Comeback (Gun Pedersen Book 1) (9 page)

14

The drive home was cool and whippy with the win
dows down. Gun could see a mountain range of
sea-colored clouds in the rearview mirror of the old
F-l50. The clouds were diagonally split by a silver
shaft where the mirror was cracked. During the hunt
ing season of ’73, when the truck was only two years old, Gun’s 30-06 Springfield had rocked out of its
back-window saddle on a bad pothole. It bounced
forth unloaded, gave Gun a brief crack on the skull,
and spun its smooth trigger guard into the mirror.
Gun hadn’t fixed it since then, and had never again
put a firearm into the rack. Now he slid them under
the seat.

A mile west of Stony on old County 70 Gun shifted
down and turned right on the lake road. He followed it
through trees that leaned in to cover the sky: tall
black-bruised birches, second generation pines from
cones tromped on by waves of loggers, slender aspens
brush-stroking in the light wind. Little rips and tears

of sky between leaves were blue and getting bluer, the
color swelling with humidity the way Minnesota after
noons do before a night rain. Gun slowed the truck
and smelled the air like a hound.

Home was left off the township road and three
quarters of a mile down a double-rutted truck trail.
Weeds exploded from between the ruts, giving the trail
a wild look that Gun liked. Cars full of cotton-print tourists didn’t drive in to ask directions.

He had left the right rear burner of the gas stove on.
The kitchen was warm and smelled like a winter
evening, and mixed with the rising humidity, it was
uncomfortable. Gun put out the flame and slid up all
the windows that weren’t already open. Then he went
to the bedroom to change.

When he reentered the kitchen to make lunch, he
was wearing cutoff Levi’s white from use and a blue
short-sleeve work shirt with the armpits ripped. A
year ago Mazy had raided her father’s dresser and
used the shirt to wax her 1968 MG. Gun, in turn, had
raided the trash at six o’clock on a Tuesday morning to
recover it before Gurney plowed in with his garbage
truck. There were still bruises of pink paint dust on
the shirt. Gun had saved it for its ripped armpits.
They allowed him to swing a bat freely, or a shovel.

There was little food. Gun opened the dank cabinet
under the sink and found some potatoes sending
colorless shoots through the holes in the plastic sack.
There was Dinty Moore beef stew in the cupboard,
and several cans of ravioli. Gun opened the refrigerator and saw a lump of dark cheese in Saran Wrap, a
carton of eggs, half a gallon of yellow buttermilk. He
sat on the kitchen table in his shorts, holding the
refrigerator open with an extended Pony runner.

He tapped the fridge door closed and lifted himself
off the table, the backs of his legs sticking to the
varnish. The air was thickening. He went to the door
and stepped out, bending to feel the untrimmed
foxtails that angled out from the foundation. They
slipped squealing through his fingers. He ripped out a
handful and tossed them up, and they drifted down in
the direction of North Dakota. Rain tonight. Gun
went back to the refrigerator and took out the carton of buttermilk and the eggs. He also broke from the
freezer a block of ice cubes which he dropped with
much snapping and splitting into a gallon jar of tea
the color of sunsets. He put the tea by the door. Then
he poured most of the buttermilk into a multi-
buttoned Hamilton Beach blender, cracked in four of the eggs, and frothed it all using the button farthest to
the right. He took the pitcher off the blender, retrieved
the ice tea, and carried both out of the house and
down the hill.

Gun’s stone boathouse was a project only a few days
old. It would be a replacement for an earlier one, a husky slabwood structure he had built to defend his
open Alumacraft from storms and Stony Lake break
ers. Its performance had been perfect for a decade until this spring. A tight nor’easter had marshaled
itself high over innocent farms in Ontario, taken a dip
down and to the left over International Falls, and
then, gaining speed, had suddenly dropped out of a dark cloud and come riding over Stony Lake like a
chariot, blowing the tops of the waves into grapeshot
spray. With his back to the heat of an April fireplace, Gun had stood at the window and watched. It took the
wind and waves three minutes to put the boathouse
asunder, and when the air was free of slabwood, he had gone out and yanked the dented Alumacraft up
into the outfield grass.

Now there was nothing on the lakefront but a clean
square hole. Gun had sandbagged a small dry area
where the hole opened out onto the shore, and had
spaded out and poured eighteen-inch footings. The

old boathouse hadn’t had the benefit of a solid anchor.
This time he would build on rock. Not for himself—
he wasn’t going to be here. Probably not for anybody.
But it made him feel useful, defiant. And it was a good
habit: finish what you start.

A hump of spray-cleaned lake stones lay on the grass
next to the hole, stones that Gun had weeded from a
walleye bed not a quarter mile out. Gun figured there
were enough rocks for four feet of solid wall on three sides before he’d run out. Again he sniffed the air for
wetness.

He went to the small shed, where bits of scrap
slabwood waited for the chainsaw, and came back
with a hundred pounds of cement dust in a bag over
his shoulder. In his other hand was a large steel bucket
containing a triangular trowel. He ripped open the
string-stitched bag and poured about half the dust
into a fifty-five-gallon drum between the footings,
then added buckets of water from the lake and stirred and slapped at the gray mud until it was flabby and
made noise like the quicksand in old Tarzan movies.
As he moved the trowel over the footings, laying a
base for the bottom tier of stones, Gun felt the first
stiffening of the small east breeze.

She’s at home, waiting for me.
It made Gun’s mouth
sour to think of Geoff’s soft hands on her. Couldn’t be
true. Was not true. He picked up one of the stones
from the pile, hefted it to his shoulder, guessed its
weight at twenty-five or thirty pounds, took three
quick steps toward the water and heaved. The rock
came down,
thump,
twenty yards out.

He had put down four layers of rock and forgotten
his buttermilk and tea. He stood straight up between
the growing walls, stripped away the soaked shirt and
saw the pitcher and jar sweating to match his own
skin. Careful not to disturb the newly bedded
lakestone, he vaulted out of the hole and dispatched

more than half the buttermilk and egg mixture. It
cooled and slightly sickened him, and he could feel his
shoulder and neck muscles rock. He traded the pitcher
for the gallon of tea, watery now. The cold jar
balanced with a wholesome weight in Gun’s wide
palm as he tilted it up. The sky was sinking down for
an early night. Half the pile of rocks was still on the
ground.

Back in the hole, Gun troweled thick mud between
rocks and packed more rocks on top and beside,
eyeing from the pile just the right stone to fit each
circumstance. Mazy had helped him build the first boathouse when she was fifteen, reluctantly handing him nails to put between his teeth. Today she had not
even been at the meeting where it was announced that
her land would soon be dead and interred beneath
cement and glass and tourists.

The rock pile disappeared a quarter of an hour
before the cloudburst. It was enough time for Gun to
take a mouthful of warm egg buttermilk, spit it away,
swim once out to the walleye bed to rinse away the grit, and go inside to bed.

15

Tuesday came up light blue and warm, the blurring
humidity washed out of the sky by what Gun esti
mated had been a two-inch downpour. The rain had muddied the walls and floor of Gun’s boathouse hole, but hadn’t damaged the mortar work. The gray ce
ment had set up fast, and now held trails of silt and
dirt between the rocks where the water had run. No
more masonry for the present.

The grass and weeds soaked Gun’s tennis shoes as
he walked to the infield. He kept the bat on his
shoulder. He wanted it dry for contact. The pitching machine, tarped against the rain, had come through the storm honorably. With his free hand Gun undid
the twine holding the tarp and pulled it into a heap behind the mound.

The machine undraped, wheels spinning, tripod
legs quivering, a dozen baseballs counting down to
blast-off, Gun waited patiently at home. On mornings
this light he sometimes smote baseballs so far his eyes
lost them in the general whiteness of the sky. More
than thirty years ago he’d done the same thing in front
of a major-league scout, who told him that frequent
repetitions would earn him a substantial and enjoy
able living. It turned out that way.

Now the machine ticked and trembled, and a ball
was seized and spun toward home at big-league velocity. Gun swung and made slight contact, launching the
ball nearly straight up. He counted a hang time of
eight before the ball came down just back of the
machine. The arm snapped again, and this time Gun
sent a hard grass burner through the hole between
third and short. It sent up a thin cloud of spray that
rainbowed briefly in the sunshine. Gun shook his
head and twisted the bat in his hands. He jabbed his
toe at the ground. Inhaled, kept his lungs full. The
next pitch came in chest high, and the club end of the
Hillerich and Bradsby met it hard, a fraction of an
inch below center. The ball rose outward, lakebound.
He tried to follow its course but the white morning air
had sunspots. It was lost until the distant
hock
of
belted water.

“I saw Jim Rice do that at Fenway once,” said Carol
Long. She was standing in the weeds behind Gun and
to the left. In the third-base dugout.

“Sweet heaven,” Gun said. “You’re early. Game
doesn’t start till one.”

“I always come for batting practice.” Carol stepped
out of the tall grass and into some that showed her ankles. She wore green spring walking shorts. “Go
ahead,” she said. “Hit a few more.”

“I’ll hit later,” said Gun. The machine clicked and
fired, and Gun held out the bat in an impromptu
one-hand bunt. “Sometimes they get lost in the grass,” he explained.

“Or the lake,” said Carol.

Gun walked to the pitching machine and killed it

just before it kicked into another fling cycle. He
turned to Carol, who was standing now in the region
of the coach’s box. Her arms were crossed. Gun
smiled. One season crossed arms had been a signal to steal. The next year it meant look out for the pickoff.
“I’m glad to see you,” he said. “Should I be?”

She waved a legal-sized notebook. “I’m working on
a story...”

“Ah, journalists.”

Carol uncrossed her arms now and started toward
him. “I’ve lived in Stony nearly a month
now and never seen the much-bespoken Gun Peder
sen land,” she said. “Or not much of it.”

“You want to find out exactly what it is Hedman’s
trying to trash.”

Carol had reached him at the pitching machine.
There were a few thin leaves of pale wet grass sticking
to her ankles, just above the sandals.

“I didn’t know about it myself until the day before
yesterday,” Gun said. “Or know for sure.”

Carol’s green shorts had abstract white designs. On
top she wore a loose white cotton pullover with
wrinkles at the shoulders.

“I’ve decided not to let them do it,” said Gun. It
was a statement that he hadn’t known was true until he spoke.

Carol’s face was direct and proportionate. No needless flesh on chin or cheek. The fall of her bangs across
her forehead stirred in the breeze. Her perfume was
something of island origin, and near enough to feel.

“Would you like me to show you around?” said
Gun. He made an exaggerated gesture with his hand.

“Yes.”

The four hundred acres made for a long morning’s
walk. Gun showed Carol the coastal hollows that
changed shape with each spring’s gouging ice-melt, a sudden twenty-acre clearing where the trees fell off to

willowy shrubs and then to rushes, the clear-running stream that left Stony Lake and headed west. Finally
they climbed a small rise at Gun’s northern boundary.
Underfoot was a cushion of needles and above rose
some of the last virgin pines in the logbelt.

“They were here,” Gun said, staring up, “before
anything.”

“Like the redwoods in California.” Carol tilted her
head back. “What kept the loggers from cutting them
down?” she asked.

Gun kept his eyes on the treetops. “I guess when the
first loggers got here there were still some Indian
legends around. One of them was about a young Chippewa chief named Mountain Face, who was a giant. Taller than four canoes are long.”

“Large fellow,” said Carol.

“Yup. And this Mountain Face died during a hard
cold winter by going without food so the tribe could
eat. They buried him up here.”

“So the loggers stayed away? I’m surprised.”

Gun winked. “The legend goes on to say that when
Mountain Face’s burial ground is violated, he’ll come
alive again, madder than hell. Maybe the loggers didn’t want to chance it.”

Carol said, “I thought the loggers had Paul Bunyan
on their side.”

“It’s only a guess, but I think Paul Bunyan would
have walked on tiptoe to keep from bothering Moun
tain Face.”

“And Lyle Hedman?” said Carol.

Gun turned to look at her. The sun was touching her
black bangs, highlighting the few silver strands. A
trace of perspiration sparkled on her cheekbones.
“What do you think?” he said.

Carol waited to answer until Gun shrugged and
took the first step back toward home. Then she said,
“I think Lyle Hedman should step carefully. Old
legends have a way of coming back.”

“All right, journalist, what have you got?” Gun
said. They were sitting on Gun’s log porch holding
stoneware mugs of ice tea.

Carol frowned and leaned back in the rough-hewn
chair. “I’m having a hard time finding the handle, if you want to know the truth, Gun,” she said. “I think
it’s about time you leveled with me, told me what your
gut says.” Carol took a sip of tea without removing her
eyes from Gun’s face. “Did she want to marry the guy or not?”

Gun laughed and looked away. “I’ve been trying not
to think about it. Doesn’t do me a bit of good. The
more I think, the more I don’t know, and the muddier
everything gets.” He tapped a finger against his head. “I can tell you one thing, though. If I knew she was in
some kind of trouble I wouldn’t be sitting here like
this. But at this point what can I do? Roar in and
sweep her away?” Gun stabbed a finger into the palm
of his hand. “I’ve got to find a reason, one good
reason. Something that’ll tell me she needs help. I
don’t have that yet.”

Carol nodded.

Gun leaned toward her. “How about you? What do
you think? You’re a friend of hers—she probably talks
to you more than she does me.”

“I don’t know. She mentioned Geoff a few times.
Told me about that night in the woods, the prank he and his friends pulled. She said how much she hated
him.”

“Bastard.”

“But she also said—about a week ago, after she’d started the story—how she was beginning to under
stand him. How the two of them had things in
common. Powerful fathers, the fear of not living up to
expectations, you know. She said she was almost
getting fond of Geoff, much as she hated to admit it.”

Gun snorted and waved off her words.

“No, I’m not blowing it out of proportion. I’m just
telling you what she said. Myself, if I had to guess, I’d say
...
oh, I don’t know.” She threw up her arms and
sighed.

“You’d say what?”

“I just don’t know.”

“So we have to wait and keep sniffing around,” Gun
said, disgusted. “I wasn’t made for this.”

“Say.” Carol brightened. “There was something
Mazy mentioned, something I meant to tell you. She
told me about it before I left for Minneapolis last
week. She didn’t know if it was important, but it had
her stumped.”

Gun waited.

“Loon Country’s a four-hundred-million-dollar
project, right?” said Carol. “And supposedly all the
money’s lined up: the local efforts are on track and
coming together pretty good, considering the fact that nothing’s official yet. Bond sales, pull tabs, stuff like
that. And the heavy hitters are committed. Tynex in
Minneapolis for a hundred mil, Diamond Inns, all of those you’ve heard about. But here’s the thing. Mazy
said she was looking through the portfolio at
Hedman’s projections and it all added up to about
three hundred million, a hundred short. She showed
her figuring to Lyle and he just laughed and pointed to
a name on the list of investors. The balance is right here,’ he told her.”

“Who was it?” said Gun.

“I don’t remember. I’d never heard it before.”

“You don’t remember anything?”

“I don’t know, but I want to say it sounded African.
It was a foreign word, I think. Yes, I’m sure it was.”

Gun spent the next five minutes trying to jog
Carol’s memory, but nothing clicked. Then she looked
at her watch and said she needed to get going, there
were interviews to do before press time. “Wait a
minute, though,” she said, frowning suddenly. “Tig
Larson.”

“What?”

“I didn’t tell you. But apparently he never went
home after the hearing yesterday.”

“Probably headed for Minneapolis,” said Gun. “He
has friends there.”

“I don’t know. There was a county board meeting last night. Larson doesn’t usually miss those—and he
wasn’t there. And Chief Bunn was looking for him
this morning. Stopped by the paper to see if I’d seen him.”

“Bunn? What did Larson do?”

“Nothing. I guess Larson’s garage was empty and
the door was open and the storm last night rolled
the neighbor’s trash can in next to the Lawn
Boy. It spilled all over. Bunn just thought it was
strange that Larson wouldn’t be there, cleaning stuff up.”

Gun frowned and rubbed his forehead with the
sweating mug. It made a vertical pink mark on the
skin.

“I saw you talking to him after the meeting,” Carol
said. “What did he seem like?”

“He seemed tired, frustrated.
He was depressed and a little
drunk. And scared, maybe.”

“He didn’t mention if he was leaving town?”

“Nope. He said something about Holliman’s Bluff,
like he might do some fishing.”

“Fishing?” Carol looked off toward the water.
“Maybe he thought he owed it to himself after that
performance at the lodge.” She lifted the stoneware

mug but stopped before touching it to her lips. Gun
was on his feet and his face was gray.

“We’ll take the truck,” said Gun.

They were quiet on the ride, partly because the old half-ton Ford made a lot of noise at seventy-five miles an hour. Holliman’s Bluff was thirteen miles away, a
dramatic chunk of upthrust rock that rose square-
chested from the lake to a height of forty feet. There
was a sign at the crest where the highway bent away
from the lake:
holliman’s bluff
—
scenic parking.
There was room for half a dozen cars. On summer nights boys in family rods brought their girls to the
bluff for especially scenic parking, while below them men in silver and red Lund boats fished for walleyes
on the shelf. The sheer rock cliff went straight down about ten feet into the water, then stuck out its shelf like a knee for several yards and dove again to lake
bottom and a final depth of a hundred feet in years
with lots of rain.