by Tim O'Brien
For at least an hour he skied steadily and carefully, forcing himself to ski and not think. Then he had to stop. Bending over the branch, he began to vomit, his stomach contracting in empty shivers, and he was sick. He was hearing bells. Music of a distant sort. He swayed with the dusk wind, caught himself with the branch, then he heard it again, thinking it was a chime inside him, in his head or belly or memories, and again he shuddered and retched, and again he heard the faraway music of bells. “Sleep,” he said, “now I lay me, now I lay me.”
He was in a glen. The forest rose steeply on each side, and the road burrowed ahead into the edge of dusk. The sky was dull and crowded with clouds. He leaned on the branch until the sickness passed. He decided he would not stop again. He would not think about another night in the forest. He pushed down the road, head down, passing through the glen and into an open meadow and then back into the trees.
The sound of the winter bells. At times the chime seemed to sound just up the road, at times behind him, at times deep in his skull. He was sick. His nose dripped with thin syrupy snot without substance, dribbling into his lips so that he could taste it, then into his beard. He was alone and he felt the full loneliness of the wintertime. Steadily, the road climbed. Perry sensed it was climbing for a reason, and he followed it up, shuffling the skis and pushing with his branch and pole. The sound of winter bells surrounded him. The branch tore a gash in his mitten. He was sweating. His nose dripped with the sweet tasting winter snot, and he reached the road’s summit where the bells were again ringing and he came down, followed the road as it twisted left and flattened and began climbing again.
It was night. The sweat froze under his parka. He skied with his eyes down, watching the few yards stretching immediately ahead.
He heard the bells.
Then he heard a dog. It was a big dog, he could tell from the bark. It was excited, too. He pushed harder. The barking was somewhere ahead of him, not far away, perhaps at the top of the hill or just below, not far. A little to the right.
It was a big dog, all right. A town dog.
He made the hill. He stopped and listened, wiping his nose. The barking was gone but the sound of bells seemed even louder. He glided down the hill and followed the road in a long slow arc, and on the far end of the curve, just as the road straightened, he came upon a yellow litter bin and picnic table. The table was brown pine, turned upside down. It was civilization. He could smell it now. Smell its complexities. It sobered him. He stopped, rested against the litter bin, and tried to clear his head to think it all out. It had been a dog, all right. He was sure of it. And the bells were still chiming, not so loud now but still there, somewhere to the right and in the woods. When he was rested, he started off again, trying to ski smoothly so as not to wear himself out. The road climbed and hit another apex and began falling. It was a long, gentle slope. When he came to the end of it, the night was complete, nothing but woods and dark and the strip of white road, and he listened, but the bells were gone and the dog, if it was ever there at all, was silent. There were no stars and no moonlight. “Wish I may, wish I might,” he murmured.
It was very cold. He hadn’t felt it before.
He let his mind clear. He wiped his nose and a blind dizziness settled in his stomach. “Star light, star bright,” he said, “have the sight I might tonight.” He held his mittens under an armpit. He blew into his hands and waited and listened for the bells.
An hour of darkness passed. The road was smooth and flat. Skiing steadily, not stretching himself and not stopping, he grew warm and the sickness eased off and left a taste in his mouth that no longer frightened him. It was a quiet cold winter night. He thought of Christmas, then of particular Christmases. Then he thought of summer, summer in general, summer with sun and mosquitoes and short cool nights. Then he thought of Christmas again.
The smell of civilization was gone. Without his glasses, he might have passed a town without noticing, a town or a house, something, the bells and the big dog. He considered turning back, calculating the time he would spend retracing the road towards the sound of the barking dog. Without deciding on one course or the other, he skied straight on, thinking about the dog, picturing it in warm greeting, thinking next about the bells, then thinking about a flurry of things.
In the night he heard an airplane.
He sat up. He hadn’t been asleep. He’d found another picnic area and sat down for rest, and sometime during the night he’d drifted back and looked at the sky. He’d been thinking. His mind was out in the woods, roaming by itself in and out of the trees, rambling about, trying corners here and shadows there, lazily exploring.
Then he heard the plane.
It made perfect sense. Without having to look for it, he saw it. It was high and far away. He saw the red and green wing lights. He did not have to move. He watched it come, aimed right at him. He saw the dark hole of the cockpit. The cabin lights. He thought he saw faces and hats. He imagined cocktails being served. And toasted almonds and smiles. As the plane passed overhead, he stood and waved, and the trees seemed to waver with the jet’s wind.
He was part of a thaw. The morning glowed and water came dripping from a tall evergreen.
For a while the country rolled as it always had. Then it straightened. Perry heard a high voice calling. The road wound through pines and into a stand of birch, through the birch and into more pine, and then into a clearing where a young child was pulling a sled.
Although her back was to him and she was trudging away, Perry knew the child was female. He was skiing in the slim tracks of her sled. All morning he’d followed the tracks, knowing it was a child and even knowing it was a young girl. She called out again, a high commanding voice, but she did not appear to notice him and he had to hurry to catch her.
Then the child must have heard him coming, for she stopped and turned and watched him without surprise but with clear disappointment, as though she’d been expecting someone else. She wore a stocking cap and snowsuit and blue mittens. When he got close, she turned again and began walking with no effort to conceal her indifference. Perry fell in alongside her. They went together, the child first, then Perry, then the sled. They followed the road through a grove of sugar maples and then through small pines, over an iron bridge, past another picnic area with the upside-down table and yellow litter bin, and neither of them spoke. Now and then the child called out in a high fierce voice that showed both command and desperation, a single syllable that he did not try to understand, and he simply followed her. She asked no questions and he asked none. Except for her slow trudging pace, it made no difference to him that he’d found a child at the end of the road.
“I ain’t lost,” she said at last, shaking her head and refusing to look at him. A while later, crossing the bridge, she stopped and examined the snow, and Perry obediently stopped and waited until she was through with whatever she had to do. When they started off again she demanded his name.
“Paul,” he said and said no more, though there were many things he wanted to say. The child knew precisely where she was and what she was doing.
“You comin’ to see my ma? Pa ain’t home, you know. He ain’t home till tonight, Ma said. Then Ma said he can start lookin’, too. What’s that thing on your back for?”
“A rucksack. A pack to carry things in.”
“What’s in it then?”
“Nothing,” he said.
She nodded as if the answer were known before spoken.
The child kept on steadily, stopping only to call out the deafening syllable, waiting for whatever was supposed to follow, then continuing down the road with Perry and her sled.
“I bet my ma’s lookin’, too,” she said when they passed through the picnic area. “She said she wasn’t gonna look but I bet anything she’s lookin’ same as me. She said she wasn’t gonna look no more, ’cause it was my fault and I’d have to look and not her anymore, ’cause I did it and not her. But I’ll bet she’s lookin’. Pa ain’t lookin’ ’cause he ain
’t here, but Ma said he’d help look when he got back, and he’s comin’ back tonight or tomorrow.”
She stopped again and screamed: “Muggs!” She listened then. “Shit!” she said.
“I been lookin’ and I’ll find him,” she said in a hard high voice, jerking the sled and starting off again. “And I bet Ma’s lookin’, too, even if she said it was my fault and I got to look an’ not her. Since yesterday. You bet I had him tied up good. Ma said it’s my fault but it ain’t ’cause you should’ve seen how I had him tied up, right to the tree an’ I went out an’ he wasn’t there, just the rope. Was Pa’s fault, not my fault. It was Pa’s rope and it was this rotten rope, that’s what, an’ I told Ma and she said Pa’d have to look then if it was his fault. I had him tied up good. Ma said Pa’d go lookin’ when he gets home tonight or tomorrow, and I’ll bet Pa finds him fast. Ma says he’s prob’bly got hisself caught in a trap, so I got my sled out and everything in case, but I don’t think he’d get hisself caught in no trap, ’cause he’s smart and knows all the traps anyhow.”
She stopped again and Perry stopped. “Muggs!” she screamed. He shivered and felt sick and waited for her, “Muggs!” she screamed fiercely. Then she continued walking.
“Anyhow,” she said, “he ain’t the first dog ever run away. Pa says it don’t matter what kinda dog it is, they all run away, an’ Ma says he wouldn’a run away this time if I’d got him tied right, an’ I says to her I did tie him tight, an’I did all right. The rope broke, an’ Ma says I should’ve used some other rope, an’ I says it was the only rope I had an’ Pa gave it to me, anyhow, an’ she says she’s got other stuff to do except look for a dog, an’ I says, well, I’ll do it, an’ just in case he’s in some trap I got my sled out. You ever seen a lost dog? You try to catch him an’ he just don’t want to be caught at all, like he thinks he’s not even lost an’ doesn’t know it.”
“Muggs!” she screamed. “Goddamn dog!”
In a while, Perry sat the girl on her sled. He slipped the rope around his chest and skied down the road, which slowly curved left and crossed another road, this one plowed clean, and, the girl told him to turn on to the new road, and he turned and pulled the sled down into the ditch, and in a half hour they came to a white house with a stone chimney and an old Ford station wagon standing bumper-deep in snow.
“I guess you just have to stay or else go on,” said the woman who looked too young to be a mother. “Arild’ll be back either tonight or tomorrow dependin’ on the weather. The car don’t start, like I said, and Arild’s got the pickup in town so I’m stuck and that means pretty much you’re stuck, too. I told him, well, I said to him we oughta get the station wagon started ’cause sometime I’d be needing it, an’ sure enough, now I need it and I ain’t got it. I feel awful bad, ’cause I know you’re wanting to get out of here, but that damn station wagon ain’t had a good thing for it all winter. Don’t know what I’d do if somethin’ happened and we had to get into town or somethin’—somebody gets sick or somethin’—and I don’t know what I’d do, like now. And then that damn dog. I been goin’ crazy tryin’ to keep up with that dog of hers, and Arild he ain’t been any help at all. Now you got maybe five miles into town, or six I guess, in there somewhere, an’ you come this far so I guess you ain’t gonna have any trouble the rest of the way, just rest up some first, I guess. What you oughta have is a bath.”
The young brown-haired woman put on her coat and went to the car and got a map and showed Perry where he was.
“Now, you see here? You got a choice. You can go into either Lutsen or back up towards Carl Larson’s place, except Larson’s don’t have no phone neither, but they got a car. Or I guess you can go into Tofte, too. It don’t make no difference. They’re all about the same distance, I guess, except maybe Tofte is a mile closer. Up to you, though. What you ought to do is get in there and take a good bath, that’s what I’d say. I ain’t one to say, though, ’cause I got the same problem tryin’ to get Arild into the tub after work. He always says it can wait till after he gets something to eat and I tell him it’ll taste a sight better if he smells it instead of himself, but it don’t matter none to me. Now you can walk if you want over to Larson’s place, it don’t take long and I go in the summers an’ it takes me, oh, half an hour, forty minutes, but that’s in summer. Or sometimes I just get on the school bus an’ ride it into Lutsen and then do my shopping an’ either take the school bus back in the afternoon or catch a ride. When Arild’s here he’ll take me an’ drop me off, but that way I gotta hurry ’cause he’s forever in a hurry. I don’t know. I reckon you’re about ready for this supper, though. It’ll wait till then. Arild’ll maybe be back tonight an’ he can just drive you in and that’ll save you some work, all right, but if you’re in a hurry then I guess you can just go, and if he comes I’ll just tell him to go out an’ get you and drive you the rest of the way, but it don’t make no difference one way or ’nother. That damn dog’ll drive you bananas, though. He was here then gone, just like that. Altogether, I spent half the winter lookin’ for him and the other half feedin’ him and the other half tellin’ Carla to tie him up good, an’ what’s the use? Can’t keep no dog like that tied up, but if he ain’t tied up you see what happens, just gets hisself lost. You chase him, chasing that bell, an’ you think you got him good an’ he’s gone again, just like that. You can just count yourself lucky not to be out there still chasin’ that scoundrel of a dog. Carla! You just sit down till Mr. Perry gets through eatin’. And yesterday I told her she wasn’t goin’ to get me out lookin’ for that scoundrel dog, not no more. Anyhow, it’s gettin’ to be night an’ if I was you I’d just count myself lucky enough and stay here till Arild gets in, or wait till morning and then you can go if you got to, but you’re awful sick lookin’ to me, and I know how that is, believe you me, I know what it feels like, I had it this winter, too.”
The little girl climbed back on the table and the woman shushed her away and stacked Perry’s dishes in the sink. The food held him fast to his chair.
“I told Arild, too, a hundred times, I said to him we oughta get the phone company to get a line out here. You know what? They won’t do it. It’s nothing to do with money for us if we got to call somebody and we can’t do it. You don’t look so good, Mr. Perry. Carla! You either stop that or get into bed, you got your choice. You all right, Mr. Perry? You better get into the tub or lie down, one or the other. You all right?”
She held her wrist, standing well away from him. She was very young and slender. And she was always moving, touching things to be sure they were there, patting her brown hair, pulling her sweater over her hips, holding her wrists, first one then the other. “You really sure you’re all right?” she was saying from a fog by the sink. “You best rest awhile. You ask me, you got no sense going back out there tonight. If I was you, Mr. Perry, I’d just get myself a hot bath and start good’n fresh tomorrow, that’s what. And you’re looking awful white and scratchy. You always wear that there beard of yours?”
“Do they have a doctor in town?”
“Which town? Lutsen or Tofte?”
“Either one. Where’s the closest doctor?”
“Tofte, I reckon. I ain’t never been. Except to have Carla and then that was in Silver Bay. Don’t know his name, though, ’cause I haven’t ever been to him, but he’s there.”
“It’s not for me. Look—” Perry started to get up but the food had seemed to clot in his belly like cement. “Look, my brother’s still out there in the woods and he’s pretty sick.”
“Can’t be a sight sicker than you.”
“Worse. I’ve, we’ve got to get somebody out there for him.”
“You’re looking awful sick,” she said from far away. “Carla! How many times … There, now that’s better. Get some hot water going for Mr. Perry. Right now, Carla, and none of that back talk, we’ll get your dog for you. Mr. Perry? Get up now, you’ll be a lot better. Carla! Carla, you hear me in there? Get Mr. Perry’s shoes … There, you better n
ow? You just get in the tub now. You’re just a might sick … Carla! You clean up that mess and stop your bawlin’ for that damn dog. Mr. Perry said he’d seen him, heard him back up the road a piece, clean up that mess there, there’s some rags under the sink … There, you feel better now, Mr. Perry? We got some hot water in the tub. No, don’t worry about that mess. Mr. Perry? Hey now! Carla, get over here.………… Now get them socks an’ put them in the sink an’ run some hot water over them, you hear? Mr. Perry? There, now you’re looking a sight better, I should say. Awful sick there for a while, I should say so. Oughta told me you was feeling so bad. What you oughta been doin’ is lying down, you know that? There, it’s better now. Carla! You get some hot water back in the tub, it’s gotten all cold. There. You reckon you can take a good bath now? I should say. You hustle on in there now and take a good bath and we’ll see what’s what.”
Lying in the tub, he had the sensation of perfect detachment. Once he opened his eyes and saw the water was stale green. It was an old-fashioned enamel tub, so small he lay with his knees bent, his head resting against the tiled wall. The smell of the water embarrassed him. He pulled the plug, drained the tub and rinsed the scum out, then filled it again with fresh hot water and lay back. Vaguely, he heard the young woman and child talking in the next room. Then he slept. He awoke with the door banging. The water was room temperature. He got out, dried himself and put on a robe she’d left for him.
“Had me plenty scared for a minute,” she said. “Swear to God, you was in there I don’t know how long.”
“I fell asleep.”