Island of Bones (35 page)

“You make a lousy hot dog,” Landeta said.

They were sitting out on the screened-in porch of Louis’s cottage. Landeta was sprawled in an old wicker chair, his feet propped up on a table, a paper plate in his lap. Louis sat hunched, elbows on knees, an empty Heineken dangling from his
fingers. It had been too hot to eat inside. A wisp of a breeze was coming across the low dunes, barely strong enough to stir the sea oats. The water out in the gulf was as flat as a mirror. Pierre’s fan whirred away in the doorway and Issy was stretched out on the cement floor, trying to get her belly cooled.

“Fuck, it’s hot,” Landeta said, setting the paper plate aside.

“It’s August,” Louis said. “You want another dog?”

Landeta shook his head. “Got any dessert?” he asked.

“Stale Ho Hos.”

“I’ll pass.”

They were quiet. Louis was looking out at the gulf. The sky was starting to turn pink. He got up and went to the refrigerator, returning with a fresh Heineken for himself and another Diet Coke for Landeta.

“C’mon
,” Louis said. “Let’s take a walk.”

Landeta followed Louis out the screen door, and across the sandy yard.

“We going to the beach?” Landeta asked.

“Yeah. It’ll be cooler down there.”

They headed up over a small dune. Landeta stopped in the sea oats, his face turned toward the water to catch the small breeze.

“Damn, that feels good.”

Louis took a drink of his beer. “Mel, I need to ask you a question.”

“
This sounds serious.”

“Who the hell is Rocky King?”

Landeta laughed. “He was an NYPD detective on television in the fifties.”

“Super
-cop kind of guy?”

“On the contrary. Rocky had no brilliant ideas or special powers and wasn’t even particularly smart.”

“So?”

“He was a stubborn sonofabitch who just tracked down clues, followed leads, and stayed on the case until he figured it out.”

They walked a little further then Landeta stopped and sat down on the sand. Louis dropped down next to him, kicking off his flip-flops.

Louis gazed out at the water. There were no islands to be seen on this side of Captiva. No clumps of green. Just the pure, flat, blue-green expanse of the gulf, fading away to the horizon.

“I saw Roberto today,” Louis said.

“How was he?” Landeta asked.

“Not good. He was with a DCF woman. He said he wanted to go home. And that it was all my fault he couldn’t.”

“Look, they’ll find him a good home. A year from now, he’ll have a foster family, a puppy, and they’ll all be eating Happy Meals together. The kid will be playing Nintendo
with his friends instead of sitting in a bone pile talking to ghosts.”

Louis picked at the label on the Heineken. It wasn’t going to be that easy, but he knew there was no way Landeta could understand that.

“You got any kids?” Louis asked.

“Couldn’t get a woman to hang around long enough.” Landeta was looking out at the water and sky. “You?”

Louis took a drink, resting the bottle on his knee. “I almost had one. Knew a girl in college. I got her pregnant.”

Landeta popped the top on his can of Diet Coke. When he didn’t say anything, Louis went on.

“I told her all kinds of crap. Like it wasn’t mine, I wanted to finish school, I couldn’t deal with it.”

“In other words, you were a shit-head.”

“Yeah.”

“What happened to her?”

“She left school and got an abortion.”

Landeta took a long drink of his Diet Coke. “You sure?”

Louis kept his eyes on the gulf. Sure? Hell, he had never thought about it before. There was no reason to think Kyla hadn’t done what she told him she was going to do.

“Shit,” he said under his breath.

“What?”

“Like I really needed to be thinking about that possibility right now.”

Landeta didn’t answer. He set the can of Diet Coke in the sand and took off his glasses. His eyes were closed and he was leaning back on his elbows, his face upturned to catch the faint breeze.

“Is this why you called me?” he asked without looking at Louis.

“I called you to invite you to dinner, that’s all.”

Landeta let out a low chuckle.

“What’s so funny?” Louis asked.

“Man, you love living on your little island, don’t you?”

Louis didn’t answer. He looked back out at the water.

“What was her name?” Landeta asked.

“Kyla.” Louis took a drink of beer. “I fucked it up,” he said softly, shaking his head.

Landeta was quiet. Louis finished off his beer quickly and looked out at the pink and orange sky. The silence grew, and so did Louis’s need to fill it.

“Do you think Horton was right?” he asked finally.

“About what?”

“That this was all for nothing?”

“You can go crazy thinking of things like that.”

Louis was quiet again. “What are you going to do now?” he asked finally.

“Enjoy the sunset,” Landeta said. He had not moved and his eyes were still closed.

“I mean about work.”

“I don’t know. I haven’t quite figured
out the rest of my life
yet.”

Louis cleared his throat. “Look, Mel...you know, if you wanted to
—-”

“Shut up. You’re fucking up my sunset.”

Louis looked back out at the water.

“You know, memory is a strange thing,” Landeta said after a moment.

“How so?” Louis asked.

“I mean you can’t always rely on it,” Landeta said. His eyes were still closed. “I have a whole library of images in my memory, things I use to remember what something looked like, things I use to make me feel like I’m not groping around in the dark when it gets bad.”

Louis was quiet, looking out at the gulf.

“I guess what I am trying to say,” Landeta went on, “is that you might not be remembering that thing in college all that clearly. Memories can be unreliable.”

Louis looked at Landeta. His eyes were still closed.

“You did the best you could at the time,” Landeta said. “I think that’s all any of us do. When you know better, you do better.”

The waves were a gentle hiss on the sand. A flock of pelicans were flying up the beach toward them, and Louis watched them as they went by in a perfect V, gliding silently over the water. The birds were beautiful, no sound, no effort, moving through their world with not a single wasted motion. Louis watched them until they were gone.

“The boy will be all right,” Landeta said.

Louis looked at him.

“And the baby is alive. You did the best you could.”

Louis leaned back on his elbows on the sand. The sun was hovering just above the horizon and the water and the sky were a blaze of orange, yellow, and red.

“So when you going back to Miami?”
Louis asked.

Landeta didn’t answer.

“Mel? When —-”

“I’m not. I’m staying here.”

“Here? Why?”

“I don’t know. I just decided this minute. Maybe it’s because you can’t see the sunset in Miami. Maybe it’s the people here. They leave you alone, let you be.”

The breeze was kicking up. Louis closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath of the tangy salt air. He listened to the breaking waves.

“Tell me what it looks like,” Landeta said.

Louis opened his eyes. “What?”

“The sunset.”

“I’m not falling for that again. I know you can see it, some of it anyway.”

“All I can see is a big blur of color.”

“Well, that’s all it is.”

Landeta laughed as he shook his head. “Christ, you’re hopeless. Tell me what it looks like.”

Louis looked back at the sky and shrugged. “I told you, it’s colorful.”

“Try again,” Landeta said.

Louis took a deep breath. “Okay, it’s red at the bottom and kind of yellow at the top.”

Landeta shook his head. “You can do better than that, Rocky.”

Louis stared at the sunset. “It’s really red and really yellow. Fuck, Mel, you tell me.”

Landeta lifted his face to the sky, his eyes closed. “The clouds are wispy, and it’s like someone tossed a bunch of yellow and pink feathers against a freshly painted red wall. And the sun is laying itself down on the water, giving in, like you would if you were going to sleep and knew you had nothing but good dreams ahead.”

Louis looked at Landeta, then back out at the sky.

“I can’t do better than that, man,” he said.

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CHAPTER 1

Wednesday, December 31, 1969

He was staring at the frozen lake and thinking about his mother lying on a table somewhere screaming in pain.

He was remembering what she told him, how they had kept her in that little room and held her down, how it felt like her insides were being torn in half and how it went on and on and on for two days until she begged to die.

He was thinking about her and how much he had loved her. But he was also thinking that if she had been able to stand the pain for two more minutes –-
two damn minutes
-- his life would have been so very different.

But she couldn’t. So he was pulled from her womb at two minutes before midnight on September 14, and because of that everything now had changed.

The ferry was coming in. He heard its horn before he saw it, a white smudge emerging slowly from the gray afternoon fog. It was running late. The straits had frozen over early this year because of the long bitter cold snap and the ferry was forced to stay in the narrow channel that had been cut by the coast guard icebreaker
Mackinaw
. It was so cold, far colder than it should be, even for December. He pulled the hood of his parka up and looked down at the duffle at his feet. Had he remembered his gloves? Everything had happened so fast he hadn’t given much thought to what he had packed. Now he was so cold he didn’t even want to open the duffle to look, so he stuffed his red hands into his armpits and watched the ferry.

It was taking a long time to get to the dock, like it was moving in slow motion. But everything was like this now, everything was moving as if time no longer existed. But it didn’t really, he thought. Not anymore. Time was nothing to him now. By tomorrow, he would have all the time in the world.

But
what
world?

He looked around. At the clapboard ticket house of the Arnold Line ferry, at the docks, the empty parking lot and the boarded-up pastie shack. He looked past the park benches and the bare black trees still wearing their necklaces from last night’s ice storm. He looked back toward town where the fog blurred all the places he had known during his nineteen years here, and he tried hard to burn everything into his memory because suddenly he knew that once he got on the ferry there would be no way to ever come back and he would forget all of this and the person he had been here.

He turned and looked left.

Canada. It was just fifty miles away, less than an hour’s drive up I-75. He had never been there before.

But until now he had never had a reason to.

The ferry had docked. No one came out to take his ticket so he picked up his duffle, sprinted up the gangplank and boarded. The cabin was empty and but at least it was warmer. He set his duffle on one of the long wooden benches and sat down. He wanted a hot cup of coffee but there was no one at the snack bar at the far end of the cabin. The clouded glass carafes sat empty on the coffee machines. There wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere, and he had the weird feeling that he was the only human being left on earth.

But then the metal floor began to vibrate beneath his feet and the ferry pulled away from the dock. He leaned his head against the cold glass of the window and closed his eyes.

He slept. And for the first time in weeks, he dreamed.

Dreamed of a bald man in horn-rimmed glasses and a blue suit. Dreamed of shooting a rifle that looked nothing like the one he used to hunt deer with his dad. Dreamed of lying naked on a cold steel table in a white room with his red intestines pouring out of his gut. And then the bald man was holding up a big bright blue capsule and smiling and telling him that if he just took it all the pain would go away.

He was jerked awake by a jabbing on his shoulder.

He looked up into the red face of an old man wearing a navy pea coat with the ferry line emblem on the pocket.

“Time to get off, son.”

He rubbed his eyes and looked out the window, but it had fogged over. He rubbed it with the sleeve of his parka and saw something in the mist outside. It was the boarded-up pastie shack on the dock. They were back in St. Ignace.

“Hey!” he called out to the old man who was heading toward the door. “What happened? Why did we turn back?”

“No choice,” the old man said. “Got out aways but it was frozen solid. Got a call in to the cutter but she’s working the shipping lines and can’t get here until tomorrow morning.” He turned and started away.

“But I have to get to the island tonight!”

The old man stared at him then shook his head. “No one’s getting over there tonight, son.”

The old man shuffled off, the metal door banging behind him. The young man’s eyes went again to the window. His mind was spinning, trying to figure out his options. Stay here and wait? No, because tomorrow would be too late. Go home and try to explain? No, because he couldn’t look his father in the eye and tell him one more lie. Leave and try to start over somewhere new? No, because she wouldn’t be there.

And it was all about her.

He reached for the duffle at his feet but paused. It was an old thing and the name stenciled on the green canvas was so faded it could barely be read: CHARLES S. LANGE. It had belonged to his father, and U.S. Army sergeant Charles Lange had stuffed his life into the duffle. Everything he needed to survive was in it – heating tablets, rations, mittens, compass, bullets, and a picture of his wife and baby son. When he came home he packed it away, emptying it and himself as best he could. Even his wife couldn’t get him to talk about had happened in Korea, and when she died three years later Charles Lange
withdrew into himself even more. He was there as a father, or at least as much as he could be. And when his son turned sixteen, he brought out the duffle and gave it to him.

Cooper Lange had never used the duffle. But last night he had pulled it from his closet and hurriedly packed it with the things he guessed he might need to survive. A change of clothes, matches, some Mounds bars, the three hundred and two dollars from his bank account, an extra pair of gloves, his father’s old Army compass.

He grabbed the bag and hurried from the ferry. The temperature had dropped sharply since he had boarded and the icy cold was like a hard slap against his face. He glanced at his watch. Almost four. It would be dark soon. He had to figure out something fast. The dock was deserted and there were no cars in the lot. Chartering a plane in this weather was out of the question, not that he could afford it.

The weather...it was getting bad fast. The fog had retreated but he could see a bank of heavy pewter clouds building on the horizon of Lake Huron. His eyes caught a spot of something dark on the icy lake just off shore. Then he spotted another dark spot beyond the first.

Trees. The dark spots were trees. That meant someone had started laying out the ice bridge. But was it finished?

There was no time to check. If he was going, he had to go now. He unzipped the duffle and found his gloves. He cursed himself for not bringing a flashlight and screwdrivers -– it was crazy to cross the bridge without them -- but he hadn’t planned on having to do this.

He hadn’t planned on doing any of this. But she...

Oh God, had he forgotten it? Digging beneath the clothes, he found her picture. It was her senior class portrait. Perfect oval face framed by long straight dark hair, somber dark eyes and not even a hint of a smile. He turned it over to read what she had written even though he knew it by heart.

When love beckons to you, follow him, though his ways are hard and steep. And when he speaks to you believe in him, though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden. – Julie.

He started to put it back in the duffle but instead slipped it into the chest pocket of his parka and zipped it shut.

He put on his gloves, slung the duffle strap over his shoulder and headed across the parking lot. At the snow-covered beach, he stopped. Someone had tamped down a path that led to the shoreline, creating a crude entry to the ice bridge beyond.

The huge gray expanse of Lake Huron lay before him. And somewhere out lost in the fog was Mackinac Island.

It was only four miles across, but he knew what he was up against. He had grown up in St. Ignace and spent the last five summers over on the island making good money slapping fudge in the shops on Main Street and cleaning the stalls at the stables. But when the tourists left in October, the island closed down and the hard winters left the couple hundred residents there isolated and dependent on the coast guard icebreakers. But sometimes, if it was cold enough, the water between the island and St. Ignace would freeze over. Someone on the island would venture out onto the lake with spud bars to test the ice’s thickness. If he made it to St. Ignace, he’d call back with the news that it was safe. The townspeople would take discarded Christmas trees and plant them in the ice to mark the safe path across.

The ice bridge brought freedom. But the swift-moving currents of the straits could cause the ice to shift at any time so the ice bridge could also brought death.

He glanced back over his shoulder at the red brick coast guard building on Huron Street. There was a light on inside. The coast guard guys didn’t want people out on the ice bridge but they couldn’t stop them so every year they sent out the same warning -- tell someone if you go out on the ice bridge. For a second, he thought about going up to the station.

But he couldn’t. He couldn’t tell anyone where he was going. That was what they had decided. She wouldn’t tell her parents and he wouldn’t tell his father. No one could know.

He hoisted the duffle and stepped onto the ice. It groaned but held firm. He pulled in a deep breath and headed toward the dark shape in the mist.

At the first tree, he stopped and looked back. The lights of St. Ignace were just yellow blurs in the mist. Looking ahead again, he spotted the next tree and started toward it.

The sun was now just a pale pink glow above the gray horizon and out here on the exposed lake the wind hit his face like needles. But he kept moving in a tentative shuffle, trying not to think about the dark cold water beneath his feet.

He was panting and his head was aching by time he reached the fifth tree. It still wore its web of fake silver icicles and they danced in the wind. One small blue Christmas ornament clung to a branch.

Seeing it brought back the dream about the blue capsule and he realized now what it had meant. Just a month ago he had sat with his father in front of the TV watching a man pour hundreds of blue capsules into a huge jar sitting on a stool. No “Mayberry RFD” tonight, just Roger Mudd staring back over his shoulder into the camera and whispering as a man in a suit and horn-rimmed glasses pulled out the first blue capsule.

September fourteenth, zero zero one.

His father, sitting in the shadows, had said nothing, just got up and went into the kitchen. Alone, Cooper watched as they put the little slip of white paper with his birthday on it up on a big board next to the American flag. He had never won anything in his life -– except this. The luck of being among the first young men drafted into the Vietnam War.

His eyes drifted left, again to where he imagined Canada was. He would be there soon enough, but right now he had to get to the island. He had to get to Julie.

A loud crack, like a rifle shot.

He froze. Afraid to look down, afraid to even take a breath. Another crack.

Suddenly the world dropped.

Blackness. Water. Cold.

His scream died to a gurgle as the water closed over him.

He groped but there was nothing but water. Everything was getting heavy and darker. He had to get some air. He pushed the duffle off and kicked upward. But his hands hit only a ceiling of ice. He couldn’t find the hole, he couldn’t see anything, he couldn’t breathe.

He could feel his heart slowing in his chest, his blood growing colder.

Mom, I miss you.