Thin Ice

Of course, all sensible people were likely to be at home, at church, anywhere but a tavern parking lot with a corpse. That’s why the deputies spread their arms in perfunctory fashion, restraining the group as it gathered again in silence. What could not be restrained, however, were the thoughts that ran through each watcher’s mind when the sledge bumped and the head lolled toward them, baring the dead boy’s face.

Kern had never seen so clearly. This was what he had tried to put out of mind: death’s plain face, unchanging, his wife’s pale face as she was wheeled away on a hospital gurney. She was here now, recast in the boy’s unfamiliar features: eyes open, surprised, seeming to study the watchers. They formed a tableau of sorts, frozen in postures that the local paper would soon describe as “horrified,” but that Kern knew to be the lineaments of self-recognition. His painter’s eye saw their stories sketched in wrinkles and sagging flesh, in their half-formed expressions, which seemed akin to the look on the boy’s pulpy, waterlogged face, his dead lips stretched in a smile that couldn’t shield him from their intrusions.

Kern saw the deputies yawning. For the first time he saw that the bartender had been a boy once himself, a boy who survived Korea to carry with him the image of other boys, dead, piled like scrap beside a frozen reservoir in a land without trees. He saw that the birdwatcher wanted a drink this morning, unable to put his own young sons out of mind. He saw that the dead boy was simply a mirror to others, and that boredom had already touched a few faces: those accustomed to shocks, those for whom this was a mere episode, a convenient way to divide the term of days before and days after this moment. And finally, Kern nodded hello to his neighbor, who had just now paused on his morning run. Panting and red-faced, the jogger gazed with incurious eyes as if the boy meant no more to him than the squirrels he trapped from his vegetable garden in summer, scrabbling clawed things that chewed at the wire mesh of the cage when he lowered them off his dock, into the water, to be retrieved later, limp as wet rags in a basket.

And, truly, the boy was little more than that, a stranger here—even more a stranger than the painter—having no one to grieve for him. Where were the mourners? Kern looked about, but the Ojibwa had driven away, rigid at the wheel, uninterested in this fair-haired child whose narrow features reminded her of a weasel. And where was the girl, eight weeks pregnant, who believed she was the cause of all this? Kern imagined her in a short coat of fake rabbit fur, her hair a sleepless tangle. She alone would push past the deputies. And unlike the rest of them, the watchers, she would not stop crying long enough to see what the boy’s eyes could tell her: that his true love lay elsewhere, in the lake’s icy depths, that his urgency as they made love owed everything to that longing, to that desire to be gone.

Then the body indeed was gone, hoisted smoothly into the ambulance. It seemed a signal to move—truck engines starting, the crowd dispersing, and Kern exploring his sorrow as the fish, stirred from their winter sleep, began to explore the lake’s new landmark, stray shadows nuzzling car seats in the green light below the ice, shadows flitting through the broken windows of the old Chevrolet which was already shifting slowly into the mud.

More immediately, the ambulance spun its tires, digging deeply into the slush. The driver goosed it, spun deeper, then climbed out to study the problem.

“What kind of parking lot is this?” he asked, directing his words at the onlookers. The other trucks idled. The deputies shook their heads. It appeared the winch would be needed once more, that the poor dead boy must undergo another indignity.

At that moment, Kern saw his chance: which is to say, he did not think, did not watch, but simply acted, stepping out of the crowd and clapping one of the deputies on the shoulder. “Let’s push.”

The young man looked quizzically at the bearded painter. He wanted to get home to his wife, to bed, to whatever was left of a Sunday well spoiled by that drunk little fuck who had drowned himself.

“You heard him,” the bartender said, suddenly at Kern’s side. The two of them strode to the ambulance with deputies and drinkers in tow—and even the jogger followed, shrugging but among them, anomalous as a tropic bird in his spandex gear. Bracing themselves in the slush, the group rocked the ambulance. They pushed it and let it roll back in its rut, then pushed it until it spun free, fishtailing onto the roadway where the sun had melted the snow.

All the drinkers cheered, Kern among them. He did not think it the grandest send-off for a dead boy. He understood it was not such a hard thing to move an ambulance with a dozen men pushing. No doubt, an engineer could better explain it: a simple matter of inertia, of force applied on a vector. But who could explain how their hearts were moved, and how they went home, and how, in Kern’s case, the vector of life had incrementally shifted, putting him on a course to his studio and the dream of days to come.

 


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