“This used to be an air force base, aye,” the stranger said. He was a local man from the Upper Peninsula, so he had that yooper rise in his voice. “Kincheloe Air Force Base, back in World War Two. Did ya know the Soo locks were the most heavily defended position in America back then? I guess they figured if the Japs or Germans were gonna bomb us, they’d start at the locks and cut off our ore supply.”

“That’s interesting,” the left-hander said. I’m sure he said it in a way that made the stranger feel that it really was interesting, and that therefore the stranger must be an interesting man himself. That’s the kind of thing the left-hander can do, with just two words.

The airport terminal itself is a one-room hut sitting next to that long runway. The left-hander went into the terminal and picked up his luggage. It didn’t take long, because the copilot just grabbed the suitcases two at a time and carried them in himself. If the lefthander was worried about getting his rental car at such a tiny airport at eleven o’clock at night, he had no reason to be. A woman named Eileen was there waiting for him, keys in hand. That was her job, after all. When somebody reserves a car, she stays up late that night and waits for the plane to come in. The lefthander signed a form, took the keys from her, and thanked her. He thanked Eileen with a smile that she’d remember for months afterward, I’m sure. Then she went home to bed.

He found his rental car in the parking lot. Across the street from the airport, there is a factory where they recondition auto parts, twenty-four hours a day. The factory sends up a constant stream of smoke, and the light from the airport makes the smoke look silver against the night sky. He must have stood there and looked at the smoke for a moment, breathing in the cold air. The coat he had just taken out of his suitcase was not warm enough. He had started his day in California, where it was seventy-one degrees. Here in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, on an April night a good three weeks after the official start of spring, it was twelve degrees.