I arrived home muddy from my walk through the woods. The dogs reared against their chains as I made my way to the door. “Mongrels,” I told them, bending down and making sure to touch them all the exact same amount, even old Abe who was my favorite. Two pats on the side of each ribcage. Then I straightened up. I could just catch the rumbling voices of my parents through the screen window. I thought maybe I’d hear my name—Madeline—but no, they were talking about a groundhog in the garden. I turned impulsively and went the other direction.
The shed was cool and dark, the roof beam awhirl with startled sparrows. I stood still and listened to them flap. I glanced at the fish cooler but couldn’t bear the idea—not after last night, not right now—of slicing ribcages out of walleye. The day-old fish would be on the edge of spoiling, but I didn’t check the ice. There would be so many tiny bones for me to deal with, if I did, a bucketful of gleaming skins. Doing my take-home trig exam would be no better—would be worse, probably—so I stood in the musty shed a long minute, wavering, before filling my backpack with a few things, tying a crushed rain slicker around my hips, and dragging the Wenonah down to shore.
The minute the canoe touched water, it moved on its own. Every stroke with the paddle was almost excessive. There wasn’t a ripple on the lake, not a wave. You could see clear to the bottom. You could see bluegill rising, lily pads sinking under the prow. You could see air bubbles winding away in a trail behind the boat. At the far end of the lake, I pulled the canoe ashore, bent down, and rolled it up to my shoulders, my head inside the hull. It took me a second to get the balance right before I set off on the rocky portage.
The next lake over, Mill Lake, was much larger than ours, its shore studded with RVs and pickups at the national forest campground. Speedboats wrecked the surface, leaving behind thirty-foot troughs. They didn’t slow down when they saw me coming. They were in a hurry to get to the next fishing spot, engines gunning, green awnings rippling as they passed. I was surprised to see a woman in a red bikini bumping in an inner tube behind one of them. The water was still pretty cold. She screamed hello to me over the roar of the engine, but I didn’t try to respond. The boat flew by too fast.
I kept paddling. After another half hour, clouds hunkered down over the treetops, and a breeze nicked the lake’s surface, giving it the look of old skin. At that point, all the weekenders headed in, fearing a return of bad weather. They were always confusing clouds with danger, seeing all clouds as interchangeable. They turned the lights on inside their RVs, making two o’clock look like dusk.
I wound my way through the little stream that connected Mill Lake to Lake Winesaga.
From there, Winesaga lay in front of me like an arrow—long and narrow, pointing north. The reservation was on the far end. When I’d been there last, years ago to get muskrat traps with my dad, the reservation had been just a few buildings. It had one paved road and maybe a dozen mobile homes, a pack of roaming Lab mixes. Now, as I drew closer to shore, I saw that all the dogs were behind chain-link fences. There was a Dairy Queen, a parking lot the size of a football field, and a stoplight. The new casino on the highway had done well. I saw a Heritage Center made from prim, narrow logs and a fish-shaped sign that said MINO-O-DAPIN! Welcome.
I beached the canoe and shunted it discreetly under a balsam fir. Then I set off down the asphalt streets, which disintegrated into the front lawns of prefab houses. All of them: white, aluminumsided. All of them: bookended with porches and two-car garages, crowned with satellite dishes, fronted with pickup trucks.
The reservation seemed deserted but for a group of boys who came out of the woods in their bright Sunday school sweaters. They carried Popsicle-stick crosses they were using as guns. “Pow,” said one of them. Another held up his cross and shouted, “Stay back, Leviathan.”
“Hey, you know where the Holburn place is?” I held my ground. “Pete and his kid, Lily.”
By then, she’d already missed four days of class.
“Why should we tell you?” one of the boys—their Leviathan-hunting leader—asked.
“I’ll give you money. I’ll give you a dollar each if you tell me where her house is.”
They paused for a moment. Then they agreed as if by telepathy, barely lifting their shoulders.
“Down that way.” One of them pointed to an overgrown gravel road at the end of the paved street. So I handed over my mother’s bills, flat and warm from two days in my pocket. The moment they were paid the boys turned on me. They held up their crosses and harangued me: “What do you want from Lily the Polak? She’s a wee-wee sucker homo freak. You a homo, too, or something?”
I sighed. I’d fielded this question from boys like these all through grade school. It was often the worst accusation eight-year-olds could muster, and I was amply prepared from years of being taunted on the playground. “A Homo sapiens?” I asked, suggestively.
They shrugged, uncertain.
“I am. Yes.”
“Barf! Gross! Yuck!” they squealed.