CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I was a forty-two year old woman. I’d spent the last ten years abusing my body with every illicit drug I could get my hands on, as well as all the good licit ones. Additional pharmaceuticals had been provided over the years by the hospitals I’d attended. A car crash—which one, in which year, I could no longer remember—had left me with a grindingly painful deficit of cartilage in my left knee. I also ate like shit.
All this is by way of saying that I did not have another sprint in me. Ollie, however, forced one out of me. We plunged through the trees, Ollie leading again, now holding both the Mr. Squiggly lunchbox and the flashlight. She seemed to know where she was going. I was blind to everything except the dark in front of my face, my concentration taken up by my burning lungs and the pain spiking up my left leg.
Suddenly the ground turned soft beneath my boots and I stumbled. We were on a dirt path now, a line of dark snaking through the snowy woods. The river appeared on our right, surprisingly close.
“Here,” Ollie said. The path bent toward the water, sloping to a landing about six feet wide. We pulled up, and I gulped oxygen. Somewhere out on the dark water lay the invisible dashed line of the US–Canadian border, a ghost-stitch visible only to satellites.
“It’s coming,” she said. I heard it then: the whine of an outboard motor. I could see nothing on the river but shadows and an ill-defined mass in the distance. Was that New York? I’d gotten turned around.
The sound of the motor abruptly grew louder. Ollie yelled, “Watch out!” and shoved me aside. A black shape lunged at us up the rocky embankment. It slammed down with a bang, then suddenly the engine cut out. It was a shallow-bottomed bass boat, painted some dark color—and it was full of black garbage bags.
“Unload them,” Ollie said. “Quick! It’s part of the deal.”
“What the fuck happened to the driver?!” For a crazy moment I thought he’d been thrown clear.
“It’s a rowboat,” she said. She grabbed one of the bags and grunted. It was evidently heavy. She tossed the bag into the bushes. There were more than a dozen of them in the small boat. All the benches except the front one had been removed to make room for the cargo. The craft had been stripped down to a motor, a big gas can, and in the corner a black fishing rod poking up like an antenna.
Dr. Gloria walked across the top of the water toward the rear of the boat. “Get it now?” she said.
Of course. The fishing rod wasn’t poking up like an antenna; the antenna was poking up like a fishing rod. The craft was a remote controlled ro-boat.
I started hauling bags, lifting from the bottom because of the weight. I could feel cardboard boxes inside them and hoped that they only contained cigarettes. I wasn’t ready to do hard time for smuggling drugs. When the last bag had been tossed into the trees, Ollie threw her own backpack into the boat, where it landed with a clunk.
“Get in,” she said.
I climbed over the side and sat down on the bench. Ollie handed me the money box. “Show it to the camera.”
“What camera?”
She gestured toward the antenna. I twisted and straddled the bench, then waved the Mr. Squiggly box at the antenna, figuring the camera was somewhere inside it or near it. “We have the money,” I said, trying to enunciate clearly.
The boat lurched—Ollie shoving it a few scraping feet across the rocky bank toward the water. I grabbed the boat’s side—the gunwale? whatever they called it—and leaned forward, ready to pull Ollie in when she got us all the way in the water. Behind her, a shadow moved on the path. It was a bent figure, barely visible in the moonlight.
Dr. Gloria said, “Aaqila!” and I shouted something like, “Down!”
Ollie was already in motion. She pushed the boat again—a full-body shove with arms and legs straight—and then let go and dropped below my line of sight with a splash.
Aaqila stumbled forward, her leg dragging behind her. One arm clutched her chest, and the other was straightening to point at me. She screamed a collection of consonants and vowels.
I have two overlapping memories of the next moment. In both, I hear each bang of the pistol—five shots, shockingly loud. But in one memory I am watching the pistol in Aaqila’s hand, and see red-orange flames flashing at the mouth of the barrel. In the other memory, I see nothing but Dr. Gloria. The angel is standing on the water between the boat and Aaqila, her wings flaring and trembling as each bullet strikes those pure-white feathers and bursts into light.
The details of both memories are suspect. Did I really see the muzzle flash, or was that something sketched in from countless movies? Alternatively, how does a figment of my imagination stop bullets?
The boat slipped sideways in the river’s current. On shore, Aaqila nestled the gun in her bent arm, trying to do something to it with her good hand—reload? Unjam it? Then Ollie rose up off the ground, holding some glossy shape above her head with both hands—a river rock, big as bread loaf. She brought it down on Aaqila’s head and the girl collapsed. The sound of the two impacts—the rock hitting her skull, her body hitting the ground—were so faint that I may have filled them in on my own.
“Oh my,” Dr. Gloria said.
From behind me came an electrical hum; then the outboard motor belched and fell into a deep rumble. The front of the boat swung toward open water.
I threw up a hand, waving at the antenna, and yelled, “Wait!” The boat continued to turn. I twisted to face the shore. “Ollie! It’s going!”
She was bent over Aaqila’s unmoving body. I yelled again, and Ollie looked at me over her shoulder, only her nose and mouth visible beneath the cap. Was she grimacing? Saying good-bye? I thought, Don’t you dare abandon me now!
Ollie abruptly turned and ran, not toward the water, but along the bank to my left. The current was pushing my boat downstream, toward a spit of land, and Ollie was sprinting toward it. She popped open her coat on the run like Clark Kent and tossed it aside, then tore the cap from her head and sent it spinning across the water. She reached the end of the land and leaped, not diving because the water could not have been very deep, and landed with a splash. The water came up to her knees. She took three slogging steps and then launched into a shallow dive. She was eight or ten meters west of the boat, but I was moving away from the shore.
The motor roared and the boat spun hard to my left. I gripped the sides and yelled at the camera, “Goddamn it! Wait!” The bow was aimed at the dark hulk of land less than a kilometer across the water. That was too close for New York; it had to be Île-Saint-Régis, the island on the Quebec side of the border.
The throttle kicked a notch higher. I pushed off the bench and half leaped, half fell toward the motor. The boat bucked and I fell the rest of the way, nearly impaling myself on the tiller. My forearms came down on the fat skull of the outboard cowling. I gripped the sides of the motor and held on as it vibrated beneath me, the entire mount swiveling as if to throw me off. Icy spray struck my face. Gasoline fumes filled my nostrils.
I’d lost track of Ollie.
Dr. Gloria flew overhead, keeping pace easily. “Remain calm,” she said.
“Fuck you!” I yelled.
Suddenly Ollie broke the surface of the water, two body lengths away, her arms knifing toward me.
“Come on, baby!” I crouched and reached for her, my thighs jammed against the sides. Too much: My weight tipped the boat and I fell forward. I seized the rim and stopped myself, my face inches from the water. The remote-controlled prop swerved to compensate, and suddenly the boat was almost on top of Ollie. Her eyes shone bright in the moonlight. I thrust out an arm, and she latched on. If I hadn’t been wearing a jacket she wouldn’t have been able to get a grip.
The throttle kicked into high then. Ollie’s weight nearly yanked me out of the boat.
Dr. Gloria landed behind me in the boat. “Pull!” she said.
“You think?” I shouted back.
I got my hips below the rim of the boat, then gripped Ollie with both hands. It took all my strength to hold on; I had nothing remaining to pull her in. The boat slewed left, then right, the drag nearly pulling us apart.
The doctor kneeled behind me and put her arms around my waist. “Ready?” she said into my ear. “One! Two!”
Dr. G yanked me backward. I held on, and Ollie popped half out of the water. Before she slipped back she managed to get an elbow over the side. The wake dragged her feet behind her.
“Almost there,” Dr. Gloria said. I reached over Ollie’s back to her belt and heaved. She fell heavily into the bottom of the boat.
Ollie coughed water. Soaking wet, hair plastered to her cheeks, she was tiny.
The ro-boat accelerated, the nose lifted, and we charged toward the border. We were home free.
* * *
The engine deafened us with its two-tone whine and rumble; the hull bounced over invisible waves. I sat with Ollie in the bottom of the boat, my arms around her. She was shivering. Her cheek was a slab of cold meat.
After perhaps a minute, Dr. Gloria said, “We have a problem.”
“You mean now we have one?” I said.
I sat up straighter. The doctor pointed to our left, up the stretch of river that led between l’Île-Saint-Régis and the Quebec mainland. In the distance was a red light crowning a row of white running lights. A big front spotlight raked the water ahead of it. The boat looked to be a long way from us, but distances were tricky at night. “Who the hell?” I said.
“RCMP,” Ollie said without lifting her head. She was trembling, and her voice was strained.
“Looks like somebody heard the gunshots,” Dr. G said.
“Can we outrun them?” I asked aloud. I didn’t know how long it would it take to cross the river, or who was supposed to meet us on the other side. These were only two of the most basic questions I should have asked Ollie back at the marina.
The engine revved, died, then revved again. Dr. Gloria said, “Uh oh.”
The tiller swung toward my head. The boat began to turn.
Ollie said, “Drones.”
“What? The Canadians have drones too?”
“Jamming us.”
“Oh come on,” I said like an angry teenager. I couldn’t see anything above us, or hear any noise but our engine. How big were they? How high up? And how the hell were we supposed to get away from them?
Our boat continued to circle, the engine surging and dragging drunkenly. The lights of the RCMP boat bore down on us.
I grabbed the tiller and tried to push it straight, but it resisted me. Fine. I gripped it with both hands and pulled it toward me like a rower. It didn’t budge—but then something snapped inside the motor. I fell back, my hands still on the tiller. The boat had turned with me.
“I can steer!” I said.
“Throttle?” Ollie asked.
I twisted the rubber grip of the throttle, and it turned easily—but the engine speed didn’t change. Fuck. It was still under remote control.
Ollie pushed herself up onto hands and knees. She reached past me to the antenna, then ran her hand down it until she found something in the dark under the back rim of the boat. She yanked, and the engine died. Her fist held a bundle of wires.
Suddenly I could hear the rumble of the police boat’s engines. “Uh, Ollie?”
Dr. Gloria said, “I really don’t think they should be allowed to call themselves ‘mounted police’ when they’re on boats, do you?”
Ollie’s hands were shaking. She thrust the wires at me and said, “Find two that spark.”
“What? Oh Jesus.” I let go of the throttle and took them from her.
“STOP YOUR ENGINE!” a voice boomed over the water. “ARRÊTEZ VOTRE BATEAU!”
Jerks. We were already spinning in circles.
I held one wire in my left hand, and touched the copper tips of one of the wires on my right. Nothing. I tried another, then another, while the growl of the RCMP boat grew louder behind us. Suddenly two tips sparked and instantly decorated my vision with spots. The engine coughed.
“Those two!” Ollie said. “Go go go!”
White light hit us, creating an instant tableau: me holding a bouquet of wires, Ollie sprawled at my feet, and Dr. Gloria perched on the bow like an eighteenth-century figurehead. Everything outside the boat became black velvet.
I squinted and pressed the wires together. The boat heaved forward. Ollie reached up and grabbed the tiller to hold us straight.
The policeman behind the bullhorn was not happy with this. “ARRÊTEZ! STOP!”
The front of the boat rose as we increased speed. Ollie and I were almost on top of each other at the back of the boat, and Dr. Gloria, balancing on the front lip, did nothing to equalize our weight and bring the nose down. We bounced over the water, barely in control. The motion kept knocking my hands apart, and with each gap between the wires the engine stuttered. Binary throttles, I decided, sucked.
The motor was ridiculously overpowered for a bass boat, even one that was usually loaded with cigarettes. But still it was no match for the size of the RCMP cruiser; I could feel the cruiser catching up to us. The white light stayed pinned to us like a vaudeville spotlight.
Ollie sat up, looked around in the dark, then pointed a few degrees off to our right. Less than a hundred meters away, barely visible beyond the glare of the RCMP light, lay a hunk of rock and trees.
“The Hen!” she said. “Stay on the gas!” Even shaking with hypothermia, Ollie had a better sense of direction than I did. I’d seen l’Île Hen on the pen map. It was a banana-shaped patch of land only a couple hundred feet long. The US–Canadian border was only about a thousand meters beyond the island, cutting diagonally across the river. But that was still too far; the RCMP boat would be on us in less than thirty seconds.
“We’re not going to make it!” I said
“What are they going to do?” Ollie said. “Ram us?” She was grinning. Why was she—how was she grinning?
Ollie aimed us toward the Hen. A few dozen feet from it she cut right, skimming the northern tip of the banana, then jammed hard to the left. The spotlight cut out; the island was between us now. We shot along the shore, so close that the trees hid the eastern sky. A rock or submerged log would throw us from the boat. But I held the wires together and we flew at top speed, the sound of the outboard doubly loud this close to the land.
In a handful of seconds we were back in open water. The mainland was half a kilometer or more ahead of us, only visible because of the distant glow of streetlights. As near as I could figure we were heading southeast, paralleling the border. We should have been going due west. I shouted, “What are you doing? That’s Quebec!”
“No,” she yelled back. “It’s Mohawk land.”
The white light slid across us again as the RCMP boat made the turn around the Hen, but we had gained some distance. Ollie pointed us at an outcropping. Did she know where to land? Or were we so outside the plan that it was all improvisation now?
Dr. Gloria pointed behind us. “Ladies?”
The police boat seemed to be charging at us at a speed it hadn’t displayed before.
“Mohawk Land” seemed to be growing no closer. In moments the RCMP had pulled up along our right side, less than ten yards away, but we could see little beyond the glare of the spotlight. The man behind the bullhorn yelled “CUT YOUR ENGINE!” and then followed up with a barrage of French commands.
Ollie waved.
The police boat surged ahead. “They’re going to cut us off,” Ollie said.
Their boat was thirty meters ahead of us now, and it suddenly swerved in front of us. Ollie jerked us to the left. We hit the big boat’s wake and went airborne.
I reached for the side of the boat, but before I could get a grip we slammed down, and I crashed shoulder first into the wet aluminum floor.
“Throttle!” Ollie yelled. The engine had died; I’d dropped the wires.
I got to my knees. My shoulder felt like it had been whacked by a baseball bat. Ahead of us the RCMP boat made a hard left, the spotlight swiveling to keep us in its glare.
“They got us, Ollie.”
“No,” she said. She stooped, trying to find the wires dangling from under the engine. “No no no.”
The police boat finished its turn. It was heading toward us now, coming at us from our left, but the turn had forced it to slow. Dr. Gloria said, “What’s that?”
A silver boat smaller than our own zipped out of the dark to our right, engine keening. The aluminum body was narrow as a canoe, with a massive black outboard weighing down the end. It skipped along the top of the waves at tremendous speed, nose high, the prop barely staying in the water. The boat had no lights, but I could make out a figure of a man sitting tall, his hand firmly at the tiller. He was aiming straight for us, racing to beat the police boat to us.
“Ollie!”
She looked up, the wires in her hand. The new boat roared toward us. There was something wrong with the driver. At first I thought he was wearing a white plastic mask, but then I realized that he wasn’t a man at all. His head was a stuffed garbage bag with a face drawn in black marker. His hand was attached to the tiller by a silver mitten of duct tape.
“We’re going to be rammed by a scarecrow,” Dr. G said.
I’d like to think I yelled “Hold on!” But it may have been only, “Fuck!”
The dummy flashed past us, less than a meter from the front of our boat. It wasn’t us that it was aiming for. A dozen meters past us it swerved hard toward the RCMP cruiser. The silver boat hit the hull of the cruiser and flipped up, catapulting the dummy into the air. The body cartwheeled over the deck of the police boat in a convincing impersonation of a drunken boatman flying to his death. The dummy came down somewhere on the other side, out of our line of sight.
The motor behind me shook to life; Ollie had found the right pair of wires. “Aim for the trees!” Ollie said. I didn’t move. I couldn’t process what I’d just seen.
“Steer, please,” Ollie said.
The spotlight had swung away from us—probably looking for the madman that had suicided against their boat—and I could see across the water more clearly now. The mainland was only two or three hundred meters away. I pushed the tiller to my left, aiming us away from the RCMP boat and the crash.
“What the hell just happened?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” Dr. Gloria said.
Ollie said, “Lyda, just hold on for now, okay?” She pointed toward the outcropping. “There!” A pair of car headlights winked off, then flicked back on. I aimed for them. The police, thank God, had stopped following us.
As we approached the shore, Ollie feathered the throttle wires, slowing us without killing the engine—basically doing a much better job than I had. She directed me to a stretch of grass that sloped up to where we’d seen the headlights. I ran the boat straight into the grass, and Ollie cut the throttle.
A male voice above us said, “Well that was a hell of a run.” Several other voices broke into uproarious laughter.
I helped Ollie out of the boat. She was still wet, and shivering uncontrollably. Dr. Gloria landed beside us. She flicked her wings, shaking the water from them.
Half a dozen men walked down to us, most of them still cracking up. Hilarious. I couldn’t make out their faces in this light, and I couldn’t tell whether they were armed. At least two of them held cans of beer. Another of them had a foot-long box hanging from a strap around his neck. As he stepped closer I realized it was a remote control unit, with a viewscreen and multiple game controller pads.
The lead man was round-faced, about sixty years old, with dark hair. Unlike the guys we’d met at the marina, he looked like my idea of an Indian elder. He regarded me without smiling and said, “You got our money?”
The money. A thrill of fear paralyzed me, and for a moment I couldn’t think. Ollie looked at me sidelong. What had I done with the money? I’d gotten into the boat with the Mr. Squiggly lunchbox, but after all that had happened, I’d completely lost track of it. Was it even still in the boat? We’d been flying at top speed over the river, bouncing all over the place.
“Sure,” I said, keeping my voice steady. “Just a sec.”
I made sure Ollie could stand upright, then went to the bass boat. I didn’t see the box. I climbed over the side, then crouched and looked under the front bench. It wasn’t there. I patted the floor under that bench, as if to make sure the bag hadn’t turned invisible.
Dr. Gloria said, “Don’t panic.”
Too late, I thought.
I stood up and duck-walked to the back of the boat. I could picture the green fucking lunchbox flying up into the air when the boat went airborne. It was all too plausible. And without the money, what would these men do to us? We’d sabotaged their boat, and they’d wrecked another one just to distract the police. Ollie was already too cold to run. Even if she could, where would we run to?
I knelt down in the back of the boat, and immediately I saw it: The Mr. Squiggly box was jammed in next to the orange gas tank.
“See?” the doctor said.
I climbed out and handed the lead man the bag. He smiled a wide, gap-toothed smile. “Welcome to the Nation.”