Nevada Barr - A Superior Death

The commonplace words were having their desired effect. The life-and-death look began to fade from his pale blue eyes. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve as if turning on the switch that would allow his lips to function. “Yeah,” he managed. “Hit something in Little Todd. Didn’t pay much attention. Time we got here we were taking on more’n we could bail. We started radioing then. I think the propeller got dinged and we’re taking on water around the shaft.”

Normalcy somewhat restored-given the world continued to pitch in a colorless panorama of blustering cloud and billowing wave-Anna spoke again. “Here’s what’s going to happen, Hal. First put on life jackets. You got any?”

He dragged two disreputable-looking orange vests out from beneath a seat and the men began buckling them on.

When Hal’s hands were free again, Anna said: “You’ll need to cut that bow line loose. You…?” She looked at the second man, who was beginning to come to life.

“Kenny. Ken.”

“Ken. You untie the stern. Hal, I’m going to hand you my towline. Make it fast to the bow. Then the both of you get aboard my boat. The Low Dollar’s riding too low in the water. I’d just as soon nobody was on board. Got all that?”

Kenny started unlooping his line and Hal returned to the bow to tug and jerk at the knots he’d made. The boats climbed a slick cold hill of water, teetered at its summit, then slid down on the other side. Kenny screamed out that his hand was caught between the two hulls, but he was more frightened than hurt.

The yell did a good turn, convincing Hal that slicing through a $1.59 piece of rope might be worth the time saved fumbling with his desperate knots.

In another minute both men were on board the Belle Isle and Anna was powering slowly away.

The towline grew taut, was dragged above the churning of the Belle’s wake. When the full weight of the sodden Low Dollar hit, Anna heard her engines growl over the challenge, then dig deeper into the lake for purchase. The Bertram might not have the personality of a good horse but it had the power of a sizable herd. Anna was grateful: glad to have a good piece of equipment between her and the bottom of Superior, glad to be leaving the oceanlike expanse for the more protected channels and coves of the north shore.

To the right, amid the waves, she could see the rocky outcrop that was Kamloops Island. Had the water been flatter, or the Low Dollar less swamped, she might have towed the damaged vessel north of the little island to Amygdaloid Ranger Station where she had tools. Or even around to Rock Harbor where they had everything including telephones and hot and cold running seaplanes. Today, from the feel of the drag, the crippled boat would be lucky to make landfall.

Hal was stationed on deck watching his boat. Kenny sat on the high bench opposite the pilot’s, his fingers clamped around the handholds on the dash. Anna had ordered him inside the cabin where he could warm up. His pallor and the clamminess of his flesh as she’d handed him over the gunwale concerned her. Anna stayed standing, her knees slightly bent, her center of gravity forward over her toes, riding the deck like a surfboard.

The fog was lifting. Several miles of shoreline were coming into hazy focus. The twenty miles of cliffs and coves between Little Todd Harbor and Blake’s Point were now as familiar to Anna as the desert trails of the Guadalupe Mountains had been. Hoping to combat fear with knowledge, she’d spent her first two weeks as North Shore Ranger creeping about, chart in one hand, wheel in the other, her head hanging out of the window like a dog’s from a pickup truck. She had memorized the shape of every bluff, every bay, the location of every shoal and underwater hazard.

On still, sunny days when the lake was more likely to forgive mistakes, she blanked her windows with old maps and crawled from place to place, eyes glued to the radar screen, ears tuned to the clatter of the depth finder. Like most landlubbers, she was less afraid of shallow waters-coves full of stones and half-submerged logs-than she was of deep. Though the brutal cold of Superior would drown her a quarter of a mile from shore just as mercilessly as it would ten miles out, Anna seldom came in from open water without a sense of returning to safety. “Safe harbor”-a phrase she’d heard bandied about since childhood-had been given a depth of meaning with Lake Superior ’s first angry glance.

“You’re new,” Kenny said as if he echoed her thoughts. “You weren’t here last year.”

Anna refocused on her passenger. “Displaced desert rat,” she replied. “I haven’t been warm or dry since I left Texas.”

“It’s not like it used to be,” he went on as if she’d not spoken. “Used to be people on the lake took care of each other. You’d never pass a vessel in distress. Never. We could’ve sunk out there and nobody’d‘ve so much as thrown us a line. People don’t care. All they care about’s getting a campsite before the next guy.”

“Did somebody pass you?” Anna asked, remembering the other blip on her radar. On such an ugly sea, it struck her as strange, though it was not uncommon. The brotherhood of sport fishermen, if it ever existed, was largely relegated to legend now; another link in the chain memory forged back to the mythical good old days.

“Not passed. A white boat with green-I didn’t see the name or I’d report it to the Coast Guard. They were out in the lake near where the Kamloops went down, headed east.”

“Maybe they didn’t see you. The fog’s been cat-footing around. Are you sure it wasn’t red and white? The Third Sister was heading this direction. They’re diving the Emperor tomorrow.”

“Green. And they saw us. They’d‘ve had to. Not a sign. The bastards left us sloshing up, to our knees in bilge. They probably heard the rainbow were running in Siskiwit and couldn’t wait. When my dad used to bring me out here-oh, twenty years ago at least…”

Anna let him ramble, even remembering to grunt or sigh- listening noises her sister had taught her. “It comforts people,” Molly had said. “Besides, it beats me having to say, ‘Anna, are you still there?’ into the damn phone every five minutes.”

The noises turned out to be worth a thousand times what Molly had paid AT amp;T for the phone time to teach her. A ranger could get more information from a few well-placed “oh reallys” and “uh-huhs” than from an hour’s by-the-book interrogation. People wanted to talk. Chewing over betrayals, disappointments, and unrealized hopes seemed to do for humans what licking wounds did for animals: a cleansing of poisons, a soothing of hurts.

Anna let Kenny talk, and she made Molly’s therapeutic sounds, but she didn’t listen. She had her own wounds to lick, her own dreams and disappointments. At that moment she would have given a week’s pay for one good hot, dry day, for the sight of one small fence lizard, the scent of sage on the wind.

The moment these thoughts blew in, Anna closed her mind to them. The lake didn’t allow for dreamers, not when the waves were three meters, not when a dilapidated sea anchor hung off the stern. The desert, with its curtains of heat and scoured, star-deep skies, was for dreaming. This land of mist and dark water took all of one’s mind up with the day-to-day chore of staying alive.

In the lee of Kamloops Island the water flattened out reassuringly. Even so, the Low Dollar was beginning to drag down the Belle’s stern. Anna cut throttle to an idle. All forward motion stopped immediately. She went up onto the deck where Hal stood staring morosely at the streaming blue hump that was his boat.

“We aren’t going to make the dock at Todd,” Anna told him.