It was still snowing. But softer now, almost out of respect.
“Stop signs, huh,” mulled Dave Iker. “He’s got a point. World War Three will probably start some hot afternoon down in Minneapolis at a four-way stop.”
They were both pretty beat up.
Iker’s service belt reeked of wet leather, piled on his desk in the sheriff’s office in the Ely courthouse. They were still wearing the mismatched sweat suits from the hospital, and Iker’s purple and red sweatshirt bore the crude drawing of a bearded man holding a big grasshopper. The type underneath spelled:
ST. ERHO FESTIVAL, MENAHAGA, MINNESOTA
St. Erho was the patron saint who rid Finland of grasshoppers. Uncle Billie maintained that St. Erho’s Day, like St. Patrick’s Day, was an excuse to get drunk, because there never were grasshoppers in Finland.
Broker stared out the window at the moderating storm and it all went into a distracted glide, and he mused how lots of Finns had settled around Ely. Maybe because the lakes and forest and six months of winter reminded them of home. Or maybe their national ethic of fatalism attracted them to farm fields full of granite rocks.
Broker caught himself drifting, shook his head, and asked, “That nurse-anesthetist, Amy, she local?”
Iker nodded. “Ummm. Amy Skoda is one of the few who figured how to come back and earn a living.” He slowly raised his eyebrows. “She was asking about you, before it all went bad.”
“Skoda? She a Finlander?” Broker asked.
“Half Finnish, half Slovene; the cream of the local gene pool.” He threw an arm toward the wall where a procession of retired peace officers stared down from framed portraits. “Second picture up there. Stan Skoda’s kid.” Skoda filled the picture frame like an amiable fireplug and Broker vaguely remembered the man from hunting parties when Broker was in high school.
“Take a hike. I gotta make a call,” Iker said. The format glowing on his computer screen gave his face a lime tint as he hunched back to his chair and stared at the number jotted in his spiral notebook.
Broker nodded, got up, and went looking for the gents, as Iker reached for the phone. He had to make the duty call to Hank Sommer’s wife and explain the circumstances of the tragedy.
When Broker returned, Iker was predictably more gloomy.
“How’d it go?” Broker asked.
“She said ‘-but he was in the hospital’ three times.” Iker shook his head. “Could have been worse. That doctor, Falken, had already called and prepared her. She’s got this nice voice,” Iker said. “You know, like way down at the bottom of an air conditioner.”
Broker nodded. He knew how it worked; the phone rings and a strange cop from faraway invites a wife to take a sudden plunge to where she keeps her personal ideas about mortality.
Iker, who lived thirty miles of impassable highway to the west in Tower, then called his wife, made sure that she and the kids were all right, and explained the day’s events and how he was stranded with Phil Broker.
“So now you and your ex-copper buddy have two choices, huh?” another wife’s voice rattled in the telephone.
“Yeah, I guess.” Iker winced and held up the receiver at arm’s length. Broker heard the wife say: “You can shovel snow or get drunk.”
Iker hung up, shrugged. “What are you going to do?”
“Get a room at the Holiday Inn.”
“I got to finish filing this report. Maybe I’ll see you at The Saloon later.” Iker tossed Broker his truck keys.
Broker left the courthouse, climbed in Iker’s truck, and drove toward the Holiday Inn that overlooked Lake Shagawa at the edge of town. No way he was going to try the unplowed road to Uncle Billie’s Lodge in these conditions. Iker’s Ford Ranger barely grabbed traction in Ely.
Moving at a crawl in four-wheel low, he went over some of the medical terminology he’d heard thrown around this afternoon: Sommer had suffered a significant “anoxic insult” and was currently comatose-in a coma due to oxygen starvation to his brain precipitated by respiratory complications following surgery. The informal opinion at Miner Hospital was that Amy Skoda had underestimated the amount of sedation in his system and took him off anesthesia too early in the operating room. Perhaps, someone speculated, she’d anticipated that the surgery would take longer, not allowing for Allen’s speed and skill. Sommer’s being hypothermic may have been a factor. Whatever the precipitating events, he developed trouble breathing in the recovery room.
Nobody was there when he crashed, and the alarm on the monitor had not been set.
As he left, Broker overheard someone console Amy. It could happen to anyone. But it didn’t happen to anyone. It happened to Hank Sommer, the guy Broker had promised to get out of the woods. The guy he helped deliver to a warm, safe hospital where they preserved his heart and lungs and lost his brain.
Wham.
Broker hooked a frustrated fist at the steering wheel in a tantrum of flash anger, swerved, and almost lost control of the truck. Reflexively, he steered into the skid and came out of the spin. Take deep breaths through your nose. Check yourself.
Usually he had a much longer fuse.
The Holiday Inn was a deserted post-and-beam jungle gym with a cathedral ceiling and a bored, snow-hypnotized receptionist who smiled discreetly at Broker’s attire. He carried in the duffel he’d retrieved from the dispatch desk, took a room, and went down a stairwell, opened a door, and stepped into a limbo of clean walls, curtains, and hotel furniture that could be anywhere-USA.
And he just wanted to disappear.
But he stripped down out of habit, went to the shower, and applied soap, shampoo, shaving lather, and a razor to peel off the cold outer layer of the last twenty-four hours. He rubbed a porthole in the steamed bathroom mirror and gauged his fatigue by the redness of his eyes. He took out dry jeans, a fleece pullover, and his spare boots.
After he’d dressed, his hand moved toward the phone, thinking to call the hospital and check with Allen, who’d stayed behind to watch over Sommer and Milt. He withdrew his hand.
You don’t really know Hank Sommer.
And it was like-all his life he’d worked the sharp end and he’d always been annoyed at the compulsion of people who couldn’t resist adding their personal embroidery to the messy edge of tragedy. Now he discovered he was not immune to this character defect.
He was dwelling on it. If you hadn’t hassled Sommer so much during the storm he might not have pushed so hard, might not have ruptured himself.
Try again, Broker.
You fell apart out there and an injured man had to take up the slack.
Either way, if Sommer hadn’t paddled to the max they would have dumped in the middle of the lake, not ten yards from the point. Their bodies would be stiff white logs rolling among the rocks on the leeward shore of Fraser Lake. He’d gone on a canoe trip in only fair physical condition and his strength had faltered when the chips were down.
These were ponderous thoughts to keep afloat in an ocean of fatigue, especially after the narcotic hot shower, and the bed beckoned, but so did the image of Sommer lying less than a mile away with his eyes closed, his heart beating, and his lungs sucking oxygen.
And his head full of static.
Broker lurched to his feet and grabbed his parka. Iker’s wife was right. He needed a drink.
The snow had grayed the early afternoon enough to switch on the streetlights and it was a bad day for a drive, but Broker took one, anyway. He pushed the Ranger through the small business district and followed the flashing blue light of a county snowplow out Sheridan Street to the outskirts of town, where the plow stopped, defeated by drifts on Highway 169. Broker turned around in front of the International Wolf Center and retraced his route.
Ely was end of the road, a departure point for tourists paddling into the wilds. Things were different when Broker was a kid and spent part of his summers here. Then, the iron ore they dug up from the veins that literally ran under the town was so pure it could be welded directly on to steel.
The iron fields were so potent they interfered with radio signals, and the rattle of boxcars full of ore had competed with the buzz of seaplanes flying fishermen into the paradise of northern lakes.
The mines came to grief on the global marketplace. Miners who had landed on Iwo and Saipan were thrown out of work when the steel could be shipped in cheaper from Japan. In the late ’70’s the government annexed the lake country along the Canadian border as a wilderness preserve and banished the gasoline motor to keep the woods and water pristine. The bitter land-use controversy still flared.
Broker switched on the radio, scanned the dial until he hit WELY. “Sally, your brother wants you to stay put. He’s safe, he’s made it to town and won’t get back until this blow is over.”
WELY was one of two American radio stations licensed to transmit personal messages. The other was in the Alaskan bush. He turned off the radio and stared into the storm.
Now the school district was shrinking. Income from vacationers didn’t translate into the kind of jobs that supported families. Like his home ground on the Superior shore, another piece of his geography was being changed by ’90’s Uber wealth.
Take it in stride, he told himself, keep moving, don’t look back.
Mike and Irene Broker had raised their boy to be a stoic. They had been inoculated against sentimentality by bumping up hard against the Depression and Hitler, and they’d passed the antibodies to their son. Broker understood the cultural message of his time. He’d been raised to fight Communists, and he had. He’d come home from his war refitted with a forty-gallon adrenaline tank.
So he’d joked that he’d worn a badge to feed his action jones. But the fact was, if somebody had to remain vigilant in the night so others could sleep in peaceful beds, it probably should be somebody like him.
A shape jerked at the corner of his eye and he almost wrenched the wheel-seeing things-an artifact of shock and fatigue, and he was back to taking deep breaths through his nose to steady down his jumpy thoughts. And he almost had to laugh-Christ, he’d come up here to get away and. .
He just had to maintain control and forward motion and balance. He used to be good at keeping things separate and filed into their own compartments. But it wasn’t that easy to take this one in stride. He’d sprung a leak. Stuff was getting in. Stuff was getting out.
His mom-well, Mom had always worried that he had too much imagination for police work. Peel back the bark, she’d said, and he was layered and impressionable. Like a ball of wax, Sommer said, things stick.
And the things that stuck were memories from more than twenty years of cleaning up after human beings at their worst. And suddenly he swerved again, but this time it was in his head, and he was back in the middle of the argument with his wife.
And she’d said, Oh, I see, so it’s all right for you to do it but not for me, is that it?
The memory invoked all the hoarded resentments; she still thought she was indestructible at thirty-three. She took too many chances out there and left him home to rehearse attending her funeral with their daughter Kit. .
Right now Kit’s absence ached in his arms and he could smell her milky sweet-sour breath and her copper curls and see her chubby face that was part Rubens and part Winston Churchill, and he could hear her pure laugh that was so uncomplicated by fear. He experienced a piercing memory of her a month ago as she struggled with the physical limitations of her limited grasp and discovered that she couldn’t carry all her stuffed animals at once.
She was going on three and by the time she was four she’d experience the death of something-a cat or a dog or a hamster. She’d find and poke her first roadkill. Fearless, like her mother, she’d probably lift the maggots on a stick.
She was almost ready for The Lion King, which he’d screened. She’d see Mufasa trampled to death by stampeding wildebeests and watch little Simba vainly attempt to rouse his father from a permanent sleep.
Eventually, she would pose the question: Daddy, will you die? Will Mommy die?
Will I die?
Broker parked Iker’s truck in a snowdrift in front of The Saloon on a desolate street in Ely and was in a fine mood when he pushed his way through the door, stamped off snow, and took over a table in the corner. The place was dim as a cave and sparsely populated by a few hardy snowmobilers and a storm-weary bartender and waitress.
Broker was no drinker. For a thirst-quencher he preferred lemonade on a hot day, and his only use for bar culture had been as a fertile recruiting ground for bottom-feeding snitches. He always made a point to leave drinking scenes before the lip sync went haywire and people’s expressions became dissociated from their words.
Uncharacteristically, he ordered a double Jack Daniel’s and drank half of it. He gagged, flushed with sweat, and drank the rest, then sat back and waited for the numbness.
He kept getting stuck on the inverted sequence of Sommer’s mind being suffocated inside his living body, and the image obligated him to reflect on his own fast parade of sudden death.
“Traffic,” Broker mumbled to his whiskey glass.
August. Last year, on a sticky, humming, deep-green afternoon he and his father were out for a walk by the state capitol in St. Paul. They’d paused on a freeway overpass with the domes of the capitol and the St. Paul Cathedral bracketing them north and south, and rush hour on Interstate 94 clamoring below their feet. Mike Broker at seventy-nine took long mental vacations and tripped down rabbit holes of nostalgia because in the rabbit holes he was young and doing things that mattered. That hot August afternoon, Dad had looked down at the racing cars and said, “This is what it sounds like when a lot of young people die fast and unhappy in a tight spot. Hundreds of lives go screaming by each minute.”
Dad was talking about the first hour on Omaha Beach.
The rush was not that loud in Broker’s memory but it was audible enough to prompt ordering another double. After it arrived and he drank it, his thinking wobbled: Okay. The body dies first. Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Christians could all agree on that much. The problem was-the major religions were designed for a medical reality that didn’t anticipate CPR, ventilators, and dialysis.
“Hey,” Broker signaled across the dim, nearly deserted room to the waitress at the bar. “Give me another.”
Pocketing his change after the drink arrived he noticed that he was losing corners of seconds off his reflexes and that the fine muscle control at the tips of his fingers had turned blunt. But his thinking had profoundly elongated.
So. Here’s the deal. Sommer’s body didn’t die but his mind did, and now his stubborn flesh was holding HIM-his spirit, whatever-hostage inside. Broker shook his head, stymied at the physical geography of where Sommer was. And his layman’s impressions about biomechanics did not encourage a solution. He understood vaguely that the “human” parts of Sommer’s mind had been obliterated because the deeper cortex-the lizard brain-had sacrificed the higher functions to preserve the vital pumps: the heart, the lungs.
Broker envisioned the embers of Sommer’s life warming a lidless reptilian eye and he suddenly wanted someone to blame besides himself-so he looked around and, well, no shit, he’d been sitting here for ten, fifteen minutes and hadn’t seen Iker hunched over a bar stool at the end of the bar. Iker had traded in his St. Erho sweats for a pullover, jeans, and a heavy leather coat.
Like two aging Earp brothers, their eyes met, paused briefly to check each other’s backs, and dropped back to their glasses.
Then, scanning the room more carefully, he spied Amy Skoda sitting at a corner table with her back against the wall. Half her face was blacked out in shadow. The other half was caught in the neon haze from a Budweiser sign. She still wore her blue trousers, now tucked into car boots, and her open anorak revealed the ID badge clipped to her blue tunic.
She moved her head forward into the light, their eyes met, and Broker saw reflected in her face the blame he felt burning in his own.