No one moved. In the deathly quiet of that moment, in the still Cork always would associate with terrible tragedy, the lake could be heard again, lapping peacefully against the shore.
The man with the rifle had been Arnold Stanley. All his life he’d held a safe job as an accountant in Chicago. But at fifty he’d risked his whole savings to buy the Bayside Inn, a small resort on a southern inlet of Iron Lake. He was a small, pop-eyed man, nervous. After the shooting, his wife told reporters that he’d been distraught at the prospect of the Indian fishing ruining his business. “He was afraid we’d lose everything,” she sobbed on camera. “He wasn’t a bad man. He was just so afraid.”
People said openly that putting six bullets into a scared little man was excessive. It was a hard statement to disagree with.
Russell Blackwater, speaking for The People, decried Cork’s incompetence. The sheriff had promised to protect the unarmed fishermen, who were only exercising their legal right. And once again it was the innocent who suffered when promises were broken.
The day Sam Winter Moon and Arnold Stanley died, the Anishinaabe didn’t spearfish or gillnet. Nor did they any other day. A negotiating committee that included Russell Blackwater, Jo O’Connor, Sandy Parrant, and several attorneys for the state of Minnesota convened in St. Paul a few days later. They reached an agreement, pushed quickly through the legislature by Sandy Parrant, requiring the state to pay a much increased annual reimbursement to the Iron Lake band of Ojibwe for not exercising their fishing rights on Iron Lake or any other lake in the state.
The county board of commissioners suspended Cork with full pay pending the findings of an inquest into the shootings. Arnold Stanley was the only man Cork had ever killed. Nervous, pop-eyed little Stanley, who’d only been scared to death that he was going to lose everything. Cork went over it again and again in his mind, replaying every moment leading to the fatal shooting. Was there something he could have done? Did people have to die?
The inquest proceeded smoothly, evidence showing that Cork had acted reasonably. But the county attorney, Warren Evans, who was a crony of Robert Parrant, asked Cork a question that tilted the whole world of the inquest.
“Why did you shoot six times, Sheriff? Shoot even after the man was down?”
Cork, in the witness stand, looked at his hands and didn’t answer right away.
“Did you hear the question?”
“Yes,” Cork replied. “I heard.”
“Please answer then. Why did you shoot Arnold Stanley six times?”
Although it was midday, midweek, the courtroom was full. Most of the spectators were white, but a number of Iron Lake Ojibwe, including Russell Blackwater, sat near the back off to one side. The quiet in the courtroom at that moment reminded Cork of the quiet at the boat landing after the shooting had stopped.
“Answer the question, Cork,” Ed Reilly, the judge, said.
Cork looked out across the waiting faces in the courtroom. He said, “I don’t know.”
“Is it possible,” Warren Evans suggested, “you simply panicked?”
Cork weighed this possibility. “Yes,” he admitted, “it’s possible I panicked.”
“I panicked!”
Helmuth Hanover used those fateful words as the headline in the Sentinel two days later. And in his editorial, Hanover expressed serious doubts about Corcoran O’Connor’s fitness as sheriff, posing the question to the voters of Tamarack County: Wasn’t a recall election in order?
In retrospect, Cork thought he might have been able to mount a decent countercampaign, but at that time it hadn’t mattered. He felt shattered, broken inside, unsure of everything about himself. Although the recall wasn’t a landslide, it was successful. In the special election that followed, Wally Schanno, handpicked by Judge Robert Parrant, stepped into office.
When he’d cleaned the old wax from the skis, he took a break, lit up a Lucky Strike, and stared across the lake toward the barren trees that lined the shore in front of the casino. In the morning sunlight, the distant copper dome flashed like a flame rising from the snow. Cork understood that, in a way, laying most of the blame for the tragedy on his shoulders had made the casino possible. Sandy Parrant could never have convinced the white population of Tamarack County to approve the land sale if they’d perceived the Anishinaabe to have been responsible for Stanley’s death. And Blackwater could never have convinced the tribal council to go forward in the first place if he hadn’t also convinced them that it was Cork’s incompetence rather than the greed and anger of the whites that had caused the death of Sam Winter Moon. Jo’s fortunes had risen with the Anishinaabe’s and through her association with Sandy Parrant, whose own political star was well on the rise. Cork tried not to be bitter over it. In the end, prosperity had come to almost everyone in the county-red and white. What was one man’s life, or two or three, compared to the welfare of so many?
Not much, he admitted as he flicked his cigarette into the snow. The ember hissed a moment, then died. Not very damn much. Unless it was your own.
11
In the parking lot of Johnny’s Pinewood Broiler, Molly Nurmi clipped on her skis and headed toward the lake three blocks away. Outside the small business district of Aurora, the streets hadn’t been touched by a plow blade. Although sidewalks had been cleared or were being cleared, most of the town looked as it had in the early light when Molly came off the lake on her way to work. Drifts sloped against anything upright-fences, hedges, walls. Slender tree limbs wore a thick white layer like icing on a dessert bar. In the sunlight, everything sparkled in a way that thrilled Molly greatly, and when she hit the open flat of the lake, she let herself fly.
Snowmobiles whined across the lake, buzzing like fast small insects, leaving a maze of tracks that reminded Molly of patterns in wormwood. Far out on the ice, a small fleet of four-wheelers had made their way to fishing shanties. There seemed more life on the hard water of Iron Lake than on land.
Molly cut north, following several of the snowmobile tracks toward the small copse of trees that hid the old foundry. Beyond that was Sam’s Place, and Cork would be waiting. She loved to push her body, to feel how strong it was, how she could ask so much of it and it would deliver. Her body was the only thing she’d ever known that was so reliable, and she took care of it religiously. In summer she ran the forested, back roads or swam long distances in the lake. Winters, she skiied every chance she got. She fed her body in healthy ways, eschewing caffeine and alcohol especially. There had been a time in her life when she wouldn’t have bet money on living past twenty-one. Now she sometimes felt wonderfully invulnerable, as if she could live forever. In a life that had been spent mostly running away from the past, she felt she’d finally come to rest somewhere full of hope.
As she broke from the trees and saw Cork standing near his Bronco watching her approach, she thought it had been a long journey to reach the place she’d come to, nearly thirty years. But she was glad to be there.
“I love this snow!” she exclaimed as she stopped beside the Bronco. She opened her arms in a gesture as if hugging the whole world. “I love winter. I adore everything about it.” She leaned to him and kissed him passionately. “And I adore you.”
“Let’s get those skis on the Bronco,” he said.
Molly saw that he had his own skis-old wooden things-already on the rack. “We’re going skiing? Together?”
“I’m using your place as starting point to ski to Meloux’s.”
“Let’s start from here,” she suggested.
“Are you kidding? I’d die. Come on, off with those skis. I’ll drive you home.”
Molly released the toe clips and stepped out. Cork put the skis on the rack and tossed her poles in back with his. He held the door of the Bronco open for her, then got in behind the wheel and pulled away from the Quonset hut. Molly took off her stocking cap and shook out her hair. The heat from her body and the moisture from her sweat steamed the windows and Cork kicked the defrost fan up a couple of notches. Molly watched him closely.