A Stolen Season

Chapter Twenty-three

The warm weather finally arrived in September. It stayed for ten and a half days. The sun was bright and in the evenings it shone against the trees and made everything look like a postcard. The sunsets were the very definition of breathtaking. You would literally stop breathing when you stepped outside to see them.

Far from being lost on me, I think I felt those days more deeply than anyone. They were so beautiful, but the beauty was tinged with a great sadness because you knew there would be so few of them. Each perfect day making you wonder if it would be the last.

A white man would have called these ten and a half days an Indian summer. I asked Vinnie what the Ojibwa called it. He said it was dagwaging.

I had apologies to make, to Vinnie more than anyone. I had shut him out, had treated him like no brother should ever treat another, even before I shot him with a fifty-thousand-volt stun gun. Someday maybe we’d be able to joke about that one. But not yet.

Vinnie finally asked me what had happened that day, after I left him. I figured I owed him the full story. We sat outside and watched the sunset while I told him. When I got toward the end, the moment of truth, I wasn’t sure quite what to say.

“He told me I couldn’t kill him in cold blood,” I said. “I wanted to. I really did. But I couldn’t do it.”

“You had the only gun at that point,” Vinnie said. “He was defenseless.”

“After what he had done, that shouldn’t have mattered.”

“No…but it still came down to shooting an unarmed man.”

“That’s why I called Laraque. I knew he’d have no problem with it.”

“So when he figured who you were calling…”

“He came right at me. He probably thought it was his last chance.”

“You had to shoot him then.”

“Yes. I did.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“I couldn’t do it straight up,” I said. “So I had to force his hand. I think I knew he’d try something.”

“But it wasn’t a bluff. You really did have Laraque on the line.”

“If the situation was reversed, Cap would have shot me right away. No hesitation. So does this make me a better man, Vinnie? A weaker man? What?”

He looked at the sky while he thought about it. It was painted with every shade of red, orange, yellow. Some blue, some purple. Even some green. A painter would have lost his sanity trying to capture it all.

“You did what you had to do,” he said. “You found the one way to get it done. I think you can let it go now.”

I didn’t say anything to that. We both sat there for a while.

“So what happened with Laraque?” he said. “What did he say when you called him?”

“I didn’t really get to talk to him until after I shot Cap. Then I tried to explain everything. He told me to give him my GPS so he could send somebody out to meet me. He had those men with a boat on St. Joseph Island.”

“They wouldn’t have let you live. I mean, talk about loose ends.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“So what did you say?”

This was the only part I didn’t tell Vinnie-the part about me sitting there in the boat, asking Natalie what I should do. Wait for the men, let them find me so I could join her, wherever she was? Or find a reason to keep on living in this world for a little bit longer.

“I came up with some coordinates, miles away from where I was. I gave those to him and told him I’d wait. I figured those guys would be going out no matter what, might as well send them in the wrong direction. Then I called the Coast Guard.”

“That must have been some scene…”

“Two dead bodies. Me standing there covered with blood. Yeah, that got their attention.”

“Sounds like you still have their attention.”

He knew I’d already been interviewed by the ATF and the Mounties. The ATF agent in particular wanted to hold an obstruction of justice charge over my head, but Sergeant Moreland called me himself to tell me the guy was just blowing steam. Laraque was still out of reach, he told me. The guns at the bottom of the lake could be tied back to Gray, but Gray was already dead. Moreland told me they might want me to testify against Laraque someday, if it ever came to it. I thanked him for all the times he had been watching out for Natalie. He thanked me, totally off the record, for killing the man who had killed her.

“It’s ironic,” Vinnie said. “You wanted to go after Laraque so bad, and it turned out he had nothing to do with it. Now he might have reason to go after you.”

“He wouldn’t dare right now. Things are still a little too hot for him.”

“Yeah, but someday…”

“We’ll see about that.”

“You’d better sleep with a gun, Alex.”

“I can’t. They’re all on the bottom of the lake, remember?”

The sun disappeared. The colors stayed in the sky, darkening one degree at a time.

“I miss her, Vinnie. I really do. It’s not getting any better.”

“You’re done running around for a while. It’s time to grieve now.”

He was right, of course. It was time.

Vinnie helped me move all my stuff to the second cabin. We left the first cabin empty for now. I’d figure out what to do with it later.

We worked on the new cabin at the end of the road. We built the interior stairs. Then we started in on the kitchen.

I spent my evenings at the Glasgow Inn. I sat by the fire and remembered the one night Natalie was there.

Ten and a half days. On the eleventh day, it was gone within an hour. You knew it wouldn’t be back for a long time. The leaves all seemed to turn at once and you could feel the cold wind coming. You could practically smell the snow in the air.

I asked Vinnie what the Ojibwa word was for fall.

“It’s dagwaging.”

“Wait a minute, that’s the same word you gave me for Indian summer.”

“There’s no difference,” he said. “The sun may be shining. Or it may be cold and gray. It is what it is. It’s still dagwaging. You accept it and you go on living your life.”

That night, Vinnie came to me and told me that Caroline was having some real trouble again. Things were getting bad with Eddie, now that she wasn’t making those few bucks on the side selling her prescription painkillers. He asked me to drive over to the Soo with him, so we could both have a little talk with Eddie, maybe suggest to him that beating up his wife wouldn’t solve any of his problems.

He drove. I sat in the passenger’s seat of his truck, watching the leaves blow around in the cold wind. He could have done this himself, I thought. He’s taking me with him for a reason, maybe to show me that I still have some fight left in me.

I looked over at him, at his stone-calm face. “You won’t give up,” I said, “will you.”

He kept his eyes on the road. “Never.”

Caroline was at work that night. Eddie was at home, sitting at his kitchen table with his beer and cigarettes, just like the first time I had met him. Here was a man lucky enough to have a woman who loved him, lucky enough to spend every day of his life with her. I could barely stand to look at him.

I’d run into my share of domestic violence before, back in Detroit. A beat cop sees it all the time. There’s only so much you can do about it. You can arrest the man, talk to the woman, help her with her options. You may feel like bouncing the man off the walls a few times, but you can’t.

I wasn’t a cop anymore.

By the time we left him, I think he was thoroughly convinced that Vinnie would be watching over her every day in the casino. Looking for a bruise. The slightest mark on her. Red eyes, maybe from crying. A bad hair day. That’s all it would take for us to pay him another visit.

It was one thing I could do. One good thing for one person who needed help. Maybe another thing the next day, for someone else. Maybe getting one step closer to being the kind of man who’d deserve having someone like Natalie Reynaud in his life, if only for a short time.

Yes, being that man, living with the dagwaging I’d been dealt. Then getting through another long winter so I can see how the world looks when springtime comes again.