The Dead Caller from Chicago

Eleven

A hundred yards out from the shore, the water began kicking harder, making whitecaps two feet high. The ferry was big, but the roil in the water was stronger. The ferry bobbed like a small boat.

I went up to the wheelhouse. The captain was talking casually to the deckhand. They both turned, smiling. They were used to angry water.

“Got work on Mackinac?” the captain asked.

“I’ve got a friend on Eustace Island.”

He winced. “Hell to pay, if that’s your destination.”

“Can you take me? I’ll pay large.”

He shook his head. “We’d crash on the rocks.”

“How do I get there, then?”

“Arnie Pine,” the deckhand said. “Keeps his boat on the next dock over from ours. The Rabbit. He’s adept.”

“Even in this kind of weather?”

“Depends on his lunch,” the deckhand said. They both laughed at the inside joke.

We docked on Mackinac Island fifteen queasy minutes later. I stepped onto the wide plank pier, and for a second I just stood in the soft rain, sucking air and enjoying the unyielding steadiness of the wood below my feet.

As promised, the Rabbit bobbed at the next dock. It was a swaybacked thing and seemed to groan under the weight of a weathered white cabin that looked too long and tall for its narrow deck. There were deep gashes, some grayed, some fresh, cut into its green hull. No one was on board.

Farther down, a man knelt on the pier, ready to pull a small motor out of a rowboat heaving in the chop. The water rose and he lunged, grabbed the motor, and set it down with a thud onto the pier. “Bad damned water today,” he called across, standing up.

“Is Arnie Pine around?”

“He’ll be back just before his four o’clock run to Eustace.”

I looked down at the water crashing into the pilings next to him. “Isn’t it too rough?”

“For everyone else, maybe, but Arnie takes his little ferrying income serious. And,” he added, “he’ll have had lunch.”

“Lunch?” The ferryboat captain and his deckhand had mentioned Pine’s lunch, too.

He wiped the mist of rain from his forehead. “Arnie takes his lunch serious,” he said. “Especially in rough weather.” He lifted his motor and started down the pier.

I had three hours to kill. I walked up the incline to what must have been the main trap for tourists. A few blocks of businesses sat on a gently curving street. Every third or fourth one appeared to be selling fudge. Or would shortly, when the vacationers started coming. For now, everything appeared to be closed.

The Grand Hotel loomed enormous and white above the winding street, easily visible through the leafless trees. Amanda and I had talked once about spending a weekend there. We’d talked about doing all sorts of things like that in the beginning, before my life short-circuited ours.

I wondered, then, if Jenny and I could ever talk of such things, and whether new beginnings were possible at all. It was a gloomy day all around.

I walked up the hill. A cast-metal sign announced that gentlemen were expected to wear coats and ties on the hotel grounds after 6:00 P.M.

A man in a yellow paisley scarf and long wool coat approached me. “We’re not yet open for the season.”

“I’m just looking around, you know, like for the future,” I said.

“Indeed.” He glanced pointedly at the inch of blazer that drooped below the hem of my peacoat. His nose was rather pointed, too, and long.

“How much?” I asked.

“They start at a little over four hundred,” he said, raising the prominent nose as though he knew I’d come north in a duct-taped Jeep, with my duds in a paper bag.

“For a week?” I asked, snooting right back at him.

“Per night, of course. Good day, sir.” He touched the brim of an imaginary top hat in salute and walked away.

Though thick snow covered its sunken terraces and broad expanses of lawn, I could imagine the hotel in full bloom. In a month, maybe two, a hundred white rocking chairs would be set out for the sorts of semiembalmed butts that would be only too happy to shell out four hundred a night to enjoy the view. I was inspired, then, as to how I might amuse myself in such a place. I’d park myself at one end of the long porch, instruct a white-coated waiter to bring me a mint julep, then proceed to work my way slowly down the long expanse, taking the tiniest sip as I tried each available rocker. The objective would be to see how many rockers I could traverse before either the julep ran out or I got ejected, accused of lunacy.

Certainly such a stunt seemed no crazier than spending four hundred bucks just to sleep in such a place for only one night.

Two dozen young men came out from behind the hotel and began walking down the hill toward the tiny fudge town. I checked my watch. It was 3:45. I fell in behind them as they made the turn toward the piers. By now, the whitecaps had swelled higher and were sloshing onto the tops of the piers. One by one, they walked through the puddles and climbed down into the oversized wood cabin of the bobbing Rabbit.

Nothing happened for another fifteen minutes, and then a man came down the incline. He had white hair and white stubble on his chin, and he wore an ancient ski jacket and a black watch cap and one glove. There was a decided roll to his gait that had nothing to do with the downward slope of the ground.

“Arnie Pine?” I inquired, when he stepped onto the dock.

He stopped and stared at me for a moment with rheumy, shifting eyes. No doubt, he was seeing me blurred. Arnie Pine had had his lunch.

“I need a ride to Eustace Island,” I said.

“The lake’s a tad ripply,” he said through the booze sloshing in his gullet, of the water sloshing on the dock.

I pointed to the workers sitting on the benches in the boat. “They’re going.”

He nodded, sensing truth, and squinted at me. “Fifty, for the two of you.”

I gave him two twenties and a ten and followed him on board. Several of the workers looked at me, disbelieving, when I went to stand at the open space at the back of the boat. My paranoia had returned, remembering the bulky man at the ticket shack back in Mackinaw City. I wanted to keep an eye on the water, for other boats.

Pine fired the engine, banged the Rabbit hard enough against the pier to carve a new gash, and headed out to open water. We’d only gone a fraction of a nautical mile, whatever distance that might have been, when suddenly the sky opened up and began hurling down sheets of hard rain. The lake kicked up even more then, sending great scoops of water crashing into the open back, almost knocking me down. I scrambled into the long, narrow shelter and grabbed onto a stanchion supporting the roof. It wiggled, loose in my hand. In front of us, Arnie Pine was whistling, unconcerned within the haze he’d acquired from lunch.

We plowed on, or prowed on, or whatever one does when one is in a boat bobbing like an empty gin bottle on a heaving lake. I could see nothing, but I felt it all, the pounding rain and the spraying lake, beating in sideways, frigid and wet and clamping onto my bones as thick as dissolving wool. No one made a sound, except one or two of the young workers, who were crying. And Arnie, whistling, still lubricated from lunch.

The small granite cliffs of Eustace Island rose up suddenly in the boat’s spotlight, not fifty feet ahead. Pine made no move to cut back the engine. He kept right on whistling, perhaps because he couldn’t see the rock for his lunch. I scuttled back out of the shelter into the full force of the rain, certain we were going to crash into the shore. By now the spotlight had swept away from the dock and onto ground that was more granite than green.

A dock appeared in the sleet, a barely visible spindly contraption that looked to have been built of scrap lumber by mumblers with dull hatchets. One hard bump would surely splinter it into kindling. Only thirty feet separated us now.

Yet Pine whistled on, at least for another few seconds, until at last he spun the wheel sharply to cut the boat’s trajectory. Only then did he turn the spotlight toward the dock.

The boat barely grazed the thin posts as the lake heaved us up three feet higher than the dock. Two of the young men, no doubt veterans of earlier passages, jumped off with ropes. Faster than snake handlers, they looped the ropes around the spindly posts and pulled the pitching boat close to the dock, leaving slack for the roiling water. Jumping off would only be possible on the rise, and even then, mistiming it by even one second would mean tumbling into the lake and getting crushed between the hull and the rocks.

The other young workers had done it before. One by one, agile as cats on a fence, they jumped perfectly off the bucking boat.

Then there was only me, alone with the whistling, insane Arnie Pine. He’d turned his head to look at me, impatient, I supposed, for the two of us to be off. I took my hand off the scarred top rail. The boat rose. I jumped and fell more than landed on the slick dock. Strong hands seized my arms and legs before I could slide off and pulled me up. I staggered, steadying, and lunged to grab one of the spindly posts.

Two of the workers tossed the ropes back onto the Rabbit, and Arnie gunned the boat around. I heard him whistling, above the diesels and the shriek of the wind, as he disappeared into the darkness.

The young men started up the hill, single file, their heads bowed against the storm raging down on them. Lightning flashed, and a monstrous shape of peeling gray wood and dangling shutters appeared at the top of the hill. It was the old hotel, converted now to cheap rental rooms for young men who could find no better work.

I shivered in the rain, waiting, for I’d seen no houses. Another bolt of lightning tore through the sky, and in its brief glare I saw a string of cottages strung loosely along the bluff to my left. All looked to be perched on rock; no trees or lawns had found foothold around them. All were as dark as the old hotel. I wondered if I was alone on the island, except for the seasonals, trudging up the hill.

The granite was slick. I slipped and fell twice, hurrying up to the first cottage. Plywood, secured by wing nuts, covered the front windows. The house was still closed for the winter. I knocked anyway. There was no answer.

The second cottage was not boarded up, but no one responded there, either. An elderly man answered at the third place. I started to ask if he knew a Mrs. Wilson. He slammed the door. I would have, too, if a drenched stranger had come out of such a storm to bang on my door.

The windows of the fourth cottage were boarded over, like the first. I barely heard my fist on the door, for the rage of the water below.

No one answered. By now, my shivers had turned to shakes. I was soaked clear through, frozen colder than anything I’d felt on the boat.

Dark spots moved in a paper-thin ribbon of light that showed at the bottom of the door. Someone was home and had come to the other side of the door. I beat on it again, yelling, “It’s Dek Elstrom, damn it. If you know me, let me in before I die.”

The door opened, and a high-powered handheld searchlight beam shot onto my face. I shut my eyes tight against the glare.

There was no shutting out the sound of a woman screaming.