Trickster's Point

by William Kent Krueger

  “I just stopped by Winona’s house,” Cork said. “She’s not there. I need to talk to her.”

  “Why?”

  “You know that list I mentioned, the one with names of Shinnobs who Sam Winter Moon had taught how to bow-hunt? Winona’s name was on it.”

  “She didn’t kill Jubal,” Willie said with great care. “God knows she had reason to, but she didn’t do it.”

  “Where is she?”

  “When she’s ready, she’ll let you know.”

  “Is she hiding, Willie?”

  “She’s grieving. Just let her be.”

  “Will you tell her something for me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Tell her that Jubal gave me a message for her.”

  “What message?”

  “It’s for Winona.”

  In the drizzle of light on the empty sidewalk, Willie Crane’s face became unreadable, stolid in the practiced way of the Anishinaabeg. At the Food ’N Fuel down the street, an old pickup pulled away, its bad muffler roaring like a wild beast. When the sound had faded into the night, Willie said, “Dead, and he still can’t leave her alone.” Then he said, in a voice vacant of all emotion, “I’ll tell her.”

  CHAPTER 17

  When Cork arrived home, Waaboo was already asleep in his crib. Cork wasn’t surprised—it was well past the little guy’s bedtime—but he was disappointed. He enjoyed those evenings when Jenny let him put Waaboo down. There was an old rocker in the bedroom that had become the nursery where Cork loved to sit with his grandson on his lap, and he would read to Waaboo from one of the many picture books—Goodnight Moon or The Very Hungry Caterpillar or Chicka Chicka Boom Boom—until those little eyelids drifted closed, and then he would sit for a while longer with that small, warm body nestled against him, and there was nothing he could think of that made him feel more content.

  That night he would have appreciated a moment of contentedness.

  Cork had come through the backyard, as he had earlier that day, to avoid any media who might still be lying in wait. Stephen and Jenny were at the kitchen table, and when he walked in, it was clear they’d been talking. Stephen was drinking from a glass of chocolate milk he’d made with Hershey’s syrup. Jenny had a mug in front of her. They were both eating chocolate chip cookies that Cork knew had come from the cookie jar shaped like Sesame Street’s Ernie, which sat on the kitchen counter. The jar had been a baby shower gift when Jo O’Connor was pregnant with Jenny, and the cookies that had filled it had sustained the O’Connors through more crises than Cork could remember.

  “There’s coffee,” Jenny said.

  “No thanks.” Cork went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of Leinenkugel’s beer. He lifted Ernie’s head, pulled a cookie from the jar, and sat at the table with his children. “How’re you doing, buddy?” he asked his son.

  Stephen thought it over. “Okay, I guess. I just . . .”

  “What?” Cork asked.

  Stephen’s face tightened. “I just don’t understand why death seems to circle this family like some kind of, I don’t know, vulture.”

  Cork said, “I don’t either. When I quit law enforcement, you guys were part of the reason. I saw the toll it was taking, and I wasn’t happy about it. I thought I could just step away, and that was that. I was wrong, I guess.”

  Jenny lifted her coffee but didn’t drink. She said, “You’re a windbreak.”

  “A what?”

  “That’s what Mom told me once. She said trouble’s like this wind that blows and blows and there have to be windbreaks to keep it from sweeping everything away. She told me you’re one of the windbreaks. It didn’t make her happy, but it’s who you are.”

  Cork said, “I don’t look for trouble.”

  “Ogichidaa,” Stephen said.

  “Ogichidaa?” Cork repeated the Ojibwe word, whose meaning he knew well. It was often misused, or misinterpreted, to mean “warrior.” Its true meaning, however, was “someone who stood between his people and bad things.”

  “That’s what Henry told me once when we were talking about you,” Stephen explained. “He said you didn’t have a choice, that you were chosen. He said that when we come into the world we’re given responsibilities by Kitchimanidoo. Yours was to be ogichidaa.”

  “I’d give it back if I could.” Cork took a bite of his cookie. “These are good.”

  “Stephen made them,” Jenny said.

  “Did Meloux say your responsibility is baking?” Cork smiled.

  “Nanaandawi,” Stephen said seriously. “Healing.”

  “What about me?” Jenny asked.

  “Nakomis,” Stephen said.

  “A grandmother?” Jenny didn’t look pleased. “Like my skin’s wrinkled and my boobs are saggy? I need to have a talk with Henry.”

  “He meant that your spirit is old and wise and nurturing, like Grandmother Earth.”

  “I still think I’d better have a talk with him,” she said with a wry smile. She sipped her coffee and asked, “How’s Mrs. Little?”

  “Distraught. But all things considered, she’s doing all right. She has her family around her for support.”

  “Dad, how come she never came up here with Mr. Little?” Stephen asked.

  “She did sometimes.”

  “Not much. Whenever you got together with him, he was alone.”

  “I think Camilla isn’t fond of the North Country, not like Jubal was. This was his home.” Then, to cut off this particular line of conversation, Cork said, “School tomorrow. You have homework?”

  “A little math,” Stephen replied. “And an essay on Manifest Destiny. But I can do that in one word: Bullshit.”

  A gentle knocking came from the dining room, from the door that opened onto the backyard patio. They all looked at one another with surprise and then irritation. Cork set his beer down and scooted his chair away from the table.

  “No, Dad, let me,” Jenny said. “If it’s a reporter, I’ll say you’re not here.”

  “And then tell him if he trespasses again, we’ll have him arrested,” Cork growled.

  Jenny left and came back a few moments later. “It’s Mr. Crane.”

  “At the patio door?” Then Cork understood. Willie had probably parked on Willow Street, just as Cork had, and come through the backyard to avoid any reporters who might still be lurking out front. He left the kitchen table and met his visitor on the patio.

  Without preamble, Willie said, “She wants to see you.” Shewanseeyou.

  “Where is she?”

  “I’ll take you.”

  * * *

  Because he couldn’t trust his left leg to do what most people’s legs did naturally, Willie drove a Jeep Wrangler modified with hand controls for braking. Because he used it often to get himself into remote areas of the backcountry where he shot the photographs that had built his reputation, the outside of the Wrangler was layered with caked mud. Willie Crane was one of the most admirable men Cork knew. Despite his cerebral palsy—or maybe because of it, Cork sometimes thought—Willie had a long list of remarkable accomplishments to his credit. He’d written articles and provided photographs for National Geographic, Audubon, National Wildlife, Outside, and dozens of other periodicals. He’d produced several collections of his own essays with accompanying photographs. He had a small gallery in downtown Saint Paul, which, like the Iron Lake Center for Native Art, featured not only his own work but the work of many Indian artists. He was painfully aware of his speech difficulty and never spoke in public, but through his writings, he’d become a strong and respected voice for habitat preservation and wildlife conservation.

  They headed toward Allouette, but half a mile outside town, Willie turned onto a narrow gravel road, and Cork knew they were going to his cabin. Years before, Willie had built a little place on the far eastern edge of the reservation, nestled against a small lake. The cabin was simple, built of logs and surrounded on three sides by aspens. When they pulled up, Winona’s Ford Ranger was parked in front,
and light poured from the interior of the cabin. They got out, and Cork followed Willie inside. It was a cozy place, an open area that doubled as living room and kitchen, with a closed door off either end of the room. The place smelled of spiced tea and, more faintly, of photographic chemicals. When the photography world turned digital, Willie had stayed with film. He did his own processing in a darkroom behind one of the closed doors. Because Cork had been here before, he knew that the other closed door led to Willie’s bedroom.

  “Nona?” Willie called. He received no answer and started toward the bedroom door. He said to Cork, “Wait here.” Waiere.

  Willie kept the cabin neat, and he’d decorated the walls with framed prints of some of his award-winning photographs. Many were landscape shots that captured beautifully the dramatic interplay of light and wilderness. Others were of wildlife—moose and deer and bears and eagles and osprey and lynx and foxes—all caught unawares and in such a natural state and so clearly that Cork had the sense he was looking at them through a window and they were just on the other side of the glass, breathing.

  Willie returned. “She’s not here.”

  “Her truck’s here,” Cork pointed out.

  “The fire ring, maybe,” Willie said.

  They went out the way they’d come in and around to the back of the cabin. Because of the overcast, there were no stars, no moon, and the night was pitch black. But in the faint light that fell through the cabin windows, Cork saw a narrow path. He followed Willie’s clumsy feet along the path to the lakeshore. From there, he could see the fire, a small dance of light in the lee of a rock that stood a dozen feet back from the water and was as big as a buffalo.

  When they reached the fire ring, only a few flames were still licking at the night air. A blanket that looked of Navajo design lay rumpled on the ground next to the ring, as if thrown there in haste. Winona was nowhere to be seen.

  “Nona!” Willie called toward the woods. Then he turned and cried toward the lake, “Nona! It’s Willie.” He waited and finally turned to Cork. “She’s afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of whoever it was that killed Jubal Little.”

  “Why?”

  “She knows things, things about a lot of powerful people.”

  Of course she did. No one was closer to Jubal Little than Winona Crane. They’d been lovers forever. He told her everything.

  “She’s not afraid of me, is she?” Cork asked.

  “When she gets like this, she’s afraid of everyone. Nona!” Willie shook his head. “I’m sorry, Cork. I don’t know where she’s gone.”

  “That’s okay. Mind if I stay a little while, just in case she comes back?”

  “Okay, I guess. But when she gets like this . . .” Willie gave a shrug. “I’ll wait at my cabin.”

  As the sound of Willie’s awkward feet retreated, Cork turned and scanned the lake that, in the inky dark of the starless night, appeared to be nothing but a black hole. Although he couldn’t see it, he knew the far shoreline was unbroken forest, and not far beyond that began the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. For a hundred miles north, there was nothing but thick woods and clear water.

  He didn’t believe Willie Crane, didn’t believe that Willie had no idea where Winona might be hiding. The real question was, Why had Winona fled? What was she really afraid of? It might well have been, as Willie said, that she knew things that made her dangerous to powerful people. But it also might have been because she’d finally grown tired of the way Jubal treated her, and she’d used an arrow to free herself from the prison of that relationship forever.

  Cork circled to the far side of the fire, sat, fed a few sticks of wood to the dying flames, and thought about Winona. She was fifty, old by some standards, but a more handsome woman he’d never seen. Her hair was long and black and, in sunlight, shone like obsidian. Her face was finely boned and ageless. Her skin was a soft caramel color. Her eyes were light almond, and whenever she’d looked at him, there was a gentle intensity so compelling that, even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t look away. She gazed at people as if she saw their souls and understood everything, good and bad, about them.

  The truth was that he’d known Winona Crane all his life, and he had never not been in love with her, just a little.

  CHAPTER 18

  What happened the night of the homecoming dance changed Winona Crane.

  She’d always been outgoing and clearly not afraid to take a walk on the wild side. After the attack, however, she withdrew from the world. For a while, she simply disappeared. She didn’t come to school or to Sam’s Place or into Aurora at all. Cork knew she was still on the rez; Willie Crane told him that, but it was all Willie would say. Cork’s mother, who had relatives in Allouette, told him a bit more. Winona had become deathly afraid. She didn’t want to see anyone, yet the idea of being left alone terrorized her.

  “Is she getting help?” Cork asked, trying desperately to think of something, anything, he might be able to do for her.

  “Henry Meloux,” his mother replied.

  Two days later, Cork borrowed his mother’s car, picked up Jubal Little, and they drove north out of Aurora until they came to the double-trunk birch that marked the beginning of the path to Crow Point.

  Jubal had changed, too. The death of Donner Bigby had done that. He was still remarkable in all the ways people in Tamarack County had come to expect, yet Cork, who was his closest friend, recognized a difference. It was as if, when he climbed down from the top of Trickster’s Point, Jubal had simply kept going and climbed right into himself. When he and Cork were together, Jubal was often silent. Cork had no trouble with silence—it was an Ojibwe virtue he admired—and he didn’t push his friend.

  The day was sunny but cool. The forest floor was covered with fallen aspen leaves, and it seemed to Cork as if they were walking on a carpet of gold. It was Saturday, and the night before they’d won another football game and he should have felt like a million dollars, but all he could think about was how, yet again, death had changed his world. Jubal walked with his shoulders hunched and his eyes on the aspen leaves underfoot and said not a word the whole way.

  They broke from the trees and crossed the meadow where the wildflowers were gone and the tall grass had turned yellow, dead from the frost that came now in the nights. Smoke rose up from behind the rocks west of the cabin, where Meloux had the fire ring he often used in his healing ceremonies. Cork headed toward the rocks, but as they passed Meloux’s cabin, the door opened, and Willie Crane stepped outside.

  “Don’t go there,” he said. Dongoere.

  “He’s with Winona?” Cork asked.

  Willie nodded.

  In the cool, still morning air, Cork could hear the faint chant of the Mide.

  “Is it okay if we wait?” Jubal asked. “Please.”

  Willie thought about it and nodded once again.

  Cork sat on the ground, and Jubal did the same, then Willie. The day warmed, and the sun reached its zenith, and still the Mide chanted beyond the rocks, and the air was redolent with the cleansing scent of burning sage and cedar.

  An hour past noon, Cork saw Henry coming from the rocks with Winona at his side. Henry Meloux was nearly sixty then, tall and strong, and he walked regally and erect, with his long hair like a flow of white water over his shoulders. Winona was tall, too, but the way she carried herself made Cork think of her as a creature small and afraid. Henry didn’t seem surprised in the least to see his two new visitors.

  “Come inside,” he said to them. “We will eat.”

  Winona looked at them as if they were not old friends but strangers who deserved her suspicion.

  They ate stew that Meloux heated on his old cast-iron stove. And then they sat in the sun outside and smoked tobacco, and in all this time not more than a dozen words passed between them.

  Finally Meloux said, “Come with me, Corcoran O’Connor.”

  The Mide led him away on the path through the meadow. At the edge of the forest he sa
id, “It is time for you to go.”

  Cork looked back at the cabin, where Jubal still sat with Winona and Willie. “But I want to stay.”

  The Mide shook his head.

  “What about Jubal?”

  “Sometimes, Corcoran O’Connor, you can see the ropes that tie people together. When I look at Winona Crane and Jubal Little, I see ropes. Go home now. There’s nothing more for you here today, and I have work to do.”

  Cork was crestfallen, but he knew it was useless to argue. He turned and headed alone back along the path toward the double-trunk birch.

  * * *

  Although it didn’t please him, it also didn’t surprise Cork that, when Winona Crane returned to the world, Jubal Little was almost always at her side. It wasn’t like dating or going steady or anything Cork had a name for. They were together because of something powerful between them that seemed to have no name. It was like love but not love. It was necessity but not needing. It was the right hand to the left. It was nothing Jubal or Winona cared to explain to Cork, and it was something Willie claimed he couldn’t. Whatever it was, it excluded Cork in a way that pained him deeply. He’d always been in love with Winona Crane, at least a bit. And he’d never had a better friend than Jubal Little. Now he was on the outside of some inexplicable intimacy between them, and he felt abandoned and a little betrayed.

  In the spring, Jubal was accepted to the University of Northern Iowa, in Cedar Falls, and offered a full athletic scholarship. All that summer when they worked together at Sam’s Place, Jubal confided in Cork that he was seriously thinking of not going. He didn’t want to leave Aurora, which Cork understood really meant that he didn’t want to leave Winona. Cork argued with him, pointed out that it was the kind of opportunity most guys would give their left nut for, and if he passed it up, God alone knew whether something like it might come again. But as the end of August drew nearer, Jubal only became more fixed in his determination. Cork figured there was nothing more he could do.