I saw Janey in town with two of her kids.
“You here for a while?” She did not look haggard anymore. Her eyes were lit with unexpected intensity and brightness.
“Just for a few days.”
“Too bad,” she said. “You left money for my children.”
“You’ve been misinformed.”
Her lips narrowed. “Buzz told me and priests never lie.”
Damn him, I thought. I hadn’t wanted her to know. It was purely a gift for someone down on her luck.
“You got thrown out by the Russians,” she said. “Did they hurt you?”
I didn’t understand why, but the Soviets had announced that I had been expelled for national security reasons, which was abject bullshit. It had been in papers all around the U.S. and I had been called by too damn many reporters wanting to talk about the situation. Following my instructions, I had refused all interviews and kept my mouth shut. It made me very uncomfortable to be a news target. And I was paranoid enough to feel pretty certain that the CIA and Soviets had made some sort of a deal. I was kicked out; no specifics would be discussed on either side. All the U.S. government had said was that the expulsion was “unjustified.”
“Don’t believe everything you see on TV. Nothing is the way it seems.”
Janey cocked her head. “Is it anywhere? You be careful wherever it is you’re running off to this time.”
I had never really had a real conversation with her before. Usually it was hi and how are you. As I watched her walk away with her kids, I wondered why I had never noticed she was pretty and felt an unexpected surge of interest in her. That’s the last thing she needs, I thought. It was just as well that I had decided to go to Canada.
•••
I drove my rental car east and crossed into Canada on the ferry at the Soo, then continued east along the north shore of Lake Huron, eventually turning north on the serpentine concrete of Highway 108, rising into the craggy granite of the Canadian shield, and suddenly there was the town on the hill, lit by the sun, a beacon, foreboding in its austerity and unexpectedness.
Along the way I gassed up in Blind River. The station attendant had long black hair and yellow teeth. “What do people around here think about uranium?” I asked.
The man grinned. “It’s like sex, eh? You let her, she’ll bake your balls?” Uranium as insatiable female. I wondered if bomber pilots called their nukes she.
“I say let’s cook the sand niggers,” the attendant added.
In the recent Arab oil crisis everywhere you went, somebody was someone’s scapegoat-of-the-moment. In Russia they had Georgians and Chechens. And American reporters.
“Think about the nice profit you’re making.” Gas prices were three times their usual in the U.S. and even higher here.
“I look like I own the bloody place?” the man replied.
Rough edges on the edge of rough territory. Cause and effect? Complementary, to be certain.
Elliot Lake did not fit my mental picture of a boom town. I had seen mining towns in Montana and Minnesota and they were gray, cluttered, and haphazard, last-leggers even at launch, born to perish, a future married to a capricious body of ore and world economics. Elliot Lake looked like the centerfold for City Planning Illustrated, its houses built in neat neighborhoods on spokes off the neat town center and all of it thoughtfully built above Elliot and Horne Lakes so that most of the inhabitants had a view of both. The sight made me laugh. How many times as a journalist had reality shattered my preconceptions? This is why correspondents corresponded, there being no substitute for being there. In the distance, to the northeast, I saw the head frame and surrounding metal buildings of one of the mines, the whole complex rising out of the gray-green forest like a medieval castle, an impregnable keep anchored in hot rock. I wondered how dangerous it was to live on top of uranium.
I took a room at the Algoden Hotel. The sleeping rooms were above a long hall, advertised as the Biggest Beer Parlor in the World but smaller than the average Russian nightspot. I shared the long bar with a wrinkled man with all his fingers gone at the first joints. He held a beer bottle the way Satchmo lifted his horn.
Just over a decade had passed since the confluence of the discovery of uranium in the town and the U.S. government’s massive need for ore to process into nuclear weapons. But fortuitous events have a way of disconnecting. In 1955 Elliot Lake was formed into a political unit and a mining camp appeared. It was a trailer town at first with mud roads and nonexistent sanitation. Double-digit dysentery swept the miners two years later and there was no hospital until a year after that, but the boom was on; there was ore to be dug and money to be made and workers and opportunists flowed in. Trailers were replaced by simple bungalows. Churches were built. Per capita liquor sales were the highest in Canada. Income, too. Whores arrived on buses via Toronto from Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit, and Chicago. The government sent agency workers.
Ontario’s political parties sent in their hacks to organize and unions battled each other for the right to represent the miners. The Mine Mill Smelter Workers had been shown to be communist sympathizers and were booted from the CIO and CCL; the Reds battled the United Steel Workers of America. Both unions hauled prospective brothers to Sudbury, which was the closest town of any real size, for food, whiskey, and union-paid prostitutes. Mine Mill had four organizers, the Steel Workers eight. Numbers and Cold War sentiments won out. The rise of Elliot Lake to economic prominence was a familiar story in the Canadian bush and had a predictable ending. With more than twenty-five thousand people packed into an area where there had been only a few hundred Ojibwa Indians before, the U.S. government suddenly canceled orders and, in the perpetual search for security, transferred its needs to uranium producers on American soil. In six years the population of Elliot Lake plummeted to six thousand hardy souls. Most of the mines had closed. A few remained open. But the boom was bust and miners and opportunists moved on. Those who remained were not gregarious. The fingerless man stared into the neck of his bottle.
A woman came into the bar and sat two stools away. She had smooth, tanned skin that shone like brass in the bar’s light. She wore a sleeveless red blouse with the collar turned up. Her dark hair was cut short and straight and she had long legs and small feet tucked into red sandals with short heels.
“You’re definitely not a glowworm,” she said in my direction.
“Pardon me?”
“You’re not a miner.”
“Afraid not,” I said.
“You lack the eyes,” she said.
“How’s that?”
“Yours aren’t desperate enough. You have more the look of a salesman. What’s your line?”
“Words,” I said.
She gave me a half grin and called an order at the barkeep, a short matron with sparse white hair.
“No sass, lass, or I’ll trim your sails before you’re outta port,” the bartender snapped back.
“Is there job security in peddling words?” she asked.
“Until they run out.”
“Like the mines,” she said, raising her glass. “There’s not a lot of call for words out here. Actions count.”
“I’m looking for a man.”
She shot me a quick questioning glance. “For business, not pleasure, one hopes.”
“It’s strictly business. His name’s Lockwood Bolt. Do you know him? He’s supposed to live in Elliot Lake.”
She stared into her libation, cogitating. “Green flint,” she said.
“Come again?”
“Bolt loves his rocks and the rarer the rock, the more he loves it. There’s green flint out near Flack Lake. He’s got himself a whole hill of it, maybe all there is in northern Ontario. You want Bolt, you should try out that way.” She sipped her drink, calculating. “You have business with Bolt?”
“Words,” I reminded her.
“How far is it to Flack Lake?”
She sighed. “Twenty miles by crow flight, more in reality. The road’s a twister.”
“Bolt’s not popular?”
“He’s a killer,” she said.
“Figuratively speaking?”
“Not if you live among us.” She looked at me, put money on the bar, and slid off the bar stool. “My name is Pierrette,” she said. “If you want to talk, I’m available.”
“Where?” She wrote her address and phone number inside a matchbook cover and left it in front of me.
I was up early and sought the library. Every planned town had one.
The keeper of the town’s books was middle aged with chemical red hair piled high on her head and bright red nail polish. “Morning,” she said, more a statement of fact than a salutation.
“You wouldn’t happen to have any of the works of M. J. Key, would you?”
“Key? Who would Key be?”
I gave her a very short version.
She tilted her head sharply left and locked her eyes on me. “I should imagine you might ask that question and receive the same answer in every library in the province.”
“You don’t have Key?”
“This institution, such as it is, serves to enlighten, but true erudition is beyond our scope. There is nothing so hopeless as a bibliophile among barbarians and I would hasten to underline that final word. For work such as your Mr. Key’s, one would need to forage the rare-book emporia of New York or San Francisco. There’s no Key here, nor will there ever be.”
“Except in the private collection of Lockwood Bolt.”
Her head snapped to the other side. “Mister Bolt is among us, but no longer of us, if you take my meaning.”
That made two for two. Bolt was definitely not a popular guy in Elliot Lake.
“You know about the Oxley collection?” I offered her the clipping from the Times, but she only glanced at it and let it sit.
“Civilization is thin and population sparse this far north, but not absent. We subscribe to the belief that rural and isolated need not mean ‘ignorant.’ I read the Times from both sides of the Atlantic. And the Globe and Mail. Of course, the post is slow, so I view these more as history than current events.”
“Is Bolt well known as a book collector?”
Her face remained impassive. “Lockwood Bolt is a pure capitalist. His focus is pecuniary to the exclusion of all else and I have no time to waste discussing the likes of that one. If your interest is Bolt, you should pursue your business directly with the man and good luck to you on that count. Good day, sir,” she added, abruptly ending our little conversation.
North of Elliot Lake was what Canadians referred to as the bush, meaning where the tracks ended and, near as I could tell, so did everything else. The roads went from paved to stone dust along a rocky spine. There were no houses. Some lakes were marked with crude signs. Flack Lake was one of them. I found two roads to the water’s edge, one curving down to a boat launch, and the other one leading to a black steel gate guarded by a large man in a yellow rain slicker standing in a gatehouse behind a red iron barricade. A forested hill lay behind the gate, off to the side of the lake. Green flint, I guessed.
“I’d like to see Mr. Bolt.”
“It’s a long queue,” the man in yellow said. “Got an appointment?”
“It’s serendipitous that I’m here. I think he’ll be glad I stopped by.”
There were blackflies crawling on the man’s face. A trickle of blood ran down his cheek. He did not react.
“Well, that’d be a first,” he said. “Get an appointment.”
“How do you suggest I go about doing that?”
“Do I gotta tell ya everything?”
Elliot Lake was quiet at night. Perhaps radium in the bedrock sapped rambunctiousness. I dined on a soggy beef Wellington at a café, had several beers, and went to bed early.
Early the next day I went to find Pierrette Rouleau. Her directions took me south on 108, then east on a crushed-stone road to a small white house with no grass around it. Visqueen was taped over the windows to keep out winter breezes. She came to the door red eyed and squinting.
“You,” she said, her face deadpan. “The word seller. Are you still looking for Bolt?” The door was cracked open and her face peering out. An invitation to come inside was conspicuously absent. She was far less welcoming than she had been in the bar. Perhaps a morning visit wasn’t what she had in mind.
“I found him.”
“But?”
“I didn’t have an appointment and he won’t see anyone without one.”
“He’s like that,” she said. “He’s not exactly what you’d call social.”
“You know him?”
She shook her head. “No and I don’t really care to. What’s your interest in Bolt?”
“Books,” I said.
Raised her eyebrows. “Are you some kind of investigator?” I heard bemusement in her voice.
“No, not those kinds of books. Books about a certain subject.”
“I never thought of Bolt as the reading type.”
“I need to get in touch with him.”
“He doesn’t let strangers in. In fact, he doesn’t let many people get near him.”
I fished a twenty-dollar bill out of my pocket and held it up. “So who do you know that he knows?”
“Are you one of those Americans who thinks money’s the answer to everything?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“If you take it.”
She smiled at me with flashing eyes and started to swing the door shut, but I got my foot wedged in.
“I’m sorry,” I said, stuffing the twenty back into my pocket. “Can we start over?” I saw her tongue press against the inside of her cheek. “I’m a reporter and I have been following something for a long time. Bolt bought some books that could unlock some answers for me, but I need to get to him and I need help.”
“I suppose you’d better step inside,” she said after a long hesitation.
She wore a heavy red flannel robe and floppy blue slippers. The house was furnished but not decorated. She poured coffee for me, disappeared for a while, and came back dressed in jeans and a gray sweatshirt with a fresh face and light makeup.
“You don’t live here,” I said.
“No?” Bit of a smile, which I read as encouragement. “Now you’re a detective.”
“No homey touches, no eau de personality.”
She eyed me with suspicion. “You’re sure you’re not a cop, eh?”
“Words,” I reminded her. “I’m a reporter for a wire service.”
“After Bolt.”
“Interested in his books.”
“You know his story?” she asked.
“The barest outline. He made a wad on uranium.”
“That’s true as far as it goes.” She warmed my coffee and poured her own. Her skin seemed even darker than in the bar. Long fingernails, well cared for.
“How far does it go?”
“To the root,” she said. “He’s made his money, the bloody magic bundle, and now he’d like to ruin it for the rest of us.”
There was no need to prompt her; she had a story to tell. “Bolt originally drifted up from Sarnia,” she said. “Which makes him barely Canadian. He fled to the bush. There are men like him everywhere up here. Misfits, dreamers, drunks.”
“Women too?”
She raised a brow and granted an almost imperceptible nod of assent. “Chapleau, Timmins, Porcupine, all the places where there were mineral strikes; he seemed drawn to ore like a deer to salt. He learned a bit along the way, enough to look, but not quite enough to find on his own.”
“But
here he did find.”
“Yes and no. In the late nineteen-forties a couple of mineral cruisers from the Soo found radioactive rock down by Quirke. A few years later a geologist from Toronto got interested. It was a puzzle. The rock was radioactive, but there was no uranium in the samples. Eventually the geologist figured out that the weather or something made the ore sink deep. This was all kept very hush-hush. They decided there had to be uranium, and a lot of it, so they organized a secret operation. They flew a hundred men into the area from the north, even had lawyers with them, and for a month they staked claims and almost nobody knew a thing was going on until the claims were filed. By then they had tens of thousands of acres all to themselves.”
“You said ‘almost nobody.’”
She smiled. “Wordman. You listen carefully. There was an American banker with a cabin on Quirke Lake. I think he was from Ohio and he came up every summer on floatplanes to fish, enjoy the outdoors. Turns out that the cabin was smack in the middle of some of the richest ore deposits and, of course, there was no way for the secret stakers to avoid the American’s place. The banker was a good man. He fed the stakers and became their friend. He knew something was up but didn’t press them. The day before the claims were filed the stakers told him their story. He went out and did some of his own quick staking and put together his own investment group and they all made a bundle.”
“How does Bolt fit in?”
She smiled again. “Bolt had no real money of his own back then. But he was a bit of the phantom of the backwoods. He turned up at various places and times, often unexpectedly. The American banker used to bring his family to the lake. The banker’s wife made friends with an Ojibwa woman who lived up the Serpent River in a cabin with her prospector-trapper boyfriend.” Pierrette Rouleau looked at me. “When her boyfriend was out, Bolt would stop by.”
“Hanky-panky.”
“Exactly. The woman liked a bit of variety in her bed. She told Bolt about the strangers. Bolt knew rock, and he knew something was up and started watching them. He figured it out and did some staking of his own right in the middle of where all the action was. It could’ve turned out to be worthless, but it didn’t. He had nine claims, all prime. Talk about lucky.”
The Snowfly Page 26