We sat at the same counter, on the same stools, and dug in, eating quietly, sopping up everything with quarters of pancake. The cold juice stung the stumps of Dad’s front teeth, and the way food kept gumming up there bothered him greatly. Those teeth would soon blacken, I knew. I felt bad for him, knowing they’d have to be pulled.
The potatoes were crisp, the muffins buttery. We’d garnished the plates with slices of orange, and those, too, we ate. You would think nothing could discombobulate a guy more than eating this meal, on these stools, in the house of the newly dead, where you kept having the urge to pass the salt to someone who was no longer there. Yet Dad was right. It felt as if we were all eating together.
Dad lifted a fork to his mouth. He took a big bite, then chewed some.
“Janis always put pecans in her pancakes,” he said.
“That’s right,” I said. “She did.”
I grabbed a handful of mints before we left. Dad partook of several toothpicks. Outside, the snow was untouched by man. The road wasn’t cleared. The steps hadn’t been salted. You couldn’t even see the outline of the parking lot, let alone where the road was, and only a plow would be able to move through snow that was fifteen inches deep and falling. We stepped off the porch as from the Apollo moon lander — my first footfall sank shin-deep.
Walking away, I realized I had some unfinished business. That dog was still barking. We went down the motel looking for it, kicking door after door. When we found the thing, it turned out to be a little collie. I stuck my head inside the room. There was a big bundle on the bed. The sheets had been stripped from the other mattress, and this person was slumped under double comforters.
“Hello,” I said, like an idiot. I stood there a moment, then closed the door.
Outside, the dog assumed a crablike stance, then crapped a half-moon across the parking lot. After that, it was a ball of energy, tongue lolling. You’d never seen a dog jump like that. Dad and I turned toward town, calling the little guy, hoping he might make for good company on our grim walk ahead. When I whistled, he instead dashed toward a snow-covered blue pickup, where he hopped in back and sat waiting.
The road we walked looked like this: There was a plain of white as far as the falling snow would let you see, and the blacktop was indicated only by two cattle fences whose bottom wires had been buried by the growing drifts. There were no trucks on the road, no cars in the ditch, and with that slow, steady snowfall, it looked as if we’d never see another person.
We stopped at the first place we came across. It was one of those creepy old farmhouses, the kind whose rooms had pitched ceilings, whose tornado cellars made you think of abandoned children, and whose backyards promised forgotten, unmarked wells. In the driveway, a pair of tricycle handlebars stuck out of the snow, red tassels and all. The roof gutters were choked with dead birds.
We knocked, then kicked the door in. Two Labradors raced out. They ran through the snow, digging out black wings.
In the kitchen, a transistor radio played static.
“Hello,” I called.
“Anybody home?” Dad called.
Dad examined several firearms on the table, but none of them had bullets. Then he went for the fireplace. There, displayed above the mantel, were two pair of snowshoes from a previous century. I didn’t think it was possible, but we sat on the leather sofa to buckle them. While I was adjusting the straps, I kept looking at the ceiling, as if at any moment the homeowners would come down. When we had the shoes on, Dad and I clacked them on the floor, then did a slow loop around the downstairs. The snowshoes didn’t feel too bad. As I passed the kitchen, I turned that awful radio off, and only then did Dad and I hear the sound coming from the bedroom. We stopped, looked at each other. The sound was rhythmic and creaking.
I slowly walked to the bedroom in my birch-hoop snowshoes. When I opened the door, I saw a husband and wife curled under the blankets of an old sleigh bed. Cough-drop wrappers were everywhere. Beside the bed was a mechanical swing, a battery-powered thing that rocked back and forth on plastic arms. In it was an infant, its head flopping forward and back, forward and back.
“What is it?” Dad whispered from the hall.
“Nothing,” I told him, then closed the door. I didn’t have the guts to go near the thing and turn it off, and for that, a dead child would forever swing on in my mind.
When we left, the dogs were playing tug-of-war with a frozen raven.
We walked along the tree break to the next farmhouse. A dog was inside, trying to scratch its way through the door, but I didn’t want anything to do with it. There was no way I was going in. I mean, through the front window you could see a woman was right there, on the couch, dead. She had a box of tissues and a remote control, and she was frozen solid. The blood on her face had blackened, and the frozen blood seemed to have glued her hand to her mouth at an unnatural angle.
I waited while Dad went inside. He didn’t call hello. I didn’t hear him opening and closing any doors. There was only the clacking of his snowshoes, the tikka-tikka of dog claws following him, and finally the emptying of a bag of dog food on the hardwood floors. Still, it took Dad a while to return.
When he came out, he was holding his ribs, so I knew something had made him breathe heavy. “What?” I asked him. “What’d you see in there?”
He left the door open for the dog, then started walking sideways down the porch steps. I followed him. “You must have seen something,” I said. “What was it?”
“Nothing,” Dad said. “Forget it.”
* * *
That’s how it went on our way through town. We were compelled to check the houses, and every time we did, the hope of survivors was tempered by the reality of what we found. More than once, we heard a shutter swing shut or saw a piece of siding flap in the wind and rushed to someone’s aid, only to find the person frozen stiff. The only public service we seemed to provide was freeing the trapped dogs of Parkton. That no one had made provisions for the dogs confirmed my suspicion that no one understood the severity of what was happening.
In Samuel Pepys’ journal entries of England’s great plague, there are innumerable accounts of the horrific variety of human death. The London plague took months to spread, and in the extended panic, Pepys witnessed victims hallucinating, begging for exorcisms, and throwing their children from rooftops. One man ran through Crambly Market with a hot poker, stabbing passersby in the neck. Pepys described persons performing primitive surgeries on themselves, and documented in detail the fanatics of Roland Hall as, one by one, they took turns burning themselves alive. The doomed souls of South Dakota, however, simply curled up in bed, drank lots of fluids, and drifted off.
As we moved from house to house, there were ghastly sights, but the ones I remember were not the bloody or the visceral. In one house, I saw a fish tank that was frozen solid. The expanding ice had busted the glass to the floor, so there was only a rectangle of water, sitting on a table. The goldfish had died right away — they were all locked in the top inch of ice, belly up. But deep inside you could see the blue-red of neon tetras that had circled and circled in the shrinking pocket of water until they were all bunched in the center, where they’d frozen solid. Also in this cloudy, distorted ice were various tubes and some colored gravel, a string of plastic plants, and a tiny sea diver. The beautiful impossibility of it stunned me. The life-and-death of it spoke to me. The way existence was reduced and compacted, the way the tetras still schooled at the end, frozen mid-turn, bright as a Christmas ornament, seemed a model of the universe.