by Paul Doiron
From across the room Brenda said, “Maybe we could use him as a hostage.”
My father stood above me, one hand gripping the butt of the.44 in his belt. Dusk was hours away, but a dark haze had come in through the windows. I saw a greasy smear of raindrops on the pane. A storm front was rolling out of Quebec.
“Jack?” she said.
“Let me think!”
Wind hissed through the chinks between the log walls of the cabin.
He removed the Ruger from his belt and waved it at me. “Get up.”
I slid off the table, stumbled sideways a few steps, and straightened up. My jaw ached, my arms were numb.
Brenda put her hand on his forearm, but he shook it off as if he didn’t like the feel of her flesh.
“What do we do?” she asked.
“Pack some food. We’re getting out of here.”
Rain clattered on the metal roof, the first rain I’d heard since the night at Bud Thompson’s farm when the bear had killed his pig. Had it only been a week? That night seemed a lifetime ago.
“Why did you call me?” I asked hoarsely.
“What?” He stood staring out the window, but the glass was so fogged with humidity he couldn’t have seen a thing, not even his own reflection.
“The night you killed those men, you left a message on my answering machine.”
“I thought you could help me with the cops.”
So that was it. Even in the first hours following the murders he’d been looking for a way to cover his tracks. Among the alibis, excuses, and lies he might use to cover himself he had remembered his son, the game warden. Why was I so shocked to realize that his only thought of me was as a means of hiding his guilt?
“They’ll find you,” I said to him. “You can’t escape.”
“You’re coming with us.”
“I won’t be your hostage.”
Brenda appeared in the dining room. She had found an olive-drab poncho which she’d pulled on over her T-shirt. She was lugging an overloaded rucksack with both hands. “You want me to put this in the truck?”
“No. The canoe.”
“What?”
“We’re going across the lake. They’ll be looking for us on the road. I know places we can hide until we can cross over to Canada.”
She let the rucksack drop. “I’m not going to hide in some wet hole.”
“Then stay here and go to jail for the rest of your life.”
“Why should I? I didn’t kill anybody.”
He turned on her. “What did you just say?”
“You killed those men, not me.”
He put his hand on the.44 in his belt. “You want to stay here? I can arrange it.”
She gnawed at her lip but didn’t answer.
“What’ll it be?” he said.
She reached down and lifted the rucksack again. He nodded. Then he said to me, “Get up, Mike.”
“No.”
He pulled the pistol loose from his belt and held it by his side. “I said get up.”
“You won’t shoot me.”
He pushed the muzzle of the gun against my sternum. I could see the calculations going on behind his eyes. Dead, I would be easier to manage and just as useful a hostage, as long as Soctomah believed I might still be alive. It made sense to shoot me. In his situation, it was the rational thing to do.
But, for whatever reason, he couldn’t do it. He jammed the Ruger back in his belt and grabbed the ropes binding my arms and began to twist them. Pain shot up my arms like white-hot wires shoved under the skin. I tried to remain standing, but he kicked my legs out from under me.
He dragged me outside into the rain and mud. Exhausted as he was, his strength was still incredible for a man his age. My shoulders seemed about to pop loose from their sockets, and I bit my tongue from the pain. He dropped me in the sand beside the longest of Pelletier’s battered aluminum canoes. I rolled onto my side. Wet sand stuck to one side of my face. Rain slid into my eyes and down my cheeks.
“Get in the canoe.” In his ragged breathing I heard what his exertions had cost him.
I didn’t move.
He kicked me in the small of my back. “I said, get in the fucking canoe!”
I tried to get to my knees, but with my arms roped behind me, it was nearly impossible. I had to roll onto my stomach and lift my ass in the air to get my knees under me.
He had me sit in the bow, facing backward. Then he pushed us off into the open water.
The wind was blowing a chop along the lake. Gray-green waves knocked the hull of the canoe and splashed over the gunwales. My T-shirt and jeans were already soaked through from the rain.
This time Brenda paddled-she had no choice. My father stared right through me as if I were a ghost. Raindrops danced off the brim of his camouflage cap.
Over their shoulders I watched the lodge and cabins grow smaller and smaller. All the windows were dark. Behind the sporting camp the old-growth pines made a jagged edge, like a dark saw blade, against the lowering sky. I listened, hoping to hear the wail of sirens, but all I heard was the slosh of water, the whistle of rising wind.
He was steering us down the lake, staying close to the shore. Eventually we would pass the spot where Charley had crashed.
What, I wondered, would we find floating there?
The chop bucked the canoe up and down, but my father kept us moving in a straight line. His strokes were deft and seemingly effortless, pulling the canoe forward rather than pushing it along as amateur paddlers try to do.
The summer I’d stayed at Rum Pond I’d asked him to teach me to paddle the way he did. He said he would, but he never did. And so I had spent hours alone, after dusk when all the dishes were washed, teaching myself to paddle-maybe in this same canoe. Now I remembered the balsam-scented dusk descending on the lake and the bats skimming low over the surface, feeding, and everywhere the trout rising, making ever-expanding, intersecting circles in the water. But mostly what I remembered was looking up at my father’s cabin, hearing his laughter and Truman’s through the trees, and feeling unspeakably alone.
A styrofoam cup floated past, then a sheet of waterlogged paper. Afloat in the distance I saw one of the paddles Charley had kept lashed to the struts of the plane. It was broken like a bone. Farther still, I saw the Super Cub, upside down, its cockpit swamped full of water, a hundred or so feet to one side of us. Maybe it rested on the shallow gravel bottom of the lake. A faded orange life jacket bobbed in the waves without a person in it.
In my mind I saw Ora sitting in her wheelchair at the end of the dock as we had taken off this morning. She had waved at us, waved good-bye to her husband. She would never see him alive again.
My father didn’t even give the plane a glance. He kept paddling.
Brenda was smirking at me. My pain, apparently, amused her. A few hours earlier, I had felt sorry for this lonely girl raised by men, but now I just wanted to wipe that smirk off that cruel face. I had no other motivation, no other thought as I stood up in the canoe.
The smirk vanished. Disbelief widened her eyes. My father started to speak, but no words came out of his open mouth. There was an instant when I stood above them, calm and perfectly balanced, and we were still gliding forward. Then, just like that, the canoe tipped over, and we were all in the water.
I went in headfirst, upside down and unable to right myself without the use of my arms. I scissored my legs and twisted. I felt thrashing movements around me. Bodies in the water. My foot kicked something hard. For a split second, my head broke the surface, but I couldn’t stay afloat, and I slipped back under the chop. Water rushed up my nose and into my lungs. Water burned my sinuses like acid inhaled.
Then my feet touched bottom. It was the gravel floor of the lake. I pushed off with both feet. Again my head broke the surface and again I slid back. But this time I didn’t slide completely under. The water was shallower. I felt rocks under me. I could stand.
Behind me I heard splashing. I didn’t pause to l
ook. I struggled into the shallows. The water felt like quicksand holding me back, pulling me down. My legs had no bones in them. All I could think about was making it to the trees.
And I almost did.
My father tackled me at the water’s edge. He lunged forward out of the shallows and got me around the knees and I went down, chest first, onto the rocks. My breath exploded out of me. I rolled onto my side. He was on his knees in the water, pawing at my legs. I drove my boot into his face. He’d lost his hat and his rifle, but the.44, I could see, was still somehow tucked in his belt. He spit blood into the lake and rose up onto his feet. He stood over me, red-faced, hair plastered in a weird way across his forehead, looking like someone I had never seen before. A complete stranger.
Suddenly the Ruger was in his hand.
I waited for it. There was nothing else I could do.
Then the surf washed a canoe paddle past his legs. He must have seen the movement out of the corner of his eye because he paused and looked over his shoulder. Brenda was nowhere in sight. The canoe had drifted against the shore. It looked almost jaunty as it bounced along on the waves.
“Brenda?” he called.
There was no answer. Rain was coming down in sheets.
“Brenda?”
And, just like that, he forgot me. Calling her name, he waded back into the depths, trying to find her. He pushed at the water as if it were sand he could clear away with his hands, but it just flooded back. He dove beneath the surface and vanished for the longest time.
I remained seated on the cold stones. My heart was galloping in my chest. It didn’t occur to me to run. I wanted to see him come up with her. In spite of everything, it was what I wanted.
Finally he broke the surface.
He had her in his arms, but her head was back and her mouth was open and she wasn’t moving.
I watched him carry her out of the lake and lay her down on the hard stones. He knelt over her, with his back to me.
There was a deep red gash on her forehead above her eye. Her skin looked bleached. Her black hair spread beneath her head like a dark tangle.
He started kissing her open mouth, trying to make her breathe. Then he began pounding on her chest. I had never seen him frantic before. I had seen him angry and happy, drunk and sober, but never, visibly, afraid. Her body jerked, and her head lolled toward me, but I knew it was just the force of his hands making her move. His strength pushed water out of her lungs and up her throat, but she wouldn’t breathe. She hadn’t been underwater for more than a few minutes, but she was dead.
I leaned my back against a boulder and used the leverage to get to my feet. Wind-driven rain smacked the surface of the lake. If he was crying, I couldn’t hear him, but his shoulders were shaking.
He had come back for her. He could have stayed in Canada and might even have eluded the police there, traveling north and west, becoming in time one of those nameless men you see pumping gas in small towns or working behind the counter of roadside convenience stores, anonymous men living always one step ahead of their past. But instead he had risked capture and death to come back for her-this unbalanced, alcoholic girl who had already betrayed him at least once.
“Dad?”
He gave no indication of hearing me. Motionless as he was, he could have been another of the glacial boulders scattered along the lakeshore. When he finally arose, he never gave me a glance, just staggered off into the forest, clutching the Ruger to his chest. He crashed through the undergrowth like a wild animal and was gone, leaving me with nothing but questions.
Would the police run him to ground before he reached the Canadian border? Or, like the escaped German POW he’d told me about, would he disappear without a trace into the Maine woods, never to be seen again?
My answer arrived in the form of a single gunshot that came booming through the trees. I’d always thought of my father as the ultimate survivor. But in that, too, I was mistaken.
I cut myself loose with my jackknife.
I had a hard time pulling it from my pants pocket, but eventually I was able to get my numb fingers to grip the handle and slide it out. I dropped the knife a few times before I was finally able to saw through the cords that bound my wrist. As the circulation returned to my forearms and hands I felt first a tingling and then a dull throbbing ache.
Leaving the bodies for the police, I picked up the paddle that had washed onto the shore and then waded out to where the canoe had come to rest amid the branches of a half-sunk birch tree. I pulled the canoe onto the gravel and flipped it over to get the water out of the bottom. Then I dragged it back into the shallows and climbed in.
The wind had subsided and the rain seemed to be lightening-at least the sky was no longer so dark.
I paddled out to the Super Cub.
The pontoons of the wrecked plane jutted above the surface of the lake. Even with the breeze blowing, a diesel smell hung in the air, and floating streamers of iridescent oil showed the currents that usually moved unseen through the lake.
Up close I could see that the plane was balanced on several submerged boulders. I counted three bullet holes just in the fuselage. Peering into the water I could make out the pilot’s door hanging open, but I couldn’t see into the cockpit.
I set the paddle down in the canoe and prepared myself to dive over the side. But dread of what I would find in the cockpit froze me in place. Rain fell into my eyes, blurring my vision. I tried to wipe them clear, but it was no use. I took a deep breath and watched a seat cushion float past the bow.
That was when I noticed the little island. It was just a clump of boulders, really, that rose up from a sandbar maybe fifty yards away-between the wreckage and the opposite shore. I hadn’t noticed it before.
Something green seemed to be wedged between two of the rocks.
I lifted the paddle again and began to chop at the water. In less than a minute I had drawn close enough to the boulders to see that the shape was a man wearing a green shirt. He didn’t appear to be moving.
“Charley?”
The canoe glided closer as if pulled by a magnet. I saw the back of his head, one suntanned arm thrown over a boulder, hanging on.
“Charley?”
The wet head turned. A swollen eye opened.
“There you are,” he said, as if he had been expecting me.
33
He looked like hell. He had been shot in the left arm and leg. The wound to his arm was just a bloody groove where the bullet had grazed the triceps. The leg wound was something worse. The bullet had burrowed like a worm into the meat of his thigh. It had missed the femoral artery, but even so, he was losing blood at an alarming rate. The skin of his face, beneath the red-and-violet bruises, was drained of color. His pulse was weak, his breath fluttery.
“I thought you were dead.”
I’d pulled him up onto the rocks and was now trying to stanch the flow from his leg by applying pressure with both hands. Dark-looking blood leaked between my fingers.
He winced. “Don’t speak too soon.”
“I’m going to get you out of here, Charley.”
He smiled, but his eyes were full of doubt. “I think I’m going into shock.”
“You’re a tough old geezer. You’ll make it.”
I made a pressure bandage out of my T-shirt and wrapped it tight around his leg. Then I went to fetch the canoe. I’d kicked it away leaping into the water and had to swim out to retrieve it. Getting Charley into the canoe without overturning it wasn’t easy. He passed out from the pain of being lifted up, and I had to shake him to bring him around again. He looked me full in the eyes.
Flecks of spittle clung to his lips. “What happened?”
“You passed out.”
“Shit.”
I pushed off with the paddle and turned the canoe in the direction of the sporting camp, a mile up the lake.
He tried to clear his throat, but his voice was still faint and strained. “Where’s your dad?”
“He killed h
imself.”
“I thought I heard a shot before. What about the girl?”
“Drowned.”
He nodded as if this explained everything. “If I pass out again and don’t come around, tell Ora I’m sorry.”
“You can tell her yourself.” The rain had stopped, but I hadn’t noticed until I’d begun paddling again. The wind had died down and a mist was rising off the slick surface of the lake. “You’re the one who told me you were indestructible.”
“Told you a bunch of lies.” He smiled and closed his eyes and folded his hands on his chest. But he was restless and couldn’t keep his fingers and feet from twitching.
“Stay with me,” I said.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
I tried to keep my strokes calm and controlled. My arms and shoulders ached as if I had done a hundred pull-ups, but I never stopped, not even for a second.
The lakeshore slid along the side of the boat, an endless wall of dripping pines and birches. We passed beneath the tumbling, talus cliffs of Holeb Mountain, its bald summit dissolving into clouds. Up ahead I saw the sporting camp take shape out of the mist. First the dock, then the lodge.
Blue lights were flashing behind the buildings. It took me forever to realize what those lights were.
Before Charley had broken off his search for Truman Dellis, he put in a call to the state police. The first trooper had arrived at Rum Pond only minutes after my father and Brenda made me step into the canoe. Now there were troopers, deputy sheriffs, and game wardens all over the scene. Wearily I watched them carry Charley away, making a stretcher of their interlocking arms. I tried to follow, but hands restrained me. I turned my head. It was Soctomah. He was wearing a navy Windbreaker over a bulletproof vest. He wanted to know what had happened. Where, he wanted to know, was Brenda Dean?
