14 Degrees Below Zero (17 page)

His mind was in a riot as he felt his body breaking. The cold was no longer a friend, and no one, it seemed, was going to save him.

Lewis watched Stephen go over the edge. His own body gave a huge convulsive jerk, as though it was he who was doing the falling, and he planted his feet hard in the snow and gasped like he was waking up from a dream. He took a couple of steps forward and looked down to see Stephen tumbling, twisting, moving downward and tossing up snow as he went.

Lewis had woken that morning feeling sure of himself, though filled with strangeness—it was as if he was slipping away and had to do something to set things right. He had swallowed his pills at the kitchen sink with Carew at his feet, the dog nervous and unsettled, sensing the veil of insubstantial breaking-up his master was suffering. Lewis remembered putting his hand on the dog, trying to be reassuring; despite the drifting away in his spirit, Lewis
did
feel sure of himself. He knew this was going to be a day in which everything changed.

He looked around. She wasn’t there.

Stephen had gone limp about halfway down the slope and rolled the final dozen feet or so through a snow-covered thicket and—could it be? was it possible?—into the water. Lewis watched in rapt fascination as Stephen broke through the ice and sank slowly into the shallow water. He must have been hurt, because he surely could have simply
sat up
and saved himself.

But he didn’t. He sank. His face, looking up to the gray sky, disappeared under the black water.

Lewis looked around again. There was no one on the path. No one had seen what had taken place.

Was the situation redeemable?
I just wanted to talk. He started the fight. It was an accident that he went over the edge. The restraining order he filed against me? Hysteria. I was trying to explain why it was unnecessary.

Of course the
point
of restraining orders was that the time for explaining was past.

Cars crossed the bridge. No one seemed to be slowing. Lewis could see Stephen’s knees poking out of the water’s surface, but his head remained submerged.

Got to go down there!
a voice screamed inside Lewis’s head.
Got to save him! For God’s sake, don’t let this happen!

He took a step toward the edge. He could be down there in thirty seconds. He could pull Stephen from the water and haul him to a doctor. No, no: the cell phone. He turned it on.

He could dial 911 and put a stop to this. He could simply tell the truth: that he had found Stephen’s office door unlocked and saw his clothes inside, deduced that Stephen had gone running, remembered that the path along the river was his route of choice. He wasn’t armed. He hadn’t premeditated murder.

And murder was what this was becoming. Another murder.

Lewis felt someone present, watching him, but he remained alone amid the heavy snow and the trees and the crushing silence. His hands shook and his chest burned. The seconds were passing, telescoping, and still he hadn’t gone down there to help Stephen.

His head swiveled.
There.
Back the way he had come, walking away. It was her. He caught a faint glimpse of her hair pulled back from her face.

Lewis sprinted through the trees. He caught one more glimpse of her in the snow, moving past an old tangled elm. But when he reached the top, she was gone again.

“Don’t go,” he said, but in reply he had only the cold and the wetness of falling snow against his face.

It was the end and he knew it. He drew his coat tight around his neck as he felt the temperature drop.

In the car, the public radio was prattling on as though nothing had happened. Lewis took the streets back to his house.

“There’s a travelers’ advisory for greater Minnesota covering the rest of the afternoon and through the night,” intoned Gary Eichten, the afternoon host. “We’re looking at about a foot more snow on top of what we already have, then there’s a front of arctic air moving in by morning—right now, the forecast is for temperatures well below zero.”

Lewis steered his car through South Minneapolis, past the cottages and four-stackers, the odd turrets, add-ons, the decaying apartments. All was covered in white, as though hiding from him as he steered in a great bubble of silence.

18. EVERY FEW YEARS A REAL CLIMATOLOGICAL HORROR CAME ALONG.

J
ay parked her car, sort of—she sailed it into a great fluffy mound of snow, her front tires grinding when they made contact with the curb. She switched off the engine and sat there for a minute, letting her breath fog up the windshield.

This was turning out to be a vengeful witch of a snowstorm. Car headlights shone feebly through the white blanket that comprised the lower atmosphere. The awnings in front of the shops sagged. Every so often the wind whipped up, rearranging the drifts and creating a complete whiteout. A couple of doors down from where Jay was parked, an old guy was quixotically shoveling the path in front of his hardware store. As soon as he scraped the concrete, it was covered anew.

No one was going to pay her for sitting in her car all morning, so Jay got out—just in time to have her door nearly lopped off by a passing bus. She hugged her car until the thing passed, racing hard as though it knew of a warmer place just over the curve of the horizon.

Inside the Cogito (she was supposed, she recalled fleetingly, to refer to the place as just
Cogito,
but found it impossible) the lights were on but the place was silent and shadowy. Snow was piling up on the windows and blocking out the light.

Phil, Jorge, and Fowler were in the kitchen, each trying scrupulously to pretend that the other two did not exist. Fowler was tossing some meat into a sizzling pan, and Jorge was making a desultory effort at slicing some carrots and onions. Phil was looking at the business section of the
Star-Tribune.

“Howdy, kid,” said Fowler.

“This is a cheerful scene,” said Jay as she began to extricate herself from her snow-covered boots. She was creating a small lake of water over by the manager’s desk, but it was bad form for anyone to complain about such things given the circumstances.

“Hey, I get paid the same,” said Fowler, staring at the cooking meat. “But we’re not gonna get anyone in here today. I was just done explaining that to Boss Wonderboy over there.”

Phil stared at the newspaper as if he hadn’t heard.

“You people are crazy,” Jorge said, a little sadly. “Going out in this weather? Expecting people to come to a
restaurant
?”

“The boss said to stay open for a couple of hours,” Phil said, his voice Wizard-of-Oz-like from behind the headlines. “I don’t see why you want to go home. You don’t get paid if you go home.”

“I’m just talking fucking common sense,” Fowler said.

“Last time I checked,” Phil said calmly, “it was impossible to fuck common sense. Might be nice to try, though.”

“They are both insane,” Jorge said to Jay, as though she was the only one left who hadn’t taken total leave of rationality.

Jay had indeed thought about not coming to work, when she woke and saw the snow piling up to obscure the curbs and almost reach the wheel wells of cars. But that wasn’t the way things were done in Minnesota. It would take worse to keep everyone indoors.

“There aren’t too many people out there,” Jay said, peeling off one of her two sweaters and instinctively turning away from Phil, who suddenly took a lot less interest in the paper.

“I know that,” he said, sitting on his desk. “I’ll be surprised if we get a single customer. We’ll give it an hour and a half, then the boss won’t be able to give us shit. It’s only going to get worse with that cold snap coming in overnight.”

“Cold snap?” Jay asked.

“Don’t you have a radio, kid?” Fowler asked with his familiar gruff kindness.

“Didn’t turn it on,” Jay admitted.

“It’s gonna get cold,
chica,
” said Jorge, stabbing the air with his knife.

“Colder than
this
?” Jay said.

“Try subzero,” said Phil. “Major Canadian air mass.”

“
Cruel
cold,” Fowler said, with more than a trace of relish. “We’re going to be locked in for days.”

Jay had received news of this kind many times throughout her life. One did not live in Minnesota without acquiring an intimate knowledge of the variations and many permutations of extreme cold and the things it did to water, air, and the human body. But it was only every few years that a real climatological horror came along—the kind of atmospheric bad luck streak that evoked a very real and pragmatic fear of freezing to death. It was always the same: the air pulled down by chance from the Arctic, the ballooning shape on the weather map as the cold descended into Canada, then crossed the border at International Falls. It didn’t have that much farther to go before it reached Minneapolis.

“The restaurant business is not going to flourish this week,” said Phil, seemingly inspired by the business analysis he had just been reading. “People don’t go out in weather like this.”

“That’s because they don’t like to
die,
” Fowler said, and Jay could see that she had walked into an ongoing philosophical debate in which Phil was grudgingly coming around to the idea of suspending business as usual, while Fowler was advocating apocalyptic panic.

Fowler, of course, was not a native. He kept glancing at the window, the way the snow kept coming and how the wind rattled the loose sill. Jorge, for his part, seemed resigned to his fate, although if he were going to freeze to death, it would not be before he had made clear his disdain for the entire project of having settled this plot of land at some point in the wilderness of the past.

“My cousin talked me into moving here,” Jorge explained to Jay, refusing to include the men. “Lots of work. Nice in the summer. And now look.”

He motioned at the window. Fowler let out a snort of derision.

“Would you stop it?” he barked. “You sound like a little girl!”

“Actually, my little girl is taking it all pretty well,” Jay observed.

“You can call me all the names you want,” Jorge said calmly. “Because you are a fucking crazy man. I don’t even listen. To him.”

That last part was delivered, of course, for Jay’s benefit. There was no settling things between Fowler and Jorge—who, in fact, deep down, did
not
like each other, and were
not
establishing a warm bond beneath their constant antagonism.

“Excuse me?” said a woman’s voice. “Are you open?”

She was middle-aged, in jeans and a parka, with an embarrassed-looking teenage boy several paces behind her. She had walked right into the middle of the kitchen without anyone noticing. Now the trio who staffed Cogito wore matching expressions of shock, as though a Tibetan Sherpa had just come into the room and announced that he was setting up base camp on the cutting board.

“Yeah,” Phil said, the first to recover. “We’re open.”

“Pick a table,” Jay said. “I’ll bring out menus and water.”

“Oh, good,” said the woman gratefully. “I was afraid nothing would be open today. You know, the weather.”

“Yeah,” Jay replied. “We know.”

As they left the kitchen the boy shot Jay a look of profound mortification and a desperate need to convey to her that he was on board with nothing his mother did or said. He was sort of cute, in an underage, it’s-all-wrong kind of way.

The day’s shipments hadn’t come in—presumably the trucks were spinning tires in some narrow alley and contemplating packing it in. Mother and son were generally sympathetic to this, and made do with a sandwich for the boy and a Cobb salad for his mother. Jay pretended to tally up receipts in the corner for a while—there were, of course, no receipts to tally because there had been no other diners so far—and took a kind of distracted pleasure in watching the mother’s efforts to cheer up her highly resistant son. The mother, thin on top and heavy-hipped, seemed genuinely perplexed. The boy had probably been perfectly reasonable and agreeable just a couple of years before. Well, Jay thought, that’s what sex did to people. That stuff going on between his legs had rendered his role in family life superfluous and ridiculous. Testosterone would take him away. That’s what it was designed to do.

It was somehow like the end of things. Jay felt a sensation that eluded attempts at definition—it was the sort of sense she’d had when she graduated from high school, or when she learned she was pregnant. She was done with something. Sure, it had to do with breaking up with Stephen, but it was deeper than that. It was as though the snow was hiding an old world that wouldn’t reemerge when the thaw came.

After Mom and Jake (that was his name, Jay learned by eavesdropping) were done with their unspectacular meal, Mom paid and left a halfway decent tip, then they were gone. Jay cleared their plates and glasses, the room silent and dark. She hadn’t even thought to turn on the stereo.

Back in the kitchen Phil was sitting at his desk with his head in his hands while Fowler and Jorge were engrossed in an argument about which supermarket was best. Jay quickly gleaned that Jorge, despite the limitations of his salary, firmly adhered to the bourgeois creature comforts of Kowalski’s. Fowler, the chef, didn’t need any of that fancy shit to cook for himself and opted for the good, honest, plebeian fare at Rainbow.

“You guys will argue about anything,” Jay said.

“Fuck him,” Fowler said, eliminating Jorge from the world with a wave of his spatula. “Hey. You want some eggs?”

“No, thanks,” Jay said, sounding more despondent than she intended. “I’m not even hungry. Hey, what’s the matter with him?”

“What’s the matter with
him,
” Phil said, staring down at the desk, “is that I’m getting a
migraine
and I left my
Maxalt
at home and it’s already too late to take it and I’m going to be in hell for the next twelve hours.”

“Mother of God,” Jorge pronounced, the soul of exasperation. “Go
home,
man. Get your medicine.”

“It’s too late,” Phil moaned. “It’s too late for me.”

“It’s too late for all of us,” Fowler muttered, attacking the grill with his spatula as though it embodied Phil’s headache, Kowalski’s, Jorge, and the weather outside.

Well, it was official, as far as Jay was concerned. Winter psychosis had set in. There was only so much the spirit could take, and those snowy walls were more than enough without the prospect of the awful cold to come. It was the anticipation that was always the worst, the certainty of the hardship and real physical
pain
and danger that they would all be up against come morning. The air would hurt the skin, each gentle breeze would jab with invisible needles. Skin can freeze on contact—they drummed that happy little fact into Jay’s head when she was a little girl. To this day she could easily conjure images of great slabs of flesh blackening and slowly dying off, then falling from her cheeks and nose. It happened to people.

There were no more customers in the next hour. Phil loosened his tie and lay prone on his desk, moaning and pitying himself with gusto. Jorge washed what dishes were to be washed, and Fowler sank into a silent funk without any pretense of preparing specials, or prepping any more food, or behaving in any manner like a chef. Instead he smoked and drank coffee and looked out the front window.

“Let’s shut this place down,” he said to Jay when she came into the dining room.

“Looks like the thing to do,” she replied.

“Should never have come in the first place.” Fowler defiantly stubbed out his latest cigarette on the wood floor, where it left a tidy little burn mark.

“I would have liked to make more than five dollars in tips today,” Jay told him.

Fowler looked up at her, seemingly stunned to hear her speak of money, and apparently chagrined at the extent of his own kvetching.

“Yeah, this sucks for you,” he said. “How’s that beautiful little girl, anyway?”

“Great,” Jay said. “You know.”

“What else is the matter?” Fowler asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You have a funny look,” he explained. “Like you’ve decided something.”

“Funny, it feels like I have but I’m not sure what it is,” Jay said. “You know, everything’s more complicated when you have a kid.”

Fowler, a compact and perpetually self-contained man, had a daughter in Milwaukee whom he saw at most once a year. The reasons for this were vague, almost certainly very complicated, and a source of regret for Fowler.

“You’ll be all right,” he said. “One shift does not a month’s pay make.”

“See, I have to be like you,” Jay deadpanned. “More philosophical.”

This launched Fowler into a wheezing laugh in which his end-times gloom lifted all at once. Probably it was the prospect of another day at Cogito, rather than the weather horrors, that had put him in his terminal state.

“I think I’m going to go get philosophical with a glass of Wild Turkey at the C.C. Club,” Fowler said, gesturing down the street. “Want to come along?”

The thought of socializing with Fowler had never occurred to Jay—though she knew his paternal attitude toward her precluded the possibility that he was up to something.

“Some other time,” Jay said. “I think I’m going to pull Ramona out of day care early. They’ll probably want to close as early as they can.”

“Snowed in with a bunch of screaming brats,” Fowler said. “No thanks. I’d rather grill burgers all day.”

“You and me both,” said Jay.

Jorge and Phil emerged from the back fully done up in their winter gear. Jorge in particular was a sight—his brown face poked out from the big white puffy hood of his coat, as though he were already buried in snow before stepping foot outside. Phil wore no hat, and walked slowly with a queasy expression on his pale face.

“You all right to drive home?” Fowler asked.

“Yeah, thanks,” Phil said. He seemed to be fighting not to vomit. “Just gotta get. To bed. Take my pills.”

Fowler almost laughed, but Phil’s distress was too great for that. Instead he settled for a dismayed shake of his head.

“What a bunch we make,” he said.

Jay put her hand on the doorknob.

“At least we have youth and beauty here to keep us from going completely crazy,” Jorge said with a warm smile.

It took Jay a moment to realize he was talking about her. And there was no weird come-on beneath the surface—
that
would have come from Phil, who was effectively neutered for the moment.