Winter Study

A wolf howled.

Maybe I’ll get eaten, she thought and was somewhat cheered by the prospect of not dying alone.

The wolf howled again, and she realized the sound was coming from the phone in her hand. Bob’s ring tone was the call of a loon and Katherine’s was the howling of a wolf. What else? Anna squinted through the rime that had built up on her eyelashes at the screen. Bob. He must have heard his cell, stopped the snowmobile, and seen Katherine’s number.

The plan was back in place; frail, absurd, but up and running.

“Hallelujah!” Anna whispered and pushed the button lighting up with green. “Bob.” She blew the name out on a soft, long breath, the cliche of the call from the great beyond. Paranoia, guilt and ketamine were on her side. She heard a sharp intake of breath from the other end.

“Katherine?” came a choked voice.

Anna’s lips made it all the way to a smile this time. “Cynthia,” she breathed in the same long, hollow tone. “Cynthia.”

“Bullshit,” Bob said, but his voice was shaky and uncertain. Anna said nothing, just breathed gently into the mouthpiece. A whining sound interrupted, and she realized he was turning the ignition key to start the snowmobile again. She wasn’t going to get the chance to lure him to the cliff top with apparitions.

“Dickhead,” she said sharply, “I’m not dead. I’ve got Katherine’s phone, pictures, notes on the blackmail and your name’s all over it. I’m calling everybody I can think of to tell them the good news. Give my regards to the boys at San Quentin when you get there.”

She hung up. The phone howled again. Bob. She ignored it. Having replaced her glove, she scooped snow over her boots and lap as best she could with one hand and a shoulder that attacked its host every time she moved.

Zach, her first husband, had been an actor. One of the things he loved most in the theater was waiting in the wings to go on. Quiet, in the living dark of backstage, he said he knew he was where he was supposed to be, in a space only he could occupy; he knew who he was and who he could be. He could be as brilliant as Laurence Olivier, as graceful as Nureyev. The audience might come to its feet in wild applause when he finished his monologue. In the wings, all things were possible.

The shriek of the Bearcat came into the edge of her hearing. Bob hadn’t gotten far. As high as he was, he probably could barely keep the machine on the trail. Anna pulled her white hood down over her eyes. She wedged her good hand underneath the branch between her knees, bent forward and, showing the trail the top of her head, she waited.

33

The growl of the snowmobile grew reassuringly louder. Anna focused on the noise to keep her mind from drifting. There would be just the one chance and it was slim. If she failed, she would be joining Adam at the bottom of the cliff. Closing her mind to the distractions of her body, she used the racket to marshal the energies remaining to her. The roar filled her head, and she directed it down her spine and into her good leg, down her uninjured arm and into the working hand until she thrummed with vibrating energy.

The engine pitch changed. Bob was making the last hairpin turns, climbing the switchback to the ridge. Anna repositioned her fingers beneath the branch and pushed her butt against the offshoot running up her back.

There was a final burst of horsepower and the snowmobile came into view. Bob hunkered over the handlebars, thick shoulders rounded down, face raw with cold and wind. He was still bareheaded.

His ears will be frozen off, Anna thought with grim satisfaction. Win or lose, Bob would have something to remember her by every time he looked in the mirror.

He reached the short, steep climb before the trail opened onto the basalt shelf.

The snowmobile ate up the last ten feet with startling speed. Every cell in her body screaming in protest, Anna threw herself back against the upright branch, simultaneously pulling on the one between her knees. Her back slammed against the limb. She felt it give, her weight forcing it back. As she went over, she saw a line of gray bark rearing up from its lair in the snow, the butt caked in white, a shaky pole levered up over the trail.

Her back struck the stone. The tree branch across the trail wrenched violently to the left. The limb jerked from her hand, tearing her glove half off. Her body hurled to the ground beside the rock. Torrents of hurt poured through her, and she wished she had state secrets that she might shout them from enemy rooftops, anything to stop the vicious knives inside her skin. Vision dimmed at the edges. She fought to stay conscious. To pass out now would be to waste all the trudging and weeping this sojourn into physics had cost.

Like a turtle peeking out of its shell, she craned her neck and lifted her head.

Idling unevenly, the riderless machine nosed into a copse of balsam firs munched by hungry moose till they were the size of bonsai trees. She couldn’t see Bob, but he had to be close by. Her wish was that he was dead or dying, but she’d used up the standard three just getting him to answer the phone, bring back the snowmobile and let himself get knocked off of it with a stick. Dead was too much to hope for. The lever had been long enough to take his head off, but she didn’t think she’d managed that. It might have caught him in the shoulder or the chest. If it hadn’t and had only fouled the skis of the snowmobile enough to dump him, he was probably unhurt.

In which case, Anna was dead.

“Not dead. I’m rising, rising, rising,” she whispered to herself, and she pushed up with one arm till she was on hand and knees. The repetition of words swam through her brain with Ellen DeGeneres’s voice and the face of the blue fish she brought to life in Finding Nemo. Comforted by the nonsense, Anna kept on. Standing didn’t strike her as possible at the moment. Leaning back, she lifted the broken ankle and stacked it on top of the other, toes down. “Ouching, ouching, ouching!” she whispered as she settled the splinted boot across the back of the other. Feet crossed, a travois of bone and sinew, she dragged the bad foot along behind as she inched forward one knee at a time, one hand for balance. “Creeping, creeping. I’m creeping creeping, creeping.”

The changing mantra in the spirit of a gay blue fish kept her moving. The snowmobile was less than four yards from where the limb had swept her off her rock. Four yards wasn’t a great distance. One hundred forty-four inches was. When she had reached “Whining, whining, whining,” and was less than a body length from the Holy Grail of vinyl, plastic and horsepower, she saw Bob Menechinn.

He was on his side across a downed trunk a foot in diameter. Legs and butt were on the side away from Anna – a small blessing but worth counting – one arm was outstretched and his head was pillowed on it as if, as he’d lifted a foot over the log, he’d fallen asleep midstep. The down of his parka was ripped out in a puff of white that Anna first mistook for snow. The branch had caught him in the shoulder. The down was tinged with red; not as much as she would have liked but enough to indicate damage. Bob had been thrown off as she had been thrown from her rock. His body spun in the air, and he landed with his head pointed toward the Bearcat.

Anna dearly hoped this meant he suffered great injuries. Good sense and personal preference dictated she crawl over and bash in his skull with a hard object while he was safely unconscious. Unfortunately her injuries would not allow her the additional fifty feet that dictate would require.

Menechinn groaned. Or maybe it was Anna who groaned. She didn’t wait to figure it out. “Moving, moving, moving,” she whispered and dragged herself the last three feet to the idling snowmobile. The seat was no higher than her sternum when she raised herself onto her knees, but it seemed an impossible distance and for a moment she knelt before it as if in prayer, her mind in confusion. In order to travel, she’d stacked her useless limbs in a pretzel-like configuration, and the logistics of getting herself into the saddle baffled her. She began at the bottom, lifting the broken foot from the opposing ankle, then pulling her knee up. Using the seat for leverage, she managed a standing position, turned and sat on the snowmobile. Another few precious seconds were taken straddling the Bearcat, feet on the running boards, hand on the throttle. The only way to go was forward. She needed the open space on the rocky outcropping to turn around.

Gingerly she eased the throttle open. The engine revved, but the machine didn’t move. She rotated it farther back; the skis broke loose and the snowmobile lurched, nearly unseating her. Then she was on the flat and moving slowly. Bob still lay across the downed trunk, his bare head on the snow.

Maybe he was dead. The thought cheered her as she maneuvered the heavy Bearcat