Hard Cold Winter

by Glen Erik Hamilton

  “Not my idea of better,” I said.

  “What the fuck does that mean?” said Fireplug. “You watch your mouth, asswipe.” His pupils were pinpricks. The guard chuckled.

  I looked at Reuben. “He one of yours?” I said.

  “Hmm?” Reuben had a little trouble focusing. “Pauly? No, he’s jus’ hanging around.”

  “You wanna go?” Pauly said. He was up on his toes, hands already tightened into fists at his sides.

  I put my hand on Pauly’s face and shoved hard. He took a step back, right off the edge of the loading dock, and fell five feet backward onto the asphalt. The impact sounded like a sack of melons.

  The guard hadn’t moved. He just stared at me. Pauly moaned. And Reuben started cracking up.

  “If he needs an ambulance,” I said to the guard as I walked down the steps, “you wait until Willard’s moved his stuff out.”

  “Hey, Shaw,” Reuben yelled after me, still bent over with laughter. “You come back when we get the cage matches going. I swear I split any bets you win for me. Fucking beast.”

  AGE SIXTEEN

  Our Paladins were getting creamed. The football game was only one minute into the second half, and already looking like a rerun of the first, with Garfield High rolling over our defense like a threshing machine.

  I sat in the stands with Rob and Luis Firmino, surrounded by cheering students and family members of the home team. Enemy territory. They waved their Go Bulldog flags. The Firmino brothers and I were the only crimson blemishes in the waving field of purple, the contrast uncomfortably obvious under the hard glare of the stadium lights.

  I’d come to the game partly to watch my friend Davey Tolan play. Davey was small, but he could beat anybody on the field when it came to quick feet. Unfortunately one speed demon wasn’t going to get the job done. Davey managed one touchdown until Garfield started crashing the line. So far those six points were the only thing keeping the game from being a shutout.

  “Geez, Van,” said Rob. “Coach is pissed at you.”

  I knew it. When we’d said hello to our friends at halftime, Coach Kray had ordered us off the field. No one else, just us. And Rob swore he had glared at me from the opposite side of the field during timeouts.

  In my first year at Watson High I’d played running back, the same position Davey had now, but by the time I was a sophomore I’d gained enough meat on my bones for Coach to move me to defensive tackle. After a couple of games, he bumped me up to the starting line.

  “See that?” he had bellowed after I’d knocked the opposing team’s halfback out of bounds and upside down. “Shaw ain’t huge. But that’s how you mothers should hit somebody! Show some gee-damned aggression!”

  But early last summer, things had changed for me. My granddad Dono had taken me on two trips, one to Portland, and one east to Billings, Montana. Both jobs were fun. More than that, both were profitable. I’d scored two grand. I wanted more. And that meant keeping my afternoons and weekends free. When practices had started up in July, I wasn’t there. Coach Kray called the house. No matter how many times I told him I had taken an after-school job—close enough to the truth—he toasted my ear for ten minutes, telling me how much I was letting down my school, my teammates, and myself. He called once a night for a week, until Dono took the phone from me and quietly informed Coach that if he referred to me as a quitter one more time, Dono would teach him the difference between American football and what he called Belfast Rules Rugby. The phone calls stopped after that.

  So now we were getting mauled, and Coach seemed to blame me for the whole mess.

  “He’ll get over it,” I said.

  “Whatever,” said Luis. “But you better pray you don’t pull him for Chem class next semester, Vannie.”

  Luis liked to call me Vannie. He called everybody by some nickname, even if it ticked them off. Luis didn’t care. He also didn’t care who knew he had a stone crush on one of the Garfield players. ’Phobes could go screw themselves sideways, he would say, sometimes right to the ’phobes’ faces. Which was exactly why Rob had asked me to come to the game, in case Luis’s attitude created a situation.

  The Paladins fumbled the ball before they could get it to Davey. To look at something else, I scanned the crowd for girls.

  I spotted one worth looking at, off our side of the bleachers by the concession stand. Dark hair in minibraids, very long limbs in purple leggings and a white tank top. She was sitting up on the wheelchair ramp railing, legs tangled around the pipes, shoulders back, like she was posing for an invisible photographer.

  Then she turned around. I laughed, mostly at myself.

  Elana Coll. Big Will Willard’s niece.

  What was Elana doing here? She was fourteen, barely. Too young to go to Garfield. With her height she could pass. Maybe she was dating a guy who went here. I usually saw Elana with a flock of tween girls like Lucille Boylan and Tammi Feitz trailing after her.

  I watched her. She kept her eyes on the concession stand. The long lines of customers from halftime had dwindled to a trickle of people, and only one skinny kid was left in the stand to take orders. He took the money from each customer and made change out of a little steel lockbox. Cash only, just like the games at Watson.

  Boys tossed furtive glances at Elana as they walked past. Some made sure to walk past more than once. Her eyes stayed on the skinny kid, and the money.

  “Hang here,” I said to Rob. “I’ll be back.”

  “Hustle up. No way I want to sit to the end of this horror movie,” Rob said.

  “Which one is she?” Luis teased.

  Elana was so focused on the concession stand that I was sitting on the railing next to her before she turned. She had painted dark black eyeliner all around her green eyes, and her lips shone under a thick layer of caramel-colored gloss.

  “Oh, hey,” she said, recognition hitting her. “You’re Van.”

  “I didn’t know you were into Mathletes,” I said, nodding toward the geeky counter boy.

  “Huh?”

  “You’ve been staring at him for like half an hour.”

  She looked back and forth between the kid and me. “What, are you stalking me?”

  I grinned. “It’s a really dumb idea. The cashbox, I mean.”

  Elana stiffened and hunched her shoulders. “I don’t know what you mean. Or care.”

  “Okay.”

  I watched the game. She held out for one more Garfield first down.

  “Why is it a bad idea?” she asked.

  “I gotta guess at a couple of things,” I said. “At the end of the third quarter, Computer Camper there will stop selling soda and popcorn and lock everything up, just like at football games at Watson. Maybe you’ve already got a way to get into the stand. But he’ll probably lock the box in a cabinet inside the stand, too.”

  “Maybe that’s not a problem. Maybe I can pick locks.”

  “Fine.”

  “You think I’m lying?”

  “Like you said, I don’t care. So it takes an extra minute or five for you to open the cabinet, and the box. Meanwhile that cop watching the crowd will probably come down here to keep an eye on people leaving the game.”

  She glanced up the bleachers. She’d known right where the cop was without looking around for him, which was one point in her favor.

  “Maybe he comes down,” she said. “Maybe not.”

  “Where you gonna hide the cash?” I said. “It’s all small bills. You got no pockets. Unless you’re wearing a much bigger bra than you need.”

  She flushed. “You’re an asshole.”

  “But I’m not wrong.”

  I watched the game, and the cop, for another minute. He hadn’t looked our way. Didn’t mean he hadn’t noticed Elana hanging around.

  “You think you could open the cabinet?” she said.

  I was sure I could steal the cop’s police cruiser and disable its transponder before he noticed it was gone, but this wasn’t a game of you-show-me-yours.
/>   “I think it’s too much risk for three or four hundred bucks,” I said.

  “Would you do it?” said Elana. She slid off the railing to stand almost in front of me, a little slantwise, head tilted just so. Another pose for the unseen photographer. “It would really help me out.”

  “Nope.”

  “Please,” she said. She moved close, touching my thigh with hers. Close enough for me to smell floral soap and hair spray. She tossed her head back and gave me a big green-eyed invitation.

  “Try that on the kid at the counter,” I said. “He’ll probably hand over the box without even knowing it.”

  Garfield must have scored again, because the crowd in the bleachers behind us suddenly roared. Elana flinched. When the noise died down she pouted at me and folded her arms.

  “Jackoff,” she said, without any heat to it. “I need the money.”

  “We all need the money,” I said. “That’s why they put it in steel boxes with cops around.”

  “You go to Watson, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll be at Roosevelt next year. Too bad.” The enticing look was back. “Would have been cool to see you.”

  I was saying a silent thanks that Elana Coll wouldn’t be lurking around during my senior year when she stepped in and kissed me hard on the mouth. I didn’t immediately kiss back. I didn’t move away. She broke it off an instant before I decided.

  “See you,” she said, smirking. She took off at a fast walk out the exit. The candy smell of her lip gloss lingered.

  When I got back to where the Firminos were sitting, Luis was grinning so wide that the corners of his mouth almost touched his pointy sideburns.

  “Ooooo, Vannie,” he said.

  “I don’t know her, do I?” said Rob, frowning at the gate where Elana had left the stadium. “She’s hot.”

  “She’s like fourteen,” I said.

  Luis waved a hand, weary of the world and everyone in it. “If there’s grass on the field, then you play, fool.”

  “Flag!” laughed Rob. “Ten yards at least.”

  I shook my head. Elana Coll had definitely scored some points off me. I just wasn’t sure how.

  CHAPTER TWO

  AT SIX A.M. THE next morning I joined the line of cars filing onto the early ferry to Bainbridge Island. My truck’s cold engine clattered in protest as I gunned it up the steep ramp and onto the ferry’s upper parking level. By the time the boat began its sluggish pull away from the pier, I’d bought a cup of coffee and was standing out on the deck.

  I passed the hot paper cup between hands and looked at the black skyline still waiting for dawn. The city had changed radically in the ten years I had been away. Was still changing. Evolution seemed to be a constant. Even after the economy tanked, construction cranes kept sprouting up like skeletal sunflowers, transforming the old into new and the newer into bigger. Corporations took advantage of the slump to double down on foreclosed real estate.

  Luce Boylan was making the same wager, hoping that the Morgen—the downtown bar she owned which had once belonged to my grandfather and Luce’s uncle—would ride the wave of urban renewal and its lease would multiply in value.

  Luce had been drifting off to sleep when I’d left. The two of us had tumbled into bed shortly after she’d closed up the bar around three and come upstairs to her small one-bedroom. She’d told me about her night and I’d told her about Willard and his niece. Luce and Elana had run in the same pack as young girls, but they had fallen out of touch when their group split into different high schools.

  Somewhere in the middle Luce and I had stopped talking and started undressing each other. A lot of our conversations went that way. I’d only been home a month. The bloom was still on the rose, as Dono would have put it.

  We’d been dozing when my phone pinged with a message from Willard, spelling out what little he knew about the location of Kendrick Haymes’s cabin. I tucked Luce in, and made the short drive to Pier 52 and the ferry terminal.

  The trip across Elliott Bay wasn’t long. I was still thinking about how Luce’s hair smelled like freshly sanded cherry wood when the big engines downshifted, and a cloud of acrid diesel fumes caught up to the slowing boat.

  State highways traced an almost straight line across Bainbridge Island and the first part of the Peninsula, until the blacktop connected with the Hood Canal Bridge. The bridge took me over the canal, to the last piece of continental U.S. before the Pacific Ocean. It was a hell of a piece. More than half a million acres of wilderness, big enough to surround the Olympic Mountain range and the national park named for it.

  Willard’s text said Kend’s cabin was on a private road off of Salismount Lane. Google Maps depicted the lane as a very crooked line, deep in the eastern peninsula. The GPS got me most of the way, following roads with names like Penny Creek and Buckhorn. But it still took me half an hour and two passes to find what must be Salismount, a narrow strip of asphalt with no signage.

  Once I was off the charted roads, there was nothing but giant trees, any direction I looked. The pavement was shaded and wet, and the truck’s tires slipped an inch or two every time I turned the wheel or tapped the brake.

  For the first half mile it was easy going. But the farther I went, the thicker the white layer covering the ferns and mossy soil in the ditches became. The asphalt ended and my tires started crunching an uneven beat over frozen gravel. Another half inch of snow under the treads, and I’d have to stop and put on chains.

  As it was, I ran out of road. Tire tracks led off Salismount. Multiple sets of tracks, recent enough to be clearly visible in the dirty snow. The tracks followed a short dirt lane, which curved for another twenty yards before it ran into a closed gate. I got out to take a look.

  The gate was made of welded iron pipes and corrugated sheet metal, and chained with a heavy padlock. The padlock had a Day-Glo yellow foam cover to keep it from freezing solid in rain and cold. My breath made dragon plumes in the air.

  I could have the padlock open in less than a minute. Dono’s good set of lockpicks was hidden under the wheel well in the truck.

  But I wanted to stretch my legs. It was half the reason I’d agreed to Willard’s request. After leaving the big man’s card game the night before, I’d swung by my house and packed a ruck. With my Army gear and what I’d found while sorting through Dono’s stuff during the last few weeks, I had everything I might need for a couple of days in the wild.

  Willard’s thousand dollars filled in the other half of my motivation. The sizable nut I’d earned during my last short visit to Seattle had disappeared just as fast, sucked away by legal fees and repaying favors and especially Dono’s astronomical hospital bills. Only the rich could afford to die slowly.

  My ruck weighed about forty pounds, counting the two gallons of fresh water in the CamelBak. Less than half of what I was used to humping. It felt odd on my shoulders without the balancing weight of a combat kit and ammunition. Just another little adjustment to being a civilian.

  There had been a lot of those discoveries recently. After ten years of taking orders on where to go and what to go, the bigger changes to my life were obvious, and welcome. But small things scratched at me. Choosing the shirt I was wearing had taken half an hour. The streets smelled unfamiliar late at night, after Luce’s bar had closed, all damp and charged with electricity. Even the buildings seemed to lean toward me. I used to be a city kid.

  So I’d go for a long walk. Check in on Elana Coll and tell her that she owed her uncle a thousand bucks’ worth of bartending time. Enjoy the scenery. Not a bad deal. And I was curious to lay eyes on Elana again, after more than ten years.

  I wasn’t sure how far the Haymes road went. Willard thought there might be a main house that the family used, along with Kend’s cabin, somewhere in all their family acreage.

  The road wound slowly upward. After an hour of hiking I guessed my elevation at about 1,500 feet. My breath was steady and my lungs burned just a little from the chill. It was easy
hiking. The Olympics were an impressive range of mountains, but gentle. Afghan mountains were like stone knives, slicing up from the earth to shatter anyone foolish enough to underestimate them.

  Eventually the road emerged from the trees. It curved along the sunlit edge of the mountain, providing a stretch with no snow on the ground and a view over the forest below. Countless trees blanketed the horizon and crumpled into folds between the nearest peaks. I stopped to open the ruck and eat some jerky and an apple I’d grabbed off Luce’s counter.

  Overhead, a hawk was circling. Watching the road in case some small animal dashed across, maybe. I drank water until I’d had enough, and then drank a little more as I hiked on. The road became steeper. Most of the thin layer of snow here had frozen solid, and my progress slowed as I picked my way around the icy patches.

  I wasn’t worried about missing the cabin. The multiple sets of tire tracks had been a constant companion since the locked gate. I tried to guess what they belonged to. One was a midsized car with tires that were nearly bald. The second might be a small sports car, front-wheel drive, with newer curving treads that looked like fishhooks. The third was the easiest to spot. A dually, a big truck with four wheels on the rear axle.

  Willard had said it might have been a party that had tempted Elana to play hooky from work. There was only one set of tracks for the car with worn tires. The other two vehicles, the sports car and the dually, had gone up the road in my direction and come back down again. I’d have to hope the bald tires belonged to Elana.

  Within another four miles the road had narrowed sharply, to where the big dually truck would have had barely a foot of clearance on either side. Low branches hung down over the road, and the shade was thick. All of the tire tracks overlapped now, making two long, straight indistinguishable channels. I hiked along one of them. There was less snow underfoot here, thanks to the canopy of the trees. But the ground was still frozen, and my boot soles made only soft thumps, like walking on concrete. In the quiet, I could hear individual branches moving above me in the mild wind.