The motor was ridiculously overpowered for a bass boat, even one that was usually loaded with cigarettes. But still it was no match for the size of the RCMP cruiser; I could feel the cruiser catching up to us. The white light stayed pinned to us like a vaudeville spotlight.
Ollie sat up, looked around in the dark, then pointed a few degrees off to our right. Less than a hundred meters away, barely visible beyond the glare of the RCMP light, lay a hunk of rock and trees.
“The Hen!” she said. “Stay on the gas!” Even shaking with hypothermia, Ollie had a better sense of direction than I did. I’d seen l’Île Hen on the pen map. It was a banana-shaped patch of land only a couple hundred feet long. The US–Canadian border was only about a thousand meters beyond the island, cutting diagonally across the river. But that was still too far; the RCMP boat would be on us in less than thirty seconds.
“We’re not going to make it!” I said
“What are they going to do?” Ollie said. “Ram us?” She was grinning. Why was she—how was she grinning?
Ollie aimed us toward the Hen. A few dozen feet from it she cut right, skimming the northern tip of the banana, then jammed hard to the left. The spotlight cut out; the island was between us now. We shot along the shore, so close that the trees hid the eastern sky. A rock or submerged log would throw us from the boat. But I held the wires together and we flew at top speed, the sound of the outboard doubly loud this close to the land.
In a handful of seconds we were back in open water. The mainland was half a kilometer or more ahead of us, only visible because of the distant glow of streetlights. As near as I could figure we were heading southeast, paralleling the border. We should have been going due west. I shouted, “What are you doing? That’s Quebec!”
“No,” she yelled back. “It’s Mohawk land.”
The white light slid across us again as the RCMP boat made the turn around the Hen, but we had gained some distance. Ollie pointed us at an outcropping. Did she know where to land? Or were we so outside the plan that it was all improvisation now?
Dr. Gloria pointed behind us. “Ladies?”
The police boat seemed to be charging at us at a speed it hadn’t displayed before.
“Mohawk Land” seemed to be growing no closer. In moments the RCMP had pulled up along our right side, less than ten yards away, but we could see little beyond the glare of the spotlight. The man behind the bullhorn yelled “CUT YOUR ENGINE!” and then followed up with a barrage of French commands.
Ollie waved.
The police boat surged ahead. “They’re going to cut us off,” Ollie said.
Their boat was thirty meters ahead of us now, and it suddenly swerved in front of us. Ollie jerked us to the left. We hit the big boat’s wake and went airborne.
I reached for the side of the boat, but before I could get a grip we slammed down, and I crashed shoulder first into the wet aluminum floor.
“Throttle!” Ollie yelled. The engine had died; I’d dropped the wires.
I got to my knees. My shoulder felt like it had been whacked by a baseball bat. Ahead of us the RCMP boat made a hard left, the spotlight swiveling to keep us in its glare.
“They got us, Ollie.”
“No,” she said. She stooped, trying to find the wires dangling from under the engine. “No no no.”
The police boat finished its turn. It was heading toward us now, coming at us from our left, but the turn had forced it to slow. Dr. Gloria said, “What’s that?”
A silver boat smaller than our own zipped out of the dark to our right, engine keening. The aluminum body was narrow as a canoe, with a massive black outboard weighing down the end. It skipped along the top of the waves at tremendous speed, nose high, the prop barely staying in the water. The boat had no lights, but I could make out a figure of a man sitting tall, his hand firmly at the tiller. He was aiming straight for us, racing to beat the police boat to us.
“Ollie!”
She looked up, the wires in her hand. The new boat roared toward us. There was something wrong with the driver. At first I thought he was wearing a white plastic mask, but then I realized that he wasn’t a man at all. His head was a stuffed garbage bag with a face drawn in black marker. His hand was attached to the tiller by a silver mitten of duct tape.
“We’re going to be rammed by a scarecrow,” Dr. G said.
I’d like to think I yelled “Hold on!” But it may have been only, “Fuck!”
The dummy flashed past us, less than a meter from the front of our boat. It wasn’t us that it was aiming for. A dozen meters past us it swerved hard toward the RCMP cruiser. The silver boat hit the hull of the cruiser and flipped up, catapulting the dummy into the air. The body cartwheeled over the deck of the police boat in a convincing impersonation of a drunken boatman flying to his death. The dummy came down somewhere on the other side, out of our line of sight.
The motor behind me shook to life; Ollie had found the right pair of wires. “Aim for the trees!” Ollie said. I didn’t move. I couldn’t process what I’d just seen.
“Steer, please,” Ollie said.
The spotlight had swung away from us—probably looking for the madman that had suicided against their boat—and I could see across the water more clearly now. The mainland was only two or three hundred meters away. I pushed the tiller to my left, aiming us away from the RCMP boat and the crash.
“What the hell just happened?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” Dr. Gloria said.
Ollie said, “Lyda, just hold on for now, okay?” She pointed toward the outcropping. “There!” A pair of car headlights winked off, then flicked back on. I aimed for them. The police, thank God, had stopped following us.
As we approached the shore, Ollie feathered the throttle wires, slowing us without killing the engine—basically doing a much better job than I had. She directed me to a stretch of grass that sloped up to where we’d seen the headlights. I ran the boat straight into the grass, and Ollie cut the throttle.
A male voice above us said, “Well that was a hell of a run.” Several other voices broke into uproarious laughter.
I helped Ollie out of the boat. She was still wet, and shivering uncontrollably. Dr. Gloria landed beside us. She flicked her wings, shaking the water from them.
Half a dozen men walked down to us, most of them still cracking up. Hilarious. I couldn’t make out their faces in this light, and I couldn’t tell whether they were armed. At least two of them held cans of beer. Another of them had a foot-long box hanging from a strap around his neck. As he stepped closer I realized it was a remote control unit, with a viewscreen and multiple game controller pads.
The lead man was round-faced, about sixty years old, with dark hair. Unlike the guys we’d met at the marina, he looked like my idea of an Indian elder. He regarded me without smiling and said, “You got our money?”
The money. A thrill of fear paralyzed me, and for a moment I couldn’t think. Ollie looked at me sidelong. What had I done with the money? I’d gotten into the boat with the Mr. Squiggly lunchbox, but after all that had happened, I’d completely lost track of it. Was it even still in the boat? We’d been flying at top speed over the river, bouncing all over the place.
“Sure,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “Just a sec.”
I made sure Ollie could stand upright, then went to the bass boat. I didn’t see the box. I climbed over the side, then crouched and looked under the front bench. It wasn’t there. I patted the floor under that bench, as if to make sure the bag hadn’t turned invisible.
Dr. Gloria said, “Don’t panic.”
Too late, I thought.
I stood up and duck-walked to the back of the boat. I could picture the green fucking lunchbox flying up into the air when the boat went airborne. It was all too plausible. And without the money, what would these men do to us? We’d sabotaged their boat, and they’d wrecked another one just to distract the police. Ollie was already too cold to run. Even if she could, where would we run to
?
I knelt down in the back of the boat, and immediately I saw it: The Mr. Squiggly box was jammed in next to the orange gas tank.
“See?” the doctor said.
I climbed out and handed the lead man the bag. He smiled a wide, gap-toothed smile. “Welcome to the Nation.”
THE PARABLE OF
the Child Thief
When the girl was six years old, three people came from afar bearing gifts. The woman who was to be her new foster mother knelt beside her and nervously presented a doll that was almost as big as the child. The doll had long dark hair and beautiful, old-fashioned clothes, and came with a complex historical backstory that tied into a series of books and videos, live-action events, and a restaurant chain. The new foster father crouched on the other side of the girl and showed her a soft-skinned ball that when spoken to or touched in the right way could turn into a cube, a pyramid, a polyhedron. He put it on the floor beside her and told her (in a forced, cheery voice) that it also could change colors, sing songs, and play counting games. It had won several Best Educational Toy awards.
The old man who came with them had also brought a gift, but he kept it in his pocket, and waited.
The girl sat on a patch of carpet in the classroom, staring into the middle distance with half-closed eyes, her head nodding as if she were listening to music. The doll lay on the floor beside her. The ball rocked back and forth, eager to play. The girl did not seem to notice either toy. She had her own possessions. On her lap lay a raggedy teddy bear with a jaunty pirate patch over one eye. And in her left hand she held a deck of playing cards fastened by a rubber band.
The girl’s tiny size and skinny limbs were alarming. Developmental difficulties, the file said. But if she was not beautiful now, she promised beauty. Her features were delicate. Her skin was the color of polished oak. Her dark hair, a wild natural afro, burned with red highlights in the sunlight that slanted through the window.
The new foster father spoke to her, but she did not look up. Only her thumb moved, rubbing back and forth over the deck’s rubber band as if strumming a guitar string.
The foster father looked up at the Village director and said, “Is this normal?”
“Yes, of course,” the director said. Meaning normal for the girl. The child never spoke, and often did not interact with children or teachers. If not for the fMRIs that showed a frontal cortex blazing with light when questioned by psychologists, she might have been diagnosed with severe mental retardation. Even her physical capabilities were not well understood. Some days she barely moved. But when a caretaker was distracted, she could disappear in an instant. She’d been known to escape locked rooms. She had stolen, magpie-like, a hundred small and shiny things. Martha, the houseparent who had taken over after Mr. Paniccia decided not to return to the Village, had discovered several of her caches, hidden mounds of safety pins, coins, chrome salt shaker lids, smart pens, syringes.
The foster father could not hide his annoyance. “I mean, has she been medicated?”
The foster mother put on an icy smile. “I’m sure they haven’t—”
“She receives medication daily,” the director said defensively. “We’ve been very clear about that.” The foster father looked up sharply at her tone. These people were not the usual foster parents. They were enormously rich, as well as famous, though the director had never heard of their names before she’d looked up them up online. Everyone in the room, except perhaps the girl, understood that this visit could make the difference not only in the girl’s life, but in the lives of all the children who lived here.
Once, decades ago, the Village was a new concept: Not an “orphanage” but a cluster of fourteen homes in suburban Illinois that surrounded a learning center and a small playground. Over seventy-five children had lived here at one time, and many of them came from families or foster homes where they had been physically or sexually abused. A number of them, like the girl, had mental disabilities. Once, decades ago, the Village had been well funded.
The director said, “We’ll of course provide you with everything you need for her care for the first month. The prescriptions are good for the next year.”
“We’ll be seeing our own doctors,” the old man said. It was the first time he’d spoken since the visit began.
“Of course,” the director said. She seemed disturbed by the old man. Perhaps it was the way his eyes never left the girl, as if he was hungry for her.
“Tell me about the teacher,” the old man said. “The one who fell.”
“Mr. Paniccia?” the director said. “That was an accident.”
“The file says—”
“I don’t think we should discuss that here in front of the girl.”
The foster mother looked as if she was about to say something, but then quickly rose and clacked away from them on her high heels, clutching her handbag. She was thin and blond, a woman carved from money. The bag cost more than what the director made in month.
The foster father said, “Why don’t you wait outside, Dad?”
This was the first of the three visits required before they could bring the girl home. The old man came each time, and spoke little. On the third visit, he helped secure the girl in her car seat (an infant’s seat, because she was so tiny), then sat in the backseat beside her. The teddy bear was placed between them. She held on to the deck of cards.
When they were well on their way to the airport, the old man’s son caught his eye in the rearview mirror and said, “Happy now?”
The old man didn’t answer. But yes, he was very happy.
It was not until later, when the son’s concentration was on the road and his daughter-in-law was either asleep or pretending to be behind her sunglasses, that the old man leaned close to the little girl and said quietly, “I have a present for you.”
The girl gazed out the car window, refusing to look at him.
He reached into his pocket and brought out a small box. Inside was a gold chain looped around a bronze ring. “This belonged to your mother,” he said. “One of them.”
He lifted the chain by his fingertips and let the ring dangle before the girl. The first step in building trust, he’d decided, was not dolls or toys. She was too smart for that. He needed to give her something of great personal value. “You see how it has six sides? I can tell you a story about that.”
The girl seemed not to hear him. She would not look at the ring.
His son said, “What are you doing now? Can’t you wait until we get home?”
The old man apologized. And when he looked back at the girl he realized that the chain had slipped from between his fingers. The girl’s gaze was fixed on the traffic outside. The old man scooted sideways, checking the seat, the floor of the car. Then he noticed that the girl’s left hand was closed, and peeking from under her fist was a glint of a gold chain.
—G.I.E.D.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
We lay in the dark, side by side, neither of us moving—yet I knew Ollie was awake. It must have been one of the first skills evolved by mammals, this hyperawareness to our cave-mates sprawled around us in the dark, an instinctive understanding of which movements were the random shufflings of sleep, and which were stirrings of restlessness, fear, or hunger. The rhythm of breath may have been our first language.
Dr. Gloria sat in an armchair near the window, legs crossed, notepad on her lap, writing. She did this all the time, filling page after phantom page. Who would read this invisible book?
Ollie and I were exhausted and should have been able to sleep—even here, in the heart of the Mohawk Nation, in the house that untaxed tobacco had built. The home of Roy Smoke. When he told us his name I thought he was fucking with us, but he assured us that Smokes had lived here for generations. He loaded us into a gleaming pickup that probably cost a fortune to keep in gasoline, then drove us three minutes down the road. Somewhere in the dark we crossed over from Quebec to New York. There was no port-of-entry on the Akwesasne Reserve, not even a border marker
that I could see.
Roy’s house was a sprawling two-story McMansion with ten bedrooms and kids’ toys strewn across the carpet. “Oh those grandkids,” he told us, pushing a plastic trike out of the way.
Everyone was asleep, but his wife Linnie woke up to greet Roy, and didn’t blink when Roy said we’d be spending the night. She was a heavyset, apple-cheeked woman with stiff black hair and an easy way about her. She made a fuss over Ollie, who was still wet and shaking with cold, and gave her a fleece hoodie and sweatpants to wear. (Whatever was in Ollie’s backpack, it wasn’t clothes, and I didn’t dare ask her to open it in front of the smugglers.) The sweats were several sizes too big, but everything was too big for Ollie.
They sat us down in the kitchen and started hauling out chicken-fried steak, gravy, corn, mashed potatoes, and cornbread, plus a loaf of white Wonder bread and a bucket of real butter.
“They’re beigetarians,” Dr. Gloria said.
I wasn’t about to complain. Comfort food was exactly what we needed. Or what I needed. Ollie barely ate, and spoke even less. At first I chalked it up to the cold, but even after her chills had died down she seemed to be somewhere else, her gaze fixed on the middle of the table.
It didn’t seem to bother Roy or Linnie. Roy talked as I ate, explaining at length the justness of his tobacco business. I thought of Christian soup kitchens where the price of the meal was a sermon, and like other homeless people, I took the deal. Roy let me know that the tobacco trade was absolutely legal and, more than that, integral to their tribal independence. Canada, he said, had no right to place taxes on products that the tribe produced, on their own land. Tobacco had transformed the Akwesasne Reserve from a third-world nation to a first-world one. If Canada would stop illegally seizing their product, they wouldn’t have to run it over the water in boats.
Afterparty Page 16
