The Ice Storm (26 page)

His home, meanwhile, had been ravaged by the elements. As Hood came up the driveway he called out his wife's name, and the sound of that name, its elongated vowels, was dispersed across the frozen wastes to echo and reverberate upon the Silvermine River. No answer. He called again. He called Wendy's name. He carried Mike to the garage, had to drag him part of the way, because Benjamin was starting to feel weak, to where the station wagon was parked. He left the body outside while he started the car.

Except that it wouldn't start. It coughed feebly and then lapsed into silence. He dragged the body back to the house. Because he couldn't open the door without setting down his burden.
Oh, please open the goddam door
. Hood wasn't at all prepared to find the house empty. Where the hell was everybody?

When he had laid Mike lengthways in the front hall, Daisy Chain trotted out from under some table someplace, his tail wagging wildly, violently. Benjamin swallowed hard on what he now perceived as the outrageous treatment of this dog.

—Poor pooch, poor, old pooch.

He let the body slump to the ground. Daisy Chain, skittering desperately at the door, would not stop.

—Need to go out, pooch? Okay, okay. Even you don't want to be stuck in here, huh?

The dog jumped at the door. And maneuvering around Mike Williams, Ben released his hound, like the rest of his family, into winter. He slammed the door shut.

Then he found out about the pipes. Water was trickling down the walls in the living room. The house had turned into some Revolutionary War fountain, the Reverend Mark Staples's fountain. Water was trickling, no,
streaming
down the walls in Hood's house. The enormity of it took a moment to sink in—as the water itself was sinking into the antique planks and walls of his home. From the ceiling the water came in sheets, and beneath it a large, brownish stain, more than eighteen inches wide, with the curvilinear shape, say, of a Smiley Face, perhaps, or the flame of some Yuletide candle. Rorschach stain. For a second Hood was reminded, in the midst of the crises around him, of the burning of the Yule log, that video loop that played on WPIX for five or six hours on Christmas Day. The water stain was inching outward along the linen-colored paint job. And on the floor of the living room, there was a large puddle of standing water. While the cascades from the ceiling ran down, the puddle trickled through the floorboards into the basement.

Maybe Hood was not thinking clearly, but he followed the water where it led. He left Mike to look after the flood. On the other side of this wall, too, in the front hall closet, more falls fell. The stream ran down onto the floor and in a winding, indirect creek down toward the kitchen. Away from Mike. In the closet, Elena's furs, some leather items, and a bunch of tennis and paddle-tennis rackets—everything had been touched by the curse of this flood.

Hood ran past Mike and up the front stairs to the second floor. He was guessing that the leak originated in the master bathroom, and, although the wall there had indeed partly caved in, although this water closet was directly above the worst manifestations of the flood, he could find no direct evidence of a burst pipe. He could see in past the Sheetrock, though, into that strange netherworld of wiring and struts and joists that resembled nothing so much as the inside of a human body. He felt he could reach into the thundering heart of his home, and thus into the heart of his family. He felt almost certain that the heart he would find there would be stilled. The frozen part of the plumbing must have emanated from that point. The water flowed out into the hall, down toward Wendy's bedroom and then disappeared, miraculously. It meant to travel, this water. It was
flow
. Its motion was no respecter of dignity. It simply moved. And there wasn't much Hood could do about it. He tried to call the plumber, got right on the phone in his blue-gray bedroom, a deep red rotary phone with a pleasant shape and heft. Then he remembered that the line was dead. He tried the tap and the shower. A sigh, like a last breath, issued forth from each of them.

The house was frigid, wet, and dark. In his perturbation, Hood recalled a lecture he had received from his own father about burst pipes. Like any paternal lecture this one was probably full of half-truths, digressions, polemics, and nostalgic anecdotes from the past. Still, one point stood out.
Sometimes a leak skips a whole floor. Sometimes the leak is on the whole other side of the house from where the problem originates
. And pipes, he remembered, usually split lengthways.

He didn't know what to do next, whether to try to find his children, whether to presume they had been spirited away by his wife, who had reached the end of her tolerance, whether to try to shut off the water somehow, whether to further inspect the damage, or whether to do something about Mike, the son of his former mistress. Each time he passed through the front hall, Mike seemed to have moved.

A strangulated yelp punctuated the silence at the front hall. The dog was back. Scratching at the door.

—Jesus, Hood said to Daisy Chain, letting him in. I have a lot on my plate here. Could you look after yourself for a little while?

Hood fished out a pair of galoshes from the hall closet. He descended into the basement, where the washer and dryer were located. The water in the basement grazed his kneecaps. It seemed to flow out one end of the basement into the Silvermine River, as if Hood's house had now become a part of the river itself, part of that topographical movement from the Appalachian foothills to the Long Island Sound. The river had reached out to incorporate the Hoods and their residence into itself.

A sort of gushing also issued forth—there in the basement—from a particularly damaged line against one wall. Hood stepped down into that river just the same. It was only because of its motion, Hood thought, that the water wasn't yet frozen. He shuddered as he waded across to where the washer and dryer protruded—craggy water hazards in that dank loch. He stepped on a pair of roller skates and fell, yelping, against the banister. Drenched to the waist. No theory of the flood, of its origin, would satisfy him now. He wasn't going to think reasonably any longer. He would abandon all thinking about causes. He decided instead just to take the sheet he saw on top of the dryer up to cover Mikey. The sheet—a blue, floral print that usually covered Wendy's bed—was drenched. But what were his options? Hood waded through the oily water and up into the front hall again. It was the least he could do.

When he reached the top of the stairs he found that the dog was now preoccupied with Mike. Vigorously, Daisy Chain circulated around the body, sniffing and licking, tail oscillating. The dog seized Mike's sleeve in its mouth and began to wrestle with it.

Hood clapped his hands feverishly, sheet clamped under one arm.

—Hey! Fuck, Daisy, get the hell away from there. Come on, oh, fuck.

The dog paused to lick Mike's palm one more time before dancing just out of reach of Hood and into the living room.

He covered poor Mike.

—What, am I going to have to chain you up outside or something? You're going to eat the neighbors now? Jesus Christ.

He followed the dog into the living room and grabbed it by the collar.—C'mon with me. He locked Daisy Chain in the kitchen. And then, with a Duraflame log from the pile in the living room, he headed for the library. He thought: Naugahyde recliner. He was exhausted and he needed a minute to think. He had learned to build a fire well, in New England. With these instincts guiding him, he relaxed, but he also accelerated the pace of his home's destruction. The pipes would melt faster.

He was awakened by the ambulance a little later. The ambulance from the police department. Janey and Jim Williams had drifted in and out of his sleep, looking like the parents in a Claymation Sunday-morning television show his kids used to watch. Religious programming. Their worried expressions and wooden movements, their beseechments and entreaties stretched a shadow across his uneasy nap. The police pulled up in the driveway without a siren, and rapped on the door knocker—the doorbell was electric—as though there were no emergency at all. Hood rose after a while. The banging had become a strange, percussive factor in his dreams. The dog was barking, too, in the kitchen.

—Got a call about some burns, the driver said.

Behind him stood two other men, sleepless and overburdened. One scratching under his ski cap. Fully certified Emergency Medical Technicians. The body occupied most of the foyer there. They couldn't miss it.

—That's him, Hood said, eyes falling back on Mike.

—He's—

—That's right.

The ambulance driver strode past Hood to the draped Williams boy. The other two men retreated to the ambulance to construct one of their foldout stretchers.

—Cold enough for you? the driver said grimly, as he peeled back the edge of the sheet and pressed his hand against Mike's neck. What do you mean burn? No trace of a burn. Why's this sheet wet, anyway?

—Well, he's—

—You weren't trying to treat him, I hope.

—No, I—

—Where'd you find him? Are you related to him?

Hood condensed the story.

—What's the condition of the roads up there? the driver asked.

—Well, there are some downed lines, Benjamin said. My car is—

—Electrical or telephone? How far was he from those lines? What time did you find him? Why didn't you leave him at the, uh, at the psychiatric hospital?

The technician had Mike's jacket and shirt open now and was looking for markings of any kind. But this expert knew the answer, Benjamin could tell, and he knew, too. When the other two volunteers had hoisted the stretcher up onto the front step, the driver pronounced Mike's fate, as though breaking a spell. He turned over one of the boy's palms.

—Electrocution, you guys. Electrocution.

—You wanna wire up the—

—No point, the driver said. He's been this way for a couple of hours, I'll bet. Radio it in?

They flung Mike's shroud on the floor by the stairs and covered him with a fresh, dry one. Then they strapped him onto the gurney and rolled it back toward the ambulance.

—Listen, Hood said. You're going to Norwalk Hospital? Before you go we really ought to tell his family. Or at least drop me there. It's just up there. The phones are down and my car is.… Do you think you could?

The driver said nothing.

—They're my neighbors. This boy is my neighbors' son. My kids have played with him. My daughter was going steady with this boy. This boy right here.

Hood had become firm. His demeanor had changed. He was acquainted with this bad luck. He knew what he was saying.

—Imagine if it was your son, he said.

The driver sucked on his lower lip. He had a prizefighter's dull glare. Said nothing. But he led Hood out into the driveway, and he held open the back of the ambulance for Hood. Benjamin was going to sit in the back, with the corpse. He was out in the cold air again, in just galoshes and the jacket from last night. He was aware that his hair was mussed, that he needed a shower. They wheeled the stretcher up to the ambulance and hoisted it in. The radio in the ambulance was clear on one point—the temperature would plunge again, in the afternoon. Yes, radio. In that swift moment, when the door was closed behind him, Hood was put back in touch with the all-news format, with its blessed and conflicting voices—Britain slashes budget, Brendan Byrne opposes Jersey Turnpike extension, United Nations peacekeeping force patrols heavily mined areas between Egyptian and Israeli armies, Hall Bartlett's new film,
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
, opens to mixed reviews, move in Congress to impeach. The Concord, California, murder case: two popular locals, Walter and Joanne Parkin, their children, their baby-sitter, the babysitter's boyfriend and her parents all murdered by drifter from the Bronx, Dennis Guzman, and his accomplice, Archie Stealing, also of Concord. Elsewhere in California: an Oakland school superintendent executed with cyanide bullets by unknown terrorist organization, the Symbionese Liberation Army, which objected to the superintendent's “fascist” policies.

—Which roads are clear? the driver called back.

Hood didn't know. The two volunteers in the back of the ambulance with Hood stared down at the floor.

They proceeded by guesswork. Here is how Benjamin Hood reached the Williamses' house. The long way, because of the power lines. Power lines down everywhere. The ambulance, with sirens cutting through the still day, through the subtle tinkling of melting ice, drove back to Silvermine Road and up to Canoe Hill, which was impassable because of multiple fallen trees, down Ridge Road to Rose Brook (past the wildlife sanctuary), back on Canoe Hill, where they went into a slide, which the driver quickly righted, down Route 123 to North Wilton, back down Laurel Road all the way to Turner Hill and then onto Valley Road. They passed the hulks of abandoned BMWs and Volvos and Volkswagens, they passed destruction in every forest and yard. The longer the drive took, the more Hood's insides knotted. His bowels were full, his life had changed, and he had a lot of talking to do.

Though the sorts of love songs Wendy sang in her semi-sleep were all mixed up, though they mixed the Eros and the Agape, gift-love and need-love, pseudo-love and the art of love, courtly or secular love (that conceit of twelfth-century poetry) and the love of God, the love of nature with the fetishism of objects, the love of parents with profane premarital love, she knew as the sunlight streamed into the guest room at the Williamses' that the house of love was the house she inhabited. Its many windows, dormers, gables, ingresses, and egresses were hers. Its sagging gutters and leaky roof, its unusual additions and secret staircases. Love was a sweet, soft thing and a force that could batter communities. Too late to turn back now, she believed she was falling in love. She was dirty-sweet and she was his girl.
Sandy, I'm a fine girl, what a good wife I will be
. Precious and few were the moments they two would share.
Call out my name, baby, just call it out
. I'll be there, on that midnight train, I'll be there. Gimme the beat boys, free my soul …