Absolute Zero

who’d stayed behind to watch over Sommer and Milt. He withdrew his hand.

You don’t really know Hank Sommer.

And it was like-all his life he’d worked the sharp end and he’d always been annoyed at the compulsion of people who couldn’t resist adding their personal embroidery to the messy edge of tragedy. Now he discovered he was not immune to this character defect.

He was dwelling on it. If you hadn’t hassled Sommer so much during the storm he might not have pushed so hard, might not have ruptured himself.

Try again, Broker.

You fell apart out there and an injured man had to take up the slack.

Either way, if Sommer hadn’t paddled to the max they would have dumped in the middle of the lake, not ten yards from the point. Their bodies would be stiff white logs rolling among the rocks on the leeward shore of Fraser Lake. He’d gone on a canoe trip in only fair physical condition and his strength had faltered when the chips were down.

These were ponderous thoughts to keep afloat in an ocean of fatigue, especially after the narcotic hot shower, and the bed beckoned, but so did the image of Sommer lying less than a mile away with his eyes closed, his heart beating, and his lungs sucking oxygen.

And his head full of static.

Broker lurched to his feet and grabbed his parka. Iker’s wife was right. He needed a drink.

The snow had grayed the early afternoon enough to switch on the streetlights and it was a bad day for a drive, but Broker took one, anyway. He pushed the Ranger through the small business district and followed the flashing blue light of a county snowplow out Sheridan Street to the outskirts of town, where the plow stopped, defeated by drifts on Highway 169. Broker turned around in front of the International Wolf Center and retraced his route.

Ely was end of the road, a departure point for tourists paddling into the wilds. Things were different when Broker was a kid and spent part of his summers here. Then, the iron ore they dug up from the veins that literally ran under the town was so pure it could be welded directly on to steel.

The iron fields were so potent they interfered with radio signals, and the rattle of boxcars full of ore had competed with the buzz of seaplanes flying fishermen into the paradise of northern lakes.

The mines came to grief on the global marketplace. Miners who had landed on Iwo and Saipan were thrown out of work when the steel could be shipped in cheaper from Japan. In the late ’70’s the government annexed the lake country along the Canadian border as a wilderness preserve and banished the gasoline motor to keep the woods and water pristine. The bitter land-use controversy still flared.

Broker switched on the radio, scanned the dial until he hit WELY. “Sally, your brother wants you to stay put. He’s safe, he’s made it to town and won’t get back until this blow is over.”

WELY was one of two American radio stations licensed to transmit personal messages. The other was in the Alaskan bush. He turned off the radio and stared into the storm.

Now the school district was shrinking. Income from vacationers didn’t translate into the kind of jobs that supported families. Like his home ground on the Superior shore, another piece of his geography was being changed by ’90’s Uber wealth.

Take it in stride, he told himself, keep moving, don’t look back.

Mike and Irene Broker had raised their boy to be a stoic. They had been inoculated against sentimentality by bumping up hard against the Depression and Hitler, and they’d passed the antibodies to their son. Broker understood the cultural message of his time. He’d been raised to fight Communists, and he had. He’d come home from his war refitted with a forty-gallon adrenaline tank.

So he’d joked that he’d worn a badge to feed his action jones. But the fact was, if somebody had to remain vigilant in the night so others could sleep in peaceful beds, it probably should be somebody like him.

A shape jerked at the corner of his eye and he almost wrenched the wheel-seeing things-an artifact of shock and fatigue, and he was back to taking deep breaths through his nose to steady down his jumpy thoughts. And he almost had to laugh-Christ, he’d come up here to get away and. .

He just had to maintain control and forward motion and balance. He used to be good at keeping things separate and filed into their own compartments. But it wasn’t that easy to take this one in stride. He’d sprung a leak. Stuff was getting in. Stuff was getting out.

His mom-well, Mom had always worried that he had too much imagination for police work. Peel back the bark, she’d said, and he was layered and impressionable. Like a ball of wax, Sommer said, things stick.

And the things that stuck were memories from more than twenty years of cleaning up after human beings at their worst. And suddenly he swerved again, but this time it was in his head, and he was back in the middle of the argument with his wife.

And she’d said, Oh, I see, so it’s all right for you to do it but not for me, is that it?

The memory invoked all the hoarded resentments; she still thought she was indestructible at thirty-three. She took too many chances out there and left him home to rehearse attending her funeral with their daughter Kit. .

Right now Kit’s absence ached in his arms and he could smell her milky sweet-sour breath and her copper curls and see her chubby face that was part Rubens and part Winston Churchill, and he could hear her pure laugh that was so uncomplicated by fear. He experienced a piercing memory of her a month ago as she struggled with the physical limitations of her limited grasp and discovered that she couldn’t carry all her stuffed animals at once.

She was going on three and by the time she was four she’d experience the death of something-a cat or a dog or a hamster. She’d find and poke her first roadkill. Fearless, like her mother, she’d probably lift the maggots on a stick.

She was almost ready for The Lion King, which he’d screened. She’d see Mufasa trampled to death by stampeding wildebeests and watch little Simba vainly attempt to rouse his father from a permanent sleep.

Eventually, she would pose the question: Daddy, will you die? Will Mommy die?

Will I die?

Broker parked Iker’s truck in a snowdrift in front of The Saloon on a desolate street in Ely and was in a fine mood when he pushed his way through the door, stamped off snow, and took over a table in the corner. The place was dim as a cave and sparsely populated by a few hardy snowmobilers and a storm-weary bartender and waitress.

Broker was no drinker. For a thirst-quencher he preferred lemonade on a hot day, and his only use for bar culture had been as a fertile recruiting ground for bottom-feeding snitches. He always made a point to leave drinking scenes before the lip sync went haywire and people’s expressions became dissociated from their words.

Uncharacteristically, he ordered a double Jack Daniel’s and drank half of it. He gagged, flushed with sweat, and drank the rest, then sat back and waited for the numbness.

He kept getting stuck on the inverted sequence of Sommer’s mind being suffocated inside his living body, and the image obligated him to reflect on his own fast parade of sudden death.

“Traffic,” Broker mumbled to his whiskey glass.

August. Last year, on a sticky, humming, deep-green afternoon he and his father were out for a walk by the state capitol in St. Paul. They’d paused on a freeway overpass with the domes of the capitol and the St. Paul Cathedral bracketing them north and south, and rush hour on Interstate 94 clamoring below their feet. Mike Broker at seventy-nine took long mental vacations and tripped down rabbit holes of nostalgia because in the rabbit holes he was young and doing things that mattered. That hot August afternoon, Dad had looked down at the racing cars and said, “This is what it sounds like when a lot of young people die fast and unhappy in a tight spot. Hundreds of lives go screaming by each minute.”

Dad was talking about the first hour on Omaha Beach.

The rush was not that loud in Broker’s memory but it was audible enough to prompt ordering another double.