Jack Pine, page 2
“Take it easy there!”
“Don’t sneak up on me like that, John,” he muttered.
“Well, I didn’t expect yer to be so gosh darn jumpy!”
Reuger rubbed his eyes and pushed his hat up from his curly blond hair.
“You always listening to the scanner?”
Mcfee held his arms wide as if for rain.
“Readers of the Ely Standard and the listeners of WELU deserve to know what’s happening and I have to be responsive to their needs here!”
Reuger stared at the local historian, then bartender, then parttime radio personality for the ten thousand-watt station WELU. That nobody wanted to fill the noontime slot and spin the polka records was his opportunity. By the time Charles Kroning descended on Ely, Minnesota, John had fashioned a program of homespun logic with local color and local history intermingled with nostalgia for the old days. Kroning ate it up and bought the radio station with one condition: John Mcfee would continue his End of the Road Program as WELU’s only paid employee.
“The press can’t be denied, Reuger.” He drew a pencil from his ear and licked the tip, pulling out a white note pad from his top pocket. So what do we have here, environmental wars? Tom Jorde finally gone too far?”
“Suicide.”
Reuger kneeled again by the spattered weeds and followed the trajectory of the blood back to the head wound. The blood matched up with the force of the bullet blowing out of the other side of the skull.Mcfee squeezed his right eye shut.
“Are you still doing yer security work there for Johnson Timber?”
“None of your business.”
“Now, Reuger, you have a slasher burned, you have illegal logging in the Boundary Waters, and you have a man shot with a handgun there.” He chewed on his lower lip. “And you got Tom Jorde declaring just the other day to WELU that he’d do whatever it takes to stop logging.”
“Suicide,” he said standing up.
“Quote you on that?” Mcfee cocked his head back. “Imagine Ben Johnson have a different view on this here crime. Of course you being a former logger for Ben Johnson, I guess I know where your sympathies lie here.”
Reuger turned and tapped him on the shoulder.
“You owe me one for the Basswood hanging.”
“And how would you figure that?”
“Gave you an exclusive.”
“Exclusive be damned! The Ely Standard is the only paper in town!”
“That’s why it was exclusive.”
Mcfee scribbled onto the pad.
So then, the deputy sheriff is tight-lipped here on this murder?”
“Suicide, John.”
He rolled his tongue.
“Ya, well then, let’s say it’s not the environmentalists here.” Mcfee looked up from his pad, gray eyes plain like sheet iron. “Then you have a serial murderer here, as I see it.”
“Need at least two bodies.”
Reuger brushed the weeds again with his palms flat.
“Ya?” One eyebrow danced high. “And with Knudsen there, I see Foster as the second victim.”
“Knudsen disappeared in one of these lakes,” Reuger stood up, “and one of these days he’s going to wash up.”
He reached down and lifted the automatic from the weeds with a handkerchief.
“Gave you an exclusive on that story too, John.”
“Well now Reuger, that is your opinion, but my public believes differently here. He was a logger who disappeared amongst the turmoil of environmental wars.”
Went the way Rusty Green went, John,” he murmured, smelling the barrel of the .45.
“Don’t know about that now.”
Mcfee looked up.
“Tell me what you think here of this lead….When Jim Carpenter called from Pine Lodge and said one of his guests reported smoke around the area Foster Jones logged, the sheriff assumed the logger was burning scrub trees. But what the sheriff found on this day was Foster Jones shot in the head and his slasher burned—”
“Where you going with that, John?”
“I’ve been looking the other way for a long time here, Reuger, and I know you been keeping a lot to yourself here.” He stabbed the pencil back. “I can’t keep quiet about slashers in lakes and tree huggers getting beat up and Earth First activists chaining themselves to trees.”
“That’s a bunch of shit, John.”
Mcfee rolled his shoulders.
“Just give me the facts here.”
Reuger pointed to the body.
“Foster Jones with a bullet in the right side of his head with his own gun ten feet away and a spent cartridge that matches that gun.” He turned to the smoldering carcass. “A gas fire on a slasher started from the engine cage. Suicide by a man out of options.”
“Well, that was all I wanted then, was yer version of events,” Mcfee nodded, writing on his pad.
“And since I just gave you another exclusive, John.” Reuger barreled the .45 in his gun belt. “You can help me get Foster up to your jeep.”
“Well, now, Reuger,” Mcfee held up his hands and backed away, “I’m the press here and in the legacy of Charles Kroning…”
“You’ll help me pick up this dead logger,” he said, clamping his shoulder.
3
THE RESERVATION SIGN was pockmarked by .22 rounds and speckled with buckshot. Reuger passed through a gate dull with noon light, past trailers with chairs, a bony dog veering through yards, and children playing beyond sagging porches. He bumped down the street toward a man in calf-high mukluks and feathered black hair hawking a store porch. Wheeling in, he snuffed the motor of the jeep.
“How she go?”
“Oh, you know, not bad.” Gary Chatoee pulled the cigar away and shrugged back his hair. “Too hot, though. You know, I really think the weather is changing up here. We used to never get days like this; now it’s like Florida during the summers. But you look at the forest now, and the trees are all dried out and the lakes are low. I think global warming is ruining the land up here.” He braided his arms and jabbed the cigar. “Out for a drive to see our part of the country?”
“Oh, ya.” Reuger stepped out of the jeep. A saw screeched like a mechanized locust in the distance. “Going to log out these hundred thousand acres and become rich?”
Gary Chatoee puffed the cigar then crushed it underfoot and scratched his belly resting on an oversized belt buckle. He paddled the sun with brown hands.
“Ya, sure, after Johnson Timber stole all the good timber, but I’m working on getting it back. That’s just some Indian loggers off the south end of the lake logging some jack pine. Only about 30,000 acres is still tribally owned, you know.”
Reuger climbed the porch and saw water glimmering down the road like a promise. When he went to the Ojibwa reservation, he often thought of pictures he had seen in a book of Indians before they entered the reservation. The first photograph showed a proud people staring defiantly at the camera with long hair and braids and earrings. The later photographs showed middle-aged men with short hair sitting stiffly in suits utterly expressionless.
“How’s the Outfitters?”
“Not bad. Lot of swampys who never been in a canoe before, so they buy everything in the store.” He grinned yellow teeth. “They like having an Indian wait on them. I tell them I still live in a teepee, and they buy even more.”
“Between the store and the Outfitters, you must stay busy.”
“Ya, and then I have to go to those village meetings, but I figure that’s what I went to college for, you know, to come back and help the people.”
Reuger tapped his radio, shifting the Colt on his leg.
“Looking for Tommy Tobin. Seen him hereabouts’?”
“Tommy Tobin.” Gary shook his head. “Nope, not seen him in a while. He still has a cabin up in the Boundary Waters. The last one, you know.” He crossed his arms. “He getting in trouble in Winton again?”
“Trouble up toward Pine Lodge this morning. I found Foster Jones with a bullet in his head and his slasher burned. Looks like a suicide, but I heard Tommy’s been working with him so I wanted to ask him some questions.”
Gary frowned down the dusty road where two dark children played. Small jets of sunlight creased his eyes. Ever since Reuger could remember, Gary had been the model Indian. He had grown up on the reservation. His hair was always combed and he looked like an ad for collegiate wear in his teenage years. He had gone off to college and then returned to start two businesses and represent his people in the ongoing struggle over timber rights.
The local people could point to Gary and say here was proof the reservation system worked. But Tommy Tobin proved the system of reservations didn’t work at all. He was the Geronimo to Gary’s Sitting Bull. They had grown up side by side, but Tommy had been the bad boy all along. He had dropped out of high school and began stealing cars before he was sixteen. He became a lumberjack and fell into the drinking and drugs that went along with the life of hard labor in Ely, Minnesota. When he pulled a knife on a couple of canoeists, the judge who had heard his misdemeanors over the years had enough. He went down to Stateville for a year and came back an ex-con. He had settled down for a while, but Reuger had found him lying drunk in the middle of logging roads several times. If Gary was the poster child for the new Indian, then Tommy was the wanted poster for the old.
“Foster, huh? That’s too bad, you know.” He shook his head slowly. “Tommy Tobin, he’s a good lumberjack and can do the work of three men, but he grew up on this reservation and took a lot of the bad habits with him; mostly he drank too much, you know.”
Reuger watched the children in the street.
“Might been last to see Foster alive.”
“Foster the old shader.” He shook his head. “Just doesn’t seem right, you know.”
Reuger saw mist on the pines where the land dropped to the lake basin. He touched his mustache, smelling the rubberized body bag. Foster wasn’t a heavy man. He had lifted him like a baby into the zippered container Mcfee held open. John had been fine until the eyes slapped back.
“But maybe Tommy will know what happened then,” Gary shrugged. “That tree hugger from town was out looking for him last week, you know.”
“Jorde?”
“Ya, says it’s important he talk to Tommy Tobin. I told him I haven’t seen him, but he told me to let him know he come by. He always wants to talk to Indians. They think we’re too stupid to know what they’re doing? He thinks Indian rights are hot again, so they want to jump on the bandwagon.” Gary nodded slowly. “But you watch, once it swings back the other way, them granola eaters will all pack their sandals and Patagonias and leave just like everybody else.”
Reuger watched the children with silky black hair playing in the dust with two sticks. He looked at the tin shacks with corrugated roofs.
“Hear from Tommy, let me know.”
“Sure thing,” Gary nodded, opening the screen door. He paused with his hand out for rain. “You know, sometimes he pulls boats at the portage.”
“Reuger.”
He unclipped the radio from his belt.
“Go ahead.”
“Reuger. This is Sheriff Riechardt. Bad trouble here at the lodge. Apparently a girl has been attacked and says it was some big Indian…I make it out to be that Tobin from her description…didn’t he just get out from Stateville?”
“Affirmative.”
“You better get up in the Boundary Waters before he heads for Canada.”
Reuger pushed his hat up, watching the children kick up dust.
“Who’s the girl?”
“…girl named Dana Reynolds. She says she was attacked in the woodshed there.”
“Attacked?”
“Maybe raped there, Reuger.”
He stared at the Indian children and heard the whine of the chainsaw.
“She a guest at the lodge?”
“Ya…lower forty-eight….Jim Carpenter and I are here with the parents at the lodge…get a seaplane…I would think he’s headed for his cabin up there first.”
“10-4.”
Reuger clipped the radio and felt Gary Chatoee’s eyes. They stood under the hot sun and Gary shook his head.
“Ya, I know what Tommy did for you…pulling you out of the snow and all you know before.”
“He didn’t just pull me out of the snow.”
“I know what he did, and you’ve been good to Tommy here.” He breathed heavily, leaning in the doorway. “But you can’t change the way some people are. You may think you still owe him something, but you’re way paid up. I grew up with the guy, you know. You can’t change what it’s going to be with some people.”
Reuger watched the boy in the road swing a stick over his head.
“You’d have done the same thing for him.”
He looked at Gary Chatoee then unclipped the radio and pressed the receiver.
“Hector!”
“Ya, go ahead Reuger.”
“Put an APB on a Tommy Tobin …T-O-B-I-N.”
“T-O-B -I -N…Ya, 10-4.”
He clipped the radio and felt tired. Gary held his hand out palm flat.
“What will be, will be.”
4
THE SEVENTEEN-FOOT MOTOR boat winged smoothly up Moose Lake toward Newfound, then toward Sucker Lake, then the Prairie Portage where International Falls spilled water down to Basswood and Canada. Reuger squinted into the northern wind snapping the lake into sparkling peaks and steered past a troop of Boy Scouts in canoes following a scoutmaster. He saw old logs sticking up like lost buoys.
The wild cloud scudding sky lifted his spirit. He loved this land carved from glaciers making their way down from the North Pole thousands of years before. The glaciers scraped the soil away and left graywacke, greenstone, and granite. The ice melted and filled the thousand lakes of Minnesota and then the trees grew on top of the rock. Many times after storms the trees fell and pulled up their root structure and a foot of earth. Beneath the tree was rock, and it was amazing that a sixty-foot tree could find purchase on a slab of granite.
But it was a beautiful country. The lakes were so clear you could drink from them. The sky was a brilliant mosaic of stars at night and a cerulean blue during the day. The cedars and jack pine and dogwoods and few remaining white pines filled the land like so many cheery Christmas trees. The weather always had the feel of a fall day. It was hard to believe he had been up here fifteen years already.
When he thought about his life in the lower forty-eight it, was like thinking back on a bad party. That life before was crowded and confused and smoky to him now. Confusion floated up on the television shows and the newspapers blaring the catastrophe of a system gone amok. The drive-by shootings and drugs and school shootings now seemed the chaos by which that society lived. Reuger didn’t have a television and caught up on news when he went to Pine Lodge, but for the most part he lived his life like the mountain men or the pioneers trudging westward.
Reuger looked at the man sitting in the front of the boat with his white hair blowing wild and his beard smoothed back. He saw the channel where the lake narrowed into a sharp S before breaking open for the next lake. Gus always hated the way he went through the channel. Most people cut their motors, but Reuger had done it so many times he knew exactly where the boulders were underwater. Then again, there weren’t many men over sixty-five who enjoyed riding in the front of a boat to go look for an armed Indian.
Gus Vanzant kept his feet on the nineteen-inch sawed-off shotgun and the Winchester and watched as the lake squeezed down to a boulder-rimmed passage. He braced himself as the boat roared into the channel past scraggly trees and roots and carpet moss and waving canebrake before swiveling back into sun on Newfound Lake. He saw a boat come around the bend, barreling like a wedge on a wave with Conservation Officer skimming the water.
A man waved in a blue hat and a green coat behind a low center console. Reuger cut the motor as the other boat rolled up. The men felt heat in their faces, their ears ringing from motors. The boats bumped along side. Dollops of water spouted.
“How she go there, Pete?”
“Oh, pretty good,” Pete Hauser nodded. “Bit sleepy with the cold here. Need some more coffee, you know.” He wiped a bushy mustache with a balled tissue. “So you’re up here looking for a little rest and relaxation, I take it?”
“Gus and I needed a boat trip. Haven’t been to the Boundary Waters for a while.”
Pete Hauser laughed. He had a five o’clock shadow chaffed red from longboat rides between lakes looking for poachers or violators of fish limits. DNR men were known as fish police to the Sheriff Department, but Pete took his job very seriously. Reuger had seen him coming back more than once with men in handcuffs who had violated the ever-changing limit on walleye, bass, and northern pikes. He was a big man who vacationed in the West where he hunted waterfowl and referred to the Boundary Waters as a biological desert compared to the fecundary wetlands of Montana. He pushed back his cap with the gold star and yawned.
“You’re early here.”
“Get a jump on it.”
His chin beckoned.
“So then, you be coming up fishing here?”
“Might say that.”
Pete grinned and leaned back in his seat, swishing his green parka.
“Ya, had a busy week here getting ready for the burn, you know.”
“They going to do her then?”
“Ya, well, after the blowdown, you can’t even get back to a lot of the portages you know,” he said, rolling his shoulders. “The environmentalists been protesting and such, but they’ll do it when she dries out enough. They’re just going to burn a couple hundred acres.” He shook his head. “What they should do is let the loggers get back in there, you know, and take all the downed timber they can carry. That would solve everybody’s problem here.”
The storm of the century had descended on the Boundary Waters the year before and knocked the trees down like so many matchsticks. Now they had a tinderbox waiting for the right lightning storm to ignite the rotting trees. The forest service abandoned its long-standing policy of letting nature take her course and started planning limited burns to do away with the timber, but the environmentalists saw this as an encroachment. This annoyed Reuger. It only made sense to burn out the old wood.
