Cold (5 page)

“Are you sure about this?”
 
She eased herself down as he stood up, so that she hung over his shoulder.

“I’m glad you lost those sixty pounds,” he said.

“The rifle,” she said.
 
“It’s way down in the snow.”

“Fuck the rifle,” Norman said.
 
“Bambi’ll have to starve.”

He began walking.
 
Her weight compressed the right side of his body, causing pain down through his hip and knee.
 
It was only about fifty yards to the high snowbank on the side of the road, but he had to stop after each step and get his balance.
 
Once he put her down so he could shift her to the opposite shoulder.
 
When they were almost to the snowbank he lost his balance and fell forward.
 
When he landed on top of her, she let out a cry.

“I’m sorry,” he said.
 
His face was against hers, and they both lay still, exhausted.
 
Finally, he raised his head and looked at her.
 
“I can’t carry you any further.”

Her eyes were watery and she whispered, “Go get help.”
 
She kept one hand on his shoulder for a moment, then dropped her arm in the snow.

He couldn’t get to his feet—there was nothing to push off of because his arms sank into the snow.
 
He took off his snowshoes, crawled the rest of the way to the snowbank and rolled over the other side into the road.
 
Standing, he could barely see the store down at the crossroad.
 
There was a truck, an eighteen-wheeler, parked by the gas pumps, its taillights two beacons in the snow.
 
He began walking, which now felt strange without the snowshoes.

•

After a while Liesl closed her eyes against the incessant flakes.
 
Cold seeped into her back and shoulders.
 
Her arms and legs were outstretched as though she was floating on her back, and she tried to imagine a lake with the blue sky of a hot summer’s afternoon above her.
 
But it wouldn’t hold, and she opened her eyes again to the snow.
 
The cold had worked its way up into her ribcage, causing her to shiver.
 
She closed her eyes again and saw bearded men in robes and fur hats.
 
They spoke a foreign language and watched her with interest.
 
She smelled grease.
 
When the sharp thin needle stabbed into her anus, she remembered Gretchen’s birth.
 
But instead of descending, the pain ascended, moving slowly up through her bowels, her stomach, her lungs, her esophagus, the back of her throat, then finally, as she opened her mouth, the warm steel slid along the end of her nose, its bloody tip stopping right before her eyes.

Two

The space heater beneath Constable Del Maki’s desk was going full blast.
 
It rattled and vibrated, and seemed on the verge of burning the hair off his shins.
 
His back, chilled by the draft coming from the window, felt about fifty-degrees cooler.
 
This had been his dilemma every winter since he’d turned forty—he was rarely able to get every part of his body warm.
 
There was always some place—his hands, his feet, that spot between the shoulder blades—where the chill resided no matter how many layers of clothes he wore, no matter how close he sat to the source of heat.
 
He had hockey knees and the cold ache where cartilage used to be was as persistent as a toothache.
 
There was paperwork he could do, but he had given up on it.

When the phone rang, his deputy didn’t answer on the first two rings—he was either dozing on the sofa out in the front office or he’d stepped out the back door to suck on one of those cheap cigarillos—but on the third ring the hardwood floor creaked as he went to his desk and picked up the receiver.

“Yellow Dog Township Police, Deputy Price speaking,” he said.
 
“Hold on, Tooley, I think the constable’s on Line Two, but let me check.”
 
Louder, he said, “Can you pick up on Line One?”

There was no Line Two—a township with a year-round population of less than eight-hundred didn’t need more than one—but Del and Monty maintained the illusion of Line Two for the benefit of the public.
 
It also allowed them to dodge calls from people who felt it was their civic duty to nag the local constabulary.
 
“Find out what he wants.”

Del swiveled around in his chair so that the space heater could do his back for a while.
 
He found that about eight minutes on a side worked best.
 
His ankles had already begun to cool.

“Easy,
easy,
Tooley—what’re you all exercised about?” Monty said into his phone.
 
“A woman?
 
What woman?
 
In the
snow?”
 
Del reached behind him and picked up the phone.
 
“Oh, he’s off Line Two now,” Monty said joyously, and he hung up.
 
The front office floor creaked and the bathroom door closed.
 
With this weather he might be cracking the window in there and lighting up his cigarillo.

“Tooley, what’s going on?”

“We got a-a sit-situation here, D-Del.”
 
He sounded more worked up than usual.

“Take your time.
 
What kind of a situation?”

From the bathroom Monty grunted, “Situation?
 
I’m
in a
sit
uation.”

“Somebody drive off without paying for the gas?”

“N-no.”

“You haven't been robbed again?”

“N-no.”

”Good, because we’re not chasing anybody in this stuff.”

“N-no.
 
S-Sheriff?
 
Just c-come out, ‘kay?”

Some residents of Yellow Dog Township insisted on calling him sheriff, probably because it made them feel more secure.
 
He was a constable, which meant he was authorized to handle most local matters of law enforcement.
 
Once he had even married an elderly couple moments before the groom died of cancer.
 
Del was a constable and beyond minor road violations or domestic disturbances he usually contacted the county sheriff’s office and let them take over.
 

The snow was horizontal, with the wind out of the north off Lake Superior.
 
Del could only see the white roof of his Land Cruiser parked beyond the snowbank.
 
A plow came down Trowbridge Street, sending a low vibration through the old brick municipal building.

“Oh!
 
The earth is
moving!”
 
Monty shouted from the bathroom.

“Tooley, you just hold on,” Del said.
 
“I'll be right out.”
 
He hung up, switched off the space heater and went into the front office.
 
“Monty,” he said, standing in front of the bathroom door.
 
He couldn’t smell tobacco.
 
“I'm going to take a run out to Stop and Go.
 
You answer the phone, hear?”

“All these sailing magazines with glossy pictures of tropical islands and palm trees,” Monty said.
 
“I never thought it was too healthy keeping ‘em in the bathroom, but they got this picture here on page 86—Del, she’s got a yellow bikini on and she’s lying back in a boat deck, all slicked up with tanning butter, and you can see her—”

“Monty.”

The bathroom door opened and Monty stepped out, still putting himself together.
 
“Some day I swear I’m going to live in a place where I’ll
never
need long johns,” he muttered as he buckled his belt.
 
“I mean someplace where they don’t have them on sale eight months out of the year at Shopko.
 
Someplace where if you mentioned your long johns they’d think you were referring to your tall uncles, one from each side of the family.”

“Monty.”

“Yeah?”
 
He looked up at Del.

“Stick by the phone.”

“Sure thing, Delbert.”

•

It had been a problem in school:
 
Delbert.
 
The first week of school every year the teacher would call roll, and being one of the M’s, Delbert Maki’s name would come somewhere in the middle of the list.
 
When the teacher got down to the L’s Delbert would sense the tension developing around him—a little stiffness in the postures in the other boys, a descent into a more complete silence as his classmates waited for his name to be called.
 
After Delbert would say “Present” there’d be the faintest snickers.
 
Or maybe a cough.
 
He’d turn—it always seemed to be boys seated behind him—and find the source.
 
One year it was Tommy Lebeau and his pal Nick Thornton, a team.
 
Another year it was a fat kid named Jimmy Nugent.
 
It was always kids with names like Tommy, Nick or Jimmy.
 
Eventually there’d be a fight, usually outside during recess; once, with Nugent, it was in the basement during lunch.
 
Delbert didn’t always win—boyhood fights rarely ended in clean decisions—but afterwards he was left alone for the rest of the year.

Then there was the song, “Runaway,” by Del Shannon.
 
A number one hit in 1961.
 
He was a rocker, he was from downstate Michigan—all the kids thought it was the coolest song, and one morning in the schoolyard a kid had an autographed photo of Del Shannon, and looking at those three letters,
D-e-l,
Delbert saw something else.
 
The kid holding the photo whispered,
"Look at this guy.
 
Look at that hair!
 
Del's so cool."
 
So from then on he insisted that his classmates and teachers call him Del.
 
For years
Delbert
seemed to have vanished; even in the official class rosters he was
Del Maki.
 
Only his Marquette High School diploma stated his full name
Delbert Esa Maki.

At Tooley’s Stop & Go Del parked next to a county snowplow, which was still running, its yellow lights rotating on the roof.
 
The truth was he went into law enforcement because he as a boy had always wanted to drive vehicles with flashing, rotating lights.
 
There were no cars at the gas pumps.
 
An orange ambulance from Marquette General Hospital was angled so that its back was just outside the door to the station.
 
Inside Del found Tooley and the plow driver, Viekko Rupp, watching as two paramedics worked on a woman lying on a gurney.

“S-she's still alive,” Tooley said, as his fingers pulled nervously on his gray beard.
 
“But v-very cold.”

Viekko probably weighed over two-hundred-fifty pounds, and with so many layers of cloths on under his brown snowsuit he might have been mistaken for a bear in this snow.
 
But here, inside under the florescent lights, he had the soft pale face of a boy, startled blue eyes and a slack mouth that revealed teeth that were already going bad.
 
The earflaps on his hat stuck straight out sideways, like stubby airplane wings.
 
“Found her up the road a couple hundred yards,” Viekko said.
 
“She was in the snow, on the other side of the bank, eh?”

The woman wasn't a snowmobiler; they always wore jazzy snowsuits and helmets like they were riding motorcycles through the great white.
 
She had on brown corduroy pants, with the wale warn thin at the knees, heavy gray socks pulled up over her calves, and an old soiled blue parka.
 
Del looked at her feet, expecting to see cross-country ski boots, but she wasn't wearing them.
 
“What was she doing out there?”

“Snowshoes,” Viekko said.
 
“They’re back where I found her, ya know.”

Del nodded.
 
He knew the female paramedic, Mona Lottke, who had been working at Marquette General for several years.
 
“Mona, how long she been out in this thing?”

Mona, who was not thirty and wore her brown hair in a ponytail, shook her head.
 
“Two, maybe three hours.”

“She going to make it?”

“The real concern is cardiac arrhythmia,” Mona said.
 
“She seems a healthy woman.
 
All we got to do is get her warmed up—and get through this stuff back to Marquette.”

Del glanced out the plate glass windows at the snow.
 
“Looks pretty chancy at the moment.”

“She was just lying there, eh?” Viekko said.
 
“About forty yards in behind the snowbank.
 
Nobody else would’ve seen her but me, up high in the plow cab.
 
The banks out there are a good eight feet now.”