fiction The Superior Gatsby By John Smolens
Then he drifted back to Lake Superior, and he was still searching for something to do on the day that Dan Cody’s yacht dropped anchor in the shallows along shore. — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
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Part I an Cody stood at the starboard rail of his yacht Tuolomee, watching the boy row across the flats off of Little Girls Point. Torn green jersey, a pair of canvas pants, and still in his teens, it was his smile that bored through Cody’s afternoon gin and tonics, alerting him to an unbridled ambition, a vulpine want that could not be denied. His youth and virility posed such a threat that Cody called down the deck stairs, “Billings, my carbine on deck!” Grinning, the tanned, blond lad in the dinghy said, “This is not a safe anchorage, sir.” Dan Cody discovered that he had a gimlet glass in his hand. The ice had melted. Still, he drained the contents, watered-down gin, compliments of the Bronfman family of Canada. The good stuff, not the bootleg poison that drove people to blindness, hallucinations, and death.
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Marquette Monthly
“Why is this not a secure mooring?” “The wind on Lake Superior is unpredictable. It can shift at any moment, and if it does, your fine boat could be driven ashore. She’ll break up in no time. Superior is full of shipwrecks.” “That a fact?” Dan Cody’s bellowing laugh was designed to create fear in his interlopers. He elicited no such response in the lad seated on the thwart in this dinghy. Billings came up on deck, silent and obedient as ever, took the empty gimlet glass from the railing and handed the Winchester to Cody. Cody liked the heft of his rifle, the feel of the wood grain stock. “I have worked the Nevada silver mines, and the copper rushes from Montana to the Yukon, and you are telling me that my ‘boat’ is in danger. You think I don’t recognized danger when I see it?” That smile persisted, a gift still offered. “I am only referring to the winds here on Lake Superior, sir.” “The winds. What’s your name, son?” A moment’s hesitation, and then, “Gatsby. My name’s Jay Gatsby.” Dan Cody was a man of means who could satisfy his
September 2021
rampant impulses. (Where other men were suspicious of hunches, he had learned long ago to follow every whim and fancy.) Something about the boy, his strong shoulders and arms, his sun-bleached hair told Dan Cody he was lying. Why would he lie about his name? But that was the key: he would lie; he would fabricate a new personality, a skin that suited his needs. Cody raised the carbine, fitting it to his shoulder, and sighted down the barrel at the boy’s chest. “Sir,” Billings said in his quiet fashion. “That will be all, Billings.” “Of course, sir.” He descended the stairs to the saloon. “Tell me, Jay Gatsby,” Cody said, “what is it that you value most in life?” Unperturbed, the boy raised his head and considered the sky. “A most interesting question.” “Is it?” “Yes. There is no one, definitive answer.” “You’re prevaricating, young man. Not a wise thing to do as this gun is loaded.” “Oh, I have no doubt about that. No, I was just thinking about the notion of value, how it is often only considered
