William Krueger: Boundary waters

“What does she see in him?” Cork asked. “He looks like a burned matchstick.”

“He writes her poetry. And he’s a nice kid.”

Cork leaned to the screen. “Jenny,” he called. “Could I talk to you a moment?”

Jo gasped. “Cork, get away from there.”

“That nice kid’s hand was on her butt,” Cork said.

When he returned to Sam’s Place, the first thing he did was to head for the basement.

Cork shared Sam’s Place with a monster he called Godzilla, an ancient oil-burning furnace that occupied a good deal of the space beneath the old Quonset hut. Godzilla had a temperamental disposition that generally required giving the burner a kick now and then. Whenever the old furnace rumbled on in the winter, a shudder ran through the pipes above that often gave Cork’s visitors a start. He’d hoped to have enough money from the season’s profit to replace Godzilla with something new and quiet that burned clean natural gas instead of smelly heating oil; but employing Annie and Jenny all summer had eaten whatever savings he might have put away. Considering how much he’d enjoyed the company of his daughters in those months, he felt it was a trade that was more than fair.

Cork pulled the cord on the overhead light and stepped around Godzilla. He went to a black trunk shoved against a wall beneath a couple of shelves of jars. The jars were gifts from Rose. They contained tomato preserves, chokecherry jelly, sweet corn relish, pickled watermelon rind. Despite the fact that Cork was separated from her sister Jo, Rose continued in her own ways to take care of Cork with a vengeance.

He opened the trunk. On top lay a rolled bearskin. He lifted the skin, felt the weight of it that was in large part due to the Smith amp; Wesson. 38 Model 10 military and police special wrapped in oilcloth inside. Both the bearskin and the gun were ties to the two most important men in his past. The gun had been his father’s when he was sheriff of Tamarack County, and Cork had worn it during his own tenure in that office. The bearskin had been left to him by Sam Winter Moon and was a constant reminder of how the man had saved his life-in so many ways-after Cork’s father was killed. They were violent symbols, to be sure. Yet upon the memories they represented rested much of the foundation for Cork’s understanding of what it was to be a man.

Underneath the rolled bearskin was folded a yellowed wedding dress, his mother’s. The trunk, before it had come into his possession, had held mostly his mother’s treasures. When, at his wife’s insistence, he’d left the house on Gooseberry Lane, the house he’d grown up in, the trunk was one of the few nonessentials he took with him. He’d failed in so many duties that keeping safe the things his mother had valued was one he would not forsake. Cork lifted the wedding dress and laid it gently on the bearskin. A great deal of the space remaining in the trunk was taken up by boxes of old photographs. When she was alive, his mother was always planning to sort through the photos, organize them, place them in the pages of albums. It never happened. What she left behind was a jumble of lives seen in scattered moments. Cork began to sift through a box. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked at the collection, and if he hadn’t been so focused in his mission, he’d have lingered over photographs, puzzle pieces that formed his history. It took him almost an hour and three boxes to find the photo he was looking for. It was black-and-white and taken with an old Kodak box camera that Cork remembered well. The photograph showed the O’Connor house on Gooseberry Lane circa 1961. In the front yard, squinting into the sun, wearing calflength print dresses, were his mother, his mother’s cousin Ellie Grand, and Ellie’s twelve-year-old daughter Marais. They’d come that year from the Twin Cities to live in Aurora after Ellie had finally given up trying to live as an urban Indian. No one seemed to know about Marais’s father, or if they did, they never spoke of him. For reasons Cork never really knew, Ellie Grand hadn’t been welcome on the Iron Lake Reservation, so Cork’s mother had offered her sanctuary in the house on Gooseberry Lane. For almost a year, Ellie Grand slept in the guest room and Marais, in the sewing room.

Marais Grand had not been like any girl Cork had known. She reminded him of an East Indian princess-long black hair; gold-dust eyes; soft, fine features; and skin a darker hue than that of any Ojibwe he’d ever seen. He loved her immediately. Marais, nearly three years older than he, had found him amusing. At first, she called him Odjib, which meant “shadow” or “ghost,” for he followed her everywhere. Later, she’d dubbed him Nishiime, “little brother.”

He dug some more in that same box and came up with a shot of Ellie’s Pie Shop, the old house on the edge of town that Cork’s mother loaned the money for and that Ellie Grand turned into an enterprise much favored by the summer tourists. He found a photograph he recalled taking himself at the Windom Bluegrass Festival the year Marais took first place. She was sixteen, beautiful, happy. All the tragedy was still far ahead.

Cork was tired by the time he came across several articles clipped together. They’d come from the St. Paul Pioneer Press and were a series that reported on the murder of Marais Grand at her home in Palm Springs. He skimmed the articles, refreshing his memory. The primary suspect had been a man named Vincent Benedetti, owner of a Vegas casino called The Purple Parrot and reputed to have had connections with organized crime. In the rumor mill, he’d been linked romantically with Marais. The articles followed the investigation until it was ultimately dropped, officially leaving unanswered the question of who’d killed Marais Grand.

Cork carefully placed everything back in the trunk except the early photo of Marais on the front lawn, and the bearskin. The photo he slipped into his pocket. The bearskin he held a while, considering the weight of what it concealed. Sam Winter Moon had once told him that all things created by Kitchimanidoo, the Great Spirit, had many purposes. A birch tree supplied shelter for animals, bark for canoes, sticks for cooking fires. A lake was a home for fish, water for drinking, a cool place on a hot day.

But a gun. What purpose did a gun serve except to kill?

Cork put the bearskin back, closed the trunk, and turned away from one more unanswered question.

He was stepping out of the shower fifteen minutes later when the phone rang.

“Cork? Wally Schanno.”

Cork rubbed a towel across his chest. The towel smelled musty and he made a note to do some wash.

“Yeah, Wally. What’s up?”

“Can you drop by my office? Soon?”

“How soon? I haven’t had any dinner yet, and I’m starved.”

“Grab a burger. You can eat it here.”

“I eat burgers all day long. What’s it about?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you. Just get over here.”

“How about a please?”

Sheriff Wally Schanno was quiet on his end of the line. “Please,” he finally grunted.

Twenty minutes later, Cork pulled his Bronco into the parking lot of the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department. Inside, the night desk officer, Deputy Marsha Dross, buzzed him through the security door.

“They’re in the sheriff’s office,” she said, nodding toward a closed door.

“They?”

“I make ’em to be FBI, maybe BCA. Poles up their asses for sure.”

“Any idea what they want?”

She shrugged. “Search me. But every time the sheriff pokes his head out, he looks like somebody gave his colon another crank.”

Cork knocked on the door and opened it when he heard Wally Schanno grumble from the other side.