Destiny.
I case the house as I wade through the bushes and creep across the grass. I can just make out the sound of a radio above the roar of the dam, but see no signs of life. I strip a man’s white dress shirt and a worn-out pair of khaki shorts from the line, tuck them under my arm, and hurry toward the boat. After unmooring the skiff, I use the oars and row quietly up past the houses. When I am completely surrounded again by trees, I pull the starter cord and race off.
The skiff finally runs aground and I hop out. I can see the next dam, not nearly as dramatic as the first, but when I get to the other side, I see what I’ve been looking for. The inlet. A marina. Dozens of boats, covered and waiting for their owners to take them out on the lake for a day of fun. Across the inlet from the marina, cottages stand clustered together under the trees. I hear the sounds of laughter and smell the campfires of people on vacation. I strip out of my prison pants and T-shirt in the shadows, then change into my new clothes and roll up the sleeves of the shirt before walking through the yard of the marina like I belong there.
I find a boat similar to the one I used to own, an open-bow Four Winns, and uncover it in plain sight of the people on the other side of the narrow inlet. Hotwiring this boat is easier than with my dad’s heavy equipment when I was a kid. Two wires clearly exposed beneath the dash. I flip on the running lights, back the boat out of its slip, and wave to the revelers as I ease up the inlet toward the open lake.
The water’s surface is smooth, and I am zipping along like a ghost, skimming the surface, flying through the night. The hillsides are dark except for a sprinkling of lights from the homes on the water. I pull up for a few minutes in the middle to strip and wash the scum from my body. The wind soon whips me dry and I stop again to put the clothes back on. Owasco is fourteen miles long, so in less than half an hour I am idling in toward a lively restaurant and bar tucked into the lake’s last cove.
This is no coincidence. Lester learned from an electrician about the place called Cascade Grill on the end of the lake. Our plan all along was for me to get us transportation this way. To be obvious and invisible. I was going to drop Lester at a bus station in Binghamton. Lester, my friend.
There is a long dock sticking out into the water. More than a dozen other boats are moored along its edge, bumping gently up against the car tires looped down over its metal support poles. The stillness of the air gives way to the steady hum of people talking and laughing and the vibrations and thumping of a band called the Works. I know because a huge banner stretches across the back of the one-story pale blue building: CASCADE GRILL WELCOMES THE WORKS.
The narrow dock leads right up a ramp and onto Cascade’s deck. Bugs swirl in the halos of the small lanterns nailed to a tall fence that blocks out the neighboring cottages. The orange wood of the deck is new and topped with dark green plastic tables and chairs with matching square canvas umbrellas. It’s wall-to-wall people. I ease through the crowd with my head bobbing gently to the beat like everyone else, and slip inside and up to the bar.
From my pocket, I remove Lester’s baggie of money and the map and I strip off a twenty from 1973. The bartender is a big teddy bear of a man with a walrus mustache and baggy pale green eyes. Even in the smoke of the bar, I can smell stale cigars on his clothes from behind the taps.
“Got any wheat beer?” I ask.
He scowls and shakes his head as if he doesn’t even know what I’m talking about.
“Löwenbräu?” I say.
He gives me a funny smile and says, “And you want to borrow my Foreigner eight-track too, right? Come on, buddy, I’ve got customers.”
I see a Bud tap handle and ask for a bottle of that. He reaches down into the cooler, keys off the top, and sets it down in front of me. I point to the twenty and leave the change on the bar like everyone else. With the bottle tipped up to my mouth, I look around. On my left are two muscle-heads in tank tops with crew cuts and big tattoos. To my right is a couple in their fifties wearing leather chaps and vests. The man has long gray hair pulled into a ponytail and his chick’s poorly bleached cut is windblown.
In front of them is a pile of small bills and change, two bottles of a brew I’ve never heard of, and a heavy chain with a set of keys. It takes me only a minute to see that they’re fall-down drunk.
I cock myself their way on the stool and buy them a drink. He’s a math teacher in Union Springs. She’s a psychologist from Seneca Falls. Every nice weekend in the summer, they get on their bikes and ride across the state. He rides a 1953 Indian Chief.
“Rebuilt it myself,” he says, throwing back his shoulders. He butts out his Marlboro and his eyes take on a sheen. “One of the ones they made in their last order for the New York City police.”
I tell them I’m a lawyer from Syracuse with a summer cottage halfway up the lake. We communicate all this by leaning close and yelling above the sound of the band and the noise of the bar. Through the window, I can see the throng swaying with their hands in the air. People start taking off their shirts.
The math teacher finishes off his Saranac Ale and staggers to his feet.
“Be right back,” he says, clasping my shoulder and using it to keep from falling on his face.
He disappears around the corner where the bathrooms are before the girlfriend stretches a smile across her face, blushes, and says, “Me too.”
She slips off her stool. I put two more twenties on the bar, ask the bartender for another round and whatever the big guys next to me are drinking too. This keeps him busy while I slip the keychain over the lip of the bar and into the pocket of my baggy shorts.
I wait for them to come back and start working on their fresh drinks before I excuse myself for the bathroom. I push through the bar and around the corner. Left is the bathrooms, right is the front door. I go right. Across a small lane is a two-tiered stone parking lot. The Indian Chief is up in the second lot alongside an orange Honda 650. They’re parked between a white van and an old Ford Escort.
I look around quick, then mount up. I had a dirt bike growing up, so I know how to drive, but I’ve never been on something as big and heavy as this. I take it easy down Route 38 into Moravia, scanning ahead of me for the flashing lights of a roadblock.
It’s too soon for that, though, and instead of making a right in the center of town to keep going south on 38, I pull over under a streetlamp to check my map. Straight through the intersection takes me out of town on 38A. Less than a mile after that, I turn off onto a farm road and weave my way across the bottom of Skaneateles, past Glen Haven, through Otisco, across Interstate 81, and on up the other side of Syracuse on Route 46.
Sometime after I was born, in a brief fit of nostalgia, my mother bundled me up and took me to the reservation to show me off to her older half sister. A week later, my mother received a proud phone call from her sister. Of her own volition, the sister had registered me as a member of the tribe. Because my mother was a Mohawk, I was a Mohawk too. Nothing to be overly proud of in the Onondaga Nation, but still, one of the people.
With that lineage came certain rights. For the same reason my father and Black Turtle had been able to line up some help for me to leave the country at the end of my trial, I zigzag my way up along the Adirondack State Park. Sticking to back roads, I go through towns like Ava, Lowville, and Colton all the way to the St. Regis Mohawk Indian Reservation.
I ease the big Chief down Route 37 onto the reservation and into the town of Hogansburg. Right there off the highway is a long single-story building, newly built. Longhouse of the twenty-first century. The Akwesasne Casino. The sky is beginning to lighten in the east as I pull into the lot. I am teetering on exhaustion until I see a bundle of newspapers that have been tossed onto the curb. I yank one out from beneath the plastic band and search for news of my escape. There is nothing. Yet. I know by the evening edition, my face will make page three at the least.