by Kirk Landers
“I’m not. I just want you to recognize your responsibilities here.”
“I’m not Japanese. That doesn’t apply to me.”
“It doesn’t matter who said it. It’s a universal truth. You have to change my diapers when I get senile.”
34
Two days later, Pender served lunch for Christy and Rebecca at a picnic table in their backyard. The sun brightened and dimmed as patches of clouds flowed in a liquid stream overhead. Beams of light sifted through the leaves of a birch tree and covered the table in a dappled pattern that fluttered and waved with each puff of breeze.
Rebecca crawled on Pender’s lap as they sat down. He hugged her and kissed her temple. They had been bonding all day. Chaos had shadowed his every movement and sat next to him at the table, putting his head on Pender’s knee.
“My daughter is quite taken with you, Gabe,” said Christy. She was squinting in the sunlight and smiling. She had her mother’s smile. She had her mother’s everything.
“She won my heart right away. I was thinking how nice it would be to try raising a child again. Right up until she crapped in her nappies.”
They conversed quietly as they ate, Christy raving about the meal, Pender admitting he was trying to show off, Rebecca grabbing Pender’s attention when it strayed from her too long.
“You know, she’s not like this with everyone,” Christy said. “This is really special.”
“Maybe she senses that I wish I was her grandfather.”
“Maybe she feels like you are her grandfather.”
Pender hugged the little girl, smiled.
“Did you tell my mother you wished I was your daughter?”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t even know me.”
“No.” He shrugged.
“I feel a bond with you,” Christy said. “My mom has talked about you so much I feel like I know you. Now, seeing you with Rebecca, I see how you are with her. You just sort of fit together. I have this eerie feeling you were supposed to be my dad. And I shouldn’t be saying this.”
Pender stared at her.
“Really, I’m sorry. I was way off base.” Christy blushed.
“No,” said Pender. “It’s not like that. I’ve felt a connection, too. Think your mom has linked us in some kind of mystical way?”
“It doesn’t make sense, but it feels like that.”
“Makes more sense than a god who works in mysterious ways.”
Christy smiled. “Mom told me you were an atheist.”
“Hah,” he waved a hand. “We’re all atheists. Some say so, some hedge their bets, and a lot of people use religion to codify their hatreds. We’re all connected.”
* * *
Pender helped Annette and Christy get their businesses ready for the Labor Day surge, laundering sleeping bags and linens, cleaning tents and cook kits, mopping floors, scouring toilets. When he was off antibiotics and feeling good, he went into the park with a crew to clear portage trails, taking Chaos with him. He learned to handle a chainsaw and how to pack logs into corduroy walkways across wet terrain. He helped place rocks to bolster washed-out paths and move the carcasses of fallen trees so that new growth could prosper.
He camped with other people for only the second time in his life—the first having been his outing with Annette and, eventually, the Survivors Club.
He fished every night with other members of the crew, took his turn at cleanup, graciously accepting his appointment as permanent dinner chef. He lay in the tent one night listening to wolves howl, Chaos’s body rigid next to his. Later, he woke to loon calls, then fell back asleep.
When they returned to Atikokan, he had seven new friends. After another week, seeing his new friends at a church social, a softball game, and a couple of different restaurants, he had more friends. He recognized people wherever he went, though he couldn’t remember everyone’s name.
The bond with Rebecca and Christy grew stronger despite how exhausting Pender found the frequency of contact and conversation to be.
Annette asked him how it felt to see the area like a local sees it. He said it was like the difference between living in New York and visiting there. He used to just see it. Now he was experiencing everything—the town, the people, the nooks and crannies. “There’s a personality emerging,” he said.
“Is that a good thing?”
“Sure. People are nice here. Cars stop in the middle of the block to let you cross the street. You folks look after each other better than any place I’ve been. But not everything I see is storybook stuff. The town has its share of alcoholics and someone at the hospital told me the area needs a methadone clinic. Jesus, there’s just no escaping that shit, you know?”
They were quiet for a while.
“Have you made plans for the fall and winter yet?” Annette asked.
Pender shrugged. “I’d like to stay . . .”
“But . . .?” Annette could feel a second thought coming.
“But it’s a risk. We both need to understand that.”
Annette felt a sense of dread creeping over her body. “What are we risking?”
“I’m starting to take you for granted already. There are some whole days where even though I look at you and talk to you and I like being near you, I don’t actually see you.”
Annette’s face puckered into a questioning grimace.
“I look at you, but I don’t notice what you’re wearing or the color of your hair or how beautiful your eyes are.”
“Everyone does that.”
“Yeah, but for forty years I remembered you as a goddess. I could visualize your face in perfect focus, the way you smiled, how you looked in a sweatshirt. I remembered how your hand felt to hold, your eyes, how you walked.”
“So?”
“So if I stay, you become human.”
“I am human.”
“I know. But if you become human in my mind, everything changes. Pretty soon, we’re like every old couple anywhere. We plod along in a routine, birthdays, Christmases, barbeques, watch the news on television. We keep doing that until one of us dies. So it’s like, if I stay, I die. This is it. This is all there is.”
Annette shook her head. “You are so full of shit, Pender. Do you think if you move on, your life will be better?”
“No. But if I stay, it could be the end of something.”
“What?”
“The adventure.”
“You lost me.”
“Finding you, after all these years. It feels like the end of an adventure. Like an explorer who’s been out in the wilderness for forty years, searching and fighting, adapting, making it work, finally finding the lost treasure. In the middle of dancing and celebrating, it hits him: this is the end of the adventure. That the best part of his life was the search, not the treasure.”
“You sure know how to flatter a girl.”
After a silence, he looked at her. “We both know I’m staying. I couldn’t live with myself if I left you now. But I have to be honest. I’m not sure I really belong here. I don’t feel like I belong anywhere.”
When he said the words, Annette knew this was the truth about Pender. Not the only truth, but the truth that brought him to this place and this time.
“You do belong here. You’ve always belonged here. It just took you sixty years to get here. Typical.”
“I wish I felt as sure as you do. I’m not even sure I can hack the winter. The only day we experienced thirty below, it hurt to breathe. I stayed in and read a book until it got back up to minus ten. What am I going to do when it stays minus thirty for a week?”
“We have books,” she said. “You can read to your heart’s content.”
“What will you be doing?” he asked.
“Cross-country skiing. Ice fishing. Getting the cabins ready. Life goes on.”
“You’re one tough woman,” Pender marveled.
“No. I just got here before you did.”
“Funny you’d say that. The first tim
e I came up here, I kept thinking, Damn, if I’d seen this place before I finished college, I might never have gone into the army.”
“You would have served,” said Annette. “You were meant to. But, you were meant to be here, too. This place exists for people like you. And me.”
Pender was mute, his face a question mark.
“This is the Canadian Shield, and Quetico is the heartbeat of the Shield,” said Annette. “It’s not for everyone.”
“That’s for sure,” Pender laughed.
“It’s for people who need more than wealth and ease. The hard winters keep the place pristine. Like a biblical flood that washes out the heathens. The people who live here are like the animals who live here—either they want to live here, just here . . . or they can’t survive anywhere else.”
“Which am I?” Pender asked.
“You tell me.”
“Maybe both,” he said.
Annette nodded. “I agree. We just have to get you acclimatized. For the holidays this year, I’ll take you on our Christmas picnic. The girls and I have been doing it since they were children. We’ll eat Christmas sandwiches and sip Christmas cider and sing Christmas carols in one of our special places. Are you game?”
“What if it’s minus twenty? Can’t we stay in and watch a football game? I can’t enjoy the holidays if someone isn’t getting their bones broken.”
“No football game. We just layer up and get out there. It’s fun, you’ll see. We get a great view of a frozen lake that’s five hundred feet deep and a forest that stretches to the horizon, and we’ll be sitting on a boulder bigger than a house that’s more than a million years old. How would that make you feel?”
“Young,” said Pender, just to make her smile. She did, and it was just like his dreams, gentle and warm, except he could touch her and put his arms around her and feel her soft breath on his skin.
Acknowledgments
The road from magazine journalism to long-form fiction is filled with potholes and mind-numbing doubts and perilous missteps. For mortals like me, the journey can only be completed through the help of others. Here are just a few of the people and institutions who helped me shape the final draft of Alone on the Shield.
My brother, Scott Landers, and my wife, Taffy, had the courage to read the first draft of this book in its dreary entirety. Scott wrote a detailed and actionable critique of it, and Taffy’s comments helped me shape the characters of Pender and Annette. To appreciate their sacrifices, it’s important to know that I offered the first draft to the Department of Homeland Security, suggesting it could be read to the detainees at Guantanamo Bay in lieu of waterboarding, but they felt waterboarding was more humane.
Several writer groups provided immense help: the Chicago Writers Association (especially founder Randy Richardson), the Off-Campus Writers Workshop (especially my Critique Group colleagues), and the Novel-in-Progress Bookcamp in Wisconsin.
Four beta-readers risked their sanity to review the next-to-final draft of this book, wading through an avalanche of typos, misspellings, and fragments of old drafts floating like space debris through the current draft . . . and helping me fix flaws in plot and characters: Larry Green, my friend and colleague of forty years or so, is a man of letters, and his spirit of independence and rebellion against ill-informed authority inspired part of Gabe Pender’s character.
Andy Marein and Rhonda McDonnell are veterans of the Novel-in-Progress Bookcamp and accomplished writers who bring intellect, empathy, and integrity to everything they do, including the analysis of a colleague’s work.
Geoff Coulson’s day job is warning preparedness meteorologist for the Meteorological Service of Canada. Geoff took the time to educate me about extreme weather events in the northern plains and prairies of North America. There aren’t many, and a derecho of the magnitude described in this book hasn’t been observed in the Canadian Shield, but it lingers on the edge of possibility.
My special thanks to two editors: Chris Nelson gave me early encouragement and direction, and Richard Thomas (of Darkhouse Press) provided the comprehensive critique that shaped the final draft. All writers should have the benefit of editors like these, and more important, all writers should appreciate the unique value they bring to our work.
And finally, my thanks to Al Hembd, a veteran of the shooting war in Vietnam and a friend who took the time to share his thoughts about this book, and especially about Gabe Pender.
About the Author
Kirk Landers launched his professional writing career in the US Army, later entering the special-interest and trade magazine worlds. His magazines won more than a hundred awards for journalistic excellence, and he is a member of the Construction Writers Hall of Fame. He lives in the suburbs of Chicago.