IT WAS ONE of those county sheriff’s departments with brass hats and military titles and enough gold braid to hogtie a Democrat. We drew a major.
Not that he acknowledged the title, engraved on a brass bar on his chest along with the name R. E. AXHORN. He was a big Ojibway with iron gray in his short black hair and black eyes in a broad pitted face the color of old blood, wearing a brown leather jacket over a buff-and-brown uniform and a revolver with a cherrywood grip in a holster behind his right hip. He shook my hand and then DeVries’s and took a seat in the wing-backed chair facing the sofa we were sitting on, leaning forward to keep his weight off the gun.
The living room was in back of a rock shop belonging to an old man named Coulee who had waded in up to his hips to help tie a rope to my rear bumper and the other end around a tree to keep the car above water until the wrecker came. DeVries and I had managed to rescue the big man’s overnight bag and my valise containing changes of clothes and now we were wearing them, growing warm and drowsy in the heat of a small woodstove, our hands wrapped around two man-size porcelain mugs full of steaming coffee laced with bourbon. The coldest winter I’d ever spent was twenty minutes in Lake Superior in late spring.
We were alone with Axhorn and a Corporal Hale, six feet and a hundred and forty pounds of elbows and Adam’s apple in a neat uniform, smoking a cigarette at a window overlooking the lake. Coulee was in the shop polishing the largest collection of Petoskey stone north of—well, Petoskey. He had gone up to Eagle River from his home in Dowagiac before the Depression to mine copper, moved to Harvey after the market bottomed out, and hadn’t been off the peninsula in sixty years. He had told us all this while we were diving for Chevies.
For a minute Axhorn sat without speaking, bent forward with his elbows on his thighs, circling the brim of his Stetson through his fingers Gary Cooper fashion. Then he looked up at me from under his brows. “You told Corporal Hale you were run off the road?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “I lost it on the curve while we were being chased.”
“Sure it was a chase?”
“Not if you don’t want one.”
He stopped circling his hatbrim. “What might that mean?”
“I saw what looked like a trap closing and reversed ends and got out of there. They turned around and followed, scratching up asphalt. Could be both drivers remembered something they’d left behind at the same moment and were in the same hurry to go back and get it. Could be they were in so much of a hurry they both kept going after we went into the water. It doesn’t have to be that they heard Hale’s siren and rabbited. If the paperwork’s easier that way we won’t yell.”
After a space he said, “Which one of you is the convict?”
“Ex,” DeVries said. “Ex-convict.”
Axhorn went on looking at me. “That makes you the private eye. I figured.”
“What might that mean?”
“On TV the big-city eye is always breaking down in some hick county with a crooked sheriff that wants to see the eye on his way. City cops are always clean, it’s the counties got their fingers in some pie. Some do, I guess. If you watch enough TV ou think they all do.”
“Sorry, Major. I guess you didn’t pick out all that brass.”
“Yeah.” He glanced down at his nameplate. “County work’s hell. The higher you get the more metal they hang on you and the closer you are to unemployment every time a new sheriff gets elected. Either of you grab a license plate number?”
I shook my head. “The truck was smoking too much and we never saw the back of the Monte Carlo.”
“Describe the truck.”
“A maroon Dodge beater with a board mounted up front in place of a bumper. Needs new rings bad.”
“That’s Burt Wakely’s rig,” Hale said.
“Who’s Burt Wakely?” I asked.
“Burt and his brother Hank are old customers at County.” Axhorn studied his hatband. “This don’t sound like anything they’d get tangled in, though. They’ll get drunk and bust up a place or take somebody’s car for a spin without exactly asking for it, but road piracy’s outside their specialty, or was last I heard. If you’ll sign a complaint we’ll bring them in for a talk.”
“They the kind that talks?”
“In a bar maybe. Not to the law.”
“Forget it then. What about the Monte Carlo? Black, this year’s model?”
“Probably a transient. The year-rounds in this county like to eat. You can’t do that and own a fifteen-thousand-dollar automobile up here. The summer people, maybe. You might have noticed it isn’t summer.”
“I noticed.” I inhaled some whiskey fumes and felt the amber glow spreading through me.
“Maybe you got some idea why Burt Wakely might want to turn hijacker.”
I met his polished ebony gaze. “No.”
“Your friend don’t talk much.”
DeVries said, “Where I come from you don’t talk till someone talks to you.”
Axhorn looked at him. “What’s a convict — ex-convict, excuse me all to hell — want with the company of a private cop two hours after he’s released? I never been, but if I was to make a list of the people I’d care to spend time with straight off the block, that one wouldn’t make the first fifty.”
“I been in twenty years. Somebody has to show me around.”
The Indian waited for more. His profile belonged on a penny. The telephone rang then on the stand next to his chair. He waited politely for Coulee to come in and answer it, then picked it up on the fourth ring.
“Hello? Bob Axhorn, who are you? Okay. That bad, huh? Yeah, I’ll tell him.” He hung up and looked at me. “That was Andy at the garage. They’ve got to gut your car and pump out the tank and fuel line. It’ll be ready Monday.”
“I’m due in Detroit Friday,” DeVries said.
“There a car rental place around here?” I asked.
“Marquette.” Axhorn glanced at the big watch on his wrist. “They’ll be closed now. Long hours are for the tourist season. You can try them in the morning. Lots of vacancies in the motels now.”
“You want us to check in when we get registered?”
“I’ll find you if I need you. I don’t know why I would. It’s just another accident involving a crazy downstater as far as the department’s concerned. I ought to have Corporal Hale ticket you, but you might take it into your head to fight it, and what I most don’t want is to see you hanging around here any longer than it takes to get your car fixed and go home and stay there.” He rose in one smooth movement and put on his Stetson. It made him look like a cavalry scout.
I put down my mug and got up. “It’s not you, Major. It’s just neater this way.”
“I don’t want to hear it.” He looked down at DeVries, hunkered over his coffee in a gray flannel shirt and stiff new jeans that left his ankles bare. “The speech don’t change. Whatever you did that took you down don’t matter to me. What does is you take it out of this county.”
“I hear you.”
“Where do these Wakelys hang out?” I asked.
Axhorn regarded me. “They got a shack a mile down White Road off Twenty-eight east of Harvey. You don’t want to mess with them, though. They wrestle them big flatbeds for the lumber company and they’re both as strong as black bears and twice as mean. Your big friend might take one of them if he don’t turn his back on the other. They eat running backs like you for breakfast.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“Don’t bother. I’m paid to keep the peace.”
Hale put out his cigarette in an ashtray made from a hunk of raw green copper and followed his superior out. We heard Axhorn talking to Coulee, then the front door slammed. I groped in my shirt pocket, remembered I’d drenched my last pack of Winstons in the lake, and let my hand drop. “Any ideas?”
DeVries rolled his mug between his big palms. “Andrew or Albert.”
“Would he know you were getting out today?”
“One phone call would of done it.”
“It might not have been you they were after. I’m not as popular as I look. Or it could have been an honest hijacking. The world’s changed, like I said.”
“It ain’t changed so much I’ll buy that one.” He stood. I winced, but his head fell an inch short of the exposed oak rafters. “Let’s go see if your money’s dry and find a restaurant. I’m hungry enough to eat the asshole out of a skunk.”
“More fast food?”
“I ain’t that hungry.”
Coulee was a short wide gnome with a cap of white hair and blue eyes like glass shards in a face nearly as dark as Axhorn’s. He was as deaf as driftwood, but he got our meaning finally and gave us back our things, only slightly damp now that they’d been spread out near the stove. Some of the ink had run along the edges of the library printout, but the picture was intact. I offered the old man fifty dollars for his help and hospitality. He surprised me by accepting it.
The sun was setting in Keweenau Bay, tinting the water orange and making black hairy fingers of the points of land and scrub pines stretched across it. Gulls congregated on the knuckles and took off in a dozen directions, dive-bombing the lake and looping back up in a sudden acceleration of wings, their shrill calls sounding like two boards mating. As the water cooled, a chill wind riffled the surface and found its way through our clothes to the skin, as it had with white and black mariners for two hundred years, and with the brown-skinned paddlers of dugout canoes for twenty thousand years before them. The lake was a continual awareness unaffected by eons, changing only when it chose and then lapsing back into the immutable calm it had known since the last glacier. Maybe it wasn’t so bad to be a prisoner on its shore. Doing time means nothing where time doesn’t exist.
We hoisted our worldly belongings under our arms and went in search of food and lodging.