He brought his face close to mine. He stank of whiskey and sweat-drenched clothes and long hours spent wading through rotting peat bogs. For a moment he stared into my eyes-so similar to his own in color and shape- and I knew he was trying to gauge my truthfulness by looking for the telltale signs of deceit in himself. What he saw, I don’t know, but he let go of me, making a noise almost like a growl, and I slumped back onto the table.
From across the room Brenda said, “Maybe we could use him as a hostage.”
My father stood above me, one hand gripping the butt of the.44 in his belt. Dusk was hours away, but a dark haze had come in through the windows. I saw a greasy smear of raindrops on the pane. A storm front was rolling out of Quebec.
“Jack?” she said.
“Let me think!”
Wind hissed through the chinks between the log walls of the cabin.
He removed the Ruger from his belt and waved it at me. “Get up.”
I slid off the table, stumbled sideways a few steps, and straightened up. My jaw ached, my arms were numb.
Brenda put her hand on his forearm, but he shook it off as if he didn’t like the feel of her flesh.
“What do we do?” she asked.
“Pack some food. We’re getting out of here.”
Rain clattered on the metal roof, the first rain I’d heard since the night at Bud Thompson’s farm when the bear had killed his pig. Had it only been a week? That night seemed a lifetime ago.
“Why did you call me?” I asked hoarsely.
“What?” He stood staring out the window, but the glass was so fogged with humidity he couldn’t have seen a thing, not even his own reflection.
“The night you killed those men, you left a message on my answering machine.”
“I thought you could help me with the cops.”
So that was it. Even in the first hours following the murders he’d been looking for a way to cover his tracks. Among the alibis, excuses, and lies he might use to cover himself he had remembered his son, the game warden. Why was I so shocked to realize that his only thought of me was as a means of hiding his guilt?
“They’ll find you,” I said to him. “You can’t escape.”
“You’re coming with us.”
“I won’t be your hostage.”
Brenda appeared in the dining room. She had found an olive-drab poncho which she’d pulled on over her T-shirt. She was lugging an overloaded rucksack with both hands. “You want me to put this in the truck?”
“No. The canoe.”
“What?”
“We’re going across the lake. They’ll be looking for us on the road. I know places we can hide until we can cross over to Canada.”
She let the rucksack drop. “I’m not going to hide in some wet hole.”
“Then stay here and go to jail for the rest of your life.”
“Why should I? I didn’t kill anybody.”
He turned on her. “What did you just say?”
“You killed those men, not me.”
He put his hand on the.44 in his belt. “You want to stay here? I can arrange it.”
She gnawed at her lip but didn’t answer.
“What’ll it be?” he said.
She reached down and lifted the rucksack again. He nodded. Then he said to me, “Get up, Mike.”
“No.”
He pulled the pistol loose from his belt and held it by his side. “I said get up.”
“You won’t shoot me.”
He pushed the muzzle of the gun against my sternum. I could see the calculations going on behind his eyes. Dead, I would be easier to manage and just as useful a hostage, as long as Soctomah believed I might still be alive. It made sense to shoot me. In his situation, it was the rational thing to do.
But, for whatever reason, he couldn’t do it. He jammed the Ruger back in his belt and grabbed the ropes binding my arms and began to twist them. Pain shot up my arms like white-hot wires shoved under the skin. I tried to remain standing, but he kicked my legs out from under me.
He dragged me outside into the rain and mud. Exhausted as he was, his strength was still incredible for a man his age. My shoulders seemed about to pop loose from their sockets, and I bit my tongue from the pain. He dropped me in the sand beside the longest of Pelletier’s battered aluminum canoes. I rolled onto my side. Wet sand stuck to one side of my face. Rain slid into my eyes and down my cheeks.
“Get in the canoe.” In his ragged breathing I heard what his exertions had cost him.
I didn’t move.
He kicked me in the small of my back. “I said, get in the fucking canoe!”
I tried to get to my knees, but with my arms roped behind me, it was nearly impossible. I had to roll onto my stomach and lift my ass in the air to get my knees under me.
He had me sit in the bow, facing backward. Then he pushed us off into the open water.
The wind was blowing a chop along the lake. Gray-green waves knocked the hull of the canoe and splashed over the gunwales. My T-shirt and jeans were already soaked through from the rain.
This time Brenda paddled-she had no choice. My father stared right through me as if I were a ghost. Raindrops danced off the brim of his camouflage cap.
Over their shoulders I watched the lodge and cabins grow smaller and smaller. All the windows were dark. Behind the sporting camp the old-growth pines made a jagged edge, like a dark saw blade, against the lowering sky. I listened, hoping to hear the wail of sirens, but all I heard was the slosh of water, the whistle of rising wind.
He was steering us down the lake, staying close to the shore. Eventually we would pass the spot where Charley had crashed.
What, I wondered, would we find floating there?
The chop bucked the canoe up and down, but my father kept us moving in a straight line. His strokes were deft and seemingly effortless, pulling the canoe forward rather than pushing it along as amateur paddlers try to do.
The summer I’d stayed at Rum Pond I’d asked him to teach me to paddle the way he did. He said he would, but he never did. And so I had spent hours alone, after dusk when all the dishes were washed, teaching myself to paddle-maybe in this same canoe. Now I remembered the balsam-scented dusk descending on the lake and the bats skimming low over the surface, feeding, and everywhere the trout rising, making ever-expanding, intersecting circles in the water. But mostly what I remembered was looking up at my father’s cabin, hearing his laughter and Truman’s through the trees, and feeling unspeakably alone.
A styrofoam cup floated past, then a sheet of waterlogged paper. Afloat in the distance I saw one of the paddles Charley had kept lashed to the struts of the plane. It was broken like a bone. Farther still, I saw the Super Cub, upside down, its cockpit swamped full of water, a hundred or so feet to one side of us. Maybe it rested on the shallow gravel bottom of the lake. A faded orange life jacket bobbed in the waves without a person in it.
In my mind I saw Ora sitting in her wheelchair at the end of the dock as we had taken off this morning. She had waved at us, waved good-bye to her husband. She would never see him alive again.
My father didn’t even give the plane a glance. He kept paddling.
Brenda was smirking at me. My pain, apparently, amused her. A few hours earlier, I had felt sorry for this lonely girl raised by men, but now I just wanted to wipe that smirk off that cruel face. I had no other motivation, no other thought as I stood up in the canoe.
The smirk vanished. Disbelief widened her eyes. My father started to speak, but no words came out of his open mouth. There was an instant when I stood above them, calm and perfectly balanced, and we were still gliding forward. Then, just like that, the canoe tipped over, and we were all in the water.
I went in headfirst, upside down and unable to right myself without the use of my arms. I scissored my legs and twisted. I felt thrashing movements around me. Bodies in the water. My foot kicked something hard. For a split second, my head broke the surface, but I couldn’t stay afloat, and I slipped back under the chop. Water rushed up
