William Krueger - Trickster's Point

“Because you’re a hunter with a fine new compound bow, and you have a pretty good reason to have wanted Little dead, and your wife believes you were visiting your father, and your father says you weren’t. At the very least, you have some explaining to do. And if the sheriff questions you about all this, word is going to spread, and whether you like it or not, people are going to start talking about you and wondering. I just thought I might be able to save you and your family some embarrassment.”

“You talked to my wife and my father?” Bigby’s fine-featured face took on a stern look that was somehow still delicate.

“I spent some time with both of them earlier today.”

“You drag my family into this, O’Connor, and I’ll destroy you.”

“Your family doesn’t have to be dragged in, Lester. All you have to do is tell me where you were on Saturday.”

“Who the hell are you to be asking me questions?” He’d raised his voice above the general hubbub of the Broiler, and other voices grew quiet; eyes swung his way. Bigby noticed and spoke more softly. “You’re not the law around here anymore. Just who the hell do you think you are?”

“I’m the guy somebody’s trying to frame for Jubal Little’s death, and I’m not just going to sit around and let that happen, Lester. Where were you Saturday?”

“You don’t know me at all, O’Connor. I’d never kill anybody over money.”

Cork leaned closer and said, “Maybe it wasn’t just about money.”

Bigby’s eyes once again gave him away, and Cork knew he’d touched a nerve. Bigby sat up a little straighter and brought out a confused look, but he was a beat too late. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Your father’s always blamed Jubal and me for your brother’s death.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“In some people, that kind of wound never heals. You know, when I was sheriff, I never encountered your father without him making some comment about how I couldn’t hide behind a badge forever. We both knew exactly what he was talking about.”

“And yet here you are,” Bigby said. “Alive and well.”

“Yeah, here I am the prime suspect in Jubal Little’s death. Exactly the kind of situation that would warm the cockles of your father’s heart.” Cork sat back. “You love your father, Lester?”

“I’m not going to answer that, or any more of your questions.”

“See, I think he would be a hard man to love. But I also think that one thing we seek most as men is the approval of our fathers. It seems to me that goes a long way to explaining everything from why Alexander the Great felt compelled to conquer the world to why George W. Bush led us into Iraq. And maybe it even explains why the son of Buzz Bigby would kill Jubal Little.”

“That’s such bullshit.”

“Is it? Easy enough to disprove. Just tell me where you were on Saturday.”

“Fuck you.”

Cork made ready to leave. “I’ll give you a while to think about it, Lester. But if I haven’t heard from you by the end of the day, next time you’re questioned, it’ll be by the badges investigating Jubal Little’s death.”

Cork walked away. But he couldn’t help feeling a tingle in his back, as if the point of an arrow was about to bury itself there.

W hen Cork left Lester Bigby, he drove directly to the Iron Lake Reservation. The afternoon had turned remarkably warm, especially considering the spitting snow and sleet of only a couple of days earlier. The sky was the soft blue of a baby blanket, and the sun, already well past its zenith, put a fire to everything so that the forest and the lake and even the pavement of the road itself seemed to pulsate with electric vitality.

He pulled into Allouette and saw Isaiah Broom’s pickup parked next to Willie Crane’s Jeep in front of the Iron Lake Center for Native Art. The door to the establishment was just opening, and both men were coming out. Cork drove past them and watched as they ambled down to the Mocha Moose and went inside. He made a U-turn and parked on the street across from the coffee shop. Broom and Crane stood at the counter while Sarah LeDuc made them something to drink, then they sat at a table near the front window, leaned toward each other, and appeared to talk in the way of intimate friends.

The roads that led to friendship were, Cork knew, as numerous as those in a Rand McNally atlas, but the underlying construct was always the same: a true sharing of self with another, a deep and vulnerable trusting. In the case of Isaiah Broom and Willie Crane, the friendship had begun in childhood, a connection between two boys painfully awkward in their own ways and filled with a terrible sense of isolation. Willie’s situation was obvious, his difficult gait and tortured speech. Isaiah Broom’s problems were less so but, in their way, just as challenging. His father had never been around, and his mother had dropped out of the picture when Isaiah was still a small child. Like Willie and Winona Crane, he’d been taken care of by a laundry list of relatives. He was a big kid, but unlike Jubal Little, whose size and physical ability were proportionally equal, Isaiah Broom was hopelessly uncoordinated. He lived in a body that seemed beyond his control, and perhaps even his comprehension. Cork had seen him sit for long periods of time staring at his big, meaty limbs as if they totally confounded him. Willie Crane, on the other hand, seemed determined to rise above the limitations of the body he’d been given, and although every word he spoke was a struggle and every step he took a battle, he faced the challenge of his life with the heart of a warrior. Probably more than anyone else on the Iron Lake Reservation, he understood what the clumsy, bearish Isaiah Broom was up against.

But maybe most important in their relationship was the fact that, when they were kids, Willie Crane had saved Isaiah Broom’s life. It had happened this way.

It was early summer. They were fishing on Iron Lake, in an old aluminum rowboat Broom had borrowed from one of his uncles. They’d rowed out a good half mile from shore and cast their lines off an island called Gull, where legend had it, a monster muskie dubbed Old Flint liked to feed. They were eleven years old. Broom had the bulk of a kid several years older. Willie was small and slender, but strong because he exercised constantly to compensate for his weak, sometimes spastic, left side. They’d been out maybe an hour when the storm came up. It blew in from nowhere, a huge, angry bluster, wind and rain and lightning that shoved the lake into a rage of whitecaps. They tried to make it back to the old dock in Allouette, each boy bent over an oar, pulling for dear life, but the boat began taking on water, wave after wave, and the vessel grew more sluggish and their arms more tired as the waterline crept toward the tops of the gunwales.

They were still fifty yards out when the boat swamped completely, and they took to the water. They swam for shore. That is, Willie swam for shore. Broom didn’t know how to swim. He flailed, arms like great tree limbs beating the water, throwing up sprays of desperate white in the troughs between the waves. Willie went back for him. Broom reached out, grasping wildly in his panic, but Willie stayed away. The oars from the boat had lifted from their locks and were easily riding the wild undulations of the lake. Willie latched on to one of them and shoved it toward his friend. Broom grabbed it, and Willie shouted for him to hold on. He swam them both near enough to shore that his feet found bottom, but by then Broom had taken in so much water and was so exhausted that the oar slipped from his hands and his body slid below the surface. Willie dived after him, wrapped his hands around fistfuls of Broom’s T-shirt, and dragged him to solid ground. He dropped him in the wash of the waves and saw that the boy’s chest had ceased to rise and fall. He cocked Broom’s head back, locked his lips against Broom’s blue lips, and breathed life back into his friend.