Gallatin Canyon

Ice

The drum major lived a short distance from our house and could sometimes be seen sitting pensively on his porch wear-ing his shako, a tall cylinder of white fake fur, the strap across his chin, folding the Free Press for his paper route. I was reluctant to so much as wave to him, since this was a time when my greatest concern — originating I don’t know where — was that I was a hopeless coward. Although we saw each other every day at school, any greeting I sent his way fell on deaf ears, and I had long since given up getting any sort of response at all, a situation said to have begun when he scored 156 on the school-administered IQ test. I had the route for the News, so it was unremarkable that we didn’t speak.

When one Thanksgiving he single-handedly captured an AWOL sailor and escorted him to the brig at the nearby base, I began to study him in the hope he held the key to escaping my cowardice.

I delivered papers in the evening and, as the year grew late, was often overtaken on my bicycle by darkness and by fear. I flung my rolled papers toward porches and stoops and onto lawns, and I was sometimes pursued by dogs, once taken down in an explosion of snow and bicycle wheels by a wolfish Irish setter. I had a recurrent fantasy of a muscular ostrich pursuing me in the dark and pecking down through my skull into my brain, another of several fears stemming from my single childhood trip to the zoo.

I always delivered my papers as promptly as possible; the drum major delivered his whenever he felt inclined to do so. One afternoon in early October, he unexpectedly chose to address me; he accused me of making him look bad by getting my papers onto people’s porches and lawns before his. When I tried to respond, he cut me off and directed me to wait until his papers had been delivered before delivering mine. I complied with his instructions, tossing my papers onto lawns at all hours and dodging any customers who tried to complain.

I went to great lengths to observe the drum major practice on the big windblown and sometimes snowblown football field, where he would strut toward the goalposts trailing a stingy cape, the gray wintry lake just beyond, twirling his baton, the white shako tilted back arrogantly, culminating in the blissful high toss and recapture of the spinning chrome-plated baton, preferably without getting beaned by one of its white rubber ends. At actual game time, when he was leading our cacophonous marching band in disordered frenzy, the entire drama depended on his actually catching the baton, so that what was meant to accent a larger spectacle became the focal point of an otherwise lurching rigmarole. There was something about his haughty gaits and their seeming disconnection from the confused uproar of the band behind him, in its modest and unattractive costumes — threadbare maroon with gold piping, led by a hugely overweight youngster doing a Grambling State — style shimmy while flogging his glockenspiel with a felt-covered hammer — that was more attractive to a modest crowd that sometimes threw horse chestnuts at the drum major.

What lay behind this behavior? I think drum majors were about to be replaced by majorettes and what had once been honorably athletic had become effete and clouded with some unspoken sexual ambiguity, however inappropriate with reference to our own drum major, all of whose pert and blossoming girlfriends seemed to wind up losing their reputations. Nevertheless, the crowd hoped for a humiliating disaster. I, strangely, hoped for his success: I waited for that high toss to produce, as though by the hand of Praxiteles, the most graceful division of space, a split second of immortality for the drum major and for me a lesson in courage. At the same time, another part of me shared the crowd’s unspoken wish to see the drum major on all fours with the baton up his behind or wrapped around his neck. As would become habitual for most of us, we wanted either spectacular achievement or mortifying failure, one or the other. Neither of these things, we were discreetly certain, would ever come to us: we’d be allowed the frictionless lives of the meek.

Our school played Flat Rock on the last Saturday of October, when winter was already in the air, the trees shabby with half-shed leaves. I was shivering in the crowd on the rickety exposed bleachers, watching our band wheel onto the field. When the drum major at last tossed the baton in its high glitter, it fell so far behind him that he had to dash into the band to retrieve it. Too late: he was swept aside, forced to stand, hands on hips, until the musicians had passed, his baton on the ground bent like a pretzel. I admit that I joined the baying crowd, our community. As he bent to pick up his bit of wreckage, we were beside ourselves. In that uproar I was without fear. I thrilled to the courage of the mob. Still, it wasn’t quite the courage I was looking for.

The following week, the drum major seemed even more isolated at school, though as always he seemed to expect this. Mrs. Andrews, the beautiful young wife of our thuggish football coach who had given up her own remarkable athletic skills to teach us history, made a special effort to console him; I remember how gently she bent beside his desk to correct his work while, across the aisle, Stanley Peabody, with his flattop, pegged charcoal pants, and Flagg Flyer blue suede shoes, attempted to see down her blouse. Mrs. Andrews, with shining auburn hair piled atop her head, a single strand of imitation pearls curling down from her throat, was accustomed to being ogled and seemed to know Stanley only by a quick glance at the roster taped to her desk.

I was surprised by the attention she paid the drum major. From then on, I was a great student of any and all interactions between him and Mrs. Andrews, viewed as scarlet with erotic undertones, and abetted by the smirking of the other boys. But their behavior was no more than a salute to Mrs. Andrews’s lovely figure. One incident does stand out, when, after long abstaining, Mrs. Andrews first called on the drum major in class. By now, I believed I sensed something quiet and subtle between the two of them.

“What,” she asked, looking straight over the top of his head of curly brown hair, “was the principal result of the Credit Mobilier Scandal?” She seemed timid.

Legs stretched in the aisle, crossed at the ankles, fingers laced behind his head, the drum major said, “You tell me.” He gazed at her with quiet annoyance that seemed to intimate possession.

We felt an electric silence, and I thrilled to what I viewed as amorous badinage disguised as classwork. Mrs. Andrews’s face colored to the roots of her auburn hair. Stanley Peabody peered broadly. His sidekick, Boly Cardwell, a prematurely wizened teen with lank blond hair cascading over his forehead, grabbed his crotch surreptitiously and rolled his eyes in feigned ecstasy.

“Perhaps,” she said, “you feel I have asked you the wrong question.”

“Could be.” The drum major had the affectless James Dean look down pat.

“In that case, why don’t you pose a question for the class based on this week’s reading?”

He leaned forward, dropped his elbows to his knees, drew his feet back under the chair, and held his head for a moment before he looked up. He said, “Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?”

By the end of the day, he was the most important boy in school. People lingered to watch him pass in the hallway and gave him plenty of space at his locker.

Mrs. Andrews added girls’ physical education to her teaching load, and from then on she seemed always to have a whistle around her neck. She moved with a new formality even when teaching history. While Stanley Peabody and Boly Cardwell headed a small group that gathered in the bleachers to run wind sprints, the drum major sat apart, focusing on Mrs. Andrews. On coed gym days, her husband, Bud Andrews, was also on the field, coaching the boys, a classic phys-ed instructor in sweats and a severe crew cut that bared the top of his scalp. One cold, dark afternoon when the windows of the gym were silver with reflected light and the air was sour with sweat, Coach Andrews suddenly sprang into the bleachers, lifted the drum major into the air, and shook him like a rag doll. The drum major managed to retain his smile, even as his head was flung about.

Coach Andrews was briefly suspended and the drum major was assigned a history tutor, though everyone agreed that Mrs. Andrews could hardly be blamed for her husband’s freak-out.

I spent my paper-route earnings on small things, an imitation Civil War — era forage cap, a British commando knife, steel taps for my shoes, muskrat traps; I had gotten caught by some magazine coupon swindle whereby I tried to win a baby monkey whose huge eyes dominated the advertisement, but when I fell behind in my payments and began to doubt if the monkey would ever be shipped, I switched schemes and wound up on an easier payment plan with a flying squirrel that bit me savagely and flew around our basement for two days before escaping through the window. My father said, “Next time you’ve got ten bucks to spare, don’t throw it away on a squirrel.” My luck changed when, digging up a jack-in-the-pulpit as a gift for my mother, I discovered an old brass compass, which I attributed to voyageurs, coureurs de bois, Jesuits, Récollets, and their various bands of Pottawatamies, Wyandottes, and Hurons. Few facts came my way that could not be magnified. That compass was always in my pocket, an obvious talisman, the one thing that stood between me and the dreaded unknown.

As a test, I went back to delivering my papers on time, but the drum major had forgotten all about me. In January, I skated out onto Lake Erie, which that year was frozen nearly to Canada. I stared at its ominous expanse. I left the shore one evening on my hockey skates, a wool cap pulled over my ears and a long scarf wound around my neck and crisscrossed over my chest beneath my blue navy-surplus pea jacket. I meant to learn courage out on the ice, to avoid the specter of cowardice by skating all the way either to Canada or, if the icebreaker had been through, to the Livingstone ship channel. I struggled over the corrugations of the near-shore ice, then ventured onto glassier black ice that rewarded me with long glides between strokes of my hollow-ground blades. Bubbles could be seen and, occasionally, upended white bellies of perch and rock bass, as the sheen of glare ice, wide as my limited horizon, spread east toward Ontario; I dreamed of landing on this foreign shore, from whence the red-coats once launched sorties against our colonial heroes. I would tell Mrs. Andrews what I had done. Reading schoolbooks had embittered me against the British and the American South, while my uncles handled the job for Germany and Japan. I meant to visit the old British fort at Amherstburg and skate home with tales of imperial ghosts and whatever other secret existences I might discover in places where no human is expected.

Such dreams in the gathering darkness enlivened my skating, and I raced on, stroke after stroke, toward the hiding place of those who once sought to crush our revolution. I would one day see this as the template for many disasters I had much later created for myself, but at the time, risking my life on the same days I worried about paper cuts or infected pimples produced no sense of contradiction. I felt only the allure of the hard, black, and perfect cold-snap ice unblemished by wind during its formation. Impossible to imagine the drum major out here like some animated Q-Tip, I gloated, no prancing among the crows and ice-killed fish.

Except for those crows I was alone out there, out of sight of land or, as I then called it, Michigan, though I knew land lay to the west by the pale sunset still faintly visible. That’s how I thought of it: I can’t see Michigan anymore. I believed that if I let coming darkness turn me back, I would never be any good and the fog of cowardice would forever envelop me.

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.