The Fugitives (21 page)

The machine hung up on him, then, inflexibly stipulating the limitations of its indulgence, its mechanical timing marvelously, serendipitously, precise—but not necessarily auguring well. It was possible, if not likely, that a Boyd Harris wouldn’t be able to differentiate between the machine’s rudeness and my own.

I stood in the new silence, concentrating deeply. I suppose it makes sense that you can locate insanity adjacent to any large-scale, organized effort to give money away. Philanthropy thumps offbeat to the known pulse of the world, but seems too metered, too contained and inhibited, to be the pursuit of holy fools, baptized in a dream of total divestiture and munificence. Invariably there’s a preoccupation on the most benign level with accountability, and on the most sinister with control. Maybe because of that I’d always been a little leery of accepting the Boyd money (though not leery enough to decline it), or maybe it was because it had funded every extravagance my imagination had seized on without subsidizing a single page of decent fiction. Was it possible that they knew? I waited expectantly in the demolished room, expecting the phone to ring again, but it remained silent. Harris was probably on to the next Fellow, likely reaching another answering system at this hour, phoning through the lonesome night from under the shining stars of Texas.

SALTEAU

O
NE
day Nanabozho was walking by the lakeshore thinking about nothing in particular when he heard voices a short distance away. Very quietly he crept toward the sound and soon spied three young men talking where they had stopped to rest. He concealed himself in the bush so that he could eavesdrop on their conversation. The young men were talking about what they wanted from life. “I want to be a great hunter, I want to be able to track game all day and all night without ever getting tired,” said the first. The second said, “I want to be a man of great wealth.” And the third said, “I want to be able to live forever, for as long as the earth does.”

After a little while, the three men got up to go their separate ways, and after they’d parted, Nanabozho sidled up to the youngest of them, who wanted to be a great hunter, and struck up a conversation with him as they walked along the trail together. The young man, still full of enthusiasm for his own dream for himself, repeated his ambition and that of his friends. Nanabozho wondered why he’d bothered to stop, because men everywhere always want the same things, and he decided that he’d play a trick on them for wasting his time. When the time came for the two to part, Nanabozho said to the young man, “I live down here. Why don’t you and your friends come to visit me sometime? I’ll give each of you a gift.” The young man knew that he was speaking with Nanabozho, and that Nanabozho liked to play tricks, but he also knew that Nanabozho could be very generous, and he assumed, as men will, that no one could be more deserving of generosity than himself. So, as Nanabozho anticipated, he agreed.

Nanabozho built a fire and then sat outside his wigwam waiting for the three men and thinking about the things they’d wished for. Eventually, the men arrived. They were tired, and they were hungry, but they asked Nanabozho for their gifts before anything else. “Eat first,” said Nanabozho. He was a very good host. When they had finished, they began again to ask for their gifts. “Sit and rest,” said Nanabozho. So they relaxed, but after a short while the youngest said, “Nanabozho, you said you’d give us gifts.” And Nanabozho responded, “So I did.” He looked at the youngest, and said, “I’m going to make you a great hunter. You’ll track and kill game day and night.” And the youngest answered, “That’s just what I wanted.” And Nanabozho said, “Good.” And then he said to the next man, “I’m going to give you great wealth. More than enough for yourself, enough to share with everyone along the lakeshore.” And the second man answered, “Thank you, Nanabozho, that’s exactly what I wanted.” And Nanabozho said, “Good.” And then to the third man, the proudest and most arrogant of them all, Nanabozho said, “I’m going to make you immortal. You’ll live forever, for as long as the earth is here.” And the third man said, “That’s exactly what I wanted. Thank you, Nanabozho.” And Nanabozho said, “Good.”

Nanabozho wasn’t surprised that, having been promised their gifts, the three men were suddenly in a hurry to leave. “When will we receive our presents?” they asked. “Don’t worry,” Nanabozho reassured them. “They’ll come to you.” So the three men left, and after a while they came again to the place where they had to go their separate ways. The youngest man went into his wigwam. Inside, it was full of horseflies. And the youngest man began to swat at them, tracking them from one corner of the wigwam to another. He swatted at them day and night, but he never seemed to be able to get rid of all of them. And so that was Nanabozho’s gift to him. The second man came upon a canoe filled to the top with furs and tobacco and weapons and other goods, more than he could ever use. And he pushed the canoe into the lake, wading in after it and then climbing aboard. But once he was far from shore, the canoe began taking on water, because of his added weight, and pretty soon it sank to the bottom of the lake, carrying the second man with it. And that was Nanabozho’s gift to him. Now, the third man, the one who wanted to live forever, found that as he was walking along his legs began to feel heavier and heavier, and he felt more and more tired and sleepy, and finally he had to sit down just where he was. And once he’d sat down he turned completely into a giant rock, part of the landscape, something that would be there as long as the earth itself. And that was Nanabozho’s gift to the proudest and most arrogant of the three men.

17

T
HURSDAY,
Salteau brought in a couple of things to pass around, a dance stick and a dream catcher. The objects passed from hand to hand, the adults handling them cursorily, with artificial reverence, and the children examining them with at least some genuine interest. One kid, around four, took the dance stick and, after looking at it for a moment with intense concentration, abruptly brought it down on the head of a smaller boy, probably his brother, causing the younger kid to cry.

“I’ll
scalp
you!” the big boy said.

“Ryan! No!” said his mother. She turned not to the smaller boy but to Salteau. “I am so sorry.”

Salteau responded with an expansive gesture. “Anishinabe would have been better off if we’d taken a few scalps here and there.” He leaned in, addressing the adults in a stage whisper. “Present company excepted, of course.” Strained laughter. Everyone felt compelled to humor the Indian, except, I noticed, Kat, who sat across the library table from me.

I was hungover enough that I’d gotten to the library a little late, even though I’d gone to the trouble of driving. Salteau hadn’t yet begun, but for the first time my primary reason for coming wasn’t to see him. I found Kat sitting off to one side of the room at one of the “big tables,” as I’d heard them called by the kids, and I pulled out a chair opposite her and sat in it. Today she had on a gray cashmere cardigan over a soft blue jersey blouse with a scoop neck. On a slender black cord around her throat she wore a small sterling silver pendant. She wore a man’s gold ring around her left thumb. She glanced at me from behind a pair of tortoiseshell glasses, smiled I think, then gestured with her chin in Salteau’s direction, turning in her chair slightly toward him, away from me, a gesture of dismissal, and knitting her fingers together. She sat like that, unknitting her fingers from time to time to shove her hair out of her face and behind her left ear with her right hand but otherwise giving Salteau her full attention. Her notebook, a long, narrow reporter’s tablet, lay unopened on the table, a pen resting on top of it.

When Salteau had finished, she gathered up her things and left the building. I followed her outside, holding my coat in my hand.

“So how’s the piece?”

“God.” She hefted the notebook and wagged it, grimacing, an unreadable gesture.

“Not coming. You need inspiration.”

“I’m inspired to go back to the hotel and crawl into bed.”

“You want company?”

“Geezum. You’re something else, aren’t you? Or do you just think you are?”

I shrugged. “Worth a shot.”

“Good try. But I’m afraid I’m scheduled to have an argument with my husband around now.”

She meant it as a joke, but I immediately thought of Dr. Heinz and wondered nonsensically for an instant if he was counseling Kat, too.

“There’s always a husband lurking around somewhere.”

“Sounds like a man who knows.”

“I’ve tiptoed out the back way a couple of times.”

“He’s back in Chicago.”

“What’s he do? Another reporter?”

“Food writer. For the
Trib.
”

“A food writer in Chicago. Hmmm.”

“Don’t start.”

“That’s like being a yacht reporter in Kansas, isn’t it?”

“Just don’t.”

“Meat, meat, and more meat.”

“What the heck is a ‘yacht reporter’?”

“Come on, lunch?”

“I told you, I can’t.”

“Saving room for the mixed grill later?”

She shook her head, smiling, and then savagely shoved her hair out of her face. “I’ve got to work. Here’s my lunch.” She lifted a bag of cookies halfway out of her purse.

“Cookies?”

“More ridicule, really?”

“No, I’m a fan.”

“Well, thank you. I’m honored.”

“I was referring to the cookies.”

“Geezum.” Hand up, across, hair, down.

“There’s a lot of integrity there,” I continued. “Take Keebler, for example. Still running the show from a hollow tree in Middle Earth after like ten centuries? That takes honor. I’m sure the Chinese could bake those cookies a lot cheaper than those unionized dwarfs.”

“Elves.”

“I defer to your connoisseurship. You win.”

“Oh, yeah? What do I win?”

“Lunch.”

“I
can’t,
” she said.

“Things were going so well. Come on. Coffee.”

“Geezum. What’s the downside of all this persistence?”

“Aggression, drunken rages, recklessly impulsive behavior, yelling. You know. The standard gamut. Come on, catch me on a good day.”

“That’s outrageous.”

BUT THREE HOURS
later we were west of Bonny Haven, entangled on the backseat of her rental Impala in an empty parking lot at the head of a trail leading up and into the dunes. The lot had been cleared of snow haphazardly and half the spaces were buried under an enormous pile of it that the plow had pushed into the shape of a hill. I had one hand under her sweater cupped around her small breast. With the other I lightly gripped the back of her head while I kissed her. The engine was idling and the heater was going full blast.

“I’m not usually in this position,” she said.

“Well, me neither. It’s pretty roomy back here, though.”

“I mean I don’t usually do this.”

“Well, that’s different, I guess.”

Not that there really had been any question of what we were going to do. We’d gotten into her car and, following my directions, she’d driven us up into Manitou, where we wound around lakes and farmland on meandering county highways. On 667 we were forced to back up when we came upon a tree that had fallen into the roadway, and that was how we’d come to make a right turn and follow the road to Noonanville, where we arrived at the bridge dividing Bonny Lake from Little Bonny Lake, both icily brilliant under the bluest of afternoon skies, and crossed it to head west toward the dunes, the highest of them, bright with snow and buff-colored patches of exposed sand, towering above the peninsula. I’d directed her to pull into the small lot on some forgotten pretext.