Lake Country (16 page)

Yet it was only then, in that moment, standing there at Hal’s place, twenty feet of weather-beaten dock between the two of them, that Mike believed he finally understood the guy.

“I think it’s just you,” he said.

Toby Lunden kept thinking that this time two years ago he’d been turning down a 3M engineering scholarship to the University of Illinois based on his math SATs.

He’d never had any plans to go to college, in Illinois or anywhere else; school bored him stiff, and by that time he was already earning more dough in a year than his old man and his stepmom combined. The truth was he’d only taken the test in the first place to get his guidance counselor, Mr. Fairchild, the hell off his case.

Then the Super Bowl took care of that for him by February anyway, when Fairchild ended up into Toby for two grand and some change. When that scholarship letter had come in the mail, Toby tossed it in the trash and moved on.

Now he was starting to think maybe he regretted that decision. For once in his life—maybe the first time ever—Toby was starting to think that maybe he wasn’t such a whiz kid after all.

“Well, well,” Bryce said. The first thing he’d said in five minutes. “Well, well, well.”

Toby sat behind the wheel and didn’t dare say anything.

It was two in the morning. Other than a quick stop in Sauk Rapids for gas and Red Bull, they’d been on the road heading northwest ever since leaving St. Paul. Fifteen miles back they’d left the state highway; five miles back they’d left the county road; two miles back, they’d lost their phone signal in the heavy timber, hence losing their map, but Bryce had memorized the trip by then. Finally, a mile ago, they’d come upon the rocky lane that dove off into the woods.

Bryce made Toby kill the headlights, then the running lights. By the final quarter mile, Toby had been creeping along by nothing but the feel of crushed rock under his tires, the occasional bright glimpse of the moon through the canopy of trees over their heads. At last, they’d found the spot they’d been looking for.

And now they sat here, at the edge of a grassy clearing deep in the woods, Toby waiting for Bryce to say something else.

What he said was “You can turn the lights back on now.”

Toby followed instructions numbly as Bryce undid his seat belt, grabbed Toby’s phone, and climbed out of the truck. The Navigator’s high beams flooded the vacant grass lot in front of them, where the lane bulbed into a little turnaround backstopped by a big lake-blue real estate sign. The sign said:

Bryce walked around the front of the truck, into the glare of the headlights, stopping somewhere near the middle of the turnaround. He stood there with his feet planted, arms crossed, rock dust swirling around him in the beams, as if he’d poofed into the spot like a magician. He stared at the sign so long without wavering that Toby imagined him setting it on fire with his eyes for his opening trick.

After a while, Bryce broke posture and walked up to the sign. He stooped down and lifted the lid of an all-weather brochure box attached to the bottom corner of the sign. Bryce pulled a brochure and stood in the lights. He looked at the brochure, then flipped it over and glanced at the back. Then he looked at Toby’s phone in his other hand. He raised it up in the air. Held it this way and that.

Finally he lowered his arms and straightened his spine. Rolled his neck. Rolled his shoulders.

He walked back to the truck. Toby had another powerful urge to throw the thing in reverse and peel out of there, spraying rocks for cover all the way back up the lane, but of course he just sat and waited until Bryce climbed into his seat.

Bryce’s good mood had dissolved. When he closed his door, and the dome light went out, the atmosphere inside the truck seemed to close in like a thundercloud.

Bryce sat quietly for a minute. He smelled different.
Hot
was the only way Toby could think to describe it. The guy actually smelled hot. Like an electric motor. A fuse burning. The lightning inside the thundercloud, waiting to strike.

“I gotta hand it to the old fucker,” he finally said. “Hard right down to the core, wasn’t he?”

Toby said, “You mean this isn’t the place?” He heard how it sounded. Bryce had warned him about his mouth before.

But after driving all this way for nothing, he didn’t care anymore. Money or no money. Thinking about that barkeeper back in St. Paul made him feel sick and small. It made him feel like a bad person. Jesus, he was only a numbers guy. How had he ended up here?

Bryce turned his head and looked at him. Toby tried to meet his eyes and stand his ground, but he couldn’t. He tried to keep his heart from pounding in his throat, but he couldn’t do that either.

He guessed he cared more than he wanted to.

“Look at us,” Bryce said then. His tone was surprisingly easygoing all of a sudden. “Land of ten thousand lakes, and here we are, stuck looking for one.”

“Yeah,” Toby said. He tried to sound easygoing too. It didn’t work. “Talk about odds, huh?”

“Hey, stupid question,” Bryce said. “But you seem like a technology guy. I don’t suppose there’s a chance you carry a satellite unit on board. You know, like a backup? Just in case?”

Toby shook his head.

“Garmin? Magellan? TomTom? Anything along those lines?”

“Sorry,” Toby said.

“It was a long shot,” Bryce said. He placed Toby’s useless phone gently on the padded console between
them. “And if we looked all around, would we by any chance find a paper map on board the vehicle?”

Toby sighed.

“Possibly a road atlas?” Bryce said. “Something from the Rand McNally family of publications?”

Toby could feel himself shrinking in his seat. He forced himself to sit up straighter. “That’s what the phone is for,” he said.

“Ah.” Bryce looked out the windshield at the realtor’s sign standing broad and bright in the headlight beams.
Welcome to Mussel Shores!
After a minute, he looked around the inside of the car and said, “It’s funny that we’re sitting here in something called a Navigator. Isn’t it?”

Toby said nothing.

Bryce looked at him and smiled. “Isn’t that just classic?”

Something in his voice caused Toby to grope for a response out of reflex. But something else told him that it would be better if he kept his mouth closed.

“Drive me to a town,” Bryce said.

A few months after he’d been home, when he could drive himself places and get around using a cane, Mike Barlowe went to visit Lily Morse at her house in West St. Paul. He hadn’t known her son, Evan, as well as he’d known some of the other guys in the company, but he had a few stories he could tell her, and he thought she might like to hear them.

It had turned out to be one of the most unbearably depressing afternoons of Mike’s entire woebegone life. Lily Morse could not have been kinder or more welcoming. She couldn’t have seemed more appreciative of his visit. Her house couldn’t have seemed emptier or quieter, and the whole time he was there, looking at the framed portraits of Evan Morse and his sister and his father on the mantel, Mike couldn’t help feeling like a flagrant obscenity in their midst.

She had lost so much, Lily Morse. By contrast, Mike had never even known his own birth mother, who’d fled St. John’s Hospital while his cord was still wet, and if she’d ever wondered what had become of him, he’d never heard word about it. But here was a woman who obviously would have given anything to have her son again, even for a minute, and it had felt
like some kind of cruel joke to Mike that he should be the one sitting there with her instead.

Lily Morse had cooked him dinner and insisted that he take home leftovers. At the door, after she’d thanked him again for coming, after they’d said their goodbyes, she touched his face with the warm palm of her hand, looked him up and down, and said, “Honey, do you need anything?”

“Yeah,” Mike had said, smiling. “A mom like you.”

He’d meant it appreciatively, something to end the afternoon on a lighthearted note, but it came out sounding heavy and awkward.

Because he had no mother, and Lily Morse had no son, and neither one of them could do a damned thing about it.

Her eyes had welled up then, for the first time since he’d arrived, and she couldn’t speak anymore after that. She squeezed his hands and let him go. Mike limped down her front steps and drove away and hadn’t been in contact with her since.

He’d thought about Lance Corporal Morse often enough since that afternoon. At his lowest, Mike used to play a sort of self-pitying game with himself—wondering what Morse would have made of his life by now if their luck had been reversed. It would have been something, the way Mike imagined it. Something successful and good. The kind of life any guy who deserved a second chance would have made.

Mike wanted to be that guy himself. He truly did.

But for whatever reason, whatever deficiency in his character, he just didn’t seem to have what it took.

He’d done a little roofing before joining the service, but the knee never healed like the doctors said it
should, and you didn’t see a lot of guys climbing ladders with canes. He knew law enforcement liked a military background, and he knew some guys who’d gone that route. But they didn’t tend to let you carry guns for a living when you had a PTSD diagnosis on your medical discharge.

And that hadn’t really mattered to Mike anyway. He’d already carried a gun for a living. He had no plans ever to do it again.

Post-traumatic stress disorder. If that’s what they called insomnia, night terrors, mood swings, depression, and the inability to tolerate other human beings, then Mike guessed it was what he had. They had programs through the VA Center and for a while he tried going in, but it all seemed like a bunch of bullshit, so he stopped. Whiskey worked better than the pills they gave anyway, and after a couple of years the nightmares tapered off on their own. Life went on.

Little by little Mike started holding down jobs again. He picked up a decent gig for a time with a local outfit doing snow removal in the winter, riding around on lawn mowers in the summer. As the leg got stronger, he got on with Deakins framing houses and building decks. He learned how to drink enough to sleep through the night without dreaming—at least, not too often—but not so much that he missed work the next day. At least, not too often.

But he’d lost track of pretty much everybody he’d known before he enlisted by then. None of his old buddies understood him anymore, and Mike sure as hell didn’t understand them. He’d met a few girls, but trying to manage a relationship with any one of them
was more than he could take. He kept up with some of the guys from his unit through email, a few phone calls here and there, and he’d heard through the grapevine that Darryl Potter had gone a little high and right since returning stateside. He’d tried to reach out, but nothing much had come of it.

Eventually he got word from the Philippines—where the 4/8 had been sent to help pull villagers out of a mud slide—that Darryl had been served the Big Chicken Dinner he’d apparently been ordering for a while. Bad Conduct Discharge, in command parlance. Fighting and drugs primarily, according to what Mike was told.

Whatever the official charges came to, they’d amounted to the same thing in the end: no medals, no benefits, eighteen months in the brig. Take your coalmining ass back to West Virginia.

The fish get big in Minnesota
, Mike had written him in a letter. A proper letter, made out of paper, sent with a stamp through the United States mail.
You know you’ve got a place to stay if you ever need one
.

He’d heard nothing in reply.

Nothing, that was to say, until one hard gray subzero morning in the middle of January, when Darryl Potter showed up breathing clouds on Mike’s snow-packed doorstep and said, “You could have told me it got so motherfucking cold up here.”

Even then Mike had sensed he was opening the door to trouble. He could see it all over the guy, from the filth on his clothes to that faraway look in his eyes. He’d had no hat, Darryl. No gloves, no car, no story. Only his rucksack on his shoulder and the
clothes on his back, standing at the end of a ragged trail of boot prints in the snow.

Christ, it had been good to see him.

They carried a canoe of their own from the shed down to the water and paddled across the narrow part of the lake. Mike sat up front with the spotlight. Darryl manned an oar in the stern. He was terrible at it and had to stop and rest before they were halfway across.

“You know we could just drive around,” he said.

“We could,” Mike agreed. “Except that’s what
you’re
going to do.”

“How’s that?”

“After you take me across,” Mike said. He wanted to pick up the girl’s trail as nearly as he could to where she’d landed, and he knew it would be easier to do that by following in her tracks than by working backward from the other side. But he didn’t particularly feel like explaining himself to Darryl. “You’re going to paddle back, take the truck, and wait for me at the lake road.”

“Oh,” Darryl said.

Mike scanned the tree line with the spotlight, reestablishing their bearing. He said, “Any other questions?”

“Think I’m clear, Sarge.”

“Then paddle,” Mike said.

As they splashed and wobbled their way to the middle of the lake, Mike thought of Darryl’s .45 digging into the small of his back. He reached around, pulled the gun out of his waistband, and tossed it overboard.
The gun hit the water with a plop and sank into the dark.

Darryl said, “What was that?”

Mike shrugged. “Probably a fish.”

There was silence behind him for a moment. Then Darryl said, “Hey, Mike?”

“Yep.”

“For what it’s worth, that fish wasn’t loaded.”