Chapter Seven
HECTOR
Parasites.
Man, I always worried about the hell that surrounded me every day in Duluth. The school administration, my uncle, my bosses, the punishing winters, the infrequent letters from my dad—they were always trying to kill me, bite by bite. Now I have to worry about being a different kind of victim.
The girl’s footsteps recede into the woods as the wind rudely smacks my face. Well, I guess she’s not trying to kill me. I blow out a breath and pause to touch my sheathed knife when a sliver of pain on my arm reminds me—I’m cut.
I was this close to slicing my arm open on purpose. And then she showed up, and I ended up cutting myself by accident. I actually forgot what had upset me so much, which never happens. The only times I forget are when I black out, but the thoughts that fill the void after that are far worse than what went missing. But this girl—she made me forget myself, in a good way. There’s nothing in my life that’s ever worth distracting me away from…me.
Under my sleeve, the wound is shallow and already wears the darker red stain of dried blood. It stings, though. I’ll have to keep it clean so it won’t get infected. I laugh, and the sound startles me. I can’t believe I care. And yet here I am, trying to survive. The contradictions have always confused me. It’s easier when I have a clear thing to run away from.
Things like my uncle. Him, and everything that house knows—I will always run away from them.
I’ve got to survive until May. I must.
I spend the rest of the afternoon picking through and retrieving the cleanest bits of food left over from the fox attack. I find one of the nearby camping shelters. There’s no bunk bed, just a wooden floor and no mattresses. The front of the shelter is just a screen nailed to a wooden framework. The wind still slices into me just as easily as before.
It’s a roof, at least. Not bad.
It’s not good, either.
One thing is for sure. I need to get more food, or else I won’t have much of a body left to protect this winter. I put all my stuff in the shelter, then leave with my fishing rod and a few obnoxiously colored lures. The gray clouds above are close and heavy, as if they’re too wiped out from the effort of staying aloft. If they slammed to earth and swallowed everything up in fog, I wouldn’t be surprised. I wipe a sheen of sweat from my face. I thought that being outdoors wasn’t supposed to make you claustrophobic.
After a half-hour walk, I’m back at the dock in Windigo. It’s so strange to stand on the wide planks without a single person in sight—a contrast to the busyness only hours earlier. Somewhere out there, the Duluth police are searching for me. For a moment, my uncle’s distressed face fills my head. He’s worried. Genuinely worried. He’s holding his phone, ready to call my dad in Germany to tell him what’s going on. The phone shakes in his hands. But what I hear isn’t him talking to the police. It’s his voice from only a few months ago, after one too many shots of Jack.
You’re my best friend, Hector.
Your father leaving you with me—it’s the best thing that ever happened.
Sometimes I get mad, but I’m not really mad. You know I love you, right? Right, buddy?
I squeeze my nails into my palms, forcing the thoughts away.
Stop it, Hector. No pity.
I jog over to the visitor center, which is shut up and closed, but I peek through one of the doors to see if there’s anything worth stealing.
A taxidermied wolf sits in a Plexiglas box in the corner. It rests on its haunches, stuffed and sewn into a stiff, howling position, facing a seven-foot-tall skeleton of a moose. The tip of the skull is pointy as a spear, and the dead teeth grin permanently at a joke that’s probably not funny.
It’s all for the sake of education, but the whole thing creeps me out. The enclosed wolf howls silently for what it can’t really howl for anymore. Maybe it’s sad the moose is dead. Maybe it’s sad that the moose can’t be eaten. Who the fuck knows, but it’s depressing as hell.
I walk away to the end of the dock as fast as I can.
I put the fishing rod together at the joints and study the lures. I’ve got three that came from a kit, along with a bobber and some weights. I choose between a dopey minnow, a baby frog with a hook sprouting out of its ass, and a Day-Glo orange worm with green sparkles on the smashed end. Hooray for variety.
I tie the worm to the end of the fishing line, along with the weights and bobber. I watched a few videos about fishing, but I don’t actually know what I’m doing. The one and only time I went fishing was seven years ago. I got invited to a fishing birthday party. My uncle was in a rare mood and actually let me go. I was the only kid who didn’t know how to fish, and the birthday boy’s dad had to show me everything.
“You hold it in your right hand, like this. Put this finger down on the release button.” He stood behind me the whole time, showing me how to cast, congratulating me when the worm I’d crucified on the hook actually plopped into the water, a reasonable ten feet away.
I didn’t smile at my success.
“So…I guess your dad’s not much into fishing, huh?” he’d asked kindly.
“My dad loves fishing.”
“Oh.” The dad had shifted in his sneakers. I could practically hear the wheels of confusion grinding inside his blond head. “So…why didn’t he teach you?”
I couldn’t say a word. Imaginary cracks fissured in my chest. Dad had sent me letters every six months, ones that I couldn’t understand for years because I couldn’t read a damn word until I was eight. By the time I could make sense of the pages, it was an explosion of information. Stuff I didn’t want to know, and stuff I really didn’t want to know.
He was at this army base, and then another. He was fishing in Florida on leave, catching tarpon for the third time. He hadn’t heard anything from my mother, had I? Was I being a good boy? Was I being respectful of my uncle, who was nice enough to give me a settled, normal life?
He’d asked questions, wondering what I was becoming, never coming close enough to the Duluth city limits to retrieve the answers himself. I wrote back, but the responses that arrived afterward gave no indication that he read them at all, or cared about their contents. He was a one-way street of words on paper.
“Hector? Are you okay?” The birthday boy’s father had put his hand on my shoulder. It was heavy with pity and radiated this nauseating warmth. I’d turned around and knocked it away violently. My fishing pole had fallen with a messy splash into the pond. I don’t remember the rest of the day. Didn’t matter anyway. For me, the party was over.
The wind picks up on the dock, and I stand to cast into the water. My hands are cold and shake with nervousness, which is stupid. There is no one here watching me make a fool of myself fishing. Well, except for the girl. I scan the shoreline carefully, searching for any glimpse of human anywhere. In the distance, I spy a thin curl of white smoke coming from the shoreline trees about a mile away, but then it disappears.
My first attempts at casting my rod are ridiculous. I forget to let go of the release button too late, and the lure winds jerkily around the tip of my rod four times. Another time, the bait plops straight down into the water and snags on a mossy stick. After a few more casts, I manage to get it out and away from the dock. As the little white and red ball bobs on the surface of the water, I smile grimly. I don’t need anyone to teach me how to do this.
I end up sitting on the end of the pier when nothing happens after the first twenty minutes. My nose runs from the cold and I wipe it on my jacket arm. Occasionally, something twitches and tugs the end of the line, but I reel in nothing. It’s like the fish know that there’s nothing but death waiting, so why bother? A rubber worm isn’t worth it.
When there’s nothing but you and a lot of silence, your head ends up filling with crap you didn’t want to be reminded of. Instead, I try to think about the girl. I wonder where she is. Who she is. Why she’s here. What she eats.
But mostly, I wonder who she’s running away from. Why else would she be on Isle Royale?
My mind fills with the stuff you see on the evening news, and it makes my stomach burn. I can’t think of an answer that isn’t horrible, so I make up all sorts of fantastical stories about her, like she’d run away from a Florida circus where she was forced to do backflips off elephants all day. Or that she’s a biology illustrator who’s drawing different kinds of fungus for a living.
I have no one else to keep me company. Soon, the curve of her cheek and the glint of her gray eyes become so familiar. Her eyelashes are wispy. Her eyebrows curve slightly upward in the middle, making her seem like she’s always about to ask a question, or doesn’t understand the one you just asked. She’s a little scrawny, like she could seriously use a steak dinner. I could describe her to a police sketch artist, if I had to. And then I wonder, what crime is she capable of committing?
Huh.
Killing mosquitoes is the only thing I can imagine.
Hours go by. The sun is getting low, and I’m a little panicked at having caught nothing. Just as I stand to pull in the line, a mighty tug yanks on my fishing pole. I almost drop it in the water, then pull it back with my sweaty hands and reel as fast as I can. I yank the tip of the rod up every few seconds, zipping my catch in, and then a flash of silver breaks the water and a tail flips spray into the air. I whoop out loud, then reel even faster.
“Please, please, please,” I pray to nobody. Afraid I’ll push the release button by accident, I grab the line when the fish is only a few feet from the tip of the rod.
God, it’s beautiful. And really fucking small. It’s maybe seven inches long, barely over a pound, shiny greenish-gray with cream-colored speckles all over and a slightly hooked mouth. My lure is sunk into the side of its mouth. Right where the barb juts out, there’s blood. It’s red like mine, which momentarily surprises me.
It thrashes around so much that I put it down on the pier and pull out my knife.
“Sorry. It’s you or me, little guy.” I raise the blunt end of my knife above its head. But I hesitate. Its glassy eye stares coldly back at me. After an eternity, I bring down the hilt of my knife and hit it hard on the top of the head. It flops a few more times, then goes still.
I start gutting the fish and scale it like I remember seeing on some TV show once. I don’t remember it being such a disgusting mess, though. A whole lot of blood for a small fish. I seriously wish I’d caught a bag of Oreos instead, or a giant ham sandwich. I’m not a huge fish fan, and the prospect of stepping into the new role of fish serial killer isn’t helping at all.
When I was a little kid, back in Korea, Mom used to make fish in the only way I liked it, with a hot bowl of steaming rice and plenty of banchan. I’m almost homesick for it, except that I don’t really know what homesickness is. Maybe I’m just sick. I try to blur my thoughts and refocus them on my mom’s face, but I can’t see it. I can feel her arms around me, above the heated floor of our room. But I can’t see her face.
I look down and there’s a dead animal in my hands. For a moment, I wonder how it got there.
Pay attention, Hector.
My hands are bloodied and slippery, and now I reek like pond scum. The scales fly everywhere when I scrape the body with my knife. I must have at least four or five on my face. But soon, I’m done. I’ve got food.
I rinse my hands and the headless, gutted fish with bottled water. As I head back to my camp, the thin curl of white smoke appears above the tree line about a mile away again. It’s on the way back, so I head toward it, hoping it’s what I think it is.
Taking the path back to the camp, I find the source of the smoke. It’s a tiny little cottage, hidden from shore by a layer of maple trees devoid of leaves. The cottage seems dilapidated until I realize it’s only weathered, not abandoned. Thin pines grow close, hugging the walls. A curlicue of smoke rises from a stone chimney, and the windows are all closed up with some battered-looking metal shutters. There’s no peeking inside this house. Still, it’s small, and she must have broken in. No one on the island would have stayed here, and I doubt anyone would stock it with food to waste over the winter.
I take out my knife and saw the tiny fish in half, then leave part of it on the stone step of the back door. I walk away quickly. Hopefully a fox won’t get it before she does.
There’s always more fish to catch. Anyway, I owe her for the water-boiling comment, and for something else. It was nice to not think about myself for a while.
At the thought, I jog back and leave the other half of the fish on the step, too.