Desolation Mountain

by Krueger, William Kent

  “Henry couldn’t help me,” Stephen said.

  “I’m not Henry. I see the world in a different way. Maybe my perspective can be of some use.”

  Stephen considered this, considered also how good it felt, even for a moment, to have the burden of the vision off his shoulders. He made his decision, and he shared with his father what he’d seen: the boy on the steep rise who was him and not him; the eagle appearing from the sky; the boy with the bow in his hands; the arrow flying; the eagle falling; the dropped egg; staring at the boy, him and not him, and the boy staring back, both of them ignorant of the meaning in all this; and at the end, the sense of something monstrous looming at his back.

  In the serving area, Naomi plopped a burger patty onto the grill, and the sizzle seemed inordinately loud.

  “The boy is you and not you,” Cork said. “I have dreams like that.”

  “This isn’t a dream, Dad.” Stephen heard the note of impatience in his voice and tried to soften. “It’s so different.”

  “I understand. I’m just trying to get the lay of the land here. The hill, is it a place you recognize?”

  “In that way, it’s like a dream. It seems familiar, but not like a real place.”

  “The boy. Can you describe him?”

  “Fourteen or fifteen, maybe. Dark hair. Dark eyes. A little shorter than me.”

  “You a few years ago.”

  “But not me, Dad.”

  “Native?”

  “Maybe.”

  “The eagle. Is it like a real eagle?”

  “Yes,” Stephen said, thinking that this wasn’t getting them anywhere. Then he realized something. “Not exactly like a real eagle.”

  “What’s different?”

  “The tail feathers should be completely white, but other colors are mixed in.”

  “What colors?”

  Before Stephen could answer, Naomi called to them, “We’ve got incoming.”

  Through the doorway into Sam’s Place, Stephen could see a couple of cars pulling into the parking lot. Behind them came two more.

  “We’ll talk later,” his father said, and they turned to the business of a burger joint.

  * * *

  The town meeting with Senator McCarthy was scheduled for that evening. It was expected to draw a good audience, a huge number of Tamarack County residents with strong feelings on both sides of the mining issue. The dinner crowd came early and heavy. Cork had called in another of the kids on his roster, and he and Stephen and the high schoolers worked to move the lines at the windows. The Waaboo Burger continued to be a big hit, and the spicy fries, another recent addition to the menu, went fast.

  Near six, while Cork was bent over the grill, the whistle atop the Aurora firehouse began a prolonged blast. Almost immediately, the phone on the wall in the Quonset hut rang. Cork handed the spatula to Stephen and took the call. The whistle, Stephen knew, was the signal for the volunteer firemen to assemble. His father wasn’t a volunteer, but he was a part of the Tamarack County Search and Rescue team, and sometimes the whistle blast and the need for the team went hand in hand.

  When Cork returned, he had removed his apron, and he threw it in the wicker basket where all the dirty aprons went.

  “What is it, Dad?”

  “A plane’s gone down on the rez. Out on Desolation Mountain.”

  A brief image flashed through Stephen’s mind. An eagle shot from the sky. “You’re going? I want to go, too.”

  Cork opened his mouth, and Stephen fully expected to have to argue his right to be there. But his father simply nodded and said to the kids at the serving windows, “We’re shutting down for the night.”

  CHAPTER 6

  * * *

  Tamarack County Sheriff Marsha Dross walked quickly up the old logging road where nearly a dozen vehicles had parked—deputies’ cruisers, a couple of hook and ladders, an ambulance, and several civilian cars and trucks. Cork waited with Stephen beside the Expedition.

  They were in the far east section of the Iron Lake Reservation, spitting distance from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Before them rose Desolation Mountain, a great uplift of gray gneiss and greenstone, scoured clean by glaciers ten thousand years ago. The mountain stood several hundred feet above the crowns of the evergreens that grew around its base. Higher up, a grove of aspens ringed the formation. The very top was bare rock where only the most basic and tenacious plant life grew, patches of gold lichen that resembled ulcers on the outcrops. The dark mountaintop pressed itself against the darkening overcast of a clouded sky. A storm was coming.

  Dross was in her mid-forties and had been sheriff for a number of years. Cork had hired her as a deputy when he wore the sheriff’s badge, making her the first woman to don a law enforcement uniform in Tamarack County. She was experienced, tough. But Saturday nights she still put on cowboy boots, tight jeans, a snap-button western shirt, and the white Stetson her father once gave her as a birthday present, and kicked up her heels at the American Legion hall, line dancing. The lower pant legs of the khakis and the Wolverines she wore now were coated in mud.

  Without prelude, she said, “It came down in a bog out there.” She pointed toward the trees west of the logging road.

  “Survivors?” Cork asked.

  “So far nothing, but we just started looking and the debris is still burning.”

  “Know who was in it?”

  As if a hand had pressed itself into her face, her eyes closed a moment, and all her features went flat. “We think it’s Senator McCarthy. She was scheduled to land at Olson Field this afternoon. Her family was with her.”

  Olson Field was the small regional airport just outside Aurora.

  “But you’re not sure?”

  “We’re double-checking.”

  “Who called it in?”

  “Monkey Love.”

  His real name was Jameson Love, but no one called him that. Monkey Love was a mixed-blood Shinnob who lived with his uncle Ned Love in an isolated cabin in the shadow of Desolation Mountain. Cork used to haul him in regularly, D and D—drunk and disorderly—at first, then for other offenses that had earned him significant jail time. But Monkey Love got clean and for the past few years had lived quietly, surviving thanks to careful spending of the allotment he received from the profits of the Chippewa Grand Casino and from the cutting and selling of firewood with his uncle.

  “Monkey and Ned don’t have a telephone at their place,” Cork said.

  “He hightailed it into Allouette, used one at the tribal office. Some guys from the rez came back out with him. They’re up there now with my people. Daniel’s one of them.”

  From out of the west came a crack like an enormous branch splintering, followed by a long rumble of thunder.

  Dross’s look went as dark as the sky. “Just what we need.”

  “Okay if we head on in to give a hand?”

  “Foster’s posted up the road a bit. He’ll point the way. Check in with Azevedo. He’s coordinating at the crash site.”

  Sirens screamed in the distance, although there was little need for a siren on the ill-traveled back roads of the rez.

  Dross said, “State Patrol,” and moved past Cork and Stephen to await these new arrivals.

  They walked the logging road as it skirted the base of Desolation Mountain. Cork knew that in Alaska or Colorado or even Vermont they would laugh at the thought of calling this hump of gneiss a mountain. But it was the highest elevation in the county, a landmark that could be seen for miles. Although it was on the Iron Lake Reservation, it was a popular destination for photographers in the North Country, especially in the fall, when the view from the top was a stunning 360-degree panorama of color. Several small lakes were visible from the mountaintop. With binoculars, and if you knew where to look, you could see Ned and Monkey Love’s cabin, hunkered among the pines on a lake called Little Bass.

  Deputy David Foster waved at them from the side of the road. Cork could see where the undergrowth had been trample
d and broken by the passage of many feet. The recently made trail led into mixed-growth forest of pine and poplar.

  “How far in, Dave?” Cork asked.

  “Couple hundred yards. Gets real mushy halfway there. After that, watch your step.”

  The trail wove a crooked course among the trees and between great humps of rounded granite, miniature reflections of the bald mountaintop. A hundred yards in, just as Foster said, the soil turned wet underfoot and their boots began to make sucking sounds. The trees thinned out, and as the ground became softer and mushier, the pines and poplars gave way to tamaracks and tall ferns. Up ahead, from somewhere still out of sight, came the shouts of men. Also from that direction came another long roll of thunder.

  They reached the scene, a boggy area, roughly circular and a hundred yards in diameter, full of reeds and cattails. The men already there were spread out across the marsh and around the edges. Those that had ventured into the reeds stood in brackish water up to their thighs. Close to the far side of the marsh, a group of the volunteer firemen had surrounded a large section of fuselage that was sending up a thick column of black smoke. Cork could see wreckage everywhere, but that one piece of fuselage appeared to be the only debris still burning. The firefighters wore yellow packs and were laying down a spray of suppressant foam where the smoke billowed.

  Deputy Azevedo stood with a group of men Cork recognized from the Iron Lake Reservation, Daniel English among them. Cork headed their way, Stephen on his heels.

  “Lots of debris in the woods,” Daniel was saying as he pointed southwest of the marsh. “Looks like the plane clipped the treetops and began to break apart there.”

  “All right,” Azevedo said. “Take your guys and see what you can find. But don’t touch anything. Yell if you find someone alive.”

  When he saw Cork and Stephen, Daniel lifted his chin to acknowledge them, then turned toward the woods, the four Shinnobs from the rez trailing him. Cork knew them all. Ned and Monkey Love, Phil Hukari, who, like Daniel, was a tribal game warden, and Tom Blessing, who worked with Native youth.

  Azevedo turned to Cork. “As soon as the fire’s out, we’ll check the fuselage. Cockpit’s over there, sunk in the mud.” He nodded toward a section of debris shaped like a white bullet and almost hidden by reeds. “We broke the windows out. Two bodies inside. I don’t figure what’s in that burning fuselage is going to be any more hopeful.”

  “Any idea how many passengers?”

  “We think the two pilots, Senator McCarthy, her husband and son, and McCarthy’s personal assistant. If this was McCarthy’s plane. We’ve radioed in the registration number but haven’t received confirmation yet.”

  “What do you need us to do?”

  “The plane broke up pretty good. Hit the trees back there, like English said, then plowed into the marsh. If you’re willing, follow the line it took coming down through those trees and across the marsh.” He eyed Stephen and hesitated before going on.

  “Looking for bodies,” Cork said.

  “Yeah,” Azevedo acknowledged. “I’ve already got some guys on it, but I could use more.”

  Someone already in the marsh called to the deputy, and Azevedo waded in.

  When he wore a badge, Cork had been on the scenes of dozens of brutal accidents—car wrecks, lumbering mishaps, explosions, fires. He’d seen life wrenched from the human body with nightmarish violence and in unimaginable ways. But that was far outside Stephen’s experience, and the father in Cork hoped that they wouldn’t find what might remain of the passengers from the destroyed plane. Yet Stephen was ahead of him, already wading into the reeds and the black water and the suck of the mud beneath it all.

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  Moments after they entered the bog, brilliant tendrils of lightning crossed the sky to the west, and only a second passed before the air seemed to shatter. Roy Berg, the fire chief, hollered to everyone to clear the water. Although the broken section of fuselage still smoldered, Berg and his men abandoned their work and made quickly for the shoreline. Cork called to Stephen but got no response. Cork thought he understood. Stephen wanted to press forward, take the risk, find what there was to find, answer the questions. This fallen plane was part of his son’s vision, and he had to know why.

  “Stephen,” Cork called sharply.

  Another bolt of lightning, then thunder like the end of the world. Reluctantly, Stephen followed his father to safety.

  A driving rain descended. Cork and Stephen hunkered beneath the trees a good, safe distance from the marsh water. After a while Daniel English joined them, along with the other men from the reservation.

  “Anything?” Cork asked.

  “Tail section and wings. Sheared off as the plane clipped the treetops,” Daniel replied. “Everything’s pretty torn up.”

  “You called it in, Monkey? What did you see?” Cork asked.

  Monkey Love looked like the Devil had walked all over him, the result of years of addiction to booze and drugs. He was emaciated. His face bore scars from drunken fights in bars and alleyways, and his damaged right eyelid was beset with a persistent droop. He had unusually long arms and fingers—he’d been called Monkey all his life—and more often than not, he could be found puffing on a cigarette hand-rolled from American Spirit tobacco. When he spoke, it was like a rasp over metal.

  “Was sitting on the crapper with the door open.” Monkey and Ned Love had no running water at their cabin. They used an outhouse for taking care of business. “Got a good view of the mountain from there. Saw the plane come over it. They all do when they’re headin’ toward the airport. But this one was strange, kinda cockeyed and real low. Going way too slow, seemed. I lost it, then heard a lot of popping, like gunshots or somethin’. Then whump. I swear I could feel it hit. Got out of that crapper, and there was Uncle Ned, lookin’ at the trees west of the cabin.”

  “Did you locate it right away?”

  “Wasn’t hard,” Ned Love said, taking up the story. “Could see where the smoke was coming from. Got there pretty quick.”

  Ned Love had always been a quiet man, a lifelong bachelor and hermit, content to live in basic isolation. He was tall and thin, like Monkey, but with a vibrancy that Cork had always attributed to Ned Love’s connection with the land he called home and his decision, long ago, to draw his life from it. A good deal of the man’s sustenance came from trapping and hunting and fishing. Aside from Henry Meloux, Cork couldn’t think of another human who knew more about harvesting food from what grew in the Northwoods.

  “See anybody alive?”

  “Just pieces of that plane and the fire. Figured Monkey and me couldn’t do nuthin’ but we oughta let somebody know, so I told him to hustle his butt to Allouette.”

  “And you guys came back with him?” Cork addressed this to the others from the rez.

  “It was like Ned says,” Phil Hukari replied. He didn’t look Native. Young, blond, balding, he was mixed-blood from Oregon, his Native heritage Nez Perce. Much like Daniel, he’d come to Minnesota because of a woman. His wife, Sue, taught early childhood education on the rez, and everyone loved her. “The fuselage piece was in flames when we got here. Nothing we could do about that. Did a quick perimeter search just in case somebody got thrown clear. Then the first responders showed up, started hitting the fire with foam. Then you and Stephen.” He looked at the sky. “Then this damn storm.”

  Finally it happened, exactly the reason Berg had cleared the marsh. A searing electric bolt hit the water. As if a bomb had gone off, the flash was blinding, the sound deafening. Even where he stood among the pines and tamaracks, many yards from the edge of the bog, Cork felt the jolt of the current rip through the ground under his feet.

  “That’s all she wrote,” Tom Blessing said in a stone voice. “If anyone was still alive somewhere in that bog, they’re dead now.”

  Blessing was full-blood Iron Lake Ojibwe. Like a lot of Native youths, he’d gotten into trouble young. He’d belonged to a gang on the rez
called the Red Boyz and still bore the brand that was part of the initiation ritual. A set of bloody circumstances had tied him and Cork together in a way that changed them both, and after that, Blessing had abandoned the Red Boyz and now counseled troubled Ojibwe teens.

  Moments after the flash, Cork got his first glimpse of the men in olive-green ponchos, a half dozen of them, spread out around the marsh along the shoreline, moving slowly. They held boxes in their hands, electronics of some kind. Cold rain cascaded down his face, and he had to wipe his eyes to see the men clearly. They were like wraiths, dark, silent figures, ignoring the dangers of the storm.

  “Who’re they?” Daniel asked.

  Cork squinted but could see nothing that would be helpful in answering Daniel’s question.

  Deputy Azevedo intercepted one of the figures. They talked. The deputy stepped back. The men in the ponchos continued on their way. After they’d completely circumnavigated the marsh, they sifted among the trees and were gone.

  Although the storm was violent, it was also brief and passed quickly. When the lightning was far to the east, well beyond Desolation Mountain, the fire chief gave the all clear and the search resumed, along with the dousing of what flames sent up smoke from inside the broken fuselage.

  Cork realized that Stephen was no longer with him. He did a scan of the dark woods at his back and saw Stephen standing by himself, arms hanging at his sides, staring down at something. Cork jumped brambles and quickly made his way to where his son had become a statue with a bowed head.

  There it was. A plane seat. Torn from its moorings. Bolt holes empty. Padding exploded from the ripped upholstery. Cork wondered if the passenger still strapped in the seat, a young teenager judging from his size, was the kid from Stephen’s vision. It would have been hard to tell. The face resembled raw meat loaf.

  Stephen turned to his father and asked a question Cork couldn’t even begin to answer.