“You disappoint me,” he said. “We all die sometime. Wendell Two Knives understood that. He went as nobly as any man I’ve ever known. You would honor him by dying well.”
“There’s no honor in dying if there’s no reason to die,” she wept.
“Dying’s never had a reason. As far as I can tell, the same is true for living.”
It wasn’t true about dying, she thought. Wendell had died for a reason. He’d died for her. And dying herself seemed like no way to honor him.
She whispered his name. Wendell. It didn’t exactly fill her with courage, but it did pull her out of her self-pity.
She considered the knife in the pocket of her jeans. It wasn’t much, but small as it was, she found herself wrapping her hope around it. She had the map in her vest, and a compass, and matches there, too, in a waterproof container. All she needed was a chance.
She wiped her tears and took up her paddle.
“Do you have a name?” she asked.
“Call me Charon.”
“Charon? Charon. Where have I heard that name before?”
Her back was to him. She listened to his voice carefully. His words were like stones, hard in the way he said them. But not without feeling. Rather, they were like a wall behind which the feeling was hidden.
“You said Wendell died a noble death. How?”
“In the end, I cut his throat. A small, painless cut. It doesn’t take much when you know what you’re doing.”
“Is that how you’ll kill me?”
“That depends on you.”
“I have money,” she tried.
“I have money, too.”
“Look, if you don’t do this, I could make it worth your while. In other ways.”
“Sex? If I wanted that from you, I’d take it.”
“I don’t understand this. I don’t understand any of it.” She hit the water with her paddle and sent a splash of silver into the gray on their left.
“?Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.? William James said that. About as close to understanding any of this as I’ve ever come.”
“I’ll bet you tortured small animals when you were a child.”
He was slow in responding, although the canoe slowed not at all. “I was the small animal,” he said.
“I have to pee.” She lifted her paddle from the water. “We need to stop.”
“No stops,” he said.
“If I’m going to die, I want to die with the dignity of clean underwear.”
A moment later, she felt the canoe draw to the left toward a small island. As the bow touched shore, he said, “Try to run and I’ll hang you by your hair from a tree limb.”
She stepped out. “I’m just going over there.” She pointed a dozen yards away to a gooseberry bush near a scrub pine. “For privacy.”
“Right there’s good enough.” He nodded toward the wet ground on which she stood.
“At least turn your back.”
She was thinking that when he did, she could grab the knife and use it. She was thinking she could cut his throat as he’d cut Wendell’s.
“So you can hit me with a rock?”
He stared at her until she undid her jeans. She pulled them down and squatted facing him.
He stood in the canoe, tugged his zipper down, and proceeded to urinate into the lake.
Wendell had told her often that it was important to note the details around her. She saw that the man who called himself Charon was uncircumcised and she wondered if that was important.
“I’m hungry,” she said when she’d finished.
“I told you you would be.” He sat back down in the canoe and waited for her.
“Even the worst condemned criminal gets a last meal,” she said.
He turned and drew in the yellow duckie they’d towed behind them. He lifted out his pack, opened it, and tossed her a Hershey’s bar. No nuts.
“You call this a last meal?”
“I had a last meal once. Flat bread, that was all. A piece of hard flat bread and a little water in a rusty can.”
She unwrapped the Hershey’s bar. “How come you’re not dead?”
He took a bar himself, unwrapped it, and sat back in the canoe as he ate. “They never bothered to check my pulse. Just threw me on a pile of other dead men. I let the flies lick my blood for a full day before I crawled away. Here.” He tossed her a plastic bottle full of water.
She took a drink, then, as his eyes flicked down for a moment to his candy bar, she spit in the bottle. She capped it and threw it back.
“How does a man get to be like you?” she asked, her voice sizzling with her spite.
“If you believe in karma, I didn’t have a choice.” He drank from the bottle.
She smiled bitterly. “If I don’t?”
“Then you enter the nature-nurture debate. I had a tough early life. So maybe that was it. Or maybe it was a simple genetic predisposition, because not everyone who had a tough life ends up in this line of work.”
“You sound educated.”
“I don’t spend all my time killing people.”
“How many people have you killed?”
“I’d know only if I gave that any importance. I don’t. The only important one was the first.”
“Your father, I suppose.”
He stared at her, then a laugh, like a freed bird, escaped his lips. “Archetypal as hell, huh?” He crumpled his wrapper and put it in his pack. “Give me,” he said and held out his hand for her wrapper.
“Think someone’s going to find it? Think it’s going to save me or threaten you? Christ, what difference does it make? You left two bodies this morning.” She threw the paper on the ground.
“You never know what might make a difference. Pick it up.” He spoke in that deadly, quiet way that was business and was final.
She picked up the wrapper and tossed it to him.
“Get in,” he said in the same tone. “It’s time to be moving.”
“Charon,” she said suddenly. They’d traveled for nearly an hour in a silence broken only by the splash and swirl of water as they dipped their paddles into the lake. The rain was mixing more and more with wet snowflakes that clung to her eyelashes before melting into drops that blurred her vision. “I remember. The boatman who ferried souls across the river Styx to Hades. The nuns made us study that. Charon. Funny in a grim sort of way. But that’s not your real name.” He didn’t reply. “What is your real name?”
“As I understand it, an Ojibwe may have several names. The name given him by a Dreamer, the name that has come to him in his own dream, a nickname, a kinship name. Which one is real?”
“You’re smart,” she said, feeling the frustration and anger rise again. “And you say you don’t need money. So why are you doing this?”
He spoke very carefully, as if it were important. “Your music. Why do you do that?”
Now it was her turn to refrain from answering.
“Let me suggest something to you, then. Your music is who you are. It defines you.”
“You kill people to define yourself?”
“I take difficult jobs. Sometimes killing is a part of that.”
“This is a job? Christ, this is just a job?”
“No. I told you. It’s who I am.”
“Who hired you?”
He paddled a few strokes before answering. “Do you believe in an afterlife?”
“What difference does it make?”
“Because if you do and you’re right, all your questions will be answered there.”
Strange, how familiar it all was. The line of hills rising west like horses lifting their heads. The island that was nothing more than a piece of bare gray rock. A hundred yards beyond that, almost hidden among ribbons of mist and rain, the place where the stream emptied into the big lake. She surprised herself by finding it so easily.
As the bow nudged the rocks along the shoreline, the
stranger stepped out and drew the duckie in. When both craft had been secured, he said, “Lead the way.”
She was trying to keep her mind clear, but she felt as if she were floating. Felt distanced from the feet that walked the soft bed of pine needles covering the trail. Separated from the cold that nestled under the big evergreens and gave her cheeks a vague tingling. She breathed but felt nothing enter her body.
Her thinking was thick and empty. She thought of the knife in her pocket and wondered should she try to use it. But it wasn’t a real thought, a real wonder. She was heading toward something so huge and absolute it couldn’t be embraced. It was as if she were already dead, had passed on in spirit, and was simply waiting for the flesh to join her.
“Up there?” she heard him ask.
They’d come to the high wall of jumbled rock that long ago had dammed the stream to create the hidden lake Wendell called Nikidin. She stared up dumbly at the rock wall, stared up out of a deep well of hopelessness.
With the toe of his boot, he tested the footing on the stones. Water seeped over everything, and the stones were covered with green slime.
“Hmm,” he said. “Slippery.”
32
It was past two when the Lincoln Town Car pulled up in front of cabin 7 at the Quetico and parked beside Wally Schanno’s cruiser. The Lincoln sat. Nothing could be seen through the charcoal-tinted windows.
“What’s he waiting for?” Nathan Jackson asked.
Jo said, “If I were him, I’d feel about as comfortable with this situation as I would stepping over a rattlesnake.” Jo moved toward the front door.
“Where are you going?”
“To ask him in.”
“I’ll go,” Schanno said.
“He’s not going to shoot me, Wally. Besides, he doesn’t know you. I’m the one who asked him here.” Before she stepped outside, she addressed Harris, who was studying the Lincoln through a lifted slat in the window bunds. “You wouldn’t do anything stupid, would you?”
A bar of the gray light from outside fell across his eyes and Jo saw how tired they looked. “Ms. O’Connor, too many stupid things have been done already.”
She crossed the porch and descended the steps. The air was cold and wet and her breath came out in vaporous puffs. As she approached the Lincoln, the back window slid down. Vincent Benedetti sat hunched in the seat, a small white man against the big black interior.
“What am I walking into?” he asked.
“A discussion,” Jo replied. She crossed her arms and hugged herself for warmth. “One that probably should have taken place a long time ago.”
Angelo Benedetti leaned into her vision. “Who’s in there? Besides Jackson?”
“Do you want to talk or not?” Jo asked.
“I’ll talk to him,” Vincent Benedetti said.
“Pop, it could be a setup.”
“Is it a setup?” The trembling little white man looked at Jo.
“No.”
“Then let’s go.”
The driver, the big blond man Jo remembered was called Joey, got out and opened the car door for Vincent Benedetti. “I’ll get the wheelchair from the trunk,” he said.
Benedetti waved him off. “The braces. Give me the braces. I want to walk in on my own.”
Angelo Benedetti got out on the other side. Jo saw a look pass between him and Joey over the car top. The younger Benedetti gave a shrug and a nod. From the trunk, Joey hauled out two metal crutches with arm braces. Angelo and he strapped them on the elder Benedetti and stood by patiently as he made his way toward the cabin, step by agonizing step. Pain twisted Angelo Benedetti’s face as he watched his father’s struggle, but he made no move to interfere. At the cabin steps, Benedetti paused, breathing heavily. He eyed the top of the steps as if he were looking at the summit of Everest, gave a grunt, heaved his right leg up, then dragged the left one after. His head disappeared in a cloud of vapor as he sucked in air and expelled it noisily. In a couple of minutes, he reached the porch, where Wally Schanno was waiting with the screen door open.
“Thanks,” Benedetti managed to say.
His son was right behind him.
Schanno reached out to offer his hand, but Angelo Benedetti said quickly and sternly, “No. He’ll make it.”
Benedetti dragged himself across the porch, the crutches thumping one after the other on the wooden planks. Schanno opened the front door, and a moment later, Benedetti was inside.
“Here, Pop.” Angelo Benedetti positioned a highbacked chair for his father, who collapsed onto the cushion, crutches splayed on either side of him as if he’d once had wings but all that remained of them were bones.
Benedetti was sweating heavily and trembling.
“Can I get you some water, Mr. Benedetti?” Jo asked.
He shook his head-a definite indication amid all the general shaking-then lifted his eyes and looked as steadily as he could at Nathan Jackson.
“You son of a bitch,” he said in a hoarse whisper.
“If you were standing up,” Jackson said, “I’d lay you right back down.”
“This is going well,” Jo said to no one in particular. She stepped between the men. “We need to cut the crap here, gentlemen. People we all care about are in trouble.”
“His doing,” Benedetti tried to raise his hand to point an accusing finger at Jackson, but the brace was still attached to his arm. “Get this thing off me.”
Angelo unstrapped the braces and leaned them against the back of the chair. Then he stood behind his father.
“Accusations have come from both sides,” Jo said.
“Where do you get off claiming Shiloh is your daughter?” Jackson leaned past Jo in Benedetti’s direction.
“It’s obvious,” Benedetti fired back. “Just look at her. She has my eyes.”
“Those are her grandmother’s eyes,” Jackson insisted. “And look at her skin.”
“Mediterranean,” Benedetti said.
“My ass. Shiloh’s my daughter.” Jackson thumped his chest. “Marais told me.”
Benedetti smiled cruelly. “She lied. To get what she wanted from you, she told you all kinds of lies. You were easy.”
“You’re the liar.”
Nathan Jackson started around Jo, but Angelo Benedetti moved to intercept him. As if part of a dance choreographed in hell, Harris leaped in and warned Benedetti, “Back off.”
The two men locked eyes. Their hands curled into fists. Their bodies tensed. Schanno wedged his tall, lean, tough frame between them. “Move back, both of you. The only thing we’re going to do here this afternoon is talk. I said move back.”
Benedetti spoke to Schanno without taking his eyes off Harris. “Anybody comes at my father again and that sheriff’s badge you’re wearing won’t matter.”
“Nobody wants to hurt your father,” Jo said.
“Wanna bet?” Nathan Jackson gave Vincent Benedetti a killing glare.
“Nobody’s going to hurt anybody while I’m here.” Schanno used his huge hands to urge the men farther apart.
Vincent Benedetti eased himself forward on the chair, leaned as far toward the confrontation as he could, and aimed the venom of his words at Jackson. “Shiloh’s my daughter, you son of a bitch. I’m here to keep you from killing her the way you killed Marais.”
“ I killed Marais?” The accusation seemed to hit Jackson like a two-by-four between the eyes. “Why would I kill Marais?”
“She put the squeeze on you one time too many. Finally asked some favor you wouldn’t grant. I’m betting she threatened to go public with the whole sordid history, so you had her killed.”
“Marais didn’t have to put the squeeze on me for anything,” Jackson shot back. “We loved each other.”
Benedetti spat on the rug. “Politicians. Shit. You think everybody loves you.”
“You.” Jackson aimed his finger at Benedetti as if he were holding a gun. “You were the one who fought with Marais. The night before she was killed. There were witnes
ses. It got violent.”
“Violent? She slapped me. She always slapped me. I irritated the hell out of her because I had her number.”
“You know what I think? You were trying to strongarm her into your bed again. When she absolutely refused, you had her killed out of some Neanderthal sense of pride.”
The exchange seemed to have taken a good deal of strength from Vincent Benedetti. He sat back in the chair, trembling violently.
“You okay, Pop?” Angelo bent and touched his father’s arm.
The elder Benedetti stared up at Jackson, but the fire seemed to have dwindled. “I wasn’t propositioning Marais. We had a deal. I loaned her money so she could get Ozark Records off the ground. Instead of paying interest, she was supposed to let me get to know my daughter. She welched. We argued.”
“You threatened her,” Jackson said.
“I lost my temper. I didn’t lose my mind. I didn’t kill Marais.”
Booker T. Harris stepped closer, but cautiously and with an eye on the younger Benedetti. “None of what you just said was in any of your official statements to the police.”
Vincent Benedetti laid his head against the back of the chair. He took a deep breath. “Back then, I was doing my best to protect my daughter. I knew you cops had jack shit on me. Little Shiloh was in a bad enough way as it was. What? Was I going to add to her troubles by dragging her through the circus of paternity hearings? Besides, my wife, Theresa, threatened to leave me if I said a word about Shiloh.”
Jackson paced a little, collecting himself, considering. Then he turned again on Benedetti. “Marais loved me. She told me she was afraid of you, afraid that if you ever found out how she really felt about you, you’d hurt her bad.”
“She was afraid of no one. She loved no one-except herself and her daughter.” Benedetti sighed, sounding tired of the whole exchange. “She used you like a carpet sweeper to clean up her messes. She told you whatever you wanted to hear.”
“That’s a lie.”
“We’re getting nowhere,” Jo broke in. She turned to Nathan Jackson. “Do you really care about the woman out there?”
He looked shocked. “Of course I do.”
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