William Krueger - Copper River

Charlie had been in more fights than she could probably remember, but she didn’t lift a finger to defend herself. “Ren, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

In the moonlight, her face became a silver mask of pain and Ren was caught by surprise, as startling in its way as Charlie’s ambush had been. She was the most fearless, pigheaded person he knew, and she never apologized.

“Come on, Ren. Please don’t be mad at me.”

He understood that it wasn’t just an apology. It was a plea. Charlie needed him. His anger vanished and he lowered his hands.

“Your old man on a bender?” he asked.

“No worse than usual. He’ll drink himself to sleep in a while.”

“Want to sleep here?”

“Naw. I’m going to look for Stash’s dead body.”

“The one he saw in the river?”

“You catch on quick, Einstein.”

“You told him you didn’t think there even was a body.”

“You coming or not?”

He was so wide awake now, it would take him forever to get back to sleep. Besides, the truth was that the idea of looking for a dead body in the middle of the night appealed to him.

“All right, sure.” He bent and picked up the flashlight and the baseball bat. When he straightened up, Charlie was grinning at him.

“What?” he asked.

“You were going to try to kill me with that bat? Dude, I’ve played baseball with you. You’ve got the lamest swing in the whole world.”

She turned from him, laughing, and led the way through the dark.

From the shed where the now unused resort equipment was stored, they took two mountain bikes. They followed the lane to the county road, navigating by moonlight. It was almost a mile to the picnic shelter overlooking the Copper River. Because the cold had already driven away the crickets and the tree frogs, they biked in a silence broken only by their heavy breathing and the rattle of the bike chains.

They left the bikes at the shelter and walked a hundred yards down a tree-lined path that led to the mouth of the river, where the fast water seemed to have no impact at all on the vast, deep stillness of the lake. On either side of the river mouth lay small beaches of smooth, rounded stones. After big storms, Ren loved to walk the shoreline searching for agates washed up by the waves. There were also large boulders that had tumbled down the river over aeons and come to rest on Superior’s shore. That night the lake was peaceful. The sky was a sweep of stars melting into the glow of a gibbous moon. There was plenty of light for Ren and Charlie to see their way without a flashlight. Ren preferred it that way. He liked the eerie feel of the moonlit scene. Although he didn’t believe they’d find a body, he’d let himself open up to the thrill of an expedition with such a dark purpose, and he was glad Charlie wanted him along. In a way, it was like telling a ghost story. He didn’t believe it, but he loved the creepy feel and the grim distant voice in his head that said Maybe…

The water lapped at their feet. After a while, they sat on two boulders that gave a view of the river mouth and the scattering of lights to the east that was Bodine.

Charlie had been unusually quiet. Ren wondered if she was still upset because he’d been mad at her. For as long as he could remember, they’d been best friends. There’d been times when they’d been royally pissed at each other, but it had never been a big deal. Lately, however, Charlie was different. Things seemed to bother her more. Moods held her a long time in their grip. Sometimes she was distant, and Ren wondered where she’d gone.

Charlie had never had an easy life. Everyone in Bodine knew it. Just about the time she was learning to walk, her mother had run off with a logger named Vernon Atwater, and nobody’d ever heard from either of them again. Charlie’s father raised her alone. He was moody and had a lazy eye that never quite looked at you straight on. Summers he worked for a nursery this side of Marquette. Winters he bolted a plow onto the front of his pickup and cleared snow. He wasn’t a mean man, exactly, but neither was he affectionate. Saturday nights he drank too much, and then he got loud and angry. He’d rant about how he ended up consigned to life’s craphouse, and he’d blame everybody from his bastard old man to the lying sons of bitches in Washington for his misery. Somewhere along the way, he’d usually include Charlie. Which might have been somewhat tolerable if he’d only taken out his disappointment verbally.

When she was eleven, Charlie was sent to live with a foster family in Marquette while her father, under court order, got himself on more stable footing. When she finally returned to Bodine, she wouldn’t talk about her experience. The one thing she would say, and said adamantly, was that she’d never go to a foster home again. Even drunk, her old man was better.

Now when things got too bad, she’d run off for a while. Sometimes she showed up on Ren’s doorstep and his mother let her stay in the guest room. Sometimes she needed to get away completely and she hitched to a safe house for homeless teens in Marquette. Eventually she’d return to Bodine. She told Ren that whenever she was gone she could always tell that her father was happy to see her again. Even his lazy eye, for a short while, would focus entirely on her.

“Maybe it’s on the other side.” Ren pointed toward the rock beach on the far side of the river mouth.

“What?” Charlie asked.

“The body.”

“Oh,” Charlie said. “Yeah, maybe.”

Ren realized she wasn’t even thinking about the body now. Probably she’d never even believed in it, but looking was better than being home.

“You want to go back?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

She reached down, picked up a rock, threw it far out into the lake. Ren saw a burst of silver.

“Careful,” he said. “You’ll wake up Pressie.”

“Who?”

“Not who. What. The Presque Isle Monster. The monster of the lake.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, really. I can’t believe you’ve lived here your whole life and never heard of it. You know, like Nessie, the Loch Ness monster. It’s that kind of thing. The big ore boats have seen it for years. Every once in a while a boat disappears out there without a trace. Nobody knows why or where. I heard that one time the Coast Guard got a radio transmission from a fishing boat a few miles off Marquette saying their nets were caught on something that was pulling them under. That was it. The boat was never heard from again. If the lake weren’t so cold and people actually swam in it, I bet there’d be lots of folks who ended up dinner for Pressie and everybody would know about it.”

She was stone silent and her face turned from Ren toward the lake that was a great, flat plate of pale reflected moonlight.

“You’re so full of shit,” she said, although she didn’t sound convinced.

He could see that Charlie was intrigued, which was good. He wanted to coax her out of the quiet dark into which she’d slipped.

“Think so? Look, here it comes.”

His finger directed her attention to a long black shape sliding along the surface of the lake, following the shoreline on the far side of the river mouth. It moved slowly, silently rippling the moonlit water.

“What is it?” Charlie whispered.

“I told you. Pressie.”

Charlie watched a while longer. “It’s just a boat,” she said hopefully.

“Where are the running lights? And if it’s a boat, what’s it doing out here now?”

“Fishing, probably.”

“It’s Pressie. You woke it up with that rock you threw.” Ren made his voice sound afraid.

There was something about fear that was like fire in dry grass. It spread easily. Ren could feel Charlie tense up as the black silhouette crept nearer.