Chapter Nine
HECTOR
Shelter, shelter, shelter.
Outside of eating enough, it’s my main goal right now. If I’m going to survive here until I turn eighteen, I need shelter. It’s all I should be thinking about, but things keep happening. Weird things.
Today it was a hat.
It was sitting on the ground at my campsite. I knew it hadn’t been tossed there by the wind. First of all, there’s nothing left behind on this island. The campers practically spit-shine the pine needles, they leave it so pristine. Also, the hat brim was weighted down with about twenty pounds’ worth of rocks to keep it from blowing away.
Kind of overkill, but charming anyway.
I’ve seen tourists wear these kinds of hats. The ones with the floppy brim and an elastic cord that cinches under your chin, because how else will muggers know you’re ripe for the picking? Normally, I wouldn’t be caught dead in something like this, but I know she watches me. Yesterday, I spent the whole afternoon squinting into the sun and cursing when I went fishing. It’s hard to fish when one hand is being used as a visor. Hence the hat.
I don’t often see her, but there are other clues.
Two days ago, I froze my ass (and arms, and legs, and junk) off after a quick dive in the lake water to bathe. The shower units at Windigo have been turned off, and I couldn’t stand my own stink anymore. I had to wrestle on dry clothes over dripping wet skin. Not fun. The next morning, there was a tea towel hung on the tree outside my shack. Which means she saw me naked. Jesus, yes, she saw me naked.
Two weeks ago, it was a battered old badminton birdie. What do they call it? Oh, yeah. A shuttlecock. The kind with the plastic feathers and the little white snub tip. A few days had gone by and I hadn’t seen her. I had gotten caught up with my plan to winter-proof my shelter. I’d tried but failed to break into the ranger’s quarters—the doors were steel and the window too small to slip through. So it was this camping shelter or nothing. The front wall is basically one huge screen, and it’s got to be covered. I’d spent days and days gathering broken tree limbs, or sawing them off myself, getting my hands all gummy with sap.
And it’s hard to work on shelter when I’m so hungry. Twenty-four hours a day, my empty stomach screams at me. I’m ravenous when I sleep, if that’s even possible. I’ve already eaten through all my food supplies. My attempts to ration spectacularly failed after four days with no fish. The dreams of Whoppers and crisp, salty fries and Wendy’s Frosty shakes don’t help. My pants are already hanging on my hips more, and I’m tired all the time.
But tiredness and hunger aren’t the worst. I can’t stop thinking.
I think about Dad, and if he’s talked to my uncle about whether they’ve found me. If he really, truly needs to leave Germany to come figure out where I am. Or I think about my mom. Is she happier in Seoul without me? Does she still eat Botan Rice Candy, or did she really only buy that for me?
I remember what it was like to wake up after hours of oblivion, my mouth dry and rancid. Seeing the newest Halo for Xbox on my bed where my uncle had left it. Maybe twenty bucks. Something that says sorry. Also, shut up.
And then I would start forgetting about my shelter, about surviving, about hunger, and my mind would become a cesspool of thoughts I don’t want or need. And that’s when I’d see it.
This broken little shuttlecock, nestled in my sleeping bag. I put it in my pocket, went back to sawing off branches, and spent those hours and hours pondering why the fuck is a shuttlecock on a nature preserve in the middle of Lake Superior? Actually, maybe that’s why. Because she knows, somehow, that when I have nothing to think about but myself, I start longing for a cigarette butt. I start reaching for my knife.
I haven’t tried to hurt myself since she stopped me, days ago.
So in between shelter-building, I’ve become her fishmonger. A really sucky fishmonger. I fish every day, but I’m not lucky enough to catch a fish every time. Still, I’m getting better and better at it. Feldtmann Lake has become a favorite place to go, despite the long-ass ten-mile hike. I know which shady spots are the best, and the fact that the fish bite most when it rains a little in the early mornings. The rod and reel have become an extension of my body when I cast. The fine monofilament begins to make a proud callus between my thumb and forefinger when I feel the line for bites.
For a while, we had this pattern. I’d spend all morning fishing. If I was lucky, I’d be able to leave a fish cleaned for her on her back step. I always wait by the back door and listen carefully, but I don’t hear a creak or a whisper inside that house. And I don’t try to say anything, or knock. Talking is so damn complicated. It involves explaining things, like who I am and why I’m here. She doesn’t try to chat me up, either. I relish this wordlessness we have.
Meanwhile, there’s some sort of weird wind current where she lives. The gales there always push hard at my back. Tiny pebbles have bounced along the ground and hit my shins. Twigs smack my hands like an old schoolmarm with a ruler. The air around that house hates me or something.
Then I’d go back to camp, work on weaving fir tree branches together with what rope I have. I make sure they point downward and overlap, so they’ll shed rain. During my breaks, one of my precious matches goes to boiling a gallon of lake water for the next day. I’d brew some spruce tip tea, wishing it was chunky soup, and chew some of the hard resin I’d gathered. It’s a nightmare version of gum—crumbly at first, before it threatens to lock your jaws together forever, but at least I get to chew on something. I’d boil the fish bones from the day before and make a broth, before I inevitably cave and inhale a remaining precious handful of nuts or dried fruit from my bag. And then I’d saw and break more branches for the next day, just so I could have my back turned for about an hour. And she’d deliver half a cooked fish to me by early evening.
Well, almost a half fish. I started noticing that my portion was getting smaller and smaller. She’d been hungrier, I guess. Or maybe her own food supplies were running out.
Today, the temperature dropped. I mean, it’s always cold, but this was a new cold that completely blasted through my jacket and pants, too easily. So I shiver inside my clothes and wear both pairs of pants (and my new hat), but it worries me. It’s only late October, and the weather will get worse. It’s a good thing I bathed off my grime yesterday. It took five minutes to bathe, and hours to warm up again. That water today might kill me if I dunk myself again.
Every time I’ve tried to wash, she’s been there. I know it. I don’t always see her, but everything gets really quiet all of a sudden. There’s no wind, no birds singing. The surface of the water becomes glass. Once I saw her face peeking behind a tree, and I caught her eyes. She made sure not to be seen the next time.
Strangely, I’m never embarrassed by her seeing me bare. I’m no nudist or anything. But her eyes on me are never an intrusion or lewd. More like fascination. Like how a person might notice a shiny rock or an interesting moth.
But then after I got used to this bizarre voyeuristic thing, something weird happened.
I’d walked knee-high into Lake Superior instead of one of the interior lakes to wash up after fishing. As I splashed the icy water over my arms, I waited for the calm. And as expected, the surface of the water quieted to stillness.
Something appeared in the water. It was only about ten feet away, and the water was pretty clear, since the wind was low. Rusted beams tangled with chains, some old rotten canvas fabric, and an algae-covered hull.
A shipwreck? This shallow, right in Washington Harbor?
I rubbed my eyes and looked again, and suddenly there were no rusty beams, no pieces of a ship. Only a skull, with a face half rotted off and a fish snaking into one open eye socket.
“Shit!” I’d screamed, backing out of the water so fast I tripped and landed on my back on the shore. Hyperventilating, I sat up and peered into the water.
It was gone. All of it, gone.
Maybe I’d been hallucinating from hunger or sleep deprivation. I didn’t see it again after that. But it definitely helped me to stop caring about being clean.
I may be dirty for the rest of the season. But one thing’s for sure, I’ll be freezing all the goddamned time, too. After a week, I finish my wall of branches. I’m really proud of my work, though it looks like I’m living in a kid’s play fort. And yet I shiver every night inside. I try banking the other walls with branches, but it does no good. The rain sheds nicely, but the wind practically scoffs at my work. Sometimes I suspect that the wind around that girl’s house purposely tries to find me at night, sneaking between the down layers of my sleeping bag. Because when I sit up and try to shift, or go outside to take a leak, the punishing wind immediately backs off. Like a crook walking away from a crime scene, whistling as if nothing happened.
Whatever. Now I’m really losing it.
And then one morning after I’m done fishing, I return to camp to find it got hit by a windstorm of some kind. The wall of branches I’ve so carefully woven are totally wrecked, like a mini tornado untwisted all my knots and scattered the branches.
Fuck.
So, right. I need a new place to stay. Today, I gather my stuff. Minus all the food I’ve eaten (and the fox ate, too), it’s a lot lighter. I take the foot trail back to Windigo and walk past the dock to search for houses along Washington Harbor. I see a few, but before I can get any closer, the wind picks up. The green firs along the shore shudder, and the surface of the lake is slapped into sharp, breaking peaks. There’s a strange, distant keening sound. A storm is rising for sure.
I hike up to Feldtmann Ridge to see if there are cabins there I can break into. Clouds hang low in the sky, the color of smudged ash. There’s a freighter near the horizon, like the ones parked in the Duluth port that dump coal and stuff. My worry over the weather turns into simmering panic when the clouds above start to churn in greenish-gray poufs. It’s going to rain, and I can almost smell the lightning about to strike. I’m in the wide open. I turn around to head off the ridge, closer to the lake and lower ground.
That’s when I see her.