“You should be getting some sleep,” Cork suggested. “You worked hard out there today. Handled yourself well. You swing a mean paddle.”
“You mean for an old coot,” Raye said, settling once again against the canoe. Then he added, “And a queer.”
“I mean period.”
“You don’t care, then?”
It wasn’t an apology, Cork understood. Raye was just making sure it was a settled thing.
“Your life,” Cork shrugged.
Arkansas Willie spoke as if the weariness of the day was suddenly overwhelming him. “It didn’t used to be.”
“Mind if I ask you a question?”
“Shoot,” Raye said.
“Did you love Marais?”
“Not that way.” Arkansas Willie snapped a twig, and Cork could make out in dark profile that he, too, was chewing on a bit of pine. “We were friends. The best. The only. The marriage, well, that was something that helped us both out of a pickle. You see, we were negotiating this TV deal. Standard entertainment contracts back then contained a morals clause. It was the studio or network or record label’s out if you embarrassed them by behaving badly. There were rumors about me, always had been. But I was careful, so that’s all they were, rumors. Marais, now she really went and stepped in a pile of pig shit. Got herself pregnant just before we were going to sign. She refused to consider an abortion. There was a lot of Catholic in her even though she tried to deny it. We decided getting married was the perfect solution. We became a good television couple.” “You’re not Shiloh’s father.” Cork stated the obvious because he’d been caught so off guard.
“Biological, no. But I raised her like she was my own. Her real father couldn’t love her any more than I do.”
“Do you know who her real-sorry-biological father is?”
“Marais would never say. It was the era of free love, you know, and Marais was just about as free as they came that way. Jesus,” Raye said with a sigh. “Shiloh’s like her in so many ways. I mean,” he went on quickly, “headstrong. Beautiful. But a streak in her mean as a wild pig when she doesn’t get her way. Between running Ozark Records and raising that child, I had my hands full. Hell, I tried everything-nannies, nuns, boarding schools. Shiloh went through ’em like a cannonball through a cornfield. I finally figured getting her into the business was at least a way of channeling all that energy. She had talent, even more than her mother. Cut her first album for Ozark when she was fifteen. Went platinum. After that, she was, well, I guess she was beyond me. We’ve been- estranged-for a few years now.”
The dark shape of Arkansas Willie Raye bent forward as the man hugged his knees. Cork understood how it felt to be separated from what you loved, from what had helped define who and what you were. It was the worst kind of loneliness.
Willie Raye spoke again. “I was surprised when I started getting Shiloh’s letters from this place. Pleased me no end. She sounded so-I don’t know-so peaceful with herself finally. Like she’d found something here I couldn’t give her. I always wondered if maybe a real father would have done better.”
“All fathers make mistakes, Willie. And I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts all good fathers lose sleep wondering if they’re doing it right.”
“Yeah?” Raye thought about it. “Probably.”
A bit of wind rose up, only a moment’s worth, but it shook the branches enough to make it feel like a heavy rain was falling. When it had passed, Raye said, “So what happens when we find her?”
“Don’t worry about that, Willie,” Cork assured him. “I’ve got a trick or two up my sleeve. Go on and get some sleep if you can. We’ve still got a ways to go tomorrow.”
Raye left him and crawled back into the tent. Cork sat then, chewing hard on the pine twig.
A trick or two up my sleeve, he thought. Sure, and monkeys fly out my butt.
23
At twelve fifty-six A.M., Jo O’Connor finally gave up on the idea of sleep. For hours she’d been awake worrying about Louis and Stormy and Sarah Two Knives. And about Cork. As an attorney, she was used to dealing with worry by sinking herself completely into the facts of a situation. Her strength lay in her ability to scrutinize circumstances from every angle and to anticipate the moves of an opponent. But she didn’t have facts and she didn’t know her opponent, and all she was left with was the worry.
She got out of bed, threw on a robe, went downstairs, and made herself a cup of chamomile tea, one of the few things she knew how to do in a kitchen without risking disaster. She turned on the television to the cable country music station and sat watching, hoping to see Shiloh, the woman all the fuss in the Boundary Waters was about. She knew the Aurora legends of the woman’s mother-Marais Grand, local girl who’d hit it big, who’d run (it was rumored) with the mob, and who’d met a brutal and mysterious death that had (perhaps) been witnessed by her daughter.
Before Jo’s cup of tea was half finished, a Shiloh video came on. It featured the young woman singing a lively, sassy country tune in which she warned a no-good truck-lovin’, beer-drinkin’, dog-smellin’, lietellin’, heart-breakin’, run-around man to “… keep away from my bed cuz I’m warnin’ you, honey, the sheet’s gonna hit the fan.” Jo found herself liking Shiloh, at least the Shiloh in the video. The woman was attractive in an unusual way. She seemed an amalgam of strange genetic blendings. Her hair, long and black and snapping about like a whip as she turned defiantly away from her cheatin’ man, might have adorned any woman on the Iron Lake reservation. Her face was exotic rather than beautiful. A long slender nose saddled with nostrils that flared broadly, like little wings on the spine of a tiny bird. There was something electric about the eyes, such anger and insolence that Jo thought the young woman was either a superb actress or had truly felt, as most women ultimately did, the utter betrayal of love. The color of Shiloh’s skin seemed to vary with the lighting. In the shadows of a room with an unmade bed, her skin was dark as an almond. But when she stepped outside, abandoning the old house and the man who’d walked all over her heart, her face danced in sunlight and glowed with a color that reminded Jo of the sky at sunset when summer fires burned the forests and everything was bathed in a smoky red-brown hue.
The song at the center of the video wasn’t deep, but Jo liked its simple sensibility and it made her wonder a little if she’d missed something by ignoring country music for most of her life.
She went back to bed and slept fitfully until the clock radio clicked on at six A.M. Outside, the morning was still black, and against the windowpane, a light rain fell. She thought about Cork in the Boundary Waters, about the rainy times she’d spent there with him and the children. In the tent all day, playing games-twenty questions, spades-reading aloud or quietly to themselves, telling stories. Somehow they’d managed never to be bored.
Cork didn’t have the luxury this outing of riding out the rain in a tent. All of them who’d gone, Louis included, had a driving purpose that would propel them onward. Her anger flared again as she thought of the men who’d used their power over Stormy to induce Louis to lead them. She was determined to bring an action on behalf of Sarah Two Knives when it was all over. The law wasn’t perfect, but anytime those who had the power to twist it did so, it grew more grotesque. With all its flaws, the law was still something she had faith in. She’d been a part of making it work, and she believed, as strongly as she believed anything, that in the end it was one of the few powerful weapons available to common people.
Jo heard Rose lumbering down the stairs to the kitchen to begin breakfast preparations, and she threw back the covers and went to wake the kids.
Her car was the first in the lot of the Aurora Professional Building. She used her key and let herself in. She hit the lights, illuminating the hallway that was long and empty. The odor of wet wool hung in the air and she recalled that the carpeting had been cleaned over the weekend. She felt a little guilty walking to her office because her feet left wet tracks on the carpet. Jo turned on the lights, hung her coat, and set her briefcase temporarily on her secretary’s desk. The cold, wet morning had made her desperate for coffee. She took the pot from the coffeemaker and went to the women’s restroom down the hall to fill it with tap water. Coming back, she saw that hers were no longer the only wet footprints on the carpet. Several more sets trampled her own, and between them ran four deep,
