“I just wanted to make sure they haven’t killed you yet,” she said.
He smiled at the sound of her voice. “I don’t kill easy. You know that.”
“Doesn’t mean I don’t worry. Are you all right?”
He rose from his bunk, left the cabin, and stood on the deck in the cool night air. The moon was high overhead, the lake water a mirror.
“Confused, but okay,” he told her. “Do you have something for me?”
“Nothing specific. Directives have come down to clamp a lid on any hint of a terrorist attack. A black eye for an administration that campaigned on keeping America safe. On our end, we’re sifting through all the threats Olympia received, looking for something specific. Nothing concrete so far. She was on the front line in so many causes. She thought of the threats as proof that she was being heard and insisted they didn’t scare her.”
She was quiet. He could hear her breathing, soft. Like wind in tall grass.
“Any help from the FBI?” he asked.
“They’re not very forthcoming, all the way up the ladder. We’re tapping every resource on the inside that we can, but we don’t have the leverage we used to. And you’ve probably heard that the governor’s going to be in Aurora tomorrow night for the town meeting about the mine, the meeting Olympia was supposed to attend. It would be good for you to be there, Bo. Take stock of the audience. Maybe someone will stand out.”
“Like who?”
“The anti-McCarthy zealots. Someone so rabid they might actually have been motivated to assassinate her.”
“In my experience, those people don’t tend to be particularly sophisticated in their methods.”
“Unless they had help from those who have the wherewithal to be sophisticated or the power to cover up a crude killing.”
“Any suggestions in that regard?”
“That’s what we’re looking to you for.” He heard her sigh. “I wish you had someone watching your back up there.”
“I’ve got help, of a sort. A guy who used to be sheriff here. Name’s O’Connor.”
“Does he know how deep you’re in this?”
“That wouldn’t be healthy for either of us. As far as he knows, I’m working for an unnamed client.”
“The truth,” she said. “At least part of it. Tell me about Gerard.”
“I’m still not sure who brought him in. Someone’s after something that came down with the plane. Maybe the flight recorder, maybe something else. People involved in the early search of the crash site have gone missing. Could be someone thinks they snatched whatever’s so important. Gerard might be behind the disappearances, I don’t know yet.”
“If Gerard gets the recorder, we may never know the truth.”
“Then I’ll have to find it before he does.”
Something jumped in the water, shattering the mirrored surface. Bo watched the dark rings spread out, ripples extending far beyond the point of disturbance.
“You be safe,” she said.
“I’ll do my best.”
The call ended without goodbyes. Bo turned off the burner phone for good. He had many others and she had all their numbers. Only one call per phone, he’d told her, just to be safe. Then he stood a long while, waiting for the lake water to return to glass.
CHAPTER 25
* * *
When Stephen, Daniel, and Trixie reached Crow Point early the next morning, the fire had already been prepared and the Grandfathers, the rocks to be used in the sweat that day, were heating. The lodge was on the shore of Iron Lake and surrounded by birch trees. It hadn’t always been in its current location. Two years earlier, it was on the other side of Crow Point. In that location, while sweating alone in winter, Stephen had seen the vision of the man who would put a bullet into his back. That shooting had taken place at the sweat lodge not long thereafter.
Following that brutal violation of a sacred place, Henry Meloux had ordered a new sweat lodge built far from the other. Stephen hadn’t helped in that construction. He’d had his hands full struggling to walk again. But his injury didn’t keep him from participating in sweats, and he was certain that the cleansing rituals had helped his body and his spirit heal.
Trixie trotted ahead, and Waaboo raced to greet her. Then the boy ran to Daniel, who bent, wrapped his son in his arms, and lifted him.
“I helped make the fire,” Waaboo told him proudly.
Which was a significant honor, particularly for one so young.
Daniel carried Waaboo piggyback and they continued across the meadow to Henry Meloux’s cabin, where the others were waiting. Rainy looked troubled.
“Where’s Cork?” she asked.
“Trying to convince Bo Thorson to come out here,” Stephen told her. “He thinks Bo might benefit from taking part in the sweat.”
“Ah,” Rainy said, but looked unconvinced. “An interesting speculation.”
“Everything okay here last night?” Daniel asked Jenny.
“Blessedly quiet.”
“Where are Henry and Leah?”
“Walking,” Rainy said. “They walk together every morning.”
“Is he teaching her about the medicine plants?” Stephen asked.
Although he hadn’t yet begun his formal preparation to become a Mide, a member of the Grand Medicine Society, Stephen already knew a good deal about the medicines Henry and Rainy used in their healing work.
Rainy smiled. “That’s what he says. I think he just likes her company.”
Henry Meloux was more than a hundred years old, Leah nearly thirty years his junior. They lived in separate cabins but had joined their lives on Crow Point in a way that someone on the outside might think strange. At twenty, Stephen didn’t fully understand the arrangement himself. Was it love? Just companionship? He had never asked Henry to explain what connected them. One day he might broach the subject with the old man, but this was not that day.
“Everything quiet on Gooseberry Lane?” Jenny asked.
Stephen and Daniel exchanged a look.
“What?”
“Waaboo,” Daniel said. “Why don’t you take Trixie outside to play?”
* * *
“Sweats have many purposes,” Cork explained to Bo as they traveled north along the shoreline of Iron Lake. “Healing. Cleansing. Visioning. Seeking.”
“If I were a religious kind of guy,” Bo replied, “I’d say it sounds like praying.”
“Prayer is a part of it. It can be about asking. It can be about gratitude. It can be about simply connecting with the sacred spirit that resides in all things, the great spirit that weaves all life together.”
Bo studied the lake, which, under the morning sun, shot blinding arrows of light. God was an abstract to him, something he’d discussed only as he might discuss the philosophy of Kierkegaard. He found it almost quaint, the way Cork talked about this belief in spirit.
“So the sweat today, what’s that about?”
“Stephen believes he might be given a better understanding of the vision that comes to him.”
“ ‘Given,’ ” Bo said. “ ‘Comes to him.’ Cork, I’ve got to tell you, this is all a little woo-woo for me.”
“I understand. I’ve lived all my life seeing things I can’t explain in a rational way. I just ask that you keep an open mind.”
They parked along the gravel roadside, behind Daniel English’s truck. English and Stephen O’Connor had come out much earlier, Bo knew, probably about the time Cork called to convince him to join them in this Indian ritual. He’d agreed, but not for the reason Cork believed. What Bo wanted to know was the location of the family who might be used as pawns in the game that was afoot in Tamarack County.
“We walk the rest of the way,” Cork said.
“How far?”
“A couple of miles.”
“I don’t do much hiking in the woods. I’m a city kind of guy.”
Cork laughed. “You look pretty North Country right now.”
The morning was cool,
high forties, the air fresh and filled with the scent of pine. The sky was blue and cloudless. Cork talked little as they hiked the trail, and Bo found this to his liking. Although he wasn’t an outdoorsman, on such a morning, he couldn’t help but believe that any conversation would be a disruption of a quiet that felt, he had to admit, a little sacred.
They came to a stream whose water was red-hued.
“Nibi-Miskwi,” Cork said as he danced across rocks to the other side. “That’s the Ojibwe name for this stream.”
“What’s it mean?”
“Blood Water.”
“Why the red color?”
“A couple of factors. The iron in all the soil up here, and also tannin from the bog seepage that feeds the stream.”
“Nibi-Miskwi. It has a poetic ring.”
“It’s a beautiful language, Ojibwemowin.”
“You speak it well?”
“Not at all,” Cork told him. “When I was a kid, it was spoken mostly by elders, but that’s changed. More and more children learn to speak it now. We have programs for that. Waaboo’s becoming pretty fluent.” Cork turned from the red water of the stream. “Still a distance to go before we hit Crow Point.” He continued down the path, and the conversation was at an end.
They broke from the trees onto a meadow that began wide but narrowed to the south. The meadow was outlined in birch and aspen trees, and beyond the trees was the silver-blue glitter of Iron Lake. Two cabins stood at the far end of the point. A little to the west rose two outcrops of high rock. Among the trees along the shoreline north of the outcrops was a squat structure with a fire in front sending up white smoke. Several figures were gathered around the fire.
“The sweat lodge,” Cork told him. “We’ll head over in a bit. First I want you to meet Henry.”
They crossed the meadow. The cabin door opened before they arrived, and an old woman stepped out, dressed in jeans and a green turtleneck sweater.
“Anin, Cork,” she said. “Aaniish naa ezhiyaayin?”
“Nminoyaa gwa, Leah. This is my friend Bo Thorson.”
“Welcome,” Leah said with a polite smile. “Won’t you come in?”
Inside the cabin was the oldest man Bo had ever seen. His hair was white and long, his face a wrinkled sheeting of flesh. He sat with a boy who was blowing notes on a little handmade flute. The music stopped and the old man and the boy looked up.
“Anin, Baa-baa,” the boy said to Cork. To Bo he said, “Boozhoo.”
“Henry, Waaboo, I’d like you to meet Bo Thorson.”
The old man rose. He’d seemed bent when he was listening to the boy play the flute. Now his back was straight and his shoulders squared, and Bo saw that the old man was as tall as he.
The old man studied him, eyes dark and penetrating, and Bo felt uncomfortable under their gaze, as if he was being probed. With surprising strength, the old man finally shook the hand Bo had offered.
“You are not what I expected,” the old man said.
“Someone taller?” Bo replied with an amiable smile.
“Someone truer.” The old man didn’t smile nor did he release Bo’s hand.
In his time as an agent of the U.S. Secret Service, and as an operative for hire since, Bo Thorson had met many people of high rank—presidents and premiers and CEOs and holders of extraordinary wealth. Standing in that simple cabin in the middle of nowhere, his hand in the grip of the oldest man he had ever seen, Bo realized that he was in the presence of someone whose power was of a remarkably different kind.
CHAPTER 26
* * *
Like most white people, Bo had lived with two different images of American Indians. One, perpetuated by Saturday matinee Westerns, was all war whoops and feathered bonnets. The other was of a population beset with a weakness for alcohol, a tendency toward violence, incapable of rising out of poverty, and leading an existence generally bereft of moral grounding; when you were in the proximity of someone clearly Indian, you took stock of your merchandise and you watched your back. His time in Tamarack County had begun to change his thinking.
He sat among the birch trees near the sweat lodge, talking with Daniel English; his wife, Jenny O’Connor; and Leah Duling. Rainy and Waaboo had moved to the lakeshore not far away, Rainy helping the little boy work out some tunes on his flute. From inside the sweat lodge came the sound of low chanting. Bo had opted not to join the two O’Connor men and Meloux in their sweat, hoping he might learn a good deal from conversation with the others that could prove useful to him in getting to the bottom of what was going on.
“She was a great senator,” Jenny was saying. “It was like she spoke my thoughts. Cut the defense budget and shift the spending to education, public assistance programs, infrastructure. Keep our wilderness areas wild and safe. Open our arms to the refugees from all the damn wars. Put teeth in all the laws that guarantee civil rights. You ask me, she would have made an ideal presidential candidate in the next election. I’d have voted for her.”
“You sound just like her,” Bo said with a smile. “But all those ideals put her at odds with lots of powerful people.”
“You can’t change the world without ruffling feathers,” Jenny replied.
“The town meeting that brought her up here was going to be about granting permits for this new mining operation. I know she wasn’t in favor of it,” Bo said. “But as I understand it, the mine would bring lots of jobs back to the Iron Range.”
English stepped in. “The iron mines devastated this area last century, but with time the land has recovered. When rain falls on the tailings from an iron mine, the result is simply rust. This new operation would involve sulfide mining. Do you know what happens when rain falls on tailings from a sulfide mine, Bo? It creates sulfuric acid. Do you have any idea what that would do to the ecosystem here? Or everything downstream of this watershed?”
“The mining company’s given assurance that wouldn’t happen. I understand there would be lots of checks in place.”
“Assurance,” English scoffed. “Do you know anything about the Mount Polley Mine in B.C.?”
“Never heard of it.”
“A few years ago, a tailings pond, basically a huge reservoir of poison, was breached, releasing over a billion gallons of tainted water into the streams up there. It was an eco-disaster of extraordinary proportion. The mining companies all said this was an incredibly rare occurrence. But the same thing happened in Colorado the following year. And it’s happened in hundreds of other places around the world. Mining is about momentary profit. Have you heard of seven-generational thinking?”
“If I’m correct, it’s the question of how what we do today will impact the world seven generations from now.”
“Exactly. This mine flies in the face of every reasonable consideration of the future.”
“Except economic.”
“Any gain is only in the short term. If the land and water are poisoned, the long-term effects could be devastating in every way, including economically.”
“Well,” Bo said, “you’ve got me convinced.”
“I wish our governor was as easily convinced,” Jenny said. “He’s thrown his support behind the project.”
“And if he wrangles an appointment to complete Olympia McCarthy’s term, he’ll do a lot of damage on a national scale,” English added.
“You don’t like our governor?” Bo said.
“He owes a lot of favors to big business.”
The blanket over the door of the sweat lodge was lifted from the inside and Cork O’Connor crawled out. The old man followed next, and Cork helped him stand. Young Stephen O’Connor was the last to emerge. All of them dripped from head to toe, their hair flat and clinging to their faces, the boxer shorts they wore drenched.
Leah dipped a ladle into a wooden bucket of cold water, and one by one the men refreshed themselves.
“That’s it?” Bo asked.
“That’s only the first door,” English said. “The first round of their sweat.”
The old man already looked exhausted.
“Are you okay, Henry?” Leah asked.
The old man sat on a blanket that had been laid on the ground. “A few minutes and I will be fine.”
“You two doing okay?” Jenny asked of her father and brother.
“We’re good,” Cork replied. But Bo could see that both he and his son were looking at the old man with deep concern. “Henry,” Cork began.
The old man lifted a hand to stop whatever was about to be said. “I have a heart that is strong and willing and a spirit that whispers ‘More.’ A few minutes, and I will be ready.”
Cork had laid his clothes in a pile near the lodge. Somewhere among all that clothing, a cell phone rang. Cork dug in the pocket of his folded pants.
At the same time, Bo’s cell phone vibrated. He stepped away from the others to take the call.
“Where the hell are you?” Gerard demanded. “Why haven’t you checked in?”
“Nothing more to report at the moment,” Bo said quietly.
“Well, here’s something for you. They found the truck that belongs to the missing couple. The Hukaris.”
“Where?”
“Some back road out there on the reservation. The truck was pretty well destroyed by fire. No sign of the couple.”
“Not the work of your people, I take it.”
“If that was meant as a joke, it’s not funny. Where are you?”
“You remember the O’Connors, father and son?”
“What about them?”
“They’ve become my eyes and ears on the reservation. I’ll explain later.” Bo ended the call abruptly.
When he returned, he found Cork dressing. Rainy and Waaboo had joined the others.
“That was Sheriff Dross on the phone,” Cork told Bo. “They’ve found the Hukaris’ truck. Or what’s left of it.”
Desolation Mountain Page 13
