Running Dark (13 page)

18

PREACHER LAKE, FEBRUARY 6, 1976

“Once people take on a deep notion about something, you can't change their minds.”

His old man had driven him to the Mimolov swamp when he was thirteen. They had parked on a jack pine plain and walked nearly a mile through muddy swales and cedar tangles until they got to a single ruined building standing on a hummock of high ground. The building's roof had rotted away, but most of the walls of lime- and fieldstone still stood.

The old man sat on the stone sill where a window had once been, lit a cigarette, popped the cork of his pocket flask, took a long pull, and said, “What do you see?”

Service had no idea what the old man wanted; he rarely did.

“Guess what this place was?” the old man asked with slight irritation.

“A church or a school?”

“Church,” the old man said. “Good. Now, what do you see?”

“The roof's gone, windows too. Porkies, probably.”

“Okay. What else?”

Service saw nothing and leaned against a wall, wishing the old man wouldn't pull this stuff on him. The stone floor was littered with chunks of stone that had broken off under years of freezing and thawing, and there were holes between the fieldstones, but no sign of nests. He looked along the base of the wall. No spiderwebs, no animal droppings, no tracks in the dust, no sign of animals at all. It was normal for animals to move into abandoned structures almost immediately.

“No animals,” Service said.

The old man nodded. “Right. A preacher named Proudfit built a church here, all by himself. Back then the loggers were thicker than mosquitoes. He hired a guy to go round to the logging camps to announce services, and one Sunday the loggers came and found Proudfit hanging. Nobody knew if somebody had hung him, or if he'd done himself in, but the church got marked as dark and people stayed away, and over time it came to be a place where scores got settled. Two men had a beef, they came here and fought it out—sometimes to the death, sometimes with spectators—but usually it was just the two men alone with their hatred. Some say hundreds have died here. More likely it wasn't anything close to that, but people were afraid of this place. At one time there were a thousand people living within a mile of here. They called it Preacher Lake. Within six months of Proudfit's hanging, they were all gone, abandoned their shacks and cabins and moved on. The Indians still claim the place has spirits all around it, which is why animals won't come into it—not a bird, not a snake, not an ant.”

“There's no lake,” he told his father.

“Never was. Just a string of beaver ponds, and they're long gone.”

“Do you believe in spirits?” Grady asked his father.

“Makes more sense to me that Proudfit built this place on bad ground—that there's something here animals can't tolerate. 'Course, porkies ate the wood, so not all the animals are afraid of it, right?” The old man dropped a cigarette on the floor and mashed it with the heel of his boot. “Once people take on a deep notion about something, you can't change their minds. Don't matter if what they believe makes sense or not,” his father said.

“Do people still come here?”

“Not to kill each other. Your great-grandfather showed me this place, and I've been comin' since I was a tyke. I've never seen another human being except those I brought. You ever need real privacy, this is your place.”

Service had never forgotten that day. He had visited the place regularly over the years and had never seen anyone, which he attributed to the area's isolation and inaccessibility rather than fear of evil spirits.

It was the perfect place to meet Cecilia Lasurm.

During his time in Newberry, he had gotten to know the waitress Nikki-Jo Jokola, pals without romantic involvement. When he was ready to place the ad in the Manistique paper, Nikki-Jo took care of it, and they'd put Nikki-Jo's phone number in; when Lasurm called her, Nikki-Jo told her to dress warm and where and when to meet him.

He had selected the site so that she had to negotiate a long, almost perfect oxbow in the road, and he had placed himself so that he could make sure she wasn't being followed. He had arrived three hours before their meeting to wait for her. When she drove by, slipping and sliding, he could see her talking to herself and fighting the steering wheel, but she was alone. He had quickly trotted back to his vehicle to wait for her to reach him.

When she pulled up, he was waiting on his new Rupp, the motor running. Lasurm looked tired and nervous.

“You mighta picked an easier place to get to.”

“We don't want easy,” he said.

The snow was knee-deep, the surface crusted over. He had a sled behind the snowmobile, which was loaded with gear. He had already broken trail into the old church, stacked firewood, and arranged an area for their arrival.

He started the snowmobile and held out his hand for her to get on behind him.

“You sure this thing will handle it?” she asked.

“You should have seen my old one,” he said.

She smiled. “I have.”

His mouth hung open. “You know where the Rupp is?”

She nodded. “They think of it as a trophy. They get drunk and urinate on it.”

Service cringed.
Rats.
When they got to the remains of the building, he helped her inside, lit a kerosene lantern, and ignited a fire between some rocks on the stone floor. He put a small iron grill over the fire and put on the coffeepot. He had rigged a tarp to make a lean-to inside the ruins, and set it up so that they and the fire would be protected from snow falling through the open roof.

“This seems extreme,” she said.

“Coming into the Garden is extreme. I wanted to make sure that you weren't followed and that we'd have complete privacy.”

He had balsam boughs stacked on the floor, covered with a canvas tarp. Two sleeping bags were rolled up on the tarp. He didn't expect to spend the night, but winter weather was fickle and it paid to be prepared.

He had trapped two snowshoe hares the day before in the swamp behind the Airstream, and now he put the meat on a metal grate over the fire and began to grill them.

Lasurm watched him go about his tasks, sipped her coffee, and remained silent.

“You're thinking about living rough in the Garden?” she asked.

“There may be a couple of days when I have to,” he said. “There's a lot of territory down there and I've got to cover it on foot. I thought about snowshoes or skis, but I don't want tracks. It's easier to cover footprints.”

“There are several places down there where you can hole up,” she said. “Did you bring maps?”

She used a pencil to mark the places and described them to him. “You're going to work at night?” she asked.

He nodded.

“This place makes me feel uneasy,” Lasurm said, looking around the abandoned, decaying structure.

He related the story his father had told him years before, and after he stopped talking, she said, “I feel what the Indians feel, don't you?”

“No,” he said, pouring coffee for her.

“You don't know how to read me,” she said as he turned the cooking hares with his knife. She held up her leg and wiggled her boot. “I can't say I miss the other one,” she said. “It's more of an inconvenience than anything. Life is about managing inconvenience . . . would you agree?”

“I never thought about it.”

“I'm not surprised,” she said. “I would think that game wardens prefer to swim in either black or white water. For you people, the ambiguity of gray is the real inconvenience.”

“It's not that simple,” he said.

“I'm sure you find gray very frustrating,” she said.

“What is it that brings out your preachy side?” he asked.

She laughed. “You don't need a church to be spiritual.”

“Like the Indians?”

“Anywhere was their church, and I'm not preachy. I'm simply comfortable in my own beliefs.”

“Such as?”

“Lots of things churchgoing Christians would not agree with.”

He sensed she was pressing him to ask for more, but he had his own agenda. “You're gonna run a lot of risk with me in the Garden,” he said.

“I don't fear risks,” she said, “but if you're going to be out nights, you're going to have to be in by certain hours, or stay out all the next day. People in the Garden aren't nosy so much as observant, and what they see, they talk about. They say information can move from one end of the peninsula to the other faster than a lightning bolt. We call it Garden speed.”

Where was she going with this?

“For all practical purposes, my house is on Burn't Bluff. I'm two and a half miles from Fayette and the Port Bar, which is a short walk from the state park,” she said. “It's four miles south to Fairport and seven miles north from my place to Garden.” She drew pencil lines on the map to show him. “If you get caught out, there are several places where you can lay over for the day.” Again, she marked the places on the map and described each one to him.

If nothing else, Lasurm was thorough.

“Did you kill people in Vietnam?” she asked.

“Vietnam is in the past,” he said. Where was she going now?

“We only left there last year and then with our tails between our legs,” she said. “How does the U.S. lose a war to rice growers?”

“We didn't lose,” he countered.

“Perhaps not on the battlefield,” she said. “But there was no true political commitment or mobilization of national will, and wars are not all won and lost on battlefields. They sent you over there and you fought and you were on your own with not a lot of support from back home.”

“You're not really talking about Vietnam,” he said, watching her eyes and trying to read the tone in her voice.

“What's Lansing's commitment to the Garden?” she said. “They send you people in to enforce what amounts to an administrative rule and give you no tools. Why? Is Lake Michigan more important than Lake Superior or Lake Huron?”

“What are you driving at?” he asked.

“If you check around the government I think you'll find that each salmon or trout taken in state waters by a sportfisherman represents about eighty dollars to the state economy. That same fish from a commercial license brings the state a buck and a quarter.”

“Those numbers are news to me.” Astonishing news.

“It's news to a lot of people,” she said, “and if the numbers aren't a hundred percent accurate, they certainly reflect the magnitude of the ratio. If you're Lansing, why revitalize commercial fishing? There's a lot more money to be made boosting sportfishing.”

He couldn't dispute her logic, and wondered why he'd never heard such data before.

“Sportfishing is more important than commercial fishing for the state economy, and tourism is our second-leading business. The DNR planted Pacific salmon to eat the alewives and cut down on the summer die-offs, which stunk up beaches and put off tourists. I doubt they foresaw the economic windfall,” Lasurm said. “Do you know about Jondreau?”

He did. “A L'Anse Chippewa,” he said. “We were briefed on the case during training. COs busted him ten years ago for not having proper safety equipment on his boat and he fought the ticket.”

She nodded. “It happened in 1965,” she said. “The lower court dismissed his case, but he took it to the state supreme court, which found in his favor. This had limited impact in terms of tribal rights, but it helped the tribes see that the courts could be useful. More important is Albert ‘Big Abe' LeBlanc,” she said. “LeBlanc is a Bay Mills Chippewa. He fished in a closed area during a closed period, and when he was arrested, U.P. Legal Services helped him fight it. You know—UPLS?” she said, lifting an eyebrow.

He shrugged; he'd never heard of it before. LeBlanc had been arrested while he was in the Newberry district, and a lot of the officers had bitched that it could lead to Indians fishing and hunting whenever and wherever they wanted. There had also been a lot of national publicity and heated editorials about the case. Attalienti's secretary was named LeBlanc. Was she tribal, a relative of Big Abe?

“Don't they teach you people
anything
in your training? U.P. Legal Services was created by Odd Hegstrom. What we have now is a federal case,
U.S. versus the State of Michigan,
and in all likelihood the feds will uphold treaty rights as they now interpret them. The LeBlanc case started last year, but there's no way it will come to trial for another two or three years, and it could be ten years before it all gets settled.”

“And then?” he asked.

“I don't have a crystal ball,” she said, “but what if the state eventually buys out all those people who still had valid commercial licenses for Lakes Michigan and Huron and lets only the Indians have all of Superior's waters and certain parts of the other Great Lakes?”