Ice Run

by Steve Hamilton

  “You okay?” he said.

  “I never hit a tree in the middle of a lake before,” I said. I rubbed my neck as I got back on the snowmobile. Then we were off again.

  The snow seemed to get even deeper as we worked our way toward the island. I could feel the treads fighting hard to move through it. The wind rushed by. Five miles, I thought. It’s only five miles.

  The ride seemed to last forever. The snow kept falling, as though it would never stop. If the trees hadn’t been there to guide us, I would have sworn that we were lost, riding around in great looping figure eights all over the frozen surface of Lake Huron.

  Finally, a great mass started to take shape ahead of us, darker than the night itself. It grew larger and larger, until we could make out buildings and the faint glow of streetlights.

  We rounded a corner by the big wall of boulders that formed a breakwater during the summer months. We rode right up past the docks where the big ferries let off the passengers, on the east end of Huron Street. At least we were right in town this time and didn’t have to ride all the way down from the airport.

  We hit a big bump as we rode up onto the street level. There was probably some official snowmobile ramp somewhere else, but that was the least of our problems. I headed down the middle of Huron Street, Vinnie right behind me. The street was empty. It looked even lonelier than the last time I had been there.

  One hotel in the center of town seemed to be open for business. Every other building was dark, until we got to the restaurant at the end of the street. I pulled over and came to a stop in front of it. Vinnie pulled up beside me. There were a dozen other snowmobiles parked along the street here. It was obviously the only place to be on a February night on Mackinac Island.

  I got off the sled and stretched for a moment. I was stiff and cold, even with the space suit on.

  “Is this where we’re going?” Vinnie said. He took off his helmet and shook out his long hair. The snow clung to his suit, making him look like a walking snowman.

  “No, it’s up the hill,” I said, pointing to the road that led up to the Grand Hotel. The huge building looked even more foreboding at night. “I just wanted to stop for a second, so we can figure this out.”

  “What’s the plan?”

  “I’m not sure if we should take the machines all the way up,” I said. “The noise will give us away.”

  “There’s a few other snowmobiles here. We won’t be the only people buzzing around.”

  “You may be right,” I said. “Although the house is way up there, just past the Grand Hotel. Everything’s locked up tight.”

  “If it’s on the main road, I’m sure the riders go up there. Even at night. You know how it is.”

  “You’re right,” I said, remembering all the times I had lain awake at night, swearing at the snowmobiles tearing down the trail behind my cabin. “It would be a long hard walk in this snow, too.”

  “You need something before we go up?” he said, nodding toward the front window of the restaurant. “Some water? Some food in your stomach?”

  “No, I’m good,” I said, which was far from the truth, but I didn’t feel like waiting another minute. I took one glance inside the place, seeing the warm light, the men sitting around the fireplace, other men drinking at the bar. It made me feel even colder.

  “Okay,” he said, putting his helmet back on. “Let’s rip it up.”

  I brushed the snow off my helmet and lifted it over my head. Then I stopped dead.

  “Alex,” Vinnie said from behind me. “Are you all right?”

  Inside the restaurant, sitting against the back wall…

  It was Natalie.

  I didn’t believe it at first. I thought maybe after everything that had happened that day, I was having some kind of hallucination. But then she moved. She looked up and took a quick scan of the room before going back to her drink. It was her.

  “Alex, what is it?”

  “She’s here.”

  “What?”

  “She’s here,” I said. “Come on.”

  He looked confused as all hell, but he put his helmet on his sled and followed me into the bar. From one second to the next, the air felt seventy degrees warmer. It smelled of cigarette smoke.

  “Gentlemen!” the bartender called to us. “Wipe off the snow please!”

  I ignored the man. I walked through the room in my ridiculously large snowmobile suit, leaving a trail of snow with every step. The faces were all turning to look at me, but she hadn’t seen me yet. She didn’t know I was twenty feet away from her and closing in.

  She didn’t notice me until I was standing right next to her. When she finally looked up at me, it all hit me at once. This was the woman I had spent every waking hour worrying about, the woman I had almost killed myself trying to find. Now here she was, sitting at this table. The light picked up the red in her hair. She stared at me with those green eyes until finally she cleared her throat and spoke.

  “You’re here.”

  There were seven or eight things I wanted to say. I picked one. “So are you.”

  “Hello, Vinnie,” she said, looking past me. “Did Alex drag you all the way out here?”

  “He didn’t drag me,” Vinnie said.

  “Natalie,” I said, “everyone’s been looking for you.”

  “Who’s everyone?”

  “All the police in Michigan and Ontario. Your old commander. Me.”

  “I haven’t been gone that long.”

  “Natalie, he’s alive.”

  “That suit’s a little big on you,” she said.

  “You already know that, don’t you …”

  “Yes.”

  “And your mother …”

  “Don’t, Alex. Please don’t talk about that, okay? I’m trying to hold everything together here.”

  “I was there,” I said.

  She looked at me. “You saw her?”

  “Yes.”

  “I shouldn’t have left her alone,” she said. She looked at the bottom of her glass. “By the time I got back, it was too late.”

  “For God’s sake, what’s going on?”

  She didn’t look up.

  “Natalie, please,” I said. “Tell me why you’re here.”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” she said, standing up and grabbing her coat. “I’ll let our old friend Simon Grant tell you.”

  Chapter Twenty

  She led us both through the bar, out onto the cold street. The snow was falling even harder now. There was nothing but the faint light coming from the front window, a light at the small hotel in the middle of the block, another far down at the end of the street. Everything else was dark. Empty buildings. Mountains of snow.

  We stopped to breathe in the cold air, all three of us. Outside the bar it was quiet. A faint wind made the snow swirl around our heads.

  “Natalie, what are we doing?”

  “You’ll see,” she said. “You have to trust me.”

  “What do you mean, Simon Grant’s going to tell us? He’s dead. I mean, not like your stepfather. I went to Simon Grant’s funeral.”

  “Please, Alex. Just come with me before you say anything else.”

  I turned to Vinnie. “Just go,” he said to me. “She asked you to trust her.”

  “Vinnie, you come with us,” she said. “I’d like you to hear this, too.”

  She set off down the street, back toward the center of town, moving quickly down the path we had just cut with our sleds. I zipped up my ridiculous suit and tried to keep up with her. I was tired, more tired than I wanted to admit to myself.

  “Where are we going?” I said. “The Grants’ place is up the other way.”

  “We’re not going to the Grants’ place,” she said.

  She stopped in front of the hotel in the middle of the block, the Chippewa. She pulled the door open and held it for us. A woman came to the counter in the tiny lobby, rubbing her eyes and looking past us, out the front door.

  “Still snowing
out there?” she said. She was a big woman, in her sixties. I would have bet anything she was an Ojibwa.

  “You could say that, Mrs. Larusso,” Natalie said. “We’re going up to my room for a while.”

  “Are you sure, hon? We have other rooms, you know.”

  “No, we’ll be fine.”

  “We always have empty rooms in February.”

  “We’ll let you know if we need one, Mrs. Larusso. Thank you.”

  “Natalie,” I said, “why are we going up to your room?”

  “Just shut up for once,” she said. “Please. Just stop talking.”

  “Natalie …”

  “I swear,” she said, taking my hand in hers, “if you say one more word, I’m gonna hit you right in the mouth.”

  She hit the elevator button, waited exactly one second, and then opened the door to the stairwell.

  “I always hated elevators,” she said, and pulled me into the stairwell. Vinnie followed. As we went up the stairs behind her, I couldn’t help but think of the last time we had been in a hotel together, and everything that had happened since then. Her room was on the third floor. It was small, dominated by a queen-sized bed with an elaborate iron frame. She took her coat off.

  “Natalie,” I said. “Will you please tell us what’s going on?”

  “Take that stupid snowmobile suit off,” she said. “You, too, Vinnie.”

  “All right,” I said. “If that means you’re finally gonna talk to us.” I unzipped the suit.

  “Sit down,” she said, “and watch this.”

  There was a television on top of the dresser. She turned it on. A commercial was just ending, then Monday Night Football came back on. Before I could say anything, she picked up an overnight bag from the floor and pulled out a video cassette.

  “Will you both sit down, please?”

  When we were both sitting on the edge of the bed, she put the videocassette into the VCR port that was built into the bottom of the television. The football game was replaced by a hospital room. A man was sitting up in a bed, his hands folded in his lap. He was looking at the camera.

  “What is this?” I said. Then I recognized the man. He was a slightly younger Simon Grant.

  Another man appeared. It was Marty Grant. His face loomed huge in the frame as he adjusted the camera angle.

  She hit the fast-forward button. The two men stayed in place, Simon Grant in the bed, Marty in the chair next to him. Their heads and hands moved in a blur as Natalie scanned through the tape.

  “Martin, I know why you’re doing this,” Simon Grant said as soon as the tape speed went back to normal. “You think I’ll be dead by the end of the week.”

  She hit the fast-forward again. “Simon Grant had a heart attack about ten years ago. Marty wanted to get a tape of him talking about his life, in case he wasn’t around much longer.”

  “How did you get this?” I said.

  She looked at me. “Marty gave it to me.”

  Before I could ask her anything else, she put the tape back to normal speed again. “Okay, this is about where we want it,” she said. “Listen.”

  Marty was laughing hard at something his father had just told him. “You gotta be kidding me, Pops. She actually fell for that?”

  “Only for fifty-five years. God bless her.”

  “Okay, if that’s the best thing you ever did in your life,” Marty said, “then tell me the worst thing you ever did.”

  Natalie moved away from the television. She went to the window and looked out at the darkness as the tape kept playing.

  “That’s a tough question,” the older man said.

  “It’s just between you and me,” Marty said, sneaking a wink at the camera.

  “I lived a long life, son.”

  “Come on, Pops. How bad could it be? It’s not like you ever killed somebody.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Yes, son, I did.”

  Marty stopped smiling.

  “Pops …”

  “I’ll tell you about it, Martin. I think it’s about time.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Let me tell you something about hate, son. I’ve learned a lot about hate in my life. Hell, I lived on it for years. It’s what kept me going, every day, when I was a young man. I hated how poor I was when I was growing up, how I didn’t have a father. How I had to go out and work from when I was ten years old. This was during the Great Depression, you understand. You don’t know what it was like back then. I’m glad you don’t. I’m glad you never had to see times like that. A man would do anything just to earn a little money, so he could feed his family. I hated having to live like that, and seeing what it was doing to my mother, how it was making her an old woman when she was forty. Later on, when I was working on the docks, I hated the men I was working for. I hated the way they took advantage of us whenever they could, like we were nothing more than animals.”

  Marty Grant was leaning forward in his chair, his elbows on his legs. He didn’t move an inch. He sat there and listened to his father.

  “I suppose, looking back on it, all that hatred in my heart, it was sort of like a fuel, if you know what I mean. It kept me going. I don’t know if I would have been able to survive, or work so hard, or later, when I was in the union … We had to fight so hard, son. Maybe I needed that hatred. But damn, what it did to me. What a price to pay. All those years…”

  Natalie kept looking out the window. She was as still as Marty’s image on the tape.

  “There was one man in particular, son. This goes back to 1929, when they still had Prohibition. People used to bring liquor across the border all the time. I bet you didn’t know that a lot of the rum-running happened right here on the border between Michigan and Ontario. Most of it was down by Detroit, of course. That’s where the gangs were. Capone’s men and Bugs Moran and the Purple Gang … God, you can’t even imagine, son. It was a different country back then. Anyway, my father and his brother, they got involved in this. They knew these other men in Canada who would bring good whiskey across. My father and uncle would meet them and pay them for the whiskey, and then they’d sell it. In the summer, they’d come over in these wooden boats. Then, when the river froze, they’d bring it over on a sled.”

  Mrs. DeMarco’s words came back to me. The ice run.

  “There was one night…”

  Simon Grant stopped. He cleared his throat.

  “It was New Year’s Eve, the last night of 1929. The Ojibway Hotel was still brand-new. They were having this big party. I guess the manager there had been asking my father if he could get some whiskey for him, but the weather had been so bad .. . The men from Canada couldn’t get through, not until the weather broke on New Year’s Eve itself. I don’t know how much my father felt like doing it that night, but the money must have been good. He and my uncle went over to get it…”

  Grant stopped again. He coughed a few times and then kept going.

  “I was just a little kid, you understand. I didn’t hear the real story until later. Apparently, what happened was, some of the gangsters down in Detroit finally got wind of what was going on up here. They hadn’t been bothering with it way up here in the U.P. But now with the new hotel and the big parties and everything … Somehow they heard of this big load of whiskey coming across. They knew exactly where the meeting would be, out on the St. Marys River. They took the whiskey and the money and they killed everybody. My father and my uncle, they never came home. That was December of 1929, remember. The stock market had just crashed a couple of months before that. The next few years.. . The next few years were tough, son.”

  Grant shook his head slowly.

  “My little sister …”

  Marty finally looked up at him.

  “Her name was Victoria. She would have been your aunt. You never got to meet her. She died of pneumonia when she was eight years old. I was ten. She was. ..”

  He had to stop for a while.

  “God, how long ago was that?” he sa
id. “You should have seen this little shack we were living in. It wasn’t fit to be a henhouse. My little sister, she was just…”

  His voice broke.

  “This angel. I remember her like …”

  He put his hand in front of his face, then let it fall back to his lap.

  “So when, 1972 … That’s forty-three years later. You were in high school back then. I get this call from a man named Albert DeMarco.”

  I looked over at Natalie. She didn’t turn around.

  “This man tells me, all these years later, that his father was out on that ice, too. He knew all about it. He told me something else that I had never heard before. He told me that the gangsters let one of the men live. That man must have made a deal with them. My father and uncle get killed … the man’s partner, Mr. DeMarco, he gets killed … and Luc Reynaud, he’s the one man who made it back home—he works directly with the gangsters from that point on. I asked this man why he was telling me this now. He says it was something he thought I should know. Of course, I knew there was more to it. Eventually, this Mr. DeMarco, he gets around to telling me that the Reynaud family was fabulously wealthy, that they had all this money from way back, during the last few years of rum-running, supplying the gangsters in Michigan, buying gold during the Depression … this whole story the man’s telling me. A big house and horses, a whole estate up there in Blind River, Ontario. All this built up on that one night Reynaud sold out my father and my uncle, and DeMarco’s father, too. He tells me all this and then he finally gets to the point. Luc Reynaud’s spoiled brat son, Jean Reynaud, was coming down for a big party at the Ojibway on New Year’s Eve. He told me if he was in my shoes, he’d want to know about it.”

  “Pops,” Marty said, finally speaking up. “Are you telling me this was the man …”

  “DeMarco wanted me to kill him. That was pretty obvious. I told him I didn’t run errands for cowards, told him if he wanted Reynaud dead he should kill the man himself. That’s what I told him. But at the same time … let’s just say I was curious about meeting the son of the man who killed my father. So I went to the hotel that night. There he was, all dressed up. He was real smooth. He had this old hat on. A gray homburg. I went up to him at the bar and I introduced myself. I asked him if he knew who I was. He said no, he didn’t. I told him I liked his hat. He told me it had belonged to his father. I asked him if he knew how his father had made all his money. He sort of looked at me funny, and then he told me that his father had made all his money by milking cows. I asked him if he was sure about that. He put his two fists up, started moving them up and down, like he was milking a cow. He said, that’s where the milk comes from, sir. Just like that. He started laughing. Then he bought me a drink. He slapped me on the back and said, Happy New Year to you, sir. Then he walked away. I just sat there for a while, thinking about what he had said, drinking the beer he bought me. Milking cows, he said.”