Jack Pine, page 24
“What is this?”
“Cave paintings.”
Reuger held the lantern high like a priest.
“Indians came here thousands of years ago.” Patricia saw etchings in the surface of the stone. The red stick figures sparkled and wavered in the light. Water dripped from the walls, plunking in the echo of time. She felt as if she was looking at the soul of a people. Their lives flashed before her eyes on the curved wall of granite and greenstone.
“This is a moose,” Reuger nodded slowly. “I think this is a canoe, looks like a man smoking a pipe here, see the head?”
“Yes! I see it!” Patricia shook her head and whispered. “It’s amazing!”
He swung the lantern over, and the light left the wall then collected on a single spot. Reuger looked like some geological explorer from an earlier time. The propane light glanced off his cheek, silhouetting his hat against the far wall. The canoe seemed to float on glass.
“Here is a man doing some sort of dance,” he nodded. “This looks like a man shooting a bow and I think this is a fish or maybe an otter. See the tip of the canoe here and the man with the paddle?”
“Yes…” Patricia squinted closer at the mineral-colored figures. The canoe had large curves at the end. The figures reminded her of hieroglyphics she had seen in some magazine. Patricia leaned closer. “What’s behind it?”
Reuger held the lantern closer with his shadow large on the cave walls.
“Looks like another canoe, must be his squaw and child.”
“A family,” Patricia said softly.
Reuger stared at the primitive family then put the lantern in the canoe and sat. He reached into his vest pocket and handed Patricia the picture from his father’s leather case. She stared at the photograph and smiled slowly. She looked up.
“Your wife was very pretty, and your son is adorable.”
He kneeled in the canoe and they stared the way parents look at a baby. With the ancient people overhead, Reuger began to explain his own journey.
* * * *
“He had enormous hands, Patricia. I saw him heft a thirty-pound chain saw with one hand like it was paper—”
“Your father,” she nodded.
Reuger gestured into the darkness while they floated under the earth. The propane light spread pale gold on the water as he told her of a man who had left him years before. She saw the wounded boy as he talked. She saw the love lost when a parent is gone.
Patricia sat in the canoe with the picture in her hand.
“All I wanted to be was a lumberjack like my father. When he took me to the site and let me watch, it was amazing. I remember the snow on the trees and my father breathing steam like some machine and those chain saws whining through the air and then the tremendous crack when those trees fell.”
Reuger looked at his own hands and shook his head. He wondered why he should think of his father now, but he was trying to understand himself. He was trying to understand what he did.
“But then he died,” Patricia said softly.
His face darkened like some sunny day snatched for a slide of a dark thunder. He took off his hat and held it by the brim.
“I was there when they told my mother.” He turned the hat slowly.
“The men came in and told her and never even looked at me. They left sawdust through the house, and the trail went back into my brother’s room. I don’t know why that was, except my mother was there when they told her and there she stayed.”
Patricia reached across the canoe and took his hand.
“That night, a logger came to the door and spoke with my mother. He told her the owner’s son had told my father to cut even though the winds were high. He had told him to cut or he would never log again.” Reuger stared at her. “My father cut that tree perfect and it fell clear, but he told him to keep cutting. It was near dark when the tree from another logger broke my father’s back.”
Patricia watched the rage reach into their space of yellow light.
“Was it…”
“Ben Johnson,” he nodded grimly.
Patricia looked away and wiped her eyes.
“Does anybody know this?”
Reuger stared at her with hard gray eyes.
“Gus,” he nodded slowly. “He told my mother.”
They continued to drift around in the cavern of vanquished people. He told her of his life in the lower forty-eight. He told her of his mother cleaning houses and the many different apartments they lived in. He explained the feeling of suffocation that gripped him at night as a boy and the dreams he had of a wide-open land away from the cities and the noise and the chaos.
“I felt like the Indians,” he said, pausing. “I never felt like I belonged to that society.”
“So why did you become a policeman?” She asked softly.
Reuger paused and shook his head.
“I don’t really know. My best friend and I took the police test. It seemed the only place where order existed, and I had no sense of it anymore.”
She lowered her head and pulled back her short hair.
“Then you married?”
“That’s right.”
Reuger squinted at the picture and smiled again. Patricia felt like crying when she saw him smile like that.
“What was your son’s name?”
“Matthew,” he murmured, staring at the three-year-old boy who was now a man.
Intellectually, he knew he had grown up, but he had stopped his memory fifteen years ago. His son was three. He would always be three.
“Funny how it never leaves you,” he nodded. “You know what I remember most about my son? Having him lay on my chest and sleep.” Reuger looked at her. “Is there anything better in this world than having your child sleep on your chest?” He wiped his eyes. “I’ve wondered what he’s like now many times, when I let myself wonder.”
Patricia tapped the picture.
“He looks like you, Reuger.”
“Think so?”
She smiled faintly.
“Oh, ya”
He continued holding the picture with his head toward the canoe. She asked him the question under the men holding spears, under the buffalo and bears and moose and canoes and women holding babies. She asked him the question under the people who had walked the land before and still haunted the soul of the nation.
“So why did you leave them?”
He held the picture as a man might hold a crucifix. He explained it to that little boy the way he had done a thousand times before.
“We stumbled onto an apartment of dealers. It was just my partner and me….He was my best friend.” Reuger pursed his lips. “We found the heroin, and then we found the money. He put the heroin on the front seat of the squad and the suitcase of money in the trunk.”
Patricia tapped out the moment on her cheek. The tip of her index finger lifted like the beat of a judge’s gavel upon her temple.
“What did you do?”
He looked up from the canoe and rubbed his jaw, a deep cut on his wrist. Lacerations of his life plain in the cracked palm and chiseled fingers, the crow’s feet cornering the eyes, the windburn leathered skin pulled tight over the jaw. His life was plain to her now; the raw wind of isolation burning into his soul as he roamed over the nation he had left. He was not unlike those men who had ascended the Rockies while civilization surrounded them who preferred a frozen death to muddled complacency.
“He put the suitcase in his garage under his lawnmower.” His voice seemed to her still be swirling around the cavern even as he went on. “We both had young families. He was my best friend, and suddenly the lines were blurred.” Reuger paused. “There was probably fifty-thousand dollars in that suitcase.”
Patricia tried to hide her eyes, but he saw the question on her lips. The canoe turned slowly in the black syrupy water. Her finger pulsed against her temple like the bang of a gavel.
“Did you use it?”
“I came home one day early,” he said softly. “It was earlier than I was supposed to, and there they were.” He looked at her and saw her grimace. “All the clichés fall away when you see it. It is this physical act between two people, and you happen to see it. Like coming onto a car accident, and what you see changes you forever.”
She sat back like someone had just pushed her.
“Your best friend and…”
“My wife,” he nodded.
Patricia shook her head slowly.
“Oh, Reuger.”
He nodded, remembering the bodies in white sheets, the murmurs, the groans, the door creaking, and then the frightened stares. Then he was running away. That was when his running began. That moment. He wanted to get away from all of it.
“So you turned him in then?”
He raised his head, eyes gray as slate. He remembered going to the station and walking in. His heart was in a riot, and he wanted revenge. He had said nothing to anyone about the money, but it was his word against his friend’s. He told them and said he would testify.
“I turned him in to internal affairs.”
Patricia nodded slowly, sitting in the canoe with her hands clasped.
“Then you left?”
He nodded slowly and remembered finishing with his testimony and knowing where he would go. His best friend was going to jail, and he was lauded as a hero by the department but hated by his fellow officers. His wife and child had left him the week before. He lumped it all into one package in his mind. He would leave all of it and go back to the Northland. He would go back to when he was happy.
“Then I left,” he nodded slowly.
* * * *
Sun flooded the cave now and danced on the minerals in the walls like embedded glass. Reuger stood examining the figures of men gesturing to the heavens. Patricia watched the sunlight outside the cave, hurting her eyes, then looked at him leaning close to the slick rock formations.
“They used something from the mineral ochre and mixed it with glue from sturgeon skeleton and bear fat,” he said, his voice echoing off the walls. “The glue and oil disappears but the iron hematite binds with the stone…that’s how it lasted so long.”
She looked up at him and felt the long night. He nodded slowly.
“Pretty smart…these old cultures knew a thing or two—”
“What happened to your mother, Reuger?”
He stared down.
“What?”
“I said what happened to your mother?”
Reuger lowered himself down and turned the lantern off in the canoe. The hiss faded and they could hear birds outside the cave. Dry light creased his cheeks and cornered his eyes.
“My mother died of a broken heart. They called it cancer, but I think she died with my father. She left this earth the week before I left.”
Patricia shut her eyes for a long moment.
“So you lost your mother while all this was happening.”
He looked out the cave and she saw the gray hairs at his temple.
“My mother remarried. George London was his name. He insisted she change her name and mine. I always hated him for that,” he said distantly. “He was a traveling salesman… they divorced after five years.”
“What was your father’s name?”
“Jim Hurley.” Reuger stared out of the cave. “I remember in the hospital, the last week before my mother died, they told her to eat. The cancer was in her stomach and unless she could eat, then there was nothing they could do. So we all sat in the hospital room and encouraged her to eat…and she did,” he nodded slowly. “But then, everyone left and I was alone with her. She was so thin by then and there was light coming in the window the way it is coming in this cave…dry light, pale…harsh.”
He squinted at the opening.
“And then she vomited up all the food, except it was bright green. It was like a fountain of bright green vomit. I’d never seen anything like that before. It was all bile.”
Patricia watched his gray eyes mist then fill like iron cauldrons.
“There were no nurses around, and she had this little vomit tray she held below her. And I remember I didn’t know what to do for her. I just called for the nurse and my mother held that tray with vomit all over everything and I saw her finger move, just sort of rub the side of the tray.” He paused. “But I knew then she understood that she was going to die.”
Patricia leaned forward and put her head down on his arm.
He raised his eyebrows slowly.
They sat in the bowels of the earth as light glimmered the water like a train coming to the end of a tunnel. Reuger turned the lantern down and looked at the woman who had her hands clasped to her chin.
“Anyway, my wife was leaving me, and I didn’t have the heart for the fight.”
He said this as if they had been having a conversation.
“For the child?”
Reuger nodded with the skeleton of light creasing his brow, dark in the tired sockets. Patricia kept her hands to her chin with her eyes moving up.
“I couldn’t stay, and I didn’t want to. I wanted nothing to do with any part of that life. When I was done testifying against my partner, I drove out one morning and got on a train and never looked back. I used to think you could just go somewhere and start over. I believed you could leave your past behind.”
Patricia looked at him tragically.
“Did you really think you could escape?”
Reuger shrugged.
“I thought up here a man could start over. It was where I was happiest. I think this is probably the last untouched wilderness of this country.” He looked at her. “I think that’s why those people went west a hundred years before. You think you can start over and become someone else.” He smiled slowly.
“For a while it worked, and I did become someone else.” He paused. “But when I saw you…I knew I couldn’t do it anymore. It only worked if I stayed out of life, but when I saw you and your son, it all came back.”
Patricia nodded, biting her lower lip.
“When you left, did you know what you were going to do?”
His eyes darkened. “I had an idea.”
“Become a lumberjack like your father?”
He looked up at her with light in the creases beneath his eyes.
“After I left, I knew it was no good. I kept seeing my son’s face and the guilt was crushing. I saw my partner as they hauled him off to jail. When I reached Ely, it was snowing very hard, and the town was empty. I picked up some supplies, and by the time I had reached the forest, I knew what I was going to do. It was snowing very hard, and I just knew.” He paused. “It’s like a darkness overtakes you, and you can’t get out. I knew death had to be better than what I was feeling.”
Patricia stared at him, afraid now.
“You mean…you…”
“Kill myself,” he said, looking through her.
“What happened?’
“A big Indian came along and found me sitting in the snow with a gun.”
“Was he—”
“Tommy Tobin.”
Patricia was quiet.
“What did he do?’
Reuger looked at her and nodded slowly.
“He saved my life.”
54
REUGER HELD THE canoe steady while Patricia stepped out. Sleep circled her eyes; and her face was pale. She read his eyes and ran her fingers back through her hair like a young girl trying to imitate her mother. A boat motor whined far outside the bay and the scent of bacon frying was in the air.
Patricia stared at him and thought of their earlier conversation.
“So if you think he’s behind it all…. Are you going after him?”
He stared at her with stubble on the tip of his chin.
“I need to go back up there and catch Ben taking out those trees… and I need the girl to say it was Cliff who raped her.”
Patricia felt how flat her hair was and wondered whether her eyes were as red rimmed and hollow as his.
“But they won’t let you near her?”
Reuger shook his head slowly. Patricia watched mist roll up from the lake in the early light. She had the loss of time people experience when they stay up all night.
“You asked me in the cave about something.” Reuger looked up. “You asked me if I used any of that money.”
She stared at his clear gray eyes and held onto herself. Reuger shook his head slowly.
“I didn’t use any of it, but I didn’t say anything about it either. I just let it happen, and now I realize that was as bad as if I had spent all of it.”
He looked across the sunny bay.
“It’s the same as the night I saw Annabel Günter…. I knew what happened, I just didn’t do anything about it.”
“What happened, Reuger?.”
“Local girl. Father worked for Ben Johnson. I found her walking the Lodge Road in the middle of the night after being with Cliff….Shirt torn up, bruised, scared, one shoe gone. I knew what had happened. I told her to press charges but she knew it would mean her father’s job and she kept quiet…”
He paused and breathed tiredly.
“And I did too I guess.”
* * * *
Patricia watched the water lap the barrels under the dock.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s still not too late.”
“Her father still works for Ben. She won’t say a word.”
“But if you could get her to say it was him. … At least you can talk to her, Reuger.”
He nodded slowly. “I just don’t understand why these girls are so reluctant to say it’s him when…”
“You’re kidding?” Patricia shook her head. “They feel guilty! He may be the worst thing to ever happen to a woman, but if he smiled at them and made them feel good and somehow talked them into a compromising position, then it all gets very fuzzy. They feel they are to blame somehow and brought it on.” Patricia slashed the air with her hand. “This girl Dana Reynolds has to face the rest of the male community that will ask her why she went into that shed with this creep? So, they gave her someone else to pin it on. Someone acceptable. It happens to be an Indian with a record this time. … Many times, it’s a black man”
Patricia moved her tennis shoe on the plank.
“So why did you stop logging and become a deputy sheriff?”
