The March Editor's Pick is by Mark LaFlamme

Please feel free to visit Mark at: laflammemark@gmail.com

BONE LAKE

by Mark LaFlamme

Me and Rupert were still in the ice shack at sundown and I don’t mind admitting we were at least three and a half sheets to the wind. We were halfway through the third bottle of Jack and the wood stove kept the shack as hot as balls. Heat and Jack. It’s a damn good way of making sure you won’t walk a straight line back from the center of the lake at the end of the day. There is no sleep as sound as that following a day on the lake with whiskey and a wood stove and a dozen tall tales. Heat and Jack. They got me through a good many winters without my Charlotte, who died of the cancer back in ‘98.

So, the sun was setting and we were arguing again about whether or not muskies had made their way to Bone Lake. I said then and I say now that there are no muskies in Maine at all except in the lakes way to the north. Rupert, who slurs a lot when he drinks, insisted he knew a guy over in Sebago who hauled three muskies from that lake in one summer. Of course, that guy was a fisherman from Massachusetts here on vacation when he caught the prize fish, according to Rupert, who has a way of telling a lie so that it cannot be exposed as such. Rupert isn’t an honest man but he isn’t altogether stupid, either.

When Rupert and me get to arguing about muskies, we both talk at once and we get increasingly louder as we try to make our points. I imagine it’s damn annoying if you’re not us, but we understand each other fine and we never stay mad once the debate is over.

On this night though, we never finished the discussion. There came a knock at the door and we quieted at once, like children caught yapping from their beds after they were ordered to go to sleep. Only it wasn’t mothers and dads outside. Mine have been dead a decade and Rupert never knew his at all. No, it was the big man come knocking and we knew it even before he pulled open the door and stepped inside along with a gust of winter wind made twice as cold on its ride across the frozen lake.

His name was Joseph and he was nearly as tall and as wide as the shack itself. His face was a tangle of hair with two eyes staring out. The beard was knotted with cords of ice and his eyebrows were frosted white. He didn’t shiver at all though, or gripe about the cold the way almost any man will do if he has to be out on a January dusk in Maine. He didn’t slap his gloved hands together or ask for a shot of gut warming hooch. He never did. Joseph just stepped inside and gazed at our lines as they descended into the darkness of holes cut into the ice.
“Have you seen them today? Any sign of them at all?”

His voice was low and hard, like a boulder tumbling down a hill. There wasn’t a way to react to that voice with anything but trembling.

“No, Joseph,” I said, because Rupert had suddenly become thirsty and had the bottle jammed against his lips. “Nothing at all today. Just a couple pickerel and they weren’t worth keeping.”
His eyes blazed as he watched the holes. He only stood there, a giant of a man who blocked the doorway completely. After a half minute or so, he raised an arm and leveled a finger at the dark hole in the ice just ahead of Rupert’s feet.

“Looks like your line has some tension on it. Pull in, please.”

Rupert is the best fisherman I know, winter or summer, drunk or sober, but in the presence of the big man, he lost all finesse. He began to pull in his line at once and without question, but coordination for the hand over hand operation had abandoned him entirely. My friend didn’t look like a skilled angler at all; he looked more like a retarded toddler trying to untie a shoelace as he tugged at the line and tried to spool it as he went.

Finally though, the line came clear of the hole and a stiff, dead shiner hung like a nail from the end of it. Rupert held it up so that big Joseph could see it and he looked like a child showing off his first catch to a father whose hard to please.

“See, Joseph? Nothing at all. Been like that all day. We haven’t seen them, really.”

Joseph’s eyes blazed some more. Lord, but he was a fright to look at. He didn’t wear a hat because his hair was so thick and wild, it wouldn’t accommodate one. The parka added extra inches to the already massive frame. He never smiled, never made small talk and I suspected, but only silently, that he hadn’t so much as had a bowel movement in a couple of years.

He nodded to us briefly before he turned back to the door and slapped it open.

“Call to me if you see them,” he said on his way out. “I won’t be far.”

The door banged shut behind him and Rupert and me both jumped. We looked at each other and tried to grin because we were relieved and because we both knew the other was scared shitless of big Joseph. There weren’t any reason at all to pretend otherwise because Rupert and me know each other too well.

We heard boots crunching on thin, crusty snow outside and then the sounded faded and we knew Joseph was on to the next shack with the same questions. It was always the same questions and the same raging determination.

Have you seen them? Any sign of them?

I wish Joseph were asking about the muskies when he came to our shack. But he wasn’t. He was asking about his wife and daughter, who drowned two years back on Bone Lake.

*****

My name is Carlton Saucier and I’ve lived here in Crabtree all my life. I knew Joseph back when he was just Joe and that was just a couple years ago. He was a quiet man then too, but quite likeable. A builder by trade, he was one of those who carried bundles of shingles to a roof by slinging them over one shoulder. He had massive hands and the rumor around town was that he once drove a nail into a beam with a fist because someone had taken his hammer. A bullshit story, no doubt, but I told it as much as anyone. A story like that is too good to dismiss just because it probably isn’t true.

Joseph was one of those men who liked to be at a work site as soon as the sun was up and he liked to work until dark. It drove the men on his crew crazy because they liked to chase broads at Rumor’s bar after work and then sleep a little late in the morning so the headaches might roll back some. But to Joseph, time was money and money was an important thing for a man who liked to buy nice things for his pretty little wife and his sweet little daughter.

I met Julie once or twice when Joseph brought her to the lake. Me, I’m always on the lake and if a person doesn’t go there, I probably won’t meet them or want to. He brought their little girl Hannah there a few times, too, and she was a sweet thing, curly blonde hair and a shy disposition like her mother. Joseph adored them, that much was clear. If a stranger stopped to say hello and to admire the little girl, Joseph was gracious enough but he also watched that stranger like an alligator watching over its young. You got the sense that Joseph was a cocked rifle ready to remove the head of anybody fool enough to make a threatening gesture or pass an unwelcome remark.

I don’t mean to make him sound like a lunatic because he wasn’t, not then. He was protective, sure. But who can afford not to be these days, when children get snatched from their homes, women get raped by passing strangers and entire families get slaughtered in their beds? Joseph was a good man, I mean to say, if a bit hard and sometimes unapproachable. That he survived their deaths at all is a little bit of a shocker, because for a time, he seemed destined for the end of a rope or the barrel of a gun jammed into his yapper. Joseph was like a crack addict from the city, only it was his family he craved instead of those silly little rocks.

The best anyone can guess, Julie and Hannah got stuck out on Bone Lake in their canoe when a storm snuck in from the east. That was July two years ago. July up here is a nice month, but its also a time when storms move in quickly and savagely. That was a bad one, too. Up in Rangeley, a tornado developed out of the storm and it ripped the shit out of a mile’s worth of camps. Nobody really gave a crap because most of those camps were owned by out of staters, but that storm was a fierce one.

Joseph was at a work site that day and the way I hear it, he had no idea his wife and daughter had sought to escape the heat by heading for the lake with the canoe. They probably had to sneak around a little is my guess, what with Joseph being as cautious as he was. Anyway, the canoe washed up on the shore of a camp twenty minutes after the storm roared out of western Maine and into New Hampshire. Julie had packed her wallet and other items in a waterproof pouch and that was still in the canoe when it was found by Ernest Sinclair, who lives over on the other side of the lake with his alcoholic sister.

It was Tony Desjardins who had to go to the job site over in Weld and tell Joseph that his wife and kid were missing. I don’t know if he mentioned that they were presumed dead at that point, though sure as shit they were. You don’t fall out of a canoe in the middle of a rip snorting storm like that and simply swim to safety.  Not unless you’re a duck.

Desjardins was a sheriff’s deputy back then and he’s a sergeant now. Later, he told us how Joseph had simply put down his skill saw, removed his hard hat and walked to his pickup truck like a zombie in one of them movies they show at the drive-in over in Bridgton. He drove away from the half finished house he was building and as far as I know, nobody ever saw him pick up a hammer or saw again. My guess is that’s the last time anyone saw him sane, too, but I wouldn’t say so out loud.

Their bodies were never found and I sometimes wonder if that makes all the difference. Would big Joseph have mourned and moved on if he’d had the corpses to lay to rest and grieve for? Is the uncertainty of their fates what drove him to prowl Bone Lake the rest of his days? I ain’t no head doctor and I surely don’t know, but I sometimes wonder just the same.

*****

Joseph dropped out of sight for a while and then, in late August of that summer, he began to haunt Bone Lake. I’m not one for dramatics and I normally wouldn’t use a word like haunt to describe what a living man does. But Joseph was more like an apparition in those days after he lost his mind. Boaters and fishermen told stories about how he would appear out of the fog as they came ashore and how he would approach them with those eyes as hard and depthless as marbles sewn into the heads of stuffed creatures.

“Have you seen them? Any sign of them?”

Always the same questions. He would appear on beaches and quiz young lovers as they strolled away from romps on blankets. He would rise from the rocks beneath Stuckley Bridge and scare the shit out of anglers who half dozed with rods in their hands. He stood along shores on all sides of the lake waiting for the last kayaker of the day to paddle in. He scared one family from New Jersey so badly, they abandoned the camp on the north side of the lake they had rented just the day before.

His hair grew wild, his beard went crazy. He was almost never seen in the grocery store or restaurants and nobody knew what he did when he wasn’t haunting Bone Lake. The town selectmen fretted about it a little bit because it wasn’t good for tourism to have a very large, very scary man frightening people away from camps. But as far as I know, the matter was never taken up in public. What were they going to do? Tell a six foot six, three hundred pound grieving man that he couldn’t visit the lake in which his wife and kid had disappeared? I know each of the selectman personally, and there isn’t a one among them who could do such a thing without shitting in their pants.

Joseph first haunted me and Rupert the winter after his family drowned and I know he haunted others, too. That first winter, Everett Paulson lost what he says was a fifteen pound pike snagged from below the ice. Paulson was fishing in a shack with Greg Whitehouse and a couple other shitheads when he hooked the pike. There was whooping and yelling as there tends to be when an afternoon of relative boredom is interrupted by a catch of such significance. Paulson told us later that he fought the pike for ten minutes and had the monster up out of the water ten seconds when Joseph burst through the door of the shack. And when I say burst, I mean it just so. I can attest to that much because I saw it later. The big man entered by plowing right through the door, splitting it in half, and knocking Whitehouse flat on his ass. The way I heard it from others, Whitehouse screamed like a girl and fell into Paulson just as he began to unhook the pike.

Paulson, who likes beer as much as me and Rupert like Jack Daniels, stumbled, lost his grip on the fish, and dropped it directly back into the hole from which it had been hauled. The sound of it might have been heard two shacks away, as Paulson told it, only at that point, big Joseph’s voice was already thundering.

“Have you seen them?”

His eyes blazed toward the hole where black water rippled with the departure of the allegedly grand fish. Later, the shack had to be hauled back to shore and Whitehouse needed a change of underwear. The presence of an insane man is unnerving and frightening and just no good for fishing at all.

Joseph wasn’t any more persistent during the ice fishing months. He was only more troublesome because there were fewer of us out there. At the end of the day, we’d meet other fishermen on shore and we’d sort of mumble about it but that was about all. We never liked to talk about it much because we never knew where Joseph was or where he might appear. And so you’ll forgive me if I say he haunted us. If you had been there when the big man came knocking, you’d understand completely.

The time Rubert and me finished off three bottles of Jack while arguing about muskies was the last time Joseph came to the door of our shack. He died in March and he didn’t go at the end of a rope, as I’d once suspected he would, and he didn’t go the way of the gun, either. My guess is that big Joseph was too determined to find his lost family to do himself in that way. Maybe if they’d found the bodies, he could have stuck his head in the oven. It’s hard to know the mind of a man who is mad with grief. Anyway, I guess it’s sort of predictable how he went. The note he left nailed to a tree sort of told the tale. I kind of wonder if he pounded that nail in with his fist before slipping into the lake.

When he died, a lot of us went to the little memorial over at St. David’s. A sister nobody knew about came from California, but she was gone again right after it was over. We all stood around and, at last, talked openly about the way he had haunted Bone Lake. It was sad, we all agreed, but it was also damn spooky. I didn’t say it and nobody else did either, but in a way that is selfish and shameful, we were glad he was gone. God rest his soul and all of that. Nobody was troubled that they never found his body. It was somehow romantic that big Joseph found his end in the same waters that took his family.

*****

So now it’s January again and me and Rupert were out last night, dropping our lines, drinking our sour mash and arguing about muskies. There are no muskies in Bone Lake, you can take my word for that. You won’t find a friggin muskie anywhere south of Aroostook County and that’s practically Canada.

We were debating so ferociously, we almost didn’t see Rupert’s line go taut. But then the spool snapped right from its rod and line began spilling into the dark water beneath the ice hole.

“Son of a bitch!” Rubert yelled, and he slurred when he yelled, too. “Bet that’s a goddamn muskie right there!”

He began pulling in his line, hand over hand, and I leaned in close to the hole, waiting for a prize fish to emerge, one that might get us a photo and caption in the weekly. Rupert fought for ten minutes and then the line went slack and we thought we lost him.

“You didn’t give it enough play!” I scolded him. “Damn you, Rupert!”

“Like hell! Son of a bitch snapped my line!”

But his line hadn’t snapped and we hadn’t lost our monster catch. Never had one, as it turns out. A half minute after the line went limp as a noodle, there was a great disturbance in the water in that round little hole. It was not the kind of disruption you will see when a fish in agony is thrashing. It wasn’t a natural sort of turmoil and we knew it was wrong at once. Rupert dropped his line and fell backward on his haunches. I leaned back from the hole and knocked over the bottle of Jack with my foot. But neither of us could draw away quick enough or far enough.

The head of big, dead Joseph rose from the hole and the shoulders came up soon after. The face was frozen white, the beard several knotted strands of ice. The eyes were frozen shut, but they opened with a sound like ripping cloth and so did the lips. When the voice emerged, it was through lungs filled with slush.

“Have you seen them,” frozen Joseph said. “Any sign of them?”

A frozen hand rose from the hole and a frozen finger uncurled in my direction. The sound was like ice cubes snapping in a glass of soda. I thought I would faint dead away at the sight and sounds of dead Joseph searching for his family, but I didn’t and neither did Rupert. We sat where we were and addressed him as though it were any other day with a grieving man knocking at the door of the ice shack.

“Nothing today, Joseph,” I said. “Not even junk fish.”

“Sorry, Joseph,” said Rupert. “Maybe try again another day.”

And with that, the big man nodded sadly and descended into the hole until only the icy shags of his hair could be seen beneath the dark water. There was a gurgling sound and then he was gone, on to the next hole to rise up and inquire again. Rupert and I remained still for a full minute and then we both raced to the overturned bottle of Jack. We were fighting over it when a girlish scream arose from two shacks down, and we knew big Joseph had found Everett Paulson and his dipshit friends.

I’ve wet my last line in Bone Lake and it’s a sad thing because there’s no better way for a lonely man to pass a winter. Rupert is done, too and I suspect there will be fewer shacks out on the lake each time I drive by. Up in Maine we can tolerate a lot, but no man wants to fish with a dead man mucking up his hole. It’s frightening and wrong and it’s just not good for fishing at all.

Mark LaFlamme is an award winning crime reporter and columnist at the Sun Journal in Lewiston, Maine. He is the author of the novels "The Pink Room," "Vegetation" and "Dirt: An American Campaign" as well as the novelette "Asterisk: Red Sox 2086." He stays up until dawn, sleeps until noon and takes the week of Halloween off each year. More info can be found at www.marklaflamme.com.