Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

ST. ERHO FESTIVAL, MENAHAGA, MINNESOTA

St. Erho was the patron saint who rid Finland of grasshoppers. Uncle Billie maintained that St. Erho’s Day, like St. Patrick’s Day, was an excuse to get drunk, because there never were grasshoppers in Finland.

Broker stared out the window at the moderating storm and it all went into a distracted glide, and he mused how lots of Finns had settled around Ely. Maybe because the lakes and forest and six months of winter reminded them of home. Or maybe their national ethic of fatalism attracted them to farm fields full of granite rocks.

Broker caught himself drifting, shook his head, and asked, “That nurse-anesthetist, Amy, she local?”

Iker nodded. “Ummm. Amy Skoda is one of the few who figured how to come back and earn a living.” He slowly raised his eyebrows. “She was asking about you, before it all went bad.”

“Skoda? She a Finlander?” Broker asked.

“Half Finnish, half Slovene; the cream of the local gene pool.” He threw an arm toward the wall where a procession of retired peace officers stared down from framed portraits. “Second picture up there. Stan Skoda’s kid.” Skoda filled the picture frame like an amiable fireplug and Broker vaguely remembered the man from hunting parties when Broker was in high school.

“Take a hike. I gotta make a call,” Iker said. The format glowing on his computer screen gave his face a lime tint as he hunched back to his chair and stared at the number jotted in his spiral notebook.

Broker nodded, got up, and went looking for the gents, as Iker reached for the phone. He had to make the duty call to Hank Sommer’s wife and explain the circumstances of the tragedy.

When Broker returned, Iker was predictably more gloomy.

“How’d it go?” Broker asked.

“She said ‘-but he was in the hospital’ three times.” Iker shook his head. “Could have been worse. That doctor, Falken, had already called and prepared her. She’s got this nice voice,” Iker said. “You know, like way down at the bottom of an air conditioner.”

Broker nodded. He knew how it worked; the phone rings and a strange cop from faraway invites a wife to take a sudden plunge to where she keeps her personal ideas about mortality.

Iker, who lived thirty miles of impassable highway to the west in Tower, then called his wife, made sure that she and the kids were all right, and explained the day’s events and how he was stranded with Phil Broker.

“So now you and your ex-copper buddy have two choices, huh?” another wife’s voice rattled in the telephone.

“Yeah, I guess.” Iker winced and held up the receiver at arm’s length. Broker heard the wife say: “You can shovel snow or get drunk.”

Iker hung up, shrugged. “What are you going to do?”

“Get a room at the Holiday Inn.”

“I got to finish filing this report. Maybe I’ll see you at The Saloon later.” Iker tossed Broker his truck keys.

Broker left the courthouse, climbed in Iker’s truck, and drove toward the Holiday Inn that overlooked Lake Shagawa at the edge of town. No way he was going to try the unplowed road to Uncle Billie’s Lodge in these conditions. Iker’s Ford Ranger barely grabbed traction in Ely.

Moving at a crawl in four-wheel low, he went over some of the medical terminology he’d heard thrown around this afternoon: Sommer had suffered a significant “anoxic insult” and was currently comatose-in a coma due to oxygen starvation to his brain precipitated by respiratory complications following surgery. The informal opinion at Miner Hospital was that Amy Skoda had underestimated the amount of sedation in his system and took him off anesthesia too early in the operating room. Perhaps, someone speculated, she’d anticipated that the surgery would take longer, not allowing for Allen’s speed and skill. Sommer’s being hypothermic may have been a factor. Whatever the precipitating events, he developed trouble breathing in the recovery room.

Nobody was there when he crashed, and the alarm on the monitor had not been set.

As he left, Broker overheard someone console Amy. It could happen to anyone . But it didn’t happen to anyone. It happened to Hank Sommer, the guy Broker had promised to get out of the woods. The guy he helped deliver to a warm, safe hospital where they preserved his heart and lungs and lost his brain.

Wham.

Broker hooked a frustrated fist at the steering wheel in a tantrum of flash anger, swerved, and almost lost control of the truck. Reflexively, he steered into the skid and came out of the spin. Take deep breaths through your nose. Check yourself .

Usually he had a much longer fuse.

The Holiday Inn was a deserted post-and-beam jungle gym with a cathedral ceiling and a bored, snow-hypnotized receptionist who smiled discreetly at Broker’s attire. He carried in the duffel he’d retrieved from the dispatch desk, took a room, and went down a stairwell, opened a door, and stepped into a limbo of clean walls, curtains, and hotel furniture that could be anywhere-USA.

And he just wanted to disappear.

But he stripped down out of habit, went to the shower, and applied soap, shampoo, shaving lather, and a razor to peel off the cold outer layer of the last twenty-four hours. He rubbed a porthole in the steamed bathroom mirror and gauged his fatigue by the redness of his eyes. He took out dry jeans, a fleece pullover, and his spare boots.

After he’d dressed, his hand moved toward the phone, thinking to call the hospital and check with Allen, who’d stayed behind to watch over Sommer and Milt. He withdrew his hand.

You don’t really know Hank Sommer .

And it was like-all his life he’d worked the sharp end and he’d always been annoyed at the compulsion of people who couldn’t resist adding their personal embroidery to the messy edge of tragedy. Now he discovered he was not immune to this character defect.

He was dwelling on it. If you hadn’t hassled Sommer so much during the storm he might not have pushed so hard, might not have ruptured himself.

Try again, Broker.

You fell apart out there and an injured man had to take up the slack.

Either way, if Sommer hadn’t paddled to the max they would have dumped in the middle of the lake, not ten yards from the point. Their bodies would be stiff white logs rolling among the rocks on the leeward shore of Fraser Lake. He’d gone on a canoe trip in only fair physical condition and his strength had faltered when the chips were down.

These were ponderous thoughts to keep afloat in an ocean of fatigue, especially after the narcotic hot shower, and the bed beckoned, but so did the image of Sommer lying less than a mile away with his eyes closed, his heart beating, and his lungs sucking oxygen.

And his head full of static.

Broker lurched to his feet and grabbed his parka. Iker’s wife was right. He needed a drink.

The snow had grayed the early afternoon enough to switch on the streetlights and it was a bad day for a drive, but Broker took one, anyway. He pushed the Ranger through the small business district and followed the flashing blue light of a county snowplow out Sheridan Street to the outskirts of town, where the plow stopped, defeated by drifts on Highway 169. Broker turned around in front of the International Wolf Center and retraced his route.

Ely was end of the road, a departure point for tourists paddling into the wilds. Things were different when Broker was a kid and spent part of his summers here. Then, the iron ore they dug up from the veins that literally ran under the town was so pure it could be welded directly on to steel.

The iron fields were so potent they interfered with radio signals, and the rattle of boxcars full of ore had competed with the buzz of seaplanes flying fishermen into the paradise of northern lakes.