Dead of Winter

by Gerri Brightwell

  “Fuck,” he says, “fucking goddamn fuck.” Snow’s got into his parka and his gloves, has come in over the tops of his boots so that cold fingers of it creep over his skin. He makes himself turn sideways, slowly, to dig in one boot then the next, taking his time as though a sickening griping wasn’t stirring his guts. He slips twice and drops his flashlight. He paws it out of the snow and slides a little, has to sit down to save himself. He’s so close to the edge that it pulls at him, and the effort of resisting leaves him dizzy. It doesn’t help that his flashlight’s shining out over the treacly water. He knows how it goes: it’s not the cold of the river that kills you, at least, not the way you’d think—the shock of it makes you gasp, and your lungs fill, and like that it’s all over because you’ve been dragged beneath the ice. Your body sinks to the bottom where you molder into the mud come spring.

  It doesn’t bear thinking about it. Not when you’re about to send another man to this fate.

  The snow beneath Fisher’s butt has curved to his shape, cradling him even as it soaks the warmth right out of him. He’s so cold and scared he’s shaking. It’s all he can do to swing the flashlight toward the tarp. Even in that sad light it’s a ridiculous crayon blue, the rope a cheery yellow, the silver duct tape gleaming. The beam’s shrinking and he cups the flashlight close to his face and breathes on it a few times, then he shines it where he imagines Brian’s broken head must be.

  “Brian?” he says. How thin and insincere his voice sounds. “Look, hey, we thought you were dead. I mean, you’d been shot in the head, right?” He lets out a flat laugh and his breath hangs ghostly along the beam of the flashlight. “You’re dying anyway, you know that. Besides, I have to think of Bree. And I mean, what the fuck was going on? You, naked in her bathroom? Because if I find out you were coming on to her, I’ll come back and shoot you myself all over again,” and he lets out another laugh.

  His upper lip’s cold where his breath has condensed on it and tried to freeze. He wipes it away with the back of his glove and the light jumps around. “Seriously, Brian, you always were an uptight shit, but when you lost it, did it have to be with Bree? I mean, for fuck’s sake, she’s just a kid!”

  The dying beam of his flashlight is drawing in like a tongue, and the darkness steps closer. He leans forward and strains his hearing toward this thing lying just past the twin mounds of his knees. He waits. He watches it. A movement, a shift in the shape of a bulge, and he blurts, “Fucking hell!” and is about to crab-walk his way back up the slope as fast as he can when he realizes. The flickering flashlight. The play of shadows. The tarp hasn’t moved. Still, he’d do anything rather than touch that cursed thing again.

  Be better than that, he tells himself, but he doesn’t move. He makes himself think about Bree and what her life might become if he’s too afraid to finish this job. A trial, he thinks, her story in the paper. Even if they let her off, the stink of what she did will cling to her for years, for the rest of her life most likely. That mightn’t even be the worst of it. What’s it like to run and know you’re being hunted? What does that do to you? And what might it make you do, especially if you’re Bree?

  He forces out one hand to grab the rope and heaves, heaves, to swing Brian’s legs past the thin spruce trunk, but he can’t do it. His lungs are aching from the effort, his knees numb where his pants and longjohns are pulled tight across the bone. He scoots closer to the tree and tucks both arms under the tarp. He feels the bend of knees over his right arm and his belly clenches. Then he cries out and hefts those legs with all his might. The body comes loose and rolls madly through the snow, then it sails out over the edge, suspended for a moment, and crashes into the water.

  As for Fisher, his arms are windmilling against gravity. The flashlight flips end over end in a perfect, short parabola then embeds itself in the snow. All the while Fisher wills himself backward, backward, can’t find his balance, can’t find anything to hold on to except air until—just when he’s got the iron taste of death in his mouth, so sure is he that he’s going over the edge too—one hand closes around the spruce, and its top flexes like a fishing pole as he drags himself back toward the safety of the slope.

  He crawls up the incline because he doesn’t trust himself to stand. His hands are numb and his feet, his knees, his face, and he’s almost sobbing, is saying to himself, “Fuck oh fuck,” because he’s carrying with him the thought of what he’s done. Hasn’t he just killed a man? A dying man, it’s true, but nonetheless one alive enough to sigh and groan? Those sounds haunt him all the way up to the guardrail, and over it, and across the packed snow toward the car.

  The air’s so warm inside that he can scarcely breathe. He rests his head against the steering wheel and feels himself trembling. Grisby’s fiddling with the radio. He says, “Christ—how long can it take to throw a dead guy in the river?” and “Man, I thought you’d fallen in with him.”

  “Nearly did,” Fisher says. “He got stuck against a tree and I had to go down after him. Fuck,” and he rubs his face. “Maybe he was a shit, but I just threw him in the river to die.”

  Grisby rocks forward and grins. “Nah,” he says, “he was dead. Dead as a freaking dodo.”

  “We heard him.”

  “Yeah, fuck, I nearly pissed my pants. But hey, remember that summer I worked as a cleaner at the funeral home? One day I’m mopping the floor around this body they’ve got laid out with a sheet over it, and suddenly I hear this groan and the body sits up. It’s some old guy and his eyes are rolled up in his head and his arms are doing the zombie-reach thing, and bubbles are coming out his mouth. Man, I pissed myself, I actually did.”

  “So he wasn’t dead.”

  “Fucking gases, man. They build up and do weird stuff. The guys there thought it was a huge freaking joke when I came running out with my pants all wet. Man, I quit and never went back. Too goddamn freaky for me, know what I mean?”

  Fisher’s face aches from the inside where the sore tissue of his sinuses is coming alive again in the warm air. He says, “You couldn’t have told me earlier? For fuck’s sake!”

  “Didn’t think about it until just now.” He sniffs. “I was as scared shitless as you.”

  “Except you didn’t have to throw him in the river.”

  Fisher has one hand bunched into a fist. He imagines it smacking into Grisby’s cheek, bone cracking against bone. He might have done it, too, but Grisby turns to him and says, “Your idea. I was just going along with it. And hey—you checked he got sucked under, right?”

  Fisher’s foot’s a clumsy frozen thing in his boot, but he forces it down on the gas pedal until the engine’s shrieking, as though that will make what he sees inside his head disappear: the sun coming up late-morning with its glassy golden glow, and the blue of the tarp lit up where it’s come to rest against the ice, held fast by the current.

  Grisby says, “Well—did you?”

  “Did you? Or were you sitting here in the warm, thinking about how much you’re gonna get for Brian’s stuff?” and he jerks his thumb over his shoulder at the boxes piled in the back seat. “You think you need to check, go check. I’ll wait for you.” He sits pressing the gas pedal until it’s clear—as they both knew—that Grisby’s going nowhere, then they take off over the rutted snow, back to the highway.

  Grisby switches stations until he finds some nerve-jangling rock, then he sits back and yawns. Fisher is perched forward to see the road because ice has shrunk the windshield to a porthole: his breath and Grisby’s, frozen onto the glass. He jacks up the heat and turns the vents to melt it. He can’t see far enough to drive safely, but he doesn’t give a shit right now. He steps hard on the gas and soon the car’s gobbling up the blacktop like it’s being hauled in by the pull of the headlights, like there’s no way anything more could go wrong tonight. But all Fisher can think about is everything they’ve screwed up: if they didn’t want Brian found, why didn’t they wrap him in wh
ite sheets, for crap’s sake, instead of a blue tarp? And then there’s all the stuff loaded into the backseat—the black bag he packed with Brian’s razor and underwear, his pants and shirts, his toothbrush, even a book, for fuck’s sake. He should have thrown the bag in after him—why didn’t he think of that? Then there’s the electronics and guns and God-knows-what that Grisby’s loaded into boxes. If Grisby’s not careful, that stuff’s going to show up in the wrong places and the shit’s going to hit the heater. And since when has Grisby been careful?

  Beside him Grisby’s bobbing his head. Over the whine of a guitar played punishingly fast Grisby shouts, “You know how it is: you wake up and the day’s just an ordinary day, and then something happens and it goes all crazy, like you’re in a movie or something, and by the time it’s over—”

  “This one’s not over.”

  Grisby leans toward him. “Near as dammit, Fisher. How about you drop me at my place? It’s not far, right?” He peers into the night beyond the car as though he has any idea where they are.

  “Thought you needed to lie low.”

  “Yeah, well,” and he licks his lips, “reckon it’s late enough for me to go home.”

  Fisher checks his mirror then steers the car over onto the slip road. “You can’t sell that stuff. You have to sit on it until this all blows over.”

  “Ah, c’mon, don’t start. I helped you out, didn’t I? Huhn?”

  “If someone puts two and two together, it’s—”

  “Listen, I know what I’m doing. OK? So drop it.” He slumps back against the seat. “You’re turning into a real tight-ass. I mean, the thing with the travel mugs—c’mon. No one’s even gonna be looking for him. He’s left town, right?”

  “We can’t screw up. It’s not just us: it’s Bree, too.”

  “Yeah, well, she got us into this.” He huffs his breath out his nose. “Hell, if she keeps her mouth shut, what are people gonna think except that some shitbag husband took off while his wife was away? Maybe your ex won’t do a thing; hell, she’s rid of him and she didn’t even have to clean up the mess. She comes back and he’s gone, that bathroom’s cleaner than it’s even been. What’s not to like?”

  “For fuck’s sake—”

  “Hey, it’s not like we killed him. We just found him with his brains blown out.”

  Fisher swallows his saliva because he can’t help but think of that house, and Brian slumped against the wall with that hole in his head, and what they’ve missed that could lead the cops right to them. But anyway, dumping a body’s not a crime is it? Or maybe it is, but it’s not like he killed Brian. All he did was dispose of what was left of him, and that from the best of motives. Plus he was careful: those yellow gloves, all that washing, all that scrubbing, the bags of trash he’s carried away and that it’ll be easy enough to get rid of. But the rest of the stuff, it’s like a bomb waiting to go off. Fuck, why did he agree to let Grisby take it? Stupid, he tells himself, stupid stupid stupid. He takes a breath and says, “I can’t let you take that stuff, I just can’t, not yet. It’s too risky.”

  Grisby’s head swings toward him. That narrow chin, that too-long nose, that grubby look of stubble on his cheeks. “You’re being a jerk.”

  “You know it’s too risky.”

  Grisby lifts his hands in surrender. “Well, fine then. You win. You take it all home. You hide it away in that huge trailer, and you make sure no one accidentally comes across it, and you get rid of it, OK? OK?”

  Fisher’s about to say OK, fine, but nothing comes out his mouth. He imagines it: all that stuff in his trailer, and Jan coming round because she wants to know where the hell Bree is, and isn’t she with him? She’d recognize that stuff right away. So, he’d have to take it to the transfer station—but even at fifty-four below there are guys who hang around and go through your trash, who’ll drag it from the dumpster and fight over it. There must be other places: holes he could dig, except the ground’s frozen; or the river again, except some of that stuff might float, and he’s biting his tongue, because there has to be some way to get rid of it. Hell, he could take it back to the house, couldn’t he? But the thought of going back there . . . no, he can’t do it.

  He lets out a sigh. He’s so tired, so very tired, and his head’s throbbing. All he wants is to sleep, because in the morning he’s going to have to search for Bree. “OK,” he says, “OK then, you take it, and Brian’s travel bag.”

  “No way, that was your idea. You take it.”

  They fight all the way back to Grisby’s apartment before finally the silence of the parking lot, and all the windows looking out across it, makes them shut up. Fisher even helps Grisby carry the stuff up to his door, and dumps the bags of trash in the building’s dumpsters, and comes back up to say goodbye. Grisby doesn’t ask him in, and he’s glad. He climbs back behind the wheel and drives off, so fast his car almost catches up to the darkness just beyond its headlights.

  11

  OF COURSE, THERE’S the bag. The almost-new black wheel-along bag that Fisher packed for Brian’s trip into the great beyond and that Grisby refused to take. All the way home Fisher senses it in the back seat like one of those sullen fares who clamp their mouth shut and stare anywhere but at his eyes in the mirror, as though it’s his damn fault they have to pay him for a ride home.

  First thing he does when he pulls up outside his trailer is wheel around in his seat and stare at the bag, like he’s trying to catch it out because this is a horror movie and the thing’s alive and out to get him. But there it sits like a stout black-coated torso, with its white label gleaming in its plastic pocket, and there’s a smugness about it, as though it knows he planned to get rid of it and was too chicken. There were dumpsters in town, but someone would spot a brand-new bag in a dumpster and haul it out. He could have tossed it outside one of the crackhouses where he’s dropped off fares—but in those streets someone’s sure to be watching, they always are. On a lonely stretch of road then—except a truck came hurtling up behind him just as he slowed on the highway home, and it occurred to him how many people take this route, and how soon the bag would be found. He thought of the pits at the bottom of his hill where gold was once dug out of the earth. Too close to home. Like leaving it on his own goddamn doorstep.

  So here’s the bag still in the backseat with that stupid label where he wrote Brian’s name and the address of that made-up hotel in Denver. Christ, what was he thinking? He can’t remember. To throw it in after Brian? To leave it someplace where it’d be found in a few days? With his handwriting on the label?

  Now he wonders what else he’s done that’s so freaking dumb. He lets his head tilt back against the headrest. One in the morning and he’s hollowed out. His thoughts freefall through the emptiness in his skull with nothing to run up against, no sense, no logic, nothing except exhaustion and—he feels it again now—a lurking anger. At Brian for being naked and dead in his daughter’s bathroom, at Grisby for being such a shithead and insisting on taking Brian’s stuff, at himself for not having thought it all through more clearly and somehow stopped it, all of it. Why didn’t he answer his phone when he could have? Then none of this would have happened. Something milder and quieter would have filled its place in the great sequence of events tipping through the universe, and by now he’d be asleep and untroubled by what he didn’t know, that by picking up his phone he’d saved himself from this mire of worry and fear.

  Already the cold’s swamping the car. With each breath the air’s a little sharper until, in how long—two minutes? three?—the inside of his nose is smarting, and the aches in his head and his cheeks are pulsing like they’ve got a life of their own. The Vicodin wore off long ago. He could go inside and take more, but right now shouldn’t he be searching for Bree? Isn’t he the only one who can save her from what she’s done? But where the hell to look at this time of night? He has no idea.

  That’s me all over, he thinks, and pulls h
is keys from the ignition. No fucking imagination. No fucking ideas.

  He heaves Brian’s bag across the snow and up the steps to his door. He’s careful twisting the key in the lock because what could be worse than snapping it off on a night like this? A moment later the key turns and he steps into the warmth of his trailer. He unzips his parka and calls his dog, and when Pax comes limping across the carpet and sniffs at Brian’s bag, he pushes the dog’s head away and stares at the bag, saying over and over “Jesus fucking Christ” until Pax looks up at him with his tail mournfully beating the air.

  12

  FISHER JERKS OUT of a nightmare that twists away like a shark into the deep. There’s Pax snoring beside his bed, there’s the green light of his alarm: 3:02. He doesn’t want to fall asleep again and fights being pulled under by staring into the darkness. Pax snuffles as he dreams. The refrigerator whirrs, a comforting sound. Then the shadows congeal. They have form. There’s a shape standing by the window with something off about the tilt of its head, and Fisher catches the stink of blood.

  He sits up. He’s awake for real now and his T-shirt’s sticking to his chest. Who knew you could dream smells?

  At six, when he should haul himself out of bed and belly up to the toilet to take a piss, and make himself coffee, and head into town for his shift, he snatches up his cell phone and calls in sick. Reggie curses at him, but hey, Reggie can go fuck himself.