The Northwoods Chronicles (23 page)

“I beg your pardon?” Mrs. Teacher was offended
and justifiably so.

He took a long, exaggerated sigh. “What is
it?”

“Are you going to keep coming around?” she
asked, her voice trembling.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Maybe?”

“I don’t seem to have much to say about it.” His
eyes strayed back to the television, and he reached for the
remote.

She pulled it away from him. “Who does? Who has
the say?”

He shrugged. “You, probably.”

This was not the answer she had expected, yet it
rang with truth. She handed him the remote. He blew her a kiss, and
turned up the volume.

Mrs. Teacher went to bed and left him alone. In
the morning, she cleaned up his dishes then sat in his recliner and
did some serious thinking.

Ever since Henry’s death, all she thought she
wanted was someone to watch Letterman with. That was what she said,
what she thought. That was what she thought she missed the
most—doing for someone and laughing with someone.

However, that wasn’t exactly the case.

She wanted more.

The following night, she stroked his tan,
muscular forearm while they watched TV and he stayed through Conan
O’Brien. The following night she massaged his shoulders and kissed
the top of his smooth head. He didn’t seem to mind. She moved the
TV tray from between their chairs and began holding his hand. He
allowed it.

But he didn’t respond. Didn’t react. Didn’t pick
her up and carry her to the bedroom for a wild, passionate romp. He
never returned the affection. The closest he got was to ask her to
pick up a jar of pickled herring the next time she went to the
store. And then he called her “Babycakes” as if that made up for
it.

She began to understand that her influence was
limited. He was what he was, he did what he did, and that was
that.

Well, fine. It wasn’t enough.

So one night she fixed him a pizza and followed
it up with a hot fudge sundae, and when Letterman was signing off,
she took the remote and turned off the TV. Yul looked at her in
surprise, with those soft lips and those penetrating dark eyes
under thick brows and she almost lost her resolve. But he wasn’t
what she wanted. She thought he was, but he wasn’t.

“It’s over,” she said.

He frowned. “You sure?”

She nodded.

He reached over with one finger and touched her
face. “Bye, cutie pie,” he said, and was gone.

Typical, she thought. Not even a thank-you.

~~~

In the morning, she donated the TV and recliner
to the Goodwill. Then she started making a list of what she really
wanted.

When it was all down in black and white, and all
the details were firmly cemented in her mind, she bought champagne,
caviar, a cabinet full of expensive imported cheeses, a wide array
of expensive wines, a special edition Scrabble game and fresh
sheets for the bed. Then she sat down to wait for Alex Trebek.

Fred Kramer tied his
brother’s boat up to the little dock and pulled in his basket of
panfish. He was sorry the long days of summer were almost over,
especially since his brother’s kids loved to come up to their
summer home as much as Fred did. When the kids were there, Fred
wasn’t. Fred, single, overworked, underpaid, lonesome and prone to
sit in his chair with his beer and his sports on a weekend, was all
too happy to run up north to take a look at the place and make sure
it was secure.

He liked his brother all right, and the wife and
all those kids, but they had seven of those kids, and each one had
to bring up a friend, and it was just too much activity for Fred,
who preferred his own company, for the most part.

He didn’t recognize the boat he tied up next to,
but he recognized the man in the fish-cleaning shack. Mooseface
Tyler. Fred didn’t have much use for Mooseface.

The shack had two cutting boards and two basins,
and Fred hoisted his basket to the countertop and began to sharpen
his knife on the honing stone that was tethered to the cabinet.
“Hey, Moose,” he said.

“Hey.” Mooseface stopped cutting fish long
enough to wipe a bloody, scaly, slimy hand across his forehead,
then lift his beer to his fleshy lips. Fred noticed the stringer of
fish he was working from, and he noticed the number of fish heads
in the basin, and, by quick reckoning, he realized that Moose was
about double his limit.

“Nice catch,” Fred said. “Aren’t you about
double your limit?”

Mooseface fixed him with an ugly stare, took
another swig from his beer without taking his eyes off Fred, and
then scowled and went back to work.

Fred hated guys like Mooseface Tyler. They broke
the rules, broke the laws, and because they were so mean and ugly,
people just let them get away with it. Nobody ever confronted
them.

“Illegal catch,” Fred said. “Guys like you make
it rough on those of us who play by the rules.”

Moose picked up his empty stringer and his
bucket of cleaned fish, left all the fish guts in the sink, and
walked away.

“That man don’t deserve a place up here,” Fred
said to the next crappie he filleted. “He don’t deserve a nice boat
like that, he don’t deserve to have fishing luck like that, not
when I obey the laws and try to do right and live from paycheck to
paycheck. Shit,” he said. “Life ain’t fair.” He turned the fish
over and expertly separated the meat from the bone.

Filled with disgust and resentment, Fred
finished his work, threw a few fish scraps to the cats that circled
the shack like sharks, wrapped all his mess along with Moose’s mess
in newspapers and threw it into the garbage can. He threw buckets
of lake water onto the counters, cleaned up the shack, took his
fillets and headed back to the house. He wasn’t going to let
Mooseface Tyler ruin his weekend. He carefully bagged the filets
and tucked them into the freezer.

Man, he’d like to have a little piece of the
northwoods. He’d like to have a little cabin, not nearly as
expansive or as much to maintain as this place of his brother’s.
He’d just like a little cabin, well-insulated with a wood burning
stove and a decent kitchen. He’d like to have a place that was his
own, where he didn’t have to worry about messing up cupboards by
putting things in the wrong places, or folding the linens the wrong
way. Even though he was family, he always felt like a guest at his
brother’s place. It was the wife made him feel that way. The wife
and all seven of them kids.

But even that was okay. He’d take what he could
get. And right now—he checked his watch—he needed to pack up and
get back to the city. And he needed to do it before the sun went
down.

~~~

It was a month before he again got back up to
the lake; it was a month before his brother and family had other
obligations and Fred could go up and stay in the peace and quiet.
He stopped at Doc’s to hear the latest gossip and found out three
important things. First, that the crappies were biting on those
stinky orange cheese balls that Fred hated to use; second, that
Babs Van Rank had died; and third, that Mooseface Tyler had turned
over a new leaf, come to Jesus, perhaps, and had taken it upon
himself to start picking up litter around town. Which, of course,
included the fish shack. Doc about split a gut telling Fred about
Moosie buying the local Superette out of Arm and Hammer. Fred got a
chuckle, but not nearly the belly laughs that it brought Doc and
apparently the rest of town. Fred thought Moose had it coming, and
that it was about time he paid a little back.

Turned out that Mooseface hadn’t had that change
of heart all by himself. The local magistrate had a little
something to do with it when Moosie was caught helping himself to a
whole box of Twinkies while he waited for Slim Nottingham to fill
up his car and his boat with gas. Slim saw the box of Twinkies,
fresh delivered that morning, sticking out of Moosie’s jacket when
he reached in his wallet for his credit card. That was enough for
Slim. He called Sheriff Withens while pretending to process the
card, and the sheriff pulled up just in time. Slim pressed charges,
because it wasn’t the first time Moosie had done a little
light-fingering in his mini mart, and that made Slim a popular guy
with the owners of most of the retail establishments in Vargas
County.

Fred didn’t like to feel smug, but he enjoyed
the smugness he felt when Moosie pulled fish shack cleaning duty as
his community service. It was only fair.

The idea of Babs Van Rank being dead was a
different matter. There wasn’t any fairness in that. Fred sat for
the rest of the day with Babs’s death stewing in his innards. He
took his stinking cheeseballs and got into his boat and spent the
day contemplating the death of a spouse, and waited in vain for a
crappie to find his bait attractive.

Gordie, Babs’s husband, was a good guy; he’d
done nothing that Fred knew about to bring this upon himself. Life
was a mystery as to why something like this happened to mild Gordie
and not nasty old Mooseface. Fred didn’t know if Mooseface was
married, but he assumed that he was, and that his wife was either
wrong in the head or as ugly a woman as ever lived. But Babs was
very pretty, and she and Gordie had a nice life. What would it be
like, Fred wondered, to have a spouse just up and die?

Or maybe Gordie was a bad guy, or Babs was
cheating on him. Chances are, things weren’t as nice and as pretty
as they seemed on the surface. Chances are, the two of them had dry
rot in their marriage, and Gordie was probably relieved to be rid
of her. She probably nagged him day and night.

Fred had never married, and it was probably a
good thing. He liked his freedom. A wife would resent his fishing.
And sports. His whole lifestyle.

When he came off the lake, after not catching a
single fish with those stinking cheeseballs, he went to Margie’s to
have himself a meal and see if he could overhear some fishing news
from a source a little more reliable than Doc.

The news was hot. Mooseface Tyler had caught the
famed albino pike, killed it, and taken it to Gordie to be mounted.
That news made Fred seethe. Mooseface, that disgusting waste of
human skin. Fred should have been the one to catch the pike. Now
that was a trophy.

Fred ate some of Margie’s chicken fried steak,
then went on home to his brother’s place. Tomorrow he’d try worms.
They were almost a sure thing. He didn’t know why he’d wasted his
whole day on those stupid cheese balls. When he got back to the
cabin, he threw the jar into the trash and mildly resented Doc for
recommending them.

Fred sat on his brother’s couch and watched the
blazing color of the sunset out the picture window. He knew what he
was going to do that evening, and he relished the anticipation, in
spite of the creeping feeling inside him that one of these days he
was going to get caught.

One half hour after dark, he put on a black knit
watch cap, grabbed his brother’s dark windbreaker, and went out the
door.

He parked two blocks from the Svensen house,
then turned the lights off and waited.

The light went on in Katarina’s bedroom. He
opened the car door and got out, eyes riveted on his
destination.

He walked around the side of the neighbor’s
house and quietly through their backyard. Their house had the look
of emptiness, and, for a moment, the thought crossed Fred’s mind
that he should stay there while they were gone. Live right next
door to Katarina. But he wasn’t stupid. He walked slowly and
quietly around the house, watching his step, and took up his place
next to the pine tree.

There she was. Beautiful Katarina, dancing to
some music only she could hear, wearing a T-shirt and panties. Her
blond hair swung back and forth as she moved, her budding breasts
making small braless mounds under the tight shirt with thin straps
and a little pink satin rose right in the middle of the neck. Her
lips moved, and Fred could see, or imagined that he saw, lip
gloss.

It was all he could do to keep his distance. He
loved Katarina, had loved her since she was about eight. He wanted
to take her in his arms and smother her with kisses. He wanted to
take her home, marry her, and just sit and watch her all day, every
day, walk around in that sweet little girl underwear. He wanted
right now, to run up to the window, press all ten fingertips
against it and watch her up close. He wanted her to see him. He
wanted her to invite him into the warm yellow light of her bedroom,
into the warmth of that down comforter, those pure white sheets,
that tight, flawless skin. Fred’s erection grew hard and
uncomfortable in his trousers, but that just made him angry with
himself. He just wanted to admire her, he told himself. Some of his
thoughts were sick, he knew, but he thought pretty much everybody
had some kind of sick thoughts.

“Whatcha doin? Looking at the gurl?”

Fred whirled around at the voice that came from
right behind him. Chainlink Charlie. A big, meaty, mentally
deficient bum who lived off the good graces of the townspeople,
Chainlink Charlie carried all his possessions in an old Army duffel
bag. He was snaggletoothed and scraggly bearded and smelled
god-awful.

“No,” Fred said.

“Yes, you were,” Charlie said, and his lips
curled up into a grin. “Yes you were, yes you were.”

“No,” Fred said, his face growing hot. “I’m
looking after this house while the owners are gone. Just doing a
walk around the property is all.”

“You were lookin’ at the gurl,” Charlie said.
“She’s pretty. I like lookin’ at her, too.”

Just then Katarina’s light snapped off. Charlie
made a sound of disappointment, and Fred made fast tracks toward
his car, hoping to escape without further incident. He hoped
Charlie didn’t talk and that people wouldn’t believe him if he
did.

No such luck.