Trailerpark

The Fisherman

IF YOU HAVE AN ABSTRACT TURN OF MIND, you tend to measure the approach of winter by the sun, how in late October it starts slipping toward the southern horizon, spending less and less time each day in the sky and, because of that, seems to move across the sky at an accelerated rate, as if in a hurry to depart from this chilled part of the globe and move on to the southern hemisphere, there to languish slowly through the long, hot afternoons of the pampas, the outback and the transveldt. Or, on the other hand, you might measure the approach of winter by the ice, which seems a more direct, less abstract way of going about it. You wake up one morning toward the end of October, and when you glance out your window at the lake, you see off to your left, where a low headland protects a shallow cove from the wind, a thin, crackled, pink skin of ice that spreads as far as the point and then suddenly stops. There is no ice yet in the swamp, where the trickling movement of inlets to the lake and the pressure of tree stumps, brush and weeds forbid freezing this early, though by tomorrow morning or the next it will be covered there too; and there is no ice where the lake empties across the flat stones of the old Indian fishing weirs to form the Catamount River, though it too will gradually freeze solidly over; and there is no ice along the western shore, for here the ground drops down quickly from the tree-covered hills and the water is deep and black.

The man named Merle Ring, the old man whose trailer was the last one in the park and faced one end toward the weirs and the other toward the swamp, was what you might call an ice-man. When the ground froze, his walk took on a springing, almost sprightly look, as if he were happy to find the earth rock-hard, impenetrable and utterly unyielding. And when the air got cold enough for him to see his breath, he breathed with fond care, as if taking sensual pleasure from the sight of white clouds puffing out before his raggedy beard. And the morning of every October when he saw the first ice on Skitter Lake, he pulled on his mackinaw and trotted down to the shore as if to greet an old friend. He examined the ice, reading its depth, clarity, hardness and extension the way you’d examine a calendar, calculating how many days and weeks he’d have to wait before the entire lake was covered with ten or more inches of white ice, cracking and booming through subzero nights as new ice below expanded against the old ice above, and he could set up his bobhouse and chisel into the ice a half-dozen holes and commence his winter-time nights and days of fishing for pickerel, black bass, bluegills and perch.

For over a half-century Merle had been an ice-fisherman. Where most people in this region endure winter to get to summer, Merle endured summer to get to winter. Ice-fishing is not what you would ordinarily think of as a sport. You don’t move around much, and you don’t do it with anyone else. It’s an ancient activity, though, and after thousands of years it’s still done in basically the same way. You drop a line with a hook and piece of bait attached into the water and wait for an edible fish to take the bait and get hooked, and then you haul the thrashing fish through the hole and stash it with the others while you rebait your hook. If you are a serious ice-fisherman, and Merle was serious, you build a shanty and you drag it onto the lake, bank it around with snow and let it freeze into the ice. The shanty, or bobhouse, as it’s called, has trap doors in the floor, and that’s where you cut the holes through the ice, usually with a harpoon-like steel-tipped chisel called a spud or else with a long-handled steel auger. At some of the holes, depending on what kind of fish you are seeking and what kind of bait or lure you are using, you set traplines, or tip-ups, and at others you drop handlines. With live bait, minnows and such, you can use the traps, but if you’re jigging with a spoon or using ice flies, you need to keep your hand on the line.

The bobhouse is only as large as need be, six feet by four feet is enough, and six feet high for a normal-sized person. At one end is a door with a high step-over sill to keep out the wind and at the other a homemade woodstove. Along one of the long walls is a narrow bench that serves as a seat and also as a bed when you want to nap or sleep over the night. Your traps and lines are set up along the opposite wall. There is a small window opening, but it remains covered by a hinged, wooden panel, so that the bobhouse can be kept in total darkness, for, when no light enters the bobhouse from outside, you can peer through the holes in the ice and see clearly the world below. You see what the fish see, and you see them too. But they cannot see you. You see the muddy lake bottom, undulating weeds and decaying leaves, and in a cold green light, you see small schools of bluegills drifting over the weed beds in search of food and oxygen, while lethargically along behind three or four pickerel glide into view, looking for stragglers. Here and there a batch of yellow perch cruise, and slowly, sleepily, a black bass. The light filtered through the ice is still, hard and cold, like an algebraic equation, and you can watch the world beneath pass through it with a clarity, objectivity and love that is usually thought to be the exclusive prerogative of gods.

Until one winter a few years ago, Merle Ring was not taken very seriously by the other residents of the trailerpark. He was viewed as peculiar and slightly troublesome, mainly because, while he had opinions on everything and about everyone, when he expressed those opinions, which he did frequently, he didn’t make much sense to people and seemed almost to be making fun of them. For instance, he told Doreen Tiede, who was having difficulties with her ex-husband Buck, that the only way to make him cease behaving the same way he had behaved back when he was her husband, that is, as a drunken, brutal crybaby, was to get herself a new husband. “Who?” she asked him. They were in her car, and she was giving Merle a lift into town on her way to work at the tannery. Her little daughter Maureen, on her way to the babysitter for the day, was in the back, where she was unaccustomed to sitting. Doreen laughed lightly and said it again. “Really, Merle, who should I marry?”

“It don’t matter. Just get yourself a new husband. That way you’ll get rid of Buck. Because he won’t believe you’re not his wife until you’re someone else’s.” He puffed on his cob pipe and looked out the window at the birches alongside the road, leafless and gold-tinted in the morning sun. “That’s how I always did it,” he said.

“What?” She was clasping and unclasping the steering wheel as if her fingers were stiff and cold. This business with her ex-husband really bothered her, and it was hurting Maureen.

“Whenever I wanted to get rid of a wife, I married another. Once you’re over a certain age and have got yourself married, you stay married the rest of your life, unless the one you happened to be married to ups and dies. Then you can be single again.”

“Maybe Buck’ll up and die on me, then,” she said with a quick grimace.

“Mommy!” the child said and stuck her thumb in her mouth.

“I was only joking, sweets.” Doreen looked into the rearview mirror. “And stop sucking your thumb. You’re too old for that.” Then, to Merle: “Is that how you got to be single, after all those wives? How many, six, seven?”

“Numerous. Yup, the last one died. Just in time, too, because I was all set to get married again.”

“To who?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I didn’t have anybody in particular in mind at the time. But I sure was eager to get that last one off my back.”

“Jesus, Merle, isn’t anything sacred to you?”

“Sure.”

“For instance.”

“Oh, marriage, for instance. But not husbands or wives,” he quickly added.

“I can’t take you seriously, Merle,” she said, and they drove on in silence.

That was the form most of his conversations took. It didn’t matter whom he was talking to, Merle’s observations and opinions left you feeling puzzled, a little hurt and irritated. To avoid those feelings most people told themselves and each other that Merle wasn’t all “there,” that he didn’t really understand how complicated life was, and that he really didn’t like anyone anyhow. But because he was orderly and quiet and, like most small, neat, symmetrical men, physically attractive, and because his financial life was under control, he was accepted into the community. Also, he didn’t seem to care whether you followed his advice or whether you took him seriously, and as a result, despite the fact that people took neither him nor his advice seriously, Merle was never a very agitated man, which, naturally, made him an attractive neighbor. No one thought of him as a particularly useful neighbor, however.

Until he won the state lottery, that is. That same October morning, the morning he saw the first ice on the lake and the morning he had the brief conversation with Doreen Tiede concerning her ex-husband, Buck, he bought as he did every month a one-dollar lottery ticket. It had been a habit for Merle, ever since the state had first introduced the lottery back in the ’60s, to go into town the day after his social security check arrived in the mail, cash his check at the bank, and on the way home stop at the state liquor store and buy a fifth of Canadian Club and a single lottery ticket. There were several types available, but Merle preferred the Daily Numbers Game, in which you play a four-digit number for the day. The winning number would be printed the next morning in the Manchester Union-Leader. For your one-dollar bet, the payoff on four digits in the exact order was $4500. At that point, your number went into another lottery, the Grand Prize Drawing made later in the year, for $50,000. Merle won $4500, and here’s how he did it. He bet his age, 7789—on October 30, 1978, he was seventy-seven years, eight months, nine days old. He had always bet his age, which of course meant that the number he played varied slightly but systematically from one month to the next. He claimed it was on principle, for he did not believe, on the one hand, in wholly giving over to chance or impulse or, on the other, in relying absolutely on a fixed number. It was a compromise, a realistic compromise, in Merle’s mind, between randomness and control, two extremes that, he felt, led to the same place — superstition. There were, of course, three months a year when, because he was limited to selecting four single-digit numbers, he could not play his exact age, and in those months, December, January and February, he did not buy a ticket. But those were the months he spent ice-fishing anyhow, and it seemed somehow wrong to him, to gamble on numbers when you were ice-fishing. At least that’s how he explained it.

Merle took his $4500, paid the tax on it, and spent about $250 refurbishing his bobhouse. It needed a new floor and roof and a paint job, and many interior fixtures had fallen into disrepair. The rest of the money he gave away, as loans, of course, but Merle once said that he never loaned money he couldn’t afford to give away, and as a result of this attitude, no one felt especially obliged to pay him back. Throughout November, Merle hammered and sawed away at his bobhouse, while people from the trailerpark came and went, congratulating him on his good luck, explaining their great, sudden need of $300 or $400 or $500, then, while he counted out the bills, thanking him profusely for the loan. He kept his prize money inside a cigar box in his toolbox, a huge, locked, wooden crate far too heavy for fewer than four men to carry and located just inside the door to his trailer.

Meanwhile, the ice on the lake gradually thickened and spread out from the coves and shallows, creeping over the dark water like a pale shadow. Merle’s bobhouse was a handsome, carefully fitted structure. The bottom sills had been cut to serve as runners, which made it possible for Merle to push the building out onto the ice alone. The interior was like a ship’s cabin, with hinged shelves and lockers, hooks and drawers, a small woodstove made from a twenty-five-gallon metal drum, a padded bunk that folded against the wall when not in use, and so on. The interior wood, white pine, had been left raw and over the years had darkened from woodsmoke and moisture to the color of old briar. The exterior, of lapstrake construction to stave off the wind, Merle covered with a deep red stain. The pitched roof was of new, unstained, cedar shingles that would silver out by spring but that now were the color of golden palomino.

Clearly, the structure deserved admiration, and got it, especially from the denizens of the trailerpark, for, after all, the contrast between Merle’s bobhouse and the cubes they all lived in was extraordinary. As November wore on and Merle completed refurbishing the bobhouse, people from the park daily came by and stood and studied it for a while, saying things and probably feeling things they had not said or felt before. Until Merle won the lottery, the people had more or less ignored the old man and his bobhouse, but when they started coming around to congratulate him and ask for loans, they noticed the tiny, reddish cabin sitting on its runners a few feet off the lake, noticed it in a way they never had before, for, after all, they usually found him working there and their attention got drawn to his work, and also they were curious as to how he was spending his money so as to determine whether there would be any left for them. And when they saw the bobhouse, really took a close look at its precision and logic and the utter usefulness of every detail, they were often moved in strange ways. It was as if they were deserted on an island together and suddenly had come upon a man from among them who was building a seaworthy boat, and not only that, a boat that could carry no more than a single person off the island. They were moved by the sight of Merle’s bobhouse, moved to hate the sight of their own rusting, tin and plastic trailers, the cheap, manufactured clutter of their shelters, and this unexpectedly disturbed them. The disturbance moved them, unfortunately, quickly to envy Merle’s bobhouse.

“How come you making it so fancy?” Terry Constant sneered.

Merle looked up from the floor where he was screwing down the new two-by-eight-inch plank flooring and saw the black man silhouetted darkly against a milk white sky so that his features couldn’t be seen. He wore an orange parka and Navy watch cap and was chewing a toothpick. Merle said nothing and went back to work.

“You win the numbers, like they said?”

“Yup.”

“That’s how come you’re making it so fancy, then.”

“…”

“Luxury!”

“…”

“Who’s gonna see it, a little fish-house? I coulda slapped this thing together in half the time for half the cost outa plywood.”

“…”

“This thing’ll last longer’n you will. You realize that? You’ll be dead a hundred years and this thing’ll still be sitting here by the lake.”

Merle picked up a new plank and with a stubby plane started shaving blond, sweet-smelling curls off the wood. Then he lay the board against the first, cast his gaze down its length, retrieved it and gave it another half-dozen smooth strokes of the plane, until finally the plank fit snugly, perfectly, into place.

“Well, it looks good, anyhow,” Terry said. He shifted his toothpick, and placing one foot onto the high sill, dropped his right forearm onto his thigh and leaned forward and into the close, dim, resin-smelling interior of the bobhouse. “Say, Merle, I was wondering, see, I’m outa work, ya know. Marcelle’s all done winterizing the park, so she don’t need me anymore until spring or unless the pipes burst or something, and you know there ain’t no work in this damn town in winter, especially for a black man, so I was wondering if you could help me out a little, ’til I could get some more work.”

“Sure.”

As if he hadn’t heard him, Terry went on. “I was thinking of maybe heading south this winter, getting some work in Florida. I got a cousin in Tampa, but it’ll take some bucks to do it. You know, for bus fare and after I get there, ’til I get a job.”

“What about your sister?” Merle asked without looking up. “She’d be pretty much alone here, without you. Being black and all. Come spring you could get work again, maybe for the highway department or something. You don’t want to leave her all alone up here.”

“Well, yeah…” Terry let his glance fall across the oak framing of the structure, noticing for the first time how it had been notched and fitted together with pegs. “But I can’t take any more handouts from her. Maybe if you could loan me enough to get through the next three or four months…” He said. “I got problems, man.”

“How much?”

“Five, six hundred, maybe?”

“Sure.”

“Seven would be better.”

“Sure.”

“I’ll pay you back.” He stood up straight again and stepped away from the door as Merle got slowly to his feet and came out to the yard.

“Sure,” he said. “Money’s in the house.”

“Okay,” Terry said almost in a whisper, and the two men crossed the yard to the trailer.

There were other loans: Bruce Severance, the long-haired kid in number 3 who sold dope, needed $300 fast, to get a very heavy dude off his back, he said; Noni Hubner, the college girl in number 7 who was then recuperating from her first nervous breakdown, wanted to do what her mother had so far refused to do, buy a proper gravestone for her father’s grave, which, since his death two years ago, had gone unmarked; and Leon LaRoche, the bank teller in number 2, said he needed money to help pay his sick mother’s hospital bills, but it came out (only as a rumor, however) that his mother was not ill and that he was spending money recklessly to support a young man supposedly going to college in Boston and whom Leon visited every weekend, practically; and Claudel Bing, who was no longer living at the trailerpark but still had friends there, and after having lost his job at the Public Service Company, needed money to pay for his divorce from Ginnie, who was living with Howie Leeke; Tom Smith was dead by then, but his son Buddy somehow heard about Merle’s good luck and wrote from Albany asking Merle for $500 so he could pay off the debts he claimed his father’s burial had left him with, and Merle mailed the money to him the next day; Nancy Hubner, Noni’s mother, insisting that she did not want the money for herself, explained that she had got herself into an embarrassing situation by pledging $1000 to the Clamshell Alliance people and had only been able to raise $750; Captain Dewey Knox, in trailer number 6, who certainly seemed affluent enough not to need any of Merle’s money, suddenly turned out to owe three years’ back taxes on the last bit of land his father had owned in Catamount, a rocky hundred-acre plot on the northern edge of what had been the elder Knox’s dairy farm, and to keep the Captain from losing that last connection to his sanctified past, Merle loaned him $638.44; and then, finally, there was Marcelle Chagnon, the manager of the trailerpark, living in number 1, and needing money to protect her job, because the Granite State Realty Development Corporation was billing her personally for the cost of replacing all the frozen pipes in trailer number 11, then vacant, which Marcelle had neglected to drain last August when the previous tenants, a pair of plasterers from Massachusetts working on a new motel over in Epsom, had left. And then, well — then all the money was gone.

By mid-November the sun was setting early and rising late, and the daily temperatures rarely got above freezing, the nights often falling to zero and below. Except for where the water rushed across the weirs, the lake was frozen over entirely. The bobhouse was ready, and Merle’s tip-ups, lines, jigs and chisels were repaired, cleaned, oiled and packed neatly into the bobhouse. First thing every morning Merle pulled on his cap and mackinaw and trotted from his trailer down to the shore to read the ice. It was going to be a good winter for ice — no snow so far, very little wind, and lots of steady, unbroken cold. A Canadian high had moved southeast in late October and had hunkered over northern New England for two weeks straight, so that, with clear nighttime skies, the ice had formed, spread and thickened several weeks ahead of schedule.

So far as fishing went, winter or summer, Skitter Lake was Merle’s. Three sides of the lake adjoined the Skitter Lake State Forest, which made it fairly inaccessible from the road, except through the trailerpark, and people, strangers especially, were reluctant to drive through the trailerpark and stop their cars before the short, sandy beach at the end of the peninsula, get out their gear, launch their boats, canoes or bobhouses and commence fishing. It was a little too public, and also a little too private, as if the trailerpark were actually a kind of boarding house with all the tenants watching you cross their shared front yard to get to their shared fishing place. The same went for ice-skating and swimming. The residents of the trailerpark skated on and swam in Skitter Lake, but other people went elsewhere, which wasn’t much of an inconvenience anyway, since in town there was the mill pond, and throughout the surrounding countryside there were dozens of small, accessible ponds and lakes where the fishing was as good as, if not better than, the fishing at Skitter Lake.

As a result, when at the end of the first week in December Merle decided that the ice was thick enough to support the weight of his bobhouse, he made the decision alone. He couldn’t wait until someone less cautious or patient than he had dragged his bobhouse safely out to the middle of the lake. He couldn’t even wait until schoolboys from town, eager to play hockey, had crossed and crisscrossed the lake a dozen times the way they did down at the mill pond, whacking the ice with hockey sticks and listening to the cracks and fault lines race away from the blow rather than down, revealing in that way that the ice was now thick enough to support the weight of large human beings.

Merle took his long-handled chisel in hand, and tapping lightly in front of him as he walked, moved like a blind man carefully onto the ice. He walked twenty or so feet from the shore and parallel to the shore toward the marshy area west of the park, where the hermit they called the Guinea Pig Lady would build her shack. Here, he knew, the water was late to freeze, because of the several trickling inlets and the marsh grass and bushes, and here, too, the water was not very deep, so that if indeed it was not safe and he fell through, he would not be in any danger. It was late in the day and the sky was peach-colored near the horizon and blue-gray where thin clouds scudded in from the northeast. Merle, in his dark green mackinaw and plaid trooper’s cap with the fur earflaps tied down, tapped his way away from the trailerpark toward the swamp, then past the swamp and out along the point, crossing the cove, and then beyond the point, until he was over deep water. Below him, the lake was a hundred feet deep, and the ice was black and smooth, like polished obsidian. This first solitary walk on the ice is almost like flying, for you have left the safe and solid earth and are moving over what you know and can see is an ether, supported by a membrane that you can feel but cannot quite see, as if the difference between the ice below and the air above were merely a difference in atmospheric pressures. Later, your mind will accept the information coming from your body, and then there will be no difference between ice with a hundred feet of water below it and the frozen ground itself, so that when you cut a hole in the ice and it fills with water, you will be surprised but no more frightened than if you had dug a hole in sand at the beach and watched it fill with seawater.

Confident now that he could safely put his bobhouse onto the ice, Merle spent the following day picking through the brushy overgrown fields out by Old Road, collecting galls from dried stalks of goldenrod. Inside each gall slept a small, white grub, excellent bait for bluegills, and it wasn’t long before Merle had collected in his mackinaw pockets half a hundred of the woody containers. Then, on returning to the trailerpark, he was hailed on the roadway just opposite Marcelle Chagnon’s trailer by Bruce Severance. Bruce had driven his black Chevy van with the Rocky Mountain sunsets on the sides up behind the old man — it was midafternoon but almost dark, and he probably hadn’t seen Merle until he was almost upon him. He stopped a few feet away, raced his motor until Merle turned, then waved him over to the driver’s side and cranked down the window.

“Hey, man, what’s happening?” The sweet smell of marijuana exhaled from the vehicle, and the kid took a last hit, knocked the lit end off the roach and popped it into his mouth.

“Temperature’s dropping,” Merle said with a slight smile. As he peered up at the boy his blue, crinkly-lidded eyes filled and glistened in the wind.

“Yeah. Wow. Temperature’s dropping. That’s what’s happening, all right.” He swallowed the roach.

“Yep.” Merle turned to walk on.

“Say, I’ve been meaning to ask you, I saw you this morning when I came in from Boston. You were in those old fields out by the road. Then later I came back out, and you were still there. And now here you are again, this time coming in from the fields. What’s going on out there?”

“Nothing. Temperature’s dropping there too. That’s all.”

“No, man. I’m curious. I know you know things, about herbs and things, I mean.”

Merle said, “You want to know what I was out there for? Is that what you’re wondering, boy?”

“Yeah.”

The old man reached into his mackinaw pocket and drew out one of the goldenrod galls. “These.”

“What’s that?”

“Goldenrod gall.”

“What’s it for?”

“I’ll show you. But you’ll have to spend awhile first helping me move my bobhouse out on the ice tonight.”

“Tonight? In the dark?”

“Yep. Got to bait the camp with chum tonight so’s I can start to fish tomorrow.”

With a slow and maybe reluctant nod, the kid agreed to help him. Merle walked around and climbed into the van, and the two drove through the park to Merle’s trailer.

When an old man and a young man work together, it can make an ugly sight or a pretty one, depending on who’s in charge. If the young man’s in charge or won’t let the old man take over, the young man’s brute strength becomes destructive and inefficient, and the old man’s intelligence, out of frustration, grows cruel, and inefficient also. Sometimes the old man forgets that he is old and tries to compete with the young man’s strength, and then it’s a sad sight. Or the young man forgets that he is young and argues with the old man about how to do the work, and that’s a sad sight too.

In this case, however, the young man and the old man worked well together. Merle told Bruce where to place his pole so he could lift the front of the bobhouse while Merle slid a second pole underneath. Then the same at the back, until practically on its own the bobhouse started to roll down the slope toward the ice. As each roller emerged from the back, Merle told Bruce to grab it and run around to the front and lay it down, which the young man did, quickly and without stumbling, until in a few moments, the structure was sliding onto the ice, and then it was free of the ground altogether. It slid a few feet from the bank, and the momentum left it, and then it stopped, silent, solid, dark in the wind off the lake.

“Incredible!” the kid said.

“Everything’s inside except firewood,” Merle said. “Put them poles in, we’ll cut them up out on the lake.”

The kid did as he was told.

Merle walked around to the front of the bobhouse, away from the land, and took up a length of rope attached to and looped around a quarter-inch-thick U-bolt. “I’ll steer, you push,” he called to the kid.

“Don’t you have a flashlight?” Bruce yelled nervously. The wind was building and shoved noisily against the bobhouse.

“Nothing out there but ice, and it’s flat all the way across.”

“How’ll I get back?”

“There’s lights on here at the park. You just aim for them. You don’t need a light to see light. You need dark. C’mon, stop gabbing and start pushing,” he said.

The kid leaned against the bobhouse, grunted, and the building started to move. It slid easily over the ice on its waxed runners, at times seeming to carry itself forward on its own, even though against the wind. As if he were leading a large, dumb animal, Merle steered the bobhouse straight out from the shore for about a quarter mile, then abruptly turned to the right and headed east, until he had come to about two hundred yards from the weirs, where the lake narrowed and where, Merle knew, there were in one place a gathering current, thirty to forty feet of water and a weedy, fertile bottom. It was a good spot, and he spun the bobhouse slowly on it until the side with the door faced away from the prevailing wind.

“Let it sit,” he said to the kid. “Its weight’ll burn the ice and keep it from moving.” He went inside and soon returned with a small bucksaw and his long chisel. “You cut the wood into stove lengths, and I’ll dig us in,” he said, handing the saw to the kid.

“This is really fucking incredible,” Bruce said.

Merle looked at him silently for a second, then went quickly to work chipping the ice around the runners and stamping the chips back with his feet, moving swiftly up one side and down the other, until the sills of the house were packed in ice. By then Bruce had cut two of the four poles into firewood. “Finish up, and I’ll get us a fire going,” Merle told him, and the kid went energetically back to work.

In a short time, a fire was crackling inside the round belly of the stove, the kerosene lantern was lit, and the bobhouse was warmed sufficiently for Merle to pull off his mackinaw and gloves and hang them on pegs behind the bunk. Bruce laid in the wood carefully below the bunk, then looked up at Merle as if for approval, but Merle ignored him.

“Now,” the kid said, shaking off his blue parka and, following Merle’s example, placing it on a peg, “show me what you got there, those whachacallits from the fields.” He sat down next to Merle and started to roll a joint. “Smoke?” he said, holding out the cigarette.

“No, thanks, I got whiskey.”

“You oughta smoke grass instead,” the kid said, lighting up.

“That so. You oughta drink whiskey. ’Course, you got to be smarter to handle whiskey than you do that stuff.” He was silent and watched Bruce sucking on the joint.

The kid started to argue with the old man. Grass never did to you what whiskey surely did, made you depressed and angry, ruined your liver, destroyed your brain cells, and so on.

“What does grass do to you?” Merle asked.

“Gets you high, man.” He grinned.

Merle grunted and stood up. “If it can’t hurt you, I don’t see how it can get you high.” He opened the trap doors in the floor, exposing the white ice below, and with his chisel went to work cutting holes. With the lip of the steel, he flaked ice neatly away, making a circle eight or nine inches across, then dug deeper, until suddenly the hole filled with water. Moving efficiently and quickly, he soon had a half-dozen holes cut, their tops and bottoms carefully beveled so as not to cut the line, and then with a smaller strainer he scooped the floating ice chips away, until there was only clear, pale blue water in the holes.

On a lapboard he proceeded to chop hunks of flesh off several hand-sized minnows he’d plucked from a bait pail. This done, he placed the chum into a tin cone that had a line attached to the top through a lever that released the hinged bottom of the cone when the line was jerked. Then he let the cone slowly down the center hole, slightly larger than the others, and hand over hand let out about thirty feet of line, until he felt the cone touch bottom. He jerked the line once, then retrieved it and brought the cone back into the bobhouse, dripping and empty.

Bruce watched with obvious admiration as the old man moved about the confines of the bobhouse, adjusting the draft of the stove, taking out, using and then wiping dry and putting back his tools and equipment, drawing his bottle of Canadian Club from under the bunk, loosening his boots, when suddenly the old man leaned down and blew out the lantern, and the bobhouse went black.

“What? What’d you do that for?” His voice was high and thin.

“Don’t need it now.” From the darkness came the sound of Merle unscrewing the cap of the whiskey bottle. Then silence.

“How long you plan to stay out here tonight?” The kid sounded a little frightened.

“Till morning,” came the answer. “Then for as long as the fishing’s any good and the ice holds.”

“Days and nights both?”

“Sure. I only hafta come in when I run outa whiskey. There’s lotsa wood along the banks, I’ll hafta step out now and then for that, and of course you hafta piss and shit once in a while. Otherwise…”

They sat in darkness and silence a while longer, when finally the kid stood up and groped behind him for his coat. “I… I gotta go back in.”

“Suit yourself.”

He took a step toward the door, and Merle said to him, “Those goldenrod galls you was asking about?”

“Oh, yeah,” the kid said.

Merle struck a match, and suddenly his face was visible, red in the glow of the match as he sucked the flame into the barrel of his pipe, his bearded face seeming to lurch ominously in and out of the light when the flame brightened and then dimmed. When he had his pipe lit, he snuffed out the match, and all the kid could see was the red glow of the smoldering tobacco. “Bait. That’s all.”

“Bait?”

“Yep. Old Indian trick.”

The kid was silent for a few seconds. “Bait. You mean, that’s how you got me to push this thing way the hell out here tonight?”

“Old Indian trick.”

“Yeah,” Bruce said coldly. “And I fell for it. Jesus.” He drew open the door and stepped quickly out to the ice and wind, looked into the darkness for the lights of the trailerpark, found them way off and dimly in the west, and started the walk back.

No one brought Merle any Christmas gifts or invited him to any of the several small parties at the park. The reasons may have been complicated and may have had to do with the “loans” they all had received from him, but more likely the residents of the trailerpark, as usual, simply forgot about him. Once in a while someone mentioned having seen him walk through the park on his way to town and return later carrying a bag of groceries and a state liquor store bag, but otherwise it was almost as if the old man had moved away, had gone west to Albany like Buddy Smith or south to Florida like Captain Knox’s mother and father or into town to the Hawthorne House like Claudel Bing. Nobody thought to send them Christmas gifts or invite them back to the trailerpark for a Christmas party.

Then, the week before Christmas, there was a snowstorm that left a foot and a half of snow on the ground and on the lake, followed by a day and a night of high, cold winds that scraped the snow into shoulder-high drifts along the shore, and that further isolated Merle from the community. Now it was almost as if he had died, and when in the morning you happened to look out at the lake and saw way out there in the brilliant white plain a red cube with a string of woodsmoke unraveling from the stovepipe chimney on top, you studied it the way you would the distant gravestone of a stranger reddening in the light of the rising sun.

A week later, just after Christmas and before the turn of the year, Noni Hubner’s mother was reading the Manchester Union-Leader at breakfast, when she started up excitedly, grabbed the paper off the table and hurried back through the trailer to her daughter’s bedroom.

“Noni! Noni, wake up!” She shook the girl’s shoulder roughly.

Slowly Noni came to. She lay in the bed on her back, blinking like a seal on a rock. “What?”

“The Grand Prize Drawing! They’re going to have the Grand Prize Drawing, dear! Think of it! What if he won! Wouldn’t that be wonderful for him? The poor old man.”

“Who? What the hell are you talking about?”

“Don’t curse, dear. Merle Ring, the old fellow out on the lake. He won the lottery back in October, and now they’re going to hold the Grand Prize Drawing on January fifteenth. Apparently, they put all the winning numbers for the year into a basket or something, and the governor or somebody draws out one number, and whoever holds that number wins fifty thousand dollars! Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

“Yeah,” the girl said, and rolled over, yanking the covers over her head.

“No, you can’t go back to sleep. You’ve got to go out there and tell him. He hasn’t been out of that cabin of his for days, so he can’t know yet. You can ski out there with the news. Won’t that be fun, dear?”

“Let someone else do it,” Noni mumbled from under the covers. “It’s too cold.”

“You’re the only one who has skis, dear,” the mother said.

“Most of the snow is off the ice.”

“Then you can skate out!”

“Oh, God,” Noni groaned. “Can’t you leave people alone?”

“He’s such a sweet old man, and he’s been very generous. It’s the least we can do.”

“He’s a grumpy pain in the ass, if you ask me. And he’s weird, not generous. If you ask me.” She got out of bed and looked at her reflection in the mirror.

“Well, no one asked you. You just do as I say. You have to involve yourself more in the fates of others, dear. You can’t always be thinking only of yourself.”

“Yeah, I know.”

It took her an hour to prepare for the journey — first breakfast, then dressing herself in three layers of clothing, bickering with her mother, as she ate and dressed, about the necessity for the trip in the first place — and then another hour for the trip itself. It was a white world out there, white sky, white earth beneath, and a thin, gray horizon all around, the whole of it centered on the red cubicle where the old man fished through the ice.

At the bobhouse, sweating from the work of skating against the wind, and having come to rest, suddenly chilled, Noni leaned for a few seconds against the leeward wall, then knocked at the door, and without waiting for an answer, entered. The door closed behind her, and instantly she was enveloped by darkness and warmth, as if she had been swallowed whole by an enormous mammal.

“Oh!” she cried. “I can’t see!”

“Seat’s to your right,” came the old man’s gravelly voice. The interior space was so small that you couldn’t tell where in the darkness the voice was coming from, whether from the farthest corner of the bobhouse or right up next to your ear.

Noni groped to her right, found the bench and sat down. A moment of silence passed. Gradually, her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and she was able at last to see the six holes in the ice, and in the green light that emerged from the holes she saw the hooked shape of the old man seated at the other end of the bunk next to the stove. He held a dropline in one hand and was jiggling it with the other, and he seemed to be staring into the space directly in front of him, as if he were a blind man.

“Why is it so dark in here?” she asked timidly.

“Window’s shut.”

“No, I mean, how come?”

“So I can see the fish and they can’t see me,” he said slowly.

More silence passed. Finally, in a low voice, Noni spoke. “How very strange you are.”

Merle didn’t respond.

“I have some news for you, Mr. Ring.”

Still nothing.

“You know the lottery you won back in October?”

Merle jiggled his handline and continued staring straight ahead. It was almost as if he’d entered a state of suspended animation, as if his systems had been banked down to their minimal operating capacity, with his heart and lungs, all his vital organs, working at one-fourth their normal rate, so that he could survive and even thrive in the deprivation caused by the cold and the ice and the darkness.

“It seems ridiculous,” the girl said, almost to herself. “You don’t care about things like lotteries and Grand Prize Drawings and all.”

A few seconds passed, and Merle said, “I bought the ticket. I cared.”

“Of course. I’m sorry,” Noni said. “I just meant … well, no matter. My mother saw in the paper this morning that they’re holding the Grand Prize Drawing in Concord on January fifteenth at noon, and you ought to be there. In case you win.”

Merle said nothing.

“It’s a lot of money. Fifty thousand dollars. You have a good chance to win it, you know.” He didn’t respond, so she went on, chattering nervously now. “Think of what that would mean. Fifty thousand dollars! You could have a wonderful old age. I mean, retirement. Retirement, I mean. You could go to Florida in the winter months. You could go deep-sea fishing in Florida … maybe buy one of those condominiums, and play shuffleboard, and have lots of friends…” She trailed off. “God, I sound like my mother.” She stood up and moved toward the door. Tenderly, she said, “I’m sorry I bothered you, Mr. Ring. My mother … my mother wanted you to know about the drawing, that’s why I came out here. She thought you’d be … excited, I guess.”

“I haven’t won yet.”

“But you have a good chance of winning.”

“Good chance of dying, too. Better.”

“Not by January fifteenth, Mr. Ring.”

“About the same. I’m old. Not much left to do but think, and then, in the middle of a thought, die.”

“Oh, no,” she said heartily. “There’s lots left for you to do.”

“Like what?”

“Well … fishing, for instance. And spending all that lottery money you’re going to win.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I suppose there’s that.” Then he lapsed back into silence again.

The girl opened the door and slipped out, and the bobhouse was filled again with darkness and solitude.

The door to the bobhouse was flung open, and a blinding light entered, bringing with it a blast of cold air and the hulking shape of a man in a hooded parka. The man splashed the light from his flashlight around the chamber, located Merle stretched out in his blanket roll on the bunk and then let the beam droop deferentially to the floor. The man closed the door behind him.

“Mr. Ring?”

“Yep.”

“I’m… I’m Leon LaRoche. You know, from the trailerpark?”

Merle swung his body into a sitting position. “You can shut out that light.”

Leon apologized and snapped off the flashlight. “May I sit down and get warm? It’s mighty cold out there tonight.” He chuckled. “Yes, sir, mighty cold.”

“Suit yourself.”

They were silent for a moment. Merle opened the stove front, throwing sudden shadows and sheets of dancing red and yellow light into the room; then he tossed a chunk of wood onto the crimson coals and closed the firedoor again.

The young man nervously cleared his throat. “Well, Mr. Ring, how’s the fishing?”

“Slow.”

“I’ve been hearing a lot about you lately, from folks at the park, I mean … how you stay out here night and day, only coming in now and then for supplies…”

“Whiskey,” Merle said, and he went under the bench with one hand and drew out his bottle. “Drink?”

“No. No, thank you.”

Merle took a slow pull from the bottle.

“Anyhow, it’s all very interesting to me. Yes, maybe I will have a drink,” he said, and Merle fetched the bottle again and passed it over. “So tell me, Mr. Ring, what do you eat out here? How do you cook and all?”

“Fish, mostly. A man can live a long time in this climate on fish and whiskey.”

“Very interesting. And you use lake water for washing, I suppose?”

Merle grunted.

“How long do you plan on staying out here, Mr. Ring?” Leon took another drink from the bottle and passed it back.

Merle said nothing.

As if his question had been answered, Leon went on. “And do you do this every winter, Mr. Ring? I mean, stay out on the ice, isolated like this, living off fish and whiskey and solitude?” He chuckled again. “I’m relatively new to the park,” he explained.

“I know.”

“Yes, of course. Well.” He wrestled himself free of his parka and flexed his shoulders and hands. “Say, it’s really comfortable in here, isn’t it? Smells a bit of whiskey and fried fish, though,” he said with a light laugh. “You wouldn’t mind if I had another sip of that, would you? What is it, by the way? It’s quite good! Really warms a man’s insides, doesn’t it?”

Merle handed him the bottle. “Canadian Club.”

Leon unscrewed the cap and took a long swallow, then slowly screwed the cap back on. “Yes. So, yes, I was saying, do you do this every year?”

“Man and boy.”

“But why?”

“It makes the rest of the year more interesting,” Merle said wearily.

Leon was silent for a moment. “I wonder. Yes, I’ll bet it does. I couldn’t stand it, though. The isolation. And the cold, and the darkness.”

“It’s a good idea to get used to the idea. Like I said, it makes the rest of the year more interesting.”

Leon’s voice was tight and frightened. “Are you talking about dying?”

“I’m talking about living,” Merle said with quiet emphasis.

“Speaking of living,” Leon said, suddenly hearty again, “you are probably wondering why I came all the way out here this evening.”

“Not particularly.”

“Yes. Well, anyhow, it has to do with the Grand Prize Drawing next week. You know, the state lottery?”

“Yep.”

“Folks in the park have been wondering, Mr. Ring, if you plan on attending that drawing over in Concord, and if not, assuming you win, for you just might win, you know, folks are wondering how you plan to pick up the prize money. You have to be there in person to pick up the prize money, you see…” He trailed off, as if waiting to be interrupted.

Merle said nothing.

“Well. It occurred to some of us that you might not care to take the time off from your fishing to go all the way in to Concord and deal with all those state officials and the reporters and so forth, seeing as how you enjoy your privacy and like to spend your winters alone out here on the lake, and we thought you might be able to empower someone else to do that chore for you. So I did a little checking around at the bank, and sure enough, you can empower someone else to pick up your prize money for you!” He waited a few seconds, but nothing more than the crackle and spit of the fire came out of the darkness, so he went on. “Anticipating your reluctance to leave your fishing at this time of year, I went ahead and took the liberty of having the necessary document drawn up by the bank attorney.” He went into his shirt pocket and brought forth a crisp, white envelope. “This document empowers me to act as your agent, should you win the Grand Prize Drawing,” he said, handing the envelope to Merle.

The old man took out the paper folded inside, and at the sound, Leon snapped on his flashlight. “Where do I sign it?” Merle asked. His voice was suddenly, strangely woeful and riddled with fatigue.

Leon directed him to a line at the bottom of the paper and handed him a pen.

Slowly, the old man placed the paper against his knee and scrawled his name on it. “There,” he said, and he handed the paper, envelope and pen back to the bank clerk, who doused the light. “It’s your problem, now,” the old man said.

“No problem at all, Mr. Ring. None at all,” he said, as he stood and pulled his parka on. “I assume,” he went on, “that if you win, you’ll want your check deposited in a savings account down at the bank.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Bring the money here.”

“Here?”

“In cash.”

“Cash?”

“Cash. No point letting some bank make money off my money. The government owns all the money anyhow. They just let us use it for a while. It’s the banks that foul everything up by getting in the middle. You bring me anything I win in hundred dollars bills. You might use one of them to buy me a case of Canadian Club. I’ve always wanted a case of Canadian Club,” he said wistfully.

Leon seemed to have been struck dumb. He moved toward the door in the darkness, groping for the latch and finally finding it. Then he let himself out.

From here on out, it was as if everyone who knew Merle knew that he was going to win the lottery. Consequently, his solitude rarely went a day without its being broken by a visit from someone wanting to congratulate him and talk about the money. Also, the weather broke into what’s called the January Thaw and people found the half-mile walk over ice and long floes of crusted snow less formidable than before. The wind died, the skies cleared to a deep blue, and daytime temperatures nudged the freezing mark, so at one time or another during the week following the visit from the bank teller, practically everyone else in the park found an occasion to visit the old man. Even Claudel Bing (though he had not lived at the trailerpark for several years, he was still paying for a trailer there and, in his fashion, was courting Doreen Tiede, and as a result had kept up his links with the park) came out to Merle’s bobhouse early one sunny afternoon.

He was already drunk when he arrived, a not uncommon occurrence that year, and therefore he wanted to talk about luck. In particular, his own bad luck, as compared to Merle’s good luck. Luck was Claudel’s obsession that year. It was the only way he could understand or even think about his life.

“You, you sonofabitch, you got all the luck,” he told Merle, who silently arranged his lines in the tip-ups and scooped ice chips away from the holes. “And that means there’s none left over for people like me! That’s the trouble with this goddamn country.” Claudel had brought his own bottle of whiskey, which he held between his legs and every now and then swigged at. “Now you take them fucking Commie bastards, like that Castro and them Russians, their idea is to get rid of luck completely, so nobody gets any. That’s as bad as what we got here. Worse, actually. What I’d like to see is a system that lets everybody have a little luck. That’s what this country needs. Nobody gets a lot, and nobody gets none. Everybody gets a little.”

“How about the bad luck?” Merle asked him. “Everybody get a little bit of that, too?” His beard and face and hands were pale green in the light from the holes, and as he moved slowly, smoothly over his traps and lines, checking bait and making sure the lines were laid precisely in the spools, he resembled a ghost.

“Sure! Why the hell not? When you got a little good luck, you can handle a little bad luck. It won’t break you. If I had money, for instance, it wouldn’t bother me that Ginnie run off with that goddamn sonofabitchin’ Howie Leeke. It’s like that, Merle,” he said earnestly. “But you wouldn’t understand. Not with your kind of luck. Shit,” he said, and took a long drink from his bottle. “You ever lose a woman you loved, Merle?” he asked suddenly. “No, of course not. You’ve had all them wives, got wives and kids scattered all over the country, but none of them ever left you. No, you left them. Right? Am I right?”

“Can’t say exactly that I intended to leave them, though,” Merle said. “I guess I just willed it. You can will what you actually do, but what you intend is all you accomplish in the end.”

“You preaching to me, Merle, goddammit?”

“Nope. Just thinking out loud. Not used to company, I guess.”

“Hey, that’s all right, I understand. Shit, it must get awful lonely out here. I’d go nuts. It’s good for thinking, though. Probably. Is that the kinda stuff you think about out here, Merle, all that stuff about will and intending?”

“Yep.” A red flag on one of the tip-ups suddenly sprung free, and in a single, swift motion Merle was off the bench and huddled over the line, watching it run off the spool and then stop, when he jerked it, set the hook and started retrieving the fish. “Black bass,” he said to no one in particular. It was a small one, not two pounds. Merle drew it through the hole, removed the hook from its lip and deposited the fish in the bucket of ice chips scooped from the holes.

“If I was you, I’d be thinking all the time about how I was going to spend all that money,” Claudel went on. “You talk about will and intentions!” he laughed. “How do you intend to spend the money, Merle? Fifty thousand bucks! Jesus H. Christ.”

“Can’t say.” He had rebaited the hook and was winding the line back onto the spool.

“You mean you don’t know?”

“What d’you think my intentions toward that much money ought to be? Can’t spend it, not the way I live. ’Course, I haven’t got it yet, so it ain’t like we’re talking about reality.”

“No, we’re talking about money!” Claudel said, leering.

“All I know is death and taxes. That’s reality. I intend to pay my taxes, and I intend to die.”

“Merle, you are fucking crazy,” Claudel said. “Crazy. But smart. You’re smart, all right. You coulda been a lot of things if you’d wanted to. Big. A businessman.”

“I always did what I wanted to do,” Merle said gloomily. Then, as if writing a letter, he said, “I was a carpenter, and I was married, and I fathered some children. Then I got old. Everyone gets old, though, whether he wants to or not.”

They were silent in the darkness for a moment.

“Yeah,” Claudel said, “but then you got lucky. Then you won the lottery!”

“It don’t matter.”

“Of course it matters, you asshole!”

“Not to me.”

“Well, it matters to me, goddammit!”

Merle remained silent this time, and after a while, Claudel’s bottle was empty. Without leaving his seat, he reached over, opened the door and pitched the bottle out. “It’ll sink in spring,” he mumbled. Then slowly, awkwardly, he pulled his coat on and stumbled out the door, not bothering even to say good-bye.

Daily, with and without ceremony, they came out to the bobhouse. The younger ones, Terry Constant, Noni Hubner, Bruce Severance, Leon LaRoche, Doreen Tiede, and poor Claudel Bing, could pretend they just happened to be in the neighborhood, ice-skating, skiing, walking or, as in Claudel’s case, bored and lonely and thought to drop in for a visit. The older ones, however, found it difficult to be casual about their visits. As Merle had said, you expect the actions of adults to have intention behind them and therefore meaning. The adults tend to expect it of themselves, too. Carol, Terry Constant’s older sister, claimed she walked all the way out to the middle of the lake against a cold wind because she had never seen anyone ice-fishing before and wanted to learn how it was done. While there, the only question she asked Merle directly was how would he spend the money if he won on the fifteenth. He said he didn’t know. Nancy Hubner baked Merle a minced meat pie (she said it was his favorite) and insisted on carrying it to him herself. While he ate a piece of the pie she told him how excited she was at the prospect of his becoming a wealthy, carefree man, something she said everyone deserved. He agreed. Captain Dewey Knox appeared one morning at the bobhouse to confirm Leon LaRoche’s claim that Merle had signed a document authorizing Leon to act as his agent at the Grand Prize Drawing. Merle said yes, he had signed such a document. “Without coercion?” the Captain asked. Merle said he couldn’t be sure because he didn’t know how a person went about coercing someone to sign something. “But you understood fully the meaning and consequences of your act?” the Captain asked. Merle said he wasn’t drunk or crazy at the time. “And is it true,” the Captain went on, “that you requested young LaRoche bring your winnings out here in cash? Hundred dollar bills?” Merle said it was true. The Captain thought that extremely foolish and told Merle, at great length, why. Merle went about his business of fishing and said nothing. After a while, when the Captain had finished telling Merle why he should have Leon LaRoche deposit the money in a savings account at the bank where he was employed, he departed from the bobhouse. The last person from the trailerpark to visit Merle’s bobhouse came out the day of the drawing, January fifteenth. It was Marcelle Chagnon, and as the manager of the trailerpark, she felt it was as much her duty as her privilege to announce to Merle that on that day at twelve o’clock noon he had won the $50,000 Grand Prize Drawing.

The winter continued to bear down, quite as if Merle had not won the lottery. There were snowstorms and cruel northeast winds out of Nova Scotia and days and nights, whole weeks, of subzero temperatures. Merle’s money, the five hundred one-hundred-dollar bills delivered by Leon LaRoche, remained untouched in Merle’s cigar box under the bunk in the bobhouse. The brand new bills, banded into thousand dollar packets, filled the cigar box exactly, and the box, with an elastic band around it, sat in the darkness of the bobhouse and the minds of everyone who lived in the trailerpark. Everyone carried the image of that box around in his or her head all day and all night. Some even dreamed about it. Leon LaRoche told Captain Knox that when he delivered the money the old man in stony silence, as if angry at being interrupted, had taken the money from the bank pouch and without counting it had stacked it neatly into the cigar box and tossed, literally tossed, the box under his bunk. The Captain, as if disgusted, told Marcelle Chagnon, who, worriedly, told Doreen Tiede, who told Claudel Bing that night after making mild, dispassionate love, and Claudel, stirred to anger, told Carol Constant the next morning when, on her way to work, she gave him a lift into town because he hadn’t got out of bed in time to go in with Doreen and her daughter. Then, that evening, Carol told her brother Terry, because she thought Merle would listen to Terry, but Terry knew better: “That man listens to everyone and no one,” he said to Bruce when telling him about the cigar box that contained $50,000, and Bruce, full of wonder and admiration, agreed with Terry and tried to explain the pure wisdom of the act to Noni Hubner, but she didn’t quite understand how it could be wise, so she asked her mother, Nancy, who thought it was senile, not wise.

In that way, within twenty-four hours of Leon’s having delivered the money to the bobhouse, everyone in the trailerpark shared an obsession with the image of the cigar box full of hundred dollar bills. They could think of little else. Merle’s earlier winnings had not achieved anything like this status, but their experience with that considerably lesser amount had gone a long way toward determining how they looked at this new money. The October lottery had dropped $4500 into Merle’s lap, and the residents of the trailerpark each had gone to him and asked for some of it and directly had received what he or she had asked for. This new amount, however, was so incomprehensibly large that no one could apply it to his or her individual needs. Consequently, they applied it to what they saw as the needs of the community as a whole. It was not Merle who had won the $50,000; the trailerpark had won it. Merle had merely represented them in that magical cosmos where anything, absolutely anything, can happen. Of course, it’s probably true that if, on the other hand, what had happened to Merle through no effort on his part had been as colossally, abstractly bad as the $50,000 was good, the residents of the trailerpark would not have felt that it had happened to the community as a whole. If, for example, Merle had been shot in the head by an errant bullet from the gun of a careless deer hunter out of sight in the tamaracks on the far side of the lake, the people in the park would have blamed Merle for having been out there wandering around on the ice during hunting season in the first place. They would have mourned for him, naturally, but his death would be seen forever after as a warning, an admonition. Anyone can be a cause of his or her own destruction, but no one can claim individual responsibility for having created a great good. At least that’s how the people in the trailerpark felt. Which is why they believed that Merle’s winnings belonged not to Merle alone, but to the entire community of which he was a part. And, of course, there was their earlier experience with the $4500. That sort of proved the rightness of their feeling, gave them something like a logic.

The days went by, and Merle showed no sign of recognizing that something extraordinary had occurred in his life and the lives of everyone else at the park as well. Every morning they peered out their windows and saw again the red bobhouse in the distance, a horizontal strip of smoke trailing from the stovepipe chimney if the wind was blowing, a vertical thread if the wind had let up. In the afternoon, as it grew dark, they looked toward the lake again and saw that nothing had changed. Because Merle refused to act any differently than he had in the weeks before he won the lottery, no one else could act any differently, either, and so it almost came to seem that they had imagined it, which is one reason why they were eager, whenever possible, to talk about the money with one another. It was true, wasn’t it? I didn’t just dream that Merle Ring won the lottery, did I? And then, as time passed, with the continuous discussions having satisfactorily proved that Merle did in fact win the Grand Prize Drawing, they began to take and present to one another their respective positions on what Merle ought to do with the money he had won. It was the natural consequence of Merle’s apparent refusal to deal with the reality of the situation.

“The man’s obviously incapable of behaving responsibly toward money,” Captain Knox explained to Leon LaRoche. “Money demands to be taken care of in a responsible manner. You can’t treat it like some sort of waif, you have to take care of it,” he said.

Leon agreed. Wholeheartedly. They were sitting in the living room of the Captain’s trailer, Leon on the sofa, the Captain slumped back into his red leather easychair. Behind him on the wall hung a map of the world. In the center of each of a large number of countries, mostly central European and southeast Asian countries, the Captain had pinned a small Russian flag. Earlier in the evening, having delivered to Leon a fairly lengthy oration on the subject of the insidious workings of what he called Castroism in the very corridors of the United States State Department, he had ceremoniously pinned a red flag to Panama. That had led him to a discussion of the responsibilities that go with power, which in turn had led him naturally to a discussion of the responsibilities that go with wealth, and that was how they had come around to talking about Merle again.

And now that people were taking positions on what should be done — with Merle, with the money, or, in certain cases, with Merle and the money — they had begun quarreling with one another. For while the Captain and Leon, for example, both believed that one had a moral obligation to take care of money in a responsible manner, they were not in anything like clear agreement as to what, in the case of Merle’s lottery winnings, constituted a responsible manner. Nor did either of them agree with what Carol or Marcelle or Claudel or anyone else thought ought to be done with Merle and the $50,000 that, through no particular effort or even intent of his own, he had so recently come to possess. And since everyone had a stake in what was done with the money, the feelings ran pretty high, and it didn’t take long for the residents of the trailerpark to think that everyone else in the trailerpark was stupid, greedy, or both stupid and greedy, while he himself, or she herself, was neither. Here, then, are the ways the people in the park thought the situation should be handled.

DOREEN TIEDE: There are some of us here who have children to support, who work for a living, who don’t get any help from ex-husbands or dead husbands or big government pensions. I think we know who we’re talking about. There are some of us here who won’t take welfare, who don’t have fancy jobs in fancy doctors’ offices, who don’t stay home and collect other people’s rent while other people are out working their asses off at the tannery. There are some of us who would like a normal American life. And who deserve it, too. I think we know who we are.

TERRY CONSTANT: We could form a corporation and buy out the trailerpark, develop the beach, fill in the swamp and put up a restaurant and bar. We have to think for ourselves and take over control of our destinies. Enough of this business of making somebody else rich while we get poorer for it. Make a summer resort out of this place. Swimming, fishing, water-skiing. Or maybe a summer camp for city kids. Nature walks, arts and crafts, sports. Put up cabins for the kids, while the rest of us live in the trailers. I’d get number 9, where that guy who shot himself lived with his kid. We could run the place in winter as a lodge for snowmobilers. Maybe, if you promoted it right, ice-fishing would catch on. The point is, we all work together for the common good. You don’t just spend the money, you use the money, because it doesn’t matter how hard you work, it takes money to make money. Not work. Not time. Money. Leon could be Treasurer, old Captain Knox could be Chairman of the Board. I could be the Executive Director. We’d make Merle President of the Corporation or something honorary like that. I’d get a good salary. Marcelle could run the restaurant, Carol the infirmary.

BRUCE SEVERANCE: When you got money, unless you’re stupid, the first thing you do is eliminate the middle man. That way you control the entire operation, like Henry Ford did. What do you think pissed off the Arabs? All those American oil companies, man, they controlled the entire operation. I got connections in Jamaica like Shell had in Saudi Arabia, man. You could bring a plane in here in winter and land it on the lake. Simple. Easy Street. How the hell do you think the Kennedy family got started? Running booze from Canada during Prohibition, man. It’s not like we’re the Mafia or something. I mean, everybody smokes grass!

NONI HUBNER: It’s important to be fair. That’s what I believe in. Fairness. Right?

LEON LAROCHE: In a savings account at the Catamount Trust, Merle’s money will earn enough for him to live without financial anxiety for the rest of his natural life. The stock market goes up and down, government and municipal bonds, though they offer a distinct tax advantage, are a young man’s game, and there’s no need to speculate on the risky commodities market. After all, Merle only wants to live in a modest way, free of worry or risk, that’s obvious and natural, and with his social security plus interest on his lottery winnings, he certainly ought to be able to do so. What kind of selfishness would prompt a person to deny him that opportunity? The bank would be happy to take care of Merle’s funds for him. He’d be the single largest depositor, and I myself would handle his account for him. I’d probably become an officer of the bank, maybe eventually a vice president. It’s not every teller can bring in a fifty-thousand-dollar savings account. The publicity would be good for the bank, too. We could have a picture-taking session, Merle signing the deposit slip, me taking the cigar box out of his hands. We’d need an extra guard. I don’t care what the Captain says, I know money.

CAROL CONSTANT: With that much money he could do something useful for a change. He could help others. The whole thing makes me sick. He sits out there on top of fifty thousand dollars, while back here people are struggling to survive. If he doesn’t want the damn money, let him give it to the town so it can help the poor, for Christ’s sake. I see people from this town every day so poor and sick they die before they’re supposed to, people whose houses burn down, people who’ve been out of work for years. I see kids with nutritional diseases, birth defects, kids who need glasses to read but can’t afford them so they do lousy at school. While that old man, that senile jerk, sits out there fishing through a hole in the ice. It makes me sick. I’m sure he’s senile. Those are always the ones who end up with money to burn, the ones who are too feeble-minded to know what to do with it. He doesn’t even know how to use it for himself. I wouldn’t mind so much if he just took off for Florida and spent it on some old lady and a condominium on the Gulf. I hope someone steals it off him. I just hope it’s not Terry. Though, God knows, Terry could make better use of it than that old man is. Terry might at least pay me back a little of what I’ve spent taking care of him these last few years.

CLAUDEL BING: You hear all the time about an old geezer dying and then they find a million bucks or something stashed under his mattress. All those years the sonofabitch has been cashing welfare checks and living like a fucking rat in a hole, and meanwhile he’s sitting on top of a fucking million bucks or something. Then the government goes and takes it all for taxes or something. I think we oughta just go on out there, get the bastard drunk, and take that goddamn cigar box off his hands. He’d never know the difference anyway. Sonofabitch. If I do it, no one’s gonna know about it. I’ll be long gone from here. California. No reason why his dumb luck can’t be my good luck. Nothing wrong with that. I earned it, for Christ’s sake.

BUDDY SMITH: You probably remember the tragic death of my father by his own hand. He was very fond of you, Mr. Ring, and often spoke highly of you to me, telling me himself what a kind and generous man you are. I will soon be returning to N.H. on business of a personal nature and was thinking of dropping by the trailerpark, where I have so many fond but also sad memories of my childhood. I thought, if you had the room, because my father was so very fond of you, I could perhaps visit with you a few days and we could talk about the old times. I’m a young man, alone in the cold world now, and without the kind of wise counsel that an older man like yourself can provide…

NANCY HUBNER: The man is obviously depressed. You people amaze me. He’s depressed. It happens often to elderly people who live alone and don’t feel needed anymore. We simply have to take better care of our senior citizens. The man needs company, he needs to feel wanted, and especially he needs to feel needed. We ought to make up an excuse to have a party, a Valentine’s Day party, say, and march out there and say to him, “Merle, if you won’t come to our party, then we’ll bring the party right out here on the ice, we’ll bring the party to you!” We’ll all have a lovely time. We’ve got to bring him back into our circle, a man like that should not be allowed to be alone in life. The money has nothing to do with it.

DEWEY KNOX: The man’s obviously incapable of taking care of himself, so it shouldn’t be difficult to have him declared incompetent to handle his own affairs. The money can then go into a blind trust, which clever and aggressive management ought to be able to double in a matter of a few years. Imagine, if you’d bought gold five years ago, as I did, when it was going for $112 an ounce, you’d now have a nice little nest egg. I myself, if pressed to it, would certainly be willing to put together a management team to handle the trust. Other than taking for myself a nominal fee for services provided, the capital accrued would of course go directly into the trust and ultimately to Merle Ring’s heirs. It could be arranged so that Merle himself received a modest monthly stipend. People like Merle need looking after. Not vice versa, the way some of you would have it.

MARCELLE CHAGNON: Am I crazy, or is everybody trying to figure out how to get Merle’s money for themselves? It’s his money, and I don’t care what in hell he does with it. He can wipe his butt with it, for all I care, if you’ll excuse my English. So what if he’s got lots of money he don’t need and you don’t have enough. So what else is new? That’s life. Do I expect my sons all grown up and making good money to send me money just because they got lots of it now and I don’t have enough? No, I do not. That’s life, is all I got to say. All I care now is that Merle does something with that money, spends it or gives it away or loses it, something, anything, just so life can return to normal around here. I wish to hell he’d never got it in the first place. Thinking about it, all this talk and argument about it, gives me a goddamned headache. I hate thinking about money, and here I’ve been doing it all my life. I get the same damned headache every time one of my sons writes and tells me he just bought a new dishwasher for his wife or a color TV or just got back from Bermuda or someplace. What do I care what he just bought or where the hell he went on vacation? What the hell do I care about money? There’s lots more important things in life than money. I just want to forget it exists. I’m tired.

It’s hard to know more about a person’s life than what that person wants you to know, and few people know even that much. Beyond what you can see and are told (both of which are controlled pretty easily by the person seen and told about), what you come to believe is true of who a person is and was and will be comes straight from your imaginings. For instance, you know that a man like Merle Ring had a mother and a father, probably brothers and sisters, too, and that for most of his life he was a working man and that he was married and had children. He said as much himself, and besides, these things are true of almost any man you might choose to read about or speak of. That he was married numerous times (you might imagine four or five or even more, but “numerous” was all he ever said) and fathered numerous children explains only why in his old age he was as alone in the wide world as a man who had never married at all and had fathered no one. Whether he meant to or not, Merle had avoided the middle ground and in that way had located himself alone in the center of his life, sharing it with no one. In fact, you could say the same of everyone at the trailerpark. It’s true of trailerparks that the people who live there are generally alone at the center of their lives. They are widows and widowers, divorcées and bachelors and retired army officers, a black man in a white society, a black woman there too, a drug dealer, a solitary child of a broken home, a drunk, a homosexual in a heterosexual society — all of them, man and woman, adult and child, basically alone in the world. When you share the center of your life with someone else, you create a third person who is neither you nor the person you have cleaved to. No such third person resided at the Granite State Trailerpark.

In any event, to return to Merle Ring, though you knew all these things about Merle’s inner and outer lives, you could know little more about them than that, unless he himself were to provide you with more information than he had already provided, more actions and reactions, more words. And, unfortunately, as the winter wore on he seemed less and less inclined to say or do anything new. People’s imaginings, therefore, as to who he really was, came to dominate their impressions of him.

This, of course, was especially true after he won the money. By then most of the people at the park were frightened of him. The money gave him power, and the longer he neither acted on nor reacted to the presence of that money, the greater grew his power. For the most part, though they argued among themselves as to how Merle should exercise his immense power, no one dared approach him on the subject. They spoke of it, naturally, and made plans and commitments to send one or another of the group or several in a delegation out onto the plain of ice to ask Merle what he was going to do with the money, but by morning the plans and commitments got broken, ignored or forgotten altogether — until the next time a group of them got to bickering, accusing one another of selfishness and greed and downright stupidity, when a new agreement would be made as to who should make the trip. The trouble was, they no longer trusted anyone or any group from among their number to return with accurate information as to Merle’s behavior, and for that reason they could not be relieved of their imaginings. Finally someone, possibly Marcelle Chagnon and probably as a bitter joke, suggested they send a child, the only true child who lived at the trailerpark, Doreen Tiede’s five-year-old daughter Maureen.

Her mother dressed the child warmly in a dark blue hooded snowsuit, mittens and overshoes. It was an overcast Sunday afternoon, the low sky promising snow, when the residents of the trailerpark walked Maureen down to where the land ended and the ice began. Smiling and talking cheerfully together for the first time in weeks, they called advice to their tiny emissary:

“Don’t forget, ask him about his fishing first! Then ask him about the money.”

“Just say we all miss him here and wonder when he’s coming back in!”

“No, no, just ask if we can do anything for him! Can we bring him any supplies, wood for his fire, tools — anything!”

The child looked about in bewilderment, and when she got to the edge of the ice, she stopped and faced the crowd.

“All right, honey,” her mother said. “Go ahead. Go on and visit Uncle Merle, honey. He’s out there waiting for you.”

They could trust the child. Merle, they knew, would tell her the truth, and she in turn would tell them the truth.

“Go on, sweets,” Doreen coaxed.

The little girl looked up at the adults.

“Merle’s probably lonely,” Nancy Hubner said. “He’ll love you for visiting with him.”

“It’s not very far, you’ll have fun walking on the ice,” Terry assured her.

“She doesn’t wanta go, man,” Bruce said to Terry in a low voice.

“For Christ’s sake, make the kid go!” Claudel told Doreen. “I’m getting cold standing out here in my shirtsleeves.”

“Shut up, Claudel, she’s just a little nervous.”

Marcelle snorted. “First time I’ve seen her nervous about playing on the ice. Usually you can’t get her to come in off it.”

“Go on,” Doreen said, waving good-bye.

The child took a backward step and stopped.

“G’wan, honey, Uncle Merle’s waiting for you,” Carol said with obvious impatience. “Whose idea was this anyway?”

“You’re the child’s mother,” Captain Knox reminded Doreen. “You tell her what you want her to do, and if she doesn’t do it, punish her. It’s her choice.” He turned and stepped from the group, as if all this fuss had nothing to do with him.

“If you don’t march out there and visit Merle Ring right now, young lady, I’ll… I’ll … take away TV for a month!”

The little girl looked angrily up at her mother. “No,” she said.

“I will too! Now get out there! He’s expecting you, dammit!”

“You come, too,” Maureen said to her mother.

“I can’t… I … have to do the laundry.”

“He only likes kids,” Terry said. “Grownups like us just bug him. You’ll see. He’ll be real glad to see you come all the way out there to visit him.”

“He might have some candy for you,” Bruce said.

The child turned and started waddling away.

“Don’t forget about the money!” Noni Hubner called.

The child turned back. “What?”

“The money!” several of them bellowed at once, and the child, as if frightened, whirled away.

The adults stood for a moment, watching the blue hooded figure get smaller and smaller in the distance. The ice was white and smooth and, because of the constant wind, scraped free of snow, so that the blue figure of the child and the red bobhouse way beyond stood out sharply. The sky, the color of a dirty sheet, stretched over the lake, and lumpy gray hills lay like a rumpled blanket between the ice below and sky above. Slowly, the people drifted back to their trailers, until only the child’s mother and her friend Marcelle remained at the shore. Once, the child stopped and turned back, and the mother waved, and the little girl went back to trudging toward the bobhouse. Then the mother and her friend walked to the mother’s trailer together.

“Kid’s got a mind of her own,” Marcelle said, lighting a cigarette off Doreen’s gas stove. “Just like my kids used to be.”

“Why do you think I let her go all the way out there alone?” Doreen asked.

“You can only protect them so much.”

“I know,” Doreen said sighing. “Otherwise you got ’em clinging to you the rest of your life.”

“Yeah.”

The child Maureen Tiede pushed the door of the bobhouse open an inch and peeked inside. The wind had come up sharply and the snow was beginning to fall in hard, dry flecks. Maureen’s face was red and wet from tears. Outside, a rag of smoke trailed from the chimney, but inside the bobhouse it was as dark as inside a hole in the ground and, except for the howl of the wind, silent. The little girl let the door close again and backed away from it as if there were no one there. For a few moments she stood outside, looking first across the ice to the trailerpark, then at the closed door of the bobhouse. At the trailerpark, the frozen beach was deserted. The trailers, their pastel colors washed to shades of gray in the dim light, sat like two parallel rows of matchboxes. Finally, Maureen moved toward the door and pushed it open once again, wider this time, so that a swatch of light fell into the bobhouse and revealed the hooked shape of the old man seated at the end of the bunk. He was squinting out of his darkness at the open door and the child beyond.

“Come inside,” Merle said.

The girl stepped carefully over the high threshold and, on closing the door behind her, realized that, while she could no longer make out the old man, the place was not entirely dark, for an eerie green light drifting from circles cut in the ice was bright enough to cast shadows against the ceiling and walls. Immediately, Maureen backed up to the bunk, and holding to it with both hands stared down at the holes in the ice, looked through the ice and saw the fluid, moving world there — tall, slender weeds and broadleaf plants drifting languorously back and forth, schools of minnows and bluegills gathering, swirling skittishly away from one another, then, as if at a prearranged signal, quickly regathering. The little girl was mesmerized by the sight, possibly even reassured or comforted by it, for she seemed to relax. She pulled off her mittens and stuffed them into the pockets of her snowsuit, then untied and pushed back her hood, all the while keeping her gaze fixed on the world beneath the ice, the world that moved beneath the cold, granitic, wind-blown world here above.

“All by yourself today?” Merle asked quietly from his corner by the stove.

Maureen nodded her head and said nothing.

Merle queried the child for a few moments, discovered that she was not lost, that her momma knew where she was, and that she had never seen anyone fish through the ice before. “Well, you just sit still with me,” he told her, “and before long your momma or somebody else from the park will be out here looking for you. It’s snowing here and ought to be there, too. That’ll bring ’em out to get you.”

By now she had her snowsuit off and was seated cross-legged on the bunk. She had said very little, answering Merle’s questions with yes or no and nothing more.

Her silence seemed to please him. “You’re a nice kid,” he said, and for the first time in months, he smiled.

After a while, Maureen lay back on the bunk against the old man’s blanket roll and fell asleep. Outside, the wind moaned and drove the snow against the ice and across the ice, piling it in long, soft drifts along the shore. The sky had closed in, and even though it was still early in the afternoon, it seemed like evening. Every now and then, Merle tossed a chunk of wood into the stove, lit his pipe, took a sip of whiskey, and checked his lines.

It was dark outside and snowing heavily, when the door was suddenly shoved open, and Maureen’s mother, her boyfriend Claudel right behind her, stepped into the tiny chamber, filling the crowded space to overflowing, so that Claudel had to retreat quickly. There were others outside, their heads bobbing and craning behind Doreen for a look the instant Claudel could be got out of the way.

Merle had lit the kerosene lantern and had prepared a supper of fried bass filets, boiled greens pulled from the lake bottom, and tea in his only cup for the child, whiskey from the bottle for himself.

Doreen, in her hooded parka crusted with snow, embraced her child. “Thank God you’re all right!” The little girl pulled away. “I don’t know what got into me!” Doreen cried. “Letting you out of my sight for a minute on a day like this!”

Maureen stared down at the holes in the ice, which were dark now.

“She insisted on coming out here to visit you, Mr. Ring, and I said no, but the second my back was turned so I could do the laundry, she was gone. It never occurred to us that she’d come out here, till later this afternoon, when the snow started building up. I thought she was just playing around the park somewhere…”

Merle went on eating, quite as if the woman weren’t there.

“She’s probably been telling you all kinds of stories!”

Merle said nothing.

“Did you, honey?” she asked her daughter. “Have you been telling Mr. Ring here all kinds of stories about us?”

The child pouted and shook her head from side to side. “No,” she said. “I just wanted to watch him fish. I fell asleep,” she added, as if to reassure her mother.

The door swung open, letting in a blast of cold air and blowing snow. It was Terry’s face this time, and he said in a rush, “Listen, we’re freezing out here, we got to get moving or we’re gonna freeze to death. Everything okay?” he asked, peering at Doreen, at the child and then at Merle. “You know,” he said to Doreen, winking. “Everything okay?”

Behind him, Bruce’s pale face bobbed up and down as he tried to get a glimpse of the interior, and behind Bruce, several more figures moved about impatiently.

“Yes, yes, Terry, for Chrissakes!” Doreen hissed. “Just give me a minute, will ya?” She pushed against the door to close it, but another hand from the other side shoved back.

It was Captain Knox, his square face in the gentle light cast by the lantern scarlet and angry, clenched like a fist inside the fur-lined hood of his parka. “Ring!” he barked. “This time you’ve gone too far! Kidnapping! A federal offense, Ring.”

“Get the hell outa here!” Doreen shouted. Merle, wide-eyed and silent, watched from the far corner. Someone grabbed the captain from behind and pulled him away, and Doreen slammed the door shut again. The sound of bodies bumping violently against the outside walls of the bobhouse, shouts, cries — all got caught in the steady roar of the wind and borne away.

“The goddamn old fool!”

“Let me talk to him, let me!”

“Get off! Get off my legs, goddammit!”

The door was flung open yet again, and this time it was Marcelle who was shouting, her voice high and full of fear and anger. “Doreen, get the kid dressed and get the hell out of here so I can talk sense to this crazy old man!” She pushed her way through the doorway, her bulk jamming Doreen against the wall. Maureen had started to cry, then to shriek, and now to wail. Leon LaRoche called to her, “Little girl, little girl, don’t cry!” and he pushed his way in behind Marcelle, only to have Terry throw an arm around his neck and drag him backward onto the ice.

“Asshole!” Terry snarled.

“Get off my legs, young man!” It was the Captain shouting at Bruce.

Noni Hubner started screeching. “This is insane! You’re all insane!” while her mother Nancy pulled Terry away from Leon and cried, “That’s all you people know, violence!”

“Get your hands off him!” Carol warned. “And what the hell do you mean, ‘you people’?” she sneered, bringing her face up close to Nancy’s.

Nancy slapped the woman’s face, then started to bawl and, tears freezing on her cheeks, collapsed to the ice, moaning, “Oh, my God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

The door to the bobhouse, held back by the press of the people inside, was wide open now, and the light from inside cast a flickering, orange glow over the ice. Claudel, a pint bottle in his hand, clearly drunk, sat a ways from the others with his legs splayed as if he had been thrown there from above. He got himself up on his feet, wobbled for a second and made for the bobhouse, holding his bottle out before him. “Hey! Merle! Lemme talk to ’im! Let’s have a drink, Merle, an’ we’ll git this whole fuckin’ thing all straightened out! Lemme talk to ’im. Me ‘n’ him unnerstan’ each other,” he said, pawing at Marcelle’s shoulder.

Marcelle turned and shoved the man back, and he careened into the darkness. “You just wanta get on his good side, you leech!” she shrieked at the man. Bruce was trying to slide through the doorway past the woman’s large body, but she bumped him against the jamb with her chest. “Hold it, pal.”

“No, man, just let me cool things out, just give me a few minutes…” he whined.

“Keep the hippy away from him!” bellowed Captain Knox.

“… safe-keeping…” came a wail from Nancy Hubner. “Just for safe-keeping!”

“Mother’s right! Listen to my mother!”

“Get the cigar box!” Leon LaRoche shouted. “It’s in the cigar box!”

Terry was on his hands and knees squeezing between Bruce’s and Marcelle’s legs, one long arm snaking behind Doreen, and then he had it, the cigar box, the money.

Doreen saw him. “Gimme that thing!” She reached for the box.

“I’ll take it!” Marcelle cried. “I’m the manager, I’m the one who’s responsible for everything!”

Bruce made a grab at the box, grimly and silently. Behind him, Leon had reached in, and the Captain had his hand stuck out, while the others, Nancy, her daughter Noni, the nurse Carol and poor, drunk Claudel, tugged at people’s shoulders and backs, trying to pull them away from the door. The wind howled, and the people shouted and swore, and the child wept, and Merle watched, wide-eyed and in silence, while the cigar box went from hand to hand, like a sacred relic, until, as it passed through the doorway, it flapped open and spilled its contents into the wind, scattering the suddenly loose bills into the darkness. People screamed and grabbed at the bills that in a second were gone, driven instantly into the darkness by the wind. Scrambling after the money, the people quickly slipped on the ice and fell over one another and cursed one another, and then were suddenly silent. The box lay open and empty in the circle of light outside the door. The people all lay sprawled on the ice in the darkness just beyond. At the door, holding it open, stood Merle and the little girl. The child was confused, but Merle was weeping.

Here is what happened afterward. All the residents of the trailerpark, except Merle, went back to their trailers that night. By dawn, of course, they all, except for Merle, were out on the ice again, searching for the money. They worked alone and as far from one another as possible, poking through snowdrifts along the shore, checking among the leafless bushes and old dead weeds, the bits of driftwood frozen into the lake, rocks and other obstructions, all the likely places. No doubt many or even all the residents of the trailerpark found money that day, and the next and the next, until one morning, as if by pre-arrangement, no one showed up on the ice. The people who had jobs went back to them; those who ordinarily stayed home did so. No one ever told anyone else whether he or she had been lucky enough to find some of the lost, wind-blown hundred dollar bills, so it’s possible that no one, in fact, had been that lucky. More likely, some were and some weren’t, but all were ashamed of having tried to acquire it. Besides, everyone had seen up close what happens when your neighbors find out that you have been luckier, even by a little, than they have been.

Merle, naturally, stayed on at the bobhouse for the few weeks of winter that remained. In early March, the ice began to soften and turn mushy in places. Gauzy fogs hung over the wet, pearlescent surface of the lake, obscuring the bobhouse from the trailerpark and erasing the opposite shore altogether. Before long, V’s of Canada geese were passing northward overhead, and then, at the weirs, a narrow wedge of open water appeared. Long, shallow pools of water lay resting on top of the ice, swelling and spreading in the sunlight, while beneath the ice deep, dark, slowly warming water chewed its way patiently toward the surface, which gradually got blotchy and pale green and then actually broke away from itself in places, making fissures and wide, tipping plates.

No one knew the exact day Merle left the bobhouse, but one morning there was a sheet of open water where the bobhouse had been, dark water sparkling under the morning sun, and Merle himself was seen by several people that same day outside his trailer somberly scraping the bottom of his old dark green rowboat.

He built another bobhouse the following winter, and as usual spent most of the winter inside it. He never spoke of the lottery money, and you can be sure that no one else ever mentioned it to him, either. Until now, that is, when Merle seems to have gotten over his despair and the others their shame.