A Superior Death

cigarette boat moored in her slot was ousted. The little girl would be educated. The Frisbee players would go unpunished. Park policy insisted Frisbee was an inappropriate activity in the wilderness. Anna knew it for a quick way to Zen and chose to let people worship in their own way.

A couple of fishermen from Two Harbors jumped up from their lawn chairs to tether the Belle’s lines to the dock. They were good boaters, the kind the Park Service could count on to bail out their less qualified brethren. Anna was always glad to see them in ISRO’s waters.

The 3rd Sister was moored near the end of the dock, her deck piled with diving gear. Hawk sat on the bow staring into the water. Anna hoped he wasn’t seeing too much trash on the channel floor. It had been six weeks since she and Ralph dove around the major docking points, trying to clean up new garbage while leaving undisturbed the garbage old enough to have been transmuted by the passing of years into Important Historical Artifacts. In its four-thousand-year human history, ISRO had been farmed and mined and fished, hunted and burned and logged. The areas where refuse was traditionally tossed could be archaeological treasure troves.

Holly, her dark hair curling close around her face, was bent over a grill all but hidden by inch-thick steaks. Three men, all of an age and dressed alike enough to have come off the same page in an Eddie Bauer catalogue, drank Leinenkugels and got in her way.

Despite Denny’s death, Holly and Hawk had gone ahead with the trip. Anna doubted it was callousness. Diving would be their way of bidding him goodbye. And they probably needed the money. Summer concessionaires-the smaller individual businesspeople not backed by the big money of the corporations allowed to run concessions in parks, National Parks Concessionaires Incorporated or T.W. Services-often held on by their fiscal fingertips from one season to the next.

Anna wandered up the dock answering questions, admiring dead fish, and-one of a ranger’s most difficult jobs- declining free beers.

“How’s it going, Hawk?” she asked when she reached the 3rd Sister. His eyes left the water briefly, flicked over her face, and returned to whatever had held them before. “Okay,” Anna said. “I can live with that.” She stood for a moment watching the northern sun play at Midas, turning water and air to burnished gold.

Holly turned the last of the steaks and looked up. “Hawk’s being a jerk,” she said with a touch of genuine malice Anna had never heard before when she spoke of her brother. Hawk shot his sister a black look. Seeing the Bradshaws at odds was like watching two of the faces of Eve snarl at each other.

At a loss for words, Anna polished the toe of her unpolishable deck shoe against the back of her calf and said nothing. “Don’t sulk,” Holly ordered her tartly. “It’ll only encourage him. Want a steak? Sorry. I forgot you are a vegetable-arian. Want a carrot stick?”

“No, thanks,” Anna declined. “I’m just passing through.” She smiled at the young men. They seemed subdued for three Type T personalities out on an expensive adventure and she wondered how long Hawk and Holly had been generating foul weather.

She left them under their dark cloud and walked back into the sunlit picnic that had spread its blanket over the remainder of the dock. She spent a few minutes sitting on the edge of the pier talking with the child who’d been feeding the fox, explaining that Knucklehead had kits hidden in the woods and she needed to teach them to hunt. If they learned only to beg for hot dog buns, come winter, when the bun market crashed, the kits would starve.

It was only a half-truth, but Anna hoped it would suffice. The facts were a little less copacetic with the balance of nature. If the fox became a pest, begging close enough to present the slightest danger of tourists being bitten, of even suffering too many foxy thefts, eventually Lucas Vega would have her killed. Anna told that bedtime story to grown-up perpetrators. Little girls got the whitewashed version. She wanted them all to grow up to be rangers.

“Keeping the faith?” It was Hawk. He watched the girl meandering back toward her home barbecue. “She’s probably going for a fresh supply of hot dog buns.”

“Probably.”

“You’re patient,” Hawk said.

“On the second offense I shoot them.”

Hawk was supposed to laugh but he didn’t. “Sorry I was a jerk. Since Denny died there’s been a lot of that going around.”

“I know what you mean.” Anna was thinking of Scotty’s alcohol-ravaged face, Jo’s eyes swollen with tears shed and unshed, of herself poking at everybody’s boils trying to prod them into telling her something that would make sense out of the chaos in the Kamloops‘ engine room.

“Can I buy you a beer?” Hawk asked.

“Let me slip into something less governmental and you’re on.”

“Meet you at the ranger station,” Hawk said. Finally he smiled.

Midas’s touch turned both the smile and the man to gold. Anna felt a dangerous melting as she watched him walking back toward his boat. Bulk was of no use to divers. Their bodies were lean and wiry, the proportions natural, the endurance of the career divers just short of supernatural. For a dizzy moment, Anna contemplated the ramifications of that endurance.

“Stop it, you horrid old woman!” she whispered to herself and hurried up to the station feeling neither horrid nor old. She felt better than she had in days, since Chris and Ally had brought their homely comfort into her wilderness. Enjoying being pleasantly foolish, she combed her hair out. Crimped from being confined so long in braids, it fell in waves down around her shoulders. It went against the heat of her mood to put on a lot of clothes, but she’d not yet steeled her thin Texas blood to the northern summer. She pulled on Levi’s and a sweatshirt.

Hawk was sitting on the steps when Anna came out. The long brown necks of four Leinenkugel bottles poked up from a paper sack between his knees. The gloom that had hung about him as he’d hunkered on the 3rd Sister’s bow had gathered round again. Anna could see it pushing down the back of his neck, bowing his shoulders. She gathered the copper mass of hair away from her face and stuffed it down the neck of her sweatshirt.

“So, what’s up?” she asked as she sat beside him. “You look like a man with the bends.”

“Do I?” He opened a bottle of beer and handed it to her but forgot to open one for himself. Anna took a drink. She loved the beers of the Upper Midwest. The Germans had truly mastered the brewer’s art.

Hawk stared down the slope toward the water where it shimmered yellow and blue, the sun still clearing the trees though it was after seven. It crossed Anna’s mind that he had come not so much to be with her but because on her front steps he would not be with Holly and yet not be alone.

Content to drink his beer and fill the emptiness next to him, she shifted mental gears from romance to contemplation of nature. Humans were herd animals, like the moose. Sometimes even the most independent needed to clump up, hip and shoulder touching, protecting their soft flanks from the wolves.

“Ever seen a wolf here?” Anna asked.

“No. Diving’s a noisy business. On shore we’re either jamming jugs or hosting a party.”

Anna nodded. The sound of the air compressor filling scuba tanks or the chatter of humans would keep the wolves deep in the woods.

“You bringing Denny up tomorrow?” Hawk asked, his eyes still on the glittering channel.

“Yeah. Around noon is my guess. There’s an FBI guy flying in from Houghton to be on the scene.”

“A diver?”

“No.”

Hawk shrugged slightly and Frederick Stanton was dismissed as having no real relevance. “I wish you’d leave him there,” Hawk said suddenly. “Jo’ll bury him on land. Plant him down in the dirt like a turnip with a slab of marble at his head to hold him there. That’s not for Denny. His body pumped full of chemicals to keep it from rotting, a Sunday-go-to-meetin‘ suit moldering down around his bones. On the Kamloops he’d float forever, flipping divers the bird and guarding the lake. Leave him.”

“Can’t.” Anna said. “It’s against the law. It’s even illegal to scatter the ashes of a cremated corpse in a national park.”

“Even if they had a Golden Eagle Pass?” Hawk said, but he didn’t smile and bitterness took the humor out of his words.

Anna didn’t reply. She finished her beer and he opened another for her without asking. She took it. “I saw a