by Chuck Logan
“Devil’s Rock Public Safety.”
“Give me Tom Jeffords. It’s Phil Broker.”
“Hey, Broker, Merryweather told Tom some guy ate your thumb. That true?”
“Yeah, yeah, Tom there?”
“I’ll patch you through.”
“Chief Jeffords.”
“Tom, it’s Broker.”
“No shit, we heard—”
“Later. Look, I just drove into town and I got some citizen in a green Saturn, plates lima lima gulf six two niner, been on my ass since I left Stillwater. I’m heading for Dad’s place. Can you have somebody check him out and call me?”
“You think somebody wants your other thumb?”
“You tell me. I’m off the clock.”
Broker handed the phone back to Nina. “Could be Earl has a friend looking for some payback,” he said.
Nina shook her head. “Guy followed me from New Orleans. Same flight.”
“We’ll see.”
“Yes we will.”
North of town Broker turned off on a gravel road and stopped in front of a billboard that advertised the Broker’s Beach Resort. A dusty CLOSED sign now bannered it. Broker got out and lowered a chain that closed off the access road. As he returned to his truck, he noticed the green car pulled onto the shoulder, about two hundred yards up the road.
It was getting harder now to dismiss Nina as a paranoid; even more difficult to banish the ten-ton shadow beginning to lurk just below his thoughts. We’ll see, he soundlessly challenged the blip of green up the highway.
Nina’s view in the passenger seat was blocked by brush and Broker said nothing to disturb her. Assuming he was in someone’s binoculars, he took his time. He mused at the cascading irony coming off Jimmy Tuna’s cryptic note. He had learned the basic premise of undercover life from Nguyen Van Trin during the one, and only, and unusually, candid private conversation he’d ever had with the man. Go solitary. Even the most trusted comrade will telegraph. Trust no one.
He got back in and drove down toward the shore. They broke through the pines and he mused how other people said their childhood environs looked smaller when they revisited them as adults.
No way Lake Superior was ever going to shrink.
The Brokers owned two thousand feet of wild lake frontage, arced in a cove and spectacularly fanged with granite. Tall old red and white pines, which had been preserved from the clear-cut at the end of the last century, cloaked the cabins from the highway. Broker’s personal cabin, sometimes rented as overflow, clung to a rock promontory to the side of the resort behind a privacy screen of gnarled white birch, balsam, alder, and mountain ash.
What he really wanted to do was pull the Jeep into the drive, walk down to the beach, strip off his clothes, and dive off his favorite rock into the icy clean water. Then fire up the sauna and do it again. He turned off the key and sagged over the steering wheel.
“Still magic,” said Nina.
“Yeah,” he nodded.
“Oh oh,” said Nina. “Something new.”
A seriously large, hundred-fifty-pound silver, black, and tan shepherd bounded from the brush and planted his square paws on the side of the Jeep. His nails drew screeches on the paint and a tongue the size of a size sixteen red lumberjack sock hung between his big pointy teeth. “Hey, get down, Tank,” Broker yelled as he got out and tussled with the dog. Nina cautiously got from the passenger side and kept the briefcase that contained her map tight against her side.
“Is he…safe?”
“Hell no,” said Broker, shaking the ruff of fur around the dog’s neck. “He was too aggressive for St. Paul K-nine so I brought him up here. Mike and Irene squared him away, didn’t they, Tank.” Tank cocked his huge head and his yellow eyes tracked Nina’s every move.
Nina squinted at the dog and then at Broker’s eyebrows. “There’s a family resemblance. And like…human intelligence behind those eyes.”
“Yeah, retarded human intelligence,” said Broker, cuffing the dog playfully. “Come on, let’s go see the folks.”
Halfway down a trail paved with split granite Tank stood alert, growled deep in his chest, and swung his head toward the road. Broker gripped his choke chain and brought him to heel.
“Do we have company?” Nina asked.
“Maybe,” said Broker and they kept walking down into a natural amphitheater cragged with immense bedrock terraces, some the size of three-story buildings. As a boy, Broker thought it looked like a huge, wrinkled pile of gray elephants.
Then he hit the eyesore on the mild late afternoon; the shells of twelve spacious cabins were tucked into the shelves of stone. The oldest ones marked the summers of Broker’s college years. He and his dad built one a year from the thick stone foundations to the cedar shake shingles that had plated the roofs. Dawn to dusk, six days a week. The main house was marked by an OFFICE sign and sat back from the cabins in a sheltered cranny. In a small bedroom on the second floor his mother still kept his high school and University of Minnesota-Duluth hockey varsity letters tacked to the wall—one of her few touches of conventionality.
When Broker got to the first grade he discovered that other kids went to church on Sunday. He learned he had been raised by North Shore pagans, small p.
His dad kept faith with the primacy of earth, sky, water, and fire. His hands had hauled on the rosary of artisan labor every day of his life as he connected heavy beads of wood, steel, and stone with bullets of sweat. He had rejected the concept of babying teenagers. He believed in preparation. Broker grew up hard.
The odd thing was that his rough, tough dad was a dutiful teddy bear who had read to him the off-the-shelf stories about mice and cuddly rabbits and all of Dr. Seuss.
Quiet, slender Irene sat her baby boy down on the wrinkled elephants during fierce dawns and sunsets, or pulled him through the deep snow in a sled under Orion and the Borealis.
Only half in jest, she told him of the race of Nordic gods who had battled the ice monsters and created the first man from an ash and an alder tree. Their names were still preserved in the days of the week. Tuesday for Odin’s son Tyr, Wednesday for Woton, which was another name for Odin himself, Thursday for Thor and Friday for Freya, the goddess of love.
Hail was the foam dropping from the jaws of the Valkyries’ horses and the Northern Lights were the flash of their armor as they rode across the sky.
And, of course, she told him about the tree the Christians stole for Christmas.
Broker clicked his teeth. Now the cabins, with makeshift plywood roofing, looked like a refugee village. Some of the sheets had pulled free of their nails, testifying to the cruel whimsy of the lake winds. Weeds already had taken sturdy root and choked the caved-in construction where plumbing had been halted. The downhill end of the foundation for the new lodge had washed out, one-ton granite blocks strewn like a child’s wooden playthings. At the edge of the grounds a wheel-barrow was embedded in a shower of cement like a grave marker, one rusty handle twisted to the sky. A winding split-granite staircase was locked stillborn in the spill.
Now Mike was under a doctor’s orders not to lift anything heavier than a ballpeen hammer.
Irene Broker sat on the deck of the old central lodge arranging Devil’s Paintbrush in a vase. When she saw them coming she stood up, lean in faded Levi’s and a pigment-smeared blue smock. Her long hippie hair was still crow-dark in her sixties and her eyes, like her son’s, were quiet, watchful green, the color of an approaching winter storm. A painting easel was set up behind her. So she was still painting loons for the tourist trade, a hobby that now brought in grocery money. She raised her hand to shade the sun. Broker released Tank who trotted to Irene’s side.
“Still painting loons, Irene?” sang out Broker.
She smiled wryly as they came up the steps. The smile broadened into a grin. “Hey, Nina Pryce. You’re all grown up. I saw you on TV.”
“Hi, Irene.”
“Talk to my childless son. He never grew up…”
; Broker hugged her. “Irene believes our only purpose on earth is to replace ourselves.”
Irene grinned at Nina. “A fat little grandbaby would be nice, but for that you’d need a woman. What happened to your hand?”
“Guy bit me.”
“Don’t tell me.” Irene walked up to Nina and hugged her. “Speaking of women, you look way too fresh and on the intelligent side for Phil.”
Nina said, “That’s for sure. He’s a piece of work.”
“Yeah, yeah. Where’s the old man?” asked Broker.
Irene smiled tightly and nodded down toward the shore. “Counting rocks.”
Broker called Tank to his side and started down toward the water. Rock was what they had. Rock had been his cradle and his playpen. Like bedrock, Brokers were heavily connected by gravity to the earth. They were difficult to move and hard to the touch. This Broker learned in the silence, working beside his father.
He learned that anger and gentleness should be seldom shown so they were never squandered, so their emphasis was clear.
Now the clan was winnowed by death and geography. Now the developers and bankers laid their plans and waited for the tick of the clock.
He’d assumed the land would always be here, to come back to. He bowed his head and, with the dog at his left heel, went down the stone terraces toward his father.
Mike Broker, despite his injury, was still muscled like a troll at seventy-three. He sat on a throne of granite, facing out toward the horizon, sucking on an unlit pipe. Broker could almost see his father’s broad back smile, sensing his son’s approach. He turned slowly, a pugnosed man with a beard and thick longish unruly gray hair over a mat of bushy black eyebrows.
He’d been to Omaha Beach and Korea and had ridden with the wild biker-vets on the West Coast. Then he’d married Irene and stripped off his leathers and made his way laying stone and as a part-time high school teacher. History, civics, and hockey coach in the winter, before he went full time into the resort business. He’d served one term as the local police chief, then refused to run again because of the office work and politics. Broker’s first memory of his father was the smell of sweat. It was his favorite memory after his mother’s voice.
Broker had his mother’s eyes, her patience for fine detail, and, for better or worse, a large dose of her imagination. Misused, thus far, inside him he knew he had an unsmithed vein of German ore that was his father’s will.
When Broker was still several feet away, Mike asked casually, “What do you get when you cross a draft dodger and a crooked lawyer?”
“I give.”
“Chelsea.”
“Hi, Mike,” said Broker who had punished Bush for letting the Republican Guard get away into the Iraqi desert and put a check next to Clinton’s name.
“Hiya, kid,” said Mike, the diehard, Libertarian Perotista.
Broker sat down and pulled out his Spirits. Tank arranged his large body at Mike’s feet.
“Bad for you, the cigarettes, you know.”
“I know.”
“What happened to your hand?”
“Guy bit me.”
“What’s Nina Pryce doing with you?”
“Long story.”
Mike mulled this over and looked out over the water. “Do you ever think about death, capital D?” he asked.
After work came questions. Broker had sat on the rocks and been quizzed by his father and had been made to think. Later Broker came to understand the resemblance of this tutor-pupil relationship to the Socratic method. He was not surprised, when, in high school, he happened on the historical statue that reputed to be Socrates, and which bore a likeness to Mike Broker. Socrates was a stonemason.
“Not every day.”
“That’ll change when you turn fifty, then it’ll be every day. Now, when you turn sixty, you start seeing it, like a person, a new neighbor, say, who you pick out at a distance but you haven’t met. Then comes seventy and he starts getting closer and pretty soon you get to know his warts and he waves every once in a while. A nosy kind of neighbor. Before long he’s going to be over to borrow a screwdriver. I think, because this is my favorite place to sit, he’ll show up in a boat, probably with a fishing rod, in the late spring I think, just after the last ice is out.”
“You think, huh?”
“Yeah. I think he comes up and thumps on you like you’re a watermelon and then he listens to see if you’re ripe.”
“Break a knuckle on you,” said Broker. “Besides, you always said dying is one of the big whens, not an if.”
“Did I say that?”
“Yeah. One of your cautions against wishful thinking.”
Mike tapped his pipe against the stone, a sound that Broker associated with this spot and the watery heartbeat of the lake. He took a nail from his pocket and began to scrape the pipe bowl in a slow, regular motion.
“You get tired of police work yet?” he asked.
“Actually, Mike, I’m thinking of making a move.”
“Well, you gotta choose carefully. Rough economy out there. Downsizing you know.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Mike turned and faced his son. And Broker could see the complicated truss strapped under his overalls. “Phil,” he said, “I know you’ve been working with Fatty Naslund down at the bank to buy us some time, but I think we’re at the end of the rope.”
“So what are your plans?” asked Broker.
Mike averted his eyes and adopted a practical and it seemed practiced tone of uncharacteristic reasonableness. “Fatty’s lined up a developer who’ll give us a decent price for most of the place. We could pay off the bank and save one lot and build a house on it. Have a decent nest egg left over.”
Broker gazed across the beach at a particular curved plinth of granite that leaned out toward the water like the bowsprit of a dragon ship. It was called Abner’s Rock. Abner Broker had claimed the rock as his own in 1861, before he embarked downcountry to join the First Minnesota Regiment. In 1861 the Broker clan had comprised one fifth of the population of Cook County, Minnesota.
“And do what? Collect Social Security? Watch them build some tourist whorehouse next door? You’ll heal, you know. Maybe not like before but well enough to handle this place. We still have thirty days.”
“Hell, Phil, we’ve run down every option short of robbing a bank…”
Broker stared out over the water. As a boy, Irene had trained his imagination by coaxing him to read shapes in the endless play of light and shadow in the clouds, to decipher faces in the wind moving through the leaves on trees, to understand motion in the wrestle of the waves.
Forty-three years old and hard as a rake handle left out all winter, he could just make out a galleon, packaged in cumulus, on the horizon.
Which was probably why Nina had come for him.
“Let’s make a fire tonight. Down where we used to,” he said.
15
HE REJOINED IRENE AND NINA BY HIS CABIN AND called Nina aside. They walked off into the trees out of earshot and Broker told her simply: “Put it in one sentence and no bullshit.”
She stood very erect and looked him in the eye. “Tuna strongly suggested that a case can be made against LaPorte about what happened to my dad.”
“I need proof.”
She glanced around. “Maybe we’ll get some tonight.”
As they walked back to his cabin their hands grazed accidentally on purpose and Broker decided to take a calculated risk with the green Saturn. The local coppers were there as backup. He’d just lay back and let it unfold.
He got out his keys, went up the redwood porch, which was cluttered with flowerpots, and opened the door. Nina carried their bags in from the Jeep and squinted as she passed through the narrow doorway.
Inside, light came mainly from skylights. The windows, like the doors, were built excessively narrow. The interior consisted of a long main room with a small kitchen at one end, a large wood stove, comfortable couches and chairs, and a big kitchen
table. A doorway, again too narrow, opened on the left to a bedroom and off the bedroom another door opened on a sauna with its own woodstove. Another doorway beside the kitchen led to a deck that overlooked the shore.
Irene gave the short tour. “Notice how the furniture and appliances don’t fit through the doors or windows. He built the entry and windows after he moved everything in, too small for the stuff to fit through.” She smiled. “My son the cop.”
A wood box and chopping block sat next to the Fisher woodstove. Broker picked up a short splitting ax in his good hand and stared at the woodbox. Nina quickly stepped in, took the ax, and efficiently knocked several pieces of oak into kindling.
“For the sauna, and the stove. It’ll be cold out tonight,” said Broker.
“Gotcha. You take a break, I’ll get it going.” She went into the sauna with her kindling and some newspaper. A few minutes later the smell of smoke and a rusty groan of heating steel permeated the cabin.
“The damper, you gotta—” he yelled.
“I can do it,” she yelled back. She reappeared and inspected the kitchen cabinets, turned on the faucet, heard the well kick in, tested the gas burners on the stove, and then went outside.
Broker sat in a chair and stared at his throbbing, bandaged left hand. Nina and Irene returned with a handful of…weeds.
“What?” he asked.
Irene held three big dandelions, roots and all, under the sink faucet, washing them. She laid them aside and then lifted a large stained kettle. She respected her son’s privacy and now, in among his belongings, she had the curiosity of a woman in the men’s lavatory. “When’s the last time this was clean?” she asked.
Broker shook his head as she filled the kettle with water and threw in the dandelions and set the burner under it. Nina checked the fire in the sauna and then said she was going to look over the beach.
“Keep the dog with you,” admonished Broker.
The next thing he knew the phone was ringing. He had crashed again. He smelled the soupy acid simmer of the kettle, saw by the long slanting shadows that the sunlight was going. He went to the phone. Jeffords.
