Die a Stranger (2 page)

As I crossed the street, I heard some people laughing as they walked through the front door, ready to hit those slot machines. There were two fountains set in the bay behind the casino. They were both spraying water high into the air, and as I stepped next to Vinnie the white noise drowned out every other sound around us.

“How you holding up?” I said.

He took one quick glance at me and turned back to the water. Dark hair hanging free down his back. Wearing that suit I had seen only once before. At the last funeral, a few days after we brought his brother’s dead body back home from Canada. That day had the common decency to be cold and miserable. That’s the one thing you can say about that day.

“Place is packed,” I said. “Your mother meant a great deal to pretty much everybody.”

Vinnie nodded.

“It’s a lot to deal with all at once,” I said. “I can see why you needed a little break.”

He nodded again.

“Just wanted to check on you. I can leave you alone now.”

“No,” he said, finally speaking. “Stay here for a bit.”

I stood with him for a while, looking out at the water. Then I opened up my little booklet and took one more read through it. I felt like I should say something, but I couldn’t think of one word.

“Why do we do it?” he finally said to me.

“Why do we do what?”

“Why do we go through life every day without even noticing all the things we’re missing?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But you’re right. We shouldn’t take one single day for granted.”

This is the kind of insight you have at a funeral, I thought. Two days later, you’ve already forgotten it—that promise you may have made to yourself, to wake up every day and realize what a gift you’ve been given.

But no, Vinnie seemed to have something else in mind. Something more specific. More troubling.

“All we have is time,” he said. “That’s all we’re given. You ever think about that?”

“Sometimes. Not often enough.”

He turned to face me. His eyes were red. “I’m serious, Alex. This isn’t something you put on a greeting card. This is real. You’re given a certain amount of time on this earth and absolutely nothing else.”

I looked at him. I didn’t try to agree with him. Clearly that wasn’t what he wanted from me.

“You don’t get any back when it’s done,” he said. “You don’t get to do anything over. One shot through and then you’re done.”

“Vinnie, are you okay?”

“The last time, I saw her…” He stopped himself, swallowing hard and looking back out over the water. “She was almost gone. She could barely talk. We were all there, my sisters and me, just standing over her, you know. She looked up at me. You know what she said?”

“What?”

“She said, ‘I’m glad you came back. It’s been so long. Look at your children. Look at how they turned out. I’m so proud of them. I’m so glad we made them together. No matter what else happened, it couldn’t have been all bad.’”

He stopped again, took a deep breath.

“That’s what she said, and she was looking right at me. Right in my eyes. She reached up and took my hand.”

“You mean she thought…”

“That I was my father, yes.”

“Well, okay,” I said. “She was kinda out of it, right? I mean, with the drugs and everything.”

“He’s been gone a long time,” Vinnie said. “But I guess you never forget, huh? What your old husband looks like?”

“No. I don’t imagine.”

“He must have looked just like me, right? If she took one look at me and thought I was him?”

There was an edge to his voice now. I didn’t say anything back. I just waited for him to work this out, whatever it was that was bothering him.

“That’s the thing,” he said. “I don’t even know if I look like him or not. I haven’t seen him since I was like, what, six years old?”

“You’ve got pictures?”

He looked at me again. We were getting into one of those things he rarely talked about.

“If my mother had them, we didn’t see them. She didn’t exactly have his portrait over the fireplace.”

“He’s in prison, right?”

That was as much as I knew, the basic facts of the matter and not much else. I knew it had all happened before I moved up here. Before Vinnie left the reservation and bought the property down the road from my father’s cabins.

“Yes,” Vinnie said. “He got drunk and ran over four people. Three of them died.”

I knew Vinnie had some pretty black-and-white views on drinking. I’m sure this event in his father’s life, even if it had happened years after he left, on the other side of the country, was probably a big part of it. Bottom line, you do not want to get drunk in front of him and attempt to get into a motorized vehicle. Especially if you’re a tribal member. He’ll knock you flat on your back and throw your keys into the bay if he has to.

“He was already long gone by then,” Vinnie said. “This all happened way out West somewhere. A thousand miles away from here. My mother didn’t tell us about it. We had to hear it from one of my aunts.”

These were new details for me. The things he left locked up inside, and probably never would have said at all if not for the sad heart he was carrying around on this one day of his life.

He picked up a rock from the lawn and threw it into the water.

“If he left when you were that young,” I said, “that must have been hard on your mother. Raising all four of you on her own.”

The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like the understatement of the year. If you do a little more math, you realize that this went all the way back to the years BC. Before Casinos. Before the King’s Club opened up just down the street, the first Indian-operated blackjack casino in the country. Before the much bigger Bay Mills Casino, in whose shadow we happened to be standing. Before the jobs and before all of that money to be shared by every member of the community.

There were shacks here, all up and down this road. Little two- and three-room shacks no bigger than my cabin, but filled with entire families. When the casinos came, they tore down the shacks and they even moved a few of them down by the prison, for families of inmates to sleep in when they came up visiting. You can see the shacks lined up there by the road when you drive to the airport, each a monument to the past.

Now it’s all nice split-level ranch houses with vinyl siding and basketball hoops in the driveways. A typical middle-class development, or at least you’d think so if you happened to miss the sign as you drove by it.
WELCOME TO THE BAY MILLS INDIAN COMMUNITY
.

But going back to the old days, when it was one of those shacks and you were happy to have it, and a minimum-wage job that would last all year long if you were lucky. What a hard life that must have been for an Indian woman on her own, raising four young children.

“How’d she do it?” I said. “I can’t imagine.”

“You work,” he said. “You take care of business. One day at a time. That’s what she always said to me.”

“Can’t argue with that,” I said.

“You always watch out for your family.”

That’s the tricky part, I thought. That’s how Vinnie grew up, right here on this reservation, surrounded by his entire extended family, brother and sisters and parents and aunts and uncles and cousins. I’ve been in a house or two here on the rez, so I’ve seen small glimpses of how that must have been. Nobody in your family needs to knock on the door. They just come in, they make some coffee, they sit down, they talk, they argue, they fight, they kiss and make up. Every hour of every day, it’s an earsplitting pandemonium of family all around you. And it’s everybody. That’s the thing. You live here on the rez, everybody is family.

To be surrounded twenty-four hours a day by so many people who care about you, who would gladly lay down their lives for you. I’d last one week. Maybe two. Then I’d lose my mind. I’d have to get the hell out of there, go somewhere far away where I could be by myself for a while. To hear myself think again.

Vinnie had the same impulse, apparently, because that’s exactly what he did. He worked and worked and saved his money, and as soon as he could swing it, he moved off the reservation. He bought the one free lot on my father’s road and built his own cabin there. I can imagine him on the day he put the roof on, the way he must have sat down on his own chair in his own kitchen and breathed the longest sigh of relief in the history of mankind. Finally, some peace. Some silence.

His family never forgave him.

They still loved him, of course. But he carried a mark now. He was different in a way they couldn’t understand. I had a feeling that even Vinnie himself couldn’t explain it. Not really. It was just something he had to do.

Even now, with Vinnie standing here on the edge of the water, away from the crowd of family under the big tent, I could feel at least a dozen sets of eyes on our backs. There’s Vinnie, the wayward son, who moved a full thirty miles down the road to live in his own little house like a hermit. Along with his good buddy Alex, who’s obviously not a good influence. A strange white man who doesn’t need any family, either. Who’s always dragging Vinnie into one mess of trouble after another.

Yeah, even on a day like this, I could feel it. Fair or unfair. Although I suppose that part about dragging Vinnie into trouble was dead accurate.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “This is my mother’s day. I don’t know why I’m thinking about my father. It’s just that, when she thought I was him…”

“Give yourself a break,” I said. “You’re dealing with a lot today.”

“Yeah, well, I probably need to go see some more people now.” The edge was gone from his voice now, replaced by a vague unease. I knew his batteries would be completely drained by the end of this long, hot day. “But I’m glad you came. I appreciate it.”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“There’ll be a sweat tonight. You feel like coming?”

I’d done it before, more than once. You go to cousin Buck’s backyard and you strip down to your underwear, no matter the weather. He’s got the hot rocks piled up in the middle of the hut, with all the old rugs thrown over the top to keep the heat in. He pours the water onto the rocks and the steam rises and fills your lungs. He adds the sage, that old healing medicine, and you feel your whole body releasing like a fist that’s been clenched for too long. I could have used it that day, but something told me to leave Vinnie to his family.

“You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll catch up to you later.”

Of course, I knew “later” would probably be a while. An Ojibwa funeral starts a good four days before the burial, and then keeps going. I had a feeling this one would set a new Bay Mills record.

“I should go back,” he said. But even as I walked away, I could see him still standing there by the water. Alone and apart, with his family and everyone else in plain view but not close enough to touch him.

It was going to be a long week for Vinnie LeBlanc. That much I knew. And this time I couldn’t help him, not one bit.

As I walked back past the tent, I overheard a hundred conversations going on at once. Remembering “Nika.” The last time somebody saw her or talked to her. Something she did one day for somebody else, long ago or just last week. A few yards farther and another conversation, about some inconvenience at the border, how long someone had to wait to cross the bridge. It all sort of caught up to me at once, how many unmistakably Canadian accents I’d been hearing all day without really noticing. But it made sense. Of course they’d come from Canada. There were just as many Ojibwa on the other side of that border, and the border was right
there,
out in the middle of that water, so close you could walk to the other side when it was frozen. I could see Ontario from where we were standing, those windmills turning in the far-off hills.

Of course they’d come, I thought. From miles and miles around.

Some of them Vinnie would know. Most of them would be strangers.

Before I got into my truck, I turned one more time and caught my last glimpse of him. He had finally gathered his nerve and was walking back to the tent.

I kept thinking about him as I drove home. Those thirty miles from the rez to Paradise, on that lonely beautiful road that follows the shoreline, all the way around Whitefish Bay. The weather stayed picture-perfect, like a consolation of pure sunlight on such a sad day. There wasn’t a hint of trouble on the water.

But of course the trouble was there, just below the surface. That cold, cold water. Just ask the crew of the
Edmund Fitzgerald,
all of them still out there, not twenty miles from the safety of land.

No matter how beautiful the day, before you can do anything about it, without any warning at all.

The storm will come.

CHAPTER THREE

A few days passed, and I still hadn’t seen Vinnie again. I figured he was spending time with his family. That seemed totally natural to me, so I didn’t think twice about it. I drove up our road, past his empty cabin. No lights were on. His truck was gone. I kept on going all the way to the end, to the last cabin, to finish my work there. I had a few last pieces of trim to install, and then there was painting to be done on the walls of the kitchen and bathroom, where it wasn’t just the rough wood of the logs. The whole place was finally coming back together again, and it felt strange not to have Vinnie there helping me with these last details. Every time I spilled a drop of paint on the floor I could almost hear him clucking at me. I’d half turn, forgetting for one moment that I was alone.

Summer’s an odd time in the rental business. You get people visiting Tahquamenon Falls and maybe the Shipwreck Museum, but it’s not the same people every year. Not like fall, when it’s the same groups of hunters, as regular as clockwork, some of them going back so many years they can remember renting from my father. Winter is snowmobiles. Or “sledding,” as most people call it up here. Spring has become, believe it or not, birding season. More and more birders coming up every year, to watch the raptors and the shorebirds make their migration north. The birds come across the great expanse of Lake Superior and stop to rest at Whitefish Point. Hawks, owls, harriers, merlins, ospreys. Best of all, eagles. Every single day in the spring, you can see eagles. The ultimate good-luck sign for the Ojibwa. Or so I’m told. In fact, I think it was Vinnie’s mother who told me that.