Annette finished the afternoon by taking Chaos fishing in the lake’s northwestern bay. She worked weeds and structure in fifteen- and twenty-foot depths, releasing several small fish before taking two nice-sized walleye . . . a little more than she needed, just in case Pender showed up. If not, Chaos would handle the leftovers with relish.
She returned to camp, hoping Pender had floated in while she was gone, disappointed to find he had not.
She cooked, ate, and cleaned dishes in a somber mood but lightened up when Chaos sat beside her on the rock overlooking the lake below. He pushed his head under her arm. She scratched his ears. He rolled onto his side. She petted his chest and shoulder. He rolled onto his back, looked at her with his tongue rolling out one side of his mouth, grinning. If dogs could grin. She laughed, rubbing his chest.
As the sun softened on the western horizon, Annette rummaged through her food pack until she found a flexible plastic container filled with red wine. It was how you brought wine into a park that didn’t allow glasses or cans, but it was even better than a bottle since you could squeeze out the air each time you closed it. Wine lasted for a week without developing off flavors. She had brought two bottles of wine, each in its own plastic bladder, thinking it would be nice to sip wine with an old friend from long ago. Not knowing how long they would share a campfire, or how much they’d drink.
She was going to save the wine until Pender got there, but now, facing the possibility he wouldn’t show up at all and with a gorgeous sunset coming up in a few minutes, she resolved to go crazy. She poured a few ounces of wine into her cup and went back out to her promontory to watch day turn to night and snuggle with Chaos.
Inevitably, her thoughts turned to Pender. She pictured him lying flat on a trail somewhere, a broken leg, trying to drag his canoe behind him as he crawled across the raspy surface of the trail, a pack on his back, a line from the bow of the canoe tied to his good leg. She tried to figure if it would be better to have the other pack in the front or the back of the boat.
That gave way to a new image of him sitting in a fancy restaurant with a thirtyish woman with full lips and perfect skin and seductive cleavage. Talking about great food and wines. She’d look like a bumpkin by comparison, Annette thought—and her choice in wine would prove it.
She didn’t really believe the broken leg image or the socialite image, but he wasn’t here. It didn’t really matter why he didn’t show up. The thing was, he didn’t. That’s how her life was when it came to men. It always ended in disappointment. She allowed herself to shed a few tears. She’d move on from this, like always, but it would have been so nice. To feel a lover’s body against yours just once more. To snuggle through a chilly night in Quetico. In her dreams, she had occasionally let herself imagine what it would be like to be held all night long by a lover in the endless Ontario winter, to plan a special dinner, to go to the store together.
It had been so long . . .
Annette dreamt of sad things that night. Disappointments. Loneliness. Sorrow. The first Christmas with just the kids, no husband, no family. The first Christmas when even the kids were gone. The deaths of her parents.
She wept in her sleep the way she would never cry in her waking hours, wept soft and wet without inhibition. Pushed away Chaos when he nuzzled her but put her arm around him as she went back to sleep.
At first light, Chaos wriggled free and tried to lick the salt from her face. His wet tongue and dog breath shocked Annette to wakefulness with a jolt. She made a sputtering noise as she tried to clear saliva from her mouth and used her hands to rub it from the rest of her face.
“That’s disgusting, you dirty mongrel!” She said it mostly in jest, but Chaos retreated to the far corner of the tent. “Don’t be such a sniveling coward. You’re supposed to expect some abuse from your mistress. Especially if you’re going to go around sticking your tongue in her face and up her nose. Pervert.”
She laughed. Chaos put on his smiling face, ears raised, tail thumping on the ground. They crawled from the tent, and Annette got a fire going. She made coffee and sipped it as she pondered breakfast. She had packed in fresh eggs and bacon for today’s breakfast, thinking it would be a way to celebrate Pender and her meeting again after forty years. Would it still be good tomorrow? Maybe. Would Pender be here tomorrow? As she considered it, she thought, probably not. He’s been in the park for a week or more. If he were going to be here, he would have been on time or early.
The realization took away her hunger, but the coffee tasted good. After a second cup, she cleaned her dishes, extinguished the fire, and gathered firewood to replace what she had used.
She stood on the promontory and scanned the lake, deciding what to do with her day. She should break camp and head for home. It would be a relief to Christy to have her there, and it would help preserve some self-esteem after having been stood up for a date that had been months in the planning.
But she knew one day wasn’t long enough to wait. Not in a place this remote. There could be a hundred different reasons why he was late, and many of them were unpleasant to contemplate. She decided to give it one more day. She packed a snack and her fishing gear and took Chaos for a paddle around the lake. She would try to score a walleye for Chaos and check the condition of the established campsite on the lake. She tried to convince herself it would be fun. Not likely. But it would be something to do.
Pender woke with a start, the dream so vivid he could still see Annette’s face in his waking vision. It was etched in outrage and hurt, her voice angry. You didn’t show up. You didn’t even call! What kind of a human being are you? What do you believe in, Pender? Do you believe in anything?
He sat bolt upright. “Jesus!” he exclaimed. It startled him anew, the sound of his own voice. He tried to check his watch, but it was inky black in the tent. He groped for his headlamp, felt the stiffness in his back, and realized for the first time that he could move. He was stiff and sore, but he was able to sit up and turn to either side without crying in pain. He found the light. It was 3:30. Too early. There would be no light for another hour and a half.
He tried to sleep. Couldn’t. Rolled onto his back and tried to imagine meeting Annette. Sometimes she was angry. Sometimes hurt. Even when she was angry she was crying inside, Pender could feel it. And he suddenly understood that when she said what she had said all those years ago, she was crying inside. I hope you get drafted and you go to Vietnam and you get shot and you die there.
It was a love song, a sad one. All those years ago. Jesus, what a waste of two lives. And then came the thought. What if it all happens again for her but not for me? If she’s interested and I’m not? Knowing that something had died inside him over the years. His emotional range seemed to stretch from indifference to anger, but mostly indifference. Could he love anyone ever again? It seemed impossible.
At 4:00 he quit trying to sleep. Got up, struck camp, moved his gear down to the lake, and packed his canoe. At 4:30 he launched. It was still pitch-black, and paddling in the dark was risky. The big lake had a lot of structure that was hard to identify in the dark, but he couldn’t wait anymore. He navigated by compass and paddled at a moderate speed, hoping if he hit a submerged rock, his canoe might survive the shock.
A half hour later, light seeped over the horizon and Pender was still upright. When he could make out the shadowy forms of rocks and reefs, he upped his speed to a racing pace, digging maniacally into the cold waters, hauling back on the paddle as if running for his life, spurred on by a desperate feeling that he was letting Annette down. He flew across the water, taking advantage of calm winds, flat waters, and a body that was working efficiently. He reached the end of the big lake before 7 AM, took breakfast on a rocky outcropping, and headed for the creek system that led to Annette’s lake.
If he hadn’t stopped for breakfast, the fat boys wouldn’t have seen him. They were crossing the south end of the big lake, heading for the river that would take them back to the Boundary Waters, when one of them spotted a solo canoe heading into the creek to the north. The boat was a good distance off. Even with binoculars, they couldn’t tell for sure if it was their guy. As the canoe disappeared in the islands and landmasses, they debated whether or not to give chase. It would take them hours to catch up to the paddler and more hours to get back to where they were now. They would lose another day, probably two, and they had already spent a week chasing the guy.
The stern paddler was done. “Come on, man,” he said. “This is stupid. I want to go home. We don’t even know if that’s our guy. He could be at home. And I need to get home myself. I’ve got a wife and family, a job.”
“I want that motherfucker!” said Gus. “No way that sneaky son of a bitch gets away with what he did to us. One more day. That’s all I ask. We’ll catch up to him this morning. There’s a bunch of portages on that creek. We’ll make up a lot of time because he has to double portage. Come on. One more day. How about it?”
Bill gazed long and hard at his friend. This had started out as something else. Yeah, they were pissed, but it was the challenge—could anyone track down a canoeist in a sprawling wilderness with hundreds of lakes and rivers, a place so desolate dozens of lakes didn’t even have names? It seemed impossible, but if anyone could do it, they could. And it would be fun.
Somewhere along the way, the thrill of the hunt had given way to a taste for revenge in Gus’s mind. That happened with Gus sometimes. They had known each other all their lives, went to the same schools, played the same sports, double dated, stood up at each other’s weddings. Most of the time he was a fun-loving, generous guy, everything you could want in a friend. But he had this other side. The obsessive side. He had been a terror on the football field, a savage blocker, a guy who got in such a mental zone for games he was scary. He once got a penalty for blocking a defensive end fifteen yards downfield, ten of them after the whistle had blown. Sometimes he just fixated on something and there was nothing anyone could do. Bill wearily assented. “Let’s get it over with.”
Annette spent the morning trying not to think about Pender, trying not to worry about him, trying not to feel sorry for herself. If she thought about it, she mostly came back to feeling sorry for herself, a grandmother whose time had passed. She tried not to recall her youth, when boys pursued her, her young womanhood, when polyamorous males and even some females in the movement made passes at her. She tried not to recall when they moved to Atikokan, how male heads turned when she walked down the aisle of a store, the miners, the loggers, the merchants.
And now, when it would be so nice to be wanted, to talk, reminisce, to feel the presence of a kindred spirit, it was just too late. She was a graying, sagging, dimming version of the woman who turned heads. There would be no more lovers for her. Her life would be about her kids, her grandkids, and maybe a couple of friends.
At least she had family, she thought. She was so lucky to have that.
To focus on other things, she toured the northeast segment of her lake, paddling lackadaisically in fine weather, covering the five kilometers to the north end in an hour, then following the shoreline east. It was too early to fish, so she nosed her canoe into shore at a portage site. It was the “other” way into her lake, the northern entry. She had come in from the south.
She told herself she was walking the portage trail for Chaos’s sake, so her buddy could get in some running. And Chaos leaped at the opportunity. But in the corner of her consciousness, Annette was hoping Pender would be coming the other way on the trail. They’d see each other, smile, hug strong and warm. She’d help him with the carry. He’d meet Chaos and they’d like each other. They’d paddle to the island, make lunch, lean against each other as they ate, looking out on the lake, talking dreamily about whatever came to mind. The princess fantasy of her childhood, adapted for old age.
It was a bland, boggy trail of medium length, not especially pretty. The last part of the trek was wet, with lengths of saplings lodged side by side like corduroy providing passage over areas of floating bog that wouldn’t support the weight of an adult. She paused to repair sections where the thin pine logs had been dislodged, hoping she would rise and see Pender coming up the trail.
But each time she rose to a silent wilderness, alone.
She made herself go to the end of the trail and look out on the tiny lake to the east. There was not a canoe in sight, no campfire smoke, just a pair of mergansers floating offshore. The waterfowl disappeared beneath the water as Chaos charged onto the beach next to her. He stank with black mud and reeked of bog stink, a not-quite-fetid odor that came from the rotting vegetation and black water that created the dark mass of the bog.
“Oh, Chaos,” she said with a sigh and a smile. “You are hopeless.”
The dog looked at her, tail wagging, tongue lolling to one side. His canine smile. Having the time of his life. Thank goodness one of us is, she thought.
She turned and hiked back to her lake. She rinsed the muck out of Chaos’s coat. Then they paddled quietly back toward her island. As they approached it, Annette glanced at her watch. It was too early for lunch, and she couldn’t bear the thought of sitting around camp with nothing to do. She would paddle on. She thought about heading to a small, isolated lake where she often fished for walleye and bass but decided to save that option for the afternoon. She wasn’t kidding herself, she was staying another night. What was one more day of heartbreak compared to the rest of your life not knowing if he showed up?
She decided to have a look at the other portage. Chaos would get some more exercise, and she would have something to do that kept her out of her depressingly lonely camp.