Sky Lake, Montana. Many miles from Sebago Lake, Maine, and Eli Franz still getting used to it. Still getting used to those Montana ways, such as the fact they elect instead of appoint judges. To him, they’re nothing but popularity contests, same as the bucking-bull runoffs at the pre-rodeo. They fill the benches with gaveling yahoos like Rudy Geiss, Eli’s brother-in-law - the one who calls him “Thoreau.”
“Folks eat that in Bangor? Hell, Thoreau, I wouldn’t put that glob on my hook. Even a hungry pike would turn up his nose…”
“Get off my back, Rudy. A sushi knife is a dangerous tool.”
Judge Rudy has deigned to hop off the campaign trail and come by the cabin for dinner – hardly expecting raw fish. Not that it’s Franz he wants to visit, either. Judge’s sister Lily has pull with the farmers.
Franz labors in the log kitchen, slitting the nori, rolling his rainbow rolls, the hot breath of Rudy raising bumps on his neck. Lily sweats and frets out back, tending to the sore-assed chickens.
“What do you know about a judicial election, anyway? You cook better than my sister and you lay carpets. Maybe that’s all you lay.”
“I’m sorry – it’s the profession I chose. I only know what I know.”
“And what do you know? How to tell a tight pile? How long the Scotchgard will last on the weft?”
“I know how to tell a tight boat too. Two years at the Old Town factory, up the Penobscot. Bending spruce ribs over steam.”
“You and your canoes. I could flip one with a fart. You want to see a real boat, come with me tomorrow.”
Franz shreds snowy daikon and looks out and away. Sky Lake at magic hour, a sleeping jewel in the lunar night of the picture window. Hours earlier it was Montana’s version of The Boat Show. Raging Cigarettes and snarling Jet Skis, dawn to dusk. Such a pearl in the thighs of the mountains, though, Eli can’t give it up. Each day, he paddles before the first wink of sun in the silver silence. When the throttles wake up and cough, he hunkers close to shore, like a shy otter. His eighteen feet of wood and canvas is a classic Old Town Guide, bought for a song Back East at the factory steam shop. First time the Judge saw him slip around the bend he bellowed,“Hi Ho, Thoreau.”
Lily bursts in as Eli mashes the wasabi. She declares the rooster has wore out the ten hens so bad he’s burned off all their tail feathers.
“We do need a smaller rooster,” she says.
“Hell no,” says Rudy. “Need a little Preparation H for the hens, that’s all. Smear of bear fat’ll do it too. That rooster and me, we could be brothers. Damn if I don’t scorch the tail feathers off my worthy opponent. You’ll see. Be kicking his ass like a soccer ball. You’ll see.”
New day, new sun. Donuts fat as flotation cushions down at Sluice Marine. Rick Sluice and Rudy, thick in the cruller powder, salivating over the nose-cone Rick calls the Red Rocket. Recently granted – by some other judge who clued Rudy about it - to McMansion divorcee in big settlement. Her instructions to Rick: price this beast to sell.
Judge Rudy strokes the red mid-hump where the huge inboard sleeps. His lungs spark and rev and rumble. Eli broods, mute as the crippled propeller cast away in the corner.
“Whatcha think, Thoreau? Take my campaign to the lake people, direct. Whistlestop up and down all four shores, and the little fee-ords too. Make stump speeches dock-to-dock. Ricky, I do like your price. But campaign contributions are always appreciated…”
Rick goes stone cold, like he’s bluffing at Blackjack.
“Thoreau here could be my pilot. Nope - scratch that. Bad idea.”
Eli stares quizzically from the Rocket’s red stern.
“Too much boat for you. I’ll drive it myself. Wrap it up, Rick boy.”
Case closed. Delivery tomorrow, Monday, the slowest day on Sky Lake, at least before normal breakfast hours, and this Monday sneaks in quiet as an empty church.
4a.m., an owl howls, a train hoots. Eli’s Mall-to-Wall boss has allowed him a day’s reprieve. He rises before the rooster and slides the green bow of the Old Town Guide into the chalice of liquid moon. He dips a paddle and puts muscle to it, but with the winds still asleep the craft glides like a huge skate on the glassiest ice. It’s as if a fingertip could flick it along.
The stars fade and, finally, the clouds flame, the rays shoot down and begin cooking the water. Gusts kick up and worse, here come the Thundercrafts and Cobalts and Renegades, snorting and spitting gasoline. They churn the sunlit lake like the blades of a giant blender. A rip of air makes Eli adjust course this way and not that, and take his bearing on the old dock at Alder Beach.
And there he sees the Red Rocket belch and roar and plane.
Worse, the Red Rocket sees him. Reading lips, Eli spies the Judge at the helm, fist in the air, whooping and charging his way. He does three furious J-strokes and turns the bow towards Larch Beach, where he finds a herd of Jet Skis in mid-stampede, thumping and roaring straight at him. His only option, hit the shallows, like a mackerel with a tuna up his ass. He spins the bow again and J-strokes towards the arc of buoys that mark the kiddie swimming zone, where the water is toddler tall. If he can just make it past the buoys there’s an inlet, and reeds so thick nothing with a prop would dare go there.
But he doesn’t make it. He feels the rush of the Red Rocket before he sees it, in the broadside of water crashing the gunwale. Then the Judge is howling at him, “Sushi made me shit the campaign trail, dammit” - and sideswiping him, swamping him, with a fierce “Hi Ho, Thoreau.” Though not a head-on hit, the glancing thud is enough to claw the hull and crack the starboard mahogany rail.
Worse, the Judge has put so much torque in the Rocket’s violent arc he can’t keep its stern from banging the bottom, taking out a few buoys and scattering kids and moms. And more follows – under the heading of felony - as the bow bucks and twists and catches one of the oncoming Jet Skis, tossing the rider the way an Orca tosses a doomed seal.
The overturned Eli rises from the drink with one thought: Escape. Using a paddle as a crutch, he limps towards the inlet, towing the mauled canoe and hearing a loop of five words in his head – too much boat for you.
He also hears wails, shouts and, now a siren, from the swarm of Jet Skis circling the crash site. It only quickens his step, and he goes so deep in the bulrushes he can’t begin to see the collision, shootout or whatever between the Judge and the Sky Lake Police. It occurs to him that this morning, if anything, has emphatically decided the election and will de-bench Rudy, likely forever.
From his reedy sanctuary, Eli watches a big osprey attempt to prey on a flotilla of common ducks, incessantly dive-bombing them, one after the other. On each assault, the targeted duck manages to make like a submarine, plunging fast and deep enough to get away. The sight gives Eli enough shock relief to attempt a return to the cabin.
There he finds Lily, disconsolate. He assumes she’s heard about the Judge, but it becomes clear she hasn’t.
“So what’s up?”“Rooster’s done in one of the hens. Wore it out till it just dropped dead.”
Lily seems to have grown new wrinkles overnight. She mops her brow and gives a sigh that makes the words “wore it out” hang in the air. Through the screen door she points to a temporary cell of chicken wire she’s constructed. There, expelled from the coop, struts the prisoner, crowing in triumph and lust.
“Well, we had ten hens. Now we have nine.” That’s all Eli can say. By now his leg is killing him. He avoids Lily’s eyes and stares at the chicken wire. It makes him think of Rudy, bellowing in the lockup for some crony to post bond, alternately primping his Bill Cody moustache and picking his teeth with a golf tee. For some reason, it also makes him think of lobster traps. Tens of thousands of them cramming the floor of Casco Bay. The lobsters wandering in and out, stealing most of the redfish at will, only the foolish lobsters getting caught.
The phone rings and Lily runs to it. She has a daffy, hopeful look, as if the call will somehow reveal how the dead chicken can be brought back to life. Eli limps outside and lets the screen door bang. This is a conversation he doesn’t want to be near.
Soon enough come the moans and sobs. He stumbles back into the kitchen.
“Well, it’s bad, but not that bad,” he tells her. “He’ll just have to find a real job, that’s all.”
“My brother’s dead,” she says, her eyes shooting away from his and searing like a blowtorch into the dumb whiteness of the refrigerator door. “Guy he sentenced years ago nailed him in a holding cell. Crushed his windpipe.”
Eli tries to hold her while the rooster screams his war cry, louder and louder – until Eli goes out there again. With his sushi knife.