Here the going was easier. Walking straight ahead, walking on a flat — that he’d mastered. It was the up and down that gave him trouble. He brushed at his clothes as he walked, stepping aside to dodge the occasional cow pie, the new hiking boots with the supergrip tread no more connected to him than the dead appendages that filled them. It was a low-hung day, raw and opaque, and he was just coming up on the bridge when he spotted something moving in the trees along the creek. He gritted his teeth, expecting some further collision, some parting gift of history. He squinted. The haze shifted. It was only a cow.
Moooo.
Going up was a little better, though the path was just as slick. Somehow it was easier to wedge his feet into the dirt here, and there seemed to be more rock, ribs of it washed clean by the runoff of a thousand storms. He snatched at branches, a mountaineer still, and hoisted himself up. Soon he was passing through Tom’s garden, with its wet glowing pumpkins and the brown stalks of all the rest, and then he sideskirted a clutch of beehives to emerge in the little clearing beneath the big naked oak.
There it was, the cabin, in all its ramshackle glory — but was she home, that was the question. Just because her car was out front was no guarantee. What if she’d gone someplace with Tom? What if she was out gathering nuts or acorns or dried flowers? Or washing her undies, taking a shower, painting her pretty toenails in her parents’ spacious and well-appointed bathroom? What if she was even then breezing up and down the rarefied aisles of the Peterskill Grand Union? The possibility that he’d find the place empty had haunted him all the way down the path from the road, across the field and up the ridge to the cabin. But now, even before he fastened on the smeared windows or glanced at the porch, he knew he had her — the smoke gave her away. He smelled it first, then lifted his eyes to the rust-eaten stovepipe and there it was, smoke, pale wisps of it against a sky that was like smoke itself.
Suddenly confident, elated even, he started across the yard, the place just as he remembered it: a few scattered stumps, honeysuckle fallen back from the house in frost-killed clumps, rusted machinery poking its bones from the subsiding bushes. The porch, as usual, was cluttered with everything that wouldn’t fit in the house but was too valuable yet to toss to the elements, and then there was the venerable old wood of the shack itself, aged to the color of silver fox, no lick of paint ever wasted on its parched and blistered hide. As he mounted the steps, a pair of bandy-legged goats stuck out their necks to peer at him around the far corner of the house, and a cat — brindled, with a patch of white over one eye — shot between his legs and vanished in the litter along the path. And then all at once he could feel Jessica moving across the floorboards inside — the same boards that supported him outside the door. Or at least he thought he could. What the hell. He forced his face into a smile and rapped twice. On the door. With his knuckles.
Dead silence.
Frozen silence.
Silence both watchful and tense.
He tried again, tap-tap, and then thought to make use of his voice: “Jessica?”
Now she was moving, he could feel her, could hear her, moving across the floor with a pinch and squeak of the dry boards beneath her, beneath him. One, two, three, four, the door swung open — stove going, bed made, jars of this and that on the shelf — and she was standing there before him.
“Walter,” she said, as if identifying a suspect in a police lineup. He saw the surprise and consternation on her face, and he grinned harder. She was wearing jeans, a pair of men’s high-top sneakers and a cable-knit sweater. Her hair hung loose, and bangs — folksingers’ bangs, newly cut — concealed the high white patrician swell of her brow. She looked good. Better than good. She looked like the girl he’d married.
“I was just passing by,” he joked, “and thought I’d stop in to say hello, I mean, goodbye—”
Still she stood there, the door poised on its hinges, and for a second he thought she was going to slam it in his face, send him packing, boot him out like a fast-talking door-to-door salesman with a vacuum cleaner strapped to his back. But then her face changed, she stepped back, and, perhaps a little too brightly, said: “Well, why don’t you come in out of the cold, at least?”
And then he was in.
As soon as she shut the door, though, confusion took hold of them both — they were in a cell, a box, a cave, there was nowhere to go, they didn’t know what to do with their hands, where to cast their eyes, where to sit or stand or what to say. His back was to the door. She was there, two feet from him, her face as white as it was the time they’d carved a sun-warmed melon in a Catskill meadow and the knife had slipped and gashed her palm. Her head was bowed, her hands clasped in front of her. Was this an awkward moment? You bet.
It was Jessica who recovered first. She turned, brushed past him and bent briskly to relieve the room’s sole armchair of its burden of hats, jackets, dope pipes, cheese graters, paperback books and other impedimenta, at the same time echoing what he’d said at the door: “Goodbye? What do you mean — are you moving or something?”
And so he was able to settle into the vacant armchair and tell her of his impending journey to the heart of the polar night, to joke about mushers and mukluks and ask, in mock earnestness, if she knew a good dog he could take along to warm his hands in. “But seriously,” he went on, encouraged by her laugh, “you don’t have to worry about me — I’m no tenderfoot. I mean, I know my Jack London cold, and there’s no way I’m going to try humping from my motel room to the bar without spitting first.”
“Spitting?”
He glanced over his shoulder as if revealing a closely guarded secret, and then leaned forward. “Uh-huh,” he said, dropping his voice. “If your spit freezes before it hits the ground, you go back to bed and wait till spring.”
Laughing, she offered him a glass of wine — the same vinegary stuff Tom Crane had been fermenting in the corner for the past two years — and settled down at the table beneath the window to string beads and listen. He took it as a good sign that she poured herself a glass too.
“You know,” he said suddenly, “there was this guy in the hospital, in the bed next to me … a midget, I guess he was. Or a dwarf. I always forget the difference.”
“Midgets look like little children,” she said, drawing the shape with her hands. “Everything in proportion.”
“Well, this guy was a dwarf then. He was old. And his head was huge, big ears and nose and all that.” He paused. “His name was Piet. He knew my father.”
She snuck a look at him, then turned back to her work, tugging at a coil of monofilament with her teeth.
“He’s the one who told me he was in Alaska.”
“So that’s it,” she said, turning to him. “Your father.”
Walter chafed the glass between his palms as if he were trying to warm them. He smiled, staring down at the floor. “Well, it’s not exactly the time of year for a vacation up there, you know. I mean, people are losing their noses, earlobes frozen solid, toes dropping like leaves—”
Again she laughed — an old laugh, a laugh that gave him hope.