Beneath the Book Tower: An Alex McKnight Short Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

Russia this year. Up by that real big lake. What was it called again?”
    The man didn’t answer.
    “Lake Baikal,” I said.
    “I wasn’t talking to you, Alex.”
    “Just trying to help.”
    “I’m leaving,” the man said, already halfway to the door. “And I won’t be back.”
    “When you get to that lake, do me a favor, huh? I’m still not convinced it’s deeper, so can you drive your snowmobile and let it sink to the bottom with you still on it? You think you could do that? I’d really appreciate it.”
    The man slammed the door behind him. Another drinking man turned away for life, not that he’d have any other place to go in Paradise, Michigan. Jackie picked up his towel and threw it at me. I ignored him and turned back to the fire.
    They have long, long winters up here. Did I mention that yet? By the time the end of March drags around, everyone’s just a few degrees past crazy. Not just Jackie.
     
    The sun was trying to come out as I was driving back up my road. It was an old unpaved logging road, with banks of snow lingering on either side. When the snow started to melt, the road would turn to mud and I’d have a whole new set of problems to deal with. By the time it dried out, it would be time for black fly season.
    I passed Vinnie’s cabin first. Vinnie “Red Sky” LeBlanc, my only neighbor and maybe my only true friend. Meaning the one person who truly understood me, who never wanted anything from me, and who never tried to change me.
    I passed by the first cabin, the one my father and I had built a million years ago—before I went off to play baseball and then become a cop—then the next four cabins, each bigger than the one before it, until I got to the end of the road. There stood the biggest cabin of all, looking almost as good as the original. I’d been rebuilding it for the past year, starting with just the fireplace and chimney my father had built stone by stone. Now it was almost done. Now it was almost as good as it was before somebody burned it down.
    I parked the truck and went inside. Vinnie was already there, on his hands and knees in the corner of the kitchen, once again working harder and longer than I ever did myself, making me feel like my debt to him was more than I could ever repay.
    “What are you ruining now?” I said to him.
    “I’m fixing the trim you put down on this floor.” He was in jeans and a white T-shirt, his denim jacket hanging on the back of one of the kitchen chairs. He had a long strip of quarter round molding in his hand, the very same strip I had just tacked down the day before.
    “You’re ripping it up? How is that fixing it?”
    “You used the wrong size trim. You need to start over.”
    “It’s not the wrong size. Damn it, Vinnie, is it any wonder it’s taking me forever to finish this place? You wanna rip the ceiling off, too?”
    “You got a good half-inch gap here,” he said, pointing to the gap between the floor and the lowest log on the wall.
    “That’s a quarter inch.”
    “Here it might be, but over on the other side of the room it gets wider. You have to measure the gap at its longest before you go out and buy your trim.”
    “Vinnie, what the hell’s wrong with you?”
    “I told you, you bought the wrong size. And as long as you’re buying new molding, get something with a little more style, too. Quarter round is boring.”
    “Nobody’s going to notice it. It’s on the floor, for God’s sake.”
    He turned away from me, shaking his head. He grabbed another length of molding and ripped it up like he was pulling weeds.
    “Something’s eating at you,” I said. “I can tell.”
    “I’m fine. I just wish you’d do things right for a change.”
    First Jackie and now Vinnie. Such a parade of cheerful people in my life. I was truly a lucky man.
    “It’s actually trying to get nice outside,” I said. “We might even have some sunlight soon. Will that make you feel better?”
    He didn’t look up. “You know one thing