The Resort
The cabins at Birchwood were numbered one through nine but there was no cabin four. There had been, once. Earl Lindgren, who built the place in 1948, had put up ten cabins in the first two years, but number four burned in the winter of 1961 when a guest left the space heater running and went to town for dinner. Nobody was hurt. Earl cleared the foundation and planted grass over it and never rebuilt, and after a while people stopped asking about the gap in the numbers. The grass grew in thick and somebody put a picnic table there and that was that.
Karen had worked the front desk since May. Before that she’d been at the Red Owl in Walker, stocking shelves and running the register, which paid better but involved standing on concrete for eight hours and listening to Donna Krepke talk about her gallbladder. The resort job was seasonal, Memorial Day through Labor Day, and the pay was nothing special, but Karen got a room in the back of the lodge and she could see the lake from the window above the sink where she washed her coffee cup every morning.
She was thirty-four. She had been married for three years to a man named Dale who sold insurance in Brainerd, and then she had not been married, and then two years had passed and she was living in Walker and working at the Red Owl and then at the resort. That was the whole story, or at least all of it she told people. Minnesotans don’t press. You say you used to live in Brainerd and now you live in Walker and people nod and say oh sure, as if the distance between those two things is just geography.
The resort was small. Nine cabins, the lodge, a dock, a fish cleaning house, space for boat trailers after the boat was launched at the public landing, and a stretch of sandy beach that was mostly rocks. The beach had a sign that said SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK that Earl had put up in 1967 after a kid from Iowa cut his foot on a shell and the parents threatened to sue. They didn’t sue. Nobody ever sued. But the sign stayed up and the paint faded and nobody repainted it and now you could barely read it, which seemed about right for a warning that had been unnecessary in the first place.
Shirley Lindgren ran the place now. Earl had died in 1979, a stroke, out on the dock one July afternoon. He’d been tying off a boat and just went down. Shirley found him twenty minutes later. She told people he looked peaceful, which Karen doubted, but Shirley was from that generation and you let people have their version.
Shirley was seventy-one and did the books and the ordering and the things that required a phone call. Karen did the rest. Check-ins, check-outs, the morning coffee in the lodge, cabin turnovers on Saturdays, the small complaints that guests brought to the desk. The hot water takes too long. There’s a wasp nest under the eave. The people in cabin seven are loud. Karen handled these with a manner she had developed over the summer, which was to nod and write something down on a pad and say she’d take care of it. Sometimes she did. Sometimes the problem took care of itself. The wasps left on their own. The loud people in seven checked out.
He checked in on a Saturday in the middle of July. It had been hot all week, ninety and humid, and the cabins were full except for two and six. He took six. It was on the end, closest to the water, with a screened porch that looked out at the lake through a stand of birch trees. The porch had a metal glider that squeaked when you sat in it and a small table with a glass ashtray that nobody had used in years.
His name was Tom Ericson. She wrote it on the card along with his license plate number, a blue Ford pickup with Minnesota plates, and his home address, which was in Rochester. He paid for the week in advance, cash, which was unusual. Most people wrote checks. He counted out the bills carefully and she gave him the key and told him about the dock and the fish cleaning house and the café in Walker, and he thanked her and carried his bag to the cabin and she didn’t hear from him again until Monday.
That first day, Sunday, she noticed his boat was gone by six in the morning. It came back around noon. She saw him walk from the dock carrying a stringer of walleyes and go into the fish cleaning house, and she heard the water running in there for a while, and then he walked back to his cabin with a plate of fillets wrapped in newspaper. She didn’t go out to talk to him. There was no reason to.
She knew the type. Leech Lake got them every summer, men who came up alone to fish. Some of them were loud about it, the ones who’d been coming for years and knew every bar in Walker and wanted you to know they knew. They’d stand at the desk and tell you about the muskie they almost landed in ‘74 and ask if Al’s bait shop was still open and had you ever been to the Goose or just the Chase. Those men came in groups, usually. They wore caps with lures pinned to them and they smelled like beer by noon and they were harmless enough.
Then there were the quiet ones. They came alone, fished alone, cleaned their fish alone, ate alone. They weren’t unfriendly, exactly. Just contained. You’d see them on the dock at first light, rigging their lines in the dark, and you’d see them come back in the early afternoon with their catch, and in between those two events they were somewhere on the lake and you had no idea what they were thinking about. Karen wondered sometimes. You couldn’t help it. A man alone on a lake for ten hours, there had to be something going on in there, but whatever it was stayed on the water.
Tom Ericson was one of the quiet ones. She figured that out by Monday evening.
On Monday he came into the lodge around five o’clock. Karen was behind the desk sorting through a box of new keys that Shirley had ordered from a hardware place in Bemidji. Half of them didn’t fit anything. Shirley had ordered the wrong blanks, which was the kind of thing that happened more often now, though nobody said anything about it. You just reordered and didn’t make a fuss.
He asked if she had a map of the lake.
She did. There was a stack of them behind the desk, the kind that the chamber of commerce printed up every year, with the depth contours and the public accesses marked and advertisements for bait shops and cafés nearby. She pulled one out and unfolded it on the desk and he leaned over it and she pointed out the spots she knew about, which were the spots everyone knew about. The sunken island on the south end. The weed beds in Walker Bay. The rock pile off Pine Point.
He asked if she fished.
She said she used to. Her ex-husband had taken her out a few times, trolling for walleye, but she hadn’t kept up with it after the divorce. She said divorce without flinching. She’d said it enough times by now that it was just a word. He nodded.
He said he’d been fishing Walker Bay all day and hadn’t caught much. A couple of small ones he’d thrown back. He thought maybe the heat was putting them deep.
She said that was probably right. The old-timers said the walleye moved to the deep mud when it got like this. Twenty, twenty-five feet. You had to find the thermocline, which was a word she’d learned from a visitor earlier in the summer. Tom thanked her for the map and took it back to his cabin. She watched him go. He walked slowly, not in a hurry. He was maybe forty, maybe a little older. Tall, dark hair cut short. Tanned. He wore jeans and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up even in the heat, and work boots.
She went back to the keys. Most of them were useless. She put them in a bag to send back.
Walker had a café on Minnesota Avenue that had been there since the sixties, though it had changed hands three times that Karen knew of and probably more before that. The current owners were a couple from Iowa who’d moved up in ‘78 and who made a decent hot beef sandwich and a walleye basket that was fine if you didn’t think too hard about where the walleye came from. The place used to be called the Pine Cone and before that it was something else, Dorothy’s maybe, or Dot’s, Karen could never remember which and the people who would know were the people who’d been here long enough that they called every restaurant by its oldest name anyway, so it didn’t matter. The booths were orange vinyl and the counter was Formica and there was a pie case by the register that usually had two or three pies in it, the kind with the too-tall meringue that looked impressive but tasted like sweetened air. Karen had tried the coconut cream once. The hot beef was the thing to get. Or the walleye basket on Fridays. Karen ate there once or twice a week, on nights when she didn’t feel like cooking on the hot plate in her room.
On Tuesday she drove in for dinner and saw Tom’s blue truck in the lot. He was sitting at the counter eating a burger and reading the Pilot-Independent. She almost sat at a booth but then didn’t, and took the stool two down from his, and the waitress got her a cup of coffee out of habit.
He looked up from the paper and nodded and she nodded back. For a while neither of them said anything. The café was half full. A family with kids in a booth by the window. Two men in seed caps at a table arguing about something, maybe baseball, maybe politics, it was hard to tell from the tone because up here both subjects got the same level of measured disagreement. The jukebox was playing something by Loretta Lynn.
“How’d you do today,” she said.
He’d done better. He took her advice about going deep and picked up four walleyes off the sunken island, trolling with a crawler harness right along the break. Kept two, released two. He said the big ones were in eighteen feet, right where the hard bottom turned to mud, and he smiled. It was a good smile. She looked down at her coffee.
He asked how long she’d been at the resort.
Since May, she said. But she’d been in Walker for two years. She left it at that and he didn’t push.
He told her he was from Rochester. He worked at the clinic there, not as a doctor, he said quickly, in maintenance. The buildings, the equipment, that kind of thing. He’d been doing it for fifteen years.
He came up to Leech Lake once a year, usually in July. He’d been doing it for five or six years. Always alone.
They talked for another twenty minutes. He asked about the lake, the town, whether the swimming was any good at the resort, though Karen never saw him swim. She told him about the beach, which was more rocks than sand, and about the better beach at the county park on the other end of town, and about the muskie that somebody had caught off the city dock in Walker the previous summer that was big enough to make the paper.
The waitress refilled her coffee. He paid his check and stood up and said he’d see her around, and she said sure, and he left. She sat and drank her coffee and watched his headlights pull out of the lot and turn right toward the resort.
She paid for her dinner and drove back in the dark. The lake was black except for one light on the far shore that could have been anything. She couldn’t tell.
Wednesday was hot again. She did laundry in the morning and hung the sheets on the line behind the lodge where they dried stiff in the sun.
Around eleven Tom came to the desk and asked if she had a Phillips-head screwdriver. The screen door on his porch was loose, the bottom hinge. She said she’d send someone to fix it and he said don’t bother, he could do it himself if she had the screwdriver. She found one in the drawer behind the desk, an old one with a wooden handle that had belonged to Earl. She gave it to him and he brought it back an hour later and said the hinge was tight now and he’d also tightened the one on the front door while he was at it, it had been wobbling.
She thanked him. He stood at the desk for a minute. He was looking at the mounted walleye on the wall behind her, a big one, ten or eleven pounds, with a brass plate underneath that said LEECH LAKE 1971 E. LINDGREN.
“Earl?” he said.
“Earl,” she said.
“Nice fish.”
“He talked about that fish for the rest of his life. Shirley said she heard about it more than she heard about their wedding.”
He smiled again. “Where’d he catch it?”
“He’d never say exactly. Somewhere in Kabekona Bay is all anyone could get out of him. He had a spot he wouldn’t share. Took it to the grave.”
“Good for him.”
He left. The whole exchange had taken maybe five minutes. It was the easiest conversation she’d had in months.
She thought about this for a while and then the phone rang and it was a woman asking about rates for August and Karen talked to her for ten minutes and then Shirley came in with a box of dish soap for the cabins and needed help carrying it and the morning went on. The guests in cabin eight wanted extra towels. The toilet in cabin nine was running. Karen jiggled the handle and it stopped. She made a note to replace the flapper valve when she had a chance, which probably meant October, after everyone had gone home.
Thursday morning was overcast and cooler. A front had come through in the night and the lake was choppy, with whitecaps out past the point. Karen stood on the dock in the early light and watched the waves come in. The dock was old, built by Earl and his brother-in-law in 1961, and it moved with the water in a way that was probably not safe. Shirley talked about replacing it every spring and never did. The boards were gray and splintery and one of them, the third from the end, had a soft spot you had to step around.
She didn’t see Tom that morning. His truck was in the lot but he hadn’t gone out on the lake. She noticed that she had noticed this and went back inside.
She went back to the lodge and did the things she did every morning. Started the coffee. Wiped down the counter. Checked the calendar for any arrivals or departures. There were none. The resort was full and everyone was staying through Saturday. She straightened the rack of brochures by the door, the ones for Paul Bunyan Land and the Heartland Trail and the casino that was newly built south of town. The Paul Bunyan Land brochure had a photo of the big talking Paul Bunyan statue in Brainerd on the front, the one that said hello to children by name, and Karen had been to it once as a kid and it had scared her. She told people this and they always laughed but she’d been five and the statue was huge and it knew her name, which at five years old is not funny, it is terrifying. She didn’t gamble and she’d never been to the casino. But the brochures needed straightening and so she straightened them.
Around ten o’clock the sky cleared and the wind dropped and the lake went flat. Tom came into the lodge. He was wearing the same flannel shirt, or one just like it. He poured himself a cup of coffee and stood by the window looking out at the water.
“Thought it was going to blow all day,” he said.
“It does that. Comes in fast, goes out fast.”
“I was going to go out early but it looked rough.”
“You could go now. It’ll be calm till evening probably.”
He nodded and drank his coffee. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get on the water. He walked over to the bookshelf by the fireplace, the one that had been there since Earl’s time, filled with paperbacks that guests had left behind over thirty years. Tom pulled one out and looked at the cover and put it back. He pulled out another one.
“You read any of these?” he asked.
“Some. There’s a Louis L’Amour in there that’s not bad. The Michener is about eight hundred pages and I got to page forty.”
He laughed. It was quiet, just a huff of air, but it was a real laugh. “I tried to read a Michener once. Hawaii. I think I’m still reading it technically.”
“I keep meaning to go back to it.”
“You won’t.”
“I know.”
He put the book back and stood there. The light from the window was behind him and she couldn’t see his face clearly. She realized she didn’t know much about him. She didn’t know if he had kids or what he did on weekends in Rochester or whether his house was messy or clean. She knew he fished walleye and could fix a screen door.
He took his coffee and went to the door.
“Good luck out there,” she said.
“Thanks.”
He was gone for six hours. She didn’t count. She just noticed when his boat pulled back in and he walked up from the dock with his rod and his tackle box and a stringer with fish on it.
Thursday night she went to the café again and he was there again. This time she sat at the counter next to him without thinking about it, or without thinking about it as much as she had a couple nights before.
He was eating the walleye basket. She ordered the same. The waitress, whose name was Denise and who had worked at this café for at least as long as Karen had been in Walker and possibly since the Eisenhower administration, brought her a coffee and raised one eyebrow approximately a quarter of an inch, which was the Denise equivalent of a detailed inquiry into Karen’s personal life. Karen ignored it.
“Caught six today,” Tom said. “Kept three. The biggest one was maybe four pounds.”
“Where?”
“Off the sunken island again. Same depth. I think they’re camped down there.”
They ate. The café was quieter tonight. The family with kids was gone. The two men in seed caps were back, same table, same disagreement. Karen had decided it was about baseball. One of them was a Twins fan and the other one was wrong about something, she couldn’t tell what, but the wrong one kept shaking his head and the Twins fan kept pointing at the table with his fork, jabbing at the table really, as if the answer was written there and the other man just refused to read it.
The jukebox was playing something country. She didn’t know what.
Tom asked where she was from. Originally, he meant.
Brainerd, she said. Born and raised. Her parents still lived there, on the south side, near the water tower. Her dad worked at the paper mill until it closed and then drove truck for a concrete company until he retired. Her mom worked at the school. Regular folk. She said “regular folk” and heard how it sounded and added, “I mean that in a good way.” He said he knew what she meant.
He was from Albert Lea. His parents were farmers, dairy, small operation. They’d sold the cows in ‘74 when the prices went bad and his dad took a job at the Wilson plant and then the plant closed too and they moved to Austin and then his dad drove truck. Similar, she said. He agreed.
He asked why she’d come to Walker and she said she’d needed to go somewhere and Walker was somewhere.
She asked if he’d been married and he said yes, a long time ago. Early twenties. It hadn’t lasted. He said “it didn’t work out” and she said “mine either” and that was all they said about it.
Denise refilled their coffees. The jukebox played. One of the old men at the table raised his voice slightly and the other one shook his head. A truck went by on the highway.
Tom paid for both their dinners. Karen let him. He just put the money on the counter and they walked out into the parking lot where the sky was still light because it was July and the days lasted forever.
“See you tomorrow,” he said.
“I’ll be around.”
She drove back to the resort behind him, his taillights in front of her on the highway.
Friday he came to the desk in the morning and asked if she wanted to go out on the lake.
She almost said no. She wasn’t sure why. As long as they were talking at the desk or over the counter at the café, it was just talking. A boat was something else.
She said yes.
He had a fourteen-foot Lund that he’d brought on a trailer, aluminum, with a 15-horse Johnson on the back. The morning was cool and the lake was glass, not a ripple, completely flat, and Karen knew that people who lived on the lake would talk about this morning later, that it would become one of those mornings.
They motored out slow. He didn’t say where they were going. The lake opened up around them. Leech Lake is big. A hundred and twelve thousand acres, which is a number that doesn’t mean anything until you’re out in the middle of it in a fourteen-foot boat and the shoreline is a dark line in every direction and you understand that you’re very small. Karen had known this her whole life, had grown up around lakes, but it still got her sometimes. A pelican flew over them, low, heading east. She’d never liked pelicans. They looked wrong for Minnesota, too tropical or something, even though they’d been coming to these lakes forever.
He cut the motor near the sunken island. She could feel it before she could see it, the water going from dark to light as the bottom came up. He rigged two rods with crawler harnesses and handed her one and she took it and they started fishing.
For a while they didn’t talk. The boat drifted. The lines went down. She watched her rod tip and felt the old familiar thing, the patience of it, the boredom. It had been years. She’d forgotten how it felt to just sit on a lake and wait.
He caught the first one. A walleye, maybe two pounds, which he brought in and unhooked carefully and held up for a second and then released. She watched his hands. He handled the fish without squeezing it and he wet his hands first so the slime coat wouldn’t come off. Not everyone bothered with that.
“You let it go,” she said.
“I’ve got enough fillets for the week.”
She nearly caught one twenty minutes later. It pulled hard and she brought it in badly, too fast, and it spit the hook at the boat and was gone. She swore, one word, and then was embarrassed, and he looked at her and said “that was a nice fish” and she could tell he wasn’t teasing.
They fished until noon. She caught two more and he caught three and they kept one between them, a big one, maybe five pounds, that Tom said he’d fillet for her if she wanted. She said she’d cook it if he wanted. Then they were both quiet for a minute.
He started the motor and they went back.
At the dock he tied off the boat and she climbed out and he handed her the rod and the tackle box and the stringer with the one walleye on it. He stepped onto the dock and they walked up toward the cabins and at the point where the path split, one way to the lodge and one way to the cabins, they stopped.
“I’ll clean the fish,” he said.
“I’ll cook it. Six o’clock?”
“Six is good.”
She walked back to the lodge.
She cooked the walleye on the hot plate in her room, breaded with flour and salt and pepper and fried in butter, which was the only way she knew how to cook walleye and which was also the best way. She didn’t have a proper kitchen, just the hot plate and a small counter and a mini-fridge, so she cooked the fish in two batches in a cast-iron skillet she’d bought at a yard sale in Hackensack the previous fall. The skillet was the only thing in her room that she cared about keeping. She’d left Brainerd with a car full of stuff and over the two years she’d gotten rid of most of it and the skillet had survived every purge.
She brought the fish and a few beers to his porch and they ate on the metal glider, the one that squeaked. The screen door was tight now, the hinge he’d fixed. The birch trees made shadows on the porch and the lake was visible through them, bright with the evening sun. There was a loon somewhere, far out. You could hear it but not see it.
They talked. It was easier now, after the morning on the lake. He told her about his job at the clinic, the boilers and the HVAC systems and the things that went wrong at three in the morning and how the night security guard, a guy named Phil, always had a thermos of the worst coffee Tom had ever tasted but would be offended if you didn’t take some. She told him about the guests at the resort, the small emergencies, the man from Edina who put his foot through the dock. He laughed at that. She told him about Shirley ordering the wrong keys and about the time a raccoon got into cabin three and the guest, a woman from St. Cloud, had called the front desk at midnight and said there was a burglar in her kitchen and Karen had gone over with a broom. She was talking too much. She knew she was talking too much. She kept talking.
He asked her what she was going to do in September when the resort closed. She said she didn’t know. Go back to the Red Owl, probably. Get an apartment in town again. She’d figure it out.
He nodded.
It got dark. The loon called again, closer now. The mosquitoes came out and they moved inside the cabin, to the small table by the window, and she opened another beer and he opened one and they sat across from each other in the yellow light of the cabin lamp. The lamp had a shade with a burn mark on it, a brown spot where someone had put it too close to a lightbulb years ago. Karen had noticed it the first time she cleaned this cabin in May and had meant to replace it and never had.
He told her about Albert Lea, about the farm. The cows, the barn, the particular smell of hay in July. He told her about his father, who had never wanted to sell the cows, who had done it because the numbers said he had to, and who had never been the same after. His father was still alive, living in Austin, but something had gone out of him. Tom said he visited every couple months and they sat in the living room and watched television and didn’t talk about the farm.
She understood that.
They sat and didn’t talk for a while. Outside, the lake made small sounds against the shore. Inside, the cabin smelled like fried fish and beer and the pine walls that had been absorbing things since 1948.
She should go. She knew that. Not because anything bad was happening but because staying wasn’t right. She sat in the chair and held her beer and looked at the burn mark on the lamp shade and didn’t move.
“I should get back,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Early morning.”
“Sure.”
She stood up. He held the door for her and she stepped onto the porch and the cool air hit her and she could smell the lake.
“Thank you for the fish,” he said.
“Sure.”
She walked back to the lodge. The grass between the cabins was wet with dew. She passed the gap where cabin four had been and went inside and brushed her teeth and got into bed.
Saturday morning she woke up at five and went to the desk because Saturdays were turnover days and there was work to do. Cabins to clean. Guests checking out, new ones checking in. She started the coffee and got out the cleaning supplies and began the list of things that needed to happen before noon.
Tom’s checkout was at eleven. He’d paid through Saturday. She knew this because she’d written it on the card when he checked in and she’d looked at the card again on Thursday, which she’d told herself was just to confirm the dates, which it was, but it was also something else that she didn’t want to name.
She cleaned cabins one, two, and three. They were the usual Saturday mess. Sheets to strip, floors to sweep, bathrooms to scrub. Cabin one had left the stove on, which happened more than you’d think and which made Karen furious every time even though she never said anything about it because what would be the point, they were already gone. Cabin two had left a full garbage bag on the porch and a note that said “Sorry about the ants” and Karen found the ants, a line of them coming in under the kitchen window, and she sprayed them and wiped up the dead ones and washed the counter and moved on. Cabin three was fine. Cabin three was always fine. The couple in three this week had been coming for eight years and they left the place cleaner than they found it. Karen wished all the cabins were cabin three.
At nine o’clock she looked out the lodge window and saw that Tom’s truck was gone. The trailer was still there, the Lund sitting on it, so he hadn’t left for good. He was probably in town, getting gas or breakfast or picking up something he needed. She went back to cleaning.
At ten she finished cabin five and walked down to six. His cabin. The door was open. The bed was made. The cabin was neat. Neater than any cabin she’d cleaned all morning. The garbage was in the trash. The dishes were washed and stacked on the counter. The bathroom was wiped down. He’d even folded the towels.
On the table by the window, next to the lamp with the burn mark, there was a piece of paper folded once. Her name was written on the outside in blue ink, in handwriting she didn’t recognize because she’d never seen his handwriting. KAREN. Just that. Block letters, careful.
She picked it up and unfolded it and read the one sentence that was written there. She read it again. Then she folded the paper and put it in the pocket of her jeans and stood there for a while, in his cabin, not doing anything.
His key was on the table next to where the note had been. Karen picked it up and held it in her hand, the old key with the wooden fob that had a “6” burned into it, one of Earl’s originals. She held it for a minute. Then she put it in her other pocket and went to strip the bed.
The cabin got cleaned like all the cabins, top to bottom, bathroom first, then the kitchen, then the main room. She swept the floor and mopped it and emptied the trash and put fresh sheets on the bed and fresh towels in the bathroom. Replaced the soap. Checked the screen door and it was tight, the hinge still good.
On the porch she stopped for a moment. The glider was there. The ashtray. The lake through the birch trees. She stood there longer than she needed to.
The note was still in her pocket. She took it out and read it one more time. Put it back.
She locked cabin six and walked to the lodge and put the key on the hook and sat down behind the desk. The next guests were due at two. She straightened the brochures. Wiped down the counter. Made a fresh pot of coffee, even though nobody had asked for one.