Ice Lake

by John Farrow

  “We’re dead,” Andy stated simply.

  “Shift down, Luc, shift down,” Lucy called from the back seat, her voice urgent, but calm, insistent.

  “Hang onto it yourself, lady.” Luc spoke English without much of an accent, but he had a tendency to butcher phrases, especially when he was excited. He slowed the car by gearing down, which was a struggle, but the gearbox wouldn’t allow him to go into first. He touched the snow on one side of the ploughed road with his tires. The snow sent the car swerving and the bodies in it rocked from side to side, but Luc wrestled with his steering wheel and recalcitrant clutch and unruly gearshift and kept touching the wheels on the right side into deeper snow. Near the edge of the river he announced, “Nope, we’re not making it in this way,” and made a move to put the car into a spin. The rear end fishtailed, then spun. Lucy howled and Andy let out a roar, hanging on, and the car twirled like a top. Luc said, “Maybe we do it this way,” and the car catapulted off the opposite edge of the road and in that deeper snow finally stopped.

  They were settled for no more than a second when Luc was gunning the car in reverse, then quick-shifting between first and reverse, the two passengers praying for the transmission to hold together. Then suddenly they were racing backwards, and Luc said, “Maybe this way,” and they were on the ice-road again. He rammed the shift forward and the car leapfrogged a series of icy ruts and scaled the embankment.

  They travelled thirty yards and stopped at the guardhouse there.

  Once again, Luc rolled down his window.

  An Indian came over carrying an Uzi, put a hand on the roof over the driver’s door and asked him, “Drive much?”

  Luc looked shyly down. “I thought to myself I did all right.”

  “Oh yeah? Maybe we should have those scorecards, you know, the ones like they use for skaters, on the TV? Me, I’d put you down for five-point-two for technical skill, five-point-nine for artistic merit. How’s that sound?”

  “Pretty good. That’s fair. Thanks.”

  “Anyhow,” he said, “welcome to the United States of America.” He stuck his head in the window. “Hey there, juicy Lucy, how’re you doing?”

  “Good, Brad, you?”

  “Not so bad. I guess what I heard is true.” He was a broad, square-faced man, about five-foot five, with a substantial belly. In the cold, his breath billowed as he spoke. He was wearing boots with unlaced flaps that overhung the toes. From time to time, the man moved his weapon from one hand to the other, then quickly changed it back.

  “What do you hear, Brad?”

  “I heard you only shack up with white men these days. That true?”

  The challenge and animosity inherent in the statement chilled the men in the car. This was not going to be a friendly encounter, and at least two participants, Luc and the Indian, were armed. Any instinctive response Andy or Luc might have felt to defend the woman’s honour was mitigated by being on foreign soil. This was the United States of America, but this was also hostile Indian land.

  “You don’t have that exactly right, Brad,” Lucy told him, nonplussed.

  Andrew Stettler was looking at her, hoping she had the sense to ease the tension here.

  “How’s that?” Brad asked.

  “I only sleep with good-looking men. Now if that eliminates every Mohawk Warrior you know, including you, it can’t be helped. I have my standards.”

  Brad had a mock smile on his face as he looked across at Stettler. “Ain’t she a bitch?” he asked him.

  Clearly, the man was waiting for an answer. Andy looked at him, then back at Lucy, then shook his head. “She has a way of sticking it to us guys.”

  The guard gave a little snort. “Lucy’s a sad story. Isn’t that right, girl? Folks died when she was young. She got adopted into the white man’s world. We’re glad to have her back, don’t get me wrong, but the white man’s world messed her up, there ain’t no doubt about that.”

  “I know nothing about it,” Andy said.

  Lucy was shaking her head in the back seat. “Tell him the whole story, Brad,” she lashed out. “Fill him in on the details.”

  Brad smirked. “You still got the bitterness in you, Lucy. It shows. The sun don’t shine in your heart.”

  “Oh, sing me a lullaby!” Lucy stormed. “Where are the fucking violins? Or the tom-toms, or smoke, or whatever the fuck you want to use to make my eyes water?”

  He was laughing now. “It ain’t hard to get you going.”

  “Tell him, Brad. Tell him why my parents died young.”

  Abruptly, he stopped laughing. “White men don’t need to hear that story. I don’t need to hear it again.”

  “You brought it up! Tell them about the time the Warriors burned my parents’ house down—”

  “Nobody knew they were home, Lucy, that’s what I heard.”

  “What are you saying? That it was okay to burn their house down, it’s just too bad they were home? Good thing I slept in the garage or I’d be dead too.”

  “That’s ancient history. Anyways, it was an accident.”

  “It was fucking murder, Brad. All over a goddamn difference of opinion about zoning. Now are you letting us through or what?”

  Brad stood up straight and shook his head for a while in a deliberate and thoughtful matter. “You’re coming back this way. That’s what I was told.”

  “That’s the deal.”

  “With a truckload of smokes.”

  “Which you get to keep.”

  “The truck stays with you. You move it to the other side, then move it back again. What’s in the truck on the way back, Lucy?”

  “You don’t want to know, Brad.”

  “Maybe I do.”

  “No, Brad,” she told him, enunciating each syllable, “you—don’t—want—to know.”

  Brad chewed on the matter a moment. “All right,” he decided. “Go on through. Do what you have to do. Understand one thing. I don’t want nobody bleeding on Indian land. If you’re bleeding, go someplace else. Don’t bring trouble on us, we won’t welcome your trouble. Is that clear enough?”

  Dutifully, Luc and Andy nodded. In the back seat, Lucy scowled.

  Brad thumped the top of the roof a couple of times and Luc Séguin drove on.

  After they had driven off Indian land into upper New York State, Andy twisted around in his seat. “Never mind that eye-to-eye stuff,” he said, “you don’t get along with your Indian brothers at all. You’re not evenßiendty!”

  Lucy pursed her lips as if she wanted to spit. “Warriors burn down my parents’ house, they kill my mom and dad and call it a mistake, I get adopted off the reserve, and when I grow up and come back they expect me to spread my legs for them? In their fucking dreams!”

  “Easy, girl,” Andy advised.

  “Don’t call me girl!”

  “Then what should I call you?” he asked. “Miss Gabriel? Ma’am?”

  “You,” she parried, “you, you can call me—” Suddenly she caught herself and burst out laughing, her mood and the tension breaking. “You can call me ‘sweetheart.’”

  “Okay, sweetheart,” Andy said, laughing too. “I’ll do that.”

  Luc did not join in the fun, and after a while he asked, “What was he talking about, not bleeding on Indian land?”

  “Look in a mirror,” Lucy told him. “Look in a goddamned mirror!”

  Andy glanced at Luc a number of times after that, finding him a hard man to read, then he looked back at Lucy. He explained, “Luc’s sensitive about his blood. He also doesn’t understand English perfectly.”

  The comment sank in, and Lucy reached forward and patted Luc gently on the shoulder. “He didn’t mean anything by it, Luc. Just that you’re white. That’s what you’d see in a mirror. Nobody told him you have AIDS.”

  Luc nodded. He kept his eyes on the road. “Okay,” he said after a while.

  They drove on. Andy kept glancing back at Lucy, and finally he asked, “How come you slept in the garage when you were a
kid?”

  “Oh, piss off,” she told him, and they drove on in silence after that.

  Luc had planned the heist. The only aspect he could not handle himself was the border crossing, but the opportunity to cross freely, courtesy of the Mohawk Warriors, was one that he could not resist. Still, he wasn’t clear on the parameters—specifically, what was in it for him. He had chewed it over with Andy.

  “You’re telling me that I jack a truck in the States and bring it back here.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Full of cigarettes, but I’m going to give away those smokes to the Indians. I am doing this why?”

  “You’ll get paid.”

  “You know what it is a truck of smokes worth?”

  “Nothing, unless you sell the smokes. You can’t sell in the States, you have no contacts. You can’t sell here, because how do you get the smokes across the border without the Indians? So the smokes are worth nothing to you or me.”

  “I’m dying, Andy, but I’m not dead. I’m doing charity why?”

  “To help people out who are dying the same way you are.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Nope. I need something out of this.”

  “It’s a mission of mercy for which you get paid.”

  “For this I get to Heaven? Your guarantee is how much to me worth?”

  His old pal from prison had a point. “Like I said, Luc, you’re getting paid. It’s sort of like being on salary.”

  “I’ll get back to you on that,” Luc told him.

  He had then taken a few days to devise a counterproposal. He agreed to hijack the truck and, after the Indians had emptied the contents, drive it back to Canada, where Lucy could transform it into a mobile lab. He’d be her driver, as she had requested, and return with her to the States. At the end of her operation, he’d use the truck for an enterprise of his own.

  “What,” Andy asked him, leery, “enterprise?”

  “I got something going.”

  “What? I need to know.”

  “I do believe I can sell the truck. That’s what I get out of it. The truck.” A salary was not enough. He was a dying man. Death was expensive, he’d been finding out. He had expenses. If he was not entitled to a share of the cigarette action, he’d score on his own.

  “Where?” Andy questioned him.

  “I know a guy in Florida.”

  “Keep Lucy out of it.”

  “No problem.”

  Andrew Stettler accepted the deal, and Luc began to plan the truck-jacking.

  Andy and Lucy dropped Luc off in town, then headed for the rendezvous point. They parked in a wooded drive, seldom used in winter but ploughed regularly, that led to a small electric transformer.

  “I brought candles,” Lucy said.

  “I’ll keep the motor running.”

  “We might asphyxiate ourselves. Or run out of gas. Who knows how long Luc will be? I’ll light the candles. Keep the window open a crack. You’ll be surprised how warm it stays.”

  After she had lit two candles, one on the dash and another between the front seats, Andy suggested that they get into the back.

  “What for?”

  “Guess.”

  “Now?”

  “Did you have other plans? Appointments?”

  She smiled. She got out to climb into the back but Andy, in his eagerness, crawled over the front seat and was there to greet her with a kiss.

  “How do you like the candles?” She spoke between kisses. “Warm, huh?”

  “What happens if we get carried away and knock them over?”

  “We go up in flames. Together. Romantic. I can’t tell you how many native boys and girls have gone out that way. You’d think we’d learn.”

  She kissed him, and settled into the warmth of his body and the easygoing excitement of his embrace.

  “I can hardly ever tell when you’re kidding me,” he confessed. “Not when you talk about Indian things.”

  “If I were you, I’d assume I’m pulling your leg pretty much all the time.”

  His hand went to her breast then, surprising her, and he kissed her roughly.

  “Here?” she asked. “It’s not that warm.”

  “No?” He pulled away from her to pull off his own jacket, sweater and shirt, as if to challenge her, to dare her to do the same. “We’ll make our own heat.”

  “Too corny for words.”

  “I’m showing no mercy today, Luce. This car. Two candles. I don’t care how cold it is outside.”

  As she reached down and tugged her shirt out from her jeans, Lucy smiled. She loved this part. The moment when there was no turning back.

  “Just so you know,” she warned him as her shirt came off.

  “Yeah?”

  She moved over top of him, straddling him, kissing him from above, reaching behind to unfasten her bra.

  “I’m not showing any mercy either.”

  Outside Massena, New York, a truck parked at the service entrance to a mall. Two axles. A separate cab. The rear box tall enough for a man to stand up in and just touch the ceiling on his toes, stretching. The vehicle had driven up from Ogdensburg, as usual, where it had been supplied with cigarettes for the northern communities of the state. At Massena, more than 90 percent of its cargo remained aboard.

  A problem that Luc Séguin faced had to do with the education of the driver. In the region where he normally hijacked trucks, drivers were aware of the practice. If they transported cigarettes or liquor they were given hazard pay, and if they were intercepted, they knew enough to hand over the keys when asked to do so by a friendly highwaymen who shouldered an automatic weapon while his partner aimed a grenade-launcher at the cab door. Heavy weapons pacified the victims, and rarely was there any need for violence. Peaceful upper New York State, on the other hand, could be home to truckers who hadn’t been educated. They might become emotional during the experience, or object to being robbed. They might resist. In Luc’s plan, the operation had to be quick, startling, and decisive. The driver of the truck could not be allowed a moment to evaluate his choices.

  The trucker stepped down from his vehicle just as Luc came around it from behind. They met at the midway point of the truck’s length.

  “Go back, please, to truck,” Luc directed him, and he opened and closed his coat.

  “Excuse me?” the man asked.

  Already this was going badly. “Go back, please, to truck.” He opened and closed his coat again.

  “I don’t follow you,” the man said.

  “No, don’t follow me, go first!”

  The clean-cut trucker wore a quizzical expression and scratched the side of his neck with one finger. “Sorry, Frenchie, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Thinking fast, Luc decided that he had a problem. When he was nervous he did not speak English well. Saying “please” was probably a mistake, it sent the wrong signal. And perhaps the deadly force of his pistol had not been apparent during the quick flashes he had given the man.

  Luc opened his coat a third time, and held it open. A hand, thrust through the open pocket of his coat, gripped the pistol and pointed it at the other man’s belly. “Get back in truck.”

  For the first time, comprehension registered on the driver’s face. Looking down, he couldn’t take his eyes off the gun. A weapon of that heft aimed straight at him had created instant terror.

  “Easy, easy,” he said, putting his hands up.

  “Put down your hands! Get back in truck!”

  The trucker was of medium build but still had fifty pounds on Luc. Around forty, he wore a wedding band on his ring finger. Luc could tell that he was already in shock and might not be able to hold himself together. He stayed right behind him as the trucker returned to the cab and climbed in, and Luc slammed the door on him. He moved quickly, and in a second was climbing up the passenger side. The door was locked. Luc nodded to the driver to lift the lock button.

  The man thought it over, but only for two seconds,
then leaned across and lifted it up.

  “Good decision,” Luc said.

  “What do you want?” He was looking around for help but saw none. He kept raising his hands, wanting to hold them over his head, as if that was expected of him, but then he’d remember that he’d been warned not to do that.

  “Drive,” Luc commanded him. “Go where I tell you to go. Worry not so much. Don’t think about dying. You won’t die today if you do what I tell you to stay alive.”

  “You want the cigarettes,” the driver said. He turned the key in the ignition and the engine started up.

  “I want your smokes,” Luc agreed. “I want your truck, too. You, I don’t want. I don’t want trouble. Understand?”

  The driver didn’t give him any trouble. They were already on the outskirts of town, and two quick turns put them on a lonely rural road. Luc didn’t want to drop him off close to any farmhouse, but he had that planned. He urged him out of the truck in a wooded area where the man would have to walk at least four miles to the nearest phone, and that was only if he happened to choose the right direction, which was not the way he’d come. The man stood on the shoulder of the road, looking up, still worried that he might be shot.

  “You got your coat?” Luc asked him.

  “It’s behind my seat.”

  Luc fished it out and passed it down. “You want these boots here?”

  “Yeah, sure.” Luc threw them down. “Thanks.”

  “Anything else you need from here?”

  “My gloves are between the seats.”

  Luc dropped them into his outstretched hands.

  “I wouldn’t mind my house keys. They’re on the same ring as the truck key.”

  Leaving the key in the ignition, Luc twisted them off the ring, tossing the collection down to the owner.

  “Pictures of my kids, inside the driver’s visor.”

  He handed those down carefully, not to soil them on the roadside snow.

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem. We’re finished now?” The man shrugged. “You’re all right?” The man shrugged again, but fright or relief or tension or the snapshot of his children brought tears to his eyes. “Button your coat up,” Luc directed. “Don’t catch cold.”