The address the woman gave me turned out to be a boat repair place about a mile from where the bus let me
off.
A seaplane sat in the browning yard. In the open garage, a large man tinkered on the engine of a motorboat, with
sports radio coming from somewhere. Though it was windy and chill, he sweated through a dirty white T-shirt.
He pushed his glasses up on his nose and hacked a smoker’s cough as I approached, eyeing me all the way but not
in a gross way, just skeptical, as most people seemed to be of a woman my size traveling alone.
“Do you know Sarge?” I asked.
He wiped his mouth and looked me up and down. “Yup, sounds about right,” he said in that slow Maine way, so
it came out, “Yee-up.”
I looked around at the desolate space. The lake lapped at the shore and against the dock behind the garage. I
could see the sparkle of water through the trees and hear the distant chug of the ferry going to one of the bigger
islands. The lake went on for miles, twists and turns, inlets upon inlets, fingers and rocks and islands everywhere
you turned. Two different kinds of birds twittered. I wouldn’t even know where to start guessing which kinds. I
didn’t know my birds.
“Where do I go?” I asked. The way my voice came out I worried he could tell the question wasn’t just practical,
but existential.
He smiled. He was missing at least one molar. “I know the way,” he said.
I hesitated. I didn’t know this guy or what he was capable of. “How do you know Sarge?”
He started to walk away and now I noticed he had a hitch in his step. “We were in the Army together,” he said
over his shoulder, and I followed him.
We took a skiff northwest up the lake. With my hood up and the wind rushing, it was too loud for conversation,
not that we had much to say anyway. I’m not sure what I expected to find. Who had been that woman on the
phone? Did she live with Sarge? Who else would be here?
With the summer tourists gone, we saw few other boats on the lake. The sky had turned so suddenly gray and
dark it was almost indistinguishable from the rocky water. HZ