Winter Study (55 page)

Her
back struck the stone. The tree branch across the trail wrenched
violently to the left. The limb jerked from her hand, tearing her glove
half off. Her body hurled to the ground beside the rock. Torrents of
hurt poured through her, and she wished she had state secrets that she
might shout them from enemy rooftops, anything to stop the vicious
knives inside her skin. Vision dimmed at the edges. She fought to stay
conscious. To pass out now would be to waste all the trudging and
weeping this sojourn into physics had cost.

Like a turtle peeking out of its shell, she craned her neck and lifted her head.

Idling
unevenly, the riderless machine nosed into a copse of balsam firs
munched by hungry moose till they were the size of bonsai trees. She
couldn’t see Bob, but he had to be close by. Her wish was that he was
dead or dying, but she’d used up the standard three just getting him to
answer the phone, bring back the snowmobile and let himself get knocked
off of it with a stick. Dead was too much to hope for. The lever had
been long enough to take his head off, but she didn’t think she’d
managed that. It might have caught him in the shoulder or the chest. If
it hadn’t and had only fouled the skis of the snowmobile enough to dump
him, he was probably unhurt.

In which case, Anna was dead.

“Not
dead. I’m rising, rising, rising,” she whispered to herself, and she
pushed up with one arm till she was on hand and knees. The repetition
of words swam through her brain with Ellen DeGeneres’s voice and the
face of the blue fish she brought to life in

Finding Nemo.

Comforted
by the nonsense, Anna kept on. Standing didn’t strike her as possible
at the moment. Leaning back, she lifted the broken ankle and stacked it
on top of the other, toes down. “Ouching, ouching, ouching!” she
whispered as she settled the splinted boot across the back of the
other. Feet crossed, a travois of bone and sinew, she dragged the bad
foot along behind as she inched forward one knee at a time, one hand
for balance. “Creeping, creeping. I’m creeping creeping, creeping.”

The
changing mantra in the spirit of a gay blue fish kept her moving. The
snowmobile was less than four yards from where the limb had swept her
off her rock. Four yards wasn’t a great distance. One hundred
forty-four inches was. When she had reached “Whining, whining,
whining,” and was less than a body length from the Holy Grail of vinyl,
plastic and horsepower, she saw Bob Menechinn.

He
was on his side across a downed trunk a foot in diameter. Legs and butt
were on the side away from Anna — a small blessing but worth counting —
one arm was outstretched and his head was pillowed on it as if, as he’d
lifted a foot over the log, he’d fallen asleep midstep. The down of his
parka was ripped out in a puff of white that Anna first mistook for
snow. The branch had caught him in the shoulder. The down was tinged
with red; not as much as she would have liked but enough to indicate
damage. Bob had been thrown off as she had been thrown from her rock.
His body spun in the air, and he landed with his head pointed toward
the Bearcat.

Anna
dearly hoped this meant he suffered great injuries. Good sense and
personal preference dictated she crawl over and bash in his skull with
a hard object while he was safely unconscious. Unfortunately her
injuries would not allow her the additional fifty feet that dictate
would require.

Menechinn
groaned. Or maybe it was Anna who groaned. She didn’t wait to figure it
out. “Moving, moving, moving,” she whispered and dragged herself the
last three feet to the idling snowmobile. The seat was no higher than
her sternum when she raised herself onto her knees, but it seemed an
impossible distance and for a moment she knelt before it as if in
prayer, her mind in confusion. In order to travel, she’d stacked her
useless limbs in a pretzel-like configuration, and the logistics of
getting herself into the saddle baffled her. She began at the bottom,
lifting the broken foot from the opposing ankle, then pulling her knee
up. Using the seat for leverage, she managed a standing position,
turned and sat on the snowmobile. Another few precious seconds were
taken straddling the Bearcat, feet on the running boards, hand on the
throttle. The only way to go was forward. She needed the open space on
the rocky outcropping to turn around.

Gingerly
she eased the throttle open. The engine revved, but the machine didn’t
move. She rotated it farther back; the skis broke loose and the
snowmobile lurched, nearly unseating her. Then she was on the flat and
moving slowly. Bob still lay across the downed trunk, his bare head on
the snow.

Maybe he was dead.

The
thought cheered her as she maneuvered the heavy Bearcat in an awkward
circle on the cliff top. A chore that was a moment’s work to the
able-bodied took Anna a painful forever.

By the time she got herself pointed back in the right direction, Bob Menechinn was standing at the head of the Greenstone.

The
side of his face was a mask of blood and snow. His arms hung at his
sides, the huge hands clublike. His eyes were almost lost in the flesh
of his face, but the heat and hatred in them bored through the masking
beef until they took up most of the space in the world. Moving with the
creaking strength of rusted iron, he staggered into the middle of the
trail.

Anna
had neither the time nor the inclination for negotiating. She opened
full throttle and, bent over the handlebars, engine and woman
screaming, the snowmobile leapt forward. Banshees of flesh and metal,
they shrieked toward Menechinn. The nose of the Bearcat struck him.
With a crunch Anna hoped was bone, he fell. The Bearcat’s skis jerked
over his leg, jolting the snowmobile. Agony smashed into Anna’s brain,
and she clenched her hand on the throttle to stay upright. The Bearcat
bucked free of the obstacle and stalled.

“Fuck,
fuck, fuck!” Anna muttered in language no self-respecting Disney fish
would use and pawed at the key with gloved and frozen fingers. An
animal roar rose from Menechinn. In the tiny rearview mirror, Anna saw
the hulk of him rising. Biting the ends of the glove’s fingers, she
ripped it off and turned the key. The engine came to life and she
blessed Arctic Cat.

Then she was moving. The Greenstone took her. She was going to make it.

Without
warning, the Bearcat slued to the left, the engine crying like a dying
calf, as Bob grabbed onto the back, his weight forcing it to the left
into the trees. Anna jerked the handlebars wildly, fishtailing down the
steep incline, a moose — a dying moose — trying to bash the wolf from
its flanks. The Bearcat sideswiped a tree. Gripping with her knees, as
if riding an unbroken horse, she yanked the handlebars the other way
and veered across the trail, gaining speed on the downhill run, and
banged the other side into a chunk of rock. Bob let out a guttural
shriek, and the snowmobile surged ahead, crazy with speed and freedom,
hurtling down the narrow trail.

Vision
blurred. Black trunks snapped at her face, white strobed till she
couldn’t tell where movement left off and hysteria began. Her injured
arm fell from where she’d zipped it in a makeshift sling in the front
of her parka and the dislocated shoulder tore at the muscles. She
started screaming — or kept screaming — her noise melded with that of
the laboring engine.

The
trail switched back on itself in a hairpin turn, and Anna cranked the
handlebars as far as she could. The Bearcat raised up on two skis, the
nose fighting for purchase as it was jackknifed to the right. With a
slam that brought the black of the trees and the glare of the snow into
the tiny pinpoint of an old television going off the air for the night,
the snowmobile righted itself. Anna forced her frozen fingers to back
off the throttle.

The snowmobile slowed.

Then
it stopped. For a long moment, Anna sat on the cooling machine, trying
to find the energy to peel her bare hand from the throttle and turn the
key. With the cessation of the cries of flesh and blood and the roaring
of metal and fuel explosions, the silence was eerie, ringing. Anna
listened to the echo of quiet fading into the inexorable softness of
falling snow. True silence whispered in where the ringing had been. She
drew it into her mind and into her lungs, let it touch the ruined parts
of her body. The pain didn’t lessen with the kiss of the quiet, but she
ceased to mind as much.

She didn’t want to move. Ever. Had she not been in love with Paul, she might not have bothered turning the ignition key.

Except to the Catholic God, it wouldn’t have mattered either way.

The snowmobile was out of gas.

34

Anna
did not get off the Bearcat. It would be no warmer, no more
comfortable, lying in the middle of the trail, and she knew that was as
far as she would get. She dug for the cell phone but it was gone,
fallen from her pocket somewhere between being knocked from one rock
and scraping Bob off with another.

No
last, last, really last calls for the six o’clock news. No telling
dispatch that if Ridley didn’t answer his fucking radio, he should be
shot on sight.

Bob
might be dead, might be too injured to walk or he might be coming after
her. Mayhem paraded through her mind: making a Molotov cocktail with
her water bottle and the gasoline from the fuel tank, tipping the Cat
over and using it as a bulwark for throwing rocks — or snowballs —
peeling the decorative chrome-colored stripping from the chassis and
planting the sharp metal strips beneath the snow.

As
the engine cooled and she listened to the pings and clicks of metal
assuming new shapes, her brain cooled with it. Thoughts of attack
turned to thoughts of retreat, of crawling to a snowbank, sweeping her
drag tracks out with a branch and burrowing deep into a personal igloo,
of working the skis free of the snowmobile and fashioning a sled that
would carry her downhill.

She
listened past the pings, listened up the hill through the fog of snow.
Bob wasn’t moving. Had he been, she would have heard him. He had no
stealth, only strength.

Cold,
a living thing, a being as bodiless as gas, as all-pervasive as air, as
cunning at finding every crevice and pore as water, insinuated itself
past the fur around her hood, trickling beneath her sweat-drenched
hair, then filtered through her fleece collar to slip an icy hand
around her neck. Squirming like rats, it squeezed into her pockets and
under the cuffs of the parka, up the legs of her ski pants and down
into her boots. Winter’s teeth gnawed on the flesh of her feet and tore
at her chin and nose.

To
take her mind off her troubles, she imagined the rats chewing up Bob
Menechinn. Then she imagined the rats dead from consuming the poisons
in his psyche.

After
a while, the teeth weren’t teeth anymore, the rats weren’t rats. Winter
had gone soft, touching her with kittens’ paws, claws sheathed. A
hearth fire started in her stomach and warmth radiated out as the soft
pad of winter crept inward. Freezing to death was supposed to be a very
nice way to die. But, then, she’d heard that about drowning and that
had been a bust.

Not the drowning itself,

she thought, mildly surprised that she could think philosophical thoughts while seated on a snowmobile. It was the