Skaters

Ben Rosenthal

The light was hurting from up there. Dom Moore and Cameron Glover, watching the Swede’s pelvis swing as she unlatched her motel door, wondered about the whereabouts of Roddy Villemeure. Glover a little more than his friend Dom, who was preoccupied by the lady as she turned the latch. Her factual motion which disclosed nothing even remotely performative in her limbs: they were natural as flowers, as sky. I am me, said the moves. Need I ever be anything more? Those jeans of hers debauched into sheepskin mukluks, cosmo chic of the bumpkin-citified, an urban goddess in rural gear. Moore thought of the factual capacities of all girls suddenly. Myla Rain Sweetwater, Carla Kunulu the homeroom girl (homeroom was every room here. Everyone crammed into a long wood room; spit and you were in the papers). Now the Swede put the key in the door, hip out as she cranked it; factual. I am fourteen, Moore thought. Could my future include such swinging? To go out and grab it, to steal a worm before the birds woke, to just shit on the dog’s lunch this crumb of a musher’s life insists on.

“Where’s Villemeure,” said Glover. “I’m scared.”

“What?” The jeans didn’t hide her shape; they were not those kinds of jeans.

“Scares me, you know. The other boys,” he said, a little iffy in the larynx, his voice changing.

“Nah. Don’t quit now. They was from other side of the Bay.”

“I can’t ever see Roddy just not showing.” It had been two hours.

“Give him time,” said Dom.

“How much more, till Christmas?”

Roddy was supposed to show up because the boys had managed to bootleg in a little suds from the Angry Métis, Cole Pickering, Nations man surly out the hydro works, worked at the Dene substation. Cole must’ve horded big sums in his aluminum trailer. He was gone driving most days; big, elaborate gambles in his flatbed Sierra winding into Roundeye zones where he would slyly procure his suds, get them the liquor octane they wanted though the town was dry. Enough belts of the stuff if you were watching the turning lights of the borealis, your mind raking things straight out of your own homemade folklore.

Dom looked up at the sky, grabbed an eyeful of dynamo stirring. It was a closer, low-lying phosphorous tangle under the moon’s rays. He watched the Swede turn, her lush mane feathering out from the creamy divide of her center part; she watched the sky churning in the same greens he was watching.

“I’m worried,” said Glover.

“Why would you be?” said Dom, watching one more hip sway as the door shut behind her. “Nothing to worry about at all.”

Glover shook his head and went inside to the Propane shop and used the phone. Even a tard like Villemeure had worried parents.

 

***

 

Bill Sharpentier read in bed, The Dene Trader, all about no progress on the boys: the ice statues.

“Bloody number thirteen,” he said to the woman stretching her arms on the edge of the battered bed.

“Confuses my heart,” she said.

“I read it, my hair comes out.”

“It’s good hair.”

“Am I laughing?”

A year of lumbering nowhere, meanwhile enough stone-deads on the frozen lake you could pull off a full squad with line changes. Now the gristmill was saying Swedes were here, landed yesterday, via planes, a miracle the telemetry braved the lights. Combing the lake ruins for fodder, the Swedes, or did they think they could help? Could they find the boys? Thirteen gone missing in the white over four years and nine months, their mukluks gone into the whirly scatter under murmuring light. The aurora had been stunning above the flat snows, its ions were caught shimmering in the other towns near James Bay; cars lost navigation, transcontinental air travel was rerouted away to southern points to escape the hypnotic hum. The electrons were blamed for mood swings, strange patters of otherwise reliable sled dogs in Inuit-inhabited plank houses. There was circadian upset, battery. The first seven boys were Inuit, tokers off the Census roll, and freezing to death was not uncommon, so “probes,” such as they were, remained sparse. Once unfrozen, some boys were found with liquor in their gut—and liquor was arduous to come by, so anyone with a bootlegging past was given a once-over till the lawmen said All Clear.

But the pace was new this month: three boys gone in as many weeks. The boys had been jolly, carefree as they trundled out to practice skating strides, but then, unexplainably, they would want to go alone. No shinny on the lake or ice racing games among schoolmates. Hours later, after searches, after the rescue dogs had exhausted their trailing skills, they would find them. The grief was the only thing standard: Ernestine Muzzen went to her knees and hugged Luke Muzzen, the boy frozen in the cocked-leg pose of a right-wing taking a howitzer slapshot. Ten days later, Connor Blier was found bearing down clutching his whittled Koho, locked in a wrister mid-release. One had only to wait eleven days and Devlin Akiak was found: a fisher awoke in his bobhouse one-hundred yards out onto the ice to find Akiak feet away in a spraddle, hands on the nub and shaft of his Feather-lite, a pro stance the fisher remembered from so many promotional yearbook shots. The old Sahtu hauled the body across the ice on his back, crying tears that froze instantly at his lower lashes. On the banks, the victim put back down in his poster boy best, his extended clan of Tlingit singing under the phosphorous that blinked like silent heat lightning through the clouds.

“Keep on freezing, by god’s lights, and you’d think, some progress,” Bill said, flapping the paper to make the words maul her.

The woman whose hair was only a little grey, and a fetching grey at that because she was younger than most who had it, came out of the bathroom clad in a dowdy robe. A ruby jewel in a wet shoebox.

“Scares the daylights,” she said. “I ought to be getting home.”

“Big cold.”

She crossed the room and peeked out the curtains, like a jail-breaker in a road motel, the alerted troopers patrolling nearby. “Light is really humming out there. I doubt the streetlights should even be on. Put the hydropower alternators to the test. Shops should all be shuttered anyway.”

“I got Marla at the shop,” said Bill. “I want the night business.”

“From who?” She started dressing now.

“Dunno,” he said. “Got to be takers.”

“See you wanna close up. Flip that sign over at six. Get the world thinking batteries they can’t get, hair combs they can’t get. Then they’ll flood you in numbers.” She hiked her jeans up, did some lively blouse-buttoning.

“Conveniences should be there till late hours.” He smack-flipped the pages of his paper.

“I ought to be getting home. Roddy. Dinner on the table.”

“Don’t, sweetie.”

“What?”

“I don’t like mentions of kids’ names.”

“Because of what’s in the paper?”

“No,” he said, raising the covers and showing her his shrivel. “Not the paper.”

“It makes you small.”

“That’s just the start of it.”

“I shouldn’t mention him.”

“And I won’t mention mine either.”

“Can I say Denny?”

“Say him all you want; he come in roaring Wednesday last, big stinking huff about tire chains, what I gulled him because it wasn’t the tensioner kind, says to me I misrepresented my chain stock, that I don’t know my stock, or something like that. I think he was drunk.”

“He doesn’t drink. No one can, right?”

“Must’d got ahold of it somehow.”

“A Nations. A Cree. Bootlegger.” She stood up and faced him at the foot of the bed. The light through the drapes lit her left half and sunk the rest in darkness—a space that begged filling in, but he didn’t speak, wouldn’t. “You trashed my husband,” she said. “So you say your kid’s name. You have to.”

“Carmen,” he said.

It did hurt Orla hearing it, but somehow they were crossing a needed threshold; behind it something unknown would either save them or leave them brutalized, and the careening mess of it all put her in a place out of time, out of the asphyxiating certainty often waiting at the first sight of grey hairs.

Carmen.

Bill thought how easy it was to say his girl’s name once he had taken the leap. Maybe it was too easy. When the ice thing on Madigan happened, he imagined Carmen and her friends forming a ring on the ice, a circle of them in mauve leotards for skating ballet, linked at the hands and jumping till they went in.

They looked at each other, Orla having stepped out from the shielding black. They looked at each other until they had to look down; the names had claws after all.

“Get going, grayhead,” he said, smacking her chummy on the rear with the paper in his hand. “I gotta check on that Marla.”

Orla tied up her grey hair. He could always get worked up seeing grey; it was “womanly.” When a person wore the age well, it was somehow tragic in a way that felt of a purpose, as though handmade to your betterment buried in you: a carnal enrichment that gainsaid a fuller life because every grey breath of it was lived. Bill didn’t want Grey Orla to start working in him, but that was what was happening.

She leaned in like a fist, kissed him; there was a fine dust in the air, caught in the light though the window.

 

***

 

Roddy had set out of his home holding a pair of Tackaberries by a tied string over his shoulder; these were promising new skates he’d got off secondhand from Charley Langmore’s Repo-to-Return Outlet, and he was hotfooting through the wavy drifts to try them out. He had his Bauer composite APX2 lumber ready to stickhandle in his left hand, and a bag full of his dad’s binned regulation hockey pucks in his right, pucks collected from around the league and, as he hefted the antique puck —the one great Orr side-armed with enviable finesse into the stands in ’72— he wondered if his dad would miss it. He’d only raided the garage once before when his pet guinea pig had stopped being Bobby Orr, but that time he chickened, and did not act. Of course, it wouldn’t stay Bobby Orr permanently; maybe till school was done and he had to “man up” (dad’s agenda) at Bay Hydropower, like dad. But strange little thing, to one day, just barely, not be Orr. No graceful rushes through stymied squads to the enemy net, blonde locks waving as he doodled with the vulcanized rubber. It stopped in the weeks after the night his sheets stuck to him; first they were wet, and then they stuck. The boy still was consumed by hockey, but it wasn’t the same since the dream, and the guinea must’ve sensed it, bowed out of being Orr. The churning Northerns were saying “Play” outside the window above the cage where the little rodent flatly refused to be the estimable Bobby, stubborn rat. The mint-green in the sky said anything could be what you did with it: the boy saw the phosphorous churning, hefted the not-Orr guinea, remembering the little maul dad kept. It chirped a little, as much as daring him to call it Bobby, since it knew it wasn’t. He set it down on the bench vise, a whim, but he couldn’t give it a slow death, so he raised the maul and braved a nice downswing, swift as a skate stop that sprayed a goalman. He felt wetness on his coat. He grabbed the Tacks, flurried into the carport, scrounged the puck. He was marching out to the ice, through the weighted maples; the haranguing fist of the cold moon was blunted by the dynamo beam. He was going to play Orr’s game: no pig necessary. He wasn’t going to be a man and that was that.

 

***

 

The one with the Coleman lantern, deep behind a birch wall along Madigan Lake, thought: my head goes to the dogs. All the same, he was touting himself in his head: I am a good sort, was his thought, with mainly noncriminal inner workings, outside of the one that smarts. And it only smarts because their law has contaminated what is natural to say, you sir, this is out of the question. So what that my brain is a bust gasket; I’ve only begun to realize my wherewithal in Art. No more lineman’s purgatory at the hydroworks; I’ve manned that dumb substation and sent watts into the Klondike snows, fed the First Nation’s brain-glazes from back when the linemen spoke Innu and sent out horsepower currents into the valley, powered the plankhouse Diocese that fed workmen that long, caressing line of Magi bunk.

He looked at the lantern light, then closed his eyes, immersed in the blinking afterimage. He saw a trail of his life melding into the long white and, in a sense, he felt righteous. The man with the lantern was point-Oh-thirty-two Northern Cree but claimed a three-quarters’ lineage. There were more than enough Cree to go around here but Cole, an Acadian French, wanted in; he thought it would explain the dawning spaces in his life, the slag he felt plumping in him that flooded over opportunity. So he claimed to be Cree waterman’s one-fuck mongrel in the name of owning righteous complaint. Became is one-use human man, “supplies” the inevitable firewater. Bootleg as a French and you’re a perv; you do it First Nations and you are folklore. He could be anything if he made .032 his destiny; knowing a Cigar Store Brave is nobler than Frogs any day; consider their history lost a war in less time than it takes a moon to turn new and afterward went lickspittle on the winners. So he fudged, and they called him the Angry Métis, and to be that he became angrier (or, as angry as he was meant to be). But he had other reasons than the grievance of a Nations Man to be angry, and because he made that grievance the reason, he couldn’t summon the other ones from where they hid. In hiding, they washed over him without him knowing it, and made him something else. Or was that the reason?

Where had it all gone, opportunity? Another word for “youth”? Probably. The Dancy girl took up three years with that marriage; had her in the altogether twice, but got sick looking at her one night and even though it was something he ate, it stuck around for whenever he saw her from then on.

But she didn’t eat all the years, the “opportunity” or all the nonperverted thoughts that might have bloomed. Did she? There was so much she or anything could explain, like what had drawn him here.

Then something breaks this thoughts, or rather, completes them: Here comes the trudging laddie Villemeure and his skates on over the hill, thought the Lantern man as he watched him. Snug as a bug in his Macintosh, the little swisher tame as gumballs in windproof earflaps. Another one who’ll try to break even in a world that was orphaning him before.

Watch him lace up those skates. Fit on those Tackaberries, little musher man. Tight.

 

***

 

Gunnar was already in her bed.

“I think some boys were watching me,” said Britt, just shutting the door behind her. “And not even shy about it.” Gunnar Gronstrand did not give the impression of being dressed under her bedclothes.

“We won’t even need unnatural light to see each other. Just part the drapes. I like it controlling us. Galvanizes the limbs, if you like.”

“Charming reader. You’re a magician without a top hat, Gronstrand.”

Gunnar raised the sheets: divestiture of imagination.

“I’ve barely checked in,” said Britt.

She was tired but awake, and that was enough.

She wasn’t surprised he’d beaten her here. The Scandinavian men always arrived as a team: Gunnar an aurora folklorist and Erland a neuroscientist of good repute. They didn’t have families. Gronstrand had called her, told he had booked the place: Nagy’s Road Inn, in three rooms though only two were really needed. Britt was there to bridge something, she wasn’t sure what; it may have been just kicks. The men had done previous collaborations, attempts to chart the dynamo’s major effects on the human mind, all failing to produce a salient outcome; the “data” they amassed seeming folderol to any of the legitimate quarterlies, easy pickings for the killjoys of peer review, but when they read about the petrified skaters it was only a matter of who would call the other one first. Britt, a criminal profiler in Uppsala, had arrived almost simultaneously, eschewing the electromagnetic delirium notion and, rather predictably, believing the boys had been called out to the water by a perp. Erland would fear her, Gunnar crave. She would marshal her wares: poll, assist; travel. Gamely, do the things one did, reminding herself that she had things to offer the commonsense types, the rural famous for lording jealously over their woodland sinecures, because didn’t she have these things to offer? Gunnar and Erland were manageable; she had weathered flirtations with both men, Erland less so (it pained her, but the latter had the strange, vivid tripod shape of a storybook wimp that put her off). Beyond that, his attempts were uncertain. Once he had simply peeked over his notebook and told her, “I see you spearing fish in a loincloth, marooned,” but she couldn’t pin it down to a flirt; it might have merely have been observation. For her part, she despised the domestic cornering of Home. Like Gunnar, she found monogamy unsettling, not quite unnatural, but then neither were uranium mines. If everything was so ultimately rejiggered, reengineered and recombined, what did “natural” mean?

Her husband was a furniture magnate, her son cute—fiendishly lassoing a runaway heart she wished she could make run faster. Sometimes he seemed to belong to the jungle, but she knew he would refine until the wrinkles came. Then he would assume the drear anxiety that was rapidly transforming her from within. The “cycle” (nervily, it called itself that) would endure. The sun would fuck the grass the rain made drunk above the coffins, the terrestrial horseabout of mortals, born of natural sex.

But it was not theoretical that boys were dying. She saw a mortal instigator behind the deaths, but romanced the spirit notions—and where the lines blurred between what she knew was right and the carnal notions that myth would gamely tolerate, she reached and saw folklore as a compass through the fog.

So: Erland saw suicide, Gunnar saw myth. Which of these striving gadflies would she go to bed with?

Gunnar, good Gunnar, had raised his hand.

With so many boys dying, it was nice not to have surprises.

 

***

 

Erland set up his C-pap machine, found his converter for the outlet. His bed did a fine thing and creaked ascetically. Through the window, muted light; the drapes were solid: of a hard cloth repellent to the electrons that banged against the reinforced glass. He could think here. He set out his books: Keenan Searle’s Climatic Variances and a Clive Cussler airport purchase. He loved bare rooms, places where he could touch thoughts, no obstructing bookcases or women’s frills to riddle. Gunnar would accompany Britt like an orphaned puppy on the plodding heels of a wifeless Italian pensioner. That was fine. He had scuttled romance, which was only something in The Blue Lagoon. Better to be a movie, a flick himself, where his big teeth gleaming—the fangs emblematic of his supremacy on the Pontic steppes—would make him a man to reckon with. His long neck and minimal shoulders: flexi-coiled, made to peer over fences or crawl though the bent wires of fences. He was real under the Northern Lights. Upon checking in, these Nagys were certainly askance. Britt wasn’t making any apologies for being Britt, that’s for sure. And Gunnar: a stye in the eye of good practice.

Erland peered out, flung the drapes. To horror fans, the most magical thinkers (Gunnar): an oblong sailing blob that stalked after winsome puck-handlers. Erland was unsure whether science could exist without magic, but knew that the opposite was true. On the north fjords there had been cases of herdsmen tracking after the plasmoid wind, wandering beatifically across grids of snow; the men were found hypothermic and smiling on the veldt after barely a brief wave to their dear ones, their goosedowns and auger gear nowhere in sight. Erland had once flown into Lofoten. Normally the lake saw skating boys, the slips of these gleeful skaters across its frozen top. On the day the neuroscientist was summoned, it saw a peacoated Laplander on its underside, smiling, hands pressed against the lid of his translucent coffin. Erland had stood there. The wind blew the collars of the boys, their eyes screaming saucers that saw wraiths. But that, of course, was not his business.

There was a knock at the door: Miles Nagy.

“You got to come out and see some folks.”

“Okay,” said Erland Rennberg. “What about the others?”

“I knock but they don’t come.”

“Did you knock persistently?” said Erland.

The man looked at Erland, and Erland couldn’t figure out if he was dumb or angry.

Erland pounded on the others’ doors but got no answer. He could only assume they were out, separately or as two.

“I’ll get my coat,” he told Nagy. Nagy, a packed mound of gums and jowl, smiled in callisthenic fashion.

 

***

 

The boy did a kind of four-in-hand with the moth-eaten laces of his Tack skates.

“You how old?” said the man.

“Fourteen.”

“How you like it?”

“Good.”

He wrote words down in his head; sometimes he saw the letter curls get a nice imprint above the birch wall in the low sky, carved inside the dynamo trails, and he noted them there: dabs he would consult from his own head’s palette.

“Those skates?”

“Tacks, my dad’s Tacks.”

“I was born with dimples.”

“What?” The boy shifted slightly; he chunked a little bad ice with his blade, almost like he was prepping to skate away.

“When a baby has them,” said the Métis with the Coleman, “they think maybe big things’ll happen cause the little tyke is cute.”

“You, um, were a cute baby?”

“Tell me why those skates.”

“Dad’s skates.”

“What’s he like?”

“Well, he’s like dad.”

The lantern man shook his head: got a lot of work to do with this one.

 

***

 

In Nagy’s Inn, Britt used the tip of her big toe to caress Gunnar’s penis, making it bob up and down. When she did this, he raised his head and exhaled in an almost-paranormal bellow from deep within his abdominal core; doubtless, “loving” was really quite silly, thought Britt. A little pleasing friction against the arch of her foot and he would holler like a wounded boar and slingshot a week’s worth of tepid nectar across her leg. This very projection had happened an hour before: a first rate mood-slayer. She looked out the window while he bobbed and saw an icicle’s meltwater running down in sluices across the panes. She swore a sigh could be heard from somewhere out there, a metallic sort of cawing, like the high whine of a skate blade on ice.

Gunnar didn’t hear it. Welling, fending off another projection, he had taken his glans off her arch and put her foot to his lips. Again he was was brimming, in visible torment because he couldn’t eat her foot, but he was really trying. Even if it had not all been risible, she knew she’d be distracted. She missed her son, who chewed everything there was to chew. He spent every second being as guileless as she felt when she made these searching trips and thought longingly of the dead men in the snow. Guileless because years pressed her advantage; he knew nothing, and she knew everything, and so it could never really be love between them. It would be guilt, condescension, and then resentment when the parity of maturation damned them to look back in shame. And now, watching this voracious manboy teethe her instep, she wondered what brought her out here, away from the real boy, whose patronage she needed: guilt she needed to hammer out. She didn’t remember boarding the little Piper Lance on the runway at Iqualuit or even the moments getting off it. What call was she answering?

The night felt urgent, anyway, and it was.

 

***

 

In the Villemeure kitchen, Erland gulped an alkaline mouthful of rosehips from a little teacup, Officers Tyne and Richard sitting next to him, rapping their wedding-ringed hands off the table.

“Has Roddy shown any penchant for these kinds of night outings?” Erland asked the parents.

Mum and dad shook their heads no.

“Uneven temper?”

No again, said their heads. Erland noticed that the father couldn’t shake a sneer.

“He’s been experimenting?”

The officers cocked their eyes at Erland—a sideswipe, this, eh?

“As in what are you talking?” said Denny Villemeure, leaning forward on his elbows. The sneer was a kind of sagging cleft.

“Sexual explorations. Drug tries?” said Erland. “I knew around here there is drugs.”

This made Denny raise a finger. “Now you gonna listen…”

Officer Tyne craned in: “That wouldn’t be a thing here, see; very, very tough a man’d get his hands on the liquor.”

“But it gets in,” said Erland.

“Very, very tough, hands on the liquor.”

“We’re dry,” said Orla Fitzsimmons.

“But there is an epidemic,” said Erland, “And if one can’t get that, what do they get? They improvise.”

Denny Villemeure needed coolant; the officers knew they were wise to be here.

Richard, untested by the grim routines that dogged his superior, Tyne, put a hand on Denny’s wrist and looked at Erland. “Not with Roddy. I can’t begin to speak for the other boys, but with Roddy—”

“He’s a little different,” said Orla Fitzsimmons. “I mean. It’s.”

“Could we say Roddy likes things and not at all in the way you or I do? We could say that, right?” said Officer Richard.

Orla nodded.

“How so?” said Erland.

“He’s got some imagination,” said Denny (contributing), his eyes no cozier, though. “He’s a bit what my mum calls a dreamer. Don’t let Orla say no tard here.”

“Denny.” Orla.

“Dreamers have wishes,” said Erland. “Dreamers can go to places where the only thing to do is medicate.”

Orla said, “We should go. We ought to really go! He doesn’t think.”

“Hasn’t been…”

“…Denny…”

“…much time. Much time at all.”

“Denny thinks the boy’s just a boy,” said Orla, looking at Erland. “Like any boy.”

“Yez just don’t know me, mum, not at all,” said Denny. And after too long a time for it to count, to register anything, he pounded the table—baring his teeth but no one saw it.

Detective Richard looked towards the pantry off the kitchen and saw minute dots of red leading out. He got up from the table.

“Where you off to?” said Tyne. “Hot date?”

“Mind if I?” said Richard to Denny and Orla, who shook their heads.

In the pantry the dots got smaller, but something shook Richard by the neck, a flicker of wind through the window, a nearly percussive blink. He unlatched the door to the garage and the dots became bigger again, broadening into a continuous stripe that eased into a feral vermillion and stopped at a row of paint cans; under the petrified strings of acrylic spillover, a bright metal sliver could be seen, the light from outside spiking in.

“Jeeesu,” said Richard, in a whisper.

 

***

 

“It is only one muscle ring,” said Gunnar across the table, tilting his wineglass that did not have wine in it but a kind of unleaded apple sputum Britt’s way. “It dilates expeditiously with the right oils. It isn’t like you go just shove it in.”

“Borji tried. Once.”

“Not a propitious evening?”

“Disastrous.” (Sip). “And it isn’t supposed to go there.”

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

The Inuit innkeepers were sipping milk at a table on the left side of the parlor, away from the fire; they shared a leathery, almost Austrian reserve.

“I’m here to profile,” said Britt.

“Start with me.”

“Sick bastard.”

“The mice will play.”

“The mice don’t always.”

“They’ll play,” he said, gazing through the snow globe of rising pulp in his wine flute at the delicious specimen across the round divide. “I should’ve pocketed one of those little airplane bottles. Now there is nothing but vegetal shit.”

“I need to be pliant,” she said.

“Especially where I’m going!” he said.

“Sick bastard. No need to expand on my diagnosis.”

He thought: I have gone too far, and, as he was wont to do, blamed it on the light.

 

***

 

They parked on the Nanisivik Road, which had a small trail through the birch woods to the lake. Tyne had gone back on Erland’s request to fetch the remaining Swedes at Nagy’s and would meet up with them later on the rim. Orla saw a weather-beaten plank house crouched on the muddy lip of the frozen water, green, termited plywood nailed in place of the windowpanes.

“Used’d be little Dene guy who throat-sung kind of thing from in there,” said Richard. “Loon sound. Only sound a mile out. That elder’d sing out and your boat’d near flip if you was pulling bass from the water.” Richard was young, and chatted in bright rhythms, like a mind just flickering awake. “He got a son who burned him down, blowed off some Wyman’s floor cleaner. A chef, you know? Man burned clear so his skull was bared.”

“I’ve got the willies already; I don’t need more,” said Orla.

“Sorry, ma’am.”

The Swede blanched. Erland himself was a risk to be infelicitous. He was here to be clinical, after all. Nothing he would ask her would be the right thing. It was a matter of sugaring his approaches; perhaps affect the opposite of the Socratic interrogation. If he made statements, overbearing comments on fear, tragedy, she would align with him.

“Children these days…” he said, louder than he wanted. That was a start. But when he looked up, she had moved twenty paces ahead, once again next to Richard.

They parted some alder branches, and now they were on the main beach side. Richard shone his four beamer, examining the lake ice with even spray. He yelled out for Roddy; the padding of winter snowfall killed the echo fast. Orla feared negation, total negation, on these shores.

Where was Bill Sharpentier, who got things done? But, wait, that was blasphemous, nearly. Hadn’t they laid the moral manure that led to Roddy going off? Officer Richard sprayed the beam, working in subzero to smoke out what any other person would deem a halfwit. He was her halfwit, though, and shouldn’t it come down to that? Whatever she’d done with Sharpentier, she was entitled to her possessions. She should not feel pained watching the foursquare Richard and his noble beam.

“Roddy admires the Northern Lights. Don’t the young respond to bright things?” said Erland on her tail. It nearly jolted the life out of her.

“Yes. I dunno. Yes.”

“When they glow, he is more apt to display a sense of wonder.”

“Yes, I suppose. Can we do this another time?”

“No.”

“No?”

“This is pertinent.”

“Jesus Christ.”

Officer Richard stopped spraying the beam. He put a hand up in a hushing gesture. Then he shook his head.

“What?” said Orla Fitzsimmons.

“You sometimes hear the sound of pucks, kind of clap on the ice.”

“But it’s not that.”

“No,” he said, “It’s the sound of an old tree falling.”

 

***

 

The lantern in his hands, running on white gas, might be running down. He conveyed this probability to the lone boy, gesturing to the rod-like mantles that ran orange glow into the lidded beaker he was holding.

“Maybe you don’t need it,” said the boy.

“Name some players,” said the man, turning down the lantern until there was nothing but the aurora for good light. He was squatting, as though an elder over a ceremonial fire. The boy was rocked back kneading his shinbones with his forearms, his butt going numb over packed snow.

“I like Bobby.”

The man nodded. “How about David Backes?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“I like Bobby.

“You get the Russians too. Fast. They go fast. You like them when they go fast?”

Now the boy nodded.

“Bobby went fast.”

“More,” said the man. “Gotta give me more.”

“I dunno. I like Bobby.”

“Which Bobby? Bobby Orr? Bobby Hull? Bobby Clarke? You got Bobby’s out your asshole in this game.”

“Orr.”

Now the man got mad: “Well, goddamnit, shithead, there’s more than one fucking hockey player out there in the goddamn world!”

“I don’t want you to be mad!”

“Then don’t make me mad!”

“I don’t know!”

The man laughed and this hurt the boy, although the boy didn’t know why he should be hurt or why the lantern man should find himself laughing. The laughter was of a kind that seemed ripe with what it thought could come in the future; not a past-looking laugh as he saw in his father; that was a chuckle at the sight of a falling brick, the last silvery sip of backwash in the damn Coors can.

“Taste, you,” said the man.

“What?” said the boy.

“You got some kind of taste in hockey players. Bobby Fuckin Orr. Go all the way back to the cavemen why don’t you?”

Roddy shook his head: “The others weren’t my guinea pig. My guinea pig was Orr. He told me.”

The man smiled now, chuckled distantly, and shook his head.

“Man, I sure know,” he said, “how to pick em.”

 

***

 

Gunnar had her like so: her belly down on the bed and her hands clasped together behind her back, as though handcuffed. He was on top of her, one big hand keeping hers bound at the palms and the other pulling her up towards his chest by the hair as though he were raising a heavy anchor; with each inch the back of her head rose to his chest, he was further in towards her intestines. It really was one little barrier of sinew—a matter of relinquishment, thought Britt—and, as the act shed its mystery and the adrenaline surge fled away, she really was his anchor going up, and her shoulder blades began to burn her. There was a kind of synovial popping, pure fright. She began interrogating the haphazard chandelier of condensed hydrogen droplets outside the window, the small ice strands decorating the overhang of Nagy’s.

There was a sighing out across on the ice. It was a sigh familiar, a little trill her son made when she had been salving his backside, a tragic protest under the invading lasers of bathroom light. Did the sky here make sound? She wanted to bolt up but couldn’t, and the words spilled.

“It’s happening,” she screamed.

“What? Are you hurt?” said Gunnar.

“I don’t know!”

He was climaxing. She could tell from the flickering pressure, a sharp run along the hem of her side.

“Something’s wrong,” she said.

Gunnar was panting, receding out of her even as he was right on top, tracing her limbs with his own, as though trying to hide her with his body.

“Everything is right,” Gunnar said, noting the sleek, almost radiographic scatter that breached the drapes. He was folkloric on his belly, a bullish cairn they were making, runic under the splinters of unnatural light. He couldn’t impregnate her from here, and he thought the Japanese would frown. They propagated under the auspices of the dynamo, their inheritors made magnetic by the blue emissions. The Finnish Samis saw the lights as an arctic fox, a kind of ethereal vulpine that slung lasers from Orion’s Belt, tracing the luminous patterns with the tip of its tail. Other Finns saw games of football on high. Gunnar would have perished had he stopped and thought “heat levels,” “radiation belts,” “substorms,” “small intestine.” So: light poured out through holes in the sky, foxes scrawled light: and that was that. Britt moaned heavenly and he pushed more. The cairn wobbled. He could see those Labrador mushers, nudging a soccer skull across a cirrus plain, telling the live ones time left earthbound to rein in their bereavement, and play.

Everything is right.

There wasn’t even blood on the bedspread.

 

***

 

The boys’ view of the Swedes was blocked by the Nagy’s drapes, and now they were too bored not to think with a little bit of fear that Villeameure was still a wrench in their game plan.

“We ought to trek, or something, for him,” said Glover.

Moore was shivering. He had his hands in his pockets. He worked his blood up enough to shrug so his friend could see it.

“What?”

“Why we care so much?”

“He’s good, Dom.”

“…fucking got a gasket bust. Brain is all over his damn coat sleeves, you sure know it?”

“The Métis guy don’t work out. Bet he’s gone west on some other booze runs. Bet some guy in Great Slave’d pay a little more handsome for his shit.”

“I had this night worked in my mind: Roddy Tard shows, we got the Métis’s blend, and maybe I crank one into the snow. Get this Viking bitch out of my system.”

“You don’t think he’s at the lake?”

“Damn is no way I’m trudging over to the lake.”

“Find Roddy?”

“Damn is no way I’m trudging over to the lake, find that Roddy Tard there.”

“Get some idea where he’s gone to?”

“Damn is no way, Glover, I’m trudging out to the Madigan and not cranking this Swedish bitch out of my balls, once and for all, in a snowpile. And you can go trudging to where you are content, and like, seeing the mysterious spirits born, because your whole brain is froze out.”

“Fine.”

“I’m going back to my Sega. Then I’ll jerk off.”

“It fixed?”

“You bet so.”

“Minecraft?”

“Yes.”

“Diablo?”

“Hey dink-head: Jerk off, yah?”

“We didn’t finish Diablo.”

“We will. We got scores to settle. But I gotta jerk off, yah?”

“I’m stuck in a Dungeon Level I want out of.”

“Not to mention there’s the EA Hockey I got too.”

 

***

 

He was shoveling.

The traction soles of his pac boots sanded bald by gathering winter rock salt. Slipped on a patch now and his bum smarted. A tailbone slammer: the final insult was never the final one. Denny had a head full of gunpowder: rise up, you limp dick, and dust off.

The lights hovered like a cloudbank over the crosstown moguls, making a perfect spotlight over Sharpentier’s place.

What he would do with that shovel. Walk maybe on over there with that.

He had watched Orla head off, presumably with the cops and the Swedish guy—the nerve this quiff had worked up that she would now see fit to follow through like you saw in a proper mother. On the other hand, could he blame her?

Denny Villemeure stared at the lights and thought: I collided with Life the moment it reversed engines on the womb and the docs barked me down that mother tunnel. His lips had been mangled in strange ways by the forceps landing, never to look like other mouths. He would slur like a tippler without drinking booze. Barry took the nefarious haymakers of common sleaze like a class act and swallowed; who could blame anyone for slinking around behind his back? Say one took Denny on his face: he’d been handed the crown jewels on Ellesmere, foreman at a generating station, there to draw 7357 kilowatts to James Bay from the stone dams in the Eastmain tributaries. Denny the morose, now Captain Morose and his delegation of Red Nations trapeze men shimmying up the transmit wires and sucking the last good terawatts from the spillway. Keep the drilling rigs in full drive twenty-four-seven, keep a working force of Baker Lake glue-guzzlers chuffed as little songbirds on the wellheads, keep the town lights blinking, fire the turbines. Harness! But he was a chump at the core in his duties. The inborn sneer didn’t not intimidate. They thought he was inebriated constantly. “They undermine me!” he would tell Orla, throwing things. And on the other end, the bosses: they had him browbeating tribal elders whose only offense was hounding after a day’s wage without snogging to damn boot heels of the Hydropower.

He made foreman one week before Moses Doig hit the alternating current off his hardhat, misjudging a four-way grid, and his face was just gone with the buzzing. Smashed onto his back a hundred feet riverward, and Denny chucked his guts. A more stark sonofagun’d say a prayer and call the men into the trailer. Denny vomited, passed out, and was an intruder forever after that.

Then there was Roddy. Off. You had to be strong to be a father. What was the point? They were young and you weren’t. You were no longer young anymore, and there was no sense in heaven’s name pretending young could ever be the thing you were again. The thing was to get down on their level, scrap with them among the Tonka trucks. But if you were to get down on their level, you would all die. Most kids are trees: cut em open by the year, and the rings of what you made them become clear to you. Roddy cut would have no rings, be the same and you’d never know the good you’d done him. Denny remembered health adversities, the doctors who said the kid would have trouble with “coordinative” things, a small kidney, bad eyes on the drift to different sight fields so a yoyo among brain-trusts was what he looked like. He tied to teach him games; Orla did the motherlies, but that was only out of fright. Denny worked this kid, his sweet yoyo Roddy, and now he wasn’t only thick, he was out the door: probably going horndog but who would lay him, and he’d never understand sex beyond what his friends would say, a foreign language. The hurt was too great to go chasing. Off. Only buddies is Dom Moore and that quarter-Dene sick fuck Glover. They’ll show him the light of the bootleg jug: a life dipping into Porto-Sans with model glue. They’ll rebaste my little turkey.

I am not going to the lake. Let Bill the storeowner squire the runaround wifey to the lake. They’ll go and find the boy. Bill’s certainly got his fair share of augers. Some real good tools on him.

 

***

 

“My bros, they got me the hard stuff and it’s waiting.”

“I know your bros; they’ll drop some back without you.”

“You’re looking at the ice?”

“You’d think a man knows his sculptures. I’m trying to get a world of my own. Ice is where my work is.”

“I shouldn’t of used my papa’s maul—”

“Ice, brother. The unknown world can happen on it.”

“What are you doing with my legs?”

“Stay right here.”

“I shouldn’t have—”

“Don’t move.”

“I shouldn’t’ve killed that pig.”

“Let’s get your stick like that.”

“I can’t stay this way.”

“I’m losing the body, and so I’m going to turn the lantern up.”

 

***

 

Gunnar, Britt and Erland sat under the kipper waves of Lt. Tyne’s campfire, ducking the lake wind. Richard sent a four beam current into the birch wall, but the dynamo’s descending radiance scooped the ray. It had taken some time to link up, but they were now a “party,” taking shifts to look and listen, to hug to the rim of the lake and hope they would sight the boy. Orla had decomposed in anxious waves and was sitting in Lt. Tyne’s green cruiser, running through the hideous probabilities, listening to the CB static overplay Tyne’s contemporary Nashville tapes, alienating. She was past and future but not present.

Britt saw the firelight under Gunnar render the man ghoulish; he had done an impaling thing, made her tummy a shaken vial of air and gut flora. Had she taken this far enough?

The sap popped in the angled kindling and Britt observed her search team: Tyne had an infant’s roundness, and in this ring of men, she—the only emissary of femaledom—was able to see with certain clarity: they were boys. They are all boys. The clothes are enhanced for aging, the features have begun to capsize, the vigor of their dermis breaking down, but the charm of them—if there is any—is that their world is still a contest. It is games that are the gills from which they breathe. If I were not here, they’d all be happier; I matter but not as flesh: I must be elusive to them. That is why a little touch hurts so bittersweetly when they get it: when I go the whole hog with them and their wincing ensues: no campfires, so jungle Jim. The gills are all verdigris.

They were having a high old time. Erland and Gunnar, dissimilar but identical patrons of these contests. Tyne was greedy; inside him lived a teenybopper leaping over the red ropes for a hip-swiveling man of song. Richard had his role: unsullied, thin, but really, did he mean it—this flashlight waving, the effortful minesweeper’s stare? She watched as he sat back down, rubbed his hands together, and dug in to a sandwich as heartily as a winger after a day of skating drills.

There was silence, a lack of game; hours had passed, signs of the boy were unpromising, and after some silence Gunnar said, “Hell.”

“What?” said Erland.

The men began to talk. Tyne chimed in. Britt lightened. The fire cracked. The search team began talking about what would become of you if your own misfortune landed you in Hell. It was that subject, and could have been anything in the white space.

“You bale hay,” said Gunnar. “But the hay is all packed tumors, giant malign squares that have teeth growing in their sides. Fat men whip you while you stack the clotted cancer.”

“You have only small dreams,” said Erland. “Your shoes are small, but your feet want to clomp sturdy mountains. You see rain in clear weather and songbirds have a bat’s visage. It’s all vaguely warped and topspin-like, as a slice you get sometimes on a golf ball.”

“That ain’t Hell,” said Tyne.

“What is Hell, then?”

“Hell?” Tyne jabbed the fire with a loose stick. “Put you in a lobster tank with all the lobsters you ever ate.”

 

***

 

Villemeure had this thought on the lake ice, the lantern man down by his Custom Tacks: He’s got me in a good pose now. Orr Mouse, I see it in his sadness, his sad face of a mouse creature. I trust that I should not have did what I did; I apologize to Orr Mouse for blowing my stack and sleeping papa gone mauling won’t have the mauler if he needs. But I’m hopeful for the first time since my garage knife that Orr Mouse is not dead. He could be the Angry Métis.

He could see a campfire on the other bank, say, not a hundred feet from his position. There was some lively types it seemed, people, trading stories—you-speak-I-speak—like people in the world did do. They were near but also faraway like Dom Moore and Glover; you could not get inside them. The pose Orr Mouse had him in was something he would like to show them, but they wouldn’t begin to understand.

Don’t call out to them. Don’t spoil it.

Lantern Man pulled the other leg high.

 

***

 

“Hell is always on its menses,” said Gunnar. “In Hell, there is always catches: you get to fuck Jean Seberg on a live bear rug. You have orgies with couture chicks, but your mother is always watching.”

“…they jam you in a small refrigerator,” said Britt. “Unplug the refrigerator, and put you in there with a bagpiper who exhales funereal hymnals for like twenty-four hours a day.”

“Hell don’t got hours,” said Tyne. “Hell isn’t measured in time.”

“Right,” said Erland. “Terminal eternity. Beyond lunisolar. No mortal mind conceives time on the present terms down in there with that demon colony.”

“Anyway,” said Tyne, sipping eggshell coffee. “Hell don’t got hours.”

“Ring saws,” said Gunnar, after a palled pause and the crackle of the little fire. “Ring Saw Frisbee.”

“No, no, no; no blood,” said Erland. “A mucus toucan squawks from a snot-rock waterfall. You have to shower eternally under the raining snot.”

Richard shone his flashlight at their faces, and they all heaved back, a flurry of protest titters.

“Clam up,” he said.

“I should remind you,” said Tyne, “of my seniority.”

Richard walked deeper into the woods.

“You get down there,” said Gunnar. “And they conjoin your balls to a trailer hitch and pull you down a flaming highway. And this ride takes forty-thousand years.”

“And that’s just in the first five minutes,” said Tyne.

“Pack forty-thousand years in five minutes? Prorated time?” said Britt.

“No time under the auspices of Satan, remember,” said Erland.

The fire cracked.

“You share a jail cell with a reggaeton mammoth,” stabbed Gunnar.

“What in the hell is a reggaeton mammoth?” asked Tyne.

“It is a mammoth that bellows reggaeton, extremely disagreeable substrain.”

“Mammoths is extinct,” said Tyne.

“Not in Hell,” said Erland.

 

***

 

Orla had crept away. The fire had been burning, and the Swedes and the officers were very much taken with that. Mulish laughter protected them, fastened them groupwise to the rim. No chance Roddy would be sighted here; even Richard, noble Richard, was untrustable. The lake was a winding specimen and the black night would not yield Roddy because Roddy had been gone since he came. How many years? Denny had been counting and she had been out on Bill’s bedspread gathering wool.

She wrapped her frock tight to her chest and sloshed in her mukluks through the trail; the frosted bramble crunched on her soles and she tripped over some downed branches licked with hiding ice. She didn’t look down, only ahead, until the packed trail ice became road and road followed the lights across town. She could trace the years in her carriage, in the creak of her footfalls. There had been an immensity of lost days: diaper changes, the primitive dumb show of routinized care: nourishing his sad Orr fantasies. The seizures when she couldn’t hold him hard enough: how the effort was paining because that’s what it was: effort, not nature. If he had been a stud show horse, would she have suffered beyond lamenting all the waste? Denny was soothing to the thick boy because he cared, and she was jealous of that. Her life had been momentum, nothing more. The afternoons with Sharpentier were a cleave down the middle of all that, but all it had felt like was fun: a little devilry that would not put the brakes on her wrinkles. To turn back, head to the lake, would be to rot with Denny and what he’d faced, go cockeyed with Denny and his hydro-Denes. She did not stop walking until she saw the clock radio gleaming through the window by the sleeping man’s double bed: it read 3:30 AM. She was pleased to see his chest rise and fall.

“Bill,” she said when he came to the window. She had thrown a little ice chink.

“Orla,” he said, as though completing a sentence. She looked like a little girl in her frock, the halo of fading aurora making her face green as algae.

“My grayhead,” he said, after raising the window and taking in the cold that strafed in off the lake a mile away, nestling in the ice of her fur collar. “I’ve been waiting for you longer than you’ll ever know.”

The light, at this moment, did not seem like a stranger to her face.

 

***

 

The white landracers would gather at the high drifts of dense snow packed in the shadow of the massifs, the clarity of the overlook that gave the dogs their sway over the creaking lake ice, the snarl of the meltwater under it. Whatever ore had been scoured from the washes, whatever southland Robber Barons had clobbered the iron mines, ripped gold from under the braided moss banks and blinking rosebay of the paleo-arctic terrain, the dogs had had no part in it. They howled and stayed limber on the snowbanks and steered clear from noisy kayakers, the crack of the hunter’s guns. They looked up, not down, and saw the glimmering lodestar, the lux currents that drove them to the lip of the known world, the glacier conclaves that stirred below. They would raise their muzzles and howl into the light. From their promontory above the frozen lake, the dogs could recognize human figures; a man and a woman, up against a tree. The woman’s hair had a pleasing windblown texture, messy how the man would like it, and he was crouched down behind her, his head in a place the dogs knew. The dogs liked this place, but when his tongue made the sloshing noise the dogs knew from their metal bowls, the woman said, “Ease off. Jesus.”

It embarrassed Gunnar, but he kept up. Britt had her hands on separate tree branches, balancing. She worried about the camp; it was light now, and the boredom that had carried them to this node only yards from where Tyne had set camp was now subject to worried revision, examination; it was Gunnar’s idea and she hadn’t demurred. “Like we’re running a thermal test.” He could’ve said anything—in this white space, out of time—jetlag and runaway failure—she would be hard-pressed to find anything a radical act.

They had slipped off when Tyne was dozing, Erland consumed, Richard in the cruiser with Villemeure (son of a choirmaster, consoling). When she had found some solid footing, Britt wriggled out of her pants, yanked down her thermal lining in a thick patch, and Gunnar went slavish on his haunches.

The night was so cold they warmed up, but now it was morning, and as the light thickened through the sagged trees, Britt, on her tiptoes, wiggled away from Gunnar’s clutch, the braising of his teeth. Something peripheral had troubled her: an object, striking as an unfamiliar car in a neighbor’s driveway. She hiked her jeans up, chastely, not urgently, thumped some snow off a hanging branch and saw the lake as a proscenium under an electronic vault of sky.

And she didn’t know it, but it was a photograph of Bobby Orr, the one taken when he clinched the Cup for Boston in 1970. In the shot she didn’t know, Orr has just tapped in a pass from behind the goal net and, upon sealing the win by a simple shovel of the runt disc past the reeling minder, is tripped by the stick of a defenseman for St. Louis. Orr hurls into the air, horizontal over the rink’s surface, his stick perfectly vertical in his right hand while his left punches out to brace against the inevitable fall. His face is giddy but assured: for some, flight is simple.

When Britt waved aside the alder branches, she saw this expression on the boy’s face. The positioner could not hope to recreate the famous shot, but his proximal best was worthy.

Britt padded a little further out and saw the face was white, the body scaled with ice, mist pellets that froze into barnacles on contact with the insulated corpse. Gunnar walked a little behind her, wanting to rest his head on her shoulder. Britt looked back. The cruiser was parked through the trees, the fire faint but still burning. The flux of the aurora was visible above the lake, muted at the edges and in the center, a whirring heartbeat of searching light.

 

© 2018 Ben Rosenthal

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Ben recently graduated from Columbia University in 2018 with an MFA in Fiction. His work has been published in Adelaide, The Potomac Review, Faultline, and THAT Literary Review. His short story “Origin Story” received Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train’s Nov/Dec 2017 Family Matters Contest. He has been a resident at The MacDowell Colony, and recently returned from a residency at U Cross.