Fire Point Read online

  HANNAH’S MOTHER, Suzanne, was a nurse at Marquette General Hospital and she was planning to attend a conference in Detroit the following weekend. Hannah and Martin agreed that after school on Friday she would go home and pack a small suitcase. That evening Martin pulled his car up in front of the house. When she got in the front seat, he said, “You know, we could go somewhere for the weekend.”

  “Oh, sure—someplace exotic, like Green Bay. Or maybe Duluth?”

  Though it was nearly dark, he was wearing his sunglasses. He wore them often since she had said they made him look cool. “No, the thought of you staying with me till Sunday is—it’s been driving me nuts all week.”

  “Me, too.” She laughed, then put her arm around his shoulders and kissed his neck.

  “We’ll be able to have breakfast together,” he said. “How do you like your eggs?”

  “In bed.”

  In bed Hannah told Martin about how since eighth grade, when she’d begun to develop hips and breasts, boys had paid attention to her. They looked at her eagerly, and she knew that her body was a source of jokes, of remarks. Girls also took notice. In the shower after gym class sometimes girls would glance at her as though in awe. They’d make jokes, too, but more often, particularly once they were in high school, they’d warn her to keep away from the boys they liked.

  The boy’s name was Sean Colby. He played football, he was funny in class, he hung out with the neatest group of guys in school. She started going with him and quickly found herself in a crowd of kids who seemed to drink and smoke dope all the time. The following summer, when she discovered she was pregnant, she actually thought that it was a good thing. She imagined herself quitting school—which she had come to dislike intensely—and going off to college with her new husband. Colleges and universities had family housing, and she imagined them living there, raising the baby while Sean studied something like marketing or pre-law—not criminal justice, because he had made it clear he had no interest ending up a small-town cop like his father. When she told Sean her period was late, he was stunned, but he said something about how it could be worked out. That’s what he said: We could work it out. But when it was certain that she was pregnant, everything changed. She wouldn’t see him for days, and when she did he was distant, uncertain. Finally, he told her his parents were furious, and his father had decided that Sean needed to get straightened out.

  “So he enlisted,” Martin said.

  “He’s in the Mediterranean—Italy, I think.”

  “Your mother, what’d she do?”

  “She arranged to have it taken care of. Sean’s parents paid for it. Last time I saw Officer Colby, he and his wife were sitting at our kitchen table writing a check to my mother.” Hannah stared at the ceiling for a long moment. The room was lit only by candles, and shadows danced on the walls. “There were complications, and I missed so much school I had to repeat senior year.”

  “You’re an outcast,” he said.

  “They hardly speak to me, except for some boy who wants to get his hands on me. Some of them tape anonymous notes with drawings to my locker. It’s a small town and now I’m the town slut.” She sat against the headboard, pulling the blankets up over her shoulders. “This is the first time—first time I’ve dated since then.”

  “When you graduate, what would you like to do—leave the U.P.?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “College?”

  “Haven’t applied.”

  “What happened to your father?”

  “He left when I was two. Mom just says he found a job out west.”

  “You’re not interested in college?”

  “I’m not interested in school, right now. I know a lot of people my age leave the U.P. after graduating, but I’ve been here all my life, and the fact is I like it. Even though I’m an outcast, as you say. . . .”

  “What’s the matter? Tell me.”

  “Now we have histories.”

  “They’re unavoidable,” he said. “What do you want, Hannah?”

  “I don’t know. I just know I don’t want to end up like my mother—tired and raising a kid on my own. That’s why I agreed to it.”

  3

  PLACES LIKE WHITEFISH HARBOR send kids like Sean Colby out into the world after high school. They go to college, they enlist in the service. The local newspaper prints their photographs and reports their accomplishments, degrees, scholarships, or promotions in rank. Then they take jobs, in Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis; they marry; they return less and less each year as family and obligations engulf them. The world had, in effect, accepted them, and family and friends back home felt proud and perhaps a little envious.

  But Sean Colby went out, and then returned suddenly—it was as though he’d been rejected, sent back by the world due to some flaw or defect. Just ten months after he went off to boot camp, he flew into Green Bay, Wisconsin, and took the bus north to the Upper Peninsula. Hung over, Sean slept during most of the five-hour trip, only occasionally opening his eyes to see where he was—Iron Mountain, Ishpeming, Negaunee—and each time he was confronted by the face of a boy hovering above the seat in front of him. The kid was four, or maybe he was six; Sean was just nineteen himself and wasn’t very good at determining the age of children.

  When the bus finally arrived in Marquette, Sean sat up and saw that the boy’s brown eyes were still gazing at the pins on his uniform. “Would you like one of these?” he asked.

  The boy’s mouth hung open, and when he inhaled there was the sound of snot clogging nasal passages. He nodded his head.

  “Why don’t you pick one?”

  Reluctantly, the boy lifted his hand off the back of the seat and pressed a finger against Sean’s chest.

  “This pin? You like this one? It means I was a sharpshooter.” He removed the pin from his uniform. The boy’s mother turned around and looked over her seat at him. She was in her mid-twenties, overweight, and had limp blond hair. “You mind if he has this?” Sean asked.

  “You can do that, just give him one of those medals off your uniform, eh?”

  It had been a while since he’d heard a Yooper accent. “I’d be happy to give it to him,” he said. “Okay?”

  “You betcha,” she said.

  Sean carefully fastened the pin to the front of the boy’s Packers T-shirt. “I won’t be needing it anymore.”

  “Jason. What do you say to the soldier?” Snot ran out of the boy’s right nostril. “Jason?” the mother said.

  The kid lowered his eyes and muttered, “Thank you.”

  Sean said, “You’re welcome, Jason.”

  The boy looked up as though he’d been rewarded. Then his mother got up and began to gather their bags. The boy was staring down at his pin, the snot now streaming over his upper lip. Sean took a handkerchief from his pocket and watched the woman. When she bent over to pick up something, he swiped the boy’s face with the handkerchief. The kid was taken by surprise and his eyes were suddenly confused and alarmed—they began to tear up. Sean leaned forward, putting his face within inches of the boy’s, and whispered, “You keep those boogers out of sight.”

  He sat back quickly and smiled as the woman straightened up, loaded with bags on both arms. She thanked Sean and then guided the boy up the aisle toward the front of the bus.

  Sean waited as the other passengers got off. Across the parking lot he could see his mother’s Ford. He knew she was sitting there behind the wheel, staring at the bus, sucking on one of her menthols. She would have come alone, while his father stayed at home—and she’d make some excuse, probably about his being tired from work. Then she’d try to touch him and say, “Sean, it’s good to have you home, no matter what.” She’d have to throw in something like “no matter what.” It wasn’t possible to just be happy to see him. With his mother everything was a burden, and she’d have to declare it immediately so that it was there between them, where she could use it.

  BY EARLY MAY Martin usually let Hannah drive the Mercedes. They we
re on the stretch of Shore Road that ran above Petit Marais—even with the windows opened, he could still smell the French fries they’d eaten in the car. As they rounded a bend in the road, a police car came into view, parked on the side of the road by a stand of pines. She downshifted and took the next curve slowly, but soon the cruiser appeared in the side-view mirror, blue lights flashing. She pulled over to the side of the road and the cruiser stopped behind them.

  She looked in the rearview mirror and said, “I knew it. It’s Colby.”

  “It’s all right.” Martin dug the car registration out of the glove compartment.

  Officer Colby walked up to the car, leaned down to her open window, pushing his reflector sunglasses back against the bridge of his nose. His face was wide and blunt, and his shave was so close that his cheeks had a faint sheen. “Hannah, this isn’t your car.” Then, reaching across for the registration, he said to Martin, “Of course not. And you are . . . her uncle?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, removing her license from her wallet and holding it up to Colby. “I might have taken that corner a little fast.”

  “You should know these roads don’t get any straighter because you’re driving a Mercedes-Benz.” Colby glanced at the registration for a moment as though it were an insult to his intelligence. “Martin Reed. Twenty-nine. Chicago, Illinois. Aren’t you up here on vacation a bit early?”

  “I just moved up here.”

  “I wonder what would bring you here in the off-season?” Colby sniffed and almost smiled. “The French fries?”

  Martin didn’t answer.

  The officer’s expression didn’t change. “You say you’re living here? Mind if I ask where, since it’s not indicated on your registration?”

  “Not at all,” Martin said. “Jane Kendall’s, on Blue Heron Road. She’s my aunt.”

  Colby nodded as he took the license from Hannah’s fingers. He straightened up and walked back to his cruiser.

  Martin said, “The ‘uncle’ bit was a nice touch.”

  She looked like she was about to cry and he took her hand, which was trembling. They sat without talking for several minutes, then she put both hands on the wheel as Colby approached the car again. He leaned down and handed her a slip. “I’m only giving you a warning, Hannah.” Then, speaking across to Martin, he said, “You get a Michigan license and registration if you plan on staying up here, Mr. Reed, and I’d suggest you be careful about letting teenaged girls drive this fine old car.”

  ALL SMALL TOWNS need a Frank Colby, because all small towns have a Pearly Blankenship. Colby explained this to Pearly early one morning when he was nineteen years old. Needless to say, Pearly had had a few. Colby had stopped him shortly after he’d put a twenty-two-pound walleye on Judge Emmett Anderson’s front porch. It was 1971 and the judge had recently given stiff fines and probation sentences to several dozen people in Marquette County. They had all been found guilty of possession of marijuana, based on the testimony of a bearded guy who called himself Rainbow and had been hanging around Whitefish Harbor all summer. Pearly spotted Rainbow for a narc and avoided him, so he didn’t get hauled before the judge.

  Colby was certain Pearly had put the fish on the judge’s porch but couldn’t prove it. It was tough to get fingerprints off a fish. For the next twenty-five years, most anything that went wrong, any of the frequent petty crimes—a “hijacked” sailboat (discovered adrift to the east, off the mouth of the Two-Hearted River), cut fishnets, headstones overturned in the graveyard, the flagpole stolen from in front of the town hall—Colby ascribed to Pearly Blankenship. Pearly wished he could take credit for some of these transgressions, which were the work of kids who were terminally bored in a town with an off-season that lasts nine and a half months. In truth, Pearly could only claim responsibility for the walleye and the flagpole. An oak mast, it had stood in front of town hall since the last days of the square-riggers. He took it down with his chainsaw but could not have transported it to safe hiding without the assistance of the DeJohn bothers, Peter and Michael, and their fishing trawler, Elizabeth Anne. Some suspected that this act of larceny had political connotations, considering that it occurred in April 1975, when the Americans pulled out of Saigon.

  “I’ve always been curious,” Frank Colby said to Pearly, years later. “What did you do with that flagpole?”

  “What flagpole?”

  It was one of the many times Colby had hauled him into the station, a snowy night in February, sometime after two A.M. Because of the weather, Colby decided not to drive Pearly over to the county jail in Marquette. Instead Colby would “invite” him to spend the night at the station, where he could sleep it off in the back room. Colby had been working on something, a report, and he looked up from his typewriter, his eyes bored, noncommittal. Pearly knew this was intended to conceal his anger.

  “What is it with you, Pearly?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Is this it? Is this going to be your life?”

  “I feel I’m necessary.”

  “Really? How so?”

  “All small towns need a Pearly Blankenship, to make a Frank Colby necessary.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Must be,” Pearly said. “You told me so.”

  “I did?”

  “I’ll never forget it.”

  “Thanks for reminding me.”

  “It’s your little nugget of wisdom and you deserve all the credit for it.”

  Colby busied himself by typing a few words, then stopped. “I’m serious. Does anything matter to you?”

  “Frank, are we going to engage in a philosophical discussion?”

  Colby took his hands off the keys of the typewriter and leaned back in the swivel chair. “Why not? Weather’s awful. We got all night.”

  “True,” Pearly said. “Neither of us is going anywhere.”

  Colby seemed faintly disgusted.

  “Since I’m here by ‘invitation,’ what’s to stop me from walking out the door?”

  “Nothing,” Colby said. “Not a thing.”

  “But just try it and we drive to Marquette, despite the weather.”

  “You know, you’re not like some of the others.”

  “Like what others?”

  “Like, say, the DeJohn brothers.”

  “How are they?”

  “Slightly brighter than the fish they catch.” He raised a hand before Pearly could launch into a defense of the DeJohns. “I was talking with Ena Stanton outside the library the other day and your name came up. She said that except for old Mary Latvala, nobody checks out more books at the library than you do.”

  Pearly smiled.

  “I say something funny?”

  “No. I like to read. Is that a crime?”

  “You have the moral and civic responsibility of—” Colby paused here and a small crease developed in his otherwise high, smooth forehead. Despite his fading beer buzz, Pearly was suddenly shot through with anticipation. “Of a beachcomber,” Colby said finally. He watched Pearly for a moment and then added, “You look disappointed.”

  “I was hoping for a fresher metaphor.”

  “Well, I don’t have the time to read as much as you do.”

  “I see. You know, I worked today. Spent over eight hours stripping shingles off a roof over in Au Train.” Colby seemed unimpressed. Then he asked, “What’s wrong with a beachcomber? Don’t they have a civil purpose? They walk the beach picking up refuse left by others. They turn in empty bottles and cans for the deposit, and as a result our beaches are cleaner.”

  “They’re bums,” Colby said.

  “Bums.”

  Colby leaned forward and it was clear that he was about to conclude this little seminar. “They’re bottom-feeders and you’re one small step above the beachcomber. You may get up and go to work in the morning hung over, but you have no real purpose in life. You just want to be—” And again he paused a moment. “You just want to be free and clear.”

  “Something wrong with
that?”

  “In theory? No. But it’s just humanly impossible. Now follow me.”

  They got out of their chairs and Colby led Pearly down the hall to a tiny back room. Pearly had been there before. It was primarily used for storage, and there were cartons of paper products—toilet paper, coffee filters, paper towels—stacked almost to the ceiling.

  Pearly sat down on the long wooden bench that stood against the back wall. “You know, my mother would have said that this room isn’t big enough to sling a cat.”

  WHEN SEAN AWOKE he couldn’t believe he was in his own bed. His room was in the basement and he could hear his mother overhead in the kitchen. She had the television on, as always, tuned to a morning talk show.

  Sean got out of bed, put on an old high-school T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, then went upstairs to the kitchen. She cooked him blueberry pancakes, his favorite. The smell of the batter on the griddle was diminished by the haze of menthol smoke. When his mother put the plate of pancakes on the table, she retreated to the counter, where she kept her coffee mug and cigarettes. Her first name, June, was printed in red letters on the pink mug. Keeping a thin shoulder toward him, she raised the cigarette to her mouth and her cheek went hollow as she inhaled fiercely. He’d forgotten how she tended to hold the elbow of her cigarette hand in the palm of her other hand.

  “You have plans for today?” she asked.

  He was relieved. This meant that they weren’t going to talk about his early discharge yet. Not last night, not this morning. Everybody was going to pretend it wasn’t there.

  “Absolutely none.” He poured maple syrup on his pancakes. “Feels pretty good, to have no plans. I tell you, the army can organize your day.”

  Her hair was shorter and it seemed to have lost what little color it had—now it was just a faint rust tone, which made her skin seem withered and pasty. “Well, he wants you to stop by the station around lunchtime.”

  “What?”

  “Just go see what your father wants.”

  “I need wheels.”