78

DAVID DID NOT HEAR FROM THE POLICE AGAIN. BUT HE read in the paper when Throgmorton was arrested. He was offered a plea bargain, giving up the others involved, including the Cirricionis who were indicted on racketeering and extortion and first-degree manslaughter charges.

Throgmorton moved to Detroit, at the end of August of that summer, and a week later, on a Sunday afternoon, was found shot in a Kmart parking lot, a talking doll for his daughter on the seat beside him.

It had been her birthday, and he’d gone to buy the doll, which had been on sale there.

And David? For a time, David ran. He ran in the bubble, and he ran for the love of it, and he ran in Georgia, and Massachusetts, and Delaware, and upstate New York. He ran cross-country, and relays.

But the concerns of the team were not his, though he still had no idea what to do with himself.

So he ran for Janie, when she came to his meets, and ran for Rachel.

And at the house in Edina, he repaired the bad plumbing, mowed the lawn, cooked, even reshingled the roof one cool week in May. Summers he took Janie swimming to the lakes in town, the children shouting and splashing, and jumping, and playing, and evenings he ate dinner with Janie and Rachel, who was seeing more of Joel.

Jarvis was gone, finally, and so was the old Rachel, and she’d taken up painting, and had a show that did well, and he loved her work, landscapes done in heavy paint, sometimes applied with a palette knife, so that the paintings were a study of something essential.

Something of what he’d seen in the field that night of the lightning.

And he wanted to give this living thing to Janie, tried, by watching over her, until she felt safe, to walk down the street herself, or be outside after dark, or ride her bicycle over to her friend’s house, just three blocks down the street.

Which took years.

He read to her nights, until she no longer listened. Helped her with her math, which she hated.

And then Janie was no longer a girl, and she didn’t tell David much, or seem to need him, though he watched out for her, and when he was accepted at graduate schools, elsewhere, again he stayed in town, finally moving out, he thought he shouldn’t hover over Janie, but he visited weekly, often to mow the lawn, and still made the pancakes most Sunday mornings.

And every spring, he traveled up north, and asked Janie to go with him, and she said, at first, never, and then, not yet, and finally, sometime, and all those years, alone, he searched when he was up on the border lakes, slowly, not even aware at first that he was doing it.

Always he went by himself, or with Bobby, his uncle, who said little, though he taught David to read what was there, in the spring, moccasin flower, and red teaberries, and bunchberries with their white blossoms. And coral root, with its tiny orchidlike flowers, and Indian Pipe, and he came to enter again that world that he’d lost, it blossoming, each thing he learned an invitation, and what was nothing to others was his home, the very names there something beautiful, a world not so tainted, and glowing with some asymmetrical symmetry, perfect, and the image of the thing he sought in it, so he felt it there more than anywhere, this light, not just in wild strawberries, and Indian paintbrush, and the flowers, in spring, embedded in verdure itself, caribou moss, this eternal green, springing from loamy hollows set in granite and basalt, what the area natives called bloodrock.

But here he could see it, he could feel it, could trust it. Life.

And every autumn, there were the softwoods, poplar, and cottonwood, and elder, ablaze, a million leaves of gold, fluttering in the cool breezes that blew in from the northwest, and the hardwoods, oak and elm, red, red-brown, and the evergreen, all the ranges of green you could imagine, tamarack, and white pine, red pine, yellow-green, blue-green, red-green, and autumn, after a rain, mushrooms would carpet the forest floor with rust red, and chrome yellow, and bone white, and they’d fry the edible, like chanterelle, in butter, and if they had Lukas Fisher, his uncle Bobby’s friend and drinking pal, along, they would have the mushrooms with walleye, and if Bobby wasn’t along, with duck, Lukas able to hunt on the reserve out of season.

But it was Lukas, who’d been his uncle’s friend, Bobby’s friend, who finally knew when David asked. Or, maybe, it was just that Lukas knew David well enough to understand.

About Gaiwin.

All these years gone by after what had happened that fall with Max and Janie, yet somehow, no time at all, and this thing David was looking for not found, so that when he finished medical school, he began to look for a place to do his residency on the border, in the north lakes area—only, which place he might be assigned depended on government programs that would forgive his debt.

For David, by this time, was deeply in it. Max, David had not been surprised to find, had left them almost nothing, his life insurance barely covering his debt, which had been substantial.

“Luke,” David said, one opening weekend when he’d come up without Bobby.

A quiet had settled on the water, and David just then felt at peace. Or was it just the night, the boat bobbing slowly in the breeze that blew in offshore where the pines whooshed and tossed?

He reeled in, then set his rod against the hull and put his feet up on the gunnel. Lukas tossed his lure, the line in the evening light gossamer, the lure splashing seconds later, like music.

“Luke?”

Lukas turned to him, the whites of his eyes darkish, and his irises so brown as to seem almost black, so that oftentimes he seemed to be studying David from some world not his.

Here, where life grew out of greenstone. Precambrian. Ancient, but scoured fresh, and new, even the marks of the glaciers still in it.

Like Lukas, whom he’d known nearly twenty years now.

“What?” he said.

David took a deep breath, but thought not to say it after all— since he’d gotten such strange reactions from others in the area over the years—but then surprised himself.

“You ever meet somebody named Gaiwin?” he asked.

Lukas glanced over his shoulder at David, grinning, his teeth white in the dark, and laughed.

“What’s so funny?” David said. “Is it just a common name, like John or Jim or—”

Lukas cast out again, that same gossamer thread, and musical, watery plunk.

“Who told you that was his name?”

David didn’t answer. It occurred to him that he’d been wrong to ask in the first place. And anyway, he couldn’t explain, doing that would bring it all back, make it real again, which he didn’t want. And then, too, he’d never told anyone—not even Janie, when she’d asked about it later; “No, there wasn’t anyone else there,” he’d told her—and wasn’t about to now.

“You owe this man something?”

David said it was nothing, stretched over the bow plate, his back cold with it, overhead high, billowy clouds scudding by, big as his boyhood dreams.

Lukas reeled in and set his gear down.

“It means ‘Nobody.’ ”

David slid from the bow plate, eyed Lukas to see if he was kidding him again. Lukas often did that, pulled his leg and then some.

“You’re kidding, right?”

Lukas shook his head.

“Nobody?”

“But, see,” Lukas said, “it’s something you usually say when . . .” He scratched the back of his neck, pushed his red-and-blue cap back, glanced up at David, not sure how to put it. “You say it when . . . when you help somebody out, but it’s a kindness, see? You say it so the person who’s helped isn’t indebted. Because otherwise you would be.”

“Indebted?”

“No,” Luke said. He reached out and gave David’s shoulder an avuncular poke. “That’s just the point. You’re not. You only say it when you know there’s no fucking way on this green earth the person can pay you back.”

Luke lifted his head, motioned around them. He spread his arms.

“You’re only indebted to life then, see? It’s just . . . life, and it’s yours to give back somehow. That’s what it means.”

Lukas tried to catch David’s eyes, David looking away, and set a hand on his forearm.

“You all right?” he said.

“Shit, I just got something in my eye is all,” David said. “Is that a crime or something?”

That autumn David put in requests for placement.

There was a waiting list for the placements, some in inner cities, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, some east, D.C., Richmond, Miami, but the one he wanted was just south of where it had all happened that week, so long ago. Thirty others wanted the clinic at Fond du Lac, because it was a short drive from Duluth, a real plum, and only three hours down to the Twin Cities and doctors in the program connected to the Rochester/Mayo clinic, which would be a great leap, if you could make it. But that was not why David wanted Fond du Lac, along with the others—some of those candidates more qualified, and from better schools.

He didn’t have much of a chance, he was told, of a placement in his home state. David told them that wasn’t it, his wanting to stay in Minnesota, but he couldn’t explain. Still, out all those who had applied, he got the position.

“Just luck,” he told Bobby, the night after he got his acceptance letter, and Bobby laughed at him.

“You believe what you want,” Bobby said, “but you won’t need to tell Lukas you’re coming up. In fact, you won’t have to tell anybody up there.”