The Ravens (7 page)

“Yeah. Maybe so.”

They laughed.

“So what is it you want to talk to him about?”

“Just some old stuff. You know that Miller is originally from Duluth, right? Well, we went to Central High together.”

“You’re joking,” exclaimed Chrissy.

“No, I’m not. He was in the class behind me. We didn’t actually know each other, but . . .”

“So that means he was a grade ahead of Dad?” she said.

“Right.”

“Jesus! Do you think Dad knew him?”

“No, he didn’t. Neither of us knew him. But there was something that happened between Miller and one of my friends . . . something stupid, something about a girl.”

Chrissy’s face lit up with curiosity.

“Tell me.”

“I met a guy awhile ago, I hadn’t talked to him in a long time, and we started reminiscing about the old days, high school and stuff like that. This is a private matter, you see, that’s why I don’t think I can tell you about it, but there was something this guy really regretted, something he’d done to Clayton Miller. So
I thought that since I happened to run into Miller now after all these years, I could . . . convey my friend’s regrets.”

“But don’t you realize that I’d like to talk to Miller too?” said Chrissy.

“Sure, but what I want to tell him is something really private, also for Miller. I thought maybe you could wait for me someplace, maybe over at Uncle Louis’s Cafe.”

Chrissy gave him a resigned look.

“I’ll sit far away from the two of you and close my ears,” she said. “But I’m not going anywhere in this cold.”

When they went back inside, the book signing seemed to be over. The three poets were talking to each other as they sat at the table with the stacks of books. Miller stood up and came over to Lance and Chrissy.

“So, there was something you wanted to talk to me about?” he asked.

“Yes, that’s right,” said Lance.

“Something about an old friend?”

“I’ll wait for you over there,” whispered Chrissy and went over to the bar. She sat down and began paging through
Siamese Wing Strokes.

“Could we step outside?” said Lance.

“Sure.”

As they headed for the door, he thought that this was probably the only chance he’d ever get to hear Clayton’s version of what happened so long ago. It was important that he said the right thing and didn’t make a mess of it.

“So?” said Miller impatiently as the door closed behind them and they stood outside in the ice-cold January night.

“Do you remember my brother, Andy Hansen? He was in the class below you in high school.”

“Yeah?” said Miller, curtly.

“He was the one who beat you up that time.”

“Yeah, I know. What’s your point?”

By now Lance had figured out what he wanted to say.

“It has to do with my cowardice as a brother,” he said. “As his big brother. I never talked to Andy about what happened. Of course I should have tried to help him, because there had to be
something really wrong for him to beat you up like that. It’s been bothering me more and more as time has passed, but after all these years, I feel like it’s too late to ask him. He would never tell me anything now. When I realized that you were one of the authors . . .”

“So this is how you avoid the unpleasant task of talking to your own brother, is that it?” said Miller. “And by the way, weren’t you the one who stopped him?”

Lance nodded.

“Do you realize that he wanted to kill me?”

“Do you really think so?”

“What do you think he would have done with that baseball bat you took away from him?” Clayton Miller shuddered.

“Well, um . . . ,” said Lance.

“Actually,” said Miller, looking as if he were searching for the right words. “Actually, it doesn’t surprise me to hear that the two of you never talked about what happened.”

“No?”

“But if this is about your ‘cowardice as a brother,’ as you said, then I don’t see what good it will do to talk to me. Shouldn’t you be talking to Andy?”

“You’re right. But tell me this, did the two of you know each other?”

There was something about the way Miller had said his brother’s name that made Lance react.

“Depends what you mean by ‘know each other.’ We hung out with the same bunch of kids for a while. But only during that one summer, I think.”

“What bunch of kids?”

Miller smiled.

“Not your bunch of friends, at any rate,” he said.

“No. I guess not.”

“Andy was . . . I don’t know. He just showed up and started hanging out with us. You know how kids are at that age, testing boundaries, trying to find out where they belong. Right? We used to sit around in Lester Park in the evening, listening to music, smoking pot . . . things like that.”

“Andy smoked pot?”

Lance looked over his shoulder to see if anyone could hear them.

“We all did,” replied Miller. “We were . . . what should I say? We were Duluth’s belated beatniks.”

“What do you mean?”

“Forget it.” Clayton Miller laughed to himself. “By the way, it’s getting really cold out here.” He clapped his glove-clad hands and did a few clumsy hops, as if to underscore his point.

“I know,” said Lance. “But could you just tell me what happened? It’s important. I’d like to know.”

Miller looked as if he was starting to tire of the whole story.

“He showed me something that he’d written.”

Lance shook his head in disbelief. “Something he’d written?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. And?”

“And I laughed at it.”

“Was that all?”

“That was enough,” said Miller.

“But Andy would never have tried to kill somebody because they laughed at something he’d
written.
”

“Depends on what it was, don’t you think?” said Miller. “But you’ll have to ask him about that yourself. Right now I don’t have time for this anymore. I’ve got a long drive back to Minneapolis.”

Miller turned on his heel and went inside. Lance followed.

The poet immediately began packing up his books, putting them in a box. Feeling at a loss, Lance stood and watched until Chrissy came over to him.

“Done?” she asked her uncle.

Clayton Miller looked up from his books.

“Your daughter?”

“My niece,” Lance told him.

“Oh, really? So she’s . . .”

“Andy’s daughter.”

For a moment Miller studied the teenager in the black clothes and makeup. Then he nodded appreciatively.

THE
WHITENESS
was starting to fill up her mind, and she had begun to hear the terrible sound of silence in the middle of the lake. When she looked around, there was nothing to see, not even the shadow of her own body, only the endless white. There weren’t even any compass points anymore.

Inga jolted upright in her chair, as if she’d been about to doze off. Was she dreaming? No, but she hadn’t been vigilant about keeping tabs on her thoughts; she had allowed them to wander where they would. And lately that increasingly meant out to the vast, white space beyond the city. What was it really like out there? Because it was a real place, after all, and could be reached by snowmobile, for instance. Wasn’t that something that young men sometimes did? Drove out to a spot where they could no longer see land in any direction, and where no one could see them? Making themselves invisible to the world. But they could still see themselves and their snowmobiles. That was the difference. When Inga’s thoughts headed out there, she saw nothing but whiteness. She disappeared.

Oscar looked at her from the photograph on the wall. That same handsome policeman smile all day long, yet it hadn’t always been that way. What was it about him? she wondered. She hadn’t thought about that in a very long time. When he was alive, especially when the boys were still small, she would sometimes lie awake, listening to her husband snoring, alone with everything
that he never even noticed. What was it about him? she would then think. Now she had the same thought: What was it about Oscar? And suddenly she realized what it was. Oscar had understood so little about what went on—both between the two of them and with the boys. Not because he was unwilling or uninterested, but because he was just plain
stupid.
He simply didn’t get it. She had to laugh at this sudden insight. A bold and stupid cop—that was the man she’d fallen for! And she wondered what that said about her.

“Oh, Oscar,” she whispered into the empty room.

Her knitting lay on the little table next to her chair. She couldn’t remember setting it down, but she must have done so. There lay the green-and-white scarf she had started knitting for Chrissy. Should she ring for the staff and ask for a cup of tea? No, she didn’t want to be a nuisance. They had so much to do, not only here at Lakeview but also dropping off their children and picking them up again, cleaning house, and cooking meals. They had friends to visit and lives of their own, about which she knew only a tiny bit, a mere speck.

She decided to reread the three postcards from Norway. This time she would read them even slower than before.

LANCE
DROVE
SOUTH
from Ely through the same kind of snow-covered, forested landscape where he’d spent the past two months. Yesterday’s events had shaken him, both the surprising encounter with Clayton Miller and, in particular, Chrissy’s story. Had a blood-spattered man holding a baseball bat actually stood on the side of the road outside Finland? If that was true, it had to have been Andy. But there was something surreal about the story, as if it had been taken from an episode of
The Twilight Zone,
just as Chrissy had said. Except for the fact that such a series of coincidences was even less believable. Was it really plausible that a couple of dopers would have made up a story about a bloodstained man with a baseball bat standing along the road on the very night that someone had his skull bashed in with a baseball bat only a short drive away?

Something huge and dark opened inside Lance, filling him completely. For several seconds he felt like he consisted of nothing but this cold, dark void, like a starless night over the lake. Then he was back in the car, bewildered by what had just happened. He slowed down in case it occurred again, but the only thing he noticed now was that his heart was beating faster than normal. Could it have been a panic attack like the kind he’d suffered at night in Kenora? But no. On those occasions he hadn’t been able to take in enough oxygen, and each episode had centered on his breathing. This was different. As if his brain no longer wished to
function and had simply switched off, taking a break, abandoning him to a rushing, dark nothingness. It was the thought of the bloodstained man at the side of the road that had unleashed this feeling. He had pictured the man as Andy. Seen Andy’s face after the murder. This scenario had suddenly become possible because someone else had seen it. For some reason this seemed worse than anything else. The fact that his brother had been seen! Not that there were any actual witnesses to the killing, and for that Lance was grateful. But someone had seen Andy when he had the face of a murderer, and that made him visible to Lance’s inner eye, in all his blood-spattered loneliness. That was what his brain had at first refused to acknowledge.

HE
LEFT
THE
CAR
IDLING
as he got out and went over to the door. The cold tore at his nostrils. For a moment he hesitated, his hand on the door handle. Then he took a deep breath and went inside.

Behind the counter Debbie Ahonen lifted her eyes without interest from the magazine she was reading, just as she no doubt always did on those rare occasions when someone opened the door to the Finland General Store. At that instant, in that moment of almost ingrained habit, when she was barely aware of herself, Lance recognized the Debbie that he had been so in love with twenty-five years ago.

“Lance?” she said in surprise, putting aside the magazine.

He smiled.

“It’s been awhile,” said Debbie.

“Yeah. I’ve been . . . busy.”

“Oh? Doing what?”

He threw out his hands.

“Oh, you know,” he said.

“No, I don’t.”

“All sorts of things.”

“Ah. Sounds hectic,” said Debbie. “Never a dull moment for the forest sheriff, huh?”

“What do mean ‘forest sheriff’?”

“That’s what Ben Harvey calls you. I thought it was funny.”

Lance realized that his presence wasn’t going to be a secret for much longer. Debbie and Ben would be talking again soon. He ran Finland’s only bar, and she worked in the only store. And Lance wasn’t going to be able to convince her—this woman whom he’d met only once in the past twenty-five years—that he wasn’t actually here in the States at all. No, that whole charade was over now. Much to his relief.

“So, what can I get you?” asked Debbie, looking at him.

Was there something flirtatious about her expression? Oh, that eternal question: What did a woman really mean? It had been years since he’d given it any thought, but here it was again.

“A soda,” he told her.

It was the only thing that came to mind.

“Sure. You can really work up a thirst in this heat,” said Debbie.

Lance laughed.

“My God, what a winter,” he said.

“And all the clothes you have to keep putting on and taking off,” said Debbie. “Layer after layer. It’s like peeling a fucking onion.”

For a moment he pictured Debbie peeling off the layers, all the way down to her winter-pale, Finnish American skin.

“So what do people do here in Finland, if they’re looking for some fun?”

“They move,” said Debbie.

They laughed, and he recognized something in her laughter, something he couldn’t put his finger on, but he heard it before her smoker’s cough took over. She finally managed to cough up the phlegm and then swallowed it again.

“I need a cigarette,” she said. “If you want to come in the back room we can see if there’s any coffee left.”

“What about the store?”

“I’m not exactly expecting a big rush. Besides, there’s a window so I can see if anyone comes in.”

She got up and came around to the front of the counter. This was the first time in more than twenty years that Lance got a real look at her. He was overwhelmed because he’d just pictured her peeled down until she wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing.
If Debbie’s face couldn’t exactly be said to be untouched by the tooth of time, her body was exactly the same. Here stood the slim and stately Debbie Ahonen that he’d never entirely stopped thinking about. A bit wider in the hips, but otherwise more or less unchanged. Lance was immediately conscious of his own big, ungainly body, which so clearly showed how much he’d neglected it, especially during the past two months in Kenora.

In the back room they sat down at a table with a Formica top that was covered with brown rings from years of countless coffee cups. Lance thought the table had to be as old as he was.

“Okay,” said Debbie as she set two mugs in front of them. “It’s been sitting around for a while, but I hope it’s still drinkable.”

She filled both mugs. The table stood under the room’s only window, which faced the deserted aisles of the store. Looking farther, beyond the Christmas decorations, Lance could see part of the white parking lot and the equally white road. No cars or people disturbed the arctic stillness out there.

He took a sip of coffee, which was no longer hot.

“Mmm,” he said with pleasure.

The coffee had thickened over the course of the day, and the consistency reminded him of soy sauce. He noticed a pen and a Yahtzee score card on the table. Did she play Yahtzee with herself?

“The coffee doesn’t stay hot in such a cold room,” Debbie apologized.

“It really is cold in here,” said Lance.

“Is there anyplace that
isn’t
cold?”

A small space heater under the table was the only source of heat in the room, which had no furniture other than the table and chairs. Against one wall was a sink with a bar of soap and a blue towel hanging from a nail, and in the corner stood a plastic bucket with two mops hanging over the edge. The calendar on the wall was a year old.

Debbie took out a cigarette and lit it. After a few puffs, the smoke prickled his nostrils, but he didn’t complain. It had been a long time since he’d had a cup of coffee with a woman, and this wasn’t just any woman, as he reminded himself.

“So, how’s life been treating you lately?” she asked.

“Oh, fine . . . been pretty quiet.”

He didn’t even attempt to tell her the truth.

“What about you?”

Debbie grimaced.

“That bad?”

“Oh, you know, coming back here . . .”

Lance nodded.

“So how was it out there?” he asked. “In California.”

“Warmer, at any rate. That’s for sure. Otherwise I guess it’s pretty much the same everywhere.”

“Is it?”

“Isn’t it?”

“I’ve never been anywhere else than here.”

“Didn’t you live in Minneapolis for a while?”

“Yeah. When I went to the police academy. But that’s still Minnesota.”

“Right.”

“So how was California?”

“For me, California was first and foremost a bad marriage. Or at least that’s what it ended up being. A bad marriage that I finally managed to escape from six years ago. By then Pattie was thirteen. She moved here to Minnesota with me, but now she’s back in California. Couldn’t take the cold.”

“Is she a student?”

“Uh-huh. She’s taking a night course. Accounting, I think. And she works in a shop during the day.”

“Where?”

“In Santa Barbara. She lives with her father.”

“Oh.”

“And you married . . . who was it?”

“Nobody you know. Her name’s Mary Dupree. From Grand Portage. Ojibwe.”

Debbie raised her eyebrows.

“But that wasn’t the problem,” Lance went on. “At least I don’t think so.”

“So what was the problem, then?” asked Debbie, stubbing out her cigarette in the ashtray.

“I guess she just wasn’t the right person for me.”

Lance was so nervous that his mouth had gone dry. He took
a sip of coffee and tried to catch her eye, but she was staring past him.

“I realized that after a while,” he went on, “but there was Jimmy to think of, our son . . .”

“And now you’re divorced?” Debbie was still avoiding his eye.

“Yes.”

Silence settled over the cramped, smoky room. Lance realized that he was standing at a crossroads. If he retreated now, it would be over before it even began. Then he could take a deep breath, get in the car, and drive back to Ely, or wherever he was planning to go now. On the other hand, if he took even the smallest step in Debbie’s direction, it meant that he would be moving into open terrain, presenting himself as a man who had sought out an old flame and who no longer wanted to be alone.

“I’ve never stopped thinking about you,” he said.

He felt his cheeks flush, but at least he’d said it. Even though it wasn’t entirely true, it felt true here and now.

Debbie smiled her gentlest smile but still didn’t look at him. From sheer nerves, he picked up his mug and took another gulp of the bitter, tepid coffee.

Finally she shifted her gaze and looked him in the eye.

“Don’t you think it’s too late?” she said. “I mean,
much
too late?”

“It’s never too late,” said Lance.

“Then you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Maybe not.”

“It’s possible that I made a mistake back then, but it’s not something that can be corrected twenty years later,” said Debbie.

“Why not?”

“Because we’re not the same people we were back then. Those two might have been able to . . .”

“But not us?”

Debbie shook her head.

“Does this have something to do with Richie Akkola?” asked Lance. “Last time you said that the two of you were living together.”

Her face closed up.

“I mean, he’s . . . Richie is . . .”

Lance couldn’t get himself to say the word “old.” That would be more of an insult to her than to Richie.

“I’ve gotta get back to work,” she said in an ordinary tone of voice, and Lance didn’t know where that came from. “It was nice chatting with you. Maybe we can have another talk again soon.”

Debbie stood up and opened the door to the store, which was just as deserted as it had been all along. Without waiting for him, she went back to her place behind the counter and picked up the magazine that she’d been reading when he came in. She began leafing through the pages.

Lance closed the door to the back room and went over to her.

“Weren’t you going to buy a soda?” she asked.

“What?”

A quick smile was all he got before she went back to her magazine. The sort of smile that was a dime a dozen.