“You can’t leave this business. You can’t fool me.”
“Watch me,” I said.
I was scheduled to leave the day Del Puffit arrived and out of spite I called Ozzie Oxley’s hooker friend, Gretchen, and asked her to go up to Puffit’s office. I paid her and told her not to take no for an answer. She thought this was quite funny. I had no idea how it would turn out, but I suspected and hoped Dolly would appreciate the scene. I also suspected that sooner or later she would force Puffit out.
I had hoped to go to Heathrow with Charlie and Anjali, but Charlie was still angry and not talking to me. I went to Charlie’s to see Anjali; she came downstairs alone to meet me in the foyer. She kissed me with the utmost tenderness but held me away, squeezing both of my arms firmly. “I’ll note you in my book of memory, my sweet Bowie. ‘Of all base passions, fear is most accurs’d. Remember, wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.’” Like Raina Chickerman, she liked to spout Shakespeare.
She put her cheek against my neck. She felt warm.
“I shall miss your tallness,” she said. “What happened was not your fault, Bowie. We were simply not meant to be. I will content myself with life as it develops and you, my sweet man, my fearless hunter, ever brave and resolute, you must do the same. You have a volcano for a heart, and much as she may dream, no woman may tame a volcano.”
So it was that I left London, Charlie Jowett/Lord Hoe, and Anjali Toddywalla.
It was time for me to get my life in order.
8
The weather any place in Michigan in January can be bad, but my part of Michigan was often the worst. I flew to New York from London and on to Detroit and then up to Pellston, where I called Lilly. She complained about not hearing enough from me, about my not warning her I was coming, and about having to drive in a snowstorm, but she came to fetch me and when we saw each other she threw her arms around me and held me tight.
“Problem?” she asked. My sister had always been able to read me.
“I quit. Decided I needed a break.”
“Quit your job?” she asked incredulously.
“I’m no longer employed.”
“What will you do for money?” She was always practical.
“I don’t know yet.”
“And you came here for a break?” She laughed for a long time. “My dumb little brother.”
•••
I had known Fred Ciz at Michigan State. He was mild mannered and nearly forty when I first met him. He had saved for close to twenty years for an education and had trekked down to State to get his degree in journalism so he could return to Grand Marais to take over the town’s weekly newspaper. Journalism students did not much run together. Most of us were loners with oversized egos. But Fred and I had gotten along. He was gentle and thoughtful with a sharp, wry wit and utterly devoid of cynicism. He had worked for his uncle’s weekly since high school and knew more about putting together a paper, top to bottom, than most of our faculty.
I asked him why he would bother with school so late in his career.
“The paper belongs to the town,” he told me. “It’s not the New York Times, but we do serve our people. You can barely make a living, but what a way to live. I figure four years down here will make me better. I serve a public trust and I want to serve it the best I can.”
It was pure hokum, I thought, but over time I learned that Fred Ciz was just what he claimed to be and I admired him for it and maybe even envied him.
Living with Lilly and her family wasn’t an option. She and Roger Ranger were stretched and their house cramped. After two days of camping out on their living room sofa, I took a bus into the Upper Peninsula to Newberry and called Fred from there. It was thirty miles on bad roads and the weather was terrible, but an hour later I was in his old Ford headed north to the south shore of Lake Superior. We had not seen each other since college, but he didn’t ask any questions and I didn’t volunteer any information.
Fred lived alone in the village in a small house two blocks from the paper.
“If it was closer, I’d be at work all the time,” he explained. “Almost am as it is.” There had been a fiancée in his distant past, but the relationship had fouled. If he had regrets, he did not let on. He was a slow-talking, painfully deliberate man and so homely that MSU students used to ask him how he had gotten so ugly; he would say it was God’s gift, and he meant it. Grand Marais was not the place for such a man to easily find a mate. Most young people fled when they finished high school. Those who stayed tended to pair up for life or remain unmarried. I figured Fred had to be lonely, but if he was it never showed. His family was his readers and the affection and attention he showered on them was returned with equal ardor.
I had been there two days when he declared one morning, “You didn’t come all this way for the scenery or the company. Things go sour?”
“I got a little confused,” I said.
“It happens to all of us.”
“I quit UPI.”
There was a slightly raised eyebrow. “Do you have plans?”
“Not a thing,” I said.
We stared at our coffees. “If you want to keep your hand in, I could use some help here, but I can’t pay. You ever tend bar?”
I told him I hadn’t.
“No matter. Up here it’s beer and whiskey neat. I can get you on at the Light. Belongs to a friend. The room here is yours for as long as you want, but you could share chow costs. If you make it through winter, you might have a new appreciation for everything. Cold always helps focus the mind.”
I accepted and it turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life.
•••
The Light was a tavern that dated back to the logging heyday, before the turn of the nineteenth century. It had high ceilings and a carved wooden bar imported from Baltimore. The owner was an octogenarian named Staley who still worked behind the bar and cooked short orders when the mood hit him. Staley had been the local rake and had tried marriage several times with no permanent takes. His interests in life were fishing, shooting big deer, bingo, and the misfortunes of the Detroit Red Wings. Staley had bought the bar when he was sixty. Before that he had done just about anything you could do for money in a small town and seemed to be one of the few locals to lift himself above the level of mere survival. Having achieved that, he seemed to be continually giving back to the community.
My bar training took about ten minutes and consisted mostly of learning to tap and untap metal barrels of beer.
On Sundays Fred went to early mass at Our Lady of Saviors Catholic Church (which everyone called OLS) and after that it was out by snowmobile to Lake 50 to fish through two feet of ice for yellow perch and the occasional walleye. Below the Mackinac Bridge, ice fishing tended to be a communal activity. Down there, on legendary Houghton and Higgins Lakes, pickup trucks with studded snow tires dragged fancy, heated prefab huts on skids out onto the ice and assembled shantytowns with shelters numbering in the hundreds. But up here there were no shanties and no shantytowns. If you went to a lake and somebody was there, you went elsewhere. You could be invited by a friend who had spudded some holes, but without an invite you were expected to move on. In the U.P. people respected privacy more than in any place I have ever been. And at the same time they looked out for each other.
I often went ice fishing with Fred. We dressed in layers and stayed warm by stamping our boots. Fred had fished Lake 50 most of his life and knew its moods and wrinkles the way a husband knows a wife. Some Sundays we went to the same spot, but other times we’d traipse across the snow-covered lake to a new position. Wherever we went there were fat perch, ten inches usually, but once in a while we’d hoist up a fourteen-inch, two-pound monster. The fish did not fight. If you found them, you could catch them. They were deep in holes, sixty to eighty feet down, and bit on spikes, a form of maggot. If you hoisted the perch fast, th
ey came up bent like apostrophes and froze as soon as they were clear of the hole. We caught only enough for three meals a week and when we had our self-imposed poundage, we packed up and returned to town.
Vietnam’s heat and England’s wet winters had ruined my constitution for subzero weather, but as the U.P. winter wore on I began to adapt. In March we got three feet of fresh snow in twenty hours. The state news wire chattered with bad-weather stories, but the denizens of Grand Marais kept their rhythm. We had six to eight weeks of serious winter remaining and frosts until after Memorial Day. If we were lucky, summer would give us a half-dozen days over eighty. The previous summer hadn’t seen a day over seventy-six and there had been only ten over seventy from Memorial Day to Labor Day. But weather didn’t seem to matter in Grand Marais. People did what they had to do or wanted to do, and to hell with the elements.
I settled in and was almost content. At the paper I got serious about writing obituaries. A person’s life was important here; every loss was deeply felt and mourned by all. I liked talking to people about the deceased and wrote details that had folks nodding. I was still an outsider, but Fred vouched for me and villagers suspended their disbelief and I tried not to do anything to alienate them. The local taverns served as social clubs except on Thursday nights, when the Catholic church hosted bingo. Because Staley was a bingoholic we closed the bar on Thursday nights. People came from fifty miles around and through the worst winter storms to play. Sometimes, in particularly heavy snows that turned to whiteouts, the bingo game would go all night and out-of-towners would sleep on church pews and floors.
OLS was about as interesting a Catholic church as could be imagined. The main building was formerly a state highway department garage. The chapel was built in one corner. The town’s library was in another part and held a distinctly unsecular collection.
The local priest was called Buzz. Not Father Buzz, just Buzz. He was a corpulent man with the baby-faced countenance of Fatty Arbuckle. His acne-scarred chins were covered with gobs of Clearasil and this made his face look like it was one color from the nose up and another color below. He wore civilian clothes and battered, unlaced leather hunting boots. He drank Jack Daniels in copious amounts and would sometimes play his electric guitar at the Light when he was in his cups. The Grand Marais Elementary School had few teachers. When one was sick, Buzz filled in. He drove an ancient Ford Woody station wagon whose fenders had rusted off and been replaced with sheet metal riveted into place. A steel-frame luggage carrier had been installed on the roof. The priest carried a loaded 30-30 at all times. It was a lever-action Model 90 and if edible game wandered across his path, he shot it and distributed the meat to parishioners. The local conservation officer looked the other way.
Bingo in Grand Marais was much more than a mere game. In some ways it was more a religion for the locals than the Catholic church that sponsored it. Over the years three babies had been born during the games. Several elderly people had died. Once a black bear got into the building on Thursday night and Buzz had gotten his rifle and shot the animal and the game never stopped. One of Staley’s ex-wives had started an affair at bingo. Several times each year the area lost electrical power; bingo went on with lanterns and candles and, if it was winter, all the participants decked out in parkas and white air-force-surplus Mickey Mouse boots. In deer season hunters came directly from their blinds and stacked their rifles in the corner. Once Staley accidentally shot himself in the foot and came to bingo limping and bleeding. He played six cards all night before driving himself to Newberry for repairs.
While bingo was a social event, there wasn’t much socializing while the games went on. A pall of smoke hung over the tables and the games were played in tight-jawed silence. Chips whick-whacked against tabletops. Winners announced themselves matter-of-factly. It was fine to win, but you didn’t rub your good luck in the faces of those with lesser fortune. First-time protocol violators were taken aside and set straight. Second-timers were dismissed for the night by Buzz with a lecture on good sportsmanship. There were no third-time offenders.
In March Buzz asked me to spend a day making rounds with him and I agreed. We started at the Red Owl, our local grocery, where we loaded his ancient Ford Woody with supplies for shut-ins. Then we stopped to see the deputy sheriff, who was stationed in Grand Marais but reported to a supervisor in Newberry.
The deputy’s name was Amp. He had been a Marine in Vietnam and did not talk about it. He was polite, short, and stout with a neatly trimmed beard. I remembered how Fistrip wanted to be a cop only to die in Vietnam. Deputy Amp was the antithesis of Rick.
“The Aho boy is at his uncle’s,” Buzz told the deputy. “He won’t be a problem. The old man was pounding hell out of the boy’s mother and he stepped in to protect her.”
“I’ll take care of it,” the deputy said.
“Billy Aho’s sixteen,” Buzz explained to me outside. “His father came in last week with a snootful, said the boy beat him up and ran off. He swore charges. Truth is that Billy was defending his mom.”
“How do you know?”
“The boy came to see me in the confessional.”
I was shocked. “I thought the confessional was secret—a sacred trust.”
“Well, it is, but this is a good boy and his father’s a crumb. A priest has to use judgment.”
“I thought you were bound by Church law.”
Buzz grinned. “Well, the Pope and his crowd are in Rome and that’s a helluva long way from these parts.” He glanced at me. “You always follow the rules?”
“No.”
“And right you are. Life is just not simple. Like it or not.”
We visited several houses. Most were shacks hacked out of isolated sites in the woods. At one we met Janey, a young woman obviously fallen on hard times. Her face was lined with stress. She had five children, all young.
“Janey,” Buzz said. “How’s little Robert?”
“Better,” she said. “Arguing with everyone. The medicine worked.”
The priest gave her several cartons of food, a grocery bag with history books, and a piece of paper. “Loretta Hinchley’s gonna drive out to see you.”
“I don’t know about this,” Janey said.
The priest smiled. “Nature is nature,” he said.
“What about the Church?” she asked.
“Let me worry about the Church.”
In the Woody Buzz told me Janey had never been married. “When she meets a fella, she thinks she’s in love, gets pregnant, and he disappears. Some people seem destined to pick the wrong partners. Janey’s an intelligent girl, a helluva smart kid, first in her high school class over to Marquette, this despite missing a year while she had her first baby. Sometimes I think God is a mean bastard, giving a kid so much beauty and brains, but we all have parts of ourselves we can’t control. Despite her smarts, her hormones got the upper hand. And she’s a good mom if you ignore her sleeping with strangers. She’s stretched bad. Some of us look after her, but she’s gotta stop making babies. Loretta Hinchley’s a nurse over in Newberry. She’s going to get Janey on the contraceptive pill.” He looked over at me. “What good’s a Church ruling against contraception if the kids are born into hopelessness? Janey’s got five. God and Rome should be happy with that. Now we need to help her do the best she can to raise the ones she has.”
This was a priest who didn’t fit any definition I knew except that he lived the way I thought any person, priest or not, ought to. Fred Ciz had told me Buzz was a remarkable man and I had to agree.
We distributed groceries all day. Our last stop was at a cabin several miles west of town. Buzz said I should stay in the car for this one and I agreed, though his request made me curious and I rolled my window down. I watched him pull his American Flyer sled up to the front stairs. The house was made of huge logs. I smelled smoke from a wood fire. There were snowshoes leaning against the trunk of a white
pine and a woodpile with layers of sawdust mixed with snow. Buzz did not go to the door and knock. Instead he kept back from the front porch and yelled.
Even from the car I recognized her immediately. I wasn’t thirty yards away. Her hair was cut severely short now and she was gaunt but it was, without question, Raina Chickerman and she was carrying a shotgun. She did not look toward the car and I sat in silence, stunned.
I heard Buzz talk to her. “Sorry to intrude, Miss.”
“I told you before, Father. I don’t need help. I am just fine and I will continue to be just fine.” Her self-confidence permeated the air.
“We’re a community up here,” Buzz said, trying to open a dialogue, but she cut him off.
“I’m my own community. I’m here to work and I will not tolerate disturbances, well intentioned or otherwise.”
Buzz left the boxes at the foot of her steps.
In the wagon Buzz was sullen. He was unaccustomed to failure. I didn’t mind the silence, but I was more than a little curious. “Who is she?” I asked. I could barely contain myself.
“Smith,” he said, gripping the huge steering wheel. “A pseudonym, no doubt. I heard she was out here and alone. I’ve tried several times to establish contact. Same outcome every time. She’s a hard case, that one.”
Hard case: That fit Raina Chickerman. I could still see her at the creek after the old man’s funeral. I tried to think how she could possibly have come to live here as a recluse. As a child she had had no social life, joined nothing, did nothing with other kids, a true loner. I had been her only friend and now I felt like I had never really known her. She had shown up after I burned the homestead and promptly disappeared. And now she was here and it seemed too bizarre a coincidence to reconcile.
It was three days later before I got up the courage to go back out to her place. I had sweaty palms and a rolling stomach, but the effort went for naught. The place was empty and she was gone.
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