“I do some guide work myself,” Vinnie said. “When I’m not working at the casino.”
“What’s your job there?”
“I deal blackjack.”
Maskwa laughed. “Blackjack,” he said. “All day long, right? Taking the white people’s money?”
“Something like that.”
“And then you take them into the woods so they can feel connected to nature.”
“Just like you,” Vinnie said.
Maskwa laughed again. “Yes! Of course I do. Why shouldn’t I?”
The weeds got taller as we got to the lake. We finally came to an old building that looked like a boathouse. It might have been a boathouse at one time, but when Maskwa opened the door we saw an airplane inside. He told us it was a DHC-2 Beaver, not quite as big as Gannon’s Otter, but more than enough plane to get the job done. “Her name’s Mikiskon,” he said. “That was my wife’s name.”
He started pulling on a chain to raise the big lakeside door. When it was open he hopped up on one of the floats and climbed the ladder into the cockpit. He gave the engine a few cranks until it finally caught. The noise was downright painful. He came to the door and took the cooler from Guy, and then waved Vinnie and me up the ladder. As soon as we were on board, sitting on seat cushions that looked like something out of an old boat, Guy pushed the plane out onto the lake, jumped onto the float, and climbed the ladder to join us. He closed the door and sat down beside his grandfather.
“Everybody ready?” he said.
I wasn’t sure, but I wasn’t going to say anything. We had come this far.
Maskwa grabbed a handle mounted on the floor and pumped it up and down a few times. Then he let the throttle out and pointed the plane toward the far end of the lake. The plane gained speed, the floats riding rough over the waves.
“Next stop, Lake Agawaatese!” Maskwa said. He had to yell over the din of the motor. “Vinnie, did you tell Alex what the name means?”
“It’s kind of a complex word,” Vinnie said. “It literally means ‘He casts a shadow while flying.’”
“You mean like a bird?” I said.
“Bird, cloud, whatever.”
“How about an airplane?” I said. But I don’t think anyone heard me. We were getting closer and closer to the far shoreline. Maskwa pulled the yoke back, and the plane fought its way off the water and into the air. It didn’t look like we’d have enough room to clear the trees, but I figured the man knew what he was doing. I sat back in my seat and tried to relax. It almost worked.
We cleared the trees with three inches to spare. Hell, maybe it was four inches. The plane kept climbing into the sky, higher and higher, until the whole forest was laid out below us from one horizon to the other. Many miles to the north, Lake Agawaatese, with its flying shadows, was waiting for us.
We flew for the better part of an hour, passing over a thick pine forest broken only by lakes and streams and wet marshlands. I looked down and saw a moose cow standing up to her knees in water. She didn’t seem to notice us.
The morning clouds had moved off to the east, but the wind was still blowing. A gust would catch the plane now and then, dropping the bottom out of my stomach. At one point, the plane took a sudden dip and half the dashboard came loose and landed in Maskwa’s lap. Guy reached over and calmly pushed it back in place.
I felt Vinnie tapping me on the shoulder. I looked over and saw an eagle soaring in the sky. “Migizi,” he said. “Maybe that’s good luck.”
Maskwa banked the plane and started his descent. Through the windshield I could see the lake coming up fast. He brought the plane in just over the trees, with what looked to be about three inches to spare again, and then touched down. We skipped a couple of times until the water finally grabbed us for good.
“A little rough, Grandpere,” Guy said.
“Let’s see you do it,” Maskwa said.
“I’ve watched you enough times, I bet I could.”
Maskwa cut the throttle back and drove the plane through the water. There was a light chop, just enough to make the plane rattle like it would fall apart any second. I didn’t see the cabin at first, but then we rounded a slight bend and there it was on the far shore, a small white building with an L-shaped dock, an aluminum motorboat tied up to it. As we got closer, I saw another smaller building by the water, and a third back in the woods.
“There’s a boat here,” Vinnie said.
“Yeah, we keep the motor in the shed,” Guy said. “Along with the gasoline. I helped Mr. Gannon bring that boat out in his plane last year. There’s no way he’ll ever bring it back.”
Maskwa cut the motor just before we got to the dock. We drifted the rest of the way. Guy climbed out his door and jumped onto the dock. When the plane was tied down, we followed him. I could still feel the vibration of the plane’s engine in my legs as I walked up the dock. The buzzing still rang in my ears.
“All right, let’s take a look around,” Guy said. He led us into the cabin. There was a small wooden porch and a screen door in front, with two screened windows. One of them was pushed in. “Goddamned bears,” he said. “If they smell garbage-”
When I stepped into the cabin myself, garbage was exactly what I saw. There was one picnic table in the center of the room, with enough spilled breakfast cereal and ketchup and fish batter and God knows what else to draw a dozen bears. The stale smell of beer hung in the air, and the wooden floor was sticky to walk on. There were unwashed plates stacked up on the counter, and three pots on the propane stove. When Guy opened the propane refrigerator, there was a carton of eggs on the bottom shelf and nothing else.
While the other men stood there looking at the mess, I went into the other room. There were three separate bunks-just bare wood to put your sleeping bags on-and a wood stove. I opened the little door and looked inside. I couldn’t tell how old the ashes were.
“My God, what an unholy pigsty,” Maskwa said. He picked a skin magazine off the floor and threw it in the empty trash can.
“It obviously wasn’t like this the last time I saw it,” Guy said. “But you could fake this, you know what I mean? If you wanted to make it look like somebody was here, you just come in and trash the place.”
“They could fool the police that way,” Maskwa said. “But not you.”
Guy nodded his head. “First, the propane,” he said. He went outside to the big tank on the side of the cabin. “When I left here last time, it was three-quarters full. Now it’s… Let’s see…” He checked the gauge. “About one quarter.”
“Is that how much gas you’d use if you were here a week?” I said.
“Yeah, pretty much. You got the oven and the refrigerator, plus the two overhead lights.”
“So maybe they were here,” Maskwa said.
“Unless somebody switched the tanks. Hold on.” He went down to the little shed by the dock and looked inside. He took out two red gasoline cans and shook them one by one. “Damn, these are empty,” he said. “How much could they use?”
“They must have gone out in the boat a lot,” Maskwa said.
“Two cans worth?”
“You think they switched the cans, too?”
Guy shook his head and looked around the place. “I don’t know.”
“If there’s no way to know for sure-”
“Hold on,” Guy said. “The outhouse. When I left here, I made sure there was toilet paper in there. I know for a fact that there were exactly four rolls in there, with half a roll on the wall. I’m positive.”
I stayed on the dock while they went to check. This was one mission I didn’t need to be a part of. I stood there watching the lake, as the colors changed with each passing cloud. We were so far away from anywhere else right now. We had taken the last road, and now an hour’s worth of flying had put us here on the shores of this lake. I zipped up my coat.
“Okay,” Guy said as he joined me on the dock. “They were here.”
“You have to admit,” I said, “it was pretty unlikely from the beginning. I mean, I suppose it was good to come out here in any case. This is the last place they spent any time. But right now I don’t see how it can help us.”