about. Ginny was tall, clever, a product of Chicago who had come to North Dakota as a customs inspector, with the primary objective of getting away from urban life. She’d fallen in love quickly with this guy, who in turn had started making trips to Canada, hoping she would clear him when he returned. Sometimes he’d even bought things, stuff he could pay duty on. She remembered the first time he’d tried that approach: He’d spent thirty dollars in a Winnipeg bookstore for a history of Canadian aviation and had clearly been disappointed when she’d waved him through because books were free of duty.
His friends had tried to warn him away from Ginny. She’ll get tired of the harsh winters, they’d said. And small-town life. Eventually she’ll go back to Chicago. They’d talked about Chicago more or less in the tone they’d have used for Pluto. But twenty years had passed, and she was still here. And she and Tom thrived on snowy nights and roaring fires.
“Is it creating a problem?” she asked, puzzled, standing over the trench that Lasker had dug around the thing. It was about six feet deep, and a ladder stuck out of it.
“Not really.”
“Then why do we care? There isn’t any reason to tear it out of the ground, is there? Just cut it off and don’t worry about it.”
“Where’s your sense of romance?” he asked, playing back a line she used occasionally. “Don’t you want to know what it is?”
She smiled. “I know what it is. It’s a pole.”
“How’d it get here?”
Ginny looked into the trench. “There’s something down there,” she said. “At the bottom.”
It was a piece of cloth. Lasker climbed down and dug around the fabric. Tried to free it. “It’s connected to the pole,” he said.
“This seems like more trouble than it’s worth.”
“It shouldn’t be here.”
“Okay. But we’ve got other things to do today.”
He scowled and chunked his spade into the soft earth.
It looked like a mast. Complete with sail.
Connected to a deck.
The Laskers invited their neighbors, and everybody dug.
The deck was part of a yacht. And the yacht was of not-inconsiderable size.
The revelation came gradually during a week’s work by a growing force of friends and high-school kids and even passers-by. The shark’s fin appeared to be a decorative piece atop one of two masts.
The yacht itself was a substantial piece of marine architecture, complete with pilothouse and cabins and full rigging. They hauled it out of the ground and laid it on its side, propping it up with stacks of cinder blocks. Lasker’s younger son, Jerry, played a hose on it. And as the muck washed away they saw bright scarlet paint and creamy white inboard paneling and lush pine-colored decks. The water created a fine spray where it struck the hull. Cables dangled from the starboard side, front and rear. Mooring cables, probably.
With every hour the crowd grew.
Betty Kausner touched the keel once or twice, tentatively, as though it might be hot.
“It’s fiberglass, I think,” said her husband, Phil.
Jack Wendell stood off to one side, hands on his hips, staring. “I don’t think so,” Jack said. He’d been in the Navy once. “It doesn’t feel like fiberglass,” he said.
“Tom.” Betty Kausner’s eyes found Lasker. “Whose boat is it?”
Lasker had no idea. The boat was gorgeous. It gleamed in the shrunken Dakota sun.
At least once every few minutes, someone asked whether it was a joke.
Lasker could think of only one reason someone would bury a boat like this, and that was that it had something to do with drugs. He fully expected to find bodies in it, and, when they went inside, he peeked reluctantly in each cabin.
He was gratified to find nothing amiss.
The boat looked different from anything Lasker had seen before, although he couldn’t have said why. It might have been, that first morning, the shifting texture of the light beneath dark passing clouds. It might have been the proportion of bow to stern, of tiller to mainmast. It might have been some subtle set of numbers in the geometry of the craft.
Will glanced toward the east, in the general direction of the Red River of the North. “It’s a long way to the water,” he said.
“It looks in good shape.” Ray Hammond, who owned the land to the east, along Route 11, scratched his head. “It looks like you could run her out tomorrow.” He touched the sails with the tip of his boot. “These might need a little soap and water, though.”