Then it happened. Trudy had cut around three-quarters of the car when the saw froze up, bound in the ice. Things suddenly went quiet, and there was only the sound of her huffing and straining to pull the blade free. Then the great cracking came, like a limb cleaving from a tree.
The ice breached, and Trudy ran. Behind her, a great rectangle of ice tilted back, the GTO rearing with it like an old cowboy showboating his horse. The slab of ice heeled higher, grinding loud as a manhole cover, and almost lost in the noise was the cracking snap of a chain and the clanging as it hooked something in the undercarriage of my Corvette.
The GTO began to go down. A surge of water washed out of the hole in all directions, an ankle-deep wave that turned the frosted ice clear black. Only as the water soaked my boots, making them seem perched atop a sheet of smoked glass, did I realize that something else had happened, that, as the black of a hot rod slipped into the abyss of the lake, my Corvette had started to baby-crawl backward toward the hole.
Silently, the GTO slipped from view until there was only an oily froth of bubbles and a Corvette following in a strange, halting dance across the water-slicked ice. In the moonlight, the ’Vette sashayed backward in starts and fits, the rear end stuttering one way, then reversing, the headlights sweeping this way and that across the ice. When its tail reached open water, and the chain hung straight down, the car stopped. Below, we knew a beast of metal hung by its nose ring in the black static of the lake. There was only a steady bubbling of air as the GTO filled with water, making it heavier and heavier. The ice let out a low, patient moan as the burden grew on the back of the ’Vette, the rear tires flattening, the front end threatening to rise up.
“Keno’s head,” I shouted. “Save the head.”
Trudy started running toward the ’Vette, half slipping in the skein of water.
“Come on, Dr. Hannah,” she called, skidding to the car. She put her weight on the front bumper. Still the car wanted to rise, the shock absorbers becoming visible in the wheel wells. The ice around her began to grimace under the strain — fractures shot out that prattled and chatted. Over the years, I’d become comfortable working shoulder to shoulder with the dead, but how it stunned me to see Trudy leap into the lap of death itself. I had no intention of hopping into a Corvette to ride shotgun with the reaper. But what was I to do? I can’t say I ran, exactly. It was more like a trot. There was only an inch of water over the black ice, but this film somehow magnified the well of black below, made it feel as if the ruminant deeps were intent on me.
At the passenger door, I paused.
Trudy was bent over, her arms brought to bear on the fender, while, below our feet, the ice seemed to glow with stress. If you could see microwaves or hear nerves fire, that’s what it was like.
“Open the door, Dr. Hannah,” she told me. “Save Keno’s sphere.”
I pulled the handle and swung the door wide, the interior looking small and sad: the Eagles poked from the tape deck, my keys dangled from the ignition, and with the clutch and yawn of the ice below me, a sermon on impatience, it was as if I could see the whole history of my car at once — from the salesman in Sioux Falls who first showed me the yellow “lady slayer” on his showroom floor to the linger of gin my father had left two nights before. I felt the rumble of the engine, smelled the hot gear oil, heard the kiss of the clutch. Oh, my willing V-8! Those worn leather seats, the custom dash, the heated glove box where I kept the old trowel Peabody’d given me, ready for any emergency!
“Dr. Hannah,” Trudy groaned.
“Right,” I said. I scrambled into the passenger seat and reached under the dash, where I found Keno’s ball, still warm from the floorboard heater. My inhaler was in the driver’s-side console, but I couldn’t reach it. I grabbed Keno’s ball, locked the door, and slammed it shut.
Trudy let go. The Corvette executed a perfect backflip into the water, showing us its dingy belly before crashing white and vanishing. We watched through the black ice as a twirl of headlight, fractured and swooshy, illuminated mushrooms of surfacing air. Ropy umbilical cords of motor oil floated up and pooled under us. Then the lights dwindled as two hot rods, their fates linked forever, raced to their graves.
We just stood there, looking past our wet feet, waiting, I suppose, for the crash as they hit bottom. They ghosted silently through my imagination, spinning ancient and celestial. If they struck the bottom of the lake, this hammer and mace, we didn’t hear, and they were left turning in my imagination.
“My car,” I exclaimed. I dropped to my knees in the cold, a ball of mud under my arm. I just sat there, looking through the ice, though there was nothing to see. When Trudy put a hand on my shoulder, I shrugged it off. “It was more than just a car,” I said. “It was a part of me.”
Trudy took my arm and helped me up. “Come on, Dr. Hannah,” she said.
She straightened my collar and dusted imaginary snow off my parka.
I didn’t want to be consoled.
“That was crazy,” Trudy said. “No one could have predicted that.”
“That wasn’t crazy,” I said. “You sank my car.”
“It was a fluke,” she said, softly. “The way that chain popped up and caught the axle — one in a million.” She looked me in the eye. “But what matters is, you were there for me, Dr. Hannah. I needed you, and you were there. Warrior peoples like the Bantu, the Cherokee, and the samurai know a debt like this can only be repaid with an equitable act of heroism. I trace my lineage back to the buffalo soldiers on one side and the Kaesong Brigade on the other, and I just want you to know this: whenever I can be of service to you, anytime, anyplace, and no matter what engaged, I will assist you.”
Trudy’s pledge, ringing like an ancient warrior’s call to arms, humbled me. She deserved more than a washed-up professor who ogled the breadth of her shoulders. She deserved a mentor worthy of her code of honor. There, on that dark, frozen lake, my Corvette sinking to its final resting place, I couldn’t even meet her fierce gaze. To acknowledge such a pledge was to commend myself worthy of it. Instead, I stuffed my hands in my pockets, leaned back in my wet shoes, and turned into the wind.
We began walking, cinching cuffs and turning up collars against the cold. My boots were freezing stiff already. There was no conversation as we headed for the marina, our eyes trained on the brief stretch of skiddish ice before our feet. We grabbed each other every so often to keep our balance, but there was nothing sexual in this sudden groping. Rather, we were merely two people reaching out to steady one another.
It was as if I were crossing that galactic glacier I’d imagined the other night, except I was not alone now; my fate was not to bump into humans once a decade, but to move with them. Anytime, anyplace. No one had ever said those words to me, and it’s laughable how quickly they solidified in my heart, like the notes to posterity kids write in wet cement. On my personal glacier, when I was lost in a crevasse, there was someone who would come looking for me, no matter what engaged.
When the moon went behind the clouds, the ice seemed underlit somehow. When the moon appeared again, the water once more darkened. There was something reassuring in this rhythm. At the boat launch, the ice clawed into the grooved incline of the ramp like the first ooze that pulled itself from the seas, and, as we crossed from ice to cement, the footing felt a little too trustworthy for my taste. Buildings appeared abandoned in the late indigo, as if summer would never come, and no one would ever rent a paddleboat again or ever lie back in the itchy grass, waiting for the Coney Dog Hut to open. Past the igloos of upturned canoes and a two-man ranger station, we moved single-file through this ashen woodcut of summer, Trudy, then me.