William Krueger: Iron Lake

“You know the way.”

“Now who’s cold?”

“Go screw yourself,” she said.

“The world would be a dreary place, Molly, if that’s the way things worked.” He leaned down and gently kissed the top of her head.

“Go on,” she said, pushing him away softly. But she smiled in spite of herself. “I’ll be right down.”

He walked along the hallway of the old log house, over Molly’s braided rugs, creaked his way down the stairs and into the kitchen. Molly had fed him. Some sort of light brown sprout bread and lentil soup. Yogurt and strawberries for dessert. She drank Evian springwater, but she’d given Cork a Grain Belt. A few swallows were left in the bottle and he drank that down. The beer was still cool but had gone flat. He lifted his parka from the peg beside the back door and put it on, then settled his black watch cap over his ears. As he worked his gloves onto his hands, he glanced at a small plaque that hung on the wall. It was homemade, woodburned by Molly’s father long ago. It contained an old Finnish saying her father had roughly translated into English:

Cold, thou son of Wind,

Do not freeze my fingernails,

Do not freeze my hands.

Freeze though the water willows.

Go chill the birch chunks.

Like most magic charms of the people of Molly’s heritage, it suggested to the evil of the world-from hiccups to death-that it visit instead other things, such as the loom or the needle or the thicket or, in a pinch, one of the neighbors. When Cork turned around, he found Molly watching him from the doorway. She’d thrown on a red chenille bathrobe and pulled bright red wool socks on over her feet.

“Will I see you at the Pinewood Broiler?” she asked.

“You won’t be plowed out in time to get into town tomorrow.”

“I’ll probably ski in.”

“Waitressing means that much?”

“This time of year the company does.”

Cork went back and kissed her. “If I don’t see you, I’ll call.”

“I won’t hold my breath.”

He pushed out the back door onto the utility porch, then out completely into the hard cold and the snow. He waded to the Bronco, cleared the tailpipe and the driver’s door, scraped the ice from the windshield, and got in. He cranked the engine. Wiping where his breath had fogged the wind-shield, he saw Molly standing at the kitchen window, her arms locked across her breasts. The light was on at her back and filtered through her hair making it like wisps of red smoke. She was a beautiful woman, large-boned and strong, ten years younger than Cork, though she’d taken such good care of herself-didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t eat red meat-that she looked even younger. Cork was a dozen pounds overweight, smoked far too much, and was beginning to go a little bald on the crown of his head. What she saw in him, he had no idea.

Women, he thought with a warm flare of gratitude. Go figure.

He slipped the Bronco into four-wheel drive and began slowly to move through the first of the drifts toward the county road that would take him to the highway into town. As he headed off, he glanced back at the cabin window, prepared to wave, but Molly was no longer there.

The state highway was no better than the county road through the woods from Molly’s. Except for the Bronco, not a thing moved in the white hillocks the wind had bulldozed across the asphalt. From the weather reports he’d heard, Cork was pretty sure it was like that from the Canadian border all the way across the Arrowhead of Minnesota into Wisconsin. He drove slowly, steadily, a little blindly. After twenty minutes, he came on a figure hunched in a red-plaid mackinaw and wading toward town. He slowed to a full stop, stepped out onto the running board and hollered, “Get in!”

The figure, so bundled Cork couldn’t even see a face, slowly turned and came toward the Bronco. When they were both safely inside, Cork started once again for Aurora.

“Hell of a day for a constitutional.” Cork peered into the slit between the wool muffler that came above the nose and the knitted cap that was pulled down to the eyebrows.

The mittens were drawn off and Cork saw old veined hands stained with liver spots. The hands went to the muffler, whose ends were tucked securely inside the collar of the coat. As the muffler came loose, Cork recognized Henry Meloux, whom white people around Aurora sometimes called Mad Mel. Cork knew he was in fact one of the Midewiwin, an Anishinaabe medicine man, who lived by himself on a remote point around the northwest end of the lake. He must have been walking most of the day in the blizzard to have come so near town.

“Shoot, Henry, what could be so important it would bring you out on a day like this?”

Meloux stared beyond the wipers that shoved the snow into little heaps off to the sides of the wind-shield. “Snow, not snow, the day is the same to me.”

“Noble philosophy, Henry, but one that could get you frozen to death.”

“I seen more storms than you could imagine. And worse. I seen storms and other things.”

Cork reached inside his parka for his pack of Lucky Strikes. “Cigarette, Henry?”

The old man took one; so did Cork. But before Cork could light up the old man sniffed at the air inside the Bronco. He gave Cork a grin full of teeth remarkably good in a man so ancient. “You smell like the good, deep part of a woman.”

“I think that wind’s frozen your nose, Henry,” Cork told him.

“No.” The old man kept on grinning at him. “It’s a good day for a man to be inside.” Meloux laughed softly. “Understand?”

The old man lit his cigarette with the lighter Cork offered and grew quiet again. They had come to the edge of Aurora. They passed the big new corrugated fence of Johannsen’s salvage yard, put up when the Chippewa Grand Casino was being built so that the gutted frames and rusting wreckage of the junkyard wouldn’t sully the image of the town. A little farther on was the Iron Lake Best Western, brand-new, with 150 rooms and an indoor swimming pool with a Jacuzzi and sauna. The big marquee out front welcomed gamblers and informed them that Lyle Porter was playing piano in the Kitchi-Gami Room eight to midnight. The parking lot was nearly full. Next to the Best Western stood a new Perkins restaurant and across the road a glittery twelve-pump Food-N-Fuel gas station.

On the streets of Aurora not much moved except a few pickups with wide traction tires. The shops had closed early and most of the windows of the small downtown were dark. For the most part, it looked as if the town’s 3,752 citizens had simply crawled inside to wait out the storm.

The old man had been quiet a long time, smoking the Lucky Strike reflectively. Finally Cork asked, “What brings you into town on a day like this, Henry?”

The old man said, “I seen it.”

“What?” Cork asked. “What did you see?”

The old man looked straight ahead. “It jumped over my cabin two nights ago, headed northwest, going toward the storm before the storm come in. I seen the black where it ran through the sky and covered the stars.”

“Seen what?” Cork asked again.

“I heard it, too. Heard it calling names.”

From the way Meloux’s voice dropped to nearly nothing, Cork figured that was bad. “Heard what calling names?”

But the old man clammed up on the subject. “I can walk now,” he said.

“You’re not thinking of going back to your place before the roads are cleared.”

“I walked here a long time before there were roads.”

“That was a couple of centuries ago, Henry.”

The old man took one last drag on his cigarette and crushed it out in the ashtray. “Thank you, Sheriff O’Connor.”

“Christ, I’m not the sheriff anymore.”

Meloux put on his mittens, opened his door, and stepped out. “The smell of you alone has been worth the time.” He grinned once again, then shut the door.