GOOD AT QUIET

The night Art came home from Kazakhstan the guy on the radio said it was ten below and thinking about throwing a blizzard out our way. I was sitting at the kitchen table, watching Sherrie while she did the dishes, trying to pull myself out of my silent brand of pissed off. I’d been deep in it ever since Art’s postcard. For a week, I’d stayed out at the store way after closing, watching National Geographic videos, coming home smelling of whisky. A couple days ago, Sherrie told me the sink was leaking again and I went into the bathroom and punched a hole through the wall. Then, last night, our daughter Julie called from her dorm, told us she’d decided not to go to Ghana with the Peace Corps next year. I yelled so loud in the receiver that Sherrie hung up the other phone and I had to call Julie back an hour later to apologize. Sherrie told me I was free to go to Ghana myself, always had been. From the way she shut the bathroom door, I could tell she was going to stay in there until I’d gone to bed.

Now, Art was just an hour away. Sherrie clanked dishes under the sink water. We’d eaten dinner in polite quiet. Hail drilled the window glass like gravel. The roads would be hell. Somehow, that seemed like Art’s fault, too.

I hadn’t seen him in a year. We used to hunt together every winter, once a week, then once a month and now once a year, if he can get back to my part of the world. Every time, from the moment we’re out the door to the moment we’re back through it, Sherrie’s nerves work on her and set her to rearranging the file cabinets, or cleaning the basement, or vacuuming the stairs. She’d started on the dishes half an hour before I had to take off for the airport, and she was finishing too early.

I shoved my chair back, got up, and went to her. Her shoulders stilled. I wiped a fleck of soapsuds from the nape of her neck, barely letting my fingers touch her skin.

"Suds," I said.

"Thanks." She bent her head a little farther forward.

I let my hands hold her shoulders, worked my thumbs along the tightened muscles of her neck. She leaned back against me. The guy on the radio was still talking about his bad weather, and I waited for him to quit it and go back to playing jazz.

When I stepped away, pulling my parka off the hook on the door, she turned and said, "No way." She shook her head, once, like she was cranking it up to let loose. "Did you hear the radio?"

Sherrie hates that parka. It’s from World War II, the color of the English Channel. Some kind of fur clings to the hood. It smells like wet dog in the rain. My Uncle Laurel must have had a parka just like it, Uncle Laurel who fought at D-Day, bellied up blood-soaked sand on Omaha beach, Uncle Laurel who got damn smack up to Germany and froze to death in cold so bad it must have been born in Russia. Every time I get that parka on it shoots a quick thrill through my joints, makes me feel like Uncle Laurel’s brother’s son.

I zipped up and watched her head for the broom. "It just sounds bad on the windows," I said.

"Promise me you’ll pull to the side if it gets worse." She swept like the dust was glued to the floor.

"I’m gonna start just driving around in storms," I said. "It’s the only time one of us actually cleans the house." She was too nervous to smile. "Really, Sher, how long have I been driving in ice? It’s alright out there. I’ll pull to the side and sit if it looks like it’s gonna come through the roof, okay? I’ll even use my headlights."

"You wouldn’t pull over if it was dropping anvils," she said. "You wouldn’t let the hail win."

It’s a good thing she didn’t follow me outside. The wipers stuttered against the hail. The back roads were rolling with it. I got 68 | West Branch to thinking of Art up in that plane hurtling along the curvature of the earth, heading here. For the first time since I’d learned he was coming back from Alma Alta, I remembered that he was my best friend.

At Arrivals, I edged through three lanes, parked, pulled on gloves, and got out into the cold. After a few minutes my ears started to feel separate from my head. I pulled the parka’s heavy hood on. Fur eyelashed my face, got in my mouth, smelled like damp Jax, the Kowalskis’ shepherd, just after he’d shook dry.

I knew it was Art behind me just from the sound his shoes made walking. Art strolls easy whether up a forty percent grade on sketchy shale, barefoot in beach sand, or in ear-freezing Vermont while everyone else stamps cold feet and dashes for cars.

"Is your harpoon in the Volvo," he said, "Or do you just grab the narwhal by the horn and shake like hell."

He was wearing the same jacket he’d had since college, the down crushed to dust, the blue gone grey and blotched with stains from seven continents. I don’t think the zipper worked; I’d never seen him use it. His flannel shirt hung open, just a t-shirt underneath, scrawled with Thai or Burmese or something. His sweatpants burrowed into felt-lined boots. A fur hat that must have once been a fox or goat or a llama came to a point over his head, ear flaps flopping at his cheeks. Yet, somehow, he’d always made men in three-thousand-dollar suits feel about as suave as store manikins. Even there, in that cold, I caught two high-school girls throwing womanly looks his way. He’s seven and three quarters inches taller than me and I’m always afraid I’ll look foolish trying to hug him.

"You look good," I said.

His lanky arms pulled me to him. We squeezed tight. I started around the car.

"You just have that knapsack?"

"You’ve still got Jasper’s stuff, don’t you?" he said. "That body suit?"

My dad had an orange camouflaged hunting suit he wore right up until the winter he died. He was a big man, Art’s size, passed on his genes to my sister. "Yeah, I think it’s still there."

"That thing’s like walking around in bed." We headed for the highway. "New car," he pronounced. "You give out free popcorn, like I told you?"

"Opened a third store down in Bennington." "Told you. There is nothing more American than popcorn and movies."

"Nope," I agreed. In high school, on the bus home, Art used to say things like, "All English sparrows should be shot. They’re messing up the migratory patterns of the chickadees," both inviting argument and leaving no room for it at the same time.

A few minutes later, I said, "I tried the popcorn thing for a week. But I had to cancel it. There was popcorn crushed into the rug. People were slipping on it. Too damn messy."

"You ever been to a movie theater?"

"How was Kazakhstan?"

"Crazy. Really, really crazy. I’ve got slides. You should do the popcorn, Tom. Could have opened two more stores." He played with the automatic seat adjustments as if he disapproved. "Jasper would have disowned you," he said when he discovered the button that increased lumbar support.

The hail did its best to crack the windshield. I drove a little faster than I was comfortable with.

"If it’s like this tomorrow," Art said, "We’re gonna have to suit up like conquistadors. Armorify ourselves."

"That’s why I was late picking you up."

"I had to take a piss anyway. Walked ten minutes before I got out of the crowds."

Art won’t use public restrooms unless he’s got serious, pressing business. He’s peed in parking lots, on roadsides, off cliff tops and out of windows.

"And then it hails on my dick," he said. I laughed and he grinned at me. "Should have peed in your new Volvo."

We turned off onto the back roads. Neither of us reached for the radio knobs. In junior high we used to sit up in my dad’s tree stand for hours, not a word between us, looking hard at shadows and flickers in the woods. After a while, we’d unwrap one sandwich and each take half. An hour later, we’d do the same with the second. Sometimes it would feel as if there were no sounds in the world but the trees creaking and our own slow chewing. We were always good at quiet.

The hail shredded the high beams, snuffed them out ten, fifteen feet ahead. Pines yellowed out of the dark, swayed, passed by. Beyond them, it was black like the inside of the earth must be, so dark it was hard to believe light had ever touched there. Even the hammering on the roof seemed distant.

I glanced at Art. His gaze was lost in the streaking hail. I wondered if he was thinking the same thing: thirteen years old, our first backpacking trip alone in the High Peaks, and it threw down hail in September. The stuff stung so bad we covered our faces and watched the trail through the cracks between our fingers. When we reached the lean-to, we crammed into one sleeping bag, told each other how bad we’d kill the other one if he touched anything, anywhere.

All night, listening to ice hammering the roof, we planned out our lives in darkness so thick we couldn’t see each other’s face, started out kayaking up to Alaska, crossed the Sahara, went shark diving off the coast of Zanzibar and made a pilgrimage to Mecca, just for the hell of it. Somewhere—I think it was with the Iditarod —we split ways. But, somehow, we always figured out a longitude and latitude at which our adventures crossed, a joint trip, a feat only the two of us could attempt together. We even made it out to space, looked out of a window at a world we’d pretty much conquered, fought over who would take the picture.

Drifting through the deep black, the hail drumming at the car’s roof, I could almost feel, again, Art’s excited breath on my face. When I glanced at him his eyes were closed. He had leaned the seat back. The thundering on the roof tumbled away into Josh Weil | 71 silence; the hail grew wings, metamorphosed to snow, slowed to drifting. There’d be fresh tracks in the morning.

A half hour later, we were home. The driveway lolled out under the floating windows, Sherrie moving in them. The snow was stacking. I parked at the side of the road and followed Art up the hill, the thick snow making me work muscles from my back to my arches, loud breath pushing at my chest. Up ahead, Art’s boots swung from the knees down, easy, jutting into steep grade, an ice climber’s efficient step.

"Arthur Canton." Sherrie yanked him to her, then held him back, looking him over. "You look like crap." I could tell he was smiling.

"Hey, Sher," I called, waving and jogging toward them.

Art was flushed when I got there. Sherrie always does it to him. He looks at room corners, smiles at things he doesn’t quite hear, nods a lot. Sherrie kissed him on the cheek just to see him sizzle and fry.

Inside, I slumped into a chair at the table, my thighs already going tight. Art wandered the kitchen, squatted to look at his postcard on the fridge, sprang up again, and finally joined me at the table.

"You’ve fixed up the whole kitchen," Art said. I slapped my wet gloves against the table legs. "Looks like you’ve put a hell of a lot of work in here."

"Yup."

Sherrie jabbed a look at me.

"Must keep you busy." His voice had gone flat, slightly disinterested, a defense mechanism he’d always had when things looked like they were slipping toward bad.

"That and the stores," I said. "Why I’m so out of shape."

"Me, too."

He avoided my eyes and I avoided his. Sherrie set the mugs down by the coffee maker a little too hard.

"You know," Art said, "Dad left the house to me on one condition. That I never try to fix it up myself. Said if I was going to try and get handy, he might as well just bulldoze it."

I half listened, staring at my gloves on the floor. The room smelled strong of coffee, dry wood, damp wool and something else I couldn’t place, something Art had brought from around the world right into my kitchen, a spice or body odor; whatever it was, it overpowered all the smells of my home, my own smell, the smell of my wife.

"He should have left you the house," Art said.

"Oh for Christ’s sake." I shoved my chair a little away from the table. "Tell me about Nepal, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, wherever the hell you’ve been. Don’t sit there talking about what a goddamn good plumber I am."

I felt Sherrie watching me across the kitchen. Uncle Laurel’s grandfather clock hammered seconds at the quiet. Art got up, poured three mugs of coffee, left two standing on the counter, and let his weight down across the table again. He sipped his coffee, loud.

"It’s been at least a year since I’ve had coffee that didn’t taste like sand and fish-oil." He blew at the steam rising off his mug. "Last time I was in the States, I drove up to the ’rents place. First time since Dad died. Mom’s up at Shady Glen now."

I looked up. "She is?"

He was looking deep in his mug. "Yeah. Almost a year."

"I didn’t know." I went to get my coffee.

"She doing okay?" from Sherrie, quiet at the counter.

"House is empty as hell," Art said.

I leaned back against the counter, cupped the mug in my hands.

"Paint’s peeling. Porch is half rotted." He drank long, grinned. "I’ve got no money to hire some guy to fix it up, it’s dead empty and I don’t see that changing any time soon. But the thing is, Tom, there’s a hell of a lot of time I spend, you know, I’ll be in some tiny damn tent with some guy’s feet up my nose, and I think about that house. Wind whipping around over fifteen thousand feet and I’m thinking about rearranging the bedrooms, switching curtains around in the kitchen." He tipped his mug back. "That’s good coffee." Under the table, his boots made two quiet thumps. "I mean, then I come here and…You make a really good cup of coffee, Sherrie." He set the mug down carefully on the wood. "Tom," he said. "You realize we’re pushing forty?"

I drank down my coffee, slapped the mug to the table. "Oh, stop bitching," I said, crossed the room, and lifted my Browning ABolt and Dad’s old Ruger off the wall. "There’s a buck somewhere out there that’s a whole lot less lucky than me or you and he’s sleeping like a baby."

Art shook a smile back onto his face. "Hell, Tom," he said. "He just knows there’s two whiny old men coming after him in the morning. He figures by daylight we’ll be crying too hard to see shit or shoot straight."

Later that night, the cold eased up. Rain perforated the snowquiet. Sherrie and Art had gone down to the basement to hunt for the slide projector. I got a fire going and hunkered deep in the velvety red lounge chair Dad used to call his "man trap dead and gone chair," plumbing out and ragging off the rifle in my lap, so close to the flames my jeans were almost too hot on my knees. I’d get going on the other rifle soon. Art never was much for practical work.

That and the fact I’d gotten the fire going with one match and no paper had heated up a good mood in me and I was remembering Dad coming in from the hunt, Chuck Hirsch and Bailey Paterson stomping around with him like cows crowding a barn, the tired clomp of Dad’s lug soles as he dragged himself over to the red chair, eased down in it like it was a back rub, bed, and bath all rolled into one, and sighed, long. "Take a load off, fellas. Alma, bring us that Scotch, would you honey? We’ll get out of your hair in the kitchen, raise hell here by the fire." A half minute later he’d be snoring hard. From the stairs, I’d watch his friends 74 | West Branch tie his shoe laces together or soak his hand in warm water in the hopes he’d wet himself. They’d wink at me, tiptoe out, carry their laughter into the night. I’d watch Mom bring a tumbler of Scotch into the living room. She’d untie Dad’s feet or draw his hand out of the water. He’d wake, smile, shake his head. "This damn man trap dead and gone chair," he’d say.

I leaned back, remembering how Mom would keep stroking his hand long after she’d patted it dry. The muscles of my face felt unused to the shape of my smile.

But, from the start, the projector’s drone wore at me.

"Okay," Art was saying, "I took this piece of crap prop plane in to Gilgit. Crammed in back with a load of medical supplies. That’s what I saw coming in—the cargo door was missing. The Konar River had flooded and I was like, shit, so much for landing, right?"

Sherrie turned to me. "Honey, could you move your chair to block the fire? It’s hard to see the slides."

"Sure," I said. The heat drained out of the room. My pant legs cooled on my shins.

"We start to drop. And I’m thinking, What, do we have pontoons on this thing?"

With each slide, I felt more strongly the distance between those people, those animals, that muddy water and my living room. It was as if the distance were materializing right there between me in my chair and Art by the projector. The floorboards stretched, the outside sucked at the walls, and the rain on the roof echoed like the sound was gathered over miles.

I stopped watching the slides. I reached back and went to work on the second rifle, rubbing hard, bringing a shine out of the metal and a gleam out of the wood. I tried to listen through the projector’s whir to the fire whispering behind me.

Sherrie gasped. A dead cow lay on its side in a muddy road, a boy pinned under it, pulling at his leg. Sherrie was leaning forward in her seat, elbows pressing her knees, fascinated.

That’s exactly how she looked the first time we met. I must have looked like that, too. That was before Julie, and Sherrie’s teaching certificate, and the video stores. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her that enthralled. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been like that, either.

"Just that slow, flooded road winding way up there. There’s no other way to get in those hills," Art said.

Sometimes, on the school bus, I’d be talking to some girl when we’d come to Art’s bus stop. He’d get on and sit down. She’d just latch on to him. I could be in the middle of a sentence, and suddenly I’d be talking to the backs of two heads. There were times then that I wanted to reach out, grab his head, and punch it over and over. Just reach over, yank him backward off his chair by the projector and slam his head into the boards.

The minute I saw that—Art down and me over him, the bone-smack of his head on the floor—I felt my stomach crawl. I looked down at my hands; they lay utterly motionless over the bolt and barrel.

"I’m the only one with any bandages. A first aid kit."

Art’s head stayed still while he talked, but I could see his neck pulse, the shifting of his jawbone. "Everyone’s shouting." That smell on him got in my throat.

"Everyone’s going crazy."

I tore the rifle off my lap, snapped up. My foot must have kicked the oil can; it hit the floor with a crash. They turned.

"Tom?" Art said.

The oil ponded on the boards. The projector hummed.

"Sorry." I crouched and wiped at the oil with the rag. "I’ve got to get a new can."

Down in the basement, I stood with the rag in one hand, the can in the other, trying to get the cramping out of my chest.

"You okay, Tom?" It was Sherrie. "You need me to come down there?"

"No," I said. "I just can’t find the fucking oil can." I wanted to tear the boxes from the walls, smash the canning jars, go at the concrete floor with a pick axe, but I could hear her still waiting at the top of the stairs. I forced myself still, clamped my muscles on themselves. On the floor above, I could hear the slide projector still whirring particles of light, Art’s documentation of our once shared dreams.

"Come on up," Sherrie said, out of sight. "We can do it afterwards."

"Tom?" It was Art. Footsteps started down.

"Don’t," I snapped.

I could see Sherrie’s blue wool socks and the cuffs of her jeans. Art must have been a couple steps behind her. They stood there.

"I’m fine," I said.

I heard Art whisper something to Sherrie. He started back up the stairs. Her feet stayed where they were. Then she stooped, peered at me across the dim basement. She was too far away, and the stairwell was too dark, for me to tell what was in her eyes.

"I’m fine," I said again.

"Christ, Tom."

"I’ll be alright."

"You’ll be alright."

I could feel the bulb above me sending its wash of light over my face. "Tell him I’m sorry," I said. I could feel her stare on my eyes, tangible as fingertips. Whatever she saw there made her straighten up. I watched her, just jeans and feet again, the rest of her hidden from me by the ceiling.

"You are so lucky," she said.

"Tell Art…"

"You tell him."

I stayed down there long after she had gone back up, after she had shut the door, after the sounds of her moving through the house shutting off lights, after their footsteps had faded to the upstairs. I could hear Art and Sherrie through two floors: water running through pipes, the occasional thud, a door smacking shut. For a long time, the winter storm switchbacked between rain and hail, rolled off the roof or drove hard at it.

Gradually, I became aware that all the sounds in the house were wind or wood. I didn’t even hear a bed creak. They were asleep. I stooped to the floor, my jeans rustling in the quiet, and lay the rag in a crumpled pile on the concrete. Crouched there, I could feel the cold coming through from the soil below.

Upstairs, the slide projector’s whir accentuated the quiet of everything else. Art must have left its fan on to cool the bulb. I made my way through the dark house. The Ruger still lay on the living room floor. I picked it up. The only light came from the digital clock on the vcr, a greenness too weak to do more than hint at my reflection in the window, the thin gleam of the barrel. The panes of glass looked fragile as the first skins of ice on November ponds and, beyond them, the night, tenebrous as the tannin-stained depths.

I reached to shut the projector off. My fingers hovered. I flicked the lamp back on. An image bloomed onto the canvas screen: a man, saffron yellow turban, white mustaches, weatherpounded face, unbuttoned army-green jacket showing a red string draped across his bare chest like a long razor slit in his skin. He carried a rifle in one hand and glared straight at the camera, at the man who was taking his picture, at Art. The light from the screen filled my face. I stared back.

We got out early the next morning, before Sherrie was up. The dark was just thinning. Art came downstairs engulfed in Dad’s orange camouflage snow suit. He warily poured himself a cup of coffee. I’d just finished frying us some bacon and he held two slices of toast out for me to ease the strips on. We stood by the window, watching the morning seep into the sky. It was warm enough inside—I hadn’t put my parka on yet and Art had the snow suit unzipped to the crotch—but you could tell how cold it 78 | West Branch had gotten outside. Trees crept out of the dark grey, perfectly still, sheathed from twig to trunk in ice.

We ate our bacon sandwiches and sipped our coffee, aware of each other’s chewing and swallowing. When we were finished, Art reached over and clapped a hand on my shoulder. The frozen trees watched us.

"We’d better get going," he said.

The second he took his arm away, I regretted not putting mine around him.

"You bet," I said.

I slipped into my heavy parka, laced up my boots. He got his zipper stuck a few inches short of the top. In that suit, he looked like I remembered him when we used to go sledding; he always got a zipper stuck or couldn’t untie a knot.

"Art," I said. He looked at me. "It’s nice to eat breakfast with you again, early like this, no one else up."

He grinned and gave his zipper a tug. "You remember those chocolate chip pancakes my mom used to make?"

"Oh God, yeah," I said, smelling his mother’s kitchen again, remembering the elation of chocolate for breakfast, the darkness outside and our dads getting the guns ready, the expectation of the day wide and long before us.

"Man those were good."

"Man, they were."

He got the zipper loose, worked it up to his chin. We lifted our rifles off the table and headed out into first morning.

The growing light brought a breeze with it and, by the time we were through the woods and at the field that edged the Kowalskis’ land, the ice-sheathed trees were rattling so loudly we could hardly hear the crunch of our own footsteps. We stopped at the stone wall. The snow was fresh and clean; there’d be no trouble finding tracks. We turned to split up, said "Don’t shoot me" at exactly the same time, and walked off in opposite directions down the stone wall.

At the far edge of the field, where I’d start to make my way north, paralleling Art in the distance, I stopped and glanced over at him. He was walking hard through the snow, arms swinging with the effort, but I could see his breath coming even and slow in white puffs. He disappeared over the hill.

The snow was about the worst it gets for walking, heavy and wet underneath and covered with an ice sheath thick enough to bruise breaking against my shins. I was sweating by the time I’d gotten halfway across the field, my flannel sticking to my underarms. My legs had gone numb and I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs. I tried breathing out hard and staccato, like Art said you do in super high altitude to open up your lungs. I just felt like I was wheezing. He was somewhere across that field, going easy and steady and fast.

I was close to collapsing when I saw it: a flash of dun, flicker of white. Struggling to quiet my breathing, I peered across the wide pond into the thin, gray branches at the other side. The rack spread huge, a strange plant over the tops of the reeds. He was beautiful. I eased off my right glove, gripped it in my teeth, shifted the rifle—the cold bite of metal on my fingers—and raised it to my shoulder.

The buck’s head snapped up, ears cocked; he turned like someone had yanked a string tied to his neck. I watched him flicker through the trees. The snow-smooth pond stretched way to my right and left. I judged fifteen minutes to get around it and over to the other side, pick up the tracks. But if I cut across, there’d be no chance Art would get to him first. I’d have him slung over my shoulders by the time Art found me, that beautiful rack fanned out like a peacock’s tail. I pushed through the reeds and onto the pond. The ice-covered stalks rattled, shed clear skin that dropped and shattered. Something in their brittle tinkling made me stop. I kicked at the snow. It was about a foot and a half deep. I couldn’t tell how thick the ice was under it, or how deep the water went under that. I took one more step. The sky was sheet metal bent over the frayed tree tops and, out there on the ice, with the pond 80 | West Branch stretching empty and white around me, I became acutely aware of the coldness of the air, the never-ending stretch of forests, the limitlessness of the snow, the depth of the sky. It was clear to me then, as clear as the simplicity of my body that was just meat and bone, veins and arteries and organs, no different than that buck that I would quarter and flay and freeze—It was clear I mattered nothing from one horizon to the other.

I backed off the ice so fast I jammed my knee. Back on frozen earth, I checked over my rifle, yanked back the bolt, checked the bullet, snapped it shut again, checked the safety, and cleaned the snow off the barrel; it made me feel safe again, seeing how well it was made. I hung the gun in the crook of my arm and started around the pond through the crackling reeds.

I’d brought my breathing under control and was halfway around the pond when a flash of orange caught my eye. Far down the other side of the pond, Art broke through the reeds, moving fast toward the shore where the buck had been. He was heading for the ice. I watched him start across. A distant, small shape, orange snowsuit, jerking ice-steps; he barely looked human. The reeds crackled around me. It seemed inconceivable, then, that such a tiny, insignificant, stuttering thing could have done all that Art had done, and that I, with my head throbbing inside the hot parka hood, the bite of bacon salt still in the cracks of my lips, my heart-thud so strong

I could feel the proof of it in my teeth: I had been the one to fail. I could feel the weight of the Ruger like it was dangling at the end of a string run through my finger bones, my wrists, all the way up into my shoulders. The bare trees and fields seemed to expand under the vast emptiness of winter sky as if to clarify the utter insignificance of one small figure moving through. That was what it must have looked like to Uncle Laurel the winter he fought his way across Europe: a sudden glimpse of a padded and misshapen animal with a rifle in its hands, one thing moving, then not, just a spot of color and line amid an endless supply of others.

He moved across the ice. I raised my rifle. On our first backpacking trip together, the morning after the night of hail, Art and I climbed up Gothics Peak, stood at the summit, gusts of wind rattling our windbreakers. Looking down, I could see my boot toes six inches from the cliff edge, the tops of the pines way below, and even farther down an endless obscurity of cloud. My whole body had wanted to jump. An innate urge to do the thing beyond imagining, before my mind could stop me. In the sight, his face was flushed, eager. The barrel shook against all that white.

I couldn’t do it any more than I had been able to jump so many years ago, any more than I had been able to sell Dad’s business, or abandon the house, or leave Sherrie, or even just cross the ice. Art’s footsteps scraped their steady rhythm into the quiet. He didn’t even glance my way.

I rushed out onto the pond then. Ice spread from my feet to way out, opening like upside down sky. I was halfway across and almost running. On the approaching shore, the stalks crackled in the wind, a beautiful sound. I sucked at the air, cold gushing into my chest. Watching Art easing cautiously across, I couldn’t help grinning. I don’t remember hearing the crack. The ice just splintered, tilted, and was gone.

He found me, of course. I don’t know how long I’d been under, or how I’d found the edge, or how long I’d been lying on my back, staring up through dead reeds at the metal sky, my fingers, arms, spine, neck frozen into the snow. I’d been listening to Uncle Laurel’s boot steps, hard crunches skimming the surface crust like stones, slamming into my ears, over and over, as if he were telling me what a fool I’d been to think a man like me could ever be a man like him. I watched the wet fur of my hood slowly turn to delicate splinters of ice. A breeze crackled the trees. Pond water lapped, over and over.

When the sky went orange I shut my eyes, but I could tell, just by the feel of the fingertips: they were Art’s hands that touched me. I remembered, then, creeping weeds, mud, shards of darkness and light, something orange flailing through it all toward me, hooking me under the arms, his face close as he lifted me to safety.

We must have looked an odd sight that winter morning, two men trudging under wet-heavy down, sloshing slowly through snow, sheathed in ice. We gripped each other tight, straining arms urging each other’s legs. I’d like to think we looked like brothers. But I think we must have looked like some horrible, creeping monster, wet fur and stone-gray back, belly an unnatural orange, half dead and still lunging for the thick of the woods.

When Sherrie opened the door she went completely still. I watched her eyes shift from shock to fright to determination. She helped me in. I freed my fingers from the icy gloves, unzipped my parka, worked at the buttons on my flannel. In the living room, I dropped into the red chair. The fire feasted noisily behind me. I heard Art shut the front door.

"Sherrie," I said. "Whiskies. Please."

She walked by him where he stood in the kitchen doorway. He had not taken off his hat or boots, had not unzipped his orange suit. His jaw shook. From the bathroom came the muffled rumble of water battering porcelain, then Sherrie was in the kitchen again, moving around Art. The clink of glass on glass. She handed him the bottle as she came back to me. I watched him from my chair while she wrapped my fingers around a tumbler. He stood just outside the room, staring at us like we were on television and he’d been watching for a long time.

"The bath’s ready," she said.

"Let Art take it."

"I’ll get you a blanket," she said.

"Help him to the bath, Sher."

Slumped in his orange suit, barely able to move his weight, he followed her down the hall. I listened to his shuffling steps, watched the bright kitchen doorway where he had been, and closed my eyes. Sitting in Dad’s dead and gone chair, warmed by the Scotch, I listened to Art splash heavily into the tub. Then Josh Weil | 83 he was silent in there, lying still. Overhead, Sherrie’s footsteps whispered from the bedroom. I heard her open a door, push aside the hangers that held our clothes, getting me a blanket from one of the shelves deep in the closet that we shared.