Cold (3 page)

“How long you in for?”

“Six.
 
But I coulda got out after four maybe.”

“You couldn’t wait another year something?”

“Guess not.
 
Now, when I go back, I don't know what I'll get.”
 
He turned his head from the window.
 
“What happened to you?”

“Car accident.
 
My husband and daughter were killed.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Are you?”

“Yes, I am.”

She went to the phone on the wall and picked up the receiver.
 
There was no dial tone.
 
She hung up.

He was watching her.
 
“Dead?”

“I'll try again in a while.”

He leaned back in the chair and the chains rattled.
 
“So you live way out here alone?”

“Harold and I built this house together, when we were your age.
 
It was about all I had afterwards.”

His eyes wandered toward the door to the living room.
 
“There's a smell—it's not the smoke, but something else.”
 
A puddle of melted snow had formed around his boots.

She picked up the rifle and put the padlock key on the table.
 
“Come in here and take those wet things off.”

He unlocked himself and put the key next to the plate; then he coiled the chain up, gathered it against his stomach, and led her into the living room, which opened on to a large studio with skylights.
 
He looked at the shelves of clay sculpture and pottery, the wheel, the workbenches, the kiln.
 
“You can smell it way out there in the woods.”
 
He bent over and began unlacing his boots.
 
“What if that phone doesn't come back?”

“We can always walk to the store down at the crossroads.”

“How far is it?”

“A ways.”

“Walk?”

“You ever wear snowshoes?”

“Not in a long time.”

“We could ski out, if you'd rather.”

“The snowshoes'll be fine.”

She stepped into the bedroom to get him some wool socks.
 
When she looked up at the bureau mirror she saw that he was asleep on the couch, cradling the chains on his stomach.

•

When he awoke he lay beneath a wool blanket.
 
His feet stuck out the other end; she had put wool socks on him while he slept and his toes were slightly numb but warm.
 
“I thought I'd never feel my feet again.”

She was sitting across the living room, the rifle resting against the arm of the stuffed chair.
 
“You stayed out there much longer and you wouldn't have.”

“I tried not to think about the cold, but it's all you think about.
 
Same as being inside, really.”

“What do you think about, inside?”

He gazed at the ceiling a long time, then he smiled.
 
“I know what most of the guys would say.”

“I do too.”

He turned his head on the armrest of the couch.
 
She had put on a green sweater that made her breasts seem full.
 
He couldn’t take his eyes off them.
 
When he raised his eyes to her face she watched him with an even stare.
 
He realized she was accustomed to men looking at her that way, that it was something she had endured for a long time.
 
It appeared to bore her.

“Bing, he read a lot and he told me stuff.
 
He had a theory:
 
if you think about how some people have it worse, you won’t find your situation so bad.”

“Not a bad theory,” she said.
 
“What’s he read?”

“All sorts of stuff.
 
Lot of history.
 
Tells me about battles and conquerors.
 
For a while we were into tortures.
 
Bing found a whole book just on torture techniques.
 
The Inquisition, Ivan The Terrible, Vlad The Impaler.”

“Wasn’t he the one Dracula’s based on?”

“That’s right,” he said, staring at the ceiling again.
 
“As a boy he had been a hostage of some sultan in Constantinople and he was buttfucked a lot.
 
So later, when he’s this fierce military leader he scares the hell out of his opponents because he impales his captors.
 
He used a long, thin needle—greases it, then shoves it up their ass until it comes out their mouth.
 
Did it in a way that it would take days to die.
 
He’d do thousands of people at a time and stick them in the ground outside his camp to ward off the enemy.
 
Like a forest—thousands on a skewer.”

He turned his head on the armrest.
 
She was staring very hard at him, and her cheeks were flushed.
 
“And Bing thought it took your mind off prison?”

“Yeah, but it only works for while.
 
You actually have to concentrate on that sort of thing and it gets old.
 
Out there in the woods, it didn’t work after a while.
 
I tried to think of everything, believe me, but I was just too cold.”

“So much for theories.”

He couldn’t tell by her voice whether she was making a joke or being serious.
 
Her eyes were just as steady as when she’d first opened the shed door.

“When you came outside with the rifle and pointed it at me, what would you have done if I had, you know, tried something?”

“What would you have tried?”

“Take the gun away.”

Turning her head, she seemed to be searching for something in her studio.
 
“I’m not sure.
 
Suppose you had gotten the gun from me, what would you do?”

“Unload it.”

She continued to stare at her shelves of pots and clay animals—eagles and deer and bears, mostly—so long that he began to wonder if she’d heard him.
 
“Well, you didn’t, and I didn’t, and it stays loaded.”
 
She looked at him.
 
“Don’t lose sight of that fact.”

“I'm not dangerous or anything.”

“Not now you aren’t.”

They didn’t talk for a while.
 
He stared at the ceiling.
 
What he had thought were shadows he realized was smoke residue from the kiln.
 
The wall and ceiling surfaces all had faint smudges built up around the slightest raised edge, whether it was a small imperfection in the wall, along the edge of molding, or around a light switch plate.
 
It gave flat surfaces relief as though someone had carefully taken a pencil and shaded everything, first using the side of the lead point, then smearing the gray with a moist fingertip.
 
Then he saw, on the wall by the door to the bedroom, a small rectangle of white where a photograph had hung.
 
His eyesight was good and he could even see the small black hole where the nail had been driven into the wall.
 
It was like her life here:
 
a white rectangle surrounded by not so white, two shades so close you don't notice the difference right away.

“You try the phone again?” he asked.

“Twice while you were asleep,” she said.
 
“Still out.”

“What’re we going to do?”

“You feel like you could walk out there again?” she asked.
 
“This time properly dressed and with snowshoes.”

“I’m not in any hurry to get back.”

“I suppose you’re not.”

“It’s nice here.
 
Warm.
 
I see why you stayed after—I see why you live here.”

“We have to go soon if we’re to get out before dark.”

•

She gave him some of Harold’s clothes:
 
long johns, corduroy pants, a second pair of socks, a flannel shirt, a heavy sweater, good insulated boots, gloves, parka, a wool hat that could be pulled down over the ears.
 
She let him use the bathroom to change, telling him that the window had been stuck for years.

When they were both dressed they went out to the shed and buckled on the snowshoes.
 
Then they went outside and began walking down the drive, which was a wide snowbound path through the woods.
 
He led and she followed with the rifle.
 
He walked slowly, with his head down, concentrating on each step.

“I’d forgotten about how you kind of a waddle,” he said over his shoulder.
 
It was hard to hear him because the wind was at their backs.
 
“I feel like a baby in diapers.”
 
There was some joy in his voice, something she imagined he expressed seldom now.

“You’re doing fine,” she said.

“How far is ‘a ways’?”

“We should get to the store at the crossroads before dark, if we take a shortcut over that hill.”

He looked to his left.
 
“It’s steep.”

“It’s that or walk five miles around it.”

•

His snowshoes were old, the varnished wood frame worn and splintered, and the mesh broken and mended in several places with dirty white shoelaces.
 
The snowshoes allowed him to sink down in the powder a good half-foot; then he could feel the snow compress and support him.
 
It was hard work, deliberately lifting his leg up and out of the snow with each step, and soon his groin muscles ached.
 
By the time they were at the bottom of the drive, he had broken a sweat beneath the layers of her dead husband’s warm clothes.

The road hadn’t been plowed either and they walked down the middle of it, toward the hill.
 
They were now walking east and the wind and snow struck them from the left.
 
She kept to his right and a full stride behind, carrying the rifle across her chest.
 
The wind was so steady the snow was horizontal.

“You mind if I ask your name?” he asked.

“Liesl.”

“Mine’s Norman.
 
How long ago was your accident?”

“Five years ago next April.
 
It was during a spring blizzard.”

“What did Harold do?”

“Lot of things.
 
Carpentered.
 
Drove heavy equipment.
 
Hunted and fished for much of our food.
 
There’s a freezer locker in the shed that used to be stocked with venison, smoked whitefish, and coho salmon all winter.”

“You’re one of those live-off-the-land people.
 
He hunted and you did your pottery.”

“Something wrong with that, Norman?”

“No.
 
Where I come from a lot of people live like that, except they don’t bother with the pottery.
 
What grade was your daughter in?”

“Wasn’t in a grade.”
 
He turned his head until he could see Liesl.
 
The left side of her coat and hood were covered with snow.
 
Her eyebrows were white and her face was red from the cold.
 
They made her eyes an even brighter blue.
 
“We home-schooled Gretchen.
 
She was seven.”

Liesl stared back at him and he couldn’t keep his eyes on her.
 
Finally, he lowered his head against the wind and watched his snowshoes.

They walked down the road about half a mile, and then began to climb the hill.
 
Liesl explained that in order to get up the hill they would have to zigzag, ascending very slowly.
 
It was rough going.
 
The woods were dense and they often had to push through branches.
 
At times it was so steep they had to grab hold of a tree and pull themselves up to the next step.
 
Liesl had slung her rifle over her shoulder so she could use both arms.
 
Norman continued to lead, and occasionally he would set himself, holding a branch, then reach back and lend her a hand as she stepped up.

Once he lost his balance, and for a moment he had the gut-hollowing sensation that he was going to fall backwards and sail off the side of the hill.
 
But he managed to fall forward awkwardly, and his arms went into the snow all the way up to his shoulders.
 
“It’s deep,” he said, laughing.

Liesl had to help him to his feet.
 
“See, you can’t run away,” she said.
 
“And I wouldn’t recommend trying to fly.”

•

It took over an hour to reach the crest of the hill.
 
Liesl said they should rest.
 
She had brought some chocolate and they sat on a granite outcropping eating.
 
They could see down through the trees to the next smaller hill.
 
Norman kept scanning the valley.