Purgatory Ridge

  LePere listened. He heard it, too. A sound like the distant buzz of a summer cicada. A boat somewhere above them. Where exactly, LePere couldn’t tell. Abruptly, the sound stopped. Bridger shined his light upward. He looked like a man hanging at the end of a luminous icicle. He gestured emphatically, urging them to surface. LePere shook his head just as emphatically. He had only a few minutes left, and he intended to use the whole time for the purpose that had brought them. He turned and started again down the hull, ignoring the angry banging of the knife against Bridger’s tank.

  His own Ikelite pierced the dark ahead of him. He took only a couple of minutes to reach the place where the hull ended suddenly in ragged metal. Slipping over the lip, he shined his light into the huge cavern that had been the hold of the ore boat. For a long moment, he hung suspended in the mouth of memory. The hold was empty now and black. But on that night a dozen years before when LePere stood at the edge of the sinking bow section, crying out Billy’s name, the hold had been full of smoke and fire. LePere had stared into the belly of a beast, and the beast had answered his cries with its own deafening scream of rending metal. He’d watched, paralyzed, as the beast tried to mount the deck where he stood, tried to get at him, to crush his bones. Many times after that, in the lonely dark of a drunken night, LePere found himself wishing bitterly the beast had succeeded.

  The beam of Bridger’s light swung into the hold beside his own. Bridger signaled toward his watch. They didn’t have much time. Using their lights, they began to inspect the plating along the edge of the opening. About halfway down the hull, Bridger pointed to an area of metal that appeared gouged, bubbled at the edges, and he gave LePere an enthusiastic thumbs-up. LePere turned on the camera and drifted slowly down, pausing to let the camera linger on those areas where Bridger indicated. Very soon—too soon for LePere—Bridger pointed upward. Time to surface. LePere checked the gauge on his regulator. The needle lay at 500 psi. Bridger was right. They should head up. LePere ignored him and kept at the work. Bridger grabbed him and yanked him away from the hull. He jammed his hand upward vehemently. LePere could guess what he’d have said if he could speak. But they were onto something, and there was so much more to film. He shrugged off Bridger’s hand. With a disgusted gesture, Wesley Bridger washed his hands of his partner, turned away, and exited the cargo hold. LePere was alone in the great empty dark.

  Although he was angry with Bridger for a moment, he knew the man was right. And he knew, too, that to jeopardize his diving companion was a selfish and ultimately cowardly thing to do. He turned off his camera, pointed his Ikelite where Bridger had gone, and followed.

  He was thinking in an excited way about what he’d captured on the film, but he didn’t think it long. As he swung under the ragged lip at the entrance to the hold, he felt himself pulled back, like a dog on a leash. Some part of his gear had snagged on the sharp teeth of the broken, twisted metal that surrounded the mouth of the open hold. He tried to turn back but found he couldn’t. He imagined his air hose, hooked on a razor-sharp sliver, ready to be severed if he pulled too hard. Reaching back, he tried to feel what was hung up, but his camera and light encumbered him. He realized he was breathing hard. At that depth every breath took several times more oxygen from his tank than at the surface. He could feel the panic taking control. Stay calm, he told himself. He swung his light over his shoulder but couldn’t turn himself to look. He strained to reach back, to feel the problem, only the camera got in the way and his thick gloves made his hands too clumsy. He let go of the camera and watched it drop slowly into the dark below him, then he took a precious few moments to peel off his gloves. Immediately the frigid water made the muscle and bone ache. He felt along his air hose, then his tank. Nothing. What the hell was hanging him up?

  He checked the gauge on his regulator again: 300 psi. Even if he freed himself now, there wasn’t enough air left to make a safe, slow climb to the surface. His only hope would be to inflate the vest he wore as a weight compensator and shoot himself upward to the ten-foot marker for decompression. There’d be hell to pay in a lot of ways, but at least he’d be alive.

  Then the beam of another light struck him full in the face. Wesley Bridger maneuvered behind him, and a moment later LePere was free. They swam quickly up the hull. At the cable, they started toward the surface. Bridger stayed beside him, holding him back when he tried to go too fast. At thirty feet, LePere motioned toward his tank, then made a slashing motion across his throat, indicating that he was out of air. Bridger pointed toward his own mouthpiece and gave him the “okay” sign. They held at ten feet, sharing the last of the air in Bridger’s tank. Finally they surfaced and climbed aboard the Anne Marie.

  LePere shed his mask and gear and turned to his diving buddy. “Thanks, Wes.” He offered his hand gratefully.

  “Forget it.” Bridger accepted LePere’s hand. “Christ, you’re freezing. Where are your gloves?”

  “Had to get rid of them. The camera, too. I’ve got to go back down.”

  “Not today.”

  “I’ve got to get that camera.”

  “It’s not going anywhere. One close call in a day is plenty.”

  The late morning was hot, the sun bright. Although it felt great standing on the deck of the Anne Marie, breathing in the sweet, plentiful air, LePere couldn’t help thinking about the evidence he’d captured on film. He wanted it in his hands.

  “What kind of SIT are we looking at?” he asked, speaking of the time interval required on the surface before he could safely make another dive.

  Bridger had turned away and now knelt at the portable compressor they’d brought to fill their tanks for a second dive. “I said forget it.” He stood up. “We couldn’t go back down even if I wanted to, which I definitely do not. Somebody took the filter off the compressor, Chief. They were probably hoping you’d go down again. Wanted you to breathe dirty air. I told you those rich sons of bitches would do more than just watch us. That camera of yours must’ve made ‘em nervous.” He scanned the lake, but the white launch was nowhere in sight.

  “We’ll come back tomorrow,” LePere said.

  “I already told you. I’m in a big poker tournament down at Grand Casino Mille Lacs tomorrow. We can do it another day.” Bridger glanced at him. “Ah Jesus, Chief. I can read you like you’re thinking in neon.” He stepped across the deck toward LePere, who’d never seen on Bridger’s face a look so serious or afraid. “Promise me, God damn it. Promise me on your brother’s watery grave here that you won’t dive alone. Promise me, Chief.”

  The lake was dead calm. Over it hung a high pall scented with the vague smell of smoke. The sun was white, and it lit a pale fire on the lake all around the Anne Marie. John Sailor LePere looked at these things, then at Wesley Bridger. He smiled calmly and said, “I promise.”

  11

  THAT EVENING, as she backed her Toyota from the driveway of the house on Gooseberry Lane, Jo took note once again of Jenny’s attire. Black silk blouse, short black skirt, black stockings, black beret. Somehow, she’d acquired glasses with stern black rims.

  “You look like you’re going to a funeral in a Greenwich Village coffeehouse.” Jo turned up Center Street, heading toward the library.

  “I don’t want her to think I’m a kid.”

  “There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being sixteen and liking her book.”

  “I love her book, Mom.” Jenny clutched the novel to her breast. “She writes with such a deep understanding of tragedy.”

  “I suspect that’s because she’s lived with tragedy, Jenny.”

  “To lose the man you love, and so mysteriously.” Jenny stared down at the dust jacket of Superior Blue. The cover art showed the dark blue of Lake Superior curving away beneath a menacing blue-black sky. Caught at the edge of earth and air, as if trapped in the mouth of a huge blue monster, was a small sailboat with an empty deck.

  “Believe me, Jen, tragedy’s more appealing in the abstract than in the reality. It makes a good read, but i
t’s awful to live through.”

  “Do you think there’ll be a lot of people?”

  “If I know Maggie Nelson, she’ll make sure people turn out in droves.”

  Two dozen chairs had been set up in the meeting room of the Aurora Public Library. By the time Jo and Jenny arrived, all the chairs had been taken. Along with half a dozen other late arrivals, Jo stood at the back of the room, Jenny beside her. Most of the audience were women, but a few men had come.

  “Mom, there he is,” Jenny whispered. “The guy who talked to me in French yesterday. The one who went to the Sorbonne.”

  She pointed toward a young man standing against the wall on the other side of the room. Jo pegged him to be in his early twenties. A thin blond mustache dusted his upper lip. He wore scruffy jeans and a white T-shirt that wasn’t exactly clean. Jo recognized him, too. She’d seen him only that morning being interviewed by a newsman at the tent city on the Iron Lake Reservation. He’d spoken ill-advisedly then. She hoped he didn’t have any other ill-advised notions at the moment and was there only because he admired Grace Fitzgerald’s book.

  Maggie Nelson stood at the front of the room beside a table on which sat a display of copies of Superior Blue. Grace Fitzgerald was seated at the table, and next to her a boy of nine or ten, with the same honey-colored hair as she. The author wore a light green blouse, probably silk. A small gold cross hung on a thin gold chain about her neck. She was a striking woman, even more so because of her nose, a prominence that resembled a raptor’s beak and that dominated an otherwise soft-featured and lovely face.

  Maggie Nelson introduced the author. After polite applause, Grace Fitzgerald said, “First of all, I’d like to thank Maggie for hosting this event. I’d also like to thank so many of you for turning out this evening, although I suspect some of you are here mostly because of the wonderful food waiting for you afterward, courtesy of Fairfield’s. Thanks, Jackie.” She gave a brief wave to a slender, dark-haired woman standing at a table filled with trays of cookies and exotic-looking bars. “And finally I’d like to thank the Friends of the Aurora Library for sponsoring this event and so many others like it.”

  She sent a smile in the direction of Jo, for Jo headed that organization and had been the one who’d first approached Grace Fitzgerald with the invitation. Jo had liked the woman immediately and immensely. She found her intelligent—which she’d expected—and also gracious and full of wonderful humor. More important, she felt a kind of kinship with Grace Fitzgerald. In a town like Aurora where not even a dozen years of residence and work on civic organizations were a guarantee of acceptance, she felt as if she’d found someone who could be a friend, someone who, like her, might always be an outsider.

  The book, the author explained briefly, was the story of a rich young woman who fell in love with a poor young man. Over the objections of the woman’s powerful father, they married. The young man finally won the father over with his intelligence and integrity and his obvious love for the man’s daughter. A child was born. Life was good. The future looked perfect. Then one day the husband sailed off, as he often had, for an outing on Lake Superior. He never returned. The sailboat was found, adrift and abandoned, but no trace ever of the man who’d sailed it.

  Grace Fitzgerald read an excerpt, a scene in which the woman stood on the shore of Lake Superior. It was a cold winter day, months after her husband had vanished. Snow spit from a gray sky and gray waves washed at her feet with an incessant voice that was “the bleak whisper of a bleak forever.” It was the moment she wrapped her heart around the cold truth: He would never come back to her. The voice of the water called to her. She considered the black unknown of death, something that seemed at that moment far better than the stark cold air that sustained her. She teetered, her foot poised to take that longest of steps.

  Grace stopped reading. The room held its breath. But Grace Fitzgerald did not go on.

  “I’d be glad to answer any questions,” she said. “If you have any.”

  A hand went up from one of the chairs near the front. “Ms. Fitzgerald—”

  “Call me Grace.”

  “Have you had any movie offers, Grace?”

  “Honestly, I have no intention of letting Hollywood have my story. I’m sure they’d find a way to slip in car chases and exploding buildings.”

  Jo was surprised to see Jenny put up a hand. “Are you really related to F. Scott Fitzgerald?”

  “Absolutely. He was my grandfather’s cousin. I’m sure that’s where I get whatever literary talent I have. And just in case you’re wondering, I got my nose from my mother’s side.”

  There was general laughter, polite.

  “Grace,” Maggie Nelson said. “You’ve written one of the most beautiful books about a man and woman in love. I guess we all know it’s based on your own experience. Does Karl ever get, well, jealous of how you feel about your first husband?”

  Grace Fitzgerald shook her head slightly. “They were good friends. Karl’s been very understanding that way.”

  “Ms. Fitzgerald, I have a question.”

  It was the young man from the tent city on the rez.

  “Yes?” The author smiled encouragingly.

  “Your current husband rapes the land for his living. He slaughters the forests. He destroys the future for us all. You write about the death of one man. How about the deaths of thousands of other living things?”

  Maggie Nelson stepped in quickly. “We’re here to discuss other issues.”

  “The trees have no voice. For them, there are no other issues.”

  “You’re not going to have a voice either in just a minute,” someone up front called out.

  The young man’s face was red, burning with a fierce passion. He moved forward, talking quickly now. “The woman you just read about is thinking of killing herself. Your husband and those like him are killing us when they kill the trees—”

  A woman stood and moved to block his way. Jo knew her. Paula Overby, a very large woman with easily enough bulk to squash the young man like a boulder on a beetle. “My husband puts food on our table cutting timber. He’s no killer, you little—” She held herself back from finishing.

  Jo, who was more than sympathetic to the cause of Our Grandfathers, found herself irked by the young man’s intrusion and irritated that there seemed nowhere anyone could go anymore to escape confrontation. She was also worried that such tactics did more harm than good.

  “That’s all right.” Grace Fitzgerald left the table and walked to the young man. She put a finger to her lips, looking at him closely, thinking. She was a woman with great presence, something Jo noted and appreciated. “I understand how you feel. I share your concern for the environment, I really do. My husband and I don’t see eye to eye on this issue. A lot of issues, actually. But you know—what did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t. It’s Brett. Brett Hamilton.”

  “You know, Brett, I’d like to ask you to use a different venue to express your concern, because tonight, we’re just here to have a good time. Have you read my book?”

  “No,” he admitted.

  “It’s about losing what we most love. So I do understand how you feel about the trees. I’d be more than happy to talk with you about them, but not tonight. Okay?”

  She smiled, reached out, touched his shoulder.

  He was silent.

  “I think it’s time for refreshments,” Maggie Nelson said. “Thank you, Grace. She’ll be signing up here for all of you who brought books.” She slipped quickly between Grace Fitzgerald and the young man, took his arm, and with gentle force, guided him from the room. He didn’t resist.

  Jo and Jenny found themselves near the end of a line that formed for Grace Fitzgerald’s signature. When they reached the author, she smiled at them warmly. “Hi, Jo.”

  “Hello, Grace. I’m sorry about the disruption.”

  “What disruption?” Her eyes, a brown so light they were nearly golden, fell on Jenny. “This must be the writer
I’ve heard so much about.”

  Jenny reddened deeply. “Just poems, mostly.”

  “That’s exactly how I started.” She took Jenny’s book. “How would you like this inscribed?”

  “Whatever you want to put there is fine.”

  “Wonderful.” Grace Fitzgerald bent and wrote in a florid script, “From one writer to another, good luck.” She started to close the book, then bent once more and added something Jo couldn’t quite see. She handed the book back to Jenny and laid her hand on the shoulder of the boy next to her. “Scottie, I’d like you to meet Ms. Jo O’Connor. She’s a famous lawyer here. And this is her daughter, Jenny. My son Scott.”

  He seemed shy, looking up at her with his head slightly bowed. A smallish boy, with green eyes and a normal nose, he looked very little like his mother. Jo figured he took after his father, the man lost on Lake Superior. “Hi.” He lifted his hand briefly.

  “Hello yourself,” Jo replied. She glanced behind her. “We’re holding things up.”

  Grace Fitzgerald leaned toward Jo and spoke quietly. “I wonder if I could talk to you—soon.”

  “Sure. What about?”

  “Professionally.”

  “You have my number. Just give me a call and we’ll set something up.”

  “Thanks.”

  They skipped the refreshments and headed to the car. As they drove home, Jenny said, “I thought she handled that guy pretty well.”

  “I thought so, too.”

  “He seemed so nice yesterday. If I was Grace Fitzgerald, I would have just told him to bite me.”

  “‘Bite me’? What’s that mean?”

  “Oh, you know, Mom.”

  “No.”

  Jenny shrugged. “It means fuck off.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “You wanted to know.”

  Jo found that she was smiling, despite herself. “What do you think she wants to talk to you about?” Jenny asked.