Captain Quad (35 page)

The trip in took twenty-five minutes at a comfortable cruising speed of thirty. The hut was still there, nestled in the brush by the lake. Snow encased it to just below the roofline, and it took the three men twenty minutes to dig it out. Once it was free, they dragged it on skids to a likely-looking spot near the middle of the frozen lake.

"All right," Rhett said once the hut was positioned. "Let's get some holes cut."

"Fuckin' A," Jerry agreed, and stamped off to gas up the auger.

The snowfall had subsided, but the wind had come up again, whining and bitter. As it twisted across the lake, it picked up snow phantoms and spun them in dervish circles. The sun, which had just sailed free of the trees, looked like a healing bullethole in the white belly of the sky. To Mike Gore, who numbly busied himself offloading gear, it seemed like a vision of hell. Why he abandoned the fireside warmth of his home year after year to come out here and let these assholes try to kill him was beyond him. It hadn't really been fun since. . . well, since the last time Peter had made the trip. With Peter along it had always been more of a legitimate fishing trip, just four good friends getting together to share in the rigors and rewards of a rugged winter sport. Sure, they'd downed a few cold ones in those days too, but it had never degenerated into these pie-eyed, falling-down puke fests.

As he did every year, Mike Gore swore this would be the last time he'd make the trip. . . but it was a lie. He would keep on coming, and keep on wondering why. Pondering it now, he guessed it was probably just some juvenile attempt to keep the good old days alive. And yet, watching his two old friends degenerate so drastically over the years, he began to wonder how good those old days had really been. For Mike, these were the best days of his life. He had a wife, two gorgeous kids, and all things being equal, he'd be the manager of his own pharmacy inside of a year.

There was a balky, ratcheting sound as Jerry yanked the ice auger's starter cord. The 8hp engine farted rudely, releasing a puff of oily smoke, then kicked over. When he triggered the throttle, the auger blade spun with an evil whir.

"Where d'you want the bait hole?" Jerry shouted, his grin triumphant. He just loved getting that auger going on the first pull.

"Up your arse," Rhett hollered back at him, laughing coarsely.

In response, Jerry swung the cumbersome auger overhead, displaying a wiry strength that seldom failed to amaze Rhett Kiley. With the whirring blade pointed skyward, he fingered the throttle repeatedly, waggling his head and shimmying his body, howling like a Ward C psycho. With his brown balaclava concealing all but his facial holes, he might have been lovable ole Leatherface himself.

"Cut the shit," Rhett warned, a little unnerved by this display.

"Right," Jerry said, letting the auger down. "Sorry, Rhett, I—"

"Just drill the fuckin' holes and let's get on with it. Say?"

Looking baffled and stung, Jerry seated the auger tip in the ice and squeezed the throttle. The randy engine belched, and the blade cored down about a foot into the hard-packed ice. When Jerry drew out the blade Mike kicked the ice chips away, then emptied a clear plastic bait bag into the hole. An assortment of minnows—shiners, suckers, chubs—wriggled affrightedly in this new enclosure.

"Now," Rhett said, assuming his customary role as foreman. "Sink a hole here"—he indicated a spot about six feet out from the shack—"and another in front of the condo. I'll rig the tip-ups while the drug dealer over here fires up the heater." He favored Gore with a grin. "Think you can handle that, Mikey?"

"Asshole," Mike muttered. But he slumped off to perform this task.

Once Jerry got the holes drilled, he leaned the auger against the shack and then stood there, squinting into the snowy glare. A few minutes later he hiked back to the snowmobiles, a distance of about two hundred yards. Rhett spotted him there, and hollered over the moan of the wind. . . but then he realized that Jerry was taking a whiz and left him to his business. When it came to his toilet habits Jerry was the original little girl. Grinning to himself, Rhett tramped over to the bait hole to select some bait.

By seven all was in order. The tip-ups were rooted by their holes, the lures baited, the men seated comfortably in the hut. Through the partially open door they could watch their tip-ups: clever rigs like arms rising out of the snow, with jointed elbows that fed line from a spool and jigged up and down in the breeze, luring the fish. The whiskey was cold, the heater hot, and Rhett could almost taste that first scrumptious pan-fried fillet. Even Mike had begun to show signs of enjoyment.

Only Jerry seemed quietly out of sorts. Rhett noticed this, but he was getting too blasted to give a shit. Maybe the dozy little wanker had a toothache. He wasn't drinking, which was weird, and he kept screwing his face into knots, as if trying to puzzle out some difficult mathematical problem. Rhett chuckled at this thought and took another gulp of whiskey. Poor old Jer. Since taking it in the head back in '83, he could barely count out change for a dollar.

Seated across from Rhett, Mike grinned nostalgically. His post-binge ailments had diminished to a tolerable grumble, and although he was taking it easy on the rotgut, his head had taken up a comfortable buzz.

"Remember the trip we made out here back in. . . what was it? Grade twelve? The time Jerry wandered off to take a dump behind that old beaver dam and fell through the ice?"

Rhett snorted laughter. "Fuckin' A. Whadda dipshit. Froze just about cock-stiff before Gardner belly-crawled over and hauled him out."

"Lookit 'im," Mike chided. "Pretending he doesn't hear us." He nudged Jerry with an elbow. "'Member that, Jer?"

Guffawing, Rhett said, "I remember Gardner stripping down to his long johns and handing Jeter half of his clothes. . .”

Rhett's voice trailed off, and a silence freighted with gloom filled the shack. Mike finally broke it, broaching a subject that had become oddly taboo over the years.

"Either of you guys ever go see him?"

"Nah," Rhett said, feigning indifference. "What's the point? The guy's crocked out, shittin' his bed, stinkin' to the high heaven. If it was me, I wouldn't want a bunch of dropouts hangin' around, reminding me of all the fun I was missing." This last was said with a trace of bitterness that was not lost on Mike.

"You're still pissed at him, aren't you?" Mike said. "Christ. It wasn't his fault you never got picked up by the scouts."

Rhett remained stubbornly silent.

"I've been thinking," Mike said, cutting to the chase. "What if we just. . . dropped in on him, all three of us. Monday, say. What the fuck? Surprise him."

"It's been a lotta years," Rhett said, his voice taking on a hard edge that made Mike uneasy. "How do we know if he's even still alive?"

"We could check. I mean, don't you feel even the slightest bit guilty? Haven't you ever tried to put yourself in his shoes?"

Rhett snorted. "Turnips don't wear shoes."

"Fine," Mike said. "Forget I brought it up."

"Fuckin' A."

"I'll go by my—"

"Why don't you just do that, Mikey?" Rhett had risen to his feet, and now he loomed over Mike like a storm cloud. "I'm sure that'd make Gardner feel a whole helluva lot better." He screwed his face into a sneer. "'Hi, Pete. It's me, Mikey. Good to see ya. I'm a big-ass pharmacist now, gettin' my wick wet every night and drivin' a two-tone Eldorado. How's things in the patch?'"

Mike stood now, too, jabbing his nose to within an inch of Rhett's. Through it all, Jerry sat staring at his slush boots, his face still twitching and twisting.

"You're a crude, bitter, self-centered bastard, you know that, Kiley? What the hell's gotten into you, anyway? Holding a grudge against a guy who can't even scratch his own balls anymore, and why? Because he was better than you? Big fucking deal! He'd've done anything for you, man. For any one of us. Why he even bothered hanging out with us was always a mystery to me. The guy outclassed us by a city block. He was a good egg, Rhett, and we dumped him. Doesn't that mean shit to you?"

Rhett's hands cuffed into bloodless clubs inside his mittens. "You don't know the half of it, you ignorant ape! He stole my fuckin' girl!"

"Girl?" Mike mimicked, struck momentarily off balance. He knew he was risking a beating here—he was big, but five years behind a stack of pharmacology textbooks had left him soft and slow—but Rhett's comment, once Mike got the sense of it, made him want to fall to the ice in hysterics. "Kelly!" he said. "Are you kidding me?" This was all news to Mike. "Get real, man. That chick was way out of your league—"

"That's right, gentlemen. She was."

The furious red drained out of Rhett's face as he spun to the sound of that voice.

It was Jerry, looking up at them from his shadowy corner of the hut. . . but for just a moment there, his voice had been someone else's. He rose from the bench, poking his head into the flat white light that slanted in through the open door. His eyebrows were unnaturally arched, and the dimpled grin on his face was completely alien.

"Why don't you two assholes dry up?" he said. Then he went out the door, letting it slam behind him in a gust.

"What the fuck was that?" Rhett said, stunned out of his anger. He goggled at Mike in bewilderment.

But before Mike could answer, that balky, ratcheting noise ripped through the walls and the ice auger barked into life. A split second later the entire hut went airborne, levered up from behind as if clouted by a powerful gust, and now the two men were standing in the open air, facing Jerry Jeter. . . but it wasn't Jerry anymore; both men could see that fight away. The man who stood waggling the auger blade at them like some oversize sadomasochist's dildo looked nothing like Jerry Jeter. His face had rearranged itself in a manner that defied reason. He looked like Jack Nicholson, or as close as anyone could come to that look, as close as Gardner used to come; he looked like Jack Nicholson with his face crammed into the ax hole in The Shining; he looked totally fucking crazy, and when he came at them revving the auger, hip-thrusting the four-foot bit as if it weighed no more than a feather, both men took to their heels. Deadly intent writhed in Jerry's eyes, a coiled black fury that was somehow more terrifying than his awesome show of strength or the sputtering roar of the auger.

Rhett cut left toward the snow machines. Blinded by panic. Gore took three wild strides and plowed into the equipment sled, pitching forward across its width. In his struggle to get free, he tangled his legs in a loose length of rope. His rump stuck straight up in the air.

"Hold that pose, boy," Jerry cried with insane good humor. "I'm gonna core you a new asshole!"

Mike cried out to Rhett for help. He lay on his belly, balanced across the sled like the shell of an overturned tortoise, and the more he struggled, the worse he got snarled in the rope. There was no way he could regain his feet.

He looked back over his shoulder and saw that Jerry was still coming, that killing light still in his eyes. This was no joke, and he could feel his bowels letting go.

"How's it feel, Mike, old buddy?" Jerry hollered over the bawl of the auger. "How's it feel to shit yourself?" He lowered the bit and cranked the throttle wide open. "Nice, huh?"

The bit poked through the padded seat of Mike's snow suit with a dull popping sound, its first revolution raking out a thick tuft of down. Mike screamed before the pain came, screamed at the vision that filled his head, a vision of his own dying body impaled on the bit of that auger.

The next twist, a bare second later, found flesh, and now the engine seemed to wail on the brink of explosion. Blood slurried out of the ten-inch hole in Mike's snow pants, ribbons of it snaking up the grooves of the cold metal spiral.

Jerry watched with remote fascination.

Mike's shriek of agony rose on the arctic air, a solid, unyielding skid of life against death. Rhett heard it, and it sparked his muscles into furious service. The snow machines were back on shore, just a few yards to go. He'd grab Jerry's; it was the fastest. . .

But something made him stop and look back, the grim hope that maybe this was all some sick fucking joke, some stupid prank dreamed up by those two crazy assholes to really piss him off. But as he whirled, already imagining how he was going to kick their silly asses, he saw Jerry advancing toward him.

He still held the auger, straight overhead, as he had when he'd cranked it alive the first time. It was still running, but only barely, because Mike Gore was skewered to its tip, limp as a rag doll and sluggishly spinning, the loose flaps of his pant legs making a torpid whuff-whuff-whuff sound, like the rotors of some hellish airship.

Screaming now himself, Rhett took the last lurching steps to the snowmobiles.

The keys were gone.

Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck. . .

Hunched beside Jerry's machine, Rhett shot a glance over his shoulder. Jerry had dropped Mike's body, and now he advanced on Rhett at a run, his teeth bared in a yellow snarl. Rhett's first inclination was to stand his ground. The crazy cunt had dropped the auger, and Rhett had always believed that man to man he could tear Jerry Jeter apart. But the mad fucker stomping across the ice toward him now was not Jerry Jeter; maybe the shot he'd taken in the head five years ago had started bleeding again, maybe that was it, but the fucker was wild; he'd flipped that shack like it was cardboard, and he'd hefted both the auger and Gore's two hundred pounds like a flag in a Santa Claus parade.

Rhett blinked his eyes. The picture didn't change. Jerry was still coming. He was thirty yards out. . . and his snarl had widened into a grin.

At the end of his outstretched arm, keys dangled from his pincered fingers. Rhett could hear their teasing little jangle on the wind.

"Lookin' for these?" Jerry called in a carrying drawl, an unmistakable drawl; there was only one voice like it in the world. It was Jack Nicholson's voice—Jack slitting Brando's throat in The Missouri Breaks, Jack riding easy in the saddle of Peter Fonda's chopper—except that Jerry couldn't do Jack Nicholson; he couldn't even bark like a dog. Gardner did Jack Nicholson; he did it so well that if you shut your eyes you'd swear the Hollywood crazy man was standing right there beside you.