66

DAVID SAW THE WOMAN IN HER PINK SNOWMOBILE SUIT and hood up come out of the station and wave, almost daintily. And so, apparently, did Janie, who reared in the pack so suddenly David almost went over backward, Janie then tucking into herself. She was imagining things, had reared like this a number of times, each time almost sending him over backward, and like the other times, she was still, after, but her knees jabbing him in the kidneys, yet in his head was a hot, raw buzz, even as the woman waved, and she was moving out to help him, and he felt himself softening in the cold, his whole body nearly falling into it, this soon-to-be rescue, someone else would finish it, other people would lift Janie off his back, would see to Max, and he was feverish with the thought, and the woman got into the car there alongside the station, one of those ugly Chryslers with the concave sides, an Imperial, or a New Yorker, silver-blue, and the woman held the wheel in both her hands—odd, the woman gripping the wheel like that, and the rear tires spinning frenetically on the ice, making an icy grating, and the car moved away from the station on the ice, and David came on, exhausted, moving toward the side road, a distance in from the highway now, his jacket open, and the sun burst through a cloud, and he saw on the hillside back and above the gas station a line of red, and then silver, the red line was on a silver background, in the trees, and something in his head told him Canoe, and he didn’t know why that should be important, the whole hillside lit up suddenly, and a man in a black snowmobile suit skittering down, like a spider, deadly.

He was squat, and heavy, but something in David’s mind stuck on it, and he watched the man coming down through the trees opposite, and the man fell, and picked himself up again, then was shouting over the whining of the Chrysler’s tires, he was trying to get to the woman in the car, and when David came out on the ice of the service road, he fell again, the ice thick and glazed here, but got up on his knees, to face the car, the last light out of the west blinding, and the car arcing right at them and in a way David did not trust, this, too, was wrong somehow, and he quickly yanked the sled into the trees off the service road, and the car slowed, the man in the trees behind the station waving his hands, at what David couldn’t tell, and shouting something, and when the car got closer, a man in a hooded blue jacket shot up beside the woman in her pink snowmobile suit, and David knew him instantly from the jacket, his heart kicking, and the car now moving with a kind of terrible mass, looming up, dented grill and an enormous length of hood, the man who’d attacked Janie there, in the passenger seat, using the woman to get to him, and David reached into his jacket pocket, and as if in a dream, lifted out the gun, and the woman in the pink snowmobile suit, a hostage he was sure, ducked, and he felt the safety under his thumb and snicked it off, and swung to track the face in the passenger seat behind the windshield, and, sure now, he squeezed off a shot, and the gun kicked in his hand and the windshield pocked, the car hugely near, but coming on anyway, still coming on, Penry dodging in his seat, even though he was sure he must have hit him, and he squeezed again, and the gun kicked, the glass shattering in a diamond spray, and a splash of blood on the windshield now, and he pulled again, and again, and again, until he was pulling on nothing, dry-firing, and he stood there in the trees, and Penry’s head slumped into that space between the dashboard and windshield, and the woman in the pink suit hunched down, so he could only see her eyes through the steering wheel, the pink peak of the suit there, and the car came on still, looming up through the trees onto the side road, the windows pocked with holes and stained red, splashes of blood everywhere, and the car’s tires locking on the ice, just short of David, the car swinging around, rusted chrome bumper, deadly, missing David by nothing, the passing of it making him blink, the car going around yet again, and a hundred feet beyond him, hitting a stump with a loud metal rending, and David, holding the heavy gun, his heart in his throat, and teeth clenched, waited.

And there was nothing. And this inky gloom filled him with an awful weight.

Had he shot the woman somehow? In her pink suit? Shouldn’t she be screaming, or running to him?

He was afraid to look. Couldn’t move.

This terrible stillness in the car, nothing but the man in the black snowmobile suit, distant, trying to get across the ice to him—he burst out from the station now, running toward him, shouting.

Was he one of them he hadn’t seen?

And David, even with Janie on his back, as if underwater, his own breathing seeming loud to him, left the sled and Max on it behind him, moved toward the car, the car having spun to face the station, Penry slumped against the passenger window, so that David went to the driver’s side and, looking in, saw what remained of a face, and long hair with barrettes in it, bloodied in the hooded dark jacket.

And beside it—

The pink-suited . . . whoever it was spun up, and into the glass. A face in the window, eyes wide, glaring.

Penry.

David tried to hold the door shut, but when he did, Penry scrambled across the seat, climbing over the body there, the body just now blocking the handle, and David, with Janie recoiling in the pack, bolted down the slope to their right and into the trees, in knee-deep snow catching the trees and spinning himself off and down the steep slope to the lake, but only gaining distance, nothing more, a little time, seconds, because the lake was down there, and Penry was cursing behind him, and it was then he felt it, or did he see it?

This shadow, paralleling them in the trees, moving quietly, and hugely there, he couldn’t believe it, or was it the man he hadn’t seen all this time, who’d given him the look from the porch that morning, was it that man in the trees? Jack? And a cry in his throat, he kept moving, but it was all for nothing, the lake coming up, more knee-deep snow here and ice, and still, he just sensed it, or was he just wishing it, that this was Gaiwin in the trees, or was that just the way you died, imagining things were other than they were, even to the last second, wishing, and hoping, and moving? And as he came through the last stand of pines, Penry bore down on them, was on top of them suddenly, reaching for the pack, catching Janie in it, Janie, just then, alone, facing Penry, and she let go a shrill cry, a caterwauling that cut the air, and went silent, and David kicked hard and spun to his right, throwing Penry off, Penry falling hard and cursing, and David making distance from him, Janie a leaden weight in the pack, her body bouncing with him as he leapt down the hillside, ran.

How could he be running, after what he’d felt coming in, barely able to lift his feet? But for Janie, gone again, maybe forever, but he would save her, he would, he thought, and the thought of it propelled him down the remainder of the hillside, and when he stopped, just back of shore, his feet shot out to both sides, the ice here, on the stone-lipped shoreline, the worst, and he moved along it, his lungs burning something awful, and when he came to an abutment of granite, blocking the shoreline, glazed and shining in this last burst of sun, he turned.

Penry walked slowly toward him, had a tire iron in his hand, and even as Penry moved toward them, the man in the black snowmobile suit, blocks back up shore, shouted, “Stop, for God’s sake! Stop, or I’ll goddamn shoot you!”

But he couldn’t shoot. Penry, in the pink suit, was in the way.

Just out from the abutment, there was a snow-covered hummock, trees growing around to the side and over it, and David tried to go over it, and slid back down. It was only eight, ten feet high, and not that steep, but the ice made climbing it impossible.

Penry came on, this dull look in his eyes.

David glanced up into the trees. He could try to climb back up the slope, but it would be too slow. And so he turned, and he lifted the gun.

But Penry came on anyway, he knew about guns, and this one a revolver, he had heard the dry-firing, or had counted the shots, had planned it all, even with whoever he’d had in the car, Penry stepping closer, this solemn look on his face, they were all done fooling around, Penry was done fooling around, and when he was nearly on top of David, in that pink suit, but the suit bloody, spattered with blood, David dropped the gun, reached for the knife on his belt, but his hand trembling so badly he couldn’t get the snap off the sheath, get the knife out, even as Penry moved closer yet, brandishing the tire iron, smeared red.

Penry held it by the angled end, had reach on David, nearly two feet.

He feinted right, whipped the iron around, nicked David’s cheek, then brought the iron around again, closer, and David swung the knife at his middle so Penry reared back, David nearly losing his balance on the ice, Janie’s dead weight in the pack throwing him off, David ducking when Penry sent the tire iron whiffing by his head again, and, too low on his feet now, David thought, in that bubble of no time, and all time—

He would have to do it. Spring from the ice, stab Penry, not cut him, and if he was quick, and put all he had into it, Janie would survive, he could do that much, he would do it.

But as he was preparing to spring at Penry, Penry whipped the tire iron down, so that David checked his jab, the tire iron barely missing the knife in his fisted hand, and his feet skidded out from under him, Penry bolting in to stand over him.

He raised the tire iron over his head to strike, and just then, David heard an airy whirring—something flying at them from the trees—and there was a hollow, fleshy crack, Penry, the tire iron lifted above his head, the hatchet buried in his mouth, and in that stunned moment, David yanked Penry to himself by the pink suit, even as Penry let go a howl, struck David across the neck with the tire iron, the blow knocking David sideways, but David plunging the knife into Penry’s middle.

Penry’s shocked face in his, staring, he rent Penry from his stomach to his ribs, drove the knife up and through Penry, Penry falling on him, and David’s head over Penry’s shoulder, he saw the long silver blade of the knife slick with blood jutting from Penry’s back, the black-suited man up shore bellowing, “My God! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!”

David fell to his knees, his lungs burning. He turned Penry’s body off him, Penry in the pink snowmobile suit in front of him, on his stomach, and only a shadow in the trees above him, a sound, a crack, a broken branch to make him believe anyone had been there at all.

But for the hatchet.

And then, even as the man in the black snowmobile suit slowed, nearing David, his brows furrowing, and this look of confusion on his face, from a distance seeing the cork-soled boots jutting from the pink fabric of the snowmobile suit, no—not his wife’s boots—David had the knife free, brandished it in his direction.

The man in the black snowmobile suit stood an arm’s length back of David, his pistol hanging forlornly from his hand, Penry between them on the ice. Janie in the pack lay inert against David’s spine. A jay called raucously in the trees.

And only when he saw the man meant them no harm did David set the knife on the ice.

Later, Cliff Hoffarber would say someone had been there with David. He’d swear it. No, not Penry, he’d tell the police. Someone had been in the trees. Or something, he’d say.

But both the knife and the hatchet, David would protest, had been his. And all had been confusion just then, anyway, and who could say what the man had seen?

After all, Cliff Hoffarber had mistaken Penry, in the pink snowmobile suit, for his wife, hadn’t he? He’d dropped to his knees beside David, rolled the body over, and the hood fell back. Here Penry’s face, the hatchet having nearly split his jaw in half, and one eye opaque from having been in contact with the ice, Penry rent up his belly, and in that instant, he realized who it had been in the car, who David had shot in the car, and what this man here, lying on his back, staring at nothing, had done.

Not only to his wife, but to this boy and, he assumed, his sister, on his back.

And he asked, “Who is it up there on the sled?”

And David told him, and the man scrambled back up the hillside and returned moments later, bent low over David, and in a near whisper, said, “I’m sorry, son. Your father didn’t make it. He’s dead.” And David, this something torn from him, a wail rising shrill and long in him, but not a note of it issuing from his mouth, sat heavily on the ice, in the blood that ran from Penry, sat right in the blood, a pool of it, turning the ice pink in the late-afternoon light, and in his pain, he lowered his gloved hand to the pearl-handled gun in the water, thinking to lift it, reload it, have done with things, having failed so badly, but he had no more shells, so instead pressed his finger into the blood, then raised the finger of the glove to his mouth and tasted it, as he did, the man saying something about the police coming, he’d fixed the phone line, and his wife dead, and he asked where they’d been, and who it was here, and he went to the pack behind David, and after a time, kneeling, a quiet, and a tenderness in him, the man kneeling in the blood, too, the blood staining his pants, he got Janie out of the pack, and he didn’t have to say it, David already knew, the man cradling Janie, who heard and saw nothing, in his arms.

“He hurt the little girl here?”

“Yes,” David said.

The man lifted the hood away from Janie’s head. He gritted his teeth and nodded, Janie’s pallor and unconscious weight making it clear just how sick she was.

“You did all right, son,” the man said.

David let his mouth drop open, and out of him came something like a sigh.