Aiming for Isle Royale [a novel]

 

 

Aiming for Isle Royale

 

~1~

 

            “You know what that is, Peyton. A downright paradox.”

            “Why so?” Peyton reached into his styrofoam box of ice and beer to grab a Michelob Ultra, then toss it to Harriet from his porch to hers. They’d been neighbors for eight years in their glorified huts just south of Grand Portage, Minnesota, the very tip of the arrowhead overlooking Lake Superior. Peyton had lived here forever; Harriet, soon after her husband died.

            “Why so?” she repeated. “You can’t claim freedom if you’re contained.” She tapped the top of the can and opened to a manageable spray. “Thanks for the beer, by the way.”

 

            They’d been debating the move by Vernon, a childhood friend of Peyton’s. Vern lived a couple miles inland—a deep woods guy, through and through. He didn’t socialize much and when he did, he’d need to have some practical occasion to justify the time. Harriet, whom he had once tried to date, was the exact opposite. She wanted no agenda whatsoever, but eternal downtime, now that she had her retirement plot and a good friend in Peyton. Memories, too, always renewed from her porch.

            Well, Vernon was having some problems with the ‘feds’, claiming he had no tax haven being less-than-Chippewa on the Grand Portage Reservation. He’d be the type to hunker down with a rifle in his hand, but instead decided to Huck Finn himself. He spent $420 and two weeks to refurbish his pontoon, usually docked at Greenwood Lake. For this ambition, he had trailered the clumsy boat to Lake Superior, the public access there at Grand Portage harbor. He drove his pickup and trailer to Peyton’s, gave him the keys and his Nokia phone, and declared his new address “round and about Isle Royale.”

            “What the hell you mean by that, Vern?”

            “I mean I’m settin’ myself afloat. Aint nobody can say I can’t.”

            Peyton tried to talk him out of it—“how’re you gonna eat, for instance?”

            “You never second-guessed that before, as if you ever saw me buyin’ groceries. Anyways, ’preciate you takin’ my truck—use it if you want—and join me out there if you ever git cabin fever.”

            “Terra firma suits me fine. But tell me, buddy, why give up your phone?”

            Vernon smiled real wide. “I don’t wanna hear somebody tryin’ to call. Defeats the point.”

 

            Harriet surveyed the two-toned blue horizon. Isle Royale was over twenty miles away, and Windigo, its only semblance of civilization, was another four miles up a glacial lagoon. It would take Vernon hours to get there—days, maybe, if he were conserving fuel. His pontoon now had slabs of red pine from floor to walls to roof, a floating garage with just a few apertures. Inside, Vernon had pitched a fair-sized tent. His problem, unanticipated, was how he’d steer the thing from a stern that couldn’t see the bow. When Peyton pointed that out, walking back to the harbor to see him off, Vernon just huffed: “I’ll drive it in reverse, then. Besides, I’m mostly jus’ gonna drift.”

            “So that’s how you left him?” Harriet asked Peyton when he slumped back  to his porch.

            “How else?”

            “Oh, I dunno. Maybe a plan to visit him in Windigo.”

            “He didn’t say that was his destination.”

            “Got a dock there, at least.”

            Peyton was loath to speculate. “The man just wants his freedom.”

 

            Three days passed—sixty-eight hours, to be precise. September mornings stretched a glinting sunrise across Lake Superior, brushing an unseen tip of Isle Royale before that speed of light embraced the eastern porches of Grand Portage, a silent alarm clock for Harriet. Peyton, next door, wasn’t sleeping much. Each of the previous two evenings he had taken his speedboat out on the lake, searching for a ridiculous red pine box. Sunsets dropped quickly, so both times he turned back before taking no more than a glimpse of the huge island. No hint of Vernon.

            By 8 or 9am, when the dawn was no longer piercing, he’d be out on his porch with a mug of coffee and the Duluth News Tribune. Harriet would usually come out a bit later with a book. They wouldn’t have to say ‘hey’ or nod for the two-thousandth time, but they usually did.

            “How goes the world?” she asked, noting his line of sight was above the limp hold of the broadsheet.

            Peyton shook almost imperceptibly. “Oh,.. you know.”

            “See you still got Vernon’s phone.” It was set on the porch rail closest to Harriet’s own.

            Peyton eye-balled it self-consciously. “Yeah, well… Just a piece of him left here.”

            Harriet sniffed and smiled at the same time. “What’re you waiting on, a call from the feds?”

            “It’s no joking matter. They pushed him to a drastic move—”

            “You yourself said he did this by his own volition.”

            Peyton glanced down at the newspaper, hoping it would change the subject. After a minute, he uttered a tried-and-true: “So, Susie asks Calvin if she can join his and Hobbes’ water fight. And Calvin’s got this wrinkled forehead response that she can, but only if he and Hobbes are on the same team. And she says, ‘Great! I can beat you and your stuffed tiger any day!’ and runs off to get her swimsuit.”

            “That it?”

            Peyton cleared his throat, “Well, no. Calvin’s grouchy when he informs Hobbes, but the tiger’s all aglow, ‘Oh boy,’ he says. ‘Girls flip for guys in jams.’”

            “Jams?”         

            “Meaning his swimsuit. I guess.”

            Harriet knew he wasn’t fishing for a laugh—more the agon between Calvin and the limits of his imagination. She could have recalled when Susie snubbed Calvin’s treehouse because it headquartered ‘G.R.O.S.S.’ for ‘Get Rid Of Slimy girlS’; he meant nothing of the sort. Or when she squeezed Hobbes as a stuffed animal—to the viewer, of course, he was stuffed—and Calvin read him the riot act for betraying male trust. Or—

            She turned, and Peyton also, to the Nokia buzzing on the rail.

 

~2~

 

            “I can take it if you don’t want to,” Harriet offered on the sixth or seventh buzz.

            Peyton grimaced as he grabbed, “Hello?” His face softened in the recognition. “Oh, hey there Vernon—yeah, it’s kinda funny aint it—you callin’ on my phone, me answerin’ on yers!”

            Harriet cocked her head. “Huh? What do you—”

            “No, Vern, don’t do that, please. Please don’t—”

            “Do what?” Harriet demanded. “Hey, give it here!”

            Peyton didn’t, but begged into the Nokia: “I just put it there for your, I dunno, your prerogative—nothing to do with spying…. No, I don’t think there’s a location tracker—woulda been attached to me, anyways…. C’mon Vernon, that would be most unkind—simply turn it off instead!”

            “What’s he gonna do?” Harriet had come around to Peyton’s porch by now.

            “For Chris’ sake, Vernon, don’t! Do you hear me? Vern?” Peyton dropped his arm like a salmon from the peak of its leap. “Damn!”

            “Hung up on you?”

            “The bastard threw my iPhone into the lake. I heard it skip and splash. And die.”

            “Your iPhone? What in the Sam Hill—”

            “I slipped it between some pine slats when I bid him ‘bon voyage’. He didn’t see me, but must’ve found it. What a dumb-ass ploy to keep him in touch.”

            “It was considerate,” Harriet countered. “Unlike what he’s doing to you.”

            The two sat for five minutes looking at the endless lines of undulation in the maturing morning sun. “Is it too early for a beer?” Peyton asked.

            “Yes, if you intend on speedboatin’ today.”

            Peyton calculated. “You’ll go with, won’t you, Harriet?”

            She bobbed her head. “Let’s bring the cooler, then.”

 

            They brought more than that, coming to a sheepish consensus that they’d camp out on Isle Royale if they couldn’t find Vernon by sunset. They debated whether to dock at Windigo or not; the park ranger there would be mightily interested in the situation but then probably wouldn’t just let Peyton and Harriet become their own posse, sending them back to Grand Portage instead. “So now it’s like we’re fleeing the feds,” Harriet joked, but Peyton remained iron-eyed on the mile or so that could be reasonably scanned from the pilot’s chair.

            The boat had a Mercury 150 and two tanks of gas; Peyton was of two minds how to use that stock—cruising mid-throttle to conserve fuel, or gunning the engine to check all the inlets for Vernon before they’d disappear into darkness. The northeast side had hundreds of rocky spits and shoals, and they decided to stop where disembarking was easy enough to broil some dinner.

            Fog descended—the weather roughening from the halcyon start of day. Harriet hiked the shoreline to see if this wouldn’t be a suitable place to camp, wait out the lack of visibility. Peyton winced at the chilly wind coming off the lake and imagined Vernon was better off right now in his red pine box, bobbing about the waves. Superior could turn nasty in a storm, surges sometimes licking the porches at Grand Portage. So far, the lake was cooperating, letting everyone settle in for the night, on shore or off.

           

            About midway through erecting the tent—one Peyton hadn’t unpacked for years—the two realized how small it was despite the tag showing three androgynous human forms, head-to-feet-to-head. “Guess that middle one there is Vernon,” Harriet quipped, “bless his upside-down soul.”

            “You know, I could sleep in the bow of the boat,” Peyton thought to offer, “there’s crawlspace enough.”

            On cue, a wolf howled to supply Harriet’s answer. “Room in there for two?”

            “Well, you could go there and I’d be here, or…”
            They smiled self-consciously the decision away. The main thing to do now was to get all food items back into the boat—minus the Michelobs, of course—and keep the fire burning. “You got any night-time routines?”

            Harriet mused a bit, liking Peyton’s question. “You mean after brushin’ teeth and turning off the light?”

            “No, I mean before. Good-night story kinda stuff.”

            “To myself?” Harriet could see Peyton blush, despite the dusk. “I sometimes call Jinny, maybe talk to the grandkids.” She was going to follow with ‘you?’ but knew Peyton had no extended family. Instead she realized, “Oh shoot.”

            “What?”

            “Forgot my phone at the cabin. Can’t call Jinny anyway.”

            Peyton dug into his pocket. “Use Vernon’s, if you can remember her number.”

            Harriet pursed some appreciation. “Nah, better let that thing keep its battery life. Never know if we’ll need it more for real.”

 

            They tucked into sleeping bags, head-to-feet, pleasantly drowsy. The three or four beers apiece provided a somnolent effect, if requiring midnight ambles to the bushes. They mocked up a prayer for Vernon. Peyton began it: “O Great Spirit, whatever Thou be callest—”

            “Just ‘Dear God’ will do, ya lug. And ‘bless all your stray sheep’.”

            “Vernon’s the last to be part of a herd.”

            “Yeah, well. That’s where the Good Lord’s gotta come in—watch out for him when no one else can…”

            They exchanged a dozen more notions, some trailing to nonsense, before falling asleep.

            By daybreak, neither knew the other was awake, but both were aware of the wolves outside, circling their tent in pitter-paws and tentative aggression. “Hear that?” Peyton finally whispered.

            “Yeah,” Harriet answered more silently. “What do they want?”

            Peyton didn’t know if ‘breakfast’ was the case or how she’d take the suggestion. What else would they want? “I think,” he hesitated, trying to imagine plans A and B, “I think they… will go away. They’re curious, is all.”

            Harriet didn’t buy that, but didn’t say so. She prayed in earnest and thought of the Nokia. How long would it take to get the 9-1-1 folks out here? What would be their coordinates? That old phone wouldn’t say.

            She sighed that realization and rolled closer to tell Peyton, who clutched her at the sudden sound of shotgun fire. Another, and the wolves seemed to scatter.

 

~3~

 

            Some twenty seconds later, five miles out, Vernon heard the faint pops. He had put out the anchor—wasn’t nearly reaching the lake’s floor—to slow the pontoon’s drift. Fishing this deep meant patience; Vern hoped to hook a single lake trout today that could constitute a half-week of meals, supplementing his fair supply of Chex mix and canned fruit. That, and endless fresh water off the boil, was all he really needed.

            Yet those pops made him think of moose venison and the shotgun he had brought for that purpose. Isle Royale hosted a fair amount of those languid giants, and as long as he stayed far away from Windigo, he could come ashore, hunt what could be had, gut it fast and leave the entrails for the wolves—a diminishing population, he knew, as they couldn’t swim to the mainland as moose could, and warmer winters prevented an ice bridge for wolf free will.

            “It’s a damn shame for them,” thought Vernon, trying to tap into the mind of wolves and moose and cavemen, dealing with anything after the ice age. He didn’t require a hundred hours on a pontoon to put together the jigsaw of the post-Jurassic universe. Still, with little to do, he imagined the float of those ice floes, various creatures deciding to go back and forth from mainland to what only humans designated as Isle Royale, well before boats. The wolves likely looked with forlorn at that stretch—a formidable eight miles to the continent at the narrowest point of non-freeze. Eight miles is a lot to free-wheel, and Vernon travelled his mind to Detroit, the question of Eminem’s cause and effect, not that his transistor radio ever tuned in his stuff. Freestyling, though, wasn’t bound to one culture or platform, era or audience. “Not even bound by species,” he said aloud.

 

            No one, of course, heard him or his thoughts. Story of his life—he was not worth being heard. He was ‘the Wart’,  a nickname from childhood that even Peyton would use once in a while. Who coined it? He never could tell, but giggles at recess put this together: ‘Vernon’ stands for things green, and he croaks like a frog, and a frog has warts and… Never mind the correction that toads are the ones with warts. Or that his croak augured an early pubescence. Those with real warts probably wished them away, go bother somebody else. Vernon took no pleasure in having none, or knowing, fact of the matter, he was reasonably handsome.

            He went into his tent and pulled out that transistor. The other day, further away from all shores, he couldn’t dial beyond the static. Night—now dawn—tended to have better reception, and Thunder Bay was a mere sixty miles away. He was primed for a traffic report, a bit of Canadian banter, even some Eminem and his cluttered-up closet.

            Nothing.

            He brought it through the pine box to the bow of the pontoon, adjusting the telescoped antennae a dozen different ways. The static went in discernable sine waves when he kept the dial in one place, so he figured at least there was some amplitude modulation, the DJ and engineers pulsing behind it.

            Nothing.

            He thought of Hemingway’s old man from Cuba, out there on the sea, yearning for news on the Yankees. Maybe he’d hear about Roger Maris slugging his 61 homers in ’61, a year that Vernon the Wart would never forget, eleven years old and visions of ‘free’. He hitch-hiked to Bloomington and got Roger’s autograph at the Old Met, playing against the spankin’ new Twins of Minnesota. Maris, from Hibbing, was hailed as a home-state hero, and Vern never forgot what he told him as he inked #9 on a baseball: “hey, kid, stay Arrowhead—it’s special up there.” Not that Maris stayed very long himself.

            The decades since then were a blur, not helped by an early tour in Vietnam that incurred a weave of addictions and PTSD. One consumed the other for breakfast and vice versa for dinner, plenty of sleepwalking between. Not all the time, though. Most folks who knew him—even Peyton—assumed he was most-the-time sober, handling himself just fine out there at Greenwood Lake.

           

            Harriet had visited him once out there alone. Previously, she had come with Peyton, who’d occasionally bring him a couple of books—Hemingway, included—and shoot the breeze, sometimes out on his boxless pontoon. Back on shore, while Peyton dashed to the bushes to urgently pee, Vernon took the chance to ask if she wanted to go to dinner, maybe a movie in Grand Marais. She looked at him with friendliness, then surveyed the lake before saying, “it’s a thing I could do in a group.”

            His eyes joined her survey. “You mean,… with Peyton along? ’Cause that’s okay, too.”

            Neither brought it up when Peyton returned. A routine ‘see ya when we see ya’ closed out the visit that time.

            But Harriet knew he was hurt. She drove out the following day with a fresh pan of coffee cake. They ate a quarter of that together, sitting on his ramshackle porch, chomping slowly to let silence communicate. She said a few things about her late husband, her need to learn not to be married. He gauged a moment to ask about Peyton, and she shrugged the suggestion away. “We’re neighbors, y’know. Pretty special to have just those.” She swallowed the end of that phrase, realizing Vernon had no one in sight. “Not that a person—”

            “—I know, Harriet. No need to pity.”

            They looked at the lake another ten minutes, uttering a few things about loons, diving down one spot and popping up wherever one wouldn’t expect. Vernon would watch them the rest of the day, after seeing Harriet to her Toyota and sharing a loose enough hug. She had a small wart on the base of her neck, just visible now, and never had she seemed so beautiful.

 

~4~

 

            Whispers were more visible than audible in the tawny morning glow inside the tent. “Wo-olv-es or sho-t-gun?” Harriet hoped the question would be clear.

            “Wh-at?” Peyton needed more.

            “Which.. to fear?”

            “Wolves,” he said into the portal of her ear. “An’ I think the shotgun made them go away.”

            They waited a suspended two minutes, then three, before a voice outside bellowed, “Come on out, you campers. Coast is now clear.”

            Harriet took a final chance to be inaudible: “Don’t say my real name.”

            “What?”

            “Never mind. Just don’ say too much.”

            Peyton seemed to finally get it. He knew he’d be identifiable by the number on his speedboat. But Harriet could be, well, just about anyone. He travelled his memory of girls he had dated or wanted to, to see which might assume the perfect pseudonym. Christine, maybe, or Amber. Not that names should make a difference. He wished, until a football star gave it some cache, that his parents had never named him Peyton. Never made a lick of sense. Thought some payment must be due, a ton of money somebody would get from someone else, and he—Peyton—merely a bystander to the transaction. He’d rather be named Jack, or Jerry. Maybe Harry, as he looked once more at Harriet. “Let’s go out,” he told her, unzipping the flap.

            The bearer of the shotgun was a ranger, a stocky woman who wore the flat-brimmed regulation hat tilted to the front, darkening her eyes. “Mornin’, trespassers, as you must know you are.” Her voice was neither severe nor sweet, but rather set on getting the next thing done.

            Peyton tumbled out of the tent. “We’re just, y’know…”

            “No, I don’t really know,” straight-lined the ranger.

            “Well, since fog rolled in—I see it’s cleared pretty good by now—”

            “Since fog rolled in last night?” clarified the ranger.

            “Yeah, last night. Me ’n…,” he looked toward the tent flap, “we were, jus’… y’know.”

            “I don’t. But you certainly must know by the registration of your boat over there that this here’s no public docking point. You’re in a national park, see, and that is quite the opposite of an open door.”

 

            With that assertion, Harriet came out of the tent. “Oh, hello there,” she said, “I’m—”

            “Hey, good morning, Christine,” Peyton threw her.

            The ranger was ambivalent. “Look, folks, you gotta scoop your gear all together in the next five minutes and vamoose. Fact is, you’re endangering the wolves’ territory by pulling them too close to my shotgun. They should’ve never had to hear them warning shots.”

            The three of them stood and sniffed what they could stifle of the situation. Harriet scanned the entry paths of the woods for wolves, imagining them not to be so gun-shy if they could only strategize. Peyton looked at her as if she were the real Christine, abstract and now reified—no longer simply the lady next door, which he feared to relinquish. The ranger studied both of them with intermittent eye contact, counting down in her mind how the five-minute warning would need coaxing. Her own boat was tied to Peyton’s, so she knew she’d have to maneuver out of the harbor before them, if just by a bit. She also scanned for wolves, fairly certain they wouldn’t come back. “Listen,” she offered, “it’s well before opening hours, but if you want to register at the ranger station, I can grant you a permit to camp in a designated area.”

            “Windigo?”

            “Well, the station’s there. You’ll get a map where you can or can’t go. Actually, there’s an app if you want to download it now—”

            Peyton hooked eyes with Harriet. “Well,” he said, “we don’t have internet.”

            The ranger cocked her head. “Phones, have ya? No? Or a radio on your boat?”

            “Aint required,” Peyton ventured, “is it?” 

            “It’s dumb as heck not to have some communication device out here. ’Specially this side of the island. You know how many ships are on the bottom of this lake? Three hundred fifty. Boats like yours, you can add a couple zeros.”

            “And pontoons?” Harriet decided to ask.

            “Pontoons?” The ranger nearly smirked. “Not many.”

            Harriet hinted a smile. “Why’s that?”

            “Foolish to put one out here in the first place. You got one yourself, Christine?”

            “Huh?” Harriet shook her head and looked at Peyton. “No. I mean, we just… got this. This one, right?”
           

            Five minutes later, they were behind the ranger’s wake, motoring to Windigo. Harriet leaned close to Peyton on the prospect that either had something to say, and also to shield herself from occasional spray. Are we gonna bring up Vernon, she wanted to ask, or did I already do that by mentioning the pontoon? She looked over Peyton’s shoulderline to scope the immense eastern horizon, gobbling up any trace of wooden cubes in the mirage of tranquility. If she had held her vision a few seconds more, perhaps she would have detected Vernon, as almost imperceptible as the faded morning star, directly above him if millions of miles away. Something had to be aware of him, she thought. Maybe it was like waiting for the loon to re-emerge, holding breath as evolution enabled.

            “Maybe we should ditch this Windigo thing,” Peyton turned to voice what he’d been thinking. It wasn’t quite a holler, but needed to lift above the wind and engine whirl. “I mean, whad’ya think—”

            She waited for him to tag, ‘Christine?’, which he didn’t. “What do I think?”

            “Yeah.”

            “I think it’s worth a stop. We’re this far out here, anyways.”

            The ranger’s boat kept a steady line and speed, slowing down once to reduce the wake for a mother moose and calf, wading in the reeds. While well beyond this morning’s wolves, it’s possible the moose trained for aqua get-away. pushing out just far enough to make the enemy lose interest. Vernon, maybe, just the same, was anybody’s guess.

 

~5~

 

            The boats slowed down considerably upon entering Grace Harbor, the name suggesting a reprieve from the torrents that had capsized all those ships. The ranger jutted her arm to an island on their left that had a single dock and cut the engine to a purr. Peyton did likewise  and cupped his ear to hear: “that’s an option,” he softly echoed to Harriet, whose eyes were still on the expanse of blue behind them.

            She turned, bemused. “This is Windigo?”

            “Nah,” the ranger heard her from thirty yards away. “Camping spot,” she bellowed. She windmilled her arm to have them continue quarter-speed through the S-like channel into Washington Harbor, where they could throttle up the last narrow miles to Windigo. Of the docks there, Peyton picked a spot that would keep his bow out, as if for a quick get-away.

            The ranger station had a visitors’ center to meet the standard of all national parks—a Teddy Roosevelt timelessness, redolent of pine resin and latent adventure. Maps and manipulatives invited serendipity, a subtle way to combat ‘a plan to have no plan’ upon departure of this outpost, especially if heading inland. Smokey Bear gave his softer rendition of Uncle Sam, pointing all responsibility to YOU, protecting this earth from, well, the likes of you. Harriet joined her index finger with his.

            “You two met before, Christine?”

            Harriet, hearing the ranger put a tender ring to the question, kept looking at the poster. “Sure. Don’ have to go to Yellowstone to know this guy.”

            “Not to mention,” Peyton reminded, “he tells us at the edge of town if today’s risk is moderate ’r low…”

            “Or high. Summer was awful dry.”

            The three shuffled around for a few minutes in relative silence. A map the ranger gave Peyton unfolded to almost twenty designated campsites, including several near where they had slept. Peyton raised an eye at that: “so, Ranger, um—other folks are out there, wakin’ up to wolves?”

            “Wilcox, my name,” and waiting for Harriet to meet her eyes, “Deborah, if you will. Those campers out there are registered—they know what to do with their food, for instance.”

            “We were okay with our food,” Harriet ventured.

            Deborah pushed her bottom lip up. “I saw the wolves viewing you all as food. Gotta really string it up, a hundred feet or more.”

            “Like bears, huh?”

            “No bears on Isle Royale, ’cept for ol’ Smokey there. Still—”

            Harriet spied a pair of binoculars hooked behind the desk. “Say Deborah—”

            “Debbie’s good, too.”

            “Are those binoculars for rent?”

            The ranger looked round, charmed by the request. “You want ’em?”

            It seemed from Peyton’s point of view that Harriet was going to spill the beans on Vernon. He wasn’t sure that should happen just yet, so let a new lie rip: “we are rather interested in stars, right Christine? Ursa Major, for instance.”

            “Can’t see them much in daylight,” Deborah gibed, “but if you’re gonna register to camp, then yes—the constellations shine here better’n anywhere.”

            “I guess, then, we’re camping here. Question’s just where.”   

            “And how long,” Deborah said. “Better count on a couple days at least. Clouds will be rollin’ in by this afternoon.”

 

            Vernon knew that, too, having a natural barometer in his bone marrow. He dug out a book he’d read a dozen times before and climbed with it to the top of his pine box. He unbungeed a beach chair and positioned himself to face north, where those clouds would eventually gather.

            His beaver thumbs brushed the page edges back and forth as he considered the hours before inevitable rain. Strange desert, this, he thought, water unencumbered with the soil and caverns and wells and pipes, just cycling through from surface to cloud to surface again. And trillions of gallons cycling below, a gyroscope of H2O around this pontoon bobber. Thrill to think some monster from the deep could swallow in one gulp, Vernon suddenly its Jonah.

            Not so outlandish, really. Lake Superior was the head of a wolf, Isle Royale its piercing eye, staring right at Minnesota’s Arrowhead. Vernon had hopped from that leer into the wolf’s ingestion, happily.

            Now thumbing through Virginia Woolf, the aesthetics of coincidence. He could start from any page, the nature of this blend of narratives. He always liked Lily Briscoe and paged to the final chapters first, “looking at the sea which had scarcely a stain on it, which was so soft that the sails and the clouds”—gathering now as he read—“seemed set in its blue, so much depends, she thought, upon distance.” Call anyone a loner, he thought, or independent; Lily was a gentle counterpunch, “in love with all of this,” even when—especially!—Mrs Ramsay wasn’t readily at reach.

            He read to the end and started up again at the middle. His perch was too high to feel the droplets of waves rising with the northwest wind. As he approached the page he had started a couple hours before, he folded the chair and bungeed it again, then climbed down to finish kinesthetically: “About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she murmured, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.”

 

            The prudent choice for Harriet and Peyton was to take the spot on Grace Island, which seemed to please Deborah as she registered them and bid them good luck with the stars. “Rest assured, no wolves there, neither.”

            They pitched the tent and pittered, napping between brunch and some afternoon Micholebs. Gradually they set off on a planned triangle twenty miles southwest, another twenty due east, twenty back to Grace. There was enough gas to do this again tomorrow, even farther into the lake. If no Vernon by then, well, then they’d tell the ranger.

            “She’ll be pissed we’d wait that long,” Harriet suggested.

            “Oh, I don’ know. She seems to like you enough.”

            “What’s that supposed to mean, Peyton?”

            He smiled. “You tell me, Christine.”

 

~6~

 

            Jinny lived in Two Harbors, a couple hours down the coast from Grand Portage. She worked in Duluth, however, another half-hour south, so she couldn’t casually pop in to visit her mother, especially during the school year. Before her deadbeat husband left, it had been easier to get her kids to the montessori on one side of town and Minnehaha elementary on the other. Weekends would sometimes have them drive up to stay a night at Grandma’s little cottage, make a pillow fort in the loft, monkey around the garden.

            Harriet would less likely come down to Jinny’s, increasingly allergic to ‘city life’ as such, never mind the fact that Two Harbors had only about four thousand souls. Her daughter had hastily married one of them, now shacking up with another mother’s daughter. There had been fights Harriet had to break up—fights she herself began, despite her docile nature. She assured Jinny there’d always be space up in Grand Portage for any need to get away.

            Wednesday afternoon, Jinny picked up Tara at Minnehaha and Tommy at montessori and spied their dad’s pickup truck in the driveway. She braked before being seen (she hoped), knowing he’d be pissed that she had changed the locks. She backed around the corner and speed-dialed her mother.

            “What’re we doing?” asked Tara.

            No one was answering—perhaps Harriet was covering rosebushes for the threat of first frost, as advised on the radio. “We’re gonna…,” Jinny started driving with her phone shrugged up to her ear.

            “Gonna what?” Tommy tried a minute later, defying his sister’s silent plea to shush.

            Jinny looked at the fuel gauge and decided they had enough, certainly to Beaver Bay. “Gonna go to Grandma’s.”

            Usually there’d be a hooray, but not on a Wednesday, as much as these little kids knew about the adult world of time.

 

            It was raining when she came to Grand Portage; the kids had been sleeping since Beaver Bay, one stick each of Twix in their bellies so as to “keep space for supper.” Jinny quavered as she said so, having called three more times to endless rings. This aint like her, she drummed with her tongue on the back of her incisors.

            Harriet’s door was unlocked—not unusual, though she would always be home when Jinny pulled in. “Mom?” she called out after switching on the light. Nothing. She looked in the bedroom, up in the loft, down the cellar stairs where there was space only for a laundry room and pantry. A quick loop around the house and back indoors, speed-dialing again, then nonplussed to hear Harriet’s ringtone on top of the fridge.

            Tara came in, yawning. “Where’s Grandma?”

            “Um,” Jinny stretched on tippy-toes to get the phone, forgetting she could stop the ringing with her own. At four foot eleven she was half-a-head shorter than Harriet, but otherwise a spitting image—gleaming eyes and all. It didn’t mean that she looked sixty-eight or Harriet looked thirty-four, but some folks confused them for sisters, even in Grand Portage. “Um,” she bought more time, “I think she’s buyin’ groceries—must be that. You an’ Tommy wanna start making your fort? and I’ll go an’ get Gram.”

            They didn’t want to make a fort yet, but an extra Twix each induced cooperation. Jinny’s ‘I’ll be back in a sec’ sounded anything but convincing, especially as she pointed out the phone and explained to Tara: “only answer it if you see my name on the screen, got it?”

            She left before an affirmation, dashing over to knock on Peyton’s door despite the darkness of his windows. She had his number, though, in her phone and searched it out. Nothing—no tone, no roboterator’s voice informing, the person you are trying to reach is…, no chance to leave a message at the beep. No one else in town to call. She retreated to her car after checking Harriet’s own to make sure she wasn’t somehow slumped below the dashboard.

            As small as Grand Portage is, few people at the town’s Trading Post knew who she was, though it helped to have Jinny’s physiognomy jog their visual sense. Striking out there, she aimed for the nearby casino—nothing neither had referenced before, but that’s often how casinos go: populated on the down-low. Jinny was asked to buy $10 of tokens at the door, notwithstanding her premise for being there, just for a sec. There was no way to scope the dark environment from the curtained cashier, on purpose. Flustered, she took two Lincolns out of her wallet, knowing well enough her surveillance would just waste time.

           

            The rain intensified in those few minutes, and Jinny drove around the rest of the strip village and north towards the border. Ryden’s gas station gave no recognition, and the border guard shrugged through his glib advice: “call the county sheriff—that’s what he’s there for.”

            Jinny rushed to her car to cry—this wasn’t the Wednesday she had woken up to. Suddenly motherless, she was six miles from her own, unattended kids; eons away from feeling safe herself. C’mon, Mom! You just got to be behind some corner—as her dad sometimes played before he died, the day before Tara came into this world. That’s how it goes. Corners presuppose some rectilinear logic. The casino, she had noticed, had almost no straight lines.

            Ryden’s had frozen pizzas and Twix bars, Michelob Ultra to replenish what she might have to guzzle from her mother’s tall fridge. Jinny swiped her debit card and returned a hollow ‘thanks’ to the teenager on duty. She’d have to call in sick tomorrow morning, even if—assuming if—her mom would turn up from some hen party or shoreline walk or anything explaining her vacancy tonight.

            Tara had already made sandwiches, and Tommy was too tuckered for more Twix. Jinny kissed them an early goodnight and stepped outside again in the drizzle to dial: “my mother’s missing. Harriet Anderson…. Grand Portage…. Yes, her daughter…”

 

~7~

 

            Notwithstanding Peyton’s navigating instincts, the line east stretched further toward Michigan’s Upper Peninsula than he was paying attention to. He’d rarely been so far away from land, even back then as a marine in the Vietnam War; water there fell in torrents from a constant monsoon sky or rose to his knees in rice fields. Vernon’s tour was with the navy, mostly on the USS Higbee, where he was on deck when an MiG-17 blew up his turret. He only lay there a minute before being pulled to the destroyer’s sickbay, but in that flash, he wrote to Peyton months later, “I felt unfit to be propped up.” Peyton would ask him about that in a telegram, then a letter back to Minnesota when Vernon returned ahead of him. But never thereafter; God forbid, face-to-face. If maybe he had used a different passive verb, as ‘propped’ implied a bunch of particulars to unpack. It was as if the man wanted further asking, or else nothing more to be asked. If anyone felt unfit for—

            “Whatcha thinkin’ about?” asked Harriet, softly loud.

            The boat had been driving itself, Peyton merely a weight on the throttle. “Huh?” he shook at the question. “What?”

            “Yeah, what?”

            “It’s—” Peyton glanced at Harriet, now tucking herself more into the windshield. He returned wide eyes to the mesmerizing blue. “Its—”

            “Think we’ve gone far enough this way. Vern’s pontoon wouldn’t go nearly this quick.” Harriet jutted her chin to indicate a view. “Them clouds there don’t look friendly.”

            Peyton swung his head left for a couple seconds. “No, they don’t,” he agreed. “I guess that’s our cue.” He steered sharper than he wanted to, causing Harriet to tilt into his lap, practically. “Sorry ’bout—”

            She adjusted and laughed. “’s okay. Say, maybe I can take the wheel for a while?”

            “Sure. Gotta take a leak, anyhow.”

 

            Vernon’s pontoon would have been in sight a half hour later, had Peyton taken up the binoculars that hung around Harriet’s neck. All eyes were on the thunderheads and their bulbous, boisterous, on-edge beauty. Vernon wasn’t afraid of this encroaching storm, but decided to putter the engine in a locked-west line in case he’d need to reach Isle Royale for additional cover. It wasn’t nearly in sight, especially with the blur of endless whitecaps and the gray slant of horizonal rain. Still, he stared into this natural vortex as if it explained his life.

            A life… as such, he spoke without moving his lips. He’d often thought about why the Higbee would have been the perfect round-out for a guy even the petty officers called ‘the Wart’. She was the first warship named for a woman, Lenah S. Higbee, serving as Chief Nurse during World War I. Unaware how much damage the bomb created, he thought the whole vessel would sink and the salt water off the coast of Đông Hơi would salve wounds and throw purpose into this operation. Being pulled below deck, away from the continued flack of fighter planes, he realized his coffin wouldn’t be so immediate. His torn-apart abdomen justified the screams so unfamiliar to his being, and he heard “hang in there, Wart” a dozen times before willing himself to pass out.

            The Higbee had no female nurses on board. Just as well… rub it in.

 

            Before the veil of rain accosted the speedboat, hailstones hammered like angry albino locusts, amped-up and desperately lost. Peyton hollered that he had a tarp but couldn’t drive the boat with it on.

            “May ’s well dig it out, in case!” Harriet hollered back, keeping on hand on the throttle, the other to cover her forehead. Her thighs managed to steer—not that any turning needed to happen, but cutting into waves required dexterous concentration. A few times she grabbed the wheel on a wild swell that would do far more damage than a couple spheres of ice to the head.

            Peyton finally popped out of the bow with an armful of disorganized canvas. “Think we should tent ourselves,” he sort of questioned.

            Harriet slowed the boat down but made sure there was enough propulsion to front each buffet or readjust when the wind and water pushed to a dangerous angle. As little as she had helmed such a craft, there wasn’t time to second-guess why levels of experience matter, now or any then. “Thanks,” she said, even-keel, when Peyton propped himself as a stantion to a makeshift tent that, at least, allowed the pilot to proceed without the knockout punch of hail.

            For his efforts—and grabbing two—Peyton reached and clicked the fuel of Michelob, not in any familiar mood. Harriet let him put one in the molded plastic spot that all boats sport, even as she had a sudden world of work to do.

 

            Pontoons, unlike speedboats, broaden out their center of gravity—like hockey players—and, to boot, Vernon’s added the heft of red pine, weight enough to thwart the threat of such a storm as this. Of course the hailstones forced him in, his box an instant percussion instrument, not that he was tapping beat. His tent, naïve to all beyond the box, was dry and without ruffle.

            In ways, the evening was too young to conjure sleep. Darkness was the steely sky, the charcoal innards of the box, the impossible-to-fathom nylon extra of the tent, unless Vern lent some artificial ignite to the mix. Tonight he offered nothing of the sort—perhaps to save, perhaps to honor Lenah S, as often he’d not light a thing on her behalf.

            Instead, he found the coddle of a Kermit frog that someone—he would never offer who—gave him, not before, of course, Vietnam (Kermit being a thing of mid-70’s chaos and anything anon). Hermetic was his tent, and hailstones bounced against the box as if to amplify omnipotence. Vernon hugged that stuffed frog like a baby—it and him—and nothing of the Lake Superior storm said boo.            

 

~8~

 

            In ways, late September was Deborah’s favorite time of year. Visitors to the island were a fraction of the summer traffic, and except for hearty retirees and an occasional field trip from Grand Marais or Two Harbors or even Ely, the Interpretive Center might be empty all day. The sunbeams through the log-frame windows made the dark interior feel like an amber capture of prehistoric things, the trilobite Debbie sometimes felt like. Oh, there were other ranger things to do besides ‘man the desk’, which she dutifully did. There were vehicles to maintain, atmospherics to gauge, campsites to check.

            Campsites to check. Christine to think about. Peyton to file away after ascertaining that his boat’s registration was on the up-and-up, true to his Grand Portage address. If Deborah approached their campsite too soon in the day, it would come off as snooping. Hell, there were sites thirty miles away that wouldn’t be seen for weeks. Difference was, Deb rationalized, those other sites required a deliberate trip, while little Grace Island was at the exit end of the oblong harbor where Windigo fortressed itself, so to speak. She had an apartment in Grand Marais to call home, yet slept there only every other weekend— it just wasn’t worth the distance or effort. She made a point, however, to chug out of Windigo at least once a day—‘get outta dodge’, she’d joke to herself.

            Knowing the northwest clouds were gathering, Deborah decided to give Christine and Peyton a heads’ up. She just about jogged to the camouflage boat and maneuvered it expertly in the easy confines of Washington Harbor. She thought about what she might say: ‘hey, you two, gettin’ some rest without the threat of wolves?’ No, that sounded dumb. Forecast worsening, I’ve heard, so batten down the hatches tonight. Even dumber.

            Their speedboat was gone, and for a moment Deborah thought about leaving a note on their tent string. Instead, she walked a half-mile or so down the middle of the island, musing on what drew her to this vocation. Ten years out of college, she did little to keep in touch with those who might consider her a friend. No social media. Unlisted number. Every month she’d attend the Missouri Synod in Silver Bay, an hour south of Grand Marais, even though her hometown had a church of the same denomination. She’d sit in the back and forsake communion, somewhat in protest of the exclusion of women in the sacristy and altar area. The Holy of Holies, running the risk of becoming the booth for your local wizard of Oz… Then why did she go? To return some Nordic helloes… To ruminate ‘chosen people’ and why they needed saving… To be among people, then later compare them to trees… She couldn’t determine any of these as she walked back to her camouflage boat.

 

            The storm was set to hit, so she put up the hardtop. She had it in mind to swing around Rainbow Cove and a measure of the route she had taken in the morning, to find this rogue couple in the first place. The sudden hail forced a decision to idle through it or return to the ranger station, and with some compunction she did the latter. She passed the vacant dock at Grace Island and sped through the now driving rain to Windigo, wondering how much a cover Peyton’s speedboat might have. His helm had no visual indication of standards by which to pull a tarp. They could curl into the bow, of course, twice as snug as a pup tent, but then there’d be no way to steer. Anchors on speedboats typically fed out forty, maybe fifty feet of rope—laughably short for Lake Superior. On the other hand, they may have bee-lined for Grand Portage, leaving their tent for retrieval after the storm.

            Deborah thought of nothing else for the next three hours. Usually in thunderstorms, she’d light a lantern (regardless of the prospect of a power outage) and write out lyrics to songs she’d never sing out loud, in the shower or anywhere. Tonight she browsed a score of screens from meteorological sites and tales from some dark side. Then the power did blip out, beyond the station’s fusebox.

            She put on a poncho and grabbed a heavy-duty flashlight. Her boat seemed none-too-eager to edge back into the harbor, darkly blurred into the sheet rain. The headlights helped visibility a bit, but Deborah relied as much on the sonar system and GPS screen.

            And, in her own way of mumbling, a prayer, predicated by a lightning strike to the water not more than a thousand feet ahead. The simultaneous boom was deafening, then the jolt of waves—the harbor could have been the middle of the ocean now, and that would swallow Peyton’s boat like a megalodon.

            Nothing docked at Grace Island, nothing having altered the tent except for the wind, wearing out the thin metal stakes. Deborah wondered what it’d look like if she unzipped it, crawled in to add weight, at least until the wind died down. Frickin’ crazy, is what that is! She ran back to the camouflage boat and heaved to get ready for a hard call. She almost never used her cell phone this way, but had her Houghton, Michigan supervisor in her contact list.

            “Hey, Gary? Deb Wilcox—can you hear me okay?”

                        She cupped her eyes.

            “Yeah, it’s comin’ your way pretty hard now. Say, need some advice. I’m at an abandoned campsite—tent and gear still here but the boat aint. Can you run a check?”

                        She clenched the back of her neck.

            “Name’s Peyton Elsruud, from Grand Portage. I left his boat registration at the station, but… Yeah, the database will have it.”

                        She curled her upper lip into itself.

            “No, not just him. A lady named Christine… didn’t register her last name… I know, my bad.”

                        Another nearby bolt caused her to drop the phone.

            “Can you—?”

                       Dead.

 

~9~

 

            Also dead—by accidental drowning—was the Nokia that squirted out of Peyton’s hand when Harriet suggested they call someone in Vernon’s contact list, as limited as that would be. Neither had brought up 911, but getting an operator to connect them to the Windigo ranger station was a reasonable option (now lost). Peyton swore at himself as he watched the little plastic perch bounce off the gunwale and into the instant swallow of Lake Superior. “That’s it, Vern! Son-uv-a-gun, you won,” he yelled against the gust.

            Harriet pulled his sleeve sharply. “Sit down, would ya, ’fore fallin’ in yourself!” Exhausted, she cut the engine to a sputter and expressed an idea through chattering teeth. “This tarp here”—draped loosely over their heads—“snaps all around the sides, yeah?”

            “Yeah, it’s a cabin cover. Don’ know if I can fasten ’em all—”

            “It’s worth a try. Cuz we’re not gonna bust through this storm with any accurate aim. An’ ’s long as we don’t capsize…”

            Peyton hung onto to her shoulder and the windshield. “Well,… the boat won’t keep headfront to break the waves, but if we tarp it down an’ crawl inside, I think we’ll be alright.” He started snapping the buttons from the windshield first, then starboard. Harriet shut the engine off and battened down the port. The immediate darkness of the compressed cabin exacerbated their balance, and twice they grabbed each other’s torsos instead of the seats. The transom wasn’t completely snapped tight, but there was no fixing that. They crawled like baby hippos into the bow and shut the door. The hatch above them doubled as a window, but didn’t offer much light. More gloom, to the point.

            “Forgot the Michelobs,” Harriet tried to joke, clenching the arms of her soaked jacket.

            Peyton dug out a dry blanket for her, another for him. “Jus’ as well. There’s a bucket there for, y’know—”

            “Sea sickness?”

            “Yeah. Or…”

 

            Vernon’s pontoon, closer to Isle Royale and the brunt of the storm, listed in the upswell and pass of the fifteen-foot waves. While firmly staked to the vessel’s floorboards, the tent itself could not prevent Vernon from feeling as flighty as a lottery ball. He decided, after asking Kermit’s advice, to zip himself out (keeping the stuffed frog within) and brace against an internal corner of the red pine box. Some water seeped through the slabs, but the compromise seemed worth it. Vernon could curl his fingers into the rough-hewn edges and bob like a buoy.

            Boy! He grinned, then grimaced at that homophone. As an eight-year-old he spent a whole day digging a pond and tributary on his stepfather’s property along the Devil Track River; he had figured out the best lay of the land and fair depth by which to fill it. His mother was impressed when she came home from work, not imagining how her new husband would react. His shift at Hedstrom Lumber would end an hour later. Just enough time to arrange some deck chairs, mock up some fishing poles that funnily could stretch to the other end of the pond’s diameter. Their bobbers were just six inches above their hooks, as if any minnows would nose into this shallow trap.

            Hedstrom must have had a party or something, because step-dad didn’t come home ’til late, then crashed on the coach with barely a “yeah, o…kay,” when Vernon announced he’d made something in the yard. His instant snore repudiated the hints Vernon had prepared to give.

            A heavy rain from midnight to dawn flooded the pond and half the yard. Vernon was woken up with a soaked shovel handle to his ribs. “You had any idea, kid,” the semi-sober man roared, “let alone permission?” He grabbed the boy by the biceps and pulled him to the picture window to stare at the muddy mess outside. “This shovel’s gotta dry out. You’re gonna hold it, buster, above your head ’til it does. No movin’!”

            And though the house was on stable ground, Vernon—several minutes in—lost his balance as if an earthquake hit. He vowed in fading consciousness never to be such a buster of a boy, and never to be like that man.

 

            Peyton may have been the only one to have heard that story, one night visiting the Wart at his Greenwood Lake cabin. There must have been reason beyond what the loosening of liquor could do, as rarely would either talk that way. Peyton figured he was an adequate friend—none too intrusive, to be sure, but all ears if one needed to talk.

            Now, with Harriet pressed against him to augment their ballast, he wanted to listen to something she’d say. Even a joke, like the knock-knock he had in mind if not yet the guts to try: Who’s there? Water. Water Who? Water we doin’ out in the middle of this storm? Or something about her grandkids—Tara and Tommy, about seven years old and four, right?—and Harriet would correct those ages by another year each, which Peyton would secretly know but tag on a my, how they grow up so fast, as if that’s what she’d want to hear.

            Instead, she asked as even-keel as was possible: “who is this ‘Christine’, anyway?”

            A sucker punch to the butterflies in his stomach. Peyton eyed the bucket, in case. “Christine?” he stalled, “is you!”

            “I mean the original one. Who did you have in your mind this morning?”

            And now the nerves got him. He held his fist to his mustache and tried again. “Christine? Ah.. I mean, jus’—” He couldn’t contain, and managed to lunge at the bucket to vomit. Not much, but after making sure it was all, he apologized.

            “Oh,” Harriet smiled, “no need to—”

            “I’ll wash this out,” he said, and crawled out the door to undo a few snaps and redo them as soon as the bucket was clean. He came back in with two Michelobs. “Christine… was…”

           

~10~

 

            Almost no civilian knows how these things go. Past 11pm, Jinny clutched her phone and her mother’s in separate hands as if the devices themselves would commandeer the ether of the evening. The Grand Marais PD had texted a couple times in vague response to her 911 request to have a trooper here to help.

            Of course there would be two, available for the lack of other mid-week accidents or domestic brawls, as sometimes occupied their beat. They pulled up Harriet’s driveway and floodlit what they could before stepping out and knocking on the door. Jinny checked that Tara and Tommy were sleeping soundly in the loft before opening, then put her finger to pursed lips in hope they’d keep their voices down, which they naturally understood.

            “Ma’am,” said the older one, “we assume you have no update since…”

            “Nope.” Jinny waved them in, though they stood still on the stoop.

            “We don’t have a warrant to come in, but we do have some questions we’d like to ask you, if you don’t mind stepping outside.”

            Jinny had to consider. The younger trooper looked like someone from her high school, many moons ago, though that wouldn’t make much difference. The rain was subsiding now, and if protocol required it, she grabbed her jacket and exited the little house. She sized up both of them to ensure what she’d say. “I’m a bit freaked out, to tell you the truth—”

            “We appreciate that, ma’am,” the older one said. “We’re here to help. Again, we have no jurisdiction in checking a house or any private property, just so you know.”

            “No, I get that,” said Jinny, “I do. I got two kids sleepin’ inside an’ they don’ have any idea what I’m goin’ through right now—” She looked at the younger one, who also seemed to stretch his yearbook memory, “—and to have to call you guys out on a night like this—”

            “That’s no problem,” the younger one said.

            Jinny expected him to say more. Something like, didn’t you cop a smoke from me once at so-and-so’s party? “So, what do you wan’ me to do?”

            The older one opened a metal-clad notebook. “Tell us everything about today…”

 

            There were others on Isle Royale with whom Deborah could consult; as much as she had earned the merit of chief ranger, the National Park system, like troopers on a beat, would never have an active post so hermetically isolated. Windigo maintained a modest year-round store, a seasonal lodge, a couple of resident academics sponsored by the USDA. Some of these folks enjoyed a game of cards or an understated happy hour; Deborah would neither frequent nor stiff-arm these, when invited. Fact was, she was rarely invited.

            But she was relatively cared about. Jeremy and Heidi took long strides on the slippery dock to help guide the bumper ropes around the cleats of the camouflage boat, a bit to Deb’s annoyance. “Was just checkin’ on Grace Island,” she told them, “and an abandoned campsite.”

            “Abandoned?”

            “Their speedboat aint there. Could be they headed back to Grand Portage, but I don’t think so.”

            “Because they left their gear?”

            “That, yeah. And…” Deborah didn’t want to say more.

            Heidi looked at Jeremy and then back to the ranger. “You think they’re out on open water?”

            Deborah nodded and tilted toward the station to have them get out of the rain. The thirty seconds to get there bought some time, as she had nothing to say. Inside, she huffed and shook her arms like a bear done with a stream. “I called Houghton.”

            “Gary?”

            “Yep, he happened to be on duty.”

            Jeremy hollowed his eyes as if he knew that wasn’t true. He opened his mouth like a frog and quickly closed it. He them a-hemmed. “Yeah,” he said, “he’d be… the best to, I mean…”

            “You want us to do anything, Deb? I mean, you’re evidently concerned—”

            “No,” Deborah blurted too quickly. “No—I’m reasonably concerned, I mean, if they’re,… as you said, out on open water. But,” she turned away from them and shrugged deliberately. “You can only do what you can do.”

            They knew that was a fair cue for them to leave—Deborah had used this tag before. “So,” Jeremy said, “you know…”

            “Yeah,” Deborah said, “I’m gonna keep in touch with Gary, but… y’know folks make choices. One’s just gotta hope.”

            Heidi smiled at that. “Yeah, Deb, that’s well said.” And they left her in that sense of sanctioned confidence.

 

            “So you’re saying,” the younger trooper came a little closer to Jinny, “you felt threatened by your ex-husband’s pickup in your driveway.”

            Jinny looked at him for five seconds before deciding, “you know, it’s damned miserable out here—can’t we please do this inside?”

            The older trooper would have to nod, and he did. “Briefly, Ma’am. As we’d need to get back to Grand Marais pretty soon.”

            “I don’t have anything else to say, really,” Jinny opened the screen door, and the younger trooper held it to follow.

            Whatever else happened inside was a matter of shuffling civilities and jots in a metal-clad notebook. Tara, pretending to be asleep up in the loft, took in everything. Her grandma had been kidnapped, she surmised, bending her mind to the notion of Grandma being a kid. She glanced at Tommy to make sure he wasn’t hearing her thoughts. She listened in to what she could understand, editing out the parts about her dad. She heard them talking about Mr Peyton, next door, and wondered why they wouldn’t just bring him over if they wanted his point-of-view—that was a term she had learned today at school: every story has a point-of-view, and “Flat Stanley, class, is told in third-person point-of-view. Someone other than Stanley or his mom or Dr Dan tells the story. So what does that mean?” asked the teacher, to bemused pupils.

            Tara thought before suggesting, “maybe Stanley doesn’t believe he’s flat.”

            “Hmm. Maybe.”

 

~11~

           

            Vernon held on ‘hell and high water’ to the slabs of red pine. A part of him knew the pontoon itself wasn’t in real trouble, but storms are like a sliding scale, and nothing from here on out could be predicted. He could continue the self-abuse of nostalgia—like fainting on his stepfather’s floor—and at the same time, woodsman nonpareil, he could Bunyan things anew. He made this seaworthy power cube, for goodness’ sakes—what else would need such proof?...

            “What else?” he imagined Kermit saying, not in Henson’s voice.

            “What else?” Vernon obliged, also not in Henson’s voice.

            “Yes. What else in terms of waves and wherewithal?”

            The darkness of the place was not absolute. Vernon had lit his lantern, trimmed the wick to bare readability and hooked it to the ceiling of the tent. The green nylon filtered such fire to a swampy-dun color. ‘Yes, what else?’ he continued with the goading, though he never felt that frog would add to those who bullied him. ‘What else, Wart?’

           

            After Vietnam he had kicked around the Twin Cities, looking for whatever Vet services were available. Not many. The blast on the Higbee gave him a Purple Heart, which greased some paperwork at hospitals and job centers, but not to any happy degree. He logged most hours at the Old Met selling beer, getting very good at pouring eleven of the twelve ounce cans into the plastic cups—the head puffed over the top anyway if he poured quickly into the center; then those single ounce remainders would go into his bathroom break where he’d close himself into a stall and drink what would be warm by now, but clean. He’d do this several times a game and chew a lot of Trident to try to hide it.

            He was guided by some good samaritans to move away from bar stools and pick up the art of pool. He became quite skilled if the ratio in his body was around four drinks and two cups of coffee—more than that he was a wash; less than that… never happened. He wore ‘the Wart’ now as a hustle name, winning just enough to pay his tab. His signature shot was the swerve; he’d rise as tall as he could above the cue and calculate how far from center-left or center-right he’d diagonally jab to make a curve around a blocking ball and perfectly hit the target ball as if to bend the physics. It meant, in British terms, he rarely could be snookered.

            Like everything in Vernon’s youth, the good days reinforced why bad days didn’t have to happen, but always did. When the Metrodome opened, vendors had to go through greater protocols, and bathroom breaks could never allow the entry of a couple dozen beer cans, empty or otherwise. Management at pool halls were suspect about hustlers, and unlike chess or card games, Vernon could not take his game out to a park and freely play.

            He moved back north and found a job at Diamond Match, Cloquet, sorting out the tips that were not binding with their sticks. Boring, to say the least, but safe for keeping sober. Until he didn’t, got fired, and gravitated further north. He met an old man dying of AIDS who had a cottage on Greenwood Lake and helped him out with the upkeep, driving to treatments at St. Luke’s, Duluth, reading to him at night. The old man never called him ‘the Wart’; he liked that he brought Kermit into the mix, and wisped “The Rainbow Connection” now and again, the only song that featured at his burial, attended by ten people who seemed to be meeting each other for the first time.

            ‘What’s so amazing that keeps us star gazing’—Vernon had closed his eyes at this point. Stars were as veiled as could be, from the storm that continued to rage and the insularity of this red pine box. Still he clutched to the slabs as he drifted to sleep, ‘and have you heard voices,’ despite the onslaught of fiercer waves, ‘I’ve heard them calling my name…’

 

            The heat woke him before the light, bursting out of the tent flaps in hungry flames. Vernon instantly thought of the metal pail he sometimes used as a chamber pot, and indeed it remained deep inside the furnace that the tent had become. He rushed out of the box for some substitute, and finding none, he took off his jacket, tied the sleeves for a handle, scooped what water he could over the pontoon rail and tossed it pathetically toward the tent. Five, six attempts only saw the conflagration reach the slabs that minutes before had served his sleeping, dreaming, Kermit-spot. Kermit! My God, don’t—

            Adrenaline compelled one action or another, and Vernon’s instinct was to climb the outside of the box to its roof. The slick wood cut into the curls of his fingers and, when finally atop, the windy undulation prevented him from standing up. He didn’t have a crowbar, of course, but attempted to pry the roof slabs off the frame to let the downpour in. Impossibly, on his knees, he managed to rip off one plank but not another—the smoke burned his eyes and lungs. He rolled onto his back and realized in an instant: the gas within the tank would explode when flames found the rubber feeder tubes.

            He stood, a hunchbacked midget of Paul Bunyan, and played out in his mind what the next ten seconds would entail. Then, the decision made, he jumped to clear the starboard side swam to grab the front handle of the pontoon. There was nothing more to do than add tears to the water and wait for the boat to blow up.

            The red pine crackled and consummated the flames, like frontline infantry. The tent and sleeping bag claimed ‘fire resistant’ on their tags; the books and Kermit couldn’t. Blame not them, he said. This one’s on the Wart.

 

~12~

 

            Peyton had to take another piss. At the door, he asked Harriet if she wanted a fresh Michelob, and she shook some left in her can. “Well,” she figured, “couldn’t hurt. Might rock us to sleep.”

            “Gettin’ bored of my stories?”

            “Ah, c’mon. If I confided ’bout some Christine in my life, you wouldn’t get bored neither.”

            “You got a Christine in your life?”

            Harriet gave his arm a little thwack. “Scoot, will ya?”

            Unbuttoning the tarp enough to stand up, Peyton risked falling headlong into the lake. The rain was still hammering, but the waves had gone down from three feet to two. All was dark except a luminous fleck on an approximate horizon. Squinting did nothing, so after finishing and re-doing his fly, he called through the open hull, “say, Harriet, hand me the binoculars.”

            She brought them, moving like a mole. “What could be possible to see?”

            “I think—” twisting the lenses for focus—“a lighthouse maybe? Couldn’t be that Rock o’ Ages we passed before the storm—”

            “Lemme look…” Adjusting the lenses her own way, she declared, “there’s something on fire, Peyton.”

            “On the lake? That doesn’t make…”

            “It’s Vernon, I bet!”

            “How in tarnation—”

            Harriet wasted no time popping up enough of the tarp to get back in the captain chair and rev up the motor. “You comin’ up here or what?” she yelled over her shoulder. He crawled under the tarp as fast as he could and hung on to her leg as she throttled up and skirted obliquely through the waves, the burning dot as her only headlight and guide.

 

            Vernon clung to the torpedo-shaped head of the starboard pontoon. The heat was full in his face if he looked up at the inferno he’d unwittingly created. Glancing away had its own points of anguish: drowning in utter darkness, he surmised, might be a suicide’s dream, like dying in one’s sleep, but he didn’t really ever want to die. Sometimes he didn’t want to live. Often he felt unworthy to. But the line of logic from not wanting to live to wanting to die was never spelled out to him. Not that anyone engaged him on that level. Oh, perhaps a minister or social worker here and there, clocking in and clocking out.

            When the fire would reach the rubber gaslines, all sense of time would cease. The flat metal floor would likely flip from stern to bow, plunging Vernon like a pile driver into Lake Superior’s depths. He could release now and try to tread in the watery desert, then grab whatever flotsam resulting from a blast.

            But for what? For the prospect of a rescue that would put him on the news? Play puns on being a drifter; serve a cautionary tale for DIY boathouses; speculate on dismissive things-turn-spectacle… They’d ask about his motives, what he took and left behind. They’d come off as kind, then safely slink away.

            He thought of Sixo, burnt by now within the tent and red pine box. ‘Definitions belonged to the definers,’ the slave in Morrison’s Beloved heard it said, before being beaten for stealing food: “Sixo take and feed the soil, give you more crop. Sixo take and feed Sixo, give you more work.” Vernon was no Sixo, but longed to likewise self-define. Kill me, if you will, he closed-lip told the boat, I won’t be pinned to you. He pushed away and arched his back to float against the waves, sadly glad to think of Sixo as the final image of his life.

 

            The motor of a speedboat had the sonic quality of whale moans, travelling for miles. Vernon heard but could not fathom how a friendly face or two could find him way out here. Harriet and Peyton were not visible to him as they approached the port side of the pontoon. Peyton yelled a blur of intentions to Harriet, who idled the engine; he slipped on the slick of his own boat but managed to grab the rail of Vernon’s and pull himself over, onto the griddle heat of the corrugated floor. He gathered to his feet to storm into the red pine box before Vernon hollered, “Hey! I’m here!” and, gulping air, “jump” (another gulp) “before the gas tank blows!”

            Harriet, imagining, drove ahead and circled round to the pontoon’s other side. “Jump!” she echoed Vernon, as Peyton seemed confused. She cut the engine completely off for fear the propeller might catch one man or the other, then looked to throw some life-line out to Vernon. “Jump, dammit!” she implored a still-bewildered Peyton.

            The pontoon erupted like a trebuchet, springing the seventy-year-old much further into the open water than his childhood friend. Vernon by this time had grabbed Harriet’s arm, and she, his. There’d be no easy way to pull him in and start the boat to gauge the life—or what was left—of Peyton.

            She searched for Vernon’s eyes, averted, as they usually were. “You stay put,” she scolded, “and don’t you dare die!” But she realized at the moment of release that the propeller would mince him mercilessly. She jumped instead and swam toward where the blast put Peyton. The blackness and the chill of Lake Superior startled her, despite the light and heat of what remained of Vernon’s boat. She felt in every swimming stroke compunction for not staying on the speedboat—at least two lives were safely stowed a half-minute ago, and now… another minute later, three lives seemed over in an instant, saving one another for no one’s end.

            Peyton, face-up and unconscious, would sink within a second, had not Harriet crooked him by the chin. The speedboat was barely visible in the fire’s extinguishing, but Vernon’s holding on was all that Harriet could hope for, dragging Peyton in a dog-paddle. She might have cast a thought for her own viability. Jinny, and the grandkids, defining a fair legacy. She could have, but—the weight of Peyton was relatively surprising.

 

~13~

 

            From midnight to the truer middle of the night, Deborah did everything she could to fall asleep. The storm had passed the Isle and was likely relishing its unimpaired, impassioned throes in the middle of the lake. She clicked some data on her laptop to confirm as much. The mainland west, on the other hand, was presently under a starry sky.

            She checked a few more screens, including a Google Earth glance at Peyton’s residence. She could see that his little house, like others on that stretch of coast, had no dock. His speedboat, hypothetically, would be a mile and a half north in the Grand Portage marina. Against common sense this time of night, the ranger decided to go there, nose around, satisfy some urge.

            Her camouflage boat was in cahoots, purring lightly away from the Windigo dock. With the aid of a single headlight, she navigated through Washington Harbor, waved a habitual ahoy to the wreckage of the SS America, seen well enough in daylight as a ghoulish tourist draw. Now, of course, there was nothing to see.

            Most her trips to the mainland were hour-longs, straight down the coast to Grand Marias. All were with a semblance of daylight. None, to this point, involved a sense of rescue—Peyton and Christine, or one from the other. They weren’t married, from what she could Google of Peyton Elsruud, lifelong bachelor. Christine might be a sister, a cousin, a girlfriend. A Stockholm hostage, not unheard of around here.

            The marina at Grand Portage would have camera surveillance and a possible alarm trigger for boats going in or out at benighted hours. Deborah decided, then, to pull up on the stones of Peyton’s waterfront. With the boat’s headlight she could see in his driveway an empty boat trailer hitched to a pickup truck. The trailer, on closer inspection, had flat rollers more suited to a pontoon, not the beveled pairs that would hold a speedboat’s hull. She checked her phone to ensure she had the correct destination point. The house next door had a couple cars in its driveway, but no trailer. Neither here nor there, thought Deborah, walking the unfenced perimeter of Peyton’s property. No plan in this pace, but also no hurry—there was no other place to be, no other information on Peyton Elsruud. Eventually, she’d knock on his door; no need to hurry that. No—

            “Hey!” she heard from a window in the neighboring house, and dashed toward her camouflaged boat.

 

             “Hey!” Jinny yelled again, followed by clipped ouches as she ran across the gravel driveway toward this intruder. Deborah had made it to her boat and was about to burst out in reverse, anchor be damned; she stopped, though, upon ignition, with the headlight beaming upon her pursuer.

            “Christine?” she gasped. “Are you—”

            Jinny stopped and cocked her head. “What? You part of 911 or somethin’?”

            Deborah clambered out of the camouflage boat. “Christine, you okay?”

            “I’m not ‘Christine’—what are you talking about?” The lake breeze caused Jinny to pull at her bathrobe sleeves. “Say, d’you know anything about my mother?”

            No amount of starlight, rocking headlight, other auspices of reading a moment could attend to either woman. Both knew, obliquely, that the hours and minutes leading to this second were opaque to one another; both felt a compulsion to fill that elementary timeline: this happened and that, which led to another this and (shyly) where we’re at… Why not, at 3:35am? “Um,” Deb stumbled up, “What do you mean… about your mother?”

            Jinny tightened her bathrobe grip. “My mother’s missing.” She moved her mouth to say more, yet no words followed.

            Deborah, despising whatever made for being shy, wanted badly to kiss those missing words. She touched what would have been the brim of her ranger hat, left in Windigo, and inhaled the guts she needed to say, “I kinda thought—don’t judge me crazy—you were the mom you say you’re missing.”

            “What?” Jinny stepped back and bit her bottom lip, pleading to some god that Tara and Tommy were fast asleep, but also (mystery of needs) that Tara at least could serve witness to the night’s surrealism. “Hold on—don’t come closer, please.”

            Rangers’ unwritten code: let a thing unfold. “Of course,” Deb said, “of course. I’m as… in the dark as you may be, I think.”

            “What do you know about my mom?” Jinny practically yelled.

            “I don’t… know… anything—I thought you might be, I mean, you’re clearly not, but—”

            Jinny unleashed. She almost plunged at this burglar but judged her heightened voice would remain the better weapon. “You thought? You here for what?”

            Deb hoped for more attack—she deserved as much, she suddenly discerned. “Listen,” she appealed, palms forward, “I’m just a park ranger at Isle Royale. Your mom, I think, has abandoned a campsite with Peyton Elsruud—”

            “Peyton? a campsite?”

            “There’s something in his name—”

            “And you think my mom would just go—”

            “I saw her—looks just like you—with him…”

            “Why in late September would she—”

            “I don’t know! I’m just here to see to campsites being safe. And,” Deborah fished her pockets for a kleenex usually there, now, balled up or otherwise, to lend this Christine look-alike, “I hoped in comin’ here to find the Elsruud speedboat, and thus your mom…”

            Jinny didn’t take the kleenex. “My mom, for frick’s sake, can’t be—”

            Deb lost all control, diving into Jinny. They rolled upon the grass that Peyton cut meticulously, every week, never imagining this kind of scene. Women wrestling for… nothing he’d imagine, let alone foresee. “You must protect yourself—” the ranger huffed into the bathrobe.

            “I’ll call you out on 911,” thrashed Jinny, hoping maybe Tara might wake up to see.

            “No!” Deborah exclaimed, “I’m only here to—”

            “Only! That’s like only in your dreams, you dyke! Get off of me!”

           

            From there, there was no reeling. Only how to disentangle.

 

~14~

 

            Contrary to Harriet’s order, Vernon did not remain clinging to the side of the speedboat. Her grunts of struggle were muted by the wind, yet he heard and swam toward them. His boots prevented any progress, so he unlaced and kicked their heaviness away; even so, his clothes weighed too much to do anything but a clumsy backstroke. Upon reaching his friends, he stayed on his back to relieve Harriet the final thirty feet.

            She had almost no energy left by the time she climbed in through the transom, using the dead propeller as a foothold. There were life preservers in the hold, she knew, if she could get to them in time. The tarp slowed her down but provided an idea: popping the final buttons, she made fast twists to its length, clasped a corner and hurled the rest toward Vernon. He could see it in the evanescent glow of little fires where his pontoon had been. Drowned within were the pages of a notebook which had, among other inspirations, handwritten lines from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”:

                                   About, about, in reel and rout

                                   The death-fires danced at night;

                                   The water, like a witch’s oils,

                                   Burnt green, and blue and white.

            “Come on, Vern,” Harriet pleaded, “reach for it! Jus’ six more feet…” She jammed her corner into a transom crease and dashed for those life preservers—vests and seat cushions—and tossed them with hasty aim. She could perceive, through those witch’s oils, that Vernon was one stroke from the tarp; she jumped to clutch her own corner, then pulled them both to the boat.

           

            Unless one is in a hospital gown or dies in one’s sleep, the notion of a person getting dressing for a final day of mortality is absurd. From the Garden of Eden onward, we have clothed ourselves to cover shame, handle cold and rain, fit into some fashion. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, must include our nakedness.

            Heavy in soaked clothes, Peyton had sustained a heart attack. Harriet, with instinct more than training, ripped open his shirt and began a desperate CPR, mouth-to-mouth and malleting his chest. Vernon held his legs up, always offering to trade places.

            It wouldn’t need to happen. Peyton coughed and dribbled water from his lungs, suddenly alive again. Vernon sobbed as Harriet collapsed in exhaustion, their three torsos sprawling upon all uncovered floorspace on the boat.

            They floated as such and fell asleep, perhaps with some nostalgic dreams.

 

            Almost by design, the storm had blown them to the geometric center of the lake, the largest on the continent. Harriet woke first to this reality, and knowing that Peyton would have no command of his own boat, she nudged Vernon for advice. He shrugged and she threw up her arms, as if done.

            “You know, if you’d just…” Vernon huffed, and threw up his own arms.

            Harriet swallowed and looked to the panorama of darkness, the witch’s oils long since come and gone. “If I’d just,” she played through the semantics of practicality, wherewithal, petty and reflective angst; “if I’d just… what?”

            Vernon hid his head. “If you’d just get us back... on track.”

            “And what, Vern, was ever your intention of being ‘on track’, huh?”

            Naturally, no answer. He did rise to what could be the co-pilot’s chair, rather irrelevant in the lack of any signals, but somehow knowing where Isle Royale would generally be and pointing, a la Crazy Horse, as if the natural destination in such circumstance.

            “You think that way,” Harriet felt a need to ascertain.

            “Yes,” Vernon responded, putting down his arm.

            “That’s it?” Harriet started the engine. “Jus’ your guess that—fun is done—we’d head back home…”

            What could be said, now or any minute racing back to a rodent hole, trying to upgrade from a frog’s escape. “I just lost everything,” he thought it apropos to say, “including Kermit, if you might have—”

            Harriet cut the engine right away and fell to the unsuspecting arms of Vernon, who caught her by sheer instinct. “Goddamit, Vernon,” sucking something else she’d be inclined to say, “le’s jus’… I dunno, jus’—”

            “Just steer us that way,” Vernon pointed a shaky west-west-northwest, and put his other arm around the captain’s chair to help that course take shape.

            A conscientious glance at Peyton, breathing enough not to be a corpse,

and Harriet gunned the engine to that shaky west-west-northwest, against the dreg-level waves of the passing storm.

             

            Predictably, the gas would sputter before daybreak, let alone a vacant sense of land-ho! Reason would tell them that survival had already played that card with Peyton’s resurrection; there were no leaks in the speedboat’s hull, and who could care if it ran out of fuel? They weren’t Amelia Earnharts, for heaven’s sake, and probably the Wart could just take over, helming as he had, drifting off to some forsaken neverland, Lake Superior only being a wormhole, so to speak. Nothing here was dangerous, now that waves were tame and incendiaries contained, including final drops of gas to move this enervated speedboat west-north-west—“Criminy, Vernon, what’s the course again?”

            Vernon pointed duly west, the both of them contriving oars to row them so, the slats of cabinets within the hold being all they could retract. They rowed opposing sides until they figured out they needed starboard thrust, thus rowing both against the headwind to the left and falling into rhythm, barely, before exhausted falls.

            Peyton saw and tried to cadence-call, but the three of them again succumbed to sleep, strangely now that dawn was breaking on their plight and could assist that doubtful west-west-northwest nonsense that Vernon could, without instruments, only guess.

            “Hey, Pey,” Harriet admonished, keeping stroke. “you stay alive now, will ya?”

            Vernon answered for him. “Of course you will, Peyton. You’ve always been good at gettin’ by—”

            “What…d’y…a mean by that,… Vernon?”

            No occasion to debate. Instead, two paddled while one lay prone, silent conversations in each head.

 

~15~

 

            Despite the cloak and dagger of the night, Jinny invited Deborah into the house for an untimely cup of coffee. Tara and Tommy were snoring in little kid ways, but Jinny still didn’t want to turn on a light, the kitchen and living room within the line of sight of the loft where they slept. Deborah kept her flashlight on until Jinny lit a candle a placed it on the round table between armchairs.

            “That’s Archie’s chair,” Jinny said softly as they sat down.

            Deborah made a motion to get back up. “Who’s that?”

            “My dad—not his real name, but what my mom liked to call him when he sat in that chair, watching TV.  You know, Archie Bunker? Edith?”

            “Oh,” Deb pretended she knew. “And where’s the television? It would block a good view of the lake.”

            “Shh,” Jinny pointed up to the loft and modeled the better volume. “Daddy never lived here. Died the day before I gave birth to Tara,” pointing heavenward again, “in Two Harbors.”

            The coffee allowed for less awkward pauses. “Two Harbors, huh. I live, well, on the island mainly, but have a place in Grand Marais…” She hoped Jinny would ask about that. “And so,” sipping to form the question right, “you came here to look for your mother?”

            “Not look for her—where else would she be?”

            “Well, the island…”

            “I had no idea she was there. I’m still,” shaking her head, “jus’… really confused. You said you saw them… camping? Like, in a tent?”

            “I registered them. They picked Grace Island, closest site to here.”

            “Close?”

            “Like, twenty-three miles away. That’s why I thought they came back here. I checked the site when the storm whipped up and only their tent was there. Scoped around the southeast side for awhile,” Deb massaged her forehead in the worry of recall, “but the waves were pushing to the great wide open, and light had faded, and…”

            Jinny leaned forward to rest her face on her fists. “An’ then you came here—”

            “What? Oh—no, I called my supervisor in Houghton, then went back to the station, checked what I could from there. Was only when the storm died down I boated out again, ’round the empty tent and, yeah,.. here.”

            “Here, meaning next door—Peyton’s.”

            “I already told you that—only had Mr Elsruud’s info. He registered for the both of ’em. That’s why I thought you were her.”

            “Then why’d you call me ‘Christine’?”

            “Cuz that’s—”

 

            From the loft erupted a shriek. Deborah dropped her coffee and sprang up from Archie’s chair. Jinny was ahead of her, leaping three stairs at a time. Her voice swirled with the ongoing scream and the other child’s whimpers. “A nightmare,” Jinny said in a most soothing voice, “just that, Tare, a nightmare—that’s all.”

            Deborah busied herself cleaning the spill, unsure whether or not to make her presence clear. Tommy clutched his mom’s waist at the sight of her; Tara looked but was still in the horror of images dreamt. Jinny, now on her butt, gathered each kid under wings and kissed their eyebrows. “Tell us, Tara, what it was…”

            Little heaves of breath and a shaking bottom lip wouldn’t allow the words. Jinny swayed gently to settle her down, prompting, “about Grandma?”

            A shiver to show ‘No.’

            “About me, or your dad?”

            A similar ‘No.’

            Jinny waited a half-minute in the calming rock-a-bye. “About Tommy? or you?”

            “About her!” Tara lanced out her arm at hypotenuse angle. Deborah, her target, dropped the mug she had just washed, shattering on the hard kitchen tiles. Tommy screamed in the newness of knowledge, burying his face in Jin’s tummy. “See?! She’s breaking things!”

            “No, no, no, no,” Jinny tried to shield her daughter’s eyes. With her own she tried to connect with Deborah, who flitted them away to survey the mess she’d made. “No, that’s just… a person helping… to find—”

            “No! That’s what those other men were doing!”

            “The policemen? Did you see them?”

            Before Tara responded, Deborah rushed to the door, also the direction of the loft stairs. Jinny yelled “wait” without knowing what course she would take. Tara dug her nails into her mom’s clothing, and Tommy dug further into her lap.

            “I—can’t—shouldn’t have come,” Deborah stammered and, despite Jinny’s second imperative to stay put, ran out of the house.

           

             The seconds counted by double heartbeats, and before Tara dared say anymore, the camouflage boat grumbled its engine on, pitched higher to back away from shore and even higher to speed into the lake. Jinny strained to detect which direction—back to the island or south toward Grand Marais. It seemed not the latter.

            “Now, Tara—she’s gone,” smoothing her hair. “Tell why she scared you.”

            Tommy lifted himself and grogged back to his sleeping bag. “I don’ wanna hear.”

            The gradual fade of the engine corresponded with his renewed sounds of sleep. Tara crawled away from her mother to do the same, but Jinny tugged at her ankle. “What was the dream about?”

            Tara searched the darkness of the loft and the candlelit dimness on the other side of its safety fence. “Um, I forget mostly. Something about Flat Stanley.”

            “Flat Stanley? What in heaven’s name would he be doing.”

            “Except it was Grandma who was flat, being folded into an envelope.”

            “By who? Stanley?”

            Tara pulled out of her mother’s grasp. “Don’ know,” she finally said, then echoed her brother’s breathing cadence.

            Jinny froze for a minute to let the night become as natural as should be. She tucked them in and kissed their eyebrows again, then whispered the same phrase she had every day post-divorce.

            She descended the stairs backwards, grabbing each step with her hands. The shards of the mugs were everywhere little barefeet would find; she’d clean that up in due time. For a moment, however, she sat on the third lowest step, wondering who in the world could be this ‘Christine’.

 

~16~

              

            More than paddling could do, the natural currents of Lake Superior brought the powerless speedboat to the spiky northeast tip of Isle Royale. Actually they were countless isles, narrow as scratches from the glacial god that molded this side of earth. They had to rest at North Government Island, not that there was any sign to say so, or Googling to show they were still more than a mile from the mother island, by which hiking trails could lead, fifty miles and more, to Windigo.

            North Government shouldered up to the great lake with a rocky wall, but the shore facing the inlet sound had pebbly places to pull up the boat. “Problem is,” Harriet surveyed, “patrollers won’t see our boat from this side.”

            Vernon seemed to shrug. “Gonna rummage up some wood, maybe we can boil some water.”

            Peyton remained asleep on his back, and Harriet propped his head with a drier seat cushion. The sun was not high enough to help dry their clothes, but any airing out would do. She undressed Peyton like he was a baby and used the tarp to keep him covered from the late September chill. Then she stretched the anchor rope to a higher crag to have it double as a clothesline. She hung Peyton’s clothes and called out not too loudly, “Vern, you there?”

            No response, so Harriet decided now better than never to doff her own damp clothes and hang them up. To kill some time, she waded into the sound and shivered herself into a swim. While never possibly warm, the getting used to was just as satisfying.

 

            Maybe knowing this, Vernon took his time to explore the limits of this islet, counting almost every tree and imagining the creatures that would temper such isolation. Certainly there could be nothing larger than chipmunks. No owls, he was sure, as the vast stretches of water would bog down their light flights. No palatable berries, if difficult to know after summer’s departure. No—human survival would be impossible here if stranded, which to some degree they were.

            Having studied maps of the broader Isle Royale, Vernon tried to recall the names of clumps of rocky land he could now see to the south: Edwards Island? Porter? South Government? All probably equally remote, and hopping to one would only necessitate hopping to another—assuming a return to civilization was ever the goal. For his own sake, he had no interest; for Peyton’s, well, he wouldn’t exacerbate that. On the other hand, he had thrown his buddy’s phone into the lake on purpose, and never asked for a well-meaning rescue.

            He wondered who was behind it—Peyton or Harriet. Or more to the point, what either of them expected in response, after last night’s drama or, hypothetically, a dull discovery that he and his red pine box were doing just fine. And except for that goddern lantern—a human, fossilized need for more light—all would be alright. In fact, they would be the ones needing a tow, Peyton’s boat running merely on fumes by then. The pontoon, in such a case, would have towed them about this far—not, on principle, all the way to Windigo. So, in a sense, fate had come full circle.

            These were friends, Harriet and Peyton. They deserved friendship and bestowed as much on Vernon. They were not the issue. Having clawed through seven decades, all three, there was infinite empathy of each other. And arguably, there was love. Love; definitions belonged to the definers, Sixo heard it said, and who on earth would deign to be definitive about ‘love’?

            But let that go for now. Peyton is mere hours into his rejuvenated heart. The mission here had been to gather firewood and warm him up. C’mon, Wart, you can do a thing or two, for a friend or two.

 

            Peyton woke to fair oblivion. The bottom of his own boat was unfamiliar, at least the way he felt it on his spine and shoulderblades. Naturally, he had no idea what the cauliflower sky above him meant toward landed coordinates below. He may have figured he had suffered a heart attack, as that part of him felt awfully strained. “Christine,” he coughed, semi-conscious that the code was off-and-on, as ever in his mind.

            Still, after a third such try, Harriet appeared above him, wrapped strangely in his own plaid shirt. “You okay, Peyton?” she asked, as if he was.

            After a puff of disbelief, he replied, “compared to what?”

            “Compared to dead, if we’re not too early to say.”

            Peyton took the bait to contemplate. He scanned between the sky and Harriet’s eyes and back and forth again. “Was I.. almost dead?” he heard himself inquire, as if detached.

            “You want the short or long of it?”

            Smiling, sniffing out. “Both.”

            Also smiling, Harriet looked toward the slope Vernon took for his escapade of fire. “The short is you’re alive, and Vernon too, if you can remember—”

            “I do,” Peyton breathed deliberately. “It wasn’t lookin’ good.”

            “That’s an understatement, Mr Elsruud. And now, go figure, it’s looking fairly good.”

            The grace of silence between friends, taking big things in. “By ‘fairly’,” Peyton knew in Minnesotan, no clause had to follow. Still, he gauged Harriet’s deliberations, bobbing head and all. “—you mean…”

            “Vern’s alive, is what I mean. There’s nothing we coulda done but witness his conflagration or try an’ save him. You stepped on his pontoon—”

            “That was stupid—”

            “Not at all. No one else but you woulda done it—no one on this earth loved Vernon as you do.”

            Eyes, still looking at the cauliflower sky, began their welling up. “Is.. he..?
            Harriet glanced around. Vernon would not likely swoop in like a caped crusader—not for causes Vietnam, let alone the stalemates of childhood. “He’s… around.”
            “Is he mad at me?”

            “Why would he?”

            Peyton lifted hands listlessly. “Because… I doubted.. that he’d…”

            “Amount to anything?”

            “No!... no…”

 

~17~

 

            A bender, it was, Deborah mulled in her Windigo bed, a bender without alcohol. From the Elsruud shore push-off to the full-throttle return to Isle Royale,

the night’s adrenaline was getting tired of itself. She barely decelerated at Grace Island, almost not caring anymore if this damned Peyton and Christine had come back to their tent, which, of course, they hadn’t. She did kill the motor well ahead of the Windigo dock in some panic that Heidi or Jeremy might be waiting there, tapping their WTF? foot.

            Back in her bed, Deb couldn’t relinquish the lock-jawed beauty of Jinny, attending to her little chicks in that loft. God, she could so easily rescript those seconds of fright—assure the screaming kid that she was really on her side, looking for grandma, comforting mama, a screaming child herself, inside, if truth be told. Truth was never told, however, not that lies were always truth’s replacement. The Missouri Synod church didn’t tell lies, per se, yet rarely spoke for truth. “What is truth?” anyway, asks Pilate of an unresponsive Christ—response would come in crucifixion, by the way, and truths thereafter would always have to fidget. History written by the winners, speaking truth to power, having a who-knows-how-to-codify one’s fifteen minutes of…

            She couldn’t sleep, naturally. A text message on her phone begged some attention—Gary, from Houghton, after all—but wouldn’t anyone in her catalogue of comparison deserve a Thursday morning sleep-in once in a blue moon? She was a ranger of the natural world, for God’s sake, not the world of human nature. Isle Royale, for that matter, couldn’t be further from the bric-à-brac of mainland, mainstream, media-making and -made vassals of some valhalla, count me out, is all she ever wanted, if tacitly, to say.

            Count me out, she tried to reinforce, talking to no one in her lack of sleep. She did drift off, eventually, against the sun’s exposure of a storm-wracked night, hardly evident on the surface of Lake Superior, notwithstanding remnants of a pontoon boat that no one, reasonably, would ever know, needle in some aquatic haystack, if even that.

           

            Jinny also counted sheep, unable to shake Tara and her fears of Harriet as a come-to-life (or death) Flat Stanley. She eventually fell asleep in Edith’s chair, the shards of mug cleaned up and nothing else to do. At the first piercing of the sun, Tara shook her arm, looking twice her age for angst.

            “Where’s Grandma, really?”

            “She’s… just away on a little holiday,” Jinny softly lied, “like we came here, unannounced—why shouldn’t Gram have the same chance to—”

            “Daddy is the reason you came here, isn’t he?”

            Pause, but not too long. “What’s your own feeling about that, honey?”

            Pause, a little longer. “Did he take Grandma away?”

            “Why would he? And where?”
            “Who was that lady?”

            “Talking with me? She was… checking on us. Maybe Grandma sent her—”

            “That’s not true!”

            “How do you know?”

            “Cuz I listened to you. She was talking about an island and,.. and Grandma wasn’t there.”

            “Should we go there today, maybe?”
            “And she isn’t here, either.”

            Jinny had no idea what else to say. She wouldn’t want to bring up Peyton now, clouding her thoughts despite his usual sunny personality. She didn’t want to bring up any man, though that younger officer last night hadn’t vanished from her mind. “We’re here now—Grandma’s house is ours, too—and you need to be a good big sister for Tommy so he doesn’t feel lonely or confused. I don’t know why Gram didn’t leave a note—”

            “—she left her phone. Couldn’t you call her?”

            “Well, honey, that doesn’t make sense, does it? She wouldn’t have it to answer… But y’know it’s early yet. Why not go back up to get more sleep. I need some, too.”
            “Then why are you in this chair?”

            Jinny smiled at little logic. “Good point. Can you make some space up there for me?”

            “Okay.”

            In a matter of minutes, despite the rising sun, both were sound asleep, fatigued beyond belief.

 

            The Isle Royale Interpretive Center had already been opened, surprising Deborah, who had taken the unusual step to set her alarm for quarter-to-nine. Heidi was behind the counter. “Hey, boss,” she beamed, despite last night’s concern. “Hope you don’t mind—I let myself in.”

            Deborah scratched her bed-head, wondering where she’d left her ranger hat. “Um, ’course not. Mi casa is.., um… You seen my hat?”

            Heidi looked away from the large desktop screen and pressed her bottom lip to her perky nose. “Hmm, nope. Maybe left it on the boat?”

            “Boat… you mean—”

            “Last night, when you checked that abandoned campsite.”

            Feigning casual recall, Deb nodded slowly. “Yeah, maybe. Any update on that?”
            “Jeremy went out to check, ’bout ten minutes ago. I’m actually looking at storm data right now.”

            “From Gary?”

            “Well, from Houghton. Nothing narrative. Say,” pursing her lips a different way, “you alright,.. I mean, from last night.”

            “Whad’ya mean?” Deb felt a sudden need to pee, shifting awkwardly.

            Heidi recognized the cue. “Nothin’. Just… reasonable to be upset about missing registrants during a storm—”

            “Was I upset?”

            “No, no. Every right to be, if they were doin’ something stupid, but…”

            “Who’s to say?”

            “Right,” raised eyebrows, “who’s to say. Hope Jeremy comes back, though, with a good word.”

            Deborah puffed out more than a sigh. “Yep, that would be welcome indeed. Say, d’you mind manning the desk for a while? Or I could put the ‘back in 5’ sign on the door—”

            “No, I’m already here, happy to man—woman—the desk as long as you need.”

            “Be more than ‘5’, actually. I want to, um…”

            Heidi filled the inarticulation. “Really, however long.”

            Tipping an invisible brim, Deborah scampered out, little clue on what she needed to do. Pee, perhaps, but something more. Had to be—something more to do. Follow Jeremy? Wander aimlessly?

            Worry.

 

~18~

           

            The heart is anyone’s most resilient muscle, as compared to those that ‘lift oneself’ by some mythic bootstraps, idiom that blushes and pales as Americana decades unfold. Peyton had never been strapped to anything—not on his body, not in a hospital, not at a court of law. His boots were merely functional and never something he’d associate with perseverance, pride, a human side.

            His heart was strung to some Christine, and that’s the hill he’d die on, if only the rest of life would let him be.

            Harriet had propped up his head and sponged out the puddles in the boat. The sun was working hard to the dispel the lagging post-storm cumulus, and fabric was drying fast. “You okay by yourself for five minutes, Pey? If so, I’m gonna root out Vernon.”

            From his hip, a thumbs-up. A muted part of his brain would have him try to get up, shake off this embarrassment, join their common rescue of themselves. He was utterly exhausted, though, and sunk into the cushion and resorted to a memory always on replay.

 

            “Vern!” Harriet called a second time from forty yards or so, through the untrailed evergreens. He tilted his head yet didn’t look her way. “You see somethin’ out there, or what?”

            He kept his gaze southwest as if he didn’t want to lose a certain landmark. When Harriet had come within a quieter range, he turned to her to offer more reception, but didn’t have a ready thing to say. “It’s, ahh…, well,”

            “It’s not Isle Royale, just guessin’.”

            “No, not this,” Vern smiled, “nor even that,” pointing directly across the sound, “or that”—an islet to the left—“or that or that,” further south. “But my gut says the separation channels are narrower than this. We could get to the mainland by noon, the way we’ve been paddling.”

            “Is it swimmable, you think?”

            “For you or me? No, that’s not such a good idea. No offense—”

            “None taken. There’s bound to be some undertow. Just tryin’ to imagine how one of us could go for help; the main island’s got to have trails back to Windigo, where they’d send a boat—or even a helicopter.”

            “Yeah, I suppose that could happen.”

            Harriet cocked her head a little bit. “Well, what d’you want to have happen?”

            Vernon dropped his eyes and messaged his left palm with his right thumb. “I don’ know, other than the obvious.”

            “Which is what? I’m not sure I know what ‘obvious’ means here.”

            “Practically,” tracing toward his wrist, “it means Peyton getting the help he needs.”

            “Uh, yeah. That’s like, the whole she-bang.”

            “Philosophically,” tracing more toward each finger, “it means us dealing with the definites as they apply to the unknowns.”

            Harriet didn’t want to smirk at that, but involuntarily did. “You’re scaring me, Backwoodsman—or Captain Ahab, as recent days have shown ya.”

            Both took in the risks of epithets, and each sought the other’s retinas. Speaking does so much, and decades of doing so (or doing the opposite) sift the main from the mist like those flour sieves that loved to convert a trigger grip to rotary result, making soft the raw-milled grain. Anyone who’d made bread before the 1980s would fist-bump with this aluminum marvel. Nostalgia aside, let alone rehashes of suspect archetypes, the two friends of Peyton wanted to do well for him, of course, and not have to plan otherwise.

 

            Peyton was technically having palpitations instead of a new case of cardiac arrest, though nothing would matter in the fiberglass shell of his speedboat, casket without its trickle of oil. His vision was up—how could it be otherwise?—and the cumulonimbus fluffed his sense that dying or not was not a major concern at this moment, lovely leeway such a passing left him.

            ‘Physician heal thyself’ is all that trickled to his brain. “It’s your own speedboat after all!” the nether cloud announced, mockery he’d always have at hand inside his head.  “Of course it’s mine,” he said out loud, “and by mine I mean the—“ and here he didn’t have a single thing in mind.

 

            “Y’know, Harriet,” the Wart tried out, “I’ve always fantasized this scenario.”

            He knew ten seconds would have to wait, and a dozen came more naturally, and then a dozen more before she would respond to that, to whit: “the fantasy is not so interesting. We all could do that for a living.”

            They walked back toward the speedboat, slowly and at imagined oar’s length. In each mind was the wonder of this moment, the Möbius strip that made it. She suddenly wanted to ask him about the loons at Greenwood Lake, and where they’d likely winter when the open water iced over. ‘That’s a Holden Caulfield question’, he’d say, and almost hearing that, she’d affirm, ‘that’s why I thought of it, but also…’. Also never came. Unconsciously, they walked as slowly as wouldn’t be so noticeable, as if they had an audience of moralists.

            Vernon decided to give the pleasant silence some voice. “So Peyton’s, um, in okay spirits?”

            “Yeah, y’know… all things considered.” She took a moment before considering to add, “my favorite radio show, by the way.” She surveyed the peeking sky through the pine canopy. “NPR—wonder if those waves would come out this far.”

            “I s’pose they would. Boaters gotta have their news and talk shows.”

            “You listen to ’em, too?”

            “Not everyday. Have to turn the world off sometimes. I’m kinda more a Lake Woebegone fan, anyway.”

            “You know where Garrison got his inspiration, for ‘Prairie Home’, at least?”

            “God?”

            Harriet tittered at that. “Maybe. God has lots to do with everything. But traceably, at least, there’s a ‘Prairie Home Cemetery’ in Moorhead…”

            “’s that so?”

            “Got my Aunt Bibi buried there.”

            “Bibi?”

            “Short for Beatrice, a name she never liked.”

            “Why not? It’s angelic.”

            “She maybe wasn’t all that. Good person, though.”

            Vernon nodded, choosing to say nothing about the associative property.

 

~19~

 

            Sans ranger hat, Deborah strided the path north of the Interpretive Center to speed up the need for the last twenty-four hours to be forgotten, erased, washed away with the storm. The flagstones encouraged hikers to start certain trails, if muddy rocks and roots would meet them in a hundred yards or so. Deborah had good boots for any kind of trekking and was quite used to slick stretches. Nonetheless, a couple minutes into the woods, she lost her footing and landed hard on her tailbone. She looked up to a Uranian sky, feeling that loneliness more than a backside pain. No one will see me for a while, she calculated, no one will go looking for me, or stumble upon. She willed herself to sleep.

            Nap, more like it, done with no discernable difference in the sky. No dream woke her, let alone a lover asking how she slept. Sometimes she invented that and stretched an answer: oh, y’know—like a baby, Baby—you tell me! And then she’d imagine dribs and drabs of banter and a playful kiss, perhaps a foot massage. And that would do it for a day.

            She lay for a minute more until remembering she needed to pee, wondering if that had unconsciously happened to rub in the humility. She elbowed her body half-way to check, then rolled to her stomach to lever her knees to get up, go off the slippery path, pull down her pants like a human to let nature call, as if the earth craved our sewage.

 

            On the mainland, Jinny watched her kids sleep like the truer babies they still were. By instinct on a workday, she couldn’t slumber past a certain pierce of the morning sun; she slithered to the loft’s safety fence and considered what she’d do next. Call in sick, for one—that should’ve happened an hour ago, to give the secretary time to find a sub.

            While she had her phone right next to her—Harriet’s, too, for comfort or clues—Jinny went downstairs to dial her school. She coughed a few times to adopt a theatrical rasp: “hi Fern,.. yeah, it’s Jinny… Well, not the best—thought a gargle of hot lemon would do it, but,... No, I’m still… north. Don’t think I can make it in today. Tomorrow? Um… yeah, thanks, if someone’s available for both days… If not, Fern, I can, y’know… Oh, thanks—you’re an angel. Sorry again for— Ok, I’ll get right back to bed. Thanks, Fern.”

            The red button on the phone pressed in the guilt. What if her mom was found dead somewhere, and the funeral would be Monday? Would she call in with the same stupid rasp? Yeah, you’re an angel, Fern, just one I’d rather lie to. No, today’s the truth, Thursday’s was deceit. Might as well keep that sub for the long haul—I don’t got the mettle. She wondered how she’d spell that in a text, so much easier to spill honesty in a hundred-some characters, then green button the thing off your own screen. She’d toy with that, maybe, texting her mom’s phone to see what it’d look like, received.

            A rap on the curtained window of the door startled her. She shot a glance to the loft in fear of more Flat Stanley trauma, then tip-toed to see whose figure this might be. Not the ranger’s, by the slighter frame, or her mother’s, taller by half-a-head. Not Peyton’s, who slumped more than this apparent man. “Who is it?” she semi-whispered.

            “Eddie. Officer from last night.”

            Eddie. So that’s who copped a high school smoke. Turned him into a cop. “What do you want?” Jinny winced at how that must have sounded—“I mean, did you find anything out?” She slid the little curtain to see him, soft-eyed and stoic.

            He shook his head almost indiscernibly. “Wanted to see how you’re doing,” pursing his lips before adding, “if that’s okay.”

 

            The paths on Isle Royale were equally adept at clarifying one’s direction and imagining abandon, where no set goal was needed and—heart of hearts—a body couldn’t really get so lost, a view of water never farther than an hour this way or that, if still the axis stretched into a fair oblivion. Deborah landed this position because she was so good at reconnoitering; Gary, training her from Houghton, told her so: “Deb, you’ll do good doin’ just the way you’re doin’—lettin’ paths just come to you and noting why they did.” He wasn’t flattering or (God forbid) flirting with this new recruit. She was ready to ranger, and he was eager to have exactly that on Isle Royale, ideal for those who didn’t mind a modicum of exile.

            And as she walked, relieved of some embarrassment and knowing more would shadow in the years and hours to come, she walked into a semblance of plan: she’d motorboat to where the damn thing started anyway—no one would call foul on that—and reconstruct the wolves, the relocation, the registration of one Peyton Elsruud and his blushing kinda bride, Christine, whose daughter would be proud of what this rangering might do: ‘let those paths just come to you’, and yes, the rest should follow.

            Jeremy or Heidi in the mix? That would be a gambit. Maybe Heidi, as she saw Deb discombobulated and the reason would be—yes, the reason would be… that—that skirting all of Isle Royale to seek a lost sheep, let alone a pair, would take a toll on anyone, and what else should a ranger be than take that toll upon herself, obsess as Jesus’ parable suggests and find the wayward sheep. Heidi, with her pretty pug nose would agree. Jeremy? Well, he’d feel something, having searched Grace Island once again. And maybe they were there, sleeping safe and sound. Crisis lifted, maybe, and everyone would go back to her post, recording eco-data and whatever else the island would require, from human purview, anyhow.

 

~20~

 

            “How come you’re out of uniform,” Jinny spoke softly, as Eddie had come in and, at her behest, taken Archie’s chair. She had thought about waking the kids to prevent redux nightmares, but figured the daylight would view this visitor more kindly.

            “Off duty. Technically can’t wear a uniform.”

            “Hmm. So… is this like a little high school reunion?”

            Eddie faked a small smile, hurt that an effort to flirt years ago was all he had to show for a memory. “You didn’t ever really talk with me then, a class below—I mean, not like you were stuck up, but—”

            “I get it. I was a junior and you were a sophomore at a party for legal people.”

            “Legal people? Drinkin’ age has been twenty-one since we were both babies.”

            “But other things, too. Well, you know it, being a law enforcer an’ all.”

            “That came by accident. Ran outta military tours. Had to have something to do.” He stared out to the sunburst lake, and added in Jinny’s silence, “to keep me straight an’ narrow.”

            She got up to boil some water. “Green tea ok? I’m kinda coffeed out.”

            “Yeah, sounds perfect. If I can ask, were you able to get any sleep?”

            Don’t cry. Don’t say anything about Flat Stanley or that ranger butch or—“maybe I’m sleepwalkin’ right now.”
            “An’ sleep talking, too?”

            “Maybe.”

            Eddie left questions at that. He hadn’t a strategy here, or didn’t want one. The drive from Grand Marais was just over a half hour, not much time to think, let alone craft an agenda. He’d be back on duty tonight, and filling day hours in such a small town was nothing he wanted to think too much about. His better friends were in Two Harbors, or further down the road Duluth; Grand Marais was the only place hiring during the recession—mostly for a modest house the precinct could lease him for practically free. The Minnesota Rust Belt had been going ramshackle for decades now, and while property taxes were still so high, rent and mortgages had to encourage folks to stay. Eddie didn’t say any of this to Jinny, pouring tea and finding Fig Newtons not yet opened. She’d know, though, most of what he’d be thinking on a Thursday in Grand Marais. “How ’bout them Vikes. Got some promise there in Cousins.”

            “Which cousins you mean?”

            “Kirk.”

            “I know—was just testing you.” She tossed him the Fig Newtons and brought over the mugs of tea, then sat in the Edith chair. She glanced up to the loft then looked into Eddie’s eyes a dozen seconds before mouthing, ‘Can you help me find Mom?’

            He blinked—nothing Morse Code—and jutted his chin as a kind of nod.

            She closed her eyes, feeling that was good enough.

 

            The serendipity had conjured needed energy, and Deborah circled back to the Interpretive Center with a plan. Jeremy was elbows on the countertop, listening to Heidi tell an anecdote, which stopped the moment Deborah came through the door. “Hey, boss,” Jeremy said, now stretching to a stand. “Nothing new to update on Grace Island.”

            “That’s too bad.” Deb said, then asked Heidi, whose eyes darted to a desktop screen, “Still no reports from Houghton or Duluth?”

            She scrolled and clicked some tabs, shaking her head in cadence to her flitting eyes. “Nope,” she concluded, “and I don’t think ‘no news is good news’ fits this situation.”

            “Well, we’ll have to see. My idea now is to boat over to Grand Portage, knock on Mr Elsruud’s door”—Deb glanced for doubting looks, which so far didn’t come—“and, if no response, call the sheriff. All we can really do.”

            “Could do that now,” Jeremy offered.

            “Mmm, no. Give it its due. Gary knows we’re concerned and can request extra air canvassing of the lake. It’s the speedboat we’re looking for, right, not only the campers. That’s why I wonder if they took it home, leaving their stupid tent for a sunnier return.”

            “Good thinking, Deb,” Heidi scrunched her too-often grin. “And Jer and me can, y’know, cover things here—not that a Thursday throng is comin’ right after a storm!”

            “Who knows?”

            “Yeah, who knows?” Jeremy thought to repeat.

 

            Apples and oranges, Tara felt no need to scream at this other odd visitor at her grandmother’s cottage, waking up on a schoolday. She’d seen Eddie, of course, in the shadows of the uniformed interview he and his fellow cop had with her mom. Before the dragon lady had come—probably the one who had taken her grandma and come back for ransom. Eddie, as she heard her mom call him, would hunt down that dragon and slay, and bring grandma back from that cave—

            —“so is that what you think we should do?” Eddie spoke in soft deference.

            Tara waited for her mom to say something sarcastic, playful or otherwise. Instead, unaware of her daughter’s ears, Jinny whispered, “I do.”

             Eddie let the unhinged part of the plan go, as he’d likely have to call in late—or falsely sick—no brainburst there, one high schooler to another, but the stakes being Harriet’s actual whereabouts, Jinny’s veiled desperation, probably also his own… He knew he’d have to voice something anyway, so why not “let’s do this, then.”

            This, as Tara and Tommy rose to realize in the not-so-rough-and-tumble, would entail a rented boat from the Grand Portage marina, an amiable Captain Eddie making sure all life vests were strapped on (even Mom’s), a launch into the biggest lake in the world, a laugh or two about skipping school, a hidden grim reality that Grandma’s fate was what this outing presupposed. Jinny floated dutifully between her little Ts and thankful high school dirtbag with experience now in theatres of war.

            They motored out of the marina, no less scared than uninformed. And somehow this remarked upon a semblance of family, not that analogues could here and now be conjured, killing all.

 

~21~

 

            North Government Island was less than a mile from Isle Royale, though to drift there—if the currents of the sound cooperated—would cover more likely three miles. Three miles of hard paddling, as the current would likely swirl them back out to sea. Vernon and Harriet scoured the stony beach head for driftwood that would serve better oars than the slats of cabinet doors. Bungy cord might combine a slat to a fallen branch; Peyton, lying on his back, lent moral support as his friends weighed this option and that.

            “And like a terd of hurtles,” Vernon announced by wry habit, “we’re off!”

Not that he was part of a plurality so often—something Peyton’s upward glance seemed to remind, appreciating that this moment was both extraordinary and familiar enough.

            “Sea turtles,” Peyton mused, “like them in Finding Nemo.”

            “Never saw it,” Vernon said. “Do they find Nemo?”

            Harriet smiled at her counterpart paddler. “Now that would be a spoiler, Vern. You wouldn’t want us to say. But come on over after this whole adventure is done with and we can put in the DVD. My grandkids love it.”

            Peyton tried to nod, his neck stiff in the constraints of his prone position. “You gonna tell them about this… adventure?”

            Harriet shot disapprobation, then surveyed the channeled horizon. She thought of Tara and Timmy not as recipients of anything she could effect (DVDs doing that job with better élan), but good kids in an ill-fated generation. Probably she held some blame for Jinny’s bad choice of husband, his empty-shell gunslinging that never once asked how another one felt, all-too-ready to fill in that blank with a half-sense of humor and a fidgeting eye, thinking of somebody else by the unhappy rise in the ‘birthday, dear [who cares]’, grandkids confused by the glory and gore of it all—they gotta be, by now. Jinny doing the best that she can, but coming home weekends in winter, shoving those cherubs into the loft, taking an Irish coffee into her dead father’s chair, then staring beyond what the tv replaced, never imagining once I’d be there, with Peyton, no less, and a blown-up pontoon…

            “How’s your side doin’,” asked Vernon.

            Much easier than mouthing a wedding vow, Harriet smiled to affirm, “all’s good.” She paused in what couldn’t be pregnant by now, wanting equally to know, “and yours?”

            “Mine’s good,” Vernon said, avoiding the sideways look he’d assume from the hull, paddling just to verify ‘good’.

 

            Deb needed no permissions. She fueled up the oblivious boat to do everything as routine. But instead of veering west of Grace Island, she turned to the northeast, up the coast of Isle Royale. The boat was not steering itself, nor was the rogue ranger overly-directive in its destination. Remotely, perhaps, the call of the other morning’s wolves pulled her along—the less-than-one-percent of improbable that wolves would plunge into a human throat, but the lore that given any open window, they would.

            Perhaps that’s what  Christine and her dullard boyfriend wanted on this enterprise—a private dance with wolves that Grace Island, at least, would never entertain. Truth be told, there weren’t too many of these wild canines on the isle. The elder moose kept them largely at bay, swimming out with their calves just enough to thwart attacks. Deborah tracked these trends with fair interest, if that job was more what Jeremy and Heidi and itinerant researchers were here to do.

            What if she were a wolf? Lone, of course—a pack mentality was never her thing. Would she go after moose, separating cow from calf? Or scramble for squirrels, or scavenge the shores for washed-up fish? Maybe she would find a campsite and plunge into a human throat, after all.

 

            Had they a map at hand, Vernon and Harriet (and maybe Peyton, seeing only the sky) would have known of Merritt Lane Campground a couple sounds from where they paddled. Not that anyone was camping there, necessarily, or that an actual ‘lane’ could provide an efficient overland transport. Hiking trails led to and from Windigo—fifty miles, with twists and turns, away. Who knows, maybe there’d be an SOS box, like those occasionally along the Interstate. For the lack of a map, however, the plan was just to keep paddling south.

            “Sorta like Huck ’n Jim, we are,” Vernon ventured, immediately self-conscious that a third passenger on the raft hadn’t come to mind.

            Harriet also thought that and waited a half-minute for Peyton to reply, if he wanted to. Since he didn’t, she decided to add, “good thing we don’t got fog to fool us. Or slavecatchers to flee.”

            “Yeah, that must’ve been big in Twain’s imagination, writing it a generation after Emancipation.”

            “Is that so?” Peyton voiced, with strain he hoped to veil.

            “Published, at least. Had it with me on the pontoon—some trout’s reading it now, I hope.”

            Harriet smiled at his spirits. She didn’t look down at Peyton but waited another half-minute for him to have his chance to utter something else, if it were better just to rest. “Slavecatchers will never go away from the world as we know it. When slavery ever ceases to exist, there’ll be new schemes to net the vulnerable. I shouldn’t’ve said we don’t have them to flee.”

            Vernon nodded and swiveled his glance across the water, ambivalent to their plight. “You know,” he offered, “we can switch sides any time.”

            “Yep. Saving some energy, too, in case we gotta fight some flow.”

            Peyton, hearing this, stiffened up his left arm, fearing another heart attack coming on, not that he felt the first when it occurred. Behind his closed eyelids he knew he could blurt anything and be instantly attended to, no matter how unequipped this aqua-ambulance. He knew he should blurt, but wouldn’t—not in this moment of gently paddling, Jim and Huck, down a mississippi dream, merrily, merrily, maybe not, but lovely to cast that thought out there, anyway.

 

~22~

 

            The Rock of Ages lighthouse—decommissioned since forever by the looks of it, still guided boats from the Minnesota coast toward the mouth of Isle Royale. Eddie pointed at the obelisk and taught the kids to say ‘starboard’ for the right side, as opposed to ‘port’, where they’d need to turn to enter the miles long Washington Harbor. Jinny hadn’t asked by now if he had ever boated here, assuming in his even-keel confidence that this was all old hat, his extended stomping grounds as a patroller, sportsman, whatever he was.

            “No, actually. Always wondered about this place. You?”

            “Me? Yeah, Mom and Dad took me here when I was little,” Jinny looked back at her kids, sitting each to a seat as if buckled in. “About Tara’s age, probably. Took a tour boat then, I remember.” Then, quietly, “must’ve put the hooks in Mama to buy the cottage after Dad died.”

            “Say, you wanna drive this in?”

            “No, you’re doin’ it fine.”

            “Or how ’bout..?” tilting his head toward the kids.

            “You trust em, just like that?” Jinny said loudly enough to get their attention. “Which of ya rug rats wants to be co-pilot?”

            At first neither one moved, processing the chance; then both blurted “me!”

            “Well,” Eddie figured, “one of ya’s gotta steer, and another’s gotta be on the throttle here. Who wants what?”

            “What’s a throttle do?” Tommy asked, following in the shadow of his sister, who rushed to the wheel.

            “Speed,” Eddie explained, giraffing his body to let them share the captain seat while keeping an index finger and thumb on both controls. “It only takes a bit of push to go a little faster—not so much—or back again. Same with the steering, left and right—”

            “Port and starboard,” corrected Tara, biting her lip, “I think it was.”

 

            Half a hundred heron miles away, Harriet stopped paddling on the starboard side and used her mock-up oar as a rudder against the current’s pull away from the big island’s shore. Vernon doubled up his efforts to try to keep the nose of the speedboat hinged to their southwesterly course. Coming on to Scoffield Point, he wracked his memory of the map—was this an island head or the end of a peninsula? If the latter, the inlet could become a long dead end, literally, for his friend. He expressed a mild abbreviation of this and glanced down at Peyton’s tightly closed eyes. “Yeah,” replied Harriet, “then let’s skirt the outer side.”

            “Then ya better join me here, to keep us from floatin’ all the way to Michigan.”

            Easier said than done, as Harriet hoisted her oar over the prow and had Vernon hold its end so that she could have both hands free to clutch the windshield, then Vern’s shoulder, stepping gingerly over Peyton’s long torso. Vernon was kneeling behind the pilot’s chair and, for a second, Harriet thought of taking that as her rowing spot. But the windshield wrapped too far for digging into the water. She ducked under Vernon’s arm to maneuver behind him, then took the oar he offered back to her. “Easy-peasy,” she chuckled.

            The boat listed, naturally, and Peyton roused a bit to keep from sliding into his friends’ legs. A few times, for a few seconds each, Harriet grabbed Vernon’s right ribs, the flannel that covered them. For his part, Vernon paddled harder and with as wide a swath as could be, without leaning dangerously toward the lake. It was a dance, really—the strokes as an adagio with contrapuntal waves and choreography at least from the kneeling pair. Peyton may have been the rapt audience—hard to tell what he was thinking through the clench of his face.

 

            Of course Eddie watched the throttle and the wheel, as well as the placid, parallel shores of the harbor. Jinny watched all that, too, and at the same time tried to reconstruct her impressions a quarter-century ago. They hadn’t seen a moose—that fact, she remembered, put a slight pallor on the trip for her father, who had described the majestic animal in teddy bear terms with an element of grizzly, a velveteen beast that could deceive in slow motion or stay true in the natural contract—you and yours have your turf, I and mine have mine. The civil understanding of being wild.

            “Can I try steering?” Tommy wasn’t bored with his task, but envied Tara’s.

            “Gotta ask the captain,” Eddie pointed with his chin.

            Tara evidently didn’t want to switch, but did—sliding over after Eddie lifted Tommy from that side of the seat. For a few seconds, no one helmed the rental boat and Jinny measured how that fact would affect her daughter. Tara hadn’t cried in months—a whole year, maybe—before last night’s Flat Stanley episode. How absurd that story was: a bulletin board! hooked above his bed like a guillotine. Go figure, third-graders: you can organize yourself to death. Or maybe worse—flatness. The summer had been nondescript after an April finalization of divorce. A lack of drama was exactly what Jinny wanted and deserved going into the school year, and suddenly…

            “You okay, Mary Anne?” Eddie’s voice was like a mourning dove.

            “You mistaking me for your girlfriend?”

            “Don’t got one. Didn’t want to call you ‘Gilligan’.”

            “Oh, so that’s it. And who are you, the Millionaire?”

            His irises glinted a bit like diamonds, but, “no. He’s not interesting.”

            “Then who?”

            Eddie checked with Tommy, then Tara, to see if they had any questions. They assured him they had this—the minuscule adjustments to both devices were more fascinating than all-out shifts and turns. He regained eye-contact with Jinny. “The Professor, naturally.”

            Jinny nodded with a grinning frown. “And that way, if we get stranded here, you’ll rig up a radio with coconuts or somethin’?”

            “Yeah. Or just use this—” He fished from his pocket his mobile phone and fumbled it, catching low with his other hand.

            “Close call, Professor.”

           

~23~

 

            The National Park Service had policies about how their boats would operate and look, standardization being an important part of the milieu—a world within and standing apart from… the world. Deborah couldn’t exactly paint her preferred boat in military camouflage, but added waterproof stickers of cattails and lily pads to the side. She twined some pine branches to the edges of the windshield and bargained for a black Mercury outboard motor instead of the white Evinrude she’d inherited. The called it ‘the Camouflage’ to Heidi, Jeremy, anyone else, just to distinguish it from the others in the boathouse—not a nickname, really, at least in her own mind. What, was she going to chummy up to the thing and give it a ‘Susie Q’ moniker, or ‘Anchors Aweigh’? She’d probably spell it wrong—throw those anchors away—anyway. Or add a random apostrophe, or risk a charming backstory on why she had that in mind. If anyone admired her cattails and pine garnish, they didn’t require context, let alone charm.

            She checked the fuel gauge another time, as if the morning fill up would have drained discernably. She could get to Houghton and back on this tank, maybe crash Gary’s place—all business, of course, to debrief after the storm. She could claim to be on posse duty; no lie in that. She felt more like a rustler, though, a poacher of other people’s groundedness. If this Peyton and Christine wanted to romp through the wilderness like teenage kids, why not let ’em?

            Was this jealousy? She recalled 11^th grade English class, staring out the window as the teacher beat that question on the board—“Where does that green-eyed monster reside? Is it inside Othello or outside?” And then some suck-up raises his hand and reminds the teacher, as if it were a private chat, “Iago tells him, ‘I do repent me that I put it to you’—so that means it’s an outside force—” “—but now inside, right?”

            Was this envy? You’re only jealous of what you have—Desdemona, case in point—fearing it will vanish. What did Deborah have? This island? Dreams of a Christine someday… But that would be envy, kidnapping her from Peyton. Wouldn’t have to do that with her daughter, just woo her and not terrify her kids up in that loft, her ‘cherubs’, she called them. Guardian angels. Jealous in their own right. Envious of nothing at such an innocent age. Shame that life can’t stay that way…

 

            “You okay down there, Peyton?” Harriet’s voice tried to hide her anxious eyes.

            Peyton opened his, blinking to focus on her face, which almost leaned against Vernon’s back. Straining to hold in a cough, Peyton, pressed a meager grin and, to prove he could utter something, offered to “tag team me when one o’ yas gets tired.”

            “Now, now, then,” Harriet replied. “Currents’ doing most the work, anyhow.”

            “That,” Vernon added, “and somebody’s prayers. We’re gonna make it to Windigo, I’d say, by… well… by—”

            Seeing that his calculations weren’t instilling confidence, Harriet jumped in with “—soon enough. Main thing is for you to say what you’re needing. Water, for instance?” Immediately upon that suggestion, she realized they had nothing potable. The plastic half-gallon they’d brought from Grace Island had been passed around since before their short stop at North Government, and while they had a Bic lighter in the boat’s glove compartment, they didn’t have a metal receptacle to boil lake water.

            “Yeah,” Peyton graveled, “a li’l H-two-O would…”—knowing he didn’t have to complete the idiom, pushed out the pride to—“hit… the spot.”

            Now Vernon’s calculations took on this other dimension, aware that they weren’t exactly in the Ancient Mariner’s shoes, where water, water, everywhere did not mean not a drop to drink. Lake Superior in their bellies wouldn’t necessarily kill them, but, “we can pull over, Pey—I see a favorable crag over there that…”

            But Harriet jolted at what had been forgotten: the cooler had ice for the Michelobs they’d expended (the empties occasionally rattling in the stern) and that would be better than stopping for a campfire that still wouldn’t magically create a kettle. She went back to open the cooler—lo and behold, a lone last Michelob bobbing in the shallow pool of melted cubes. “Got your choice here, Pey: H-two-O or a warm beer?”

            Peyton either didn’t hear or want to respond. Harriet reached for the plastic carton and tilted the styrofoam cooler to deepen the puddle. She thought about asking Vernon over to hold one or the other—cooler or carton—to drain all that was possible, but Vernon was visibly fighting to keep the boat straight and somewhat hugging the shoreline of Scoffield Peninsula.

            The water smelled rancid when Harriet swirled it like the carton was a wine goblet. “This can’t be good,” she whispered to herself, but still put the aperture to Peyton’s lips and levered carefully. To no avail—he gagged and coughed the liquid out. “I’m sorry,” Harriet said, while Peyton looked contrite as if he’d done something wrong.

            “Maybe the brewsky would be better,” Vernon advised without breaking his stride.

            Having tended bar in her day, Harriet stretched her mental catalogue as to beer ever making anyone better. A shot of vodka, sure, if stopping at that. “Maybe,” she decided, and clicked open the top. Since it would be impossible to cleanly lean the can to Peyton’s lips, she took a fair swig herself and stretched her arm toward Vernon to do likewise.

            “What’s this, like the ‘Last Supper’?”

            Harriet smiled. “Nope. More like high school.”

            “Well, back then,” Vernon deadpanned, “the Wart was known to hold his liquor. Aint that so, Peyton?”

            Peyton had closed his eyes, but twitched the corners of his mouth to agree. “Don’t call.. yourself… Wart.”

            Paddling still, but turning toward his floorbound friend, Vernon assured, “I’ve owned it by now, don’t worry. Now why’n’t you take a sip o’ that.”

 

~24~

 

            The docks at Windigo came into Tara’s sight—“up ahead,… starboard,” she uttered with a fun sense of modesty.

            “Good. Keep ’er steady then.” Eddie advised, then, turning to Tommy: “How’s the throttle, Engineman?”

            “Same. Should I slow it?”

            “Just a little. Still got a stretch to cover.” Eddie watched him use two hands as if the pull back needed more than a finger of strength. “You guys are doin’ great.”

            They bit their upper lips by instinct, maybe having seen their mom do so in whatever praise she ever received, recall of which would take their eye off the road, so to speak. Jinny, for her sake, smiled too wide to bite her own upper lip, then walked it back in reflection of why they were really here. She drew close to Eddie’s ear—starboard ear, she heard inside her mind—and queried as soft as she could, “what d’we do when we get there?”

            Eddie nodded not because he knew. A measure of training as a soldier and cop could go through the protocols, even as he was decidedly off duty. Only a measure, though, in deference to the kids and what they imagined this venture to be. “Let’s see,” he spoke just as muted over his shoulder. “What would you want?”

            “To erase this week, start it over.” She suddenly wanted a cigarette, first craving in years. By Eddie’s breath and other fresh aspects about him, he’d done away with the cancer sticks as well. “Or at least erase yesterday,” Jinny corrected herself.

            “Every day’s interconnected,” Eddie offered, “tomorrow depends on today and so on.”

            “Isn’t that backwards? Like time goin’ backwards?”

            “I don’t know. Didn’t do so good in physics class.”

            “You had your eye on Mary Anne?”
            He worked his glance further over his shoulder, into her own side-eye. “Could say that. She wasn’t in the classroom though.”

 

            Bringing the rental boat to dock required Eddie’s hands on the controls, but the kids still clung to their roles below his hands. Jinny looped the mooring rope and tugged the vessel to its settle. The crew climbed out and sized up the gentle slope that led to the ranger station—or the Interpretive Center that fronted the humble cluster of other buildings. Heidi and Jeremy were on opposite sides of the counter, making little effort to work.

            “Hi there, folks,” Jeremy straightened up, “welcome.”

            Since he wasn’t in a particular uniform, Jinny nodded less at him than at Heidi, who was. “Thanks. We’re, um, just off the boat.”

            “Yeah, could see ya—” thumbing a window with a arbor-veiled view of the harbor. “Good learning, kids.”

            Eddie spoke for the shy, “teachers, actually—I was learning from them.”

            “Not true!” Tommy thought to correct, shushed instantly by his sister.

            “True enough,” Jeremy said, “teachers are learners, too. I’ve been learning a lot about the animals around here—you guys interested in fish or birds or four-leggeds?”

            “What about millipedes?” Tommy asked. “They got a million legs.”

            “No they don’t!” Tara now wanted to assert accuracy.

            “Well, they got a lot, for sure, and—you’re right, we have some of those on the island, too. We’re real careful about turning over rocks, ’cause that’s where they might be—”

            “—and they’re poisonous,” Tara warned.

            “Say,” Eddie asked, “do you have a display case for some of those?”

            “So happens we do,” Jeremy curled his arm like Clayton Kershaw to get them moving to the kitty corner of the room.

            Not knowing whether to follow them, Eddie sought Jinny’s eyes, which told him to stick beside her. Then she spoke quietly to Heidi. “We’re here to look for my mom. Harriet Anderson. Did she register here?”

            Heidi furled her brow. “We’re not at liberty to divulge information about—”

            “Can you just nod, then? Or blink twice for yes? Isn’t she in your system.”

            Heidi clicked the keyboard and, after some seconds, said, “she’s not.”

            “How ’bout Peyton Elsruud?”

            More clicks, deeper furl. Two blinks.

            Eddie slid out his badge and gently placed it on the counter. “I’m here to support a missing person report,” he all but whispered. The kids were well out of earshot, preoccupied with an insect display. Still, Eddie beseeched Heidi without words to click more data for them. “Was Mr Elsruud with anyone?”

            Heidi looked between this couple to see if, somehow, she was being had. “You say she’s your mom?”

            Jinny nodded, feeling her bottom eyelids well. “Looks like me, everyone thinks.”

            “I haven’t seen any campers the last couple days, and no one looking like you come ’round. I’m kinda just holding the fort—my boss maybe has…”

            Jinny flinched at the imagination of Heidi’s boss. She had wrestled with this woman, disentangled, served her coffee, heard the name ‘Christine’, watched her flee, apparently, back to this island. “Is your boss around?”

            No blinks, but a heavy sigh. “She’s… on her rounds.”

            Eddie, who had gathered an idea of the night visit—Jinny shaking her head about it more than completing sentences—pocketed his badge. “Think you could call her for us. Tell her we’re here.”

            “I’ll… see what I can do.”

            To give her that space, Eddie wandered over to Jeremy and the kids. “So the island has a kind of different food chain,” Jeremy was explaining, “as not all the same kind of weasels and birds are here to eat the insects that are pretty much the same population as on the mainland.”

            “How did they get here, then,” wondered Tara. “Boats?”

            Tommy laughed at that. “Tiny boats—for millipedes!”

            “That’s a great question, really,” Jeremy stroked his chin. “How does any land creature come across a wide span of water, and what do they hope to find as a result?”

            “Maybe they were running away from something,” Tara conjectured.

            “Like what, you think?”

            “Like,..” Tara sought Eddie’s eyes, “like, I don’t know. Maybe humans?”

            Tommy harrumphed. “Humans don’t eat millipedes, dummy!”

            “They stomp on ’em, though.”

 

~25~

 

            If it weren’t a paradox, Deborah’s camouflage boat was on auto-pilot without such speed and helm controls. She, as actual pilot, must have been thinking and reacting to her line on the lake. The past half-hour, then forty minutes, then fifty, blurred into a nebula unlike she’d experienced before—not daydreaming or blanking out, exactly.

            Not calculating, at any rate. Canada geese were migrating now, their molting period over. Deb looked at their formation and imagined being last in the longer splay, tempted at any moment to abandon the cause. Not planning to, but tempted. Glide with the gravity, flap without needing a destination, a flock-endorsed reason to keep going, goslings affected or not by their possible witness.

            The boat slowed to the spot it seemed to remember thirty hours earlier, when Deborah had first spotted Peyton’s speedboat. The shotgun she used to disperse the wolves remained ready in its tailored compartment. A Remington 20-gauge, the same type that did Cobain in, not that she’d followed him, being just eight years old when it happened. She was more a Robert Smith groupie, anyway, the emo frontman for The Cure. If she had a favorite song—debatable, that—it might be “The Forest”. The one summer she tried to jog herself into shape, their album Staring at the Sea had worn itself out with looped replay in her Sony Discman. Who knows, from one title to another, if this magnetic circle of plastic might have nudged her to this very place, her fate as curator of Isle Royale.

            Forest and sea weren’t the problem; people were. And no walk in life could really shake that reality.

 

            The last tips of Michelob seemed to be doing the trick. Peyton was breathing more comfortably through his nose and managed to adjust his life-preserver pillow by himself. “Can I turn on my side,” he asked Harriet, who looked at the back of Vernon’s head for advice.

            “I guess so,” she decided. “Which way?”

            He’d already twisted to his left, which would look toward the shore if the wall of his boat weren’t in the way. Harriet tugged his plaid shirt to follow the turn and snuggle him in better. 

            Vernon kept paddling, using a particular tree a football field or two away in order to motivate the closing of that stretch of shore. He’d counted fourteen trees that way—stations of the cross, he thought, in this Via Dolorosa. He remembered in the navy a yeoman named Smitty who was a devout catholic and felt the need to invent such stations on the USS Higbee. Maybe it helped, as he lay dying after the attack, a couple weeks after Easter, 1972. Vernon didn’t witness his final breath, battling his own injury below deck. But he remembered Smitty talking to him about station number 6. “That’s maybe where you got your name, Vern,” he said, “after ‘Veronica’, the lady who swabbed Jesus’ face. It’s my favorite, you know—probably shouldn’t have a favorite, but…”

            “Penny for your thoughts,” Harriet dug into the water and Vernon’s concentration.

            “What? Oh…, um, well… a guy in the war… named Smitty…”

 

            Deborah could see there was no evidence of Peyton and Christine’s return to their rogue campsite—the speedboat wasn’t there, for starters—but she felt drawn to shore up and explore. If nothing else, she could reconnoiter the area for wolves and justify a professional reason for taking this departure from duties otherwise. Jeremy would appreciate the data, she imagined. She took the shotgun from its compartment and stepped out of the boat, pulling the mooring rope with her to the same tree Peyton had used to secure his.

            She circled around where their tent had been. No traces—not enough grass to be matted down, and the dirt didn’t show any stake holes. Deb imagined how they slept, the palpable air inside their tent, creating a common aroma. In the middle of the night, one or the other would need to unzip and step out to pee—probably Peyton, she had read about night habits of men, statistically. He’d head over there, to that stand of pines.

            Or perhaps, beyond any practical need, one or the other (now in her mind was Christine) would just want to walk, provided a measure of moonlight, to take in the most ineffable sense that you were alone in the absolute center of the continent—for all sense of proportion, the whole world—and the island itself was the an impenetrable fortress, its moat deep and wide to keep intruders away.

            Like me.

            Deb tried to change the tone of that—just don’t hate me—but felt worse for idea of massaging language, inner thoughts, whatever these were. Sometimes they came in this fashion while she sat in the back row of church, waiting for one of the pastor’s ‘please rise’ occasions to exit unnoticed.

            She trudged toward the trees that would make for a good midnight pee and slid with her back down the rough of one trunk. She clutched the forestock of the shotgun and used the butt as a crutch to complete the sit. What should come first—to kill or devour? She drove off other options, even the distinction of ‘devour’ and ‘eat’; of course there was more than a chance she’d do neither, but why, in such a cradle of isolation, would she have to cast a net for more options? For whose satisfaction? Christine’s daughter? Who’s pushing me over the edge? Given an inch, I’ll take a foot, enough rope to hang myself, patting the shotgun for security’s sake.

            She sat against the tree long enough to fall asleep, despite the pummeling pain from the back of her skull. As on the camouflage boat, no dreams bothered to fill in the cracks of her consciousness, all but wiped out by the day, night, and day. There’d be no further night to worry about, if only this would all work out. This. This. Th

 

~26~

 

            Though the Interpretive Center wasn’t large, the interactive displays could occupy a visitor for a solid hour or two. Tara liked the choose-your-own-adventure touchscreen, ‘with Mosie, the moose calf’. Tommy gravitated to the maps he could color, making Lake Superior as purple as possible. He added fangs to the mouth of the wolf seen from space, otherwise known as the Keweenaw Peninsula. The wolf’s eye, of course, was Isle Royale, and Tommy colored that blood red for the southwest half he was in, dilating the dot of Windigo where he sat to a black-hole pupil. Jeremy commended the artwork, then shifted over to Tara’s screen to show her the lens by which moose of all sizes see their world, above and below the waterline.

            Jinny and Eddie, meanwhile, snuck outside to plan what they could of the day. “When’s your shift actually starting tonight?” she asked him.

            “Don’t worry about that.”

            “But I’m clueless about what we can really do—I mean, this island is ginormous, and Mom could be anywhere, if she’s even—”

            Eddie intercepted her hand, rising to join her other already on her forehead. She squeezed his thumb like a baby would. “So from what I understand,” Eddie acted the detective, “this ranger who crashed your place was the last to see her and—Peyton is his name?”

            “Yeah.”

            “—at a campsite on Grace Island, just up the harbor—”

            “How do you know where it is?”

            “From the map on the counter. We could’ve stopped there on our way in, had we known.”

            “Let’s go, then.”

            “What about the kids?” Eddie asked.

            “What about ’em? They could stay here with these… deputies, or whatever they are.”

            “You’re not worried about the ranger’s return? What you said about Tara’s reaction?”

            Jinny weighed that and muscled her lips sideways. “Ok,” she decided. “Sneaking off wouldn’t be a good model, anyway. Should’ve sent that memo to my mom.”

 

            Jeremy joined the adult huddle at the counter. “But I just came from Grace Island a little while ago,” he informed. “No one’s there.”

            “But their tent was, right?”

            “Yeah—just like Deb said it would be.”

            “Deb?” Jinny asked, “is that the ranger’s name?”

            Heidi shot Jeremy a look, then nodded. “Ranger Wilcox, if you will. You probably passed her on your boat ride over. She was going to check Grand Portage—”

            “Last night?” Jinny pressed.

            “No, this morning. Camouflage boat—you had to see her if you were coming from Grand Portage.”

            Eddie filled in a five-second silence. “Big lake. And, you know, camouflage…”

            Jinny turned to the laminated map on the counter. “Is there any town on this island? Like another place they’d possibly go?”

            “Town? No. Mott Island has a dozen buildings, maybe, over here. Near Edisen Fishery. But nothing’s active, especially by summer’s end.”

            “What do you do,” Jinny measured her phrasing, casting a glance at her occupied kids, “when people go missing?”

            Heidi turned to a larger map behind her. “Houghton,” she pointed inside the mouth of the cosmic wolf , “is the command center for Isle Royale—the whole lake, really.” She went on in quiet detail about networks and search protocols. Eddie took mental note of how National Parks, the Department of the Interior, 911 dispatchers, National Blue and so on might make quick work of things or, just as likely, a maelstrom as worthy as Veterans Affairs. Jinny interspersed questions at various levels of urgency, nudged sometimes by Eddie to whisper less loudly. He could see that the kids were headlong focused on their tasks, and Jeremy was loping over to run interference, anyway.

 

            Over the years, well before her mom and dad’s separation, Tara had become bat-like in her sense of hearing. While through the night and morning she had guessed enough about her grandma’s absence, she was presently taking mental notes more meticulously than Eddie, albeit clueless about most references. She prayed in her own way that this Jeremy would tend to Tommy and allow her to hear more from the trio at the counter.

            Faith worked, though Tara couldn’t exult in what she was finding out. Mr Elsruud’s speedboat was the concern, especially if it weren’t near their campsite or safely harbored on the Minnesota shore. She knew what the seacraft looked like—had taken a ride in it with him and Grandma and Tommy as recently as July; a little smaller than this morning’s rental, she imagined steering it, now that she knew how. She shuttered at the whispered speculation that, out in the open water during yesterday’s storm, a small boat like could flip over, making it very hard to detect from fly-overs or GP trackers. Here Tara heard her mother talk about mobile phones: how grandma forgot hers at home, so that meant her GP wouldn’t be accurate. The lady named Heidi nodded with a frown. Eddie asked how they might help—not only him, he suggested, but Grand Marais PD. Jinny dug her face into his windbreaker, and things got instantly quiet.

            Jeremy was now coming over to talk moose. “How’s Mosie holding up,” he asked.

            Tara didn’t want to pretend. “I want to see my grandma now.”

            “Well,” he looked to Heidi, whose frown was starting to flutter.

            “What we’re gonna do,” Eddie declared, “is boat over to Grace Island and, at least, leave Grandma a note. Can you an’ Tommy put that together?”

            “To say what? Where is she?”

            Jinny rubbed her eyes and came over to Tommy’s table. “That’s a question we’ll put in the note. C’mon,” flipping over one of the map outlines.

            Somewhere in the maze of Tara’s brain, the Lambchop optimism squeaked approval of this idea. If Stanley could mail himself to visit a far-away friend, or become a kite to see a vaster span of earth—if he could use his tragic circumstances to catch a thief, or vanish himself at just the right pivot—maybe this wasn’t an endless nightmare after all. Maybe.

 

~27~

 

            Vernon spoke about Vietnam like it was the dark side of the moon—the solar system phenomenon first, then the Pink Floyd album. “I barely set foot in the place called ‘Vietnam’. The only terra firma for my squadron was the Cat Lo base near Saigon, and that was place for R&R. Didn’t even see Saigon, for that matter—or Ho Chi Minh City, as it’s now named.”

            “That bother you?” Harriet asked, paddling in synchronicity behind him.

            “What, that the Viet Cong won? Nah, not really. It was never my fight, personally. Thought about it lots when I was wrapped like a mummy in the Philippines: there’s Warts and Smittys and girlfriends back home on any side of any battle. I read about a year ago an obituary for Nguyen Van Bay, the ace pilot who bombed us. From all accounts a decent man, happy to grow old. I’d like to think he’d read an obituary of me and make the same conclusion.”

            “You’re not dead, Vernon. Twice now revived.”
            “Oh, more’n that, prob’ly.”

            “So, what’s the other ‘dark side’ association you were thinking about?”

            Vernon stopped paddling a second to sing in muted tenor, “quiet desperation is the English way. The time is gone, the song is over—thought I’d something more to say.”

            Harriet waited until he started paddling again. “Pretty. That’s Pink Floyd?”

            “Yep. Gilmour’s voice through Waters’ lyrics through an allusion to Thoreau’s Walden. Heard it about a year after I came back and thought it resonated Vietnam, or as little as I knew of the place.”

            “I know ‘Us and Them’—same album, right?”

            “Richard Wright. Side 2, after ‘Money’.”

            Half-chuckle. “You remember flippin’ records? B-sides that never got radio time.”

            “Some did. Best songs are sometimes nestled in.”

            They rowed in silence for a stretch, Vernon no longer counting trees that pulled them forward. Instead, for him at least (Harriet, too, he could only imagine), selected b-sides swirled in his memory. ‘What ever happened to this season’s losers of the year? Well every time I got to thinking where’d they disappear.’ Cheap Trick, surrendering again to the time motif. Live at Budokan, side 2. Performing there just six years after the Higbee hit. Sure, the same distance as Anchorage to L.A., but somehow in the neighborhood. Pacific blue beyond ubiquitous horizons in a dozen time zones. Vernon looked left toward the same blue horizon of Lake Superior and blinked away any undue sentimentality—this is supposed to be Peyton’s Higbee, dammit!

 

            “Hey—a boat over there!” Harriet broke in, “and if I’m not mistaken, this is the little bay we camped at—holy smokes, could it have been yesterday?”

            Peyton groaned in blind recognition. “Day… before…”

            Vernon altered his stroke to push perpendicular to port side and aim the stern toward the shore. “Holy smokes, indeed. Let’s get this.”  He didn’t want to think as he tripled his exertion. Not like Hemingway’s protesters of thought—those Nick Adams, Jake Barnes types who could never become shell unshocked, thus curling into their own kind of shell; no, that’s not what he wanted to think of for a desire not to think. Just funny this week: a sudden one-eighty from wanting to float away from the civilized world to a desire, time being, to consort with it. Invariably, there’d be questions and troubles to face—starting with the ecological damage for the pontoon he managed to blow up. Evasions, then, would add to the stack. Saving Peyton—Harriet’s deed, really—might mitigate things. But you said not to think, Wart, now stop it! “You okay… back there?” he sputtered.

            Harriet, breathing like the occasional jogger she’d been through the years, piped optimism: “Damn straight…. Think Smitty’s prayin’ for us?”

            Vernon searched for a rejoinder even as energy would be better spent with clenched-teeth resolve. Besides, he’d talked reams more in the past hour than probably the summer and Indian summer combined. Time to be quiet, if the desperation was looking to imminent relief, God and this camouflage boat willing.

            “Say,” Harriet realized, “I know this boat. It’s the Ranger’s. Hey, Peyton! What was her name again?”

            Peyton tried to moisten his lips to speak better. “Deborah, I think.”

            “Yeah. Kinduva piece o’ work, but… beggars can’t be choosers...”

 

            They toiled to the part of the inlet that had no discernable current and, for the first time in miles, waves to actually carry them in. Harriet switched to her original side and paddled to guide their speedboat between the ranger’s and a boulder that somewhat shielded the slap of the lake. Twice she hallooed, “Debbie?” to no response.

            “Maybe..., she’s…” Peyton began, but didn’t complete for the exhaustion or the lack of idea, or both.

            Vernon stepped onto to the covered bow and short-hopped to the boulder. He gestured for the anchor rope and Harriet looped about twelve feet of it to add bulk to the throw. From that, Vernon pulled the slack and speedboat snug into the wedge of rock and camouflage. Harriet saw that Peyton wanted to rise. “You need to pee?”

            “Nah,” he strained. “Just... gettin’ a backache.”

            “Tell ya what—we’ll find the ranger and then help you up. How’s that sound?”

            “You’re.. the boss… I mean,” grinning self-consciously, “… the best.”

            “We’re back here in a jiffy,” Harriet grinned back. She clambered out and called Deborah’s name again, if more of an ‘indoor voice’ in the intuition they were half-way home. The absence of an echo bothered her, though, and her mind it with the wolf howls they woke to on this very spot. She hadn’t told that to Vernon—nothing, in fact, of tenting she shared with Peyton. Why would she? Or wouldn’t?

            “Hare,” she heard Vernon hiss, “c’mon over here.”

            He was crouching and clinging to a birch trunk. “What?” Harriet whispered when she tender-footed to him. “Wolf?”

            “No, but—” he pointed a line to a bodily slump of camouflage against a distant pine.

            Harriet gasped, “Deb!”

 

~28~

 

            The note was hard to write, exacerbated by the fat, unsharpened crayons. Tara had lightly drawn lines like empty sheet music to fill in, a prospective symphony of maybe six or eight measures. ‘Dear Grandma,’ she started in orange and slid it to Jinny, who picked up a black and block-printed ‘WHERE ARE U?!’ with a minus sign under the punctuation dots. Tara wasn’t pleased with that choice, nor the color combo—“it looks like a Halloween card. Let’s not make this scary.” She selected a stubby teal from the tub and wrote, ‘We are here to.’ Jinny couldn’t tell if she intended a dangling infinitive or simply misspelled the last word.

            Instead of explaining how they were here, Jinny asked Heidi if a little business card of the ranger station might be stapled to the bottom. “I really wish she had her phone, but at least… I don’t know, she’d at least know that enough of us are—” she was going to say ‘worried’ but changed to “anxious.”

            “What’s that mean, Mom?”

            “Eager to see her.”

            A few more phrases and they signed it, ‘love Tara and Jin’ and passed it to Tommy to do likewise. He added his and walked it over to Eddie, who had just come in after speaking with Jeremy, now headed to the harbor. “Here,” Tommy directed, “you gotta sign it here.”

            “Thanks, Cap’n, but my name might confuse her.”

            “Why?”

            Jinny followed and pinched the letter. “Tom, Tara, go use the washroom before we go.”

            They went into the separate doors. Eddie scanned Jinny’s eyes to see what else she needed. “After Grace Island, you’d want to go—”

            “I don’t know. You’d have to be gettin’ back—”

            Eddie cupped her shoulders. “I promised you I don’t. Erase that unnecessary… anxiety, will ya? I mean, if you want me to split off to double the coverage, that’s an option.”

            “We just got the one boat. And anyways, Heidi said the northwest side has constant surveillance on it from Thunder Bay. It’s the southeast side that’s more in the dark.”

            “Well then, let’s do that. I’ll ask Jeremy if we can top-off the tank—he says that’s maybe what stranded your mom in the first place—simply runnin’ outta gas.”

            Jinny reached in her pocket and pulled out a twenty dollar bill, which Eddie waved off. “Better use that for cans of spam or whatever they got in stock,” he advised, then called over to Heidi, “is it open, that general store?”

            “It is when I unlock it. Plenty o’ bandits around here, y’know,” she tried to inflect some irony, “but yeah, let’s get you set up. Kids must be starving by now.”

 

            In fact, the afternoon was quickly escaping them. Heidi convinced them at the store to buy some cookable items for a butane burner she wanted to lend them. “There’s a couple campsites around Siskiwit Bay—you took a map, right? And, you know, it gets darker quicker on that side, so you gotta pace wisely. You can always come on back to the station and,” Heidi leaned in to keep this on the down-low, “we got a little bunkhouse if need be.”

            They motored out of Windigo with grim resolve. Tara and Tommy didn’t initially gravitate to their piloting roles, but hung at Eddie’s side to see how the extra speed might be something they could handle. Jinny demurred at the switch, a half mile into the harbor, but once the boat got back to the cruise tempo Eddie had set (and audited, an arm’s adjustment away), she appreciated the gift of distraction.

            At Grace Island, Eddie took over to glide the boat ashore without the depth of a dock. He requested the other three to sit atop the covered bow and transfer some weight off the stern, an effort to protect the propeller. “You callin’ us elephants?” Jinny ribbed.

            “Elephant seals—baby ones! Cute as a California beach. Now, if you guys can pull that rope when you slide off—be sure you keep you shoes dry—good.”

            Jinny waited until Eddie killed the engine and took her extended hand. “I am not an animal, I’ll have you know.”

            “Oh, but we all are. Learned that in biology class.”

            “Thinkin’ of Mary Anne.”

            “You betcha.”

 

            The tent was nothing Jinny or the kids had seen before—nothing they’d imagine Harriet would want to sleep in, given a choice. Inside were a couple sleeping bags, a flashlight, a cardigan that must have been Peyton’s, a duffel of fresh socks and underwear. “For both of them,” Jinny answered Eddie over her shoulder, “together.”

            Tara and Tommy explored the little island as encouraged, keeping an eye on each other. Eddie went another direction to let Jinny have time enough alone. She joined him in a minute, however, little else to do. “It’s a beautiful spot they picked. Sunrises must be gorgeous.”

            Jinny shrugged. “Same as from Mom’s living room, more ’r less.”

            “You know, we could come back here when it’s dark. You ’n the kids could sleep in the tent; I could bundle up in the rental.”

            “Or maybe we could undo the tent and bring it with us up the coast. That may buy even more time.”

            “Good thinkin’. But you’d leave the note here, yeah?”
            “Could attach it to their duffel, string it up from a branch like a distress flag. Might even attract helpful attention if anyone else stumbles by, widening the search party.” Jenny brought the heels of her hands to her eye sockets. “Can not believe I’d ever have to say that regarding my mom.”

            Eddie waited for one of her eyes to open before offering an embrace. “We’re doin’ this well, Jinny. And that makes me think she and—what’s his name again?”

            “Peyton. Like that quarterback.”

            “Manning, hmm. Makes me think she and Peyton are also doing alright.”

            They stood like that awhile, then headed toward the tent to take it down.

 

~29~

 

            The gasp woke her up, but Deborah remained shut-eyed and frozen in her slouch. Faking a state of sleep was a practiced skill for her—from teenage mornings when insomnia was the truer reason for ‘sleeping in’, to afternoons at the Interpretive Center when small talk (or deep, for that matter) could be avoided by leaning back in the swivel chair and breathing with a dainty snore. Sometimes she’d be on the phone with her mother, whose assisted living facility encouraged such communication; while Deb’s mother was just as shy as her, she’d talk for an hour if Deb would stay on so long. Ten minutes in, more likely, the call would end on that practiced snore and patience for the phone’s unique disconnect signal, Deb’s favorite tone beyond what nature could produce.

            “Why does she have a gun?” she heard a man whisper, after counting twenty seconds of the gawkers’ incredulity.

            Harriet sunk her neck as a kind of shrug. “Don’ know—is she… dead?”

            “Christine?” the ranger uttered, without moving otherwise.

            Harriet shot a look at Vernon, who continued to stare at the seemingly disembodied voice. “Um, yeah, it’s… me. Are you okay, Debbie?”

            She lifted her hatless head and snarked, “bear shit in the woods?” Her reddened eyes begged them to get the joke.

            Harriet’s smile complied. “This here is Vernon”—instantly swallowing regret at not providing him a cover name, as Peyton had done so quickly on his feet a mere million hours ago.

            Vernon didn’t seem to mind being named. “Can we help you out with anything?”

            Funny, that, both women thought in synch. Deborah voiced first: “I’m the ranger of Isle Royale. I mean, it’s kind to offer assistance with…” shifting her eyes to Harriet, “whatever you… have in mind.”

            “Well,” Harriet cut to the chase, “we actually need your assistance. You see, Peyton—who’ve you met—is… not well.”

            Deb lifted herself up, pulling at the flagstaff of the gun’s barrel as a crutch. “Where is he?”

            “Over in the boat, near yours.”

            “This aint,” the ranger studied Vernon’s physiognomy, “a trick, is it?”

           

            Forty miles southwest, traveling toward them at thirty knots, the rental was buzzing by the easiest coastline to eyeball for Peyton’s speedboat. Eddie piloted on his own, cutting into the rougher waves and deciding when to come closer to shore for what Jinny or the kids pointed at. White fiberglass with red trim was the only object necessary to find, but if there happened to be herons or moose, that would be worth a moment’s awe.

            Jinny thought about her father, perhaps to drift away from where her mother’s fate presently resided. Archie, she liked to label him, less for Norman Lear’s character than the goofy, good-natured red-head in the comic books she lapped up as a kid. Her dad wanted so badly to be a grandpa, maybe for the desire to have more than one child, as Jinny was a ‘miracle’, he said, letting his wife fill in the details of their endless pregnancy trials. Tara’s nursery, a month before she was born, was painted by Archie multiple hues of pink and garnished with a zoo of stuffed animals—several of which now looked out from Harriet’s loft. His death the day Jinny’s water broke was chalked up as an aneurysm no one saw coming; doctors a floor and a wing away from OB/GYN worked feverishly to save him, keeping Jinny in the dark about his prognosis—her own labor was not without complications. Harriet paced a spider web of waiting rooms, steeling herself for the news of one, two, three losses after a lifetime of asking for not so much—just to keep what already was, or what was due.

            Eddie bumped her arm tenderly and throttled down. “There,” he softly told her first, before pointing for the kids to also see: a rackless moose knee-deep in an eroded inlet. Behind her, as their vantage point eventually allowed, stood her calf, apparently nervous about the relative depths they were in. “See,” Eddie kept his voice to Jinny’s ear, “that’s a promising sign.”

 

            Deborah, shotgun angled to steps she was about to take, followed Vernon and Harriet to the boats. When Peyton saw her, he offered a frail “sight for sore eyes,” which she had to think about before politely nodding.

            “So it all comes full circle,” she decided to say to this marooned crew, bemused by what ‘it’ might mean. She pat the shotgun stock and declared, “wolf-free, though they have more right to an undesignated campsite than humans do. Just sayin’.”

            Harriet smiled to help out. “Yeah, they gave us the heebie-jeebies, that’s for sure.”

            “It’s a big reason we can’t have renegades ’round here,” Deborah leveled in Vernon’s direction. “You still haven’t explained your part in this little drama.”

            Oh, to be a loon right now, Vernon flashed in his energized mind, to dive away from anyone’s prediction where or when I’d surface again. “I’m, so happens, stranded as well. Had to, um, bail out of a sinking.…” He stopped, hearing Harriet’s silent, lawyerly plea not to divulge everything. “A sinking situation,” he felt it safe to conclude.

            “That doesn’t tell me much,” Deborah dug. “Like, who isn’t in one o’ those, more often than not?”

            “A fuller explanation can follow,” Harriet interceded, “but Peyton here really needs a doctor’s attention. Think we could, um—”

            The ranger moued at the prospects, one boat and both. “Tell you what: gonna be fifty miles to the closest road—that’d be Eagle Harbor, Michigan.”

            “Closer than Grand Portage, or even Thunder Bay?”

            “Yep. And wind’s in that direction, too. I think the best way to do it is to tug yours with mine.”

            Vernon risked an idea: “Wouldn’t it make more sense to syphon off some of your fuel? That’s all we need, really, is—”

            “Nope. Got an inboard tank and no suction tubes. Besides,” she winked, “I’m duty-bound to keep an eye on you.”

 

~30~

 

            The kids were pretty pumped about the moose, and the fringe benefit was that they studied the shoreline with telescope intensity. Eddie had returned the speed to about thirty knots and now, at the turn into Siskiwit Bay, he and Jinny had to make a crucial decision. The bay cut backwards more than ten miles of shoreline that could turn up Peyton’s boat but also lose them remaining daylight to continue north, where being stranded would have more dire circumstances. For that matter, to get into the bay they had to six islets, none of which they bothered to circle in order to ‘leave no stone unturned’—the total shoreline of all 450 islands totaling a galactic distance.

            “Let’s go toward Malone Bay,” Jinny advised, pointing out on the map a fair amount of coves that would require more pressing exploration. “There’s a camp area there, too, as we’ll need a break eventually.”

            The lake breeze was exhilarating over the wide open water; Tara and Tommy seemed to have forgotten the somber purpose of this trip, caught up in the fast-moving adventure. Jinny, despite constant cognizance of the purpose, pressed her lips to prevent a relieved look on her face—that somehow what they were doing was wholesome, no matter how grim the pragmatics or prospects for success. Eddie’s eyes indicated the same, and while he was subtly bopping to some driving tune in his head, nothing but Jinny and her family was on his mind. His shift would be starting three hours from now in Grand Marais, which was more than three hours away at full throttle; he had meant to call in at Grace Island, but let that go as if to ensure he’d not be lured back. He learned in Afghanistan when hearing any talk of a ‘higher call’: a focus needed focus, with one or the other (or both) a capital ‘f’.

            “Can I drive, to give you a break?” Jinny asked.

            “Sure.” He London-Bridged his arm for her to get to the throttle, then take hold of the steering wheel. “I hope I wasn’t losing—”

            “Focus? No way. That’s why I’m tapping in, to get some o’ yours.”

 

             Now that the elders had set foot on Isle Royale—even Peyton, who responded to the nature’s call with some propping up by Vernon—they had to fight the fading afternoon light to launch back into the lake. There was still some debate on which direction made more sense—Michigan seeming so remote in, especially, Harriet’s estimation. Deborah emphasized that Houghton HQ was already apprised of the situation: a missing couple, at least. “I have no idea who may be looking for you, Vernon,” she qualified. “Seems you just surfaced from… Loch Ness or somethin.”

            The joke allowed him a little levity himself. “Yeah, that’s about accurate. Still adjusting, though, to my faithful fan base.”

            “Say, you have a phone, right? In case you need to tell me to slow down, speed up, whatever.”

            Vernon looked at Peyton, who displayed his empty palms. “Nope. Guess I’d have to send you smoke signals.”

            “Can’t we just all fit in your boat, Debbie?”

            “An’ leave this one abandoned? No. Besides, you can see that yours has more room for lyin’ down.” She uncoiled the speedboat’s anchor rope from their mutual tree, then walked it over and into to stern of the camouflage boat. The heavy swivel fangs of the anchor fit snug into a utility bar embedded for such purposes. “Thing is,” Deb calculated, “we’d be better off distributing the weight. Vernon, you stay with Peyton; Christine, you ride with me.”

            Harriet’s face fell. She hoped one of the men would speak to another arrangement, but they were already easing themselves into the speedboat. “Maybe it’d be better if—”

            “It would be better if we follow established protocols. I may need your yeoman help, anyway, looking over our payload and all.”

            “Peyton as ‘payload’,” Vernon snickered. “Let’s hope we get this mission right.”

 

            Malone Bay was garrisoned by Wright Island, shaped like an open lobster claw. Eddie eased the boat into this lagoon and took advantage of an empty dock near what seemed to be an abandoned house. “Bathroom break, anyone?”

            The kids ran off with scant regard for Jinny’s admonition to stay safe; their exploration of Grace Island had emboldened their sense of purpose. “If you were my mom—” Jinny glanced around, “and I know you’ve never met her—would you pick this kinda place to disappear?”

            Eddie nodded mirthlessly. “She hasn’t disappeared, exactly, Jinny. We just haven’t discovered where she’s at yet.”

            “Knowledge, you’re saying, is a matter of perspective.”

            “Yes, and a bit o’ faith. No one but you knows where I’m at right now—they wouldn’t guess right in a thousand tries. Speaking of,” he dug into his pocket, “should claim my sick day by now.”

            “I’ve already practiced my deceit, if you want me to do the honors on your behalf.”

            Eddie, sliding his fingers on his screen, beamed at that: “hey, boss, I got my nurse here to fill in the facts! That would lower suspicions, I bet.” Then, as he put the phone to his ear, he changed expressions. “Well, that figures—‘no network coverage’. Maybe yours has better reach?”

            Jinny took out her phone and slid her fingers in like fashion. “Who should I call? Hey—my mom’s phone is back at the house.” She speed-dialed. “Maybe she found her way back… Shit! same blockage. I guess we’re pretty remote, huh?”

            “I guess. Maybe that’s why whoever lived here bailed out. They were probably happy as clams before the world became wireless.”

            “Whatcha gonna do about your shift?”

            “Rick can handle it. The precinct has reinforcements when needed.”

            “I don’t want you to get in trouble.”

            Eddie drew out his arms and raised his chin. “I took an oath to protect those in trouble, not to trouble things more. It’s all good.”

            “No. But you’re good.”

 

~31~

 

            Almost as an afterthought, Deborah sheathed the shotgun in its compartment and turned the key. Whenever asked if she had actually shot any wolves—or anything else on the island—she turned the notion around. “I’m here for their protection, to keep their diminishing population from vanishing altogether. Wolves I’m not worried about, and certainly not the moose they need to eat.”

            “Then why—”

            “Humans. They’re worth worrying about.”

            And while Deborah could replay this kind of conversation in her mind, she didn’t at the present moment. Nor were Harriet or the men asking her about the gun or the nature of her worries.

            Harriet made sure that Peyton was well enough pillowed in the bottom of his floating gurney. Vernon took his position in the swivel opposite the pilot’s chair; he promised to give a thumbs up or sidewise or down whenever Harriet requested a status check, which she said she’d do every ten minutes or so using a Joshua tree gesture. “Sounds good, Hare,” he voiced as Deborah pushed them to deeper water.

            “Who’s ‘Hare’?” she mumbled as she held Harriet’s arm to ease her into the camouflage boat.

            Harriet scowled at Vernon on the sly, then turned to Deborah as if she hadn’t heard the question, which Deb repeated. “Oh, it’s just… a nickname. Like the rabbit. I used to run a fair bit.”

            “Hmm. I’m kinda a tortoise myself, as you mighta noticed. Anyway, I like ‘Christine’ better. Sounds… pristine.”

            The anchor rope sunk between the boats, forty, now fifty feet from each other. “What’s optimal distance?” Vernon asked across the water.

            “Depends on the speed,” Deb voiced above her started engine. “Faster we go, further you should be in the wake. But don’t sweat it—no time, no need for such adjustments. I’ll start ’er slowish and open up when the rope’s above the surface.”

            “Okay.”

                       

            Pulling away from land mass was not the hardship for Harriet, in the lead boat, and Peyton lying blind in his own, impotent craft. The notion of help-on-its way (or rather, travelling to their own rescue) was clearly a reason to rejoice. On the other hand, heading back into the vortex of Lake Superior—even under stormless skies—put a damper on things. Vernon upheld a poker face, having committed himself to the idea of being an old Odysseus, come what may. Debbie, also, had her own kind of maskless disguise.

            She was sure her pristine passenger was going to inquire about their route, who’d receive them at Eagle Harbor, where they’d sleep, and so on. She’d want these questions for the attention, if every response would add to her duplicity. Like Gary knowing they were headed to his domain, for instance—Deb was prepared to reassure Christine with even his real name, what he looked like, how he held the left side of his beard when he wanted to talk some more or think something out with a fellow ranger. Of course, no call to Gary had been made, not in the recent hour or two that mattered. And, unlike cell phones and their fragile reliance on ‘network coverage’, she had a CB radio that would always work—no excuses on that front. So far, though, Christine gave no second guesses. Vocally, at least.

            For her part, she approximated many mississippis to be as close to the 10-minute checks as possible. Vernon must have been doing likewise, as he always looked down to talk with Peyton a half-minute before Harriet’s Joshua tree, and so his thumbs up was already readily informed. He’d hold his gaze in Harriet’s direction well beyond her acknowledgement—bringing her hands together in a namaste that wished she could be there, walk the tightrope between boats, ask how this all looked two days ago from his pontoon.

            ‘Oh, thanks for asking,’ he’d sheepishly say. ‘It was, um, slower for sure. Lonelier. Not as cold—had that pine box buffer to the wind, you know. And lantern heat, you also know. My eyes were more in folds of novels than what the lake was tryin’ to say. Truth of the matter, I had counted on more time to observe the vacancy of everything and, of course, the foolishness of that conclusion. Like bein’ a teenager in reverse. But no more feelin’ sorry for myself. Purposes being what they are, we got each other to keep our capillaries flowin’. Peyton’s passin’ fair in that regard, all things considered.

           

            The lake itself, one could imagine, was neutral to the escapades upon its surface, and maybe just as much below. Like an epidermis, the waves flashed just a fraction of the inner essence, the systems circulatory and neural and endocrine.

There was a story, if the voice box of the lake could tell it, of a waterspout that formed in what would be the brain of the wolf, twenty-some miles further on from the tip of Keweenah Peninsula. Many times the power of an F-5 tornado, the spout didn’t move from its spot and, instead, drilled into the ebony depths of the water, roiling the fish and clams and coppery clay. Humans, if they had capacity to witness, would understand their future vessels would not stand a chance against such flushing force.

            And then, as if its own Moses figured the turmoil was enough, the whirling storm subsided and the flow from bed to middle fathoms to the surface that would float birch logs, at first, then canoes, then rudimentary pontoons, ships eventually made from taconite that logic says should sink. The surface seemed to encourage these, if the churn of that great waterspout retained its memory and lashed out on occasion.

            As much as Deborah was a ranger of the land, her jurisprudence necessarily claimed the lake—surface and below. That churn was not a myth to her like Ojibwa legends of water panthers per se. At any moment it could swallow decades of preparation in a single gulp.

            By coincidence perhaps, Deb’s stomach growled.

 

~32~

 

            In the span of a half hour or so, the kids covered the three-quarter mile length of the southern lobster claw of Wright Island. White spruce and balsam fir spotted the open grass and moss, looking like a summer version of ‘the Island of Misfit Toys’. At least that’s the impression Jinny had, finding a lush patch of moss on which to lie down. She patted the space between her and Eddie, still standing. “A cat nap will keep us more alert,” she suggested.

            Eddie looked east with some concern that Tara and Tommy were not in sight. “You don’t wanna trail them or nothin’?”

            “Look at the map,” Jinny said with eyes closed. “Do you think they could get lost here?”

            “Probably not.” He sat for ten seconds, then leaned as long on one elbow before succumbing to Jinny’s pull on his shoulder. To her mock snores, he shook his head. “I’m just jittery, I guess.”

            She reminded him, “neither of us got much sleep last night.”

            “Good point.”

            Ten minutes of yawns and pillow-testing one bicep and then the other, their eyes blinked finally open at the same second. Jinny laughed through her dimples. “How come tomcat isn’t napping?”

            “Cuz puss ’n’ boots aint either.”

            “I got reasons.”

            “So do I.”

            Jinny suddenly reflected on the gravity of her reasons. She squeezed her eyes not clownishly, but like a flash image of someone shooting heroin. And like the instinct to turn away—squeeze the eyelids tighter—she couldn’t ‘unsee’ it or replace the image with something anodyne. Now the vision of her mother’s body bloated with lake water, floating like a dust bunny somewhere in the Metrodome, which—even worse—had been demolished years ago. You can turn over stones today, but not know what was or wasn’t there yesterday. Her eyes now were sealing up the tears that begged to burst; Eddie slid towards her and they did into his chest. Ten minutes like that he held her, and, when breathing synched, they feel asleep.

 

            Tommy had bought into his sister’s upper hand in any clue of what was happening today. How they navigated Wright Island had the earmarks of how they organized the loft each time they visited Grandma, or (more subliminally) how they coped during weekends with their dad, which hadn’t happened for a while. Memories were mixed for awhile; drives down to the Twin Cities to see a Minnesota Wild hockey game—where Dad even knew one of the players!—were exhilarating, but also exhausting by the middle of a Saturday night, when they’d get back to his tiny apartment in Duluth. A stop at Denny’s was always welcome, with permission to order the mini-grandslam breakfast at 11pm; a stop on the shoulder of the interstate was often bewildering, with Dad taking a whizz (“either o’ you guys need to? Now’s the time!”) or downright frightening, with blinding blue lights and Dad’s failure in a breathalyzer test. A social worker sat with Tommy and Tara in the back seat of a police car to assure them they were not in trouble and would be back with Mom in Two Harbors soon. “Is Daddy in trouble?” Tommy bleated. The social worker, experienced this way, waited the five seconds or so that an older sibling would supply an answer, and Tara’s “he’ll be okay, Tommy—he just can’t drive us” was script-perfect. At least to satisfy her little brother.

            Tara had no illusions; there was no ‘just’ anything regarding her father. Hockey, with such fast pounding of bodies into the boards and the inevitable third-period fight, when the Target Center roared differently than when the Wild scored a goal, beguiled her to imagine some analogy in her second-grade mind. Even the players who fought shook hands at the end of the game, and maybe that was what her dad hoped would happen with Mom.

            They had reached the southeasternmost corner of Wright Island and circled back toward the rental boat with a business-like gait that they were being of some help. Nonetheless, Tommy was getting irritable. “Why Grandma would come way the heck here when we wanna visit her? Is she playing hide an’ seek?”

            Tara sighed and waited those five seconds or so. “We don’t know where she is, so we can’t ask her what’s going on.”

            “Well, what do you think’s going on, huh? And is Eddie… Mom’s friend?”

            She bit her lower lip and didn’t answer beyond his ‘huh’ a bunch more times.

 

            He had lapsed into disgruntled silence for their trek to the harbor side until he looked toward a mound of clothes in the distant grass and shrieked. “What!” Tara grabbed his raised forearms, then swung toward the mound that was now jostling with the aural shock. “Wait! Tommy—it’s… it’s…” But she wasn’t sure.

            “Hey,” shouted Eddie, now discernible as the darker part of the behemoth.

Jinny framed her face within the triangle of his arm and torso.

            “Were you? I mean,” Tara regretted launching an uncertain question at such volume, even in a theatre of no one else listening. “Were you… playing… dead right now?”

            “No, no, Tara honey,” Jinny crawled through the tent of Eddie and, like a slow sprinter, gained her footing from four limbs to two. “Didn’t mean to frighten you—Tommy, we’re alright—just fell asleep—grass so soft here, doncha think?”

            “I thought you were dead!” he yelled, squirming out of her embrace to cry in some makeshift corner. “Like Grandma is!”
            “What?” Tara whimpered, “where is he getting that?”

            Jinny moved to her like that parti-colored parachute she sometimes was afraid of in P.E. “Nowhere,” Jinny whispered to calm her down, “he’s not getting that from nowhere!” She sought Eddie as she hugged Tara tightly.

            De-escalation flashed in Eddie’s mind, but he bristled at resorting to the protocols of training. “It’s important we listen,” he announced, “reason we got two ears. You can talk, Tommy—we care what you need to say…” 

 

~33~

 

            While Tommy eked out general frustrations about Tara being bossy, he didn’t repeat anything about Grandma being dead. Jinny held his hands and asked him directly if he saw anything, “even in, like, a dream?” Tommy’s reddening eyes glistened an Are you crazy? then blinked rapidly as if to transition himself to a better mood.

            Tara, for her part, gathered harebells and large-leaved asters and swatches of moss. “Eddie,” she asked, “is there some string on the boat?”

            “Um, don’t know. What you got in mind?”

            “To make a… what do you call this?”

            Eddie sized up the clump she was trying to assemble. “A bouquet?”

            “Yes. And it needs string to hold it together.”

            “Well, let’s see what the boat’s got. Maybe even a vase, in case they get thirsty.”

            Jinny and Tommy walked more slowly behind. They’d need to shove off anyway to take advantage of remaining daylight. The rest stop had been welcome, notwithstanding the frayed nerves—better to out them on terra firma than keep them hostage in the boat.

            The best Eddie could come up with was tourniquet tubing in the first aid box. He helped Tara scrunch the stems and coil the tubing with garnishes of moss to hide the rubber. “So, who’s the lucky guy?”

            “Huh?”

            Eddie blushed at the need to explain. “Um—it looks like for a wedding.”

            Tara glanced at her mother, who had settled into the swivel near the pilot chair. “Well,” she wagged her head, “if maybe Mom wants it—”

            “Tara!” Jinny pretended to scowl.

            “I made it really for Grandma,” Tara admitted, “if we find her.”

            Tommy held his elbows and hooked them over the harbor side of the boat, now floating free from the dock. Eddie started the engine and affirmed, “when we will”, before revving to circle around and out of the lobster claw. Peering toward the xanthous west, he swallowed hard the tall order he had just proposed.

 

            Some twenty miles northeast, still within the reach of many breaker islands, Harriet studied the same western sky, having shifted her closed-circuit gaze on the helpless speedboat. Jinny came to mind—it would have been natural to call her or be called every couple of days at least. And here it had been, what, four days since Vernon’s pontoon meteor? five? She’d have a belly laugh at this, now that it looks more… hopeful. “Deb?” Harriet called out, still staring where the sun would set, basically between her cottage and Jinny’s house in Two Harbors. “Debbie?” she repeated with more volume.

            “Yeah, Christine, wha’s the matter?”

            “Could we slow down?”

            Deborah turned to gauge urgency, then throttled down at increments that wouldn’t send the speedboat crashing to her stern. “You need to pee? or vomit?”

            “Huh?”

            “I won’t look—Vernon back there shouldn’t either.”

            “No. No! I just wanted to… ask a favor.”
            The camouflage boat kept an idling rumble, in part to keep the request just between them—women’s business the men needn’t hear. “Sure,” Deborah reached to find the brim of her nonexistent hat, pinching the short hair above her left temple instead. “What’ll it be?”

            “Can I borrow your phone,” Harriet instinctively made a weave with her fingers, just below the outer knuckles, “to contact my daughter.”

            It was less a request, in Deborah’s mind, than a crash visit from a ghost. She levered her jaw like an excavator and pretended to swallow a burp. “Ah,” she finally let out, “no really can do.”

            Harriet drew her eyebrows down and then raised them in appeal. “Wh..Why not?”

            “Just ’cause,” patting her breastpockets and pants, “I don’t got one. And I don’t s’pose your daughter has a CB radio.”

            “Wait, you had it yesterday—I’m sure you did.”

            “No, I advised you to have some communication device—I’m sure of that.”

            Vernon piped up from a drifting thirty yards. “Any problem?”

            The wind whistled for a few seconds above the grumble of the engine. Harriet locked her eyes on Deborah’s face, flinching self-consciously. “No,” she uttered, “Christine’s just… lonely.” With no response from either, she added, “reasonably so.”

            “You wanna switch, H—Christine?”

            Deb answered on her behalf. “Now how would that even be safe, playing chinese firedrill out here in the open water?”

            “I’m fine, Vern,” Harriet said, trying to give him some sort of wink. “And, yeah, a touch lonesome.”

 

            After Wright Island, Eddie maneuvered the rental around the north rim of Malone Bay and further up the coast of Isle Royale. He, Jinny, and Tara kept their eyes peeled on the port side; Tommy, still with folded arms, perused the starboard endlessness of purple (the lake and sky having lost the day’s innocence of blue). He felt like throwing Tara’s bouquet, lying neglected on the deck, as far into the water as possible. They’re gonna die without water, anyway. But some counter-impulse prevented him from pulling that trigger.

            At the mouth of Chippewa Harbor, two miles long and narrow as a cobra, Eddie cut the engine to consult with Jinny and the map. To do the search justice, they’d need to cross this sinewy enclave off the list of possibilities, especially since it would entice distressed sailors in a storm. There was a campsite a half-mile in, and maybe they wouldn’t reach another one before nightfall. While there was little to debate, Jinny thought a vote might do the posse good. “All in favor—‘aye’.”

            Tara and Eddie said theirs, and Jinny would make a majority, but wished Tommy would come back to them. “No,” he simply muttered.

            “Well, what would you prefer then?”

            “Going back to Grandma’s house.”

            “You know that’s too far now today.”

            He didn’t know. Eddie suggested that he and Tara could resume the captaining of this ship when the calmer harbor waters allowed. Tommy instead turned his back on the harbor. ‘Let him be,’ he heard his mother whisper.

            He remained silent in his sulk, even about those two tiny boats on the horizon.

 

~34~

 

            “How’s Gitche Gumee doin’?” Peyton’s question rose to Vernon’s ears with surprising clarity, despite the return of the dull roar that the camouflage boat made.

            “The lake that Lightfoot sang about?”

            “Oh, way before him.” Peyton paced his phrasing to suit his still-strained breathing, but his desire to converse compelled Vernon to slide closer beside him. “Plus,” Peyton continued, “if you’re referring to the Edmund Fitzgerald,” that infamous shipwreck almost forty-five years ago, “ya better knock on wood.”

            Vernon smiled and knocked on the gunwale. “Fiberglass will have to do! But all’s smooth sailin’ now, ’s far as I can tell.”

            “I thought you might… think ‘Hiawatha’ first,… for all the readin’ you do.”

            “Longfellow’s poem? His ‘song’ that nobody sings? No, I didn’t pack that for the pontoon. Probably should’ve. Sink that naïve wiseman once again; keep that lethal legacy alive!”

            “Thought he… flew up…”

            “Threw up?”
            “No!” Peyton chuckled. “Flew up… purple mist of… sunset, was it?”

            “Think you’re mixing Jimi Hendrix into it—’xcuse me, while I touch the sky!”

            “Ha!... You’re right…. Purple is the polar… opposite of sunsets, anyway.”

            Vernon surveyed the sky from the goldenrod fringe atop Isle Royale to the cloudless gray of what had been azure to the navy blue that Peyton now peered from the inside bottom of his boat. Further east, color was less the designation than the steeliness the sky defined, as if funeral bunting for the Edmund Fitzgerald, desperate to get to the haven of Whitefish Bay and away from the grip of Gitche Gumee.

 

            The feldgrau of the camouflage boat bled into the steely atmosphere. Harriet’s light green windbreaker distinguished her figure, at least, from the shadow that had become the ranger. “How did you first receive this… Deborah person the other day?” Vernon quizzed his friend, to keep both of them awake.

            Peyton described the waking up to curious wolves, the shotgun blasts to disperse them, the guilt trip she had leveled for camping on the sly. “Not that we were looking… to break the law…”, to which Vernon grinned in similar regard. Then the following behind the ranger’s boat to Windigo—“well, sorta like we’re doing now,… I guess…”—to register and camp on Grace Island, “on the up… and up.”

            “And that’s when Harriet became ‘Christine’?”

            Peyton tried to laugh at that. “We were… confused, coming out of the tent… to wolves and gunfire… I knew my boat would trace back to my name… but Harriet…. Just wanted to protect her identity…, you know?”
            “Like a fugitive, almost.”

            “Well,.. not really. We had nothing… to hide.”

            Vernon let his friend rest. Speaking over the rushing wind and motor buzz was exhausting enough, and whatever qua confessions about any/nothing to hide put potential straw on this camel’s back. Both men loved Harriet for her goodness—they loved each other the same way. Neither would want to think much further than that, even privately. Still, as the escaping sun seemed emblematic of their back-and-forth mortality, the longing to be in love—just once more before the Hiawatha hour—was as stark as a stomach cramp. You run through it, any athlete knew. Pain is not the same as injury. “Camping’s a wholesome thing,” Vernon opined, “registration seems kinda counterintuitive.”

            “We weren’t trying… to skirt the system,” Peyton felt the need to reiterate. “National Park Service is… ’xactly that—a service… we should support.”

            “Yep. Especially when we muck up the rest of the planet.”

            “Damn straight.”

            Ground Control to Major Tom entered Vernon’s mind for some reason. He had hummed it once on the pontoon—‘here am I sitting in a tin can’—happy for the ‘nothing I can do’ but, naturally, melancholic. Like Tom, he apparently had a choice in the matter to exit human society; unlike Tom, he had no Ground Control to call. “If you were staked in at Grace Island,” he asked Peyton seemingly out of the blue, “why would you go out on the lake again, especially with a storm brewin’?”

            “Seriously?” Peyton smirked, then coughed in an effort to quickly assert the obvious. After his pal patted his chest to calm him, Peyton opened his hand for an Indian shake. “We were only intent… on lookin’ for you.”

            Vernon gently clasped the raised hand. “Worried about the Wart, huh?”

 

            The men fell asleep like that, holding left hands like tee-pee poles above Peyton’s chest. Vernon had waved to Harriet with his right—like a puppeteer, he supposed—and a thumb up to assure her that being out of view was not a worry. He simpered that it may have resonated a hitchhiker’s combination of dread and hope and come-what-may. Story of my life, he wafted in his weary mind.

            Peyton’s slumber came a minute after Vern’s, as he was aware of specific soft snores he occasionally heard throughout the years. Not in Vietnam, of course, but days in the life sandwiching that formative scourge. A marine and a seaman go fishing one day… He had read Tim O’Brien’s set of stories about soldiers carrying the weight of their own worlds, crushing them sometimes more than the actual enemy. The narrator—presumably Tim—considers dodging the draft and gets as far north as Rainy River, where he encounters old Elroy as maybe a future ghost of himself, compelling him to decide his own fate.

            ‘Have I been a good enough Elroy to Vern? Peyton problematized, or vice versa?’ They hadn’t really each other’s backs as much as the notion held water. Then again, here they were, clutched in a rush to a doctor to stitch one or both of them up. Harriet, there, an incentive to live—to cooperate, at least. If we ever get there—wherever the ranger was going…

            … go fishing one day… If maybe he’d done more of that on Greenwood Lake. Or lightened up on the Michelob, … A marine and a seaman… caught in the drink … go fishing one day… to get hooked….

 

~35~

 

            “Hey, a beaver!” Tara blurted from the captain’s chair, clutching the wheel as Eddie controlled the throttle. They had just passed the Lake Ritchie stream bed and narrow channel to the windless backwaters of Chippewa Harbor.

            Jinny crunched in between left and right shoulders of Tara and Eddie. “Well, I’ll be. All these years, I’ve never seen one! Are you sure it’s—”

            “—it could be an otter maybe, or a muskrat,” she chanced, not having seen any of these in the wild.

            Eddie had reduced the engine hum to almost nothing. “Interesting—could be any o’ those, but I’ll bet your first instinct is right. See the tail kinda like a pancake?” The glide was thick like a log of firewood, steady at a nonchalant speed, mesmerizing.

            Tommy finally ventured over. “A beaver needs to have a home of sticks.”

            “Good point,” Eddie whispered. “Let’s see where he’s swimming.”

            “Or she,” Jinny jabbed.

            The beaver practically trawled the rental boat, a couple lengths behind, through the length of the bay. It disappeared on seemingly no impulse, and Eddie cut the engine altogether. The crew held a collective breath and scanned the surface with some anxiety that, absurdly, the beaver might be in duress, drowning, terrified of these stalkers. Or maybe playing cat-and-mouse. Eddie, who had seen these before and—trying to repress the thought—participated in blowing up dams and dens with dynamite in his pre-police freelancing work, figured the beaver was aiming for a tunnel that ramped into the land. Theirs was a public/private existence, ambivalent to their effect on the world, not unlike human engineers. Jinny was thinking of this analogue, too, intrigued by their calm wiliness, forgetting her mother for this follow of the unseen until—slap!

            There she was (the beaver, not Harriet) a hundred yards perpendicular to the boat. The kids let out their muted excitement; Jinny covered her mouth as if she needed to throw up. It was so relieving—cathartic, goddammit!—that the animal was in such aesthetic control, the opposite of lost or drowned or…

            Eddie opened his arms like he was showing how big the fish was that got away. Jinny flashed a look at the back of her babies’ heads and fell into Eddie and wept as silently as she could.

 

            Dusk descended tangibly as the rental boat circled back toward the mouth of the harbor. A dock like the one on Wright Island allowed Eddie to sidle up and talk over the evening. The kids disembarked with less energy than before, Tommy still intent on being a grump-a-lump. Tara noticed a ring of charred stones from a campfire and announced she’d look for marshmallow sticks. “Don’t go too far in those woods,” her mother called out, deciding not to correct her impression that they actually had marshmallows. “Tommy, keep an eye on her, yeah?”

            Tommy didn’t ‘yeah’ back, but trudged like an orangutan. He stalled at a gap between trees to eyeball the distant lake—his vision threading through those trees and a channel islet and rocky coast into the murk where he had seen that tow of boats heading further into the swallow of the darkness. They wouldn’t there by now, logically, but worth the lookout anyway.

            “Wonder what he’s thinkin’,” Jinny spoke to Eddie, still in the boat. “Poor kid—not ready for this.”

            “Are you?”

            “What, camping here?” Jinny turned to sit on the dock and let her legs dangle just above the water.

            “Facing another uncertain night.”

            Smirking, not too much, Jinny sought his own take on the question. “Well, what the hell else to do? I mean,” gnawing her lip, “I’m more lost than my mom.”         Eddie didn’t move on that. “You go to church ever, if I can ask?”

            “You just asked. And once in a blue moon. Is that gonna rise tonight?”

            “The moon? A sliver, I think—been pretty dark this week. I sorta soured on church myself, since… fifth grade, maybe?”

            “How would I know? Anyway, you suggesting we, um…”

            “I was reading something this summer about Noah’s Ark. Finding the lost animals that didn’t come on by twosies, twosies or come off by threesies, threesies—you sang at camp, didn’cha?”

            “No,” belying her wag at his rhythm. “And don’ tell me about animals that drowned in the flood.”

            “Won’t do—the book didn’t go there. But—and this is where I thought I heard it in church one time—Noah sends out a raven that doesn’t come back, then a dove that does, but empty-handed, then another that brings a twig as evidence of good land, then another that just sort of disappears—”

            “—like the raven.”

            He nodded, “like the raven, I guess, and Noah then, after all that, knows it’s gonna be okay to finally get back to dry earth.”

            Jinny leaned back on her elbows. “So why are you still in the boat? Are we the doves and ravens here?”

            Eddie stepped out with the rolled bundles of tent and sleeping bags. “I’m not sure why that came to mind.” He covered the dock in six strides, whistling the animals, they came on, they came on by twosies, twosies…

            Jinny joined him in a minute, already staking a good spot for the tent. “Maybe try callin’ your precinct,” she reminded, reluctantly.

            “Tried that already—same ol’ Model T of technology. Good riddance.”

            “If you get fired over this, I’ll be pretty pissed.”

            “If I get fired, I’ll exile to this here island—live off the land like Captain Fantastic!”

            “Doesn’t the mom go crazy in that film?”

            “Well,” he guffawed, “don’t have to be locked to that script.”

            Tara came with an armload of sticks and cones, “for a fire—you got matches, right?”

            “Where’s Tommy?”

            “Just over there. He’s looking out at the lake, in case of invaders, he says.”

            “Not bad,” Eddie affirmed. Jinny fetched food from the boat, and in no time they had a roaring fire.

 

~36~

 

            Heidi and Jeremy, colleagues for a couple years on Isle Royale, hooked up every once in a while. Nothing illicit, really—the nature of the job meant that being off-duty usually kept them on the island, and what they did for R & R was their unpronounced business. Heidi had a bunk in the attic space above the store, and Jeremy had his off the boathouse. They preferred venturing al fresco, though, both for the extra risk and range of options.

            Since the departure of Deborah in one boat and the search crew for Harriet Anderson in another, they’d had three bouts of intercourse. They’d waited an hour at the Interpretive Center for mainland visitors until shrugging that prospect off. Heidi insisted on their aardvarking behind the tall counter, however, in case a message buzzed from Houghton or Debbie’s CB radio. But nothing disturbed, and they fell asleep thereafter.

            Guilt must have woken them around noon, when data from the weather station needed to be sent to Houghton. Jeremy fetched those indicators while Heidi scrolled a variety of screens. Still no update on the missing campers, to her pursed cheek consternation. She was tempted to type in the fact that another boat was on the lookout, though she couldn’t find any information of anyone actually on the case—not Deb, not a pontoon plane from Houghton, not the police department from… where did Eddie say he’s from? She wanted to ask Jeremy as he returned, but forgot in the licking of his lips.

            There were other duties to fill the afternoon. A half-dozen visitors came in the regularly scheduled ferry from Grand Portage, all intending to shuffle around for three hours before the regularly scheduled return. They bought some items at the store, hiked a modest loop in hopes to see a moose and hid their disappointment in a flip through of photos that paled in comparison to postcards. Someone always asked a hundred questions when a dozen would suffice, and Jeremy tagged-teamed with Heidi on this afternoon’s someone.

            When the ferry finally departed, they were again alone and ran off to the mossiest patch they knew, near the mouth of Washington Creek. The overcast sky didn’t auger rain, but they quite wished to get caught in a cool drizzle—to keep them awake in the afterglow, if for no other reason.

 

            The dusk woke them, drunk for an unimbibed and groggy moment. “Holy crap, Jer—we gotta get back!” Heidi’s nostrils flared when she was anxious or amused, or both.

            “Back to the grind?” Jeremy deadpanned.

            “I’m serious! Deb’s probably gonna be there and, and then what?”

            Jeremy bobbed his head and frowned in no great thought. “I guess we say we’ve… been looking, too.”

            Heidi lightly swat his beard. “You mean lie? Like pretend we’re actually helping with the emergency?”

            “Well,” tapping her back, “what else can we do? I mean—how could it hurt to say that? It isn’t getting them in worser shape. And who’s to say they aren’t off on their own moss mound, anyway?”

            Now she slapped him for real. He fumbled a couple apologies as she zipped her jacket and race-walked toward the Interpretive Center. The light sensor went on as she approached, startling her as if it would have been Deborah with a flashlight. She went in—cursing the fact that they had left the place unlocked—and dashed behind the counter and the computer that took a quarter-minute to restore its screen. Nothing new. She typed some cursory search phrases and then more deliberately into a message box.

            Jeremy opened the door and raised his eyebrows. “What’s the world saying?”

            Heidi grimaced. “Nada. And I don’t wanna go above Deb’s head—she’d be the one to send this to Houghton, logically…”

            “Well, try calling her again,” Jeremy suggested, pulling his phone from his pocket. “Here—I’ll do it.” He pressed her contact and held it obliquely to his ear, having already heard a couple hours earlier the brash disconnect tone. When that sounded again, he wondered, “how ’bout her CB?”

            Heidi was already fiddling with the dials. “It must be off, or…” 

            At the risk of sounding dismissive, Jeremy coughed into his hand and opined, “ya know, maybe she needed a day to herself. I mean, we just sorta did.”

            “That doesn’t make sense. Her ‘me time’ equals our ‘we time’? And this during a missing person search? Are you nuts, or just plain—”

            “Yep, guess so,” Jeremy glummed. He thumbed toward the boathouse. “You know where to find me in case…”

 

            Heidi stayed a long time at the counter and ended up sending several messages with subtle shades of S.O.S.: ‘waiting here in Windigo’; ‘haven’t heard from search teams’; ‘here again is Mr Elsruud’s registration’. She thought about referencing the Minnesota policeman to cast the net farther—an all hands on deck sort of spark in effort to light up the lugubrious tech. As a last resort, she could call her mom and get some advice.

            Instead, she called Jeremy to bring her some bedding—she’d sleep behind the counter tonight.

            Jeremy came with that and a bottle of wine. “Just threw a couple pizzas in the oven.”

            “I don’t have an appetite,” Heidi pouted. “These jerks from Houghton…”

            “They’re probably at the pub. It’s too dark now for the day to have something to show.”

            “So what about Deb, huh? Where the hell is she?”

            Jeremy sighed an I dunno. “She mighta boated down to Grand Marais, stop in her own place for a change. Hell, she’s off-duty, too.”

            “But she could say so! Leaving us to—”

            “—to do exactly this: hold the fort.” Jeremy unhinged a corkscrew from his Swiss army knife and squinted underneath the counter. “See any cups around here?”

            Heidi grabbed the bottle, squeaked it open and glugged a mouthful straight. “We got each other’s germs already,” she mumbled.

            Jeremy took a long swig himself and smoothed out the bedding.

 

~37~

           

            The nature of a tugboat is to be inconspicuous—never haughty about its pack-a-punch power or diminutive leadership. Just fast enough to build momentum, then tortoise enough to keep that steady, modest speed. The captain of a tugboat is always aware of the comatose weight behind, and thereby needs to guard against being lulled to that same coma—especially in the open sea, where there are no obstacles or reasons to turn this way or that.

            On Deborah’s mind, barely budging the mid-set throttle or steering wheel, was Andreas Lubitz. Though this airline pilot en route from Barcelona to Dusseldorf peered into a bright morning sky, the opposite of Deborah’s, his day aimed to eradicate all optic nerves in his power, asap. And not, like a preschool teacher, modeling nap time for the pupils to follow—this is the way we go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep, (then more slowly) this is the way we go to sleep, go to sleep, go… No, the crew on the towed tanker usually stayed awake, played cards, looked out the portholes, relaxed; the cabin of that Germanwings had, among its 150 passengers, a group of high schoolers who’d more likely swap seats to bluetooth photos and laugh at last night’s after-party. These, also, were the optic nerves Lubitz craved to crash. His breathing in the locked cockpit remained as indecipherably calm in the ten-minute descent, arrowing lugubriously into the stony face of a stoic Alp. The chief pilot, who had stepped out to use the toilet, pounded incredulously on the cockpit door, never imagining Lubitz to be, well—‘out of control’ couldn’t possibly apply—to be so… inhuman.

            Behind Deborah, everyone had fallen asleep. She had been conscious of Christine’s occasional shouts to Vernon if all was fine, and though she didn’t turn to see if he raised a thumbs up, she could tell that he had settled into the bowels of the boat to keep warm and—who knows?—to snuggle up with Peyton. As for Christine, she had coiled within her arms and raised knees, as comfortably as could be in the cushioned chair diagonal from Deborah. Her almost imperceptible undulation showed that she had abandoned her watch and succumbed to sleep.  Slowly, then, the ranger decelerated the camouflage boat.

            She no longer thought of Lubitz—she was not him, nor he her. A sliver of moon barely made a dent in the charcoal sky, and any shadow of the sunset behind her had by now slipped away. The headlight on the boat only illuminated a football field of lake—wedged in the shape of a hammerthrow. No, not Lubitz, but The Police somehow entered in; the cover of her Synchronicity CD had cracked years ago, but the disc itself was still able to play “King of Pain”—with the world turning circles running ’round my brain I guess I’m always hoping that you’ll end this reign… It was as if KQDS had sent it out to her turned-off radio: ‘next song’s dedicated to Deborah Wilcox from a secret admirer—keep on rockin, Deb!’ She recollected the fullness of almost five minutes to bring the boats to a standstill, the rope between them floating on the surface like an emaciated anaconda.

           

            The work was stealthy, lynx-like, devoid of voices or visions in her head. She tip-toed past Christine and knelt down to the bar that pressure-gripped the anchor of Peyton’s boat. The rope needed to slacken a bit more to undo the hold, so Deborah pulled to close the gap between the boats by a few inches. The lack of light slowed her efforts, but if all remained relatively quiet, there was no real hurry. The engine still murmured with the harmony of wind and wave-break, but Deborah was careful not to clank the galvanized steel against the body of the boat.

              She knew that the weight of the anchor sinking quickly would jostle the speedboat and potentially wake Vernon. To avoid that, the plan needed to risk the potential waking of Christine. Fingers crossed, neither would happen. She balanced the shank and flukes on the corner of the transom, ensuring nothing would rehook.

            Any hesitation was really only to keep the procedure slow. She returned to the captain’s chair yet didn’t sit immediately, preferring to stare for a minute at the opaque scene, the womblike imagination of the speedboat with its unsnipped umbilical cord. There was no ceremony in this—God forbid any witness—and with the minute over, Deborah slid into driving mode and geared gently forward. She heard the scrape of the anchor and its subsequent splash; she didn’t hear Christine react, though, knock on fiberglass. She gradually accelerated to the same speed as before “King of Pain”—there’s a red fox torn by a huntsman’s pack, out of these woods, out of these woods…

 

            The faux of the plan nearly went according to plan: Deborah slouched forward and jerked her forehead up as methodically as the tick on a slowly set metronome. This way, whenever Christine woke up, it would seem as if Deborah was nodding off. In fact, she did several times, shaking in panic each time she came to. A vague question in her mind, among others, was the direction she should veer, as she’d want nothing to do with Gary’s Upper Peninsula, Michigan. Likewise, a line back to Windigo would face the firing line of Jeremy, Heidi, reports to file, a life unlivable. Just as it would be in Canada, if at least she could kill time in the eking toward that nautical border.

            Then, what to do with Christine? Force a thing or two, abbreviate a tale from the darkside, act drunk, slow dance a promise all will work out, slide her off the corner of the transom, now that she had the practice. Join her, if the spirit led—whatever such nonsense meant.

            Or just keep going. ‘Yep,’ she could straight-face to colleagues, ‘sure got lost out there.’

 

~38~

 

            The stones of the fire ring were at the right height to prop roasting sticks for bratwursts, and Jinny also rigged a grill out of wire hangers she ‘borrowed’ from the Interpretive Center’s coatrack at Windigo. On this grill she broiled some peeled potatoes and warmed the hot dog buns, then pop tarts for dessert. “And an apple to brush your teeth,” she said.

            “Plenty of bottled water in the back of the boat,” Eddie reminded. “It’s important to stay hydrated out here. Kind of deceptive with so much water around.”

            “Is it true,” Tara queried, “that our bodies are mostly made out of water?”

            “Hmm,” Jinny hugged her arms to stop from spilling out. “Kind of like Frosty the Snowman?”

            Tara shook her head. “He’s all water. And we’re hotter inside.”

            “These are good questions, kiddo. I remember thinking the same thing in Afghanistan,” Eddie recollected, poking at the fire, “and sometimes being thirsty as heck out on desert duty, like anything we drank… evaporated, it seemed, inside us.”

            “I thought it was cold in Afghanistan,” Jinny shivered for effect, “like here.”

            “Mountains, maybe. But my deployment was in Farah, which is low and blazin’ hot.”

            “Why were you there?” Tommy asked, softening his ire for the evening.

            Eddie breathed in what might have been a prepared response. “Kinda the same as I do now. They need policemen there, too.”

            Tommy scrunched his eyebrows but didn’t follow up. Tara positioned herself to hear more, which Eddie provided in harmless anecdotes—feeding baby camels; helping an old lady out of her collapsed house; earthquakes in that country, natural and otherwise; stars you could study all night long, sometimes to keep awake. “Which we’re not gonna do tonight, right?”

            “Right,” Jinny agreed. “Can you guys get the extra life preservers from the boat. That wool blanket, too—be careful, yeah? Take the flashlight.”

            Eddie watched them scamper with admiration. “You’ve raised them well—they’re…”

            “They’re rugrats at night—gonna be rollin’ all over the tent. If you had designs on sleeping, maybe cut ’em in half.”

            “I said I could sleep in the boat—tent barely made for three, anyhow.”

            “Nonsense. Could rain. Too cold—the tent’s gonna hold in everyone’s body heat.”

            “Melt us like Frosty,” Eddie joked, “times four.”

            “Plus,” Jinny risked, “I might have nightmares about… that stupid beaver.”

            “Wasn’t stupid. Just using instincts we don’t really understand.”

 

            The unzipping of each sleeping bag allowed for more flexibility in spreading them out as wide, fluffy combinations of mattress and blanket. Tara curled kitten-like into one corner of the tent and her brother sprawled in a less disciplined yang from the pillow he made of her knee. Jinny arranged the top sleeping bag to tuck them in and cover her, too, and Eddie overlapped that with the wool blanket that he rolled into on the far side of the tiny tent. He and Jinny caressed hands as they waited for the soft snores of kid slumber.

            That corresponded to a gradual whistle of a western wind. “Did’ja pound the stakes in deep enough?” Jin whispered, not at all worried.

            “Don’t worry,” Eddie returned at the same pitch. “We’re in Noah’s Ark, remember?”

            “Twosies, twosies?”

            They listened to the eggshell energy and let the other be the first to go to sleep. When it became apparent that neither would for a little while, they talked. Deeper context about that baby camel, about the reasons Jinny drove to Grand Portage on a weekday afternoon, about Flat Stanley as a generational fixture in the elementary curriculum. About the blessings of a tent.

            “Somebody told me that the Czech word for tent is ‘stan’.”

            “Hmm. And?”

            “And so, for a while, I lived in Afghani-tent.”

            “As a bohemian guy, right?”

            “As disturbingly numb, most of the time.”

            They snuggled closer and chanced a couple kisses. In a general kind of way, they lofted an unelaborate prayer for Harriet, that tomorrow would find her safe and sound. They pinky-promised not to let the unknown be enemy of eventual truth. Then they sank into the dreamworld of the other creatures on the ark.

 

            By the crack of dawn, the night-long gale had subsided and the overcast sky promised to behave for the purposes of the search. Tommy was up first to run into the woods to pee, then Tara followed when he returned. The adults smiled at the irony of sleeping in on a school day, even as Eddie admitted he often watched tv after shifts to this very hour—last night’s NBA or pundit shows debating the country’s divided direction. Sleep came better after a measure of mind muck, he said, a feeling of getting caught up and being that much more informed before the evening shift.

            Breakfast was another box of pop tarts—blueberry, this time, “good for brain cells, I’ve heard.”

            “Really?”

            A shrug ‘why not?’ before supplying, “the additives can’t be too helpful, so we won’t make a habit of this…”

            Eddie stacked the rolls of sleeping bags and blanket on top of the life preservers and uprooted the tent stakes. “Gonna miss this site,” he mused, “glad to have met ya!”

            “We can come back here, right?” Tommy wanted to be sure of something in this strange journey.

            Jinny looked at Eddie, who pointed his eyebrow back as ‘your call’. She sighed at the prospect. “We’re gonna keep going up the coast—got enough food for lunch and dinner—and head toward Windigo to see what’s what. Maybe even back to the marina and Grandma’s house.” She gauged how this was being received before concluding, “so, no—I don’t think we’re coming back here, nice as it is.”

            With that, they folded up the tent and checked the site “to leave it cleaner than we found it, right?” Tommy took his post between the trees, surveying the lake’s horizon, barely different than the light gray hem of sky.

            He jerked when he heard Tara’s scream: “Mom! Where’s the boat?!”

 

~39~

 

            There’s a thought that floats about Jonah, encapsulated by the giant, Mediterranean fish: conscious or not, he requires a larval stage to undergo a reincarnation; instead of entering as worm and leaving as butterfly, however, he doesn’t change his form at all. At Nineveh, in fact, he demonstrates the same intractable disposition as he had before entering the watery womb. His three moribund days don’t change him much; he hasn’t had a ‘come to Jesus’ moment, really. If anything, he’s like a hockey player thrown into the penalty box for highsticking, planning a less discernible revenge the minute he’s out. Jonah is the mirror image of…

            Vernon had to think this out; of mirror images, he decided. At an uncertain point, his dreaming phase that may have had a place for Jonah (or not) gave way to waking knowledge of the baby-rocker boat. Peyton’s speedboat, going nowhere. Peyton sleeping—rosy enough to prove he wasn’t dead. Vernon had shared his body heat with him, the closest either had come to having a spouse, at least this side of being over-the-hill. They’d gone on fishing trips together, sleeping in the pickup’s slide-in camper, each to a thin bunk. The bottom of this boat was different—something like the belly of a fish.

            It was time to get up. “Rise and shine,” Vernon drolled to his friend, who kept his eyes closed but raised his brows to make his characteristic worry lines. Vernon chuckled at his groggy mug. “We’re back in the military, buddy. Gotta get more done by 9am than most people do all day.”

            Peyton groaned, “says who?”

            “Well,” Vernon levered his elbow, “that ranger lady, probably. Wonder why—” He suddenly changed his tone. “Wonder why we stopped.”

            “Whad’ya mean?”
            Vernon contemplated their unseen options, or, as he tried to poker-face, the lack thereof.

            “Whad’ya mean, Vern?” Peyton repeated. His worry lines smoothed out in the energy required to squint against the morning light.

            “Well,” Vernon pushed himself up to peer above the gunwale. The expanse of opal waves and overcast was blinding; nothing varied but the hint of sun unhinged from the horizon, landless and aloof. “Got ourselves,” he weighed his words, “a pickle of a situation, see.” He looked down to try to make it easier to say. “Not so much in danger, I guess, as just danged lost.”

            Peyton strained to get his stiff body up, pulling on Vernon’s shoulder. “Harriet?” he wisped before his line of vision would make that question moot. “Are you…?” His jaw quivered and his throat tightened against the reflex that something in him would spill—even emptiness, like dry heaves. Vernon, trying to be more valiant, likewise felt this siege upon his senses. He instantly busied himself with the cushions to make them suitable for sitting upright, as much into the tuck of the impotent helm to guard against the wind.

            “Let’s just sit awhile, huh? Kinda… let some minutes pass.”

            “As opposed to what, Wart?”

 

            The anchor line tempered some of the speedboat’s bobs upon the ten-inch waves. Vernon climbed atop the cabin roof and bellied over to assess the situation. The rope disappeared straight down, barely tilting toward the direction of the wind, which Vernon assumed would be from the west-northwest. The ratcheted spindle had the lion’s share of rope still coiled—the fifty feet released for the tow would not, of course, come anywhere near the bottom. Though Canada’s Great Slave Lake was deeper, Lake Superior boasted more volume of depth; Vern had read somewhere that all its water spread out would flood the land mass of both American continents to at least twelve inches. The weight of such a blanket would crush life forms worse than any Ice Age fantasy. Water, being the source of life, constantly reminds of the need for equilibrium.

            The Goldilocks ‘just right’ theory, thought Vernon. And at this moment, Gitche Gumee was as Papa Bear as he could imagine. He wondered whether to release the pawl to drop more rope and slow down their drift, or crank the anchor up to let the wind have freer reign. He decided to do neither, deferring to Peyton’s armchair take on things. Before he’d ask, though, he envisioned where the camouflage boat would have been and how Harriet would look in this morning’s pall. Without the engine roar, they could talk, tell a joke about loons popping up wherever your eyes weren’t. Update Peyton’s vitals and the ranger’s plan to get him to a hospital. As grim as it was that none of this could happen now, Vernon smiled at the imagination.

            “So,” he slid back down to Peyton, “it looks like the anchor didn’t hold onto the ranger’s boat.”

            “Meaning?”

            “Meaning that… we’re on our own.”

            Peyton swallowed what little spit he had. He didn’t want to exacerbate their straits and rather deliberated if this were right to say: “On your own is what you wanted all along.” He cast a glance to see how that would be received. Vernon was listening but didn’t take the bait. So Peyton continued, “to say ‘we’re on our own’ is rich: Harriet and I sure as hell didn’t need to come out here, fetch you from this teenage angst you always seem to have.”

            “Then why did you?”

            “Why did we?” Peyton doubled his volume. His worry lines returned to ask through an imperative: “you tell, me, Vernon. Why indeed did we?”

            Vernon responded with a tacit, minute-long regard for his friend, whose accusation of immaturity, in whatever tone, was not for the first time. “What’s weird,” he said at last, “is that now we need to fetch Harriet, or hope she can fetch us. I s’pose thereafter we can figure everything out. If you’d still be talking to me by then.”

            The men remained silent a stretch of thirty swells of wind. “Talking with you,” Peyton corrected. “I hate talking to someone. Like Bad Company’s ‘Feel Like Making Love’, but—”

             “I get it.”

 

~40~

 

            In ways, being stranded on the northeast half of Isle Royale was as dire as being stranded in the middle of Lake Superior. Jinny and Eddie came running to Tara’s discovery of a boatless dock and all but dropped the vests and sleeping bags they had casually scooped up before the shriek. Tommy approached more warily and decided to report, “I saw yesterday somebody stealing a boat.”

            “What?!” Jinny now put down the vests. “What are you talking about, Tom?”

            Tommy pointed to the mouth of the harbor, puffing out his little chest unconsciously for all the energy he put to being on look-out. “There, when we were coming in here, I saw it.”

            “Saw what?”

            “A boat—like ours—pulling another one, like ours.”

            “You saw that… when?” Jinny was now holding him by the biceps. “And, like, how come we didn’t?”

            His face flushed—heroic feelings suddenly felt betrayed. Eyes glistened with too old to cry yet started to well, glancing over to Tara, bawling now and leaning into Eddie’s attempt to comfort her. “I… I… didn’t mean to… keep…it—”

            Now Jinny embraced him to let him be less accountable. “It’s okay, it’s okay, Tommy. It’s okay…” She swiveled her head to gauge Eddie’s thoughts, as if he had collected them. “We’re not in danger—we’ll figure things out.”

 

            From Tommy’s look-out to the open waters of the lake was a little over a half mile; the craggy shoreline added another quarter mile of winding bedrock level enough to walk. Eddie led a brisk pace and eventually ran ahead in fading hopes he’d see the rental boat at any retrievable distance. Jinny brought up the rear to make sure the kids wouldn't slip or freak out about this nervous turn. Truth be told, she tried not to tell herself, preventing them from freaking out is just a tactic to not do that myself. Being stuck out here—as it seemed the day or looming weekend had in store—would be survivable, but wouldn’t make a dent in their goal to find her mother, whose survival may have already run out the clock. Don’t be thinking that, Dummy!

            “Mom,” Tara stopped to catch her breath, “what… if we… don’t—”

            Tommy kept following in Eddie’s direction until Jinny ordered him to stop. “Nobody panic, okay?” They’d heard her speak with this tremulous calm on some occasions when their dad had come over, drunk or discontent or both. Siblings have a tacit code to let parental arguments boil over, at least until they’ve read beyond Flat Stanley kinds of things. “Nobody panic,” Jinny repeated in slower syllables, nodding a strange kind of yes?

            “Is Eddie gonna come back?” Tommy needed to know. “Let’s not lose him!”

            “We’re not,” now his mother’s nods turned to shakes. “Not going to lose him. He’s…” and she wasn’t sure she knew what to say.

            Tara thought through what she wanted to ask and rehearsed it one last time in her mind before blurting: “he’s trying to be our new dad, isn’t he?”

            Jinny gravitated to a boulder the size of a yoga ball and sat down, rehearsing her response. “He’s trying to find Grandma.” Not what she was rehearsing, as Tara’s staredown seemed to know. “I mean… that’s what we all need to be doing right now.”

            “Maybe Dad took her.”

            “What? How? Why would you think that, Tara?”

            She wanted to say ‘ransom’, but wasn’t sure what that word really meant.

 

            Eddie reached the promontory that hinged the mouth of the harbor to the wide expanse of Lake Superior. A thousand boats could have been upon its surface now and none would necessarily be in sight of any other. He squinted not because the sun had pierced the overcast, but to try to find a mote of difference from the endless shades of blue.

            Gears engaged within his brain. Could the boat have floated inland, toward that beaver? The wind made that unlikely. Would anyone steal it? He pat the soft foam of the key ring in his pocket—a thief would only have the motor of the wind. Might he be dreaming this vanishing act? Then dreaming that Jinny was dreaming it, too. He always hated those David Copperfield illusions about things outside a theatre—the disappearance of the Statue of Liberty, for instance, and stupid oohs from those who witnessed on behalf of TV viewers. How magicians make us doubt what we believe, and vice versa—entertainment, after all—but send those wizards to a war: make the Taliban disappear; restore the Twin Towers; bring back this boat; play god with things that matter, instead of sleight of hand….

            He realized every second standing here would cost another minute of operative action. He had come to Harriet’s door as a cop—a least that evening responding to her daughter’s call. Gotta stay a cop, not a stream of consciousness, a guy who always had a crush on that older girl in high school, who had copped a cigarette and seeded his imagination.

            The children would need an answer, too. Losing the boat might strangely be of graver concern than losing their grandmother, who at this stage in a missing person search was statistically more likely to be dead than alive. Getting back to Windigo, or further to the mainland, would only really happen with another boat. Perhaps they could reset camp upon this promontory, take cues from Tommy and his watchful instincts to flag down a passing vessel. Tara could… keep on being a big sister, even as a little kid.

            “The good news is,” he rehearsed and uttered upon his return, “there’s a clear viewpoint over there that will act as our lighthouse for a boat that’s sure to come on by.”

            All three faces tried to process what that meant. The whisper of a breeze supplied some lag time for their silent wonder. Then Tara ventured to voice what Eddie hadn’t crafted yet: “And the bad news?”

 

~41~

 

            Harriet blinked confusion—a random Morse code sequence to the overcast that had drifted and obscured heaven through the night. She swung her head left and right to remind herself of the absurd immensity of the lake, then remembered the task they had been on to tow Peyton’s speedboat. Completely gone, like the mirage of an oasis. “Deb!” she shrieked before turning to the sleeping ranger, now jostling awake. “Where are the men?”

            The motor had been extinguished, the camouflaged boat bobbing like a huge piece of flotsam. Deborah flinched at the instant thought she needed to steer, avoid some watery ditch, answer to her negligence. “Whoa,” she puffed and followed with a shallow cough. “Looks like—”

            “Looks like you dropped off! And lost your…” Harriet felt the incipience of heaves, implausibly dry.

            Deborah shifted her girth and reached out to offer assistance. “Now, Christine, breathe easy.” She maneuvered toward her by kneeing the floorboard and aiming to clasp Harriet’s shoulders. The latter slid off her cushioned chair and toward the bilge and the bar where Peyton’s anchor should have been hooked.

            “Where?” she snarled, “the hell are they?!”

            With some honesty, Deborah shrugged. She pushed her upper lip into a pout and shook her head. “Dunno. Must’ve shaken loose.”

            “Shaken loose?”

            Both cast their eyes to the barren endlessness of beer can blue. There were no gulls or leaping lake trout; no exhaust trails from airplanes seven miles up—well above the cloud cover, anyway. The lapping of waves against the army green sides of the boat, fooling no one for its reedy decals, beat in the stark reality of their utter isolation.              

            “Yeah.” Deb decided. “Must’ve.”

           

            Both women turned inward for a while. The boat swung gently as a hammock and, whatever physics were involved, inched the two closer to the middle. Occasional mist from an ambitious little white cap added to the modest chill—September seemed Octoberish away from anything to shield the wind. Harriet calculated the hours she’d been upon the lake in recent days, envisioning an abacas that needed several metal rods of colored beads. In moving them in her mind, one became the head of Vernon, another—on a level just below—Peyton’s. Her own, or this hulking ranger’s, she couldn’t conjure. Or wouldn’t, for sanity’s sake.

            Deborah, for her part, was all but penning her suicide note. She emblazoned the imaginary page of legal pad with a title: ‘Anchors Away’; she wondered if an apostrophe was due—like an anchor (or two) possessed the quality of ‘away’. Or if this Christine and herself were strictly nominative: two anchors in the shiftless world who, go figure, got away. Like Mr Snuffleupagus and his sister Alice—the most interesting plotline of Sesame Street. ‘Big Bird was telling the truth, you goddam grown-ups’ became the next line on Deb’s legal pad. Everyone needs invisible friends—far, far better than the ascertainable…           “Christine,” she interrupted her own inchoate manifesto, “did you ever… have…” She couldn’t craft a completer, realizing she hadn’t an actual thing to ask.

            Harriet considered clearing up the whole Christine business, for what would duplicity serve in present circumstances? Instead, she honored the probable notion that Deborah would not do well with extra layers of complication. “Have I… what?”

            “I don’t… really….” She slumped like a turtle and stared at the seat Harriet had slept upon. “I mean,” attempting a restart, “this aint what we thought the week would hold, right?”

            Harriet waited a couple beats, providing a chance for the turtle to try any eye-contact. The assertion merited a swallowed chuckle, a no-shit-Sherlock; at the same time, the desperation between the uttered lines couldn’t be a joking matter. “No, Deb. Not at all what we woulda thought.” She gauged some response, not forthcoming. “And,” pacing out the risk, “first round of Michelobs on me… when we get back to shore.”

            Deborah appeared to grunt, albeit noiselessly. “You want the shore or your men?”

            Biting her lip, Harriet knew those dry heaves would reassemble in the form of tears. “B-both,” and gulping fast to follow with, “why… not?”

            “Fuel,” Deb spoke more to the gauge she clambered to check, “gets us to shore—not to the middle of the lake again.”

            “Well, we have to! Can’t let them drift, with no provisions—”

            “—I have no idea where they’d be. It’s far more likely a surveillance plane would find them, anyway.”

            Harriet stood up and slung her index finger out like a pistol. “Well, you better radio that plane right now! You can’t just—”

            “Cool it, Christine!” Now Deborah’s face reddened with the same, sudden fury. “You want so badly to make that call? Huh?” The ranger grabbed the CB handset off its hook and, with her other hand, ripped the end of the coil from the consul. She threw the mess at Harriet’s bemused face with both hands: “Then you do it!”

           

            Time out. Ageless, that concept, even as decades had passed since either had it applied. Oh, maybe Harriet had to discipline a surly Tommy that way once in a while (Tara, even more rarely). Jinny deserved a grounding every couple of months as a high schooler, way back when. Who didn’t? Deborah, too, reflected on how relatively bad or unbad she’d been through life. Never homicidal to her recollection. Never seriously, at least.

            But back to that legal pad, and somehow Harriet from twelve feet away joined in. ‘If Big Bird needed an imaginary friend, you goddam adults, then he also had a need to give that friend a partner, with dreamy eyelashes and a bow in her butch haircut.’

            ‘And what do you need, Deb, right now?’ Harriet tacitly relayed, her face clenched in supplication.

            The ranger bore into the opposite direction. ‘What does Snuffy need, you mean?’

            ‘Okay. Go with that.’

            The wind probably snatched away the idea. Likewise, Deb tore the phony page from the legal pad, balled it up and tossed it overboard.

           

~42~

 

            “The bad news is…” Eddie sought Jinny on whether to comply with such yin yang expression; Jinny subtly shrugged, so he continued: “we left our excess water and food on the boat. So we gotta—”

            “Are we gonna starve?” Tara asked, strangely as a matter of information.

            “No! No.” Again Eddie begged Jenny wordlessly to intervene. “Won’t let that happen, and,” nodding for emphasis, “someone’s bound to come by.”

            “If they notice us,” Tommy added, adult-like.

            “That’s right. So we have to be seen, and be patient, and—”

            “—be lucky,” Jinny uttered. “Maybe find some berries.”

            Late September, this far north. The flora wouldn’t be a resource. Fauna would be just as truculent—to catch a fish or squirrel without equipment was frankly not going to happen. There was no good news, in Eddie’s quick recalibration, though he put some brave creases on his handsome face. Jinny did likewise.

            “Let’s light a fire first,” Tara suggested, “so a passing boat can see the smoke.”

            “Um,” Eddie responded after a cough into his hand, “kinda early for that. Jumping Jacks would attract attention better. You guys go with your mom to hunt for berries, while I’ll take first watch at the viewpoint, sound good?”

            Their brusque nods weren’t convincing, and Jinny read the duplicity. She knew there’d be no fire as the box of matches remained with the boat—a deliberate choice to ensure they’d stay dry and not forgotten under a campfire stone. In fact, she reflected, maybe even Eddie’s stepping into hull to store stuff for the night had loosened the mooring rope. You’d think a cop would check the mooring rope. Oh, shut up, Jinny! she ground her teeth to stop such thoughts, leading her ducklings away from vast improbability that the lake would take notice of them, let alone care.

 

            Forty nautical miles east southeast, Vernon had rigged up a rudimentary bimini to guard his friend against chill and ultraviolet exposure that, so far, had been mitigated by the sea of unbroken stratus clouds above them. Some handfuls of lake water had to suffice for parching thirst, and Peyton tried to energize himself once or twice to participate in these efforts—even wanting to pee for himself, which Vernon had to prop him up for. No shame in that, of course, but Peyton asserted he wouldn’t burden this mothership much longer.

            “Hey now, c’mon—don’t be that way.” Then Vern voiced a modest “oorah” to jog his memory: “a marine doesn’t fall on his sword—”

            “—I’m long decommissioned, Wart.” Peyton still labored his phrasing and wanted to follow right away with, “I shouldn’t call you that,” which he eventually managed to Vernon’s tender protestations not to worry.

            “Let’s jus’ let the day take its course. Rescue’s gotta be on its way.”

            “If not,” Peyton took pains to say, “take… my house.” His eyes were more bloodshot than tearful. “And take… good care of…”

            “Go easy, buddy—everything’s gonna be cared for—”

            “Harriet. Ask her…”

            Instant on Vernon’s mind was whether she could be any more alive than they at this very moment. “Okay—you’re going to ask for yourself, but go on…”

            “… to marry you.”

            Peyton could have said almost anything else. The topic had been about as common as the Vikings winning a Super Bowl—coulda shoulda kind of talk that laughed off losing (or losing out). Minnesota bachelors as an easy trope for Garrison Keillor, worth owning to uphold the culture. But not about Harriet. That would smack of a therapy session, an intimacy unnatural for as close as they’d been all these years. When Harriet moved to Grand Portage eight years ago, perhaps then the conversation could be tried. Abstractly, as a gentle tease. Then, to know Harriet would be to respect her privacy: not to put her in such straits, to have her worrying about a next door neighbor or his backwoods friend. “Now hang on there, Peyton—you got a better chance for her affirming. I’ll be your best man, no worries about that.”

            “Not… joking, Vern…. Because—”

            “Cuz why? C’mon,” Vern rushed to his friend’s fading aspect, “keep talking, man—cuz why?”

 

            Eighty nautical miles east northeast, well into Canadian waters, the camouflage boat bobbed as if abandoned. Though still too far from shore for gulls, their view from above the boat would find two women slumped in the inertia of the passing hour. The ranger, instead of holding a legal pad and ballpoint pen, clutched the barrel of the unlocked rifle. The hostage, instead of facing that threat, cocked her head toward what would have been the boat’s wake.

            “So you aint gonna try to talk me off this bridge?” Deborah barely asked, her tone belligerent and hollow at the same time.

            Harriet counted to thirteen in her mind—the baker’s dozen she always appreciated to combat the trappings of superstition. “I don’t have anything left to say,” she suggested, even though she had plenty.

            “Then you basically want this trigger pulled.”

            “No.”

            “Twice.”

            “Another no.”

            “Double negative. I figured you’d be smarter than this, Christine.”

            Harriet almost looked her in the eye but kept her shoulder up as a pathetic shield. “That’s not my name, by the way.”

            “Naturally. Why would it be? And now I’m supposed to say my name isn’t really Deborah, and then we brush each other’s hair and talk about boys and how we glitter up our notebooks and blush away our zits.”

            Another count to thirteen. Harriet decided the name thing wasn’t worth explaining. “I’m a grandmother, you know,” seemed more of an in.

            Deborah of course knew. She wanted badly to describe her house—the Archie chair, the loft where those grandkids slept until the nightmare kicked in. The curl of steam from the elegant blow across the surface of a coffee cup. A mouth she’d never get to kiss, unless… “I can’t imagine, Christine. Still gonna call you that, for the time being.”

             

~43~

 

            The old fashioned phone rang on the far end of the counter at the Interpretive Center, jostling Heidi to get out from under Jeremy’s deadweight arm. “Huh?” he uttered when she grunted her way up. Then, like a flash of lightning, he realized the oven in the boathouse had been on all night. “Shit! be right back—”

            Heidi’s attention was only on the phone. “Hello? Yes, Gary—oh my God, I’m glad… What?”

            Jeremy grimaced at the locked door and gestured for the keys. “Hurry,” he whispered, “the pizzas!”

            “Huh? Oh, wait—no, not you Gar—” She flit her eyes to the floor and bent for the tarantula of metal legs. Tossing them to Jeremy, she repositioned the phone to the shrug of her shoulder and right left ear to enable her to type into the computer. “Yeah, I’m here, Gary, just checking the overnight info.” She clicked a few keys but stopped at what she was hearing. “You mean, you haven’t been in contact either?” She bit her lip, swollen somewhat. “And her CB is also unresponsive—I just don’t get it. Unless…”

            Evidently the ‘unless’ had floated in the Houghton consciousness by now. Gary verbalized what the screen, with a few more clicks, now displayed: a dispatch of the Stinson floatplane to Windigo, due within the hour. Washington Harbor would be its landing strip, if any ferry or other boats needed to stay clear.

            “Nothing on the schedule this morning,” Heidi confirmed, “but I’ll send Jeremy out to the mouth just in case.” She hung up the phone, realizing too late she had neglected any kind of goodbye or even whether Gary would be on that plane. Bon voyage, she mouthed before scrambling to the door to follow up with Jeremy.

 

            The boathouse hadn’t burned down overnight. The pizzas on the oven rack had shrunken to a petrified char, and putrid smoke hung stubbornly as Jeremy tried to whisk it out with a dishtowel. “Hungry?” he half-joked, then coughed at his exertion.

            “You gotta secure a landing of the Stinson. I’ll take over this mess.”

            “When is it due?”

            “Takin’ off from Houghton just now.”

            Jeremy rested his weight upon folding table where they would have feasted. “Wouldn’t they do a loop around the island? What d’ya think they want from us?”

            Heidi pugged up her face. “Info, maybe. Support. How should I know?” She opened another window and pulled Jeremy outside. “Just like a social smoker—the room’s gotta breathe last night out.”

            They walked toward the dock. “What’s your own take on all this?”

            “All this… what?”

            Jeremy held her hand, natural by now if also the first time in such an open space. “Deb. Missing campers. Gary coming over to inspect.”

            Heidi feigned a pout. “I thought ‘all this’ was a boyfriend proposal.”

            “Sure. That, too.”

            “Back to business, I’m not sure actually if Gary’s actually in the search crew.”

            “But anyway…”

            “Anyway, I’m worried about Deb. Have been for a while now.”

            Jeremy slowed the pace almost imperceptibly. “Me, too.”

            “Why you?”

            “Well, why you?”

            “I asked you first.”

            “But you expressed your worry first.”

            Heidi didn’t want the banter. She took some seconds to decide to say, “it’s a woman thing.”

            “—that a guy like me wouldn’t understand?”
            “I didn’t say that.” She brushed her pinkie around the heel of Jeremy’s hand. “Deborah’s quite lonely, you know.” She waited for a no shit, Sherlock that didn’t come. She wondered if she would use the word ‘surmise’ and how that would sound. “This is only surmising—I’m not any closer to her than you.”

            “I hope you’re closer to me than to her.” Jeremy instantly regretted saying so, fumbling with, “I mean,”

            “—I know what you mean. And she sees that, too, with everyone, I think.”

 

            They were now at the dock, dithering with the patrol boat that didn’t need to launch just yet. Heidi didn’t elaborate much on what she meant, but dropped a few f’r’instances: Memorial Day last year, when Gary had treated them with a BBQ party already prepared on the deck of the biggest boat they had in Houghton, floating to Windigo unannounced with most the office staff aboard. Some had brought their families—their day off, in most cases—and everyone had a great time. Deb simultaneously tried to blend in and hide.

            “Don’t we all?” asked Jeremy.

            Heidi barely nodded. Kids jumping off the boat when it was allowed by the somewhat buzzed adults, some of whom jumped in as well. And Debbie got body-language upset that someone was going to drown—not that she took to lifeguarding the situation—and sort of tumbled in from the deeper side of the boat, out of sight but conspicuous enough. Minutes later, when someone noticed she hadn’t made her way to the hook-ladder on the stern, she must have pushed from the hull to do the dead man’s float.

            “I remember,” Jeremy added, “that she called it the ‘manatee’.”

            She did, but after the drama was over. Gary dove in to flip her airways upward and hauled her to the ladder, where others hoisted her to the deck. The scramble was professional—rangerlike—and just as Gary got to her chest to pump life back into her, she opened her eyes and spoke as if nothing had happened. “So what’re you waiting for? Permission granted for CPR.” Someone laughed at that, but certainly not Gary.

            “Yeah, but they made it up by the end of day,” Jeremy recalled. “He even chuckled at the manatee self-dig.”

            Heidi scanned the harbor’s channel west of Beaver Island, where the plane would typically skid to a safe speed.       “I think she was practicing that day.”

            “For…?”

            “Your turn to surmise, Jeremy.”

            “Not even sure I know what that means.” He blushed at his lie and busied himself with a check of the motor oil.

            “It means people like us have hoarded what she dreams about.”

            “Sex?”

            “If only.”

 

~44~

 

            If Vernon had been on his pontoon, alone and unconcerned about a heart on the blink, he’d be hankering for a mid-morning nap. He’d take one of his paperbacks and read a chapter or two before nodding off, maybe using the splay of those pages as a face tent against the sun. Or, as in the case of today, the glaring overcast. The absence of books on Peyton’s speedboat made him think of how their present drama might play out.

            “You ever read Lord of the Flies, Pey?”

            The question was a tactic, Peyton knew, to keep him conscious. “Can’t… recall.” He raised his bloodshot eyes to supply a measure of ‘do tell.’

            “It’s not our present situation, exactly. The opposite, probably.”

            Peyton forced a smirk. “In’resting. Now… I re—”

            “Hey, don’t strain yourself.”

            “…member. Opposite.”

            “Well, yeah. They’re kids stranded on an island and we’re…”

            Peyton made a shallow cough before supplying, “the same.”

            “Come to think of it, maybe true. Anyhow, they want to get rescued, see, at least at first. And their plan was to keep a fire burning on the mountain—plenty of wood, or ‘creepers’ they kept referring to. Problem was the igniter. Only one kid had glasses—”

            “Piggy,” Peyton lightly puffed.

            “That’s right! You do recall, then, after all. When I first read it I related to Simon, the loner who gets mistaken for the beast they collectively create—the boar’s head on a stick.”

            Another puff: “Piggy.”

            “Hmm. Never thought about that. Piggy dies another way.” Vernon tightened up his face. “Probably shouldn’t have brought it up. Only for the opposites.” He let that thought settle before remembering why he had it on his mind in the first place. “Just that—and you may slug me for the suggestion—a signal fire might do us a favor out here.”

            Peyton grunted out a “hell no,” but mused at the absurdity that saved Vernon from his own immolation.

 

            They fell asleep on that note, cradle-rocking with the waves. Conceivably, the boat had properties of an islet in the south Pacific—a mound of sand with a single coconut tree. No coconut, of course. The question of cannibalism would enter a mind at a certain point, right? Only to dry heave it away. But if one or the other had already died, wouldn’t pragmatics kick in? One or the other might have drifted to the consideration, trying to stay asleep or wake from wicked dreams.

            The buzzing of the prop plane opened their eyes at exactly the same time. Evidently, by the angle of its wings, the pilot was circling them in recognition. The cloud layer forced it to fly relatively low, but not close enough for Vernon to see the face of the pilot. He dropped his view to the altitude of waves and imagined how a water landing would handle the white caps, let alone how the plane would build enough speed for a takeoff. He’d seen these in Thunder Bay, even his own Greenwood Lake once for a plane in distress. Much calmer water, though.

            Tipping the wings like a weighing of options, the pilot was practically reading Vern’s thoughts. A closer, lower round enabled the copilot to open his side window and wave, compelling a response to gauge urgency. Vernon mimed a heart attack and pointed overtly at Peyton, still lying on his back but showing his palms so as to say, ‘I’m not dead yet’. The copilot pointed to his watch and then swirled an ellipse to suggest they’d come back in a little while.

            “Or send a tugboat!” Vernon shouted through the cone of his hands. The plane tipped its wings as a way of understanding.

            Peyton waited for the sound to fade before protesting in his wispy voice: “Fred… Sanford… you made… me… seem.”

            Vernon slid down beside him. “Rest easy, buddy. I think we’ll be outta these woods soon enough.”

            “Woods?”

            “Good point. Back into the woods where we belong.”

 

            An hour passed, then part of another. “Maybe my mime wasn’t Sanford enough,” Vernon mumbled. “Or maybe they lost our coordinates.”

            Peyton didn’t move. His slight breathing movements proved he was still alive, but this waiting game couldn’t be good. Perhaps the plane had been just a mirage—a tease intended to buy a half-day of hope.

            It came in a ranger boat that, except for the lack of camouflage, resembled the one Deb had driven. “You know who I’m talking about?” Vernon asked this new ranger after he and his deputy helped position Peyton more comfortably into their boat.

            “Of course we know Ranger Wilcox,” he said. “Do you have info of her whereabouts?”

            Vernon blinked at that question, envisioning Harriet (not that damn Deb) blue in the face at the bottom of the lake. “I... I don’t…. Her boat had towed us this far, and—”

            “We’re going to have to leave yours floating for now. We’ll fetch it later.”

            “Of course, of course.” Vernon’s voice trembled.

            The ranger conducted a final check of things before shoving the boats apart and starting the engine. The deputy squatted beside Peyton, taking his pulse. After jotting it down on a spiral pocket pad, she assured, “you’ll be okay, Mister…”

            “Peyton,” Vernon answered for him. The instant roar of the ranger boat prevented further introductions. He managed to ask where they were headed, however.

            “Eagle Harbor,” the deputy practically yelled. “Ambulance there will get you guys to Houghton.”

            So that part was true, Vernon reflected. Don’t think badly of good intentions. But then, back to the lake bed. He would never forgive himself if she were there right now. He’d repudiate any forgiveness from Peyton, assuming he’d extend such a hand. How could a stupid pontoon stunt involving no one else  maim one friend and murder another? How could this go so belly up?

            The deputy read his worry lines. She avoided eye contact but reached for his hand, another pulse if need be.

 

~45~

 

            Flying low, below the cloud cover, had the advantage of seeing each swell of water and anything that might not be water. But the view for the pilot and copilot was not vast. They communicated very little verbally and pointed more at cockpit gauges and screens to show what was on their minds, at least in terms of the mission.

            Gary sent them, veterans of a cumulative thirty years, to hasten to Windigo with a measure of surveillance along the way. A ‘zipper line’ he called it, straight enough not to get snagged off course, but putting as much of the search zone behind them as reasonable.

            They sent coordinates of the speedboat they’d just circled around and Gary dispatched a ranger from Eagle Point. Roger, that. They had coordinates of a rental boat from a Grand Portage tracker that was a couple miles north of their flight path to Windigo. Four passengers—adult male, adult female, two children—hadn’t turned in the vessel nor communicated in the twenty-four hours out. While the connection of this uncoded APB wasn’t clear, Gary intuited that it could be absorbed in their search for the missing campers and, with the fast unfold, Ranger Wilcox. Indeed, Heidi had confirmed a description of the renters having stopped in at the Interpretive Centre, and her thought that they’d circle Isle Royale as anxious relatives to one of the campers.

            With a GPS sticker on this rental, it wasn’t much of a needle in the haystack to find. The pilot executed a similar fly-by to note no occupants, unless by chance all were tucked within the tiny cargo holds. By design, though, the rental company reduced these to size of extra life preservers and such. The copilot called it in on the radio as “abandoned”, presuming even that passive act of volition. Gary forward this data to the Coast Guard and audibly sighed over the radio waves. “Hey, safe landing in Washington Harbor, yeah?”

 

            Roger, that. Jeremy escorted the pilots in and topped off their tank with a reserve of aviation fuel he’d rarely have to rummage. Then he joined them at the Interpretive Center where Heidi had put Gary on speakerphone mode. The voices in the room volleyed what they knew and wondered, what might establish a wise use of resources. “Why don’t we have GPS trackers on ranger boats?” was a question that stirred some debate: a ranger’s phone would provide that, right? or a CB signal? None of that was available concerning Deborah or her camouflage boat. And no one, of course, had knowledge of an older lady as her ward.

            “Alright,” Gary decided, “aerial cross-section of the island for two hours max—fuel enough?” Roger that. “Thunder Bay’s been contacted—Mounties from Sleeping Giant offered to cruise around the spit, from Amygdaloid Island up.” Nothing against Canada, no one had to roger that; the more open eyes, the better.

Heck, even some closed eyes, for those inclined to pray that way.

 

            To kill time, which was sorely running out, Jinny bid the children to recite as many nursery rhymes as they could remember. Tommy protested how babyish that would be, but chimed in with lines Jinny recalled from ‘The Cat in the Hat’: “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me NOW! It’s fun to have fun, but you have to know how.”

            “Not exactly a nursery rhyme,” Tara smirked, wondering what genre ‘Flat Stanley’ was.

            “Well,” her mom prodded, “what’s your example, then?”

            She shrugged. “Jack and Jill, maybe.”

            “So—start: ‘Jack ’n’ Jill went… up… C’mon!”

            “I don’t want to. It doesn’t make sense, anyhow.”

            “What doesn’t make sense?” Jinny pretended to look for berries as she asked.

            “Just… everything. Why do they go up a hill to fetch a pail of water? Like, the water should flow downhill, right?”

            “They need a pail,” explained Tommy, “which somebody left up there.”

            “Hmm. Hadn’t thought of it that way.”

            Tara wasn’t satisfied. “And if Jack falls down and breaks his crown—”

            “’Cuz he’s king of the hill,” Tommy snuck in.

            “—then why, stupidly, does Jill come tumbling after? I mean, what is she thinking?”

            “She’s not,” said Tommy, setting up his favorite joke, “she’s snot!”

            Jinny didn’t want a sniping fight. “It’s a good question, honey. Lots of nursery rhymes don’t satisfy our hope for learning lessons or following good leads. The boy who called wolf, for instance.”

            Tommy hadn’t heard that one, and despite Jinny’s regret in bringing that up in these circumstances, she recited it with an altered ending: “and when the boy saw no one there to believe him this time, he ran like crazy to the village, where the wolf knew he wouldn’t dare enter.”

            “That’s not how it goes!” Tara ignored her mother’s side glance. “The boy gets devoured like Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother.”

            One word too far. They had almost forgotten in the past hour about Harriet, their reason for venturing to this end of the known earth. And yes, the less-than-grim denouement has the woodsman axing her free from the bad wolf’s belly. A grimy reunion to restore the idyllic universe, no longer naïve. Then again, Jack’s crown doesn’t necessarily heal, and Jill’s no help, no hero. God, these stories are god-awful. Dumb suggestion, Jinny! At the same time, Jinny tallied these internal punches at self, reminding herself of the one-hand rule. For tallying, not punching.

             

            “What’cha up to?” Eddie emerged from lakeside brush. The three had given up on berries and nursery rhymes and had no other ideas than to lie on moss and look into the overcast.

            “See that swirl?” Jinny pointed like they were studying the Sistine Chapel. “I bet that’s an octopus leg.”

            “Where’re the others, then?” Tommy challenged.

            “Snuggled in. Which I’d do if I were an octopus in a cloud.”

            Eddie lay down next to Jinny, who found his hand. “Can I play, too?” he asked.

            Tara filled the small silence. “Play a woodsman?”

           

~46~

 

            “The worst thing anyone ever said to me?” Deborah repeated Harriet’s truth or dare. It was the latter’s effort to reverse psychology and build upwards from this floating nadir. “The worst thing said to me,” Deb turned an icy eye, “was nothing. No one ever talked to me, as if I was a porcupine.”

            “Ever?” Harriet asked with muted disbelief.

            “Eventually,” the ranger continued, “I joined them.” She scratched underneath the hem of her untucked shirt. She seemed to be waiting for Harriet’s ‘how?’ which wasn’t forthcoming, so she supplied it “by not speaking to myself.”

            The elephant in the room—the unseen shores of Lake Superior and the walnut confines of the camouflage boat—was this very exercise of talking things out. Harriet rehearsed her next line a couple times before uttering, “surely, though, there are other porcupines. Otherwise, we’d be hard-pressed to know of their existence.”

            Deb, with the shotgun squared across her lap, demurred: “a shadow doesn’t mingle with another shadow, even when they overlap. So to hell with finding fellow creatures. When it comes to it, I’m just the frickin’ shadow of a porcupine.”

            “Then there must be light—several sources of light, if the shadows overlap.”

            “You gonna talk about God, now?” Deborah asked with no telling what she’d do with that trajectory, though a stroke of the shotgun’s barrel added to her body language.

            “Well, I don’t know what to say about God. But I think he listens. Or she. Especially in darkness. Shadows are pretty interesting—kinda the spawn of light but also their own, cool distinction. Dependent, but not.”

            “Able to blend into the night.”

            The ranger seemed to turn robot, making it difficult for Harriet to add her, “yeah, ‘blend’ is… interesting.”

            “You writing this down, Christine? I mean, taking mental note?”

            “I told you that isn’t my name.”

            The robot searched from some recall from the back pew of a sanctuary in Silver Bay. “‘So Jesus asked the man who begged to be healed, “What is your name?” and he replied “Legion”, because many demons had gone into him.’ Gospel of Luke, chapter infinity.”

            Harriet, searching the irises of her captor, had vague recollection of that story. Not enough to know what would come next: the demons begging Jesus not to cast them out into the abyss, abstractly, but into a fortuitous herd of pigs feeding on the hillside nearby; and so the transfer occurred, and

            “The herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned,” the lack of irises said.

 

            In the recesses of her mind, Harriet continued counting to thirteen, slowly and over and over again. She told a few things about her life: a penchant for pressed flowers in most of the many books in her house; a 1980 Olympic bid for synchronized swimming, crushed by the boycott; a longing for a Michelob right about now. She interspersed questions for Deb, too, all met with a sullen silence. Something about that herd of pigs had subsumed her. And the one time Harriet hazarded a “what will we do with the rest of today?”, Deborah stood the butt of the rifle between her heels and measured how far the lean back would need to be. She didn’t fire just then, yet effectively shut up her captive for an uncountable while.

 

            She shuffled it to her side with the sudden streak of an Air Force jet, brick red with a cubist maple leaf imposed on its belly. The plane maneuvered to acknowledge the sighting—Harriet’s arms shooting up and waving in instinctive celebration—then continued on its original course.

            “Well, that should tell you where we’re at,” Deborah monotoned.

            “Canada?”

            The ranger stood up and gestured for Harriet to do likewise. Like bowling pins at opposite ends of the hull, Deborah clung to her gun and Harriet to the back light, rising as a cane from the transom. “Canada is immaterial. A jet like that is patrolling for no invaders, only folks like us who’ve lost their way.”

            “So, we’ve been found, then.” Harriet felt a blush of blood rush from her rib cage to her collar bone, or thereabouts. She hoped it wouldn’t alter her solemn-looking face.

            “Yes, we’ve been found. And to say it’s been nice is, well,” Deborah seemed to count her own rendition of a hidden thirteen. “It’s a damned lie, Christine, is what it is.”

            “My name is Harriet. Harriet Anderson—no middle name. ‘Christine’ is only what Peyton called me.”

            “And the other guy called you ‘Hare’ cuz you fancy running.”

            “I was really more of a swimmer, as I mentioned. But yeah, ‘Hare’ as short for Harriet.” Disclosing truth could make a person feel better or worse. Harriet felt neither, truth be told. Her eyes were heavy for the lack of blinking, looking for a breakthrough. They still couldn’t read the buttoned orbs of her captor. 

            As for her part, Deborah thought over the next few minutes. An apology? A reveal of the actual worst thing anyone ever said? An explanation of how a seemingly single-barrel shotgun has two shells, and whether Kurt Cobain had a second one in the little elevator below the bolt. Instead, she took a folksy tone while leveling the weapon. “It’s been nice, Christine.”

            “No! It hasn’t!” Harriet put up her palms and stammered. “I swear I wouldn’t turn you in if…”

            “If you survived? Or if you ’n’ me both? Doesn’t make sense.”

            “Please,” tears finally gathered in the wells, as if from out of hiding. “Please—for my grandkids! Names are… please, please, please,” her breath was failing. “Tara… and Tommy—”

            “And your daughter, right?”

            “J-Jinny, right! For… her, too, please—”

            Deb smirked. “That’s maybe who I’m doin’ this for. Free her up from the likes of me.”

            “What? No! I don’t understand, Deborah! Please… put it down and… and talk to me… I’ll listen…”

            Nothing but a gun blast jostled the very being of Gitchie Gumee. Then another.

 

~47~

 

            The pilot named Jackson was experiencing a squishy stomach—“lit’l lower, actually,” he tried to joke it away—“usually,” grunting, “I’m known for my guts.”

            “Just run for the can, Jack,” his compatriot encouraged. “Plane’s not goin’ without you.”

            “Yeah,” Jackson strained, “be… right… back,” weebling his way to the john.

            Jeremy tried to stifle a giggle, harder when Heidi shot him a don’t you dare. She waited for the bathroom door to close before slugging his shoulder. “You got any solutions, wise ass?”

            “Well,” rubbing what certainly wouldn’t bruise, “not really. I try to keep my wisdom from seepin’ out.”

            The other pilot pretended that was funny. “Oh, Jack’ll be alright. It’s me to worry about—if I hit one of our eject buttons by mistake!”

            Heidi wasn’t in the mood for this. “I don’t think we met before.” No hand extended. “I’m Heidi.”

            He extended his, which she touched for a second. “Jason. Got an island o’ Jays here, it seems.”

            “Not a ‘j’ in my name. Or Deborah Wilcox, who you’re looking for.”

            Jason nodded. “Yes, Ma’am—didn’t mean to… um…”

            “Jest?” Jeremy offered. “But hey, Heid, lighten up a bit. Being grim isn’t any better’n—”

            “Just shut up, Jeremy. Maybe you two should yuk it up in the skies and leave poor ol’ Jackson here to recuperate.”

            “I can’t fly—you know that.”

            “Wouldn’t matter actually,” Jason said. “I fly solo enough over open water, and following shoreline is lots easier. All I’d need is a surveillance partner, and maybe Heidi’s right—Jack may not be fit for that.”

            Jeremy obviously didn’t want to leave terra firma. In the half-minute of everyone looking at their shoes, he channeled silent ways of saying that. Wisdom did seep out, though, as “I’ll go—it’s Debbie that matters here.”

            Heidi scrutinized him. “I never heard you call her that…”

            “Well,” he shrugged, feigning a sensitive shoulder, “She ‘n’ I been on this island longer than you. Not that…” And he dropped the thought.

 

            Jackson came out a couple minutes later and accepted a cup of ginger tea Heidi had the presence of mind to heat up. Jason broached the idea that he’d stay at the Windigo station for a spell, but the veteran waved that option away. “I’m good,” even though he still look it. “Tea’s good, too,” he expressed after a sip.

            The four talked about Deb. Impressions, really, just to add that element of predictability in their search. She could be moody, Jeremy said, but hid well in a veneer of something almost ambivalent—a ‘keep calm and carry on’ when there wasn’t anything not to be calm about.

            “She like it here, Isle Royale?” Jason asked, as if he were shopping the neighborhood.

            Heidi responded with a fair sense of logic, stringing clauses that implied a why wouldn’t she, yet avoided the invitation of doubt. “Still,…” Jeremy tried to crystalize: that time she spent an hour on the phone—right over there, where Gary called from this morning—and played with the coils the whole time wrapping each finger like a mummy, nice and tight, then the bone-white result to get flooded with blood again, only to do the next and next and next—a Valley of Kings to release to the world, it seemed. A couple times Heidi, who’d also been in the room then with Interpretive Center-type things to do, qualified the tension of those coils, how she volleyed the phone from one ear to the other as anyone would do over the course of an hour. Wanting perhaps a touch of eavesdropping, but not having much to say. Whispers here and there and even, absurdly it seemed, a shushing to whatever pressed into her ear—like the ear itself was trying to mute the other voice for a stretch of heightened rhetoric, followed by some welcome levity. An inside inside joke, punchline unneeded. Then a baker’s dozen bids goodbye—not like lovers do, but kids at zoo—getting in those final looks at the polar bear, hoping it would plunge into the window-walled pool once again to cool off from the summer swelter.

            “Sounds like she likes someone,” Jason figured after all that.

            Heidi eyeballed Jeremy, who resorted to his shoes—all wise ass thoughts removed. “Deb hung up the phone,” she continued the recollection, “and made a point to tell us, ‘I’m out if they call back.’”

            “And did he?” Jason asked, “or she? Call back, I mean?”

            “Couldn’t. That phone hadn’t worked for a week,” Jeremy supplied. “Fallen branch had snapped the line after a storm. I was supposed to fix it by then.”

            “And Deborah knew—”

            Heidi finished—“knew that we knew.”

 

            The tea only added to the fluids Jackson had to expel, so the decision was fairly clear to keep him grounded. Jeremy grabbed his binoculars, remarking that the camouflage on the ranger’s boat would make it trickier to find against the cover of certain inlets. Jason studied the map on the wall to see which areas Jeremy had in mind, if all the island was indeed a haystack to the needle that was Deb.

            They were about to leave the Interpretive Center for the Stinson when Heidi asked everyone to sit for a minute—“like my host family in Russia did when I was a foreign exchange.” It was explanation enough, evidently, as no one cast a dubious glance. Heidi would have said the Russians did this for the prospect their roads would never cross again—not because the plane would crash, but… just the sifting ways of sand. A prayer, perhaps, for those who wouldn’t do so otherwise.

            Jackson was the first to jostle up—he’d need to use the loo again. Jason was next, replacing his folding chair against the wall where it had been. Jeremy sat another quarter minute before moving, moose-like, to where Heidi had risen. Aware they’d never been public this way, they hugged as if they were Russian.

 

~48~

 

            The ambulance at Eagle Harbor had room enough in back for both Vernon and Gary to sit while the lone paramedic monitored Peyton’s re-hydration, mostly. He was rallying, for sure, in this bigger casket of care. Gary tried to make this moment not too much an interview, but, naturally, things needed to be known. “So, the last time you saw Ranger Wilcox was… when, exactly?”

            “Well,” Vernon mulled, “the last time I saw her boat was, I dunno, just before sunset. We were cruising along like a cargo train.”

            “Hobos,” Peyton huffed from the gurney.

            “Glad you’re alert, Mr Elsruud,” Gary responded, “but save your energy—wanna get you back on your feet, you know.”

            “I think we’re heading there,” affirmed the paramedic.

            Vernon filled in more details about the journey and the way they woke up, just floating as if the anchor rope had broke. Gary imagined the anchor slipping its grip, but it didn’t square that Deborah would notice that. He was wary about thinking all this out aloud, but to some degree he needed to. He worried she might have noticed in the middle of the night, circled back to recover, got lost. It bothered him that communication channels were cut off—as if this were happening decades, even centuries ago. No one wanted to broach a deliberate prong as a possibility, a kidnapping of Harriet, who now became Gary’s focus:

            “So she’s about your age?”

            “Younger looking, but yeah. Spry.”

            “Good,” Peyton uttered, after a little cough, “grandma.”

            “Yours?” Gary tried to joke. “No—don’t explain—I already heard she’s your neighbor. Must be good livin’ there in Grand Portage. More peaceful than Houghton, I’d suspect.”

            “Jaws of the Wolf?” Vernon mused, assuming Gary would share that view of Keweenaw Peninsula.

            “Yep,” he nodded. “You got the eye up there in Isle Royale; we got the salivating tongue.”

            “All the same creature though—at least its head.”

 

            Gary stayed on at the hospital while Peyton was being checked out. The prospect he’d be treated as an outpatient was absurdly realistic, given the stance of insurance companies and the untoward cause of his condition. You got what you bargained for seemed to be the eye-relay of the registrar when she heard from Vernon the manner in which the heart attack occurred. Gary, also, was nonplussed at the tale. “The pontoon blew up? And the fire is how they found you in the thick of night?”

            “Seems so. Fire came first,” Vernon reflected. “Or… I guess their concern had to be there, in the first place.”

            They remained silent for a minute, the way a waiting room tends to have the ebbs of conversation against the prevalence of solemn walls and white noise. Vern decided to contextualize that pontoon a bit—less about the push-out from Greenwood Lake and more about the Higbee, getting hit and not sinking during the Vietnam War. Then sinking afterward, if never completely drowning. He told Gary about his nickname, Wart. How even Peyton called him that on occasion, innocuous enough like Charles Barkley being the Round Mound of Rebound, or even ‘Fatso’ to his closest friends. A frog shouldn’t drown—it can hibernate for months in mud, cling to seaweed roots as the ice descends—but still not drown. The heart and lungs of the little thing tend to stop, sometimes outright freeze; then spring comes to thaw it out, and Wart is back in business.

            “Looking for a Missus Wart?” Gary thought it not insensitive to ask.

            Vernon was a lifetime ready for such a question, rarely posed out loud. “Oh, for certain… lookin’. Even blind guys gotta look. But that’s about the extent of things.”

 

            An orderly came over to indicate that Peyton could be visited now. They followed, single file on the right side of the corridor—less to honor traffic laws than have these few seconds not to talk. The orderly stopped and pointed at a doctor outside a room, scribbling some notes old-fashioned style. She peered up to her approachers and gestured to a bench out of earshot of the closed door. No one ended sitting down, however. “Nothing too serious, all things considered,” she began. “Initial tests show a coronary artery spasm—what’s sometimes known as a ‘silent heart attack’.”

            “Not a real one?” Vernon asked.

            “Oh, they’re real—and scary enough to traumatize. But technically not a cardiac arrest with a consequence of brain damage—though trauma can do that, too. At any rate, we’ll monitor him at least overnight and run a few more tests.”

            “Good,” said Gary, then, turning to Vernon, “if that’s good for you.”

            “I mean, sure. It’s not about—”

            Gary reached for his shoulder. “We can put you up at the ranger station—no problem.”

            The doctor had another topic. “From what I understand—he was pretty emotional and not so coherent—he’s worried about… Christine? Still out there on the lake?”

            “You mean,” Gary wagged his head between the doctor and Vern, “Harriet?”

            The doctor shrugged. “I have no idea… if this is hallucinatory or real or—”

            “Harriet’s real,” Vernon clarified, “and… ‘Christine’ is…”

            He bit his fist just as Gary’s cellphone rang. “Excuse me,” he mumbled before answering and inching down the corridor.

            The doctor gave Vernon a moment; he puffed his cheeks and lifted his eyebrows to encourage more from her side. “Is she his wife? Or was she?”

            “No—and we don’t know ‘is’ or ‘was’ out there… in the ranger’s boat. They were heading here, towing us… Peyton may’ve told you that.”

            She nodded in slo-mo. “Sorta, he did. What’s your take?”

            Vernon’s take. He opened up his fist and searched for lifelines. Before he could assemble any more syllables, Gary came back with the phone slacked against his hip and his other hand stroking his forehead. “We might need to sit down, actually,” he stammered. But still no one did. “Canada’s Coast Guard.” He tunneled the notion. “Awfully bad news—”

 

~49~

 

            Though a hundred miles away, Jinny might have heard the gunshot—gunshots, if it came to quantifying unsubstantiated things. She was trying not to sleep—the opposite of counting sheep—as she stroked Eddie’s ribcage. “How come you don’t have a holster?” she wanted to know.

            The kids were sleeping on the moss. Still, Eddie shushed before responding, “I’m off-duty, remember? And I don’t much like guns anyway. Wouldn’t carry if I didn’t have to.”

            “Why’d you become a cop then?”

            The breeze was a narcotic—September sweet with a guarantee of icy air to come, perhaps tomorrow. “I fell into it,” he said, “’cause people said I’d wanna,… I don’t know,… understand trouble at its crossroads.”

            “Which people?”

            “Typical ones. Mom maybe more’n Dad. Pub buddies—got some practice there, and under no circumstances would a gun ever do anybody any good.”

            Jinny stayed silent for a while. “If you had one here,” she decided to try, “we could hunt a moose.” Eddie might have smiled—she couldn’t feel that subtlety against his chest. “And maybe we’d survive.”

            “Oh, we’ll survive alright. Just gotta wait—have faith in systems.” Eddie was smiling, subtly. “Kinda glad I couldn’t make phone contact, actually. It means the precinct will be looking for me.”

            “They’ll think I kidnapped you.”

            He massaged her triceps. “I promise not to press charges.”

            They continued to talk as long as the children would naturally nap. If they would survive in this wilderness, long-term, they’d need to set up a school—Eddie suggested something like the one in Billy Jack, where they had just three rules. Since Jinny had seen that movie too, they tried to recollect what exactly those three rules were—the need for everyone to carry their own weight—that they were sure of. And ‘no drugs’ rang a bell—probably rule #1 out there, beyond the reach of peddlers but not necessarily somebody’s secret stash. Then what was the last rule? It escaped them as they drowsily sunk into the dance of sugarplum ferries.

 

            A cool drizzle woke them, four napping cats suddenly scrambling for some cover. The tent had been packed into its nylon bag, expecting to be on the rental boat by now; Eddie pulled it out at least as a tarp, their heads serving as slumping pillar capitals. They debated whether or not to set it up again—maybe at the promontory where they had planned to watch for passing ships. But if they wouldn’t come, or if no one on board was looking, or if looking they only saw a tent in no particular trouble…

            The back-and-forth had to be diplomatic, as panic could metastasize. Jinny thought the waiting could be done for one day maximum, then they’d need to hazard the long and sometimes pathless way back to Windigo on foot. “It’s one of those things—do you gamble on someone else’s help or resort to your own?” Tommy didn’t know this word ‘resort’ but probably figured it out. Tara knew it as euphemism—like a resort hotel for happy, rich people. She may have even read it in a Flat Stanley book, having to resort to different patterns as a two-dimensional being. At least in fiction-world, sliding under doors and turning invisible to a perpendicular line of sight had definite advantages. But these wouldn’t inform their flesh-and-blood dilemma.

            They decided to put it to a vote, Eddie taking out a coin to be the potential tie-breaker (if in his mind, Jinny would make the final call). As a preliminary procedure, they had to consider how to do this fairly, so that one opinion wouldn’t have to react to the other. Jinny knew this method from school, but it required stepping back into the drizzle: if everyone pointed straight up at the sky and, after the count of three, stretched that arm in the direction of the lake of the deeper land, that would eliminate ‘order bias’, which Tara was proud to explain off the top of her head. Tommy, skeptical, wanted it explained by an adult—Eddie, in particular.

            “It’s like if you could choose to eat pancakes or tacos, but I wouldn’t tell you what time of day it was.”

            “Huh?”

            “Just don’t worry,” his sister said, eager to exercise her first real shot at democracy.

            “Ok,” Jinny gestured, “one arm up—straight like a tower. And you know where the lake is and where we’d have to hike, right?” They both nodded. Eddie put his arm up, too, without his trigger finger extended; his eyes were downcast, reflective like an Olympic medalist in Mexico City. Jinny continued, “so right on three, okay? One,... two,… three!”

            Tommy jabbed toward the lake and Tara, a millisecond slower, dropped her hand the other way. Eddie wavered as Jinny paralleled Tara’s vote. He flipped the quarter to Tommy, who caught it, and joined the landed vote. “It’s not against you, buddy,” he assured, “but if lightning comes with rain, we’ll need the extra tree cover.”

 

            It made sense, and they made quick time to gather up the tent again and sleeping bags and go toward where they had previously seen the semblance of a trail. The drizzle had ended—a heavenly ploy to force a reckoning—so the dirt hadn’t the chance to become muddy. Some rocks were slippery though, and Jinny constantly warned to watch footing.

            Thirty miles on emptying stomachs left no margin for error, but still the kids prattled on in front of the adults when a trail was evident, then behind them when guesswork had to happen. “A blank slate aint a bad thing,” Eddie opined in Jinny’s ear. “Keeps the journey creative.”

            She wasn’t so sure, but perked up to the jog of her memory: “rule #3 at that Freedom School was… drumroll, please—” to which Eddie tapped fingers on her shoulderblades— “to create something, heart and soul.”

            Such optimism carried ten minutes, at least, despite the hopelessness that had no rules.

 

~50~

 

            Gary didn’t have the details, but he sputtered out the essentials in this order: a National Park Service boat found half-submerged; an almost headless ranger slumped within the upper hull; another body in a life-jacket, clinging to the backlight.

            “Alive?” Vernon urged.

            “Your Harriet,… apparently,” Gary shook to say. “Deborah… not.”

            The doctor called a colleague—the psychiatrist on duty, she openly admitted—with the original intention of flagging the Christine delirium, but now to help process the news. “Let’s go to my office,” she spoke in a hush, “to prevent Mr Elsruud from overhearing anything.”

            Another phone call there established a hasty proposition to have a Pukaskwa National Park helicopter fly 150 miles over the heart of the lake to deliver Harriet—escorted by Mounties—to Houghton’s Coast Guard authority. She wasn’t under arrest or, frankly, under much suspicion, but they’d need to iron out the story; with a US ranger involved and Harriet’s claim of her suicide, the problem wouldn’t be Canada’s.

            But the boat—tethered to an emergency buoy for its gaping hole near the motor—remained an investigation site. And Deborah’s corpse would stay at the morgue in Marathon, Ontario for the time being—too much on short notice for the helicopter to carry.

            A mosaic of facts and supposition formed from Gary’s phone to the strategy session on how to receive Harriet. Peyton was still oblivious, and Vernon left the doctors to stay with him, promising to keep mum on the little he had gathered about Harriet’s condition. She would receive a thorough medical exam upon arrival, of course, but assurances were coming in that she had no symptoms of hypothermia—having been in the water only minutes before the Canadian Coast Guard raced to the site, tipped off by an Air Force flyover. Harriet had described for them the hours-long standoff and then those consequential seconds: her pleas to put the shotgun down as Deborah leveled it at Harriet’s head, then chest, then abdomen like a fuel gauge suddenly going empty; the instant slant to the space next to her feet; the thunderbolt from the barrel. Harriet dropped in the fast-expanding puddle and lifted her head just as Deborah palated the barrel head and stretch her right arm down to push the self-destruct. To describe the rest, she said, could not be done with any heart—the pieces of the person no more than smoke is of the log, let alone the log’s nostalgia of the tree.

           

            None of this, then, needed debriefing when Harriet stepped out of the helicopter on the clinic’s landing circle. Vernon hung back at the rooftop door as Gary approached her and the Mountie escorts. She nodded at what he told her with both comprehension and disbelief, then ran unrestrained to Vernon, having figured out his presence.

            He held onto her unlike any of the couple dozen hugs he might have had in life, all of which had felt like a fleeting apology over nothing really wrong. Now, knowing how rightly wrong he’d been this week, he didn’t feel that shame—impossible, maybe, in her minute-long embrace. “So,” he tried to muffle his sobs in her puffy collar, “the loon… does… resurface, eventually—”

            “—you callin’ me a loon, Vernon?”

            “You… you’re okay?”

            She showed him her eyes to make him really look—little convex mirrors if he’d like. “No,” she softly said, “not altogether. But that makes two of us, huh?”

            “Peyton’s… here, too.”

            Information she knew, conveyed in the troposphere between an unknown Gary to unknown Mounties. “How’s he—” Now she sputtered in the need for cover in Vernon’s arms.

            “You know, he’s…” Vernon tried to read Gary’s approach for any cues—what to say or otherwise.

            Gary led them down to the doctor’s office, risking a joke about broken hearts and Cupid unaware of Medicare. Deborah was far more on his mind than his face relayed, but the focus had to be on baby-stepping through the traumatic minefield of survivors. “Your friend Peyton’s going to be alright. But we haven’t told him about you yet. You or this ‘Christine’ he’s asked about.”

            Harriet didn’t know this man beyond the fact that his shirt matched Deborah’s. And that his name came out of Deborah’s mouth a few times. What had been her mouth and the drawbridge gears that open/shut us up at instinct’s discretion. To articulate a name. To energize or enervate the air a certain way. To attempt some levity against the vacuum crush of inner space. “I understand,” she

decided to convey.  

           

            Against any explicit advice, coming out of one exam and into another, she whispered to Vernon, “tell him I’m here.” Gary and a U.S. Marshall were discussing release details with the Mounties; now that the helicopter had refueled, they were eager to get back before sunset.

            The Stinson also had a flight plan over darkening water. Now that the news of Deborah had reached Windigo, that search was null and void. As for the elderly campers, well, Heidi just had to trust Gary’s crazy account on the phone. Scratch them off the scavenger hunt. Jackson would dread the pinched hours in the air, but Jason promised a smooth glide home.

            Vernon did as he was told. If it weren’t for his IV tube and cardiogram cords, Peyton would have bolted out of bed. Instead, he calmly rang the nurse for his bathroom walker and, that ruse accomplished, orchestrated a little jailbreak. The clinic was small enough to guess where Harriet might be—Vernon played dumb to let his buddy pace this out himself.

            Just as the doctor would have ordered: Harriet sprung up to embrace him, tie his undone robe ribbons in the back, kiss him on his blushing neck. “How are you, Harriet?” he had the guts to ask.

            “Christine, you mean?”

            He surveyed the doctor taking stolid mental note and felt some need to explain. “That was, um—”

            Harriet shushed his fluster. “Proper thinking on your feet.”

 

~51~

 

            Distances blur anyway in the rain, but with empty stomachs and no clear idea of direction—moose paths wouldn’t lead to Windigo—Eddie answered Tommy’s told-you-so question with “half-way there.”

            Jinny drew closer to whisper, “really?”

            Eddie had been relying on his recall of the map—buried in his dead phone—and knew that Siskiwit Lake, the largest on Isle Royale, would mark about one-quarter of their needed distance. And they were maybe only half of that from their start at Chippewa Harbor. Eddie had suggested they keep to the harbor’s shoreline and see if the rental had somehow floated inland, like the beaver. Keeping this line to Lake Whittlesey, long and narrow, would prevent them from walking in circles—the glacial lakes being quite like the grainy ruts inside a log. “No,” Eddie conceded as gently as he could, and he’d continue when they had a better chance to strategize. “Getting lost is less my concern than dehydration”—the stream water they scooped with their hands could backfire in their bowels, and the rain was too spotty to meaningfully get on the tongue, down the throat.

            “Why don’t we camp here, then,” Jinny reasoned, “and this part of the tent—” she gestured, “above the entrance—can pool up some rainwater at least.”

            “It’ll make quite a long night, and longer to hike tomorrow.”

            Jinny stayed silent for a minute, mulling the potential spat. “Don’t put off today what you can do tomorrow?”

            Eddie flashed eyes of understanding. “You know, capturing the rainwater is exactly a today thing to do. Let’s get the kids to pick out a plot.”

            “Like a Flat Stanley plot? Tara’ll be all over that.”

            Eddie laughed, semi-aware of this whole Flat Stanley thing. “Tent plot,” he didn’t need to clarify, “before it gets too dark.”

 

            The Stinson flew through this rain, too, as it spread across the massive lake. Jackson was taking it as easy as he could, but ethically knew not to leave Jason in too much silence. Neither knew Deborah very well—Jackson had a few more years to try, but he was less outgoing than Jason, who also barely tried; Deb was not much for banter. Still, they were rather melancholy about this strange turn of events.

            “Least we did our job finding that other boat,” Jackson offered.

            Jason corrected him: “two boats—one peopled, one not.”

            “Yeah, forgot about that other one. Sheesh.”

            They didn’t say anything more for a couple minutes—Jason could see the strain on Jackson’s mug. “I wonder,” the latter finally expressed, “how much you can connect these distressed vessels.” He shifted his weight, as if to find a modicum of comfort. “These three dots, as it were, flung far apart.”

            Jason added, “five dots, if you include ranger stations.”

            “Probably should call ’em both to say we’re A-OK.”

            “Yeah,” Jason reached to call up a radio signal. “Now you got me thinking about that abandoned boat. Funny how it didn’t come up with Jeremy and Heidi.”

            “Well,” Jackson grunted, “we coulda pressed it more…”

 

            For her part, Heidi was having decidedly unfunny thoughts about the very same mystery. If this witness to Deb’s… undoing… was alive in Houghton right now, all the more reason her daughter and grandkids needed to know. But what if— “Holy shit, Jer! We gotta find that foursome!”

            “What, by dragging the lake bed?” Jeremy had been connecting the dots as well. “I hate to think Deb mighta had something to do with their fate.”

            Heidi’s nose twitched at the possibility. “You mean…?”

 

            The only ones not connecting the dots were Peyton, blissful in his bed with no need for an overnight IV, and Harriet and Vernon, settling in at the ranger station after a dinner at the clinic canteen. Though there were two rooms, they chose the one with bunk beds so as simply to be with someone after such a day, such a stretch of days. Gary left them a bottle of merlot—“sorry, don’t have Michelob”—which they sipped as they talked at the over-lacquered table against the room’s window. No view with the lights on, of course, so they turned them off. Still not much a view. But they got a kick out of thinking they were in the wolf’s mouth of the lake they’d just barely survived—what view would they expect?

            Harriet fiddled a bit with the light ankle bracelet she had to wear, courtesy of the US marshal who told her not to worry—her verbal account was not really in doubt. All the same, there’d be an affidavit to draw up and sign, an interview with the investigative team, a general need to know where to locate her if necessary.

            “I s’pose I shoulda gotten one o’ those,” Vernon deadpanned.

            “Sure, like a leash on a loon. But let’s get some shut-eye, huh? Honest to goodness good night’s rest.”

 

            That was accomplished despite Gary’s temptation at midnight to knock on their door and discuss his debrief with the pilots, now returned, about this abandoned boat. His phone calls to Heidi only upped the urgency—to find this foursome, God willing, or get Harriet in the loop for whatever clues she could provide.

            All too cascading, he repeated in his mind, over and over through the night’s rain and dawn’s murk. He practiced his line to what would be her bemusement: taking time is essential, but time is of the essence…

            “What?” Harriet rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “Jinny?”

            Gary could only shrug. “We can fly you to Windigo—”

            “Where is she?” her raised voice roused Vernon, who’d been listening on the lower bunk. “And her kids?” she cried, “Tara an’ Tommy?”

            “We… nobody is sure. They’d rented a boat—a man with them, too. They may be… Heidi, at the Windigo station, um…”

            Vernon rushed to hold Harriet from toppling over. “This is all my fault! Shouldn’t have thrown Peyton’s phone.”

            Harriet wouldn’t speak to that, fainting in his arms.

 

~52~ 

 

            The Stinson had a 4-person capacity. To squeeze a fifth in the small space behind the passenger seats would be a violation of code. In the scheme of things, Gary had rationalized to Jason, the circumstances cried out for common sense. Jackson was not fit to fly; Gary hadn’t renewed his pilot license since his  promotion to office life, but he at least could assist Jason with navigation against the bleary sky. Harriet sat directly behind him and Peyton held her hand, as if he were the spiritual IV she needed now. Vernon lay in the hold—‘the doghouse’, he wanted to say but, of course, did not.

            “Aiming for Isle Royale,” Gary spoke into the radio in response to what only he and Jason knew was Heidi’s voice.

            “Nothing new here,” she said too matter-of-fact. Gary could imagine Harriet’s eyes clenching shut at that. He signed off with their estimated arrival.

            The tiny fuselage was silent as a wake—one that Deborah, apparently, would never have. Gary tried to think of her divorced from her grisly end. Impossible, at this point. Harriet had no such thoughts of the past twenty-eight hours, or really this whole absurd week. The wake in her making began with Tara—how excruciating that would be. Grandma, can we read Amelia Bedelia again? I made you space in the loft! Tommy would be out at the rocky shore, searching for stray crayfish and minnows; invariably, Peyton would act as lifeguard from his porch. Where to put Jinny? Archie’s chair, grading papers as procrastination for drawing up her divorce, or at least restraining orders. Maybe that’s why they rented a boat, to get the hell out.

            The low cloud cover posed a dilemma for Jason—whether to break through the rain blanket or stay just below. Peyton’s voice somewhat nudged his decision for the latter: “Wonder if were gonna see our boat, Vernon.” Vernon was in no position to see anything but the various duffels and hatches, ostensibly harboring parachutes and rescue equipment. Useless stuff, by now.

 

            Jason wasn’t piloting a line to find Peyton’s boat, which would have drifted anyway, despite the drag of its anchor. Gary assured its overland delivery in due time, though his mind was preoccupied with the trip to Pukaskwa that would have to come first, to close out the material details of Deborah and her camouflaged wreck.

            The rental would have also drifted; Jason approximated its present coordinates and veered a smidgeon off-course to satisfy his instincts. In all likelihood, however, the Grand Portage company would have retrieved it by now, or the Coast Guard. The 20^th century had floated myriad untracked vessels on the surface of Gitchie Gumee; the conventional wisdom these days was to tidy up any trouble and reduce the risk of sunken junk. The lake was far too deep to investigate such causes.

            The final forty minutes of flight was bereft of any voice. The propeller cut through the crying air and enabled the backdrop of white noise, to deeply think or otherwise. To pray or navel gaze.

            On the approach to Washington Harbor, Peyton pointed out Grace Island on his side of the plane. Harriet stretched over his chest to see. “Tent’s not there,” he noted.

            Harriet scanned from the limits of her vantage point. “Maybe all this never happened.”

            Vernon, from his doghouse, could only imagine the ‘all this’, all my fault… all my fault.

 

            As the day before, Jeremy escorted the Stinson’s landing to the Windigo dock, where the elders walked on stiff legs like baby moose. Heidi watched them from the entrance of the Interpretive Center, reluctant to be too far from the phone or computer screen. The rain had mostly let up, but the overcast remained steely. A mid-day sun would not bother to gauge whatever they had in mind here, and no one pretended to plan the afternoon.

            Lunch, then, was going to be frozen pizzas Jeremy promised this time not to burn. Jason joined him at the boathouse. Gary conferenced in muted tones with Heidi behind the counter. Peyton gravitated to the coloring area and a beanbag chair to sink into. Harriet ascertained, you okay?, then went back outside to find Vernon, who hadn’t trekked up this hill.

            He was hunched on his hams, hands locked behind his head, not exactly looking at the water, if toward the distant side of the harbor. Harriet was silent as she crouched and slid her head under his right arm. His torso trembled as he attempted several times to finally utter, “I left… not to drag everyone… along.”

            She was too sad to say anything one way or another. Eventually he understood her wish for him to lower his arm around her, rock-a-bye to no conceivable end.

            Over both their shoulders, then, some fifty yards into the trailhead, voices sounded weary relief. They ceased just as Harriet turned their way. “Grandma!” Tommy shrieked, and ran almost as fast as Tara to dive into her stunned embrace. She had only managed to rise to her knees as she squeezed into their collarbones. Vernon relayed his apologetic eyes to an unknown Eddie, who had planted at the spot where the kids had taken off. Behind him was Jinny, clutching his shoulder for fear of falling down.

            The kids were spouting gibberish as they kept their clutch. Harriet heard an amalgam of “we saw a beaver and—” “—our boat got stolen” “—no it didn’t!” “Eddie’s nice, he’s—” “Mom’s here, too, Grandma, wanna see?”

            Of course she wanted to see. But the world had turned aquarium in the flooded wells of her eyes. Vernon’s sleeve served as a hanky as he ushered her toward Eddie. Jinny dug her head into his shoulderblades, begging him to say she’s not a ghost.

            “She’s not a ghost,” he assured. They shuffled forward with leaden legs. “A good spirit, though, I can tell you that.”

            Harriet, clearly hearing, found Vernon’s ear. “He means you, too.”

 

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (June 5, 2021)