Rough Country

under-time—Virgil gave him his money’s worth—but did worry about Virgil dragging his boat around behind a state-owned truck. And he worried that Virgil sometimes forgot where he put his gun; and that he had in the past slept with witnesses to the crimes he was investigating.
    Still, there was that clearance record, rolling along, solid as ever. Davenport was a pragmatist: if it worked, don’t mess with it.
    But he worried.
     
     
     
    “YOU KNOW,” JOHNSON SAID, “in some ways, your job resembles slavery. They tell you get your ass out in the cotton field, and that’s what you do. My friend, you have traded your freedom for a paycheck, and not that big a paycheck.”
    “Good benefits,” Virgil said.
    “Yeah. If you get shot, they pay to patch you up,” Johnson said. “I mean, you could be a big-time writer, have women hanging on you, wear one of those sport coats with patches on the sleeves, smoke a pipe or something. Your time would be your own—you could go hang out in Hollywood. Write movies if you felt like it. Fuck Madonna.”
    “Basically, I like the work,” Virgil said. “I just don’t like it all the time.”
     
     
     
    JOHNSON WAS AN OLD FISHING PAL , going back to Virgil’s college days. A lean, scarred-up veteran of too many alcohol-related accidents in vehicles ranging from snowmobiles to trucks to Ever-glades airboats, Johnson had grown up in the timber business. He ran a sawmill in the hardwood hills of southeast Minnesota, cutting hardwood flooring material, with a sideline in custom cutting and curing oversized chunks of maple and cherry for artists. A lifelong fisherman, he knew the Mississippi between Winona and LaCrosse like the back of his hand, and was always good for an outstate musky run.
    Johnson wore jeans and a T-shirt. When it got a little cooler, he pulled a sweatshirt over the T-shirt. When it got cooler than that, he pulled on a jean jacket. Cooler than that, a Carhartt. Cooler than that, he said fuck it and went to the Bahamas with a suitcase full of T-shirts and a Speedo bathing suit that he called the slingshot.

    NOW HE DIRECTED VIRGIL across the back roads between highways 1 and 79, generally south and west, over flat green wet country with not too much to look at, except tamarack trees and marshy fields and here and there, a marginal farm with a couple of horses. As they got closer to the Eagle Nest, the woods got denser and the terrain started to roll, the roads got narrower and lakes glinted blue or black behind the screens of trees.
    “Wonder how long it took them to think of the name Eagle Nest?” Johnson wondered. “About three seconds?”
    “They could have called it the Porcupine Lodge or the Dun Rovin or Sunset Shores or Musky Point,” Virgil said.
    “You’re getting grumpier,” Johnson said. “Back at the V, I was the one who was pissed.”
    “Well, goddamnit, I’ve been working like a dog all year,” Virgil said.
    “Except for the under-time,” Johnson said.
    “Doesn’t count. I was still working, just not for the state.”
    “You oughta model yourself after me,” Johnson said. “I’m a resilient type. I roll with the punches, unlike you fragile pretty boys.”
    “Fragile. Big word for a guy like you,” Virgil said.
    Johnson grinned: “Turnoff coming up.”
     
     
     
    ON THE WAY DOWN, Virgil had formed a picture of the Eagle Nest in his mind: a peeled-log lodge with a Rolling Rock sign at one end, at the bar, a fish-cleaning house down by the dock. A dozen little plywood cabins would be scattered through the pines along the shore, a battered aluminum boat for each cabin, a machine shed in the back, the smell of gasoline and oil mixed with dirt and leaf humus; and on calm nights, a hint of septic tank. Exactly how that fit with a rich advertising woman, he didn’t know—maybe an old family place that she’d been going to for years.
    When he turned off the highway, into the lodge’s driveway, he began to adjust his mental image. He’d been fishing the North Woods for thirty years, ever since he was old enough to hold a fishing pole. He thought he knew most of the great lodges, which generally were found on the bigger lakes.
    He’d never heard of an Eagle Nest on a Stone Lake, but the driveway, which was expensively blacktopped, and which swooped in unnecessary curves through a forest dotted with white pines, hinted at something unusual.
    They came over a small ridge and the forest opened up, and Johnson said, “Whoa: