Blood is the Sky am-5

by Steve Hamilton

  He started pulling on a chain to raise the big lakeside door. When it was open he hopped up on one of the floats and climbed the ladder into the cockpit. He gave the engine a few cranks until it finally caught. The noise was downright painful. He came to the door and took the cooler from Guy, and then waved Vinnie and me up the ladder. As soon as we were on board, sitting on seat cushions that looked like something out of an old boat, Guy pushed the plane out onto the lake, jumped onto the float, and climbed the ladder to join us. He closed the door and sat down beside his grandfather.

  “Everybody ready?” he said.

  I wasn’t sure, but I wasn’t going to say anything. We had come this far.

  Maskwa grabbed a handle mounted on the floor and pumped it up and down a few times. Then he let the throttle out and pointed the plane toward the far end of the lake. The plane gained speed, the floats riding rough over the waves.

  “Next stop, Lake Agawaatese!” Maskwa said. He had to yell over the din of the motor. “Vinnie, did you tell Alex what the name means?”

  “It’s kind of a complex word,” Vinnie said. “It literally means ‘He casts a shadow while flying.’”

  “You mean like a bird?” I said.

  “Bird, cloud, whatever.”

  “How about an airplane?” I said. But I don’t think anyone heard me. We were getting closer and closer to the far shoreline. Maskwa pulled the yoke back, and the plane fought its way off the water and into the air. It didn’t look like we’d have enough room to clear the trees, but I figured the man knew what he was doing. I sat back in my seat and tried to relax. It almost worked.

  We cleared the trees with three inches to spare. Hell, maybe it was four inches. The plane kept climbing into the sky, higher and higher, until the whole forest was laid out below us from one horizon to the other. Many miles to the north, Lake Agawaatese, with its flying shadows, was waiting for us.

  We flew for the better part of an hour, passing over a thick pine forest broken only by lakes and streams and wet marshlands. I looked down and saw a moose cow standing up to her knees in water. She didn’t seem to notice us.

  The morning clouds had moved off to the east, but the wind was still blowing. A gust would catch the plane now and then, dropping the bottom out of my stomach. At one point, the plane took a sudden dip and half the dashboard came loose and landed in Maskwa’s lap. Guy reached over and calmly pushed it back in place.

  I felt Vinnie tapping me on the shoulder. I looked over and saw an eagle soaring in the sky. “Migizi,” he said. “Maybe that’s good luck.”

  Maskwa banked the plane and started his descent. Through the windshield I could see the lake coming up fast. He brought the plane in just over the trees, with what looked to be about three inches to spare again, and then touched down. We skipped a couple of times until the water finally grabbed us for good.

  “A little rough, Grandpere,” Guy said.

  “Let’s see you do it,” Maskwa said.

  “I’ve watched you enough times, I bet I could.”

  Maskwa cut the throttle back and drove the plane through the water. There was a light chop, just enough to make the plane rattle like it would fall apart any second. I didn’t see the cabin at first, but then we rounded a slight bend and there it was on the far shore, a small white building with an L-shaped dock, an aluminum motorboat tied up to it. As we got closer, I saw another smaller building by the water, and a third back in the woods.

  “There’s a boat here,” Vinnie said.

  “Yeah, we keep the motor in the shed,” Guy said. “Along with the gasoline. I helped Mr. Gannon bring that boat out in his plane last year. There’s no way he’ll ever bring it back.”

  Maskwa cut the motor just before we got to the dock. We drifted the rest of the way. Guy climbed out his door and jumped onto the dock. When the plane was tied down, we followed him. I could still feel the vibration of the plane’s engine in my legs as I walked up the dock. The buzzing still rang in my ears.

  “All right, let’s take a look around,” Guy said. He led us into the cabin. There was a small wooden porch and a screen door in front, with two screened windows. One of them was pushed in. “Goddamned bears,” he said. “If they smell garbage-”

  When I stepped into the cabin myself, garbage was exactly what I saw. There was one picnic table in the center of the room, with enough spilled breakfast cereal and ketchup and fish batter and God knows what else to draw a dozen bears. The stale smell of beer hung in the air, and the wooden floor was sticky to walk on. There were unwashed plates stacked up on the counter, and three pots on the propane stove. When Guy opened the propane refrigerator, there was a carton of eggs on the bottom shelf and nothing else.

  While the other men stood there looking at the mess, I went into the other room. There were three separate bunks-just bare wood to put your sleeping bags on-and a wood stove. I opened the little door and looked inside. I couldn’t tell how old the ashes were.

  “My God, what an unholy pigsty,” Maskwa said. He picked a skin magazine off the floor and threw it in the empty trash can.

  “It obviously wasn’t like this the last time I saw it,” Guy said. “But you could fake this, you know what I mean? If you wanted to make it look like somebody was here, you just come in and trash the place.”

  “They could fool the police that way,” Maskwa said. “But not you.”

  Guy nodded his head. “First, the propane,” he said. He went outside to the big tank on the side of the cabin. “When I left here last time, it was three-quarters full. Now it’s… Let’s see…” He checked the gauge. “About one quarter.”

  “Is that how much gas you’d use if you were here a week?” I said.

  “Yeah, pretty much. You got the oven and the refrigerator, plus the two overhead lights.”

  “So maybe they were here,” Maskwa said.

  “Unless somebody switched the tanks. Hold on.” He went down to the little shed by the dock and looked inside. He took out two red gasoline cans and shook them one by one. “Damn, these are empty,” he said. “How much could they use?”

  “They must have gone out in the boat a lot,” Maskwa said.

  “Two cans worth?”

  “You think they switched the cans, too?”

  Guy shook his head and looked around the place. “I don’t know.”

  “If there’s no way to know for sure-”

  “Hold on,” Guy said. “The outhouse. When I left here, I made sure there was toilet paper in there. I know for a fact that there were exactly four rolls in there, with half a roll on the wall. I’m positive.”

  I stayed on the dock while they went to check. This was one mission I didn’t need to be a part of. I stood there watching the lake, as the colors changed with each passing cloud. We were so far away from anywhere else right now. We had taken the last road, and now an hour’s worth of flying had put us here on the shores of this lake. I zipped up my coat.

  “Okay,” Guy said as he joined me on the dock. “They were here.”

  “You have to admit,” I said, “it was pretty unlikely from the beginning. I mean, I suppose it was good to come out here in any case. This is the last place they spent any time. But right now I don’t see how it can help us.”

  “Something’s still wrong,” Vinnie said. He had been quiet since we had landed here. “Something is very wrong.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Let me ask you something,” he said to Guy. “If you were leading a hunt here, would you leave this place looking like this?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Even if you couldn’t stand the men you were with. And it was them that made the mess?”

  “I’d still clean up before we left,” Guy said. “And they’d hear about it, believe me.”

  “Exactly. That’s the same thing Tom would have done.”

  “So what are you saying?” I said.

  “They didn’t leave here under normal circumstances,” Vinnie said. “Something happ
ened. Maybe they had to leave in a hurry.”

  “Or maybe,” Maskwa spoke up behind us, “they never left at all.”

  Vinnie turned around and looked at him.

  “Maybe they got lost hunting,” Maskwa said. “The people at the lodge, they didn’t want to deal with it. So they lied.”

  “Tom wouldn’t get lost,” Vinnie said.

  “Your brother is a long way from home. These are not his woods.”

  “If that’s what happened,” Vinnie said, looking beyond the cabin at the thick wall of trees, “then he’s still out there. Tom knows how to survive. He knows how to find plants he can eat, how to make shelter, how to make a fire.”

  “But what about their wallets?” I said. “Why would they be in the Suburban?”

  “They may have left them here at the cabin,” Vinnie said. “When Gannon came out here, he found them. Maybe Maskwa is right, Alex. Something may have happened. The people at the lodge are just covering it up.”

  Maskwa stepped up to Vinnie and grabbed him by the shoulders. “We will look,” he said. “I promise you. We can’t panic, Vinnie. We can’t run around here like chickens.”

  “I know.”

  “Let’s eat first, okay? Then we’ll look.”

  Maskwa sent Guy back to the plane for the big bag and the cooler. Then he sat down on the dock and took out two long salamis and a loaf of bread.

  “Grandpere,” Guy said. “How much food did you bring?”

  “I had an intuition,” he said. “Something told me we’d be here all day.”

  We all sat down on the dock with him and ate. Maskwa passed me one of the cold Molsons from the cooler. The sun came out and shone on the surface of the lake, making it feel a lot warmer than it really was. Under different circumstances, it would have been a hell of a nice day.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about that Suburban ditched in the woods. It seemed too far-fetched, that they’d dump it there just to cover themselves. The whole thing was starting to feel wrong, from top to bottom. The real answer was probably something simple. It almost always is.

  “You and Vinnie can go out together,” Maskwa said as we finished up. “Alex will come with me.” He looked at his watch. “We should meet back here at 3:00. The days are getting shorter-any later and we won’t have enough daylight to fly back.”

  Vinnie and Guy picked the trail that went north from the cabin site. The other trail curled around the rim of the lake before heading west. The pine trees were thick enough to obliterate the sunlight. Maskwa led the way.

  “If they’re lost,” I said, “then they could be miles away from here. How are we gonna find them?”

  “We won’t,” he said. “But we may find which way they went. A man can’t walk in the woods without leaving some trace behind.”

  I followed him deeper and deeper into the woods. The trail seemed to disappear every now and then, but Maskwa didn’t hesitate. He kept moving forward, and inevitably the trail would appear again. “You see all these tracks,” he said.

  “What are they?”

  “Look at them. You tell me.”

  The tracks were about four inches wide, with five distinct toe-prints and little gouges in the dirt where the nails must have dug in. They kept appearing in pairs, with one print right in front of the other.

  “Bears?”

  “Yes, black bears,” he said. “You see how they walk? Each back foot almost steps into the front track.”

  “There’s a lot of tracks here.”

  “You can tell how fast they’re going from the spacing. You can even tell if the animal was limping.”

  “Are you seeing any human tracks around here?”

  “Of course, aren’t you?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not good at this.”

  “You just have to look,” he said. “I mean really look. Come here.” He went to the edge of the trail and crouched down close to the ground. I leaned in close to him.

  “Come all the way down here,” he said. It was a position I knew well, of course. Most catchers crouch down behind the plate a few hundred times a day until they’re done playing ball. And then they never crouch again if they can help it.

  “See right here?” he said. He brushed away some pine needles. “Here’s a boot print. What does it tell you?”

  “Looks like about a size twelve,” I said.

  “What else?”

  “I’d guess it’s not very recent.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Well, number one, the fact that we don’t see any tracks in the middle of the trail. It’s all bear tracks. That means the bears have been here more recently.”

  “Okay, what else?”

  “The pine needles,” I said. “It would take some time for the needles to fall and cover the tracks.”

  “Couldn’t this man have stepped on top of the pine needles?”

  I looked more closely. “If he did, then the pine needles would be pushed into the mud. And some would be bent.”

  “Very good,” he said. “It’s all common sense, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. So what now?”

  “So we go back. It doesn’t look like this trail has been walked on in the last couple of weeks. The men went a different way.”

  We retraced our steps to the cabin site. It was just after two o’clock when we got there. Maskwa and I sat on the dock again, and I had another beer.

  “This is a beautiful lake,” I said. “It’s too bad we had to see it this way.”

  “You must be a good friend,” he said. “You came all the way up here.”

  “Vinnie would do the same for me.”

  “Do you have a brother, Alex?”

  “No, Maskwa, I don’t.”

  He nodded and looked out at the lake. “I had two. They’re both gone.”

  “What about your son? Guy’s father.”

  He threw a small rock into the water.

  “Never mind,” I said. “It’s none of my business.”

  “He’s gone, too. He killed himself.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shook his head, threw another rock in the water. “He has peace now.”

  We kept sitting there on the dock. The sun shifted west, making the shadows longer. Three o’clock came and went. It was almost three-thirty when Vinnie and Guy finally came back.

  “What did you find?” Maskwa said.

  “Lots of bear tracks,” Guy said.

  “A real bear highway,” Vinnie said. Even in the cold air, he was sweating.

  “There were boot prints, too,” Guy said. “As far as we could tell, they looked pretty recent. The trail split off, though. And then again. There might be four or five different spurs.”

  “And in that one spot-” Vinnie said.

  “Yes, a lot of boot prints together. It was hard to say what was going on there.”

  “Just a bunch of men standing around?” Maskwa said. “Maybe they were waiting for somebody.”

  “I don’t know,” Guy said. “Some of the prints were uneven.” He leaned his leg so that most of his weight was on the inside of his foot. “Like this.”

  “We don’t have much light left,” Maskwa said. “I think we should go back. Tomorrow we can bring radios with us, and more food. We’ll search again. We can even fly over the area if we want.”

  “I can’t leave,” Vinnie said. “I’d like to spend the night here.”

  “There’s no need to do that,” Maskwa said. “We’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “You brought plenty of food,” Vinnie said. “If you’d be good enough to leave some with me, I’ll sleep here in the cabin.”

  “Vinnie,” I said. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “I need to do this, Alex. Tom was here. He slept here. I can feel it. Being here might help me find him.”

  “If you’re gonna spend the night here,” I said, “then I’m staying, too.”

  “Me, too,” Guy said.

  “You’re no
t staying here,” Maskwa told him. “You’ll come home with me, and help me get ready for tomorrow. Go get two of those sleeping bags from the plane. And two flashlights.”

  Guy put up a small fight about it, but eventually gave in and climbed up into the plane to get our supplies. Vinnie thanked Maskwa a couple of times for everything he had done.

  “We will find your brother,” Maskwa said just before he left. “I promise you.”

  We stood there and watched the plane take off. As it cleared the trees, it banked and circled us once and then headed south. We could still hear the sound of the plane, long after it disappeared.

  Vinnie started walking around the clearing, collecting sticks. The trees were close on all sides, with the edge of the water just a few yards away. It was so small, this cabin site, a tiny speck in a huge wilderness.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Making a fire.”

  I helped him build a teepee-shaped pile of wood. He put some birch bark in the middle and lit it with a match. The bark burst into flame.

  “Best fire starter there is,” he said. “It’ll even burn when it’s wet.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  An hour later, the sun was going down and painting the sky in deep shades of red and orange. Vinnie and I sat by the fire, eating more salami sandwiches and finishing off the Coke and beer.

  “It’s a nice sky,” Vinnie said. “Tom probably sat right here and watched it.”

  “What you said about feeling him here, do you really mean that?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Don’t you believe me?”

  “I’m not saying I don’t.”

  “Tom and I used to fight a lot when we were kids. My grandmother told us we shouldn’t fight because we had the same blood in our veins. We were part of each other. I didn’t really listen to her back then. I wish I could talk to her now. She’d know what to do.”

  “You’re doing everything you can.”

  He put some more wood on the fire. A dry pine log crackled and sent sparks into the air. The sky got darker.

  “It’s getting cold,” I said. “We should get some sleep.”

  “You go ahead. I’ll put out the fire.”

  I went in and got one of the pots off the stove, cleaned it out as well as I could and then went down to the lake to fill it with water. I heated the water on the propane stove and washed my face. Then I unrolled a sleeping bag on one of the bottom bunks and climbed in, with my coat balled up as a pillow. I lay there awhile, listening to the night, wondering when Vinnie would come inside.