Ice Lake (8 page)

Luc pressed his foot to the floor. The relic fishtailed
on the ice. The doors and side windows rattled, and cold air rushed through a small gap in the floorboards with a flurry of snow, and the springs in the seats shook. Luc had the car up to seventy-five when he said, “Oh, shit.” The embankment on the other side suddenly loomed ahead, a white mound on a white river, and he hadn’t left himself room to stop, not on ice.

“We’re dead,” Andy stated simply.

“Shift down, Luc, shift down,” Lucy called from the back seat, her voice urgent, but calm, insistent.

“Hang onto it yourself, lady.” Luc spoke English without much of an accent, but he had a tendency to butcher phrases, especially when he was excited. He slowed the car by gearing down, which was a struggle, but the gearbox wouldn’t allow him to go into first. He touched the snow on one side of the ploughed road with his tires. The snow sent the car swerving and the bodies in it rocked from side to side, but Luc wrestled with his steering wheel and recalcitrant clutch and unruly gearshift and kept touching the wheels on the right side into deeper snow. Near the edge of the river he announced, “Nope, we’re not making it in this way,” and made a move to put the car into a spin. The rear end fishtailed, then spun. Lucy howled and Andy let out a roar, hanging on, and the car twirled like a top. Luc said, “Maybe we do it this way,” and the car catapulted off the opposite edge of the road and in that deeper snow finally stopped.

They were settled for no more than a second when Luc was gunning the car in reverse, then quick-shifting between first and reverse, the two passengers praying for the transmission to hold together. Then suddenly they were racing backwards, and Luc said, “Maybe this way,” and they were on the ice-road again. He rammed the shift forward and the car leapfrogged a series of icy ruts and scaled the embankment.

They travelled thirty yards and stopped at the guardhouse there.

Once again, Luc rolled down his window.

An Indian came over carrying an Uzi, put a hand on the roof over the driver’s door and asked him, “Drive much?”

Luc looked shyly down. “I thought to myself I did all right.”

“Oh yeah? Maybe we should have those scorecards, you know, the ones like they use for skaters, on the TV? Me, I’d put you down for five-point-two for technical skill, five-point-nine for artistic merit. How’s that sound?”

“Pretty good. That’s fair. Thanks.”

“Anyhow,” he said, “welcome to the United States of America.” He stuck his head in the window. “Hey there, juicy Lucy, how’re you doing?”

“Good, Brad, you?”

“Not so bad. I guess what I heard is true.” He was a broad, square-faced man, about five-foot five, with a substantial belly. In the cold, his breath billowed as he spoke. He was wearing boots with unlaced flaps that overhung the toes. From time to time, the man moved his weapon from one hand to the other, then quickly changed it back.

“What do you hear, Brad?”

“I heard you only shack up with white men these days. That true?”

The challenge and animosity inherent in the statement chilled the men in the car. This was not going to be a friendly encounter, and at least two participants, Luc and the Indian, were armed. Any instinctive response Andy or Luc might have felt to defend the woman’s honour was mitigated by being on foreign soil. This was the United States of America, but this was also hostile Indian land.

“You don’t have that exactly right, Brad,” Lucy told him, nonplussed.

Andrew Stettler was looking at her, hoping she had the sense to ease the tension here.

“How’s that?” Brad asked.

“I only sleep with good-looking men. Now if that eliminates every Mohawk Warrior you know, including you, it can’t be helped. I have my standards.”

Brad had a mock smile on his face as he looked across at Stettler. “Ain’t she a bitch?” he asked him.

Clearly, the man was waiting for an answer. Andy looked at him, then back at Lucy, then shook his head. “She has a way of sticking it to us guys.”

The guard gave a little snort. “Lucy’s a sad story. Isn’t that right, girl? Folks died when she was young. She got adopted into the white man’s world. We’re glad to have her back, don’t get me wrong, but the white man’s world messed her up, there ain’t no doubt about that.”

“I know nothing about it,” Andy said.

Lucy was shaking her head in the back seat. “Tell him the whole story, Brad,” she lashed out. “Fill him in on the details.”

Brad smirked. “You still got the bitterness in you, Lucy. It shows. The sun don’t shine in your heart.”

“Oh, sing me a lullaby!” Lucy stormed. “Where are the fucking violins? Or the tom-toms, or smoke, or whatever the fuck you want to use to make my eyes water?”

He was laughing now. “It ain’t hard to get you going.”

“Tell him, Brad. Tell him why my parents died young.”

Abruptly, he stopped laughing. “White men don’t need to hear that story. I don’t need to hear it again.”

“You brought it up! Tell them about the time the Warriors burned my parents’ house down—”

“Nobody knew they were home, Lucy, that’s what I heard.”

“What are you saying? That it was okay to burn their house down, it’s just too bad they were home? Good thing I slept in the garage or I’d be dead too.”

“That’s ancient history. Anyways, it was an accident.”

“It was fucking murder, Brad. All over a goddamn difference of opinion about
zoning.
Now are you letting us through or what?”

Brad stood up straight and shook his head for a while in a deliberate and thoughtful matter. “You’re coming back this way. That’s what I was told.”

“That’s the deal.”

“With a truckload of smokes.”

“Which you get to keep.”

“The truck stays with you. You move it to the other side, then move it back again. What’s in the truck on the way back, Lucy?”

“You don’t want to know, Brad.”

“Maybe I do.”

“No, Brad,” she told him, enunciating each syllable, “you—don’t—want—to know.”

Brad chewed on the matter a moment. “All right,” he decided. “Go on through. Do what you have to do. Understand one thing. I don’t want nobody bleeding on Indian land. If you’re bleeding, go someplace else. Don’t bring trouble on us, we won’t welcome your trouble. Is that clear enough?”

Dutifully, Luc and Andy nodded. In the back seat, Lucy scowled.

Brad thumped the top of the roof a couple of times and Luc Séguin drove on.

After they had driven off Indian land into upper New York State, Andy twisted around in his seat. “Never mind that eye-to-eye stuff,” he said, “you don’t get along with your Indian brothers
at all.
You’re not
evenßiendty!”

Lucy pursed her lips as if she wanted to spit. “Warriors burn down my parents’ house, they kill my mom and dad and call it a mistake, I get adopted off the reserve, and when I grow up and come back they expect me to spread my legs for them? In their fucking dreams!”

“Easy, girl,” Andy advised.

“Don’t call me girl!”

“Then what should I call you?” he asked. “Miss Gabriel? Ma’am?”

“You,” she parried, “you, you can call me—” Suddenly she caught herself and burst out laughing, her mood and the tension breaking. “You can call me ‘sweetheart.’”

“Okay, sweetheart,” Andy said, laughing too. “I’ll do that.”

Luc did not join in the fun, and after a while he asked, “What was he talking about, not bleeding on Indian land?”

“Look in a mirror,” Lucy told him. “Look in a goddamned mirror!”

Andy glanced at Luc a number of times after that, finding him a hard man to read, then he looked back at Lucy. He explained, “Luc’s sensitive about his blood. He also doesn’t understand English perfectly.”

The comment sank in, and Lucy reached forward and patted Luc gently on the shoulder. “He didn’t mean anything by it, Luc. Just that you’re white. That’s what you’d see in a mirror. Nobody told him you have
AIDS
.”

Luc nodded. He kept his eyes on the road. “Okay,” he said after a while.

They drove on. Andy kept glancing back at Lucy, and finally he asked, “How come you slept in the garage when you were a kid?”

“Oh, piss off,” she told him, and they drove on in silence after that.

Luc had planned the heist. The only aspect he could not handle himself was the border crossing, but the opportunity to cross freely, courtesy of the Mohawk Warriors, was one that he could not resist. Still, he wasn’t clear on the parameters—specifically, what was in it for him. He had chewed it over with Andy.

“You’re telling me that I jack a truck in the States and bring it back here.”

“That’s right.”

“Full of cigarettes, but I’m going to
give away
those smokes to the Indians. I am doing this why?”

“You’ll get paid.”

“You know what it is a truck of smokes worth?”

“Nothing, unless you sell the smokes. You can’t sell in the States, you have no contacts. You can’t sell here, because how do you get the smokes across the border without the Indians? So the smokes are worth nothing to you or me.”

“I’m dying, Andy, but I’m not dead. I’m doing charity why?”

“To help people out who are dying the same way you are.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Nope. I need something out of this.”

“It’s a mission of mercy for which you get paid.”

“For this I get to Heaven? Your guarantee is how much to me worth?”

His old pal from prison had a point. “Like I said, Luc, you’re getting paid. It’s sort of like being on salary.”

“I’ll get back to you on that,” Luc told him.

He had then taken a few days to devise a counterproposal. He agreed to hijack the truck and, after the Indians had emptied the contents, drive it back to Canada, where Lucy could transform it into a mobile lab. He’d be her driver, as she had requested, and return with her to the States. At the end of her
operation, he’d use the truck for an enterprise of his own.

“What,” Andy asked him, leery, “enterprise?”

“I got something going.”

“What? I need to know.”

“I do believe I can sell the truck. That’s what I get out of it. The truck.” A salary was not enough. He was a dying man. Death was expensive, he’d been finding out. He had expenses. If he was not entitled to a share of the cigarette action, he’d score on his own.

“Where?” Andy questioned him.

“I know a guy in Florida.”

“Keep Lucy out of it.”

“No problem.”

Andrew Stettler accepted the deal, and Luc began to plan the truck-jacking.

Andy and Lucy dropped Luc off in town, then headed for the rendezvous point. They parked in a wooded drive, seldom used in winter but ploughed regularly, that led to a small electric transformer.

“I brought candles,” Lucy said.

“I’ll keep the motor running.”

“We might asphyxiate ourselves. Or run out of gas. Who knows how long Luc will be? I’ll light the candles. Keep the window open a crack. You’ll be surprised how warm it stays.”

After she had lit two candles, one on the dash and another between the front seats, Andy suggested that they get into the back.

“What for?”

“Guess.”

“Now?”

“Did you have other plans? Appointments?”

She smiled. She got out to climb into the back but Andy, in his eagerness, crawled over the front seat and was there to greet her with a kiss.

“How do you like the candles?” She spoke between kisses. “Warm, huh?”

“What happens if we get carried away and knock them over?”

“We go up in flames. Together. Romantic. I can’t tell you how many native boys and girls have gone out that way. You’d think we’d learn.”

She kissed him, and settled into the warmth of his body and the easygoing excitement of his embrace.

“I can hardly ever tell when you’re kidding me,” he confessed. “Not when you talk about Indian things.”

“If I were you, I’d assume I’m pulling your leg pretty much all the time.”

His hand went to her breast then, surprising her, and he kissed her roughly.

“Here?” she asked. “It’s not
that
warm.”

“No?” He pulled away from her to pull off his own jacket, sweater and shirt, as if to challenge her, to dare her to do the same. “We’ll make our own heat.”

“Too corny for words.”

“I’m showing no mercy today, Luce. This car. Two candles. I don’t care how cold it is outside.”