Cataract City (41 page)

We nosed into a tributary. Skeins of ice shattered under the treads with the sound of busted light bulbs. Drinkwater’s tracks disappeared. Maybe he’d cut further down the inlet?

Duncan switched off the engine. The summer woods were host to many sounds, but in the winter woods, sounds were rare, and those that remained took on a haunting note: the hoot of snowy owls, the green-stick snap of a tree limb under the weight of snow, the booming crack of ice fissuring under tremendous pressure.

Faintly, the whine of a motor—to the north, further down the inlet.

Duncan forded the tributary, which branched eastward, narrowing, hemmed by shaggy spruces. Soft, hand-shaped spruce fronds lapped our shoulders.

We surged into a snowy chute that tapered to a flat expanse. Drinkwater’s tracks cut straight ahead, aiming for the thick forest looming against a scrim of winter sky. Duncan charged full-bore, the muffler’s silencer failing, the motor issuing a band-saw buzz. The night moved as winter nights so often do: in soft crests and eddies, plays of moonlight and starlight. Soon Drinkwater’s tracks bent sharply—so sharply that they seemed to disappear. The snow was abruptly trackless.

I barely sensed the threat.

Years later I’d return to this spot, a steep decline that lay some four hundred yards shy of the forest. It fell sheer, almost twenty feet straight down. It would take me some time to locate, even in daylight. But then, at night, running flat out, it was nearly impossible to see: the snow and shadows made it look as if the land continued on an even plane.

Too late, I sensed the outcropping where the snow crusted in a ragged edge. Dunk squeezed the brake levers instinctively but our momentum was unstoppable. We went over the crest at thirty-five miles per hour. A giddy weightlessness gripped my guts, the kind you feel on a roller coaster the instant before the tracks drop from under you.

The skidoo free-fell, then slammed into a powdery drift. One tread bit, differentials howling, metal shearing apart and spitting off in sharp spears. What I remember of the impact exists in polar flashes. My chin slammed into Duncan’s shoulder, teeth colliding with a brittle
snap
. My knees popped as I was jolted off, following a broken flight path. With dreamlike clarity I saw Duncan’s chest crush the handlebars; his neck snapped forward, face bashing the hood. His body kicked over the bars and he was sailing free, his
arms pinned to his sides like a man kicking furiously towards the water’s surface.

I came to with pain singing down my arm: an aria, the type sung by sopranos with voices capable of shattering crystal stemware.

I lay in a drift. I blinked away the flaming birds that flocked before my eyes, focusing on a pine tree to my left. Had I hit it, my skull would’ve been crushed. Pulling my knees in, I struggled to stand. At this I failed.

I held my arms out. The right was heavy. I let it fall a few inches. A rivulet of blood ran out of my parka sleeve. The pain was duller now, its knife edge gone.

What had happened? I remembered the headlights falling off the cliff, remembered clinging to Duncan tightly, figuring—with that childlike hope that attaches itself to fearful moments—that if I held on to him the way I had as a boy, everything would work out.

“Dunk? Man, you okay?”

Silence. Running the fingers of my left hand over my right arm, I could feel a small surgical incision in the fabric above the elbow. I prodded two fingers through the slit until they met something soft, warm, pulpy. Hinging my arm at the elbow, I felt something stuck in my flesh near the bone.

Shock
: this, too, came from far away. I must be in shock. When I pulled my fingers out they were chalk-white to the second joint, after which they turned red.

“Dunk?”

Fear seeped into my chest when this second call went unanswered. I noticed that a fingernail was ripped off my right hand. My phone! Patting my pocket, I felt its comforting shape. But when I dug it out, its face was spidered. The liquid crystal leaked through the cracks like oil.

A fingernail-slice of moon hung over the pines. The only light came where it reflected off veins of quartz in the cliff face: these shone like rivers on a map. The skidoo lay twenty yards off. One tread had shredded off; shards of metal winked in the snow.

That’s when I saw him. Duncan lay thirty-odd feet beyond the wrecked skidoo. His body was heaped near a rocky outcropping. Fear thrummed down my neck.

Be okay—god damn it, you
be
okay, Dunk
.

I staggered around the skidoo and drew near to Duncan. Now I saw that it wasn’t rocks he was sprawled across: it was bare bracken, as black as obsidian. He rolled over, groaning weakly. His face appeared to be covered in molasses. His nose had exploded. The cartilage was shoved off to the right and blood bubbled out of his nostrils.

“Breathe through your mouth,” I said. “Your nose is … bad.”

Duncan must’ve heard me; he quit bubbling. His limbs jutted at the proper angles: no green-sticks or feet facing the wrong direction. His hands were a mess, skin rasped off the remaining knuckles. One of those hands rose instinctively towards my face, moved over my chin, the pits of my eyes. Satisfied, Dunk let it drop back into the bracken.

“Jesus, Owe. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I didn’t see it either. Your nose …”

“Bad. You said that already.” He pawed at his face and said, “Yeah, it’s bust … it’s been bust worse.”

I had a hard time believing that. “We got lucky. The good Lord watches over drunks, fools and skidooers.”

Duncan rose to his knees, then stopped abruptly, clutching at his chest.

“What’s the matter?”

His fingers crawled over the front of his parka. “I don’t know … That hurt, though.”

I couldn’t recall a time Duncan admitted that
anything
hurt.

“Can you stand?”

Duncan did. “You said something about your arm?”

“It’s fine for now. Do you have a phone?”

He shook his head. “I was meaning to get one, but …”

We hobbled to the skidoo and hunted through the emergency satchel: two flares, a Leatherman tool, protein bars, duct tape and a medical kit. No phone.

Duncan unzipped his parka. His fingers roamed under his sweater, investigating his chest. “Sorta like heartburn. Worst case ever.”

Starlight reflected off the curved metal jutting from his waistband.

I said, “What’s that? Tucked into your pants.”

His gaze met mine, the momentary quiver in his eyes hardening. He lifted his sweater to show me Bruiser Mahoney’s gun.

“Mind telling me why you’re carrying that?”

“I wasn’t planning to shoot Drinkwater, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“You carry a gun, Diggs, you ought to have a reason.”

“Gee, thanks, pops.”

We stared at each other evenly. The blood on Duncan’s face was freezing to a shiny glaze.

“I’m not asking that you hand it over …”

“But you’d highly recommend it?”

“This is still a police investigation, Diggs.”

Duncan pulled the sweater over the gun and zipped his parka up.

We stripped the skidoo. Duncan detached the oil reservoir and dumped the oil. Next he used the Leatherman to cut the length of rubber hose connecting the air intake to the carburetor, unscrewed the gas cap and slid the hose down. He sucked until his mouth flooded with gasoline, retched, and siphoned gas into the reservoir.

I unscrewed the mounts and tore out the twelve-volt battery, along with a few connecting wires. I slit the nylon straps mooring the shotgun to the frame and pulled it free.

Drinkwater’s tracks were gone. He must have edged his way down west of here, where the incline descended more gently. He’d be miles away by now. Back over the river, maybe, in his truck driving towards some sleepy border crossing.

We weren’t far from the river—fifteen miles, tops. But the incline was too steep to retrace our path. Possibly our best bet was to stay put. If a search helicopter swept past, it might spot our fire—providing we’d retained enough of our Boy Scouts fire-craft skills to build one.

Standing shoulder to shoulder, we peered into the forest. My eyes had become accustomed somewhat, but human eyes were not built for this kind of dark. Here and there I caught—sensed?—sly shiftings and shadings, movement tracing over the rocks and trees. I squinted at the luminescent hands on my watch. It was past 2 a.m. On a typical Friday night I’d be … drunk, probably. Passed out in bed. My warm, soft bed.

I gestured into the heart of the woods. “Got to be something. A road, a logging route, an old trapper’s shack.”

“Something. Sure.”

Duncan hitched the satchel up on his back. I slung the shotgun over my shoulder. We entered the blackness of the woods.

A winter forest is pure whiteness rolled flat. Austere endless white that dissolves every landmark. Imagine trying to find your bearings on the moon.

It’s tough going, especially without snowshoes. Each footstep breaks through the snow crust, miring your boots in the soft powder. Before long the eyelets and uppers are iced over and heavy.
Envy of chipmunks and dormice sets in: weightless creatures who skitter across the crust.

Cold radiates from that whiteness, borne on slinking winds that curl under pant-legs and down collars. Coldness wraps around your skull, encasing the brainstem in ice. You get foggy-headed with it, and it dawns on you that all you want to do is sit. Your boots are so heavy it’s like hauling anvils. The snow is soft and inviting. People who freeze to death are often found with faint smiles on their faces: during those last moments they occupy a different geography in their minds. You have to fight the urge to just … sit … 
down
.

We trod lightly, bodies tilted against the wind, carving a path between the poplars. The naked branches knit together, a latticework of angles shielding the winter sky. We were tired and achy but the adrenaline hadn’t yet burned off. A snowy owl watched from a low branch, eyes shining in the ruffled oval of its face. It hooted—a trilling, melancholy note—and took flight, white wing-tips trailing into the darkness.

We’d barely covered a mile before we came across Drinkwater’s skidoo. Its hood had crumpled against a lightning-felled oak, and one ski had snapped off and stuck in the bark. The right tread had sheared off its runner.

I set a gloved hand on the muffler. “Still warm.”

Fifteen feet past the fallen tree we could make out the spot where Drinkwater’s body had hit. There was a dark stain on the snow the size of a dinner plate. I inspected the skidoo’s empty webbing and untied straps, figuring Drinkwater must have scavenged it. Dark coins dotted the snow around the machine. From there, Drinkwater’s footsteps advanced into the woods in a determined line.

I pulled Duncan down behind the skidoo. “He could be out there. He’s got a gun.”

I imagined Drinkwater hunched a hundred yards off, eyeing us down a rifle’s sights. Worse, I pictured Drinkwater bleeding out somewhere in the dark, stubbornly refusing to call for help.

“Lemmy!” Dunk shouted, as if channelling my thoughts. “You all right?”

“
Shut it
,” I hissed. “What’s the sense of that?”

Duncan didn’t answer. The effort it took to shout doubled him over. “He’s running,” he managed to say through gritted teeth.

“You don’t know that.”

“He’s hurt and he’s running, Owe. He could die out here.”

“We could, too.”

We sat with the possibility until I said, “Twenty years later … Finnegan, begin again.”

Duncan smiled. “Same shit, different day.”

We shared a gravedigger’s laugh. The cold locked around our joints, crimping our nostrils shut with each inhale.

“We should make a fire,” Dunk said.

“He could see us.”

“If he doesn’t make one himself he’ll freeze to death, anyway.”

We cleared a spot next to the skidoo, scraping with our boots until we hit the frozen earth. We snapped twigs off the fallen oak. Duncan doused the heap with gasoline and pulled a flare from the satchel.

“Not that,” I said. “We may need it later.”

I sat the twelve-volt battery on my lap, stripped the plastic coating off two wires and twisted one around the negative coil and the other around the positive coil. When I touched the wire-tips, they glowed. I rubbed them over the kindling pile until a spark caught the gasoline.

We sat on the skidoo seat, hands held to the licking flames. The twigs crackled and glowed, sending up a grey coil of smoke. I thought
about how making this fire didn’t have the same life-or-death quality it had when we were kids down to one paper match with the darkness chewing at our backs. But it still felt like a distinctly human act that set us apart from the surrounding wilderness.

I peered across the flames, following Drinkwater’s footsteps into the gloom. Was there a faint flicker out there? A wavering orange dot? It could have been a few hundred yards off, a mile, or a trick of my fatigued mind.

“You think he’s out there?” Dunk asked.

“He’s a survivor. I heard Native boys used to get sent out into the woods for a week, no food, no nothing—a quest, to find their spirit animal. A raven, a wolf, a bear. Once they’d found it, they returned to the tribe and were accepted as warriors. I’m not saying that happens anymore. It’s a survivor culture is all I’m thinking. Hey, what if you found out your spirit animal was a weasel?” I laughed. “What if a worm came to you in your dreams?” Laughing even harder. “I’d lie my ass off. Tell the chief,
Oh, yeah, I saw a moose. Big mean bastard
.”

Dunk found a shard of clear ice and bit into it as if it was peanut brittle. We both ate a protein bar. We had three guns between us, but no rifle. I wondered if Dunk would try to shoot something with Bruiser Mahoney’s old pistol, just like Mahoney had shot that poor raccoon.

Warmth prickled my skin, bringing the pain roaring back down my arm. It was sharper now, an edge of glass raked across raw bone.

“What’s the matter?”

“This arm … something must be in it.”

“If something’s in there, Owe, we ought to get it out.”

Gingerly, I unzipped my parka. The right side of my shirt was dark and heavy red. Duncan helped me peel it off. My right sleeve was stuck to my wrist with a gummy collar of blood. Duncan used
the Leatherman to cut the sleeve near my shoulder. He slit it down my biceps and wrist, and the material fell off my arm like a shed snakeskin.