Lucky's Girl (6 page)

The voice of the Big Tree had never been so clear, so powerful, so real and irresistible. It should have been disconcerting, but he knew that the Big Tree would give him what he wanted most: revenge.

CHAPTER 7

Errol tilted back his fourth Molson, took a long swallow, and said, “Elton Township, we hardly knew ye, farewell!”

Jerry tipped his double scotch towards Frankie the Bartender, and the man held his up too. It was his second double of the night, and would be his last before heading home to polish off the Canadian Mist he’d bought yesterday. He made a point of only getting sloppy at his own home.

Holding it at eye level, Jerry said, “The Rev.”

Errol shook his head and whispered, “Yeah.”

Frankie exhaled long and loudly. “Hell, Everclear and the fucking Polack, this place ain’t gonna be the same without ‘em.”

All three men looked down with the same sad, rueful smiles. Frankie’s Bar was where most arrests happened in Elton Township, and those two had been regulars at the bar and the drunk tank afterwards. They would be buried in a potter’s field at the county seat, unless someone claimed their bodies. But that required money and a family and neither had any.

All three men sat tearless but knew a corner had been turned, and now they were completely in the dark. Elton Township had one pillar, the church, and that church had one pillar, the Rev, and he was now gone.

Errol spoke up. “I guess I’ll go clear their cabins out. I can’t imagine they’ve got next of kin or anything valuable. It’s gonna be some work though, do you think I’ll be able to wrangle any volunteers from the church still?”

Frankie shook his head. “Hadn’t thought about that, not sure how the hell that’s gonna work now.”

Jerry pulled back off his barstool and stood up. “That’s cuz it’s not gonna work, not anymore. You think she’s gonna hold that church together? She’s a great lady, but she’s not the Rev. That church was the only thing bailing out this sinking ship.”

Frankie looked around at his little bar. Apart from this place there was a convenience store, a diner, and a couple of motels. Other than that there was the church and a bunch of cabins in the woods around Elton Lake.

“It ain’t like that, Jerry. There’s supposed to be new timber leases this next summer. There’ll be jobs. We’re all torn up about the Rev but we can’t just lose faith and give up.”

Jerry looked to Frankie, then to Errol. He put his windbreaker and policeman’s hat on. “You’re both gonna be fine,” he said, his voice cracking. “I can’t kid you, I’m just thinking about myself. Looking out for number one, and this number one is just about fucked boys. No township; no sheriff, and ain’t no town gonna hire a fat sixty-year-old drunk.”

Frankie looked scared. “Well you got a pension coming… don’t you, Jerry?”

Jerry smiled, turned, and walked out the door.

***

While the rest of the country baked in the dog days of summer, the Upper Peninsula was already turning to Autumn. Maybe it was the isolation, or a declination of the sun, but the shadows grew longer with cooler winds becoming the norm. America used to know the Upper Peninsula as a place to while away time camping and swimming, waiting for the summer’s end, but America had moved on leaving the U.P. remote and forgotten.

Kenny sat in the rocking chair on the porch of his uncle’s cabin. There was another next to it, the one he’d used when he was the kid. Some part of him had thought his uncle would like him sitting in his old rocker after all these years. He was on beer two of the Molson six-pack he’d gotten when they’d crossed the state line. He hadn’t had one of these in… twenty-something years. He wasn’t a big drinker, so two Canadian beers had given him a pleasant buzz to take in the U.P. night.

It had only taken a few hours of cleaning before both kids had fallen asleep on the old couch. There were three areas of the cabin – the kitchen, which opened on to the living room, and then the bedroom where the bathroom was. His uncle Henry hadn’t been a troglodyte, but he’d been clean in spite of being a shut-in. His clothes had hung in the closet, his boots would be neatly lined up next to the front door. The house had smelled exactly like Kenny had remembered; tobacco, English Leather, and bacon grease. The gun cabinet was still locked, the key on a hook under the sink, with the same four rifles: an M-1 Garand, two deer rifles, and the .22 his uncle had taught him on, plus one double-barreled shotgun and the .45 a grandfather brought home from Okinawa.

Someone had cleaned out the refrigerator so there’d been no smell of rot.

Then they’d cut the electricity at the breaker box.

Kenny dozed off, pulling the flannel shirt around him, starting awake whenever the chair would ease forward or back. He opened his eyes with tingles going up his spine.

Everything was the same, down to the smallest detail.

Except he wasn’t a boy, he was a man… and his uncle was dead.

Other than that, everything was the exactly the same. The TV that his uncle had saved up for about a year to buy, probably in about 1987, the old blue 1975 Ford Pickup, the fishing rods arranged around the back door, the refrigerator in the corner of the kitchen. It had turned right back on when Kenny had hit the circuit breaker. Some things were just not made like they used to be.

A pair of headlights and the sound of wheels crunching on the dirt driveway stirred him from his reverie. He figured it wouldn’t take long before someone came to investigate who had taken up residence at the old McCord cabin, but Kenny was stunned by the guy getting out of the old mail jeep and grinning sadly at him. It was Mailman Errol, the same guy who’d shown up every day when Kenny was growing up with a handful of junk mail and a VA check once a month. He was still here, still handing out mail, and with the same goddam mail jeep.

“Well, golly gee, if it ain’t Mailman Errol come to check on the prodigal son… or nephew I guess.”

“That’s
Mayor
Mailman Errol to you, Kenny McCord.”

“Wooowee! We’re hittin’ the bigtime up here in Elton Township! Shouldn’t you be driving a Caddy or something?”

“Unpaid. I go to the capitol once a year to beg for the funding to keep the lights on around here.”

“Sad, very sad, Mister Mayor. Why don’t you pull up a rocker here and catch me up on the gossip in the ‘ol Township here. By the way, were you aware that someone repo’d your lake? I’ve heard of broke before, but this is ridiculous.”

“Don’t mind if I do, McCord, though there ain’t a whole hell of a lot of good news in this part of the world.”

They sat back in the rockers, looking out into the deep dark woods and big clear sky. Neither said anything for a while but both men knew the other had an awful lot to say, and none of it was going to be easy.

“I figured Kaminsky would have sent one of his deputies to come check up once someone had noticed a truck sitting in front of the old McCord cabin.”

Errol lit a Camel, offering one to Kenny. “There’s just Kaminsky and me. We haven’t had the funding for deputies for almost ten years.”

Kenny exhaled long and hard at Errol’s revelation about how bad things really were. Then he put up a hand to decline the cigarette. “No thanks. Clean living, you know?”

Errol shrugged. “What, are you crazy or something? These are fancy cigs up here in this neck of the woods.”

“Had to quit, people in my line of work shouldn’t smoke.”

“What’s that, Kenny?”

“Underwater welding.”

Errol nodded. “Right. Offshore, Gulf of Mexico, oil rigs. Frank told me that. He was real proud of you. I made a point of coming out here and sitting with him about once a month. So did Kaminsky and a couple of folks from the church.”

Kenny didn’t say anything, feeling the first tears working their way up from inside. He hadn’t planned on this conversation tonight. At first he’d been happy to see Errol, the idea of catching up on old times seemed like fun, until the reality of those times had come back into focus.

“Tell me something, Errol, why are you here? Why are you still in this town?”

“Towns need mailmen, Kenny.”

“This town doesn’t really seem like much of a town anymore. I don’t buy it. Why are you here? Why is anyone here? There’re no jobs.
Why do people stay?”

Errol looked down, shaking his head. “People like your uncle, Kenny, and there are a lot of them. They’re just lost in this world. Somebody has to help them, somebody has to care. You don’t know how many times I’ve watched human beings just wink out of existence, poof, gone. I’d tell myself I was gonna pack my bags and never look back. But what the hell would happen to the people left behind, what would happen if everybody just turned their backs?”

A strange question crept into Kenny eyes. “Errol, how is the Reverend James, how is his… how is Mrs. James? God, those people were so good to me growing up but everything… well, you know what happened. How are they?”

Errol shook his head, running his hand through his hair. “He’s dead. Funeral’s tomorrow.”

Kenny felt the first tear roll from the corner of his eye. He wiped it away, then looked at the wetness on his fingers. “Sometimes, growing up, I’d wonder why this town was even here. There’s no reason for it. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s like a ghost town which never had any reason to be in the first place… but nobody ever left. They just stayed, poor and fucked up.”

“Wow, Kenny, you outta be on Oprah or something.”

Kenny laughed. “I’m being serious. When I was a kid, I was never able to figure out why this town was here. It was poor back then and I never could figure out what the hell kept people here.”

Errol squinted at Kenny in the shadows of the porch. “You left. You left and you never looked back ‘til now. I know why you left, any sane man would, but you look like you’re back, and from the look of your truck, you got kids. What’s going on, man?”

By the time Kenny told Errol his twenty-year story the six-pack was gone and Kenny was out of tears again. When Kenny was about to pass out, Errol walked him into the cabin. He caught a glimpse of two young kids sleeping on the fold-out couch and said a quiet prayer for them. He put Kenny to bed, saying another quick prayer for widowers lost in the U.P. He closed the door to the cabin, making sure to hear the distinct click to know it really was closed. In the distance he heard the first calls of the Pack, too far away to know which direction they were coming from. But he knew in his gut this song was different. Wild, frenzied, mad with the anticipation of triumph. Errol’s hairs stood up on the back of his neck considering just what kind of triumph that was.

CHAPTER 8

Across the field two sets of moonlit eyes glared at one another. On the southern side Blackie stood, apparently alone. From the north, two packs from the roughly one-hundred-mile radius of Elton Township stared back, drawn for one reason alone: to kill Blackie.

Blackie had been born to one of those tribes, her own mother standing across the field from her, ears back, teeth bared, wild with rage. The alpha female of that tribe, the one who had mauled her, the one who had made her a rogue, the one who’d left her barren, was there too. She stood beside the alpha male of the tribe, a big grey with a luxurious white belly of fur. They were seven in total, the alpha male and female, three younger females and two young males, the pups somewhere in the woods behind them.

The second tribe was larger, with two big females and one large male. Blackie recognized them as well, particularly the females. They’d chased her away after finding her scavenging one of their deer kills. She had been starving and badly injured, her wounds only just beginning to close. She’d gone north after being mauled and exiled, wandering into their territory. She was very lucky to have escaped with her life. After that she went east, then south, attracted by the garbage cans outside the Rev’s house.

When they’d discovered her they’d left raw hamburger for her the next night. She spent several weeks eating leftovers from the church out of a bowl left at the edge of the tree line. This gave her the time to heal, to explore, to bring that first house cat to the base of the enormous white pine on the small island in the lake.