Holy shit was right.
Those first thousand feet were heartening, smooth and fairly easy in the hardened track he’d made the day before. Inness immediately said that her ankle hurt, but only that once. He thought of her tossing everything out of the loft, grinned, couldn’t help it: if they’d been up there when the cabin fell, they would most certainly be dead, or worse: hurt very badly and about to drown. Little stabs of regret: the Advil, various items of food, his Leatherman.
Well, fuck that. “My house by nightfall,” he said. And he kept repeating positive thoughts: “We’ll have hot showers when we arrive.” And, “If the road isn’t plowed, there’s that big house by the bridge. If no one’s home, we break in.” And, “Steady progress.”
Inness kept up a stream of curses, but she didn’t make fun of him, didn’t complain. A leader’s a leader and Eric had assumed command. And she didn’t say a word about Jimmy’s letters, Obama’s letter, K-Bomb’s. You’d think she’d wonder where they were, or care.
The long curve in the river was as easy as it had looked—windswept sand, just a few inches of snow. But of course all that snow had been blown downstream, and so their progress slowed in the next leg, slowed further, one step at a time, long rests. The sun finally reached them, warmed their backs. Eric pressed his chest through the drifts ahead, moved a ski forward, moved the other forward, pressed his chest into the drift ahead, always keeping an eye on the river—at least they couldn’t get lost—feeling with the hoe handle for holes and obstacles, skirting rocks, skirting the tops of tall shrubs that tangled him. Inness had it easier behind him, but that was only relative. He felt impressed with her uncomplaining courage.
She said, “Do I stay with Patty Cardinal tonight?”
“Later for Patty,” he said after a few steps. “I have a guest room. You’ll have your own bed.”
A few more steps. “And a bathtub?”
“And a Jacuzzi, never used. All to yourself.”
“And I’d like a massage.”
“Well,” Eric said, her tattoo coming unbidden to mind, that ribbon of ink. He pressed forward through the snow.
“That’s a joke,” Inness said at length. “No massage. You keep your fucking hands off me, mister.”
“Yo,” Eric said.
They made a few more yards of progress.
She said, “And you have, like, cognac.”
“Scotch, I think it is. A client gave me a bottle of thirty-year-old something-something, supposed to be very smooooooth.”
“We will drink in moderation, mister.”
The banter was good; it kept up their spirits. They worked through a difficult stretch, came out of it, proceeded.
Inness said, “In your house. Are there a million photos of Alison?”
“Probably a few, yes.”
She thought about that. “Well, you go in first. You go around and take down the photos. Easier than a tattoo. Just do it. All the wedding shots, all the shots of her family, all the cute kisses on the back of some motor scooter you rented on some honeymoon island, and put them away where I won’t ever see them not ever.”
“Roger.”
“And don’t use military lingo.”
“Check.”
And again they giggled, not for long. They came to another wind-cleared sandbar after several torturous hours of the deep stuff, scant progress. Eric was wary of resting, but they stopped long enough to sit down on exposed rocks and drink small amounts of water, tear up tortillas and eat them, open an orange, drink more water, eat snow.
Forty-Five
THEY GOT A workable rhythm going, and in fact the way was inexpressibly beautiful. Twice more they had to stop to laugh, snow caving in all around them, just something funny about swimming out of drifts with their arms. The sun grew warmer, and then warmer yet, and then the danger was sweating, and increasingly wet clothes. Heavy drifts then bare areas, slow progress then quick, no progress at all at the old dam site and so turn back, try a new route, success, the river roaring at their sides as the way downhill got steeper, more treacherous. But steeper took less energy, practically a glide. Eric’s shoulder began to click, distinctly to click. Two o’clock, at a guess, only an hour more of the day, two hours more light, maybe two and a half if lucky, no sense of their progress. Gradually, Eric’s thoughts grew black. Inness was slowing down, repeating that her ankle was fine, over and over, “My ankle is super fine,” which meant it was not. Burst pipes to look forward to, if the power were down in town. If they made it to town. Inness close to tears: that ankle. Advil left in the cabin. Click-click. A long, costly rest. A creaky rising back to their feet. And onward resignedly, one heavy ski before the other, exhaustion looming, harder and harder to concentrate, sunset a terror. Ahead, suddenly, the oddest horizontal, a freaky illusion, like the sky had fallen sidewise, a great gray chunk of dusk, which resolved even more suddenly into a cement span: the 138 bridge! They’d practically forged their way under it!
“Bridge!” Eric cried.
To get up the embankment and to the highway was going to be the worst work of the day, a long, slow traverse. But gloriously, 138 had been plowed, it seemed. They’d made it! The resulting snowbank, however, was like a talus slope on a mountainside. Eric started the ascent, no more sliding along but instead a tough, lateral climb in soft, loose material—killer on Inness’s ankle, no way around it, and impossible without the skis, so no relief. Leaning back to her awkwardly, he removed a glove and wiped her tears away with his bare hand, full of the feeling that they might topple and fall all the way back down and into the river.
“We’re about there,” he said.
“I’m crying,” she said.
Where was his hoe? Her poles?
Long lost.
They made their slow way, incremental progress, long rests, the sky going dark, Jupiter appearing yellowy in the crystal sky, then the brightest stars one by one, then in the dozens, gradually the millions. And painfully they reached the top of the bank, no triumph. Because success unveiled the next trial, and then more. For one thing, Eric had been wrong about the house near the bridge. There was no house near the bridge. Which meant there were no houses at all until they reached Houk’s Corners, a mile or more.
And maybe a couple hundred yards back up the road the other way, toward the veterinarian’s, another discouraging sight: one of the enormous state plow-trucks, its lights flashing faintly under fresh-blown snow, stuck in a drift as high as its cab, higher in fact. The plow job the driver had abandoned was hopeless in any case, what the state called FRAO, First Responder Access Only, Eric knew from lawsuits, but a proven lifesaver and a lifesaver now: even in the dark of night he and Inness could walk to Houk’s Corners and not lose their way: the banks were canyon high.
Inness said, “We’ll have to think about names.”
And maybe Eric was drifting, too, because somehow that made sense. A queer sensation came over him, the strongest feeling that the bridge they had to cross was unsafe, and further, that they had to think of names. The night upon them, the bridge’s clear deficits making his heart pound, lists of names forming (Disraeli, DiGiacomo, Dirigo), he worked at unwinding duct tape—no Leatherman to cut it with, goddamn—gradually freed Inness from her skis as she said names, dreamy lists of names.
“You’ve got to stay awake,” Eric told her. He lifted her chin. “Tell me another name,” he said.
“Louise,” she said. She sat on the crest of the bank.
Eric freed himself, then, stood in rain boots and duct tape, propped his skis in the snowbank, propped hers beside them neatly. “Maybe we’ll come back for these,” he said.
“Mementos,” she said clearly.
The plow driver had escaped, and so would they. There’d be a radio in the truck! Eric said, “Let me check something.”
Inness slumped.
Eric sat her up again. “More names,” he said.
“Eleanor,” Inness said.
“You’ve already said that one,�
� Eric told her.
“Eleanor,” she said again.
“Move your arms,” Eric said. “Can you swim your arms? Can you roll your neck? Keep moving? I’ll be right back.”
“No. Eric.”
“You’ll see me the whole way. You can see in starlight. I just have to check that plow. Think of more names.”
He slid himself down the bank, but a miniature avalanche started and grew and the bank caved and Danielle came down with it and on top of him on the road as he tried to stop her. He struggled from under her, and brushed himself off as he stood. She hardly seemed to know what had happened, still muttering names. He lifted her, sat her on a chunk of ice, and she fell off. He sat her in the road then and she slumped over.
“Right back,” he said. And trotted all too blissfully unencumbered up the road and to the plow, climbed the huge bank of snow using the driver’s footprints as toeholds, he realized, difficult going in rain boots, found the driver’s door unlocked, the window opaquely netted in frost, dug barehanded to find the handle, yanked hard at it, got an inch, yanked again, bashed the snow with the door, yanked and bashed till he could squeeze himself bodily into the cab. Freezing in there. Why had he expected it to be warm? No keys, of course. And the radio was gone, just a steel rack and a couple of loose cables, electronics removed per Schedule Six DOT operator regulations, each driver assigned and responsible for a radio set. This cut down on thefts. Alison had helped write that boring bit of policy as part of a mitigation program she’d designed for this or that senate committee against the costs to the state of vandalism and petty theft, back when she was taking any work the state would offer. Upshot: DOT drivers took their radios with them. Likely the guy was picked up by his supervisor in a smaller state truck—looking at the road, Eric detected the tracks of a tortured triple k-turn beneath the fresh dusting.
He slid and shuffled back down to Alison, who lay in the road now—no, Inness, Inness lay in the road, in the middle of 138, which on a clear day you drove to town in ten minutes, give or take. He dreaded crossing the bridge to Houk’s Corners, the surest feeling that the thousands of tons of cement and steel were about to fall, that he and Inness would be plunged into the river among smashed concrete and the crushing debris of the cabin, the cabin that even then was floating and bumping inexorably their direction, the jagged pieces of the cabin. Against panic he held his breath, he let it out, he held his breath, he let it out, he held it long and let it out. He reached Inness, said a few soft words about the snow plow, how it had saved them, urged her to her feet, got her under the arms and lifted her, made a soft joke about dancing, got a weak smile and a little effort from her. She stood on her own feet, swaying.
“Ready?” he said.
“Yo,” she said.
He took her elbow and focused on her walking and they reached the bridge and began to cross over it (just a regular highway bridge, low steel railings, fairly new), and he tried not to think of the river and all the ice below but couldn’t shake the image of the butcher’s block knocking its way through the rocks down there, though of course it could never have made it this far, not through the jammed ice, the mess of tree trunks, docks, and all that must have come by in the night. Inness leaned heavily upon him and so all his focus was on her and she hobbled in her duct-taped socks and led him, whether she knew it or not, led him across the span, which held.
Forty-Six
ALREADY, ALPENGLOW HAD turned the sky lavender. Eric fished around in his makeshift hood for the water bottle and they drank the last of their supply. She’d begun to shiver and now he was shivering, too. They shouldn’t stop moving. The walking brought them heat. He found the remaining tortilla and the apple he’d stowed, the last orange, and they took small bites, Inness trying to drop to the road and sit, Eric propping her up, keeping her on her feet.
“It’s fuel,” he said. He thought how much he’d like to take his blanket off, loosened the tape at his neck. “Ready?” he said.
She moved her feet, nothing to say, shuffled and leaned on him, and they slumped and hobbled a few hundred feet at best. From any distance, he thought, they’d look like a failed moose. Houk’s Corners and the store were not more than a mile up the hill around a series of broad curves, twenty minutes’ fine walk in summer, a two-minute drive. But the hill was like a mountain now, and the cold was deepening, flowing down the river valley in its own stream, a still, clear evening, his nose pinching with the cold, ice in his eyebrows. And they were sweated.
Eric’s thoughts drifted. Ice skating when he was a kid. Mr. Gernitz would flood his yard, a dozen kids would skate back there, a kind of violent hockey with brooms and an empty tuna can, Mr. Gernitz’s close interest in them unclear. He had to work to remember that Inness was beside him, that they were involved in an emergency.
“Honestly,” Inness said, serene. And sagged, slipped out of his grip, thump on the road. She had icicles hanging from her nostrils.
He wiped them away with his bare hand. Where had he lost his glove?
“I’ll sleep,” she said.
Eric thought that sounded nice. They could sit a while, lie down a while. It was getting warmer anyway. But no, no, of course not. He swam his arms, he rolled his neck. He had to keep her moving. He thought to run ahead, get help, but if he left her she’d sleep and freeze.
“Come on,” he said. “Time to stand. It’s time. Not far to go.”
She held up her arms for help and he pulled her to her feet, both of them wobbly. So in a motion, the only solution, he bent and hefted her to his shoulder, folded her over his shoulder at the hips, balanced her, began to march. She was lighter on his shoulder than she’d been on his arm; she was light altogether. He found he could really walk for the first time all day, walk like a human, head held up, right foot then left, right then left, Inness inert, the true night upon them, the true cold, the bite of it in his nose, enough starlight to make out the canyon that was the road ahead, rain boots and bits of scarf and duct tape bunching around his feet, blisters breaking, every bit of strength he had, no lights ahead, nothing. The road got steep and his step weakened. He needed a rest, just a quick rest, felt himself sweating under the big blanket. He should just take it off, get comfortable. He put Inness on the road and tried to figure it out, all that duct tape, sat beside her, got distracted by thoughts of a row of buildings he’d seen once in Europe, closed his eyes. Just a small rest.
Forty-Seven
MACHINERY BACKING UP, alarm beeping, a deep rumble, then an odd jangling like disconnected music: tire chains. Eric struggled up from sleep, struggled to sit. Far up the hill the forest was lit red with brake lights, and a white, glaring spotlight shone down the canyon of snow, backup lights and the beeping alarm, brake lights red and the sound of heavy chains clanging and the woods beyond lit up as if on fire, a truck coming toward them backward.
Galvin Roberts! In his big old industrial towing rig. Backing gradually toward them down the narrow canyon, expertise in the extreme. Galvin! Sent to recover the state plow! Eric managed to stand, shouted and shouted again, a muted human noise in the vast silence, waved his arms. Inness—oh no—Inness was face down on the road beside him. He lifted her to sitting, patted the snow off her cheeks and lips and forehead.
She murmured something, good.
The truck was backing slowly down the hill. Eric shouted louder but his voice was like nothing.
Galvin must have seen them there frozen in his spotlight, though, blew his air horn to say so—loudness itself—backed more slowly till he was nearly upon them, slowed perfectly to a stop, hissing of airbrakes, clank of clutch and creak of handbrake, squeal of door, idling rumble, diesel exhaust. He climbed down from the huge rig, hurried back to them, face set in amazement: Okay, here was Eric Neil, the lawyer fellow, Eric Neil whose car he’d towed just a few days back, Eric Neil the lawyer with a lady in duct tape sitting in the road nowhere near anything and twenty degrees below zero.
“Mr. Neil?” the driver said.
&nbs
p; “Galvin Roberts,” Eric said.
Galvin helped him get Inness to her feet and together they walked her to the truck, lifted her up into the cab. Eric hobbled around and got in on the passenger side, a ladder to climb, like Everest. Inside this truck, unlike the other, it was warm. Galvin took Inness’s hand, tugged it unresisting out of the big coat sleeve, took her pulse against his huge black watch.
“I was worried about the bridge,” Eric said.
“It’s high,” Galvin said. “Like a hundred forty, very high. She’s hypothermic, Mr. Neil. That’s my guess.”
“I thought it would fall in. And the cabin.”
“Okay, chief, you, too, I see. Let’s get the heat turned up. And then I can get you home and you two get yourselfs into a warm bath. Mr. Neil? Focus up, Mr. Neil. A hot bath and blankets after, soup if you’ve got it. I’d take you to Woodchurch Memorial but they ain’t plowed. Plus they got no power—generators is down, fuel gone. Trunk line didn’t reach the hospital. You tell me why.”
“They can’t get fuel in?” Alison had been embroiled in the trunk line dispute, that was what Galvin was saying, something about Alison.
Galvin said, “It’s that bad, yup.” He put the truck in gear and put the gas to it and they roared into motion, lumbered up the long hill inside the snow canyon so brightly lit, heater pumping gloriously, a couple of minutes to Houk’s Corners, complete darkness in the buildings there, maybe a candle lit in the Clarks’ house.
And onward.
Galvin took it as his job to keep talking: “Focus up, Mr. Neil. You got to stay focused. You both, you want to stay awake. State’s got all four plows down. Town plows can’t pass nowhere rural—just concentrating on the village. And 138 here? They just pulled Dick Wynot out of his rig an hour ago. I was coming down to collect it if I can. Believe I can. DOT garage is open. They’re on the trunk line there, got power. Alvin LeGrande is there with parts. Just heard on the radio: drift heights fifteen feet and that’s an average. I seen one thirty feet by the high school—I mean it’s over the roof of the gym and that’s three stories, wouldn’t you say? May not make it. Hannaford roof collapsed early this morning! No one in there, of course. Oh, but imagine the mess. Got a crew shoveling atop Walmart right now, but there’s going to be more to this disaster! Who builds a flat roof in Maine? They want to fix Dick’s rig and get River Street plowed down over to Johnson’s Feed and Fuel—proper shed roof there—get ’em plowed out so’s Billy J. can get the tanker to the hospital. Ten thousand gallons number-two diesel, it holds. They burned some twenty-five hundred gallons running the generators at the hospital before they run out, tank on a quarter, is what I heard, budget cuts. Flat roof on the hospital, too, come to think of it, but that’s a fortress, there. Life Flight has got every helicopter flying, now that the wind’s finally down. They took out some of the worst. But they ain’t equipped to fly in diesel, no suh. And the drifting, by god. Weight of the snow broke the hydraulics on Dick’s rig, froze the SDL direct wing, and as you can imagine, with the wing seized up you can’t back out of nothing. And Mr. Neil—keep focused—the plow coming the other way was lost, too. He lost track of the road and ended up in one of the potato fields up there north. So 138 is blocked clear to Brighton, sixteen miles. Both them drivers near to froze their ass. Roger was talking angels when we got to him. It’s a night to die.” Talkative Galvin: “Hold her hands,” he said, meaning Inness’s. “Pump her arms a little. And see if you can’t help him, honey. Pump your arms a little, kick your legs a little, sweetheart. You hearing me?”
The Remedy for Love Page 23