Thunder Bay (17 page)

“A man come looking for your uncle dis morning,” he finally
began. “I told him Woodrow had gone to his reward and he asked about you. Wants to hire you.”

“I don’t guide anymore.”

“I told him dat. He’s pretty stubborn, dis one.”

“I don’t care.”

“I know it’s hard for you in dese woods. I imagine everywhere you go reminds you of Woodrow. But dis is different, Henry. He wants to go way up nort. Canada.”

Henry began to reel in his line. He was tired of talking to the man.

“I don’t want to go to Canada.”

“You ever been in a airplane, Henry? Dis man, he’s going to fly you up dere. Sounds pretty good.”

“I’m not interested.”

Luukkonen leaned nearer. “Henry, I’m tinking it would be good for you. I’m tinking you need to get away for a while.”

Away.

Away hadn’t occurred to Henry. Away meant the boarding school in Flandreau. Or for Dilsey and his sisters, the school in Wisconsin. Or for his parents and Woodrow and so many others on the rez, away simply meant death.

“Dere’s nutting for you here right now, Henry. Go away for a while. Maybe when you come back, tings will be different.”

The outfitter was right. What was there for him here? What he loved had passed or was passing. Go away, Luukkonen advised. The Finn was offering him a different kind of away than he’d thought of before, one that suddenly and powerfully appealed to Henry.

“All right,” he agreed.

“One ting I didn’t tell you,” Luukkonen said. “Dis man who wants you. You know him. His name is Wellington. Leonard Wellington.”

W
ellington had changed little. He didn’t seem as tall to Henry, who’d grown several inches since their last meeting. His hair was thinner. But he still had a hatchet blade for a nose and a too proud look in his eyes.

Wellington stared at Henry with astonishment.

“Christ, you’ve filled out,” he said. “Left that boy you were a good distance back, eh.” He offered his hand. It was tanned and rough. “I was sorry to hear about your uncle, but awfully glad to have you on the expedition. Luukkonen told me you understood the terms.”

They had been simple. Henry agreed to sign on for as long as necessary at five dollars a week. He was to maintain camp, provide fresh meat and other native food to supplement the supplies, and see to the safety of the expedition members, meaning Wellington and his partner, Carlos Lima. “As long as necessary” was vague, but Henry wasn’t concerned. He didn’t care how long he was gone. And he could already feel fall in the air and knew that it wouldn’t be long before winter closed the door to any expedition far to the north.

“Well then.” Wellington rubbed his hands together eagerly. “Let’s get started.”

Henry had canoed past a floatplane tethered to the dock behind the outpost. He’d seen a few such planes. Sometimes men used them to reach lakes deep in the Northwoods without having to paddle and portage their way in. It struck Henry as not only lazy but disrespectful to the spirits of the deep forest.

Yet here he was throwing the propeller to help Wellington start the plane and then climbing afterward into the belly of the beast with the same purpose in mind. Wellington had observed that the boy
Henry had been was far behind him. As he felt the plane glide across the surface of Iron Lake and lift free of Grandmother Earth, it seemed to Henry that he’d never been so far from who he’d thought he would become.

To see the earth as an eagle would, what magic. The lakes like puddles of rainwater in deep grass. The high, formidable ridges no more than wrinkles. The great woods a green sea stretching away as far as he could see. Once inside the plane, Wellington didn’t speak to Henry. He sat at the controls and seemed deep in thought. The plane had only two seats and Henry wondered where he would sit once Lima was aboard. There was an empty area in the rear that Henry suspected was waiting to be filled with supplies. He also suspected he’d end up there, too. He didn’t care.

Near noon, a great shining water appeared ahead of them. The plane began its descent.

Wellington finally spoke to Henry. “Lake Superior.”

Kitchigami,
Henry thought. He’d never seen the big water, though it was well known to him.

As they flew over the squat buildings of a town below, Wellington spoke again. “Fort William. And up there across the river, that’s Port Arthur.”

Canada, Henry understood.

The plane landed smoothly and motored to a dock where Henry saw two people waiting. One he recognized. Carlos Lima. The other was a woman about Henry’s age.

“Damn,” Wellington swore under his breath then cut the engine.

Lima tied the plane to the dock. Wellington opened his door and stepped down. Henry followed him. Lima had changed, grown visibly older. He’d put on weight and his mustache was thicker, with a dullness to it that made Henry think of a little gray mouse. Lima looked on him with the same disdain he’d had in the summer Henry saved his life.

“Where’s the other one?” Lima said to Wellington.

“Henry’s uncle died last winter. Henry has agreed to work for us.”

Lima’s dark, distrustful eyes did a long assessment of Henry. “You’ve grown,” he finally said and gave a nod as if he grudgingly approved.

Wellington said, “What’s Maria doing here? I thought we agreed.” Lima shrugged. “You know her.”

“This isn’t a trip for a girl, Carlos.”

“She’s strong, Leonard. And pigheaded.”

“You’re her father.”

“You’ve never been a father. You don’t know.”

The girl was near enough to hear the talk about her, but she seemed not to notice. Or maybe she simply didn’t care. What she did was to look frankly at Henry, who burned under the gaze of her dark eyes.

“All right,” Wellington said, finally giving in. “Let’s get loaded. We have a long way to go.”

Lima called to a man in a truck parked at the end of the dock. The man hopped from the driver’s seat and dropped the gate on the bed that was covered with a canvas tarp. He threw back the tarp, lifted a box, and headed toward the plane. Wellington went about refueling from metal barrels on the dock while Lima and Henry helped load supplies. Maria also stepped up to lend a hand, and at the back of the truck her shoulder brushed against Henry. He felt it as deeply as if she’d burned him with a hot coal.

They organized the cargo area in such a way that there was a small space for Maria and Henry, who sat facing each other, seated on rolled tents. The plane was heavily loaded and seemed to struggle to rise off the lake. Once it did, it headed directly into the afternoon sun for a few minutes, then curled toward the vast green wilderness waiting to the northwest.

They’d been introduced on the dock in a perfunctory way by Wellington. Maria Lima. She’d smiled, but not like her father, whose smile was a snake’s grin. Hers was genuine, though there was something hidden in it that Henry couldn’t decipher. To her chipper “How do you do?” he’d mumbled a reply.

Now they sat facing each other in the belly of the plane, legs drawn up like two babies in the same womb. The machine bounced and shook and noisily rode the currents. Up front, Lima pulled a rolled map from a tube, spread it out before him, and he and Wellington talked. Henry caught snatches of their conversation, but not enough to follow the thread.

To keep from staring at the young woman, Henry pretended to
sleep, but he kept his eyes open a slit. He watched her take a notebook bound in leather from her canvas bag and spend a long time writing with a fountain pen.

The plane dropped suddenly. The supplies in back shifted with a bump. Henry’s eyes flew open.

“Air pocket,” Wellington said over his shoulder, shouting to be heard above the noise of the engine and rattle of the fuselage. “Happens sometimes, eh.”

Maria put the notebook and pen back into her bag and took out a book. Henry couldn’t see the title. She opened it, then looked at Henry. She said something Henry couldn’t quite hear. He held up his hands in question.

“Do . . . you . . . read?” she said, louder this time and speaking slowly.

“I can read,” he answered.

She laughed. It was odd that he could hear it amid all the other noises. It was a sound both beautiful and disconcerting. “I figured that. I asked
do
you read.”

Henry hadn’t looked at a book since boarding school. With Woodrow, there’d been no need.

“Listen to this,” she said. “It’s about bullfighting, about a matador named Pedro Romero, who is fighting a bull to impress a woman.” She spent a moment finding the right page, then read aloud, enunciating carefully.

“ ‘Never once did he look up. He made it stronger that way, and did it for himself, too, as well as for her. Because he did not look up to ask if it pleased he did it all for himself inside, and it strengthened him, and yet he did it for her, too. But he did not do it for her at any loss to himself. He gained by it all through the afternoon.’ ”

She finished and looked hard at Meloux, in a way that made him uncomfortable. “He is killing the bull for her. For himself, too, yes, but it is also for her. Does that make sense?”

Henry tried to think about it, but his brain was too full. Full of the young woman—her smell that was clean and flowerlike, her eyes that were like black bullets, the bones that fiercely shaped her face, the notes that made her voice sing. Her nearness, too, their knees almost touching.

“It’s by a man named Ernest Hemingway,” she went on. “Have you heard of him?”

Henry hadn’t. But he wished he had.

“What I wonder is, do men really believe that that kind of brutality is impressive to a woman?”

Henry stared at her, feeling dumb as a cow.

“It takes place in Spain and in Paris, a city in France. I was there last summer. It’s a fine place, but...” She stopped and her eyes went to the window at the front of the plane. “I like it here much better. I think what people build can be very beautiful, but what God builds goes beyond beauty. You stand outside Notre Dame, say, and you marvel at the accomplishment, but you can’t really connect. It’s artificial, do you see? It’s only a representation of something. Spirit, holiness, maybe even God. But it’s not the thing itself. Out here, it’s all there before you, around you. You’re steeped in it, the real thing. Spirit. Holiness. God.”

She was Lima’s daughter. Henry could see traces of the father in her—the slight shadow of the skin, the black hair, the slender nose— but Henry thought her mother must have been terribly beautiful. She didn’t speak like Lima. There wasn’t the odd roll to her language. She sounded little different from the whites Henry had known all his life. He wondered about that.

“I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. “Sometimes I go on and on. You’re tired, I’m sure. You probably want to sleep.”

Henry wasn’t tired, and he liked hearing her talk. But he felt tense and awkward and had a pressing need to escape for a while.

“Yes, I am tired,” he said. He closed his eyes.

He did, in fact, sleep. He woke as he heard the engine throttled back and felt the plane descending. They landed on a lake surrounded by forest, and Wellington guided the plane to shore, where a small cabin and dock had been built. The men got out, then Maria and Henry. A scruffy man who looked Indian in his features greeted Wellington, and they talked briefly, then set about refueling the plane from a metal barrel. Maria spoke to her father, who pointed toward an outhouse near the cabin. Henry walked into the woods and relieved himself. In a few minutes, they were in the air again.

It was late afternoon by the time they finally glided to rest on the
shore of an immense lake contained on three sides by steep ridges. They unloaded the equipment and set up their tents. There was one for each of them. Lima and Wellington set up their own tents, located next to each other. Henry put up Maria’s. She asked for it to he as far from her father as possible because she said he snored terribly. Henry erected his own tent a bit away from the others. By the time he’d finished, the treetops had punctured the sun, and it was sinking fast. Henry canvassed the area for wood and quickly built a fire. Wellington opened a big tin of soup from the supplies that Lima had brought and heated it directly on the coals. Shortly after dark they all crawled into their tents.

Henry lay awake that night, and though he was in the middle of a vast Canadian wilderness, the sounds he heard were as familiar to him as his own breathing. The chirr of crickets and tree frogs. The creak of branches stirred by the wind. The lap of the lake against the shoreline. The smell was like home, evergreen pitch and clean water. But he was as far from home as he’d ever been, and he felt it. This was not like the government boarding school where the trees were spare and the land was flat and cultivated and smelled of manure. This was a different distance. He had the sense that he’d embarked on a long journey, without any idea of his destination.