Trickster's Point

CHAPTER 37

A side from the cowboy cookie he’d had in Allouette, Cork had eaten nothing that day since the biscuits he’d shared in the morning with Rainy and Henry. It was a little after two o’clock when he drove away from Crown Lake, and he was famished. He was also sliding into a despondent place. He seemed no closer to understanding who’d killed Jubal than he’d been during those three long hours while he watched the man die. He still had no idea who the hell Rhiannon was or what she might have to do with Jubal’s death. And he was kicking himself for having dragged Lester Bigby, an innocent man, into the mess. His ear ached from the blow Bigby had landed, but he figured it was a pain he deserved. The weather was no help. As he made his way toward Aurora, snow began to spit against his windshield. He thought after he got food in his stomach, he might rebound a little, so he headed home.

If he was looking for sympathy there, he didn’t find it. He found Stephen in a rotten mood.

In the instructions he’d left on the kitchen table that morning, he’d given Stephen permission to stay home from school another day. He’d indicated they should all stay close to the house, and not open Sam’s Place until he okayed it. When he pulled into the drive, he saw Stephen playing with Waaboo and Trixie in the backyard. His grandson didn’t notice him; Waaboo was too busy trying to catch on his tongue the flakes drifting out of the sky, a precipitation not nearly heavy enough yet to be called a snowfall. But Stephen saw Cork and gave him a long, hard look.

Jenny was in the kitchen, working on her laptop.

“They should be inside,” Cork snapped. “I left instructions.”

Jenny slid the sheet he’d left across the table where he could see it. “Your instructions were to stay close to home. They’re in the backyard. Can’t get much closer to home.”

“I meant-” Cork began.

“We’re not mind readers,” Jenny shot back.

“Sorry,” Cork said. “Bad day. Where’s Cy?”

“He went to Pflugleman’s to get some NyQuil. He’s coming down with a cold, he thinks. He promised to be right back.”

From the refrigerator, Cork pulled a plate of cold fried chicken and a bottle of Leinie’s. He grabbed a napkin from the holder on the counter and sat at the table with Jenny. “What are you working on?”

“Another short story.”

“When are you going to start a novel?”

“When I’m ready.”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to pry.”

Jenny closed her laptop. “That’s okay. Just a little testy. I feel like I’m caged in here. Any progress?”

“Not much.” Cork took a bite of a chicken leg and through the window watched Waaboo and Stephen lick snowflakes from the air. “What’s his story?” Cork asked. “When I drove up, he looked at me like I was a rat bringing the plague.”

“He’s pissed at you.”

“Me? Why?”

Jenny shrugged. “Ask him.”

Cork waited until he’d eaten before he went out to face his son. Jenny walked with him, scooped up Waaboo, and said, “We’ll be inside, playing with a ball or something.”

Waaboo tried to slither loose, calling “Baa-baa.” He reached desperately toward his grandfather, but Jenny held him tightly and, though he protested with little cries, carried him into the house, calling after her, “Come on, Trixie. Come on inside, girl.”

Cork stood with Stephen in the empty backyard. In the young man’s stiffness and the shove of his hands deep in his jeans pockets and the way he averted his face, Cork could see his son’s anger. He thought he could even feel the heat of it radiating across the space of cold air that lay between them. They didn’t look at each other but stared at the sky as if the dull grayness was hypnotizing.

“Is there something you’d like to say to me?” Cork asked.

“Yeah, as a matter of fact.”

“I’m listening.”

“Just butt out of things.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just stop doing what you do, Dad.”

“What is it I do?”

Stephen turned to him, his dark eyes blazing. “You leave early. You come home late. In between, people shoot at you.”

And sometimes hit me with a sucker punch, Cork thought, though there was no way he’d say that out loud. Not at that moment anyway.

“You like to hunt,” Stephen said, his voice pitched and rasping with anger. “I don’t get it, but I get that it’s something important to you, so I let it slide.”

When Stephen was young, Cork had hoped to share with him the experience of hunting, as his own father and Sam Winter Moon had shared it with him. But from early on, it was clear that Stephen had no interest. In fact, it was clear that Stephen abhorred the whole idea of killing something for the sport of it. Cork tried to explain that hunting played an important role in control of wild game populations and that, for him, there was a spiritual element to it, threaded far back in the culture of the Ojibwe and probably in the psyche of human beings, but Stephen never bought it. Cork hadn’t forced his son to participate, and he and Stephen had reached the mutual understanding that it was a subject on which they would probably never see eye to eye.

Stephen continued his tirade. “But when you let yourself become the thing that’s hunted, Jesus, I just don’t get that.”

“Let myself? Stephen, I had no idea someone was going to take a shot at me.”

The fire in his son’s eyes flared to brilliance, as if Cork had only added more fuel. “What about after that? You could have stayed home, where it’s safe, like you ordered us to do. But no, there you are, running all over God knows where by yourself, still a target, and maybe next time whoever’s shooting at you won’t miss.”

“Stephen, I know who shot at me.”

That clearly caught him by surprise. “You do?”

“Yeah.”

“Who?”

“I pretty much promised to keep that to myself. A deal I made with the guy who pulled the trigger. His side of the bargain was that he wouldn’t do it again. And that he’d leave Tamarack County for good.”

“You believed him?”

“Yeah, I believed him.”

“Why’d he shoot at you?”

“To scare me. To protect someone he loves.”

Stephen drilled his father with a penetrating glare. “There,” he said. “That’s the point. Someone he loves.” He turned away, and Cork watched the snowflakes drift between them. “You should be thinking more about the people you love. At Trickster’s Point, someone was ready to kill you, but that doesn’t seem to matter to you. You just keep doing what you do. And me and Jenny, we’re just sitting around waiting for the time we get a call and some stupid voice on the other end of the line tells us you’re dead.”

Which was pretty much how the news had been delivered when Stephen’s mother was killed.

Cork didn’t say anything for a while, simply stared where his son stared, upward at a sky as gray as a tombstone.

“I don’t look for trouble, Stephen. Honest to God, I don’t just go looking for it.” He shrugged. “ Ogichidaa. What can I say?”

Anyone else might have looked at Cork as if he were crazy or full of hubris, but Stephen’s own perception of the world was very much colored by his love of what was Ojibwe in his blood and in his life, and rather than disbelief, he eyed his father with disappointment.

“But why you, Dad?”

“I don’t know. I just know it’s true. I know it here.” Cork tapped his heart.

“So am I supposed to be, like, proud of you or something?”

“No. Well, yes, but not because of that. It’s who I am, same as you were born a spirit meant to heal. I admire that in you. Me, I’m a guy who seems to step into the fire again and again, and it’s not because I’m stupid or insensitive to the danger or to what it would mean to you if I got myself killed. It’s just who I am. It’s not something I’m proud of. It’s simply something I accept.”

Stephen didn’t reply. He stood motionless as snowflakes settled on his shoulders, held a moment, and melted away. Then suddenly he turned to his father, and there were tears in his eyes. “I don’t want you to die. I don’t want you to leave me, ever.”

And now there were tears in Cork’s eyes as well. “I won’t. I promise.”

He took Stephen in his arms, his son who was on the edge of manhood, with all the weight and uncertainty and responsibility that meant, and held him, knowing there was no way he could make a promise like that but wishing, at the moment, with all his heart, that it was true.

As they turned together to head back into the house, a car pulled into the drive and parked next to Cork’s Land Rover. Leon Papakee got out and watched Cork and Stephen come to greet him.

“Boozhoo,” Papakee called.

“What’s up, Leon?” Cork said.

“Hey, Stephen. Good to see you.” Papakee shook Stephen’s hand. “You’re almost as tall as your old man now.”

“And still growing,” Cork said.

“I just left the sheriff’s department,” Papakee said. “They’ve finished interviewing Isaiah Broom, for the time being anyway.”

“What do you think?”

“He couldn’t give salient answers to half the questions. He’s as guilty of killing Jubal Little as you or me.”

“You’re not on their list of suspects, Leon.”

“It’s clear that he’s covering for somebody. Well, clear to me anyway. I don’t have any idea who that might be. Holter’s afraid he also wants a public platform to spout activist rhetoric. They’ll probably cut him loose soon. And then, I’m guessing, our intrepid BCA investigator will turn his attention back to you. He’s got to throw something more out there for the media to chew on, and at the moment, Cork, you’re the only item on the menu.”

“I think I’d better go have a talk with Agent Holter.” Cork looked at Stephen. “Are you okay with that?”

Stephen thought it over seriously a moment, then said, “Just don’t let him shoot you, okay?”

Cork waited until Cy Borkman returned. His friend looked a little under the weather, but he refused to be relieved of what he saw as his duty. Cork could have argued, but he was grateful and told his friend, “When this is over, I’m buying you the biggest steak the Pinewood Broiler can grill.”

“When this is over,” Cy said, putting his big mitt of a hand on Cork’s shoulder, “I go back to boredom. So take all the time you need.”