by Ron Corbett
Yakabuski was big for a Polish kid. Six-foot-four, more than 230 pounds by the time he was sixteen. He towered over his schoolmates, his cousins — everyone in High River, pretty much. It was assumed by most that he would join the High River police force after high school, like his father, or take on with O’Hearn, like his uncles, where his size and last name alone would pretty much assure he would be running a bush camp before he turned thirty.
He did neither. Not many Poles from the Upper Springfield Valley had wanderlust, but Frank Yakabuski was the rare exception. He wanted to see the world, and so he enlisted in the army the day after graduating high school, a light infantry battalion garrisoned out west, about as far from the Northern Divide as possible. There are officers yet serving in the Third Battalion who claim he was the best light infantry soldier they’d ever seen. An utter natural. His stamina was legendary, winning him every Ironman contest he entered at the garrison. In the field, he could go days without food or water, track anything, predict what the weather was going to do almost to the minute. In hand-to-hand combat, he had no peers. He was the first one in his battalion chosen for tours in Bosnia and Afghanistan, was seconded to a United Nations quick response team, and got written up in dispatches because of it. For “Heroism” in the Pashwan Valley, which is as good as it gets for Dispatches, although the specifics were left vague.
It seemed Yakabuski could go anywhere he wanted in the army. Yet he mustered out after eleven years. No good reason ever given to his family. A year later, he was living in Springfield, working for the regional police. He was quickly seconded again, this time to a federal task force set up during the biker wars in Quebec. Yakabuski was a star recruit, as no one knew him in Montreal or Buffalo, and when he grew out his hair, put on a leather jacket, and stopped smiling, he looked the part. One big, mean mother biker.
Yakabuski kept jigging the hook and tail, looked around his ice hut, and began to laugh, imagining Papa Paquette sitting there beside him, fishing for ling. Papa hated everything about the outdoors. Like most bikers. He used to call Yakabuski a bush-boy, and Yakabuski called him a Crescent Street dandy. Until Yakabuski testified against him. Then the head of the Popeyes motorcycle gang had other words to describe his former friend. Yakabuski had been undercover nearly three years. When he returned to Springfield, he was transferred to major crimes and made a senior detective.
Springfield would never be home to him. It was a northern city of nearly a million people, built where three rivers came together in a low, meandering valley that collected, because it was the low point in the valley, all the flotsam, stray logs, and lost souls within five hundred miles. Springfield was the ultimate catch basin. A hopped-up, biker-torqued, mills-running-all-night, jingle-jangled crossroads on the edge of North America’s great boreal forest. Yakabuski had grown to both love and fear the city.
He pulled up his line shortly before midnight and put the board over the hole. Nothing. Not so much as a bite. Two nights earlier, the ling had been running so well he had thrown back more than a dozen. He thought about that a minute, then scolded himself for being silly. That was just old bush-camp nonsense, believing that a bad fishing trip, if it happened right before a journey, was the sign of bad travelling ahead. Superstitious nonsense. Besides, even if it had been true once, no one believed in portents or signs anymore.
. . .
The call came in to a throwaway cellphone almost three thousand miles from Springfield. The man who answered sat on a lounge chair beside an infinity pool with a view of the Gulf of Mexico. He was middle-aged, in good shape, with thick, bulbous arms covered in tattoos, legs the size of fence posts. He went by many names, but the most common was Cambio. He waited, and after a while he heard a voice say: “We may have a problem.”
Cambio didn’t speak. Kept staring at a cruise ship as it dropped anchor in a small bay, the foredeck speckled with tourists in their brightly coloured vacation clothes. When he was a boy, there had not been a single hotel in this village. He didn’t consider himself an old man, but he was starting to think like one, already missing the way things had once been.
The man on the other end cleared his throat and said, “Some people have been killed outside town. Squatters. The cops are on their way.”
Cambio shifted his weight on the lounge chair and watched a tender bringing the first of the tourists to shore.
“Was it you?” he asked.
“What? No. Fuck no. We had nothing to do with it.” A longer pause this time, the man who’d placed the call clearing his throat and taking several deep breaths before continuing. “It wasn’t us. I swear. We don’t know what happened. They were just squatters. No one fuckin’ knew ’em. We’re just hearing about it. The cops are coming tomorrow.”
The tender pulled up to the wharf. Cambio fantasized briefly about an RPG round hitting the bow, could see in his mind’s eye the explosion, the fire, the plumes of smoke afterward. No more tourists. As simple as that.
“Squatters?”
“That’s right. They were living by an abandoned bush camp about five miles outside town.”
“It wasn’t you?”
“No. I swear.”
“Does our friend in Springfield know what’s happened?”
“Yes. I’ve already told him. I wanted to make sure you knew, too.”
“You do not think he would tell me?”
“I’m not sure. That’s not what I’m saying. I just thought you should know.”
“All right. Don’t do anything. Stay indoors. Tell me what the police are doing when they get there.” Cambio hung up and scratched the underside of his chin with the phone for several minutes, wondering if he was being lied to. He wondered about it most of the day.
Just before dusk, he punched a pre-set number on his phone. When the ringing stopped, he heard the sounds of a bar. The clicking of pool balls. The laughter of drunken men. But no one spoke.
“I may need you to go to Ragged Lake,” said Cambio. “You should get a crew ready.”
In a nightclub in Springfield, a man put his cellphone back into the pocket of his winter parka, smiled, pushed back his hair, and ordered another quart of beer.
CHAPTER FIVE
The traffic snaking into Springfield that morning was what you would expect to find in any northern city in mid-February. Late-model sedans with salt stains etched around the tire wells. Minivans and pickup trucks. Cube vans with a metallic tradesman sign stuck to a panel somewhere. Occasionally a long-haul lumber truck, with logs stacked eight high, so tall the sun was momentarily blocked, casting the small knot of cops by the side of the highway into shadows.
The two cops with Yakabuski were young, maybe the youngest in the Ident department, which made sense to him. Heading to the Northern Divide in the dead of winter — that was an assignment senior Ident cops got out of by not answering their phones late at night. The two constables were called Buckham and Downey. Local boys — Donnie Buckham so local that the town they were setting out from that morning was named after his family. Buckham’s Bay.
The Springfield Regional Police had four Polaris snowmobiles, and they were going to be using the three of them being unloaded from a cargo trailer parked nearby. There wouldn’t be much patrolling on the snowmobile trails for a few days. But that happened from time to time. There were many places in the Springfield policing district that weren’t easy to get to during the winter, and the sleds were moved around.
“I got to tell you, Yak, this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.”
Yak looked at the young constable and tried to remember his first name. He was the taller of the two. Maybe a year older. “What doesn’t make sense?”
“Heading up to Ragged Lake because of a phone call. We don’t even know if a crime has been committed, is that right? We get a phone call from some bar, and we’re on our way to the Northern Divide?”
Matt. The shorter one was Donnie. Bot
h spoke in Valley accents, with clipped consonants and downward inflections at the end of their sentences, rarely registering surprise, rarely lilting. Yakabuski imagined them growing up in mill towns along the Springfield, the sons of mill hands, the grandsons of mill hands, young men who would be working at a mill right now if mill jobs still existed. But they didn’t. So they became paramedics. Firefighters. Cops. Both had hair cut so short it reminded Yakabuski of the hard fuzz you find on kiwis.
“Ragged Lake is our jurisdiction for major crime, Matt. Been that way, I’m told, since the High River police detachment was shut down. It’s a pain in the ass, I know.”
“It’s more than a pain in the ass. We’re going to be gone two days, at least. Can’t someone check it out before we go all the way up there? At least confirm there’s been a crime?”
“There’s no one to send.”
“Yeah, come on, Matt, lighten up,” said Buckham. “Look at these machines. They’re prit’ near brand-new. This is going to be a blast.”
“I don’t mind a sled trip,” said Downey. “I just don’t like wasting my time. Does this make sense to you? We’re the guys checking out a call from Ragged Lake? Why don’t we check out the dark side of the fuckin’ moon on our way back?”
“It’s our call,” repeated Yakabuski. “Let’s quit wasting our time and get going.”
“Fuck. Can’t that tree-marker send us a photo or something? I bet you it’s all a fuckin’ joke.”
“Why don’t we get him to fill out the police report, too?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying, Matt.” And with that, Yakabuski gave the cop an angry look. “We can’t ask that tree-marker to investigate. Even a little. This could be a homicide case with no one in custody. Do you know what you’d be asking that kid to do?”
The men unloading the snowmobiles had stopped talking and were now staring into the forest, as though they had just seen an animal. Downey was staring at his feet. Buckham was looking around, trying to find something to stare at. None of them knew Yakabuski well. Only by reputation. The man who brought down Papa Paquette. He was a big cop. He was annoyed. They kept staring.
Taking advantage of the unease, Yakabuski said, “Come on, let’s go. I’d like to be at that cabin by mid-afternoon.”
. . .
The Springfield to Portsmouth Line had been built in the early twentieth century by lumber baron James Rundle Bath, who’d wanted a railway line running through the Springfield Valley and then down the Northern Divide all the way to Lake Superior. His plan was to bring timber and newsprint to market in the American Midwest. At the time the rail line began construction, in 1903, Bath was the third richest man in British North America. The rail line became a testament to hard work and the folly that can ensue when one man accrues a king’s riches.
“I’ve never been on the S and P in the winter,” said Buckham, settling himself on the seat of the Polaris and turning over the engine. “My dad used to fish Lac Claire from time to time and we’d take a truck up. Never was on the train.”
“You weren’t missing much,” said Yakabuski. “The truck was probably quicker.”
Originally slated to be finished in three years, the S and P took more than a decade to complete. Not a foot of track along the Northern Divide was laid without blasting. Not a mile of laid track made sense when you looked at a map, if you simply wanted to go as quickly as possible from Town A to Town B. The route was dictated by what Bath owned, a meandering path through unsettled land, from bush camp to bush camp, timber right to timber right, until almost surprisingly the train rounded a corner, cleared the forest, and pulled out onto the shores of Lake Superior.
The day after the rail line was finished, Minnesota, Michigan, and North Dakota slapped a twenty-five percent duty on imported softwood, and Bath never brought a board foot of wood to the American Midwest. It is said the lumber baron never complained, never tried to fight the duty, and never seemed particularly vexed by what had happened. By then, Bath was the second richest man in British North America.
“When did you have to use the train?” asked Buckham.
“My dad liked to fish Lac Claire as well. He was a cop and he had a special rail pass. I was on the train quite a few times when I was a boy.”
“Can’t imagine it was ever busy.”
“It was in the spring. You’d get the Sports coming up from the States on their way to the lodges. Some hunters in the fall.”
The fishing lodges were the first to close. One by one, although it took only a decade before they were all gone. Little Joe Lodge. Arrowhead. The Northern Inn, which was owned by Bath himself and had dinnerware made by Royal Doulton, using a pattern only slightly different from one used by Queen Elizabeth II during formal state dinners. The lodges could not compete with the auto parks, motels, campgrounds, and good highways that arrived in the North Country in the mid-sixties. Could not compete with the wave of working-class families that could suddenly pitch a tent right next to a lodge and be out on the lake fishing next to some industrialist from Pittsburgh.
The mills shut down next, the sawmills closing first, no longer able to make money shipping cut wood from the Northern Divide when softwood forests were being planted and replenished by the tens of thousands of hectares down south, and long-haul trucks could get timber to market within hours. After that, the pulp and paper mills shut down. After that, the folly was also shut down, following more than a decade of what was little more than on-call service. O’Hearn was the last company still using the rail line to ship newsprint from its Ragged Lake mill, when it had enough orders.
The rail line sat there for a long time while people waited to see if the mills would reopen. Then, five years ago, the ties were pulled and the bed was turned into a recreational path, one used by hikers and cyclists in summer, cross-country skiers and snowmobilers in winter. Thanks to Bath’s circuitous route, by setting out from Buckham’s Bay, the cops would cut more than two hours from their journey, although it was less than a thirty-minute car ride from Cork’s Town. By going off trail and bushwhacking from Kowalski Lake to Palmer’s Junction, they might save another two. But they were still looking at a six- to seven-hour snowmobile journey.
There had been a storm the day before, and nearly eight inches of fresh snow was on the old rail bed. The world had that talcum powder freshness to it you get sometimes after a winter storm. All three cops took deep breaths of cold air before Yakabuski turned his snowmobile toward the first trail marker, a triangular piece of tin painted red and nailed to the trunk of a cedar around two hundred yards north.
CHAPTER SIX
The cops drove past the second-growth cedar and scrub pine surrounding Buckham’s Bay, then a string of old homesteader farms, travelling beside stone fences that had been protecting bad land for nearly two centuries. When the sun had inched above the treeline, they branched away from the Springfield to follow the Matagami, a tributary that ran true north. Before long, the cedar gave way to hardwood, a few leaves still clinging to the trees, waving in the wind like badly faded flags. The cops drove past Cobden and Grimsly, then the ghost town of All Bright, settled by Mormon missionaries in the late 1890s, come all the way from Salt Lake City to build an agrarian commune on the backside of the Northern Divide. They’d left ten years later, destitute and faithless, having suffered the fate of most who tried to farm this land or were afflicted with blind faith. The missionaries caught the train finally to Springfield, where the women found employment in brothels and the men were killed on sight because of the clothes they wore. All that remained of All Bright when the cops passed that morning was the skeleton frame of an old wooden silo and some stone windrows.
They left the rail line to travel the backcountry of Wilco, hooking up with the Highland Hiking Trail and running beside that for more than an hour, climbing until they reached the top of an escarpment so high a
nd so steep there were only bushes and small shrubs growing. Lakes appeared far below them as if in some distant land. Whispery patches of mist made it seem as though they were travelling above the clouds, and all three cops were grateful when they got off the escarpment and started the descent into a valley of white pine, a dense old-growth forest with tree trunks as large as the hulls of wooden sailing ships. They travelled in shadows cast by the giant trees, shivering in the sudden cold. When they reached the shore of Kowalski Lake, they cut across an ice road to reach the tiny hamlet of Palmer’s Junction.
Palmer’s Junction had been a fur trading post, then a Bath work camp during construction of the S and P. It crossed the Buffalo-Montreal Railway line on the northern shore of Kowalski Lake and was still a functioning railway yard. There were a half-dozen permanent homes in the hamlet, along with some mobile trailers for work crews, three large metal garages, and a gas pump. The gas was intended for only BMR work vehicles but was sold to anyone who drove up and asked for it. It was an understanding people had when living this far north. The men who pumped the gas at Palmer’s Junction were a quickly moving secession of soon-to-be-pensioned brakemen, crippled up engineers, and bad drunks.
“Don’t get many cops here,” said the old man working the pump that morning, and it didn’t sound like a complaint. “Where you boys heading?”
“Ragged Lake,” said Yakabuski.
“Why you have to go all the way up there?”
“I’ll tell you on the way back.”
The old man shrugged and didn’t bother asking another question. There was smoke coming from two of the homes in the hamlet. In one house, a drape moved back and forth while the cops got gas. Nothing moved in the other. When it came time to pay, the man brought out an old credit card machine and etched the back of Yakabuski’s card with a finger that looked as black and hardened as a chisel.