Still Farley sat there. He shifted the cough drop in his mouth.
I stood. “And what if you are a ghost, Farley? Then what? You going to sit out here and fish forever? I can tell that you really haven’t thought this afterlife thing through. Loneliness and a bucket — that’s as far as you’ve gotten on your own. And say I am a ghost. I happen to be the one ghost on earth out here talking to you. I happen to be the only spook who cares.”
Farley stood. “Jeez, Hank, do you always have to be like that?”
“Be like what?”
“Oh, bring your bucket,” he said. “We’ll use them for flotation if we fall through the ice.”
* * *
Once we were off the ice, I sent Dad and Farley to the library for topographical maps and river charts, and then I sledded home to University Village. I hadn’t been back to my apartment, and when I walked up the steps to the courtyard, everything looked ominously the same. The professors who shared the complex with me were a closed-shade, locked-door bunch, and their disappearance from the earth left not a trace. I felt my pockets for keys and panicked when I remembered they’d gone down with the Corvette. But when I got to my place, it was wide open. On the door, above the busted deadbolt, was Eggers’ calling card: a shoe print with a Nike swoosh.
Snow had drifted in, and all of Janis’ plants had gone limp before freezing. I’d been in a lot of houses lately, and what struck me about my apartment was that it looked more like a motel room than a home. In the bedroom, I went through the hampers until I found some good clothes for the trip, ones that seemed durable and warm. These I stuffed into the washing machine, and only after I’d added detergent did I remember there was no electricity.
That move left me with little to pack. I pulled my carry-on bag down from the shelf, and into this I threw socks, undershirts, and drawers, and a toiletries bag stuffed with dental floss, Q-tips, and my liquid antibacterial soap. I thought the carry-on bag was a pretty good choice — compact, sturdy, with wheels and an extendable handle. I also packed the cast of my mother’s leg, the photo of Janis, and Peabody’s bottle of bourbon. I looked around my house, thinking there must be something else to take. I looked at my rock-and-roll collection. I opened and closed drawers in the kitchen. I studied the tools hanging beside the hot-water heater. All of those items looked foreign and worthless to me.
Professors of tomorrow, as you excavate the empire that was America, you’ll find a million unusual objects to puzzle over. Don’t bother. Make no theories concerning the purpose of a Slinky. Postulate not over flip-flops. I’ve made sketches of selected objects that no longer exist, and I include these only because they have a certain bearing on the drama I deliver to you now. So, please, muse not over food dehydrators, subwoofers, and blow-dryers. Waste no time attempting to understand golf carts, greeting cards, StairMasters, and car alarms. Ignore high heels, cycling pants, pet cemeteries, carpeted cat condos, videotapes of child birthings, and anything you stumble upon that is cryogenically frozen.
I left the door open on my way out.
This time, when I reached the prison the dogs needed no special prodding to race uphill. Their backsides remembered the way. At the workshop, Gerry had a grand sled waiting. The runners measured out at eleven feet, and the litter, nearly eight feet itself, was capable of carrying a driver, a passenger, and a few hundred pounds of gear. Inside, the kids were putting the final touches on the dog harness, a chain of lanyards tailored from seatbelt webbing and anchored back to the sled with two long copper cables. These had been the grounding cables for the workshop’s lightning rods. The rig was so large I’d have to use the snowbrake to steer it.
“It’ll take thirteen dogs to pull her,” Gerry told me, marveling at his own creation. “But I wouldn’t advise mushing through any electrical storms.”
Roaming through the shop were a few dozen dogs that Gerry and the boys had captured. They were big, goofy-looking things with no idea how their lives were about to change. One kid moved from dog to dog, cutting off collars with tin snips. The collars went into a pile not unlike the one on Sheriff Dan’s desk.
“You really think these dogs are up for it?” I asked.
“I’ve got a randy bitch for the lead,” Gerry said. “Putting a female up front is an old Eskimo trick I read about. The male dogs will follow her to the end of the earth. You’ll pull five miles an hour, fifty miles a day, guaranteed. The question is — are you up for it?”
“That doesn’t matter,” I told him. “I leave from Central Green in an hour.”
“That’s the spirit, Hanky,” Gerry said. The kids were saddling up the first dog, an Irish setter with a case of the shakes. “You hear that?” he called to them. “The professor’s going to go see his old lady.”
* * *
From the Hall of Man, I retrieved the bones of Keno’s hands and placed them in a large Ziploc bag. Upstairs, in my office, I dug Peabody’s old bullwhip out of the closet and stuffed it under my belt. From the coat rack, I grabbed my university regalia — the robes, hood, and mortarboard I wore at graduation ceremonies to grant degrees to my students. Packing these things was a no-brainer. Next, however, I was faced with a hard choice.
When it came to Junior, I had to admit there was no way all twenty-seven boxes were going to fit on the sled. I stared at the stacks of paper, a life’s work. It would have been easy to get all soggy thinking about wasted years of my life, but the more legitimate fear was that I was about to strand myself hopelessly in North Dakota, where I was likely to perish. That thought kept me sane. Plus, I had been given a gift not everyone received, not the young playwright dying in the street, not the old man trying to save the chickens he’d raised from eggs. I was the one with an opportunity to salvage what I could of a life’s work.
I narrowed the boxes down to the most essential fourteen, which I humped one at a time down the stairs and lashed to the sled. It took a lot of bungee cords. I didn’t save the scientific studies that were most crucial in supporting my argument. Instead, I saved the data that were gathered under the most extreme circumstances, and would therefore be more difficult to replace in whatever future was ahead. These included ice cores recovered from three miles beneath the Greenlandia Ice Sheet, gas samples gathered from metallic balloons cruising the lower ionosphere, and sulfur-to-C02 ratios in molten lava harvested from the Colvenas Trench, at the bottom of the Pacific.
It was only a short ride to Central Green, where I would make my departure. The sled was overburdened and kept threatening to spill. Whenever the dogs got rebellious, a taste of Peabody’s lash was needed to secure their allegiance. I almost got weepy crossing campus — there are few things more difficult than leaving your home, and it makes no difference whether that home is a palace, a prison, or the playing fields of death. As I mushed, I tried to think of the words I might speak to my friends, family, and students. I didn’t want to get speechy, but I hoped to convince them to set aside their worries for me. Certainly I was scared silly, but I felt called to do something. My whole life I’d been chasing the inaccessible and unavailable. But things were different now. Yulia needed me, Hank Hannah, and not any other person in the world. She needed me, and I would go to her.
The dogs hadn’t even begun to froth when I halted in the middle of the quad. I looked around, then checked my watch. No one was there to see me off. Not Eggers and Trudy, who were supposed to outfit me. Not my father, not Farley.