The Fugitives (13 page)

The boy and girl gathered together their things, the sprawl of media on their tabletop, stuffing them into zippered and Velcroed pockets in their jackets and bags and getting up to leave.

“So,” I said. “John Salteau.”

“Man of the hour. My quest.”

“All the way from Chicago. I’m thinking, don’t they have Indians there?”

“It’s the lake-and-mountain beat. Part of an unending cycle of insistent articles on fun in the summer sun, under the turning leaves, on the winter slopes. Precisely why I went into journalism, as you can imagine. How long have you known him?”

“Few months. Around since he started at the library.”

“This was when?”

“Mid-fall, I guess? I’d been here a couple of months. I wandered in one day and there he was.”

“You’ll excuse me, but it doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that would captivate someone like you.”

“It isn’t, ordinarily. But I was primed to be captivated by someone not suffering from a terminal case of Cleveritis Famosus. I got to the point where I’d walk into a bookstore in Manhattan and see all the dust jackets and have to turn around and walk out, where I’d pick up a copy of
New York
magazine and have to put it down, where seeing the same five or ten names recycled again and again would make me want those people to vanish from the face of the earth, and then I realized that my name was probably on someone else’s list of people who should vanish.”

“So you vanished. We covered that.”

I was embarrassed. “I’m sorry. Of course we did. I’m sorry.”

“Geezum,” she said, “don’t commit suicide or anything.”

Not necessarily the thing to bring up, for many reasons. I’d considered it myself, from time to time, window-shopping, as it were; to a tourist like me it seemed like a pastoral part of life here in the higher latitudes, especially in winter, the sun spinning out of sight around four o’clock each afternoon. I was almost able to imagine it as an event that possessed a kind of rustic charm, a frozen body leaning against a trunk amid a stand of pine, half-empty pint of rye in the pocket of its buffalo-checked jacket. Another good reason to live in town. Or maybe not, I don’t know: there was something unforgivably hesitant about my lingering at the civilized edge of country I knew so well; I was hedging and I knew it; town was a planned reality so concrete and measured and consistent that it became less dangerously real than the accidental humps and bends of the true land up in Manitou, glacially formed and wind-planed; I hadn’t wanted to learn whatever Manitou might have to teach me, its icy quiet under its trillions of stars; “the eternal silence of infinite spaces terrifies me,” Pascal had said; what I wanted was the slow-motion fellowship of a town, a beach, a good burger and a pint of beer served by a twenty-two-year-old with a pierced nose and a genial disdain for the banal middle-aged man ogling her; the incomplete solitude of half measures.

“It has to do with a suspension of rules, I guess,” I was saying. “Salteau’s telling stories about talking animals, for Christ’s sake. Things fly, they change into other things. Spirits return from the grave. It’s not allegorical, it’s not symbolic, it doesn’t turn out in the end all to have been a dream. No lessons, just an idea of order.”

“Primitive,” she concluded, tilting her head and then shoving her hair out of her face.

“Not exactly.”

“Authentic. Oh, what’s that face?”

“The specter of inauthenticity hovers over everything like a threat.”

“Shouldn’t it?”

“If we’re talking about a Picasso with questionable provenance, maybe.”

“You don’t think it’s germane if it’s an Indian telling Indian legends?”

“Would it be germane if he were telling stories from the
Odyssey
? Would he have to be a guy named Ari Pappadopolous?”

She rolled her eyes and gave me a funny smile. “Oy, you’re difficult. I
knew
I wouldn’t be able to quote you. Engaging as it may be, nobody leafing through the Weekend Discoveries section wants to hear your version of the culture wars.”

“We got off track. I’m sorry.”

“OK, Alexander. You thought he was different and engaging. Although not primitive or authentic. Timeless? Oh, another face.”

“Let’s say a breath of fresh air.”

“First-rate.”

I gazed at the remains of my sandwich. Take stock, Mulligan: a meal with a woman.

“I apologize again. I’m not making fun of you. He’s got something. Whether it’s authenticity or its exact opposite, a kind of really game inventiveness, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a voice.”

“Better. Now: where does he come from?”

“Sure,” I said. “Horton Bay, he told me, once.” The compulsion to lie came over me as suddenly as Kat had changed the subject.

“Horton Bay.” She was writing. “Do you know what tribal band he belongs to?”

“That I don’t know. I know he’s an Ojibway.”

“What did he do before he started performing?”

“He said that he’d been in the army. And some other stuff. An insurance underwriter, I think he said. Drove a cab for a while.” These small untruths seemed to me to be both gravely significant and utterly harmless.

“Has he ever talked to you about his family?”

“Not exactly. He did tell me that his cousins and his great-grandfather were the models for characters in a Hemingway story. ‘The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife.’ It’s a good story.”

She exhaled audibly and I thought that possibly I’d pushed it a little far. I added, “Of course, there are probably a thousand people around here who claim some intimate connection to Hemingway.”

“There probably are. He ever tell you how long he’s been doing this, the storytelling?”

“He said that he’d been doing it for a few years.”

“You know, it’s funny, but I can’t find anything at all on him before last year.”

“Really? Well, he did tell me that he’d gotten into it kind of informally.”

“Has a friend, or a girlfriend, ever been at the library with him?” Kat had laid down her pen.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Have you ever seen him here in town—say, shopping or at a restaurant?”

“He’s a very private guy, I get the impression.”

“So you’ve never seen him outside the library.”

“No. I mean, right outside, the building I mean, sure.”

“What does he drive?”

“Pickup. Old Ford, I think.” As I made these things up, it occurred to me how little I actually did know about Salteau, how incurious I’d been about the man. “I guess we’re not really
friends,
you know?”

“Is he standoffish?”

“Private, I’d say. Note how this conversation is looping back on itself.”

“Noted.” She flipped her notebook closed. “I guess that’s a start, sort of, Alexander.” Although there was the slight nasal edge of complaint to it, the hint of a grievance, she kept it bright. “I guess I could be asking him some of these things directly.”

“I guess you could.”

“I guess so,” and the edge now was playful. “And guess what. Lunch is on you, because you hardly earned a free meal.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

“I could use a coffee.”

“This is the place.” I stood up, jerking a thumb in the direction of the enormous roaster that sat in the passageway leading to the front of the store. I went and ordered coffee at the counter, two double espressos—they may roast fine coffee in the midwest, but they brew it half-strength—and brought them back to the table.

“Are you from Chicago originally?”

“Nope. Michigander, actually. A town called Nebising.” She pushed her hair out of her face.

“Don’t know it.”

“No reason you should. Not really anyplace at all. I grew up, I got into the U of M, I took off.”

“Chicago.”

“Eventually.” She shrugged, sparing me the account of her two years in Flint or wherever.

“You always wanted to be a journalist?”

“An anchorwoman.” She smirked. “I majored in communications studies.”

“You foresaw the fall of print early on.”

“Geezum, how old do you think I am?” She laughed. “Yeah, no, I didn’t foresee it clearly enough, evidently. The tea leaves I read only showed me spending about ten years doing stand-ups in front of downed power lines and expressway crashes wearing a puffy coat and an earnest expression, living in mortal dread of a cold sore. So I got a job at the copy desk of the
Free Press
and the rest is history. But I guess it’s good to have something to fall back on.”

“The
Mirror
’s hanging on?”

“Ish. There’s a slow-spreading anxiety. You always think you’re going to see the cuts percolating up from the bottom in an orderly and predictable way: the pressmen being let go, the delivery truck drivers, the techs in the photo lab. But it’s more sinister than that. Furniture disappears overnight, clusters of desks, phones left sitting on the floor. It takes a while to realize that the people who sat at the desks and talked on the phones are gone too. The coffee lady doesn’t turn up one day.”

“The coffee lady?”

“It’s a liability to have her on the premises, that’s what I heard. One scalding incident and we’re all out on the street.”

She lifted her cup and knocked back her espresso, then glanced at her watch. “Look,” she said, “I’ve got some things I need to get done this afternoon. Thank you for lunch.”

“I wasn’t as helpful as I led you to believe.” I leaned forward and looked directly into her eyes. “I confess that I just wanted to have lunch. I’m sorry.”

“Always apologizing.” She capped her pen, slid it into the spiral binding of her notebook. “It was a nice lunch,” she added unconvincingly.

“And you’re done with the story?”

“Oh, no. I have to talk to John Salteau, obviously.”

“You haven’t yet?”

She paused to look at me for a moment, her hand frozen in the act of stuffing her phone into her bag. “Uh, no. No, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tip him off that I was here.”

“He doesn’t know you’re profiling him? That’s different.”

“Not really. Different, I mean. I just didn’t want him to know he was being observed.”

“Sounds pretty cloak-and-daggerish for a Weekend Discovery.”

She stood up, shook her head, shoved her hair out of her face. “Honestly, I just work backwards sometimes.” As if to illustrate the point, she began backing away from the table.

“OK,” I said.

“He’s more relaxed, I’m more relaxed, it just works better.”

“I believe you. Will you be back at the library on Thursday?”

She hesitated. “Yes,” she said, finally, then turned and left.

I WALKED HOME
slowly, eating from a bag of candy I’d picked up at the counter when paying the check, disks of chocolate covered with tiny hard spherical sprinkles which I took pleasure in working out from between my teeth with my tongue and then pulverizing between my molars. It had stopped snowing and the temperature had risen; the snow was heavy and wet. My feet ached from having worn boots for hours. I walked on Front Street until the storefronts began to peter out; there was a brief zone of civic confusion, a block or two of body shops and service stations, before the resumption of the town’s sedate decorousness; the businesses here mostly professional, doctor’s and lawyer’s offices run out of the parlor floors of well-kept individual houses, the occasional beautician or hairdresser. I crossed the road and headed south into my neighborhood.

In a yard I saw a group of boys, around ten years old, squatting and kneeling on the ground. At first I thought they were building a snowman, but as I drew closer I realized that their activity was a much more focused kind of play. They had spread a striped dishtowel on the snow, on which had been arranged a tweezers, a turkey baster, a pair of kitchen tongs, a paring knife, a flashlight, and some sandwich baggies. One boy held a baby monitor that he spoke into, barking unintelligible commands. Another stood as I approached, withdrawing a green-and-orange water pistol from the pocket of his jacket, which he held pointed toward the ground in his right hand, the fingers of his left bracing his right wrist with professional-looking aplomb.

“Crime scene, sir. Please move along.”

“What are you guys doing?”

“Move along, sir.” He gestured slightly with the gun, ushering me in the direction he wished me to take.

A boy used the tweezers to place a twig in one of the sandwich baggies. “Good work, Cowan,” he said. “Sir, we’re collecting DNA evidence for laboratory analysis. We can’t risk compromising the integrity of the scene. Please move along. The community liaison officer is available to take any questions you may have.”

“What if I’m with the media?”

“Who lets these guys in here?” the kid asked, in a wonderful simulation of scripted indignation. “We’ve got work to do.”

“The people have a right to know,” I said.

“Someone escort him out of here,” the kid said, turning back to his work. Cowan, the kid with the water gun, raised the pistol and leveled it at me, tilting his head to sight along the barrel with his dominant eye.

“I’ll have your badge for this,” I said. “I’ll be talking to your commanding officer.”