Ice Run (4 page)

I hit the steering wheel with both palms, and then spent the next ten minutes trying to turn the truck around. When I was finally pointed north again, I drove back into town. There was no rush now. I went five miles per hour instead of my daredevil ten miles per hour. When I got to Jackie’s place, I looked in again and saw the lights and pictured the fireplace and a cold Canadian. I pulled into the parking lot.

There were six people in the place, all locals who had walked down the road for a little company. They all looked up at me when I opened the door and cheered. It was that kind of night, when walking fifty yards was a cause for celebration.

“Alex!” Jackie said from behind the bar. “Did you walk all the way down here?”

“Can I use your phone?”

“Help yourself,” he said, pushing the phone across the bar. As I got closer, he did a double take and stared at me.

“What did you do?”

“Huh?” I dialed Natalie’s number.

“You did something.”

I shook my head at him. Natalie wasn’t answering.

“You did,” he said. “Something’s different.”

I dialed the Ojibway Hotel again. I got the same desk clerk, and this time he told me, yes, Natalie Reynaud was there. I waited while he called her room.

“Alex,” Jackie said. “You did something to your hair. That’s what it is.”

Yeah, I thought. My hair. The box said it would look totally natural, and that nobody would notice. Totally natural, my ass.

“It’s just a little thing for my gray,” I said.

“Just a little thing? You look like a lounge singer.”

I gave him a look and wondered how the day could get any worse. Then I heard her voice on the phone.

“Alex, is that you?”

“Yeah, it’s me.” I tried to pull the phone off the bar, but the cord wasn’t long enough. I waved Jackie away, but he didn’t move an inch.

“Oh my God,” Jackie said. “Now I know.”

“They said the roads are all closed out your way,” Natalie said on the phone. “I barely made it here myself. I think they closed the bridge right after I got across.”

“This explains everything,” Jackie said. “I should have known.”

If I could have reached him, I would have grabbed him by the collar and choked him.

“I’m sorry,” I said into the phone, trying to wave him away again. “It was a bad idea.”

“Don’t worry about it, Alex. It’s kinda nice here, eh? A nice hotel. It’s really good to be out of that house for a while. I was going stir crazy.”

“I shouldn’t have asked you to come out.”

Jackie just stood there watching me, shaking his head.

“Alex, I’m fine,” she said. “Really. I’ll just go downstairs and get something to eat. Watch the snow for a while. If you think you might be able to get here tomorrow—”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll be there tomorrow.”

Jackie looked at the ceiling and sighed dramatically. I looked around for something to throw at him.

“Okay, then,” she said. “I’ll stay here tonight and I’ll see you tomorrow. Call me in the morning, eh?”

“I’ll do that,” I said. Then there was a long silence while I tried to think of something else to say.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said. We both said goodbye and hung up.

“A woman,” Jackie said.

“I’m going to kill you.”

“A woman. This is why you’ve been acting so weird lately.”

“Yeah, and this is why I didn’t mention it before, Jackie. I know how you are about women.”

I didn’t want to have the whole discussion again with Jackie, the man who lived through the worst divorce of the twentieth century. But it was coming whether I wanted it or not, so I just asked him for a beer and went over to the fireplace. As long as I’d be staying put in Paradise, I knew I should be back out there plowing my road. But a little break wouldn’t hurt.

So that’s where I was when the sun went down that evening. I was sitting by the fire in the Glasgow Inn, my usual spot, but on this day not at all where I wanted to be. The wind kept blowing and the snow was still coming hard, like it would never end.

This is why the Ojibwas prayed to the winter every year, asking for mercy, asking that the spring would come quickly, and that the old man and the young child would both live to see it.

The snow finally stopped around midnight. But the damage had already been done. I didn’t even know it yet. As I slept alone in my bed, I didn’t even know what I had done.

Everything that was about to happen would begin that night. And it would all be on my head.

The time passed between the two of us, leading up to this night at the Ojibway Hotel. I had been going over there three or four times a week, for how long was it then? A month? Five weeks? You add up the actual waking hours we spent together, and it wasn’t that much. But she was always there in my head. If I wasn’t on my way over there or on my way back, I was thinking about what she was doing, and when I’d be seeing her again.

And me, I was virtually the only person she saw, the only person she ever talked to. She’d go down into Blind River, pick up some things, go right back home, work on the house. That’s all she did. She said it helped her forget everything that had happened. She had to put it all behind her before she could think about what to do next. That’s what she told me.

It made me wonder. Was I just a part of that? Another way to forget?

It got strange sometimes. She’d be doing something and she’d look up at me, like I had just shown up and she had no idea what I was doing there. I wouldn’t hear from her for three or four days. Then she’d call me up and ask me how soon I could be there. She was hungry and she wanted to eat dinner with me right away.

Then we’d go upstairs. It was always the same room. The same bed or floor or a little of both. The last couple of times, we’d lain there and she’d be looking off at nothing, like she was a million miles away. She’d snap out of it and give me a quick smile, and then without a word she’d get up and go downstairs.

It wasn’t real. That’s what I finally started to realize. The whole thing was like a spell, or a daydream, or something you’d make up on a lonely night. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were someone, right here, right now …

I’ve never left well enough alone, not once in my entire life, so I decided it was time to put this thing to the test, to get it out in the daylight and to see what happened. So I asked her if she’d like to come down to Michigan sometime. Just mentioned it. That she’d never seen the cabins, or Paradise, or the Glasgow Inn. She’d have to meet Jackie, and, of course, Vinnie she already knew. But it would be good to see him again, to see how well he was recovering.

She didn’t say no. She said, yeah, that would be great. We’ll have to do that sometime. Sometime soon. Maybe after she got some more work done on the house.

“Soon” never came, until the night the snowstorm hit and I was stuck here in Paradise. So it got postponed another day. Now, finally, maybe I’d find out if this whole thing was real after all. And maybe I didn’t really want to find out.

That’s the kind of soap opera nonsense that was going through my mind as I finally made my way out to the Soo. I had called her that morning. She said it was a little strange sleeping there in the king-sized bed, listening to the snowstorm. Being a cop didn’t help. If anything, it makes a woman realize all the more how vulnerable she can be. So she never did like staying in hotel rooms by herself. I told her I hoped we could change the arrangements that night. Just saying that out loud, seeing how it sounded, seeing how she responded to it. She told me to hurry up and get over there.

I had to plow again, of course, so I didn’t get out until after lunchtime. Even then the main roads were still a mess. It took me a good two hours to get there, pounding my way through the new snowdrifts and then crawling along behind one of the county trucks.

In Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, a six-story building is as big as it gets. That’s how tall the Ojibway Hotel is, looming over everything else on Portage Avenue, right across from the Soo Locks. According to the sign in the lobby, it had been in business since 1927, and it was the only game in town if you wanted some real luxury. It had big red awnings over all the windows on the ground floor, and the dining room was like something out of another era. I always made a point of having lunch there when I was in the city, but I had never spent a night there. Until now.

As I finally found a place to park between the giant piles of snow, I knew she was up there in one of those rooms, waiting for me. I grabbed my overnight bag and crossed the street, trying very hard not to slip and fall on the hard-packed snow. That would be my luck, to break my leg twenty feet from the front door.

There was a young man out front, trying to shovel the snow. He looked cold and miserable, and he was wearing a uniform that belonged on an organ-grinder’s monkey. I watched him as I made my way to the door, wondering how long it would take him to split open the back of his red coat.

He stopped when he saw me coming, and opened the door for me. “Afternoon, sir,” he said.

“Hell of a day to be shoveling snow in that suit.”

“We do what we can.”

I stomped the snow off my feet before I entered the lobby. It was the last place you’d want to track snow in, with all the fancy furniture and the Oriental rug and the display cases showing off the hotel’s long history.

I didn’t notice the man sitting there in the lobby. Not at first. I went to the desk and said hello to the woman behind it. She asked me if I had seen enough snow for one lifetime and I said that I had. When I asked for Natalie Reynaud’s room, she picked up the phone and called her. I didn’t take that personally, of course. You don’t send a man up to a woman’s room without calling her, no matter how friendly he looks.

I turned around while I waited. The doorman was still out on the sidewalk, struggling with the snow. The way he was lifting with his back instead of his legs, I knew he’d be sore as hell. It didn’t matter how young he was.

Then I saw the old man sitting in the lobby. He was in one of the big chairs by the fireplace. He had a nice overcoat on, and it looked like he had a suit and tie on underneath that. He was wearing a hat, an old fedora. You don’t see men wearing hats like that anymore. That’s the first thing I thought. Then I noticed the boots he was wearing. They were like rubber fishing boots, going all the way up to his knees. They didn’t go with the rest of his outfit, but with all the snow, what the hell.

He was looking at me. He smiled.

Before I could smile back, the woman gave me the phone.

“Alex, is that you?”

“Natalie. I’m in the lobby.”

“I’m in room 601. Come on up.”

“The top floor. I’m on my way.”

I hung up the phone. I thanked the woman at the desk and headed for the elevator. My throat was dry.

I pressed the elevator button and waited. Then the door opened and I got in. The old man was right behind me.

I pressed six and asked him which floor he needed.

“Six is good,” the man said.

I nodded and looked up at the row of numbers above the door. The door closed. I couldn’t help noticing the man was looking right at me. It’s the one thing you don’t do in an elevator.

I looked back at him. He smiled again. Up close, I saw he was a little older than I had first thought. He had gray eyes with red rims, and a dark little mustache that had gone too thin. His lips were purple.

I returned his smile, then looked away. The elevator door closed. He kept looking at me.

I cleared my throat.

“Do you like my hat?” he said.

“Excuse me?” I said, looking at him again.

“Do you like my hat?”

I didn’t know what to say. The elevator was moving now. “Yes,” I finally said. “I do.”

“It’s rather old,” he said. He kept looking me right in the eye. He kept smiling.

“I figured.”

“Would you like to know how old my hat is?”

The elevator came to a stop.

“No, sir,” I said. “I don’t need to know that.”

“Very well.”

The door opened. I got out. Room 601 was just a few steps away, so I didn’t have time to notice that the old man was still standing in the elevator. I was just about to knock, my hand in midair, when I looked back. He had stayed in the elevator, one arm extended to keep the door from closing. He was still smiling. Finally, he gave me a little nod of his head, pulled his arm away, and let the doors close in front of him.

I stood there for a moment, trying to figure it out. Then I thought, to hell with it. An old man slightly off his nut. Never mind.

His eyes, though. They were clear. They were focused.

Never mind, Alex.

I knocked lightly on the door. Natalie opened it and let me in. She was wearing blue jeans and a red sweater. I had never seen her in red before. “You look great,” I said.

“Your hair,” she said.

“Oh God.” I touched it, like I was verifying it was still on my head. “Okay, here’s the thing. The box said it was supposed to look totally natural.”

“You dyed your hair.”

“No, no. It wasn’t dye. Come on. It was, what do you call it, a rinse.”

She came over to me and put her arms around my neck. “You dyed your hair,” she said. “Who’d you do that for, you jackass?”

I wrapped her up. “The box said—”

“Yeah, I know,” she said. Then she kissed me. Everything seemed to run downstream at that point, right onto the bed. I lifted the red sweater over her arms and then she went to work on my shirt buttons.

“I wasn’t going to do this,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because. God, Alex. I think we need to slow down a little bit.”

“Too late.”

“Why does this happen?” she said. “Every time I see you?”

She seemed genuinely angry this time. At me or at herself. I didn’t know. I held her down and kissed her hard, and then everything happened again, just like the first time and every other time after that, like there was nothing either of us could do to stop it, even if we wanted to.

Afterward, as we were both lying there in the tangled-up sheets, I looked out the window and saw the snow falling. “Oh great,” I said. “Just what we need.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Are you okay?” I said.

“I don’t know.”

“What is it?”

“We should talk about this.”

“So go ahead.”

“I need some air first,” she said, sitting up. “Come on, it’s not too late. I want you to show me around.”

I laughed. “There’s not much to see. Not this time of year.”

But she was already putting her clothes back on. A few minutes later, we were both downstairs in the lobby, wrapped up tight in our coats, ready for our evening stroll. I looked around for my friend from the elevator, but he was nowhere to be seen.

“What is it?” she said.

“Oh, there was just a man down here before. He was acting kinda strange.”

“An old guy, right? All dressed up?”

“Yeah, did he say something to you, too?”

“No, I just saw him in the dining room yesterday. When I was having dinner alone. He walked by and tipped his hat to me.”

“I think he’s got a screw loose.”

“I’m sure he’s harmless,” she said. “He sort of fits in with the place, doesn’t he? All these old artifacts in the display cases.”

The young doorman opened the door for us. He still had the shovel, and it looked like he had almost finished the sidewalk. Until this new snow had started falling. Whatever they were paying him, today it wasn’t enough.

We walked down Portage Avenue, toward the locks. They were closed for the winter, of course, so there were no ships to see. The entire river was frozen now, all the way across to Canada. I told her this street would be busy in the summer, when the shops were open and the tourists were walking around and watching the locks from the observation deck. It was hard to imagine now.

“What did you tell me?” I said. “That you’ve never been over here before? All those years you were living across the river?”

“I drove through a couple of times,” she said, “but I never came into town, no. I heard all the stories, though.”

“What stories?”

“About Soo Michigan. What a wild town it is. At least, when I was growing up.”

I looked down the empty street. The snow was falling and the wind was kicking up clouds all along the high snowbanks. Some wild town. At that moment, it was hard to imagine anyone even living here.

“My grandfather never wanted me to come over here,” she said. “He told me there were gunfights and prostitutes and all sorts of bad stuff going on across the bridge.”

“I think maybe he watched too many Westerns.”

“Yeah, well, some Canadians think all of the States is that way.”

We walked some more. The sun went down. From the end of the street we could see the International Bridge, the lights glowing in the darkness. It started to feel a lot colder.

We made our way back to the hotel, holding hands like schoolkids. What she had said back in the room, about wanting to talk—I kept waiting for it to happen. But it didn’t. The lights were on outside the hotel and the doorman was there shoveling the snow.

We went inside with faces red from the cold air and snow all over our shoes. It felt good to sit down in the dining room and to feel the heat thawing us out. The room was elegant, with chandeliers and big windows overlooking the river. On a different night in a different season there would have been ships moving through the locks just outside, great seven-hundred-foot freighters on their way to Lake Huron. But on this night all we could see outside was the snow falling. Endless snow, that’s what this winter had become.

When we had ordered our food, I noticed the old man again. He was sitting on the other side of the dining room, facing us, with a big cloth dinner napkin tucked into his collar. We were the only three customers in the place. He gave me a tip of his hat.

“There he is,” I said.

“Who?” She turned to look and then gave the man a little wave when she saw him.

“Maybe he’s a ghost,” I said. “He died in this hotel and now he haunts all the guests.”

She smiled for just a moment, then looked out the window. We were both quiet for a while. Just as she was about to say something, the waitress appeared with a bottle of champagne.

“Compliments of the gentleman,” she said, setting up a stand with an ice bucket.

I looked back over at the old man. He was drinking something now. He raised his glass to us.

“Who is he?” I said.

“I don’t know,” the waitress said, pulling the cork. “I’ve never seen him before. But he sort of goes with the place, doesn’t he? This hotel was built in 1927, you know.”