Die a Stranger: An Alex McKnight Novel Read online

  “He was already long gone by then,” Vinnie said. “This all happened way out West somewhere. A thousand miles away from here. My mother didn’t tell us about it. We had to hear it from one of my aunts.”

  These were new details for me. The things he left locked up inside, and probably never would have said at all if not for the sad heart he was carrying around on this one day of his life.

  He picked up a rock from the lawn and threw it into the water.

  “If he left when you were that young,” I said, “that must have been hard on your mother. Raising all four of you on her own.”

  The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like the understatement of the year. If you do a little more math, you realize that this went all the way back to the years BC. Before Casinos. Before the King’s Club opened up just down the street, the first Indian-operated blackjack casino in the country. Before the much bigger Bay Mills Casino, in whose shadow we happened to be standing. Before the jobs and before all of that money to be shared by every member of the community.

  There were shacks here, all up and down this road. Little two-and three-room shacks no bigger than my cabin, but filled with entire families. When the casinos came, they tore down the shacks and they even moved a few of them down by the prison, for families of inmates to sleep in when they came up visiting. You can see the shacks lined up there by the road when you drive to the airport, each a monument to the past.

  Now it’s all nice split-level ranch houses with vinyl siding and basketball hoops in the driveways. A typical middle-class development, or at least you’d think so if you happened to miss the sign as you drove by it. WELCOME TO THE BAY MILLS INDIAN COMMUNITY.

  But going back to the old days, when it was one of those shacks and you were happy to have it, and a minimum-wage job that would last all year long if you were lucky. What a hard life that must have been for an Indian woman on her own, raising four young children.

  “How’d she do it?” I said. “I can’t imagine.”

  “You work,” he said. “You take care of business. One day at a time. That’s what she always said to me.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” I said.

  “You always watch out for your family.”

  That’s the tricky part, I thought. That’s how Vinnie grew up, right here on this reservation, surrounded by his entire extended family, brother and sisters and parents and aunts and uncles and cousins. I’ve been in a house or two here on the rez, so I’ve seen small glimpses of how that must have been. Nobody in your family needs to knock on the door. They just come in, they make some coffee, they sit down, they talk, they argue, they fight, they kiss and make up. Every hour of every day, it’s an earsplitting pandemonium of family all around you. And it’s everybody. That’s the thing. You live here on the rez, everybody is family.

  To be surrounded twenty-four hours a day by so many people who care about you, who would gladly lay down their lives for you. I’d last one week. Maybe two. Then I’d lose my mind. I’d have to get the hell out of there, go somewhere far away where I could be by myself for a while. To hear myself think again.

  Vinnie had the same impulse, apparently, because that’s exactly what he did. He worked and worked and saved his money, and as soon as he could swing it, he moved off the reservation. He bought the one free lot on my father’s road and built his own cabin there. I can imagine him on the day he put the roof on, the way he must have sat down on his own chair in his own kitchen and breathed the longest sigh of relief in the history of mankind. Finally, some peace. Some silence.

  His family never forgave him.

  They still loved him, of course. But he carried a mark now. He was different in a way they couldn’t understand. I had a feeling that even Vinnie himself couldn’t explain it. Not really. It was just something he had to do.

  Even now, with Vinnie standing here on the edge of the water, away from the crowd of family under the big tent, I could feel at least a dozen sets of eyes on our backs. There’s Vinnie, the wayward son, who moved a full thirty miles down the road to live in his own little house like a hermit. Along with his good buddy Alex, who’s obviously not a good influence. A strange white man who doesn’t need any family, either. Who’s always dragging Vinnie into one mess of trouble after another.

  Yeah, even on a day like this, I could feel it. Fair or unfair. Although I suppose that part about dragging Vinnie into trouble was dead accurate.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is my mother’s day. I don’t know why I’m thinking about my father. It’s just that, when she thought I was him…”

  “Give yourself a break,” I said. “You’re dealing with a lot today.”

  “Yeah, well, I probably need to go see some more people now.” The edge was gone from his voice now, replaced by a vague unease. I knew his batteries would be completely drained by the end of this long, hot day. “But I’m glad you came. I appreciate it.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “There’ll be a sweat tonight. You feel like coming?”

  I’d done it before, more than once. You go to cousin Buck’s backyard and you strip down to your underwear, no matter the weather. He’s got the hot rocks piled up in the middle of the hut, with all the old rugs thrown over the top to keep the heat in. He pours the water onto the rocks and the steam rises and fills your lungs. He adds the sage, that old healing medicine, and you feel your whole body releasing like a fist that’s been clenched for too long. I could have used it that day, but something told me to leave Vinnie to his family.

  “You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll catch up to you later.”

  Of course, I knew “later” would probably be a while. An Ojibwa funeral starts a good four days before the burial, and then keeps going. I had a feeling this one would set a new Bay Mills record.

  “I should go back,” he said. But even as I walked away, I could see him still standing there by the water. Alone and apart, with his family and everyone else in plain view but not close enough to touch him.

  It was going to be a long week for Vinnie LeBlanc. That much I knew. And this time I couldn’t help him, not one bit.

  As I walked back past the tent, I overheard a hundred conversations going on at once. Remembering “Nika.” The last time somebody saw her or talked to her. Something she did one day for somebody else, long ago or just last week. A few yards farther and another conversation, about some inconvenience at the border, how long someone had to wait to cross the bridge. It all sort of caught up to me at once, how many unmistakably Canadian accents I’d been hearing all day without really noticing. But it made sense. Of course they’d come from Canada. There were just as many Ojibwa on the other side of that border, and the border was right there, out in the middle of that water, so close you could walk to the other side when it was frozen. I could see Ontario from where we were standing, those windmills turning in the far-off hills.

  Of course they’d come, I thought. From miles and miles around.

  Some of them Vinnie would know. Most of them would be strangers.

  Before I got into my truck, I turned one more time and caught my last glimpse of him. He had finally gathered his nerve and was walking back to the tent.

  I kept thinking about him as I drove home. Those thirty miles from the rez to Paradise, on that lonely beautiful road that follows the shoreline, all the way around Whitefish Bay. The weather stayed picture-perfect, like a consolation of pure sunlight on such a sad day. There wasn’t a hint of trouble on the water.

  But of course the trouble was there, just below the surface. That cold, cold water. Just ask the crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald, all of them still out there, not twenty miles from the safety of land.

  No matter how beautiful the day, before you can do anything about it, without any warning at all.

  The storm will come.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A few days passed, and I still hadn’t seen Vinnie again. I figured he was spending time wi
th his family. That seemed totally natural to me, so I didn’t think twice about it. I drove up our road, past his empty cabin. No lights were on. His truck was gone. I kept on going all the way to the end, to the last cabin, to finish my work there. I had a few last pieces of trim to install, and then there was painting to be done on the walls of the kitchen and bathroom, where it wasn’t just the rough wood of the logs. The whole place was finally coming back together again, and it felt strange not to have Vinnie there helping me with these last details. Every time I spilled a drop of paint on the floor I could almost hear him clucking at me. I’d half turn, forgetting for one moment that I was alone.

  Summer’s an odd time in the rental business. You get people visiting Tahquamenon Falls and maybe the Shipwreck Museum, but it’s not the same people every year. Not like fall, when it’s the same groups of hunters, as regular as clockwork, some of them going back so many years they can remember renting from my father. Winter is snowmobiles. Or “sledding,” as most people call it up here. Spring has become, believe it or not, birding season. More and more birders coming up every year, to watch the raptors and the shorebirds make their migration north. The birds come across the great expanse of Lake Superior and stop to rest at Whitefish Point. Hawks, owls, harriers, merlins, ospreys. Best of all, eagles. Every single day in the spring, you can see eagles. The ultimate good-luck sign for the Ojibwa. Or so I’m told. In fact, I think it was Vinnie’s mother who told me that.

  She was gone now, and it felt strange, knowing that she wouldn’t be there in that house on the rez, even if I saw her only a few times a year. I could only imagine how Vinnie was feeling. How he was dealing with it. Or what he was doing to find a way past it.

  The wind coming off Lake Superior is usually the biggest air conditioner in North America, but on this one strange night the air stayed warm, and I had to drag out some fans and deliver them to the cabins. I stuck around to talk to two of the families for a while. It was dark when I finally headed down to the Glasgow. The sun doesn’t even go down until after nine o’clock at this time of year, so it was late. Vinnie’s truck was parked in front of his cabin, but I didn’t see any lights on inside.

  When I walked into the Glasgow, I saw Vinnie sitting in front of the fireplace. He didn’t turn when I walked through the door. Jackie was behind the bar, looking a little more agitated than usual. With that weathered old Scottish face of his, that Rudolph’s nose and whatever hair he still managed to put a comb through.

  “He’s in a state,” Jackie said, nodding his head toward Vinnie. The slight brogue in his voice still, all these years later. “I’d be careful if I were you.”

  “What do you expect?” I said. “It’s only been a few days.”

  “No, you don’t understand.”

  I stood there waiting for him to enlighten me. But he didn’t.

  “Just go see,” Jackie said. “Go sit with him a bit, eh?”

  I wandered over and took the other seat by the fire. Vinnie still hadn’t looked up. I watched him stare into the fire and that’s when it finally occurred to me that there shouldn’t be a fire going. It was the one and only genuinely warm night of the year, and it probably wouldn’t even go below seventy all night long. Up here, that was the kind of heat wave that would have the natives passing out in the parking lot.

  “Who needs a sweat lodge?” I said. “You can just sit right here.”

  He didn’t respond. That’s when I noticed the second thing that was out of place. This one was a lot more alarming than an unnecessary fire on a warm night, because cupped in Vinnie’s hands was a glass filled with amber liquid. It didn’t look like ginger ale and there was no ice in it. The glass was half empty.

  That’s when it hit me. He had left his truck at his cabin, and he had walked down here. A perfectly sensible thing to do if you plan on drinking, but for Vinnie it was the last thing I ever would have expected.

  I sat there watching him watching the fire. I wasn’t sure what to say. Jackie came over and he had a cold Molson. Force of habit, and on any other night it would have been the most welcome sight in the world. A cold bottle straight from Canada, not the watered-down stuff they bottle in the States and slap a Canadian label on. The real thing from the real home of beer, after a long unseasonably hot day.

  I left it on the table. I sat there in silence while the condensation on the bottle made a wet ring.

  “Vinnie,” I finally said. “What’s going on?”

  He shook his head.

  “What are you drinking?”

  He looked down at the glass. “Scotch? Ask Jackie.”

  I looked over at the man in question. He threw his bar towel up in the air and rolled his eyes.

  “Something tells me Jackie didn’t force a drink on you,” I said. “Come on, what the hell?”

  “I asked for a real drink,” Vinnie said, finally looking me in the eye. “I’m a grown-up. I’m in a bar. I wanted a drink and he gave me one. Then I paid him some money for it. Then I made a fire even though it’s the warmest night in years, because I felt like having a fire. Are we good now?”

  “Yeah, we’re good. Since when do you drink scotch?”

  “What’s the problem?” he said. “It’s been a hard week and I’m having a drink. You go through a case of Canadians like every night, right?”

  “I don’t think I drink a case of beer every night, no.”

  “A case a week then. Whatever. You’re way ahead of me, that’s all I know. So what’s the problem?”

  “I’m not the one with a lifelong hatred of alcohol.” I could have reminded him of at least a dozen times when he’d left a room because of too much drinking going on. Too much liquor, too much noise, too much goddamned foolishness. I knew Vinnie couldn’t stand it.

  “Maybe I need to lighten up,” he said. “Just let go of it once in a while.”

  Yeah, that’ll be the day, I thought. Let’s go to the Cozy and watch a few of your cousins doing shots after their shift at the casino. You so enjoy watching that scene.

  He lifted the glass and drained it. When it was empty, I saw a quick grimace on his face, the look of a nondrinker who can’t quite believe how bad liquor can taste. Then just as quickly the look was gone and he was on his feet.

  “Set me up again,” he said as he went to the bar. He didn’t waver or stumble. Not yet. There’d be plenty of time for that later.

  “Ah, one’s enough,” Jackie said, “wouldn’t you say now?”

  “No, I wouldn’t say. I’ll have another, please.”

  Jackie looked over at me for help. I didn’t know what else to do except give him a shrug. Hell, Vinnie was a thirty-whatever-year-old man and he’d just lost his mother. Now he wanted to have another drink. He wasn’t an alcoholic. He had no history with the stuff whatsoever, not that I knew of. What were we supposed to say?

  Maybe this is exactly what you need, I thought. Press the Reset button on your life. Get out of your own head. You’ll feel like death tomorrow morning, but for tonight, I mean, why the hell not?

  He came back to his chair with another glass of scotch. There were ice cubes in it this time. Blasphemy for a true Scot, but I guess Jackie was doing whatever he could to help him keep it slow and easy.

  Vinnie tilted the glass back and drained it.

  “All right, come on,” I said. “If you’re gonna drink, do it right. You don’t shotgun that stuff.”

  “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I’ll try to do better with the next one.”

  “Seriously, why don’t you take a break for a minute, okay?”

  He stood up, and this time I saw a little wobble in his step.

  “Don’t even ask me,” Jackie said. “You don’t even drink, Vinnie. You’re just gonna make yourself sick.”

  “If I can’t drink here,” Vinnie said, “I’ll go somewhere else.”

  “Look, I know I’m not your father, but—”

  “No, you’re not,” Vinnie said, reaching into his back pocket. “Here’s my father
right here.”

  He threw a photograph onto the bar. Jackie picked it up. I got up from my chair and went around to look over his shoulder. The photograph was half folded from being in Vinnie’s pocket, but the faces were unmistakable. One was a younger, thinner version of Vinnie’s mother. The other was … Well, it was Vinnie. That’s the only way to say it. At least at first glance, with the man himself standing right next to you while you looked at the picture, even with the washed-out color from the seventies, you’d have to believe that this was the same man, like somehow he had not aged at all since this photograph had been taken.

  “My God,” Jackie said. “You’re the spitting image.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” Vinnie said. “That’s great to hear.”

  “This can’t be a big surprise,” I said. “I mean, you knew you looked like him, right?”

  I thought back to the day of the funeral, standing next to Vinnie on the shore of Waishkey Bay, what he told me about his mother’s last days, how she had looked up at him and in the haze of her painkillers had mistaken him for her long-lost husband. Now that I was seeing this picture, it was a lot easier to believe.

  “I found this picture in my mother’s house,” Vinnie said. “When I was cleaning out some drawers. She didn’t exactly have his portrait hanging over the mantel. Not after he ran out on us.”

  “I understand,” I said, “but you must have seen pictures like this before.”

  “I did. Not for a long time, but yeah. Once in a while. I don’t know, there’s just something about this picture, though. This picture I’ve never seen before.”

  I looked back at the two faces. They were standing outside in the sunlight, the mother in a plain dress, the father in jeans and a white shirt. That dark hair tied up behind him, the way Vinnie does it. An automobile behind them, some big hunk of American metal from the seventies. They were blocking the grille, but I would have guessed a Chevy Impala. It didn’t look new, but it was probably new to them and they were standing there on the reservation in front of the car and looking proud and happy. There was no hint on either person’s face that he’d soon be gone and she’d be left to raise four kids on her own.