Peter Geye - Wintering

—

Maybe Harry had been awake during Willem’s questioning of Gus. Maybe they’d talked it through before, on those days they spent escaping from the wilderness. Maybe he simply knew through their consanguinity what Gus would have told Willem or anyone else like him. Maybe — and least likely, I think — he actually was amnesiac and simply couldn’t remember the details of their last days. Maybe their story was merely telling itself. Whatever the case, when Harry woke the next morning and Willem came back to put his campaign hat on the chair beside his bed, the story did stay the same, what parts of it he could remember, anyway.

Ana assured Willem that it was natural Harry could have lost some of his memory. Hypothermia did that, stripping things from your mind. And even if the hypothermia hadn’t, the shock and trauma of their experience might well have. Indeed, that was likely, too. So Willem left again, the story still the same.

A week after Freddy and Marcel Riverfish delivered them to the emergency room, they came back to drive them home. Or to what was left of it. Lisbet had moved into the same attic apartment where I’d spent so much of my life, an irony that’s still not lost on me. (It wouldn’t be long before she left Gunflint altogether, a divorcee headed back to Chicago and whatever might have been there.)

The whereabouts of Charlie Aas was the only thing Gunflinters talked about the rest of that winter. Many folks were ready to believe that he’d merely skipped the country and had flown his plane into Canada to avoid his local legal troubles, which were by then considerable. The authorities would find it impossible to prove he’d killed George, but all the rooting around they’d done investigating that charge had unearthed dozens of other crimes on top of the good work the Tribune reporter had done. By the time Charlie left Gunflint for the last time he’d already had his real-estate license revoked, he’d been placed on unpaid leave as mayor, and his wife — long-suffering — had filed for divorce. His daughter, Cindy, hadn’t spoken to him in months, not since she’d been brought down to Duluth to get better in the psych ward at St. Luke’s.

There were others who believed his last flight was a suicide mission. These were predominantly the same people who blamed the Cubans for JFK’s assassination. Folks like Len Dodj, who, instead of being with Charlie on the borderlands, was mopping the floors at the hospital where Harry and Gus ended up. Matti Haula was seen plenty around town, usually plunked down at the Traveler’s Hotel, and he had his own theories about where his pal had disappeared to.

But no one knew, not even Lisbet. She told Willem first and then the federal authorities who came later that when Charlie left on that January morning she knew neither where he was going nor who was with him. I never doubted the veracity of this. No one else did, either.

—

It wasn’t until early April that the speculation came to an end. A Canadian trapper on a lake called Hagne — deep in the Quetico — found Charlie’s Cessna, undamaged and empty but for a pack of American cigarettes, a box of rags, and three empty Mason jars. A twenty-gallon jug of airplane fuel sat on the ice outside the plane.

The trapper reported his find to the ranger at the Cross Lake Station two days later, and in turn he dispatched a party to retrieve the plane. Because by then air-traffic restrictions were already in place for the entire borderlands wilderness, Charlie’s plane being where it was at all made this a criminal investigation from the outset. But the search lasted only one day and included only the three men whom the ranger had sent out there. By the time the plane was linked to Charlie, and Willem and the federal investigators were alerted, he’d been given up for dead.

Charlie Aas, and the two men who’d been with him, left no trace.

—

“This is your first time back here?”

“Yep.”

“What about when you were searching for your father?”

“I stopped below the lower falls that night.” He threw his thumb over his shoulder as though to say, Down there.

“Is it strange?”

“No. I don’t think so.” He stepped up to the railing on the lookout and peered over the edge. “In a way it’s like I never left. Lately, it sometimes feels like that.”

There was still snow in the woods, and ice knurling from the fissures above and below the falls, but the birch trees upriver were greening.

“Do you think it’s true that people have thrown pianos and cars down there?” Gus said, pointing at the Devil’s Maw.

“I’ve heard those stories, too.”

He looked around. “How could you even get a piano up here?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know whether to hate you or thank you, Gus.”

He looked at me like I’d slapped him.

“I know you meant no harm. I’m just certain of that. But you have to understand something about all that you’ve told me.”

He stepped away from the railing, toward me. “What is it, Berit?”

It was only as I stood there looking at the falls that the notion had come to me at all. Rather, it was only by standing there that I was able to start making sense of it myself. “We almost never talked about that year, your father and I. When we first started seeing each other I asked him what happened up there. He told me only what he’d always told the authorities. He said the story was out there for anyone who wanted to hear it. As though the whole thing had been written in some book.”

Gus now wore the expression of a scolded child.

“I believe there was only one other time,” I continued. “This was maybe five years ago. I asked him about it after Charlie’s wife, Maddy, passed away. In fact, I didn’t even ask him about that winter, simply what he thought had happened to Charlie.” I looked at Gus, who was standing so near I could’ve reached up and touched his cheek. “Your father said that Charlie probably got lost in the woods and froze to death up on the Îles des Chasseurs. He said he hoped he’d died slowly.”

He had such an expectant look on his face, Gus did. Like I held the secret answer to the whole riddle. He seemed almost to be tipping over. So much that I put my hands up as though to catch him. “I don’t understand,” he finally managed to say.

I took a step back. “We were together for more than thirty years, Gus. Think of that. He knew me better than anyone. A hundred times better.”

He still looked at me like he couldn’t understand.

“And all that time,” I explained to him, the falls rushing, the falling water rising again in cold mist, “I did not know him. Actually,” I said quickly when he raised his hand to object, “I meant to say I didn’t know one of the most important things about him. His secret, if you will. All you’ve told me, it’s got me wondering if it changed who he was — if it changed who we were together?”

There’s a little wooden bench up there on the lookout, and I sat down on it. I felt dizzy. I put my hand to my head and tried to press the whirling sensation out of it with my fingertips.

Gus sat down beside me. “I’m sorry,” he said.

It seemed wrong for him to apologize, and I told him as much.

“I didn’t give enough consideration to how this story would affect you,” he said. “I really didn’t. I’m sorry.”

I looked at him and saw that boy in the hospital bed all those years ago. For a long time I kept looking. Also seeing someone else.

When he started talking, I could barely hear his voice above the river. “When we got back, after Dad got home from the hospital, I used to sit around the house with him. Just waiting and hoping he’d say something. Anything. An apology, sure. That’s what I wanted most. But eventually I would’ve happily taken a simple glance.”