No wonder the snow’s gleaming. Al’s pickup. The headlights are dazzling around Al as he runs toward the cab. Fisher scrambles. His knee hits the steering wheel, his elbow bumps the window. He jerks the steering wheel to send the cab back out into the road and his foot’s searching for the gas pedal because there’s Al with his pale egg of a face, and he’s holding onto the doorframe, and Fisher’s not even looking where he’s going. He’s staring at Al, sees his mouth widen as Fisher’s foot hits the gas and the cab jolts off along the road. The dark chips of Al’s eyes soften, his face strains, then he’s gone. Fisher guns the engine and sends the cab screaming down the road with the door open and the dome light on, everything the light touches looking small and shabby.
He drives like the devil himself is chasing him. Off along the straight stretch of road where the snow folds away on both sides, staring past the web of cracks where Lyle’s head smashed into the glass and there, twitching green across the sky in electric waves, is the aurora, magnificent tonight when nothing deserves to be.
Fisher lets himself laugh and the sound of it sets him on edge because there’s something crazy about it. It’s miles before he stops and shuts the door. By then the cab’s bone-achingly cold.
39
FISHER GETS GAS in Sumner. A wind has picked up and scours his face as he watches the numbers on the pump change. Every few seconds he turns his whole upper body so that he can peer out the funnel of his hood. Along the highway comes a pair of headlights, and another, but they slide on by.
Fisher wonders: just how badly hurt was Lyle? Bad enough for Al to drive back to town? Or is Lyle just bruised and furious, and right at this moment he and Al are scanning the few bright lights of Sumner, looking for him? And here he is, under the glaring lamps of the gas station, beside his ridiculous cab with its ridiculous bear logo. Thinking about it gives him the shivers worse than the cold. The pump clicks off and he fumbles the cap, has to try three times before it catches on the thread. By then he’s all twitchy with fear. He wants to take off into the darkness but he knows better than that; what chance will he stand if he leaves without supplies? What good will he be to Bree if he arrives with no food, no nothing?
If she’s even there, he reminds himself. This is just his best bet, that’s all.
He parks around the back of Sumner’s small supermarket where the mouths of the dumpsters gape with half-flattened boxes. Inside there’s a deli and a bakery, and Fisher’s so hungry saliva wells up in his mouth in painful spurts before he’s even decided he has to eat, because what good will he be to Bree half sick from hunger?
The woman behind the counter has her black ballcap pushed way back as though to tell the world she doesn’t care about the acne scars that pock her forehead and cheeks. She holds out an order form and a stub of pencil. “Closing up in a few minutes—all we got’s what’s in the cooler.” She turns away.
“Just give me a pastrami on rye.”
She’s wiping down a plastic chopping board. She doesn’t turn around until she’s leaned it against the wall. “All we got’s what’s in the cooler.” Her voices presses a little harder on the words this time, like he must be stupid.
But it’s hard to look in the cooler when his eyes are tugged toward the doors. Every time a customer leaves those doors whoosh open, and he’s so afraid that his chest turns hollow and the air seems too thin to support him. He’s barely looking at the dishes of cut meats and salads laid out in front of him. Instead he sees Lyle falling backward out of the cab with his arms stretched like a diver’s and his face taut with shock, sees the door hang open for a moment, and Al’s face like a demon’s. He remembers the surge of relief that made him shove his boot hard on the gas, and how the door had swung and flapped for miles until he stopped to close it. But it wasn’t just relief. There’d been a measure of raw joy in it too: Lyle’s hands grabbing at his parka, his fingers slipping, the weight of him suddenly and deliciously gone. Lyle, lazy fuckhead Lyle, Lyle who’s so psycho, so sick in his head, that he shot Pax.
The supermarket doors slide open and Fisher’s eyes jerk up. A man. His breath catches. An old guy with a face sharp as an ax. Not Lyle. Not Al.
Behind the counter the woman has given up on him. She’s rinsing out containers in a hiss of water. He looks at the order pad: a mass of choices his head’s too clogged to make sense of. He calls out, “Just give me a cold cut on whatever bread. OK?”
“Choose your cold cut from the cooler, and mark it down on your order form.”
He makes himself stare at the steel dishes. Most of them are empty. Some have a spoonful or two of what looks like egg salad or tuna mayonnaise. On others slices of ham lie greasy and limp. But what the hell. “A ham sandwich. OK? Just give me a ham goddamn salad sandwich.” He slaps the order form onto the cooler. “And a rootbeer.”
Her lips vanish and two creases appear on her brow, thin and deep as claw marks. She doesn’t look up.
“Be back for it in a minute,” he says, but she keeps her head down over the bread she’s buttering for him.
A line of yellow bearpaw prints leads toward the back of the store and out through a pair of swinging doors to the bathrooms. There’s something bleak about the backrooms of stores, something that makes the lights and packages and shining fruit laid out up front seem as luring and ill-intentioned as a trap. You push through the doors with their scuff marks and blurred plastic windows, and in an instant the light’s thin, the walls stacked with pallets of plastic-wrapped boxes, and the air’s slippery with the smells of cleaning fluid and old coffee, because this is what life really is.
On one wall hangs a clock for employees to punch in, a handwritten notice in lazy capitals above it saying, YOU MUST CLOCK OUT ON BREAK OR BE DOCKED AN HOUR’S PAY! THIS MEANS YOU! Here the pawprints are grimy and their yellow paint flaking away. In the corner, propped up like a drunk, a mop stands upended in a metal bucket, and Fisher catches the piney stink of disinfectant, a smell that reminds him of throwing up at school in the corner of the classroom and being given the mop to clean up, because didn’t he know better?
The men’s bathroom reeks of smoke and a cigarette butt’s floating in the toilet bowl. Fisher’s hands are cold against his dick, and his dick’s soft and damp in his hands. As he pisses the butt bobs like a lost ship and tiredness drags at him, like part of him’s escaping. The warmth of his soul maybe. It’s just leaking away and there’s no stopping it. With a shiver he tucks his dick back into his boxers. For a moment he thinks about checking the cut on his thigh. It’s stinging, of course it is. But what can he do about it? Instead he zips up his fly and turns away.
The washroom sink’s gray with dirt and the faucet so loose it wobbles then gushes when he barely touches it. He rubs soap and water over his face, then stares at himself in the mirror over the paper towel he dries himself with. Twenty-four hours and he’s a changed man. Before he had the forlorn look of the abandoned. Now he could be a long-time drunk, or a guy living homeless, his face bruised and pale, his stubble uneven, his eyes with a desperate look. Who’s he to save Breehan? he thinks. Who’s he trying to kid?
The small supermarket feels like a place out of the past, before stores grew so big that you couldn’t call out to someone from one end to the other. Its ceiling’s low and the shelves reach just below head-height. He pays for his sandwich and steers a small cart across the worn linoleum. It’s light as a toy, at least until he piles in cans of chilli, baked beans, spaghetti and meatballs, ravioli, condensed milk, then bottles and jars of everything from water to powdered coffee to apple sauce, plus sugar, and chocolate, toilet paper, even a couple of cheap dusty sleeping bags stuffed into a bottom shelf because hell, there’s nothing more dumb than heading off to a cabin that’s miles from nowhere with no supplies. At least, back in the days when he was driving a truck up to Prudhoe Bay, through hundreds of miles of nothing, he always took off with a shitload of supplies, never mind that he had G
od’s own luck and never broke down, or not for long enough to need them.
He eats his sandwich as he goes, leaving wisps of shredded lettuce on the floor, wiping his lips on the back of his hand. At the end of one aisle, in a dim corner where the light doesn’t quite reach, he runs his hands over pocketknives hanging from a display. Cheap crap, he thinks, not knives that’ll become a familiar weight in your pocket, that you’d use every day, several times a day. Like the knife Al took from him, a good goddamn knife, for all it was one he’d taken from a fare who wouldn’t pay or couldn’t pay. And now, when he needs a knife most, he doesn’t have one and is looking at these pieces of junk. One of them has a can opener and a decent blade, a screwdriver, a small fork even. Better than nothing, if not by much.
It’s a serious business, this venturing out into the heart of winter: one slip and you’re a goner. You forget to bring matches. The small gas bottle doesn’t fit your camp stove. You lock your keys in your car. You let the cabin door snap shut behind you when you’re in nothing more than a sweatshirt and underwear, because you were just stepping outside for a piss. Then the cold swamps you. Even now, in the warmth of this supermarket, Fisher remembers the crush of the cold when he was locked in the outhouse. Dear God, he thinks, and Bree’s out there somewhere. She’s not prepared. She’s the sort of dumb kid who wears sneakers in January to look cool. The few times he took her camping—at Blair Lake and down in the state park—she sat in the car until he’d set up the tent, then sat in the tent with her knees folded up to her chest and said, “What now?”
Ahead of him at the checkout is a sinewy old woman in work jeans and huge white bunny boots. Beneath her hat her hair shows as rough and gray as iron. She stares shamelessly into Fisher’s cart then sucks in her lips like she’s seen it all before, that there’s something he’s doing wrong, poor fuck.
Fisher’s purchases fill six plastic bags to bursting. They hang from his hands and bang against his legs. In the small foyer he sets them down and digs around for the pocketknife. It’s a job and a half to get it out of its plastic, then there it is, a bright red lozenge in his palm. He stares at it for long enough that it looks like something he’d own, then slips it into his pocket.
Outside the cold makes the wound in his thigh smart but he walks slowly, slowly enough to let his eyes search the glow condensed beneath the parking lot’s few lights. He keeps to the shadows as he makes his way around the building. There’s the cab, the eyes of the cartoon bear eerily distinct in the darkness. Already it’s cold inside and the steering wheel stiff as he does a u-turn and heads back to the road. Headlights behind him. A small silver car. He eases the cab onto the highway heading east. He’s so pleased with himself he doesn’t notice the pickup that slides out onto the road behind him and no wonder: its headlights are off. By the time Fisher does notice it—when the driver flicks on the lights just where the streetlights of Sumner give out—it’s too late. The town, such as it is, is gone.
You’d think there’d be something Fisher could do to escape his pursuers. And there is, he tells himself, there surely is. He just hasn’t put his finger on it. He could lead Al and Lyle away from Bree—but then, how will he find her? Besides, there aren’t many roads to turn off on, not out here, and everything’s telescoped in by the darkness. You want to turn off? You peer down the beams of your headlights for the pea-green of a road sign, and in an instant, there it is, just a few yards away, half hidden under a layer of frost. Too late. You’ve passed it.
The lights of the pickup distract him, as does the uneven thunk-thunk of the broken wing mirror banging against the cab door. He needs to think. He reaches into one of the plastic bags and yanks out a bottle, unscrews the cap and pours the iced coffee into his mouth. It’s as sweet and thick as melted ice cream. He drinks it anyway, then stretches his neck this way and that. Only now does the cab feel comfortably warm. Over the coffee on his breath he detects another smell, muddy and unpleasant, so slight at first that it’s barely there.
He has to lose Lyle and Al, he thinks. He can do that, can’t he? Doesn’t he drive for a living, for fuck’s sake?
He drains the last of the coffee and tosses the bottle behind him. A moment later his foot’s hard on the gas pedal and the engine’s roaring. He sends the cab slicing across a bend, then the next, for all that his heart’s frantic against his ribs. For whole seconds at a time the pickup’s lights vanish. All he needs is enough time to pull off and kill the lights, to let Al and Lyle pass without spotting him, but here comes the pickup once more, tearing up the road behind him. A crack splits the air. A shot. For fuck’s sake, and he pushes harder on the gas, but it’s no good. The minivan’s not built for speed. He takes a curve too fast and the tires slip enough to scare him. He’s shifting his foot to the brake when the rear window fractures into a cobweb with a dark hole at its center.
In seconds he’s shivering from the cold being sucked in. Funny how you can forget about the temperature outside when the heat’s blasting. But now—now he hunches into himself for warmth, and the pickup settles in behind him once more. On he leads them, eating up the miles between Sumner and the cabin because, for the life of him, he can’t think what else to do.
40
IT’S THE STILL heart of the night, a time when darkness takes on the depth of permanency and your soul clenches at the sight of it. The cab’s headlights catch a flash of green: Moose Lake 5 miles. Only five miles. A panic trips inside Fisher. All he’s doing is leading Lyle and Al straight to Bree, and they’re not going to take it well that Brian’s not there. Will Bree know enough to be scared of them? Or will she get mad if they won’t believe Brian’s dead, and things’ll get out of hand?
He has to think. He tells himself there must be something he can do, only he’s thinking so hard he’s not concentrating, doesn’t realize how much he’s let the cab slow until the pickup’s so close its lights dazzle off the mirror. He hits the gas hard enough for the cab to shimmy and slip, sees the scabby trunks of spruce, a snowbank all yellow in his lights, all of it sliding past him, then he’s wrestling the steering wheel until there, there’s the blacktop again.
He recognizes where he is: the small bridge over Deadman’s Creek that rattles when you pass over it. At the end of a track there’s a short row of mailboxes nailed to one end of a railroad tie, like a few tenacious teeth in a moose jaw; then there’s the gas station that hasn’t been open in years, the building collapsing in on itself. Jensen’s, that’s what it was called.
Then it comes to him, like a match struck in the darkness: he doesn’t have to lead Lyle and Al to Bree. All they know is that the cabin’s on the lake. He can take the third turn-off instead of the fourth and they won’t even pass the old cabin. Instead he’ll lead them up past Pa Jensen’s place with its mounds of busted-up cars, and buckets from the dredge that’s been gone for sixty years, all of it just bumps under the snow in his vast yard, and down to Jim Jensen’s cabin, right on the lake. With any luck, Jim’ll have been out there recently enough for the place not to look deserted.
And then? Fisher can’t imagine. But hasn’t he thought it far enough through for now? And he drives on like a man possessed.
When Fisher pulls up close to Jim Jensen’s cabin, the pickup pulls in right behind him. In the glare of the headlights, the cabin’s more ramshackle than he remembers, the plywood more stained, the cheap glass of the windows gleaming thin as soap bubbles. The place looks like it’s sagging into itself, but then, it looked that way fifteen years ago when he banged on the door in a panic the night Jan went into labor early with Bree.
When Fisher gets out he smells woodsmoke on the air. No vehicle parked here, though. Could be the smoke’s drifting in from across the lake, held down by the cold air. He steps up onto the narrow porch. It’s stacked with boxes and garbage bags three deep.
A shudder and a grunt behind him: the pickup’s engine shutting off, then its headlights. The cabin’s bare windows, t
he bags of garbage heaped on its porch, the raw teeth of a saw hanging from a nail by the door, all lose their gleam as the night sweeps in.
Beyond the dark shape of the cabin lies the frozen lake. Under the crooked peel of moon hanging in the sky, Fisher can make out its flat expanse, a curiously luminous blue. Close to the horizon, just above the trees, a few stars glitter, but the air’s too choked with ice crystals for much else to show.
He tugs at his hat. The soft, bruised flesh where the woman hit him throbs, fluids dammed up where they shouldn’t be, and the cut on his thigh prickles horribly as the cold slices into his flesh. How old he feels, his chest sore, his ribs aching, his whole self broken apart and weary. Dear God, he thinks, how did that happen so quickly? He remembers his younger self, bulky as a bear, standing outside this cabin with a suffocating tightness in his chest at the thought of his wife bunched up and moaning on their bed, and his child being born out here where there was no help to be had. Now here he is again, fifteen years later, still trying to save Bree.
Boots grunt across the packed snow and Fisher turns, catches a flash of shadow in the darkness, then he’s reeling and Lyle’s on top of him, his fist sharp against his chest. He’s yelling, “You fucker! You goddamn fucker!” Fisher’s face down in the snow. He can’t breathe. The cold’s everywhere. He shoves hard and Lyle rolls off him, far too easily. When he’s struggled to his feet he understands: there’s Lyle, lopsided, one arm hanging strangely. Broken, perhaps, or the shoulder dislocated, and Lyle’s stoked up a crazy anger, is coming at him again, crouched forward and his injured arm swinging like an ape’s.
Dead of Winter Page 18
