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.
--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 is 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.
--Vermont? You shittin’?
The car continued rotating until he again put torque to the rear wheels, just enough of a spurt, blended with the brakes to counter the spin and bring it to a broadside stop, only an arm’s length from where we were now standing.
He was a guy you’d never catch with a hat on, with only the upright collar of his fatigue jacket to keep the wind off his ears. The Army jacket was deeply faded, with only the dye shadows to provide a memory of the unit and rank patches that had been removed. His TV gunslinger smile showed teeth all the way to the molars, a smile that pegged us as somewhere between glorious and mentally defective.
--You crazy cocksuckers skated here? From Vermont?
Rudy moved Boney out of the way so the guy could get the full effect of Art’s funeral parlor complexion.
--My brother got dunked. We gotta get him someplace warm.
--I ain’t running you back to Vermont, if that’s what you’re getting at.
The guy jumped on the accelerator, whipping the Merc’ around so that the rear bumper almost cleaned the bunch of us.
--Pig fucker!
Wheels churning hard now, his speedo probably pegged close to eighty with the car hardly moving, he counter-rotated the Merc’ sharp, the centrifugal pull swinging out the passenger door like it was valet-opened.
--Just watch the skates. I spent all day Thursday at Rayco springing for new seat covers and mats. I don’t want it looking like somebody had bayonet practice in here.
With their joints locked solid, we had to tip and rotate Boney and Jimmy like Queen Anne chairs to fit them into the back seat. There should have been room for three in the back. But we’d have had to break their arms and knees with sledge hammers to make room for another guy. And Art was still so stiff that we had to fit him diagonally across the front seat, his ass never really touching the cushions. Then Rudy held the door for me.
--See if you can worm in there.
--What about you.
--I ain’t going to be much behind.
--I ain’t going to be much behind.
At this point, I was so tired, I’d sit down on a camp fire. But I also knew that if I could finish this, shore to shore, then maybe when people saw me coming, they wouldn’t think of me any more as the kid whose father was a stewbum, the kid whose mother was a sneakaround. If I could finish then I’d be the kid who had skated across Lake Champlain to New York State. I pushed the door closed and stood back with Rudy, waving off the others off.
The Merc’ had been parked outside the roadhouse for fifteen or twenty minutes when me and Rudy realized that the reason our skates wouldn’t glide any more was because we were standing on the frozen sand above the water line. I was so used to the lessened resistance of the ice that I felt wobbly with the friction of normal earth and just sagged down onto the beach. Rudy tugged me to the stairs where he flopped on the bottom tread and literally dragged our asses up the steps to the entrance to the tap room.
Art, Boney, and Jimmy sat on the long, raised hearth of the cold and largely ornamental fireplace, their skates flopped out on their counters. Boney was still wearing his mittens and nobody had even pulled off their hats yet. Art’s trouser legs were starting to melt and the water was pooling around his skates as if he had peed his pants. Rudy unfastened the buttons of his brother’s navy jacket and Art’s shoulders were so slacked that the coat just slid off him.
Drew, the Merc’ driver, came from the bar with shot glasses fit into the wide splay of his fingers, three jiggers to each hand. Boney had finally let one of the mitts drop off and he could barely curl his fingers into a circle to accept one of the shots.
The bartender didn’t want to know where the drinks were going and he just turned away, stepping up on a milk crate to pivot the rabbit ears, trying to improve reception of the Knickerbockers’ game, now down to a couple minutes playing time.
Rudy took two of the jiggers from Drew, one for himself and one for his brother.
He held out the last shot for me. I took the shot and wondered if I would get shit for not drinking it.
--Okay, men. Up to the lips, down to the gums, look out belly, here it comes.
Jimmy took a glug and snapped his head like it was ammonia. Rudy threw the shot against the back of his gullet and swallowed without even a wince.
Outside, there wasn’t enough light left to tell a dog from a wolf. Not that there was ever a chance that we would skate home. Jimmy Mundell’s family car had a split head gasket and Boney’s mom was pulling a shift ‘til midnight. Nobody looked my way and finally Rudy said that if the bartender would let him reverse the charges, he’d call his father and see if he’d come get us.
When my laces had thawed enough to work the knots out, I gently pulled off the skates, afraid that pieces of my feet would peel off with the leather. My socks were sodden, still iced in places, and I was shocked by how cold they were to the touch. The slow return of blood to my feet was searing and I just wanted to get them under warm water. I set down the untouched shot glass and asked the bartender how to get to the men’s john. He pointed me through the dark dance pavilion.
Waddling on my heels, I turned through the archway into a room that was the size of a high school gym. The rotating amber and lime tubes of the Wurlitzer juke box played a kind of aurora borealis effect off the curve of the arched ceiling. A big Pabst beer sign spilled a path of light sufficient to pick out a line through the empty cocktail tables. I was thinking about veering onto the parquet dance floor, just to slide my socks across the hard sheen and see how it compared to the ice. But then I realized that a nicely-dressed couple was seated at the second table just inside the arch. I felt immediately silly in my deformed wool socks and wanted to turn back. But then when the woman looked up, I realized it was my mother. The look of surprise lingered on her face for only an instant before she quickly recomposed herself and turned back to Andre, who was only too happy to pretend I wasn’t there. I think I lingered a moment, sure that my mother would say something to me. Maybe even cuss or holler. But they had both decided that I did not exist.
I went back out to sit with the guys on the fireplace, catching a glimpse out the window of my mother and Andre running toward his BelAir hardtop convertible. If anything, I was at least relieved the other guys hadn’t seen her with the man who wasn’t my father.
Mr. Charlebois turned up about seven o’clock and kicked Art and Rudy’s asses so thoroughly that he ended up with arthritis in his hip and never again walked without a limp. He put me, Jimmy and Boney on notice that our folks would be expected to put in for gas and oil.
It was a two hour drive, by way of Rouses Point where the shores narrow enough to get a single-span bridge across. I know that Mr. Charlbois kept the heat on the lowest setting, just to compound the misery.
My dad was asleep when I came in by the kitchen door about nine-thirty. My mom took a step from the bathroom, her face splotched and bloaty, smelling of witch hazel. She said she told my father I’d stayed over for dinner with my cousins. When she was done with the sink, I should hurry up and get washed for bed. That was about the final word on it and she said if I cared anything about the family, I would leave it all right there. She never spelled out what she meant by “it” but we both knew.
The cold broke at the start of the following week and it rained and went warm through February. That was the last time I got out the skates all winter and by the next season, they were too small to even push my toes into.
We never made the newspapers, though that was probably for the best. And next to nobody ever knew that I was one of the guys who had skated shore to shore, from Vermont to New York State on the coldest day of the year.
Boney finally showed me the Hitler suicide gun. But even I knew it wasn’t a Luger, just a rusty old Dickson Detective Sterling .25, a crappy-ass holdup gun. But, maybe because of what we’d been through on the lake, I never let on.
Boney moved to New Britain, Connecticut that summer after it got around that his mom was caught taking the Demerol and codeine that had been dosed out for her critical care patients. I don’t know if Jimmy Mundell’s heart held out, though years later, I saw something in the paper that he was going to Dartmouth on a scholarship and wanted some day to be a chemical engineer.
Rudy and Art passed me on the street sometimes. They never stopped to talk like friends or anything. But then they never pounded my ass either. Later there was stuff about stolen cigarettes and an underage juvenile. In those days, the courts would give you the choice of jail time or a hall pass directly to the recruiter’s office. The one time I got to Washington, I spent an hour at the Wall, looking for any Arthur or Rudy Charlebois, just because it seemed like that was the way things would come out for them. But neither of the Charley-Boys was there and I wondered if they had ever left their mark anywhere.
I live in California now and some forty years since I last laced up a blade, I have quite abruptly taken up skating again. And in the free skating hour after the hockey leagues, the ice on the mall rink feels squishy and granular, as if it never absolutely freezes. But I just skate oblong loops, trying to find a stride, until the Zamboni moves out to skim and coat the sheet for the five a.m. turnover when the little gosling figure skaters try to twist and blend their herky lutzes and axels into a thing of beauty.
Best story of the year!
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