Page 35 of Shadow Ticket
“Just a lift for a lady on the run, quick trip, no romance. Sorry.” Aware as he says it of how often he’s likely to have to again.
November gales out here being respected for their violence and deadliness, having over the years carried off Lake navigation of all tonnages, sending to the bottom lumber schooners and daysailers, working steamers and pleasure yachts, sparing nobody, arriving without warning, proceeding without mercy, not leaving till they decide to. Tonight’s is turning out to be one of those.
“Trouble, captain?”
“With this on-and-off fog situation I’m not sure exactly where we are anymore.”
Daphne thinks they’re pretty close to an Ojibwe reservation, maybe not exactly one on the map, “Where I know some people.”
“High-ticket head case with pals among the Chippewa,” muttering to himself. “Check ’n’ double check. But—”
“Some of us,” she explains, “get to go to finishing schools over in Europe someplace, others have to learn to enjoy a lifetime of getting bounced around by adults who in general have no idea of what they’re doing, tough on the nervous system but a great way to expand your social horizons and of course always better if you’re the bouncer not the bouncee, ain’t that so, and here’s the rez by the way, you could just drop me off if you wouldn’t mind.”
“Not at all. What I do mind now and then is gettin Lindy-hopped around.”
“You’re sure sensitive, for a side of beef.”
Without knowing exactly how, even after looking it up on nautical charts afterward, Hicks seems to have run Daphne a good way up what’s known here as the Shipwreck Coast, as far as asecretIndianreservation, mentioned only once in a rider to a phantom treaty kept in a deep vault under a distant mountain belonging to the U.S. Interior Department and unrevealed even to those guarding it. Like rezzes elsewhere in the state more familiar and earthly, there’s no Wisconsin statutes in effect here, either. “Where white man’s law is null and void,” as Boynt likes to put it, “and savage ways prevail.”
—
By strange Chippewatelepathy a small committee has gathered dockside in the fog and drizzle to welcome Daphne. A gent in a Cubs baseball cap, with a bargain cigarette hanging off his lip and a night shift someplace nearby to get back to, hands her ashore.
In travels around workday Wisconsin Hicks has come into eye contact with a native Indian or two, without ever learning much. The gazes he’s getting now sort out the way they usually do, into wary, unfriendly, too ancient to decipher, too claimed in the present tense by details like the motorboat and the girl. Everybody’s smoking cigarettes in the ten-cent, or with no taxes around here maybe closer to five-cent, range. Woodsmoke comes seeping out of galvanized flue pipes, mixing with the damp fog now rolling in, and a fishing-boat smell. From up the Coast comes the half-earthly two-note bellow of a foghorn. Kewaunee, most likely. Maybe Two Rivers. Thunder west of here, something on the way.
“Thanks, you just saved me from life in the nuthouse.” Kissing him formally on the cheek.
“Step easy, there, Daphne.”
“Abyssinia yerself, Life Saver, and get back OK,” or something like it, already walking away, calling against the wind, trying to be tough, if she’s nervous at all being carried through by grace Hicks can sense but she may not.
All Hicks has ever had for grace is reflexes, which he depended on all that long night ride, pretty much running on fumes by the time he got backto the MPD moorage. Only days—all right, hours—later did sexual regrets begin to arrive, deep as a two-note foghorn—“Tough…Luck! Too…Bad!” like suppose she’d been legal age all along! Maybe they could have found a quiet inlet, rode out the storm, done some kidding around, “So forth.”
“And you never saw her again, got her phone number…”
“That’s right, hammer it in.”
“Can’t help remembering ourselves, that one time, in that boat…”
“Remember it well, Upper Nemahbin Lake, same summer Jack Zuta got the bump, li’l Evinrude outboard. But this other boat Daphne was in was a rumrunner, doing up to 80 knots, 15-foot waves, winter gales rollin in, hell, 20-foot, and enough else to worry about.”
“Not a night for romance, you’re saying.”
“You do understand.”
“The hell I do.” Reaching for the smokes.
—
Only weeks laterdid Hicks run into somebody from that night, up in the Ward, at his hatmaker Vito Cubanelli.
“You again!” Vito busy with tollikers and curling shackles and a steam nozzle, shaping the brim of a derby, “some picky character walks in off the street, wants left and right sides different, sort of like tilting your hat without tilting your hat, three different diameters, and people wonder we go crazy.”
“And here I thought it was mercury fumes.”
Vito does a lot of his own felting, dealing direct with Indians who are apt to show up here at all hours with a rumble seat full of beaver hides, come in, drink some home brew, clown around, Vito buys in volume, gets a discount, all is copasetic.
“Cazzo, get a load of this topper, all you gotta do is step out the door. Hopeless.”
