Without goggles, the wind cut at our eyes as we booked across the USSD campus and followed the river past the hog fires to the edge of town. In the orange light, frozen cattails stood smudged with black, and regarding the river ice, I’m here to tell you that blackness can illuminate — the soot-stained ice sheets were strangely glowing as they sprawled into the oily, color-flashing river. Though bodies were beached along this shore, we raced on. Though the hog loader was parked beside dump trucks whose tires sagged under heavy loads, we didn’t pause to investigate what use they had now that hogs were extinct. We didn’t consider what business the remaining inmates had been up to when they called it a night and made for their cold cots.
Soon, we were flying across cornfields in the general direction of the casino, and the Lollygag Motel. “Hold on,” Dad said, and I wrapped my arms around him for all I was worth. He put the engine in high gear, tearing so fast through the ice and corn stubble that the headlight was worthless. He turned it off. I couldn’t believe the balls he had to ride open-throttle into complete black. I imagined the casino where I thought it should be — without electricity, it was only a black cube against a charcoal sky.
Can you feel condemned and liberated at the same time? Can you sense that death awaits even as you marvel at how you’re cheating it? I decided I had nothing to fear — my father was an expert at converting darkness into speed. I leaned forward and put my head sideways across my father’s back and closed my eyes.
At some point, we hit something in the dark. We were bound to. If it was a rock or a post, I don’t know. The snowmobile lifted, and we were ejected. In the darkness, there was no stage direction. I flew, I tumbled, but I did not lose consciousness. I heard my father’s body hit the ground hard. Somewhere near me, I could hear him moaning. He’d cracked a couple ribs, and there was a hitch in his voice. With each breath I could tell he was wincing. He called out my name, and though I could tell it hurt his ribs to shout, I didn’t respond right away. It sounds weird, I know. My ankle was sore. I was jammed funny in the snow. Yet I didn’t answer. Over and over, my father called my name. He’d busted out the crowns on his two front teeth, so there was a whistle to his voice, but I didn’t care. I listened as he felt his way through the snow. I was silent as he cursed himself. He made a series of oaths to the heavens or the universe, and I didn’t want to spoil it. I didn’t want it to end.
When he found me in the dark, he grabbed me and pulled me up to him.
“I’ve still got you,” he said. “You’re still here.” He shook his head, then broke into fretful, nervous laughter. “Twice in one day,” he said. “I thought I’d lost you twice in one day.” He sat there laughing, a forced, painful laugh that lifted his shoulders, that made him grimace from his ribs. He put a hand on my chest and with his other mitten wiped his eyes. “Oh, God,” he said, clearing his nose and shaking his head. “Oh, God, twice in one day.”
When I think back on this night, I remember it ending with those words.
Of course, other things fade from your memory. Rest would not come until we had finished our business. And our night would not be over until we had pulled ourselves together and made the mile-or-so walk to the Lollygag, where we would discover Lorraine, much as we’d feared we’d find her. I had wanted my father to grieve for a year now — to empathize with Janis’ worsening illness and to feel her loss after she was gone. When we reached the motel and my father found Lorraine, I finally got my wish. He began weeping, uncontrollably, inconsolably. Helpless before his shuddering grief was how I spent the rest of the night. Right away, I knew I was wrong in wanting to see this grief. I knew no person should feel such pain. Yet what was started could not be stopped.
No, in my memory, the night ends with a snowmobile on its back. It concludes with the two of us finding each other alive in the purple and tan of a cornfield, clutching each other’s coats for all we were worth, as if our hands and shoulders were finally admitting what our voices would not — that we were all we had.
Chapter Eleven
The next morning, my father and I collapsed from exhaustion. The sun was cresting the horizon when we made our way to the room we’d shared the night I sank my car. After kicking in the door, we even slept in the same beds. I’d never kicked open a door before. All it took was one boot, right above the knob. I’d always felt safe behind locked doors, but locks, I discovered, only locked you in.
I can’t say if I slept. The room was literally frosted, and somewhere in the hotel, a dog was barking. Returning to this setting, with its musty drapes and scratchy sheets, made it feel as if I’d stepped into the past. I knew the television wouldn’t work, yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I lifted the remote control Jeremiah Johnson would be playing, that with the push of a button, I’d see Robert Redford dressed for the year 1870.
The cars in the parking lot meant other rooms contained other Lorraines — humans slumped in chairs, curled on floors, or reclined in tubs of water grown cold. Looking at the ceiling, I could sense the chalk line of a person in the room above. In other rooms, I imagined the dead the way thermal cameras see the world — with everything reduced to green and black: the energy of the living glowing through walls and doors, vibrant against an eternal, inanimate night. The only life in the building was that dog, trapped in a room with its owner, now only the signature of the person, a formless dark disruption, a void where a person should shine.
I rose to wash my face. I couldn’t remember the last shower I’d had. It had been a week since I’d even removed my Clovis coat. If the water was hot enough, I might even forget the things I knew we’d encounter in the day ahead. When I opened the faucets, nothing came out. I felt like an idiot. Of course there was no water. In the mirror, my face was black and oily. Nervously, I inspected the interior of my mouth. There was no red. I exhaled forcefully against the mirror a few times, but there was no misting of blood. Relieved, I engaged the commode, and after I’d fully employed it, the thing, to my horror, would not flush.
When Dad woke, he wanted breakfast. We laced our boots and walked through the tiny lobby to the lounge, which, fortunately, was empty. It was a relief that no humans had chosen to spend their last moments in a place adorned with plastic bottles of Popov and dirty bean-bag ashtrays lining a Formica bar.
When we approached the short-order grill, Dad stopped.
This grill had fried a million chicken wings, hashed out countless patty melts, and had started the days of too many men with the beer-and-eggs special.
I asked him, “You sure you want to do this?”
“Not really,” he said.
On the counter were chips and jerky. Beyond that were doughnuts under glass.
I said, “We can grab a bite and go.”
“No,” he told me. “Lorraine would want us to eat. If she were here, she’d cook us the works.”
At the grill, Dad ignited the propane burners. He rounded up some bacon and partly frozen eggs. I thawed orange juice and began grating potatoes. We’d eaten such breakfasts a thousand times. Janis insisted that Saturday mornings begin with big, lazy breakfasts. So we crisped our bacon and grilled toast with a practiced familiarity. Cracking the last eggs, I wasn’t thinking that such a breakfast would never again be eaten. Dad just whipped the whisk the way he always had, and I measured out the flapjack batter with my usual scientific sense of proportion.