The Run to Gitche Gumee

by Robert F. Jones

  “Frozen Chosin?”

  Ben nodded.

  “Oh shit,” Tony said. He nodded his head. “Right, then. We’ll take the ladies and lead the way in the Avon. Let’s saddle up and move out.”

  On the way downriver in the canoe Ben told me that on the MLR in Korea, after the breakout from Chosin and his stay in the Yokosuka Naval Hospital for frostbite, the Marines had conducted nightly forays into the Chinese positions. There were four different kinds of incursions, each with a separate mission and code name. A four-man body-snatching probe, aimed at retrieving either Chinese or Marine dead, was called a “Rolls Royce.” A combat patrol, usually squad strength but sometimes numbering thirty men or more armed with satchel charges and bangalore torpedoes, was a “Diesel.” An ambush party was a “Mercury,” and a recon patrol a “Cadillac.”

  “This little mission of ours is a Cadillac,” Ben said. “We’ve got to keep dead quiet, move slow, and think ahead. So I’ve been thinking.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Tony says there’s a big pond behind Cardigan’s place. One night when he was in there having one of his routine look-sees—Cora’s orders, Know Your Enemy—he noticed some long dark things swimming around on the bottom. He thought maybe they were sharks or muskies, but they could be our bull newts.”

  It made sense.

  Or at least it was worth the gamble.

  I said, “Maybe I’ll rig up that 9-foot 8-weight.”

  “Not a bad idea. If you can get one of them to take, we’ll have the proof we need.”

  I pondered a minute. What fly should I use?

  These salamanders were piscivorous—the old C.K., of course!

  “Did you bring along the Cannibal-Killer?”

  “Damn straight I did.”

  “Hand it over.”

  He fumbled in the duffel and tossed his flybox up to me, where I knelt paddling bow as usual. “The streamers are on the bottom in those long compartments.”

  There it was. I held it up in the last of the moonlight. White and red marabou saddle hackles for the wings, a touch of green peacock herl, black chenille body with silver ribbing, and an orange-dyed hank of bucktail for a beard—all tied on a needlesharp longshank 3/0 hook. I hooked it solidly in my hat brim. We were locked and loaded.

  After clearing Cora’s lower guard post, Tony shut down the outboard on the Avon and we paddled the rest of the way downstream, another ten minutes. The current was strong and fast but there was no whitewater. Then Tony flashed a hand signal and pulled in to the east bank. It was dark as a bat’s armpit by now but once we’d pulled the boats up into the woods my eyes adjusted to the gloom and I saw a faint, narrow trail leading inland. Ben told Jake to stay and guard the canoe. The dog eyed the guns with a melancholy look, sighed once, then obeyed.

  Mezzoni led the way. Ben was right behind him, then me with the rod case and the Bushmaster, the girls on my heels. Molly Bellefont, still woozy on her pins and kind of pale even in that dim light, wore a camera around her neck. Two of Tony’s young toughs brought up the rear. Their faces were smeared with matte black camouflage paint. They carried matte black Uzis to match. You’ve got to be properly accessorized for a quick criminal action. This was starting to feel like a war movie. A commando raid. I hadn’t had that sensation since I was a kid playing war.

  Then I placed it. Of course . . . the escape from Doc and Curly’s cellar.

  Only this time we’re breaking in, not out.

  We came to the edge of a clearing. Cardigan’s mansion loomed in the near distance. It was a tall stone structure, rather Gothic, with gabled towers rearing at either end. Lights gleamed from some of the casement windows downstairs but the rest were dark. There were stables out back, and what looked like a carriage house.

  Tony motioned with his hand—lie down.

  He crawled out through the brush and looked around. His eyes froze to the right and his head sunk slowly into the weeds. We heard footsteps, someone yawning, and a figure appeared. The guy was taking his time. The sweet smell of marijuana drifted with him. He had a headset on and I could hear the faint beat of taco rock on the still midnight air. A stubby little machine pistol dangled on a sling from his shoulder.

  Tony signaled one of his boys to crawl forward. The kid waited until the guard was past, then moved like a nighthawk. Something thudded. The kid pulled a cell phone from the night guard’s pocket. Tony, right behind him, threw the machine pistol into the woods.

  “Wait till they call you from the house,” he whispered. He glanced at his watch. “That’ll be in about ten minutes. Then say ‘Nada’—like N-A-D-A—and make fuckin’ sure to mumble it.”

  The kid looked up at him, trembling.

  Mezzoni caught the reaction. Nerves. He smiled. He laid a hand on the kid’s shoulder. “But what the fuck, Aldo? You know the drill.”

  He turned to us. “What’s next?”

  “You mentioned a pond behind the house,” Ben said. “We want to go fishing.”

  Tony stared at him for a moment, disbelieving. Then he shrugged. “Okay, yeah . . Korea,” he said. He pointed the way. Then he looked toward the house.

  “I gotta make sure those guys in there stay busy. See ya in a few minutes.”

  Bending low, Tony ran through the shadows toward the back of the house, headed for a junction box located between the first floor windows. Bent on deactivation no doubt.

  I jointed the rod and tied on the Cannibal-Killer, cinched it in the keeper ring. We ran toward the pond with Cora, Wanda, and Molly right behind us. Molly’s camera clinked against the buttons of her coat. Ben turned and told her to hold the damn thing still. Beyond the pond I could see an airstrip with a Lear parked and tied down. There was a helipad too, with a sand-colored Huey Cobra squatting on it. The decal on the hull read “Cardigan Enterprises.”

  The pond was dead calm. No frogs, no rises. Not even the ripple of moving fish cruising deep. Did bull newts generate wakes? I looked into the depths. No shadows moved across the bottom. I could see the dim shapes of rocks down there, big pale glaciated slabs. Tony must have been here when the moon was out. With the others crouched low behind me, safely to my left, I knelt on both knees and stripped out line, gauging the distance. The pond was about a hundred feet across. I worked out flyline with short high backcasts, low sweeping throws to the front—time after all was of the essence. The fly was a bit too heavy for my 8-weight Trident salmon rod and the C.K. had a tendency to lag on the foreward cast. I beefed up my strokes. Quick into a double haul . . . graphite works wonders . . . and shot the C.K. across the surface. It plopped down ten feet from the far bank.

  Ben crawled up and whispered, “Take your time, Hairball. Let it sink . . . ”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  The first retrieve drew nothing. Not even weeds.

  “You’re not deep enough,” Ben said. “Let it tick the bottom.”

  I threw ten yards to the left and let the fly sink until I felt it touch muck, then twitched the rod tip high and started stripping. Two pulls, then a stop, then three faster strips. I let it fall again, and picked up with a series of spastic, stuttering twitches. Stops, starts, stutters, adding a semblance of life and motion to the marabou hackles, all the way in.

  Nothing.

  Four more throws.

  Nichts.

  Zilch.

  Niente.

  Zip.

  “That’s six,” Ben said.

  I handed him the rod. He rolled the line, picked it up smoothly, and reached the far side of the pond after only one backcast. He stripped slow, very slow, hand-twisting the line, crawling the fly up and over the rocks. Twice it hung, and when I saw the rod tip bow, I thought he might have had a touch, but he threw some slack into the leader and twitched it clear.

  On his third cast, the line stopped halfway back and the rod bowed again, throbbing this time. “Gotcha!”

  But it was too small, no bull newt. When Ben stripped it in, it proved to be—of all things!—an outsized gol
dfish. About fourteen inches of long-finned, decorative carp.

  “Well, fuck me,” he said. “I thought these things dined only on glass shrimp and fish flakes.”

  “Carp will eat almost anything,” Molly whispered. “But the important thing to realize here is that both Andrias davidianus and A. japonicus feed on goldfish. Maybe Mr. Cardigan stocks the pond with goldfish to feed his pets.”

  I looked at Ben. “Want to try live bait?”

  “I haven’t fished bait since I was ten,” he said, “and I’m not about to start again now.”

  “Then let me try. I’m not fastidious.”

  “Three more casts and it’s all yours,” he said.

  Maybe it was the turmoil raised by the carp, maybe it was emanations from its lateral line, maybe it was the sweet taste of blood in the water—on his next cast Ben hooked something solid. Something big, and alive. The drag screamed, the leader hissed through the water. Like the first run of a huge northern pike. Whatever it was thrashed to the surface and rolled. In the dim starlight I saw mottled warty skin. And as it rolled again, short, stubby legs.

  “That’s him,” I said.

  “Molly, get your camera ready.”

  “Fuckin’ reel makes too much noise,” Ben said, glancing toward Cardigan’s house.

  “Well, subdue him then,” I told him. “That’s a Mirage fluorocarbon tarpon leader, abrasion resistant and good for anything up to eighty pounds.”

  He tried. For ten minutes he tried.

  “I can’t move him.”

  “Pump and reel.”

  “I’m trying. Maybe he’s under a rock.”

  “Tap on the butt of the rod.”

  “I tried that.”

  “Try it again.” He tapped. Nothing doing.

  “Did you see him when he was on top?” I asked Molly.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see legs?”

  “Indeed I did.”

  “Is it Andrias?”

  She hesitated, a true scientist. “I can’t say for sure until we have him up close.”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll have to go down there and fetch him out for you.”

  “But Doctor Taggart . . . ”

  I stripped to my skivvy shorts and waded into the pond. Ben smirked at the scene—a skinny, wrinkled, potbellied old man in his undies. Well, fuck dignity. Somebody had to flush the monster from his lair. The water was slimy but warmer than the air. I swam out to where Ben’s line disappeared into the water. Then took some deep breaths and dove, following it down into darkness.

  Night diving without a light and a face mask is unnerving under the best of circumstances. I felt my way down the line to a huge granite slab. Clouds of marl were settling around it. The line bent under the ledge with about six inches of shock tippet just showing. I pulled on it and something at the far end shook its head. I peered under the ledge but saw only murk.

  I had maybe a minute of air left in my lungs. Okay—now or never. Placing my feet against the side of the slab, I grabbed the shock tippet with both hands and heaved. A moment’s hesitation, and then the bull newt came boiling out straight at my face, jaws snapping. I dodged aside. Warts scraped the hide from my forearms and left side. My hand was wrapped in the shock tippet. He shot for the surface with me trailing behind him, flapping like the tail of some godawful Chinese kite. Why hadn’t I thought to borrow Ben’s K-Bar?

  I hit the surface and gulped air.

  But then the line slackened for an instant, the stiff Mirage fluorocarbon unbent, and the bull newt barreled straight back in my direction. I ducked to the side again, he brushed past me, and the leader unwrapped itself from my mangled paw. I sprinted for the shore. Cora reached down and helped me from the water. “Are you hurt?” she asked.

  “Nothing a hand transplant won’t cure,” I told her.

  Other creatures were roiling the surface now, attracted no doubt by the struggle. Were they all bull newts? It looked that way from the warts. Ben was cranking hard, pumping and reeling. He was gaining line. The bull newt’s struggles grew weaker, he rolled again like a big lake trout, trying to wrap the line around his body and with his sheer weight break it.

  “Get the gaff, Hairball.”

  “What gaff?”

  “Oh fuck, I didn’t bring it.”

  “Where’s your trusty K-Bar?”

  “On my left ankle,” he said, “in the sheath. What are you going to do?”

  “Remember the old Tarzan movies, Johnny Weissmuller stabbing crocodiles to death with the blade of his father?”

  “Too much Hollywood,” he said. “Maybe that’s why you stayed in California, to break into the movies.”

  I waded back into the pond, K-Bar in hand. “Get ready,” I told Molly. “I hope your flash works.”

  “Oops! I forgot to bring it from the lodge.”

  Oh hell, I’d have to kill it. Which I did, with one surgically perfect stroke to the base of the bull newt’s skull. It shuddered and died. You don’t slice eyeballs for a living without learning something about precision.

  Just as I hauled it up on the bank, though, a door opened at the back of Cardigan’s castle. Light flooded the backyard. An armed figure stared for a moment and then started shooting—single, hurried pistol shots that threw up dirt ten yards short of us.

  A machine pistol ripped nearby. The Bushmaster. It was Cora, who had picked it up and was firing back—but high. I heard her 5.56mm bullets spanging off the stonework. Chips flew everywhere. A second-story window blew in. “Run for it, guys,” she yelled. “I’ll cover ya.”

  I slung the dead bull newt over my shoulder like a bag of birdfeed—no, a sack of gold—and hightailed it for the woods. The others were hard at my heels. Tony and his men were waiting.

  Jake growled low in his throat as we neared the canoe. Ben spoke to him, “Good boy,” and the dog relaxed. All was well. But he’d heard the gunfire and seemed disappointed that all we brought back was an outsized skink.

  Tony and his boys had lingered on the trail to watch for pursuit.

  “Does anyone have a flashlight?” Molly asked. “I’ve got to get some pictures before this animal starts drying out. The few frames I snapped when that searchlight came on weren’t close to definitive.”

  Ben fetched the underwater spotlight from the canoe. Molly set to work.

  “It’s Andrias, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “Nothing else,” she said. Her motor drive clattered. “And judging by its size, it’s the Chinese species—davidianus.”

  “Hurray,” Ben said beside me. His tone was flat. “Now can we bid you ladies adieu and shove off downriver?”

  “What?” Cora said. “You’re leaving?”

  Wanda clutched at Ben’s arm, crest-fallen.

  “Well,” I said, “we made a vow to ourselves—and to Jake—that we’d reach Gitche Gumee before the snow flies. We’re old guys, all of us. If we go back with you now to Shikaree, we may never get away. There are trout and salmon to catch, game birds still to fly.”

  “Wild birds,” Ben added.

  “But who knows?” I said. “When we’ve fulfilled our quest, found our grail or whatever you want to call it, we may be back.”

  Tony appeared. “They’re coming,” he said. “Six of ’em with heavy artillery. We better be taking off, ma’am.”

  “Say goodbye to Florinda for us,” Ben said. “Tell her the roast beast was terrific.”

  Molly wrapped up her photo op. Tony Mezzoni slung the carcass of the bull newt into the Avon. It thumped limp on the floorboards. They boarded the raft and shoved away from the shore. The 40-horse Johnson lit off on the first pull.

  By that time Ben and I were already deep into the main current, hellbent for Gitche Gumee.

  12

  TRÈS RICHES HEURES

  Just below Cardigan’s castle we hit a run of whitewater, but when we’d cleared it, the river broadened and ran strong and fast into the starbright north. Ben remembered this long sweet stretch. N
o dangerous water ahead until dawn. We were already below the spot where Stony Creek drained Twodoggone Lake into the Firesteel, and we agreed that it would be unwise in these circumstances to detour back up there. That muskie would just have to wait. Maybe forever.

  I reached for the horn and blew us some getaway music . . .

  “Keep playing as long as you like,” Ben said. “With this kind of a current all I have to do is steer.”

  What the hell, I thought, we weren’t tied to any schedule. We’d left behind the world of nine to five, along with Cora and Wanda. The only hours that concerned us now were dawn, high noon, and sunset. Prime, nones, and vespers, to put it in canonical terms. In the God-fearing world of long ago, prayers were chanted to mark these hours. We’d observe them in our own neo-pagan fashion—psalms of fin and feather, the sacred rites of trout fly and birdshot.

  There were ducks on the water, mallards, mergansers, a few early teal, but their season wouldn’t open for a week. Geese were legal, though, and we saw a few rafts of Canadas sculling for cover along the brushy shore. Jake perked his ears at their alarm calls. “Later, boy,” Ben assured him. “Come daylight.”

  An owl swooped out of the darkness to check on us, then hooted once and swept off on silent wings. I picked up on that note and blew a long random series of interlocked chords that grew into a number I thought of as “Night Bird Boogie.”

  We ran past Crusoe’s Island in the dark, no sign of the Airstream or that ’49 Hudson. Maybe Peter Martin and his druggie pals had gotten off the island, or maybe their bones were mouldering in the leaf duff of half a century, along with the frames of their car and trailer. Not a bad life they’d drifted into, though, cruising America for kicks. The four bees: boo, bennies, bourbon, and bebop. Work only when you need money for gas, or better yet panhandle, then move on down the road to a fresh new scene of scruff and nonsense. Wandering mendicants. Try anything once. What were they seeking? Enlightenment, I guess. Whatever that means. The trouble was they hadn’t a clue to how the world really works. Or anything in it for that matter. They couldn’t even build a campfire.

  We passed Marlow’s Leap—a footbridge now crossed the gorge here. A user-friendly place these days. Daylight was coming on. By full dawn we were nearing Chemango, the spot where we’d saved the Stoat entourage with our daring incendiary raid on the old Mobilgas station. Nothing remained of the town, not even the dock. We pulled over to the bank and tied off to a snag. “Let’s take the shotguns,” Ben said. He pointed to a stand of aspens where the old general store once stood. “Jake needs a workout before breakfast and I’ll bet we find woodcock in there—real ones, in touch with the soil, not those phony European birds with their fake standards and perverted values.”