Chapter 31
When I woke, it was dusk and Stan was feeding the fire. He had the Glock slipped under his belt and made sure I saw it when he came over to untie me. “You were having a nightmare,” he said. “Must’ve been a bad one.” When I didn’t reply, he said, “We need to eat.”
Ollie had opted to take only the precious pack into his tent.
He left the food canister outside. I quickly located a sealed package of dehydrated mac and cheese and ground beef and set to work.
Toward the end of my preparations, maybe aroused by the aroma of cooking food, Ollie emerged from his tent.
When he approached us, Stan waved him back and said, “Christ, you smell like a gas station toilet.”
“I want to keep those damn mosquitoes and flies from eating me alive.”
“This will help.” Stan pulled the deet from his pocket and showed it to his brother.
“You bastard,” Ollie said, when he realized his brother’s deception. “I oughta kill you.”
“Take a bath first.”
Ollie lumbered to the edge of the pool, stripped off his clothing, and waded into the water.
“It’s full of muck,” he complained.
“Just get it done,” Stan said.
Ollie dunked himself several times, splashed around, scrubbed at the caked urine-mud on his arms and neck and face, then let himself float a little like a dead whale. When he finally emerged and stepped onto the wild grass that fringed the pool, he looked down and screamed like baby.
“Get them off me! Get them off me!”
A half dozen leeches had attached themselves to his lower legs and hung from his skin like small black snakes.
Forgetting the pain in his back, Ollie danced around, kicking as if he could simply dislodge the suckers.
Stan made no move to help. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying his brother’s predicament.
“Just pull them off,” I calmly advised.
“I don’t want to touch them! Filthy little buggers.”
I left the fire, where I had the mac and cheese almost ready in the skillet, and walked to where Ollie danced around.
“Hold still.” I reached down and, one by one, plucked the leeches from his legs and threw them back into the water.
All that was left was a small wound at each site, oozing a little blood.
“Did they give me something?” Ollie asked in a desperate voice. “A disease or anything?”
All in all, leeches are pretty harmless.
If they’ve attached themselves for very long, the site can be itchy and, because leeches secrete an enzyme that inhibits clotting, bleeding from the tiny wounds can be difficult to stanch.
But throughout history, leeches have been used for medicinal purposes, and they are still being used today.
That was something I wasn’t going to tell Ollie.
“Could be,” I said. “May have to consider amputation.”
“Jesus!” Ollie said. Then he caught his brother laughing. “What’s so funny?”
Stan, who was clearly the more scholarly of the two, filled his brother in on the harmless nature of the creatures. “Nothing deadly got inside you and you’ve got plenty of blood left,” he assured Ollie. “And you smell a hundred percent better.”
The leeches hadn’t been on him very long and the wounds hardly bled at all. There was a tube of bacitracin in the first aid kit. I tossed that to Ollie and told him to use it. Then I turned my attention back to preparing our dinner.
We ate in silence. That was partly because we were famished and focused on feeding our faces. But there was a sullen element to Ollie’s silence. He kept eyeing his brother and then me as if we were somehow in a conspiracy against him.
By the time I’d cleaned up from the meal, it was dark.
Ollie smoked a cigar and drank from a bottle of Four Roses he had stashed in his Duluth pack. Stan still looked pretty beat from the day’s journey and sat nodding by the fire.
“Let’s tie this guy up and then you should hit the sack,” Ollie suggested.
Ollie held the Glock on me while Stan did the work of tying me to the tree. Then Stan crawled into his tent. Ollie didn’t go into his yet. He rummaged in the BearVault and came up with a Snickers bar.
“You keep snacking and we won’t have enough food to get us to Canada,” I advised him.
“The hell with you. I’ll shoot us a deer or something.”
“With that Glock? Good luck,” I said.
He took a bite of his candy bar and said as he chewed, “I don’t like cops.”
“You’re not alone in that.”
“Why were you a cop?”
“My dad was a cop.”
Ollie gave a little huff. I wasn’t sure if it was a laugh or a grunt of recognition. “My old man was a gangster.”
“How’d he know about Wollersheim and whatever it is that’s in the pack? I mean, Wollersheim was a businessman.”
“My ass. That’s what he liked to call himself.”
Ollie took another deep swallow of the Four Roses. The whiskey seemed to be loosening his tongue.
“Wollersheim’s business was trafficking in drugs and prostitution and anything that’d bring him a good black-market profit. My old man and my uncle were partners with him. When he hightailed it out of Canada to live in the States, he took everything with him.”
“Why Duluth?”
“He grew up there. Dual citizenship. His father was Canadian, his mother from Duluth. He should’ve moved to Australia or someplace far enough away my old man and my uncle couldn’t reach him. But he was a conceited old bastard. Thought he was immortal or something.”
He took another drink of whiskey. His speech was beginning to slur a little.
“When we were kids, he insisted we call him Saba. That’s ‘grandfather’ in Hebrew.”
I couldn’t help thinking of what my grandson called me—Baa-baa. It was close.
“Saba,” Ollie said and spit.
“You married?” I asked.
“Twice. But not anymore.”
“Any kids?”
“Nope. Shooting blanks, I found out. Okay by me. Kids’re nothing but a pain in the ass. Ask my brother.”
“He has kids?”
“A couple. Boys. Twelve or thirteen, something like that.”
I wondered what kind of father Stan was. Did his kids curse their old man the way he and his brother cursed theirs?
“He doesn’t see them much. Him and the old lady divorced a while back. Hit him pretty hard.” Ollie took a final drink of the whiskey, then threw his Snickers wrapper into the fire. “Gonna hit the sack.”
He stood up slowly from the log he was sitting on.
It was clear his back was still giving him trouble, but the whiskey had contributed significantly to making him unsteady.
He grabbed the BearVault and the pack with its mysterious precious contents, never far from his grasp, and headed into his tent.
In no time at all, he’d commenced to snoring.
It was a clear night with a three-quarter moon on the rise.
The light on the still surface of the pool made the water look like molten silver.
As I watched, a fish jumped, sending out glittering ripples.
Among the reeds, frogs gave out their deep-throated mating calls.
It was too early in the season for crickets, but I heard the slap of something, maybe a beaver’s tail, on water.
There were other sounds, unfamiliar. I’ve often heard mysterious stirrings in the wilderness at night, sounds with no clear origin.
Henry Meloux once told me that there are more things at work in the forest than a man could ever imagine, more things than any human could ever hope to understand.
I considered the vision I’d had that day, one of those experiences beyond human understanding. If this was what Stephen and Waaboo felt when they saw their own terrible things, oh my God, what a curse.
Even though I was fully awake, the taste of blood seemed to linger in my mouth, and the triumphant feel of the brutal killing, the thrill of it, still haunted me.
Is that really me? I wondered. In the deepest part of me, in my very soul, is that who I am?
Is this the beast that will consume what is human in me?
Then I thought of the man I’d found tortured to death. And the savagery done to Cordell Bishop and Tucker Jackson. And I wondered what, if I had the chance, I would be willing to do to the Kennedy brothers.
An exhausted sleep finally overtook me, otherwise I might have been gnawing all night on the vision and the terrible wonderment that came with it.
But I didn’t sleep long before the bear came.
I woke to snuffling and the sound of rummaging nearby. The waxing moon had risen high, shining bright above me. Its broad beam hit the camp like a spotlight, and although the bear’s fur was black, it glowed as if electric.
It was male. Boars are larger than sows, broader of shoulder and their faces blockier.
This was one of the biggest black bears I’d ever seen.
He lumbered near me on feet that, because of the great weight they carried, were flat, another difference between males and females of the species.
He paused and sniffed my way. I could see that he was older, his muzzle and the rest of his face covered with scars.
He’d been in many fights and, though battered, had come out victorious. This was a bear to be reckoned with.
I considered hollering, making noise in an attempt to scare him off, but I was afraid doing that might just put me center stage in his interest. Tied to the tree, I was in no position to deal with a bear.
I watched him sniff and snuffle, smelling for the food that must have been what brought him. Bears have an extraordinary sense of smell, superior even to bloodhounds’. This one could have smelled our food stash from a great distance.
The boar lumbered to the tent where Ollie had disappeared with the canister containing our food supply.
The great animal lifted a paw the size of an oven mitt, and its claws ripped through the flimsy tent fabric.
It slashed again and again until it had created a gaping, shredded hole, which it proceeded to enter.
That’s when Ollie started screaming.
I thought the bear was attacking the big man, but a moment later, as if totally unconcerned with the ruckus Ollie was raising, the boar reemerged with the BearVault firmly in the grip of its jaws, the plastic of the canister pierced by sharp teeth.
It left more rapidly than it had come, lumbering away along the series of pools until it had vanished from the moonlight, leaving behind the sound of Ollie still screaming like a banshee.
Stan was up now and out of his tent. “What the hell’s going on?”
“A bear,” I said calmly. “It took our food.”
Stan looked at Ollie’s tent and saw his brother crawling from the hole in the thin fabric.
“Jesus!” Ollie cried. “Jesus! Did you see that?”
“Which way did he go?” Stan asked.
“There.” I used my head to nod in the direction the bear had taken.
“Where’s the gun?” Stan said.
“I don’t…” Ollie said. “Somewhere in the tent.”
“Get it,” Stan said.
“You’re not thinking of going after that bear, are you?” I said.
“He’s got all our food.”
“You go after that bear and try to shoot him, I guarantee it’s you who’ll end up dead. And it won’t be a quick, pretty death.”
“What are we going to eat?” Ollie said, as if he’d forgotten all about his fear of the bear but was now absolutely terrified at this new development.
“The Boundary Waters is full of food,” I told him. “You just have to know where to find it.”
“And I suppose you know?” Stan said.
“I do. I can get you to Canada and I can get you there without starving.”
The brothers stood, two white statues in the hoary moonlight, weighing their options, though in truth, they had only one choice.
“All right,” Stan said. He looked in the direction the bear had gone. “Will it come back tonight?”
“I doubt it. He got what he came for. In the morning, I’ll track him, see if anything’s left. We all need to get some sleep. It’ll be another long day tomorrow.”
Ollie eyed his tent. “I’m not sleeping there.” He looked at his brother. “I’m moving in with you.”
I watched Stan’s face as he thought about this. He looked like he was about to eat something Ollie had puked up in front of him. In the end, he said, “Let’s go then.”
Ollie retrieved his sleeping bag and the pack with its precious contents and followed Stan into the remaining tent.
I sat tied to the tree, looking up at the moon and saying a silent prayer of thanks to the Creator. The Kennedy brothers had become totally dependent on me. And oh, was I going to enjoy the hell I planned to put them through.
For one very brief moment, I almost let out the howl of a wolf.