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"Know where I can rent a canoe for a couple days?" I asked the bartender in a dark little tavern in northern Wisconsin.

He looked me up and down with the same doubting glower he'd given my driver license when I ordered a beer. "Depends what you wanna do with it.”

I wanna shove it up your ass, I almost told him. But a glance at the men strung along the bar made me hold my tongue. No need to wise off around half a dozen guys who drank boilermakers at noon. "Fishing trip," I said, touching my new mustache and grinning. "Me and...um...you know, a friend."

The bartender's glower grew even darker, but one of his drinkers laughed. "Way to go.” When he raised his shot glass my direction, I relaxed. Nobody was going to give me guff about my long hair. Or why I wasn't in Nam.

"You could try Timberlodge," the bartender said, but more to his customers than me. "Lotsa fish over there, know what I mean?"

I didn't, but everybody else seemed to. They guffawed like the yokels in a John Wayne movie. When they were done, the man who'd raised his glass said, "Up here fish means Fucking Illinois Shit Heads. You ain't from Chicago, are you?"

I told him not to insult me, which gained not only a laugh but some honest advice about where I could find a canoe. "Schmidt's used to have fishing boats, I know," said a little red haired guy. "But he's shut down, ain't he?"

A man in a buffalo shirt answered. "Had some kinda attack, Schmidt did. Right after their boy got killed in that hunting accident. Think the resort's still open, though. Don't know what they rent."

One or two more places were mentioned, then silence fell over the bar. Canoe rentals weren't exactly thick on the ground this late in the year, though I found Timberlodge had a few--at a price only rich Chicagoans could handle. But it didn’t matter. I was headed for Schmidt's anyway.

My trip to the North Woods hadn’t begun as a canoe adventure. It had begun because Mr. A. needed to do a favor for a friend but didn't want to give the job to anyone local. So he called me all the way from Chicago, said he'd heard my name around. Heard I used to lived in Wisconsin.

I hesitated at first. Then he told me what he'd pay. It was enough to finish grad school. Do this, I told myself, and you'll have your PhD and be the Hemingway specialist at ….Well, Berkeley wasn't altogether out of the question.

I’d just turned twenty-three that September, and since Mr. A. was sending me to the North Woods anyway, a canoe trip seemed like one great idea. Admittedly, I wasn’t much of a canoeist--or an adventurer, either, though I read a lot of Hemingway. But I'd been in Scouting for a while as a kid, long enough to learn to do a J-stroke and to get off the lake when a hard wind came up.

And I needed escape. From L.A., of course, and riots and dead heroes--and Chris and rock 'n roll and the war. I needed someplace that wasn't 1968.

Schmidt’s resort took half the afternoon to find. It lay on one of the bigger lakes but in a back bay miles off the county highway through a wooded maze of gravel road and dirt lane. The place itself was pleasant enough, four little cabins set on an acre or two carved out of the pine forest. They were made of vertical half-logs freshly painted a dark red. Their screened porches faced the lake and the boat shed that jutted into it. A larger cabin, also red but not so fresh-painted, stood back from the rest. By its driveway, next to a black GMC, was a sign that read "Schmidt Cottages and Boat Rent. Closed For The Season."

A middle-aged woman came out of the house. She had faded blonde hair and wore an apron over her shirt and trousers. "Sorry," she said when I rolled down the car window. "We ain't open. Maybe for fishing next spring. But there's already a waiting list."

When I said I only wanted to rent a canoe, her eyes gave me a going over that made the bartender's seem like a love tribute. "How old are you?"

I touched my mustache, then reached for my billfold. She waved it away. "We just got a few jon boats. No canoes."

In that case, I wanted to ask, what are the two items on the rack by your boat shed? Following my gaze, then glancing back at the house, the woman said, "How long you need it for?"

"Couple days."

"That long?"

Willing to compromise, I said, "Tomorrow, then."

She looked at the house again as if she were seeking permission from someone inside. But there was no one at the picture window or, as far as I could see, on the screen porch either. "The aluminum one's seven bucks.”

I knew aluminum canoes could be noisy, just what I didn’t need. I told her I'd take the other one.

"That'll be ten.” It was probably more than she usually got, maybe a lot more, but still cheaper than Timberlodge. I pulled a five and some singles out of my billfold.

"Seven's ok," the woman--I figured she was Mrs. Schmidt--said. "But we don't provide shuttles. You'll have to get back on your own."

"Not a problem.” I held out the seven dollars.

Taking the money and shoving it into an apron pocket, Mrs. Schmidt shot another glance at the house. Someone was on the screen porch now. Her husband, probably.

He was the man I’d come to kill.

After my canoe trip.

I parked the car behind a cabin where it couldn't be seen from the lane. I'd stolen it in Madison, almost two hundred miles away. Still, there was no use taking any more chances than I already had. Then I went to help Mrs. Schmidt with the canoe, a 16-foot Old Town, bigger than I'd have liked and by no means new. But, short of a howling gale, I figured I could handle it. We carried it to a sandy little beach nestled between a big willow tree and a patch of lily-pads, where I started stowing my gear. By the time I finished, Mrs. Schmidt had brought a life-preserver and a paddle with the varnish peeling off.

"This should fit you," she said. And sure enough, when I measured it toe-top to chin-bottom, it did.

"Thanks," I said. "And don't worry. I'll take care of it all."

As I bent down to pull off my boots, Mrs. Schmidt said, "You sure got a mop of curly hair."

"My sister says I look like a poodle in desperate need of a groomer. You don't want to know what my dad says."

"Fathers can be awful hard on their kids, their boys.” Mrs. Schmidt smiled a little. "I think your hair's just fine."

I thanked her again, tossed pad and paddles into the canoe. "Guess I'll be off now.”

"You'll be back tomorrow for sure?"

Oh shit, what was this? But when I looked at her, she still wore the little smile. "Bring everything you need with you? You know, warm clothes? Rain gear?"

Pointing at my backpack already in the canoe, I said I'd be fine and, anyway, the forecast was for fair weather.

"Well," she said. "Up here, you never know what'll happen."

She helped me push the canoe into the water and held on while I climbed in. The canoe rocked like crazy. "Steady as you go," Mrs. Schmidt said.

The canoe righted itself and I began paddling. The knack came back quickly enough, so I was already a couple hundred yards into the lake by the time I turned to look back at the shore. A man had joined Mrs. Schmidt on the beach, to watch me through binoculars.

Of course, the lake was blue and the sun bright and the trees a glorious red and gold, just like on every postcard in every store in every town north of Highway 8. That Paradise Regained stereotype was the point for city-slickers like me. The old-time loggers knew northern Wisconsin better than that. "Hayward to Hurley to Hell," they described it.

For an hour or so, I stuck close to the shoreline so I could listen to the breeze soughing through the trees and watch blue-herons standing one-legged in the shallows. When I got tired of that, I paddled further out and made sure I could no longer see Schmidt’s or any other sign of human habitation. Then I built myself a nice little berth in the bottom of the canoe. With the life-preserver for padding, I leaned against the seat and stretched my legs under the thwarts. My business with Art Schmidt wasn't till morning. I fell asleep.

When I woke, the canoe was in a stump-clogged little cove, safely nestled against a fallen white birch. Tossing the leader around the birch, I slipped into the shallow water and hauled the canoe ashore. The Scouts had taught me fairly well, so the first thing I did was find a good spot to pitch camp.

With all the cedars around, the campsite smelled like gin, but there was plenty of dry down wood nearby, in every size from tender to thigh-thick logs. True, the logs took some chopping, but even with only a hatchet I split them in no time. I laid the wood in the teepee-style I'd been taught in Scouts, then lit it with one of the kitchen matches I kept in a metal Band-Aid box along with my cigarettes. Fire going, I spread out a ground sheet and my sleeping bag, an ugly khaki thing probably left over from the Korean War. I laughed when the clerk at the army surplus store called it a mummy bag.

I'd brought The Hemingway Reader so I could reread "Big Two-Hearted River" by campfire. And eat canned beans and spaghetti fried up together, just like Nick Adams in the story. But by the time I had a pan over the fire, it was already dark. The fire didn't give off enough light to read by and my flashlight was pretty dim. I felt beat anyway, so when I finished the beans and spaghetti--not too bad, really--I opened my canteen and dumped a little water into my mess kit, swished it around, and threw the rest on the fire. I used an army surplus trenching tool to bury the fire, smoked a cigarette, crawled into my mummy bag. I slept like the dead.

The next morning was clear but cold, so I put on heavy hunting socks and pulled my new red wool Pendleton shirt over the T-shirt and blue jeans I'd slept in. Then I got to work on my pistol, an Iver Johnson .22 Cadet. The model had become rather notorious in recent months, after Sirhan Sirhan used one to kill Bobby Kennedy. The only difference was that Sirhan had the short barreled version. That and the fact he got caught.

My own gun had been stolen months before from a sporting goods store in Skokie, its serial numbers filed off, and was, Mr. A. guaranteed me, untraceable. Not that anyone would ever find the thing once I finished with it. I poked eight .22 longs into its cylinder, then tucked it in the waistband of my jeans. When I had the canoe packed, I paddled back to Schmidt's.

Still several hundred yards out, I saw a man watching through binoculars. When I put in, I asked him if he was Art Schmidt. "Yeah,” he said with a curt nod. “Now take your shit out and help me carry this thing back to the rack."

Schmidt shoved the binoculars into the case on his belt and, while I climbed out of the canoe, fished a battered pack of Camels out of his shirt pocket. "My wife," he said, "told me you was a guy."

Before I could stop it, my hand went to my face. The mustache was gone.

I hadn't planned to kill him out where the sound of a shot might carry across the lake. But now there didn't seem to be any choice. Neither masculine bravado nor feminine wiles would stave off his questions. As Schmidt touched a match to his cigarette, I drew my pistol and fired.

The shot hit him in the throat and was enough to bring him down. I used the life-preserver to muffle the sound while I finished him off with five or six more bullets to his body and one behind his ear.

Later, I went into the house and tied up Mrs. Schmidt. "Is he dead?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Thank you," she said in a strangled voice. "The bastard deserved it. After what he let happen to our son."

I told her I didn't want to know anything about it.

That silenced her for about a microsecond. "I wasn't gonna let you have the canoe. Till I realized you were a girl. Like Tony told me he'd send. You don't think the sheriff'll figure it out, do you?"

I slapped a length of duct tape across her mouth. She could figure the rest out by herself.

That afternoon, I tossed the .22 into another lake and left the car on a street in Wausau. Then I caught a bus headed south.

I still have Schmidt's binoculars, by the way. And a PhD.

END

Copyright 2009 M. J. Jones

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