by L. L. Enger
“Yeah, Minneapolis,” he said.
“So you’re coming up. Oh, God, that’s the best news. It’s been so cold.”
“I’m not coming up, Carol, not now. I’m here to see Neil Faust.”
“Ah.” He could hear both the disappointment and her unwillingness to let him hear it. They weren’t to
the stage where you liked to admit any need. “I read that column of his. I thought you might be interested.”
“Apparently that’s what he thought, too, and he’s made himself scarce. Carol, I need to get in touch with Jack. I just tried calling his place and he’s not there, but I think I know where he is.”
“If Jack’s not around, maybe I can help you.”
“Carol, you know I’d call you in a minute. But this time ... I’ve got to talk to Jack.”
“So tell me where to look.” She spoke a little too fast.
“Mary Magdelene’s.”
“There a funeral?” Carol asked.
“No, it’s—”
“Do you realize what time it is, Gun? It’s six o’clock.”
“Yup, and Jack should be at his place, drawing a beer for somebody or frying a burger, but he’s not This happens every couple months. He kicks everybody off their stools and out the door and hangs a sign up that says back in an hour. Then he’s off to see Father Barnstead.”
“For what?”
“Confession, I guess you’d call it.”
“That’s nuts. Why doesn’t he go in the mornings, before he opens his place?”
“You’d have to ask him. Look, could you run over there for me? And then have him call me? I’ll be at... let’s see.” Gun relocated the phone number of the car rental agency he’d found in the yellow pages, the one closest to where he now stood. He gave Carol the number. “Tell him I’ll be there until seven. If he doesn’t get back to me before that, I won’t be around.”
“And then what?”
“He can forget it.”
“And there’s nothing I can do.”
“Not right now. I’ll call if that changes, I promise.” He kept his voice as far away from her as he could, speaking slightly away from the mouthpiece.
“Take care of yourself, Gun.”
“I miss you, Carol.” He waited for a response that didn’t come. Then hung up without saying more.
Another cab trip and Gun was at Hertz, Northside, where he rented a black Ford Taurus, then waited with a giant-size coffee strong enough to make up for his sleep deficit—or make him feel that way for now.
He was pretty sure Jack would call. Carol would find his rusty Scout parked out front of Mary Magdelene’s wide granite steps, and soon Jack would appear, face broad with contentment, wide shoulders squared to the world. He was a man of simple notions who didn’t spend a lot of time questioning the imponderables, one of the rare people Gun had met who still knew what he believed and lived by a set of rules. In Jack’s case, you told the truth, you helped your friends, and you didn’t swear in mixed company, and if somebody else did, you set him straight in one hell of a hurry. You did all these things the best you could and then, because you were human and full of shit, you went to the priest when it got piled up too high inside. Get rid of it, start over. There was nobody in the world Gun trusted or respected more than Jack LaSalle.
At ten to seven the phone rang behind the rental counter and the man who answered said, “It’s for you, Mr. Pedersen.” Gun stood and drained the last of the coffee, mostly grounds which caught in his teem.
“Jack?”
“No, Mother Teresa. What’s your problem this time?”
“I’m trying to remember. You’ve trapped a few weasels in your day, haven’t you?”
“Anything you need to know about weasels, ask me. Weasel expert Runs in the blood, French trappers,
right? I can find ’em, catch ’em, and skin ’em. I can think like a weasel. Why do you ask?”
“I’m looking for a weasel by the name of Neil Faust, and it’s hiding out someplace on Jack Knife Lake, probably in a fish house.”
“You’ve got a thousand fish houses on that lake, Gun. Minimum. Which end’s he on, upper or lower?”
“I don’t know that. Why do you think I called you? Here’s the thing, I thought maybe you could take one end and I could take the other.” Jack Knife Lake was fifteen miles long and made up of two separate bodies of water, connected in the middle by a narrow channel. Gun had fished it many times in the winter and knew there’d be two main icehouse settlements. One extending off’ a point of land called Muskie Snout, on the south end. The other, on the north end, was smack on top of the eight-mile bar, an underwater ridge with drop-offs, deep ones, a good spot to angle for walleyes, and if you stayed close to shore on the east side you might get a poke at a long northern. Gun had taken a twenty-pounder there one year.
“Suppose you tell me what’s going on between you and this Faust devil,” said Jack. “Ha.”
“I can’t rightly say yet. He’s acting like he knows more than he should know. He doesn’t want to talk to me. He’s got all his friends running interference. We’ll just have to wait until it’s face-to-face and hear what he’s got to say. Could be, it’s all just bile, plenty of that inside of him. Or maybe he’s messed up in a murder.”
“Where do you want to meet?” Jack asked.
“Say, Leo’s Bait and Cafe? That place on the west side?”
“The one with the stop sign painted on the roof. That little guy with the eyes.”
“That’s it. How early can you leave?”
“Long as it takes me to get my fishing clothes on and gas up. Jack Knife’s about halfway to the Cities, so if
we leave now—let’s see, it’s seven—we’ll both get there by nine or so. And Gun...”
“Yeah.”
“Carol Long told me she’s coming with us. Ibid me in a voice I don’t argue with.” He coughed. “In fact she’s standing here right now.”
“See you both, then,” Gun said.
24
Gun got there first and made arrangements with the owner to rent two snowmobiles for the night. Leo was a guy so small you’d mistake him for a half-grown boy if you saw him from behind and didn’t look too hard. His face was young, too, the absence of wrinkles almost shocking beneath the heavy thatch of white hair which he combed straight back and never covered with a cap, not even tonight at minus five, not counting windchill. His eyes were nearly the same color as his hair, icy gray, and you knew it when he looked at you. It was like being watched by a cat
“Cold,” said Gun.
“Warming, the weatherman says. Supposed to be up around twenty by morning. Kind of late to be going out, isn’t it? Unless you’ve got yourself a shack.” He waited for a moment, watching. “You got one?”
“No.” Gun didn’t feel like fabricating a story. Besides, the man probably needed some mystery in his life.
“You’ve got a friend on the way, then,” said Leo. The two of them stood down at the rocky shoreline, just outside the long cement building where Leo kept his snow machines. The snow cover on Jack Knife was beautifully clean and the air so pure and hard from the cold that Gun felt it like a pressure against every surface of exposed skin: his face, and his hands now as he rolled a cigarette.
“A couple friends, and here they are now, looks like.” The lake road cut between the shore and Leo’s place, and Jack’s Scout was pulling off into the gravel parking lot, headlights going black as he ground to a stop. He was out of the driver’s door even before the Scout quit rocking on its lousy shocks.
“In a hurry, too,” said Leo. His cool eyes were sheepish with curiosity.
Gun whistled and raised one hand, saw Jack and Carol look around, see him, and hunch themselves forward against the wind.
“A woman,” said Leo.
“Is most of the spearing getting done on the upper or lower?” Gun asked.
“Upper, always. Course, some guys like the southern half, closer to town in case you
run out of bottles.” He almost grinned, but caught himself. “But mostly they’re north. Same place as usual, east of the anglers. Though right now quite a few guys’ve got themselves off that little tit of land the DNR owns. Know where I mean?” Leo pointed toward the north. “There’s just a few of ’em up there now, along the rushes stretching away from the bar.” Leo turned to look at Jack and Carol, entering the circle of light cast by the yard lamp.
“Nice night to be on the lake, glad you thought of us,” Jack said. In his red-and-black checked parka he looked comfortable and excited, his eyes like little pulsating bulbs.
“Thanks for coming.” Gun turned toward Carol as he said it. “Hope you’ve got enough wool on underneath that thing. Jack’s?”
Carol nodded. She wore green military coveralls too short in the limbs and stood with her arms out stiff from her body. “I don’t think there’s such a thing as enough.”
“Leo’s gotta gas up the machines, so we might as well go inside,” Gun suggested. “Plan strategy.”
In the wooden booth Carol sat next to Gun and under the table pressed her hand on his thigh. In the canvas military getup she smelled like cinnamon rolls in a burlap bag. Sweetness smothered. Jack said he was sure he’d recognize Faust by the photo which appeared with his column every day in the paper, and it was agreed that Jack would cover the lower lake, Gun and Carol the upper.
When Jack went to the men’s room, Gun found himself not knowing what to say. He’d never felt like this with Carol before. He took her hand and said, “I’ve been thinking of you,” aware of how weak it sounded.
“Wouldn’t know it by the phone calls and postcards.”
“It’s only been a few days.”
“And you’ve been so busy, I know all about it. But Gun, I have a bad feeling, and I don’t know exactly why. Is there something I should know about? Something you should be telling me?” The earnestness in Carol’s dark eyes was disconcerting, but Gun didn’t look away.
“I’ll be real careful,” he said.
“Lots of things can happen. Often they don’t even seem dangerous at the time.” Carol lifted her perfect chin. Her green eyes didn’t challenge him, they were sad.
“I’ve always tried to learn from my mistakes, Carol. I’ve got a good long memory, you know that....” But as he said it, he remembered Diane Apple’s face, her hair, the sound of her voice, the way she possessed the small cabin by just lifting an arm.
“Thanks,” said Carol. “I want you back here, soon.”
Jack returned to the table and they all zipped up and went out into the crystal night air. It was so cold Gun felt his lungs lock up for an instant, his heart give a little extra push, gear down. At the lake Leo handed out helmets with plexiglass face bubbles and started both machines. “Save your heads from freezing, turning black, and falling off,” he said.
“Au revoir,” said Jack. He revved his engine and left in a cloud of oily exhaust, heading south. Gun and Carol started north, Gun at the helm, Carol perched on the back of the cushioned seat. The few lights in the distance came from the settlement offish houses three miles off, small white lights nearly indistinguishable from the lowest stars, which tonight were especially crisp, reminding Gun of the tent he’d slept in as a kid, lying there at night, a full moon lighting up the pinholes in the canvas. By squinting he’d been able to make them twinkle and grow.
25
By the time they reached the edge of the fishing town Gun’s fingers were numb. He wore a pair of sheepskin-lined choppers he’d borrowed from Jack, but holding on to the steel handlebars defrayed the insulating properties of the wool.
The little shack town looked much like the tract-house settlement where Clarence Coldspring lived, the main differences being snow instead of bare dirt
for ground and a temperature ninety degrees colder. It was bigger, too. There were enough fish houses out here to cover a couple city blocks. Most of them were small, eight-by-ten or nine-by-twelve, but a few were more spacious, and a couple were nearly the size of a two-car garage. You could tell which ones were occupied by the smoke trails rising from the metal chimneys, the trucks or cars parked alongside.
Gun stopped the machine next to one of the larger fish houses, the outside done in cheap paneling, sitting at the edge of the settlement. On its side was a sign that said jimmy boone, rt. 1, stony, mn. “You as cold as I am?” he asked Carol.
“Not bad, really. I’ve got you in front of me.”
“You look cold. Your lips don’t want to move when you talk.”
“I can’t feel them.”
“We’ll warm up here,” he said, nodding at the paneled fish house. “You know Jimmy, I bet.”
“What’s he doing way down here?”
“Daughter lives nearby.”
Jimmy Boone was Stony’s only barber and he still cut hair for under five bucks, still lathered and shaved your neck with a straight blade once he’d finished with the scissors. Every winter he closed down shop except for two days a week and devoted himself to fishing like a monk does to work and prayer. He was a man of habits, Jimmy was, most of them good ones. His taste for root beer was legendary, and he made it—strong and dark—in his basement in town, then gave it out free to the neighborhood children. He was long widowed but kept his house and yard like a fussy wife, everything just so. People claimed that his comings and goings, even on days when he wasn’t working, were steady as a clock.
Gun knocked on his door and Jimmy opened it, smiling. He was over six-feet tall and athletic: broad shoulders, hips still narrow, even at seventy plus. He
wore a gray mustache and his lined face had a few days of silver growth and his breath was sweet with root beer. His eyes were dark green as a spruce tree on a cloudy day. “It’s warm in here. Get in,” he said.
He settled Gun and Carol on a pair of canvas fishing seats next to his oil burner, dipped an aluminum cook-pan into his angling hole and set it on the stove. “Somehow I’m not thinking root beer for the two of you.” He reached to a high shelf and brought down a jar of instant coffee, which he set quickly on the floor when his red-and-white bobber disappeared underwater. He grabbed the retreating line and brought it in hand over hand. A large black crappie broke surface and flopped on the fish house floor.
“It’s been all day for this bugger,” Jimmy said. With expert fingers he removed the hook, then rose to his feet and tossed the fish out the door onto the ice. “Water should be hot real quick now,” he said.
Carol looked from the pan of lakewater to Gun, her eyes wrinkling at the corners.
“I’m getting fingers again.” Gun wiggled them above the stove.
“And hurt like a son-of-a-gun, I bet. You’re not fishing tonight, are you? What’s going on? I heard you were down in Florida somewhere, and this here’s a long jump from there.”
Gun started a quick summary of Moses Gates and the recent killings in West Palm Beach, but Jimmy cut him off.
“I’m a barber, remember? I hear it all. I know what you’re up to. What I don’t get is why you’re sitting out here tonight with me on the God blessed North Pole.”
“Neil Faust is why I’m here. Know who he
is?”
Jimmy nodded.
“I think he can help me—not that he wants
to.”
Jimmy touched his finger to the water on the
stove, said, “Ouch,” and lined the pan using a leather mitten for a pot holder. He poured the hot water carefully into two mugs that said john deere in green letters on the side. He did this with delicate care, measuring with his eye to be sure both mugs were equally full-Then he added instant coffee, pinching it from the jar with his fingers and stirring with a long plastic hook remover. “Neil Faust likes to spear, you know. Normally puts his house up north of here off the DNR land.”
“You haven’t seen him?”
“Nope. But I know the northerns’ve been active even farther north, up around that reef. Another quarter mile or so. It shouldn’t
be that hard to find him, if he’s here. Look for his shingle, and I think he drives a Wagoneer, red one. Last year he did.”
Gun tried the coffee and found it not too bad, strong enough to override the flavor of freshwater fish. He saw Carol pretend to sip. Jimmy reached into the hole, between the floor and the ice, and brought up a dark bottle of root beer. “Don’t like coffee myself,” he said, and snapped off the cap on a bottle opener affixed to the wall.
“I appreciate the help.” Gun lifted his coffee in thanks.
“One thing. You wanna be real careful on those snowmobiles tonight, up around that reef. Gets cold like this and funny things can happen. Ice slabs start fighting amongst themselves and pretty soon you got open water. If you go much beyond the last spear houses you’ll see a big ridge in the ice, probably six, seven foot high and at least a hundred feet long. Either side of it might well be open water—even in this weather. Where one slab’s buckled under. It’s not so deep there, but deep enough to drown. Be careful of yourselves.” His warning was supported by a deep booming that sounded far off and right beneath them at the same time, like underwater thunder. “Hear that?” said Jimmy. “That’s the ice, that’s power.”
“We’ll be careful,” Gun said. He drank a little more of Jimmy’s coffee, watched Carol pretend to drink more of hers, and they left.
Jimmy was right: Faust’s icehouse was easy to find. Gun counted just ten shacks clustered here, and the one with a red Wagoneer had Faust’s name and address printed neatly on its side, in adherence to state law. Gun memorized the address: 4567 Lucky Street, Robbinsdale. He killed the snowmobile’s engine and took his mittens off to blow into his hands, which had already begun to numb up again. His fingers felt like bones with no muscle or skin or nerve.
“Why isn’t he out here checking us out?” Carol whispered.
“Asleep, probably. Bet he’s got a little bunk and everything. Lots of guys do.”