Pender started feeling better about everything as soon as he headed north. Not giddy or elated but like things were finally starting to happen. After a winter of planning and a spring of training for long, hard paddles and steep, treacherous portages, he was finally moving.
He would slowly wend his way north to Ely, Minnesota, in the ancient Blazer he bought to replace the BMW. He wanted something that he could abandon when he got to Ely. When he went into the wilderness this time, there would be no strings attached. When he entered the Boundary Waters, he’d leave his old life. He’d paddle across the border into Quetico and explore until he ran out of food or got bored. When he came out of the park, he’d start his new life, whatever that might be.
It sounded better than it felt. He felt like a man with no place to go, no close ties to anyone, no reason for being.
Pender stopped for dinner in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, the first day out. It was a steak and walleye place he had often patronized on his trips home from Quetico, family-owned, quiet, illuminated by the gentle glow of large aquariums filled with northwoods game fish. It was a casual, relaxing night in the eatery. His meal went down well. He felt mellow for the first time in months. He decided to stay the night and savor the moment.
“Any vacancies next door?” he asked the waiter.
“You bet,” the man said. “Want me to reserve you a room?”
Pender nodded and ordered a second beer. It went down in tiny sips, cold and smooth, laced with soulful hops. He shifted his languid gaze between the setting sun outside and the bright fish tanks inside, finding between them a moment of inner peace marked by glimpses of happy moments from days gone by.
He woke the next morning with no agenda. There was no place he had to be, nothing he had to do. He was no longer a clocks and calendars kind of person. At breakfast he heard two fishermen talking about the Chippewa Flowage just down the highway. The name stirred memories. He’d often thought about stopping on the way to or from Quetico to paddle and fish Wisconsin’s great rivers, the Chippewa especially.
And further back in time, Chippewa Falls was a name that evoked images of the old Wisconsin, laid-back, green and lush, friendly. Pender’s mind filled with a memory from that time.
Spring 1975.
“Jesus, Pender! We’re late! Get John! We’re really, really late!” Pender had never seen Peg so panic-stricken. “The wedding’s at 4, not 4:30!” She stared at the card that had been on their refrigerator for a month and on the motel room dresser for two days. Their best friends’ wedding. Evelyn and John tying the knot. Pender, John’s best man. Pender wanted with all his heart to look at the card and find that, no, the wedding was at 4:30 like they’d been thinking all day. But Peg never got stuff like that wrong, and it pissed her off when he doubted her.
They shook John from his nap, threw on their formal clothing, and dashed to church in Pender’s car, a gas-guzzling Camaro with a roaring V-8 engine that shook the pines as they shot through the hills and careened through curves, Peg praying out loud that they wouldn’t hit a deer, John praying Evelyn would still be at the church when they arrived, Pender wishing to Christ he’d read shit like that card once in a while instead of trusting his memory, which sucked.
They skidded to a stop in front of the little church snuggled in the woods, a cloud of dust settling to the earth in their wake. Evelyn stood at the front door looking down at them, a princess bride with a white smile and blonde hair, wearing her mother’s wedding dress.
“You better get him here on time, Pender!” she called. “This is shotgun country.”
“You have a shotgun?” Pender yelled back as they scrambled up the steps.
“No, honey,” she said. “I have big tits and a lot of ex-boyfriends who have shotguns.” It was a joke, and they laughed with her. She was the kind of woman who could say things like that and you’d laugh with her.
Pender drove out toward the river, found a cheap motel, and spent the next couple days paddling the Chippewa. He’d get out early and fish, stop around nine for granola and coffee, then paddle upstream. He’d stop somewhere in the early afternoon to read and nap and laze in the sun. In the late afternoon he started drifting with the current back to his put-in place.
His leisure thoughts bounced from one thing to the next: his fall from grace in the publishing world, his failed marriage, what it would be like to see Annette again. When he thought about the proximity of Chippewa Falls, he thought about Evelyn.
“Want to know a secret?” Evelyn’s eyes were too bright, her smile too wide. They had all consumed too much wine, and Pender could see Evelyn was at that dangerous stage of giddy inebriation where things got said that shouldn’t be said.
“Maybe not, Ev.”
She stood closer to him, looking up, flashing her toothpaste-commercial smile, her hands on her hips in a stance that was both defiant and seductive.
“I’m going to tell you anyway. I used to think if it didn’t work out between John and me, you know, I’d like to be with you.”
“I’m glad things worked out between you two. You were made for each other.”
“I still think about you.” She waited for him to respond, but Pender couldn’t think of anything to say.
“I’m flattered,” he said finally.
Peg and John returned to the bar, saving him from further floundering. Pender and Evelyn never spoke of that moment again.
That was back when friends were about laughter and discovering new things, Pender thought as he drove back to the motel. Before friends became business. Before life became full-time serious. He couldn’t remember a particular point in time when it changed, but it did. Everything changed. Him, Peg, John, Evelyn. They all stopped loving each other and went their separate ways.
Pender sat in his sterile motel room thinking about where to eat. The silence was interrupted only by tires crunching over gravel as cars came and went outside. In between cars, there was just the ever-present tinnitus ringing in his ears. It should have been relaxing, but it was more like a song about loneliness. Pender made himself focus on where to eat. He detested chains and fast-food places but didn’t know many alternatives in Chippewa Falls. Just one, really. He sighed. What the hell. He’d never pass this way again. He fired up the ancient Blazer and pointed it in the direction of the northwoods diner that had been in Evelyn’s family for fifty years. He didn’t think she’d be there. Hoped she wouldn’t be there. But he had to stop in. This was the last time he’d ever come this way, the last contact with his youth.
The Chippewa Diner was the kind of place that made Pender love crossing the border into Wisconsin back in the sixties and seventies. It had anything you wanted, fresh and fried. The smell of cooking oil and French fries thick in the air. Friendly waitresses, friendly short-order cooks. Lively conversations all over the room, none of them serious. The Wisconsin of that era had been a great place to be a tourist or a kid. Or both. No one had airs. You were always welcome.
What a difference time can make, thought Pender as he entered the place. From the outside it looked more weather-beaten than it had back when the world was young. Inside, the aromas of fried foods and the buzz of conversation still filled the air, but it felt different. A sign above the cash register read, THIS IS A CHRISTIAN RESTAURANT. “Christian” was underlined. The wall art included a portrait of Jesus, light skinned and immaculately groomed, and photos of people at a church.
A teenage girl greeted Pender. She was maybe seventeen, too much eye makeup, a barbed wire tattoo around her ankle. Neither friendly nor unfriendly, she just told him to follow her. As he sat, she said something that started with “Today’s special” and continued in a staccato burst of unintelligible consonants separated by indistinguishable vowels. Small-town Wisconsin had caught up to the big city, thought Pender. Maybe broiled food would be next.
The menu on his table shared its holder with a brochure for a church. Probably the one whose parishioners graced the walls, he figured. He scanned the menu. Standard diner fare, everything homemade.
Pender ordered and took a long look around. A dinner crowd of couples and families, all ages. Everyone seemed to know each other.
He spotted Evelyn. She stood at the cash register, ringing up payments, helping the waitresses seat customers and shuttle food. She had put on a few pounds, but she was still a looker. Her Scandinavian blonde hair was still light, though age had taken some of its brightness. Her strong facial features still made her a handsome woman, her eyes a shade of blue so bright he could see it from thirty feet away.
Watching her work, Pender figured the cook must be her husband. The one who came after John. They chatted sometimes, not about orders. Evelyn wouldn’t have a lover. Had to be her husband.
Pender’s mind wandered back in time again, to when it came apart for Evelyn and John. When the babysitter from across the street got their daughter naked and fondled her, when the law said it was powerless to act because there were no physical signs of molestation and no witnesses. When sex became a filthy, dirty thing to Evelyn. When she found she couldn’t stand men anymore, at least, not the men she knew.
Pender gave the molester a blanket party one night, a night when John and Evelyn were at a social function with lots of witnesses. He roughed up the kid a little, no broken bones, and left him tied up and gagged at his own back door. The family got the message. Packed up and moved out lickety-split.
It helped John but not Evelyn. Nothing helped Evelyn until she found Jesus. Jesus gave her direction but couldn’t restore her faith in humanity. She homeschooled the kids to protect their purity, then put them in Christian schools. Did church stuff daily. Made John quit drinking. Made John take up the Bible. Told John nothing he could do would ever make her want to have sex with him again.
And asked Pender to never again come to their home, not unless he accepted Jesus as his lord and savior. This from a woman who just a moment ago was one of his closest friends, who was once on the brink of telling him she wanted to sleep with him.
He lost them both. Evelyn divorced John and moved back to Wisconsin. He and John managed to keep up a friendship for a few more years, then an acquaintanceship, then nothing. They stayed in touch long enough for John to share the news that Evelyn had remarried. John said he hoped the guy wasn’t expecting to get laid.
Toward the end of his meal, Evelyn noticed him from her command perch. Her face went through the stages of recognition: Do I know him? Yes I do. What’s he doing here? After Pender’s table had been cleared and his coffee served, she sat down across from him, her face humorless.
“Are you Gabe Pender?” she asked. No smile.
“Hi, Evelyn. It’s been a long time.”
“Must be twenty-five years.”
“I hope they’ve been good ones for you,” said Pender.
“Very good.” Evelyn looked away, then back at him. “How’s Peg?”
“Peg is pretty much the king of the universe right now. Company president. Rich. Powerful. Looks younger than she did when she was thirty-five. Has men lining up to ask her out.”
Evelyn cocked her head. “You’re . . .”
“Yeah, divorced. Just this year. It turns out, you’re never too old.”
Evelyn didn’t smile. In fact, her face seemed grimmer somehow.
“Have you found God yet, Gabe?”
“No,” sighed Pender. “All I’ve found is a great spiritual wasteland.”
“You need to accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior.” She rattled off the words like a familiar script, her face still a stern mask.
“It’s just not in me.” Pender tried to say it in a way that wouldn’t offend.
“It’s in all of us. Just open your heart to the Lord.”
“I’ll keep trying,” Pender said.
“What brings you here?” Her tone was cold again. Suspicious.
“Just passing through on my way north. Every time I come through the area I think about you. And John. And Peg and I. How it was.” As Pender talked, Evelyn’s face turned sour.
“I know,” he said. “We’ve all moved on from there. But it was a happy time. I just stopped in for one final salute to happy times.” He raised his coffee cup to her and sipped from it.
Evelyn gave him a cold stare, shaking her head from side to side. “I don’t remember anything happy about those times. We were stupid and irresponsible. When I think of how I was then, I shudder.”
Pender shrugged. “When I think of how you were then, I see someone who was happy and living life to the fullest. That’s how I see all of us back then.”
“We were ruled by our vices. Smoking, drinking, lust. It was evil. That’s why all the bad things happened to us . . . the divorces, my baby . . . all of it.”
“Do you think I’m evil, Evelyn?”
She nodded yes, slowly but emphatically.
Pender stared, mesmerized by the woman in front of him and the memory of how she used to be. He tried to break the tension. “I guess you’ll want me to pay in cash then.”
Her face wore the coldness of a vengeful prophet. “I want you not to come back.”
Pender looked her in the eye for a moment, saw no trace of humanity. “Okay,” he said with a sadness that started deep in his core. He rose and said goodbye softly, hoping maybe she’d change her mind, let the person she used to be come forth, at least for a moment. But her grim countenance never changed. He reached into his pocket for cash, left a tip on the table and twelve dollars with his receipt by the cash register. When he reached the door, he glanced back. Evelyn was still sitting at the table, staring at the far wall. She looked like a statue hammered from stone by an angry artist.
As he walked to his car, Pender got that feeling again, the one where he was maybe dead, where he couldn’t feel his body anymore and was seeing everything from someplace else. The people from the happy moments in his life were gone, turned to dust by the ravages of life. This was worse than losing Peg. She at least had a life. Evelyn, once so full of life, was just going through the motions now. Her human goodness was long dead. He wished he could cry, could somehow wash away the morose currents that were sweeping him to a far-off sea.