We all listened for a response, but he’d gone a great way out, and the snow and wind swallowed everything. On the count of three, we cupped our mouths and shouted, “Farley.”
Everyone has a Heroics Bone, the source of fear-induced valor and idiotic acts of daring. You know it — it’s that nervy vertebra in your lower back, the one that plays hell with your bladder and prostate. While we listened for Farley’s response, I looked at Dad and Trudy and Eggers. They were all would-be lionhearts. When we heard nothing but our echo back, I preempted their obligatory chivalries:
“Let me go,” I said. “The man will listen to me.”
A normal spill on the ice would result in some accidental urine and seven days of heating pads. This ice was waiting to grab you, freeze you white, then fold you up like airplane luggage. What made it most dangerous was its beauty and playfulness. There was something jocular about the way sheets of it raced downstream to the lake, then nose-dived below the waiting ice or rode upon its back. Great slabs of it would tumble, surface like whales, then bob like bath toys.
But people weren’t exactly falling down to block the path of my possible death.
“Be careful,” Trudy said. “It looks pretty awful out there.”
“Yeah,” Eggers added, “watch your step.”
Only my father cautioned me against going. “There’s no need for this,” he said. “Your friend will come off the ice when he’s ready.”
“He needs me,” I said.
Dad clapped me on the back. “Okay,” he said. “I understand.”
Eggers gave me his sledding goggles, and Trudy closed the toggles of my coat.
“You might want to take a few dogs with you,” Eggers said. “If you fall through the ice, they can pull you out.”
I looked at those loafy dogs. Labs stood with drool frozen to their chins, and a Saint Bernard wept mucus. Kicking down the doors of my neighbors, I’d run across plenty of dogs like these. Invariably, they were the ones who, upon the deaths of their masters, scratched open the cabinets, ate all the dog biscuits, then jumped on the bed to sleep off their tummy aches. And you don’t want to know what the little dogs did.
“I’ll take my chances,” I said. “Eggers, Trudy — I’m sending you two on a mission. This afternoon brings with it the beginning of a perilous journey, and I’ll need you two to secure my provisions. Meet me back on campus, at Central Green.”
They stood there nodding. “Get going, then,” I told them.
I turned to Dad.
“I’ll wait here for you,” Dad told me.
“So be it.”
I set out upon the ice, avoiding places where the snow had piled, trying to find sure footing, hopping from one piece of clear ice to the next. I tried to keep my eyes on the horizon and, by way of baby steps, both my prison-issue boots under me. Frozen inside the ice was lots of trash — white napkins, crumpled brown sacks, and patches of black that looked like roofing tarpaper. As I made my way toward the center of the lake, there was more refuse in the ice, but most things I couldn’t identify. I came across only one human. He was entombed about a foot and a half down, so it was hard to make out detail. Because the ice had fractured and migrated, I saw his feet first, then about ten inches away were his shins. His knees were snapped clean, as were his femurs, and this kind of cross-sectioning went on. Above his midsection, nothing was in attendance.
It was easy to get turned around on the lake. You couldn’t see far enough to make out landmarks, and the monolith of the dam, which could always be counted on as a frame of reference, was now merely a curtain wall above the ice. Snow blindness was a problem — yellow spots haunted my peripheral vision. Once, neglecting to watch my footing, I stepped into a pool of open water, only to realize it was perfectly transparent ice, transmitting the true black of below. And only when I fell did I realize those pieces of frozen trash were birds. There were millions of them, all the birds that I’d have seen littering the landscape of Parkton were it not for the snow.
In the light through the ice, I could discern each filament of even the blackest feather. Pink marrow was visible in even the tiniest bones of broken wings. I could make out the fluting of nearly invisible quills. I’d never been so close to birds. They’d always been up in trees or at great heights. Now, when they were inches away, just past my cheek, they were locked away behind ice. With their nautilus beaks, the red rings of their feet, and the flecks of color in their eyes, there was no denying that each one of them was a ravishing thing. If the history of humanity has been the history of extinguishing other forms of life, it’s hard to say whether we have been evolving. The Clovis built an empire of meat, and their parting gift to the earth was to leave it thirty-five species lighter. And our last gasp was to eradicate hogs and birds. The Clovis outdid us in the variety of their extinctions, but we had them in terms of time. The hogs were gone in two weeks, and whatever happened to the birds — a poison, a nerve agent, a virus? — took place in two days.
Farley, when I finally neared him, held a tilt-up rig like a fishing rod and was sitting on an upturned bucket. Slumped, he focused his eyes on the line in the hole.
“Farley,” I called, but he didn’t look up.
When I neared, I saw another bucket sitting there, as if waiting for me.
“Farley, it’s me. Hey, buddy, I’m here.”
When I sat on the bucket, Farley glanced up, but only for a second.
“Not you, too,” Farley said.
“Are you okay? It’s me, Hank.”
“Are you Hank? Or more to the point, eh — are you the ghost of Hank?”
Ghost of Hank? “I’m alive, Farley. I’m here to help.”
Farley started reeling in his line, turning the handle slowly while pinching the water off the incoming line so his tackle wouldn’t freeze.
“I left these buckets out here,” Farley said. “And here they are. Everything else is gone, the warming huts and ice shacks, but the ice left these two white buckets.”
When the hook came up, I said, “Looks like they stole your bait.”
“I didn’t bait it,” he said. “Isn’t that funny? You wander around knee-deep in death all week, and a guy doesn’t have the heart to put a cricket on his hook.”
“Farley,” I said, “you don’t really think I’m a ghost, do you? I know you’re Native American and all, but you realize I’m really here, talking to you, right?”
“I’ve seen a lot of ghosts this week,” Farley said. “My old man would talk about spirits and that kind of business. That stuff was never for me, but I’ve seen ghosts now, a lifetime’s worth of them.” Here he pulled out a cough drop. “I was sitting here thinking, What if I’m the one who has left the world of the living, and now I’m in a place where I’m the only one? Does that make me dead? Am I the ghost, Hank?”
“Give me the rod,” I said. “I’m going to stick that hook in my finger. Maybe blood will prove this is me, Hank, the guy you used to eat lunch with at the cafeteria, the guy you’d let copy off your exam papers. Give me that hook, and I’ll show you alive.”
I thought Mr. Wouldn’t Hurt a Cricket would wave that notion off and take me at my word. Instead, Farley handed me the rod.
I found the fishhook and lined it up with my fingers. After careful examination, I decided on the pinkie finger. With that little silver hook poised to draw blood, I said, “You think you’re funny, don’t you? You’re going to make me do this. Tell me this first, do ghosts bleed?”
“I don’t know, eh,” he said. “They might. They might bleed more than people.”
I shook my head. “You are in some kind of state,” I said. I set the fishing rod down. “You would make your friend stick himself in the finger, wouldn’t you? Well, now you’re just being silly. Now it’s time to snap out of it. I have a journey to make, my friend, and I can’t leave with you out here on the ice.”