“Can I help you?” the girl asked, in a voice as reassuringly ordinary as the rest of her. She had put her hands on the counter near the kerosene lamp. Whether that particular lamp had been in stock fifteen years ago Simon had no way of telling. There was fluid in its glass reservoir, and the wick was charred. The house had electricity, of course, but that lamp had been used recently.
Simon smiled confidently. “I see you have a canoe down there. I’d like to rent it for a couple of hours.”
“No,” said the girl, shaking her head. It was a surprisingly quick, definite answer, as if such requests came frequently and she had been trained how to respond to them. But then she added unexpectedly: “If you want to go over to the castle, my brother can paddle you over.”
Simon blinked deliberately. “I didn’t say anything about a castle. You mean the huge house on the other side of the river?”
The girl surveyed them calmly. “You don’t look like you’re going fishing, or on a picnic.” Simon exchanged glances with Margie; they were both dressed casually, in practical jeans and longsleeved shirts against expected mosquitoes. Margie had on light white gym shoes, Simon brown suede loafers. But they weren’t dressed for fishing, and apart from Margie’s large shoulder bag they were carrying nothing.
Tuning up his smile to about its second most charming level, Simon told the girl: “We’re not waterskiing, either. All right, then, we’ll hire the canoe and your brother too for a couple of hours. Does he have a regular rate?”
“Talk to him,” the girl advised. “I’ll go get him.” She came out from behind the counter and scuffed on bare feet toward a side door.
In the dim light Simon looked around at tawdry, scanty merchandise, at junk, at dust. Margie’s eyes were alert and expectant but he had nothing to communicate to her at the moment. Listening carefully he could hear the girl’s quiet voice drifting in faintly from beyond the side door where she had gone out. He couldn’t hear what she was saying. There was a private yard out there, on the side of the house away from the highway, or at least there had been one when Simon lived here.
Shortly the girl came back into the shop, followed a moment later by a boy who in apparent age, about fifteen, might have been her twin, but who otherwise resembled her only vaguely. He was tightening the fancy belt buckle on his jeans; his lean chest showed under an unbuttoned gray shirt, and his feet were shoeless like his sister’s.
Simon asked him: “Five bucks an hour okay?”
“Yeah. Fine.” The youth sounded moderately eager.
“Our car’s not going to be in your way out here, is it?”
The girl assured them: “Nobody’ll bother it.”
Then Simon and Margie followed her untalkative brother out through the side door, past a couple of lawn chairs in the yard, and down a narrow path toward the water. The river, Simon thought to himself again, was quite high for midsummer; the lands to the north and east, along the upper Sauk and its tributaries in far northern Illinois and Wisconsin, must have been getting heavy rains lately. And he could see rainclouds now, in the southwest sky, beyond the wooded bluff where the hidden castle waited. When you lived in the city steadily, he thought, you lost touch with the weather, caring only how cold it was at the moment, whether you might be going to get wet. Anyway he estimated that the next rain here was still hours away; it shouldn’t interfere with what he and Margie were going to try to do.
Simon helped the boy turn over the canoe and get it into the water. Margie, following directions and making no fuss about possible tipping, got in without incident. Simon loaded his own considerably greater weight in near the middle of the craft; and then their barefoot guide shoved off and hopped in skillfully behind him.
Their guide’s presence restricted conversation somewhat. Simon had planned to use this portion of the trip for briefing Margie further on history and local conditions, but he would be able to do that later when they were alone. He sat in the canoe and looked around and thought.
So far, the view from the water only reinforced his general impression that nothing much had changed, except for people. He wondered without concern where his aunt and uncle were. Surely, if they had sold out or otherwise departed permanently, the name on the mailbox would have been changed by the new occupants. Of course the boy and girl might easily belong to some branch of the family. They would hardly have been born fifteen years ago, and Simon hadn’t kept up with any family events. He wondered idly if perhaps they were really twins; that would be consistent with their being relatives. It seemed that multiple births were more common in the complex of locally interrelated families than they were in the general population.
“It’s really pretty here,” said Margie, almost dreamily. She was sitting relaxed in the prow, as if she had in fact come here only for the scenery.
“Actually is,” Simon agreed. In his own mind the view upriver from Frenchman’s Bend was quite ordinary. In the far distance, a couple of miles above the town, the girders of the aging bridge had been repainted at some time and it was evidently still functional. Between the bridge and the town a scattering of tied-up boats and floating docks were visible along both shores. People from Blackhawk or elsewhere maintained riparian summer cottages along here, and farmers sometimes kept small craft tied up during ice-free weather, going fishing when they could. In the middle of a broad stretch half a mile upstream, an outboard towing a waterskier was droning in determined circles, like some huge insect magically confined.
Change in the scenery came swiftly as soon as the Sauk curved west and south from Frenchman’s Bend. Simon, looking back now, realized that he had always understood somehow that in the downstream direction ordinariness no longer applied. Looking ahead now as the canoe moved with the current, he saw what might almost be one of Mark Twain’s rivers. It would scarcely be a surprise to hear a steamboat hooting from a couple of bends downstream, feeling for the channel. In his childhood the old people of the neighborhood had talked about how in Twain’s day a few boats had actually ventured this far up from the Mississippi, seeking cargo.
Here, just below the bend, the Sauk ran for a time even broader than above. And here the width of the river appeared to be stretched by a flotilla of islands, all but the tiniest of them heavily wooded. Naturally being broader meant that the river here was shallower as well. With the exception of the elusive and sometimes shifting channel, vast stretches were no more than knee-deep even when the water, as now, was relatively high. This made power boating here below the Bend a very tricky proposition, and usually all the recreational boaters stayed above the town. Canoes, rowboats, and rafts, could certainly ply here, without any particular trouble, and yet with the exception of the few craft owned by Frenchman’s Bend people they rarely did. No other boats were to be seen now, anywhere ahead. Nor were there any cabins along the shore. Of course you wouldn’t want your cabin on a flood plain ten feet from the highway; and on the far shore the bluffs were too abrupt for cabins.
“It’s wild, too,” Simon said, belatedly continuing his response to Margie’s comment.
The boy, still silent behind Simon, just kept on paddling. He evidently knew the best routes among the islands as well as Simon had known them at his age. To reach the castle landing by the quickest way from the Frenchman’s Bend landing, you angled downstream between a certain large island and the small one next to it, which gave you the benefit of a slightly accelerated current; coming back upstream, if you hugged either shore you’d find yourself in slack water much of the way and not have to work against the current.
Already the great gentle bend of river behind the canoe had taken the railroad bridge and most of the distant cottages out of sight, as well as the buildings of Frenchman’s Bend itself. They were now passing between the two islands, both thickly overgrown. All of the islands here were small chunks of permanent wilderness, preserved from cottage-building by the high water that drowned them at least once a year, the spring ice jams that gouged bark from their trees and sometimes sprinkled them with kindling that had once been a boat dock or a shanty somewhere upstream. In summer the islands tended to be well populated with flies and mosquitoes, but they were visited sometimes by picnickers and fisherfolk nonetheless.
The island now passing on the right of the canoe was large, a couple of hundred yards long. It was the one where Simon earlier had thought he’d seen a figure moving. No reason, he repeated to himself now, why someone couldn’t be there. It was just that the figure he’d seen had seemed designed to evoke things in his memory.
No boats had been visible on either side of the island, which was the shape and he supposed about the size of a large ship, prow and stern carved narrow by the endless flow of water, maybe fifty yards across the beam amidships. In a couple of places along its shoreline, willows hung far out with their leaves trailing in the water, making under the curve of branches green dim caves in which a small boat might possibly lie tied up in concealment. Simon, gliding past, stared intently into the shadows under the willow branches, until he was sure that there could be no boat. A narrow shoreline rim of mudflat running virtually the whole length of the island was
