The ragtag group finished portaging shortly after 6 PM, Gus carrying Joe on his back like a father carrying a child in play. His bravado made Pender feel like kicking his ass, but it was all Pender could do to carry a pack and the elderly couple’s canoe.
“I’m half man, half bear and meaner than a mountain lion,” Gus yelled at the top of his lungs as he reached the beach. “My mama was a wolf and my daddy was a rattle snake, and I can outrun, outfight, outdrink, and outcuss any sorry son of a bitch on this here green earth!”
Gus had been practicing his imitation of the old fur trappers’ braggadocio for the whole carry, making Pender fantasize that he was carrying an M-16 on his back and he’d be able to shoot the fucker as soon as they got to the beach. Pender figured the hot air was how Gus summoned energy when fatigue set in, but it was still annoying as hell. Even Annette wore an expression of resignation as the big man cupped his hands and hurled the final words of his monologue across the lake. Emily regarded the man quizzically while her husband, now standing on the ground, seemed completely oblivious, as he had been for the whole portage.
Bill struggled to his feet and joined them for introductions.
Annette, Emily, and Pender had all camped on the lake before, and they huddled together with their maps to plot a strategy for finding a campsite for the night. They expected to find several canoe parties on the lake because they were getting close to the perimeter of the park where most people camped and fished. They broke up and headed for the canoes just as Gus was screaming to the lake that he was hungry enough to eat a bear.
“And I’m tired enough to feed you to one,” said Pender.
They checked the campsites on the south half of the lake first. One was littered with downed trees and occupied by two fishermen who had miraculously escaped harm. The second was occupied by four fishermen. One of their tents had been crushed by a falling tree, leaving one man with a bad head injury, the other with just scrapes and bruises. The second tent and the men in it were unharmed but shaken. The group was low on food and scared.
“None of us are getting out of here, not for a long time,” their leader told Annette. “You can’t get a hundred yards on the portage into Pickerel.”
“Don’t you worry,” Gus yelled to the man. “We’ll get you out of here tomorrow. Ain’t no trail in the world that can hold us back!”
Annette cut him off with a hand gesture, polite but pointed, and spoke to the man. “With a little luck, visibility will be better tomorrow and we’ll see some aircraft, maybe a medevac, maybe some people dropped in to clear trails.” She sounded more convincing than she felt. The man nodded appreciatively.
“We’re going to find a campsite,” Annette told them, “Then I’ll come back with some ibuprofen and anything else we have that might help your injured party. If we bring you some fish, can you cook them?”
The leader of the group nodded.
“Let’s give them the fish we’ve got with us,” Pender said to Annette. “I know this lake pretty well. We can camp on the other side of this point and pick up bass on the north end of the lake. I bet my fat-ass fishing buddy back there”—he gestured to Gus in the stern—“can catch four or five in a half hour or so.”
Annette compromised. She gave the campers the big pike, and they checked the other two campsites near the portage trail to Pickerel Lake. They were occupied by trippers who had been heading south into the park when the derecho hit. The sites were devastated, but the trippers suffered only minor damage to their gear and planned to head south in the morning, undaunted by their experiences in the storm.
It was a smallish lake, about three kilometers long north to south. Its north shore was a featureless bay with a rocky rubble bottom and acres of shallow water. It faced south, so it caught a full day of southern sun in the spring, which, combined with the rubble bottom, made it a magnet for spawning bass in May and early June. The lake’s south bay contained most of the established campsites and the trail to Pickerel Lake, the last trail they would have to portage to get to French Lake.
As they paddled into the north bay, Pender hoped his fishing luck would hold and that his old campsite was still intact. And he hoped they would have a night of rest. They were a tired and aching group, even motormouth Gus. Even Annette.
The derecho had been capricious in its distribution of wreckage. The surrounding forest had been mangled by the winds, but Pender’s primitive campsite had been spared by a matter of ten yards or so. Still, it didn’t look like much. The beach below the site was overgrown with reeds and brush. Grass and woody plants littered the shoreline, and knee-high grass and brush covered much of the campsite. Rocks that had once formed the fire ring were strewn like rubble throughout the area. It was a dreary-looking place for a tired band at the end of a long day, but Annette let no one dwell on it. She put the able-bodied to work immediately, rebuilding the fire ring, unloading boats, and setting up camp.
When others began erecting tents, Pender and Gus went out to fish. As they launched the canoe, Chaos leaped into the middle of the boat and lay down, tongue out, face smiling. Pender started to order him out, then thought the better of it.
“If that crazy bastard snarfs down a fish, I’m going to kill him right then and there,” said Gus, like he was half kidding.
“If you let him snarf down a fish, I’ll hammer your fat ass flat,” said Pender. He forced a small smile to take the edge off. Sort of.
It was twilight when they returned to camp with three more bass, filleted and skinned. The group was ravenous and exhausted, but there was still more work to be done. Annette and Gus took medicine to the injured campers. By the time they returned, Pender and Emily had a savory soup heating on the fire, fish filets ready for sautéing, and enough firewood to take the chill off the night and the next morning.
“Bill says you’re a fabulous chef,” Emily said as Pender worked the filets. “Big Gus, too.”
“Really? Gus said something nice about me? Stop the presses, Lord!” Even Bill, sitting nearby, smiled.
Annette and Gus returned just as herb-laced aromas from Pender’s frying pan filled the air like a Christmas promise. Chaos walked to the fireplace and stood, drooling. Gradually, the other paddlers made their way to the campfire area, drawn by the fragrance emanating from Pender’s skillet.
Gus and Annette joined the group, everyone sitting on rocks and logs near the fire, watching Pender cook. To fill the hungry silence, Emily reminisced about how she and Joe drove the thousand miles to Quetico on their honeymoon fifty years ago, over a newly completed road, going to a place they knew nothing about, finding a wilderness paradise.
“It was like a dream,” said Emily. “So we kept coming back every summer because there just wasn’t any other place on earth we wanted to see more.”
“I know how that goes,” said Annette in a gentle voice.
“Usually we’d make it a two-week vacation and drive three or four days each way so we could see some of the other parts of Ontario. It’s such a big province, you know. Toronto is more than a thousand miles from Quetico . . .”
Her voice trailed off, Emily lost in a flood of images from a half century of warm memories. Pender could feel what she was feeling, could taste the bittersweet moment, so much to be glad for, so much to miss in a life that might never come back to this place again.
Their reverie ended when the filets and chowder were ready to serve.
Dinner had a festive air despite the trials and tribulations of the day and the ones that lay ahead. The campfire chatter died when the meal was served, then revived a few minutes later as people finished eating.
“Li’l fella, I gotta hand it to you,” said Gus. “You sure can cook.”
“Hungry as we were—” Pender stopped himself from making a joke. “Thanks,” he said.
After they finished the meal cleanup, Annette gathered the group again and shared the bad news, bit by bit.
“Gus and I visited the other two camps, and the news isn’t good,” she said. “The man with the head injury . . . it’s a serious injury. He can barely walk to the latrine, and he’s in great pain. He’s going to have to be carried over the portage, which is supposedly impassible even for healthy people.
“The people in the other campsite are okay except for some bruises and scrapes, but their canoe is completely demolished, which means tomorrow we’re going to try to portage out to Pickerel with ten people, two solo canoes and three tandems, and God knows how many packs.”
Gus started to say something, but Annette raised her hand for a moment more of silence.
“There’s more. We’re low on food. The people over by the portage trail were scheduled to go out today, so they only have scraps left. We have maybe two days’ supply for six people, starvation rations for ten. We won’t get fishing time tomorrow. And we don’t know if we can get through to Pickerel.”
Gus could stay silent no longer. “We’ll get through, if I have to carry every canoe, every pack, and every person myself,” he bellowed. “I promise you, we’ll make it. I don’t care how high those trees are stacked . . .” he droned on, an adrenaline-hopped jock back in the halftime locker room of his high school glory.
When Gus finally shut up, Pender stood. “Let’s start the day with a group of able-bodied people breaking trail, just carrying packs and saws and hatchets. We need to keep one canoe on this lake where an aircraft can see it. Maybe we’ll get lucky and get a medevac for Bill and the guy at the other campsite.”
“Good thinking,” said Annette. “If we can get through to the other side with packs, we can figure out how we’re going to handle the canoes and we can start sending other people with packs. Maybe the paddlers here can catch a fish or two while they watch for planes.”
There were nods and oral consents all around the campfire.
“By the way,” said Annette, “the people Gus and I visited said there’s one more camp on this lake, so we might be joined by some more people in the morning.”
“And don’t expect them to be helpful,” said Gus. “They didn’t bother helping anyone all day. They were out fishing and sightseeing and checked out the portage, but they didn’t even wave at the people in the camps.”
Gradually, quiet overtook them—six people huddled around a crackling fire, not quite ready to retire to their tents, too tired to carry on a long conversation. Pender leaned against Annette, one arm around her waist pulling their bodies close together, enjoying the warmth.
“This is nice,” said Annette. “Even after all we’ve been through and everything we will certainly face tomorrow, this is really nice.”
Pender murmured his agreement. “If only we had another bottle of that Cab left, it would be perfect.”
Gus snickered at Pender. “Wine is a pussy drink. I bet you pack cute little wineglasses and go, ‘Oh what a lovely bouquet!’ If you were any kind of man, you’d drink beer. Wine is for liberal wimps. Beer’s a man’s drink!”
“All the beer drinkers I knew were big, fat, draft-dodging cowards.”
“Fuck you, Pender.”
“Actually, I drink beer,” Annette interjected. “My daughter and I split one every couple of nights. It tastes good after a long day, looking out at the lake and the stars. I like wine, too, but it’s really expensive here.”
Emily nodded. “We used to have wine regularly. I loved it, the different flavors and varieties. We bought wines from British Columbia, California, Chile, France, Australia. It was like being an armchair traveler. Sometimes we’d talk about the region the wine came from. Joe read a lot. He liked to research things. But we cut out alcohol when he was diagnosed.”
They talked about wine and beer and perfect meals and beverages until fatigue overtook them all. They doused the fire and retired to their tents.
Annette and Pender pushed their sleeping pads together and slept under the same sleeping bag, their bodies spooned.
“Emily and Joe are something, aren’t they?” Annette murmured.
“Mmm,” Pender mumbled. “She reminds me of you.”
Annette was thinking the same thing, except that Emily had always had someone. She fell into a deep sleep, dreaming worried dreams. Seeing the injured man in the other camp, his face contorted in pain. Feeling the dull, aching pain in his head, seeing him die on the portage to Pickerel, seeing the grief-stricken faces of his wife and children. She dreamed that people blamed her for his death and her business failed in the echoes of the tragedy. She was left trying to find a way to make a living, starting over at sixty years old. Christy having to move to Toronto, or maybe join her father in the States, her granddaughter gradually forgetting who her grandmother was.
Pender couldn’t sleep. His back pain screamed through his body and mind, worse when he moved, awful when he didn’t. Still, he spooned with Annette for more than an hour because the pleasure of her body against his outweighed the pain. He felt a deep bond with her. In a world built on quicksand and moving geological plates, Annette was warm and solid and true. He would mourn their lost love for as long as he had left. What might have been if only he had been a more mature twenty-one-year-old.
When the discomfort became unbearable, he rolled onto his back, still snug against her, and let his mind wander back to other painful times in his life, moments of anguish flashing into his memory like a slide show on fast-forward. Until he got to the all-night fire fight near Cu Chi. He hadn’t thought of it in years.
It was a rare moment in the shadow war when a company-size NVA force was caught in open terrain, nowhere to run, no cover, fighting like demons. An endless night of muzzle flashes and the murderous zipping sound of bullets in the air, of streaking tracers, of nightmare screams, of thumping noises and dirt flying as bullets burrowed into the earth around him and rocket-propelled grenades exploded and flashed all over the battlefield. Then the relays of Cobra gunships rushing overhead like fire-breathing insects, their rotors throbbing like cannon fire, showering the desperate NVA soldiers below in a torrent of bullets, firing rockets that exploded with such violence Pender could feel vibrations in his chest as if he’d been hit by a powerful boxer. Firing his M-16 all night, aiming at muzzle flashes, rolling below cover, reloading, waiting for the responding fire to end, then repeating the cycle. Getting resupplied time after time. Shooting all night, until the first glimmer of morning light brought proof that every single NVA soldier was dead, many of them shot multiple times.
Flying back to base tired and filthy, numb from the carnage. He had never seen so many dead bodies, so many ugly deaths. Had never been so physically and spiritually exhausted. All he wanted was to take a shower and go to bed, but after the shower he decided to have a quick breakfast. Walking to the mess hall, hearing a faint shout, he turned and saw a small man in bright green fatigues yelling and waving at him. He waved back, continued on his way. Suddenly confronted by an angry man huffing from running to catch up, his face as red as a Santa suit, his fatigues as green as a Christmas tree. Bright green fatigues, the mark of a new arrival. Just off the jet and fully in command. A first lieutenant, Pender noted dimly, a first lieutenant who was screaming.
“Did you hear me?” the man yelled in his best command voice.
Pender shook his head no.
“You’re walking on my track!” The man screamed it as though Pender were walking on the bodies of women and children.
Pender looked about himself in disbelief. Track? Had he stumbled into some new reality? Was he in a dream? All he could see was the same dusty, featureless rock surface that had been there since the area had been deforested in clouds of Agent Orange.
“What track?” he asked.
“My track, Sergeant Pender!” the little man thundered, staring at the name on Pender’s shirt. He gestured to the empty area again and Pender finally saw four traffic cones marking the corners of a square track of maybe a quarter mile.
“Right,” said Pender. He took a last look at the man, figuring it all out. He was new in-country, right out of OCS, full of the autocratic superiority the army pounded into its junior officers. Assigned to some kind of cushy role that involved making a track out of poisoned ground so that people could play games in the middle of a fucking, goddamn war zone. Thinking that this was beyond insane, especially because this newbie lieutenant was absolutely dead fucking serious. The thought of it sapped all Pender’s strength. He could not reply, so he just turned and walked toward the mess hall again.
“Goddammit, soldier!” the lieutenant screamed. “You don’t just walk away from a superior officer!”
Pender turned, alarm bells ringing somewhere deep in his mind that he could get in real trouble with this asshole. “What do I do?”
The lieutenant sputtered for a moment, realizing he hadn’t ordered Pender to do anything but knowing he was being disrespected.
“You salute your superior officer!” he said finally.
“Oh, right,” said Pender, flashing a sloppy, limp-handed salute, then turning and heading for the mess hall.
The lieutenant got in his face again, livid, demanding to know Pender’s unit and his commanding officer, promising to make that officer aware of his disrespectful conduct, threatening Pender that if he ever walked on this track again, he’d be arrested. Pender shook his head in disbelief and started to walk again, half turning to flash another insulting salute. His captain said later that he wanted to punch the little bastard himself when he listened to the lieutenant’s story, that this whole fucking war was a bad dream being stage-managed by morons and cowards but that we all had to keep our wits and walk out of this thing alive. The captain was a no-bullshit good guy. Got zapped a month later by a sniper during a patrol. And that sniveling little basecamp louie probably went home with a medal for track building and a hundred bullshit stories of battlefield heroics.
Annette stirred and twitched, then her body jerked and she breathed deeply, sighed a painful sigh, then sat bolt upright, twisting her torso from left to right trying to coax light from the inky blackness of her world, trying to discover where she was. She reached out with her hands, finding the wall of the tent on one side, Pender and Chaos on the other.
“Name’s Pender,” Pender joked.
Annette exhaled in relief. “Bad dreams.” She said it and lay back down as though nothing had happened.
“Do you want to talk about them?”
“No. I’d like to talk about us sometime. But not in the middle of the night.”
“Okay, but give me a hint. How would that start?”
“Huh?”
“What would we be talking about when we talk about us?”
“I just want to know if we’ve got a future together or if this is it. A fun week in the park and goodbye, see you in the next life.”
“Am I still invited to stop by when we get to French Lake?”
“Of course, but I’m not begging you. I just want to know if you’re interested.”
“Yes. I am. Scared shitless, but interested.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“What your daughter will think of me. Meeting your old boyfriend, your friends and neighbors. People have found reasons to dislike me all my life, and, generally, I don’t care. But if the people around you don’t like me, that puts us both in a tough position.”
“Deep down inside, Big Chief Warmonger has the heart of a hummingbird. Take a chance, li’l fella.”
“Very funny. Plus, what if everything else is great but I just can’t hack living in a small town that spends four months a year in the dark with below-zero temperatures and the best theater is the annual high school play?”
“We don’t have an annual high school play. Jesus, our sports teams have to travel hundreds of miles to get to games. The nearest movie theater is 150 kilometers away. Our television stinks, too. You make it through the winter by being busy and talking to people.”
“Can we get away with necking in the Fort Frances movie theater?”
“Cute. Let’s shut up and get some sleep now, okay?”
Pender shifted his body against hers, put a hand on her hip, and nuzzled the back of her neck with his lips. Much better than sleeping, he thought. Though he hadn’t slept well in so long he wasn’t sure what that was like.