked at the fish. It looked back at him. He
remembered that look. The last time he saw it was the first time he
fished this lake after he got back from Vietnam.

It had all happened about the same way. He’d
come home from Vietnam, given his mother a kiss, his father a
handshake, and then jumped in his car and come up to the
northwoods. He’d been camping for about a week, trying to cleanse
the Army and all its war-related nastiness from his soul. He
borrowed a little boat, and went out early one fall morning to fish
for walleye, a dozen worms he’d dug himself in the bottom of a
rusted coffee can he’d scavenged out of the park trash. He caught
an albino pike, but it was the strangest strike he’d ever felt.
Like someone had grabbed his line and held it tight while they put
the fish on, then let the fish passively rise to the surface.

He reeled the odd fish in, but it didn’t thrash,
it was calm, so he didn’t feel like he needed his landing net. He
reached down and grabbed the fish, brought it up to eye level, and
that’s when it happened.

He looked into those golden eyes, they looked at
him, and Doc realized he had an option. Two paths stretched before
him in his mind’s eye. On one path lay his NFL dreams, riches, big
house, football glory, lots of women, beautiful women, but the
vision had a shallow feel to it. There was ease to life, but no
meaning. No love. No warmth.

The other path, as clearly sign-posted as a fork
in the road, had a little house here on the lake in White Pines
Junction, a small tackle shop, a dog, a wife, and never enough
money. A struggle, but filled with heart.

There was never a doubt in his mind. He would
choose the northwoods lifestyle, even though he knew that rearing
children in Vargas County was not an option for him. He’d still opt
for the simple life, with one woman he could love and take care of,
and a community that he could be a part of because of who he was,
not because of the money he made.

The fish blinked, or at least Doc thought he saw
the fish blink. He took the hook out of its lip, took another
moment to marvel at the wondrous colors that swirled along its
mutated skin, then bent over to release it. It slipped out of his
grasp and went deep into the water, leaving barely a surface
ripple.