by L. L. Enger
They walked to the door and knocked. Inside, someone said, “Huh?” and then a sound like a pair of feet thumping against the floor. “Just a second. Who is itr
“Warden,” said Carol, stern. Gun smiled at her, squeezing her elbow.
Faust opened the door then. He wore a gray thermal undershirt and fatigue trousers that looked brand-new, glossy and stiff. No shoes. His eyes were squinting and swollen with sleep, then came open in a hurry. Gun thought of bothersome squirrels he’d caught in a live trap and how their eyes seemed incapable of blinking—perfectly round, and frosty with fear. Except Faust did blink, once, then slammed the door shut in their faces. Gun heard the locking bolt slide into place.
“Just let me get dressed,” Faust called. “Let me get dressed, then we’ll talk. Be right there.” Through the plywood walls they heard Faust moving around, rustling into clothes. He was quiet for a few moments. The light came on. He opened the door. The parka he wore was white. The pistol he held was blue, blue steel.
26
“Get inside, inside,” he said, stepping to his right. “I mean it, come on,” snapping the pistol fast, like a Ping-Pong paddle. His nostrils twitched and he sniffed loudly, shook his head. He was like a man full of expanding gas—his squirrel eyes enormous, his face taught and round.
“All I want is to hear what you and Billy talked about,” said Gun. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
“I don’t know who you mean. I don’t know any Billy. Now get in here.” He was still waving the pistol, and Gun and Carol did like he said.
“On the phone, you said you hadn’t told him anything. What did you mean?”
“Shut the hell up and sit down, both of you.” He leveled the barrel of the gun at Carol’s face and she lowered herself to the floor of the fish house. Gun knelt beside her.
“Neil. If you’re in trouble maybe we can help,” he said. “It’s not like anybody’s accusing you of anything. Nobody’s saying you killed anybody.”
“Shit, no,” said Faust. “I don’t “—his mouth got stuck in an inadvertent smile—”kill people.”
“Then you’re not doing yourself any good this way. Think,” said Carol. “Think it out, you’re a journalist. This won’t help ... whatever it is.” Carol’s voice was perfectly moderated, low and ripe with good sense, and Gun saw the muscles in Faust’s jaw relax. “We’re here to ask for your help, Neil. Maybe we can help each other. But we’ve got to talk first. You’ve got to talk.”
“I don’t have to do anything, damn it.” Faust took a deep breath and pinched at the inner corners of his eyes. “Shit.” The hand with the pistol started to come down.
Gun was just reaching for it when the ice boomed again, twice, like two shotgun blasts, and Faust came to life, brought the pistol back up. The pressure was there in his face again, behind his eyes, pushing them out like bullet tips.
“Okay, you’re both staying here,” he said. “I’m leaving, to get things straightened out. And don’t try to come after me. Just stay here.” He took a padlock from the shelf next to the door and stepped outside, slowly, holding the pistol on Gun as he moved. He shut the door. The padlock clicked into place.
A moment later the Wagoneer started, its tires spinning, catching hold. Gun threw himself into the door with his shoulder. It held, but felt vulnerable. He kicked it with the sole of a boot and the hinge side began to sag. One more kick and the door yawned open the wrong way.
Faust’s taillights were still visible in the clear night as Gun yanked the pull cord on the snowmobile. “You wait, we can’t catch him with both of us on here. I’ll come back.”
“You better! Gun—”
He waved and throttled all the way down, the noise of the engine drowning Carol’s voice. He aimed the
machine’s twin skis between Faust’s tire tracks, which cut through a snow cover of eight inches or so, with drifts up to a foot and a half. He watched the speedometer needle rise quickly to forty on the gauge, then fifty and finally sixty-five, all the while keeping the Wagoneer’s taillights at the top of his vision. Then they were gone. Disappeared. Thinking of Jimmy’s warning Gun released the throttle and the snowmobile slowed. He drove on cautiously, no red lights in front of him now. Soon he saw the ridge of ice.
As he came closer to it, Faust’s tracks showed evidence of a slide to the right, toward the shoreline a hundred yards away. Evidently Faust had locked his brakes and cranked his wheel to the right, but too late, because his tracks went up and over the ice ridge.
Gun stepped from his machine and carefully approached the reef. It was about seven feet high and not so steep you couldn’t climb up the side of it, like a pitched roof. His boots had plenty of grip, and he eased forward on all fours, took hold of the top and pulled himself up for a look.
Black water. A lot of it. A large ragged hole in a crust of new ice which covered an even larger break in the winter slab. And right in the middle, standing on top of his sinking red Wagoneer, Neil Faust The truck was three-quarters submerged and going down fast Fifteen feet of open water separated nun from the reef—a long swim in this kind of cold.
“Hop in, stroke hard, I’ll give you a hand up. There’s nothing else to do,” Gun said. He started maneuvering himself down to the water’s edge. He could see that Faust had already been in the water. His wet clothes held close to his body and Gun saw in the bright moonlight that he was starting to shake from exposure. He didn’t have long.
“Hurry up! Now. We’ll get you back to the fish house, warm you up. Come on—we’re at the pool, Holiday Inn.”
Faust looked down at the water, just six inches from the top of the cab now, then slowly crouched to his knees. He turned to the west, where the lake extended for a good two miles, then to the east, where there were lights on shore. They looked very close in the cold air.
“Don’t be a damn fool. You’ve got one choice— listen to me, damn it—and that’s me. Unless you want to kill yourself, and it can’t be worth that much. Come on, jump in, swim.”
Faust opened his mouth but all that came out was the sound of teeth knocking together in a cold spasm.
“Jump, you idiot!”
Then the top of the Wagoneer disappeared with the sound of a giant water cooler releasing a bubble. Faust rose to his feet, looked down once at the lake rising above his ankles, turned toward shore and threw himself belly first into the water, away from Gun. It took him half a dozen sloppy strokes to reach the edge of the thin ice, which crumbled when he tried to haul himself on top of it. He struggled forward again but the ice wouldn’t hold. His arms and legs were wild, sending icy water in all directions. His breath came in short loud gasps which vaporized in the air. He started to yell then, producing a ragged string of vowel grunts that sounded like the cow bear Gun had frightened on the Crow River one spring.
“This way!” Gun shouted. He felt sick at the bottom of his stomach, told himself he’d be crazy to go in after the man. It was too cold. He’d be as dumb as Faust—the guy would weigh three hundred pounds in that waterlogged gear he had on. He’s going to die, and I’m just watching.
Gun started to remove his parka but then,
miracuously, Faust was out of the water and lying on his belly on thin ice. He wasn’t more than forty feet from the reef, and about the same distance from where the truck had gone down. Gun scrambled along the reef until he was opposite Faust, who wasn’t moving at all now, just lying belly down, arms and legs spread-eagled. His eyes were closed.
“Stay put, I’m coming after you.” Gun had his parka off, just in case, and he spread himself as thin as possible across the ice. From what he could tell it wasn’t an inch thick, and he had no idea what he’d do once he reached Faust, but the man was in shock. The cold came right through his wool shirt and insulated underwear and told his brain to panic. Now you’ll die, too. Both of you. Wash up on shore during the spring melt, nicely preserved. Gun bit his lip and started forward, keeping every possible inch of himself distributed upon the sur
face. Stay on top, go slow. He heard and felt the ice creaking beneath him, saw a picture of himself as a tiny insect caught in a huge glittering web, waiting. The ice snapped, released, held. He told himself to breathe. Don’t stop breathing, don’t stop moving, don’t do anything too fast.
Ahead, Faust’s eyes came open. They were all Gun could see inside the soaked parka hood, and they didn’t reflect the situation. Behind the dull gloss of fear was sharp defiance that said, You don’t have me.
Gun stopped moving. “Neil, listen to me. You’ve got to try and move this way. The ice will hold you. It’s holding you now. Keep yourself flat and spread out and slide forward. Pretend you’re a snake. Come on. You’ll freeze there if you don’t move.”
Faust turned his head the other way toward the lights on shore, which were diffused into large blots by pine trees. Gun could see by the tightening and preparation in Faust’s shoulders that he was going to try for the good ice—another forty or fifty feet away.
It wasn’t any good trying to stop him, Gun knew that, but he tried anyway, sliding forward as fast as he dared, saying, “You can’t make it that way, Neil. Don’t even try.”
Faust rose up on his hands and knees and started crawling away—he looked like a bug on water, he was moving so fast—going ten, twenty feet, then he was under the ice, out of sight without a struggle or a sound. Gun crept forward, watching for a hand, a face, a foot, anything, in the spot where Faust had disappeared, and when he neared the hole of open water he saw a shadow beneath the surface, dark and moving. He reached forward with one hand and stirred the water, felt nothing. He inched ahead until his face was above the hole. Peered down. Then the ice gave way and Gun was sucking a last gulp of air before the cold had him. He felt his clothes take on weight, the pull of gravity toward bottom, the icy, lost fear in his chest. But he didn’t sink far. His feet found lake bottom in just seconds—eight feet down?—and he bent his knees, tried to recall his scattered wits back from the water which was drawing them away along with precious heat. He drove upward with every kind of strength he owned, eyes wide open, passing a closed fist on his way, broke surface and sucked his chest full. He blinked the water from his eyes and felt already the reluctance of his muscles to respond to his brain. Blinking was conscious work. There wasn’t time for anything. There wasn’t time for Neil Faust. But Gun made one more trip below, thinking, Look for the fist and take hold of it, grab it.
Faust was floating like a balloon in a soft breeze about three feet off the bottom, his face surprised in the parka hood, mouth slack, eyes cracked wide. Gun, out of air, pushed once more for the top and when he got there knew he didn’t have a choice. He started a hard crawl toward the reef, bringing his hands down like hammers on each stroke, smashing the ice,
then following through with his body, the sound ringing in his ears like glass. He reached the ice reef and tried to find a hold on it, but it slanted up too steeply, giving him nothing. His fingers could just as well have been someone else’s for all the good they did him. He edged his way along the reef until he came to a flat spot where he could plant his elbows and hoist himself chest high. For a few seconds he rested in that position, most of him dangling in the water, his arms and chest and head freezing fast in the cold air. He closed his eyes, trying to will his nerves and muscles into obedience beyond the cold, then leaned forward and pushed down against the ice, rolling to the side as he came out of the water.
Nothing was left in Gun’s mind except an image of a tiny little fellow, cold and wet and clinging to the inside of his shirt, shivering against his chest—so small he could fit in a shirt pocket but fully grown nonetheless and his fingers like mouse fingers clutching to Gun’s skin. Gun curled himself around his small passenger and scrambled over the top of the reef and slid down the other side, where he saw an eternity of sand. Long dunes, wind fashioned, sunbaked.
Knowing he was safe, Gun lay down to sleep.
27
He woke to a pain he knew from childhood. Frostbitten skin thawing. Coming in from a late afternoon of trapping muskrats on the bay, reaching into cold water to reset the steel-jawed traps, his fingers and toes and ears and face all aching with a deep urgency that said, You’re lucky we’re still here.
First just that feeling, and the awareness of being dry and warm, itchy all over. A wool Hudson Bay blanket—red, white, and green—wrapped tightly around him. Then Carol’s face, glowing, her eyes calm, lips tight with concern. And above her a small gold cross tacked to a plywood wall, and the words hope
FOR ALL.
“How’s your fingers and toes feel?” The mouth that entered Gun’s vision was mostly covered by a gray mustache going yellow with age. “They tingle some? Or more than that?” asked Jimmy Boone.
“More than that,” Gun said. “Feel like they’re going to blow up here any second. Bratwurst on the grill.”
“They’ll be fine. Give ’em an hour. They weren’t even white yet, you just had a little case of the hypothermia comin’ on. We get it warm enough in here?”
Gun realized Jimmy had a large drop of sweat ready to fall from his generous nose. He looked at Carol, whose face was dotted with moisture, each particle relaying a small bit of the light cast by Jimmy’s gas lantern.
“How’d you get me here?” Gun asked her.
“I had some help.” Carol took Gun’s hand and with a little teo much pressure began to stroke it. “That reefs close by, like Jimmy said. When you stopped the snowmobile I could still see the headlight, so I ran. Then Jimmy .. . happened along?” She looked up at the old man.
“I had this here feeling about things,” Jimmy said, “so I took a little drive up that way. But she didn’t need me. Time I showed up, she had you practically draped over the back of that Ski-Doo.”
Gun freed his arms from the blanket, raining the tuck, and gripped the edge of the cot he was on. He pulled himself to a sitting position. He saw his clothes strung up above the hot stove, and it wasn’t until then, seeing his pants and shirt and long Johns hanging there empty and damp, that he remembered Faust.
“Couldn’t get him out,” Gun said. “He had on that parka—the water was so damn cold.”
“You were lucky to get yourself out,” said Carol. She stood and pressed her palms against Gun’s chest until he eased himself back down on the cot Her expression was steady and patient. “Thank God,” she said.
“So, what did Faust go over the reef for?” Jimmy asked, matter of fact. He was stirring a teaspoon of coffee into boiled lakewater, deliberate.
“I’ve never seen a man like that, so scared,” Gun said. “He wasn’t going to talk to me if it killed him.”
“Which it did,” said Jimmy.
“He wouldn’t let me help him. You wouldn’t believe it. I could’ve tossed the guy a rope, he’d have tossed it back.”
“Whatever he did, or whatever he knew, it’s pretty safe now,” said Carol. “What next?” She took the coffee from Jimmy and handed it to Gun.
“Drive to Minneapolis and have a look through his house. Do you know what time it is?”
“Midnight—ah, twelve-thirty,” said Jimmy, checking his pocket watch.
“So you’re not planning on telling anybody what happened tonight,” said Carol, her eyes grim. She pushed her dark bangs straight back from her forehead and took a long breath.
“No, I’m not.” Gun drank the coffee carelessly, burning his tongue and throat. He felt the heat flash through his lungs like a light. “Nobody up here knows
a thing about this situation and they’d have me answering questions for a week. I won’t do that. I can’t.”
“Gun, we can’t just leave him under there.”
Jimmy cracked open a root beer on the bottle opener, which was Hamm’s-Beer-blue and shaped like a cartoon bear. He took a long pull from the chipped brown bottle.
“There’s a man under the ice, dead, and he’s got a family, friends. It’s not right to leave him there, even if you think it is. Even if you’ve got i
mportant things to do.” Carol accepted a cup of coffee from Jimmy but kept her eyes on Gun. He looked away from her, then back, unwilling to accept the guilt she was pushing.
“Under normal conditions, there’s also the matter of your Ski-Doo tracks, and Faust’s tracks, and whether they’d be able to piece together anything from them,” said Jimmy. “But the weather’s going to cure you of that worry.” He stood up and held aside the curtain from the small window to reveal a dark square of falling snow. “What I can do is make a little call to the sheriff in the morning. Almore’s an old friend of mine. I just call him and say I heard a little shouting in the night, north of here, and I go to have a look but it’s snowing pretty good and I don’t dare get too close to that reef. I tell him maybe he should go up there and have a look. And he’ll be able to see how the ice has been busted up and refrozen.”
Jimmy turned to Carol and nodded solemnly. “I don’t want to think about a man under the water. Faust can be under there”—Jimmy pointed down with his thumb—“or underneath a carved stone, and it doesn’t make a whisper of difference at this point. Not to him, at least.”
He stood up and slapped at Gun’s pants hanging above the stove. “Coming along,” Jimmy said.
“Won’t be but another half hour.” He took another swallow, smacked his lips, and gave a little wave with his bottle of root beer. “Now this batch here, it’s got a little spark to it,” he said.
28
At two a.m. Gun was driving his rented car south toward Minneapolis and not feeling too bad, considering. He had the heater going full bore, a large insulated mug of coffee on the dashboard and a cigarette rolling on one knee. His fingers and toes were tender but free of pain now, and his body had the kind of all-over soreness a guy feels about two days after a home-plate collision. He wasn’t coughing or sneezing. In fact, there was nothing bad in his chest, only a sympathetic catch whenever he thought of how cold he’d been just two hours ago.