The Last Run

by Todd Lewan

“Wiseass!”

  Morley said, “Bob?”

  “Yeah, Mark?”

  “Don’t let me go.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I don’t think I can swim anymore.”

  Out of nowhere a landslide of water buried them, then another, and countless others, sending them tumbling as if they were inside a washing machine. The water was very cold. They could hear the waves coming and sense when they were going to break but they never saw what hit them. As soon as they came up they took breaths and went down again. It was quiet underwater but each time they went down it was as though the ocean had peeled another layer of heat off their bodies. The ropes tying them together began to slip.

  BOOK FOUR

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The house sat back from the road at the end of Verstovia Street. It was a two-story Cape Cod, quite big by Sitka standards, and had gabled roofs over each of the upstairs bedrooms that gave the house a quaint, New England look. It had steel gray shingles with white trims and gutters and a white picket fence that closed in a big front yard. There was also a wraparound porch with a spoked, white-painted banister and white posts. Window boxes hung in a row along the banister. In the spring and summer the boxes always had cheerful pansies in them and, in the winter, after a storm, the bunting of freshly fallen snow.

  It was a roomy and fine house for any couple, though it could easily accommodate a family of four. There was a master bedroom upstairs and two ample bedrooms at the other end of a hall, three bathrooms, a spacious kitchen with an island counter for entertaining, an ample dining room, a utility room, a smokehouse off the two-car garage, a greenhouse out back and, his favorite room, a carpeted den with large windows decorated with lemon yellow cornices and drapes that looked out on the front porch. From the den on winter nights you could hear the wind coming in from the sound and whispering in the tops of the spruce trees outside, and if you went to the window you could see the moving shadows their branches made on the white, frosted lawn from the light of the moon.

  A man named Ted LeFeuvre, who was a captain in the Coast Guard, had rented that house and lived in it since his transfer to Sitka in June 1997, the month he had taken over command of the air station. After one has lived many happy years in large, family dwellings it is not always easy to make the transition to a bachelor’s apartment, and Ted LeFeuvre, who had always taken great pleasure in homemaking and entertaining company, did not want to give up having friends over for a meal or having out-of-towners stay a few nights in a spare bedroom.

  Sometimes he would invite guest speakers at the air station to stay over, or the boys from high schools around Alaska who were in town for a swim meet or a basketball game, or on rare occasions even his parents, who had already made the trip once from Los Angeles. On Wednesday nights he led a Bible study group and sometimes he would cook dinner for as many as fifteen of his fellow parishioners. He liked to prepare Cajun food for his guests, seafood jambalaya, red beans and rice being his preferred dishes, and he always derived a certain pleasure when his guests commented that his cheese nachos were bordering on being a bit too spicy even for the average Mexican palate.

  When there was no one to cook for he would come home from work late and fix up something easy —a can of green beans and salted broccoli, usually. As a rule he disliked microwave food —it always came out too bland and mushy—and most fast food, except for an occasional slice of pizza with vegetable toppings. Some nights he would stop at the Sea Mart deli on his way home from work and pick up one of those sterile premade salads and a few packets of dressing. He always thought that meals were, in their essence, occasions best suited for family or groups of friends. Preparing a meal in his big house merely for himself, he thought, not only was boring but also bordered on selfishness.

  Having lived nearly twenty years with a woman whose hobby was painting and etching, Ted LeFeuvre took care to fill his house with paintings and charts and photographs. He liked landscapes, particularly scenes of solitary cottages, or dark forests, and on nights when the house felt a little vacant he would stand and study a larger canvas on the wall of his den, which depicted a large oak tree standing tall and strong in a hazy, Georgia field, protected by a fence of barbed wire.

  He also hung a number of photographs of his son and daughter on the walls of the den and his bedroom, each showing a different stage of their development, and he dressed up end tables and counters and shelves with portraits of his parents, his brother before his skiing accident, his cousin and his cousin’s wife and children. There was but one reminder of his former wife on display and you saw it in a glass frame as soon as you entered the den. It was a little gift she had given him years earlier —white, crocheted flakes of falling snow, each flake in the shape of a teardrop.

  In the winter, when the northers blew and the temperatures plunged the house was kept warm and cozy by an iron stove in the den. The stove burned pellets of compressed sawdust, which looked something like rabbit food, only bigger, and it was very effective in heating both stories and much cheaper than it would have been to run the electric heat. Half the time Ted LeFeuvre would forget to refill the stove with pellets when he left for work in the morning, and he would come home to a forty-degree house. But once he got the pellet stove roaring it would take only a short time to make the entire house feel comfortable again. On especially cold nights, while waiting for the chill to leave the house, he would stand in front of the stove, listening to the norther blowing outside and watching the bright orange glow of the fat pellets burning.

  Most evenings he would sit in the rocking chair beside the stove, wrapped in a comforter, reading the Book of Matthew by the lamp on the heavy wood stand. Sometimes he would look up while he was reading to hear the chime of the brass pendulum clock he loved so much or the wind as it moved under the eaves of the house and sang in the wires outside. As he sat in the chair he felt far away from the wind, although, really, the wind was whipping at all of the gables and working to get in through the cracks of the storm windows and the screen doors. In the chair he could feel the warmth of the stove and sometimes he would remember the feeling of bouncing and cradling his baby daughter in his lap all those years ago when he had stayed home to care for his wife, who’d had a particularly rough time giving birth at the hospital.

  The pellet stove was a great thing in the winter and he relied on it and took good care of it through all of the coldest months. He hated the cold and the long darkness of the Alaska winter and the way memories could play tricks on you in the night, and the stove and his Bible helped him through it and kept him looking forward to the coming spring.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The first time Ted LeFeuvre’s children came to stay at the house was the week he moved to Sitka to take command of the air station. It had been arranged for the two of them to meet their father in Seattle and to sail together on the ferry up the Inside Passage. His daughter, Michelle, who was eighteen, had been quick to tell him that she would only be staying a week. She had a new job, she said, and couldn’t get time off. His son, Cameron, who was a year younger than Michelle, had invited a friend, Mark, along on the trip. Cam was still in high school but he was on summer break. He would be able to stay two weeks. Afterward, he would fly back to San Diego and spend the rest of the summer with his sister at their mother and stepfather’s house.

  He had offered to fly them all up to Sitka, but the kids had insisted on riding the ferry. The ferry will be cool. He reminded them it was a two-and-a-half-day boat ride. Were they sure? Dad, we want to go on the ferry. So he relented and bought four ferry tickets. The ship left at six-thirty in the evening. At eight-thirty they approached him in the stateroom, having not found a game room, casino, pool, bar or dance club. How long do we have to be on this ferry? They killed time together playing cards and telling jokes and catching up on all the insignificant news and scuttlebutt that parents find so interesting and teenagers so boring, and finally, after they’d spent more than fifty hours of seeing nothing but wate
r and tree-studded coastline, the boat pulled into Sitka’s ferry terminal a little after five in the morning. The outgoing base commander greeted them with the usual entourage of officers and had them driven to LeFeuvre’s new home on Verstovia Street. To the kids, the trip had been a bore, a complete waste of time; their father wouldn’t have traded it for anything.

  They had a fine time that first week. It was almost as good as it had been in the old days, before all of the sadness. They went for a long hike on a mountain trail together and spent an afternoon at Whale Park. They drove the Jeep Cherokee up Harbor Mountain Road until they reached the alpine level, more than two thousand feet above the sea. Another day they spent hiking along the banks of a mountain stream. The highlight was spotting an enormous brown bear splashing around at the top of a waterfall.

  Ted LeFeuvre was at the air station at six each morning and worked until midafternoon. The kids usually slept in, and he wanted to lose as little time as possible with them during the days. Sometimes he would pause at his desk to imagine the kids exploring around Sitka and visiting the harbors and the sights, and it gave him a warm feeling to know that he would be home soon and cooking up salmon in the smoker and sharing supper with them.

  The boys slept on mattresses in the bigger guest room at the end of the upstairs hall and Ted LeFeuvre’s daughter slept on a bed in the smaller room, and it was a lot less lonely sleeping when he could hear the children laughing and chattering while they watched TV at night. They were a little shy at first and much neater than they were by the end of their stay, but Ted LeFeuvre found he did not mind the mess. They left their beds unmade and sometimes he would see the pillows on the floor and their sneakers and clothes and nylon bags scattered about their rooms, but it did not trouble him. He had many precise habits, as one develops after years of living alone, but he was pleasantly surprised to find that it felt good to have the kids break them up. He realized he would have his habits and routines long after the kids had gone.

  Of the two children, it seemed to him that Michelle had gone the furthest away from him. She was tall, pretty, with long, wavy brown hair, her mother’s bittersweet eyes and a wide, electric smile that brought a room to life. Michelle had known about her mother’s affair before her younger brother and, as he discovered much later, several years before he himself had. She never lost an opportunity to take her mother’s side in an argument, and when she bridled under her father’s discipline she would always make a point of saying I can see why Mother left you. Once the divorce was final and her mother began openly traveling to New York to see her lover, Michelle was left behind on her own for weeks at a time, a freedom her high school friends considered a real coup. Ted LeFeuvre feared his daughter would become a little too wild and urged her to live with him in Los Angeles, where he was stationed at the time, but she told him with the terrifying flatness of a fifteen-year-old: Dad, I could never live with you because you have too many rules. Instead, her visits grew less frequent. Under the custody agreement, he was to pay fifteen hundred dollars a month in child support and was to see Michelle every other weekend. He was careful to pay the travel expenses each time Michelle made the trip from San Diego to Los Angeles, but he saw his daughter maybe ten weekends a year, if that. She would call sometimes a day before he was expecting her, and bow out of the visit with the patent line, Something’s come up and I can’t make it.

  But what really hurt was how his ex-wife had enlisted his daughter to spy on him—more precisely, on his checkbook. After one of his daughter’s visits he knew to expect a phone call from his ex-wife and to be peppered with questions about his church donations. Why do you always do that? You could give me the money.

  The boy was another matter. Cameron LeFeuvre was a copy of his father physically, reduced in scale and shortened. He was small and dark-haired, with his father’s bushy, black eyebrows, the same thin, wide-set eyes and angular, unfrivolous jaw. Cam was thoughtful and he had a sense of loyalty and was a quiet, respectful boy, although in repose his face had a mischievous look to it. He compartmentalized his feelings and, like his peers, had a defiant streak and tuned out talk that did not focus on cars, the beach or girls. After the divorce he moved with his father to a three-bedroom duplex in Redondo Beach outside of Los Angeles and they lived together until word came from command that Ted LeFeuvre was going to Sitka.

  The night before his ex-wife and her new husband were to take Cam back to San Diego, Ted LeFeuvre prepared a dinner of steamed broccoli and red beans and rice and chicken nuggets. Cam ate in silence. Ted LeFeuvre sipped his Dr Pepper and watched him, searching for something to say.

  All he could think of, finally, was, “So, there’s nothing I can say to get you to change your mind?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “You could bring Buck.” That was his son’s yellow Labrador, which he had raised from a pup.

  “No, Dad. No. I couldn’t.”

  “You know, I always prayed that your mother would come back.”

  “Yeah?”

  “We can’t always get what we pray for, I suppose.”

  There was a heavy pause, and then Ted LeFeuvre said, “Sure you don’t want to go to a godforsaken hole?”

  His son laughed.

  “You should never be afraid to change your mind, Cam. Especially when it comes to moving to a cold, dark, rainy, bear-infested—”

  “Dad.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ll miss you, too.”

  In that way he had lost his only son. A decision was a decision and a compromise was truly a compromise, and knowing all of this and having been taught all of the other pleasantries of divorce, Ted LeFeuvre was happy that at least the children could come to see the change-of-command ceremony in Sitka. If one week with your daughter and two weeks with your son is what you get, he thought, then that’s what you draw. Besides, a lot can be shared in fourteen days with the people whom you cherish above anyone else in this world. But why split up in the first place? You had better leave that one alone, he told himself. Be glad that you have two healthy children who know you and respect you and show some gratitude to the Lord that you were able to raise them for seventeen years, even if the last three brought you so much pain. They are fine kids, on balance, and they got some of her good qualities, along with some of her bad ones, but that is all part of it and nobody is so complicated that you cannot at least try to understand what makes them tick.

  He had always been able to view the world through rose-colored glasses and he normally coped with change and hardship by looking ahead. He was one who got more enjoyment out of planning a trip, looking ahead to the trip, than the actual trip. Perhaps that was a character flaw, a mechanism for self-preservation. But when it came to his children or his ex-wife, looking ahead did not seem to free him of the regret or the loneliness. He had learned to stop the guilt for missing the signs of trouble in his marriage, but there seemed no end to the regret and the loneliness, not even through prayer.

  Whenever his children were with him was like taking a vacation from the loneliness, or rather, the aloneness. He knew that each time the children came to visit they would open up new rooms in his heart for the aloneness to move into once they were gone. But there was nothing to do about that. It would be very empty and bad for a while, but no good would come from fearing it.

  Michelle caught her flight out to California a day after the ceremony. After she left it rained almost every day for a week. The mountains were misty and the wind raged out over the sound. Ted LeFeuvre worked hard and Cam and his friend took walks along Halibut Point Road to the ferry terminal and fished the bay there. One day Wayne Buchanan, the executive officer at the air station, took the boys out for a full day on his boat and showed them a spot he knew where the reds ran thick. They caught many salmon and cooked them in the smoker at the house.

  Then one morning Ted LeFeuvre put on his blues and packed the boys’ bags in the Jeep and drove them to the airport. The boys checked in and stepped through the me
tal detector. Cam turned, waved and mouthed, “Bye, Dad!” and then walked through the doors and into the boarding lounge.

  So they were gone, too, and Ted LeFeuvre eased the Jeep out of the parking lot and rode next door to the air station. Wayne Buchanan knocked on his office door.

  “The boys leave yet?”

  “I just saw them off.”

  “That Cam’s a good kid. Too bad he didn’t want to go to school up here.”

  Ted LeFeuvre looked out the window.

  “I guess you’re really going to miss them.”

  “Yes,” Ted LeFeuvre said. “I guess I will.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  His first year in Sitka, Ted LeFeuvre worked as hard as he ever had in the Coast Guard. It was not a large air station, as bases went. There were three hangars, a trio of helicopters, a runway, three landing pads, an operations center and, down the road, the gymnasium, officers’ club and barracks. But he had 150 men and women to manage, and Sitka was not easy on outsiders. One could get claustrophobic, with the rain, long winter nights and the creeping detachment that came with living in the middle of an archipelago with no road network, only water and more water. Even locals left the island in the winter for a couple of weeks in drier, sunnier Seattle—Seattle, of all places. Getting off the Rock, they called it.

  Truly, the country could be harsh on the soul and, knowing quite well how easily one could feel cut off from the world, Ted LeFeuvre took extra care to engage his staff consistently. He made a point of visiting the pits and machine shop at least once a week, not a common practice among his predecessors, and he enjoyed chatting with machinists, mechanics, janitors and the cooks. He routinely ate at the enlisted mess—he rather liked the food—and around holidays he hosted parties, albeit alcohol-free ones, for his officers. He took care not to go off on tangents, lock his door or spend all day on the computer. And yet he did not coddle his people or make excuses for them; he was the commanding officer, after all, and he could not allow himself to get chummy with subordinates.