The Cavanaugh Quest (47 page)

Archie drifted between reminiscing and mute reflection on his life and theirs, how it had all turned out. The freeway swept past as we worked our way toward Duluth. The mist clung to the earth and there were patches of ground fog but traffic was light. I was nervous, tight with anticipation, desperately curious about Billy’s message yet afraid to hear it.

“It’s funny,” Archie was saying, “being so near the end and looking back across your life, being able to think about it as a whole story. I do it, knowing I’m near the end, but I don’t
feel
like I’m near the end … I still figure I’m going to live forever, but I’ve got evidence to the contrary right under my nose, all the experiences of my lifetime. Anyway, I’ve got news for you, the idea of dying doesn’t frighten me at all anymore … I think it’s a young man’s fear, the fear that you’ll miss so much. At my age you don’t figure there’s much to miss, there’s no expectation of terrific things to come—you’ve done whatever great things you were going to do. Nobody lives much longer than this, there are no precedents for what the hell there is left for you to do … so I guess I’ll just keep writing books until my mind goes west …” He smiled and grew silent again, content.

Later he said, “You know, as a bunch we were a pretty unimaginative lot. Boring. God, how could we have enjoyed it so much? Thank heavens, I’m not a joiner, I only went up once in a while and then moved away, but think of the ones whose spare time revolved around that goddamn lodge … Whew. Crocker and his idiotic football crap, one locker-room extravaganza after another. And Dierker, he was no prize either—all the sense of humor you’d find in your average turnip. Honest, moral, sober as a young man, churchgoer … And Boyle, always had a dirty joke and a red face, like he’d been caught jacking off in the men’s room.” Archie made a little face. “Goode, he was always there with all the answers, he could shoot straighter, swim farther, run faster, and who the hell cared? Hub Anthony was always going on about which heiress to which grain or lumber or railroad fortune gave him his last blowjob … he kept score, I’m sure, and I’m amazed he never married several million dollars. Maybe all the heiresses were ugly, who knows? I never believed a word of it. So long ago. Doesn’t amount to a damn thing now, does it?

“And conservative? Oh, what a bunch of Establishment bastards. They’d take anything but a risk, they hated running risks for fear of making a mess … It happened just once, a real mess, so far as I know. Hub told me about it and it seemed funny to me at the time, though today I’m not sure why. It was that whorehouse business and it really scared hell out of them.” Archie laughed, shaking his head, caught in memory’s web. “They could just see all their wonderful ambitions getting blown right out of the water, wives beating them with umbrellas and rolling pins, I suppose. You see, apparently one of them had heard quite a bit about this all-Indian-maiden whorehouse way to hell and gone somewhere, beautiful Indian virgins were the stuff of north woods dreams forty years ago, kiddo, and some woman named Helen Littlefeather ran the place—Hub didn’t tell me whose idea it was but they apparently went up there
en masse
one night and something nasty happened, somebody got hurt, one of the girls, I mean. One of the lads got a bit overly enthusiastic was the way Hub put it and worked one of the Indian virgins over at some length …

“Well, hysteria reigned and Helen kept some husky, very physical young Indian gentlemen on hand who were about ready to avenge the wrongs of the past century on our boisterous clubmen. Hub stepped into the breach, according to his version, with offers of large sums of money, far exceeding the cost of any repairs to the girl. The young bucks figured they’d take the money and then beat hell out of these arrogant bastards but Helen’s cooler head prevailed … They simply bought their way out of what could have been a nasty scrape, might have escalated into a scandal … anything to avoid the consequences, they lived by that. It wasn’t that I blamed them or even disagreed with them, but when I heard about it, all I could think was gee, I wish the Injuns had beaten the shit out of ’em! And these guys were my friends!”

The mist had thickened and I turned the headlights on before we got to the crest of the hill that dropped down into Duluth. Then I turned the wipers on and wiped sweat out of my eyes with a Kleenex. It was like driving through a soup caldron.

“You know,” he said, continuing along the same line, “I always thought that it was Jon Goode the one who beat up the girl. He’s got a hell of a primitive soul flailing away beneath that buttoned-up surface. He told you man was a predator, well, he ought to know, using himself as an example. He’s a killer.” He yawned. “If Maxvill goes after Jon, he’d better be prepared. Jonny’s not gonna sit there and take it between the eyes.” He stretched his legs under the dashboard, shifted position.

We took the dip down into Duluth beside the metallic slab of lake and came out in another country where the light was gone behind the high bluffs, the mist had turned to a stinging spray, and the temperature had dropped thirty degrees. Archie put on his Burberry when we stopped for gasoline and huddled with the collar turned up, quiet, for the remainder of the journey. It was past eight o’clock when I turned left away from Lake Superior and began to wind inward toward the lodge.

The headlamps poked accusingly into the wet darkness and finally brought the building up out of the gloom. We were the first to arrive and I pulled the car through the spongy grass as close to the porch as I could. It was a child’s fright dream come to life, the constant dripping of the rain, the wind scuttling where you couldn’t see it, the trees rustling and bending in the darkness. The steps creaked. The lights worked inside and I clomped into the living room, as if loud footfalls would frighten off the evil things.

The lamplight was dim and it was cold and damp inside the lodge. Archie wandered around, distracted by the memories being summoned, and I set about building a fire, lost for the moment in my own memories of being there with Kim the day she’d sought me out and brought a picnic with her. I had fallen absolutely in love with her that day. It seemed so long ago. I’d just gotten the logs crackling when Archie called to me from the porch.

“He’s here, son.”

A Camaro pulled up, doused its lights, and the wiry, athletic figure of Billy Whitefoot dashed across the fifteen feet of rain and mounted the steps. He shook hands with me and I introduced him to Archie.

“Of course,” Archie said, “I remember Bill. It’s been a long time and Paul tells me you’ve made good use of the years—it’s good to see you again.” They shook hands.

“It sure beats hell out of the last time I saw you,” Billy said. “I think I was riding my lawn mower.” There was a thick irony in his voice but no hostility. He had come on business and he brushed past us, went into the main room, where he hung his jacket across the back of a chair, and went to warm himself by the fire. He was wearing a blue button-down shirt and old Levi’s. With his horn-rims and the gray-flecked hair he was a strikingly handsome man, a fact which had passed me by earlier.

“This is going to take a little time, gentlemen,” he said abruptly, rubbing his hands together, “and I’ve got to get back to Jasper tonight. I don’t want to leave my daughter alone all night. I think you both better sit down … I’m going to need room to pace around. Please, sit down.” He gestured toward a couch and we sat down expectantly.

“What has this got to do with the murders?” I asked.

He looked at me impatiently. “This is bound to go a lot faster if you hold back on the questions, all right? It’s pretty damned self-explanatory but when I’m done, you can have me fill in the gaps …” I nodded and he began pacing, speaking as he went.

“When you came up to Jasper with all that bullshit about wanting to write a newspaper story, I figured something funny was going on—didn’t require a genius. You dragged the Norway Creek connection in, my ex-wife, and then that business about Rita Hook’s disappearance, that got me pretty good and I wondered how much you really knew …

“You know how it is when you’ve got a guilty secret you’re carrying around? You figure everybody’s watching you, everybody knows … well, that’s the way I’ve felt for the last couple years. I have had that kind of secret, a deathbed bequest. I’ve had to live with, not knowing what the hell to do about it. I knew something I had no business knowing but it had all happened so long ago I just sat there being mocked by it … no one would care about it anymore and a lot of people might be hurt very badly. Why not let the past stay dead, right? Well, that’s what I decided to do … but Kim was involved in it, in a horrible way, and that kept eating at me. I hold her in very high regard, she was the injured party in our marriage … anyway, I finally got in touch with her about six months after I came into possession of the true story, that’d be toward the end of 1972, the winter of ’72-’73.” He had come back to stand staring at us. Rain lashed at the windows and cold winds shuffled along the floor.

“I had to tell Kim that Rita Hook wasn’t her aunt at all, but her mother. And her father was unknown.” He took a deep breath. “And I had to tell her that there was a very good chance that Larry Blankenship was her brother … that they had both been born to Rita Hook …” He waited for us to react I looked at Archie, holding my breath.

“You mean to say,” Archie said slowly, “you told Kim all this in 1972? Almost two years ago?”

“That’s right. I went to Minneapolis and told her.”

“And how did she take it?”

“She was shocked, of course, but she didn’t accept it completely. She said she would do some checking of her own. She was that way. She always figured she knew the better way to handle a thing … I’m not saying she was wrong, either.”

I said, “How did you ever find this out? We already know it, we discovered it a few days ago … but we really had to dig it out. Did you?”

“No. Running Buck told me just before he died. It was the summer of ’72 and he was hanging on by a thread and he had this story weighing very heavily on him. He didn’t want to die with it on his conscience and I was the only person he had to tell … that wasn’t all, not by a hell of a way. The part about Kim, that was just an angle, he didn’t give a damn about that really, one way or the other …” His eyes flickered in the firelight like doorways to centuries that were long out of reach. His mouth was set in a grim line. “No, he told me the whole story of what happened at the lodge on the night of December 16, 1944.”

T
HE WINTER OF 1944 HAD
begun early in Grande Rouge and there had been almost a foot of snow on the ground by mid-December. The cold had come blowing off the lake and the nights froze deep and hard. Willie Running Buck was spending the evening working in Ted Hook’s outbuilding, tinkering over odd bits of carpentry and plumbing, a potbellied wood-burning stove sending out dry warmth with the wind fit to be tied outside, sleet rattling on the door. An old Motorola table-model radio was contributing
Inner Sanctum.
It was a good winter night.

Then Rita Hook had come knocking with a burr under her saddle. She had to go out to the lodge. She wasn’t drunk but she’d been drinking; she was full of hundred-proof courage, as if she’d been getting herself ready for something. She wanted Willie to drive her in the pickup truck and she wouldn’t take no for an answer. He didn’t want to go; he’d miss his radio shows, for one thing, and the heater in the truck wasn’t worth a damn. But there was no point in arguing.

The drive had taken almost an hour. The temperature was rising unexpectedly and the sleet got wetter and wetter, weighing down the wipers and piling up on the windows, causing him to stop several times and wipe it off with his gloved hand and the arm of his plaid mackinaw. Rita had been nervous, laughing without reason, smoking incessantly, filling the cab of the truck and making Willie cough. She talked constantly, thinking out loud, some of it making sense and some not.

She’d been preoccupied with money, telling Willie that her ship had really come in this time, that everything was going to be all right after she got through the evening. She went on about what she was going to do, how she was going to get the hell out of Grande Rouge and, once the war was over, she was going to do some traveling. And buy some pretty clothes. See the world and have a good time. Her ship had really come in this time.

Willie was only half listening, mostly because his attention was locked on the road, which seemed to slip and slide beneath the truck—but also because he was an Indian and he’d learned you could say or do anything in front of an Indian, they weren’t like real people. Not up in that neck of the woods. He nodded and grunted from time to time and Rita just rattled on, finally produced a bottle of bourbon from her bag and took a swig, smacking her lips. Willie remembered that, the smell of the bourbon mixing with the cigarette smoke. It was making him sick to his stomach and when he had to get out to take care of the mush on the windshield, he did so thankfully, gulping the cold, moist air.

They finally turned off the highway and the tire chains rattled and dug into the snow and gravel. The sleet and rain hung like a wall before them and he edged the truck slowly into the narrow path among the trees. It wasn’t until then that Rita began talking directly to him and the slur dropped away from her words. It didn’t make much sense to him but she clutched his arm and forced him to pay attention.

She said that she wasn’t there to check the pipes and the bottled gas, as she’d originally claimed. She was in fact going to the lodge to meet the members of the club; she rattled off the names, checking them off on her fingers. He knew some of the names; he knew the members of the club by sight but their names were of no account to him. They were white men, they were rich, they were from the Cities; beyond that there was nothing he needed to know about any of them. Rita didn’t go any further into why she was meeting them. Willie figured they were giving her money—why was none of his business. He didn’t care. White men had their ways and he didn’t give a damn one way or the other.