Finally, he was ready. By Shaker’s fat Rolex it had been nearly thirty minutes since he left him. He shook his head; there was nothing else he could do but try. Maneuvering the body onto the sled was going to be hard. He only wished he still had his snowshoes. And who had stolen those? Talk about irony.
Shaker’s face looked waxy. Nate reached out to touch the skin; it felt as stiff as old putty. He felt again for a heartbeat. Nothing. He waited a whole minute. Was there anything at all? Was he imagining something too faint to really count and at too great an interval to do much good at all?
With a lot of effort, he piled the body onto the sled. The man was built like a middle linebacker and probably weighed as much — which made him about fifty pounds heavier than Nate. He had brought cam straps, a snake’s nest of them from the container they kept in the back of the Mule. The straps were to serve a double purpose: one, to hold the man down so he didn’t bounce out of the sled or slide out when the sled headed up the hill to the camp; and two, to hold him down in case he came back to life. As he was tying the last strap in place, Nate remembered the nasty black revolver. He checked Shaker’s pockets; it didn’t seem to be on him. He checked again for a cell phone. Nothing. He looked out at the wide expanse of snow around him, still sparkling like all get out. Made him think of a Johnny Cash song his dad liked, “Field of Diamonds.” The weapon was probably out there somewhere, buried, where it would stay until spring. And when the ice finally melted, with any luck it would sink to the bottom of the lake.
By the time he’d gotten the body back to the camp, Shaker was dead. Nate stood beside the sled pulled up close to the stoop. He checked Shaker’s pulse a couple of times and felt nothing at all. He hadn’t saved him.
He stared down at the man for a few minutes. Then he looked at the watch he’d taken from him: it was 2:23. There was no way they’d catch the Budd now. Which was when it snapped. Everything he’d been holding in, the huge adrenaline rush of the ride up to the jumping cliff and everything that had happened since. He had killed a man. He could have died himself. And the floodgates opened. At some point, he felt a hand on his shoulder, leading him inside and closing the door behind them.
Nate woke up disoriented. Not spatially; he knew this little box of a room as well as he knew his own bedroom back home. He was disoriented in time. For a moment, he didn’t know when he was.
It was the light. The light sifting in the curtained window was wrong somehow. It wasn’t summer light. It wasn’t morning light. It was coming from the wrong direction. A watch. He was wearing a watch. Then he remembered — felt — the clunky Rolex he’d taken off Shaker’s thick, limp wrist, and lifting his arm to the light, he saw that it was five o’clock. Late afternoon.
But what day?
Cal was asleep by the stove. The scotch bottle was empty. The cabin was cooling down. Nate heaped some wood on the embers in the stove. He looked at Cal’s sleeping face. Some faces in repose were neutral. Some, like his mother’s, looked peaceful. Even when no one was looking, Astrid Ekholm smiled. But there was no peace in Cal’s face. His features were strained. He looked like a man in a tug-of-war that never ended. He was sweating, too, despite the chill in the air. The wound had seeped right through the old sweats Nate had found for him. The bandage would need changing. But sleep was good, even if it took a bottle of booze to get there. And it wasn’t exactly as if he craved the man’s company.
He wandered over to the little window in the east wall that looked out onto the yard. There stood the sled with the dead body strapped to it. Crap. He’d have to do something about that. He turned away and stopped. Closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath, in and out. Night was coming. He’d have to do something about it right now.
Dressed warmly, he set off. He fired up the Doo. He cleared a place on the workshop floor, found an old paint-stained drop cloth. Then he dragged the corpse into the shed and laid him out, covered him over. He stood and stared at the bundle in the dimming light. He didn’t think the drop cloth would keep the mice from him for long.
He shuddered.
He had killed this man. He had deliberately led him up a treacherous path to a sheer and hazardous drop. He had taken his own life into his hands, true, but he had lived and Shaker had not. It was not something he could have ever imagined doing in a million years. He closed his eyes again and lowered his head in prayer. But his prayer didn’t get all the way to God. It was a prayer to his friend Dodge. “You saved my life, man,” he said. Then he opened his eyes and shook his head slowly in bewilderment. The idea of Dodge saving anybody’s life seemed so totally whacked out he almost laughed. He didn’t want to do that. Hysteria didn’t seem far off.
He was about to leave the shed when he suddenly turned, found the padlock, closed the door, and locked the dead man inside. He wasn’t taking any chances.
With renewed energy, Nate collected the plywood shutters in the sled and drove them over to the H-house. He had brought along some supplies from the work shed, so before he put the shutters back up, he screwed in several pieces of one-by-six across the back door to keep it tightly closed. By the time he’d replaced the shutters, the sun was just a yellow crayon line along the western hills and the deep cold was settling in. He was hungry, but he felt a little bit better. At least one camp was shipshape.
“A little better” didn’t last long. When he stepped into the house, Cal was groaning and thrashing his head from side to side. Nate took off his outdoor clothes and made his way over to the old man. The tug-of-war wasn’t going well. His expression was of a man in mortal pain. Sweat poured from his ragged face. Nate knelt and hesitantly leaned toward the sopping red bandage. The smell made him gag: a putrid smell, the smell of tissue breaking down, infection setting in.
Nate stood up, stepped back two, three paces. When was this going to stop? Was he going to have two dead men on his hands by the end of the day?
“Kid,” said Cal. He’d opened one eye, which was trained on Nate. He reached out for his arm, except that his hand fell short, landing with a thump on the arm of the chair. “I need help,” he said.
“I’ll change the bandage,” said Nate.
Cal’s mouth hung open. He shut it, and Nate watched the old man’s stringy throat constrict as he tried to summon up some spit. “You gotta take me somewhere.”
“There is nowhere. The Budd’s been and gone.”
Cal’s eye closed. It seemed to take him some minutes to register the news. Or to accept it. Then he opened both his eyes. “You gotta get me help.”
Nate nodded, and then he said, without a trace of irony or anger, as if he were just asking a reasonable question, “How am I going to do that?”
Cal’s eyes closed again. He became still and Nate wondered if he was finally facing his fate, the enormity of the mess he’d gotten himself into. Then he opened his eyes again.
“Likely,” he said.
“What?”
“Likely La Cloche.”
“What about him?”
“Down at Sanctuary Cove.”
“Yeah, I know, but —”
“He’s got a radiophone.”
The information caught Nate off guard. He actually knew Likely had a phone. There’d been a couple of times when his mother or father had used it. He just hadn’t thought about it.
“Nate, are you listening?”
“Yeah, yeah. But is he there?”
Cal swallowed hard and the muscles in his face strained. “It don’t matter.”
“I mean, how could he be with this snow and him being disabled and —”
“I said it don’t matter! It don’t matter whether he’s there or not. I know where he keeps his keys.”
Nate wasn’t sure why he was surprised. And here he’d thought they were somehow special up at the north end. Cal probably knew where everybody kept their keys.
“Don’t zone out on me, kid.”
“Sorry. I . . . Yeah, so . . .”
Cal reached out his hand to Nate and
managed to snag his arm, but he was too weak to hold on to it and his hand fell to his lap. His eyes appealed to Nate. “Please,” he said. Nate didn’t actually hear the word but saw the shape of it on the old man’s lips. Probably not a word he’d used all that often.
“Okay,” said Nate. “I’ll go, except I don’t know how to use a radiophone.”
Somehow, even in dire pain, Cal managed a scowl. And seeing it was almost a relief. There was life in the old bastard yet.
Nate wasn’t going anywhere without changing Cal’s dressing. An argument ensued, but Nate was holding all the cards. The sweatpants he had lent Cal were toast. He rolled them down. Cal was harder to move now than before because he seemed to have no strength at all to help out. The upside was that he had no fight left in him to struggle.
Nate breathed through his mouth, avoiding the worst of the stink as he cut away the bandages. Wearing a pair of rubber washing-up gloves he found under the sink, he balled up the soggy dressing and hurled it in the woodstove, where it sputtered and bubbled. Gross.
He was about to hurl the sweatpants in, too, but didn’t want to smother the fire. He put them in a garbage bag he’d deal with later. The wound looked every bit as bad as it had before, even more livid in color. He cleaned up the surface with wipes and then applied the ointment and new compresses and the rest of the bandage roll. Then he found another pair of old torn, paint-stained sweats, put them on Cal, and stopped to take a breather.
He looked at the eggs and bacon sitting on the table. They’d been out all day, abandoned. He was starving, but he didn’t have the time to cook. So he made himself a sandwich: peanut butter and some old blueberry jam that had crystallized. It was from a batch Fern Hoebeek had made the previous year. He’d harvested the blueberries along with Dodge and Trick down by the dam, and Dodge had pretended a bear was coming just to get Trick’s goat.
The bread was dry with blue mold spots. Too bad. There wasn’t time to toast it, so he wolfed the sandwich down anyway and ended up gagging. Lukewarm water was all he had to wash it down with. The invaders had left a couple beers in the fridge but that, he figured, was the last thing he needed. If he made it through tonight, he might just want one later. Then he went to look at a large-scale map of the lake on the wall. There was Sanctuary Cove on the eastern shore, almost at the southernmost end of the lake.
“For Christ’s sake, kid, what are you doin’?”
Cal’s sleep had obviously reawakened his foul nature.
“Coming,” said Nate, but he kept staring at the map. He wondered whether this is what a wild-goose chase looked like.
“If killin’ me is what you had in mind, you’re doin’ a good job.”
“You’re the one who got himself shot,” said Nate.
Which set Cal off, more foulmouthed than ever — a regular Vesuvius of red-hot resentment. His eyes closed and his body taut with pain, he still managed to hurl abuse at everything and everyone who’d ever crossed him or let him down. Untouched by any of it, Nate watched with rude fascination. And he thought of his father. He believed Burl Crow to be about as good a man as ever walked the earth. Listening to Burl’s father bluster and rage, Nate’s esteem for his own father only grew. How did any human manage to overcome such a start in life? Amazing.
The rant ended. The room grew quiet but for the ticking of the fire Nate had stoked up. He’d be gone a good long time.
“You still here?” said Cal.
“No,” said Nate. “I’m gone.”
Oh, the stars.
There was the Ram truck constellation and . . . what were the other heavenly patterns they’d named? Gandalf, Donkey Kong, Larry Bird —
“Who?”
“The greatest basketball player ever,” says Dodge. He points out a bunch of stars that are supposed to be Bird’s elbow and knee and fingertips. “He’s making a fadeaway jump shot — see the ball arcing toward the net?” The net was a star just off to the left, several million light-years away.
“Oh, right,” says Nate. “I see him now. But he looks more like LeBron, to me.”
“You’re crazy, Numbster. Gotta be Larry. See? He’s white.”
The moon rose over the low-slung hills to the southwest, not full but with fullness in mind, fat with light, making the snow cover glitter and lending the abandoned Polaris a sharp and reaching shadow as Nate flew past it and on down the narrows.
Then he was riding across Dead Horse Bay, and Nate steered close to the shore but not too close, fearful of what he might see, for this was where the Hoebeeks had met their fate, where Dodge might still be floating, suspended in the dark. And maybe his ghost roamed the rocky shoreline, back and forth, back and forth, a spirit packed and waiting for his ship to come in and yet never ready to go. Nate tore his eyes from the dark shore, gripped the controls tighter.
And on and on he flew under the moon and stars.
“Do it,” Dodge whispered in his ear. “What could go wrong?”
And Nate felt the excitement in the lost voice and obeyed his ghostly friend, flipping off the Ski-Doo’s headlight. It was like diving down into the lake, flippers kicking, calf muscles straining, down into the darkness of night fish. It freaked him out but Dodge held him to the darkness. “Not yet,” he said as Nate reached for the toggle. “A little longer.”
Everything was a game of chicken to Dodge.
The shadowy settlement at Sanctuary Cove came into view off to his left, hugging the shore and marching up into the trees. No lights. Nobody home. Nate turned the sled shoreward. He knew about where Likely’s place was, but he’d never come at it in the dark. He slowed as he got nearer to shore and turned southward, trying to pick out the place in a ghost town.
And then there it was, larger than the Crows’ camp, impressive in silhouette. Nate found his way up the rise from the lake toward the small porch, but there would be no entrance from there; the snow was up to the door’s window. So he made his way along the right flank of the cabin, in the lee of the storm, now passed, and around to the back, where there was a second entrance. Which wasn’t going to be much easier to access. There was a shed back there as well, its door facing south and mostly clear of snow. He hoped like crazy there was a shovel in it, or it was going to be a very long night. There was a generator in there, something he wouldn’t have known if Cal hadn’t called out to him just as he was leaving.
“You got a flashlight?” Nate had stopped in the open door, sighed, and dropped his head. Somehow Cal managed to summon up a derisive little laugh. “Mr. Outdoorsman obviously di’n’t teach you much about being prepared.”
Nate had reached up then with both hands to the lintel of the door to support himself. Not because he was going to fall over but because he needed to keep his hands engaged at something other than wringing Cal’s neck. He recalled how, back at the H-house, the man had grabbed his neck from behind in a pincer-like grip. How easy it would be to do the same thing to him. Finish the job off.
When Cal had wrung about as much out of the moment as he could, he explained about the generator, how the phone wouldn’t work without electricity and how he’d have to switch the charge over from AC to DC in the La Cloche camp and where to find the switch to do that.
Assuming he could get the generator started.
Assuming the Doo didn’t die on him on the way there.
“Is that everything?”
Cal had nodded, closed his eyes again. “Knock yourself out.”
The keys were where Cal said they’d be and he got the generator going, and there was a shovel and Nate took to digging his way to the back door like a man possessed. The idea that on the other side of it was the possibility of contact with the world beyond this nightmare put new muscle into his back. He’d pay for this tomorrow, he thought — probably be sore for a week — but that didn’t matter now. All that mattered was getting inside and finding the phone. Pray to God the phone worked. That the storm hadn’t torn down the radio tower. That would just about be Nate’s luck.
He stood inside the deeper dark of Likely’s kitchen not having any idea which way to turn. He reached out, found a counter right where he’d expect to. So far, so good. Then his hand sidled up the wall until it made contact with a plastic switch plate.
And, lo, there was light.
He entered the front room, turning on lights as he went, and off to the side, where Cal said it would be, was a nook and there was the phone. Cal had told him what to do. How to get access to the tower, what buttons to push, but he didn’t make the call right away. There was a time limit, and he needed to clear his head. Just the essentials, he told himself. Say only what you need to say.
His mother answered.
“Mom, it’s me. I’m okay. I’m calling from a radiophone at Likely La Cloche’s camp. There’s only three minutes. You have to say ‘over’ when you finish talking. Over.”
“Nate! Oh my God. What’s happened?”
She didn’t say “over,” but he figured she was too surprised. He pressed the talk button. “Everything’s okay. Did you get a text message from me? Over.”
“No. I don’t think so. When? Over.”
“It’d have been a couple days ago. Never mind. A whole lot of things have happened and there isn’t time to go into it now. Over.”
It was his father on the extension when he took his thumb off the talk button. “Good to hear your voice, son. If you’re at Likely’s, you’re in good hands. You say everything’s okay and I’m hoping that means the camp is still standing. Over.”
Nate smiled to himself. He forgot sometimes that he wasn’t really an only child. He had this older sister, the camp.
The Starlight Claim Page 17