T
he truck smelled like dampened cigars, and the inside of the windows were wet with fog. The plastic upholstery covering the enormous front seat was split and cracked from corner to corner, and mustard colored foam padding was bursting through each tear. On the dashboard, a speedometer, fuel gauge, and heater control were the only accessories. There was a void beneath the dash, a place for a radio, where three wires, one red, one green, one white, dangled, clipped, with copper frizz flowering out sharply from each.Olaf put the key in the ignition, pumped the gas pedal four times, and turned the key. The truck made a retching motion as it started to turn over, but failed. Olaf pumped the gas pedal a couple more times and tried again. This time it made a choking sound, a groaning, muffled, nearly dead sound, but finally started. He tapped the accelerator a couple of times and billows of white smoke blossomed from the tailpipe; the inside of the car filled with the smell of old, stale gasoline.
Olaf looked at Noah with a grin on his face. ‘Carburetor,’ he said.
‘We can take my car,’ Noah said, pointing out his window at the dust covered Volvo sedan with the dented front bumper and passenger side quarter panel.
‘Your car couldn’t make it up the road.’
‘How long has it been since you drove this thing anyway?’
‘Not more than a week. I still have to get into town to buy groceries and what not.’ ‘You bought this in 1970, when I was ten years old.’
‘It’s got almost four hundred thousand miles on it,’ he peeked under his forearm at the odometer. ‘Three hundred ninety eight thousand to be exact.’
‘That is truly one of the most amazing things I’ve ever heard,’ Noah said. ‘I’ve had four new cars in the last eight years. All of them two year leases.’
‘I never have to worry about repairs this way. I haven’t had a car in the shop since I started leasing.’
‘Except for the new transmissions, the rebuilt engine, and the new axels, this thing has never been in the garage either.’
Noah could only shake his head.
Olaf pulled a stiff rag out from under his seat and wiped the slick fog from his side of the windshield and rolled his side window down halfway. ‘Crack your window, would you? Needs to dry out in here.’
‘Where are we headed?’ Noah asked.
‘Thought it might be nice to get down to the lake, see the waves.’ ‘Is that what you wanted to show me? The lake?’
‘No, no,’ Olaf said as he navigated the gargantuan Suburban up through the low hanging trees and onto the county road that led back to the lake and to town. It was getting towards noon, and the temperature, as far as Noah could tell with it fanning through the open window, was still falling.
‘It’s getting colder, isn’t it?’ Noah asked.
‘It is, but the pressure is rising, which means it’ll be clearing up. This wind though, it’s going to blow the high pressure through here in no time.’ The tall pine trees were swaying drunkenly, even the empty boughs of the aspen and birch trees were moving as if to a song. Olaf drove the truck slowly and steadily down the middle of the two-lane road.
‘That your deer?’ Olaf said.
‘That’s her,’ Noah said, sitting up to get a better view through his father’s side of the windshield. ‘Doesn’t take long for the scavengers to get at it, huh?’ It was already half devoured.
‘Seldom does,’ Olaf said.
When they got to highway 61, Olaf turned left, away from town, and drove slowly still. After a few miles the road wound down, through the heavy forest, to the lake.
‘Look at that water,’ Olaf said.
‘Those waves are huge. It’s like the ocean,’ Noah answered. ‘It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this.’ He sat there, transfixed but thinking of nothing, for a few quiet minutes before he remembered his father sitting next to him. He was watching him from the corner of his eye. There was a constant look of discomfort on the old man’s face. The deep creases around his eyes and in the slack of his chin and neck seemed to be flexed all the time; his lips and nose crinkled in a constant grimace; his mouth parted for the laborious task of taking long, slow, willful breaths between his puffs on the acrid cigar. Noah watched his father’s hands, too, one on the steering wheel with quivering white haired knuckles, the other sitting on his leg, as if helping to keep the accelerator constant. They were going thirty miles per hour.
In half an hour they’d made it to the Cutface Creek wayside where Olaf pulled the truck into one of the dozen parking spots. It was Wednesday, just after noon. Noah thought, I bet that the next nearest person, aside from the truck drivers steering their rigs along the highway, is either fifteen miles behind us, in Misquah, or fifteen miles ahead of us, in Grand Marais.
Olaf turned the truck off. ‘I never come down here anymore,’ he said.
‘On my way here yesterday, I missed the county road back in Misquah and ended up driving all the way up here before turning around.’
‘You missed the county road and the red trees?’
Noah smiled. ‘Yes, I missed them. But anyone would have.’
They sat uneasily for a few seconds. ‘How far is it from say, Silver Bay across the lake to Marquette?’ Noah asked, adjusting his weight to his right elbow on the door’s armrest.
‘How far across the water?’
‘Well, I reckon it’s about 175 miles as the gull flies. But it isn’t straight across the lake, of course. It’s about eighty nautical miles from Silver Bay to the middle of the Keweenaw Peninsula, which makes it what, ninety miles or so. Beyond that, my best guess is another eighty or eighty-five miles, most of that across the Keweenaw, then the Huron Mountains, and only another ten or twenty nautical miles across the Keweenaw Bay. Farther, of course, if you were getting there by ship.’ He paused, as if to check his math. ‘Why?’
‘When I was driving here yesterday, I picked up a radio station from Marquette for a little while. It surprised me, that’s all.’
By now they had gotten out, moved around to the front of the truck, and were leaning against the rusty bumper. Six foot waves were curling up onto the rocky shore in firework-like explosions of blue and white. The sky, though less threatening than it had been the day before, was still swollen with cumulous clouds.
They were both facing the wind, a sharp wind that brought a delicate spray of lake water with it. Olaf said, ‘I wonder if it’s anything like this on the coast in Norway.’
‘I never thought much about you being born there.’
‘I don’t think about it much either, to tell you the truth. And I haven’t ever been back. I don’t remember much about the place.’
‘What do you remember?’
‘Our house in Bergen, little two room place on the edge of the city,’ he said. ‘My father coming home from work, surly as hell; almost everything about my mother; the miscarriage she had before we came here; stuff like that.’
‘How hard did they have it?’
‘Who knows? Whatever trouble there was, was too well hidden behind their goddamn stoicism for me to see it.’
‘He worked as a lumberjack at first. He was gone all the time, down around Cloquet, up along the shore. Great big man who was strong as an elephant. Later he worked on a tug over in Superior.’
‘What about grandma?’
‘What do you mean, what about grandma?’ ‘What did grandma do?’
‘She raised me, of course.’
‘I wish I could remember her better.’
‘My mother was the kindest person I ever knew. She was a saint, truly. Never hit me once, hell, never even yelled at me.’
‘That’s how mom was, too.’
Olaf glared ahead, out at the water, towards a horizon that rested somewhere in the middle of the lake. ‘My mother, she was faithful. She loved my father, God knows why. She was forgiving.’ Noah thought he understood, for the first time in his life, what his own mother’s affair had meant to his father, knew that his father knew. He had always accepted it as her due, as the solace in her long, lonely days. And whatever pain it had caused his father, if he knew about it at all, well, Noah had always thought that his due. But now the perverse pleasure he had always taken in his mother’s infidelity was replaced with the shameful recognition that there was another side of the story.
‘Solveig tells me you’ve got a map shop out in Boston.’
Caught off guard by the change in topics, Noah stammered, ‘Yes, yeah I do. It’s an antiquarian shop. Old maps. Maps from all over the world.’
‘What about teaching?’
‘I wasn’t a very good teacher. I was a terrible teacher, in fact.’ ‘How are you at selling maps?’
‘My maps sell themselves. The people who buy them are the same kind of people who collect stamps or coins or rare books; they’re the kind of people who know ten times more about the business than the people who run the businesses.’
‘That doesn’t make a whole lot of goddamn sense, does it? You’re at a disadvantage aren’t you?’
‘I would be at a disadvantage if they didn’t consider overspending an integral part of their passion.’ Noah smiled to himself. ‘It’s simple larceny.’
‘You make good money?’
Noah looked at him, considering the question as though a perfect stranger had asked it. ‘I do okay.’
‘By the looks of that car of yours, a little better than okay.’
‘Yeah, I do okay, sometimes a little better than okay,’ Noah said feeling strangely boyish, glad of what he took to be his father’s approval, but suspicious of it, too.
‘You got anyone working for you?’
‘One full time employee. A guy named Ed. Nice guy, loves the business. Honest. Retired from the army.’
‘How much do people pay for these maps?’
‘Well,’ Noah said, amazed that his father was taking an interest and anxious to impress him. ‘It depends on the map. Two weeks ago I bought a hand written diary by Tycho Braha. In the diary, there were twenty or twenty-five illustrated maps of the seas and constellations. It cost me eight thousand dollars. If I get the right person at the right time to buy it, which I almost always do, I’ll sell it for a profit of twenty-five or thirty percent.’ Olaf was looking at him with one raised eyebrow and Noah couldn’t tell if it was skepticism or the wind that made it peak. ‘Now, that’s a very valuable, very high-end manuscript. At the same time I bought the Braha, I also bought five maps, each cost between four hundred and twelve hundred dollars. That’s average, I’d say.’
‘I have a network of about ten dealers that I do business with. I also research my own purchases when nothing is happening with them. I do almost all of it over the internet.’
‘Why don’t the collectors just buy directly from your dealers?’
‘I don’t know the answer to that, but it’s why I call it larceny.’ Both men smiled, and looked out at the lake again.
‘And what about Natalie? When are you two having kids?’ ‘Those are two different questions.’
‘Take them in order.’
‘Natalie is doing well,’ Noah said without having to think. ‘She works for a consulting firm. She spends a lot of time traveling.’
‘What the hell is a consulting firm? What the hell does she consult?’
‘She works for a company called, McGreary & Wynn, their clients run the gamut. She works mostly in the computer sector. I don’t understand a lot of it myself, but her clients pay her to be told how they could be running more efficiently, either with their products or their people or their plants, anything really.’
‘And what about kids?’
Noah paused, closed his eyes and bowed his head for a second. ‘That’s the million dollar question,’ he said, picking his head back up and looking squarely at his father. ‘We’ve been trying for more than two years now. We’ve had a couple of miscarriages, lots of tough luck. But we’re still plugging away.’
‘Plugging away, huh?’ Olaf said and winked.
T
hey stopped for lunch at the Manitou Lodge, a place just a few miles beyond the wayside in the opposite direction of Misquah. The dining room was a moderately sized room with grand ambitions. The walls were paneled with dark, stained wood, and the vaulted ceiling supported four chandeliers that aspired to some kind of elegance, but failedbadly. The floor was a rippling, knotted pine thing polished to a shoeshine brown. Along one wall there was a colossal fireplace with a mantel as big as a canoe. Hanging over the mantel there was a moose head with antlers that spanned six feet or more. On either side of the fireplace, black bearskins hung like paintings. Above the wall of windows that faced the highway, a dozen or more fish hung mounted on elaborately carved and lacquered pieces of wood. They were Chinook and brown salmon, lake trout, northern pike, walleye, even a few pan fish. The tables were sturdy and unvarnished and covered with paper placemats and lusterless silverware. Salt and pepper shakers, sugar bowls, pats of butter, foils of jam, packets of cream, all sat huddled on the edge of each table. The three waitresses on duty all wore black skirts and white blouses and aprons bursting with pens and order pads. One of them, a young, pretty if not plump, girl of about eighteen directed them to a table by the window in the corner and gave them menus.
‘Our soup of the day is walleye chowder,’ she said as she filled their water glasses from a brown, plastic pitcher meant to look like a barrel.
‘Thanks,’ Noah said.
‘I’ll be back to take your order when you’re ready,’ she said, and sulked off. Noah smiled at her.
‘I bet I haven’t been to eat in a restaurant in a year or more,’ Olaf mused. ‘We eat out three or four times a week.’
‘Your wife doesn’t cook?’
‘When we eat at home, I usually cook. Natalie’s not often home until eight or nine at night.’
‘What’s she doing until eight or nine o’clock?’ ‘She’s busy at work almost all the time.’ ‘Are you kidding me?’ Olaf asked.
Noah ignored his question. ‘What looks good? Anything?’ ‘I’m having the chowder,’ Olaf said.
When the waitress came back she was sucking childishly on a spearmint candy, her bright blue eyes still sleepy. Before she could ask, Olaf said, ‘The chowder. That’s what I want. And some hot coffee.’
‘Okay,’ she said, rolling her eyes towards Noah and switching the candy from one cheek to the other. ‘And you?’
Noah smiled again, compensating for his father’s rudeness he hoped, and asked for the chowder himself. She smiled, put her pen behind her ear, and walked towards the kitchen. The two men were still the only customers in the dining room.
‘How does a place like this stay in business?’ Noah thought out loud. ‘Tourists.’
‘Hard to believe,’ Noah said.
‘Listen, wait here a minute,’ Olaf said, steadying himself by gripping the edge of the table as he stood up. ‘I’ll be right back.’
Noah, who had his back to the fireplace, watched his father shuffle across the dining room and out the glass door. From his seat he could see the old man trudge across the gravel parking lot. Noah watched him open the back door of the truck and take out a wooden box the size of a desk drawer. Balancing it on his left shoulder, he somehow managed to get the truck door closed and back into the restaurant without falling over dead, but his tentative steps and the labor it took to hoist the box up onto his shoulder startled Noah into the reason he was there in the first place. His father looked like the man Noah expected to see, the man he kept conjuring up as he drove across the country to get here, and it depressed the hell out of him.
The hostess opened the door for Olaf and offered to take the box from him but was rebuffed with a wave of the old man’s furry hand. He stumbled through the dining room and set the box, which was branded with the insignia of an Irish whiskey distillery named Tullamore Dew, on the placemat for what would have been a third or fourth guest.
Noah realized, for the first time since he’d been back, that his father hadn’t had a drink since he’d been there. ‘What’s in the box?’ he asked, half expecting his father to open it, pull a brown bottle from paper hay, and mix them both a drink.
‘Just a second,’ Olaf said as he slid the slotted lid from the box. It was carefully