Eleven Miles to Oshkosh

by Jim Guhl

  My face was skewed low and to the right, nearly laying on the dashboard as I looked through the only patch of glass that hadn’t been shattered by bullets. The whole truck shuttered as I scraped another snowbank turning right on Oak. The rear end fishtailed with a hard left on Division.

  I roared past Shattuck and screamed around another right turn on Reed when the idea hit me. With no way of shaking the bastard on dry land, I would take my chances on the lake. I bombed around the corner at Lauden Boulevard and nearly tipped the truck onto two wheels, turning right at South Park before angling left on Bayview. He was still right on me so I jumped hard on the gas. Another left and right turn brought me to the ice and gravel beach of the Fresh Air Camp.

  An infinity of ice lay in front of me on Lake Winnebago. It was no skating rink. The spring ice had begun rotting away and was anything but smooth. Remnants of snow drifts and pressure ridges stood in my path. From the way the sunlight reflected, I could tell that it was covered with slushy puddles and laced with cracks. A smattering of sturgeon spearing shanties showed themselves near the east and west shores. Directly in front of me, to the south, lay the flat line of nothingness—an empty horizon. It might as well have been the Arctic Ocean. Thirty miles of ice between me and Fond du Lac. I set my sights on that flat horizon and cranked up the throttle.

  Slush sprayed up on both sides as I launched Asa’s truck onto the lake and headed for the gap and makeshift bridge across a pressure ridge of jagged ice.

  KACHUNK! KACHUNK! I was on and off.

  A quick check of the side mirror showed the black Cadillac splashing through puddles and slush beds close behind me. I wondered if he would shoot again by hanging his left arm out the window like in the gangster movies. The black car bounced and lurched, fishtailing one way and then the other.

  Asa’s truck had two advantages over the Cadillac—ground clearance and snow tires, and I intended to use both to my advantage. While the Cadillac Man bumped over the steel planks of the ice bridge, I hammered the throttle and bucked through a three-foot drift as thick as mashed potatoes. I would forge my own path. Shulepick could either chase me all the way to Fond du Lac or give up. Either way, I was pretty sure I could ditch him.

  51

  With one eye on the speedometer and another on the ice, I brought the truck up to forty-five miles an hour, heading south. The slush was really flying as the Chevy Apache bucked and swayed like a wild bronc. Every once in a while I scraped a heavy drift with the muffler, and it dragged my speed back to thirty. I know, I know. I was plowing a trail for the creep but there was still no way he could keep up with me in that low-riding sedan. For every mushy snow drift that bogged down the truck, at least a dozen smaller ones scraped at the bottom of the black Caddy. In the first five minutes he had fallen back by the length of a football field. If I just kept going at the same pace, I was certain to lose him.

  Visibility was a problem, of course. With my shot-up windshield I was constantly lining up my eyeballs with the top of the dashboard, where I looked through a small patch of unshattered glass just above the wipers. I spotted some wooden sticks poking out of the ice and realized that they marked an abandoned sturgeon spearing hole. Those big, rectangular holes became my biggest hazard. Cut by chain saws, they usually measured six feet long and three feet wide. I steered clear.

  Garlic Island came into view a couple miles ahead near the west shore. I would skirt it on the left, keeping my southbound bearing toward Fond du Lac. I looked back and saw my enemy at about three football fields back. Pretty soon he would be nothing but a speck.

  But wait. Something was different. The Cadillac wasn’t splashing through puddles or swaying back and forth anymore. What was going on? Had he given up?

  Through the busted-out rear window of the truck cab, I heard a gunshot. The crazy man was shooting at me again. I ducked my head but wasn’t too worried because he was way beyond handgun range.

  Suddenly, another shot rang out, and at the same time a bullet clanged into the truck.

  Dang it!

  Another shot sounded and the clang announced another direct hit on the Chevy. Shulepick was shooting a high-powered rifle—probably the same one he used to kill Sheriff Heiselmann.

  I ducked my head further and looked around for options. A second pressure ridge of cracked and buckled ice appeared, coming out from the west shore near the island. A thought popped into my brain—one that would allow me to shake off the Cadillac Man once and for all. I angled the truck toward the crack and looked for a crossing point. Slabs of ice as big as cars were tipped vertical here and there, but other stretches looked more like rough snowdrifts laced with trash-can-sized ice chunks. I turned the steering wheel and kept my head low as I bucked toward a likely crossing point. The sound of two more rifle shots clinched my decision to take the chance. I picked the least rough of the possible crossings, dropped my speed to thirty, and went right at it.

  KABUMP-BUMP-CRUNCH-KABUMP! I was up and over.

  “Try crossing that—Jerk!”

  I looked back out at the Cadillac Man. He was following me again, bumping . . . swerving . . . splashing. I cranked the speed back up to forty-five, then decided to bump it to fifty. The Chevy seemed to handle it okay. I looked back again, satisfied that I had ditched him at last.

  “See ya in prison—Peckerhead!”

  Now that I knew he couldn’t follow me across the ridge, it was just a matter of finding a place to drive off the lake. Otter Street in Oshkosh would work. Asylum Bay would be coming up even sooner. From there I would simply find a pay phone and call Agent Culper. Between him and the local cops, they could nab Shulepick, maybe right off the lake, and toss him in the slammer. Then we could go back together and gather the evidence that I left in his backyard.

  By the time I turned my eyes back forward in the tiny clear patch of my windshield it was too late. The sticks and twine marking an abandoned spearing hole were right there in front of me.

  “Dammit!”

  I jumped on the brakes and pulled hard left on the steering wheel. The truck threw up a huge spray of slush like a water skier making a bank turn. My front wheels barely missed the big rectangle of open water. Had I dodged it?

  THUMP! . . . BUMP!

  The thump was the rear wheels falling in the hole. The bump was my head hitting the metal dashboard of the Chevy Apache pickup. I felt a warm trickle running around my nose to my chin. A salty taste found my mouth. I brought my hand to my forehead, pulled it away, and gazed at a bloody mess. My eyes drooped and my head fell sideways. I slapped my own face, trying to shake off the cobwebs.

  “What happened?”

  Looking out the window, I saw the horizon at a thirty degree angle to the truck.

  “I’m stuck.”

  The truck was still running, so I gave it some gas. The engine revved but the truck didn’t move. On the passenger side, my rear wheel was completely submerged and churning the lake water like a washing machine. I was stuck all right. I was more than stuck. Grandpa’s truck teetered on the brink—ready to take the plunge to the bottom of Lake Winnebago.

  I pushed hard on my door, but it wouldn’t open since the bottom edge was wedged in the lake ice. I cranked open the window instead and climbed out, feeling instant pain as the jagged ice bit into my feet. I looked down at a barefooted left foot stained pink and the right covered with nothing but a bloody sock. I gazed forward, spotting Garlic Island on the horizon. I turned back toward the northeast and saw a black car fishtailing and splashing in my direction. My survival instinct woke up pretty quickly after that.

  Holy smoke! He’ll be on me in two minutes.

  The nearest shore was a mile due west—Garlic Island, a mile to the south. Between the two stood a tiny cluster of three spearing shanties, one black, one white, and one purple. By my reckoning, they were a quarter mile away. I took off at a wobbling trot toward the black one. With each step, my cut-up feet got worse, but at that point it didn’t matter. Every so often I stopped to snort
blood out of my nostrils. The average zombie looked better than me.

  I was almost at the shanty when I heard another gunshot behind me. I looked back just in time to see the Cadillac Man in his referee shirt bracing a rifle on the hood. A flash of light was followed by another crack from the muzzle of the rifle. This time a sharp pain stung my right leg.

  “Aahh!”

  I glanced down and saw blood soaking into my jeans. I was hit, but how bad? A closer look showed me that the bullet had grazed the edge of my thigh—just enough to put a three-inch rip in my jeans and plow a shallow trough through my flesh about as wide as a pencil. The sting quickly turned into throbbing pain. I turned again toward the black shanty, limping as fast as I could while changing directions every three or four strides. The gunfire continued and I wasn’t sure whether or not anything hit me, so I just kept going.

  At last I ducked behind the black shanty, breathing hard and trying to figure out what to do next.

  I cupped my hands to yell toward the other two shanties. “Help! Is anybody there?! I need help! Is anybody there?!”

  No response.

  My attention shifted to the door on the black shanty. As expected, it was locked. The other shanties would be locked up just the same. I was a coyote in a trap, just waiting for the bullet that would finish me off.

  Waiting for my doom was not an appealing option, so I looked around on the edges of the shanty for something heavy. What I found was a wrench, probably used in cranking the shanty down to the ice level. I grabbed it and quickly went to work on the padlock. It only took about six hits before the combo lock popped open. I ripped it off, went inside, then shut and latched the door.

  On the inside, everything was dark except a big rectangle of eerie green light coming up from the gaping hole in the floor of the eight-by-six-foot shanty. I opened a sliding shutter that exposed a peephole to the outside. With my eye to the opening, I saw the Cadillac Man striding toward me from where he had left his car on the other side of the pressure ridge. He was just a couple hundred yards away, carrying the rifle across his body like a soldier. Unless I came up with something, I would be dead in three minutes.

  A weapon! A weapon! I need a weapon!

  I dropped to my knees and groped with my hands on the floor of the shanty. Two wooden spear shafts stood upright in the corner but the spearheads themselves were gone. I remembered Dad telling me that a good sturgeon spear cost as much as fifty dollars and that nobody left them in their shanties overnight.

  Using the two shafts, a wooden bench, and a length of rope, I rigged a barricade to keep the Cadillac Man from busting in on me. I figured it would hold him back for a little while, maybe a minute. Then he would either kick in the door or shoot right through it. I checked the peephole again. There was no mistaking him in that black-and-white striped shirt, only a hundred yards away and walking directly toward me. I breathed in and out.

  It was a weird feeling knowing that I was going to die. Believe it or not, it didn’t seem real. I felt like an actor in a play that had a script with a tragic ending. I didn’t freak out and I didn’t cry. Instead, I sat there and waited quietly.

  All of a sudden it occurred to me that Howard W. Shulepick was going to get away scot-free. After killing me he would simply push my body in the hole and shove it underneath the ice. My cold, dead corpse would eventually drift away with the spring thaw. No evidence, no witnesses, no funeral, no nothing.

  At first, that knowledge only made me mad. Then it made me think. How far away were those other shanties? I peeked through a crack along the edge of the door and saw them both. The white shanty was about eighty yards away. The purple one was closer—just a strong football toss. Could I swim my injured body under the ice in freezing cold water and find the underwater opening to that purple shanty? I lined up the location of the target with the glowing-green rectangular hole and made a mental note of the direction. My thoughts drifted back to my experiences diving for fishing lures. I started taking long deep breaths of air to charge my lungs with oxygen like I did in the murky waters of the Fox.

  I shook off my coat and kicked that last remaining bloody sock into the hole.

  Deep breath . . . Exhale . . . Deep breath . . . Exhale . . . Deep breath . . . Exhale.

  Crunch . . . crunch . . . crunch . . . crunch. The footsteps announced Shulepick’s arrival. A shadow crossed the crack of light around one edge of the door. The whole shanty rattled as he yanked at the knob. He rattled it harder and then bashed his whole body against it. My barricade held.

  Deep breath . . . Exhale . . . Deep breath . . . Exhale.

  One more shoulder hit and the top hinge came loose. It was time to swim or die, so I stepped over the hole, pointed myself toward the purple shanty, put my arms and legs together like a toothpick and dropped straight in.

  The freezing cold water felt like it would kill me all by itself. I had heard people describe falling through the ice as a shock like a million needles pricking your skin from every side, and that’s pretty close to what I felt. But do you know what? The fear of not finding the opening to the purple shanty scared me even worse. I swam the underwater breast stroke in the direction I had pointed myself.

  Arm pull . . . leg kick . . . glide . . . arm pull . . . leg kick . . . glide.

  The bottom side of the ice was a puzzle. Every frozen bubble and crack lit up by the sunlight overhead.

  Arm pull . . . leg kick . . . glide . . . arm pull . . . leg kick . . . glide.

  My lungs were almost tapped out, but I didn’t panic. From my practice in the Fox River I knew I could keep pulling myself forward.

  Arm pull . . . leg kick . . . glide . . . arm pull . . . leg kick . . . glide.

  That was it. I had moved on to uncharted territory and my head and lungs were ready to explode. It would be mind over matter.

  Arm pull . . . leg kick . . . arm pull . . . leg kick.

  A rectangle of shade appeared just ahead.

  Arm pull . . . leg kick . . .

  Alarm bells clanged in my brain as I slid under the black shadow of the shanty, found the hole, and splashed up into pitch darkness. I gasped and coughed and gasped again. My hands held the floor of the shanty as I felt a certain sense of accomplishment. My lungs and body basked in the chance to breathe again. I was alive. Then a million needles surrounded me again, reminding me that if I wasn’t shot, I would probably freeze to death.

  It was time to use my pull-up muscles, and in one swift movement, like a leaping fish, I yanked my body out of the water and lay dripping on the floor of the shanty. Spasms of shivering came next, and there was no stopping them.

  Tapped out of energy and shaking like a paint mixer, I knew the Cadillac Man would be busting into this shanty next. I slapped my arms against my chest and shoulders, trying to slow down the shivering. What I really, really, really needed was a weapon. I felt around in the corners and edges of the shanty, finding two metal folding chairs and a pair of wooden shafts.

  Dammit!

  I was no better off than at the other shanty. I groped around and found what felt like a small knob. I turned it and a panel opened up to a secret cubbyhole in the back wall. Inside I felt something hard.

  Could it be?

  I lifted out a four-tined spearhead as big as a pitchfork and gazed at it in the backdrop of green light from the hole. It had twelve-inch tines welded to a sturdy crossbar and a round, tubular socket for a handle. I touched the tip of one of the points and pulled my finger away quick. The spear was sharp all right. I pulled out one of the wooden shafts and fit the tapered end into the tubular socket of the spearhead. Lashing them together was no easy matter with stone-cold hands.

  Crunch . . . crunch . . . crunch. Howard W. Shulepick had arrived.

  With my teeth I held one end of the rope while working the other into a half hitch and pulling it tight with both palms pressed together. I quietly slid into the back corner of the shanty, where I assumed a crouching position and held the huge spear toward the door. The
palm of my right hand held the butt end of the smooth, wooden shaft. My left palm created a guide halfway up the shaft. My whole body shook and so did the spear. Could I do it? Maybe. Just maybe. I would have one, single chance. My body shook. My brain waited.

  Crunch, crunch, crunch . . . click.

  BOOM! Splinters of wood flew into my face as a section of the door as big as my palm was blown away, letting in a jagged bar of sunshine. I held as steady as I could. The door swung open, and all I saw was the silhouette of a man holding a gun against the backdrop of pure white light. The Cadillac Man either hadn’t expected to see me or didn’t consider me much of a threat, because the rifle was held muzzle-up, in a one-handed grip. For one long second, neither one of us moved.

  It was now or never and I surged forward with everything I had—arms, legs, fingers, toes, back, and stomach . . . every muscle in me tightened to drive that spear forward, and when it hit its mark I kept on charging with a scream that I had been saving since the night Dad was killed.

  The force of my thrust drove the Cadillac Man backward, and his rifle flew from his grip. I surged forward following the spear—driving, driving, driving that spear into the chest of my father’s killer. All the while I screamed and yelled, not stopping until all ninety pounds of me were standing over him, forcing that spear as deep into his chest as I could push it. Four circles of blood grew into the white stripes of the Cadillac Man’s referee shirt. He growled and reached for the rifle, but I stomped his hand and kicked it away. I practically climbed to the top of that spear shaft, pushing down with all of my weight until the tips of all four tines were through him and poking into the ice on the other side.

  For a long time I stood over that spear, as the horrible reality sunk in. The referee shirt was, by that point, completely soaked in blood, every white stripe now bright red. Through it all, the Cadillac Man’s legs kicked and his arms flopped and flailed at the air. There were moments when his eyes locked on mine and he made punching jabs toward my face.