Iron Lake Read online

  At 5:35, he got word over the radio that Helmuth Hanover of the Aurora Sentinel had received a call from an anonymous spokesman for the Minnesota Civilian Brigade threatening some form of retaliation if the Indians fished. Cork had no time to consider this development. Less than a minute later, just as the drizzle seemed to let up and the faintest hint of morning light crept across the lake, Deputy Jim Bowdry radioed that the procession of vehicles he was leading from the reservation was only a mile from the landing. Earlier Cork had given instructions to his men to clear a corridor from the parking area to the lake as soon as he gave them the word. He told them now to get started. The crowd, who’d been quiet and had even seemed a little sleepy, came suddenly to life and began chaotically to gather behind the lines formed by the outstretched arms of the deputies. The morning had been still enough to hear the lap of lake water against the shore, but now shouts back and forth across the empty corridor shattered the quiet. Placards rose above the crowd, swinging back and forth like signals at a dangerous railroad crossing. The news teams had crawled out of their trucks and started their cameras rolling.

  Cork had a bad feeling in his gut. And for the first time in years, he was so afraid he was shaking.

  The procession of five vehicles—the patrol car, two old pickups, a station wagon, and Blackwater’s motorcycle—came slowly up the access toward the parking area. Jim Bowdry stopped his patrol car far short of the lot, where some of the crowd were waiting. Cork walked over and asked Blackwater to keep his people there a few moments. Then he hauled a bullhorn from his car, stood on a picnic table, and addressed the crowd.

  “This is Sheriff O’Connor! Listen up, everyone!” He waited a moment for a quiet that never quite came. “This is Sheriff O’Connor! I want everyone to stay back of the lines my deputies have formed. I want a clear corridor for these fishermen to walk to their boats. Stay behind the deputies. I repeat, you will stay behind the deputies and keep the corridor clear.”

  He set the bullhorn on the table, stepped down, and approached Blackwater. “This is what you wanted, Russ. Let’s do it.”

  Cork led the way. Directly behind him, side by side, came Russell Blackwater and Sam Winter Moon. Jo was back with the others who followed, all of them keeping close together. The big yard light that illuminated the boat landing at the far end of the cleared corridor seemed miles away to Cork. The shouts of the crowd rose angrily on both sides. Cork had ordered his deputies to keep their firearms holstered, that if a situation arose they were to let him handle it. He didn’t want an incident. He recognized many of the faces in the crowd, but they were different faces than he’d seen in the shops and the quiet streets of Aurora. They seemed like twisted things, grotesque Halloween masks of anger.

  A third of the way to the landing, Cork caught a movement to his left just out of the corner of his eye. He swung around quickly. An empty Pepsi can clattered onto the black asphalt of the corridor and Russell Blackwater kicked it as it rolled across. Cork realized that he was gripping the handle of his holstered revolver. He took a deep breath, turned back toward the landing, and moved on.

  They’d come thirty yards safely and had less than a dozen to go to reach the boats. For a moment, Cork finally let himself think it was just about over; they were almost there. He felt how tight he was, all his muscles tensed in a way that suddenly seemed more painful than he could bear, and he let himself relax, just a little. It was only a moment, one brief instant, but it was enough for tragedy.

  A small figure stepped into the hard glare beneath the light over the boat landing. He’d come around the end of the crowd, slipped past the last outstretched deputy’s arm. He stood at the end of the corridor, dead center. The light above him at his back cast his face in shadow, and Cork couldn’t see who it was. The shadowed mouth didn’t utter a word. The arms simply lifted a rifle and pointed it toward Cork.

  Forever after, Cork remembered the next few seconds as if it all had happened in slow motion. He could see every detail. The drizzle-wetted hair plastered to the top of a balding little head. The dark outline of ears sticking out like handles on an urn. A moment of illumination as the face turned slightly, looking from side to side behind Cork. And finally the slow drawing back of the hand that operated the pump. Cork’s own movements seemed like something done underwater, nightmarishly slow. Reaching toward his holster. Fumbling with the strap over his revolver. Starting to draw the firearm clear. All of it too slow.

  Fire flashed from the rifle barrel. There must have been a sound, but Cork in all his remembering never heard a sound. He expected to be hit, the impact to be like a log slammed into his chest, but he felt nothing and his arm kept moving, clearing his revolver from its holster. As the figure before him drew back the pump of the rifle again, Cork fired. The little man stumbled back. Cork fired again and again. The rifle discharged once more, but high this time, uselessly into the dripping sky; the little man collapsed. Cork followed him with his revolver, pumping the last of his rounds into the man even as he lay fallen.

  Cork turned back. Behind him Sam Winter Moon lay sprawled on the wet black asphalt, his chest blown into a pulpy mess.

  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.

&nbs
p; “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.

  “You’ve been thinking about Sam Winter Moon and Arnold Stanley,” she said.

  He was surprised, but tried not to show it. “What makes you think so?”

  “I can always tell. Your face gets like a mess of old knotted-up rope.” Molly slid across the seat so that she was against him. “I’ve got an idea. Let’s go to my place, do the sauna, roll in the snow, and screw ourselves blind. That’ll take the knots right out of you, I guarantee.”

  “Can’t,” Cork said.

  Molly ran her hand slowly up his thigh. “Not true.” She smiled.

  “I mean I don’t have time right now. Like I said, I’m on my way to see Henry Meloux.”

  “All right.” She shrugged and slid back across the seat. “Your loss.”

  Although she said it without malice, Cork still felt guilty. “Want to come with me?”

  They turned off onto County Road AA, which curved around the north end of the lake toward Molly’s place and the thick pines of the Superior National Forest. Meloux’s cabin stood on a piece of reservation land just beyond.

  “Does Meloux have anything to do with the judge?” she asked as she watched the endless snowbanks sliding past.

  “You heard, huh?”

  “This isn’t exactly New York City, Cork. Death here is big news. Was it awful?”

  “I’ve seen worse.”

  “Is that supposed to impress me?”

  Cork said, “I put Jo through law school by being a cop in the worst part of Chicago. I saw a lot in those days.” He drove a little way and, out of the corner of his eye, saw the pinched look of disapproval on Molly’s face. “You’re right,” he admitted. “You never get used to something like that. It was pretty bad.”

  “It’s odd. He was just about the last man I would have suspected of suicide.”

  “If it was suicide.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like you said, he was the last man anybody would suspect. That in itself makes me wonder.”

  “Did he leave a note or something?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So what, then? Murder?”

  “Not my jurisdiction anymore. Ask Wally Schanno.”

  She reached out and touched his shoulder. “It must be hard sitting on the sidelines.”

  “I’m getting used to it,” he lied. “Here we are.”

  Molly’s lane hadn’t been cleared and the plowing of the county road had left a steep snowbank blocking her access. Cork put the Bronco into four-wheel drive and carefully crawled over the bank. He had no trouble in the powdery snow beyond. He stopped in front of Molly’s cabin, got out, and pulled the skis from the rack. He changed to his cross-country boots, and as he bent to clip on his skis, Molly asked, “Is Henry expecting you?”

  “He
has a way of expecting everything,” Cork replied.

  Meloux’s cabin was made of cedar and had been on its small point of the lake—Crow’s Point—for as long as anybody could remember. In winter when the other resorts were closed for the season, Meloux was Molly’s closest neighbor. Just inside the reservation boundary a mile northeast along the shoreline, Crow’s Point was visible from Molly’s sauna. As they started out onto the lake, Cork could see smoke from Meloux’s tiny cabin rising up calm and straight as you please into the perfectly still air above the pine trees. The shoreline curved away from them in a ragged arc of inlets and small rocky points. Three-quarters of the way across the ice, a long tongue of open water stuck out into the lake. It came from Half Mile Spring, a rush of water that issued from ground so near the lake that it didn’t have time to freeze in its journey.

  They stayed well clear of the mouth of Half Mile Spring. Crow’s Point was rocky and steep, and they had to remove their skis to climb up to the old man’s cabin. Meloux opened the door to them even before they knocked, and he stood grinning in welcome. An old yellow dog stood patiently at his side, tongue lolling, tail wagging.

  “Corcoran O’Connor,” the old man said. “I see you survived the storm.” He laughed in a way that sounded as if he were making fun of Cork’s concern for him the night before. “And Molly Nurmi. It is always good to see a neighbor’s face. Come in, you are both welcome.”

  He stood aside and let them enter. The cabin was a clean and simple place, one room, with a wood stove, bunk, a rough-hewn table, and two benches. On the walls hung many objects, some from animals—a bearskin, a bow with string made from the skin of a snapping turtle and ornamented with feathers, a deer-prong pipe; some of wood—a birch-bark basket, a small toboggan, snowshoes. On the floor beside the bed lay a mat of woven cedar bark. Not far from the stove hung an old Skelly calendar—1948—with an elaborate cartoon picture of a pretty young lady in revealing shorts, bent to check her makeup in the rearview mirror, much to the delight of an admiring gas station attendant. Cork handed Meloux a pack of Lucky Strikes, which the old man accepted graciously, then Cork sniffed at the air.