Alone on the Shield

by Kirk Landers

  “Hi. I’m looking for Patrick O’Quinn?”

  “What do you want with him?”

  “I wanted to say hello. We’re old friends. We used to work together.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Pender.”

  Her face wrinkled in thought, as if the name was familiar but she couldn’t place it. “Do you have a first name?”

  “Yeah, but no one ever uses it.”

  “Wait a moment.” She closed and locked the door. He could hear her feet padding away. A few minutes later she was back, the door opened a crack, chain still in place.

  “Come back in an hour. He’ll see you then.”

  Pender said okay, but she was already closing the door. Not the warmest welcome an old friend ever got. He wondered about the woman, why she was so suspicious. He shrugged. Not the first time someone disliked him on sight, maybe not the last either, though time was getting short for that particular ritual.

  He stopped at the first-floor landing to check the name on the mailbox. Minton and O’Quinn. The Minton was typed, O’Quinn was a handwritten addition. Pender wandered the waterfront again, found a sit-down restaurant, had a hot breakfast, chatted up the waitress and another patron, and then walked back to the Minton and O’Quinn household.

  This time the lady opened the door all the way. She was slight of build, fiftyish, attractive. Short hair, straight with blonde streaks, those complex gray-blue eyes. The summer sun had given her fair skin a tawny tan, and the Lake Superior winds left her with faint red highlights on her cheekbones. Ms. Minton was the most attractive of the O’Quinn ladies Pender had met. Nice that some good things come later in life, he thought.

  “I’m Carrie,” she said, leading him into the living room of a spacious flat. She stopped, extended a hand for a handshake.

  “Pat’s been sick,” she said. A nice voice, hushed, like in a hospital or church. “It’s cancer. Pancreatic. He’s been through chemo. They don’t think he’s going to make it. He’s worried you won’t recognize him. It’s been tough.” She tried to say the words without emotion, rattle them off like a schoolkid reciting memorized lines, but it was there, the little crack between syllables, the descending intonations at the end of phrases, the sad eyes just above the brave smile.

  “Shit,” said Pender. He shook his head slowly.

  “No argument here,” she said, and led him down a hallway to the bedroom where O’Quinn waited.

  O’Quinn greeted him as soon as he entered the bedroom. “You sure have a great sense of timing.” His humor helped take the edge off Pender’s shock at the sight of him. Deathly pale. Emaciated. A desiccated shadow of the man Pender had known. A skeleton with skin and odd tufts of hair and a dying ember of life.

  “Well, if you’d write once in a while, I could have been up here a long time ago. Jesus, Patrick, you look like shit.”

  “Yeah, but I look better than I feel.” He smiled, too weak to laugh.

  “So this is where you disappeared to?” Pender took in the room, the pictures on the wall, the view of the morning sky from the windows.

  “My own little paradise.” He paused and closed his eyes.

  “He owns the shop downstairs,” explained Carrie.

  “Best two years of my life,” said O’Quinn. “Except for the last few months, of course.” He closed his eyes again and drifted off.

  “He sells the works of local artists and his own photography.”

  “Let me guess,” said Pender. “He pays the artists a bigger commission than the other guys and doesn’t take enough profit.”

  “He pays a nice commission and makes enough money to pay the bills and keep the doors open,” she responded.

  “That’s my Patrick.” Pender turned to Carrie. “I’ve missed him. I understand why he took off, but I missed him.”

  “He talks about you, about your work together. What kind of editor you were. He loves you.”

  “He’s the best photographer I ever knew. He could get journalism and art in the same shot, you know? I remember a cover he did for my construction magazine way back when. He’d already shot a hundred frames or so, and it started raining. Most people would pack up and get out. He already had the setup shot—clean machines, posed bosses. Why risk your equipment, right? But the construction crew kept working in the rain, which became a total deluge. It grabbed Pat. He got out there with them and shot for an hour in a monsoon rain. He came away with the most dramatic construction photos anyone ever saw, mud streaming out of the loader bucket, rain splashing off the hard hats, workers up to their calves in muck, their clothes stuck to their skins. Smiling like a bunch of kids at the beach. Greatest construction shot ever. Defined construction work like nothing else I ever saw. He won a national award for it.”

  Carrie nodded, eyes watery. She took Pender’s hand and led him back to the living room, stopped in front of a picture on the wall. It was the shot Pender had just described. The walls of the room were festooned with other dramatic photos—sports, nature, cars, architecture, food.

  “If there was a God,” said Pender, “the motherfuckers who destroyed these magazines would be dead and Pat’s life would just be starting.”

  Carrie cried. Pender put his arms around her. She buried her forehead in his chest and sobbed silently.

  When she recovered they went back to O’Quinn’s room.

  “Trying to steal my girl?” he asked as they sat down.

  “I’d only embarrass myself,” said Pender. “Never had much luck with women, though I was finally able to make Peg happy.”

  “Buy her a nice polo pony? A yacht?”

  “Naw,” drawled Pender. “I signed her divorce papers.”

  “No kidding,” said O’Quinn, smiling. “Why in the hell would she want a divorce? You getting it on with the maid?”

  “No. The maid wasn’t interested in me either. No, what broke poor Peg’s heart was me getting old and dull. Did I tell you I also got fired?”

  “You? You got fired? I can’t believe it. You’re an institution!” O’Quinn’s face was animated in disbelief.

  “Not much use for institutions in the brave new world of corporate publishing I’m afraid. They’re letting the air out of the magazines because they want to write them off. Your publishing hero Charles Jamison Blue thought the strategy was brilliant.”

  “That empty suit is still around?”

  “In all his glory.”

  “Did he tell you to your face or send you a memo?”

  “He couldn’t wait to give me the news himself. He really enjoyed it, right up to the time I popped him. Left hook to the gut. It was an immature and beastly action on my part.”

  O’Quinn’s smile consumed his emaciated face. “Goddamn but I’d have loved to see that! Tell me about it, every detail. This might be the last best story of the rest of my life.”

  Pender took him through the whole sequence of events, including his anger management sessions.

  “But it must have felt good going down, eh?” said O’Quinn. “I used to dream of doing something like that to those Ivy League idiots.”

  “You’re one of the few people who could understand how good it felt,” said Pender. “It was like finding Jesus.”

  They sat quietly for a while, lost in thought.

  “It’s been building in me, Patrick,” said Pender, finally. “I feel this rage all the time, deep inside. I try to control it, but sometimes the mad genie just roars out of the bottle. Everything that’s happened since Vietnam has been a lie. And the bastards who are spinning the lie are getting rich and they’re laughing at us and they don’t care where the lie ends as long as it ends with them being rich. I watch these stupid CEOs who don’t know shit about the businesses they’re in run their companies into the ground and make millions doing it. And the phony chicken hawks who wave flags from their cars but wouldn’t serve on a bet. It pisses me off. It’s like people like you and I have wasted our lives being puppets in their game.”

  Pender pause
d in thought. “So, yeah, it felt . . . great.” He looked at Carrie. “I’m not as psychotic as I sound, honest. I hadn’t had a fight since I got out of the army. But that little lapse . . . it was like scooping a fingerful of frosting from a cake you can’t afford to buy. Watching that pompous bastard turn blue trying to get his breath, seeing him sit his fat ass on the chair and cry. Goddamn, it was better than an orgasm. At this stage of my life, anyway.”

  “Better than a job?” O’Quinn asked.

  “Yeah, Pat,” said Pender. “No one was going to hire me anyway, but even if someone was interested, there isn’t much left. No one’s focused on greatness anymore, not even growth. The whole industry is about cost cutting. It’s like running a baseball team by managing the scoreboard.”

  As Pender vented some more, O’Quinn gently nodded off again. Pender and Carrie strolled to the coffee shop, then toured O’Quinn’s art gallery. Between bits of artist biographies and local notes, Carrie answered Pender’s questions about her and O’Quinn.

  Carrie was fifty-three. She was a Berkeley girl, an art major, and a counterculturist, too late for the revolution but full of fire and passion. After she graduated she tried teaching in Mendocino, but her passion was art, not dealing with kids who wanted to be doing something else. So she became a painter of expressionistic canvases and a waitress. She made more money waitressing. She tried marriage, but it was too confining. When Mendocino got too yuppified, she moved on to Sonoma County and, when the BMWs invaded, she migrated to the Lake Superior shore of Wisconsin.

  “I do okay here,” she said. “I got a deal as a sales clerk in Patrick’s shop long before he got here. I got paid and I got to have my work on display and I got a great deal on the apartment. And this is a great area. The few jerks we get are gone by the time the cold weather sets in.”

  Pender stopped in front of one of Carrie’s canvases, an explosion of blues and whites with dashes of warm colors and multicolored streaks. “Sailboats?” he asked.

  “Good one! Yes. It’s a sailboat race on Lake Superior.”

  “Yeah, I can feel the speed.”

  “You’re saying all the right things. Want to buy it?”

  “I’d love to,” Pender said. “But I don’t have walls anymore.”

  Carrie glanced at him quizzically.

  “No more house, no apartment. No address. That’s my home.” He gestured to his vehicle outside. “And in a week or so, I won’t even have the truck.”

  “Where are you going?” Carrie asked.

  “The Boundary Waters, Quetico.”

  “For forever?”

  “For as long as it lasts.”

  “What then?”

  Pender shrugged. “Haven’t gotten that far. What about you?” he asked. “Do you still work here?”

  “Yes. My hours are way down because I’m taking care of Pat, but yes, I still work here. He’s leaving the place to me, so he’s been teaching me how to run the business.”

  “So you’re staying? When he . . .”

  “Yes. When he passes, I’ll stay. Everything I love is here. Him. The shop. The lake. The people around here. Even the godforsaken winters. As inhumanly cold as it gets, it’s incredibly majestic.”

  “I envy you,” Pender said.

  “Me?”

  “I envy you having a place you love and people you love.”

  When they went back up to the apartment, O’Quinn was awake, waiting for them. He asked about Pender’s plans after Quetico.

  “I always wanted to see the Maritimes,” Pender said. “Whenever National Geographic ran a spread on them I thought, damn, that should have been you and me doing that, the words and pictures. Wouldn’t that have been the life?”

  They recollected their misadventures as a failed freelance team in their post-Vietnam days.

  When O’Quinn needed to rest, Pender strolled through the town and along the lakefront, memories of his postwar days suddenly fresh in his mind. He had been steered into a singles complex by a friend, the fourth roommate in a bachelor townhouse. Two hip, urbane up-and-comers who sidestepped the draft, launched promising careers, and were popular with women. And two others who weren’t any of those things. O’Quinn and Pender. Veterans of an unpopular war. Crap jobs. Socially challenged.

  They both wanted to be freelancers, to experience variety and independence in their work. To pursue adventure. Do work for National Geo and the bigs of magazinedom, collaborate on books.

  They pursued the dream for almost two years. O’Quinn worked nights as a janitor to pay his bills, Pender edited press releases for a local shopper. They spent weekends trying to hustle stories. Between them, they barely eked out enough money to pay their rent and groceries and keep one of their junk cars running. In the second winter of their enterprise, Pender’s car died. They shared O’Quinn’s ancient heap until one morning, as Pender depressed the clutch to shift gears, the floor of the vehicle gave way, forming a sort of scoop that funneled new-fallen snow into the cockpit.

  The man at the welding shop laughed, said the steel it would take to make the repair was probably worth more than the car. He had a point.

  Pender tapped his savings to get a used car so they could pursue new jobs. By spring Pender was working for a trade magazine and O’Quinn caught on as a staff photographer with a suburban paper, then a daily in central Illinois. Pender graduated to a senior staff position on a construction title, then Menu, the company’s flagship magazine. O’Quinn came back to Chicago as a freelancer, busy with newspaper assignments, weddings, and in-home portraits.

  Pender assigned work to O’Quinn as he rose in the ranks, especially when he became editor in chief of Menu. So they stayed in touch with business lunches through marriages, children, braces, college. O’Quinn’s divorce.

  O’Quinn’s divorce was an especially malicious event. He was shocked when she served the papers, more shocked when he realized how well planned it all was. The youngest son had just gone off to college, and Pat’s replacement was packed and ready to move in the day the divorce was finalized.

  Not long after that he got tired of the routine of his business, told Pender and a few others he was going to do something different, somewhere different. And then one day he just disappeared.

  Pender located him in the winter of his own discontent when an Internet search turned up his name and his business on the Wisconsin shores of Lake Superior.

  What a long, strange journey, he thought.

  They dined together that night. As Carrie cleared the table and started dishes, O’Quinn started to fade again.

  “Patrick,” said Pender. “Before you nod off . . . I’m leaving early tomorrow. Real early. I don’t sleep much anymore, you know? So I wanted to say goodbye. And, don’t get mad, but I have to ask this or it’s going to haunt me forever. I have some money. More than I need. Can I help with anything? Medical bills, the mortgage, whatever . . .”

  O’Quinn smiled drowsily. “I always wanted to have a rich friend,” he said. “But no, we’re good. Thanks. How’d you get so rich, anyway?”

  “I married well,” said Pender. O’Quinn cocked an eye in question.

  “Peg insisted we buy that place on the river right after the hundred-year flood,” explained Pender. “We got it for a song because it had flooded. Then it just kept appreciating, especially after the flood abatement projects were completed. And we kept doing well ourselves. So we had a lot of marital assets to split up, including a two-million-dollar house.”

  “She split it with you?” O’Quinn could hardly imagine such largesse.

  “She did. What she lacks in personal warmth she makes up for in a strong sense of fair play. Who knew?”

  When O’Quinn nodded off, Pender prepared to leave. He gave Carrie a slip of paper with his financial manager’s name on it. “You can reach me through this guy if you or Pat need anything. Or if Pat makes a miracle recovery . . .” His voice trailed off for a moment. “You know, Pat and I always talked about paddling the Mississippi tog
ether . . .” Pender sobbed. Carrie put her arms around him and cried.

  “God, I can’t believe we didn’t do that. What a waste!”

  She hugged harder. “Let it go, sweetie. If you live right, there’s always something left undone.”

  Pender nodded. “And you let me know if you need any help . . . financial or whatever.”

  She nodded. They hugged a final time, and Pender left. Another farewell completed. Another door closed. A lonely universe waiting for him.

  6

  Rob showed up at Quetico Outpost during one of the busiest weeks of the season, the second Mrs. Blain in tow.

  They just popped in on their way to Toronto, to see Rob’s daughter and first grandchild. For Christy’s sake, Annette tried not to resent the intrusion, but it wasn’t easy. The new wife, Janice, was only a few years older than Christy and bubbled over with girlie enthusiasm for everything. Her effervescence was punctuated by stylish fashions—she wore a designer suit in the wilderness—and breasts bigger than watermelons.

  “Thing is,” Rob was saying, Janice gushing a wet red lipstick smile at her as he talked, “The White Otter is full tonight, and we were wondering if you had a cabin available . . .”

  In that moment, the truth about her ex-husband loomed before her in a tableau with the stark reality of a political cartoon. Until that moment, she had defined him by his intellect, his passionate speech, his good looks, and by his flaws—his penchant for skirt chasing, his inability to adapt to life on the Canadian Shield. But as he stood beside his child bride and panhandled for a free room from his ex-wife, she realized that he was defined by shallowness and insensitivity. The realization didn’t make her mad. It made her sad.

  “Check with Christy on that,” she said. “She’s running the cabins this summer. She’ll know if we have something open.”

  “How’s she doing?” Rob tried to get a conversation going, to feel better about the situation he had created. If he hadn’t become a political science professor, he would have been a used car salesman or maybe a politician.

  “She’s great.” Annette gestured to the office. “She’s in there. So is your granddaughter. If you’re lucky you might get to change a dirty diaper.” Annette suppressed a chuckle. Rob had been terrified of shit-filled diapers at first sight. Indeed, he had to force himself to even hold his infant daughters, what with the puke and pee and poop they emitted.