And the Dark Sacred Night (20 page)

“Glad you stayed?”

“Not sure it’s much better in town, Dad.” Kyle points at the radio. “State of emergency.”

“Oh that. Governors love national attention. Moment in the spotlight.”

Kyle laughs, shakes his head. “I know you want people to
think
nothing fazes you.”

Jasper considers scrambled eggs on the woodstove. Easier than toast. Warmer than cereal. Better fuel. Maybe he’ll treat himself to real eggs, yolks and all; skip that glop in the carton.

Kit’s back, huffing in the doorway. “Dogs look okay.”

But Jasper still needs to feed them. He walks the waist-high path so efficiently shoveled by Kit. The dogs bark, too excited by the snow to resist.

“Pipe down, hepsters,” says Jasper. “No snow day for you.”

He goes to the shed for a spade with which to break the ice on their water trough. As he pushes through the drift against the backside of the fencing, he sees the tracks: two sets, beginning with a scuffled spot where they jumped too easily (how tempting is a fence that’s suddenly shrunk from six to three feet high?), resuming with a full gallop of paw prints pointing toward the hogback.

“Crap. Crap in a bucket of fish.” Jasper surveys the gleeful trajectory of their escape. He knows, without checking, who the culprits are. Mitchum and Zev. Hounds at heart, those two, they’ll choose freedom over food any day. Call of the friggin’ wild. They’ll come back on their own, but the storm isn’t over, and the conditions, wet snow laid down over dry, worry Jasper. (Never mind irate landowners with the inability to tell a dog from a coyote and one of the various firearms Vermont so blithely lets everyone carry about like tote bags.) Three years ago there was a small avalanche in the valley on the opposite side of the mountain, the snowpack sledding down a forty-five-degree ledge. No one caught in its path, but a rescue chopper called it in. Avalanches are rare so early in the season, but he will not rest till he gets those dogs back home.

He breaks the ice, pours out food, shovels a swath inside the fence. Takes attendance as the dogs eat in their relentlessly frantic way. He guessed right.

Kyle and Kit have already cooked up the eggs. They left a good portion in the skillet for Jasper. “Dogs okay?” says Kyle through a mouthful of food.

“Two are thinking they’re especially okay right about now. The two heading off on a toot.”

Kyle, overplaying the sympathy, groans.

“They’ll come back, won’t they?” asks Kit.

“In their own sweet time. But that’s not what I have in mind.” Jasper looks out the window; the snowfall’s weakening. Iron Man may get his wish: a Saturday afternoon of human gridlock on the slopes. If the humans can get to the slopes.

One of the two boys should go with him, but he can’t take both—and one should stay at the house. He knows that if he asks for a volunteer, they’ll both speak up, and he’ll have to choose. He’d rather leave Kit alone in the house, but he’d rather have him as company, too.

“Kit,” he says, before he can think too much, “I’ll need you to head up with me on the sled.”

“Not taking the snowmobile, Dad?” says Kyle.

“Last one gave out. Haven’t replaced it.” In fact, Jasper sold it. Part of that decision was Kyle’s joyride, with a bar buddy, two years ago. Jasper spent three long hours in a panic-stricken rage.

“Pack us coffee, water bottles, crackers, trail mix, dried fruit if I’ve got any left. I’ll get the gear together,” Jasper tells Kit. “Kyle, deal with the cars. Power comes back on, call the shop. Get Jim over here with his plow.”

Kyle salutes his father. “Aye-aye.” More overkill.

“Take extra clothes from my room,” Jasper tells Kit. “Clean thermals in the bottom drawer. I hope clean.”

He glances at the comatose computer and feels its dispiriting pull: the sense that if he can’t hook up to some satellite—scan the weather from above, know who wants to reach him, see the day’s headlines beyond this mother of a storm—the day cannot properly begin.

He thinks of Jonathan Burns’s Web page. He has, for the first time, a name. Which means that he has something concrete to withhold;
no more claiming he can’t remember or doesn’t really know. Perhaps he should have asked Kyle, not Kit, to be his companion.

The dogs whine as soon as they hear the door to the bay in the shed where the sleds are stored; they bark when Jasper comes into view with the harnesses looped over his arm. These new, candy-colored harnesses, which Loraina spotted in a catalog last year, even glow in the dark. “Kids, we have a mission!” he says. Carefully, apologizing to those who’ll stay behind, he releases only the eight dogs he’ll use on this trip.

“Hi hi hi!”
he shrills, calling them to the sled, to the task they love so much—or do in order to make him happy. In the very best dogs, true motivation is never entirely clear. Perhaps it’s all one, pleasing master and self. (Does such a dog even have a self? Do dogs have selves of any semblance? Here’s the sort of philosophizing Jasper misses in losing Rayburn to the fog of dementia.)

Without the poor departed Pluto or the delinquent Mitchum, he’ll put Yoda and Mojo at the head of the tugline.

Jasper helps Kit match the names on the harnesses to the dogs they fit.

Kit looks bright with anticipation. One thing about a storm and its aftermath: your mind takes a wide detour from the most abstract of all your concerns. For today, Kit is a man with a job, possibly several. Kyle, too. Jasper is grateful to the elements for putting off questions he’d rather not have to answer; even for keeping him away from the shop.

The snow hisses under the runners. Sharp snow, Jasper calls it when it’s this wet, this unyielding. The tracks they leave will ice over almost instantly. The return trip may be rough on the team’s paws.

The dogs yip and pant as they find a shared rhythm, get a feel for the weight of the two men they’re hauling. After a series of veerings and lunges away from the tugline, they settle toward a center. The tracks of the renegade dogs quickly leave the trail, of course. Nothing’s that easy. Jasper knows the places they favor, but the sled must follow the meandering track to the top.

Kit crouches before him, under a fleece blanket, holding the front rail.

Jasper concentrates on the trail, trying to see as far ahead as he can. He hates using goggles, but snowflakes sting his eyes. Now and then, heavy clumps of snow fall from high branches, briefly spooking the leaders. This is where Pluto excelled. Nothing much deterred him from forward motion. Mitchum’s the same, but his bravado is rash, not a dividend of experience. He started out as a pet, a puppy too headstrong for life as a suburban pooch. (Where the hell is he now, that scoundrel?)

“
Hi hi hi
,” Jasper urges them on. Not necessary, but it’s reassuring to hear his voice penetrate the harsh brilliance of their surroundings.

At a place where the track dips into a hollow, “Ho!” he shouts once, halting the dogs for a rest. Kit unfolds himself slowly from the sled. Together, they release the dogs, who run in circles, gulping snow, digging, marking random trees. Their noses point toward the sky as they yearn for promising smells. They’re like children begging for a story.

Jasper takes a swig of coffee. Kit declines. “I’m remembering everything,” he says.

“Everything?” Jasper says, alarmed.

“Everything about this place—the trails, where they go. The hideouts I had with my friends, to get away from you and Mom.”

“Don’t tell me things I’d rather not know,” says Jasper. “Even in hindsight, ignorance is bliss.” He whistles to Yoda, who’s wandering. “You must miss your family.”

Kit nods.

“Things all right with Sandra?”

Kit looks directly at Jasper, though most of his face is obscured by the knit hat pulled low, the scarf wrapping his chin. “I’d like to say yes. But no is probably the truth. At least my kids miss me.”

What the hell is Jasper doing? “Ah well, those periods come and go.” With his mittened hand, he makes a hills-and-valleys motion.

“Not counting my mother,” says Kit.

“Sandra’s not your mother, that I promise you. Not to—”

“Insult Mom? Say what you like. Right now I’m pretty pissed at her. I can’t believe I actually came here thinking I could somehow outsmart her.”

Jasper says quickly, “I’m glad you came here. That was a good thing. Good for me, too, by the way. Today, especially!”

Kit gazes around at the dogs, laughing. “Until we disappear into the wilderness, never to be heard from again.”

“Hey. You’re with an elite survivalist guide. I’ve got certificates to prove it. I’m your next best thing to a bulletproof vest.”

“Ski Bum Number One. You think I’ve forgotten?”

He didn’t start mushing until he and Daphne had been married for two or three years. The first time he took her out on a sled, she told him it felt like
Doctor Zhivago:
she was Julie Christie to his Omar Sharif. That, in a crazy way, he misses: a woman to exaggerate the romance of everything, turn up the volume on beauty. You could never say that of Loraina. Loraina’s a leveler. Viv, he imagines, would have viewed the team like a harmless fraternity, including the bitches. “You and your dogs,” she’d have said, the way other women scoff at a husband’s poker crowd, his fellow Sox fans down at the juke joint.

Jasper is the product of one cliché begetting another. He is the man neck deep in dogs because he was denied even one as a child. Why? Because his father was the postal carrier who hated dogs.

Jasper’s mother kept a parakeet in the kitchen, caged in the warmth of a sunny window. Its ceaseless chitterings sabotaged all attempts to eavesdrop on conversations between his parents that sounded tense or urgent. Early on, Jasper figured they had to be about money. Later he found out that they were about his mother’s cancer, something secret and female that took years to eat her from the inside out, the way termites consume a house, finishing the job when Jasper was ten. His father was a veteran of Belleau Wood who carried with him, as heavy as his mail pouch, a lingering darkness, a weary pessimism. He’d arrived late—reluctantly rather than gratefully, Jasper has guessed—at marriage and fatherhood. He died two months after Jasper married Viv. The one thing Jasper could thank his parents for was raising him near a mountain, letting him seek refuge there—from his father’s negative pronouncements on the future of mankind, from (though he didn’t know it then) his mother’s drawn-out sufferings.

Viv was tender about that distant loss. He claimed not to remember much about his mother’s death; there was no ritualized good-bye, no emotional father-son bonding. An aunt had broken the news to
Jasper. Viv told him that all these vaguenesses only deepened the wound. She promised to take care of herself as well as any children they might have. “Don’t you worry: I’ll outlive you,” she said, “even if it’s the last thing I want to do.”

Oh, promises.

An hour later, still no sign of the escaped inmates. Jasper guessed wrong on three spots where he assumed they might be loitering. The coffee’s long gone; the crackers are stale, the dried apricots tough; his fingers feel brittle despite a change of mittens.

Jasper gives the team a second break. This time Kit says very little. He’s probably wishing he had been assigned Kyle’s post. Probably the power’s back on at the house, Kyle sitting on his toasty butt, watching cop-show reruns.

“We’ll do a loop round that hill, head back,” says Jasper. “We can do chili on the woodstove. Nothing like beans to heat you up from inside out. Furnace food. Just the ticket for today.”

Kit merely nods before helping him hitch up the dogs yet again.

The trail that lassos the high foothill before them cleaves to a steep slope on the far side. He will have to maneuver the team tightly for a stretch. But through a break in the trees, they’ll have a broad view of the valley. Jasper will broadcast a big
yahoo
. If the dogs are anywhere out there, they should heed his call.

As they make the curve, Jasper spots a cardinal through the trees below. Is it time for cardinals? Shouldn’t they be on vacation somewhere down south? Viv knew birds; Jasper knows trees, terrain, skies. That final year, they advertised hikes for birders. Viv led the first of those outings. It was the last one, too.

The bird is some distance downhill, but suddenly it moves in a way that corrects the scale: it’s a hell of a lot larger than a cardinal, farther away than his eyes first told him. At the same time, Kit points, and the ersatz cardinal morphs into a person in a red jacket, waving hysterically.

Jasper halts the dogs. They look back at him, whining. Trixie barks.

The red figure begins to climb toward them, clumsy and slow.

“I’ll go,” says Kit. He waves and calls out.

Jasper wants to be the one to go down, but he should stay. The sled is on the narrowest part of the track.

“Help me!” calls the oversize cardinal. “My boyfriend!”

Backcountry fools. Storm chasers. The sort of people who think it’s fun to swim in a riptide, surf in a hurricane, ski in a blizzard, sail across the ocean in a washtub. Idiots who, Jasper thinks privately, deserve whatever fate the elements hold in store. Now Kit is face-to-face with the fool, who gestures spasmodically. All Jasper can hear of their conversation is the helium pitch of the girl’s voice.

Kit motions her to stay where she is and climbs back up the slope.

Panting, he tells Jasper, “Campers. The boyfriend’s leg is broken. Slipped off a ledge.”

“Where the heck is he?”

“Somewhere up ahead. She came toward us when she heard the dogs.”

Jasper thinks about the logistical fix they’re in. The prospect of chili, more glorious than ever, recedes across a day that’s suddenly looking unbearably long.

“She says we’ll see the tent if we go farther along the trail.”

Jasper takes the first-aid kit from the pack attached to the sled. “Couple aspirin and an Ace bandage in here, that’s about it. You go with her. I’ll go round, tie the dogs, climb down from there.”

The dogs are revved now, as if they know the outing’s changed its purpose. Only a minute round the bend, he has to rein them in again when he spots the peak of the tent a couple hundred feet down the slope. Yoda and Trixie bark their objections, and then they’re all putting up a ruckus.