Wild Thing: A Novel (12 page)

Eventually the bartender comes out and leans against the railing next to me. Blond and thirty-five, with a sun-aged smile that I like. “Do you mind if I smoke?” she says.

I think about that. Cigarettes are so fucking awful for you that they make your urine carcinogenic and your brain unable to regulate how much oxygen it gets, and as a doctor I probably have a responsibility to say something along those lines. But I have no idea what. Preventative medicine’s hard to bill for, so the only research on how to change human behavior through communication gets done by the advertising industry.

“Only for your sake,” I end up saying, thinking I need to formulate something better. “Am I keeping you up?”

She lights and does the slow exhale. “Not yet.”

Nice.

I get along with bartenders. There are plenty of women to sleep with on a cruise ship—it’s called a
cruise
ship, for fuck’s sake—but if you’re into superficiality, bartenders are special.
Not to belabor it, but they do spend most of their time being sociable behind a barrier.

I should go home with this woman and tell Violet about it in the morning. Better yet, take her to my room and project as much noise as possible through the wall. Kill any chance with Violet I might have.

Since Magdalena Niemerover’s death because of me eleven years ago, I’ve observed the following rule: if a woman gets so close to me that she cares what my birthday is, I never talk to her again. It keeps me from endangering anyone, and has other benefits as well, since half the time
I
don’t remember when Lionel Azimuth’s birthday is supposed to be. And the last thing anyone needs is to try to throw me a surprise party.

Violet and I haven’t reached that point yet. But my lies are piling up fast—commission, omission, whatever. If it’s not too late for us to have stranger sex now, it will be soon. And if I’m going to have sex with her on the premise that she actually knows something about me, I might as well go do it now, while she’s passed out.

I should end the possibility. I’m too weak to, though.

“I won’t take up much more of your time,” I say to the bartender. “My wife and I have to get going in the morning.”

If anything, the bartender looks relieved. Now we can have something even
shallower
than a sexual relationship.

“Where to?”

“We’re just tourists,” I say. Which, it occurs to me, is true. Here in civilization—even civilization with a view of not-civilization—Ford and its discontents seem a million miles off. “Anything we should see?”

“You planning on going canoeing?”

“Probably.”

A werewolf howl rips out of the Boundary Waters, full force from across the lake.

The bartender sees my face and laughs. “It’s just a loon,” she says, making me wonder how many of northern Minnesota’s mysteries are going to turn out to be just a loon. “Don’t get your hopes up.”

Bill Rom Public Library, Ely, Minnesota

Friday, 14 September

“I don’t really remember the details,” the librarian says, picking up the phone, “but I know who does. Hold on a sec.”

Violet, in her sunglasses, is listing against the counter. I woke her up early and dragged her to a place here in Ely that, I shit you not, was called the Chocolate Moose.

Ely is not like Ford. Its central avenue looks like something from a ski town, all souvenir shops and organic grocery stores. Two blocks over there’s an intersection with a granite WPA office building on each corner, one of which has the public library in it.

So far, the library hasn’t been much help. We’ve read back
issues of Ely’s two weekly newspapers on the library’s computers, but they’re both strangely circumspect when it comes to Ford. I don’t know if they consider Ford too far away to be interesting or whether what happens there just isn’t a good fit with the weddings, high school football games, and letters to the editor that make up the rest of the papers’ material. But Ford hardly gets mentioned.

We
have
managed to confirm that the four deaths there actually happened—Autumn Semmel’s and Benjy Schneke’s as the result of “a boating accident” at the end of June two years ago, Chris Semmel Jr.’s and Father Nathan Podominick’s in “a possible hunting accident” five days later.

And, interestingly, we’ve learned that the University of Minnesota was at one point considering building its High Energy Physics Lab at the bottom of the closed Ford Mine. Which might explain the visiting scientists, although U Minn seems to have come to its senses and put the lab at the bottom of the Soudan Mine instead.

Past that, it for some reason seemed like a good idea to ask the librarian.

“Carol?” she says now into the phone. “It’s Barbara. Is the sheriff in? I’ve got some people here who want to know about White Lake.”

“That’s really not necessary,” I say quickly.

The librarian covers the mouthpiece. “Don’t worry, they’re not busy.”

“No, really—”

She’s not listening to me, though. She’s nodding and saying “Uh huh, uh huh” to whoever’s on the phone. She covers the mouthpiece again. “Carol says to come on over. What are your names?”

“Violet Hurst and Lionel Azimuth,” Violet says.

“Their names are Violet Hurst and Lionel Azimuth,” the librarian says. “I’m sending them across right now.”

“And Reggie
Trager
is running this tour?” Sheriff Albin says.

Albin’s early thirties, with a small, knobby head and a slow way of talking, possibly due to the industrial-grade bullshit-detection software he seems to be running. Naturally, he’s done nothing since Carol sat us down in front of his desk except grill the shit out of us. And write down our names.

“That doesn’t seem like something Reggie would do?” I ask, even though I’ve been trying to stay quiet enough that Albin doesn’t feel the need to look me up after we leave.

He barely shrugs. “Who’s your employer?”

“We’re not allowed to say,” Violet says, with the fearlessness of the just. “It’s a large private philanthropy.”

For all I know that’s true, although I’m pretty sure the check
I
got was from a company with “Technologies” in its name.

Albin weighs Violet’s nonresponse and decides to let it go. “Has any money changed hands between your employer and Reggie Trager?”

“No. At least not yet,” Violet says.

You can practically see Albin wondering if what Reggie’s doing is indictable in advance, under RICO, and if so whether Albin has a responsibility to take it to the DA. Not a lot of thanks in that, I’m guessing.

“And has he stated specifically what kind of animal it is that you would be expected to find at White Lake?”

“No,” Violet says.

“Although your employer sent a paleontologist.”

“I’m the only life sciences researcher he has on personal staff,” Violet says. “I think that has more to do with why I’m here.”

Albin looks at me.

“I don’t do research,” I say. Which is true.

Then at his notes. “And the letter was on CFS stationery. How long is this ‘tour’ supposed to last?”

“Six to twelve days,” Violet says.

“Six to twelve
days?
”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s just a long time to take people who aren’t canoers on a canoeing trip.”

“I think we’ll be on land for most of that time,” Violet says.

“Reggie said that?”

“No…”

“Then I would question that assumption. Do you know where White Lake is?”

“No,” Violet says.

Albin gets up and goes to a gun cabinet that turns out to have maps in it instead of shotguns. Cute. He takes one out and unrolls it on his desk.

It’s a Fisher elevation map. Yellow land, tarp-blue water. I used to use them in my former line of work.

On this one, though, there’s blue all over the place, like the holes in a sponge.

“This is Lake Garner,” he says, pointing to an elongated blue horizontal oval. “And this is White Lake.”

White Lake looks like a lightning bolt touching down at Lake Garner’s northeastern end. Together the two lakes look like a musical note with a jagged vertical stem.

“White Lake looks so narrow,” Violet says.

“That’s because Lake Garner is fairly big,” Albin says.
“White Lake is about a hundred yards across where it touches Lake Garner, and it gets wider as it goes north.” Albin points to the southwest corner of the map. “Meanwhile, Ford is three maps that way.”

“How long a trip is that usually?” Violet says.

“Could take two days, could take a week,” Albin says. “Depends which portages you use.”

“ ‘Portages’?”

“Por
tah
ges,” he says, changing the pronunciation so that instead of rhyming with “cordage” it rhymes with
“fromage.”
“Same thing. Just American versus French-Canadian.”

“I don’t—” Violet says. She looks at me.

“No idea,” I say.

Sheriff Albin lets his head drop in a moment of exasperation. “Okay. I’m going to have to teach you about portages. They’re the key to the whole Boundary Waters.”

Ill-Star Lake, Dakota
^*

Saturday, 2 April, AD 1076
^*

Two Persons really gets his back into it now that he can hear the beat of an airborne ax whirling toward him from behind. But still his mind stays weirdly clear. Thinking,
You couldn’t really throw a large ax from the canoe I’m in. It would just tip over
. Unlike from the Dakota
^*
warboat chasing him.

The warboat, with its crew of six hard-rowing Dakota face-eaters, is the trunk of a single enormous red pine. Hollowing
it out has to have taken months of work by a large group of people—Two Persons has had that job himself, though not, thank Gods, in years. Meanwhile, the canoe Two Persons is test-driving is so light and fragile that with each oar-stroke it digs its nose deep into the waterline, then shudders as it bobs free. Something else to report back to Knowledgeable Raccoon. If, of course, Two Persons survives the next few minutes.

The ax, spinning horizontally—
Why?
he thinks.
Just to show me that your giant fucking canoe is so stable you can throw things from it sideways?
—passes just to the left of Two Persons’ ducked head, then curves to the right before it contacts the water. It skips once and heavily goes under. A moment later Two Persons is past the spot where it went down. It does move along, Knowledgeable Raccoon’s new all-bark, carryable, one-man canoe.

Still, fuck Knowledgeable Raccoon, if for no other reason than the off chance that he’s the one who told the chief that Two Persons has been skimming the grouse take. For Two Persons to receive the virtual death sentence of trying out Knowledgeable Raccoon’s new boat just for stealing a few fucking grouse is ridiculous. Two Persons has screwed three of the chief’s daughters and two of his wives. But there you have it.

Or maybe this assignment
does
have to do with the daughters and wives. Two Persons flinches as the shadow of something overhead crosses his face, and a falling ax head, spun to stay vertical, nicks cleanly through the bottom of the canoe right in front of him.

You know, that could be a problem, “Knowledgeable.”

The canoe immediately starts shipping water, but less so than Two Persons would have thought. Or maybe he actually has it flying now, his flailing arms turning the paddle into a wing.

The canoe scrapes rock. Showtime: he hasn’t let himself
believe he was this close to shore. He jumps out and lifts the front end like Knowledgeable taught him to, rolling the whole thing over so he can duck under it and run.

Looking back, he gets a glimpse of Death itself. The Dakota warship is turning sideways, either so everyone in it can jump out and chase Two Persons onto land or so they can all hurl projectiles at him at once.

Two Persons, figuring he’s about to find out, reminds himself that the sense he now has of his back being protected by the bark canoe is pure illusion. He lifts it high above his head and exits the water, dancing up a couple of boulders to reach the woods between Ill-Star Lake and Lake Waste-of-Time,
^*
no problem. Because now the canoe really is up in the air—and it doesn’t weigh
anything
.