And the Dark Sacred Night (21 page)

Suddenly, out of nowhere, Mitchum and Zev are mingling with their teammates. “Christ all blooming mighty,” says Jasper. “Boys, you are in one big fat cauldron of trouble, know that?”

From next to the tent, Kit’s waving at Jasper. Now he gets it: the runaway dogs, in their free-agent wanderlust, found the campers. By happenstance, sure, but Jasper can see the local headlines already: Mitchum and Zev elevated to heroes on the order of Balto. Loraina will be pleased: nothing like free publicity.

Leaving the dogs hooked to the tugline, Jasper detaches it from the sled and fastens it around a tree. “Set your furry butts down and stay.”

As he starts down the slope, snow up to his groin, Jasper feels the sensation he dreads most, that nerve-twisting click in the joint where thighbone meets pelvis. Because he slept on the couch, not in his room, he forgot to take the naproxen this morning. Even with the pain dulled, moving downhill is torture. He clutches at a sapling. Right now, like it or not, he’s going nowhere.

The red girl has disappeared—presumably into the tent. Kit is looking expectantly up at Jasper.

“Can’t!” he shouts down. “Fuck,” he says quietly. “Sorry, Viv.”

Kit pushes up the slope till he’s next to Jasper.

“I’m fine,” Jasper insists. “Except I’m stuck. Stuck and madder than hell.”

“They screwed up, and they know it. But we’ve got to take the guy out.”

“The idiot girlfriend, too.”

“You can take both, can’t you? You’ve got the two other dogs now.”

Jasper actually remembered to pack the extra harnesses. He feels the pain in his hip settling from a bellow to a mutter. One marvel after another. Still, he hasn’t seen the boyfriend to assess whether it’s safe to move him.

The girlfriend’s joined them. “Oh my God, we were going to die out here, I swear. If it wasn’t—” She looks at the dog team, lying together in a hollow they’ve dug from the snow. “Oh my
God
, are those amazing dogs yours?”

Jasper looks at the young woman’s face, her skin a mottled mask of red and bluish white. He unwinds his scarf. “Wrap this around your face.” He can’t help sounding brusque, but the rage he feels is at his own limitation. He cannot go down to that tent. “Anybody know you’re out here, anybody likely to be looking for you?”

She shakes her head. “We figured we had our phones, but it’s like we’re in a black hole of some kind.… ”

From Kit’s face, Jasper can see that the boy knows how angry he is. Kit says, “Raven and I can pull him up. I think that’s what we have to do.”

(Raven? This blond matchstick is named Raven?) Jasper nods at Kit. “Can you pull him uphill in a sleeping bag?”

“Wait.” Kit goes to the sled and shoves things around. He comes away with the two extra harnesses, the ones Jasper packed for
Mitchum and Zev. He holds one up before him, turning it this way and that.

“You hear me, Kit?”

“I have it figured out, I think. I hope.”

Raven’s wrapped most of her face in Jasper’s scarf. She’s a wispy thing, to start with, but now her muscles have probably turned to jelly from the stewed effects of cold and fear. She’ll be useless. Useless with a touch of frostbite. Kit tells her to stay with Jasper.

Jasper has managed to pull himself to the trail, using the trees. This is it, he understands: the beginning of his retirement, right here on this side of a not-even-mountain. Here he stands, marooned with this helpless harebrained girl, while his suburban stepson, a professor of
art
, is left to deal with the kind of problem that he, Jasper, is trained to solve.

“I’m coming, Bruno,” Kit calls down to the tent.

Raven and
Bruno
?

Kit gallops back down the slope and goes into the tent. The harnessed dogs wait quietly now, having played out the ritual of scolding, inspecting, and forgiving the two scofflaws.

“Climb in the sled and wrap yourself up good in those blankets,” Jasper tells Raven, who’s crying steadily now.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“You’re all right, you’re just fine now,” he tells her gently, though what she needs is a good dressing-down.

“We came up a few days ago. There was no sign of
this
in the forecast,” she says through chattering teeth. “No warning.”

“You have a radio?”

“We brought our phones.”

“Never enough.”

She cranes her neck to see what’s going on below. “Oh God.”

Not a sound from the tent until Jasper hears an outburst of fury or pain. The tent seems to shudder, and from inside emerges a composite human creature made of Kit and a tall, thin young man. It takes a minute or so for Jasper to see that Kit’s used the dog harnesses to strap the two men together at the waist. Kit has one arm clamped around Bruno’s back, his opposite hand clenching the harness at the front of Bruno’s waist. He is virtually hauling the guy up the slope. Bruno clings to one tree after another as they climb.

Close up, Bruno is disturbingly pale and has no energy to speak. He doesn’t even seem to see Jasper; he’s attached in every way to his rescuer. Kit has broken out in a sweat and cannot seem to speak, either. “Blanket,” he gasps, and Raven climbs out of the sled to surrender the fleece throw in which she’s been wrapped. “Ground.”

Kit unfastens the harnesses only when he can lower Bruno onto the blanket. He then goes back to the tent. Jasper won’t ask any more questions. He feels as if he’s being rescued right along with these silly young lovers.

Kit brings the sleeping bags from the tent and makes a nest of them in the front of the sled. He instructs Raven to help him pull Bruno to the sled.

“Can you splint the leg?” Kit asks Jasper. “I assume that’s what we have to do.”

Still Bruno says nothing. His pleading gaze darts between Kit and Jasper. He is shivering feverishly. “Don’t touch,” he whispers, his shaky hands shielding his injured leg.

“Got to. Won’t be too bad,” lies Jasper. Inhaling against his own pain, he gets down on his knees in the snow and, with his knife, slits the boy’s jeans and long underwear. He’s seen worse breaks. No bone exposed. On the other hand, he doesn’t dare guess what shape the boy’s feet might be in. Not a good idea to take off the boots.

“The dogs were with us,” says Raven. “They kept us warm.”

Jasper sets about finding a straight branch. Kit hands him the Ace bandage. Jasper works on Bruno’s leg while the boy whimpers and the girl jabbers manically about the dogs saving their lives, about how she tried to light a fire but all the wood was wet, how she tried to find a trail but the snow hid everything, how she couldn’t leave Bruno alone because how would she find him again, how the weather came out of nowhere and when did it ever snow this much so soon in the season.…

Midway through binding the leg, Jasper stops to stare at her until she stops speaking. “Let’s conserve our energy,” he says. She reminds him so much of Daphne at her worst, Daphne in a panic over some minor catastrophe or other. They will all get through this alive, maybe minus a few toes, an earlobe or two. Kit and Jasper may have to take turns mushing and walking—depends how supple the snow is on the return—but the sky is clearing, and the sun will be out long
enough for them to reach the house before dark. Loraina will be in a very bad mood, holding down the commercial fort. That’s fine, but please, thinks Jasper, please let Kyle be sober, just for the rest of this difficult day. His hip rebukes him as he stumbles to his feet, but the dogs are eager and ready to go.

Kyle’s not at the house when they make it back, but he left a note:
How’s this for lunch? Gone to check on Sally and Myrtle. Back soon with more coffee!
And, the cosmos willing, a case of Mountain Dew.

Sitting on the warm woodstove is a pot of boiled hot dogs and another of canned beans. On the table sits a bowl containing chopped-up lettuce and chunks of carrot. Beside the salad, Paul Newman’s at the ready with his jaunty carnivorous smile and famous blue eyes. (Eyes like a husky, come to think of it. That spooky crystalline blue.) Kyle’s even put out plates and forks.

It’s clear he got the small plow rigged to the front of Jasper’s truck and got it down the driveway; a wobbly track leads to the road. Power’s still out, but the town rigs are going through; you can hear, from somewhere near enough, the grinding protest of their blades as they strike the potholes in the road. Without the truck, however, they can’t get Bruno to the hospital on their own. Kit volunteers to head down and flag the first vehicle pointed toward town. He’ll ask the driver to call an ambulance once he gets there. Jasper can’t wait to be rid of Bruno and Raven, return them to the world of perpetually generated warmth, electricity, and people paid to deal with the damages wrought by human folly: privileges the pair do not seem to appreciate.

He’s sitting with Raven at the kitchen table. Bruno is propped on the couch, wrapped in comforters, triple dosed on Jasper’s painkillers, a blazing fire in the hearth. After eating a few bites of hot dog and beans, he dozed off.

Among the too much information Jasper now has about this couple, he knows that Bruno and Raven are “collaborative creative engineers” who teach at the famous art school in Providence. Once it was clear to the girl that her boyfriend would survive, once he fell asleep, her hysteria gave way to hunger. After two large helpings of everything, she’s begun to sermonize. She explains how they’ve
compromised their aversion to all things urban in order to be the artists they are meant to be. Together, they construct bamboo bridges linking trees together in parks, on college greens, sometimes on private grounds. The idea is to draw people into dialogue with trees. “So many people don’t realize that our survival, our very ability to breathe, will come down to the worldwide fate of trees. It is almost as simple as that!” She seems to think of herself and Bruno as arboreal missionaries. Every chance they get, they flee the city and find someplace off the beaten track. Nature in the raw is their inspiration.

And just about their demise, thinks Jasper as he listens to Raven yammer on while they wait for the medics to arrive.

“Sometimes we think of doing what we do off the grid. Except that so many people who do that are totally crazy. I mean, I hate to say it, crackpots. And it would defeat our ultimate purpose. The problem with cities is that really, when you get down to it, they are such small places. I mean, all the spaces you inhabit are so confined, the ways of thinking so yoked to that kind of living, living in boxes when you think about it, never mind all the dependencies you develop. We need places like
this
to get ourselves centered again.”

She gestures out the window at the snowbound world from which she’s just, by the skin of her well-tended teeth, been rescued. “I just love how
big
it is!”

“Quoth the actress to the bishop,” mutters Jasper. He’s turned away from her, adding wood to the stove.

“Excuse me?” Ah, the sharp ears of youth.

“We all love that, don’t we?” he says blithely, turning to face her. “The bigness. It’s not called the great outdoors for nothing.” He listens for a siren. What he wouldn’t give right now for a hot bath and a shot, just one, of Jim Beam.

Kit comes in and tells them help should arrive soon. He stopped a plow, and the driver radioed his boss. Failing to read Jasper’s rescue-me expression, he joins Bruno in the living room. After a bit, Jasper hears them talking quietly. Christ, are they talking about the glory of the great outdoors as well?

As Jasper contemplates telling Raven he’s got to go check on the dogs (he doesn’t; those creatures are out for the count), a minor cacophony of clicks, hums, and groans announces the return of power. He listens for a few minutes, waiting to see if it will hold.

The computer twinkles.

“Snow in the forecast? How’s that for breaking news?” says Jasper. He realizes he forgot to power down the computer before the blackout.

As he walks toward his desk, the phone rings.

“Well, now I know we’re both alive to face the invasion together,” says Loraina.

“How many runs are open?”

“Three. The usual suspects. Power came back a few hours ago.”

“You get through the night okay?”

“All digits intact. Thought you’d have been in here by now. Plows have been through, haven’t they?”

“Small detour from the daily norm,” says Jasper. “Remember those hikers from Rhode Island?”

“Who?”

“Never mind. We stumbled on some backcountry …” He almost said
backcountry wankers
, a term used fondly by Kirkus, an Aussie on the ski patrol. But then he remembered that the wankers were both within earshot. “Hikers who lost their way in the storm.”

This is when he becomes aware of the siren.

“Have to call you back. Under control over there?”

“Stu made it in on time. I’ve got Carlos and Ginny lined up to give lessons. Hey. Know what? You’d be redundant.”

“Best news I’ve heard all day,” says Jasper.

Flashing lights assault the interior of the house, and the EMTs pour out of the ambulance like a SWAT team in a cheap action movie. Here come the heroes, the ones who can almost always work some kind of small, crucial miracle. Except when they can’t.

After the backcountry wankers have been dispatched in the ambulance—based on the demeanor of Raven, it doesn’t look like they learned much of a lesson—Jasper goes upstairs to his bedroom. Kit is on the phone with his family.

Despite the repairs on the damaged corner of the house, a miniature drift of snow weaseled its way through the chinks that remain. Now, with the heat rising, it’s melting swiftly into the seams between
the floorboards. Jasper fetches a towel from the bathroom and throws it over the wet spot.

He wants to lie down, but if he does, he’ll fall asleep instantly. He knows he won’t make it to the slope: the sky’s already edging toward dark, though normally that wouldn’t be an excuse. Still, he has things to do before he can let himself collapse. And he’s suddenly hungry, having sacrificed most of his lunch to the “creative engineers.”

How he craves that bath, or just a good blistering shower, but the water won’t be hot enough yet, probably not for an hour. He stands idly in front of his dresser and gazes at the framed photograph of Vivian holding Kyle, one week old, Rory standing beside her, his smile a poor disguise for his confusion.