The Last Sailing

The man who had said before the whole pack that he didn't know her signed her charter sheet every morning at six.

The lake was grey before the sky was. Katja Vukelich came down the hill at twenty to six with the thermos in one hand and the bait bucket in the other, and the harbor lay below Main Street like something not yet decided on, flat and dull and cold, the breakwall a black line and the gulls asleep on it in rows.

Twenty-seven days. She had the number without counting, the way she had every number that mattered. She was twenty-nine years old. She held a third mate's license, current, endorsed for Great Lakes and inland waters, and on the first of September she would sign onto a thousand-footer out of Duluth and stand a mate's watch on a boat that took four miles to stop. The Dora V. was sold. The papers had been signed in June, the deposit was in the bank in Hancock, and the handover was the last sailing, Sunday the thirty-first, keys on the wall of the wheelhouse and a man from Duluth taking her lines. Until then she worked. Twenty-seven mornings of charters, and the boat did not leave the slip without her father's habit of a checked oil level and a warm engine, so she was always down here in the grey before the guests were awake.

She went aboard at the stern and the deck took her weight the way it had since she was twelve. Diesel and old varnish. Wet rope. The fenders hung where she had hung them last night and the lake slapped once against the hull and went back to nothing.

She checked the oil, both engines, the way Frank Vukelich had taught her, the rag folded twice, the level read twice, and she started the starboard engine and let it turn over slow while she coiled the stern line into a proper flat coil, because a coil you could throw was a coil you could trust. The cabin top was wet with dew. The ball cap kept most of it off her hair, the ponytail through the back of it, and her father's old ball cap at that, the brim gone soft as cloth, and she wore it every morning and did not call it anything but a hat.

The booking book sat dry in the wheelhouse where it belonged, and she opened it on the chart table to the week and looked at what the week was.

Every line of it said the lodge.

That was new, and it was not new. The Copper Harbor outfit had run this shore's overflow fishing for ten years, a good operation, a captain who knew the reefs off the point better than most, and on Thursday their engine had let go so completely that the tow in had taken six hours and the crankshaft was in pieces on a pallet in a workshop in L'Anse. Their season was done. Their bookings had come down the road to Copperfall in a wave Thursday night and Friday morning, and Deb Trevethan at the lodge desk had taken every one of them and put them on the Dora V., because the Dora V. was what was left. Which was fine. Which was a full book, the fullest August the boat had seen in four years, and Katja had stood at the chart table Friday evening and done that arithmetic too.

What it meant was the sheet.

The lodge ran its guests on a charter sheet, the old paper kind, carbon copy underneath, the lodge's name at the top and the manager's signature at the bottom, and the lodge paid on the sheet and not on the day. Somebody with the lodge's authority had to sign it every morning before the boat cast off. For years, back when the lodge sent the boat a third of every season, that signature had been the old manager's, and then it had been nobody's, because the lodge had stopped sending anyone at all.

Now the lodge was the whole book, and the signature at the bottom of the sheet belonged to the general manager of Copperfall Lodge.

She knew his hand. She had seen it Friday, the first sheet, and Saturday, and Sunday, and she would see it every morning until she left, and it was a neat hand, a manager's hand, and it belonged to Elias Toller.

She shut the book and went back out into the grey and took the thermos up onto the dock to wait, because the coffee was hers and the dock was hers for about nine more minutes, and she drank leaning on the fuel-dock piling with the boat at her back and the town above her not yet awake, one light in the pasty shop, the gulls beginning to argue out on the wall.

The rite had been in October, nearly four years ago. She had stood on the Ledge below the lodge with the fire on her face and the pack in a half-moon around the iron ring, and she had said, before all of them, "Before the pack, I know you." Elias Toller had stood four paces off with his hands at his sides, and he had said, "I don't know you," and the elders had said "The pack heard," and she had walked back up the hill alone, because nobody touched the refused one on the walk back up the hill.

That was all of it she allowed herself. Four years was long enough to make a file of a thing and keep it shut.

She had been twenty-five. He had been thirty-four, and the beta's seat had come to him that winter, and she had watched the whole town decide what she was worth by watching what he had decided, and she had kept fishing. That was the sum of it. The lake did not care who sat at the alpha's table.

He came down at six exactly.

She heard the truck first, the lodge's pickup, up on Main, and then the door, and then his boots on the steps down to the harbor, and she did not turn around. She knew his walk. Four years of not looking at a man taught you his walk anyway. That was its own joke, and she let herself have it, dry and small, into the thermos.

"Morning." His voice came across the dock, level, the voice he used on guests and on her, the same one for both.

"Morning," she said, and turned, and handed him the sheet off the clipboard she had ready, so there would be no reason for his hands and hers to both be on the same thing at once.

He took it. Black T-shirt, the fitted one he wore at this hour, dark trousers, boots that cost more than deck boots and were none the worse for it. He was six-five and built like the lodge's woodpile was a hobby and not a chore, broad through every part a man could be broad, the close fade of his hair sharp, his jaw clean. He was thirty-eight. The sheet said he was the general manager. The pack said he was a beta, that he sat at the alpha's table, that when pack business was decided Elias Toller was in the room where it happened.

He read the sheet. He always read it, every line, and she had decided on Friday that she respected that and refused to respect anything else about the transaction.

"Six," he said. "Lake trout."

"Six. Lake trout. North along the shore, back by one."

"Deb says two of them fished with you last year."

"Wisconsin people. They caught." She took the pen out of the clipboard's clip and held it out. "They'll want the same spot off the point, and the same spot off the point is where I'll take them."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The idea of one, declined.

He signed. Elias Toller, in the manager's hand, and the date, and he stood there.

The paper was done. The carbon was under it. There was nothing left on the clipboard to read, and he stayed, one breath longer than the paper needed, his eyes going past her once to the wheelhouse and coming back, and she kept her face the way the lake had been at twenty to six, flat and giving back nothing.

"Fuel's on the lodge account," he said. "Whatever you take on this month. Deb set it up Friday."

"Fine."

"You need anything on the dock before the thirty-first, you call the desk."

"I've run this dock since I was nineteen," she said. "I'll call the desk."

He looked at her then, straight, for the first time that morning. His eyes were dark brown and they stayed dark brown, whatever was under them kept down where he kept it, and she noted that, and filed it, and did not name the file.

"Six o'clock tomorrow," he said.

"Six o'clock."

He went back up the steps, and she watched him go because watching a man leave was not the same as watching for him, and the truck started up on Main and was gone.

The guests came down at twenty past, all six of them in a knot, lodge fleeces and new rain gear and a cooler among them that the lodge kitchen had packed, and Katja put the two Wisconsin men and their wives in the stern where the rods were, and the young couple from St. Paul amidships on the bench, and she went over the boat the way she always went over the boat. Life jackets under the thwart. The rail was one foot nothing of freeboard and the lake was not a pond. If she said hold on, hold on. If she said sit, sit.

"You're the captain," the older Wisconsin man said, pleased, settling himself. "Same one. We told the desk we wanted the same boat."

"You got her," Katja said. "Twenty-seven more days of her."

She cast off bow and stern, walked the boat out of the slip with a hand on the piling, and let the engines take her backward into the harbor basin, slow, the way her father had backed this boat for thirty years. Past the fuel dock. Past the wall.

She did not look back at the dock.

She looked ahead, at the gap in the breakwall and the open grey beyond it, and she kept her eyes there, and she knew anyway. She knew he had come back down after the truck door shut, or had never gone up at all. She knew he had stood on the dock while she took the lines, and while she walked the boat out, and while she backed her into the basin and brought her bow around. She had not looked once, and she could have sworn to all of it in front of a notary: he stood there until the Dora V. cleared the wall, and then some.

Four minutes. She had counted by the engine revolutions and the gulls and the distance to the gap, and it was four minutes, and that was a number too, and it went in the file with the rest of them, and the file stayed shut.

Outside the wall the lake opened up, long and flat and cold, a low swell running down from the northwest that the boat took on the bow without caring. The sky was going the color of pearl over the Keweenaw behind them, and the sun would be up inside the half hour, and the water off the point would be holding fish. She throttled up and the Dora V. came level and ran, and behind her she heard the younger woman from St. Paul laugh once at the speed of it, and the older Wisconsin man tell his wife, "Told you. She knows the lake."

She did. She knew this shore the way she knew her own hands, every reef and hump and drop-off from the stamp sand to the point and ten miles past it, and she had learned it standing on a fish box next to her father with the wheel above her head, and in four weeks she would take a mate's watch on open water and learn a bigger lake all over again. That was hers. The license was hers. The berth was hers, and the sale was hers, and the four years were hers, every booking and every empty slip of them, written down in her father's logbooks in the wheelhouse in pencil.

Nobody on this water had given her any of it. Nobody on this water was going to take it off her.

The depth sounder found the edge of the reef and she eased the throttle and turned to her guests, all six of them watching her, fleeces zipped against the morning, their whole vacation sitting in her hands along with the rods.

"All right," she said. "Let's catch some trout."

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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