William Krueger - Vermilion Drift

“Have you told anyone else?”

“Just you.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Liam, let’s talk to Sam Winter Moon and George LeDuc. And maybe Henry Meloux.”

“To what end?”

“Maybe they can help.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But they’ll be more likely to believe you than almost any white person in Tamarack County.”

“There’s that,” he says.

Where are you now?

At Grandma Dilsey’s.

Who else is there?

You.

Who else?

Grandma Dilsey. My mother and father. Aunt Ellie. Becky Stonedeer. Sam Winter Moon. And George LeDuc.

He’s supposed to be swimming in the lake, but he has sneaked back and is sitting against the side of the house below the kitchen window, and he can hear them talking inside.

“Never liked that man. Never trusted him,” Sam Winter Moon says.

“Indigo Broom,” Meloux says. “There is a powerful spirit there. Dark like bog water.”

“I have no proof of anything,” Cork’s father reminds them.

“Proof? I know how to get proof,” LeDuc says. “Liam, you know what the word ‘Ojibwe’ means? To pucker. We used to roast our enemies until their skin puckered.”

“I hope you’re joking, George.”

“Our children are missing, Liam. About this, I don’t joke.”

“What do we do?” his mother asks.

“We go to his cabin, Colleen,” LeDuc says. “If he’s there, we talk to him. If he’s not, we wait until he comes back.”

“Talk to him?” Cork’s father says. “Or pucker him?”

“Whatever it takes, Liam.”

“I can’t let you do that, George. That’s not why I came here.”

“Doesn’t matter why you came.”

“Now wait a minute,” Sam Winter Moon says. “There’s got to be something we can do short of torturing the man.”

Grandma Dilsey says, “If we make him suffer and we’re wrong, can we live with that?”

“Hell, I can,” LeDuc says.

“Unless you silence him for good, George, he’ll sue you for everything you’ve got.”

LeDuc laughs. “That’s the white man’s revenge, Liam. On the rez, he’ll just wait in the dark and slit my throat. I’m willing to take that chance.”

“I think we should watch him,” his mother says. “There are enough eyes out here that he can’t hide. The moment he tries something, we grab him, and then, George, you can do all the puckering you want.”

“What about the woman?” Meloux says.

“Would she do anything without Indigo Broom?” Becky Stonedeer asks.

“I don’t know,” his father replies. “Henry, these are not normal people. God alone knows what they will or won’t do.”

“Can she be watched?” Meloux asks.

“I can’t put any of my men on her. I’d have to do some explaining, and I don’t know how I’d do that. And I can’t watch her myself night and day.”

“I think,” Meloux says, “that I would like to talk to this woman. Indigo Broom, I know. This woman is a stranger.”

His father says, “Got any idea how I can arrange that, Henry?”

“I have an idea,” his mother says. “She gives a lot of money away. What if Henry and I approach her about an Ojibwe charity?”

“What charity?” his father asks.

The kitchen is quiet. Then his mother says, “The Missing Child Fund.”

Now? Where are you now?

It’s night. Late. He has slipped from his house and ridden his bike ten miles to the southern edge of the rez. The moon is up, and Waagikomaan is a river of gray dirt winding among the trees. He knows from what he’s overheard that Indigo Broom is being watched, and he’s careful. There is only one way to Broom’s cabin, and he’s on it. He walks his bike and has tuned all his senses to the forest that presses in on either side of the road.

There are crickets and tree frogs, and then there is a deeper sound, unnatural, in the trees to his right. The sound, he realizes, of a man snoring.

He creeps past the sleeping man and, a hundred yards farther, remounts and rides to an old logging road that cuts south toward Mr. Windigo’s cabin. He lays his bike at the side of Waagikomaan and starts up the logging road. The trees blot out the moon, and the woods are dark. He can barely see.

He’s here because… because he’s a boy on the edge of manhood, and he wants to be a part of this important effort to find his cousin and Naomi, to find the truth of the Vanishings, and he hopes that somehow in the dark of that night, or of another, he will find the way.

His whole life he has lived in the community of the great Northwoods. He has spent nights alone in a tent or in a sleeping bag under the stars, and the darkness itself doesn’t frighten him. But there is something about the place under his feet now that is different, that fills him with dread. There are no night sounds here. No crickets. No tree frogs. Only silence. It is a dead place, he thinks. And he thinks he should not be there.

But he forces himself to go on.

The cabin is a dark shape visible against a wall of stone that catches moonlight and seems to glow. There is another building as well, smaller and set off to one side and a little back from the cabin. There is a pickup truck parked near the second structure.

He goes to the cabin first, crouching in his approach, his Keds tennis shoes making no sound in the soft dirt. He peers carefully in at a window, cannot see a thing except his own faint reflection peering back. He circles the cabin, stealing a peek in every window, and in every window there is only his own, intense face. He lopes to the other building, which has no windows. He tries the door. It isn’t locked. He opens it, and something-an ill wind, a malign spirit, a palpable evil-rushes out. He stands a moment, staring into the darkness, paralyzed by the malignancy he senses. He has brought with him a flashlight, which is clipped to his belt. He pulls the flashlight free, turns it on, and scans the interior of the small building.

At first, he thinks it is simply a toolshed. Many kinds of implements hang on the walls. Saws, axes, shovels, pry bars, a wheelbarrow, a coiled water hose. The beam, where it hits the wall, forms a round yellow eye, and he keeps it tracking to the right until suddenly in the middle of that eye is something he can’t explain. A chain bolted to the wall with an iron cuff at each end. He creeps forward, circling a long, rough-hewn table in the center of the room, holding the light steady, more or less, on the chains. He reaches out and fingers a cuff. The metal is cold and, he thinks at first, rusted. Then he realizes the color is not from rust, and he yanks his hand back. His heart pounds furiously and his breath comes in shallow little gasps and he wishes he weren’t there, but he is and he turns and the eye of the flashlight finds the tabletop and he sees manacles there, too, and dark mosaic stains soaked into the wood.

He hears a noise, a long intake of air, and shoots the beam of the flashlight toward the door where Mr. Windigo stands grinning.

The old man touched his shoulder, and Cork came out of the dream to the wet heat of the sweat lodge on Iron Lake. He was tired beyond measure.

“I want to go on,” he said to Meloux.

“First, we refresh. We cool ourselves in the lake.” Meloux called to Rainy, who drew back the cover of the opening.

Sunlight cracked the dark inside the lodge, and Cork blinked at the sudden glare. He followed Meloux clockwise around the pit where the Grandfathers lay cooling. When he was outside, he saw that Rainy was standing ready with the pitchfork to remove the stones and replace them with others she’d set among the embers of the sacred fire to heat. Cork walked with Meloux to the lake and plunged in. The cold water was a slap and brought him fully awake and refreshed him.