“Word travels,” Grady said.
“Right,” Saul said. “Well, I thought you’d like to hear about it. And if I hear something new, you’ll be the first to know.”
They hung up, and Grady dropped the phone onto the cushion beside him and stared at the wall.
Devin Matteson shot in the back, Frank Temple III arrested for drinking in Indiana a day later. Celebration, maybe? A few champagne toasts to the dead?
No. No, that couldn’t be it. The kid was doing fine, and Matteson had any number of enemies. The list probably grew by the day.
Frank had wanted him, though. Frank had wanted Matteson
He picked up the beer again, drank what was left, and stood up to go after another one.
“I should have asked about the wounds,” he said aloud, talking to his empty apartment. That would have settled it. Because if there’d been more than an inch or two between those bullet holes, then Frank Temple III hadn’t been pulling the trigger.
Ezra Ballard ran an electric fillet knife down the perch’s side in a smooth, quick stroke. Turned the fish over and repeated the motion. Moved the filets to the side and then lobbed the fish head over the fence and into the dog kennel. Two of his hounds hit the fish carcass together. There was a soft growl, the sound of snapping teeth, and then the winner retreated with his prize.
Last summer, an architect from Madison had given Ezra a nice lecture after watching him feed the leftover fish to his dogs. Fish in that condition wasn’t suitable for dogs. Could do serious harm. Ezra had tried to stay polite, listening to him. Finally Ezra asked him if he had any experience with bear hounds. No, not with bear hounds, the guy said. Plenty of experience with dogs, though. What kind of dogs, Ezra asked. Pugs, the guy said. Took all Ezra had to smile and nod, wait till the guy wrote out the check and went on his way. Pugs.
Ezra had selected all four of his hounds when they were just weeks-old puppies, watched them in their litters and picked up on traits of personality that set them apart. Trained them himself, spent long summer hours in the woods and brush with them, teaching them to work as a team. Though the hunting season wasn’t till October, you could run bear in the summers in Wisconsin for dog-training purposes. On days when he didn’t have to guide, he generally loaded the hounds into their crates and into the back of the truck and set off to take advantage of the free time in the way he loved best: out in the woods, alone except for the dogs. Of course, it wasn’t like being alone at all. The dogs were Ezra’s family. More than pets, more than friends. And when the air turned chill as fall began to lose its early skirmishes with winter, and the dogs bayed long and loud in the dark woods, Ezra with gun in hand as they chased their prey? Then, the dogs were something altogether nearer to his heart: comrades.
Boone, a six-year-old bluetick, was the pack’s alpha male even though he wasn’t the largest. Bridger (they were all named after famous woodsmen—Boone, Carson, Bridger, Crockett) was bigger in size, taller and fifteen pounds heavier, but he lacked the aggressive edge that dogs respected in a leader. He was a diplomat, Ezra had decided, whereas Boone tended toward the preemptive strike. Ezra felt closest to Boone, but he spoiled Bridger and tried to put out the idea that he was the favorite.
He cleaned a final fish, tossed its remains into the kennel, and then gathered up the filets and his knife, turned off the floodlight above the cleaning station, and went into the house. He cooked the fish and ate it with potatoes and carrots that he’d seasoned and wrapped in foil and cooked outside on the propane grill, ate at the kitchen table, facing the mounted head of a ten-point buck he’d taken five years earlier. Everything from the decor of his room to his clothing to his daily activity told him what he was, reminded him of it, pushed the essence of his life into him from the outside. He was a fishing and hunting guide, a woodsman, a local. His clients knew it, his friends knew it, his neighbors knew it. After nearly forty years, he was starting to know it, too. Mission accomplished.
You became what you wanted to become. That’s what Ezra believed. You could become it if you tried hard enough, could take what you really were and change it, force-feed yourself a new life until it became your old life, too, blurred together until a better self emerged.
He’d spent twenty years in Detroit and another four in the jungle trying to decide what he’d be if he could choose. Nothing stopping him, he’d move back in time, open up the west with Fremont and Carson and the others who were there, see this country in all the beauty it had once held. Reality did stop him on that one, and so he chose the next best thing, a life spent on the water and in the woods and far away from the urban world of greed and hustles and constant violence that he’d known growing up. He’d been twenty-five when he arrived here, a young man with an old warrior’s body count behind him, had no idea where to find a walleye, no idea how to track a deer or run a bear. He learned those things, and now he taught those things, and there were moments when it seemed that the perception of others—that idea that he’d always been here—was true.
He finished his meal and washed his dishes and gathered his car keys and went out to the truck. Took Cedar Falls Road to the logging road, went bouncing over the uneven track. Anybody else would spend hours, maybe even a full day, trying to locate that car from the land. Ezra was different, though. A tree that looked identical to the rest stood out as a landmark to him, each bay and inlet and island as familiar as the houses of neighbors in a suburb. He knew the gray-haired man had taken the logging road, and he knew which fork of it he’d followed.
The road went on a good half mile past the point where Ezra brought his truck to a halt, but he didn’t want to drive all the way down to the water, have his headlights visible from the island. He took the rest of it on foot, the wet earth sucking at his boots. Here the soil was almost boglike, holding moisture long after the last rain had passed. The lake was surrounded by more than sixteen thousand acres of forest that were protected by the state, home to bear and deer and three wolf packs. Home to Ezra.
There was a boat ramp farther south, but Ezra knew people who used this logging road as a put-in area for canoes, saved some paddling time if they were headed north. You’d put your canoe in the water and take off across the lake, splitting either north or south around an overgrown island with a few
Matteson’s grandfather, a Rhinelander native, had owned forty acres of good timberland several miles east of the Willow and adjacent to hundreds of acres owned by one of the state’s major paper mills. When the mill accidentally clear-cut his property, he sued. The case had gone to arbitration, and the arbitrator had decided to award Matteson property of comparable value instead of cash. Back then most of the land around the flowage was owned by the paper mills rather than the state, and the arbitrator had issued Matteson a small tract on a point of land on the eastern shore and one of the only islands in the whole lake that was high enough to avoid regular flooding. The total land came to just under five acres, a fraction of what he’d lost, but the arbitrator argued that it was waterfront property and therefore worth more. Matteson had accepted, and now, sixty years later, there remained one privately owned island on the flowage.
Dan had grown up around here, and on long days and longer nights in Vietnam, he’d talked of the place. To Ezra, who’d never been more than forty miles from Detroit until he shipped out, the flowage had sounded like a dream world. Miles of towering dark forests, pristine lakes, islands. The island that Dan owned held appeal that Ezra couldn’t even put into words, but the longer they stayed overseas the more attached he grew to the idea of the place. He couldn’t go back to Detroit. Not if he hoped to avoid the sort of existence he’d left behind.
Just before he’d enlisted, Ezra had gone out with his older brother, Ken, to settle up a debt. The sum owed was four hundred dollars. Ezra had held the arms of an alcoholic factory worker while his brother swung on the guy with a bottle. When the bottle fractured, Ken had hit him one more time in the face, a driving uppercut, and the jagged glass bit into the unconscious man’s chin and continued upward, peeling a strip of pink flesh off the bone from jaw to eye socket. They’d left him in the alley after emptying nine dollars from his pockets. The next day, Ezra went to talk to a recruiter.
As his tour wound to a close, and the prospect of returning home became more real, Ezra made an official
