The Run to Gitche Gumee

by Robert F. Jones

  Harry laughed. “Just like in the movies,” he said again.

  I turned back to Curly, but during the fracas he’d turned again and was sprinting for cover, a thicket of bankside aspens a hundred yards upstream. He reached it before I could raise the BAR.

  “Point-blank range and none of us even got nicked,” Harry said, prodding Doc’s inert body with his toe. “He wasn’t much of a marksman.”

  Doc groaned and stirred, his fingers twitching. I picked up the pistol.

  “Plenty good for a blind man, though,” I said. “He didn’t have to hit us. He bought enough time for Curly to give us the slip.” My mind was racing. We had to clear out of here, but first I wanted to check for more ammo—both the Colt and the Thompson took .45 pistol rounds; the BAR fired full-length .30-06s—and find out what had brought about Flo’s change of allegiance. She was already inside the kitchen, packing food and personal gear into a wooden crate. I gave Harry the BAR, showed him how it operated, and told him to keep watch on the aspen grove. Also on Doc. Shoot or at least shout if he saw Curly. I set the selector switch on single-fire—I didn’t want him emptying the rest of the 20-round magazine on a single frantic burst—and went into the kitchen.

  “So you changed sides,” I said to Flo.

  “Five years with these bimbos,” she said, not looking up, “and still they treat me like the help. A housemaid is all I am to them. I cook for them, clean for them, make their beds, lug water, gut game, muck out the privy, haul firewood, even do windows, and every month or two they’re gracious enough to throw me a ten-second fuck. Like it or not, I have no say in the matter. Somehow I’ve lost my enthusiasm for the job.”

  “Didn’t you used to drive their getaway car?”

  “No, that was my son, Morton. His Chippewa name was Moonbeam. He loved engines from little on, raced motorcycles on the dirt tracks up here, a Flying Merkel he rebuilt himself. He dreamed of becoming the first Indian to run at Indy, but the only driving job he ever landed was with these galoots. Then he caught a slug on a stickup in St. Cloud, Minnesota—that was the winter of forty-four. A thirty-eight in the belly. They brought him to me on the Bad River rez up here. I’m a medicine woman—not the black magic kind, the herbal and sweat lodge variety. But it was no use. Septicemia, and penicillin in short supply because of the war. The black market price was sky high. We needed more money and a real sawbones, one who wouldn’t rat them out to the cops. That’s why they pulled the bank job in Oshkosh where Doc got his eyes blown out. I only drove for them that once. I had to. Morton died anyway. Just a month short of his twenty-first birthday . . . .” Here she sighed and closed her eyes. She looked up again. “So we all moved up here,” she continued, deadpan, “to the late, lamented headquarters camp of the Firesteel Logging Company.”

  Could I—should I believe her? It could all be a setup. What’s Doc up to? Or maybe Curly? She looked up at me, inscrutable, then kept on packing.

  “You’ll want more rounds for the Thompson and Doc’s Colt,” she said, “and aught sixes for the Browning. There’s a full bandolier for the BAR under that bunk where the guns were, and a carton or two of forty-fives in the chiffonier by my bed. Then we’d better make tracks. Doc we can leave here. But Curly, he’s dangerous.”

  The sun was a hand’s breadth above the horizon when we loaded the canoe. Harry was still covering the aspen grove. With the Thompson, I stitched five quick holes through the bottom of the Grumman. Curly could always patch them, of course, but it would take him awhile, and we needed all the river room we could get. Flo took the paddles from the aluminum canoe and stowed them under our thwarts. We waded out and boarded the Old Town. Flo took the stern thwart, I sat amidships, facing backwards with the BAR, and Harry shoved us off, then swung aboard and paddled bow. We left Doc hogtied on one of the bunks. He was conscious, silent, staring bottomless black deathrays at us as we backed out of the cabin. Then in his high, squeaky voice he said, “I’ll see you later, boys. You can count on it.”

  I realize that we should have shot him then and there, but we were good boys in those days. The Ten Commandments still meant something to us. I learned better up on the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea, then later on the MLR. But I’m getting ahead of myself . . . .

  As we swept around the first bend below the logging camp, I saw Curly emerge from the aspens. He looked at us disappearing downriver and sprinted up toward the bunkhouse, hell-bent for leather—to find out what had happened to Doc, or just for his rifle? I’d pulled the bolt from his Springfield, smashed the stock with the splitting maul, and taken all his bullets—’06s like those the BAR ate—but I was sure he had more bullets stashed away someplace, Flo had indicated as much, and maybe even a spare bolt or two. He’d mend the busted stock one way or another. Old Marines are like that with their weapons. As Stingley said, “Treat her right and your rifle will be truer to you than any cunt in Christendom.” Curly and Doc would be after us soon enough.

  I swung around facing forward, grabbed one of the extra paddles and dug into the water. It resisted, sullen and dark and deep but flowing the way we wanted to go. Then it was swept away, behind us. “Pick it up, pogues,” I said in my best Sergeant Stingley voice. “We gotta make holes in the water. Big fuckin’ whirly ones, and plenty of ’em.”

  5

  TWODOGGONE LAKE

  My first instinct was to paddle all night, and all the next day too if we could hold up that long—clear to Lake Superior if possible. But that soon proved too dangerous. With night falling fast, we entered a chain of increasingly steep sluices and rapids, the river whipping left, then right, then left again, the sound of it rising from hiss through grumble to ominous growl. The second-growth forest of jackpine and spruce grew tight to the banks, and its lengthening shadows swallowed the river in darkness. All we could see up ahead were the seething white eruptions where water smashed against rock.

  “Chippewa people call this the Bonebreaker,” Flo shouted to me above the roar of the rapids. “It’s tough to run even with the sun shining.”

  “You know the river better than we do,” I yelled back. “What do you suggest?”

  “Let’s pull over and line down the rest of the way. It’s not much farther. Maybe a mile or two.”

  “Okay.” I leaned forward and nudged Harry’s back with the tip of my paddle, gestured toward the right bank. Flo dug her paddle in deep on the right side and held it to turn the bow shoreward while Harry and I paddled hard. We swept in fast between two white-fanged boulders and then we were into the slack water, close to the bank. Harry jumped out, hip deep, and held the canoe.

  “We’ve got to line it down the rest of the way,” I told him. “If we dump the canoe in this whitewater, we’re finished.”

  “Good enough,” he said. “That was getting kind of scary.”

  Flo went ashore with her hatchet and cut a small spruce, limbed it and whacked off the top. “You two take the bow and stern lines. I’ll use this pole to help brake her and fend off if the current sets us onto any sharp rocks.” She clambered back in and stood amidships. I tied the stern line to the towing ring aft while Harry knotted another to the bow thwart. We let out line. The Old Town struggled against us like a harpooned whale, bulled this way and that by the braided currents and eddies. Slowly we inched our way downstream, knee deep, thigh deep, sometimes wet nearly to the navel, dragging our heels in the gravel of the riverbottom to slow the canoe’s descent. I don’t know how long it took us to clear the rapids, but it felt like all night. My arms were being ripped from their sockets. Twice we spooked large animals from the shore—deer most likely, come down to drink.

  Then, as we rounded a particularly nasty bend, Harry stepped into a pothole and dropped his line. The full weight of the canoe came to bear on my arms. I couldn’t hold it, felt the burn of rough manila as it slipped inch by inch through my palms. Flo glanced back at me, shipped her pushpole and scampered aft to the stern thwart, unbelievably agile for a woman of her bulk. She grabbed up a paddle.
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  “Let it go,” she yelled. “I can run this next patch.”

  I dropped the line, grateful, and she swept off into the roaring, black and white darkness.

  We waded down through the shallows, splashing, stumbling, falling, skinning our shins on sunken rocks. The moon was just rising through the trees to our right. At each turn I expected to see the canoe ahead of us, wrapped around the boulders with its back broken. But then the roar of the river eased to a mutter, a whisper, and stopped. We’d reached the end of the fast water. Below it widened into a long, slow pool on which floated the canoe. Flo saw us and raised her paddle. It glinted in the moonlight, a welcome sight.

  A smaller stream entered the Firesteel just below the rapids. Flo said it drained a lake about a mile to the west. “The first white man to explore the Firesteel country called this tributary Stony Creek. That was in the 1680s. The lake is called Twodoggone.”

  “Strange name.”

  “Strange man. Daniel Greysolon, the Sieur du Lhut. That’s spelled L-H-U-T. Your people got the letters screwed around, thus the great city of Duluth, Minnesota. Du Lhut had a pair of war dogs with him, mastiffs. He sicced them on any Indian who dared to get uppity with him. After his Chippewa paddlers portaged him up to the lake, they were paddling across it when the dogs spotted a swimming moose. They jumped overboard and capsized the canoe with all the furs he’d taken from the Indians so far. Sank without a trace. The dogs caught up with the moose all right, but it drowned them. The Chippewas were delighted of course. They named the lake Two Dog Gone. It stuck.”

  “What’s the lake like nowadays?” Harry asked.

  “It’s privately owned,” Flo said. “Some rich moke from Milwaukee, a banker. President of Heartland National, in fact. Morison Stoat. No roads in to the place, he flies up here in a float plane—a big red and black DeHavilland Beaver. Stoat’s got a fishing lodge on the lake, a huge place that looks like a Tinker Toy castle, electricity from diesel generators, summer kitchen, servants quarters, boathouses, knotty pine paneling in the toilets, a flagpole that reaches halfway to the moon, speedboats, water skis, the works. His caretakers shoot at anyone who dares to trespass on his water. There’s big muskies in Twodoggone and he saves them for his big customers.”

  Harry’s eyes lit up. “My dad banks at Heartland,” he said. “I’ve never landed a muskie. Let’s go up there and see what it’s like. We’re looking to shake Doc and Curly anyway and they’ll never think of following us up the Stony. We can let them shoot on past, wear themselves out on a wild goose chase, then when they’ve dragged ass back upriver in a day or two, we’ll just continue on down to Lake Superior.”

  “We’ll probably miss our lift in your dad’s truck.”

  “So what? One of us can hike into town and hire another. I’ve got plenty of . . . ”

  His face fell. Curly still had his wad of cash.

  “Your money?” Flo said. “Don’t worry. Before we shoved off I grabbed what was left of Doc’s loot from the cookie jar in the kitchen. I’ll loan you enough to get back home. I agree it’s a good idea to throw them off the scent. We can hide the canoe up the Stony—it’s a hell of a portage—and hike up to the lake in the morning.”

  We hid the canoe in an alder brake about a quarter of a mile up the feeder stream and made a quick camp above it in the pines. No fire, too risky. While Flo and I cached the supplies in a rocky cave she knew from previous visits, Harry slapped together some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with his last stale slices of Wonder Bread. That was our supper, washed down with tin cups of icy creek water that tasted faintly of iodine. Then we grabbed some shut-eye. The ground was ten percent sand, the balance made up of rocks and roots and half-buried pine cones. When I finally managed to doze off, I dreamt of eyeless men and roaring water. In the morning, covered with mosquito bites, we rolled our sleeping bags, picked up the weapons, flyrods, and some eats from Flo’s supply, then hoofed it to Twodoggone Lake, chewing deer jerky on the way.

  The sun was directly behind us when we got there, a long, narrow reach of brass-colored water with rocky shores. Ospreys rowed the air above the lake, three of them this time, rakish birds with fierce yellow eyes that dove like fighter planes to strafe the water and hook up wriggling panfish. Like most of the lakes up here in those days, Twodoggone was home to at least one family of loons. We could hear them before we saw them. They were weird, beautifully marked, low-swimming birds that dove deep and swam far, then reemerged to turn the lake eerie with their cowboy yodeling and wobbly laughter. To me that sound was the essence of Up North.

  The loons were congregated at the north end near a big lodge built of squared and varnished white-pine logs. It stood in a large clearing, surrounded by a close-cropped, bluegreen lawn. A long white dock projected into the lake from the bottom of the lawn, with a white boathouse squatting solid beside it. Stoat’s float plane bobbed at its moorings off the end of the pier, a bulky no-nonsense Beaver as Flo had said, and a big float boat, mounted on long pontoons and powered by a massive outboard motor on its stern, was anchored in the shallows. A pair of rowboats were pulled up on a narrow, sandy beach shaped like a fingernail clipping. From this distance they looked like Adirondack guide boats.

  As we watched, the boathouse doors opened and a long, sleek speedboat emerged—a low, mahogany-hulled Gar Wood with a reverse sheer to its cambered bow. A fast, rich boat with a throaty purr that sounded of money. A few minutes later it was trolling a pair of suntanned young ladies in bikinis behind it on water skis, blasting along at full speed. The Gar Wood ran the lake like it owned it. With a bone in its teeth it rocked the shores with thunder and the rowdy waves raised by its wake. The boat swept toward us with a roar from its old World War I Liberty engine. We ducked down in the brush as it passed. Waves slapped the rocks. We could hear the girls squealing.

  “Looks like Stoat’s got the family up for the weekend,” Flo said. “The blonde girl’s his daughter, Cora. I don’t recognize the other one.”

  “You seem to know the family pretty well,” I said.

  “You mean for an Indian? No mystery about it. I used to work for Stoat’s wife, Eunice. Talk about neurasthenic. I was her herbalist. Dogbane root for heartache, blueberry buds for madness. Barks, roots, and flowers. Tonics, lotions, pastes of pulped roots to ease those imaginary twinges in her joints and nether parts. She spiked the tonics with gin, and they seemed to work.”

  “Do Doc and Curly know about this place?”

  “No. That was before they showed up in my life. I didn’t want to tell them about the Stoats because Curly would sure as hell want to burglarize the lodge, maybe even kidnap Cora and hold her for ransom.”

  “What’s Cora like?” Harry asked.

  “Ditzy but kind of sweet. At least when I knew her. Now she’s going to some girl’s school back east, Bryn Mawr or one of those places. But we always got on well. Old Stoat’s another matter.”

  “Would he give us a hard time if we showed up at his door?” Harry asked. “Told him we were fishing the Firesteel, dumped our canoe, lost all our supplies, and wanted to borrow, say, a cup of . . . rice?”

  “Or a can of sardines,” I added.

  Flo chuckled. “He might give you the bum’s rush, but not if Eunice is there. She never wanted me to leave.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe we can spend the night in the lodge. I’d sure sleep better without worrying about Curly or Doc cutting my throat in mid-snore. With a houseful of people they’re not likely to break in.

  Flo shrugged and looked at me. I nodded agreement. “Okay,” she said, “I’ll flag down the boat.”

  The Gar Wood was still whizzing around the lake. Flo walked out on a rocky point and stood there with her arm raised, like someone hailing a cab. The blonde girl spotted her and signaled to the boatman. The Gar Wood circled in toward the promontory, then slowed and wallowed to a stop, its engine idling. The two girls sank in the water, ski tips up.

 
“Florinda?” the blonde girl yelled. “Is that you?” When Flo nodded, she kicked off her skis and swam ashore. Harry and I stayed back in the bankside shrubbery.

  “She’s got a good stroke,” Harry said. I could see sparks of love in his eyes. Or anyway lust.

  The girl and Flo talked for a bit, then Flo waved us out of hiding. We must have looked pretty shabby by now, rumpled and sunburnt and lumpy with bug bites, but Harry brushed back his buzz cut anyway, tucked in his shirt, and put on his shyboy smile.

  “I’m Cora,” she said, smiling and offering her hand. “Any friends of Florinda’s are friends of mine.” The other girl swam over and Cora introduced her as Wanda Nachtisch, a Bryn Mawr classmate from Pennsylvania. She was a cute, shy brunette with short hair and China-doll eyes, which she batted at us. Then blushed.

  We rode in the Gar Wood uplake to the lodge. The sleeping bags, BAR, and Tommy gun were hidden in the brush along with our other gear, and we carried only the flyrods. Harry also had his horn, of course. The boat ride back was too noisy for talk, but as we approached the dock, we saw a man emerge from the screened porch at the front of the lodge to stand at the top of the lawn with a drink in his hand.

  Morison Stoat was a short, narrow-chested gent. He was wearing plaid shorts and a fancy white shirt, all pleats and embroidery, what they called a guayabera shirt. Pale, skinny legs stuck out of the bottoms of his Bermudas like bent pipe cleaners, and he carried one of those double-walled plastic glasses that have gaudy trout flies embedded in them. A tight, hard potbelly poked through his shirt despite the Cuban couturier’s best efforts. He had a ruddy face, even in winter I was sure, with white, wavy hair and the thinnest wisp of hair on his upper lip that could pass for a mustache. His nose was long, and I suppose you could call it patrician despite the webwork of ruptured capillaries that crawled over it like so many wireworms. In a region where most people drank brandy or rye with beer chasers, he looked like the sort that sipped scotch whisky neat, no ice—Black Label, if you please. I could hear music from a Victrola echoing opera out over the water. The boatman tied the Gar Wood to the dock. It bumped to the slow onshore chop against neat, white fenders. Stoat came down the lawn to greet us.