Maybe when I get home it will be different, he thought. Maybe she will have decided she loves me again, or that even if she doesn’t, she will work toward getting to that place again. Maybe.
He felt something shift within him, something as subtle yet significant as a cloud passing across the sun. He looked out the other window, out at the deep blue expanse of Lake Pend Oreille. They were on the long narrow bridge that spanned its eastern harbor, heading into town from the south.
In the summer the lake was festooned with the bright flags of yachts and sailboats, but at the moment there were no boats out on its blue depths; the winter’s ice still extended several hundred yards out toward the open water, still white and brilliant in some places, but in other places it was beginning to discolor back into translucent opaqueness, with mercury-colored trails of slush revealing the paths where ice fishermen had trudged earlier in the winter.
The charred stubble where their warming fires had earlier burned (bright and warm but in no way able to burn down through the thick winter-plate of ice) remained, piles of coal and stump as random and ill sorted upon the paling ice now as bones or entrails cast there by druids interested in some prophecy already gone away. It was an astoundingly lonely visage, and made more lonesome still—Jerry felt the strange thing inside him click or slip or slide further, even as if against his will—by the sight of one or two fishing huts still set up out on that waning ice; and then, somehow horrifically, he saw that some of the ice fishermen were still out there, walking out across that thinning egg-colored ice, carrying their poles and buckets and avoiding narrowly the soupy channels of disintegrating ice but pushing forward nonetheless—risking it all, risking everything, as if not out of joy but deadly habit.
From a distance, Jerry could see how dangerous it was. Already there were man-sized craters of open water out on the shelf ice, in which rested, as if in some paradoxical semblance of tranquillity, the season’s first returning ducks and geese and even swans.
It wasn’t just old people, either, who were streaming out to those distant huts; Jerry could see that plenty of the ice walkers were young people, young men and women walking together, still strong in their youth but certainly old enough to know better.
It was terrible to watch. Finally he couldn’t stand it. Jim was dozing, having just drifted off to sleep—his head rocking up and down like a dead man’s—but Jerry couldn’t help it. He pulled over to the side of the road—Jim sat bolt upright for a second with the catch of fear, then remembered his instructions, and lowered his head once more—and Jerry got out of the truck and began shrieking at the distant, colorful figures making their way across the ice.
“Hey!” he shouted. “You goddamn fools! Hey! Motherfuckers!” he shouted, beginning to curse now for all he was worth. “Go back!” He waved at them across the distance, and a few of them stopped and stared at him, and, unable to discern his words, only his gestures, began to wave back at him.
“Go back!” he ranted. “Oh, you goddamned fools, go back!” But he was unable to make himself heard to them, and after a few moments of waving back to him, they drifted on farther out across the ice, leaning into the mild south wind on the bright, sunny, beautiful day, as he stood there on the bridge in full sight and continued to rant and howl.
With their backs now turned, he felt himself fading already from their consciousness—becoming as strange and irrelevant as the cold coals of their old winter-fires that lay scattered like trash across the barren, temporary snowscape.
As if, even though he stood on the bridge right before them, they could already no longer see him. As if they had chosen to no longer be able to see him.
He kept yelling, but the wind had changed now and was carrying his words away, and they could not even hear his shouts.
The brightly colored walkers reached their huts, opened the doors, and disappeared inside. Jerry watched for a moment longer—half expecting the huts to fall through the ice—but when no tragedy ensued, he got back into the truck, where Jim, with his head still lowered, wanted to know what all the yelling had been about.
“Nothing,” Jerry said. “Nothing, really. I just got scared for a minute, was all. I’m all right now. I was just scared, was all,” he said. “It’s okay now. It’s better.”
Real Town
JICK WAS UP ON the mountain gassing dogs when the windy day blew through. It was their last chance. Some chance.
He has a hank of my hair, which he bought from my ex-boyfriend after we broke up and the ex left the valley. Jick keeps the hair in a little display case in his store. He sells it for ten dollars a lock. He puts the glass box of it up by the window, so that it catches the light. It glows red. Jick knows how much it unnerves me, and he thinks I will buy it all back someday. But I don’t have any money. I have to just look at it. He’s sold two locks of it so far, both to tourists. People will buy anything.
He runs the store here, jacks the prices up so high that you’ve got to be really desperate to buy something. It’s fifty miles to town, and Jick gets a not-so-secret thrill every time someone admits that paying his price is better than driving a hundred miles round trip.
Three dollars for a box of envelopes that costs next to nothing in town, in real town; a dollar for an old drying-out lemon that someone needs for a recipe; two dollars and fifty cents for a quart of milk.
It’s dark in the store, and
