Purgatory Ridge

  “What we’re on the verge of is destitution. My luck ain’t held at the tables lately. If we have another hefty diving expense, I can’t cover it.”

  “We stay with diving the wreck. We’re so damn close to the answers. I know it. And that’ll pay off big, sooner or later.”

  “You got more patience than brains, Chief. But that’s okay.” Bridger reached out and punched his shoulder gently. “You got time to think about it. The postman always rings twice.” He pulled his van into the casino lot and parked it. They stood beside the van a moment before separating.

  “We’re still on for the dive tomorrow,” LePere said.

  Bridger smoothed his mustache and considered. “You’d go alone if I said no, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yeah. I’d go alone.”

  “Jesus. And you call me crazy. What time?”

  “I’ll pick you up at five A.M. We can be out on Superior by seven.”

  Bridger winced. “Make it seven. We’ll be on the lake by nine.” He saw the unyielding look on LePere’s face. “For Christ’s sake, Chief, that wreck’s been there for a dozen years. It ain’t going anywhere.”

  “Six,” LePere countered.

  Bridger threw his hands up in surrender. “All right. Six it is.”

  They headed in opposite directions, Bridger to the gaming floor, where he’d spend most of his day at a blackjack table, and LePere to a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. After he’d signed in at the security desk, he went to the locker room and changed into his dark blue jumpsuit. The other custodial staff were already heading out. He joined them, joking with them as they split off toward their own areas. He pulled his cart from a closet on the east end of the casino and headed to his first stop, the men’s room on the first floor east wing. He put out the CLOSED FOR CLEANING sign and stepped inside.

  A large bald man in shorts and a loud Hawaiian shirt stood at the third urinal, his stance wavering. When LePere stepped in, the man looked up from his business. His hand traveled along with his bloodshot eyes, and a stream of urine splashed over the wall. He watched the yellow flow make its way down the wall and puddle on the floor, then he grinned stupidly at LePere and zipped up. He started toward the door, reaching into his pocket as he came. When he was abreast of LePere, he said, “Sorry ‘bout that, Geronimo.” He pulled a red five-dollar casino chip from his pocket, tossed it onto LePere’s cart, and stumbled out the door.

  5

  WHEN CORK FINALLY ARRIVED at Sam’s Place, his daughters already had things well under control.

  Sam’s Place was an old Quonset hut set on the shore of Iron Lake, just outside the town limits of Aurora. Long ago, the structure—a leftover from the Second World War—had been purchased by Sam Winter Moon. Sam had turned the hut into a clean little joint where, during spring, summer, and fall, he’d served burgers and shakes and cones through a small window. His customers had been mostly boaters who motored up to the dock Sam built. When Sam Winter Moon was killed at Burke’s Landing, the old Quonset hut had passed, via Sam’s will, into Cork’s possession. And when, immediately after that, Cork’s life fell apart, Sam’s Place had become his refuge and his vocation. He’d learned how to flip a pretty mean burger.

  North of Sam’s Place, behind a chain-link fence, was the long brick rectangle where Bearpaw beer had been brewed since 1938. South, stood a copse of birch and aspen that hid the ruins of an old foundry. In its day, the foundry had cast the metal for a good number of the double-bladed ax heads used to clear the magnificent white pines that had been the glory of the great North Woods.

  Except for the haze from the burn of the forest fires up north and the black smudge from the fire at Lindstrom’s mill, the day was beautiful. A perfect day for sailing, and already a lot of boats were on the lake.

  Sam’s Place was divided into two parts. In the rear half was a kitchen, a small bathroom, and a living area furnished simply with a table and two chairs handmade from birch, a desk with a shelf for books, a couple of lamps, and a bunk. Sam Winter Moon had lived there first, then Cork in the worst part of his life. The front of the Quonset hut contained the freezer, grill, deep fry, ice milk machine, and stacked cartons of food and paper goods. As Cork entered, he saw that it contained all of his children as well.

  “Daddy!” Stevie cried. “I’m helping.”

  “I can see that, buddy. Good for you.” He smiled at his daughters. “Thanks, guys.”

  Jenny said, “No problem, Dad.” She was busy with the ice milk machine.

  “We’re going to need ones,” Annie told him, looking up from the register.

  His daughters were growing in a way that made him proud. Jenny had recently abandoned purple hair and a fierce desire to pierce her nose. Over the last year, she had worked her way through every volume of The Diary of Anaïs Nin. Her sixteenth birthday was less than a month away; she intended, once she’d finished high school, to move to Paris, live on the Left Bank, and write great works of literature.

  Annie, eighteen months younger, redheaded, and freckled, was the star pitcher on her softball team. For as long as she’d had the ability to conceive a future for herself, she’d wanted to be a nun.

  “What was all the excitement this morning?” Jenny asked.

  “Some trouble at the Lindstrom mill.”

  “What kind of trouble?” Stevie asked. He’d opened a small package of Fritos and was munching.

  “Well.” Cork hesitated, but he knew they’d all hear soon enough. “There was an explosion and a fire. Someone was killed.”

  “Who?” Annie asked.

  “We don’t know.”

  “We? You mean they, don’t know. Sheriff Schanno and his men.” Jenny looked at him in the same way her mother did whenever she caught Cork in a slip of the tongue.

  “Right,” Cork said. “That’s what I meant.”

  Stevie appeared troubled, his small face intense and focused as his mind worked. “He got blowed up?”

  “They’re not sure, buddy. He might have died in the fire.”

  “He got burned up?”

  Cork felt his stomach turn as he watched his son work on that one in his small head. “Tell you what,” he threw in quickly. “Let’s you and me go to the bank and get some small bills so we can do business today.”

  Stevie brightened. “Will I get a Tootsie Pop?”

  “If they don’t give you one, we’ll change banks. How’s that?” He hefted his son onto his shoulders. “Hold down the fort, you two.”

  “We’re on it, Dad,” Annie said.

  • • •

  When Cork returned almost half an hour later, a beaten-up Econoline van stood parked in the graveled lot of Sam’s Place. The van was a dull green and wore a thick coating of dust. Painted on the side, barely visible now beneath the grit, was a huge white pine. Scripted in red letters under the pine were the words SAVE THEM AND WE SAVE OURSELVES. The van carried California plates.

  A young man lounged against the counter at the serving window. He appeared to be in his early twenties; he had curly blond hair, wire-rimmed glasses, a light green T-shirt with the sleeves rolled high up on his biceps, cutoff jeans, and hiking boots. He laughed as he spoke with Jenny. Near the picnic table on the grass that edged the shoreline of Iron Lake, a woman about Cork’s age leaned on a carved wooden cane and stared across the glimmering blue water. When she turned and walked to the picnic table, her gait was slow and appeared to cause her a good deal of pain. She relied heavily on the cane.

  The young man slid money to Jenny and received in return a white sack and two shakes. Cork, as he headed toward the door, heard the final exchange between the two of them, French words he didn’t understand. The young man took the sack and shakes and joined the woman at the picnic table. They talked quietly, then opened the sack and began to eat.

  “Dad,” Jenny called to Cork as he came in. “That guy. He studied in Paris, at the Sorbonne.”

  “He says he studied at the Sorbonne,” Annie pointed out. “Sister Amelia warned me that m
en will say whatever they think you want to hear.”

  Jenny fisted her hands on her hips. “Yeah? And what would that dried-up old cow know about men? The nearest she ever came to being with a guy was that Halloween Stuart Rubin got drunk and put on a Richard Nixon mask and trick-or-treated at her door stark naked. You know what she said to him?”

  “Everybody knows what she’s supposed to have said.”

  “What?” Stevie asked.

  Jenny smiled down at her brother. “‘Thank you, Lord.’ “

  Stevie’s right cheek bulged around his Tootsie Pop. “Huh?”

  “Never mind,” Cork said to him. “Why don’t you help your sisters get some more cups out and ready to go. I’ll be in the back with the books,” he told the girls.

  Cork sat at the desk in the back part of Sam’s Place and pulled out the ledgers he used to track the finances of his business. So far, in terms of profits, the summer had been stellar. The heat drove people early to the lake, and when they got hot on the water, they often headed toward the little stretch of shoreline at Sam’s Place where the big red pine shaded the picnic table. Cork paid his daughters a good wage, and not just because he loved having them around. They were excellent help. Annie possessed such a sense of responsibility that God, on the seventh day, could easily have turned his new creation over to her and napped without a worry. Jenny had a mystique and a skill with people that kept them talking with her through the serving window long after they’d been given their order. Studying the numbers in his ledgers and listening to the laughter of his children in the other room, Cork was fairly certain that—even full of smoke and fire—this summer would be the best since he’d taken over Sam’s Place.

  A knock at the door of the Quonset hut pulled him from the desk. He found Celia Lane and Al Koenig standing on his doorstep.

  “Morning, Cork.” Celia smiled brightly. She was a small, energetic woman dressed in gray. She chaired the committee for Tamarack County’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Al Koenig, a big pot-bellied man who managed the Perkins restaurant on Center Street, was her cochair. “May we come in?”

  Cork stood aside.

  Celia, who’d never visited Cork at Sam’s Place before, glanced around. “Austere,” she commented. “I’m sure you’re glad to be back with your family.”

  Cork waited, wordless. People in politics loved to talk. You never had to wait long. But it might be a long time before they came to a point. And Celia, once she began, talked in a line no straighter than a sloppy drunk could have walked. Cork hadn’t asked them to sit. They didn’t seem to notice, or if they did, didn’t seem to care. After a couple of minutes, Cork broke in.

  “What is it you want?”

  Celia and Al exchanged a cautious look. Al said, “We want you to run for sheriff come November.”

  Cork offered them no reply.

  Celia jumped in. “You had to have heard. About Wally Schanno, I mean. He’s not standing for reelection.”

  “You know that for a fact?”

  “On good authority,” Celia said. “From what we gather, the Republicans are going to run Arne Soderberg.”

  “Soderberg?” Cork let his concern show.

  “Exactly,” Al said.

  Celia began again, a convoluted line of words, talking party, talking politics, aspects of the job as sheriff Cork had never much cared for. He’d been a law enforcement officer first and foremost, and although he’d been a Democrat all his life, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party had simply been the way to the job. That way had always been a little like stumbling through a minefield. He wasn’t fond of Celia or Al or most of the men and women who became absorbed in politics in the county. He didn’t feel badly about not liking them. After the killings at Burke’s Landing, not one of them had stood by him during the recall that opened the door for Wally Schanno to take his job.

  As Celia went on and on, Cork became aware of the sound of voices raised outside Sam’s Place. Annie stuck her head in the room. “Dad, you’d better get out there.”

  Cork moved quickly out the door and around to the front of the Quonset hut. He paused a moment to take in what he saw.

  A shiny black Ford F10 pickup had pulled into the lot and parked beside the green van. The faces of two children poked out the driver’s-side window of the truck. Their eyes were big and scared. Their father, Erskine Ellroy, had the young man who’d spoken French to Jenny pinned up against the front wall of Sam’s Place. Since he was eighteen, Ellroy had been a logger. With his huge upper body and biceps, he could have arm-wrestled a grizzly. He had a thick black beard and as angry a face as Cork had ever seen on a man. He had the kid by his T-shirt and he’d nearly lifted him off his feet. The kid offered him no resistance.

  “You little son of a bitch.” Ellroy’s face was shoved so near, the long black hairs of his beard brushed the kid’s downy chin. “You come here where you don’t belong, where you don’t understand a thing about what’s going on, and all you do is screw with people’s lives. What do you care, right?”

  “I care about the trees, man.” The kid’s voice came out weakened from the press of Ellroy’s massive body against his chest.

  “Fuck the trees.”

  “You are,” the kid managed bravely.

  Cork glanced at the woman who stood near the picnic table leaning on her cane. She watched with great interest and although the kid seemed in real trouble, she appeared not at all inclined to interfere.

  Ellroy threw the kid to the ground. “Get up.”

  Looking up at that great angry body towering above him, the kid was clearly afraid. Hell, Cork would have been afraid. But the kid stood up anyway.

  “Question for you, nature boy. How’re you going to save the trees from a hospital bed?” Ellroy made a fist and cocked his right arm. The kid made no move to avoid what was coming.

  “Erskine.”

  “Stay out of this, O’Connor.”

  “Question for you, Erskine. How’re you going to feed your kids from jail?”

  “One, O’Connor. Just one good one.” His fist was back but still in a holding pattern.

  Cork stepped out of the shadow of Sam’s Place into the sunlight. He slowly approached Ellroy and the kid. “Criminal assault, Erskine. Witnesses. Open-and-shut case. You’ll go down, I guarantee it.”

  “The hell with you, O’Connor. You’re not the sheriff anymore.”

  “I don’t have to be to know you’re making a big mistake, one you’ll regret. This tree business’ll be over soon. You’ll be logging again, making regular payments on your mortgage. But you lay into that man and you’ll be in jail a long time after the rest of this is done. Think about it. Think about your kids there.” Cork nodded toward the black pickup and waited until Erskine had looked where his children watched, frightened. “Hitting this man won’t end the tree business, but it could take you away from your kids a long time. Is it worth that?”

  Ellroy hesitated. A hot breath shot from his lips. He shoved the air in front of him as if pushing the whole business away. “Fuck it.”

  “If you came for food, Erskine, go ahead. It’s on me.”

  “Screw you and your food.” Ellroy stomped back to his vehicle. The tires of his pickup spit a lot of gravel, and a thick plume of dust followed him as he sped over the tracks into town.

  The kid turned to Cork, pissed. “I didn’t need your help. I could’ve handled him.”

  “I didn’t do it for you.” Cork looked toward the woman with the cane who seemed only to be waiting. “I’d be obliged if the both of you would take your food and eat somewhere else. You’re not exactly helping my business here.”

  “We’re finished anyway.” The kid said it coldly. He moved to the picnic table, took the half-eaten meal, and threw it in the trash barrel. He escorted the woman with the cane to the van, got in, offered Cork a last hard look, and moved the van out.

  Celia Lane and Al Koenig flanked Cork on either side.

  “You’re a natural, Cork,” Al said.
>
  “People would vote you back in a minute,” Celia added. “Think about it. That’s all we’re asking. Just think about it.”

  They slid into their car and followed where the others had gone, down the short gravel road that led into town, kicking up more dust in their passage. Cork felt a tug at his leg and looked down. Stevie held on to him, looking scared. Usually, he was a boy full of questions. Now he was silent. Cork knelt and held him.

  Jenny and Annie came from Sam’s Place. They were quiet, too, watching where everyone had gone.

  Jenny cautiously put a hand on his shoulder. “Are you going to run for sheriff again, Dad?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “I honestly haven’t given it any thought.”

  Until now.

  He watched as the dust slowly settled on the road.

  The bastards.

  6

  ISAIAH BROOM WORRIED JO O’CONNOR. Long before she’d ever visited the Iron Lake Reservation, she had seen him, many times in many places. Not Broom exactly, but men just like him. Angry deep down, and with the slow-fuse potential for real destruction.

  Broom sat halfway down the long table in the conference room of the Alouette Community Center that housed the tribal council offices. Broom was an elected representative on the council. With him at the table were the other elected members: George LeDuc, chairman; Judy Bruneau, secretary; Albert Boshey, treasurer; and representatives Roy “One Swallow” Stillday, Edgar Gillespie, and Heidi Baudette. Thomas Whitefeather, one of the two hereditary chiefs of the Iron Lake Band of Ojibwe, was also there, in an advisory capacity. The only man not present was Charlie Warren, the other hereditary chief and a man who, like Whitefeather, commanded great respect on the reservation. The council members spoke with much feeling about the incident at Lindstrom’s and the potential of its impact on the situation with Our Grandfathers. Although no one was sympathetic to Lindstrom, they were aware of the damage the violence could do to their own position in the controversy. Jo noted to herself that Isaiah Broom was uncharacteristically silent.