27

WHAT HAPPENED AFTER THAT, DAVID HAD CAUSE TO THINK about, and to blame himself for, later—though he didn’t understand that assigning such blame, and to oneself alone, is grandiose, much in the manner of Max’s overconfident way in the world. David’s version of his father’s hubris had just taken a different form. You’re responsible, David, for what happens in your life, Max had always told him, and whether he consciously believed it or not, that belief had taken root in him, perhaps too much. Was not tempered by consideration of chance, or fate, or circumstance. So that If I had onlys stemmed and blossomed and multiplied tenfold from actions he could only guess the outcome of, some of them seeming inconsequential at the time, like throwing the ball farther than Buddy, or here, giving in to his father to keep the peace.

Later, David would wake in drenching cold sweats, night after night, to ask himself, Why hadn’t he seen things for what they were? Or had he, he asked himself, as he had helping Greg Becker that morning, and done the wrong thing, anyway? After all, helping Greg had been one thing, but throwing that ball had been another.

Why, really, had he done it?

Like this moment now, and what followed.

David stood at the table, and Max stood with him, and they went out to the car.

Janie, out front of the motel, was playing with the motel cat, black, heavy bodied with white boots and face, and Max avoided Janie, knowing that this would be the next thing she’d be asking for, the kid just loved cats, she’d be asking him for a cat, it was obvious, and the strange thing was, cats just loved her.

David saw how Max hardened against it, watching Janie draw the fishing line in the sand path, and the cat darting after it, and David felt that warmth again when Max shrugged.

Max could be a hard-ass with him, but not with Janie.

If she asked, if Janie asked just now, David knew, Max would get her a cat, later. David could just see it in him, how he even wanted her to ask him. Here, now, when the cat was rubbing up against Janie’s legs, and when she dodged out into the empty morning street, and the cat came with her, stretching, then butting its head up against Janie’s hand, which she held, as David had taught her, the back of her hand out toward the cat, the cat’s bell tinkling brassily and small.

“Don’t play in the street there,” Max said, but with this affection in his voice, a voice he had for Janie, and she came back toward the motel, and there picked up the piece of string again, and had the cat chasing it.

This, David thought, was beautiful—girl and cat, this symbiosis, more dance than anything.

David followed Max around to the trunk of the car, and Max had his key out and opened the trunk and David looked in—this he’d been dreading since they’d left Minneapolis, and his fears about Max and the food did not go unrewarded. Here were two brown shopping bags, and he went through them, cans of Dinty Moore beef stew, two five-pound blocks of individually wrapped slices of Velveeta cheese, four loaves of Wonder Bread, half-crushed bags of noodles—now, that was right, the noodles—and presweetened drink mix. Instant coffee, that was good, too. A pint of whiskey for a drink if he wanted one, Max said.

Max had brought a cooler, a red Coleman.

“What’s in it?” David asked, realizing he’d gotten an edge in his voice. With his father, it seemed they were always on the edge of something.

“Frozen steaks, hamburger.”

“What do you want to do with the cooler?”

“What about it?”

“We can’t bring it,” David said.

“Why not?”

David set his hands on his hips, kept his eyes on the trunk.

“It’s too wide,” he said.

“Not if we put it in lengthwise . . .”

“Believe me,” David said, “with that center thwart, you can’t put it in lengthwise. How’s Janie going to have any room?”

This pleased Max not at all. He somehow hadn’t thought of that.

David slid the cooler to the side. They had food for, maybe, six days, tops. Less if the burger or steaks spoiled before they could eat them. But it was cold nights now, so maybe not. David felt the whole weight of it coming down on his shoulders. It was his call here, but he didn’t want to get into it with Max.

Max had made all the typical weekender’s assumptions, so what was the big deal?

David supposed it was that Max hadn’t so much as asked somebody what he’d need. Max had never been out, and he’d been too proud, or too stubborn, or just too full of shit to spend an hour or two looking into it all. But even that wouldn’t wash. If he’d been too proud, too full of himself, for that matter, he could have just called Hoigaard’s, and they’d have given him an earful right over the phone, nameless, faceless, told him what was what.

But a goddamn Coleman cooler? David laughed to himself and Max bristled.

“What about the tent?” David said.

“A Timberline,” Max said, the wings of his nose flaring. “That all right?”

David told him it was. That was good. But then Janie was calling to the cat behind him, “Kittie kittie kittie, here, kittie, come here, kittie,” and he knew he’d have to do something about the food. For Janie.

But what David was aware of now was this: He had ten dollars on him, the last of his savings from painting apartments with his uncle Bobby. It made him almost sick to have to ask for money, worst of all from his father, but he was going to have to do it and, like usual, Max was going to humiliate him when he did.

This was the little ritual they’d gotten into, when the beatings had started at night, when he’d asked for his allowance all those years ago, and suddenly it was all right there, even in daylight, and David was sorry he’d ever thought he could do this, come out here with Max, but then he thought of Rachel.

Of course, she’d asked him, so it was different, so he didn’t blame himself entirely, but he cursed himself anyway, here at the trunk, and now Janie, who’d worked as some salve between him and Max, gone with the cat.

But it was thinking of Janie that stopped all that hesitation.

“We need a Duluth pack,” David said. “We need a dining fly, twelve by fifteen, ripstop nylon. We need some dehydrated potatoes, maybe some vegetables, and powdered soup. We need a map case . . . a spare paddle. I don’t see any paddle here.”

“All right,” Max said. “So what the—” He was going to say fuck, but said, “What don’t we need?”

“All I’m saying is—”

“I understand what you’re saying just fine. So why don’t you just say it?”

“Just . . . give me some money, and I’ll go get the things. I know Herter’s up the street, I’ve been there.”

Max had his wallet out. “What do you want, fifty? That do it?” He held the money out at David as if he were holding out his blood, or his life. “Here,” he said, shaking the two twenties and ten. “Take it.”

“I’ve got ten,” David said.

“You don’t have anything.”

This shocked David. He wanted to say, What do you mean I don’t have anything? But he’d already retreated inside himself.

Never come out, he told himself. Never.

For Janie, then, he thought.

He struggled with thoughts of striking Max in the face; it occurred to him, the reason Buddy’d gotten to him the way he had was this, right here. He was used to taking it, had been since he’d been little, and then his father so huge, as he seemed even now, like some psychological trick, because Max wasn’t, really, much larger than David. Max had twenty-five, thirty pounds over him, most of it fat.

“I’ll get the things we need,” David said, and took the bills. “Shouldn’t take more than minutes.”

“I’ll drive you.”

“No, don’t,” David said, turning away, and, moving up the street, he said over his shoulder, “Gotta be able to carry the stuff to portage it, anyway.”

Inside Herter’s he moved around the back of the store still in such a rage he couldn’t see for it. It was a black mood he was in, the kind only Max could put him into, and he thought to go outside again, and just walk, walk it off, and he tried to decide what to do, leaning against a table stacked with portable stoves, some white gas, some Sterno, some propane. He idly handled a can of propane, his mind still tripping over itself, all that old crap coming up, and in it he got this sense of unreality.

And now, here he was talking to this guy, a badge on his shirt, Herter’s/Brian, and he was very matter-of-factly telling him what he needed, and in minutes they were at the register, and David paid him, and they exchanged some pleasantries about the weather, and the clerk asked had he heard about the dump they’d gotten in Anchorage, a record breaker, which could be on its way south, and he helped David arrange the gear in the Duluth pack, which he’d rented, and so put the receipt in his wallet and then he was outside, and he smoked a cigarette, there beside a snarling wooden bear, half again his height, and David, looking at it, thought, Wrong species, this was Ursus horribilis, a grizzly, and there were no grizzlies in northern Minnesota. All black bears, Ursus americanus, though, since they’d habituated to having people around, and eating garbage, they could be dangerous, too.

Still, in his present mood, it calmed him somewhat, looking at the bear, and he crushed out his cigarette and moved up the street, the Duluth pack’s straps digging painfully into his shoulders. But that was normal. And the pack was only partially full, and of no consequence. He told himself he’d done the right thing, and there was some satisfaction in that.

Yet the moment he was later to painfully remember was nearly upon him.

He was still sweating slightly at the humiliation of his father giving him the money—at how Max had given it to him. And at his, David’s, having—even given that situation—taken it.

You don’t have anything.

He’d done it for Janie, he told himself, but that was a lie, because he’d been afraid for himself, too.

And like that, he approached the motel, and from a block back he heard voices. Something coiled and vicious there. And among those voices, but outnumbered, and so outpowered, was Max’s. And David rushed then, the pack on his back nothing now, but then coming around a station wagon, two flat-bottomed Alumacraft canoes on the top, a sticker on the rusted rear bumper that read Meat Cutters Unionize!, he saw them, around the trees there, Max and Janie, at the car, and in front of them, at the motel, the men, hunkered in chairs on the porch, Janie yards back from the argument.

David slowed down, and then stopped.

He listened, from where he was standing, could see the four men behind the rail, his father at the Cadillac, leaning combatively toward them.

One man, who seemed almost ashamed to be sitting with the three others, looked off up the street and saw David, and knew he was the son, right off, which stopped David in his tracks. And that, for David, was another cause for regret later.

Regret and shame.

If he’d come out right then, maybe this man, who’d had some kindness in his eyes, maybe he would have stopped it. Because this bigger man, eyeing David, shook his head, and David, understanding, nodded in return, staying to the rear of the car, out of sight.

Don’t put your old man in a position of having to be tougher than he is, the big man had signaled. And David had hung back.

But later, when it was all over, he asked himself, Had he done so to prevent things from getting out of hand, from escalating? Or out of cowardice?

And what could he have done, anyway?

Because by then their charges had gotten far beyond them, David’s, and the big man’s—who David would not know as “Jack Carpenter” until all of what came with the investigation later, though, even here, David sensed some dark complicity in the three with him. Yet most disturbing was this:

The shortest of the men with this “Jack,” as if in some déjà vu moment, David seemed to know. But from where he could not recall.

But then, all three of the men with this Jack seemed somewhat familiar, only David just then couldn’t have said how. Wouldn’t know until long after it was all over who these men were:

To Jack’s left, Larry Munson, just “Munson” here, Jack’s former co-captain on the Austin Chargers football team, who, unbeknownst to Jack, had for some time been part of the theft going on at Dysart, and so had been asked to throw in his oar with the others, Munson rawboned and unshaven in his cutter’s khakis, and wearing a pair of Red Wing boots, this sharp pleasure in his eyes, which David saw, and inwardly recoiled from.

And to Munson’s left, Stacey Lawton, a man David recognized on sight as a coward, and a bully, the one to jump in after, Lawton’s near-hyperthyroid eyes bulging, and his upper arms and back thick, fattish, and around his middle a sizable beer gut, and even, in this subtle morning light, wearing a baseball cap, I’m With Stupid emblazoned across the crown, an arrow pointing to his left, a kind of willful, and small, meanness in him, Lawton wearing green twill pants, and thick-soled work boots.

But it was the one on the far end that sent a shudder up David’s back, this shortish familiar man, Dennis Penry, whom Munson and Lawton called The Goat, when he wasn’t around to hear it—this man who would inhabit David’s nightmares all his remaining life. He was the kind of person one avoided.

David knew that at a glance.

Penry couldn’t have been more than five-four, but he was bulletlike, his features squashed together, his nose upturned and piggish, his forehead low. He wore aviator glasses with bottle-bottom-thick lenses, on his hands on the porch rail, like gaudy brass knuckles, those ugly Jostens rings, the kind no one wore, really—if they bought them at all. But Penry did, one a class ring, and another football—they’d been football buddies, David saw, and he assumed, wrongly, and with a kind of relief, here was what he’d thought familiar, Penry reminding him, in some vague way, of Buddy.

But Penry, he was retarded, or looked it, was a mechanic, or something, they all were, but then he put them together with the car—no, meat cutters, David thought, recalling the bumper sticker, and he thought, Max had no business getting near them, but here Max was, arguing with them.

David saw all that at a glance, and that Jack, on the end, was of a different order from the others. As if he were some chaperone, or what he couldn’t say.

But Penry—“The Goat”—there was something wrong with him, in the way he was smirking, and in his milky-white skin, and flat, reddish brown oily hair, and in his thick hands on the porch railing.

He was ignoring the argument and was watching Janie and the cat. It was as if this short man were rubbing shit all over Janie, just by looking at her, David thought, but here was Max, out in front of the car, taking in none of it, and then Penry turned to Max.

“Like I told you, a canoe like that, you oughta be on a pond,” Penry said. “You got taken, and then some.”

“What do you call those cattle boats you got on top of your jalopy there?”

“Those Alumacrafts’ll take a poundin’ and keep on goin’, unlike yours.”

Max shook his head, glaring—he understood the insinuation. The threat. I could whup you, pussy boy. Watching, David felt— deep inside him—a kind of twisted pleasure, and at the same time felt shame at it. A very deep pleasure, and worse shame.

Max, before he’d beaten David, had always poked David in his chest with his index finger, his finger like an iron rod, which was maybe the worst of all.

Who do you think you are? Max had said. You just can’t take criticism, can you? What are you sniveling about? Can’t you take it?

You’ve always got that ugly look on your face.

Now Max was fussing with the canoe ropes on the front bumper of the Cadillac. From the way Max was muttering to himself, David thought it was all over, but then he saw the color rise in Max’s forehead, and he got a sick feeling in his stomach.

“You got as big a mouth alone as you got with your pals there?” Max said, turning to look at Penry.

Penry, Munson, and Lawton laughed. Jack, beside them, took a deep breath and set his hands on his knees.

David felt something in his mouth, but whatever it was, it didn’t come out.

Maybe just, Dad, which he didn’t use around Max. Come on, Dad, let’s get out of here. But he didn’t say it, only stood, as if transfixed by the awfulness of it, behind the cars.

“You best watch your mouth,” Penry said. “You got a girl there to be lookin’ out for.”

There was a second when David didn’t know what to think, but he was oddly surprised at Max, how he swelled, became something he’d never seen.

It was frightening, what this meaningless argument was becoming, and all the while, he, David, was aware that all he had to do to end it was step out, out from behind the cars here. He set the pack down now, intending to.

But here was Max, shaking his head at the stupidity of it all, turning to the car again.

Max made a point of testing the ropes on the canoe, making sure they were taut, but when there came a snickering from up on the porch, he spun around.

“You got something to say?”

“I already said it,” Penry said.

“What’d you say, just so we’re clear on this?” There was a new edge in Max’s voice, and it positively electrified the air.

Penry, though, knew where to jab now.

“Best watch out for that girl, you hear? There’s bears out on those islands.”

Max turned to face all four. He set his hands on his hips, and he soberly regarded Penry again.

“I see you out on the lake, coming into our camp, I won’t warn you first.”

David felt his brows knot at that—after all, what was Max implying here?

“What’s to say I don’t do just that?” Penry asked.

“Do what?”

“Come for a little chat?”

He seemed to be implying that there was something between them, himself and Max. But now the big man on the end, Jack, spoke up.

“Shut up,” he said.

“Shut yourself up. The doc and me were just havin’ a little . . . understandin’, weren’t we?”

“You,” Max said to Penry, “couldn’t understand the sole of my fucking shoe.”

This sent Munson and Lawton kicking back in their chairs and laughing.

“He got you there!” Lawton said, jabbing Penry with his elbow. “Jesus, did he get you! Dumber than the sole of his shoe, that’s—”

Jack Carpenter bent forward and glanced down at Penry to see how he was taking it. There was no sign of humor on Penry’s face, his skin taking on an even more ashen pallor. Then Penry smiled as if he hadn’t smiled in years, dentures, his teeth bone white. Fake.

“All right,” the big man on the end, Jack Carpenter, said, standing. “Let’s move on and get some breakfast here. It’s time, isn’t it?”

Munson and Lawton stood, too.

There was a path through trees, a shortcut, and Jack Carpenter took it, and Munson and Lawton followed, Penry sitting there, glaring at Max, until Jack shouted, “Penry!”

Which name stuck in David’s head like a hot poker.

And at the mention of his name, some door closed, or at least came closed a distance, so that Penry stood, smiled that smile again, and said to Max, “I’ll be seeing you,” and went off in the direction of the other men, their voices cajoling, and Lawton saying, loudly, “—sole of his shoe—now, that’s a new low, Stupid!” And Penry laughed, David recognizing his voice, he was sure of it, it was the kind of laugh you’d hear in a nightmare, full of menace and dark possibility. More a bark than laughter.

But still, he couldn’t place it.

David came around the back of the Cadillac, uneasily, as if he’d only arrived now. Janie was blinking in the bright sun, pulling at her hair the way she did when she was upset. Max was jerking at the ropes holding the canoe down, his gestures full of a rage that David had only seen directed at him.

“What was that all about?” David asked, his eyes on the men up the path.

“I was just talking to somebody.”

“Who?”

Max spun around, and in that way David was too familiar with, he said, “I said it was nothing. All right?”

“All right,” David said, but it was not all right, and when Janie came over, hugging the cat to her chest, her eyes were big and she was shaking.

She knew David had been standing there. She looked from David to Max and back again, gulping a little, as if she might cry. David stepped over beside her, and throwing his arm around her shoulder, and squeezing her, whispered in her ear, “Promise.”

And Janie, clutching the cat, nodded.

They had the car loaded and were off to the ranger station before the men returned.

Max asked David and Janie to wait in the car while he went up to the ranger station, Max going up the steep hill purposefully, and David and Janie saying nothing in the car, Janie with her chin propped on the front seat, near David, but there between them this awkward quiet, neither knowing what to say, and David, to be busy with something, taking the map case he’d bought at Herter’s, and folding the now-critical midsection maps he bought there, into Ziploc bags, and reaching into his pocket for the sheet of paper he’d found in the telephone booth, he did likewise with it, sealed the folded sheet in a baggie, and slid it into the case under the maps, all the while turned to his right and hunched over so Janie wouldn’t see the sheet with the numbers and names scrawled on it and ask what it was—David himself didn’t know, but again, as it had last night, it felt hot, dirty, awful somehow, even hidden as it was—and he rummaged around in the top flap of the Duluth pack, beside Janie, fitting the map case in the pack pocket under the heavy plastic window, yellowed and scratched and sewed into the heavy green canvas, eager to be rid of the maps and sheet of paper, and sat back, his thoughts tangled, anxious, and in light of the rest of it, the sheet with the numbers on it was forgotten, it was their itinerary he’d have to get Max to change, but they had topographical and relief maps now, and he was thinking of this other route to the west, and Janie said, “What’s taking him so long?”

“I don’t know,” David said.

He was anxious to be gone, but then, anxious, too, about going out onto the lake, those men out there, somewhere. Maybe. He knew Max was submitting their travel plan, a day-by-day version of it, and these men would be doing the same, and that made David doubly wary.

It was possible, just possible, those men could find out where they were going.

Unlikely, but possible.

He was thinking, maybe, when Max returned he’d say something about changing their itinerary, and then Max’s feet, then legs, were visible through the blue tinting in the windshield, Max coming down the slope from the ranger station, and the sun bright, and the car warm, even with the windows open.

Max thumped down behind the wheel.

“Okay!” he said loudly, and with so much assurance, David felt disinclined to say anything. Max started the car, then craning his head over his shoulder, backed out, and driving east, got his sunglasses on and wrapped the bows around his ears.

He smiled at David and slugged him, jovially.

“What?” David said.

“Yeah, what?” Janie said.

Max glanced over at David. He was going to say something, then changed his mind.

“What say we drive up to Grand Marais, and go in there.”

“You got maps?”

“Sure do!”

David felt himself smile at that. He kicked back in the seat, into the heavy vinyl, craned his head around to look at Janie, and all that darkness went right out the window.

David knew what Max had done: He’d given the ranger their old itinerary. It was a bit dangerous, but not really, and they’d come out on the same day, in roughly the same place, and they’d never see the four men who’d been at the motel.

It was impossible. There were thousands of lakes out there.

They’d be fifty miles from them, to the east, and the lakes were all theirs again.