“Yes.”
“Gimme some of them, too.”
“We’re diving,” LePere reminded him. “If you eat all that, you won’t need weights.”
Bridger scowled at him, then at the waitress. “And coffee. Lots of it.”
The restaurant was filling up. A few locals, it seemed to LePere, and a lot of tourists. A family-man, woman, boy-stepped in and waited to be seated. They were only a few feet from where LePere and Bridger sat by a window.
“Can we go swimming in the lake?” the boy asked.
“No way, Randy,” his father replied. “The water’s too cold. It’s so cold, in fact, that the bodies of drowned people don’t float to the surface. Lake Superior, son, doesn’t give up its dead.”
“Stuart,” his wife admonished.
“Why?” the boy asked.
Ignoring the look from his wife, Stuart replied, “As a body decomposes, gases form inside it that make it float. It fills up like a balloon. But the water here is so cold, bodies don’t decompose. They just lie there on the bottom of that big lake-”
“That’s enough, Stuart.”
“They say,” he went on, “that at night when the moon is very bright and the water very still, you can look down and see all the dead dancing along the bottom.” He gave his hands a ghostly flutter.
“That’s enough.” This time it was LePere who spoke.
Stuart stared at him, surprised. A smile tried to come to his lips, hoping the unhappy, powerful-looking man at the table was only joking.
“I was just…” he started to explain. He ended simply: “Sorry.”
The family stood silently until they were seated. LePere sat looking out the window toward the lake that burned with a silver fire under the morning sun.
When the check came after breakfast, Bridger said, “Mind catching it?”
LePere dug for his wallet. “Luck didn’t change, huh?”
“Went down to Black Bear Casino last night. Thought a different location might help. It didn’t.”
“Maybe if you stopped mixing cards and alcohol,” LePere suggested.
“Just buy the damn breakfast, okay? The least you could do. I didn’t get out of bed this morning for my own amusement.”
LePere dropped a couple of bucks for a tip and paid at the register. As he stepped outside, he saw Stuart watching him from the window. Stuart looked quickly away.
Breakfast had awakened Wesley Bridger. He walked briskly to LePere’s truck, then stood shaking his head at the old blue Dodge pickup with its homemade camper shell.
“How long you had this rust bucket?”
“Eleven years now.” LePere climbed in.
“Time for a new one,” Bridger said, opening the passenger door. “But then, cleaning toilets won’t exactly cover monthly payments.”
LePere pulled the truck onto the highway and continued south out of Beaver Bay.
Bridger reached for the radio and found a country station. He crossed his arms and settled back. “Those casinos really rake it in. Christ, middle of nowhere and the parking lot’s always full, day or night. They must haul in a million bucks a day.” He eyed LePere. “And you don’t get one red cent?”
“Like I told you before, each casino is operated by a specific band.” LePere checked his mirror and passed a slow-moving Buick with an old woman at the wheel. “The Chippewa Grand Casino is operated by the Iron Lake Band of Ojibwe. To get an allotment, you have to be an enrolled member of that band. My mother was a Cree from Canada.”
“Even so, you’d think with all that bread there’d be enough to spread it around to every Indian in the state. The hell with that band stuff.” Bridger’s foot tapped along to Reba McEntire. “You’re thinking, I suppose, that at least they gave you a job. Big deal. Cleaning the crap off toilet seats.”
“I know where this is leading.”
“All I’m saying is that no matter how you look at it, you’re owed big time by somebody.”
“And that’s why you’ve come up with this new harebrained scheme. Because I’m owed big time.”
“No, I came up with it because the very idea of holding a million bucks in my hand makes my dick stiff.”
“You used to be sure we’d get a million bucks diving the wreck.”
“We will.” Bridger settled back and crossed his arms. “We will. But it’ll be at the end of long, drawnout litigation. Way my luck’s been lately, I can’t wait that long for a bankroll. Like I told you, we got any more heavy expense with this diving, we’re shit out of luck.”
“Maybe it’s time you stopped gambling, Wes.”
“It was gambling brought us this far,” Bridger reminded him sourly. “Look, I’m just suggesting a different game, that’s all.”
“What you’re suggesting isn’t a game. We could go to jail.”
“Like your life ain’t a fucking prison now.”
They approached a long ridge that stretched east, a dark wall rising in front of them. The ridge was crowned with evergreen and aspen, but its sides were bare rock, striated basalt cliffs that, at the eastern terminus, plunged more than two hundred feet, before touching the surface of the lake. It was Purgatory Ridge, the deep ancient lava flow in whose shadow John LePere had been born and raised. The highway cut under the ridge in a long tunnel, lit by bright lights. As LePere drove through, the tires of his old truck seemed to be singing one long note that echoed off the tunnel walls. When the highway broke into sunlight again, LePere immediately slowed the truck and turned onto a narrow lane of dirt and gravel. The lane wound a quarter mile through a thick stand of poplars until it came to a small house on a protected cove named for the ridge that towered above it. Purgatory.
The cove had a beach composed entirely of small stones rounded smooth by waves. LePere’s was the only house. The only other artificial structures were a sturdy little fish house and a long dock where a reconditioned 36-foot Grand Banks trawler christened Anne Marie was moored. LePere parked the truck near the fish house and got out. He fumbled the key into the padlock on the door.
Bridger got out, too, and stretched. With a nod toward the little house, he asked, “How come you never go in the old place?”
“I go in.”
“Just not when I’m with you.”
“I don’t like things disturbed.”
“What is it? Like some kind of shrine?”
“Get your tanks,” LePere said, and threw open the fish house door.
In LePere’s youth, the fish house had been where his father cleaned the day’s catch-ciscoes, herring, whitefish-he sold to the markets and smokehouses along the North Shore between Grand Marais and Two Harbors. Jean Charles LePere had come back from World War II and four years in the navy with a love of big, open water. With the money he might otherwise have used for college, he bought the land on Purgatory Cove from an old Norwegian named Bugge. Along with it came the dwelling, the fish house, a leaky fishing boat, and yards and yards of tangled nets. He spent nearly a year repairing the buildings, making the vessel seaworthy, mending the nets. In the winter of the repairs, he met and fell in love with a beautiful young Indian woman named Anne Marie Sebanc who worked as a waitress in a little place in Knife River. During his second year of laying nets, he married her. Although the house was small and rustic, it became their home, and within a year, they had a son. John Sailor LePere.
For a long time, John LePere’s life was wonderful. He remembered spending long days collecting agates on the shore of the cove and accompanying his father to the north shore towns where he sold the stones to souvenir shops while his father was selling fish. He remembered picnics atop Purgatory Ridge with the Sawtooth Mountains to the northwest, and to the east Lake Superior stretching flat and blue all the way to the end of the world. He remembered his father pointing out to him from that height where, under the silver surface, the fish ran and where was a good place to set a net. His father had loved fishing and loved the big lake. Yet it had been these very things that had killed him, that had plunged his wife into a dark confusion from which she never fully emerged and that had forced his sons to grow up too quickly and too hard. For much of his life, LePere had struggled to crack the truth at the heart of this mystery. What he’d finally come to accept was that the lake called Kitchigami was so vast and ancient and part of something so huge in its ultimate purpose that one human life-or two or three-mattered not at all. In that way, he’d come to think it was like God, who gave and took and offered not the slightest explanation for either.