William Krueger: Iron Lake

He edged the door back open. “Judge Parrant?” he called. “Are you all right?” He hesitated a moment, then stepped in.

Paul had been inside many times before at the judge’s request. He always hated it. The house was a vast two-story affair built of Minnesota sand-stone. The interior walls were dark oak, the windows leaded glass. A huge stone fireplace dominated the living room, and the walls there were hung with hunting trophies-the heads of deer and antelope and bear whose sightless eyes seemed to follow Paul whenever the judge asked him in.

The house smelled of applewood smoke. The sudden pop of sap from a log burning in the fireplace made him jump.

“Judge Parrant?” he tried again.

He knew he should probably just leave and close the door behind him. But there had been the shot, and now he felt something in the stillness of the house from which he couldn’t turn, a kind of responsibility. As he stood with the door wide open at his back and the wind blowing through, he glanced down and watched tendrils of snow creep across the bare, polished floor and vine around his boots like something alive. He knew that a terrible thing had happened. He knew it absolutely.

He might still have turned away and run if he hadn’t seen the blood. It was a dark glistening on the polished hardwood floor at the bottom of the staircase. He walked slowly ahead, knelt, touched the small dark puddle with his fingertips, confirmed the color of it by the firelight. There was a bloody trail leading down the hallway to his left.

Pictures from the manual for his First Aid merit badge that showed arterial bleeding and how to apply direct pressure or a tourniquet came to his mind. He’d practiced these procedures a hundred times, but never really believing that he’d ever use them. He found himself hoping desperately the judge wasn’t badly hurt, and he panicked just a little at the thought that he might actually have to save a life.

The blood led him to a closed door where a dim light crept underneath.

“Judge Parrant?” he said cautiously, leaning close to the door.

He was reluctant to barge in, but when he finally turned the knob and stood in the threshold, he found a study lined with shelves of books. Along the far wall was a desk of dark wood with a lamp on it. The lamp was switched on but didn’t give much light and the room was heavy with shadows. On the wall directly back of the desk hung a map of Minnesota. Red lines like red rivers ran down the map from red splashes like red lakes. Behind the desk lay an overturned chair, and near the chair lay the judge.

Although fear reached way down inside him and made his legs go weak, he forced himself to move ahead. As he neared the desk and saw the judge more clearly, he forgot all about the procedures for a tourniquet. There was nowhere to put a tourniquet on a man who was missing most of his head.

For a moment he couldn’t move. He felt paralyzed, unable to think as he stared down at the raw pieces of the judge’s brain, pink as chunks of fresh watermelon. Paul didn’t even move when he heard the sound at his back, the soft shutting of the door. Finally he managed to turn away from the dead man just in time to see the second thing that night his Scout training could never have prepared him for.

“Cork?” Molly said from the bed.

He heard and he didn’t. Standing at the window with his hands poised at his zipper, Corcoran O’Connor watched drifts rise in the yard. His old red Bronco parked in the drive was already hub deep in powdery white. Farther down through the pines, the abandoned resort cabins by the lake were nearly invisible behind a gauzy curtain of blowing snow.

“You’re not really thinking of going, are you, Cork?” Molly asked. “Not into that.”

“What would folks say if I ended up snowbound here?”

“The truth. That you were screwing Molly Nurmi, that shameless slut.”

He turned to her, frowning. “Nobody calls you that.”

“Not to my face, anyway.” She laughed when she saw his anger. “Oh, come on, Cork. I’ve lived with that most of my life. It doesn’t bother me.”

“Well, it bothers me.”

“I’m glad it does.” She pushed the hair from her eyes, dark red hair damp with sweat. “Stay, Cork. I’ll fire up the sauna. We can get hot and wet, roll in the snow, come back to bed, and make love again. How does that sound?”

He finished zipping his pants, buckled his belt, and came away from the window. He went to the bed and took his red corduroy shirt from the corner post where it had been hastily draped. Slipping it on over his long johns, he slowly worked the buttons through. He bent and tugged on his socks. The cold floor had nearly frozen his feet. “Hand me a cigarette, will you?”

Molly took one from Cork’s pack of Lucky Strikes by the bed, lit it, and handed it to him. “They’ll kill you.”

“What won’t anymore?” He glanced around the room, looking for his boots.

“You seem distracted today.”

“Do I? Sorry.”

“Feeling a little guilty?”

“Always.”

“There’s no need to,” she said.

“Easy for you to say. You’re not Catholic.”

“Come on. Relax here beside me a minute while you finish your cigarette.” She patted the bed at her side.

He looked out the window. “I should get going. It’ll be hard enough getting back into town as it is.”

Molly drew the blanket and sheet around her and pushed herself up against the headboard. She pulled her knees up to her breasts and hugged them as if she were cold. “Why are you always so concerned with what people say about you, Cork? It’s not as if you’re still the golden boy.”

“I don’t care what people say.” He knelt and fished around under the bed for his boots. “It’s not me I’m worried about.” He found them and sat on the bed.

“Your wife?” she asked innocently.

Cork exhaled and shot her a cold look through the cloud of smoke.

“You know what I mean,” she said.

Molly took the Lucky Strike from his fingers and tapped the ash into a little tray shaped like a pair of red lips on the nightstand. She left the cigarette there while Cork concentrated on lacing his boots. She reached out and let her hand drift down the knobby ridge of his backbone. “What is it that you think we do here, you and me? I’ll tell you what I think it is. This is grace, Cork. This is one of those things that God, when He created it, said, ‘That’s good.’ ”

Cork kept lacing his boots as if he didn’t hear, or if he heard, as if it didn’t matter.

“Can I tell you something, Sheriff?”

“I’m not the sheriff anymore,” he reminded her.

“Can I tell you something,” she went on, “without you getting cold and stomping out?”

“Do I get cold and stomp out?”

“You get quiet and make excuses to leave.”

“I won’t get quiet,” he promised.

“Cork, I think you miss your family.”

“I see my family all the time.”

“This is different. This is Christmas. I really think you miss them more than you want to admit.”

“Bullshit,” he said, standing up.

“See, I’ve made you mad. You’re leaving.”

“I’m not mad. I just finished tying my boots. And you know I have to leave.”

“Why? What difference would it make if you stayed and people found out about us? It’s not as if you’re being unfaithful to a loving wife.”

“It’s a small town and I’m not divorced. People would kick us around in their talk like a couple of soccer balls. I don’t want my kids having to listen to that.”

“Fine.” She slid down and pulled the covers tight around her. “Have it your way.”

He picked up his cigarette, took a last drag, and ground out the ember on the red lips of the ashtray. He slipped the pack of Lucky Strikes into his shirt pocket. “Going to see me out?” he asked.