Steve Hamilton - Ice Run

Natalie moved away from the television. She went to the window and looked out at the darkness as the tape kept playing.

“That’s a tough question,” the older man said.

“It’s just between you and me,” Marty said, sneaking a wink at the camera.

“I lived a long life, son.”

“Come on, Pops. How bad could it be? It’s not like you ever killed somebody.”

There was a long silence.

“Yes, son, I did.”

Marty stopped smiling.

“Pops…”

“I’ll tell you about it, Martin. I think it’s about time.”

“You’re serious?”

“Let me tell you something about hate, son. I’ve learned a lot about hate in my life. Hell, I lived on it for years. It’s what kept me going, every day, when I was a young man. I hated how poor I was when I was growing up, how I didn’t have a father. How I had to go out and work from when I was ten years old. This was during the Great Depression, you understand. You don’t know what it was like back then. I’m glad you don’t. I’m glad you never had to see times like that. A man would do anything just to earn a little money, so he could feed his family. I hated having to live like that, and seeing what it was doing to my mother, how it was making her an old woman when she was forty. Later on, when I was working on the docks, I hated the men I was working for. I hated the way they took advantage of us whenever they could, like we were nothing more than animals.”

Marty Grant was leaning forward in his chair, his elbows on his legs. He didn’t move an inch. He sat there and listened to his father.

“I suppose, looking back on it, all that hatred in my heart, it was sort of like a fuel, if you know what I mean. It kept me going. I don’t know if I would have been able to survive, or work so hard, or later, when I was in the union… We had to fight so hard, son. Maybe I needed that hatred. But damn, what it did to me. What a price to pay. All those years…”

Natalie kept looking out the window. She was as still as Marty’s image on the tape.

“There was one man in particular, son. This goes back to 1929, when they still had Prohibition. People used to bring liquor across the border all the time. I bet you didn’t know that a lot of the rum-running happened right here on the border between Michigan and Ontario. Most of it was down by Detroit, of course. That’s where the gangs were. Capone’s men and Bugs Moran and the Purple Gang… God, you can’t even imagine, son. It was a different country back then. Anyway, my father and his brother, they got involved in this. They knew these other men in Canada who would bring good whiskey across. My father and uncle would meet them and pay them for the whiskey, and then they’d sell it. In the summer, they’d come over in these wooden boats. Then, when the river froze, they’d bring it over on a sled.”

Mrs. DeMarco’s words came back to me. The ice run.

“There was one night…”

Simon Grant stopped. He cleared his throat.

“It was New Year’s Eve, the last night of 1929. The Ojibway Hotel was still brand-new. They were having this big party. I guess the manager there had been asking my father if he could get some whiskey for him, but the weather had been so bad… The men from Canada couldn’t get through, not until the weather broke on New Year’s Eve itself. I don’t know how much my father felt like doing it that night, but the money must have been good. He and my uncle went over to get it…”

Grant stopped again. He coughed a few times and then kept going.

“I was just a little kid, you understand. I didn’t hear the real story until later. Apparently, what happened was, some of the gangsters down in Detroit finally got wind of what was going on up here. They hadn’t been bothering with it way up here in the U.P. But now with the new hotel and the big parties and everything… Somehow they heard of this big load of whiskey coming across. They knew exactly where the meeting would be, out on the St. Marys River. They took the whiskey and the money and they killed everybody. My father and my uncle, they never came home. That was December of 1929, remember. The stock market had just crashed a couple of months before that. The next few years… The next few years were tough, son.”

Grant shook his head slowly.

“My little sister…”

Marty finally looked up at him.

“Her name was Victoria. She would have been your aunt. You never got to meet her. She died of pneumonia when she was eight years old. I was ten. She was…”

He had to stop for a while.

“God, how long ago was that?” he said. “You should have seen this little shack we were living in. It wasn’t fit to be a henhouse. My little sister, she was just…”

His voice broke.

“This angel. I remember her like…”

He put his hand in front of his face, then let it fall back to his lap.

“So when, 1972… That’s forty-three years later. You were in high school back then. I get this call from a man named Albert DeMarco.”

I looked over at Natalie. She didn’t turn around.

“This man tells me, all these years later, that his father was out on that ice, too. He knew all about it. He told me something else that I had never heard before. He told me that the gangsters let one of the men live. That man must have made a deal with them. My father and uncle get killed… the man’s partner, Mr. DeMarco, he gets killed… and Luc Reynaud, he’s the one man who made it back home-he works directly with the gangsters from that point on. I asked this man why he was telling me this now. He says it was something he thought I should know. Of course, I knew there was more to it. Eventually, this Mr. DeMarco, he gets around to telling me that the Reynaud family was fabulously wealthy, that they had all this money from way back, during the last few years of rum-running, supplying the gangsters in Michigan, buying gold during the Depression… this whole story the man’s telling me. A big house and horses, a whole estate up there in Blind River, Ontario. All this built up on that one night Reynaud sold out my father and my uncle, and DeMarco’s father, too. He tells me all this and then he finally gets to the point. Luc Reynaud’s spoiled brat son, Jean Reynaud, was coming down for a big party at the Ojibway on New Year’s Eve. He told me if he was in my shoes, he’d want to know about it.”

“Pops,” Marty said, finally speaking up. “Are you telling me this was the man…”

“DeMarco wanted me to kill him. That was pretty obvious. I told him I didn’t run errands for cowards, told him if he wanted Reynaud dead he should kill the man himself. That’s what I told him. But at the same time… let’s just say I was curious about meeting the son of the man who killed my father. So I went to the hotel that night. There he was, all dressed up. He was real smooth. He had this old hat on. A gray homburg. I went up to him at the bar and I introduced myself. I asked him if he knew who I was. He said no, he didn’t. I told him I liked his hat. He told me it had belonged to his father. I asked him if he knew how his father had made all his money. He sort of looked at me funny, and then he told me that his father had made all his money by milking cows. I asked him if he was sure about that. He put his two fists up, started moving them up and down, like he was milking a cow. He said, that’s where the milk comes from, sir. Just like that. He started laughing. Then he bought me a drink. He slapped me on the back and said, Happy New Year to you, sir. Then he walked away. I just sat there for a while, thinking about what he had said, drinking the beer he bought me. Milking cows, he said.”

Simon Grant stopped for a while to let that sink in. Marty Grant stared at the hospital floor.