Nights Below Station Street (28 page)

“How long is this road – before we get to the highway?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Vye said. Both of them at that second felt that they should turn back, and yet, strangely, on they went around a turn.

“Once I get out on the goddamn highway, I can get my bearings and probably stop in at the house tonight,” Vye said, talking about his brother’s house.

Just then the car shuddered, and went sideways for a second, and then around another turn.

They started up a hill and the car tires spun, and Vye and Myhrra laughed. He put the car in low, and made the grade. Myhrra bumped her head once going up, and was jostled a little. Then they started down the other side.

Halfway down the hill the car stalled. Vye managed to start it, and then seeing a drift had covered the gut at the bottom, decided to back up. But backing up the hill became too difficult.

“Goddamn,” Vye said. Then, taking a drink of champagne, and giving Myhrra a drink also, he tried to make it through the drift and lost control of the car. Halfway into the drift, snow came up over the hood and windshield. Myhrra grabbed him, and the car was pushed sideways by a force that was unexpected. The car slid down a bank about five feet deep and stalled again, with its front tires off the ground. There was a sudden smell of gas. Everything was silent, except the snow.

After approximately twenty minutes trying to start the car the battery wore down.

The lights dimmed and Vye turned them off for good. The night engulfed them and the road was silent and white. The trees creaked outside the windows.

“What are we going to do?” Myhrra said.

They had come five or six miles on the gravel road. The last house was two miles before that. Myhrra thought back to the time when she was told to leave candles in her glove
compartment in the winter, and some salami as well. She had not been hungry all day, but now suddenly she was, and asked Vye if he had anything on him to eat. He handed her a small piece of groom’s cake that he had in his pocket.

Vye tried to make the best of it. He took the last drink of champagne, and threw the green bottle into the dark outside. It landed with a slight
shhh
sound on a mat of snow, and then clinked into a ditch.

Vye told her he would have to go back and find some help. Just as he said this, wind tossed the car back and forth, and it seemed to last for a long time.

“Keep the door locked,” Vye told her. Then he smiled. He was not prepared to walk seven miles in a storm, but he didn’t know this. Once outside the car, it did not feel all that cold. He thought that if a man could run a mile in four minutes (this is how he was thinking) he could walk seven miles in less than an hour and a half.

He had a new scarf in the back of the ear and wrapped that about the collar of his three-quarter-length coat. The trouble was he had no boots, only his leather shoes.

He looked in at Myhrra. “Some of the road’s bare,” he said. “I’ll be back in a little while.” And then he poked his head inside and kissed her as an afterthought.

“Bring me back something to eat,” she said. He took off his watch and gave it to her, and told her to count the minutes until he got back.

Turning around he slipped suddenly and went down on one knee. His body looked suddenly heavy, as he staggered up.

He walked for a while and it soon became clear that everything was covered over. Sometimes snow was up past his shins. And at other times he stepped off the road and went up past his knees. He lit his lighter and found his way back to the road. Sometimes white drifts loomed up like
animals, which he was always frightened of – he had not liked the woods since that time on a fishing trip when his friends ran ahead of him and he got lost. Now he looked about and the trees were so close to him that he couldn’t believe he was on a road at all, which had become nothing more than a track, with some old wooden fence posts being the only markers.

Snow. Snow on his bare head and behind his ears. He tasted snow on his lips. He thought of an old veteran at the cenotaph, who when he saw the first snowflake of the winter falling out of an iron-grey sky said, “There’s mathematical perfection.” And then turned to Vye, who was a cadet at the time, smiled, and then kicked his heels absurdly and looked glumly ahead.

Vye suddenly thought of Belinda holding the little girl on her hip. Even though men were stronger they could not carry children with the ease and dexterity of women. And at this moment, feeling lonely, that seemed an essential fact, though he did not know why. He got angry with the trees, and with the sound of the wind.

He took a rest and blew his nose. And then he thought of Myhrra back in the car and he pushed on. He cursed at the snow and at the wind, and he swung his fist twice into the night air. But nothing came of it. His shoes were soaking and his left leg was numb. So he stopped and tried to pull his socks up higher, and then whistled.

He moved on into the snow and drifts, using his lighter to light the way, and stumbling forward as he went. His thick legs made a path – an indistinct track, as if children had played there a long time ago.

Because of the champagne she’d drunk, Myhrra had to get out of the car to have a pee. She took her coat from the back seat and put it around herself. The snow was deep as she struggled over to a certain spot which was almost bare and dry, under the huge white pine she had noticed before but had forgotten about. Vye’s watch had ticked away forty-seven minutes. The storm had increased, and yet in the bare spot under the tree she could smell pine nettles and summer branches.

As she stood there, her wedding veil came off and blew up in the air. Snow fell down her neck. She slapped at the snow with her hands as if to brush everything away. Then she remembered the last woman whose hair she had cut, and remembered how white her neck was under her dark, black hair. And then she felt tears in her eyes.

She also thought of Byron with his fish and mice – and how sometimes at night when they were alone he would put on plays for her. Wearing a bath towel as a cape, he would act out Caesar. That was always the character he acted out, that is, his own rendition of who he thought Caesar might be. Sometimes he would have Caesar killing everyone in the house. And sometimes he would have Caesar getting it in the guts and falling into her lap.

But now as she started back she thought she heard an animal and froze. Suddenly the idea that she was alone – miles from the nearest house, in the middle of a blizzard – made her afraid. One tree creaked and then another. And she couldn’t see the car from where she was. It sounded to her as if the animal was coming after her, and she panicked and ran away from it.

She ran thirty feet into the woods and then tried to find her way back out. Snow covered her coat and the front of her dress. A stick had scratched her face, and had caught in her hair.

She sat on a log, shaking, looking about, as if waiting for someone to tell her to do something. Now she did not know how she got in here or how she would get out. Taking deep breaths, she looked at Vye’s watch to see what time it was and had to scratch the snow off it. It had stopped. The trees are insulting to those who are lost. People curse the trees they are lost amongst, simply because of their indifference.

The best thing was to follow her footprints back, and that is what she attempted to do. A few hours ago she was sitting at the head table, while the emcee told one joke after the other about Myhrra – but now nothing seemed funny. All the words had put a bad taste in her mouth, and her heart sank as she remembered some of the things that were said. She moved on, but in the dark in a blizzard she only struggled on further into the woods. The pit of her stomach seemed to turn cold.

Yet by not finding the road – and by taking a turn to the left because of a windfall that tore her dress, stumbling down a hill and grabbing a branch in the dark – by coming to a brook and being frightened that it was a swamp, and moving back up the hill – and stopping just an instant to realize that she had lost both of her shoes – and by waiting a few seconds to taste the blood on her gashed cheek – she had saved her life.

For if
she
had done anything else, moments sooner or moments later – or taken another direction in any degree, or stopped for any longer on the windfall when she checked the time, or got out of the car any later to have a pee – she would not have stumbled out in front of Allain Garret’s truck lights just as he was backing out of his wood lot. Similarly, if Allain had not left the house when he had, he would not have spotted her.

Allain at first did not even know what he saw. But he
moved forward and shone his truck lights again, and saw Myhrra falling down at just that instant. When he approached her she did not realize it was him and picked up a rotted branch in order to defend herself, and he looked at her from behind a tree quizzically, wondering what she was up to. Then he smiled, his breath smelling of rum and his face creased.

And suddenly she tried to smooth her dress and looked at him, and then sat down in the snow. And when she did this, he smiled again and helped lift her. She began to tell him about Vye, but at this moment he could not help holding her in his old arms, which were shaking.

Vye stumbled forward with his lighter lighting the way. But the wind kept blowing it out. Snow had covered his shoulders and hair, and gotten down the back of his neck. He carried his gloves in his left hand, which was a habit he had.

An hour had passed but he hadn’t come to the main road. He had taken his cummerbund off and now regretted it, for snow and wind washed onto his stomach through his open coat.

Then he decided to turn and go back to the car. And then, after a time, and after falling twice, he came to two roads, and had no idea which one to take.

Suddenly he remembered how Joe and Clay Everette could travel in the woods, and this made him angry at them. Besides this, he’d heard a car door slam, but didn’t know what direction it came from. Then he saw Maggie smiling at him, the day he went to Belinda’s. He yawned suddenly.

After a time he was drawn irresistibly toward the woods, every now and then stopping to check the number of buttons he was missing on his coat, and trying to button them up. He remembered how proudly he’d sat on the men’s hands as they carried him to the car. All of the shouting and laughing seemed ridiculous and sad. And he became annoyed with himself for not saying something more, or better, or in a different way.

Vye had taken a wrong turn at the top of the first hill. He had moved off the road the car had travelled, and without knowing it was in a maze of logging roads. His lighter no longer worked and he had left his gloves on a stump. It was a stump he kept circling without knowing that he was. The trees he touched with his hands were often trees he had walked near twenty minutes before. Drawn irresistibly into the woods, he called out Myhrra’s name until he couldn’t bring himself to anymore, sitting on the very gloves he had left behind an hour ago. He took out his handkerchief and remembered how his best man had tucked it into his pocket in the church, along with a note. He had not read the note, and now it fell into the snow without him seeing it.

Vye didn’t know that at that moment there were twenty men looking for him.