Did you see the sign when you entered the park?
Which sign?
The one that says the park is closed after dark.
No, sir. I’d have to say I didn’t notice it. I was just driving through on my way home.
Just driving through.
Yes, sir.
You just told me you took your dog there and let her out. Did she jump out of the moving vehicle?
No, sir. I stopped and put the leash on him but then he got away.
The deputy looked at Danny.
Sit here, he said. And then he walked back to the truckbed and raked his beam inside it again. He walked behind the truck and he walked to the passenger side and he walked all the way around to the front, and when he got there he put his beam on the windshield and into Danny’s eyes as if playing some kind of game. As if to see how his face would look in the bright instant before a head-on crash. Then he came back full circle and looked once more into the cab.
I’ve got half a mind to make you walk a line, Daniel. But I don’t think I’ll do that tonight. Tonight I think I’ll let you get on home. Straight home. No more stops for nothing. That work for you?
The deputy’s flashlight was off and Danny could see his eyes under the brim of the hat. Wide-set eyes that bulged slightly and didn’t seem to center on him exactly. As if they were not quite designed for forward vision, like the eyes of a fish, or a frog. He stared at Danny with these eyes and Danny said, Yes, sir, that works for me. One hundred percent.
37
AFTER HE LEFT the Hilltop Tavern he drove through town, and at the end of the business drag he pulled into the park once again, and once again it was after dark—but no dog with him this time, no Wyatt with his nose out the window and his entire body quivering with his need to get out of the truck, to sniff and to lift his leg and to know the whole world by its smells.
The road had been plowed but not plowed well and there were three distinct tracks in the snow, the center track shared by cars coming and going, and if anyone came along you’d have to inch by each other to pass or else drive into the deep snowbanks, and he could see where some of them had done just that. His lights in the turns swept over the naked trunks of the oaks and the snowy boughs of the pines, and no other cars coming or following as far as he could see.
When he reached the stretch of road that ran along the river, with just the row of pines between the road and the riverbank, he shifted the truck into four-wheel drive and plowed into the snowbank and let the truck come to rest on its own, one headlight glancing off the deep snow and one yet on the road. He killed the engine and stepped down into the road and shut the door behind him. No sound but the ticking of the engine and no light but the light of the snow itself and a faint glow of moon drifting behind the dark clouds above the treetops.
He crossed the road and stepped up into the snowbank on the opposite side and trod through the drifts between the pines and came to the edge of the river and stopped, winded, his bare hands in his jacket pockets. Before him the river lay flat and still from bank to bank and buried in white except where the wind had scoured away the snow and left black, glassy ponds of ice, like portals for looking into the water that flowed below. It was two bodies of water really, one holding in place for the long winter while the other flowed on beneath it. One staying, one going. When they were kids they played hockey on the pond behind Shep Porter’s house first and then, later in the winter, out on the lake, but they were not allowed to play on the river because of the current. And there was that time on the lake when Shep’s little brother Royce went out for a runaway puck and everyone saw him drop, just drop, like he’d hit a trapdoor, and the whole gang of boys taking off yelling Human chain, human chain! and you were the first one out there and you went down on your belly and Jeff Goss had you by the ankles and someone had Jeff, and you reached first with your hockey stick but that wasn’t enough, and you had to crawl right up to him, the whole chain crawling too, and Royce waiting with his arms spread on the ice before him and his face already blue and when you saw his eyes up close you knew you’d never really seen fear before, not even on your brother’s face, and you told him Royce, you’re all right, I got you, and you had to shuck off your gloves to get a good grip on his jacket, and the kid pawing at your arms, your neck, and when you reached into the water for his legs it was just amazing the coldness, like putting your hands into fire, and only then did you think about the deepness under you and how you would go in face-first and upside down… but then somehow you were moving away from the hole, Jeff and the boys behind him pulling you back and you pulling Royce and when you were clear, you all half carried him on his skates back to the warming shack that was not warm but it was out of the wind at least and the kid was too cold and too shocked even to cry, and it was another month easy before any of you were allowed back on the ice and only then after Shep and Royce’s father had gone out there with his augur and tested the thickness.
And he thought of those two girls down in Iowa, Sutter’s daughter and her friend, the moment when they knew they were going through the ice but had no idea what that meant, no idea really that there was a second river under the river and how the water was so cold it would feel like fire, so cold all the blood would rush to their chests to keep their hearts from stopping.
They said Holly Burke was still alive when she went into the river. Said she’d been breathing but unable to swim. Unconscious or too broken from the impact of the vehicle. That was in October, when the river was just one river. Vehicle, they said—not car, not truck. If she’d died from the impact it might have been just manslaughter. An accident. Might have been. Unless you were drinking. Then you were looking at vehicular homicide. But if you moved her and put her in the river, well, that was a whole other deal, they said. That was murder.
Murder.
That word, spoken to you by men in uniform, real cops in the real world, was unbelievable. It couldn’t be happening. It was a word to take the life you knew and turn it instantly into something else. Which, all right, was nothing compared to what had been taken from Holly Burke. From her parents. But it was a kind of death. It was the death of how the world thought of you and even how you thought of yourself. You didn’t know that you had been happy, that you had been free and happy and that you had loved life until you heard that word. Only then did you know, but too late.
It was two steps down the bank to the ice and he put one boot down on the ice to test it, feeling for give, listening for pops, and after a moment he brought the other boot down and stood with his weight centered over his feet and his back to the bank. And then he walked. The snow bright and undisturbed except where small animals had passed, and if there were pops from the ice they’d be muted by the snow and obscured by the sound of it compressing under his boots, and he walked all the way to what he judged to be the middle of the river and there he walked onto a clearing of black ice and stood listening. No popping. No cracking. Just the sound of his own breathing. The strange vantage of the wide river before him, the banks far away to his left and right. Like walking on water. When he looked overhead for the moon behind the clouds he had to put his arms out for balance.
He got down on his hands and knees and smoothed a glassy place with the palms of his hands and shaped his hands into a diving mask and put his face to his hands and he made his heart cold with the thought of something bobbing into view out of the darkness, sudden and horrible, as it would in the movies—a face, blue and frozen in its last moments of terror. But there was nothing to see in the ice but darkness.