The Ravens (14 page)

He opened the glove compartment, took out the gun, and made sure the bullet was still in the chamber.

“Right. An angel,” he muttered to himself.

The sound coming from the snow-covered ice was so intense that he thought he could see figures appearing and disappearing out there. The hazy, slightly trembling shapes of men who were on their way toward him. He raised the gun and aimed at one of them. “There,” he said quietly, signaling the intended shot with a slight pressure on the locked trigger. It had been a while since he’d fired a pistol, but he’d always been good at it and felt confident that he could defend himself if necessary.
I will defend everything that is mine
. Wasn’t that what Andy had said?
If that means I have to kill you, then I will
.

Lance sat there in the car, staring at the dazzling whiteness where the shadowy figures kept making their way toward him.

TWENTY
MINUTES
LATER
he pulled up in front of the house in Two Harbors for the second time that day. Now Andy’s old Chevy Blazer was parked out front. Lance took the gun out of the glove compartment, checked that the bullet was in the chamber, and stuck the gun in his waistband.

It took only a few seconds after he rang the bell for Tammy to open the door.

“She’s not back yet,” she said, looking worried.

“She’ll be here,” he assured her. “Give her a few hours. But I need to talk to Andy. Could you ask him to . . . ?”

Tammy went back inside. Lance heard her say something and then Andy’s deep voice replied, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying. Andy spoke again, sounding annoyed. Lance heard him approaching, and a moment later they were facing each other. Andy stood on the threshold to the entryway while Lance, dressed warmly because of the cold, stood outside on the porch.

“What do you want?” said Andy, a scowl on his closed face.

“I need to talk to you.”

“Go ahead and talk.”

“I think you should come outside and close the door behind you. You won’t want Tammy to hear what I’m going to say.”

Reluctantly, Andy put on a pair of boots and came out to the porch. Lance took a step back.

“Well?” said his brother after closing the door.

“You know that Chrissy is coming back home later this evening, right?”

“Yeah. I guess I should thank you.”

“Not necessary. I didn’t do it for your sake,” said Lance. “But there’s one thing I want to say to you. If you ever lay hands on Chrissy again, I’ll make sure that she and Tammy and the rest of the world find out exactly who you are.”

A slight flickering in Andy’s eyes showed that he’d hit home.

“I met Clayton Miller, and he told me what you wrote to him back then. I know what you are, Andy. And if you leave even one bruise on her body, I’ll make it public.”

Andy opened his mouth but closed it again. He cast a quick glance over his shoulder, as if to make sure that the door was still closed. Then he opened his mouth again, but closed it without uttering a word. He looked as if he were searching for a phrase that would give him a way out, a key that might unlock the trap into which he’d fallen.

With a feeling that he’d won, Lance turned his back on his brother and calmly walked over to his car.

THE
KITCHEN
WAS
FAINTLY
LIT
by the winter night outside the window. His long absence still hovered over the room. Two months of silence and stillness. Dust that had slowly settled and remained undisturbed. As if the whole house were as yet untouched by the fact that he was back. He recognized the old feeling of being one of the dead visiting the world of the living, incapable of having the slightest effect on it. Someone who couldn’t even stir up the dust.

On the counter the coffeemaker was gurgling like a drowning man. He went over and filled a mug. When he switched on the light in the hallway, he caught sight of himself in the mirror: a big man in his bathrobe with a face that was gray with winter and long hours spent indoors. Behind him he saw the dimly lit living room and someone sitting there. Lance dropped the mug on the floor, and the piping hot coffee splashed up his calves. He let out a scream. Swamper Caribou was sitting in the easy chair, staring at him, the whites of his eyes gleaming under the brim of his big hat. Terrified, Lance turned around, but the chair was empty. He stood there peering into his own empty living room at three in the morning, screaming at the top of his lungs. He felt like he would explode with fear, but the medicine man was gone. He became aware that he was still screaming so violently that it could probably be heard far beyond the walls of his house. He fell to his knees and sobbed. After a while he collapsed forward, resting his
forehead on the floor, and there he lay for several minutes until he stopped crying.

I’m completely nuts, he thought as he struggled to regain control. For a man who was lying on the floor and weeping in the middle of the night because he’d seen a ghost, there was no way back to normal. I need to dream about him, Lance thought. Willy was right. The world of dreams was the only place in which Swamper Caribou and Lance Hansen could meet as equals—neither of them more a ghost than the other. What he had to do was find an opening into that world he’d been unable to enter for almost eight years.

He opened the curtains but didn’t switch on the light. After turning the chair to face the window, he sat down with a shudder. This was the same chair the medicine man had just occupied. It felt cold, and there were no dents in the cushion. What was it I saw? thought Lance as he stared at the winter-blue night outside the window, his own reflection swaying weightlessly and phantomlike over Lake Superior. What
exactly
did I see?

As he sat there, something began to dawn on him. He pictured Swamper Caribou sitting in the chair, and the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that the Indian was holding something in his hands, something that had been partially hidden in the darkness. But no matter how hard Lance tried, he couldn’t summon up the image from his memory. He hadn’t seen what it was—only that something was definitely there. Swamper Caribou had been holding an object in his hands, as if he’d come to give something to Lance.

WHEN
IT
WAS
A
FEW
MINUTES
PAST
SEVEN,
Lance got out of bed for the second time, even though he’d been unable to go back to sleep. He made himself breakfast and then went out and started the car. He realized he wanted to drive north, even though he had no reason for heading in that direction. It was much too early to visit anyone, but since there was no point in going in any other direction either, he would go north.

Except for a narrow strip of light in the east, the vast night sky over Lake Superior was still intact. The myriad twinkling
stars and the seemingly endless snow-covered expanse beneath them comprised a world that no one should stare at for long if he wanted to maintain his sanity. Here all distances were erased, and any kind of shape might emerge and perish without revealing whether it was real or not. Lance stared into the void as he drove. It didn’t matter because he had no sanity to maintain. Or rather, he’d lost his former state of sanity, which might have been damaged by too much contact with all of this. His new state of sanity was concerned with very different things, such as the visit of an Indian medicine man who had disappeared in 1892.

As he drove through Grand Marais, he saw a man filling the gas tank of his car, clouds of icy white vapor issuing from his mouth. Clad as he was in a one-piece snowmobile suit, the man looked like an astronaut on assignment in frigid outer space. In front of Gene’s Foods, a green forklift stuck its two spikes under a pallet loaded with canned goods and lifted it up. The driver was visible only as a dark, shapeless lump inside the cab. This was the world that Lance needed to return to. People who got up early and went to work every day whether the job interested them or not. A world, when viewed from outside, that hardly seemed to contain anything at all; yet in reality it could contain a whole life, as long as the person was immersed in it, as Lance had been until he found the body of Georg Lofthus. It was then that he began to fall, and by now he’d fallen all the way out of this world in which the man in the forklift was living. Yet it was there that he wanted to go.

When he reached Hovland the sky had paled considerably, and he had to concentrate hard to see the stars. It took less than a minute to drive through the little hamlet. In 1888 two Norwegian families had each built a log cabin in the woods here and spent the winter in the deep snow, with no neighbors besides the Indians. Several years later it had become a whole settlement, with a boat-building business, a school, post office, and telephone exchange. Nowadays very few people still lived there.

At the top of the long ridges beyond Grand Portage he stopped at a rest area. From here he could see a portion of the lake that was marked by big, forested islands and narrow bays that cut into the surrounding land, which was no longer flat and
uniform but instead had steep slopes and deep valleys. A few miles farther north, the Canadian border station was visible as a small, dark patch in all the whiteness. The border itself followed the Pigeon River, which he couldn’t see, hidden as it was under snow and ice, with snow-covered woods on either side.

As he sat there like that, looking at the borderland, he thought about everything he carried inside him. Black-clad fishermen from Halsnøy who dreamed of having their own boats and a good future for their children. Winter nights spent in smoke-filled birchbark dwellings, so far back in time that any connection with the past that he normally regarded as his heritage had vanished; the only possibility was to seek a different past, other dreams, a whole different beginning and end. And the story about Otter Heart and Sad Water was part of it. Had Willy told that story for his sake? In spite of everything, he was Willy’s ex-son-in-law. He’d done everything for Mary, building a bridge over even the smallest creek. Yet it was never enough. No matter what he did, Mary’s dissatisfaction soon returned. The worst part was that in the end she started using their son against him. “You’re so wrapped up in the past that you don’t even notice your own son,” she told him one night. No, she had screamed the words, her face flushed with anger and sorrow, while their whole world collapsed all around them. That was how the last period had been, a whole world coming unhinged and falling apart. A unique world that could never be resurrected because it existed only in the interaction between Lance Hansen and Mary Dupree.

He felt so sad as he thought about this. But then he remembered Debbie. Beautiful Debbie Ahonen had come back from California to settle down once again in the town of Finland. She had rejected him when he appeared before her as the lonely man he was, rejected him for the second time. But if another chance should present itself, he would not only build bridges over even the smallest creeks, he would also carry her over those bridges. Never would a single drop of water touch Debbie’s feet, if only he could have her.

Something was about to change. He just hadn’t noticed it until now. What he had thought was a mountain chain far north in Canada was in reality something he hadn’t seen for weeks: a
dark cloud bank stretching across the horizon to the northeast.

He typed a text message and sent it to Chrissy.

“Back home?”

He quickly received a reply. “Yes, but at school.”

“Andy didn’t kill you?”

“What did you do to him?” replied his niece, followed by a row of smiley faces.

“Told him to shape up,” texted Lance. Then he sent another message: “What were you doing in Minneapolis?”

This time it took longer for her to answer. “What do you mean?” wrote Chrissy.

BIG,
WET
SNOWFLAKES
drifted past outside the window. Lance was sitting in his easy chair, staring at the gray swirls. It had been weeks since he’d seen any form of precipitation or even an overcast sky. The weather had been so dry and clear, with such a piercing brightness that it hurt his eyes. Now the tables had turned.

He should really go visit his mother, but he couldn’t bear the thought of driving through such a heavy snowfall. It would have to wait until tomorrow. Instead he picked up his cell, which was lying on the coffee table, and called Inga, but she didn’t answer. That didn’t mean anything. She was probably in the communal lounge, talking to somebody. Lance looked at the texts he’d received from Chrissy. He thought about the background noises he’d heard on the phone when he called her yesterday, while he was at the Kozy Bar. They were definitely the sounds of a city bigger than Duluth, so she had to have been somewhere in the Twin Cities. But why had she lied?

At that moment his cell rang. The words “Minnesota Department of Corrections” appeared on the display. Lance felt his mouth go dry.

“Yes?” he said in a low voice.

“Is this Lance Hansen?” asked a woman.

“Yes.”

“Is it true that you requested a visit with one of our inmates? Lenny Diver?”

“That’s right,” said Lance, although his voice was barely audible.

“Your request has been granted. Diver is in the Moose Lake jail.”

“So he’s willing to meet with me?”

“Your request has been granted,” the woman repeated impatiently.

“But doesn’t the inmate have to agree to it?”

“I doubt he has other commitments.”

“I guess not.”

“So now you know.”

“Thank you.”

She’d already ended the call.

IT
HAD
GROWN
DARK
OUTSIDE,
but in the glow from the streetlamp down by the hardware store he could see that it was snowing hard. His own hazy reflection against the pelting snow made him depressed—a phantom whose only wish was to get inside. At least he’d managed to accomplish one thing: Andy would no longer lay hands on his daughter. That gave him a good feeling.
And if you leave even one bruise on her body, I’ll make it public,
he’d said, knowing full well that Andy knew what he meant by “it.” He tried seeing things from his brother’s point of view. An abyss instantly opened up before him. For Andy, “it” was probably more terrifying than the possibility that he might be found guilty of murder. Lance would have felt the same. To have “it” exposed in public would mean his life was no longer worth living. The thought sent a cold shiver through Lance’s body. What had he done? He’d even lied about knowing what his brother had written on the note he gave to Clayton Miller.

He went into his home office, found Miller’s phone number on the Internet, and called the professor and poet in Minneapolis.

“Miller,” the man answered, sounding out of breath.

“This is . . . I don’t know if you remember me, but we met in Duluth a few days ago.”

“Who is this?”

He seemed impatient. In the background Lance could hear traffic and voices.

“Lance Hansen.”

“Who?”

“Lance Hansen. We talked about something that happened in high school. You had a fight with my brother, Andy.”

“Oh, right. But we didn’t have a fight. He attacked me and tried to kill me. What do you want?”

“I’m going to be in Minneapolis tomorrow, and I was wondering if you could set aside some time to meet with me.”

Clayton Miller laughed.

“I’m a very busy man,” he said.

“I realize that, but it would only take a few minutes.”

“Why?”

“I need to know more about what happened back then.”

“And of course you haven’t talked to your brother about it, have you?”

“No.”

“Listen here, I’m really getting fed up with all this nonsense.”

“I’m trying to stop my brother from killing himself,” Lance explained.

Silence on the line. Nothing but the background sounds of the city.

“Hello?” said Lance at last.

“How well do you know Minneapolis?” asked Miller.

“Pretty well.”

“Do you know where Matt’s Bar is?”

“The place with the Juicy Lucy burger?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve been there a few times.”

“It’s on Cedar Avenue at Thirty-Fifth.”

“I know where that is.”

“I’ll meet you there at one o’clock tomorrow.”

“That sounds good.”

“Okay, see you tomorrow.”

“Thanks a lot,” said Lance.

What could he possibly gain from the two meetings? From Miller he primarily wanted to find out what exactly it said on the note Andy had given him. Plus he’d order a Juicy Lucy; it had been a long time since he’d had one of those. When it came to Lenny Diver, things were a lot more vague. Maybe it had to do with looking himself in the eye?