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looping back up in a sudden acceleration of wings, their shrill calls sounding like two boards mating. As the water cooled, a chill wind riffled the surface and found its way through our clothes to the skin, as it had with white and black mariners for two hundred years, and with the brown-skinned paddlers of dugout canoes for twenty thousand years before them. The lake was a continual awareness unaffected by eons, changing only when it chose and then lapsing back into the immutable calm it had known since the last glacier. Maybe it wasn’t so bad to be a prisoner on its shore. Doing time means nothing where time doesn’t exist.
    We hoisted our worldly belongings under our arms and went in search of food and lodging.

5
    T HE MOTEL HAD EVERYTHING except a Victorian mansion on the hill and a nervous taxidermist in the office. In his place was a woman of Coulee’s height and general age group in a curly blond wig and man’s canvas jacket turned back twice at the cuffs, who gave our waterstained luggage the fish eye and told me I’d forgotten to write my license plate number on the registration card.
    “We came on foot.”
    “Thirty-five dollars,” she snapped. “In advance.”
    When I’d forked it over she directed us to one of six log bungalows on a dirt lot. The only vehicle nearby was a spanking new silver Ford four-by-four pickup with a snowblade on the front, parked under an outside light behind the office. I glanced inside at the tasseled pillow on the driver’s seat and the wooden blocks tied to the floor pedals and decided the old lady made her payments with her guests’ gold fillings.
    DeVries was thinking the same thing. “If it’s okay with you I’m sleeping with the lights on tonight.”
    Our bungalow had two double beds, an Indian rug made by the Taiwan tribe, an obese lamp, and a water closet worthy of the name. The plastic sanitized glasses on the ledge over the sink were the only things in it not nailed or bolted down. Everything was spotless, at least; what the Upper Peninsulans don’t spend on luxury goes into clean. I kicked one of the beds. “I guess sleeping with your feet hanging over the end is nothing new to you. Which one you want?”
    He threw his bag onto the one nearer the bathroom. “I’m used to sleeping next to a toilet.”
    I stripped the cellophane off a glass and drank some water. We’d eaten in a family place on the edge of Harvey, complete with red-and-white-checked tablecloths and friendly waitresses and enough garlic in the spaghetti sauce to float the Vatican; my upper tract had sworn a vendetta. When I came out of the bathroom, DeVries was still standing between the beds. He had a look on his face like a little boy at Disney World. “So when do we go see the Wakely brothers?”
    “Who said we would?” I asked.
    “We walked past three other places looked better than this. If what Axhorn told us is right we’re just a brisk walk from their shack.”
    “ I am. You’re a hundred miles away. If it comes to busting heads, I don’t have a parole to worry about. I thought that was why you hired me.”
    “I been free six hours now. I’m ruint for staying put ’cause someone tells me to. Besides, you heard what the cop said.”
    “I’m tougher than I look.”
    “I got you beat there. I’m just as tough as I look.”
    “You’re too big to argue with. Get some sleep. It’s coming on your bedtime and I need you fresh and dewy-eyed when we take on the Wilderness Family.”
    He took his bag off his bed, stretched out on it fully clothed, and was asleep inside five minutes, snoring evenly. Sleeping when you’re not tired is one thing prison teaches you. I opened my valise on the other bed and got out the S&W Police Special I’d been carrying for eight years. It was dry in its holster and chamois leather wrap I used to keep it from bouncing around in the case, but just for luck I unloaded it and cleaned and oiled it from the kit and wiped off each of the cartridges