Nobody around here would give you any argument that January was the worst month of the year. Christmas and its false promises had come and gone. Football was done for the year, and especially done that year because the Giants had lost to the miserable Colts who couldn’t even get the job done in the regular time, and needed the refs and an extra eight minutes to steal the Championship. And it would be three months before the snow would melt and the mud dried enough so you could toss a ball without sinking up to the ankles. If it wasn’t for skating, January would be about as bearable as leukemia. But I had been banned from hockey since Christmas vacation when LaBarge’s dog chewed the only puck in the neighborhood and Larry Ringer got the brilliant idea of wrapping a can of tuna with electrical tape Sculling backwards to cover the goal, the can deflected off a dimple in the ice and I took it in the lip. It cost my paper-boy money for the rest of the winter to pay for the nine stitches the emergency doctor had to put in. My mother cried about it the whole weekend and said that now I was going to go through life looking like a hare-lip. Actually, the shittiest part of the whole deal was that they took out the stitches the day before New Year’s and I didn’t get the benefit of returning to school with a war wound. I had served Seven o’clock Sunday Mass and was warming up in Patnode’s Variety before the haul up Orchard Road to our place, three driveways past where they stopped plowing the sidewalk. Squatting on a bale of Boston Globes, I could hear Perk Patnode ragging on the Charlebois brothers. He said they had shorted him two doughnuts from the standing order of four dozen plain and buttermilk that their step mom fried up for people collecting their Sunday papers on their way home from church. The old people in the South End, the Canucks who came down from Magog and Saint Hyacinthe in the days when the woolen mills were running three shifts, called them by the French way, the Sharr-lay-BWAs. But the rest of us pretty much thought that anything French was sissified. To us, they were just The Charley-boys. Rudy and Art Charlebois lived halfway up the hill and I was hoping for them to leave first. Rudy would beat the snot out of you, just for the lack of having anything to make conversation. And his year-younger brother, Art, would jump in just because Rudy was doing it. The Charley-boys went to Converse School and around the South End, everything was cleanly Balkanized into the factions of kids who went to Converse Public and kids who went to Sacred Hurt School It wasn’t a class or religious thing. Everybody was Catholic and most all our folks worked assembly at either G.E. or Blodgett Stove and Oven. The Charlebois house was at the end of a flag pole right-of-way, set back from the newer cape and ranch houses which fronted the street. Between Halloween and Thanksgiving, their old man would send them to Orchard Riding Stables where they would heap a handcart with horse manure that would then be tamped around the foundation to keep in the stove heat through the winter. A sour-sweet barn pungence accompanied the brothers and they liked to press up tight in your face when they talked, just daring you to blink and give them license to take a round out of you. The brothers were still gripeing with Perk Patnode who was sure they had hogged down the missing doughnuts. I figured this to be as good a time as any to duck out the back door so I could get a couple blocks running start. But halfway up the hill, I heard the sizzle a snowball passing close to my ear, whomping the Steep Grade sign and rocking it on its post like a whirly-gig. --Yeah, you with the hair on your head! I turned but continued to walk backwards. I could feel my heels sliding up inside my froggy green barn boots. The shoddy flannel linings tended to wear quickly, leaving the heel counters slick and requiring a slight fisting of the toes so that your feet didn’t slide up the sleeve of the boot. Bolting was not an option. One abrupt step and the boots would sling off my feet like a drop-kicked football. The Charley-Boys never wore overshoes. They scuffed through the snow in their seminary shoes, the heels worn as thin as chocolate patties. The snow would fluff up the cuffs of their dungarees, rolled six inches for a couple years of growing room, and sting like a steel ruler when it hit the ankles. In their own good time, the Charley-Boys caught up. --What’s up? I knew it was a trick question. No matter how I answered, it was probably going to end up with blood in the snow. I just pushed my hands into my coat pockets and rolled my shoulders, trying to look bored and ambivalent. --Just fucking around. Fuck was calculated, a liberty among friends, as if for a minute they might forget their real intention--to pound me down to the size of a dwarf. I even felt a brief swell of courage, not as if I could face up to the Charley-Boys, but for the fleeting confidence that I might be able to tolerate an ass-kicking without crying. --How’s your old man? Another trick question. About all that people knew about my father was that he was a butcher at Ransom’s Meat and Beverage and a drunk. Of course, the Charley-Boys’ old man was a drunk too. But, by the rules of booze, you could almost always find some way to feel superior to another family with a drunk. At least your drunk wasn’t a falling-down-drunk. At least your drunk had never spent a night in the tank. At least your drunk wasn’t a dago red drunk. At least your drunk could hold a regular job. Of course, this wasn’t the time to argue the finer points with the Charley-Boys so I just shrugged. --Same as always. A good enough answer, I guessed, seeing that my nose was still in the middle of my face. Rudy shifted his feet in the snow. --Still got those clown skates? I knew what he was talking about and faked a laugh. My folks had got me the skates two winters back, buying them a couple sizes large so that I’d be sure to get more than one year on them. The first winter, I had to wear three pairs of socks and still wad the toes with newspaper. The brown-on-black Northlands looked like clown shoes on me and I got needled and mocked all that winter at the rink. Last year, they were still large, but at least more in proportion to my body. About mid-August they must have been a perfect fit because now they were snug if I tried to wear extra socks. --Me and Art were talking to some pike-fishers down at the ferry landing. They say the ice looks like it’s all the way in. We were thinking about pulling together a team, maybe give a shot at skating over to New York State. Measuring by the lights from the other shoreline, and the general way that a twelve-year-old sizes the world, I figured it had to be at least fifteen miles across to Essex on the New York shoreline. Even by ferry, it was more than an hour’s crossing. And many years, the lake didn’t freeze it’s full width. But it had been down below zero most nights since Christmas. And from the city pier, you could already see encampments of fishing shanties out as far as Dunder Island. --Think you got the stones for something like that? People had been crossing the lake in sleighs and Jeeps for years. But I couldn’t remember hearing of anybody skating across. Especially not kids. It might be the kind of thing that would get in the Press-Enterprise. That would be a better story to take to school than some stitch tracks across my lip. --Ain’t gonna be like skating rink ice out there. Lots of heave cracks, hot holes, skim ice. You fall in, they ain’t going to find you ‘til St. Floaters Day. St. Floaters Day was well known up and down the lake. Usually about Easter, it came when the ice finally broke up and the water warmed enough for all the bodies to start filling up with gas and come bobbing to the surface. On a good day, up and down the lake, the Coast Guard would pull eight or a dozen jokers who had gone through the ice by way of suicide, alcohol, or carelessness. --So where you figure on meeting up? -- Front vestibule, Sacred Hurt’s. An hour. We ain’t waiting. And better wear your fur-lined jock. I should have realized that it was really too cold for a fist fight. The Charley-Boys never wore gloves and at this temperature, a solid punch would split knuckles to the bone. Rudy pivoted around me, hat-dancing on the points of his oxfords around the drifts and snow clumps. But Art lingered to make the point that his inclination was for pile-driving me into a snow bank. People said that Art had been dropped as a baby, which was supposed to account for the permanent bend to his neck, which made him look like he was lugging a bucket of water. Then his head dipped sharply, a boxer’s feint, a sucker move to get the other guy to cover up low and then counter to the unprotected face. The reflex was automatic, raising my hands to cover my gut. But there was no counter-punch. And Art moved past, his mouth warped into an indecent grin. Art following Rudy, the Charley-boys tightrope-walked one of the wobbly set of tire tracks that rutted through the snow to their house. I had to seriously consider that maybe this was some kind of patsy fall. On the other hand, if I wasn’t at Sacred Hurt in an hour, they would know I was chicken-shit and I’d never be able to leave my house. But guys like the Charley-Boys were uncontrolled and impulsive. It wasn’t their nature to postpone the gratification of a good ass-kicking. So now I was committed and I had to seriously ask myself if I really had the nerve to follow the brothers onto unknown lake ice that was known to regularly swallow up fishing shanties and pick-up trucks. The snow told everything anybody needed to know about my house. The berm across the driveway, deflected by the city plow, was unbroken and proof enough that my dad hadn’t moved the car from the garage. Two sets of footprints led from the side porch to the street. My own were obvious, two aimless ruts from the scuffing boots; the second set, like perfect little trowel dabs, moving in a direct line to the street. My mother was in heels, wearing the clear, pull-on booties she had mail-ordered from an ad in the back of the Sunday papers color magazines. If my old man was awake, he’d ask if I saw her at Mass. I’d say I did, just to keep the peace. After church, she was supposed to be over at her mother’s house. But she’d be driving around all day with Andre, the Lebanese who tried to pass himself off as French. It looked crummy but I knew pretty much for a fact that all they did was drive around. A couple times last year, while my father was in Florida looking for work and a fresh start, my mom took me around with them. We drove to Montpelier and then to Basin Harbor and finally to the airport where we watched the Mohawk Airlines flight land and the people in nice coats come down the boarding ramp. I figured Andre would surely buy me a Coke or some baseball cards, just out of the good politics of keeping my mouth shut. But he didn’t even seem interested in talking to me. And the couple times they did have something to say about me, they talked in a kind of regretful, detached drone, like I had died of a brain tumor or something. Andre dropped us a block from my aunt’s house, where we were renting a room until my dad found work and sent us the money to come down to Florida on the bus. --Don’t say anything to anybody about today, okay? She said it in the most casual way, without swearing me to any blood oath or threatening that I could wreck the family. It kind of pissed me off that she just made the assumption that I wouldn’t blab to my father when we got off the bus in . But we never went to Florida. About a week later, I woke up at three in the morning to a big fuss downstairs and I could hear my father arguing with my Uncle Walt. My mother came up and I asked her when papa got back. But my mother just quietly drenched the pillow and told me to go back to sleep. The little rented cottage stood taller than it did wide. It was originally framed as a corn crib back when the property was a working farm, and without the porch and attached garage to anchor it, the place would likely to tip in a good wind. The owner had painted before we moved in and the white trim and red chimney made it seem respectable enough. But even if it was peeling and falling down, I wouldn’t mind. It was a house and not an apartment and you didn’t have to judo chop through somebody’s laundry to get to your door The door screen was iced up in a diagonal sweep to the top corner, distending the mesh in an old-man paunch. The storm doors and windows were still stacked in the garage and my father would say that next week would turn and we’d put them up when the temperatures eased off. But then if the weather did turn, he’d say that it was really going to be a mild winter after all. So some nights the cold blew in sheets under the sashes, strong enough to shiver the flame on the stove or stir the onion paper of the McCall’s dress patterns on the leaf of my mother’s sewing machine. The house was quiet, save for the slow clop of the faucet drip and the draft that fussed the stovepipe damper in the front room. My father was sleeping. Nothing new. On Sundays he slept past noon, which was the one thing, more than the drinking and the smashed cars, that most burned my mom. If only he could get up at a decent hour and we could do something like a real family. Thirty years later, my dad would pass in his sleep. A King’s Death, the old people called it. But to my mind, it was just his regular way of doing things. I was sometimes afraid he hadn’t figured it out yet, lolling along in his deep winter’s sleep, not yet realizing he was dead. Nobody ever disputed that my dad was a hard worker. I had seen him at the market, arms bear-hugged around a two-hundred pound side of beef that he had wrestled off the breaking ceiling. Hips plunged and his knees almost bent to the floor, he would let the beef tip and then steer it’s slow topple onto the cutting block where it would be quartered into roasts, steaks, and stewing meat, with the rest pushed through the grinder and mounded into long trays of hamburger. To my knowledge, he was never late for work, regardless of the pain. Monday to Saturday, he was first up and a lot of mornings I could hear him through the floor vent, heaving himself dry into the kitchen sink. My dad didn’t own a single picture from any time before he started going out with my mom. But once, visiting my aunt in Lyndonville, she showed me pictures of my father from grade school. One, taken around third or fourth grade, shows a fair child in a line-dried white shirt, open wide at the collar; a farm-boy haircut, not quite grown into his ears, his eyebrows elevated with hopefulness. A second snapshot was probably from the sixth grade. A tie closes the collar of the print shirt, his hair water-combed and chopped high above the ears. His shoulders slope and his eye sockets seem receded, the cheeks raised as if to close access to they eyes. As an adult, I asked my dad about the pictures. What had happened between the two? He was sober and clear the last ten years of his life but couldn’t think of anything in particular. To his mind, the real forming event came over the Thanksgiving holiday of his senior year. He had been cleared for early graduation to enter the Air Corps. He was going to fly P-38 Lightnings. But strangling abdominal cramps had him turning inside out on the bedroom floor. The town doctor said over the phone that it sounded like he was just irregular. A few spoons of Milk of Magnesia would move things along. In those days before penicillin, your odds of surviving rabies and a burst appendix were even money. After twenty-two operations to drain the peritonitis, anybody seeing him on the beach would assume he’d been shot through with shrapnel. My dad said the only thing that pulled him through was a promise made to him one night when he was never supposed to come out of the ether. His father said he had bought him a ’32 Dodge coupe. It was waiting in the side yard under the elm. He had described the horsehair seats and the marbled onyx Bakelite of the steering wheel. Over months, they finally suctioned out all the pus and poisons. The abscesses closed. He left the hospital, looking for his Dodge. But there was no car. And nobody would talk about it, especially not his father who absented himself for three days on a drunk. My dad believed all the promise in life had been snatched from him because he had lost his chance to jockey a P-38 or a Mustang and to stencil swastikas or red meatballs beneath his canopy for all the bandits he had flamed out. But then the promise was renewed when he went to a dance on Thanksgiving Eve and pushed through a circle of guys to ask my mom to dance. My mom said yes and invited him for dinner the next day with her mother and sisters, which made up for every bad card he had ever been dealt. Though this was kind of confusing for a twelve-year-old because my father was drinking hard and my mom was spending Sundays driving around with other men. I never needed much from my dad. Toss the football a little on the weekends, take me to a Jerry Lewis movie or show me how to work on the car. I think if he would have been awake when I came home and offered to teach me chess or taken me bowling, I would have ratted out my mother like a commie spy. But he was still out, his face fixed into a kind of strain, as if it was an effort to sustain such deep sleep. I pulled down the woolen pants, hanging off their suspenders from a hook on the back of the door. I found a red hunting shirt that had been a gift to my father but had gone through the wash and shrunk down to something near my size. The basin of the wringer washer tended to be the collection bin for laundry and I sorted through long johns, pillow cases and towels to match up a couple pairs of heavy socks. The cargo pockets of my jacket swelled with a tube of Ritz crackers, some ribbon candy and a couple of hot dogs. I sniffed the kitchen for leaking gas, one of my mother’s half dozen phobias, and adjusted the faucets to maintain the slow drip that would keep the pipes from freezing. With my skate laces knotted and slung over my shoulder, I rabbit-punched the ice clogging the screen door but just managed to tear it away from the frame. I’d be hearing about that when I got home. The opening door of the church vestibule sucked in the cold air from Flynn Avenue, agitating the votive candles in the stepped iron racks that closed around the statue of John the Baptist. The vestibule was hardly much refuge from the cold and only a couple degrees warmer than the street. But I was glad to see Jimmy Mundell and Boney LaBue, figuring they were not likely to be party to any ambush. Mundell was in my class at Sacred Hurt, though he should have been in Seventh. But he had scarlet fever when he was eight and had to stay back and make up. The other kids gave him a bad time because lots of afternoons, his mother came in the car to pick him. One day when he was out sick, the nuns said we shouldn’t give him grief because he had a hole in his heart and he’d probably never live to graduate from high school. Boney went to Christ the King, the other Catholic school, and liked to tell people that his uncle had given him the Luger that Hitler used to blow out his brains. Though, when anybody was over at his house and wanted to see it, Boney said that it was locked up or on loan to some gun show. Boney came out early Saturdays at the Boy’s Club rink, lapping everybody on his racing skates. With easy, gliding strides, he bent at the waist and rested one hand on his back, as if mocking our clipped, chop-sockey bursts. Boney reached into his Army pack for a pair of flannel-lined leather mitts as Rudy made us stand for inspection. I wished I had an Army pack. It was a lot sexier than the dirty paperboy bag that I used to lug my books and lunch to school. I was tired of everybody passing on the stairs, asking if I had the funny-papers for them today. Boney had also packed extra socks, a scarf, and a sandwich wrapped in wax paper like a wedding present. No kid ever wrapped a sandwich that perfect. His mother must have done it for him. Rudy clapped the shoulders of my coat, making sure I had enough layers. He took my hands and turned them at the wrist, inspecting the green wool gloves with the leather palms that had begun to curl at the corners. --Mittens would’a been better. I shrugged. It was the best I had. -- And you got your spuds someplace you can get at ‘em easy? My dumb-ass expression made it pretty apparent that I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. Art figured to clear up the confusion. --Ice spikes, you numb-nuts. Jimmy Mundell pulled out a couple of screw drivers. --Like a pick or something you can get a grip on. If you fall in, you can jab into the ice and pull yourself out. Mundell offered one of his screwdrivers. --One’s all I really need. --Ever hear anybody talk about the Army Coat Man? I turned to Mundell and Boney. They didn’t seem to know about Army Coat Man either. --This guy from Alburg, he was one of the Battling Bastards of Bastogne. Yeah, we all had pretty filthy mouths, but I could see that Boney and Mundell were squirmy with the swear word spoken inside the walls of the church. Especially given the kind of jaunt we were talking about. --This guy’s Army coat kept him warm in a frozen foxhole and he told everybody it was warm as any fishing shanty. He was fishing walleye off Cumberland Head and he’d put in about eight, ten holes with jigging rods. He was going back and forth, pulling up wall’s fast as he could recock his flags. He’d maybe been across the same hot spot a dozen times when it gave. He didn’t go all the way under and he could kick enough to keep his head and arms out of the water. Art was trying to warm his hands off the votive candles and had his palms almost touching the flames. --If he’d’a had his spikes, could’a probably pulled himself out. --Some guy had stepped out of his shanty to drain the dew. He could see somebody, maybe a mile off, just hanging on. Him and his buddies ran out far as they could. But the wind was up and had split the ice all the way to Brothers Island. They kept waving and hollering for the guy to hold on. But the ice was cheesy and they were busting through. The guy wasn’t moving much, and as long as he was holding on, they had to try and get to him. Somebody had gone for a dinghy and they finally got across. By this time, they were going by battery light. And when they got up to where they could get a hand on the guy, there wasn’t nothing left but that old Army coat. --Just a coat? --No guy in it? --The state troopers finally came with ladders and hooks. And what they put together was: that old coat had soaked through and iced up like an igloo. A frozen coat will keep out the wind and hold in some heat. For a while. They figured when the guy couldn’t hold anymore, he just slid under. And that frozen Army coat stuck there like a frozen ghost of him. One of the votive jars cracked as the wick burned to the bottom of the glass. Art was lighting a couple of new candles. --You think that’s okay without putting any money in? --I’ll just owe it to next time when I got some coin. Then Rudy lit a candle too. --Better everybody light up. For luck. -- Doesn’t count, does it, unless you put in money? --If God’s supposed to know everything, then he knows who’ll truly come back and put in their dime. It sounded like an odd test to prove the existence of God. But Boney and Mundell were already starting a candle off the same lighting stick. Rudy put his shoulder against the heavy elm door like a furniture mover. --Just keep in mind out there: ‘Thick and blue, tried and true. Thin and crispy, just too risky.’ Last out the door, I reached to dip my hand into the holy water font but just bent my fingers backwards when I realized it was a frozen block. That brought to mind what they were saying on the radio last night about the weather systems all being wound backwards over Canada and how this could be the coldest day of the year. The wind-driven ice had slammed into the dead end bight of Smiley’s Cove and we had to climb the blocks and upended slabs like we were looking for survivors in a train pile-up. Between the boxcar slabs, we Frankenstein-stepped across snow that had bonded to the ice, making for a layer of frozen popcorn. --So where’s the friggin’ ice? Rudy stood King of the Mountain on another sharp heave. We crawled up the slab and beyond found a great, perfect plate of ice that was black and shiny as cemetery marble. I understood about flat, not as a description but an absolute. My grandfather, on my mother’s side, was a stonemason and I spent a good part of one summer squatting on his lunchpail, watching him step the slope of the back yard into garden terraces. My grandmother said he always worked alone, given the stonemason’s tendency to secretiveness. It made me feel special that he would let me watch, which was a gift I did not much get at home, even being an only child. His permanently soiled hands wiggled and tamped each limestone block into the soft mortar gruel until the top edge matched up critically to the line of kite string which defined each run of stones. He would not work with gloves, as he said that, in masonry, the hands knew more than they eye. My pépère spoke of level as his Gospel. If a slipshod workman raised a chimney, he said, and the first course was off by the thickness of a fingernail, by the time it cleared the roofline, the whole thing would tilt like a ski jump. The ice was so flawless and transparent, you could cut out whole sheets and set them as show windows in Wards and J.C. Penney. Flimsy mare’s-tails of snow wisped the surface, finding not even the refuge of a microscopic pore or scratch. Seeing the perfect flat of the ice, I thought how my long cancer-dead pépère would have been impressed with nature’s work ethic. Boney could not control himself and whooped, slashing into the ice. Each stroke rang clear and like a bell ring, leaving a light etching on the surface. Jimmy Mundell and me dashed right after, startled by the quick acceleration. The groomed surface at the Boy’s Club rink seemed granular and gritty by comparison. --Eh, you jack-asses! We could hear Rudy hollering but we were on magic blades and I felt like I was quicker off the line than a Corvette. We finally let the skates glide, banking into a long sweep that curved back, the ice surface like greasy little atoms that offered barely any resistance. Back at the ice stack, Rudy caught hold of Boney’s coat and socked him hard in the shoulder. But the layers of wool and flannel sopped up all the energy of the punch and Boney almost made the mistake of laughing. --Now clean the fucking wax out of your ears and listen-up! Our skates were impossible to back, wanting to run. But Rudy made us hear him out. New York was a long-ass haul. Slow and steady wins the race, he said Don’t let the rope drag on the ice, but also don’t pull so tight to yank the other guy off his feet. Be on the awares for cracks and sudden changes in the surface. If anybody crashed through all the way, first instinct would be to swim to the light. But that was a sucker move. Always swim toward the dark. That was where we’d find the opening. Each of the brothers carried a length of clothesline, coiled over one shoulder and across the heart, bandoleer style. The brothers spooled out the ropes and Rudy wrapped several turns around his waist. Boney roped up with Art. I was tailgunner on the second rope, with Jimmy Mundell the middleman. Finally we were moving, Rudy setting the line. The rope was awkward and it was hard to match strokes because Mundell strided like he had learned on figure skates, driving off the toe, while my gait was more of a side-to-side hockey shift. I was either hopscotching over the dragging rope and skating up Mundell’s ass, or jerking on his waist, snapping him back. We moved like some kind of cider-drunk insect. But with the wind at our back, it seemed we would reach New York in no more than an hour. Rudy had figured on two, two-and-a-half hours over. We would need a half hour’s rest on the New York side and it would for sure be slower on the return, allowing for wind and the fact that we’d be tired. I knew my mother probably wouldn’t be home until dinnertime. And my dad, if true to form, would finally stir around noon, have a few snorts, then flop back on the sofa. As long as I was back to set the table by six, nobody would have a clue. Even with the tailwind and the perfect ice, the pace was still an effort, kind of like a steady pedal on a bike Glancing over my shoulder, I was surprised to still see the squat, gray cylinders of the Tydol gas farm. We were moving up on a squatters commune of two dozen fishing shanties. Two holers, four and six holers. Some, just a stick frame stapled with tar paper. Others sheathed in puzzle-matched scraps of plywood. A few were like little playhouses, finished in clapboards and painted trim, with cutouts for Plexiglas windows. Chimney pipes vented thin strings of black stove smoke that curled back upon us, blending with the stink of kerosene and fish guts. A triple-sized woman’s girdle flew from a broomstick off one of the shanties. I knew from my Uncle Fred’s stories that this signified the mayor of the shantytown, an election that usually took place after the first good freeze. I had also heard tell of another ceremony of the ice season known as a “shirttail parade.” Somebody would set a pint of liquor far out on the ice. Whoever was first to survive the dash across the ice, barefoot and in shirttails, was allowed to claim the flask of hooch. The people who kept closer to shore seemed content to jig for panfish, like perch or calicos. But Rudy said we were probably over a deep-running current that was known for lake trout and northern pike, the prizes of ice fishing. Boney was now coasting upright, pinching his shoulders and arching his back. --You guys cold? Anybody want to stop a little? But Rudy bent deeper at the waist, tightening the line between himself and Jimmy Mundell. --Let’s not break the pace. We swung a wide turn around the shantytown, stutter-stepping over the scabbed circles from the refrozen jig holes. I didn’t notice a single face in any of the fogged windows and it occurred to me that if we all fell through the ice, not a soul would be able to tell the troopers that we had even passed. Possibly our last contact with warmth and shelter and I felt a sudden little boy surge of panic, a harsh bulge against my ribs. --We can still turn back. --Yeah, you can go back. But tomorrow, when everybody’s talking about us like some kind of war heroes, what are you going to say when they ask how come you were the one who turned back? Jimmy’s cheeks were clown red and it looked like he could bust a blood vessel and start bleeding out of his face at any moment. --I ain’t going back. I felt shamed by Jimmy Mundell, with his crummy heart that wasn’t supposed to be strong enough to last him to his senior prom. Then Rudy pulled the rope taut and it seemed he would drag us to New York if he had to. The wind was coming at a quarter off our shoulders now, no longer giving us the helpful shove, and we lowered our shoulders into the flow like linemen against a blocking sled. Even the cheap pot metal of our Northland and J.C. Higgins skates rang off the apex each stroke, holding the clear ping, like sabre steel. The inside of my thighs ached all the way to the crotch and I was seriously doubting I could keep this up another hour. Definitely not two. I let my head droop, looking down at the ice that was more and more marbled and fractured. --Step! Rudy called out, barely giving us time to adjust to the drop in the ice along the fracture line. A few more strides and the surface shifted again --Step! Step! The changes in the ice came faster and it was impossible to hold a cadence into the wind that was slamming us almost full in the face now. Skipping up to the curb-high offset created by another fracture, I could feel the plate dip noticeably under our weight. Boney was spooked. --Is this okay? Rudy didn’t seem to think it was a concern worth any reply. We toe-hopped onto the next plate, feeling the ice sawing underfoot. The wind came in gusts now, but at least it had come around to due north, off our shoulders. Every few strokes, I raised a hand to cover my mouth and nose and exhale into my palm, trying to vent a little warmth to my face. When it seemed we were again making progress, a sharp artillery crack fired beneath us like an inverted sonic boom. The two rope teams let their skates glide out and we turned back to see a widening fracture in the ice we had just crossed, running more than a mile north to south. --Sweet sufferin’ Jesus! The mop-colored water swelled and splashed over, freezing almost immediately where it puddled on the ice. --Ain’t coming back this way, I’d say. Rudy said it a pressure crack and actually this was a good thing because the fracture had relieved some of the tension that had been packing into the ice. Art, who would usually follow his brother through hell in a gas suit, didn’t look so sure any more. For myself, I was wishing there was some way to undo the business with the church candles. The nuns had drilled us with the idea that God was the kind of person who keeps accounts down to the penny. At that rate, a dime was ten times over enough to get you killed out here. Everybody drew tight, backs turned into the wind. Boney rocked from skate to skate. --Fuckin’ colddd! From where we stood, I could swear we were on some kind of high point of the lake, with the surface sloping back to either shore. A high school understanding of physics would have made it obvious that I was actually witnessing the curvature of the earth. But at that point, all I knew was that the Vermont and New York shores were equally far and we were a long way from any heat and rest. --Now’s good a time as any to have a bite of whatever you brought to eat. Even without removing my gloves, I could tell that the two hot dogs in my pocket were frozen like railroad spikes. And when I tried to break off a piece of the ribbon candy, it just fractured into a hundred pieces. Nobody showed much interest in food, all of us thinking that if we came upon another expansion crack, we’d be screwed. Jimmy Mundell had a thought. --Any’a you think to tell anybody we were coming out here? Obviously, neither one of my folks had any idea I was in the middle of Lake Champlain. And I didn’t believe the Charley-Boys family was big on communication. Actually, nobody knew much about the Charley-Boys. Their real mother never much came up in conversation and some lady, old enough to be their grandmother, kept house and was seen most nights drinking with their father at the Cozy Corner. There was an older sister, Audrey, who ended up at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers. But that was at least two years ago and anybody thinking about keeping their Pepsodent smile thought better than to bring it up within the brother’s in earshot. Then Boney just started to bawl, shivering and sobbing so it was all mixed up and his body was shaking in two different directions. I was expecting Rudy to straighten him up with a sharp kick in this ass and tell him to stop crybabying. But Rudy just turned off for a moment and let Boney be. Somehow, Boney breaking down kind of lifted the weight off the rest of us. And we just stood there for a while, the wind finding all the seams and gaps in our clothes. --Okay, let’s get moving before we freeze our nodes off. The cold had locked our joints solid and it seemed somebody would have to slash them with axe handles to get them moving again. But then Rudy yanked on the rope and turned into the wind. Nobody was able to get up a good rhythm but we got moving, if only to generate some body heat. I was watching the flimsy shanks of Rudy’s skates, hand-me-downs twice over, thin as purse leather and offering no support. What went on in his house, I wondered, for him to have developed such a tolerance for so much discomfort? We had been holding a course more or less on line with Mt. Marcy, an on-end ham-hock that was supposed to be the highest point in the Adirondacks. My dad said that the mountains of the east were the oldest in the world and once had been as high as the Alps. But the ceaseless currents of weather had worn them down. At school, the ball at the corner of the stair rail had been worn into the shape of peach by all the semesters of kids passing hands over it. But Sacred Hurt School had only been around since the early Twenties. And the number of years it would take to wear down the Matterhorn to something the size of Mt. Marcy, that was a hefty piece of thinking for my Sixth Grade brain. But the disorganized threads clouds, overflowing out of Canada, had stalled and curved back on themselves over the Adirondacks. The blue between the high clouds was filling in and sky seemed to be dropping from the weight of all the cold it had accumulated. Whiteface, Jay, and the other Adirondack peaks seemed to be just dissolving. If the clouds came down to lake level, and without a single landmark to steer us, we could veer off into the wide reach of the lake and not turn up until St. Floater’s Day. I lifted my face long enough to see that Boney was holding his arm out level, like somebody feeling for a door in the dark. I was afraid he had gone snowblind but then realized he was indicating the horizon, a few degrees off our course to the south. I had a moment of hope that he had caught sight of the New York shore. No, we were still too far out. But there was a definite bump on the horizon, darker than the ice. Maybe another shantytown where there would be fishermen to let us warm up around their heaters. And even if nobody was out, who would find too much fault if some freezing kids who broke in to get out of the cold. Boney’s arm was still out level. --You guys seeing anything out there? --Yeah! Definitely! Maybe a mile! I suspect I said “mile”, mostly just to hear myself say it, so that there would be some finite measurement to this misery. The sighting definitely picked up the pace, all the skaters bending a little harder into their stride. The wind and the cold watered my eyes, squiggling everything on the horizon. But a distinct shape was rising up out of the ice. We were still miles from New York and it didn’t make sense that there would be a building out this far. But maybe an ice-locked barge. Or a lighthouse to mark a reef or some other hazard. Either way, it would surely offer shelter. By now, my face had lost all feeling and I was afraid a good gust of wind would flake it off in pieces, like the coating on a candy apple. I kept my chin ducked low into my collar, watching the rope swing, counting off ten, twelve strokes before glancing up again in hopes that the distance had been closed. Mercifully, it was only a few hundred yards now. If this was an old lighthouse or a cannon bunker, the ice had swollen it to twice its real size, with debris tumbling from north to south. We were more tromping than skating now, with the sheets heaving up in jumbled plates. We tight-rope-walked along the sharp gutter created by a split in another slab. Me and Jimmy Mundell jabbed in the points of our skates, ascending one of the slabs to survey the pile from the top. Long icicles hung thick off the slabs, creating an impression of dungeons and monster fangs. But no sign of anything that resembled a door or a chimney. Rudy whistled us over to a platform that could be reached by giant-steps of crumbled ice. From here, we could access a hole into the core where Boney had crawled back out from a kind of igloo opening. --Down here! This is the way! Art followed Boney into the crawlway. The three of us waited until they cleared then bellied through behind. The last move was through a contorting dip, kind of like a sink trap, that required a spastic dolphin kick before it spit us out the far end. We had entered a large chamber, something on the order of a gymnasium or the lobby of the Hotel Abanaki. At first, nobody really had words for it. The floor had the polished marble sheen of a ballroom, clear to six feet or more, with smelt and perch captured in the freeze like flecks of mineral. Alcoves and grottos were hollowed into the wall, as if waiting to receive statuary. Jimmy skated into the center of the ice and banked into tighter circles, pivoting off a couple of wobbly choctaws and finally flouncing a comic lutz that nobody seemed to appreciate. Art just clapped his arms. --Fuckin’ colder in here than a whore’s armpit. I say we just git. Though the wind couldn’t find as much as a wormhole through the walls, the air seemed super chilled and I concentrated on brief, shallow breaths, afraid that inhaling deep would paralyze my lungs with ice crystals. Jimmy Mundell sculled backwards, leaving hourglass wiggles on the ice. Boney thought he had a brainstorm. --We could bring people out and charge money for tours. Like Luray Caverns or Mammoth Cave or something. --Yeah, we’ll be packing them in come August. Everybody was really too frozen to much appreciate the miracle of it and now Rudy was twisting arms toward the exit hole. Jimmy Mundell wanted just one more full circle of the exceptionally pure ice. But at the far end of the sheet, he hockey-braked so sharply that he had to reach out and catch himself on his finger points, just suspended there for a moment like a spooked crab. Then without really coming off his hands, he dashed back, breathless, his face stony and suddenly old. --What? Rudy caught the fur of Jimmy’s hood as he tried to scramble back into the crawl hole. He flapped a hand at the far end of the ice room as if his mitten had caught fire. --Satan, man! I saw Satan under there! Jimmy clubbed away Rudy’s hand and squirmed back out through the hole. The rest of us just looked at each other kind of dumbass, sure that somebody was going to come up with the punchline at any moment. Then Art wanted an end to the bullshit. Just weight-shifting from skate to skate was enough to carry him forward. The rest of us followed at a safe distance. Then Art held up sharply where the ceiling sloped down and the walls curved in at the deepest end of the ice room. We could definitely distinguish a dim, pulsing red in the ice, repeating at about the frequency of a mantle clock. --What in the fuck’s that? --Maybe Jimmy weren’t shittin’. --If it were Satan, don’t you think he’d’ve melted through by now? Rudy let one skate ride, dragging the other blade drag so that he could spin off and bolt if necessary. But the ice was softened and the momentum ran out almost directly above the source. Rudy just looked down between his skates, kind of tranced-out for a moment by the regular pulse of light. --Rude’? When we realized that Rudy hadn’t been snagged up on a pitch fork or turned to salt, we let our skates coast. The increasing slope of the roof forced us to crick our necks. Using Rudy for cover, we could better see the red pulsing from deep in the ice. Boney then got down on his knees, rubbing the soft ice to try and see better. But then Rudy just started to laugh. --A frickin’ blink-light! --Blink-light! --A navigation beacon. Must be a reef running underneath. That’s howcome all the ice pilin’ up here. Outside, it took nearly ten minutes to pick a route through the ice pile-up and then to get moving again. The ice was clean but seemed to resist the kind of long, easy strides that had taken us away from the Vermont shore. The next artillery crack stood everybody upright, though we kept moving, instinctively realizing that we may need the momentum to spurt out of a jam. Then another concussion sizzled up our skate blades and into our legs, as if a lightning bolt had been building in the ice. Rudy stroked out hard, yanking on the rope and almost pulling Jimmy off his feet. --Bug fuckin’ outta here. Now! We went off at a dash and for a moment I pulled up even with Jimmy Mundell. Then I could see Rudy spring inelegantly off one heel, like a deer suddenly come onto a snake in the trail. When Jimmy leaped next, I realized we were upon another break in the ice. The expansion crack was about six feet and I sprung off one skate point I didn’t get a good push and I bike-pedaled over the sloshing water, flailing wildly as if I might catch the tiniest amount of traction off the air. My lead skate cleared but then shot forward, scissoring me out and slamming me down on my trailing knee. I glanced back and hollered out a warning to the other rope team. --Crack! Art’s eyes got big when he saw the water and his skates just slid off the edge. His yelp was a backwards holler, the air going the wrong way, like somebody blowing into the bell of a horn. His legs thrashed at the water, somehow creating enough turbulence to reach the far rim but leaving him hips and legs in the water. --Art! A rope-length behind, Boney’s racing skates grooved in for the spontaneous acceleration that let him easily leap the crack. He immediately ran out the line and the suddenly taut rope slammed him down. Art pawed at the ice. --Hold me! Hold me! The air squeezed from Art’s crimping lungs, his cry only a thin gasp. Boney splayed out flat and kicked in the toes of his blades, gripping the line in both fists. But the rope was swollen twice it’s thickness with ice and hoar and the line slipped through his bulky boxer mitts. Me, Jimmy, and Rudy got our momentum reversed and it took a minute to get everybody turned without spooling ourselves into the rope. We all dropped then shimmied toward the crack on our asses. Art’s woolen pants quickly wicked up with water, filling the cavities and adding a hundred pounds to the dead weight. Even with four of us pulling on the frozen clothesline, we couldn’t amass enough friction to drag Art out of the water. Art threw off his mittens, clawing the ice with his fingers. He couldn’t really speak anymore and instead just kind of panted fast. We could see pink and then red streaks where the ice was peeling back Art’s fingernails. His color was something like window putty and I could see his skin being sucked into the hollows of his skull. It occurred to me that I was going to be witness to the extinction of the last breath and light from a person I knew. A brain-surge of panic cut off my breath and closed down my vision to a narrow cylinder where all the color went out. All I wanted to do was to run in any direction. Even into the ice gap. But then Rudy threw off his gloves and braided his arms two or three times around the rope, finally getting purchase. With his skate shanks augured wide right and left to anchor a triangle, he spoke in a slow, imperious monotone that had the effect of making this seem like it was more of an annoyance than a crisis. --So? Saving those ice spuds for when something really goes wrong? The cold must have retarded Art’s brain function and Rudy seemed to understand he had to talk to him at the two-year-old level. -- Show me your ice spuds, Art. Show me. Finding the flap button on his pocket, Art pulled out two Phillips screwdrivers and held them up as if waiting for somebody to tell him he was a good boy. Rudy continued with the slow grown-up tone, something that had a composing effect on all of us. At least for me because I didn’t feel like running any more. --Reach out, Art. Can you do that? Reach out and dig ‘em in. It was as if Art had to form a picture of it in his brain first before he stretched out to stab the points into the ice in front of him. He had purchase now and we could slide our hands up the rope to take out the new slack. In less than a minute, we had Art out of the water and yanked him away from the crack like a clubbed seal. Art laid out flat, his whole body shaking like there was an electric current going through him. We just stood around like gawkers at a traffic wreck while Rudy tried to wring the water out of Art’s cuffs. But already the fabric was going stiff. --You gotta get up, Art, and start moving. Rudy grabbed Art’s wrists and with the four of us finally working together, it was like righting a tipped gravestone. Rudy hammered on the glazed knot around his waist but it wouldn’t even fracture. He found his Scout knife and sawed through the rope. --I thought the rope was for safety? He cut loose Jimmy, me, then Boney, leaving us with hobo belts around our waists. --It’s slowing us too much. We got to get where it’s warm. Art’s pants were frozen up solid as sewer pipe and he couldn’t move his legs. Rudy reached back for Art’s wrists and started to pull. At first Rudy just slashed in place. But Boney got behind Art and started to push. We were moving again, though not much faster than a walk. The sky had completely filled in and I couldn’t see Mt. Marcy or any other landfall. I was skating point, scouting ahead for open water. Every time the ice groaned or popped, we all went taut, expecting the sheet to split open and pull us in. On each stride, I had to redouble my focus to keep my ankles upright and stiff, afraid that if they flopped, the tendons wouldn’t be strong enough to hold the bones in their sockets I swore I could feel cells in my thighs dying one by one, each firing off like a burned Christmas bulb. My shoulder joints ached from just the weight of my arms, to the degree that I had to support my elbows in each palm and I skated like a man holding a bag of groceries. My lips were numbed up thicker than any Novocaine shot and my nose was frozen all the way through so that I could feel the prick of ice crystals high up under my eyeballs. I would raise my face into the wind for a moment’s exposure then dip back into my raised lapels and count ten more strokes. Ten down and peek. But the next time I looked up, there seemed to be a fuzzy black speck in the seam where the sky and the ice matched up. Ten down and peek. When I looked up again, the black speck was still there. In fact, it had separated from the horizon and enlarged several times over --Guys…? Jimmy Mundell had seen it too. --That a car? Is it cops? You never heard the mention police in such a wishful tone. Even through the thick wool of watch caps and bomber flaps, we could make out the bubbling murmur of dual glasspack pipes. Those were hot rod mufflers, not any cop cruiser. Even at several hundred yards, the big mouth chrome grill looked like my dad’s Chrysler New Yorker and I have to say, I never looked so forward to an ass-kicking. But Boney was thinking Pontiac AirFlow; Jimmy was dead certain, Olds 88. Art spoke for the first time in fifteen minutes. Trying to force his mouth into the shape of the words, he sounded like a retard. --Who fu’ttin’ cares? Long’s iss gaa heat. At about fifty yards, the black ‘50 Merc’ veered off with no break in the engine pitch. The driver spun the wheel hard right and the back end of the Merc’ came around a hundred and eighty degrees as if to show us his ass. He cut the accelerator as he glided past in reverse, his hands off the wheel and arms out in a mock flying camel. A slight blip of the gas set the wheels churning again and he was coming back at us, this time pitching the car in a flaring three-sixty. He timed the rotation so that the driver side swept past in a graceful radius, his forearm resting on the open window, as casual as if he was cruising girls coming out of high school. --Kinda far from home, ain’t ya? --Yeah. Vermont. The trunk of the Merc’ gavotted past. After an embellished circle, perfect as a school figure, he shimmied left then corrected right a touch, just to show off his control Then with the drive wheels locked, he pounded it into reverse and gunned it for a second, enough to send the car into a mirror-image reversal of the last one-and-a-half spin. The Merc’ slewed past again, controlling the rotation entirely with clutch and throttle pedals. ... [Message clipped] View entire message Reply Forward