Trickster's Point (12 page)

C
ork stood at the edge of the ridge and watched his son paddle across the broad gray of the lake. It was like watching a small bird fly alone into a great threatening sky. He felt a deep sorrow in having to send Stephen on that lonely mission. No parent’s child should have had to go through what Stephen, in his brief sixteen years, had already been asked to endure. Cork felt an abiding loneliness as well, but this was for himself, because the tone of his son’s comment in parting hadn’t escaped his notice. Corcoran O’Connor attracted death the way dogs attracted fleas, a phenomenon that his son clearly recognized and just as clearly disapproved of. Cork thought every man wanted to be understood by his children, but—he looked toward the dead man, the second he’d kept company with in as many days—how could anyone understand this?

He turned to a duty that, across the decades of his life, had become depressingly familiar: He investigated the corpse. He didn’t touch anything, just looked the body over carefully.

The dead hunter was Caucasian, with a powerful build. He wore a full camouflage suit, insulated for cold weather, the kind of clothing worn when stalking rather than hunting from a blind. His boots were Danner, expensive but well worn. His rifle was a Marlin 336C, a common make, popular for hunting deer. It was scoped with a Leupold, which was what Cork, when rifle
hunting, usually mounted on his own Remington. Cork bent close to the crusted eye socket and studied the entry wound. Probably the hunter had died instantly, or almost so. And, probably, he’d been caught by surprise, otherwise, considering the Marlin, he’d have had the advantage. Cork wished he knew if the hunter had been murdered before Jubal Little or after, and how the two killings were connected, because it was clear that they were. The fletching on the arrow that had killed the man was the same pattern Cork used on his own arrows, the same as on the arrow that had killed Jubal Little.

Cork would have loved to have been able to go through the hunter’s pockets for a clue to his identity, but he knew better. He would have to wait, maybe hours, before the crime scene team from the Tamarack County Sheriff’s Department made another visit to that remote location. He couldn’t begin to imagine what Marsha Dross and Ed Larson and the BCA people would make of this. Hell, he had no idea what to make of it himself.

He was about to see if he could track the route of the hunter’s approach, hoping that he might be able to determine if the killer had stalked him there, when movement at the base of Trickster’s Point caught his eye. Cork knelt quickly to hide himself and watched as a figure slowly circled the great pinnacle. It was a man, he was pretty sure, although he couldn’t be entirely certain because the head was down and the face hidden beneath the bill of a cap. The figure wore a blaze orange vest, a wise precaution during hunting season in order not to be mistaken for a deer. Every so often, he would pause and bend and scrutinize the ground, then move slowly on. He spent a good deal of time at the place where Jubal Little had breathed his last, then his eyes seemed to follow an invisible line that led to the base of the ridge. Cork laid himself fully on the ground and continued his vigil.

The man walked to the ridge and began to ascend, but gradually. He spent a while in the small natural box that Stephen had discovered and that Cork was certain Jubal Little’s murderer had
used. He continued to climb, pausing in the same places Cork had paused when he’d found the displaced stones and the boot print. He crested the ridge and studied the ground, just as Cork and Stephen had, then he eyed the aspens, went to the breach in the gold wall of captured leaves, and followed the trail. Cork finally stood up and moved to block his way before he entered the tiny clearing.

The man looked up, startled.

“Who are you?” Cork demanded.

“Officer John Berglund. U.S. Border Patrol.” He reached inside his vest and brought out ID. “Who are you?”

“Cork O’Connor.”

Berglund, who’d looked grim and official until then, smiled, as if the name was not unfamiliar to him. He appeared to be in his late fifties, medium height and weight, black-rimmed glasses, a friendly face. But there was something penetrating about his eyes, as if he knew things about you that you’d rather nobody knew. He offered his hand.

Cork hesitated in accepting the offer. “What are you doing here?”

“Sheriff Dross asked me to come out and look things over.”

That explained a good deal. In law enforcement circles, the agents of the Border Patrol were legendary for their tracking ability. Cork finally shook the man’s hand, but by then Berglund was more interested in the dead guy at Cork’s back.

“What’s going on?” the agent asked. It was a true question, no hint of an accusation.

“Found him here like this,” Cork replied.

Berglund walked to the corpse, knelt, and while he studied it, said, “I saw evidence of several people climbing that ridge. I imagine you were one of them.”

“And my son,” Cork replied. “When we found the body, I sent him back to call the sheriff’s department.”

“This man’s been dead quite a while. Think he came up the ridge, too?”

“My guess would be no.”

“What, then? A hunter who found himself at the wrong place at the wrong time?”

“If he’s a hunter,” Cork said, “where’s his blaze orange?”

Minnesota law required that anyone not hunting from a stand wear blaze orange clothing above the waist as a safety precaution.

Berglund thought a moment. “Maybe already got his limit and was poaching?”

“Maybe. What exactly did Sheriff Dross ask you to do?”

Berglund stood up and scanned the ground around him. “Pretty much the same thing you’re probably here to do. She said she believed you weren’t responsible for Little’s death, and she wanted me to see if I could find any trace of someone else out here, someone you wouldn’t necessarily have seen. She said she thought her people had done a good job with the crime scene itself, but she wanted me to look a little farther afield.”

Marsha, God bless her,
Cork thought.

Berglund began to walk slowly to the east, moving among the aspens, following the crown of the ridge, eyes sweeping earth covered with aspen leaves that had fallen in the weeks before and were soggy from the rain. He went out about fifty yards, then returned.

“Two men came in this way,” he said. “Only one went back.”

“Did they come together?”

“Can’t tell.”

“Think you can follow the trail far enough to figure out how they approached Trickster’s Point?”

“As I understand it, there’s just the one Forest Service trail, and that’s the one I took from the trailhead back at the county road. Saw evidence of foot traffic along the way, but nothing that appeared recent. How’d you get here?”

“Canoed across the lake. It’s the shortest route.”

Berglund nodded. “We might be able to assume that this man and whoever killed him both approached the area in a way that assured they wouldn’t be seen.”

“Can you confirm it?”

Berglund considered. “I guess I can try. You want in on this?”

Cork shook his head. “I’m going to stay with the body, make sure it isn’t disturbed.”

Berglund shrugged as if to say “Whatever,” turned his back, and began to move east along the ridge crown, his nose aimed toward the ground like that of a bloodhound.

Once again, Cork was left alone with the dead and in spitting distance of Trickster’s Point.

*   *   *

The first time he’d been in that situation, he was just shy of seventeen. Not much older than Stephen was now.

It was early October, deep into football season. The Aurora High Wolves were at the top of their division that year, taken there mostly by the strong arm and reliable leadership of Jubal Little. Talk of a state title was on everyone’s lips. But no team is built entirely on one man, and that year there were several fine players, among them Cork O’Connor, who was a junior and played end, and Donner Bigby—Bigs—in his senior year, at fullback. Between Jubal and Bigs there was no love lost. Since that first meeting in Grant Park when Jubal had stepped in to thwart Bigby’s cruelty toward Willie Crane, there’d been a kind of charge building between them, like a summer storm you knew was on the way, inevitable, and even though it was still beyond the horizon, you could feel the buzz of the electricity everywhere around you. On the football field, Jubal was all business and didn’t appear to let his own feelings toward Bigs get in the way of what was best for the team. Bigs wasn’t so magnanimous; when a pass went awry or a play call was questionable, he was given to deriding his quarterback. If Donner Bigby hadn’t been an unstoppable locomotive in the backfield, his mouth might have got him benched for much of the season.

The homecoming game that year was against the Virginia
High School Blue Devils, a team whose win record was only one game back of Aurora’s. It was played in a downpour, on a field that was more mud than grass. The wet conditions seriously hampered both Jubal’s accuracy in passing and his receivers’ ability to hold on to the ball. So the game was played mostly on the ground and was dominated by the rhino charges of Donner Bigby. As the fourth quarter neared its end, the score was tied at 13–13. The Blue Devils had the ball and had pushed deep into Wolves territory. The drive stalled on the twenty-two-yard line, and the Blue Devils lined up for a field goal attempt. The kick went wide to the right. All that remained was for the Wolves to run out the clock—five or six running plays, or three and a good long punt—and the game would end in a tie, with Aurora’s lead in the division secure.

In the huddle, Jubal Little called a fullback sweep right. The play was good for a short gain. He called a gut left. Bigs plowed ahead for four yards on that one. The team huddled. Their jerseys, once a glorious white and gold, were the color of pig slop and hung wet and heavy against their pads. Their bare legs and arms were so mud-crusted that you couldn’t see the color of their skin or the bruising there. The air was chill, and their huffed breaths clouded the center of the circle that their bodies, shoulder pad against shoulder pad, had formed.

Jubal looked them over. His eyes were the color of his muddied uniform, and the whites of them, under the glare of the field lights, seemed to glow. He said, “You want to settle for a tie? Or do you want to beat these bastards?”

“I want to grind their nuts under my cleats,” Bigs said without hesitation. “Just give me the ball.”

“We all together on this?” Jubal asked his teammates.

“Yeah,” they said and “You bet.”

Jubal’s eyes fell on Cork. “If I get it to you, can you hold on to it?”

“What are you doing?” Bigby said.

Cork’s heart was stomping around in his chest, and he
couldn’t swallow, nor could he speak. But he could still move, and he gave Jubal a decisive nod.

“Little, I’m telling you—” Bigs began.

“Ends, five and out. Quick right fake, on two,” Jubal called. “Let’s go.”

They broke from the huddle. Cork saw the Blue Devils crowding the line of scrimmage, expecting a run, but their safeties were in a prevent formation, defending against the long pass. The area between, as Jubal had probably expected, was wide open. Cork set himself on the line, drier of mouth than he’d ever remembered. Jubal crouched under center and called out the count. The ball was snapped, and Cork gave a quick head fake to the end who guarded him, then broke toward the sideline. He looked back over his right shoulder, just in time to see the ball spiral toward him with a grace he would never forget. He opened his palms like cradles, and then it was in his hands, and he wrapped his arms around it and locked it against his chest and turned up-field. He saw the two safeties moving to intercept him and could sense, galloping hard at his back, the end who, for a fateful fraction of a second, had bought Cork’s feint. Cork ran as he’d never run before. At midfield, the nearest safety angled toward him, and Cork veered straight at the kid. An instant before they collided, he danced right and spun and shed the arm tackle, and ran on. At the thirty-yard line, he heard a grunt as the end behind him launched himself in a last, desperate effort to grasp an ankle. Cork stumbled but didn’t go down. He saw the goal line, twenty yards ahead, and the second safety running an arc that would cut him off well before he scored. There was no feeling left in his legs, no strength. He ran on wooden stumps that barely supported him and that had no trickery left in them at all. He would, he knew absolutely, come up short.

And then a figure flew past him, fleet as a deer or the dream of a deer, and a mud-covered body threw a block that toppled the Blue Devil safety, and Cork loped untouched across the goal line, and the game was theirs.

He turned in the end zone and watched Jubal Little disentangle himself from the safety and rise, exhausted. Across a ground as brutalized as a battlefield, their eyes met.

In his life so far, Cork had never known a finer moment. And in that moment, he thought that he would never know a better friend.

*   *   *

The trouble began at the homecoming dance on Saturday night.

The music for the dance was provided by a group who called themselves the Wild Savages. It was Willie Crane’s idea and his energy that had brought the group together; Winona provided most of the vocals. Willie played lead guitar and Indian flute. Two other guys from the rez—Andy Desjarlais and Greg “Hoops” LeBeau, playing bass guitar and drums, respectively—completed the ensemble. They did covers of recent tunes—“Good Lovin’,” “Hanky Panky,” “Surfer Girl,” “Hang on Sloopy”—but they also slipped in some of their own compositions, which tended to rely heavily on Willie’s flute playing and the driving beat of Hoops’s drums, so that an Ojibwe sensibility came through clearly. In the North Country of Minnesota, the Wild Savages had a following and had become a popular choice for school dances.

The dance was held in the high school gymnasium and was a pretty good affair, especially because praise continued to rain down on Cork for winning the game the night before. He knew it hadn’t been just him; it was Jubal’s calling of the play and it was Jubal’s delivery of the ball that had made the difference. But Jubal was content to step aside and let Cork shine in the spotlight. Which was the kind of thing Jubal often did, and not just for Cork. He generously gave away the glory others desperately dreamed of having and shamefully coveted. The reason may have been that glory came to him so easily; but Cork chose to see something Ojibwe in his best friend’s behavior. His generosity of spirit was the kind valued by Henry Meloux and Sam
Winter Moon, and Cork believed that, although Jubal wouldn’t admit it, more and more he was acknowledging and embracing the Indian side of his heritage.