Boundary waters

31

The water looked like gray earth and the paddle in her hand felt like a spade. With every stroke, Shiloh saw herself digging her own grave.

The man in the stern of the canoe hadn’t spoken except to press her for directions. She’d lied to him, tried to misdirect him to buy time. “That way,” she’d pointed, leading them through a narrows between two islands. “Now that way.”

His sense of direction was flawless even though the mist and the drizzle sometimes blotted out everything except the flat water fifty yards around them. “That will take us in a circle,” he said quietly at her back. “Don’t try that again. Which way is it?”

“There,” and she’d lifted her hand grudgingly in the direction of her death.

She’d struggled with despair all her life. She knew that people envied her, looked at the trappings and thought she had it all. They were wrong. Her life was a big beautiful box with lots of ribbons and bows on the outside but completely empty within. The only love she’d ever known was from her mother and that had been wrenched from her a long time ago. Her father had given her everything she wanted except love. She’d been raised by nannies, nuns, tutors, and housekeepers. She’d never had any real friends, anyone she trusted deeply. All she’d ever had was the music.

What would be the loss? Who would even care if she never came out of the woods? She laid her paddle across the gunwales, laid her head down, and wept. The canoe didn’t slow in the least.

“You disappoint me,” he said. “We all die sometime. Wendell Two Knives understood that. He went as nobly as any man I’ve ever known. You would honor him by dying well.”

“There’s no honor in dying if there’s no reason to die,” she wept.

“Dying’s never had a reason. As far as I can tell, the same is true for living.”

It wasn’t true about dying, she thought. Wendell had died for a reason. He’d died for her. And dying herself seemed like no way to honor him.

She whispered his name. Wendell. It didn’t exactly fill her with courage, but it did pull her out of her self-pity.

She considered the knife in the pocket of her jeans. It wasn’t much, but small as it was, she found herself wrapping her hope around it. She had the map in her vest, and a compass, and matches there, too, in a waterproof container. All she needed was a chance.

She wiped her tears and took up her paddle.

“Do you have a name?” she asked.

“Call me Charon.”

“Charon? Charon. Where have I heard that name before?”

Her back was to him. She listened to his voice carefully. His words were like stones, hard in the way he said them. But not without feeling. Rather, they were like a wall behind which the feeling was hidden.

“You said Wendell died a noble death. How?”

“In the end, I cut his throat. A small, painless cut. It doesn’t take much when you know what you’re doing.”

“Is that how you’ll kill me?”

“That depends on you.”

“I have money,” she tried.

“I have money, too.”

“Look, if you don’t do this, I could make it worth your while. In other ways.”

“Sex? If I wanted that from you, I’d take it.”

“I don’t understand this. I don’t understand any of it.” She hit the water with her paddle and sent a splash of silver into the gray on their left.

“?Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.? William James said that. About as close to understanding any of this as I’ve ever come.”

“I’ll bet you tortured small animals when you were a child.”

He was slow in responding, although the canoe slowed not at all. “I was the small animal,” he said.

“I have to pee.” She lifted her paddle from the water. “We need to stop.”

“No stops,” he said.

“If I’m going to die, I want to die with the dignity of clean underwear.”

A moment later, she felt the canoe draw to the left toward a small island. As the bow touched shore, he said, “Try to run and I’ll hang you by your hair from a tree limb.”

She stepped out. “I’m just going over there.” She pointed a dozen yards away to a gooseberry bush near a scrub pine. “For privacy.”

“Right there’s good enough.” He nodded toward the wet ground on which she stood.

“At least turn your back.”

She was thinking that when he did, she could grab the knife and use it. She was thinking she could cut his throat as he’d cut Wendell’s.

“So you can hit me with a rock?”

He stared at her until she undid her jeans. She pulled them down and squatted facing him.

He stood in the canoe, tugged his zipper down, and proceeded to urinate into the lake.

Wendell had told her often that it was important to note the details around her. She saw that the man who called himself Charon was uncircumcised and she wondered if that was important.

“I’m hungry,” she said when she’d finished.

“I told you you would be.” He sat back down in the canoe and waited for her.

“Even the worst condemned criminal gets a last meal,” she said.

He turned and drew in the yellow duckie they’d towed behind them. He lifted out his pack, opened it, and tossed her a Hershey’s bar. No nuts.

“You call this a last meal?”

“I had a last meal once. Flat bread, that was all. A piece of hard flat bread and a little water in a rusty can.”

She unwrapped the Hershey’s bar. “How come you’re not dead?”

He took a bar himself, unwrapped it, and sat back in the canoe as he ate. “They never bothered to check my pulse. Just threw me on a pile of other dead men. I let the flies lick my blood for a full day before I crawled away. Here.” He tossed her a plastic bottle full of water.

She took a drink, then, as his eyes flicked down for a moment to his candy bar, she spit in the bottle. She capped it and threw it back.

“How does a man get to be like you?” she asked, her voice sizzling with her spite.

“If you believe in karma, I didn’t have a choice.” He drank from the bottle.

She smiled bitterly. “If I don’t?”

“Then you enter the nature-nurture debate. I had a tough early life. So maybe that was it. Or maybe it was a simple genetic predisposition, because not everyone who had a tough life ends up in this line of work.”

“You sound educated.”

“I don’t spend all my time killing people.”

“How many people have you killed?”

“I’d know only if I gave that any importance. I don’t. The only important one was the first.”

“Your father, I suppose.”

He stared at her, then a laugh, like a freed bird, escaped his lips. “Archetypal as hell, huh?” He crumpled his wrapper and put it in his pack. “Give me,” he said and held out his hand for her wrapper.

“Think someone’s going to find it? Think it’s going to save me or threaten you? Christ, what difference does it make? You left two bodies this morning.” She threw the paper on the ground.

“You never know what might make a difference. Pick it up.” He spoke in that deadly, quiet way that was business and was final.

She picked up the wrapper and tossed it to him.

“Get in,” he said in the same tone. “It’s time to be moving.”

“Charon,” she said suddenly. They’d traveled for nearly an hour in a silence broken only by the splash and swirl of water as they dipped their paddles into the lake. The rain was mixing more and more with wet snowflakes that clung to her eyelashes before melting into drops that blurred her vision. “I remember. The boatman who ferried souls across the river Styx to Hades. The nuns made us study that. Charon. Funny in a grim sort of way. But that’s not your real name.” He didn’t reply. “What is your real name?”

“As I understand it, an Ojibwe may have several names. The name given him by a Dreamer, the name that has come to him in his own dream, a nickname, a kinship name. Which one is real?”

“You’re smart,” she said, feeling the frustration and anger rise again. “And you say you don’t need money. So why are you doing this?”

He spoke very carefully, as if it were important. “Your music. Why do you do that?”

Now it was her turn to refrain from answering.

“Let me suggest something to you, then. Your music is who you are. It defines you.”

“You kill people to define yourself?”

“I take difficult jobs. Sometimes killing is a part of that.”

“This is a job? Christ, this is just a job?”

“No. I told you. It’s who I am.”

“Who hired you?”

He paddled a few strokes before answering. “Do you believe in an afterlife?”

“What difference does it make?”

“Because if you do and you’re right, all your questions will be answered there.”

Strange, how familiar it all was. The line of hills rising west like horses lifting their heads. The island that was nothing more than a piece of bare gray rock. A hundred yards beyond that, almost hidden among ribbons of mist and rain, the place where the stream emptied into the big lake. She surprised herself by finding it so easily.

As the bow nudged the rocks along the shoreline, the stranger stepped out and drew the duckie in. When both craft had been secured, he said, “Lead the way.”

She was trying to keep her mind clear, but she felt as if she were floating. Felt distanced from the feet that walked the soft bed of pine needles covering the trail. Separated from the cold that nestled under the big evergreens and gave her cheeks a vague tingling. She breathed but felt nothing enter her body.

Her thinking was thick and empty. She thought of the knife in her pocket and wondered should she try to use it. But it wasn’t a real thought, a real wonder. She was heading toward something so huge and absolute it couldn’t be embraced. It was as if she were already dead, had passed on in spirit, and was simply waiting for the flesh to join her.

“Up there?” she heard him ask.

They’d come to the high wall of jumbled rock that long ago had dammed the stream to create the hidden lake Wendell called Nikidin. She stared up dumbly at the rock wall, stared up out of a deep well of hopelessness.

With the toe of his boot, he tested the footing on the stones. Water seeped over everything, and the stones were covered with green slime.

“Hmm,” he said. “Slippery.”