Lightning Strike

by William Kent Krueger

  Liam half-circled the cabin and, in a Dole pineapple cardboard box below the back window, found what he was looking for. The box was half filled with empty whiskey bottles, Four Roses, just like the two empties at Lightning Strike. How long had Big John been off the wagon?

  He returned to his cruiser, which he’d parked behind Big John’s truck, and started back to Aurora.

  When he entered the Sheriff’s Department, which was located in the basement of the county courthouse, Deputy Joe Meese looked up from the contact desk. “Got something for you from the BCA. Big John’s blood alcohol level. You asked for that first. The full toxicology report’ll take a bit longer.”

  He handed Liam the manila envelope. The sheriff opened it and slid out the paper inside. “Did you look at this?”

  “Yeah. Just like we figured. Through the roof.”

  “I was just out at Manydeeds’s cabin. His truck’s there but not his canoe. And you didn’t find his canoe when you searched Lightning Strike, right?”

  “Nada,” Joe said. “Probably loaned his canoe to somebody. You know the Ojibwe. Generous people. So he probably had to walk.”

  “A long last walk for a man carrying a couple of bottles of whiskey and a rope just the right length to hang himself. He had to have passed through Allouette. Someone would have seen him with the bottles and the rope. Why hasn’t anyone said anything? What are they hiding?”

  “Got me. Going to the wake tonight?”

  Liam nodded.

  “Won’t be easy, I expect,” Joe said.

  Liam said, “In this job, not much is.”

  He went to his office, closed the door, and sat at his desk. He placed the manila envelope on the desktop and stared at it as if it were a scorpion.

  Folks on the rez had to have known, didn’t they? But no one had said a word to Liam, not even his wife. And why would they? He understood perfectly. Big John Manydeeds was Anishinaabe, which meant “The First People,” though Dilsey often shortened it to simply “The People.” Big John was one of them. But Liam O’Connor? Although he’d married a woman who was half Anishinaabe, that didn’t make him one. And there was nothing he could ever do that would change it.

  CHAPTER 5

  Allouette, the larger of the two communities on the Iron Lake Reservation, was grieving the loss of Big John Manydeeds, but the grieving went back long before that. In truth, it had begun with the white man’s earliest encounters with the Anishinaabe people, who were also called Ojibwe or sometimes Chippewa. The killings, deceptions, and theft of all that was dear and sacred came soon after that. The ancestors of the Ojibwe of the Iron Lake Reservation were Algonquin and had lived along the Atlantic coast. Long ago, they’d been driven west by their enemies, the Iroquois. According to the old stories, they’d followed the sacred Megis shell until it brought them to the great lake they called Kitchigami, which white men knew as Superior. They’d finally come to rest and for a long time had been happy.

  But the white men followed, came in such numbers they were like swarms of blackflies. They took what they wanted, by force or deceit or through twisted laws. In the end, what was left to the Ojibwe people was only a small parcel of what they’d once called home.

  This wasn’t the history taught in schools, but it was a history Cork knew because he’d been told it by Grandma Dilsey.

  Cork and Billy Downwind found her in the Allouette community center, a plain wood construction painted white and with “Ain Dah Yung,” which meant “Our Home,” burned into a large plaque of polished maple and hung above the door. At one time, it had been the school where she’d taught the children of the reservation. Those, at least, who hadn’t been dragged off to one of the government boarding schools. Along with several other women from the rez, she was helping prepare the center for Big John’s wake that evening.

  “There you are,” she said when she saw the two boys enter. “We thought you’d been eaten by wolves.”

  “Billy wanted to go out to Lightning Strike,” Cork said.

  Grandma Dilsey had been putting a cloth across one of the tables where food would be set for the communal meal which would accompany Big John’s wake. She scowled at the boys.

  “Why in heaven’s name would you want to go there?”

  “It used to be one of my favorite places to go with my uncle,” Billy told her. “I just wanted to see it again, and see where…” But Billy couldn’t finish.

  Grandma Dilsey’s face softened. “Your mother’s been looking for you.”

  “We want to talk to Henry Meloux first,” Cork said.

  “He’s gone back to Crow Point to prepare himself for tonight. You can talk to him then. In the meantime, your mother needs you, Billy. And, Cork, don’t you have papers to deliver?”

  Outside the center, Billy said, “Thanks for going with me.”

  “Sure. See you tonight at the wake.”

  In parting, the two boys solemnly shook hands, as if they were grown men.

  Cork didn’t leave right away. He waited until Billy had gone, then went back inside the community center and shadowed his grandmother for a moment until she realized he was still there.

  “Those newspapers won’t deliver themselves,” she said. “Here, take the end of this tablecloth and help me spread it.” After Cork had done as she’d asked, she looked at him closely. “Something on your mind?”

  “Broomstraw says—”

  “She’s an elder, Corkie. Show her respect.”

  “Mrs. Broom says that Big John’s spirit can’t walk the Path of Souls.”

  “And why not?”

  “It’s been more than four days since he died.”

  “I’m sure the Creator understands the circumstances.”

  “Besides that, he took Mass.”

  “And I’m sure the Creator has more important things on his mind than how we pray.”

  “What do you think, Grandma?”

  “About what?”

  “What happens. You know, after we die.”

  “Sit down,” Grandma Dilsey said.

  They sat in folding chairs at the table and Cork’s grandmother took his hands. Because she’d been a teacher much of her life, she had a lot of experience with the questions of children, though Cork was no longer a child.

  “I don’t know if there’s anyone who can answer that question truthfully, Cork. I don’t know if there’s anyone who’s actually come back from the dead to tell us.”

  “I saw a story in the National Enquirer in the drugstore.”

  “Forget that claptrap.”

  “What about the Path of Souls? What about heaven?”

  “In the absence of evidence, we have faith, Corkie.”

  “Do you believe in the Path of Souls? Do you believe in heaven?”

  “What I believe isn’t important. It’s what you believe, what you feel in your heart.”

  But he didn’t feel anything in his heart at that moment except a great emptiness, and he didn’t know how to give that emptiness words of explanation.

  “Talk to Henry tonight,” Grandma Dilsey said. “Now, I have work to do, and so do you.”

  Cork had left his bike leaning against the side of the community center. He mounted it and began the long ride back to Aurora. The bike was a ten-speed Schwinn Varsity, which Cork had purchased himself after nearly a year of saving all his earnings from delivering newspapers and cutting lawns and from gift money at Christmas and his last birthday. On his Schwinn, he felt like he was riding the wind, and the ten miles between the Iron Lake Reservation and his house in Aurora were nothing. Or almost.

  Allouette was a crisscross of a few streets, none of them paved. The homes were a hodgepodge of drafty old cabins, flimsy houses built by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, trailers set on cinder blocks, and a number of sturdy little houses with flowers and medicine gardens, his grandma Dilsey’s among them. With LBJ’s “war on poverty,” electricity and phone service had finally come to the rez, but no running water yet, and outhouses were the nor
m. There wasn’t much enterprise—Frank’s gas station, the Wild Rice Café, LeDuc’s General Store, the small tribal building, and the community center. It had never been what might have been called a bustling town, but these days, with so many families like Billy’s having been lured away to distant cities by the promise of jobs, it sometimes felt deserted.

  Cork was quickly outside town and cycling his way along the gravel road that paralleled Iron Lake itself. The vast blue sparkle of water came in bursts between the birch and aspen lining the shore. To Cork’s left rose rugged hills covered in a mix of evergreen and hardwood, stretching east more than sixty miles to Lake Superior. This was the great Northwoods, the country he’d known since birth, and he felt the pulse of its life in the same way he felt the beat of his own heart.

  He’d gone three miles when he came to a spur that cut left and led to the old mission, where Father Cameron Ferguson from St. Agnes still held Mass every Sunday afternoon for those in Allouette who’d been confirmed. It was also the place where many of the Ojibwe of Allouette buried their dead.

  Without thinking, Cork took the spur and biked the quarter mile to the mission. It was small, built seventy years earlier of white pine logs, and still stood sturdy in a little clearing circled by wooded hills. Behind it was the cemetery, enclosed by an old picket fence. Cork got off his bike and leaned it against one of the fence posts. Among the markers and headstones stood a number of traditional spirit houses, which were small planked structures that rose two feet above the grave. Each house had a hole at one end, allowing the spirit to escape, and a little shelf where offerings could be placed to help the departed in their journey to Gaagige Minawaanigoziwining.

  Cork walked to a mound of dirt that marked the place where Big John’s casket would be lowered the next day. The open grave had been covered with a canvas tarp held in place by four heavy stones at the corners. Cork removed the stones and pulled the tarp away. This was more than idle curiosity or a morbid interest. It had to do with the swirl of questions in his head about death, and not just Big John’s. He questioned the Ojibwe belief in the soul walking a path to a better place, and he questioned the Christian view of heaven. Staring into that square of vacant earth, which felt to him like a cold, unwelcoming box, Cork considered that maybe everything he’d been told about death and what came after was no better than a fairy tale. That waiting hole, where even now he could see earthworms wiggling along the edges, told the real story. There was life, all of it aboveground, in the freedom of the air and sun and moon and stars, and then there was death, which was nothing but a hole in the ground waiting to be filled. A dark, senseless forever.

  He was about to put the tarp back into place when he saw a small pink square in a corner at the bottom of the grave. It stood out in dramatic contrast to all the raw, dark earth around it. Cork peered more closely and could see that it was a piece of folded paper. The hole was six feet deep. Cork eased himself over the side, dropped to the floor of the grave, and picked up the paper. He carefully unfolded it and saw that it was a piece of stationery with flowers along the edges. One word had been written on it: Goodbye.

  There were little gray stains on the paper, and Cork realized they were from tears. Then he caught the scent of something exotic, something lovely and floral, and he lifted the paper to his nose. The perfume, whatever it was, was strong. Cork had never smelled anything quite like it.

  He knew this was an intrusion, a trespass on someone’s private grief, and he refolded the paper and put it back where he’d found it.

  Getting out of the grave was a bit of a struggle, but he finally scaled the side and put the tarp back in place. He mounted his bike and started again for town, feeling an enormous sense of sadness. But surrounding that emotion was a lingering disquiet because of the great darkness he’d glimpsed—or thought he’d glimpsed—rising above the shadows at Lightning Strike.

  CHAPTER 6

  When Cork returned from Allouette, his mother wasn’t home. Jackson was gone, too, and he thought maybe she’d taken him to the vet. There were reports of distemper in Tamarack County, and his parents had discussed the importance of making sure the dog was well protected.

  Cork wrote a note saying he’d gone to deliver his papers and attached it with a magnet to the refrigerator door. He walked to the newspaper drop box on Dahlia Street, where he found Jorge Patterson sitting cross-legged on the ground, reading a magazine. The publication was called Famous Monsters of Filmland and featured photographs of creatures from movies, old and new. The boys loved monster movies, but while Cork saved his money for things like a Schwinn Varsity, Jorge bought monster magazines and monster model kits. His bedroom was decorated with his drawings of frightful creatures, not only re-creations of those dreamed up by Hollywood but also many that came directly from Jorge’s vivid imagination.

  “Check this out,” Jorge said.

  The picture in the magazine was of a woman with snakes sprouting from her head.

  “The Gorgon,” Jorge said.

  “Yeah, I know,” Cork said. “Greek myth.”

  “But this one terrorizes an English village. Stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. It’s gonna be great, man. I can’t wait to see it.”

  Cork pointed out that the film wasn’t going to be released for a long time yet, then added, “It’ll take forever to get to the Rialto, if it ever does.” Aurora’s small movie theater showed mostly family-oriented films, usually long after they’d hit the screens in the Twin Cities. “Come on, let’s get these papers delivered.”

  Between them, they shared three afternoon routes, delivering the Duluth Herald. Cork also had a morning paper route for the Duluth News-Tribune, but that job he did alone. They divided the streets, Cork taking one side and Jorge the other, and in this way, the whole process was finished in a little over an hour.

  Cork liked the job in part because it took him through a small town he knew as well as he knew his own face in the mirror. But Aurora was changing. It had once been a booming iron-mining community, as were so many towns along Minnesota’s Iron Range. But the iron mines had begun to close—cheaper foreign steel, everyone complained—and Cork had watched families leave, kids he’d grown up with gone forever. It sometimes felt to him as if the ground under his feet was shifting, and it scared him. If he had the power, he would have frozen everything in place forever.

  When the boys finished their routes, they headed, as usual, to Sam’s Place. This was a Quonset hut constructed during World War Two, but it had been purchased after the war by Sam Winter Moon and converted into a thriving burger joint on the shore of Iron Lake. Sam was Ojibwe and a family friend. He was a frequent dinner guest at the O’Connor house, and Cork’s father and Sam often hunted and fished together. But maybe the tie that bound them most was that they’d both been in the war. They’d fought their way across Europe into Germany in many of the same battles. They seldom talked about their war experiences, at least in Cork’s presence, but they seemed to understand each other in a deep and, to Cork, mysterious way.

  When the boys arrived, Sam was standing in the dirt parking area looking at his Quonset hut. He turned when he heard them coming. “Think I should paint it red?” he asked.

  The hut was dull gray, the color of the corrugated metal from which it was constructed, the color it had always been. Cork had never given it a thought one way or the other. It was just Sam’s Place and served up the best burgers in the North Country.

  “Daisy says it would be more appealing if I painted it red.” Sam shook his head.

  Sam Winter Moon stood just under six feet tall. His hair was black and he kept it in a crewcut. His eyes were two dark almonds in a face the color of deer hide. When he smiled, which was often, you could see that his teeth were porcelain white.

  He ran a hand along his jawline. “Daisy’s got an eye for things like that. What do you boys think?”

  Before Cork could answer, Daisy Winter Moon, Sam’s niece, who’d just graduated from high school, leaned out the
serving window of the Quonset hut and called, “Or blue. Would match the lake, don’t you think?”

  Sam shook his head. “Come on, boys, let’s get you something to eat.”

  Most folks who visited Sam’s Place took their orders and left, or they ate at one of the two picnic tables placed near the lakeshore. Cork and Jorge usually ate inside, in Sam’s personal, private area. In his remodeling, Sam had divided the Quonset hut into two sections—the front for food preparation and serving, the back as his living area from spring until late fall, when he closed up for the winter.

  Sam threw a couple of hamburger patties on the griddle and Daisy made two chocolate shakes. When the food was ready, the boys sat down at the table in back where Sam ate his meals. Sam called out to Daisy, “Give me a holler when the rush comes,” and he sat down with the boys. “So, Jorge, how are things out at Glengarrow?”

  Jorge’s father had died in the Korean War, one of the many Marines killed at Heartbreak Ridge. Jorge’s mother had moved from San Diego to Aurora with the idea of raising her infant boy among his father’s Minnesota relatives, an idea that soured as soon as she arrived.

  “A bunch of religious crazies,” Jorge had told Cork more than once. “Because Mom’s from Mexico, they think she’s dirty. And because I look Mexican, I’m dirty, too. When we bump into them somewhere, they pretend they don’t see us. The hell with them.”

  To support herself and her son, Jorge’s mother had taken a position at the big estate called Glengarrow, which belonged to Duncan MacDermid, who owned the North Star iron mine.

  “Everything’s fine, Mr. Winter Moon,” Jorge said. “But old Mrs. MacDermid’s health isn’t so good.”

  “Never has been, truth be told. But you help out?”

  “I do what I can.”

  “All anybody can ask.” Sam turned his attention to Cork. “You look like someone with a question on his mind.”