Death Stalks Door County

by Patricia Skalka

  “I can get myself into town.”

  “Not in this thing you can’t.” Beck kicked the right rear tire of the jeep as they walked past. “Flat as a smashed nickel. You must have picked up a nail on your way back.”

  Cubiak cursed under his breath. There was only one working jack between the two park vehicles and the last place he’d seen it was in the rear of Otto’s truck. “Give me a minute to change, anyway.”

  “Don’t bother. The uniform makes you look official.”

  “Yeah? And what’s a park ranger doing in town looking for one of the local lowlifes?”

  “You’ll think of something. Now, you coming or not?”

  “What about the park? I’ve got work I’m supposed to do today.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I’ll take care of it. Otto can find someone else to babysit the campers.”

  Fine and fuck you, Cubiak thought, as he got in the Mercedes and slammed the door.

  SUNDAY AFTERNOON

  Under a cloudless sky, the bay at Ephraim assumed a blue tint of breath-taking intensity. In the calm and near perfect conditions, a flotilla of sailboats, kayaks, and one lone canoe was on the water. When the canoe disappeared around an outcropping of rocks, Cubiak stepped off the dock. He didn’t like the way Beck had manipulated the meeting the previous afternoon and had no intention of helping him find Entwhistle. He’d hang around town for a couple hours and then say he hadn’t had any luck.

  Up and down the narrow waterfront, artists and vendors were setting up their stands, hoping to get a jump on business. Outside the Village Hall, volunteers hammered together craft booths where pioneer skills would be demonstrated throughout the five-day fest. Tourists wandered the narrow streets, inhaling the aroma of brats, grilled onions, and popcorn.

  At the entertainment stage, Cubiak watched the Bay City Cloggers’ rehearsal. The men wore white shirts and sky blue pants; their partners were dressed in white blouses and skirts that did little to flatter their soft, middle-aged frames. Faces furrowed in serious concentration, the cloggers focused on their leader, a plump, gleeful woman with red starched hair and fleshy arms. When she let loose with a shrill hoot, the dancers slammed their steel-cleated shoes into the wooden platform in an ear-splitting crash. A group of onlookers roared its approval and hand-clapped in time.

  As the cacophonous din drew more people, the ranger walked away.

  The laughter and happy chatter that suffused the village were an affront to Cubiak. Every family reminded him of what he had lost. Every couple reinforced the gnawing emptiness inside. He wandered aimlessly, occasionally nipping at the bottle tucked in his pants pocket. In a sea of determined revelers, he was a piece of floating debris, a solitary lost and despondent soul. He had felt that way before. When Lauren and Alexis died, his friends, the other cops and their wives, tried to console him. But they, too, felt defeated and helpless. Nothing they said comforted him. Nothing they did lightened the burden or eased the pain. Nothing assuaged the guilt.

  Counseling hadn’t helped either.

  Session one.

  Therapist: “How are you holding up?”

  Patient: “Fine.”

  “Problems at work?”

  “No.”

  “Tell me about your dreams.”

  “I don’t dream.” He had nightmares. Cubiak knew he was playing word games and didn’t care. The therapist trained his sad brown eyes on Cubiak, who in turn studied the psychologist’s soft Italian loafers and muted argyle socks.

  Session two.

  Therapist: “What would you like to talk about?”

  Patient: [Shrug.]

  The therapist didn’t work hard to disguise his impatience. Halfway through the second appointment, Cubiak stood up, thanked him, and walked out. Stone faced. Emotions pummeled into a thimble, ingested whole. Alone. Alone with his guilt. He sped recklessly down dimly lit side streets until he reached the shabby neighborhood tavern where his father’s ghost waited. “Ah, now you know,” Papa uttered in grim satisfaction as his son inhaled a triple shot of vodka and ordered another.

  He had to accept and move on. Intellectually, Cubiak knew this was true. But emotionally, he couldn’t. He tried, but every attempt failed. Eventually he tired of the angry inner voice and turned a deaf ear to the ranting. In denial he found some relief, and for a long time he convinced himself he had dealt with the loss. But he hadn’t bargained for the enduring pain and the relentless ache that became his constant companions.

  His work suffered. He skipped shifts or showed up intoxicated. Pressured by his superiors, he eventually agreed to resign. Though he was several months short of being fully vested, police officials made helpful accommodations that resolved the issue in his favor and allowed him to leave the force with a substantial lump sum. The money could have paid off the house. Instead, it bought boatloads of vodka. He clambered on board, capsized, and lost everything, except the pain and guilt that were seared into his heart.

  In the bright sunlight of a Door County afternoon, Cubiak blinked and remembered the day his world disintegrated, the day his blind stupidity prevented him from keeping his word and sent his wife and daughter off by themselves to endure death by battering.

  Hey, Sarge, what is that smell. Man, that’s terrible.”

  Cubiak chuckled.

  “What you laughing at? ”

  “Nothing.”

  “Man sitting in a frying pan getting poached and laughing while it’s happening is either going crazy or he’s laughing at something.”

  Cubiak appraised his reflection in his partner’s mirrored sunglasses. “I’m laughing at you. Not at you. With you,” he said. “It’s the way you talk.”

  A Bible-thumping, hand-clapping Pentecostal who took not the Lord’s name in vain, who persisted, even in hell’s most abominable holes on earth, to keep his language, his mind, and his soul pure, Malcolm spoke only in italics.

  “Oh, that.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well all right. Least you’s laughing at something.” The temperature in the stakeout car jumped up a notch as a rough-edged, desertlike breeze swirled the stink past Malcolm again. “So?”

  “It’s a dead skunk. Probably killed by a stray dog. Or a stray bullet.”

  “Here? We are sitting in the middle of Chicago and you’re telling me there’s skunks around here?”

  “There’s all kinds of animals in the city.” Cubiak glanced back to the smeared windshield and the local drug house under their surveillance. “You’re just too used to dealing with the two-legged variety.”

  Malcolm started to close the car window and then reconsidered. With the sun frying the blotched roof of the rusty black Mustang, the heat inside the car might be more oppressive than any odor. He slumped farther into the driver’s seat. They were one of several dozen undercover police teams that, operating under the extra precaution of radio silence, were scattered across the tattered Lawndale neighborhood in the mayor’s latest assault on narcotics. These much ballyhooed crackdowns came as regularly as local elections. The downtown spin doctors had dubbed this one “Operation Clean Sweep.” So far, lots of brooms, very little sweep.

  Cubiak worked his shoulders. Sweat spread a delicate, liquid spider-web down his back. He momentarily projected himself into a cool shower and fancied a cold beer in hand. Or ice cream. He squinted down the street. It wasn’t a pleasant vista. They were in deep on the West Side, an area torched during the King riots and then left to wither in slow decay. There were four buildings on the entire block. Three were vacant and in danger of imploding where entire sections of masonry had been worked loose and removed. One was a rundown tenement, a lifeless facade save for a torn, yellowed sheet in an open second-floor window. From inside, a high-pitched, grating Motown refrain boomed into the street.

  The Loop was four and a half miles directly east, the city skyline a shining symbol of power and wealth stark against the blue sky. On the corner, a pack of boys, probably five or six years old, swung metal pipes t
hrough the heavy heat haze. They alternately jeered and taunted each other with cries of motherfucker, shithead, and other attributes Cubiak couldn’t decipher but could imagine. He looked from the ragtag group to the cityscape and felt an immeasurable sadness. How the hell do you get from here to there? he wondered.

  To the vice and narcotics cops who regularly worked the area, Lawndale was just another segment of blighted city landscape. Cubiak hated it, viewed it as an aberration of the American ideal, a sore that festered up and down the urban backbone.

  “Sweet Jesus, help us.”

  Startled, Cubiak looked up where Malcolm was pointing.

  Less than ten feet away, a scrawny teenage girl in a dirty cotton dress lurched toward them. Somnambulant and balanced on thin birdlike legs, she cautiously negotiated the cracked, uneven sidewalk, unremarkable in the setting, save for the naked baby haphazardly cradled in her frail arms. The infant was grotesquely malnourished, with a swollen belly and an incongruous black smudge across its forehead. The jagged smear reminded Cubiak of Ash Wednesday, how he’d always tried to duck the priest’s thumb.

  Was the child hers?

  The baby slipped. The girl snapped to and struggled to secure her human cargo against her bony chest. In her momentary alarm, she looked up, and Cubiak caught her frightened gaze. Help me she seemed to be pleading. He felt suddenly overwhelmed by the impulse to leap from the car, grab the child from her arms, and snatch them both into the safety of another world. He blinked and the moment passed. The infant settled into place, and the girl’s hooded eyes swung down again to the broken pavement. She drifted forward, as he watched, empty with relief.

  The scream of police sirens shattered the air. One blue-and-white came in from the alley. Another wailed directly down Madison and jumped the curb. Flying past the girl with the baby, the vehicle screeched to a sliding stop in front of the Mustang. Three uniforms jumped out and ran to the stakeout car.

  Malcolm jolted upright. “What the heck!” he sputtered.

  A beefy, red-faced cop shoved his face through Malcolm’s window and whispered in his ear. Malcolm blanched. “Sweet Jesus.”

  The other two opened Cubiak’s door. The lieutenant grabbed his arm and pulled him from the seat. Cubiak did not share Malcolm’s predilection for sanitized speech. “Hey. What the fuck, man! You’re blowing our stakeout. What about the mayor, for chrissake. Clean Sweep?”

  The lieutenant responded in well-practiced cop cadence—“Fuck them/Fuck him/Fuck it”—and kicked the door shut. “You got trouble at home, buddy. Let’s go.”

  Months later, in a freezing spring rain, Malcolm found Cubiak near a strip of abandoned factories on the far South Side near Indiana and 119th, just off the Ryan. He was huddled under a viaduct like discarded trash, his hands trembling from either too much or too little to drink.

  “Jesus Christ.” The interjection became a prayer as, with tears brimming and his face hard-set, Malcolm half-carried, half-dragged his former partner through a slimy, sucking mixture of mud and animal excrement to his car and brought him back to his home on a quiet street of black, middle-class respectability in Chatham.

  Malcolm kept him there, sat stoic and unmoved while Cubiak ranted and beat holes in the pink rose patterns of the neatly papered walls, waited patiently until the demons gave up. Then he hauled the broken shell of Dave Cubiak into a straight-back chair, pushed his chin up off his chest, and said, “They see you from up there. You ain’t got no right to break their hearts, too.”

  When he finished lecturing, Malcolm offered himself up as the crutch that Cubiak would finally use to begin his long, painful climb back up. Encouraged—badgered—by his friend, Cubiak rented a room at the Lawson YMCA, parked cars for a few dollars a day, and wrenched his gut to stay reasonably sober. One day Malcolm arrived with a newspaper opened to an inside page and handed it over.

  “You need something like this. It’ll give you a new direction.” Malcolm was insistent.

  Cubiak shoved away the paper with its ad for continuing education, but his friend wouldn’t relent. Malcolm kept on cajoling until he elicited a promise. Then he showed up the next morning to help Cubiak fill out the application.

  Two weeks later, apprehensive and shy, his face raw from a clumsy shave, Cubiak folded his too-tall frame into a lecture hall seat at Truman College. On a whim, he’d signed on for forestry, a vocation as far removed from his former life as he could imagine. Several weeks into the class, Cubiak grudgingly admitted that Malcolm had been right, and though he feared failing and disappointing his former partner, he did well—not at first but slowly and steadily. When Cubiak graduated, Malcolm brought his entire family to the ceremony. Dressed for church, they stood and applauded their friend. His smile for them was the first in a long time.

  Cubiak was working for the Cook County Forest Preserve when Malcolm came across a notice about a job in Door County. “It’s there,” Malcolm said, laying a map of Wisconsin on the table and pointing to the peninsula. “A new world.”

  All Cubiak saw was the great expanse of blue Lake Michigan water. In high school, he’d sat by the inland sea and read Moby-Dick, convinced he understood Ishmael’s pain.

  “Didn’t you tell me you went up there when you were a kid ? Boy Scouts or something?” Malcolm said.

  Yes, Cubiak said, he had.

  “Well, then, what are you waiting for?”

  Fuck Beck, fuck everything, Cubiak thought, reaching for the bottle. He felt a tug at his sleeve and looked down into the tear-stained face of a little girl with long brown bangs and a crescent of freckles across her nose. The child sniffled and said something in a panicky voice. Unable to hear her above the crowd, Cubiak bent down.

  “I lost my mommy,” the little girl whimpered into the side of his chin. A ketchup stain smeared the shoulder of her orange top.

  “Shit.” He spoke louder than he intended and several reproachful looks came his way.

  Even the child turned an accusatory look at him, her plight momentarily overshadowed. “You shouldn’t say that word.”

  “Yeah, well.” Cubiak scanned the horde for the face of an anxious parent and nearly drowned in an ocean of good cheer.

  He tilted toward the child again. “Where were you before?”

  She shivered.

  “Think,” he insisted.

  The girl pinned her red-rimmed, puffy eyes on him. “I don’t know,” she wailed.

  It came to him slowly that the child had sought him out because of his uniform; she had done what her mother had told her to do if ever she was lost or needed help. Find a policeman. Tell the store clerk. Look for someone official, the person in charge.

  “It’s okay,” he said gruffly. “We’ll walk around together. You look for anything familiar.” He’d take her to the church. Find a cherry-decked greeter and leave the girl with her.

  The simpering child latched onto Cubiak’s arm. But when he stepped forward, she didn’t move.

  “Come on,” he said impatiently.

  “I can’t.”

  Before Cubiak could stop her, the girl pulled off her right shoe and bloody sock. A large blister on her heel had broken. The skin underneath was fiery red and raw. She hopped unsteadily on her good foot and started toppling over when Cubiak grabbed her. Without thinking he swung her up against his chest and, in the automatic reflex of a child being rescued by an adult, she wrapped her thin legs around his waist and her arms around his neck. The feather-touch of her hands on his shoulders stabbed his heart.

  Cubiak thought he would weep.

  “I think we were there.” She pointed toward an ice-cream stand fifty feet away. “Or maybe there.” She looked toward the stage.

  Steadying himself, Cubiak waded into the frolicking throng. He struggled to keep the clinging child at arm’s length, but the crowd kept jostling at them and the frightened child responded by pulling closer and tightening her grip.

  Cubiak stopped abruptly. He was light headed; his heart drummed wildly in his chest. He
loosed the child’s grasp on his collar and dropped her to the ground.

  She wobbled and grabbed his arm. “I’m sorry. I’ll walk, I’m too heavy,” she said as tears trickled down her face.

  “No. It’s okay,” he said, but he remained motionless.

  He had fooled himself into thinking he had erased all image of voice and touch. He hadn’t.

  Memories washed over him. He was at the petting zoo with Alexis. Still a toddler, she wore one black leather Mary Jane and one white ballet slipper. Trailed by a spotted baby goat, she twirled through the miniature farmyard in her favorite yellow sundress, her laughter the purest expression of innocence and joy he could imagine. The next instant, he was lying on the living room rug, exhausted from working three straight shifts, while Alexis bent over a puzzle nearby. From the kitchen, Lauren admonished the child to leave Daddy alone and urged him to go up to bed. But he’d been too exhausted to move and so Alexis knelt by him and sang a lullaby. While she serenaded him, her fingertips brushed lightly up and down his arm. Then she dipped and kissed him. “Good night, Daddy,” she whispered.

  Cubiak had met Lauren at a party. He’d almost not gone. She had looked tall from across the room, and he was surprised when he stood next to her to find she barely reached his shoulder. She was a kindred spirit. She cooked chili and talked to him about books. She loosened the ties of his spiritual straitjacket and freed him from the pain of his soldier’s soul. She eased his guilt at not having saved his parents from themselves.

  When Lauren’s life seeped away into a puddle of blood on a pot-marked street, Cubiak lost more than his love. He lost his way.

  “Are you okay? Sir?” The child’s voice cracked.

  “Yes.” Cubiak squeezed her stubby fingers.

  Rage and anguish had driven him to drink. Crazed with alcohol, he plotted ways to kill the elder Wisby son in prison; it would be easy enough to bribe a guard to poison the man or to hire another inmate to stab him. Other nights, he thought about ways to take his own life; the method he preferred was carbon monoxide poisoning—so simple to lock the garage and leave the car running. Dying like that, he thought, evoked a sense of ironic justice. In the end, he didn’t do anything to harm either the DUI or himself. Years before, he’d decided that there was too much death and killing in the world. That’s why he became a cop in the first place, to try and stop the slaughter. He couldn’t add to it.