The Run to Gitche Gumee

by Robert F. Jones

  “Alright already,” he said. “I get your drift. Nag, nag, nag.”

  “Three minutes to go,” Dobbs said. “You better get a move on. When you hear my first shot, start blasting.”

  I said, “And remember . . . ”

  Harry gave me the finger and crawled over the top. He ran in a low crouch to the rear of the store.

  “Which pump is the avgas?” I asked Dobbs. He looked at them and shrugged.

  “The colors are too faded to tell for sure, but I think it’s the near one. If there’s a price schedule left on them, it’ll be the one that’s most expensive.” He looked at his watch. “A minute.”

  It was a long one. I tightened the laces on my sneakers and tied them tight in a double knot. I loosened the caps on the gas cans. I started taking deep breaths. It was about twenty yards to the gas pumps.

  Dobbs counted down. “Five, four, three, two, one . . . Go!”

  As I topped the berm I heard Flo cut loose on full automatic. Splinters flew from the front of the store, long silvery gray ones, and what was left of the glass in the windows shattered to bits. I heard the Savage crack behind me, then a chugging, four-round burst from the rear of the store. Then I was at the pumps. The first one I came to had no price listed, but it had “Hi Test” painted in white letters on the faded red cylinder. I unscrewed the cans, lifted the hose from its rack, and started pumping the handle. At first there was nothing but air, the stale smell of old gasoline fumes. But then I heard a gurgle, and a trickle of pale gold petrol spilled from the nozzle.

  Fuck! At this rate of flow I’d be jacking off an hour!

  But then it started gushing. I flailed at the handle like a mad masturbator, bullets flying every which way around me, the roar of gunfire everywhere, even from the front of the store, where Curly was returning fire. He hadn’t seen me yet, though, too focused on Flo’s muzzle flash to look to his right. Then I heard a shotgun blast from the back of the store. Doc had gotten into the act, spraying buckshot blind in Harry’s direction.

  Suddenly Dobbs appeared beside me and grabbed the pump handle. He handed me the rifle and Flo’s half empty box of bullets. One gas can was full, and we switched to the other. He pumped while I reloaded the Savage, holding the pump nozzle in the mouth of the jerrican with my knees. The whole area reeked of gas fumes now. The hose was leaking.

  “Almost full,” Dobbs said.

  I saw the muzzle of Curly’s Springfield poke out of the glass-fanged hole that had been the front window. Flo’s fire had stopped. She must be switching magazines. The muzzle swung back and forth, like the head of a snake licking the air for a taste of its prey. I raised the Savage but then thought better of it. This close the rifle’s report would tip Curly to our presence at the pumps. With all the high-octane gas soaking the ground, one whitehot bullet fired at us could touch off an inferno.

  “We’d better call this good enough and run for it,” I told Dobbs. He nodded and screwed on the last gas cap.

  “It’s damn near full already.”

  Curly’s muzzle swung back fast to the front and steadied. He had a target. Looking down his line of fire, I saw something galloping toward us. Something lanky, longlegged, and rusty brown. Gayelord! He must have spotted me at the pump and broken away from the girls, who were supposed to be holding him. The ground between the store and the plane was littered with stumps and old slash, all interfering with Curly’s aim. But in a moment Gayelord would reach an open patch only fifty yards away.

  I raised the rifle, tried to calculate where Curly would be behind the muzzle of his Springfield, and fired. Instantly the rifle disappeared. Did I hit him? We ran for the bank, the jerricans swinging heavy from Dobbs’s hands. I looked back and—shit!—saw Curly lean out of the shattered window. He glared straight at me. The Immortal Jarhead. He tossed the Springfield from his right hand to his left, or open side—a good Marine marksman can shoot off either shoulder—and drew a bead on me. But at that moment Harry burst from behind the store, ran around to the front, and firing from his hip cut loose with the Tommy gun.

  “No!” I yelled.

  Sure enough, a spark from the Thompson’s muzzle blast hit the spilled gas. Ignition . . . Harry saw it happen, figured it with a flash, spun around and sprinted toward us. The flame flickered for an instant over the rainbow-hued puddle, blue and yellow and ghostlike, then the whole shebang went WHUMP!

  The explosion blew me into the river. Harry landed on top of me, still clutching the Tommy gun. When his head popped clear of the water, his eyebrows were gone, along with the hair on the back of his head. Dobbs stood up to his waist in the water, holding the gas cans clear of it. The heat from the fire reached us even under the bank. We slogged back fast toward the plane.

  Cora and Wanda were weeping when we slogged in from the river, while Mrs. Stoat hovered beside them, murmuring words of comfort. Gayelord had somehow gotten back and cowered now, shivering, at Flo’s feet. His hair looked kinkier than ever.

  “Well, well,” Stoat said. “Our Johnnies come marching home. Rather bedraggled but none the worse for wear.”

  The girls ran to us, so did Gayelord. Quite a reunion.

  While Dobbs waded out to the plane and began refueling, I looked back at what had once been Chemango. The store was a plume of fire. A greasy black cloud writhed above it. No way Doc and Curly could have survived that holocaust. Harry had brought his horn up from the canoe. He played a few sweet bars—the opening notes to a favorite of ours: “My Old Flame.” The Spike Jones rendition, with Peter Lorre on the lyrics. Spike Jones and His City Slickers . . .

  Back in grade school we used to play those old 78s in Harry’s rec room during our nonstop Ping-Pong matches, which the Hairball always won, 21 to 6. Or maybe 10 if my reflexes were sharp. He riffed around those basic notes for a minute or two, then skyed off into noodling arpeggios, high intervals overlaying low ones, blats and flats and fresh sweet lyrical phrases that spilled from his horn as if there were no limit to his invention, sounds that would have left the Bird himself flightless in their wake. He looked up and winked at me. Behind him the flames of the Flying Red Horse quavered all over the sky, red black and yellow.

  13

  CROSSING THE BAR

  After Mrs. Stoat and the girls had treated our burns with salve from the Beaver’s first aid kit, we helped carry Sailor aboard. He was much better now. Curly’s bullet had grazed the side of his head, leaving him with a bloody but superficial wound, a concussion, and a hell of a headache. Dobbs had refueled the plane, filtering the old avgas through a chamois cloth to remove any crud or ground water that might have accumulated during its months of underground storage. We pulled the nose of the Beaver in close to the shore and cranked the prop a couple of times to prime the engine. Up in the cockpit, Dobbs hit the ignition switch. The big DeHavilland rotary sputtered, coughed, hiccupped once or twice, and then lit off in a loud cloud of dirty blue exhaust.

  “Why don’t you two come with us?” Cora asked over the roar of the engine. “Bring Gayelord, too. There’s room enough on the plane for all of us, and you could always come back later for the canoe. We’d drop you off on the river at Heldendorf.”

  I could tell from the look in his eyes that Harry was tempted.

  “Thanks,” I said, “but we have an appointment to meet a guy downriver.” It was only early afternoon, and I might have added: “A couple of steelhead, too.”

  “Y-yeah,” Harry said. “M-my dad would skin me alive if we stood his t-t-truck driver up.”

  Oh hell, his stutter was back. He really wanted that plane ride.

  “Hey,” I said, “I could take the canoe the rest of the way. It’s not all that far. Why don’t you and Gayelord go along with them?”

  I could see him debating the options. He must have decided that there wouldn’t be much chance to make out with Cora on the plane, not under the eye of her parents.

  “I’d b-better not,” he said. “We started this together, let’s finish it that way.” He turn
ed back to Cora. “I’ve got your address at Bryn Mawr. I’ll write you when I get back home.”

  Stoat came up to us. “Well, boys, I don’t know what to say. You sunk my float boat, but then you salvaged it. You abducted my daughter and her friend and poached my priceless muskies. But then you saved our bacon from those . . . those murderous canaille.” He gestured toward Doc and Curly’s funeral pyre, which by now had about burned out. “All I can offer you is my halfhearted thanks and the whole hearted suggestion that you never darken my door again. He turned and helped his wife onto the float. The girls followed them into the cabin. Wanda looked back from the door and blew me a kiss.

  “Here’s the BAR and the bandoleer,” Flo said, handing them to me. “There’s only a couple of full magazines left.” She picked up a sheaf of herbs and weeds she’d harvested after the firefight, ingredients for Mrs. Stoat’s potions. “It’s been nice working with you. And one last bit of advice, boys. It might look like Doc and Curly are burnt bacon in that little bonfire over there, but I’ve known them both long enough to realize that nothing’s for sure with those jokers. So watch your backs.”

  She climbed aboard and slammed the door. We grabbed one wingtip of the Beaver and helped turn it around, facing outboard toward the Firesteel, then stood watching as Dobbs taxied out into the current, bucking it upstream to get enough room for his run. They turned again and took off downriver in a roar of flying spume. Dobbs didn’t waggle his wings good-bye.

  “D-do you think she’s right?” Harry asked. “They c-couldn’t have lived through that fire, c-could they?”

  “We could go over there and rake through the ashes, I guess. Might turn up some bones. Or we could go fishing instead.”

  We went fishing.

  Heartbreak Rapids was dicey, but the Firesteel was high after the rain and the canoe was light now. We ran the vees like slalom racers. This was a whole new river, deeper, colder, loaded with power, and paved with huge gray granite boulders. The water was still turbid and we couldn’t see the bottom at first, but then a mile or so downstream it started to clear.

  “Let’s keep our eyes on the bottom when we can,” I said. “These steelhead will hold down there, in the lee of the boulders. Look for a long silver flash.”

  We paddled on for another half hour. Then Harry saw one. And then another, and another. A whole damn pod of them, holding at the bottom of a deep, fast riffle. We pulled over to the west bank and debarked. Judging by the sun, it was about two o’clock. We had at least three hours in hand and the lake was only that many miles away.

  We stripped the floating line from Harry’s rod and bent on a fast-sinking cored flyline. Harry tied a heavy leader to it, with a 2X tippet.

  “What fly should we use?”

  “Why not the old r-r-reliable? The Firesteel C-Cannibal-Killer.”

  “We don’t have it anymore. Remember? I broke it off on that muskie.”

  He unzipped a pocket in his fly vest, pulled out a streamer box, and produced the fly in question. “Once again, Voilà!”

  “How . . . ”

  “I t-tied another one last night, when we stayed in that cave on the c-cliff. You woke me up, snoring, and I didn’t have anything better to d-d-do. The Might was bad, but it came out okay.”

  I took the fly and examined it. “The wraps aren’t as tight as they were on the original, and the whip finish looks like a booger. You’re losing your touch. Let’s just hope it has the same magic.”

  It did. On his third cast, stripping in slow and deep past the boulders where we’d seen them lying, Harry’s rod tip bent in a sudden arc and line ripped off the reel. “H-holy shit!”

  The steelhead ran him up the riffle, Harry stumbling and skidding over the rocks along the bank, then down it again. I saw bright, quick streaks across the bottom as the other steelhead cleared out of the pool. I could swear they were breaking the sound barrier. The hooked trout kept Harry sweating for fifteen minutes before he brought it in to his feet. It was a long, sleek, bright fish that glowed in the water like a silver ingot. Harry worked the hook free and held the steelhead facing upstream until it revived. “Y-you oughta feel this g-guy. He’s hard as a rock.” I reached down and the trout was gone at the first touch of my fingertips—flat disappeared, upriver to join its buddies.

  We moved down to another pool. It too held steelhead, but they looked hard to reach, so we continued toward the lake. Two pools lower, the bottom looked studded with them, like hobnails in the sole of a boot. My turn. I cast up and across toward the lie of what looked like the biggest one. He took on the first pass. I’d never felt such strength in a fish before, not even the muskie came close. Once again it was a footrace to keep the backing on the spool. I fell twice on the rocks but didn’t even feel the bruises.

  “K-k-keep your rod tip up!” Harry yelled, smirking.

  “Up yours,” I grunted.

  “N-now you know what it f-feels like.”

  A dirty gray herring gull swooped down over my head as I knelt to release the fish. When I looked up, the sky was full of them, white gulls and brown ones along with the gray, all screaming their lonesome cries. The air was colder here, I noticed, with that icy bite of the big lake on it. I was about to comment on it when the water at my feet jumped. A sharp crack followed, from upstream.

  “C-C-Curly!” Harry was pointing to the top of the riffle we’d just run. There the bastard stood, on the rocks above us, working the bolt of the Springfield. He was four hundred yards away. I could see the other canoe, nosed up on the bank. Doc sat in it, his face wrapped in bandages like the Curse of the Mummy.

  I popped the fly out of the steelhead’s mouth and ran for our canoe. Harry was there before me. Another bullet smacked off the center thwart, shattering it. Gayelord, who’d been nosing around in the shallows for crayfish, jumped in and dove under the tarp. I slung the rod into the Old Town and we shoved off, paddling up a froth.

  “We’ve got to get around that next bend. Right now!”

  “‘W-watch your b-back!’ she said. G-goddamit, we d-didn’t.”

  “Dig!” I yelled.

  Two more bullets hit us before we swept around the next bend. The first one holed the canoe just forward of where I knelt. The second ripped across my back, throwing me forward onto the duffle bags. A hit like a blow from a sledgehammer. It knocked the wind out of me. No pain, not at first, but a sudden eruption of fear that started my water. How bad was I hit? The paddle started to slip from my hands, and I only just saved it from going over the side.

  Then I came back to my senses, dug in again and kept paddling. They’d be after us in a minute. Our only hope was to get to the highway bridge and hope the truck driver was waiting for us. Maybe a cop would be parked behind him, writing him up for obstructing traffic. Fat chance. I could feel blood soaking into my waistband. Maybe we could get far enough ahead of them to pull over to the shore near the truck, break out the automatic weapons, take cover behind the bridge abutments, and turn Curly back before he drilled us both. Doc couldn’t help them much, he looked way too weak from his burns from what I’d seen.

  “H-how far are we from the highway?” Harry yelled back.

  “A mile and a half, maybe less. Hey, listen. Curly nicked me. In the back. I’m bleeding but I can’t see the wound.”

  He turned around, eyes wide.

  “No, no, keep paddling. You can’t do anything for me, and if it was bad enough I’d be unconscious.” Or dead, I thought. “I just thought you ought to know, in case I pass out or something. If I do, pull over quick and grab the BAR and the bandoleer. Then head for cover, a boulder or whatever. Leave the Tommy gun with me. I might be able to play possum long enough to kill the fuckers when they get within range.”

  “Shit.”

  “Hey, there’s no time-outs in this ballgame.”

  We swept into another bend. The river got faster here, and whitewater showed its teeth up ahead. Way off to the north I could see sand dunes, humped like camels in the hazy distance,
and a creamy line of breakers beyond them. Blueblack water. Gitche Gumee . . . . We were damned near there. The bridge might be visible once we cleared the next corner. There were empty shacks along the river here, gray boards, rusty tin roofs, tumbledown places, but one of them might provide enough cover for us to make a stand. I looked over my shoulder. No sign yet of Curly’s canoe.

  Then the pain began. Dim at first, no worse than a bee sting, but it widened and deepened with each stroke of the paddle. It was the twisting motion that did it. I should never have looked back that first time. But then I turned again. And wished I hadn’t. There was Curly, coming fast, less than half a mile behind us. Much less. Doc was slumped in the bow. His head was up and he was dipping his paddle in the water, but once for every five of Curly’s strokes. They were token gestures. No strength in them.

  When I turned to the front again, I felt woozy. Silent star-bursts behind my eyeballs, tiny ones but many of them. I was no better off than Doc. Worse, maybe. The bottom of the canoe was red now, a shallow pool of blood swirling with ice water, sloshing side to side with every paddle stroke. My khakis were soaked with the stuff. I was bleeding out . . .

  “There’s the bridge,” Harry yelled. We came around the last bend into the straightaway. “And the truck is there too.” His voice sounded faint and hollow to me. Over it I could hear or maybe feel a hollower, rhythmic pulse. My heart? No, it was the sound of the surf. Only a few hundred yards more to go.

  The driver—I remembered that his name was Ted, or Ned, or maybe Red?—was leaning on the bridge rail, watching us approach. Harry waved to him. He didn’t wave back, just looked at his wristwatch. ’Nuff said. He spit in the water.

  I must have blacked out then, just for a second or two, but the next time I looked up, the bridge was looming ahead of us, over us. We were centered on it, not heading in to the bank. The current was too fast to turn. I heard a faint, far pop and a bullet spanged off the concrete abutment. Ted or Red didn’t hear it. He had his back to us, showing his cool, looking out at the lake. We shot under the bridge, into momentary darkness, then emerged again—out into the turmoil of the lake.