Northwest Angle

  Stars lay on the sky like sugar tossed on an onyx plate. The moon, frost-colored and nearly full, was at their backs. The islands rose black all around them, their outlines visible from the way they blotted out the stars.

  They’d been intent on their responsibilities, on keeping all eyes toward the lake in front of them, and for a long time they had not spoken. Rose was tired, tired physically and mentally, tired of considering all the tragic possibilities they might have to face. She’d lapsed into a long, silent prayer.

  “I keep trying to figure that storm,” Stephen finally said, without looking away from the broad yellow oval where his flashlight beam met water. “I never saw anything like it before. Like a tornado except it was everywhere.”

  “Straight-line winds,” Anne said. “We had a storm like that once at St. Ansgar. A bunch of trees on campus blew down. A lot of damage in town, too.”

  “I wonder how far the damage goes here,” Stephen said. “All the way to the Northwest Angle, do you think? And back to Kenora?”

  “That’s something we probably won’t know until we dock,” Anne said.

  The progress of the houseboat, though measured, created a small breeze that felt cool against Rose’s face. Her eyes hurt from the intensity with which she scoured the lake and the darkness ahead. Mal had said that, as soon as they hit open water, he’d try to give the houseboat more throttle. Until then, it was best to proceed with utmost caution.

  “Do you think they’re okay, Aunt Rose?” Anne asked.

  Anne stood to her left. Rose tried to remember what that side of the boat was called. Starboard? Port?

  “I really think that, yes,” Rose replied, trying to keep the exhaustion out of her voice.

  Stephen stood to her right. He turned his face toward her sharply. In the moonlight at his back, half his features were brilliant, the other half in shadow. “Why?” he challenged.

  “It’s simply what I choose to believe.”

  “What if they were caught in open water?” he threw at her. “They’d never make it.”

  “Then they weren’t caught in open water,” she said calmly. “They made it somewhere safe before the storm hit. Until I’m proven wrong, I’ll believe the best.”

  “You actually think that way?” His tone suggested that she was more than a little foolish.

  He had good reason to be skeptical of her philosophy. Almost two years earlier, when his mother had disappeared on a charter flight over the Rockies during a horrific snowstorm, they’d all held to an impossible hope that she would be found alive. It had been Stephen’s father who’d pursued the truth and brought it, like a slaughtered animal, home. All of them, Rose thought, in their own ways, were still reeling. And now this. This pushing through the dark again.

  “Stephen,” Anne said, “it will be all right.”

  Her voice was gentle, but the strength in it was undeniable, something annealed in the fire of her heart. Several years earlier, when she was eighteen, she’d stood toe-to-toe with death during the rampage of a high school shooting. Bloodied, she had cradled the dying in her arms, had walked out of that hell a different person, had followed a road many would have called pointless. She was preparing to be a nun.

  “Okay,” Stephen said, though he didn’t sound fully convinced. “But say they didn’t make it all the way to the Northwest Angle. Where would they have put in?”

  “There are probably a thousand islands they could choose,” Anne replied.

  “How would we know which one?”

  “A signal fire?” Rose suggested.

  “Maybe they simply waited it out and then went on to the Angle,” Anne said.

  “No,” Stephen said. “They’d have come back to check on us after the storm passed.”

  He was right, Rose knew. But nothing of the dinghy had been seen or heard since Cork and Jenny motored away hours ago.

  “So, they took shelter on an island,” Rose said, “and they’re stranded, and the boat’s damaged. Okay?” She looked toward Stephen.

  This seemed to be a scenario he could accept. He nodded. “The fire would be difficult,” he said, thinking it through. “Everything’s wet. Did they take matches?”

  None of them knew.

  “He’s got gasoline in the outboard,” Stephen went on, as much to himself as to the others. “He could soak a bunch of the wood and all he would need would be a spark to get it going. Once he did that, he would just have to keep feeding it.” He looked north toward a long island that was like a black caterpillar on the shimmering surface of the lake. “We could probably see it a long way off.”

  “Or someone could,” Anne said.

  “What do you mean someone?”

  “I’m sure there are folks out searching for people lost in the storm. The Coast Guard, the sheriff’s office, the provincial police.”

  “And locals giving a hand,” Rose threw in.

  Stephen scanned the empty horizon. “Why haven’t we seen anyone?”

  “It’s a big lake,” Rose said. “But they’re out there, I’m sure.”

  She realized that her words weren’t just for Stephen. They helped her hold to her own hope.

  They were all quiet again. Again, for a long time.

  From the east came a sound like a buzz saw working through wood. All their heads turned in that direction, and six eyes scanned the liquid silver that was the lake.

  “A boat?” Anne asked.

  “Yeah,” Stephen said. “Powerful. Look, there it is!”

  He poked a finger into the wall of night, pointing directly toward the moon, where a broad avenue of silver lay across the water, and where, for a few moments, the black silhouette of a boat was visible.

  “A cigarette boat!” Stephen cried.

  “What’s a cigarette boat?” Rose asked.

  “A long, fast powerboat,” he replied. “They’re called cigarette boats because they’ve been used a lot to smuggle cigarettes into Canada. They were designed to outrun the boats the Coast Guard and customs people have.”

  “How can you tell it’s a cigarette boat?”

  “Gordy Hudacek’s father has one. I ride in it all the time on Iron Lake. They have a different look and sound to them, and, man, can they fly.”

  The boat was gone in almost the same instant she’d seen it.

  “I can’t tell which way it’s going,” Rose said.

  Stephen listened. “North,” he said. “It’s headed away from us.”

  “I don’t see running lights,” Anne said. “Aren’t you supposed to use running lights at night?”

  “Not if you’re smuggling,” Stephen said.

  “But it’s going so fast in all this . . . this garbage,” Rose said, indicating with a sweep of her hand the debris they were slogging their own way through.

  Stephen shrugged. “Desperate, maybe.”

  Desperation, Rose thought. That was something they all knew about. She listened to the sound of the boat growing distant. It was good to know that they were not alone on the lake. She said a little prayer for whomever it was so desperate that they risked speeding across treacherous water, prayed for their safety.

  Then she prayed once again for Cork and Jenny.

  TWELVE

  Jenny said, “Where are you going?”

  The moon had been up for an hour, and the island was like a charcoal etching, black shapes against white light.

  “Back to the cabin,” Cork replied.

  “Jesus, what for, Dad?”

  Cork stood bent at the edge of the little shelter, peering out at the blasted landscape. In the moonlight, it seemed to him to be an island made of bone. He spoke in a whisper in order not to disturb the baby.

  “If I’m going to build a raft to get us off this island, I’ll need some things I don’t have now.”

  “Like what?”

  “Rope, for starters. I saw a clothesline at the cabin.” He stepped outside into the clear night and brought himself upright.

  Jenny moved away from th
e where the baby lay on the blanket, left the shelter, and stood beside her father. “Isn’t there something else we could use? Tear strips from our clothing or something.”

  “Rope’s better,” he said.

  “What else?”

  He was looking at the lake now, at the tall islands around him, black as char. The powerboat had gone away, far enough that the sound of the engines had faded to nothing. Cork hoped that somewhere in the hard dark he might see a light—a campfire or lantern or flashlight—something that would indicate they weren’t completely alone, though he knew in his heart that was exactly what they were.

  “What do you mean ‘what else’?” he said.

  “You said ‘for starters.’ ”

  “Oh. Maybe a flashlight.”

  “Or maybe a gun,” Jenny said, nailing his real thought. “You told me you’d never touch a gun again.”

  He faced her. In daylight, her hair was so blond it was nearly white. When she was a little girl, there were times that her windblown hair had reminded him of the silky fibers of milkweed. Her mother’s hair had been the same color and texture. Jenny was like her mother in many ways, Cork thought. Lovely, smart, perceptive. But her mother was dead, and Jenny was very much alive, and Cork meant to keep her that way, whatever it took.

  “I told you I’d never fire a gun again at a human being,” he said.

  “When you were sheriff, you told me, and I quote, ‘Never aim a firearm at someone without being fully prepared to use it.’ End quote.”

  “Journalists,” he said. Then he said, “Yes, I’d prefer to be in possession of a firearm at this moment.”

  “I’d prefer that, too,” she said. She looked deeply and sadly into her father’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  “Not your fault,” he replied. “I’ll be back, and then we’ll throw something together to float ourselves off this island.”

  She unscrewed the cap on the Ball jar, took a handful of matches, and gave them to him. “There are more candles in the cabin, in a cigar box,” she told him. She also handed him the knife. “You’ll need this to cut the clothesline.”

  He kissed the top of her head, threw a glance at the child, and left. He began to make his way to the other side of the outcropping, where he intended to follow the shoreline until he reached the cove near the cabin.

  The moon had risen to a point roughly forty-five degrees above the horizon, so bright that he could see much of the detail, if not the color, of those island features within a few dozen yards of his position. Whenever he glanced back toward the outcropping to gauge his progress, he found his shadow floating behind him on the water, a familiar companion in all that was so strange.

  He did something dangerous as he slogged along. He thought. Not about his current situation, which he’d already spent enough time considering that he had a working plan. He was thinking about Jenny and how startled he’d been when he saw her with the baby sucking at her breast. He’d stood paralyzed for a moment, but it wasn’t because of the odd circumstance. What shocked him was that for a brief instant it wasn’t Jenny he’d seen. In the dark, with her white-blond hair and her slender body and her protective pose, it had been Jo, Jenny’s mother, holding the baby in her arms. And now Cork couldn’t shake the confusion of emotions that vision had brought with it. Paramount among them was a relapse into grief, which he thought he’d put behind him.

  Grieving wasn’t only useless, it was dangerous, especially now, when he needed to focus. From grief he slid easily into anger, all directed at himself. What had he been thinking, bringing everyone he loved here, isolating them at the end of the earth, putting them in such great danger? This was his fault, all of it. And all because he wanted his family to be happy. Christ, how stupid, how selfish was that?

  He tried to shake off his black mood with some useful thinking. He considered Anne and Stephen and Rose and Mal, imagining what their situation might be. He thought about the anchorage of the houseboat when he and Jenny had left. He visualized its orientation with regard to the approach of the storm. He decided that someone on the boat would have seen the monster front sweeping across the lake, and they would have steered into the bay of the little island and tied up somewhere in the lee of the ridge. And if they were even only a little bit lucky, they would have emerged from the fury in good shape.

  That’s what he wanted to believe, decided to believe.

  And if that were true, then they would probably try to get Jenny on her cell phone, and when that didn’t work, they’d radio Young’s Bay Landing on the Northwest Angle to find out if he and Jenny had arrived safely to pick up Aaron. When they had their answer, they would begin motoring toward Young’s Bay, keeping an eye out along the way, maybe in conjunction with a search mounted from the Angle itself.

  And if all this were true, then a signal fire would be the best way for him and Jenny to be found. But a signal fire could alert the wrong people. The man in the cigarette boat, if he was responsible for the young woman’s death, or if not him, then whoever it was who’d inflicted the cruelties.

  A gun, Cork thought. If only I had a gun.

  Which was a thought of enormous and uncomfortable weight, because Jenny was right: Cork had taken a vow never again to raise a firearm against another human being. In too many ways, his history was written in blood. The blood not only of enemies but more especially of those he loved. He’d lost his wife to a bullet. He’d lost his father that way as well, and also Sam Winter Moon, the man who’d taken the place of his father in so many ways. He’d lost friends and allies. He’d seen the carnage of mindless, brutal killing in the streets of South Side Chicago and in school hallways and in what should have been the heaven of the great north wilderness he called home, violent death that, even when it was perpetrated in the name of things sacred, ended the same pointless way.

  And so, he’d given up his firearms and promised himself that his part in the killing, which would doubtless continue in the world just fine without him, was over.

  How very strange, he thought now, his mood still bleak, that circumstance kept bringing him back to the place where his hand ached for the grip of a gun. The destinies of some men and women, he’d decided long ago, were bound to the sulfur stink of cordite and the iron odor of blood. He’d tried his best not to be one of them. Yet here he was again.

  At the cove, he turned inland and, with the help of moonlight, made his way through the web of branch and timber to the damaged cabin. The door stood open. Inside, moonbeams shot through the shattered roof and gave definition to what would otherwise have been utter dark. He carefully navigated the labyrinth of the boughs thrust down from the fallen pine. At the tumble of logs from the destroyed back wall, he peered through the opening where he’d first spotted the dead girl in a pool of blood. A splash of bleached-white light illuminated the area. He saw clearly the pooling of dried blood, but the woman’s body was no longer in it.

  He found the cigar box with the candles and lit one with a kitchen match. He searched the cabin thoroughly, looking for the firearm he hoped like hell he might find. When he’d satisfied himself that the woman had none, or if she had it had been taken, he blew out the candle and headed back outside. In the moonlight, he located again the clothesline he’d discovered when he first explored the area. He cut the nylon where it was knotted around the aspen saplings, coiled it, and started back toward the shelter to rejoin Jenny and the baby.

  Before he reached the little cove, he turned and took a last look at the ruined cabin. He felt tired beyond belief, heartsick with an aching weariness that came from the understanding that he was deep into another chapter of his life that would probably be inked in blood.

  Half an hour after her father walked away, Jenny left the baby sleeping in the shelter and climbed the outcropping, where she sat among the ragged, twisted cedars that remained. Tough little trees, she marveled. They’d wedged their roots into the crevices and held tenaciously to what seemed solid rock. They reminded her of Manidoo Gihiiganze, wh
at many white people called the Witch Tree, a gnarled cedar that had been growing for centuries out of the bare stone above Lake Superior near Grand Portage and was sacred to the Ojibwe, sacred in part because of the impossibility of its location. Many things existed where they should not, she thought, and she considered the baby’s mother, alone on this island. How long had she been here and why had she come? Was this place refuge or prison? Had the man in the powerboat been friend or keeper?

  Anishinaabe blood ran in Jenny’s veins. Her great-grandmother had been true-blood Iron Lake Ojibwe. Her father was a man of very mixed heritage, with strong ties to both the Anishinaabe and white communities in Tamarack County, where he’d lived almost his entire life. Jenny, however, had been raised with a decidedly Anglo sensibility. She never denied the Ojibwe part of her ancestry, but neither did she much celebrate it. She’d been to powwows, but they remained exotic to her. She was more at home with a folk festival or a poetry slam. She had friends from childhood who were Ojibwe, but with her they’d usually shared their lives on other, more general levels. Still, alone atop that rock, bathed in moonlight, she closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself as the young woman in the cabin, focusing not just on the slender thread of Ojibwe blood that precariously bound them but also on the more common grounding of their gender.

  She experienced two incredible emotions. First was an overwhelming, almost consummate joy that came from the company of the child. She recalled the feeling when the baby had sucked at her breast, how unifying it seemed and how she’d never experienced anything quite like it before. And second, she felt a deep isolation, a loneliness whose origin she couldn’t explain.

  She opened her eyes and saw a small, flickering light in the cabin. Her father, she figured, searching for a gun. In the dark of that isolated island, even a small light made a great impression. She turned her eyes toward the southwest. The stars there came right down to where sky met earth.