Gallatin Canyon (6 page)

The ice seemed to rise before me and disappear into the twilight as though they were one and the same; I had to slow down in case the ice came to an end. Lights that had briefly shone on the Michigan shore were gone now, and I had yet to see my first Canadian light or the outlines of the fort I’d imagined. I touched the old compass in my pocket. Then it was dark.

When I stopped to reconnoiter, I felt the cold penetrate and I adjusted my scarf. It was time to go home, I knew, but I couldn’t leave this undone at the first wave of panic. I had to press on into the plain blackness long enough to prove that it was I who elected to return and not those forces determined to make me worthless in my own eyes. Such thoughts produced an oddly inflexible rhythm to my skating, by which I reached my feet through a distance I couldn’t judge by sight until I contacted the hard floor of ice.

Now the sound of my blades, which had seemed to fill the air around me, was replaced by another as murmurous as a church congregation heard from afar. I glided toward the sound when suddenly a vast aggravation of noise and turbulence erupted as a storm of ducks took flight in front of me; it was water. I heard the ominous heave of the lake. I turned to skate straight away—or not quite straight, because after some minutes of agitated effort I found myself at water’s edge again, water sufficiently fraught that it had broken back the edge of ice, heaving it in layers upon itself. I skated away from that too, and, when once more surrounded by darkness and standing squarely on black ice, I stopped and recognized that I was lost. I was suspended in darkness. A step in any direction and I would drown in freezing water.

The feeling of being completely lost was claustrophobic, like being locked in a windowless room. I had an incongruous sense of airlessness; it came to me that I was going to die.

I lashed out first at my entangling fantasies, the hated red-coats especially, the pursuing ostrich—and then against death itself. My bowels began to churn, and I squatted on the ice with the pea jacket over my head, pants around my knees; I recited the Lord’s Prayer in a quavering voice. And I was answered: a deep rhythmic throb that gathered slowly into a rumble. I stood and gazed into the darkness; as I pulled up and fastened my pants, a light emerged, followed by several others, streaming toward me in a line. At the moment the sound was most intense, a black all-consuming shape arose before me. It was not the god I expected: a lake freighter whose wake caused the ice to groan all around me, bound for Lake Superior. The lights streamed away and it was silent again.

I extracted the compass from my pocket and began bargaining with death. If anyone was looking on, it would be clear that whatever benefits I might be entitled to would have to be channeled through the old instrument, in whose tremulous magnetic needle I had placed all my faith. It took some concentration to hold panic at bay and rotate the battered brass case until I had north pinned down; then, staring down at the ornate
W
through the cloudy glass held just under my nose, I began to skate as rapidly as I could, moving fast on the cold mirror beneath me, creating my own wind, knowing that if the compass didn’t work after its many years in the ground I would skate straight off the ice into a world from which I would not return. Myopic faith kept me stooped over my cupped hands as I pressed on with all I had.

The light of moon and stars was enough to see by if I’d known where I was going; and in a short time I could make out a half dozen squarish shapes in my path, ice fishermen’s shanties. There were several of these little villages in the area, and I tried to figure out which of them this might be. They were all quite similar, small houses placed over a round hole spudded through the ice through which the occupants could angle for perch or hang for hours, iron spear in hand, to await the great pike drawn to their hand-whittled wooden perch decoy. By night, the shacks were all deserted.

But one shanty revealed a flickering light, and to it I attached all my hopes. At its door, I made out voices, and I stopped before knocking. They were voices from my classroom, and I listened as if dreaming to what sounded like a quarrel. First the drum major, cocky and bantering. The other seemed to plead and whimper and was, of course, Mrs. Andrews. And then there were different sounds, less precise than words. I had no business knowing what I knew.

I landed a long way from where I’d put on my skates and was obliged to traverse a considerable distance on my blades, tottering upon pickerel grass, water-rounded glass shards, and pebbles, waving my arms around for balance while thanking everything around me for further days on earth. But in a scrap of tangled beechwoods, these pious thoughts soon crumbled before my lurid new vision. Light from the small houses that lined the narrow road to the shore made of my flailing progress wild shadows in the leafless trees. I heard dogs barking behind closed doors, and one homeowner let his beagle out while watching me from his porch. I tried to manage my movements, but I couldn’t walk normally nor could an observer see that I was wearing skates. The beagle approached to within ten feet and sat down, emitting a single reflexive bark as I passed his lawn. The owner remained on his porch and in silence watched me pass.

I didn’t go on the ice again that winter. It seemed there were better things to do. As the days grew longer, I often saw the drum major starting his paper route as I got home from mine. We didn’t speak, but my customers got the news on time.

Old Friends

John Briggs was made aware of the fact that some sort of problem existed for his friend and former schoolmate Erik Faucher by sheer coincidence. A request for news came from the class secretary, Everett Hoyt, who had in the thirty years since they’d graduated from Yale hardly set foot out of New Haven. With ancestors buried at the old Center Church in spitting distance of both the regicide Dixwell and Benedict Arnold’s wife, Hoyt was paralyzed by a sense of generational inertia. It was said that if he hadn’t got into Yale, he would not have gone to college at all but would have remained at home, waiting to bury his parents. Now, in place of any real social life, he edited the newsletter, often accompanying his requests with small indiscretions delivered with a certain giddiness—which he called
Entre News
— concerning marital failure or business malfeasance, and they almost never made it into the alumni letter.

Hoyt phoned John Briggs at his summer home, in Montana, on a nondescript piece of prairie inherited from a farmer uncle, and, while pretending to hunt up class news, insinuated that Erik Faucher, having embezzled a fortune from a bank in Boston, had gone into hiding.

“I have heard through private sources that our class scofflaw is now headed your way.”

Briggs waited for the giggle to subside. “I certainly hope so,” he snapped. “I’ve missed Erik.” But he began to worry that Erik might actually come.

“See what you can do,” Hoyt sang.

“I don’t understand that remark, Everett.”

“Perhaps it will come to you.”

“I’ll let you know if it does.”

Faucher’s ex-wife, Carol, called around five in the morning, having declined to account for the time change. “How very nice to hear your voice,” said Briggs, producing a cold laugh from Carol. “How are you?”

“I’m calling about Erik. He has not been behaving sensibly at all, some very odd things to say the least.”

Briggs absorbed this in silence. He knew if he said anything at all, he’d have to stand up for Faucher, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to.

“Carol, you’ve been divorced a long time,” he said finally.

“We have mutual interests. I don’t know what sort of plan he has in place. And there’s Elizabeth.” Elizabeth was their daughter.

“I’m sure he’s made a very sensible plan.”

“I don’t want Elizabeth to wind up sleeping in her car. Or me, for that matter.”

“I don’t think we should argue.” This was in response to her tone.

“Did I say we should? I’m saying, Help. I’m saying, It’s about time you did.” When Briggs failed to reply, she added, “I know where he’s going and who to put on his trail.”

Briggs’s friendship with Faucher had been long and intermittent. Arbitrarily assigned as roommates at the boarding school they’d attended before Yale, they had become lifelong friends without ever getting over the fact that their discomfort with each other occasionally boiled over into detestation. Sometime earlier they had been sold loyalty much as the far-fetched basics of religion are sold to the credulous. When Briggs was in his twenties and had sunk everything into a perfectly legitimate though very small mining company in Alberta with excellent long-term prospects but ruinously expensive short-term requirements, Erik rescued him from bankruptcy by finding a buyer who bought Briggs out at a price that restored his investment and even gave him a small profit to accompany this dangerous lesson. Erik explained that he’d had to waste a valuable quid pro quo on this and waved his finger in Briggs’s face.

When Erik was pulled from the second story of a burning whorehouse on assignment for UNESCO as part of a Boston Congregationalists’ outreach to hungry Guatemalans, Briggs made a desperate stand to keep the matter out of the newspapers and saw that nettlesome citations on his dossier were expunged.

Against these decades of loyalty, they seemed to search for an unforgivable trait in each other that would relieve them of this abhorrent, possibly lifelong burden. But now they had years of continuity to contend with, and it was harder and harder to visualize a liberating offense.

“I’m glad you called,” he said to Erik, while holding a watering can over the potted annuals in his front window. “Everyone else has said you’re headed this way.”

“Everyone else? Like who?”

“Like Carol, the vulgar shrew you took to your heart.”

“Carol? I don’t know how she tracks my movements.”

“And things are not so well just now?”

“Oh, bad, John. It’s not wrong to claim the end is in sight.” His voice struck Briggs like a saw.

“I do wish this came at a better time. I’m on a short holiday myself, the theory being rest is indicated—”

“I won’t be any trouble.”

“Is that so?”

Erik arrived at night while Briggs was preparing his notes for a company stalemate in Delaware for which he was serving as an independent negotiator. It surprised Briggs that Faucher had found him at all, having ventured forth from the Hertz counter at the Billings airport with nothing but a state map. He arrived with a girl he’d picked up on the way. Briggs met her after being violently awakened by Erik’s jubilant goosing and her feral screeches. Her name was Marjorie, and Faucher confided that he called her Marge, “short for margarine, the cheap spread.” This was not the sort of remark Briggs appreciated and was therefore exactly in the style Faucher had adopted over the years. Around midnight, Faucher reeled downstairs to inquire, with a hitch of his head, “Do you want some of this?”

“Oh, no,” John said. “All for you.”

Thereafter Marjorie, who seemed an attractive and reasonable girl once she started sobering up, came downstairs to complain that Erik had asked her to brush his teeth for him. John advised her to be patient; Erik would soon see he must brush his own teeth and would then go to sleep. Briggs offered her the rollout on the sunporch, but she returned wearily to Erik, having gone to the front window to cast a longing eye at the rental car. She wore a negligee that just reached her hips and, when she slowly climbed the stairs again, presented a view that was somewhat veterinary in quality. The aroma of gin trailed her. When Briggs went to bed, he thought, Who drinks gin anymore? A full moon made bands of cool light through the blinds. The Segovia he’d put on at minimum volume to help him sleep cycled on,
Recuerdos de la Alhambra,
again and again.

He hadn’t been asleep long when he was awakened by noises. In the kitchen there were intruders. Briggs heard them, thumping around and opening cupboards and speaking in muffled tones. He wondered for a moment if he had forgotten that he was expecting someone. Once out of bed, he slipped into his closet, where his twelve-gauge resided on parallel coathooks for just such a time as this. Briggs quietly chambered two shells and lifted the barrels until the lock closed.

In the living room, he knelt behind the big floral wing chair that faced the fireplace and its still-dying embers. From here he could see the intruders as silhouettes, moving around the kitchen, briefly illuminated by the refrigerator light. He lifted the gun and, resting it on the back of the chair, leveled it at the closer figure. Only then did he recognize the man as his nearest neighbor, with whom he shared a water right from the irrigation ditch and a relationship that strained to be pleasant; the other intruder was the man’s wife, a snappish, leanly attractive farm woman who was less diplomatic in concealing her distaste for Briggs. Listening to their conversation, Briggs understood that they expected him to be out of town and were raiding his refrigerator for beer. Briggs decided that confronting them would create waves of difficulty for him in the future and that this episode was best forgotten or set aside for use another time. So he put the gun away and crept back to bed. The neighbors departed a short time later with a farewell fling of beer cans into his roses.

Faucher’s voice came from the top of the stairs. “Were those people looking for
me
?”

“No, Erik, go back to sleep. They’ve gone.”

Marjorie was the first up: she had a remedial geometry class to teach. “Always a challenge after a long night,” she explained to John. She wore a pleated blue skirt and a pale green sweater that buttoned at the throat. Her hair was drawn back from a prettily modeled forehead. She was at the stove, one hand on her hip, the other managing a spatula. “Potatoes O’Brien and eggs. Then I’ve got to run.”