Purgatory Ridge

“Toast, maybe. Soak up some of that battery acid you call coffee.”

They stopped at a small restaurant in Beaver Bay. LePere ordered two eggs over easy, hash browns, wheat toast, a side of ham, and orange juice. Bridger rubbed his face with his hands and scratched at his grizzled jaw as the waitress, a young woman with patient brown eyes, stood with her pen poised over her order pad.

“Ah, hell,” Bridger finally said. “Gimme a stack of cakes, bacon, coupla eggs scrambled. You got home fries here?”

“Yes.”

“Gimme some of them, too.”

“We’re diving,” LePere reminded him. “If you eat all that, you won’t need weights.”

Bridger scowled at him, then at the waitress. “And coffee. Lots of it.”

The restaurant was filling up. A few locals, it seemed to LePere, and a lot of tourists. A family-man, woman, boy-stepped in and waited to be seated. They were only a few feet from where LePere and Bridger sat by a window.

“Can we go swimming in the lake?” the boy asked.

“No way, Randy,” his father replied. “The water’s too cold. It’s so cold, in fact, that the bodies of drowned people don’t float to the surface. Lake Superior, son, doesn’t give up its dead.”

“Stuart,” his wife admonished.

“Why?” the boy asked.

Ignoring the look from his wife, Stuart replied, “As a body decomposes, gases form inside it that make it float. It fills up like a balloon. But the water here is so cold, bodies don’t decompose. They just lie there on the bottom of that big lake-”

“That’s enough, Stuart.”

“They say,” he went on, “that at night when the moon is very bright and the water very still, you can look down and see all the dead dancing along the bottom.” He gave his hands a ghostly flutter.

“That’s enough.” This time it was LePere who spoke.

Stuart stared at him, surprised. A smile tried to come to his lips, hoping the unhappy, powerful-looking man at the table was only joking.

“I was just…” he started to explain. He ended simply: “Sorry.”

The family stood silently until they were seated. LePere sat looking out the window toward the lake that burned with a silver fire under the morning sun.

When the check came after breakfast, Bridger said, “Mind catching it?”

LePere dug for his wallet. “Luck didn’t change, huh?”

“Went down to Black Bear Casino last night. Thought a different location might help. It didn’t.”

“Maybe if you stopped mixing cards and alcohol,” LePere suggested.

“Just buy the damn breakfast, okay? The least you could do. I didn’t get out of bed this morning for my own amusement.”

LePere dropped a couple of bucks for a tip and paid at the register. As he stepped outside, he saw Stuart watching him from the window. Stuart looked quickly away.

Breakfast had awakened Wesley Bridger. He walked briskly to LePere’s truck, then stood shaking his head at the old blue Dodge pickup with its homemade camper shell.

“How long you had this rust bucket?”

“Eleven years now.” LePere climbed in.

“Time for a new one,” Bridger said, opening the passenger door. “But then, cleaning toilets won’t exactly cover monthly payments.”

LePere pulled the truck onto the highway and continued south out of Beaver Bay.

Bridger reached for the radio and found a country station. He crossed his arms and settled back. “Those casinos really rake it in. Christ, middle of nowhere and the parking lot’s always full, day or night. They must haul in a million bucks a day.” He eyed LePere. “And you don’t get one red cent?”

“Like I told you before, each casino is operated by a specific band.” LePere checked his mirror and passed a slow-moving Buick with an old woman at the wheel. “The Chippewa Grand Casino is operated by the Iron Lake Band of Ojibwe. To get an allotment, you have to be an enrolled member of that band. My mother was a Cree from Canada.”

“Even so, you’d think with all that bread there’d be enough to spread it around to every Indian in the state. The hell with that band stuff.” Bridger’s foot tapped along to Reba McEntire. “You’re thinking, I suppose, that at least they gave you a job. Big deal. Cleaning the crap off toilet seats.”

“I know where this is leading.”

“All I’m saying is that no matter how you look at it, you’re owed big time by somebody.”

“And that’s why you’ve come up with this new harebrained scheme. Because I’m owed big time.”

“No, I came up with it because the very idea of holding a million bucks in my hand makes my dick stiff.”

“You used to be sure we’d get a million bucks diving the wreck.”

“We will.” Bridger settled back and crossed his arms. “We will. But it’ll be at the end of long, drawnout litigation. Way my luck’s been lately, I can’t wait that long for a bankroll. Like I told you, we got any more heavy expense with this diving, we’re shit out of luck.”

“Maybe it’s time you stopped gambling, Wes.”

“It was gambling brought us this far,” Bridger reminded him sourly. “Look, I’m just suggesting a different game, that’s all.”

“What you’re suggesting isn’t a game. We could go to jail.”

“Like your life ain’t a fucking prison now.”