Page 20 of Shadow Ticket
“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 a secret Indian reservation, 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 Chippewa telepathy 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 back to 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 later did 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.”
“There’s a lot of activity on the job,” Hicks explains, “…what a hat goes through out there a dozen times a day, sat on, hit with snowballs, set on fire, checked in and out of a number of different classes of joint by careless tomatoes with long, sharp nails—”
“Don’t forget natural disasters, good morning, Jimmy,” to a hide seller who just stepped in, whose Ojibwe name means He Who Watches in Secret, but who goes by Jimmy when he’s in town.
Catching sight of Hicks, “Hey, it’s ’at speedboat captain again, ain’t it.”
Nodding, “Well. How’s the Airmont broad been keepin?”
“Only what I see in the papers.”
“If I’m not bein too nosy, how’d she ever get connected up with you folks?”
“You know how once you’re bit by a werewolf, you turn into one yourself?”
“You tellin me ol’ Daphne—”
“No, no, Ojibwe, see, instead of the werewolf, we have the Windigo. Maybe human, maybe not, nobody ever likes to look too close…turns out to have a human flesh habit for one thing, which fifty, sixty years ago began to create a dilemma for the white man, whose normal policy up till then had been whenever possible just shoot the Indian, except that Wisconsin back at that moment happens to be going through one of these bleeding-heart reform situations, loony bins state and county being constructed by the dozen at public expense, taking the ‘humane’ approach that whenever any member of any tribe even so much as thinks about nibbling on a gingerbread man, this should right away be labeled early-onset cannibalistic ‘Windigo Psychosis’ and the offending redskin locked up for mental treatment and preferably for good.”
“And…Miss Airmont…”
“Oh. Apparently in one of these childhood loony bins she was in and out of, Daphne crossed paths with some Ojibwe Dawn Society brother being railroaded in on just such a phony cannibal rap. One thing must’ve led to another and first chance she got she was off on her Spirit Quest, somebody runs her out into the deep North Woods, leaves her there to do what she has to to make her way back, in hopes that somewhere in the logistics of return, she’ll pick up a spirit guide. ”
“And…” Hicks flashing back to those first few minutes after he’d set her back on land, stepping off the rumrunner’s special and already on her way to becoming the darling of scandal sheets including Modern Peeper, Yikes!
, and Lowlife Gazette, featuring photos of her sporting a range of lurid getups and a loose smile she may not by that time of the evening have been in full control of, surrounded by a prize selection of merry loophounds gazing at her like chorus boys in a musical number, under headlines like Dairy Deb Sin Spree.
“You know you saved her life, bringing her up to the rez when you did.”
“This again, thanks, heard it before, just giving a hitchhiker a lift was all.”
“Fact remains that once you put so much as a toe into the flow that is the life journey of another…”
“Wait, you’re tellin me, one helpful act—not even that, just trying to be polite—has dumped me into a washday radio drama that can go on now for, what, years?”
“Back in Pozzuoli we have this all the time,” Vito puts in, “it’s called la vendetta, what’s the commotion?”
“And if I say thanks but no thanks, what happens, I get an arrow through my head?”
“You don’t have to be all that way about it either, white man.”