William Krueger - Purgatory Ridge

They were quiet the rest of the way home. Stevie was still up and Cork volunteered to put him to bed. He read for a few minutes-James and the Giant Peach-but Stevie was so tired he was asleep after one page. Cork turned on the night-light and turned off the lamp. He stood a while looking out the window. Stevie’s breathing was soft and steady at his back. Through the branches of the elm tree in the backyard, a gentle wind blew, the breathing of the night. The dark air smelled of smoke, of the distant fires. Cork left the room. As he headed down the hallway, he heard Jo and the girls talking downstairs. There was a moment of soft laughter. He got himself ready for bed and lay on top of the covers. He thought about that morning, the moment he’d opened his arms to Jo and they were about to make love. It seemed like a long time ago. He felt more tired than one day should have made him. He waited. Jo didn’t come up. At last, he fell asleep, so deeply he didn’t know if she ever came to bed.

LEPERE HAD STRONG, HOT COFFEE in a metal thermos, and he handed the thermos to Wesley Bridger as the man got into the truck.

“You look like hell,” LePere said.

Bridger steadied his hands and poured coffee. “I’ll be fine. It’s this getting up before the goddamn birds.”

“It’s the whiskey before bed.”

“Fuck you, Mom.”

Bridger bent to his coffee as LePere kicked his old pickup into gear and took off. Coffee splashed down the front of Bridger’s shirt.

“What the hell’re you doing?”

LePere smiled at the road ahead that was just beginning to glow with morning sunlight. “Hot shower.”

Despite the coffee, Bridger slept most of the way. After an hour, LePere hit Illgen City and turned south onto Minnesota State Highway 61. On his right, the hills that formed the southern tip of the Sawtooth Mountains were bathed in the gold of a beautiful morning light. From the base of the Sawtooths, Lake Superior spread east, dark blue water running unbroken to the horizon where it fused with the softer blue of the sky.

Clear day, LePere thought. Perfect for the dive. Bridger shifted, opened his eyes, blinked at the sun that struck him full in the face.

“Hungry?” LePere asked.

“Toast, maybe. Soak up some of that battery acid you call coffee.”

They stopped at a small restaurant in Beaver Bay. LePere ordered two eggs over easy, hash browns, wheat toast, a side of ham, and orange juice. Bridger rubbed his face with his hands and scratched at his grizzled jaw as the waitress, a young woman with patient brown eyes, stood with her pen poised over her order pad.

“Ah, hell,” Bridger finally said. “Gimme a stack of cakes, bacon, coupla eggs scrambled. You got home fries here?”

“Yes.”

“Gimme some of them, too.”

“We’re diving,” LePere reminded him. “If you eat all that, you won’t need weights.”

Bridger scowled at him, then at the waitress. “And coffee. Lots of it.”

The restaurant was filling up. A few locals, it seemed to LePere, and a lot of tourists. A family-man, woman, boy-stepped in and waited to be seated. They were only a few feet from where LePere and Bridger sat by a window.

“Can we go swimming in the lake?” the boy asked.

“No way, Randy,” his father replied. “The water’s too cold. It’s so cold, in fact, that the bodies of drowned people don’t float to the surface. Lake Superior, son, doesn’t give up its dead.”

“Stuart,” his wife admonished.

“Why?” the boy asked.

Ignoring the look from his wife, Stuart replied, “As a body decomposes, gases form inside it that make it float. It fills up like a balloon. But the water here is so cold, bodies don’t decompose. They just lie there on the bottom of that big lake-”

“That’s enough, Stuart.”

“They say,” he went on, “that at night when the moon is very bright and the water very still, you can look down and see all the dead dancing along the bottom.” He gave his hands a ghostly flutter.

“That’s enough.” This time it was LePere who spoke.

Stuart stared at him, surprised. A smile tried to come to his lips, hoping the unhappy, powerful-looking man at the table was only joking.

“I was just…” he started to explain. He ended simply: “Sorry.”

The family stood silently until they were seated. LePere sat looking out the window toward the lake that burned with a silver fire under the morning sun.

When the check came after breakfast, Bridger said, “Mind catching it?”

LePere dug for his wallet. “Luck didn’t change, huh?”

“Went down to Black Bear Casino last night. Thought a different location might help. It didn’t.”

“Maybe if you stopped mixing cards and alcohol,” LePere suggested.

“Just buy the damn breakfast, okay? The least you could do. I didn’t get out of bed this morning for my own amusement.”

LePere dropped a couple of bucks for a tip and paid at the register. As he stepped outside, he saw Stuart watching him from the window. Stuart looked quickly away.

Breakfast had awakened Wesley Bridger. He walked briskly to LePere’s truck, then stood shaking his head at the old blue Dodge pickup with its homemade camper shell.

“How long you had this rust bucket?”

“Eleven years now.” LePere climbed in.

“Time for a new one,” Bridger said, opening the passenger door. “But then, cleaning toilets won’t exactly cover monthly payments.”

LePere pulled the truck onto the highway and continued south out of Beaver Bay.

Bridger reached for the radio and found a country station. He crossed his arms and settled back. “Those casinos really rake it in. Christ, middle of nowhere and the parking lot’s always full, day or night. They must haul in a million bucks a day.” He eyed LePere. “And you don’t get one red cent?”

“Like I told you before, each casino is operated by a specific band.” LePere checked his mirror and passed a slow-moving Buick with an old woman at the wheel. “The Chippewa Grand Casino is operated by the Iron Lake Band of Ojibwe. To get an allotment, you have to be an enrolled member of that band. My mother was a Cree from Canada.”

“Even so, you’d think with all that bread there’d be enough to spread it around to every Indian in the state. The hell with that band stuff.” Bridger’s foot tapped along to Reba McEntire. “You’re thinking, I suppose, that at least they gave you a job. Big deal. Cleaning the crap off toilet seats.”

“I know where this is leading.”

“All I’m saying is that no matter how you look at it, you’re owed big time by somebody.”

“And that’s why you’ve come up with this new harebrained scheme. Because I’m owed big time.”

“No, I came up with it because the very idea of holding a million bucks in my hand makes my dick stiff.”

“You used to be sure we’d get a million bucks diving the wreck.”

“We will.” Bridger settled back and crossed his arms. “We will. But it’ll be at the end of long, drawnout litigation. Way my luck’s been lately, I can’t wait that long for a bankroll. Like I told you, we got any more heavy expense with this diving, we’re shit out of luck.”

“Maybe it’s time you stopped gambling, Wes.”

“It was gambling brought us this far,” Bridger reminded him sourly. “Look, I’m just suggesting a different game, that’s all.”

“What you’re suggesting isn’t a game. We could go to jail.”

“Like your life ain’t a fucking prison now.”

They approached a long ridge that stretched east, a dark wall rising in front of them. The ridge was crowned with evergreen and aspen, but its sides were bare rock, striated basalt cliffs that, at the eastern terminus, plunged more than two hundred feet, before touching the surface of the lake. It was Purgatory Ridge, the deep ancient lava flow in whose shadow John LePere had been born and raised. The highway cut under the ridge in a long tunnel, lit by bright lights. As LePere drove through, the tires of his old truck seemed to be singing one long note that echoed off the tunnel walls. When the highway broke into sunlight again, LePere immediately slowed the truck and turned onto a narrow lane of dirt and gravel. The lane wound a quarter mile through a thick stand of poplars until it came to a small house on a protected cove named for the ridge that towered above it. Purgatory.