Tooth and Claw (15 page)

“You look like a snowman,” she said. “A walking snowman.”

He took this as a signal to stop, and he planted his feet and rotated to face her. She seemed reduced somehow, as small as a child sent out to play with her sled on a day when the superintendent had closed down the schools, and he wanted to hug her to him protectively, wanted to make amends for his mood and the mess he’d gotten them into, but he didn’t. The snow drove down, burying everything. There was a crown of it atop her hood, individual flakes caught like drift in her eyelashes and softening the frames of her glasses. “You too,” he said, pulling for air as if he were drowning. “Both of us,” he gasped. “Snowmen. Or snow man and snow woman.”

Later on—and maybe they’d gone another mile—he made a discovery that caused his heart to leap up and then almost simultaneously closed it down again. They’d come to a place he recognized even through the blowing snow and the shifting, subversive contours of the landscape—an intersection, with a half-buried stop sign. Straight ahead the road pushed deeper into the wilderness; to the left, it led to the Big Timber Lodge, and at least he knew where they were now, even if it wasn’t nearly as close as he’d imagined. He’d been fooling himself, he knew that, but all along he’d been hoping they’d passed here in the disorientation of the night. “I know this place,” he said. “The lodge is this way.”

She was panting now too, though not ten minutes ago she’d been telling him how she never missed a day on the Stairmaster—or almost never. “Fantastic,” she said. “See, it wasn’t so bad.” She stamped in place, shook the snow from her shoulders. “How far from here?”

His voice sank. “Pretty far,” he said.

“How far?”

He shrugged. Looked away from her even as a gust flung a fist of snow in his face. “Thirteen miles.”

T
HERE CAME A POINT
—it might have been half an hour later, forty-five minutes, he couldn’t say—when he gave in and let her break trail ahead of him. He was wiped. He could barely lift his legs. And when he wasn’t moving—if he paused even for a minute to
catch his breath—the wind dug into him and he felt the sweat go cold under his arms and across his back. He couldn’t believe how fast the snow was accumulating—it was up to his crotch now and even deeper in the drifts, the wind raking the trees till the needles whipped and sang, the temperature falling as if it were night already, though it was just past one. He watched her move ahead of him, head bobbing, arms churning, six steps and then a recuperative pause, her lower body sheared off at the waist as if she were wading across a river. She’d slipped a pair of jeans on over her leggings in the fastness of the car but she must have been cold, whether she’d grown up in the snow or not. He was thinking he’d have to catch her by the arm and reverse positions with her—he was the one who’d gotten her into this and he was going to lead her out of it—when suddenly she stopped and swung round on him, heaving for breath.

“Wow,” she said, “this is something, huh?” Her face was chapped, blazing, the cord of the hood gone hard with a knot of ice; her nose was running and her mouth was set.

“Let me,” he said, “it’s my turn.”

Her eyes gave him permission. Slowly, with the wind in his face and his feet shuffling like a drunk’s, he waded on ahead of her.

“I wish we had snowshoes,” she said at his back.

“Yeah, me too.”

“Or skis.”

“How about a snowmobile? Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Hot coffee,” she said. “I’d settle for that.”

“With a shot of brandy—or Kahlúa. How does Kahlúa sound?”

The wind came up. She didn’t answer. After a while she asked him if he thought it was much farther and he halted and swung round on her. His fingers throbbed, his feet were dead. “I don’t know—it can’t be that much farther.”

“How far do you think we’ve come? I mean, from where the road forked?”

He shrugged. “A couple miles, I guess, right?”

Her eyes narrowed against the wind. She ran a mittened hand under her nose. “You know what killed off the glyptodont?”

He hugged his arms to his chest and watched her, the wind-blown snow riding up his legs.

“Stupidity,” she said, and then they moved on.

N
EAR THE END
, when the sky shaded perceptibly toward night and the ravens began to call from their hidden perches, she complained of numbness in her fingers and toes. Neither of them had spoken for a long while—speech was superfluous, a waste of energy in the face of what was turning out to be more of a trial than either of them could have imagined—and all he could say was that he was sorry for getting her into this and reassure her that they’d be there soon. The snow hadn’t slackened all day—if anything, perversely, it seemed to be coming down even harder now—and the going was ever slower as the drifts mounted ahead of them. Earlier, they’d stopped to share the remaining power bar and she’d been sufficiently energetic still to regale him with stories of the last passenger pigeon dying on its perch in the Cincinnati Zoo and the last wolf shot in these mountains, of the aurochs and the giant sloth and half a dozen other poor doomed creatures winging by on their way to extinction even as he silently calculated their own chances. People froze to death out here, that much he knew. Hikers forever lost in the echoing canyons, snowmobilers awaiting rescue by their disabled machines, the unlucky and unprepared. But they weren’t lost, he kept telling himself—they were on the road and it was just a matter of time and effort before they got to the lodge. Nothing to worry about. Nothing at all.

She was ahead of him, breaking trail, the snow up to her waist. “It’s not just numb,” she said, her breath trailing behind her. “It stings. It stings so bad.”

The gloom deepened. He went on another five steps and pulled up short. “Maybe we should stop,” he said, breathing so hard he felt as if his lungs had been turned inside out. “Just for a couple minutes. I have a tarp in my pack and we could make a little shelter. If we get out of the wind we can—”

“What?” she swung round on him, her face savage. “We can what—freeze to death? Is that what you want, huh?”

The snow absorbed them. Everything, even the trunks of the trees, faded to colorlessness. He didn’t know what to do. He was the one at fault here and there was no way to make that right, but still, couldn’t she see he was doing his best?

“No,” he said, “that’s not what I mean. I mean we could recoup our energy—it can’t be much farther—and I could warm your feet. I mean, on my chest, under my parka—isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Flesh to flesh?”

She snatched off her glasses and all her beauty flashed out, but it was a disengaged beauty, a bedraggled and fractious beauty. Her lips clenched, her eyes penetrated him. “Are you crazy? I’m going to take off my boots in this? Are you out of your mind?”

“Ontario,” he whispered, “listen, come on, please,” and he was shuffling forward to take her in his arms and press her to him, to have that at least, human warmth and comfort and all the trailing sorrowful release that comes with it, when the air suddenly bloomed with sound and they both turned to see the single Cyclopean eye of a snowmobile bounding toward them through the drifts.

A moment, and it was over. The engine screamed and then the driver saw them and let off on the throttle, the machine skidding to a halt just in front of them. The driver peeled back his goggles. There was a rime of ice in his beard. The exhaust took hold of the air and paralyzed it. “Jesus,” he said, his eyes shying away from them, “I damn near run you down. You people lost or what?”

H
E COULD HAVE STAYED
where he was, could have waited while the man in the goggles sped Ontario back to the lodge and then returned for him, but he trudged on anyway, a matter of pride now, the man’s incredulous laugh still echoing in his ears.
You mean you come up the back road? In this? Oh, man, you are really in the shits
. He was less than a mile from the lodge when the noise of the machine tore open the night and the headlight pinned him where he was. Then it was the wind and the exhaust and the bright running flash of the meaningless snow.

She was propped up by the fire with her boots off and a mug of coffee wrapped in her hands when he dragged himself in the door,
shivering violently from that last wind-whipped run through the drifts. Her wet parka was flung over the chair beside her and one of her mittens lay curled on the floor beneath the chair. A group of men in plaid shirts and down vests were gathered at the bar, roaring over the weather and their tall drinks, and a subsidiary group hovered around Ontario, plying her with their insights as to the advisability of bringing a vehicle up the back road in winter and allowing as how you should never go anywhere this time of year without snowshoes, a GPS beacon and the means of setting up a shelter and building yourself a fire in the event you had to hole up. She was lucky, they were telling her, not to mention crazy. In fact, this was the craziest thing any of them had ever heard of. And they all—every man in the place—turned their heads to give him a look as he clumped toward the fire.

Someone shoved a hot drink in his hands and he tried to be a sport about it, tried to be grateful and humble as they crowded around him and offered up their mocking congratulations on his having made it—“You’re a snow marathoner, isn’t that a fact?” one of them shouted in his face—but humility had never been his strong suit and the longer it went on the angrier he felt. And it did go on, he and Ontario the entertainment for the night, the drinks circulating and the fire snapping, a woman at the bar now, heavyset and hearty and louder than any of the men, until finally the owner of the place came in the door, snow to his eyes, to get a look at this marvel. He was a big man, bearded like the rest of them, his face lit with amusement, proprietor of the Big Timber Lodge and king of all he surveyed. “Hello and welcome,” he called in a hoarse, too-loud voice, gliding across the room to the fireplace, where Zach sat slumped and shivering beside Ontario. He took a minute, bending forward to poke solicitously at the coals. “So I hear you two took a little hike out there today.”

Zach reddened. The laughter rose and ebbed. Ontario sat hunched over her coffee as the fire stirred and settled. Beyond the windows it was dark now, the snow reduced to a collision of particles beating across the cone of light cast by a single lamp nailed to the trunk of one of the massive trees that presided over the parking lot. “Yeah,” Zach said, looking up into the man’s face and allowing him half a smile, “a little stroll.”

“But you’re okay, right—both of you? You need anything—dinner? We can make you dinner, full menu tonight.”

For the first time, Ontario spoke up. “Dinner would be nice,” she murmured. Her hair was tangled and wet, her face bleached of color. “We haven’t really eaten since lunch yesterday, I guess.”

“Except for some beef jerky,” Zach put in, just for the record. “And two power bars.”

The big man straightened up. He was beaming at them, his eyes jumping from Zach to Ontario and back again. “Good,” he said, rubbing his hands as if he’d just stepped away from the grill, as if the steaks had already been flipped and the potatoes were browning in the pan, “fine. Well, listen, you make yourselves comfortable, and if there’s anything else, you just holler.” He paused. “By the way,” he added, leaning in to brace himself on the back of the chair, “you have a place to stay for the night?”

The fire snapped and spat. It was all winding down now. Zach put the mug to his lips and felt the hot jolt of the coffee like a bullet in the back of his throat. He didn’t look at Ontario, didn’t pat her hand or slip an arm round her shoulders. “We’re going to need a room,” he said, gazing up at the man, and in the space of that instant he could hear the faint hum of the wings and the beat of the paws and the long doomed drumming of the hooves before Ontario corrected him.

“No,” she said. “Two rooms.”

I’
VE BEEN LIVING
in Jubilation for almost two years now. There’s been a lot of change in that time, both for the better and the worse, as you might expect in any real and authentic town composed of real and authentic people with their iron-clad personalities and various personal agendas, but overall I’d say I’m happy I chose the Contash Corp’s vision of community living. I’ve got friends here, neighbors, people who care about me the way I care about them. We’ve had our crises, no question about it—Mother Nature has been pretty erratic these past two years—and there isn’t a man, woman or child in Jubilation who isn’t worried about maintaining property values in the face of all the naysaying and criticism that’s come our way. Still, it’s the
people
this whole thing is about, and the people I know are as determined and forward-looking a bunch as any you’d ever hope to find. We’ve built something here, something I think we can all be proud of.

It wasn’t easy. From the beginning, everybody laughed behind my back. Everybody said, “Oh, sure, Jackson, you get divorced and the first thing you do is fly down to Florida and live in some theme park with Gulpy Gator and whoever—Chowchy the Lizard, right?—and you defend it with some tripe about community and the New Urbanists and we’re supposed to say you’re behaving rationally?” My ex-wife was the worst. Lauren. She made it sound as if I was personally going to drive the Sky Lift or slip into a Gulpy suit and greet people at the gates of Contash World, but the truth is I was a pioneer, I had a chance to get into something on the ground floor and make it work—
sacrifice
to make it work—and all the cynics I used to call
friends just snickered in their apple martinis as if my post-divorce life was some opera bouffe staged for their amusement.

Take the lottery. They all thought I was crazy, but I booked my ticket, flew down to Orlando and took my place in line with six thousand strangers while the sun peeled the skin off the tip of my nose and baked through the soles of my shoes. There was sleet on the runway at LaGuardia when the plane took off, a foot and a half of snow expected in the suburbs, and it meant nothing to me, not anymore. The palms were nodding in a languid tropical breeze, the chiggers, no-see-ums and mosquitoes were all on vacation somewhere, children scampered across the emerald grass and vigorous little birds darted in and out of the jasmine and hibiscus. It was early yet, not quite eight. People shuffled their feet, tapped their watches, gazed hopefully off into the distance while a hundred Contash greeters moved up and down the line with crullers and Styrofoam cups of coffee.