The Wind Chill Factor

by Thomas Gifford

  On December 8, 1941, by order of the President, our many-chambered mansion on the estate looking down on that lovely river and the falls which bore our name was put under armed, uniformed Army guard and so it stayed until several months after the war ended. Austin Cooper was cordoned off, protected from all those with reason to wish him ill.

  Four

  CHICAGO LAY SMOKING AND VAST, a smudge of industrial haze frozen in the sky above it. As I swung northward against the grain of wind the overcast swept toward me. Soon I was in it again, feeling the two-and-a-half-ton Lincoln take the blasts on its great slab sides. And the snow came swirling across the frozen fields and the sun was reduced to nothing more than a dim grayness behind the howling wind and snow.

  I pulled up off the tollway to one of the Fred Harvey emporiums. The place was virtually deserted, cups echoing in saucers: there was an unreal, unearthly quiet about it all, as if, insulated in its cocoon of snow, Fred Harvey had opened a space station. There was a curious moment when I felt as if I’d fallen among automatons and was the only living thing within reach.

  The spell was broken when the girl brought my coffee. She smiled past some remnants of high-school acne and commented on the weather. “It seems like night already,” she concluded and went away. Two men came in to the eating area and sat down, ordered coffee. One of them, a tall, balding man in a sheepskin coat came over and asked if he could read the Tribune lying on the counter beside me. I told him it wasn’t mine and he was welcome to it. He smiled and shook his head at the snow blowing across the expanses of glass, obscuring the view of the highway below us.

  “Heading north?” he asked with a friendly, gaunt smile.

  “All the way to Minnesota,” I said.

  “You may not make it,” he said sadly as if we were all facing this common enemy together. “I hear it’s bad, worse the farther north you go.”

  “I suppose it is,” I said.

  “Well, it’s a hell of a thing.” He lit a Kool and folded the newspaper in large, long-fingered hands. He looked like a cowboy, herding cattle home through the drifts. “Thanks for the paper,” he said and went back to his companion.

  They were quietly drinking coffee when I put my gloves on and went back outside to my car. I was wearing my favorite turtleneck sweater, a heavy oily thing woven by some little old lady in the Hebrides, nothing but thick wool, yet soft as glove leather. The car surged to life immediately, and I ran through the checklist in my mind making sure everything was functioning perfectly. I drove slowly across the service area past a black limousine standing by a bank of pumps. The men inside the restaurant had come back outside. They were standing by the black car, and sheepskin coat waved to me as I passed him and rolled down the ramp to the empty white pit that slowly revealed itself as the tollway.

  I was daydreaming without losing my concentration on the road. I would let Cyril dominate my thoughts for a time, then Digby would take his place and I’d be bringing her back to Cooper’s Falls for the first time as I’d done so many years ago. My father would be talking to me, the way he’d never had the opportunity to do in reality; my grandfather would address the croquet ball, deliberately, black tie flapping in a summer breeze, and I could hear the solid sound of mallet on ball. …

  Early evening had overtaken me and the snow was thicker. The roadway had grown slippery with packed snow and ice. Visibility was a joke. I hadn’t seen more than a half dozen other vehicles in an hour and I had just passed the state line into Wisconsin when I saw the black limousine suddenly beside me, only a few feet away on my left. It was sliding toward me and there wasn’t time to react before I felt the impact, felt the Lincoln gliding off the road unable to grab hold on the hard-driven snow.

  Like a pair of gigantic ice skaters, we slid through drifting snow, plowing slowly on down a ridge of crusty whiteness. I spun the wheel, took my foot off the gas, hoped that somehow the snow tires would catch. The black limousine finally detached itself, pulled away and ahead of me, stayed on the shoulder as I slid downward. Finally I felt solid footing behind the rear axle and in an uncharacteristic instant of clear thinking I shoved the gearshift into low and hit the gas, hoping to regain control. Curiously, the maneuver worked and I felt the Lincoln gather itself together, push through the snow below the level of the highway, and claw its way back up to the shoulder, snow rising like waves in front of me, beside me, all around me. I suppose it took only a few seconds from the initial impact until I was back on the shoulder, but it seemed an agonizing lifetime, a nightlong terror which left me suddenly sick to my stomach, shaking, dripping with sweat. I sat clutching the wheel, gulping air in an attempt to keep from vomiting.

  The black limousine appeared again out of the snow, its lights blunted against the storm. I could hear it honking, saw the sheepskin coat waving to me, watched as it pulled in ahead of me and stopped. In view of my own lights, doors opened on either side of the limousine and the two men got out and hurried back toward me, leaning into the wind. I pushed open my door, which creaked sorely at the hinges and stepped out, feeling the full blast of wind and a coldness which had not been there when I’d left Fred Harvey. It cut through the sweater and the gaunt man in the sheepskin coat was shouting to me.

  “Are you all right?” His voice was nearly smothered by the wind. Snow bit at my face and eyes.

  “Yeah, I’m okay, I guess,” I said.

  “Jesus, I couldn’t help it,” his companion said, a short stout man in a blue duffel coat. “I’m sorry as hell, fella.”

  We stood looking at the damage: paint scraped off, door and front fender badly creased. “Shit,” I said.

  “I’ll look back here.” Sheepskin coat ducked his face down behind the fleecy collar and walked toward the rear of the Lincoln. There was no sound but the raving of the storm.

  Blue duffel coat beckoned me toward the front wheel, pointing at the fender. He knelt in the snow, seemed to be tugging at the fender, pulling it back from the wheel. I joined him, on my knees in the snow. The fender didn’t seem to be rubbing against the tire and I turned to say so.

  I never got the words out. I felt instead a blunt, numbing sensation on the side of my head. I heard the sound of something against my skull, heard a man grunt softly with exertion near my ear, felt the snow rushing against my face and then there was nothing.

  Five

  HOW LONG CAN YOU LIVE lying in the snow in below freezing temperatures? I don’t know. But I survived. I was stiff with cold when I awoke and when I lifted my head it bumped against the undercarriage of the Lincoln: somehow I had half hidden myself underneath the car. I had survived the attack for two reasons. Sheepskin coat had done an ineffectual job of bludgeoning me and the warmth from the huge engine, retained against the cold, had kept me from being frozen to death.

  Slowly, painfully I wriggled into the open. Our films and television have insulated us against the reality of physical violence because our heroes survive it each week and in each film. I had suspected we were being fed something less than the truth. Standing beside the Lincoln, leaning desperately against its wounded side and puking into the snow, I found my suspicions confirmed. It was more horrible—both the physical reality and the knowledge of menace hovering over me with a tire iron in its hand—than I could possibly have imagined, even in the delirium of drunkenness. Those sons of bitches had left me in the road to die, actually die—and I had lived by a quirk of chance. Suddenly I was aware of the weather: I opened the door, hauled myself back up into the driver’s seat, and turned the key. The Lincoln fired back to life with me, spraying warm air around the leather interior, defrosting the windshield. The Lincoln was saving my life.

  The side of my skull was sticky with blood and terribly tender to my fingertips’ pressure. I sat in the warmth trying to calm down and get my thoughts sorted out. Then I got back out of the Lincoln, washed the side of my head with snow, washed the blood off my hands, and set out again. The front tire was not rubbing the fender.

  The night was
dark. I was back on the road. I couldn’t see far enough ahead to push much past forty, and it occurred to me in one of those delayed-action double takes that the black limousine might appear once more, that these bastards might keep doing this to me until they did it right.

  It wasn’t until I saw through the storm the highway equipment, red lights flashing, pushing a path in the snow, that I began to feel reasonably safe again. There were men in those huge vehicles, men in the trucks full of sand—normal men doing their jobs, trying to protect me from the storm rather than lying in wait to kill me. Slowly, deliberately, I clung to the plows and sanders all the way to Madison, which glowed through the storm like a friendly apparition.

  Undoubtedly I ought to have checked my head at a local hospital emergency room, but instead I eased down off the highway, made a cloverleaf to the right, crossed the southbound lane, and pulled up the steep grade to a Howard Johnson’s, its orange roof peering out through the snow. After a few polite but mildly perplexed looks at my mussed condition, I was given a room facing toward the rear parking lot, away from the highway and backing against a sheer looming bluff of stone several times higher than the motel itself. The parking lot was well lit, snow in a constant filtering of whiteness, cars parked with six inches and more frosting roofs, hoods, trunks. I lugged my bag out of the rear seat, slid the glass door to my room open from the outside, and discovered the room clerk turning on lights, pointing toward the bathroom. He had a butch haircut, the first I’d seen in a long time. His eyes smiled from behind horn-rims.

  “Thought I’d come back and see you got in all right.” He nodded his head like the man in the sheepskin coat had done at Fred Harvey’s: a weather comment was coming. “Nothing much happening on a night like this. All day long we’ve been getting cancellations from salesmen snowed in somewhere else. Of course,” he said philosophically, “most of our salesmen decided to stay an extra night, so we’re back to even, I suppose.” He watched me throw the bag on the bed. I pulled the sliding door closed. “Heat’s over there,” he said, motioning to a wall dial. “Bathroom’s in here, color television if you’re one of those guys just can’t stand to miss the Carson show.” He pointed to a blanket folded on the bed. “Brought you an extra blanket.”

  “Very kind,” I said. “Do you have any Excedrin? I have an Excedrin headache, definitely.” He went away. Standing at the floor-to-ceiling wall of glass, staring at the white, fluffy parking lot and listening to the wind gnawing at my feet, I realized exactly what I was doing: I was scanning the parking lot for a black limousine with a dented side. I didn’t see one and the smiling desk clerk was telling me that here were my Excedrins and didn’t I look a little pale?

  “Yes, I probably do look a little pale,” I said, “but that’s only because my head aches, I’m sick to my stomach, and I’ve been throwing up in the snow on the freeway. Otherwise, I’m fine.”

  “Well, you’d better get to bed, then,” he said. Smiling from the doorway he said: “This flu, it’s been going around. Just murder. So get a good night’s sleep.”

  Just murder. Oh, boy.

  For a while the Excedrin kept me awake and I kept seeing the man in the sheepskin coat smiling at me and telling me I might not make it to Minnesota. But why had they attacked me? Thrill killers? It didn’t seem likely: surely such psychopaths would have enjoyed the act of murder, would have made very sure. Thieves, then? But they had taken nothing: no papers, no money, no credit cards, nothing. Yet, they had painstakingly lured me into a trap and tried to kill me. How else could I interpret it?

  I finally drifted off to sleep, the snow scurrying across the glass wall and the shadows falling in stately bars.

  Six

  AS I LEFT MADISON AND headed north on January 20, my head ached slightly, a patch over my left ear was swollen and tender, but I’d had no recurrence of vomiting. All things considered, with bacon and eggs under my belt, I felt reasonably well. The man at the Texaco station had checked under the hood for loose hoses and leaks, pronounced everything all right. Aside from her cosmetic damage the Lincoln was purring, giving ample evidence of her fine disregard for the economics of fuel consumption. The sun was bright in the east. The sky was glacial. The temperature had fallen to ten degrees.

  January 20. Somewhere Cyril was approaching Cooper’s Falls, was perhaps even now landing at Minneapolis/St. Paul. By evening I would know what he wanted, what all the urgency was about.

  I knew no more now than I had when I set out from Boston. There was the telegram: URGENT YOU MEET ME COOPER’S FALLS 20 JANUARY, DROP EVERYTHING, FAMILY TREE NEEDS ATTENTION. CHEERS, OLD BOY. CYRIL. I had it memorized.

  And it meant nothing to me, nothing I could put my finger on. Decorating the family tree, obviously, was the matter of my grandfather’s political eccentricity, but how might that need “attention”? Austin Cooper had died peacefully in his eighties, the family’s oldest friend at his side. It was Arthur Brenner himself, in fact, who had written me of my grandfather’s death a few years before, had told me how my grandfather had peacefully slipped away with Arthur at his bedside. Arthur Brenner had been my grandfather’s attorney, a dear friend of my father’s, although a good many years his senior, and had broken the news to me not only of my grandfather’s death, but of my father’s, my mother’s and my little sister Lee’s, as well. Arthur had helped my father get into Harvard through his own Harvard connections, had aided him in being attached to the Royal Air Force, and had subsequently helped me go to Harvard. And Arthur Brenner himself had commented upon the death of Austin Cooper that at last the family slate was wiped clean. Time would pass, he’d said, and eventually the memory of my grandfather’s Nazism would be gone, and then the memory of my father’s heroism would pass, the family would scatter, and Cooper’s Falls would be only a name on a map without a living soul attached to it.

  I pushed on into the afternoon, farther and farther north, closer to home. By early afternoon the sun was gone, the sky the color of my gray suede driving gloves. The radio reported a blizzard developing in the Dakotas and in the western edges of Minnesota. Swinging north, following the river at the Wisconsin-Minnesota border, darkness began and it was no longer as warm inside the car. It seemed as if the fan blowing warm air had slowed, so I reset the temperature controls upward and stopped to refuel. The service station attendant seemed never to have seen the workings of a Lincoln before and had no theories about the failure of the heating system.

  Back on the road, which was now a simple two-lane strip cut between banks of fir trees which grew thickly almost to the roadside, I began thinking of the man in the sheepskin coat, wondering if there could be some connection between two such curious events—the telegram from Cyril in Buenos Aires and the attempt to kill me in a blizzard on a highway in Wisconsin. But that was absurd. Surely, I had been victimized by coincidence, and nothing more. Such violence is terribly complex once you begin to analyze it and realize that there is no apparent motive.

  For the last stage of the journey, I turned off on a trunk highway, blacktopped, narrow, totally dark. There was no moon; no starlight; no other travelers. I turned the radio off. There were forty miles yet to go and the fans suddenly stopped blowing altogether. There was no heat in the car and what little there had been was quickly dissipated. I stopped in the middle of the road and wrestled my own sheepskin coat out of the back seat and struggled into it, afraid to open the door to the harsh wind. Snow eddied across the frozen snow adhering to the blacktop. It seemed as if I’d been engulfed in a thick blowing fog.

  Driving on, it became colder and colder. At first my hands hurt, stung with cold, then they began to lose feeling. I tried to stomp feeling back into my feet. My breath began to freeze in my mustache, in the hair in my nose. Passing familiar turns in the road, I knew I had twenty miles yet to go. I turned the radio back on. They kept saying that it was very cold, that a blizzard was on the way, that it was twenty-five degrees below zero in Duluth.

  The car was trying to kill me, I thou
ght. Maybe the Lincoln, which was behaving so uncharacteristically, could accomplish what the man in the sheepskin coat hadn’t. What in the hell was the matter with the heating, anyway? I fastened my eyes on the Lincoln’s hood ornament, pretended that in some miraculous way the chrome ornament was pulling the car through the frozen night. I remembered a movie I’d seen as a child in which there was a motion picture studio called Miracle Productions. Their slogan said: “If it’s worth seeing, it’s a Miracle.”

  And finally, in the ragged nick of time, I made the final turn through the trees and eased back off the gas. In front of me were the two stone towers at the entrance to the drive, the gates of my childhood where Cyril and I had waited for the school bus. I sat there, half frozen but forgetting my discomfort for the moment, grinning. Nobody, nothing had killed me. It was still January 20, and I was home at last.

  Poplars lined the stretch of road, forming a discreet natural barrier between the Coopers and the curious world: now, in winter, the lights of the Lincoln picked them out against the blackness like gaunt survivors of a death march. Beside the gate on the right was a stone gatehouse with a heavy oak door and long, ancient-looking hinges. During the war years Cyril and I had come down to play with the soldiers who were young and bored and very happy not to be crawling along Omaha Beach. We had touched the Garand rifles and climbed on the jeep and on a few memorable occasions we had gone into town on errands with the soldiers in the jeep, the wind tearing at us as we laughed with the excitement of it all. There are still photographs somewhere of Cyril and me in our regulation suntans, clip-on Army ties neatly in place, properly fitted out with insignia and caps, uniforms our guards had given us one Fourth of July.