Purgatory Ridge

4

JOHN LEPERE HAD BEEN WAKING SOBER long enough that even when he had one of the bad dreams, he woke fresh and strong.

And that night, he’d had a dream.

He woke early, at first light, pulled on his Speedo and his goggles, and hit the lake. Every day he swam, every day a little farther. He started when dawn colored the water with a cold, gray light, and he moved steadily, stroking his way north, heading out into the center of Iron Lake where the water turned dark and fathomless beneath him. He never tracked his distance. He swam for another reason, a reason that led-twisting and turning-ultimately back to vengeance.

When he drew abreast of North Point that morning, he paused and saw that the sun had risen, a feverish red through the smoke in the sky. The lake around him had turned a bloody hue. The same moment that he noticed the color of the water, he heard an explosion from the direction of Aurora. Beyond the town, a black column climbed into the sky like a snake out of a charmer’s basket, but John LePere watched with only mild curiosity. Whatever the cause, it was the concern of other men. His only concern was keeping himself strong for the work that had become his life. As the siren in town sounded, calling the volunteer firefighters to their duty, LePere turned back and focused on cutting through the blood-colored water toward home.

He’d had the bad dreams so often over the years that he’d learned to keep himself from thinking about them by focusing on physical chores. By the time he’d showered and shaved that morning, he wasn’t thinking about the dream at all. He dressed in clean creased jeans, a crisp white shirt, blue canvas slip-ons. He fixed himself breakfast-oatmeal with raisins, a sliced banana, brown sugar and milk, whole-wheat toast, and a tall glass of orange juice. He ate slowly, alone in the quiet of his small cabin on the shore of a cove off Iron Lake. When he’d finished, he did up the dishes. Finally, he lifted his Leitz binoculars from where they hung on a steel spike hammered into the cabin wall near the back door, and he walked out onto his dock. He settled himself in a canvas chair and watched the big log home more than a quarter mile north across Grace Cove.

His own cabin was simple. His father had built it in the space of a single summer when John LePere was six years old. LePere remembered that summer well-the building of the cabin and the feel of working with his father, a serious man who spoke little but never raised his voice or his hand to his son. The cabin was meant as a retreat whenever LePere’s father tired of fishing Lake Superior for the herring and whitefish and lake trout that, for his living, he caught and sold to smokehouses along the North Shore. Fishing on Iron Lake, he didn’t care if he hung a line in the water all day and caught nothing. There, he fished for other reasons.

When his father bought the land in the late sixties, the price was cheap. The shore of Iron Lake was still quite empty, especially along the eastern side south of the Iron Lake Reservation. Much had changed in thirty years. To build the big log home-the only other dwelling on Grace Cove-Karl Lindstrom had had to pay a fortune for the land, LePere had heard. Lindstrom bought everything up to LePere’s property line. He even tried to buy LePere’s land, offering better than a good price, but John LePere had refused to sell. Between the cabin and the Lindstrom home lay woods full of birch and aspen and a few magnificent spruce. The property line ran along a little stream-all dirt and rock now in the long, dry summer-called Blueberry Creek. Before Lindstrom bought most of the cove, it had been called Sylvan. Lindstrom had changed the name to Grace Cove, after his wife. LePere didn’t know what sylvan meant, and although he liked the word grace attached to the beautiful inlet, he hated the ease with which money changed a thing that had been set on maps and in people’s thinking for over a hundred years.

The great home, built of yellow pine logs, lay in the long shadows of spruce and birch, and LePere, although he hated to admit it, liked the look of the place, especially on cool mornings when it seemed to rise out of the mist of the cove like something from a dream.

There was no mist on the lake that morning. As with every morning for weeks, the air was already warm. The water was a perfect mirror of the hazy blue sky, and across the real and the reflected ran a black smudge rising up from somewhere far across the lake, beyond Aurora.

When the woman came from the house with her boy, LePere lifted his field glasses to watch. She was dressed for sailing, in a white top, khaki shorts, canvas deck shoes, and a red visor pulled over her long, honeycolored hair. The boy wore a light blue polo shirt, jean cutoffs, and black Converse tennis shoes. A few feet out the back door, the woman stopped, smiled, and said something to the boy. They started racing toward the dock. The boy was awkward, a graceless runner. The woman, LePere could tell, let him win. There were never any other children about. The boy seemed to have no friends. Because of the time the boy’s mother spent with him, LePere guessed she understood this, too. Maybe she contributed to it. Sometimes the people you loved were the ones you most betrayed with your weakness, something LePere understood well.

They went to the dock where two boats were tied up-an expensive twenty-eight-foot sloop named Amazing Grace and a small dinghy with a sail. They stepped aboard the dinghy. The woman pointed toward the stern and began talking to the boy, giving him a sailing lesson, LePere guessed.

At that moment, LePere heard at his back the creak of the springy boards on his own ancient dock. He lowered the field glasses, but before he could turn, a nylon cord looped around his neck and drew taut.

“‘Round here,” the voice growled into his ear, “this is what we do to an Injun who stares at a white woman.”

The cord cut off LePere’s breathing. He shoved himself up and back, stumbling against the man who’d grabbed him from behind. LePere tried to twist, feeling the blood gather in his head, pounding in his ears, but the grip that held him was too powerful. He swept his left leg around, hoping to knock his assailant off balance. No good. Lightning flashed across his vision. Then, as suddenly as it had been drawn about him, the rope was loosed. LePere felt himself pushed free.

Wesley Bridger laughed, whooping hard. “Goddamn, Chief, you gotta be careful. Hell, you were so intent on that broad’s hooters the U.S. Cavalry could’ve galloped up behind you and you never would’ve heard ‘em.”

LePere rubbed at the raw skin over his throat. “Wha-” His throat felt all kinked up. He forced down a swallow. “What the hell, Wes?”

Bridger picked up the field glasses that had fallen on the dock and peered through them at the dinghy. “You know, Chief, in the SEALs we learned more’n forty ways to kill a man. I could’ve employed a good three dozen on you just now. Here.” He handed the field glasses back.

Wesley Bridger was tall, and although he was lean, every inch of him was taut. He was like a man constructed of steel cable with a thin layer of suntan slapped over it. LePere didn’t know how old Bridger was, but there were more than a few gray hairs in his black mustache and he’d made reference once to losing his virginity in high school while he listened to Pablo Cruise. His age didn’t matter. There was a part of the man that age, and the wisdom that went with it, would never touch.

Bridger shoved the cord into the back pocket of his Wranglers and watched the woman and the boy step back onto the deck of the sloop. “You know, Chief, the rich are different from you and me. I think it was Scott Fitzgerald said that. He sure knew whereof he spoke. You ever seen her up real close? I always wondered if those hooters were real. But I guess they must be. If she’d laid out the money to pump them hooters up, she’d’ve laid out the dough to cut back some on that honker of hers. Two amazing hooters and one hell of a honker. What a combination, huh?” He smiled at LePere and a lot of silver flashed among his teeth. “Got any cold beer?”

LePere was watching the woman and the boy again. With Bridger there and making such a commotion, he kept the field glasses at his side. He needn’t have. Neither the woman nor the boy looked his way. “You know I don’t keep alcohol here. It’s too early to be drinking anyway.”

“Fuck you, Mom. How about a Coke?”

“In the fridge.”

Bridger turned and headed toward the cabin whistling “Witchy Woman.”

LePere sat back down on the canvas chair and brought the field glasses to his eyes again. The woman had a rope in her hand now and was showing the boy how to tie knots. When LePere was a boy, his father had taught him the same knots, probably.

Bridger strode back onto the dock, guzzling a can of Coke. In his other hand, he held a paperback book.

“Superior Blue,” he said, holding the book up so that the shiny cover caught fire in the morning sunlight. He nodded toward the woman in the dinghy. “This is the book she wrote. You read it?”

“Yeah. What of it?”

“You’d better be careful, Chief. People are going to think you’re stalking her.”

LePere didn’t answer. Bridger rolled the can of cold Coke across his forehead, which was already beginning to glisten with sweat from the heat.

“Life’s full of irony, don’t you think, Chief? I mean, here she is, only a few hundred yards away, and she doesn’t even know who you are. Hell, she doesn’t even know you exist. Doesn’t even suspect that you hate her guts.”

“I don’t hate her,” LePere said.

“No?” Bridger shook his head. “You are one strange motherfucker, Chief.” He glanced across the water. “Show’s over.”

The boy let go the mooring lines. The little engine began to sputter and the woman steered the boat toward the opening of the cove. Once they were on the main body of the lake, LePere knew she would cut the engine and lift the sail. And if there were wind, they would fly. But even the rich couldn’t command the wind.

Bridger turned and started off the dock. “Well. You ready for another day at the salt mines?”

Bridger drove, one arm resting in the open window of an old green Econoline van. They were headed toward Aurora, driving along the state highway that edged the southern shoreline of Iron Lake. The trees there were mostly evergreen, and the air carried the sweet bite of pine pitch.

“Hear what happened at Lindstrom’s mill?” Bridger called over the wind.

“No.”

“Somebody blew the fuck out of it.”

“Protest?”

“Got me, Chief. All I know is it woke me up before I was ready to be woke up. I was dreaming about this little bar I used to go to in San Diego-”

“Anybody hurt?”

“Who am I? Walter fucking Cronkite?”

LePere settled back and let the air and the shadows of the trees and the smell of the pine wash over him. Lindstrom. More trouble for an already troubled man. LePere felt no pity.

“So… Chief-you give any more thought to what we talked about yesterday?”

“What you talked about.”

“Whatever. You think about it?” Bridger watched the road.

“No.”

“Easy money, Chief.”

“It’s crazy.”

“Every great plan has some element of craziness to it. That’s what makes it great.”

“You must’ve been reading that biography of Patton again.”

“Great man,” Bridger said. “Look, I can tell you’ve been thinking about it.” He leaned near to LePere and whispered like the voice of the devil. “A cool million.”

“Only a million? Why not two?”

Bridger straightened up and pounded the steering wheel, grinning. “Hells bells, why not? The risk is the same.”

They passed a sign on the road that said

CHIPPEWA GRAND CASINO 3/4 MILE TO A JACKPOT OF GOOD TIMES AND GOOD FOOD.

“You see, that’s the point,” LePere said. “You’re thinking the way white people think. More, always more. Never happy with what they have.”

“Tell me you’ll be happy just cleaning toilets the rest of your life.”

LePere stared out the window as they turned onto a beautifully paved road that led through a stand of young white pines to the casino. “It’s too risky,” he finally said. “People could get hurt, Wes. We could go to prison. Besides, we’re on the verge of something big already.”

“What we’re on the verge of is destitution. My luck ain’t held at the tables lately. If we have another hefty diving expense, I can’t cover it.”

“We stay with diving the wreck. We’re so damn close to the answers. I know it. And that’ll pay off big, sooner or later.”

“You got more patience than brains, Chief. But that’s okay.” Bridger reached out and punched his shoulder gently. “You got time to think about it. The postman always rings twice.” He pulled his van into the casino lot and parked it. They stood beside the van a moment before separating.

“We’re still on for the dive tomorrow,” LePere said.

Bridger smoothed his mustache and considered. “You’d go alone if I said no, wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah. I’d go alone.”

“Jesus. And you call me crazy. What time?”

“I’ll pick you up at five A.M. We can be out on Superior by seven.”

Bridger winced. “Make it seven. We’ll be on the lake by nine.” He saw the unyielding look on LePere’s face. “For Christ’s sake, Chief, that wreck’s been there for a dozen years. It ain’t going anywhere.”

“Six,” LePere countered.

Bridger threw his hands up in surrender. “All right. Six it is.”

They headed in opposite directions, Bridger to the gaming floor, where he’d spend most of his day at a blackjack table, and LePere to a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. After he’d signed in at the security desk, he went to the locker room and changed into his dark blue jumpsuit. The other custodial staff were already heading out. He joined them, joking with them as they split off toward their own areas. He pulled his cart from a closet on the east end of the casino and headed to his first stop, the men’s room on the first floor east wing. He put out the CLOSED FOR CLEANING sign and stepped inside.

A large bald man in shorts and a loud Hawaiian shirt stood at the third urinal, his stance wavering. When LePere stepped in, the man looked up from his business. His hand traveled along with his bloodshot eyes, and a stream of urine splashed over the wall. He watched the yellow flow make its way down the wall and puddle on the floor, then he grinned stupidly at LePere and zipped up. He started toward the door, reaching into his pocket as he came. When he was abreast of LePere, he said, “Sorry ‘bout that, Geronimo.” He pulled a red five-dollar casino chip from his pocket, tossed it onto LePere’s cart, and stumbled out the door.