Gryphon: New and Selected Stories

Snow

TWELVE YEARS OLD, and I was so bored I was combing my hair just for the hell of it. This particular Saturday afternoon, time was stretching out unpleasantly in front of me. I held the comb under the tap and then stared into the bathroom mirror as I raked the wave at the front of my scalp upward so that it would look casual and sharp and perfect. For inspiration I had my transistor radio, balanced on the doorknob, tuned to an AM Top 40 station. But the music was making me jumpy, and instead of looking casual my hair, soaking wet, had the metallic curve of the rear fins of a De Soto. I looked aerodynamic but not handsome. I dropped the comb into the sink and went down the hallway to my brother’s room.

Ben was sitting at his desk, crumpling up papers and tossing them into a wastebasket near the window. He was a great shot, particularly when he was throwing away his homework. His stainless-steel sword, a souvenir of military school, was leaning against the bookcase, and I could see my pencil-thin reflection in it as I stood in his doorway. “Did you hear about the car?” Ben asked, not bothering to look at me. He was gazing through his window at Five Oaks Lake.

“What car?”

“The car that went through the ice two nights ago. Thursday. Look. You can see the pressure ridge near Eagle Island.”

I couldn’t see any pressure ridge; it was too far away. Cars belonging to ice fishermen were always breaking through the ice, but swallowing up a car was a slow process in January, though not in March or April, and the drivers usually got out safely. The clear lake ice reflected perfectly the flat gray sky this drought winter, and we could still see the spiky brown grass on our back lawn. It crackled and crunched whenever I walked on it.

“I don’t see it,” I said. “I can’t see the hole. Where did you hear about this car? Did Pop tell you?”

“No,” Ben said. “Other sources.” Ben’s sources, his network of friends and enemies, were always calling him on the telephone to tell him things. He basked in information. Now he gave me a quick glance. “Holy smoke,” he said. “What did you do to your hair?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I was just combing it.”

“You look like that guy,” he said. “The one in the movies.”

“Which guy?”

“That Harvey guy.”

“Jimmy Stewart?”

“Of course not,” he said. “You know the one I mean. Everybody knows that guy. The Harvey guy.” When I looked blank, he said, “Never mind. Let’s go down to the lake and look at that car. You’d better tell them we’re going.” He gestured toward the other end of the house.

In the kitchen I informed my parents that I was headed somewhere with my brother, and my mother, chopping carrots for one of her stews, looked up at me and my hair. “Be back by five,” she said. “Where did you say you were off to?”

“We’re driving to Navarre,” I said. “Ben has to get his skates sharpened.”

My stepfather’s eyebrows started to go up; he exchanged a glance with my mother — the usual pantomime of skepticism. I turned around and ran out of the kitchen before they could stop me. I put on my boots, overcoat, and gloves, and hurried outside to my brother’s car. He was already inside. The motor roared.

The interior of the car smelled of gum, cigarettes, wet wool, analgesic balm, and aftershave. “What’d you tell them?” my brother asked.

“I said you were going to Navarre to get your skates sharpened.”

He put the car into first gear, then sighed. “Why’d you do that? I have to explain everything to you. Number one: my skates aren’t in the car. What if they ask to see them when we get home? I won’t have them. That’s a problem, isn’t it? Number two: when you lie about being somewhere, you make sure you have a friend who’s there who can say you were there, even if you weren’t. Unfortunately, we don’t have any friends in Navarre.”

“Then we’re safe,” I said. “No one will say we weren’t there.”

He shook his head. Then he took off his glasses and examined them as if my odd ideas were visible right there on the frames. I was just doing my job, being his private fool, but I knew he liked me and liked to have me around. My unworldliness amused him; it gave him a chance to lecture me. But now, tired of wasting words on me, he turned on the radio. Pulling out onto the highway, he steered the car in his customary way. He had explained to me that only very old or very sick people actually grip steering wheels. You didn’t have to hold the wheel to drive a car. Resting your arm over the top of the wheel gave a better appearance. You dangled your hand down, preferably with a cigarette in it, so that the car, the entire car, responded to the mere pressure of your wrist.

“Hey,” I said. “Where are we going? This isn’t the way to the lake.”

“We’re not going there first. We’re going there second.”

“Where are we going first?”

“We’re going to Five Oaks. We’re going to get Stephanie. Then we’ll see the car.”

“How come we’re getting her?”

“Because she wants to see it. She’s never seen a car underneath the ice before. She’ll be impressed.”

“Does she know we’re coming?”

He gave me that look again. “What do they teach you at that school you go to? Of course she knows. We have a date.”

“A date? It’s three o’clock in the afternoon,” I said. “You can’t have a date at three in the afternoon. Besides, I’m along.”

“Don’t argue,” Ben said. “Pay attention.”

By the time we reached Five Oaks, the heater in my brother’s car was blowing out warm air in tentative gusts. If we were going to get Stephanie, his current girlfriend, it was fine with me. I liked her smile — she had an overbite, the same as I did, but she didn’t seem self-conscious about it — and I liked the way she shut her eyes when she laughed. She had listened to my crystal radio set and admired my collection of igneous rocks on one of her two visits to our house. My brother liked to bring his girlfriends over to our house because the house was old and large and, my brother said, they would be impressed by the empty rooms and the long hallways and the laundry chutes that dropped down into nowhere. They’d be snowed. Snowing girls was something I knew better than to ask my brother about. You had to learn about it by watching and listening. That’s why he had brought me along.

Ben parked outside Stephanie’s house and told me to wait in the car. I had nothing to do but look at houses and telephone poles. Stephanie’s front-porch swing had rusted chains, and the paint around her house seemed to have blistered in cobweb patterns. One drab lamp with a low-wattage bulb was on near an upstairs window. I could see the lampshade: birds — I couldn’t tell what kind — had been painted on it. I adjusted the dashboard clock. It didn’t run, but I liked to have it seem accurate. My brother had said that anyone who invented a clock that would really work in a car would become a multimillionaire. Clocks in cars never work, he said, because the mainsprings can’t stand the shock of potholes. I checked my wristwatch and yawned. The inside of the front window began to frost over with my breath. I decided that when I grew up I would invent a new kind of timepiece for cars, without springs or gears. At three twenty I adjusted the clock again. One minute later, my brother came out of the house with Stephanie. She saw me in the car, and she smiled.

I opened the door and got out. “Hi, Steph,” I said. “I’ll get in the backseat.”

“That’s okay, Russell,” she said, smiling, showing her overbite. “Sit up in front with us.”

“Really?”

She nodded. “Yeah. Keep us warm.”

She scuttled in next to my brother, and I squeezed in on her right side, with my shoulder against the door. As soon as the car started, she and my brother began to hold hands: he steered with his left wrist over the steering wheel, and she held his right hand. I watched all this, and Stephanie noticed me watching. “Do you want one?” she asked me.

“What?”

“A hand.” She gazed at me, perfectly serious. “My other hand.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, take my glove off,” she said. “I can’t do it by myself.”

My brother started chuckling, but she stopped him with a look. I took Stephanie’s wrist in my left hand and removed her glove, finger by finger. I hadn’t held hands with anyone since second grade. Her hand was not much larger than mine, but holding it gave me an odd sensation, because it was a woman’s hand, and where my fingers were bony, hers were soft. She was wearing a bright green cap, and when I glanced up at it she said, “I like your hair, Russell. It’s kind of slummy. You’re getting to look dangerous. Is there any gum?”

I figured she meant in the car. “There’s some up there on the dashboard,” Ben said. His car always had gum in it. It was a museum of gum. The ashtrays were full of cigarette butts and gum, mixed together, and the floor was flecked silver from the foil wrappers.

“I can’t reach it,” Stephanie said. “You two have both my hands tied down.”

“Okay,” I said. I reached up with my free hand and took a piece of gum and unwrapped it. The gum was light pink, a sunburn color.

“Now what?” I asked.

“What do you think?” She looked down at me, smiled again, then opened her mouth. I suddenly felt shy. “Come on, Russell,” she said. “Haven’t you ever given gum to a girl before?” I raised my hand with the gum in it. She kept her eyes open and on me. I reached forward, and just as I got the gum close to her mouth she opened wider, and I slid the gum in over her tongue without even brushing it against her lipstick. She closed and began chewing.

“Thank you,” she said. Stephanie and my brother nudged each other. Then they broke out in short quick laughs — vacation laughter. I knew that what had happened hinged on my ignorance, but that I wasn’t exactly the butt of the joke and could laugh, too, if I wanted. My palm was sweaty, and she could probably feel it. The sky had turned darker, and I wondered whether, if I was still alive fifty years from now, I would remember any of this. I saw an old house on the side of the highway with a cracked upstairs window, and I thought, That’s what I’ll remember from this whole day when I’m old — that one cracked window.

Stephanie was looking out at the dry winter fields and suddenly said, “The state of Michigan. You know who this state is for? You know who’s really happy in this state?”

“No,” I said. “Who?”

“Chickens and squirrels,” she said. “They love it here.”

My brother parked the car on the driveway down by our dock, and we walked out onto the ice on the bay. Stephanie was stepping awkwardly, a high-center-of-gravity shuffle. “Is it safe?” she asked.

“Sure, it’s safe,” my brother said. “Look.” He began to jump up and down. Ben was heavy enough to be a tackle on his high-school football team, and sounds of ice cracking reverberated all through the bay and beyond into the center of the lake, a deep echo. Already, four ice fishermen’s houses had been set up on the ice two hundred feet out — four brightly painted shacks, male hideaways — and I could see tire tracks over the thin layer of sprinkled snow. “Clear the snow and look down into it,” he said.

After lowering herself to her knees, Stephanie dusted the snow away. She held her hands to the side of her head and looked. “It’s real thick,” she said. “Looks a foot thick. How come a car went through?”

“It went down in a channel,” Ben said, walking ahead of us and calling backward so that his voice seemed to drift in and out of the wind. “It went over a pressure ridge, and that’s all she wrote.”

“Did anyone drown?”

He didn’t answer. She ran ahead to catch up to him, slipping, losing her balance, then recovering it. In fact I knew that no one had drowned. My stepfather had told me that the man driving the car had somehow — I wasn’t sure how a person did this — pulled himself out through the window. Apparently the front end dropped through the ice first, but the car had stayed up for a few minutes before it gradually eased itself into the lake. The last two nights had been very cold, with lows around fifteen below zero, and by now the hole the car had gone through had iced over.

Both my brother and Stephanie were quite far ahead of me, and I could see them clutching at each other, Stephanie leaning against him, and my brother trying out his military-school peacock walk. I attempted this walk for a moment, then thought better of it. The late-afternoon January light was getting very raw: the sun came out for a few seconds, lighting and coloring what there was, then disappeared again, closing up and leaving us in a kind of sour grayness. I wondered if my brother and Stephanie actually liked each other or whether they were friends because they had to be.

I ran to catch up to them. “We should have brought our skates,” I said, but they weren’t listening to me. Ben was pointing at some clear ice, and Stephanie was nodding.

“Quiet down,” my brother said. “Quiet down and listen.”

All three of us stood still. Some cloud or other was beginning to drop snow on us, and from the ice underneath our feet we heard a continual chinging and barking as it slowly shifted.

“This is exciting,” Stephanie said.

My brother nodded, but instead of looking at her he turned slightly to glance at me. Our eyes met, and he smiled.

“It’s over there,” he said, after a moment. The index finger of his black leather glove pointed toward a spot in the channel between Eagle Island and Crane Island where the ice was ridged and unnaturally clear. “Come on,” he said.

We walked. I was ready at any moment to throw myself flat if the ice broke beneath me. I was a good swimmer — Ben had taught me — but I wasn’t sure how well I would swim wearing all my clothes. I was absorbent and would probably sink headfirst, like that car.

“Get down,” my brother said.

We watched him lowering himself to his hands and knees, and we followed. This was probably something he had learned in military school, this crawling. “We’re ambushing this car,” Stephanie said, creeping in front of me.

“There it is,” he said. He pointed down.

This new ice was so smooth that it reminded me of the thick glass in the Shedd Aquarium, in Chicago. But instead of seeing a loggerhead turtle or a barracuda I looked through the ice and saw this abandoned car, this two-door Impala. It was wonderful to see — white-painted steel filtered by ice and lake water — and I wanted to laugh out of sheer happiness at the craziness of it. Dimly lit but still visible through the murk, it sat down there, its huge trunk and the sloping fins just a bit green in the algae-colored light. This is a joke, I thought, a practical joke meant to confuse the fish. I could see the car well enough to notice its radio antenna, and the windshield wipers halfway up the front window, and I could see the chrome of the front grille reflecting the dull light that ebbed down to it from where we were lying on our stomachs, ten feet above it.

“That is one unhappy automobile,” Stephanie said. “Did anyone get caught inside?”

“No,” I said, because no one had, and then my brother said, “Maybe.”

I looked at him quickly. As usual, he wasn’t looking back at me. “They aren’t sure yet,” he said. “They won’t be able to tell until they bring the tow truck out here and pull it up.”

Stephanie said, “Well, either they know or they don’t. Someone’s down there or not, right?”

Ben shook his head. “Maybe they don’t know. Maybe there’s a dead body in the backseat of that car. Or in the trunk.”

“Oh, no,” she said. She began to edge backward.

“I was just fooling you,” my brother said. “There’s nobody down there.”

“What?” She was behind the area where the ice was smooth, and she stood up.

“I was just teasing you,” Ben said. “The guy that was in the car got out. He got out through the window.”

“Why did you lie to me?” Stephanie asked. Her arms were crossed in front of her chest.

“I just wanted to give you a thrill,” he said. He stood up and walked over to where she was standing. He put his arm around her.

“I don’t mind normal,” she said. “Something could be normal and I’d like that, too.” She glanced at me. Then she whispered into my brother’s ear for about fifteen seconds, which is a long time if you’re watching. Ben nodded and bent forward and whispered something in return, but I swiveled and looked around the bay at all the houses on the shore, and the old amusement park in the distance. Lights were beginning to go on, and, as if that weren’t enough, it was snowing. As far as I was concerned, all those houses were guilty, both the houses and the people in them. The whole state of Michigan was guilty — all the adults, anyway — and I wanted to see them locked up.

“Wait here,” my brother said. He turned and went quickly off toward the shore of the bay.

“Where’s he going?” I asked.

“He’s going to get his car,” she said.

“What for?”

“He’s going to bring it out on the ice. Then he’s going to drive me home across the lake.”

“That’s really stupid!” I said. “That’s really one of the dumbest things I ever heard! You’ll go through the ice, just like that car down there did.”

“No, we won’t,” she said. “I know we won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Your brother understands this lake,” she said. “He knows where the pressure ridges are and everything. He just knows, Russell. You have to trust him. And he can always get off the ice if he thinks it’s not safe. He can always find a road.”

“Well, I’m not going with you,” I said. She nodded. I looked at her, and I wondered if she might be crazed with the bad judgment my parents had told me all teenagers had. Bad judgment of this kind was starting to interest me; it was a powerful antidote for boredom, which seemed worse.

“You don’t want to come?”

“No,” I said. “I’ll walk home.” I gazed up the hill, and in the distance I could see the lights of our house, a twenty-minute walk across the bay.

“Okay,” Stephanie said. “I didn’t think you’d want to come along.” We waited. “Russell, do you think your brother is interested in me?”

“I guess so,” I said. I wasn’t sure what she meant by “interested.” Anybody interested him, up to a point. “He says he likes you.”

“That’s funny, because I feel like something in the Lost and Found,” she said, scratching her boot into the ice. “You know, one of those gloves that don’t match anything.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “One glove. One left-hand glove, with the thumb missing.”

I could hear Ben’s car starting, and then I saw it heading down Gallagher’s boat landing. I was glad he was driving out toward us, because I didn’t want to talk to her this way anymore.

Stephanie was now watching my brother’s car. His headlights were on. It was odd to see a car with headlights on out on the ice, where there was no road. I saw my brother accelerate and fishtail the car, then slam on the brakes and do a 360-degree spin. He floored it, revving the back wheels, which made a high, whining sound on the ice, like a buzz saw working through wood. He was having a thrill and soon would give Stephanie another thrill by driving her home across ice that might break at any time. Thrills did it, whatever it was. Thrills led to other thrills.

“Would you look at that,” I said.

She turned. After a moment she made a little sound in her throat. I remember that sound. When I see her now, she still makes it — a sign of impatience or worry. After all, she didn’t go through the ice in my brother’s car on the way home. She and my brother didn’t drown, together or separately. Stephanie had two marriages and several children. Recently, she and her second husband adopted a Korean baby. She has the complex dignity of many small-town people who do not resort to alcohol until well after night has fallen. She continues to live in Five Oaks, Michigan, and she works behind the counter at the post office, where I buy stamps from her and gossip, holding up the line, trying to make her smile. She still has an overbite and she still laughs easily, despite the moody expression that comes over her when she relaxes. She has moved back to the same house she grew up in. Even now the exterior paint on that house blisters in cobweb patterns. I keep track of her. She and my brother certainly didn’t get married; in fact, they broke up a few weeks after seeing the Chevrolet under ice.

“What are we doing out here?” Stephanie asked. I shook my head. “In the middle of winter, out here on this stupid lake? I’ll tell you, Russell, I sure don’t know. But I do know that your brother doesn’t notice me enough, and I can’t love him unless he notices me. You know your brother. You know what he pays attention to. What do I have to do to get him to notice me?”

I was twelve years old. I said, “Take off your shoes.”

She stood there, thinking about what I had said, and then, quietly, she bent down and took off her boots, and, putting her hand on my shoulder to balance herself, she took off her brown loafers and her white socks. She stood there in front of me with her bare feet on the ice. I saw in the grayish January light that her toenails were painted. Bare feet with painted toenails on the ice — this was a desperate and beautiful sight, and I shivered and felt my fingers curling inside my gloves.

“How does it feel?” I asked.

“You’ll know,” she said. “You’ll know in a few years.”

My brother drove up close to us. He rolled down his window and opened the passenger-side door. He didn’t say anything. I watched Stephanie get into the car, carrying her shoes and socks and boots, and then I waved good-bye to them before turning to walk back to our house. I heard the car heading north across the ice. My brother would be looking at Stephanie’s bare feet on the floor of his car. He would probably not be saying anything just now.

When I reached our front lawn, I stood out in the dark and looked in through the kitchen window. My mother and stepfather were sitting at the kitchen counter; I couldn’t be sure if they were speaking to each other, but then I saw my mother raise her arm in one of her can-you-believe-this gestures. I didn’t want to go inside. I wanted to feel cold, so cold that the cold itself became permanently interesting. I took off my overcoat and my gloves. Tilting my head back, I felt some snow fall onto my face. I thought of the word “exposure” and of how once or twice a year deer hunters in the Upper Peninsula died of it, and I bent down and stuck my hand into the snow and frozen grass and held it there. The cold rose from my hand to my elbow, and when I had counted to forty and couldn’t stand another second of it, I picked up my coat and gloves and walked into the bright heat of the front hallway.