In a way, Lasker had told his own sons, it’s still out there. Only thing is, you can’t swim in it
Lasker was a big man: awkward, with thinning brown hair and huge shoulders. His features were sharp, raw edged, blasted hard by the Dakota winters. The eyes were difficult to read. Of all the farmers in the area, people would tell you that no one was more clearly designed by nature to play poker than Tom Lasker.
At dawn on the day after they found the object, Lasker and his older boy were back atop the slope. The plain was bleak and cold in the gray light. They had an hour or so before Will had to get ready for school. Ordinarily Will wouldn’t have been here at all on the morning of a school day. But he was curious about the shark’s fin. And, without any more talk, he confronted the object, which now looked like a triangular hand fan mounted on a pole. The pole burrowed down into one side of the ditch. “Let’s do it,” the boy said enthusiastically, sinking his spade into the earth. He turned it over, and the soil, even this late in the season, was heavy and sweet.
Will seemed all right this morning, the air was still, and Lasker felt good about the world.
He measured off a few feet in a straight line from the point where the pole entered the side of the ditch, and began throwing up soil in his own methodical way.
They worked until Will had to leave. Lasker had planned to quit when the boy did (he was only pursuing this to satisfy Will’s curiosity), but by then he’d discovered that the pole was at least eight feet long, and showing no sign of ending. His own steam was up.
Whatever it was, the angle of descent was steep. He was down almost six feet when he quit for lunch.
Ginny came back with him afterward to see what the fuss was about. She was tall, clever, a product of Chicago who had come to North Dakota as a customs inspector, with the primary objective of getting away from urban life. Lasker’s friends and family had warned him that she would quickly tire of solitude and harsh winters. But she’d thrived and seemed to enjoy nothing more than settling down on a snow-driven night with a book in front of a roaring fire.
“It’s blocking the pipe?” she asked, puzzled, standing over the thing.
“Not really.”
“Then why all the fuss? You don’t really have to tear it out of the ground, do you?”
“No.” Most of it was down pretty deep. “But I’d like to know what it is. Wouldn’t you?”
She shrugged. “It’s a pole.”
“How’d it get here?”
Ginny had spotted something. Lasker had dug three ditches down to the descending pole, each deeper than the preceding one by a couple of feet. They now knew it was at least twelve feet long. Ginny was looking into the deepest of the pits. “There’s a wad of some sort buried down there. At the bottom.”
Lasker had set a ladder in the pit. He climbed down, and used his spade to fish at the wad. “It’s cloth,” he said.
She frowned. “I think it used to be attached to the pole.”
He dug around the fabric. Tried to free it. After a few minutes, he gave up. “I’d like to find the other end of the pole,” he said.
“I suggest you forget it. If you can’t drag it out of the ground, it’s going to turn into a big job.” She blinked in the sunlight. “Maybe you should go down to Colmar’s and hire a couple of men.”
“I will,” he said, “if this goes on much longer.” He grinned at her and, constricted by the narrow confines of the pit, worked his spade in around the pole and pulled more dirt loose.
Ginny was reluctant to leave. She was still standing over him, watching, when the spade chunked against something solid.
“What is it?” she asked.
* * * *
A boat.
A sailboat.
A dozen people, Lasker, Will and Jerry, Ginny, the hired men from Colmar’s, several neighbors, stood in the twilight near the top of the slope. They’d hauled it out of its hole and laid it on its side, propping the mainmast with a stack of cinder blocks. Jerry was playing a hose on it. The water washed the clay away, and revealed a bright scarlet hull and creamy white inboard paneling and lush pine-colored decks. A set of canvas sails that had once been white were spread on the ground nearby.
Nobody was saying much.
Betty Kausner touched the keel once or twice, tentatively, as though it might be hot.
“It’s fiberglass, I think,” said her husband Phil.
Jack Wendell stood off to one side, his hands on his hips, just staring. “I don’t think so,” Jack said. He used to work at Morrison’s Marine in Grand Forks and he figured to know about things like that. “Even for fiberglass, it’s pretty light.”
“Tom.” Betty Kausner was staying close to her husband. “You sure you got no idea about this?”
“No.” He glared at the boat as if it were an unwelcome intruder. “None.”
“It looks in good shape,” said Rope Hammond, who owned the land to the east, along Route 11. “You could take her for a spin tomorrow.” He touched the cloth with the tip of his boot. “Even the sails. Tom, these can’t have been in the ground very long.”
Another car pulled into the driveway, and disgorged Ed Patterson and his family. Five kids. Ed owned the Handy Hardware in Cavalier. The kids charged up the hill and began chasing one another around the boat.
Kausner had gone back to his station wagon. He returned with a tape measure. He made marks in the soil at stem and stern, and measured it off. “Nineteen feet, five inches,” he announced.
The hull looked subtly different from anything Lasker had seen before. It was rounded, flared. Something. It had a mainsail and a jib and a staysail. Running lights were set toward the front of the hull. He wondered if they would work.
“Look at this,” said Hammond, poring over the bow. He was pointing at a cluster of black Arabic-looking characters. “What language is that?”
“Looks Iranian to me,” said Jack Wendell, remembering the signs carried by demonstrators back in the days of the Ayatollah.
Three more cars were coming in from Cavalier, and two from Fort Moxie. Lasker sighed. Ginny had set up the coffee maker they used during planting and harvesting. She was passing out cups, and telling people there was Danish inside.
Gradually the sense of vague disquiet that had ruled the early evening lifted, and by ten o’clock the house was filled with noisy, well-oiled guests.
Two hours later they were gone. Lasker helped Ginny clean up. He was setting dishes in the washer. Through the window over the sink he could see the boat. It lay on its side at the top of the slope, its hull curved and inviting in the moonlight.
“Going to bed,” said Ginny, tossing a dishtowel across the back of a chair.
“I’ll be up in a while.” Lasker reached for his jacket.
“It’s cold now,” she said. “Don’t stay out too long.”
* * * *
The ghost’s name was Corey Ames.
He never knew why he took it into his head to drive into Fort Moxie that night. When he went outside, he’d intended simply to go up and take another look at the boat. But as he got near it, the old rush of fever he’d felt whenever he thought of Corey took him, drove him back down the hill, and carried him toward the garage.
His heart was hammering by the time he got into the front seat of his pickup, because by then he knew he was going into town, and he knew why.
Dumb.
But still, he would indulge himself. Give himself over to the old passion for an hour. Let it hurt—
Fort Moxie lends itself to timelessness. There are no major renovation projects, no vast cultural shifts imposed by changing technology, no influxes of families with strange names. The town and surrounding prairie possesses a kind of stasis. It is a place where Eisenhower is still President. Where people still like one another, and crime is virtually unknown. The last felony in Fort Moxie occurred in 1934, when Bugsy Moran shot it out with the customs people.
In all, it is a stable place to live, a good place to rear kids
. But it holds memories. Much as the land held the big lake.
Long gone now.
He bounced out onto Route 11 and turned left.
Corey was in Seattle. Or at least she had been last he’d heard. She’d married an insurance salesman and moved out of the Fort Moxie area. Guy by the name of Maury. Corey Maury. Goofy name. She’d come back for her father’s funeral in ‘77, and Lasker had cowered at home. Hoped she’d notice he was not there. The husband had not come along, and Lasker had wondered dismally whether they’d broken up. He was himself married by then, and would not have left Ginny no matter what. Still, he wished Corey ill, and it shamed him to realize it.
There’d been a daughter. Six or seven years old. It felt good to realize that Corey might be a grandmother.
He sucked cold air into his lungs, felt the old emptiness close around him.
Route 11 is a two-lane, unlighted highway except when it curves through the windscreen at the Hammond property. It runs parallel to the Canadian border, about a mile south of the line. Lasker could see the soft illumination of Fort Moxie in the night sky. The moon had set now behind the Turtle Mountains. But the stars were hard and bright. The wind pushed at the pickup and rattled the load of hoes and rakes in the flatbed. It blows all the time across the northern prairie. There’s a kind of channel connecting Hudson’s Bay with Fort Moxie, and the wind builds up over the pole and just charges down the channel. Doesn’t much matter what time of year it is; it’s always cold. The joke in Fort Moxie is that if you leave town over the Fourth, you miss the summer.
The old lake bottom was lush and black in the glow of the headlights. It rushed by, and the pickup’s tires sang against the paving.
Lasker passed the old Milliken spread. The barn and outbuildings were shadows beneath the trees; cheerful light spilled out of the farmhouse. Milliken had added a deck since the last time he’d been by.
The road looped north, banked slightly, turned east again, past the cemetery. His headlights swept across the markers, and then he climbed up over the interstate, and dropped down among the sleepy frame houses and wide tree-lined streets.
His breathing slowed.
Charlie’s Southern Barbecue now marked the edge of town. It was new, had been there four years or so.
The Tastee-Freez still stood at Nineteenth and Bannister.
The lumberyard. And the Prairie Schooner Hotel.
He drifted quietly through the empty streets.
Damn fool. A quiet rage began to build, taking its place beside the ancient passion.
Corey’s town.
Even now, after twenty years, a good marriage, two sons, after Ginny, he could still see Corey’s cool smile. Still recall the gold bracelet on her right wrist, the long white scarf, the soft press of her lips.
My God.
Three months, they’d had. Somehow, Lasker had known from the start that he would not be able to hold her.
In retrospect, he recognized that he knew almost nothing about her. Nothing that mattered. She laughed easily and she had luminous brilliant eyes and dark brown hair cut in bangs. He knew of no book she had read, nor had he any idea of any political opinion she held. She liked rock. But then, almost everyone did. She enjoyed Jets games in Winnipeg and the science museum. (How had he forgotten that?)
It ended suddenly. Without warning. There’s someone else. Is there any phrase in the language that plunges a more painful shaft into the ribs?
Her town.
Harley’s Deli.
The post office at the corner of Stutzman and Main, where she’d held a clerk’s job. (He’d picked her up here one evening during a whiteout, after she’d worked late.)
Chip Leonard’s place off Twelfth, where they’d celebrated her nineteenth birthday.
The walking trail along the Red.
The high school. The tennis court. The old Roxie Theater (still there, but long closed).
Her house.
(The house number, 1621, was still mounted beside the front door on a plaque that featured a Victorian carriage.)
He floored the pedal, and hurried away, scattering leaves.
* * * *
He dreamt of her that night.
It had been a long time. She rarely appeared now. But the pattern was similar: Corey was young, dazzling, the way he remembered her. They were on the front porch at her house. It was a summer night. (He had never known her in summer,) And she told him how happy she was to see him again.
When he woke, the gray early morning light leaking through the blinds, he lay a long time without moving.
* * * *
Hal Riordan, who owned the Fort Moxie lumberyard, was waiting for him beside the boat. Hal had been old when Lasker was in school: his hair, gray in those days, had gone completely white. He was tall and glacially slow, a man who would not go to the bathroom without due consideration. “Something really odd here, Tom,” he said.
“Hello yourself, Hal.” Lasker grinned. “What’s the matter?”
“Take a look where the mast is joined to the cabin roof.”
Lasker did. He saw nothing unusual. “What about it?”
“It’s all of a piece. The mast should have been manufactured separately, I would think. And then bolted down. Everything here looks as if it came out of a single mold.”
Lasker looked again. Riordan was right: there were no fittings, no screws, nothing.
“It’s a joke of some kind,” Lasker said. “Has to be.”
“I suppose.” Riordan pushed his hands into his pockets and pressed the toe of his shoe against the hull. “Pretty expensive one.”
* * * *
By 8 a.m., there was a yardful of people again. More than the day before. “You ought to charge admission,” suggested Frank Hall. “You got people coming in from Drayton now. By tomorrow, they’ll be here from Winnipeg and Grand Forks.”
Hall was an import specialist with the Customs Service. He was easygoing, bearded, wide shouldered. His wife, Peg, had arrived with him and was helping Gin set out coffee again. Ginny caught his eye and shook her head. This was costing too much, her eyes said. We’re going to have to do something.
“What do you make of it, Frank?” Lasker asked.
Hall looked at him, looked at the boat. “You really don’t know how this got here, Tom?”
“No.” With some exasperation: “I really don’t.”
“Okay, then: this boat is some sort of homebuilt job.”
“How do you know?”
“Easy.” He pointed toward the stern. “No hull identification number. It should be in raised lettering, like the VIN on your car. It’s not there.”
“Maybe this was built before a hull number was required.”
Hall shook his head. “They’ve been requiring them for twenty years.”
Lasker spent the morning cleaning out the boat’s cabin. Several of his visitors offered to help him, but Lasker was beginning to suspect he might have something valuable, and wanted to be careful. Anyway, there wasn’t room for more than one at a time to work inside the cabin.
Padded benches were set along both bulkheads. Lasker was surprised to discover they were still soft, although the seats were located uncomfortably close to the deck.
The bulkheads themselves were the color of winter wheat. There were shelves and cabinets, all empty. The upper part of the forward panel was glass. A set of gauges was installed beneath it. He wiped them off cautiously: none of the symbols was familiar. The characters bore a family resemblance to the inscription on the bow.
At noon, Ginny cornered him. “Where are they all coming from?”
Lasker shrugged. “It is getting worse, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said. “We can’t afford to pump coffee and set out snacks for everyone in the Red River Valley.”
“I thought some of the local folks were bringing their own.”
“Some. Anyhow, we’re out of business. Thought you’d want to know. Maybe we should set up a turnstile.”
Mor
e cars were pulling in while they talked.
* * * *
The cure apparently occurred on the late morning of the third day after the excavation. It was a Saturday.
Mark Watkin had come with several of his friends to see the boat. Mark limped noticeably, a result of a basketball injury that had ruined his left knee almost a year earlier. Doctors had recommended he use a cane, but the boy steadfastly refused.
The teenagers had not stayed long. And in fact they had come and gone without being seen at all by Lasker, who was now actively avoiding the crowds. But the following day, Mark was back. This time he went to the front door of the farmhouse. And the limp was gone.
Full Spectrum 3 - [Anthology] Page 21
