Rough Country

his hands, once, and said, “Hot damn. This is something. I mean, I hate to say it, but I’m having a pretty good time right now. Wasn’t having a good time this morning.” He turned to one of the deputies. “I’ll call you up if we spot him, and you get on to Jim Young, get his ass up to Deer River. I’ll put down on the track up there, and I want a picture of me getting out of the helicopter.”
    And he said to Virgil: “Politics. He’s the local newspaper guy.”
    “Gotcha,” Virgil said.
     
     
     
    THAT NIGHT VIRGIL THOUGHT about God some more, and about the Deuce, that lonely spark of fire out in the middle of a swamp, a single twisted soul believing itself safely wrapped in nature, with no idea of what was coming in the morning.

23
    VIRGIL WENT BACK to the truck and got a black nylon emergency jacket. August in Minnesota—chilly in the morning this far north, and this early in the day.
    A river rat named Earl, drafted by Sanders, had just backed his eighteen-foot Alumacraft jon boat down the boat ramp into the water. Virgil would be riding with him, and with a cop named Rod. Rod was messing nervously with his AR-15, and kept looking downriver, where they expected the helicopter to show up. Two more jon boats were already in the water, and there were more both upriver and down.
    “You going with your handgun?” Rod asked Virgil.
    “Haven’t decided,” Virgil said.
    Rod asked because he could see Virgil didn’t have a long gun, and assumed his pistol was under his jacket; actually, it was under the front seat of the truck. All the guns were making Virgil nervous: they were heading into a swamp, without much visibility in some places, and six boats full of cops with rifles, converging on a central point from three different directions. Sanders’s chief deputy was as nervous as Virgil, and worked back and forth through the deputies, talking about fire discipline.
    Virgil went back to the truck again, looked back down the ramp, at all the deputies, at four cop cars and three trucks with trailers, watched Earl park his trailer, and thought that maybe the best idea would be to lie low in the boat; though lying low in a jon boat would shake your bones to pieces. The low, flat-bottom craft were fine when moving slow in flat water, but were no damn good in heavy chop; or in a heavy firefight, for that matter.
    He thought about it some more, and finally pulled out his pump twelve-gauge, loaded three shells, and put seven more in his jacket pocket. If that wasn’t enough, fuck him.
     
     
     
    WAITED SOME MORE, in the mild stink of mud and rotting fish. One of the deputies borrowed a paddle and fished a plastic bag out of the water and threw it in a trash can. Somebody looked south and asked, “Wonder what they’re doing down there?”
    Then the chief deputy called, “Saddle up. Sheriff’s on the way.”
    They all bustled down to the boats, climbed aboard, and the guys on the motors fired them up, quiet four-strokes, and eased out onto the lake, looking south. A minute later they heard the chopper, and then saw it, fairly high, coming fast, then slowing. And the shoulder radios went off and Rod said, “They got him! He’s right under the chopper.”
     
     
     
    THEY ALL TOOK OFF, three boats carving long wakes in the smooth water, Rod holding his rifle straight up like a movie-poster commando, while Virgil sat on a cushion in the bow, back to the incoming wind. Rod, his fair face reddening with the cold wind, listened to his radio, and then shouted, “He’s running for the trees, he’s running for the trees.”
    The swamp was actually the remnants of a series of Mississippi oxbows, some of which could still be seen from the air, as long, curling cutoff lakes, separated from one another by wild rice flats, cattails, and brush. There was one big hunk of trees south of the flats. If the Deuce got into them, he’d be hard to dig out, especially if people were shooting at one another.
    That had to be a ten- or fifteen-minute paddle, though, if he was still where he had been the night before. Sanders’s flotilla was no more than two or three minutes away. . . .
    They crossed the lake, running hard—hard for a jon boat, anyway—and cut into a channel that wrapped around in a hard curve. Earl stayed with the speed, though, familiar with the territory, juked once for a snag, and blew into an intersecting channel that Virgil thought might be the river, though it was only forty or fifty feet