第18章 The Traverse

The Traverse opened for the season on the day the cold broke, and Vail walked it in the middle of the afternoon with the wind off the west and the whole white width of the river under his boots. The ice road ran from Filmer Island to the far shore, a plowed lane across a foot of river ice, and the marker crew had set the line of spruce poles two days before Ragna Sund was arrested and had not touched it since. The poles stood straight in the wind, and beside them the Keld stood open, black and patient, and the two together made the shape of the whole story: the road you could cross, and the hole you could not. Runa came up the lane behind him with the recovery sled and the last of the gear. "Brekke called the station this morning," she said. "Three times. He says he'll talk to you and no one else, and he says he's got maybe a month, and he wants it done." "His heart." "His heart." She stopped beside him. "He wants to make a statement." Vail looked out across the river at the far shore and said nothing for a while. "Then we take it today," he said. "Because there's one more thing in this and it belongs to him, and if he dies before he says it the file stays open, and I am not going to leave the file open." They drove to the bluff above the dam, and Brekke met them at the door of the orchid house and led them in among the pink and heavy flowers, and he sat in his chair with his hands on his knees and gave them the last piece in a flat voice that did not ask for anything. "The man in the good coat who came to the station that night was Corwin Muir," he said. "But Muir did not come on his own. He came on the mill's behalf, and behind the mill there was a man above the mill, a man who owned the pipe and the outfall and the contract, and who told Muir to make sure that a young constable did not chase a drowning into a business." "Who?" Vail asked. Brekke said the name of the mill's old owner, a man who had died a rich death fifteen years ago and whose estate still held the ground under the Winterway, and then he said the second name, the one that mattered. "And I let him," Brekke said. "I was the sergeant. I took the check and I told you to close it, and the file has your signature on it because I sent you to get the signature the way you send a boy to get water, and that is the whole truth of it, and I have had it in my mouth for twenty years like a stone." Vail stood among the orchids and looked at the man who had trained him and made him and then used him, and he found that he had no anger left for him, only a kind of cold clarity. "You'll put that in a statement," Vail said. "I'll put it in a statement." "And you'll say it in a courtroom." "I'll say it anywhere that will listen." Brekke looked up. "And then you'll put yours next to mine, and the file will have both names on it, yours and mine, and neither of us will be a constable or a sergeant by the spring. Do you understand what you're trading?" "A badge," Vail said, "for the truth." He looked out through the orchid glass at the frozen reservoir and the river beyond it, and he thought about Ivar Sund waiting on the new ice for a man who never came. "I have been paying for one with the other for twenty years without either of them showing up in a ledger. I'd sooner have it written down." Runa wrote the statement out by hand and read it back to Brekke twice, and he corrected one word, and then he signed it and set the pen down and looked into the orchids, and Vail understood that the old man had been waiting for years for somebody to come and take the stone out of his hand. He did not forgive him. He did not have to. There is a kind of debt that does not get paid; it only gets written down, and writing it down was the only thing the two of them could still do. They took Brekke's statement and drove back down to the river, and on the ice road, halfway across the Traverse, they came up on a cluster of Authority trucks and a crowd of men standing at the edge of the Keld, and Vail's stomach dropped before he heard the shout. Somebody had gone through. A marker pole lay on its side at the lip of the open water, and one of the crew, a young man named Stig Hauge, was in the black with his hands on the edge of the ice and his face going white, and the current had already begun to pull him under. Ragna Sund was in the back of the second cruiser with her wrists cuffed and the door open, and before Vail could get his breath she was out and running, and nobody thought to stop her because nobody in that crowd was thinking of anything but the man in the water. She went flat onto the ice at the edge and reached him the way a woman reaches for a hand she has taken a thousand times, and she got his wrist and set her boots against the lip and leaned back, and Runa was there a half second later with the rope, and together, one on each arm, they pulled Stig Hauge out of the Keld and rolled him onto the lane and wrapped him in a coat. Ragna sat down on the ice with her cuffs on and her hair wet and her breath going, and she looked at the open water and did not say anything at all. Vail stood over her in the wind and thought about the fact that the woman who had put four men into this water had just taken a fifth man out of it, and that both things had been done by the same pair of hands, and that the law would make nothing of the second thing and he would make something of it anyway, because he had spent twenty years learning the one lesson this river had to teach, which is that a person is not the sum of the worst thing they have done, or the best, but of all of it at once, in order, like a gauge reading. Vail crouched beside her. "Why?" he asked. "I know every inch of this river," Ragna said. "I know where it takes and I know where it gives back, and I have spent twenty years learning it so that one day I would not have to watch a man go under and do nothing." She looked at him then, and her eyes were the same as they had been on the bank, steady and out of grief. "I did not get to save Ivar. I have been trying to save Ivar every winter since. The river does not care which man it takes. That is the whole trouble with the river." They took her back to the car, and the crew took Hauge to the clinic, and Vail stood on the Traverse in the wind and looked at the Keld, and he understood at last what the four winters had been for, and it was not only revenge, and it was not only grief. It was a woman teaching herself the river until the river owed her one. ---