Absolute Zero Read online

  I’m here.

  Me, Hank.

  Come back.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “I don’t suppose anybody brought in the other canoe, did they? I’d hate for it to sit out there all winter. Freeze-up will probably stove it in.” Uncle Billie was calling long distance from Arizona golf heaven and when Broker didn’t respond, Billie continued on, “Well, I guess not. Don’t worry about it. I’ll write it off. And the tents. And all the gear . . .”

  Several seconds ticked by during which Broker did not volunteer to go back into the canoe area and round up Billie’s lost items. Billie cleared his throat and resumed talking. “Just goes to show you. Hell, kiddo, we all figured it’d do you good to get out in the woods. Get some fresh air, work out your heebie-jeebies.”

  “Yeah, yeah, go cut a rug,” Broker shot back in Billie’s Kilroy lingo. “Let me talk to Mom.”

  Irene Broker came on the line. “How are you doing with all this?”

  “I got a cold,” he said, avoiding the question.

  “Heat up some cider, lemon, and vinegar.”

  “I know, I know; listen, Mom—have you, ah, heard anything? I know she’s got the number out there.”

  “No calls.” He waited while his mother searched for the right words. “Maybe she’s waiting for you to call her. You have numbers for her over there.”

  “Right. How’s Dad?”

  “He’s taking a nap, should I get him up?”

  “No, just say hello; look, someone’s here, I gotta go.”

  “Take care.”

  He placed the phone back in its cradle. No one was here at the moment, but Amy was on her way, bringing supplies to the shut-in. He just didn’t want to talk. Being sick mocked and trivialized him, and his darkest thoughts all ended in a comic sneeze.

  He stared up at the stuffed moose head over Uncle Billie’s fireplace. Damn thing was too big for the main room and it swooped out with horns like the wingspread of a Stone Age bat. The glass eyes followed him.

  And he kept seeing Jolene Sommer being led off by Allen Falken and that Earl character. He wondered how she was doing with all this.

  It was four days later. The weather had turned dismal and Broker’s cold exaggerated all his doubts. Between Kleenexes, he scourged himself with shoulds: Should have been more responsible on the trip. Never should have been caught in open water by the weather like that.

  Never should have unloaded on that slob in The Saloon.

  More specifically, he never should have thumped the guy in front of Amy Skoda, who now worried that he was extra-deeply troubled, which added a mighty tweak to her caretaking instincts and brought them up to full erect. So she dropped in every day to check on him, to bring groceries, provide company, and offer her strong but also very soft and warm shoulder to buoy him up. Taking some vacation time from work in the aftermath of the “event,” she reminded him that she was just a call away . . .

  He made camp in the lodge’s main room with the moose. He’d folded out the sleeper couch in front of the fieldstone hearth and surrounded himself with tissues, tea, and lemon, cough drops and VapoRub. Days unwashed, his hair was a greasy thicket. He lived in baggy long johns and Uncle Billie’s ancient blue wool robe.

  He turned away from the telephone, picked up the TV remote, and clicked to CNN on satellite feed. He watched the news until they showed the gritty color images of corpses in a weedy ditch for the tenth time today. Kosovo: UN monitors expelled, refugees running to the mountains, winter coming on. He averted his eyes from the image of a dead child.

  He tapped off the remote, went back to the phone, and punched in his voice mail at home. No new messages.

  He swore out loud, which caused him to have a wracking coughing fit. When she’d heard his cough, Amy worried about secondary infections and had mentioned pneumonia. She wanted him to go in and have it checked.

  Pneumonia was for infirm old people.

  He drew the line at pneumonia and antibiotics.

  Onward.

  He went to the kitchen where two large kettles simmered on the ancient Wolf stove, and turned the heat up under the smaller one. When the loose sage and eucalyptus in it bubbled, he draped a towel over his head tent-fashion and inhaled the steam. He was trying to think positive when he heard a car.

  He crossed to the windows and saw Amy’s green Subaru Forester pull up the drive and park. Her choice of vehicle revealed a lot. Knowing her a little better now, he gathered she was a serious student of Consumer Reports. Impulse-buying was not in her nature. She did her research, budgeted her priorities, and then moved decisively to get what she wanted.

  And if Consumer Reports posted an index for independent, thirty-something women she would rate first in her class in reliability and crash-worthiness.

  And persistence.

  Hatless, wearing a tidy blue parka with gray sleeves, she swirled in from the cold with her freckles and her hair bright as Celtic metalwork. She carried a shopping bag in her arms and a saddlebag purse slung over her shoulder.

  “How are you feeling today?” she asked, heading for the kitchen.

  Broker coughed hello.

  “I think you should go in and have that checked,” she said over her shoulder.

  “In all due respect, I won’t be going near a hospital for quite a while, thank you.”

  “Fine.” She dumped the bag on the kitchen counter.

  “You get it all?” he asked, hobbling after her.

  “I bought all the hippie cures they had in the co-op.”

  “Think you know everything, don’t you?”

  “I know some of this stuff has merit as prevention but you’re full-blown. I know a serious lung inflammation when I hear one.”

  Grumbling, Broker unloaded the bag: Vita-C, cider, vinegar, oranges, limes, lemons, echinacea, goldenseal, and Siberian ginseng. Cough drops and two boxes of Popsicles. He put the Popsicles in the freezer.

  She went to the stove, avoided the cloud of sage, and sniffed the other pot, picked up a hot pad and lifted the cover. “What’s cooking?”

  “I found some venison in the freezer so I’m making stew.”

  She covered the pot and took off her jacket and hung it on a kitchen chair. Her sweater and jeans were practical and lived-in. He wondered if she ever wore a dress. Probably not. She crossed her arms, looked around at the cozy stocked shelves, the pots and pans dangling on a steel butcher’s rail, and said, “Kitchens.”

  “What?” Her tone of voice put him on guard.

  “My dad always said you have the best talks in the kitchen.”

  “What?” he repeated.

  “Your Uncle Billie and my dad are hunting buddies, you know.”

  “Uh-huh,” Broker said.

  “Well, they talk.” She paused. “About you.”

  “Jesus,” Broker grinned awkwardly.

  “Well, it doesn’t hurt to talk.”

  Broker scrubbed his knuckles in his frazzled hair. “Like about my life, up to and including the present train wreck with Sommer?”

  Amy shrugged her shoulders agreeably.

  “And talking about it is going to make it better?” Broker nodded his head. “Usually when women say that, it means they’ll feel better if they get you to talk. Okay, let’s talk.”

  “Fine. Tell me about your marriage,” Amy said.

  “That’s easy. My wife has this Joan of Arc complex. She intends to be a general. Does anybody ask what it’s like to be the general’s husband, home taking care of the kid? Or at teas with the officer’s wives?”

  “Women did it for years, why can’t you? Where are you at with being separated from your daughter?”

  “I’ve been with my daughter every day for two years. She’s probably due for some full estrogen immersion.”

  “Aren’t we light and breezy today, and so adept at small talk,” Amy said.

  “That’s me?” Broker gestured offhand. “Food, eat; gun, shoot; woman, copulate.”

  Amy planted her han
ds on her hips. “You know, down in the Cities you might be a bad motherfucker. But up here, guys like you are a dime a dozen.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Broker drew back, a tad defensive.

  Amy shook her head. “Sort of sad when a guy like you is reduced to bullying overweight drunks, like that guy at The Saloon. That was all out of proportion. Dave and I talked about it.”

  “Great. So now it’s amateur-shrink hour.”

  “Dave thinks it’s all coming down on you; your wife takes off, you’re getting older, being on your own, not having any—well, structure in your life.”

  Broker grinned. “Lucky for me I got Amy Skoda standing here with the structural integrity of a small skyscraper.”

  Amy raised an eyebrow and swatted a denim-clad hip. “Check it out. This is not exactly a cornerstone.”

  Broker lowered himself to a chair at the kitchen table and mumbled, “I’m old enough to be . . .”

  “I know—my brother,” Amy dismissed him with a wave of her hand and plopped into the chair across from him.

  “So how was your day?” he asked.

  “Oh, wonderful. We had a preliminary root-cause analysis session.”

  “Sounds grim.”

  Amy winkled her nose. “Allen Falken sent a tape-recorded statement. He said he wouldn’t come in person because his friendship with Hank Sommer could be perceived as coloring his judgment. He did a beautiful job of making me look like a hick.”

  “That bad?”

  “Pretty bad. But friendly, more like. How do you staff for a five-hundred-year storm if you routinely staff for light fishing accidents in the summer. So it’s like my fault, but he can sympathize because I’m not really up to speed.”

  “Really?” wondered Broker. “Right after the surgery, before it happened, he made a point of telling me how sharp you were.”

  “I guess he had a change of heart. So the consensus is that Hank Sommer wound up a vegetable because the nurse-anesthetist miscalculated somewhere and the attending nurse failed to monitor in postop.”

  Amy’s finger traced invisible water rings on the tabletop. “They’re not sure exactly where things went wrong. He was hypothermic and cold is always a weird variable and can effect the way the body metabolizes drugs. Like it could sequester and hoard them in a sluggish circulation system and release them at odd times.”

  She tossed her hair. “Whatever. And Nancy Ward, the recovery-room nurse, was having a bad day; she’d had a fight with her husband and she’d worked all the previous night. Technically, she’ll catch the brunt of a malpractice suit. It looks like she neglected to program Sommer into the monitor. So she takes the blame for leaving him untended. But I was in charge. So it comes back to me.”

  “You agree with them?”

  She crossed her arms across her chest.

  “You don’t agree with them?”

  She uncrossed her arms, then recrossed them, stood up, and changed the subject. “There’s this rumor how you smuggled two tons of buried gold through Laos into Thailand and banked it in Hong Kong? Dave says if you didn’t have connections in the FBI, the IRS would be all over you.”

  The rumors. Broker waved his hand. “Hell, I should pull it out of the stock market, put it all back into bullion, and bury the stuff again.”

  “Bury it? Like a pirate?”

  “Exactly.” He heaved up and went to the counter, selected a knife from the rack on the wall, and sliced an orange, then a lemon, followed by a lime. The tart citrus circles tumbled off the blade and laundered the air; orange, yellow, and green in a pile like tropical doubloons. He dumped the slices into another large pot, added a quart of cider, a generous splash of vinegar, two tablespoons of honey and a cinnamon stick, and set the flame.

  Amy got up, joined him at the counter, and looked over his shoulder. “You’re going to have the most expensive urine in Minnesota.”

  “Mom’s home remedy.”

  “Whatever.” She held out her left hand. “Look, see that?” She pointed at a faint white line on the edge of her palm.

  It was an old scar. He said, “So?”

  “Thirty years ago, the summer you helped Billie put in the boat dock.” She pointed out the window toward the old, hump-backed dock jutting into the lake. “You cut a fishhook out of my hand. You were eighteen. I was seven.” She appraised him. “You don’t remember.”

  He didn’t recall the fishhook. He remembered building the damn dock, though.

  “You’re no fun today,” she said as she put on her coat. “I have something else for you.” She removed a bag from her purse and handed it to him. It contained a cardboard and cellophane toy box and a copy of the outstate edition of the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

  “What’s this?” There was a kid’s action-figure called War Wolf in the box—plastic wolf head on a pumped-up body, dressed in camo fatigues.

  “Way uncool, Broker; everybody’s heard of War Wolf, the poor man’s Star Wars,” Amy said, patting his cheek. “You know what else Dave said? He said you were lost in the modern world. I’ll bet you’ve never seen Seinfeld? Ally McBeal?”

  “Hey, knock it off, I read Doonesbury every once in a while. And I watch The Crocodile Hunter.” He held up the toy and hunched his shoulders, questioning.

  “Read the paper, there’s an article about Hank Sommer in the feature section folded on top.”

  Amy touched his cheek lightly once more, told him to keep washing his hands, and outside, clomped down the steps, got in her practical, reliable car, and disappeared into the early evening. She probably drove the speed limit when nobody was around.

  As he turned his mom’s cider remedy down to a simmer he wondered if she kissed with her eyes open.

  It was not much of an article, with just a tiny picture of Hank squeezed into the type. A bigger picture showcased the plastic toy.

  Creator of War Wolf in Coma.

  Timberry writer Hank Sommer was diagnosed as being in a coma due to complications following emergency surgery in Ely, Minnesota, last week. After a daring boundary-water seaplane rescue in a violent storm, Sommer was operated on to repair a rupture and perforated bowel suffered during a canoeing accident.

  Milton Dane, prominent St. Paul attorney, is representing Sommer and his wife against the Duluth Medical Group that manages Ely Miner Hospital.

  According to Dane, “Ely Miner violated the standard of care with respect to Sommer’s post-operative treatment. It is ironic that Hank survived the storm, the hypothermia, the rescue, and the surgery, only to be deprived of oxygen in a hospital recovery room.”

  Irony has stalked Sommer throughout his writing career. His first two novels garnered critical attention but little in the way of sales. Then he wrote War Wolf, a satire in which a returning veteran afflicted with dioxin poisoning becomes a vengeful Communist werewolf.

  Director Bruce Cook found a copy of War Wolf three years ago in the remainder bin. The movie—which earned over ninety-three million dollars—established Sommer’s career as a novelist. It also produced a financial bonanza for the author, who shrewdly negotiated lucrative deals on other War Wolf spin-offs, including the action figure and video games.

  Broker shook his head, pushed up off the couch, put on his parka, and selected a cigar. Brandy seemed like a good idea, so he raided Billie’s liquor cabinet and poured two inches into a cup, hit the play button on Billie’s CD player, went out on the front porch, and sat down on the steps. Through the open door he heard Jay and the Americans kick in as he popped a match.

  Cigar smoke clawed his throat, so he took a soothing drink by way of a solitary toast: Whiskey, Women, Work, and War—to Hank Sommer, who wears a coral snake on his wrist, who saved my life, who takes second billing to a kid’s plastic toy . . .

  C’mon, Broker, tell the truth, you voted for Ventura, didn’t you?

  Yeah, Hank, damned if I didn’t. Just to spite the suits.

  He looked out over the dark lake and shivered. Damn, it was cold for October th
is year. Tiny glints clamped down along the shore; there’d be a skin of thin ice in the morning.

  Uncle Billie’s porch faced north up Lake One and as the night filled in, the edges of the pine crowns feathered out and melted into a black sky. As the tree line disappeared so did perspective. Broker was alone with a star dome virtually unblemished by artificial light and, except for the occasional airliner and the seldom satellite, it was the cosmos of the ancients.

  The Big and Little Dippers hung high to the north around the polestar, and Orion hugged the eastern horizon. The summer triangle of Deneb, Vega, and Altair slipped away to the west a little more each night.

  Mom, hoping he could be the artist she had never been, tried to nurture in him a sense of discovery, and never missed an opportunity to slip a few coppers of wonder into his piggy bank of instincts.

  See the shapes of animals in the clouds. The constellations.

  Dad taught him to find the real animal in the forest; the deer by his tracks, where he bedded, where he fed; by his rubs and scrapes. Honoring both his parents, he’d let his practicality cross-fertilize his imagination.

  The Cities, stacked with high-rise humans, had never been his home. This was home and, as always, the wilderness beckoned with silent beauty, absent mercy. Broker sipped his brandy and mused how the death traps in nature were always feminine: oceans, mountains, deep woods. Which was as it should be because their victims were usually young, romantic, dumb men.

  Jay and the Americans called it accurately:

  Come a little bit closer

  you’re my kind of man

  so big and so strong . . .

  Moved by the rhythm of the old music, he didn’t have to travel far to find the memory of Jolene Sommer’s green eyes.

  Broker stood up, poured out the rest of his drink, grimaced at the cigar, and threw it away. Getting cold, he went inside, shut the door, and placed another log on the coals.

  He dippered out a cup of his mom’s cider, settled back on the fold-out bed, took a sip, and let the citrus mix of honey and vinegar trickle down his sore throat.

  The damn newspaper stared at him again, and he was about to toss it across the room when he caught the headline below the fold on page one.