William Krueger: Iron Lake

“Who’s there?” he yelled.

He got no answer. Near him nothing moved but the snow. He couldn’t see a thing in the swaying trees.

“Is anybody there?” he tried again.

No voice answered except the bitter howl of the wind. Cork finished clearing the snow and got into his Bronco. As an afterthought he locked the doors. He waited a moment before driving away, trying one last time to see if anything moved among the trees.

Because he could have sworn someone there had called his name.

Next morning, Cork rose in the dark, stumbled to the kitchen and started coffee dripping in the Mr. Coffee. He showered, shaved, and dressed. Back in the kitchen, he poured himself a cup of coffee and looked out the window. Over the lake, the sky in the east was just turning a faint, powdery blue. He put on his coat, went to the back room, scooped a quarter bucket of corn from the sack, and made his way down to the shore of the lake.

In the night, the storm had moved east beyond Lake Superior and into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Its passing left the sky clear and with a few stars still shining. The snow lay smooth and deep, cast in the pale blue-gray light of early morning. The air was so still the white smoke from the chimneys in town rose up straight as birch trunks. Cork loved the painful cold of the morning, the brittle new snow beneath his boots, the breathless clarity of the sky. He loved Aurora deeply in such moments.

The geese were on the water. He was glad to see that they’d made it through the storm. They honked and paddled nearer when they saw him, but they wouldn’t come all the way to shore. He kicked a big circle in the snow, clearing it, as he had done with Anne, down to the frozen ground underneath. He shook the grain out of the bucket. After he’d stepped well away, the geese came quickly.

The sun still wasn’t up when he left the cabin, but a big bubble of yellow light showed where, in half an hour, it would rise over the bare trees on the far side of the lake.

At Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler, Cork found Johnny Pap out front shoveling snow. Johnny was first-generation Greek. His real name was John Papasconstantinou, but his father had shortened it when he arrived in the States. He was fifty, stout, a man of great but nervous energy.

“Winter’s here, that’s for sure,” Johnny observed. “Knew it had to happen.”

“Coffee ready yet?” Cork asked.

“Molly’s doing it now. Ski’d in from her place. Got here before me even.” Johnny leaned on his snow shovel. “Wish Maria was like that,” he said, speaking of his wife. “Takes a couple sticks of dynamite to get her out of bed most mornings.” He wiped the drip from his nose and eyed Cork man to man. “Wish she was like Molly in a lot of ways, if you know what I mean.”

“I’ll see you inside,” Cork said, and left Johnny to his shoveling.

Except for Molly, the place was empty.

“Well, well.” Molly smiled, glancing up from the big stainless steel coffeemaker. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

“Anybody ever tell you you look mighty good in the morning?”

“Not for a long time.” She leaned across the counter to where Cork sat on a stool. “Thought about you all night,” she said.

“Long night?”

“It went on forever.”

“Try reading a book next time. It’s what I do.”

“I knitted. I’m working on a Christmas present for you. Something for cold nights.”

“Wool condom?”

Molly laughed, poured him a cup of coffee, and slid it across the counter. Then she turned to the kitchen. She fixed him bacon and eggs and wheat toast. By the time he’d finished eating, the place had begun to fill with men. The Broiler was a popular stopover for people on their way to work. The clientele were regulars, men mostly who ordered the same breakfast every day, said the same things day in and day out. They worked at the brewery or the sawmill or for the highway department. Or they were shop owners killing time before they headed to the task of clearing the walks in front of their stores. Johnny had taken over the cooking. Two other waitresses had arrived, but it was Molly who caught everyone’s eye. She moved quickly and efficiently from table to table, booth to booth, slipping easily among men who eyed her just as keenly as Cork did. He liked how she cocked a fist on her hip and said something hard and funny to the ones who made passes, and there were a lot of them. He liked the combination of her plain good looks, her efficiency, and her elusiveness there in a place where men hungered around her in a lot of ways. She was a woman who knew how to take care of herself.

At the register, he spoke to her quietly. “Got it on good authority there’s an ex-law enforcement officer heading out your way later. Maybe that civic minded ex-officer could give you a lift.”

“Wouldn’t accept anything from an ex-officer of the law. But I’m a definite pushover for any man who knows how to flip a burger. Is there a charge for this ride?”

“That’s negotiable.”

“Then you’ve got me over a barrel,” she admitted with a smile.

Cork lifted his eyebrow. “Now, that sounds interesting.”

On the state highway just beyond the limits of Aurora stood a big marquee, a neon bow that shot a neon arrow in the direction of a newly paved road through a stand of white pines. “Chippewa Grand Casino,” the marquee proclaimed; “ј Mile To A Jackpot Of Good Times And Good Food.”

Growing up in Aurora, Cork had often traveled the road through the white pines. The road was gravel then and the pines part of a large county park. At that time the quarter mile led to a ball field and a huge picnic area shaded by maples and a long stretch of beach on the lake. A year ago the land had been sold to the Iron Lake band of Ojibwe so they could build a gambling casino. Under federal law, property purchased by a tribal entity became tribal land, exempt from the prohibition against gaming that constrained non-Native American landholders. Initially there had been a good deal of objection to the sale. Rust River, a good trout stream, ran through the land. Trout fisherman and conservationists questioned whether the stream would be ruined. Construction of the casino was to be bankrolled by a loan from Great North Development, and Sandy Parrant did a bangup job of assuring everyone that not only the quality of the trout fishing, but the beauty of the land itself would be preserved. He’d kept his promise. The white pines and the stream had been untouched. The ball field had become the casino parking lot. Only the maples of the shaded picnic area were razed and in their place rose the copper dome of the casino.

As Cork drove down the road through the pines, he thought, as he often did, of the lines of a poem whose title he couldn’t recall: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree.” The casino was ninety thousand square feet of pure white brick, glass, and glinting copper. It sat in the clearing with a great apron of parking lot in front of it. Behind was a beautifully sculptured landscape where the trout stream ran unspoiled. Through the trees, the broad flat white of the lake was visible. The parking lot had already been plowed and dozens of cars were parked. Snow lay several inches deep on many of them, indicating they’d been there all night. Although it was possible people had been trapped by the storm, it was just as possible they would have been there all night anyway. Gambling, Cork had come to understand, affected some people in an odd way. Not unlike fishing. Fisherman would drive their pickups and four-wheelers out onto thin ice risking their necks just to catch a damn fish. Some gamblers took the same kind of chance at a blackjack table.