The Cavanaugh Quest (23 page)

North of Duluth, having dropped down to the lake’s valley, the temperature fell off twenty degrees and you began to feel the wilderness around you instead of people. Off to your right, Lake Superior chopped itself to pieces, wicked and icy in the wind, and the woods and raw fields and taconite plants made something ominous of the landward side. The sun dimmed and the white glow blurred, grew murky and gray and plaintive. The little towns hung on the rock ledge that disappeared abruptly into the lake. The streets were potholed and the children in the playgrounds wore quilted jackets already and kicked at footballs. The cars at the chipped curbs were muddy and old and sagged on lifeless springs and roadside taverns looked like polished log cabins with red neon signs. A big mining town, with dreadful black pyramids crisscrossed by catwalks, looked prosperous for an instant but you whisked by too fast, saw the ramshackle quality behind the Veneer of flashy motels and executives’ homes. It wasn’t deep woods and it wasn’t city; it was that dirty, gnawed half thing that scuttled nervously in between, looting and despoiling the land at one end; spewing out jobs and salaries at the other end. Hobson’s choice.

I pushed the Porsche on through the afternoon, burrowing deeper into the gray, like a man in a tunnel, feeling the north tightening around me, collapsing in on me. I’d never felt it quite so strongly before, never felt the intimidation. It could have been my imagination; it could have been the peculiar, muffled quality the day had taken on. It could have been my mission.

Matt Munro was singing the song from
The Quitter Memorandum,
a sorrowful song, and I’d heard it a thousand times. I joined him in a fervent duet as I swept past the black pyramids and out along the lake once again. I was following the long angling drive up the lake and my eyes kept being pulled toward the whitecaps, the sailboats thrashing recklessly among them, ignoring danger, because summer was almost over; time was running out.

I reached Grande Rouge about three o’clock and pulled over by a green strip of parkland which lay between the main street, which was the highway, and the rocky beach. The wind was cold and the only people in sight were wandering around the gas pumps at the Standard station. Two brokendown, wheelless cars from the late forties lay like ancient ruins beside the station and a mud-caked station wagon was being serviced at the pump.

Named for a towering outcropping of reddish rock just behind and a hundred feet above the town, Grande Rouge struck me as a lousy place to start a vacation but it was the weather. In the sunshine or decked out in shimmering snow, it would have a certain charm. Gray with a faint mist slipping quietly in off the lake didn’t do it justice.

I left the car where it was and walked across the highway to the Chat and Chew Cafe, a white frame building with a picture window and the obligatory red neon sign. There was a counter along one wall, tables in the middle, and booths along the other wall, a series of coat hooks on the wall, an authentic Wurlitzer freestanding jukebox, a glassed-in case of pie, cake, and doughnuts, and crockery three-quarters of an inch thick. It smelled like hot coffee and fresh baking and maybe Grande Rouge wasn’t so bad after all. I sat down on a stool and had coffee and a piece of apple pie with a moist, rich crust that crumbled and fell apart at the touch of a fork.

The counterwoman, who had the proprietary air of an owner, leaned on the stainless-steel counter across from me and wiped her hands on a clean towel. She was about fifty and had a nice, tight hairdo from Ruth’s next door and smelled of a little too much face powder. She looked at me and grinned out of the corner of her mouth. “Busy, busy, busy,” she said.

“Well, you can’t expect much from the middle of the afternoon,” I said.

“Summer’s gone, that’s the reason,” she said. “Just up and left about ten days ago, been cold ever since. Hasn’t been above sixty. It’ll be this way—slow and gettin’ colder—all through the winter. Makes you want to hibernate. Or go south.” She made a little clicking sound. “Am I right, Jack?”

A man of about her age, wearing a blue policeman’s windbreaker, heavy dark-blue whipcord pants, and a revolver strapped into a holster on his hip, moved among the tables, coming toward us. He had sad eyes and a wrinkled, weatherbeaten face. He was carrying about forty pounds too much gut. “How’s that, Dolly?”

“Summer’s gone. We’re in for a long winter.”

We all looked out the picture window. There was nothing moving but the surface of the lake. A few drops of rain spattered hurriedly on the glass.

“ ’Bout ten days ago,” Jack said, rubbing his chin, “got colder’n a witch’s tit. Summer just shut down.”

“Just what I said,” she said.

“Where you headed?” The policeman was looking down at me.

“Here,” I said. “Right near here, anyway.”

He sat down two stools away. “Might as well have a cup of coffee.” He sighed and unzipped the windbreaker. “Sure ain’t no crime wave to stop. And Dolly’s coffee beats watchin’ Leo pump gas over at the station. Quiet little town,” he added, watching the steam rise off the coffee as she poured it. “Hell,” he said conversationally, “there ain’t nothing
near
Grande Rouge, not so far as I can tell anyways.” He looked up expectantly, his eyes on me. “That apple pie pretty good, is it?” I nodded. “You sure you’re in the right town?” He chuckled.

“Oh, I’m sure,” I said. “But I’ve got to drive back up into the hills a few miles. My dad and some friends used to have a cabin, a lodge actually, pretty good size, back up in the woods. They used to come up here and fish, hunt … They tell me it’s still there and it still belongs to them. I thought I’d like to see it.”

“Sure, I remember those fellas, huntin’ and fishin’, fellas, used to come up from the Cities. Hell, back in the thirties and forties, when my dad was the police hereabouts—you say your dad was one of ’em, eh?”

“For a while anyway. Then he moved away.”

“So now you’re taking a little vacation in the old lodge.” He shoveled some pie into his mouth, dribbling crumbs on the counter.

“Quite a bunch they were,” Dolly said. “Used to come into town for bait, have some beers, raise a little hell. Pretty damn near tore up Helen Little Feather’s … ah … house of ill repute one night, or so I heard. That’s, oh, fifty miles north of here, but news travels fast, I always say.”

“Well, Helen had to expect that from time to time, catering to these city boys out on the loose in the woods. That and the damned woodchoppers. …” Jack grinned at me. “Your daddy’s bunch knew how to have a good time, that’s something.”

“I don’t think he was in on that,” I said.

“No offense, mister,” Dolly said quickly. “Just remembering the old days and all. Long time ago, thirty, forty years anyways.”

“I wasn’t taking offense,” I said while she filled my cup again. “As a matter of fact, I’d like to hear anything you can remember about that group of men. I’m a writer and I’d like to do a piece, a story, on what it was like up here in the old days …”

“Nostalgia,” Dolly said firmly. “It’s what they call nostalgia, Jack, real big now, they say.”

“Anything like neuralgia?” Jack said, guffawing suddenly. “My God, Dolly, you don’t have to tell me what nostalgia is. I’m the town cop, not the town retard!”

“Do you remember much about it?” I asked. The coffee maker hissed. A Regulator wall clock ticked beneath the pressed-tin ceiling. It was very peaceful. I ate another forkful of apple pie. “Anything?”

“Well, I’d have to sit and recollect a bit,” Dolly said, eyes far away, as if she’d already begun.

“Course, there was that business about the housekeeper, or whatever the devil she was—Rita, Rita Hook, that was her name. Old Ted Hook’s wife.” Jack peered into the bottom of his coffee cup, stirring the remains. “I was about eighteen, nineteen, maybe twenty, sort of helping out my dad, and there was this funny business out at the lodge.” He rubbed his chin again. “I couldn’t make head nor tail out of it, my dad couldn’t neither, hell, nobody could.” He lapsed into silence.

“Well, what was it? Don’t leave me hanging …” I was forcing a smile.

“Not real clear what did happen out there, y’see. But Ted Hook’s wife, Rita, went out there one winter night and damned if she never came back! You remember that, Dolly?”

“She ran off with somebody,” Dolly said matter-of-factly without bothering to look up from a huge stainless steel kettle. “Married to old Ted, him an invalid, she just got herself all excited and ran off with some fella … Plain as day.”

“Nobody from Grande Rouge, though,” Jack said. “Nobody else showed up missing.”

“But what’s her running off got to do with the lodge?”

“I said what.” Jack grinned. “She went out there one night, dead o’winter, to check the water pipes or something, some bit of maintenance, told old Ted she’d be home later or come back in the morning if she had to stay overnight … You understand I’m just getting this off the top of my head, mister, and I may not have some of it quite right …”

“The place was deserted, then? Nobody from the club, the men, none of them were there?”

“Not so far as I know. That spaghetti for supper, Dolly?”

“Yep, sure is. She leaned back and shifted the kettle onto an electric grid which glowed red. “She never came back. Ted Hook never heard another word from her. Never one word. Just left him.”

“Left him pretty well fixed.” Jack was lighting a cigar with a Zippo lighter which had a leaping-fish emblem stuck on the side. He exhaled an enormous cloud of smoke, engulfing his head. “Old Ted built a motel with a roadhouse, been living off it ever since—”

“He’s still alive?” I asked.

“More or less,” Dolly said. “He’s been in a bad way ever since the war, the Great War, that is. Old Ted, he must be near eighty. But he could tell you about that night. If you really want to know. He could probably tell you as much about your dad’s club as anybody left around here. Because of Rita working out there, I mean. You could go see him, he’s a great one for going over old times. Real talker.” She opened a huge commercial can of tomato sauce, pitched the lid into a waste can, and dumped the sauce into a kettle.

“I could just drop in on him?”

“Sure. It’s just called Ted’s, on the north side of town. He’s usually at his table in the roadhouse.”

“There was another guy, too. That old Indian guide—well, he wasn’t so old then, I guess.” Jack picked up his peaked policeman’s hat from the counter and stood, zipping the windbreaker all the way up to his collar. “The men at the lodge, they had this Indian guide, Willy I think his name was, my dad knew him … I just remember him riding a bicycle around town. He may still be around somewhere …”

“He died,” Dolly said. “A while back. He’s dead.”

“Well, I’d better go pound my beat,” Jack said. “Nice to meet you, Mr. …”

“Cavanaugh,” I said. “Paul Cavanaugh.” We shook hands. “Thanks for the information. Very helpful.”

“Enjoy your stay.” He turned at the door. “Say, do you know how to get to the lodge? It’s sort of twisty. You’ve got to know your way or you’ll wind up nowhere.”

“I don’t really.”

He told me in detail, went over it twice. “Maybe you should leave a trail of bread crumbs.” He burst forth with a guffaw.

I went back to the counter and paid for the pie and coffee, thirty-five cents. I left a quarter tip beside the coffee cup.

“No tipping,” Dolly said, stirring the spaghetti sauce with a long wooden spoon. “Not for strangers who pass a quiet afternoon.” She smiled and I hoped her husband, if there was a husband, appreciated her good heart. “Go talk to Ted. He’ll bend your ear, bet on it. And if you feel like it come on back for spaghetti. It’s not bad spaghetti for Grande Rouge, Minnesota.”

It was still misting when I walked back across the highway. Dark clouds were piling up behind the red rock and the scraggly trees on its crown looked like dancers cavorting at the end of a Fellini movie. The lights were on at the gas station and a white lantern flickered through the mist, obscuring the lake. I got into the Porsche and sat staring at the warmth in the window of the Chat and Chew, behind the red neon. A block farther on, Jack was rocking on his heels, hands in hip pockets, talking with a white-coated pharmacist in the doorway of a Rexall drugstore. It was nearly five o’clock and night was slipping down like a hood over Grande Rouge

TED
, in huge neon lettering, hung in the darkness over the water and I swung down off the highway onto gravel, moving slowly toward the lake. The moist air was full of water smell, the chill blowing landward. It was a long, low timbered cabin with a few touches, like leaded glass windows above the shrubbery, uncommon to the north shore. Torches burned in wrought-iron hardware beside the front door. The motel, softly floodlit in blue, arched outward around a bay to the left. There were several late-model cars parked by the door but no signs of life.

The roadhouse was expensively rustic with just the beginning of the weekend crowd lapping at the bar. I smelled frying shrimp and beer. A center aisle divided the restaurant from the tavern and straight back there was a long open grill with a guy in a white hat moving huge slabs of steak around on the spokes over the glowing coals. At the rear of the building, on both restaurant and tavern sides, there were long glass bays looking out into the void where the lake was supposed to be. I went to the bar and asked the young man polishing glasses if Ted was around.

He nodded toward the bay window. “He’s always in the same place,” he said with a touch of bitterness. “You can hear the wheezing. Just follow it and you’ll be there.” He made a sullen face and pointedly turned away. He looked too young to be so nasty.

The old man was sitting in a wheelchair facing the lake. He wore a flat golfer’s hat and a heavy woolen overcoat with a scarf high on the back of his neck and covering the chin he’d tucked down into its folds. Round spectacles perched on the bony ridge of his nose and the kid was right: All I had to do was find the wheezing. It rasped, in his chest and in his throat, and I’d heard that kind of agony once before, escaping from an old professor I’d had who’d been gassed in France during the Great War. It was an unmistakable sound.