32

Lake Garner / White Lake

Boundary Waters Canoe Area, Minnesota

Saturday, 22 September–Sunday, 23 September

There are a couple of cops—a woman and a man—on chaise lounges on the beach of Lake Garner, both stripped down to their undershirts. At one point she blows him against a tree. Which doesn’t make it at all uncomfortable to be waiting with Violet at the other end of the lake.

With the help of maps drawn up by Henry, the trip back has taken less than two days. Our instructions to him: give us the direct route, fuck how hard the portages are. We’ll use GPS and a twenty-nine-pound canoe.

And thank the Christ for that. I’ve just spent two days having a series of exchanges I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to avoid.

Like:

“Have you ever killed someone just to intimidate someone else?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Anyone by accident?”

“No. Well—once someone I took with me on a job killed someone I didn’t mean to kill.”

“Someone innocent?”

“Underage.”

“A kid?”

“Around the same age as Dylan Arntz.”

“But not innocent?”

“Like I say: underage.”

“What did you do to the guy who killed him?”

“Eventually? Killed him.”

“Because of that?”

“It didn’t help.”

“Are there people you’re glad you’ve killed?”

“Glad I killed personally? No. I wish I’d never killed anybody.”

“But there are people you killed who you’re glad are dead.”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever kill anyone you didn’t know anything about?”

“Yes. I tried not to, but yes. Some people I killed just because David Locano asked me to.”

“How many?”

“Give me a minute.”

“Would you kill David Locano if you could?”

“That’s giving me a minute? Yes.”

“Because of Magdalena? And because of your grandparents?”

“Yes.”

“Both?”

“Yes.”

“Equally?”

“Fuck!”^[67]

Except for the tent Palin was using, which her bodyguards took with them, Reggie’s campsite is still mostly intact, only now with fluttering crime scene tape around it. When the cops go back to sunbathing, Violet and I discuss the possibility that they’re sleeping here, and that we’ll have to row past them in the dark and go over the spit at its far end. But exactly at five p.m. the Parks and Rec floatplane glides in to pick them up, using the ramp Palin’s bodyguards left in place on the beach.

Violet and I paddle the length of Lake Garner, skirt the tape, and cross the spit. Take the beach as far along White Lake as it goes, then get back on the water.

We try not to talk as we paddle. It’s bad enough that the sound of every stroke I screw up comes back at us off the walls of the canyon. And that I’ll probably flip out the way I did when we went to Omen Lake to look at the rock paintings. I’m not sure why I haven’t flipped out already.

Maybe it’s the need to focus. After the second zigzag, we’re in geography we haven’t seen before, and the cliffs are full of indentations conceivably large enough to hide a boat. Why that should successfully distract me from the idea of an animal conceivably large enough to eat a boat, I don’t know. But being back on White Lake in clear daylight is somehow easier than it was to have to think about it in advance.

Which is not to say that when we reach the last, and widest, segment of White Lake, where the cliffs are gone and there’s forest on three sides, I’m not covered in sweat that has nothing to do with exertion.

Or that when we spot a gap in the shoreline undergrowth that looks large enough to stash our canoe, we don’t get ourselves and our boat off the water and into the brush as quickly as fucking possible.

★★★

The sun goes down as fast as it did three days ago.

The moon’s bigger, though, and for a couple of hours it’s brighter. Then the clouds slide over it, and things turn suddenly dark. So dark the branches in front of your face are only slightly purer black than the space around them, and you can hear the lake right in front of you but not see it.

It’s an interesting situation. Our senses are jacked from anticipation and the physicality of getting here. And we’re invisible, which even the ancients knew is asking for trouble.

Things you could do in that kind of darkness:

Lean against each other for warmth.

Lean toward each other, with your foreheads on each other’s shoulders, out of boredom as well as for warmth.

Put your hands between each other’s thighs, for even more warmth.

Tackle each other to the ground and fuck like Orpheus and Eurydice, Tarzan and Sheena, and Watson and Holmes all at once, for the kind of warmth that makes it okay to take a while to find your clothes afterward, and leaves your abs trembling and your mouth bruised from having hot wet crotch stubble ground into it.

I’m just saying: those are some things you could do.

★★★

Just after midnight we hear something crashing through the trees, then engine noise, then the sound of an amphibious Zodiac flopping onto the lake just across from our position. I put on my new night-vision goggles from CFS and slot their narrow angle of view onto the Zodiac. Its wheels are still rising out of the water as it passes us.

The fucker driving it has his hood up again. But I don’t think he knows for sure someone’s watching him, because he lights a plastic-wrapped stick of dynamite and tosses it off the rear of the boat without looking around too much.

“Dynamite,” I say.

“I see it.” Violet’s got her own night-vision goggles.

The noise of the explosion still makes us both jump.

The reason you can fish with dynamite, if you’re so inclined, is that water isn’t compressible, whereas fish are. For a fish, particularly a shallow-water fish, being in the water near an explosion is like being at one end of a Newton’s cradle made of wrecking balls. Everything else just transmits the force and stays put. The fish absorbs it, and ruptures. It’s the same concept as dropping a depth charge near a submarine.

All that noise makes the time we spent practicing how to silently relaunch the canoe seem a bit silly, but we follow procedure anyway, and as we move into the wake of the Zodiac I take a moment to appreciate how much better our tandem rowing has gotten over the past few days.

Then I take a moment to appreciate how I really should have asked myself a couple of basic questions before getting into this situation. Like whether this guy is or is not using sonar, and if so whether he can pick out a trailing canoe with it.

The Zodiac suddenly leans into a U-turn tight enough to make me conclude that the answers are yes and yes. Particularly since the guy’s now scrambling toward the harpoon gun at the front of his boat.

Violet and I check our canoe sideways to stop its motion. We’ve taped over the IR lights on our goggles so the guy won’t be able to see them, but he seems to be doing fine without them. In any case, the searing light of his own goggles is showing us everything we need to see. Like him aiming at us. And firing.

I shout “Hang on!”

I wonder if Kevlar’s any good against harpoons.

That’s all I have time for.