plywood storm shutters down covering the windows, the yard overgrown with weeds.
The woman at Island Variety, across the road from the ferry dock, said yes, the grandmother was in the cemetery, buried last winter. The woman said the Band office didn’t know what to do about the house or the furniture, all the grandmother’s things. Armand Degas told her he’d take care of it and turned away, not wanting to talk to this woman in the noise of kids playing video games, Breakout and Zaxxon. There were other people too. Some duck hunters in the store were buying candy bars and potato chips, talking loud to each other. Their cars with Michigan plates were parked outside where Walpole guides waited smoking cigarettes. They had stopped talking as Armand walked by them, coming in. They knew who he was.
Pretty soon the duck hunters in their camouflage outfits and two-tone rubber boots, still talking loud and taking forever, moved out the door and Armand saw a guy he recognized, toward the back of the store.
Lionel something. Coming away from the cooler with two cans of Pepsi. Sure, Lionel, walking with that limp. He was a kid when the Degas brothers came here as kids. They beat him up the first time they met; Lionel came after them with a live snake and they got to be friends. Then nine years ago they saw him in the bar at Sans Souci on Harsens Island where the Indians went to get drunk and he was using a cane to walk. They had some beers and he told them how he fell off a building, “into the hole” as he called it, and broke his legs pretty good. He was an ironworker then. Lionel Adam, that was his name. He was still limping, swinging one leg way around, but didn’t have the cane— taking the Pepsis over to a guy leaning against the craft counter, where they sold handmade Indian stuff.
The guy was taller than Lionel, maybe younger, with light-colored hair. He wasn’t Indian. He was thin but looked strong. Now he straightened up, turning away from the counter as Lionel handed him a Pepsi, and Armand saw something written on the back of the guy’s blue jacket. In white letters it said ironworkers, and under it, smaller, build america. So he was another one of them, probably an old buddy of Lionel’s.
Armand went to the cooler and got himself a Pepsi. He popped it open edging closer to Lionel and the ironworker, looking at a poster that announced bingo tonight at the Sports Center. visit the canteen for all your refreshment needs! Lionel didn’t seem to notice him. They were talking about hunting whitetail.
It sounded strange, the ironworker telling the Indian he was going to make sure Lionel got a buck to hang on his meat pole. Saying he bought a salt lick to put out in the woods. Lionel was saying they should take a sweat bath and not eat any meat for a week. A whitetail could smell it if you had a hamburger and tell if you had mustard or ketchup on it. The ironworker said you had to take time beforehand to read the deer, think like them and you’d get your shot.
“Pretend you’re a buck,” Lionel said, “with a big rack.”
“Sixteen points,” the ironworker said.
“You see a doe, her tail standing up in the air waving at you,” Lionel said, “you won’t know whether to shoot it or hump it.”
“Or both, and then eat it,” the ironworker said. “I fill the freezer every November and it’s gone by May.”
They walked toward the door, Lionel telling the ironworker he could make it tomorrow afternoon about four o’clock. Armand came to the front of the store with his Pepsi. Through the window he saw them standing by a tan Dodge pickup. When the ironworker backed around and drove off toward the ferry dock, Armand saw a tool box in the pickup bed and a Michigan license plate. He waited for Lionel to come back into the store, but saw him walking away, limping past the window. Armand had to go after him.
“Hey, where’s your cane?”
Lionel stopped and half-turned to look back, standing behind Armand’s blue Cadillac. He said, “I thought maybe it was you,” sounding different than when he was talking to the ironworker, not much life in his voice now. “You go by the Band office?”
“For what?”
“About your grandmother. We been trying to get hold of somebody, a relative, find out what to do with her house.”
“I don’t know,” Armand said, “I been thinking, I could fix the place up.” His gaze moved to the trees along the road, then over to the tip of Russell Island, where the freighter channel joined the St. Clair River. He saw gulls out there, specks against the afternoon sky. Lionel was telling him he could sell the house the way it was. Why spend money on it?
“No, I mean fix it up and live there,” Armand said, turning enough to look down the river road. You couldn’t see any houses, only trees changing color. This island was all woods and marsh, and some cornfields. He couldn’t imagine staying here for more than a few weeks. Still, he wanted Lionel to say sure, that’s a good idea, live here, become part of it.
But Lionel said, “What would you do? You know, a guy use to living in the city. That place, all it has is a wood stove.”
Armand’s gaze returned to Lionel in his wool shirt and jeans, rubber hunting boots, Lionel still half-turned like he wanted this to be over and walk away.
“What are you, a guide for those big-shot duck hunters come here from the States? I could do that, be a guide,” Armand said. “I know how to shoot. In the winter trap muskrats.” He wanted Lionel to say sure, why not?
“We do it in the spring,” Lionel said, “burn off the marsh. You get all dirty out there, filthy. You wear a nice suit of clothes. ...You wouldn’t like it.”
Armand watched Lionel shift his weight from one leg to the other, careful about it, as though he might be in pain.
“How long were you an ironworker?”
Lionel shrugged. “Ten years.”
“Now you work for those big-shot hunters come here, think everything’s funny. You live here but have to go across the river to get drunk in a bar. Or you stay here and play bingo, visit the canteen for all your refreshment needs. But I can’t live here, ’ey? That what you telling me?”
Lionel stared back at him like he was getting up courage to answer and Armand looked away, giving him time, Armand’s gaze following the ferry on its way to Algonac, Michigan, another world over there. He heard Lionel say:
“There’s no life for you here. There’s nothing for you.”
Armand wanted to ask him, Then tell me where there is. But when he looked at Lionel again he said, “You ever ride in a Cadillac? Come on, we’ll drive over there, have some drinks.”
“You have some,” Lionel said. “I’m going home.”
He walked over to his pickup truck swinging one leg, leaving Armand standing there in his suit of clothes by his blue Cadillac.
2
RICHIE NIX BOUGHT A T-SHIRT at Henry’s restaurant in Algonac that had it’s nice to be nice written across the front. He changed in the men’s room: took off his old T-shirt and threw it away, put on the new one looking at himself in the mirror, but then didn’t know what to do with his gun. If he put his denim jacket back on to hide the nickel-plate .38 revolver stuck in his jeans, you couldn’t read the T-shirt. What he did was roll the .38 up inside the jacket and carried it into the dining area.
There was a big it’s nice to be nice wood-carved sign on the shellacked knotty-pine wall in the main room, over past the salad bar. It had been the restaurant’s slogan for fifty years. Most people who came to Henry’s liked a table by the front windows, so they could watch the freighters go by while they ate their dinner. Richie Nix took a table off to the side where he could look at freighters and ore carriers if he wanted, though he was more interested this evening in keeping an eye on the restaurant parking lot. He needed a car for a new business he was getting into.
The waitress brought him a beer. He looked up, taking a drink from the can, and there was a big goddamn ore carrier a thousand feet long passing from the river into the channel. Richie grinned at the sight. It was neat the way the boat looked like it was going right through the woods. It went by the point of Russell Island, a narrow neck of land, and you saw the boat through the trees without seeing the channel. It could be going to Ford Rouge or one of the mills downriver from Detroit.
For the past few weeks Richie had been staying with a woman he’d gotten to know at Huron Valley when he was doing time there a couple of years back and she was a corrections officer in charge of food services. Her name
