The Ice Storm (24 page)

It was a story that didn't lead anywhere. Just something that happened. Just something to think about in the locked vault of familial regrets.

III

Okay, the time has come in this account for a characterization of the mind of God. Just briefly, for thematic reasons. Happily there's no need to concern ourselves with this mind as it has expressed itself directly—because it hasn't, really. Therefore this story can be content with indirect examples, with metaphor and with evidence from nature. For example: Benjamin Hood, who was on Saturday morning asleep on the floor of the Halfords' bathroom, had a dream—an uncomfortable dream in the midst of a grueling hangover. Dreams retold are a burden, so this will be brief. In Hood's dream, a special tax had been levied against him because of fruit-bearing trees growing in his yard on Valley Road. He learned of this tax while taking a drive with Jim Williams (in a station wagon with simulated wood paneling, though Williams actually drove a Cadillac). Hood was trying to explain the presence of government inspectors in his yard, those inspectors in white, lead-lined suits, measuring the size and yield of his plum trees and then blowtorching them.

—The thing I can't figure out, he told Jim Williams, is whether this is happening in 1973 or in 1991.

—Well, pal, Williams said, the past and the future happen in the present moment.
That's just how it is
.

That's it. That's the dream. And the amazing thing about this dream is that Benjamin's son would dream it, too. Years later. Really. In Hoboken, New Jersey. Paul Hood. With his father as the main character and everything. Benjamin, however, as he lay on the floor of the bathroom dreaming uncomfortably, couldn't know—would never know—that his son would dream this very dream, that his son would wake and retell it and in the retelling become his father's imaginer as well as his father's son. His father's narrator.

This congruency—between Paul and his dad—is sort of like the congruency between me, the narrator of this story, the imaginer of all these consciousnesses of the past, and God. All these coincidences and lapses of coincidence were set in motion long before Benjamin or Paul was conceived, the way the topography and history of New Canaan—the shifting course of its rivers, the rise and fall of its tax revenues, its past, its future—preceded Benjamin and Paul, preceded all of us.

That's metaphor. I mentioned an example from nature, too. It follows. Though metaphors of the mind of God are characterized by coincidence and repetition, examples from nature aren't as tidy. Nature is senseless and violent. So this part of the story is violent, and because it's senseless, too, it's not from the point of view of any of the protagonists. It features a minor character. Mike Williams.

The ice had built up on every surface, on roofs and shrubs and avenues and cars and waterways. It formed a glittering and immense cocoon on tree limbs and power lines, a cocoon of impossible mass. The sound of tree limbs giving out under this weight was like the crackling of gunfire. Mike Williams, who was wandering around in the earliest part of dawn, heard these explosions in the stillness and laughed giddily at them. He was up really late. The threat of heavy weather impelled him out into the elements. To watch.

Danny Spofford's had been his first destination, up on Mill Road; Mike walked up Silvermine. When the occasional vehicle skidded past, he hid. The Conrads' AMC Gremlin went by. Somebody in a Corvette. It took a while to get to the Spoffords' on foot. When he got there, though, he and Danny stayed up watching television—
Don Kirshner's Rock Concert
—until the electricity went off. Then they became inventive, resourceful and inventive, as though the storm could in some way end all conversation, all teenaged fraternity. As though they only had a little time left. They began to counsel one another on what sexual intercourse would really be like. Fucking. At one point, Danny went into the kitchen and fetched a jar of strawberry jam out of the dormant refrigerator, Shopwell brand jam, into which he slid his middle finger. In an effort to simulate the velvet interior of a woman's reproductive apparatus. Standing in the middle of the kitchen, licking the jam from his
fuck finger
, Danny Spofford said that if it was going to be like that he wanted to do it right away.

—Pop the cherry, Charles.

Mike, of course, had experienced more of this than he was letting on. He was a Casanova. But since Danny Spofford was homely, since he was a kid with a big beak and a sloping forehead, ears that stuck out too far, Mike didn't want to insult him with too much experience. Not right away. But then as the night got deeper and colder and they wrapped themselves tighter in the blankets and quilts that Danny's dad had piled up on the old couch in the basement, Mike started to tell Danny about Wendy Hood.

—That slut? Danny Spofford said.

—Hey, you don't know her. Don't say that.

—A harlot, Charles. She's a
lesbee
. You're not gonna tell me—

—You don't get it, Spud. Let me finish.

But Mike was powerless to render the intricacies of unconsummated teen lust, the way it flattened out differences and made everyone compatible and everything tolerable. He couldn't explain how Wendy's dad had caught them with their pants down, because it was too embarrassing, and how this entrapment (kind of like that other arrest, in which Frank Wills stumbled upon Egil Krogh's men: James McCord, Bernard L. Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, and Frank Sturgis) had only deepened his feelings for her. In the flickering candlelight, in the riot of competing flashlight beams, he couldn't say why he was always thinking about her, how he doodled her name and her initials in his ring binder, how he concealed it in english assignments, how he searched out songs in which her name appeared in the title or lyrics, how even words like
wind
and
when
had become pleasant because they were phonetically near to her name. Mike couldn't think of a way to tell Danny about any of this without sounding like a
sap
, a
moe
, a
fag
, a
homo
, a
feeb
. And anyway, he wasn't too good with words. What he liked to do was wander around.

—Forget it, he said. I'm gonna walk down to Silver Meadow. Wanna come?

—Nah. Let's toast some weenies. On these candles. Weenies, awesome.

Mike knew Danny wouldn't come with him. Danny's dad would probably show up from the party soon and would probably have some woman with him, and before he went upstairs with her, he would come down into the basement to see Danny. Maybe even the woman would come down and plant a single, moist kiss on Danny's forehead. Danny told Mike all this. His dad would check to make sure he had enough candles, that the batteries in the flashlights were fresh. His dad would tuck in an errant corner of his blanket and smooth back his cowlick. Because his dad had sued for custody and won. It was a rare thing and Danny wanted all the benefits of it, Mike figured. He was a kid blessed with a dad.

Mike's dad was okay, too, really—when he was home. But here Mike was: out in the cold. One of the unsupervised kids of New Canaan. The Spoffords' front door locked behind him. The creaking of the trees was like the sound track of some haunting. He thought about the blackout at Silver Meadow, about how the orderlies would be trying to keep all the loonies in line, in the dark, with the gunfire of trees snapping all around them. The loonies would be breaking out of the padded cells, breaking out onto the shuffleboard courts to conduct silent competitions with one another, they would be breaking into the medicine cabinets looking for opiates and tranquilizers, huddling with one another to give loony reassurances; they would be going out for booze, raiding adjacent homes for scotch and rye and gin and vodka and bourbon or Lavoris or Skin Bracer or Old Spice or Hai Karate.

It was the perfect time to sneak in.

So he did. He passed the Hoods' house, without so much as a look—he was denying himself—and then he snuck onto the grounds. It was a cinch, as usual. It was so easy that when he came to the Silver Meadow bowling alley, Mike tested the door. Impulsively. It opened! These guys were ridiculously casual! In the glow of emergency lighting he surveyed the two lanes. Since they were automated, the reset button obviously wasn't gonna work. And there were no balls to be found. Mike violated the first rule of bowling—proper foot attire—as he paced up and down the lanes. He had always wanted to walk right down to the pins. With a deft kick he tipped them over. And then set them up again. Knocked them over, set them up. It was too easy. Then he heard voices, the voices of authority, and took off.

He slipped back out onto the grounds. This went on for a long while, this trespassing. He imagined himself and Wendy in a wood-paneled station wagon with two children in the way back, puking from motion sickness. He walked from building to building, was chased off by a security guard—waving an impressive flashlight—and returned to trespass some more. Everywhere New Canaan was sheathed in this ice, in this coating that seemed to render the stuff of his everyday life beautiful again—magic, dangerous, and new. He recognized trees in a way he never had, recognized the vast, arterial movement of roads in his neighborhood, recognized the gallant and stalward quality of telephone poles, recognized even the warm support, in the occasional candlelit window, of community. Man against the elements, man. Everything was repackaged, sealed into a cellophane wrap that assured singularity and quality control. Mike was happy.

And then he saw his first live wire. It was in the middle of the night, the very center of night, in the darkest part before dawn. The sound of a maple coming down was familiar enough now. Mike laughed as the branch tumbled to earth and with it the telephone pole, the wires, a couple of shrubs. These things fell across Valley Road in a considerable impasse. He roared with laughter, coyote of the suburbs. The severed wire was anything but still. It hissed, of course, and there was the gold-dusting of electrical sparks. And it danced. The jig of the dervish, of delirious and religious mad persons, of hyperactive children and their weary parents. The dance of the charmed snake. The electrical line hopped and skipped and nothing could stop it that Mike knew of. It was just one of the hazards of life now. Cool!

Look, he was not a brilliant kid. He had not scored well on standardized tests or on any other tests. He was a little lazy, in fact. Mostly he tried to sit next to Mona Henderson and copy answers. But he knew about live wires, about the lore of live wires. So he made a wide berth several hundred feet around the moiling electrical field and then back onto that thoroughfare, Valley Road, back onto his trail. He wasn't lonely now. He was full of life. He wished Wendy Hood were here to see all this. As he climbed carefully over the cable guardrail, he checked the icy sheen on the incline there, where Valley Road started down toward Silvermine. He checked the surface and found it to his liking. It could be burnished into a fine sliding surface. He cleared away any chunky, crusty stuff on a good twelve or fourteen feet of the roadway. With his sneakers he brushed this surface clean, as carefully and lovingly as if he were going to sign his name to it. And then he positioned himself ten feet or so from the beginning of this runway to get up speed.

Oh, the solitude of that moment! Mike could hear his breath as he chugged up to the ice, and then the sharp intake as he held in the chilly air and careened down the hill. It was good. Cool. He cleared a few more feet. No one was up, but he thought he could make out the glimmerings of dawn in the east. There were stars and moonlight and the intimation of dawn, and these occasionally illumined his solitary competition. No cars would be coming, because the road was sealed off now by the splendid devastation of the elements. Mike was like the hockey stars so prized by New Canaan high schoolers. He was like Ken “The Snake” Stabler, quarterback for his favorite football team, the unforgiving Oakland Raiders. He was like the intrepid skiers at the beginning of
The Wide World of Sports
. He was like Dave Wottle or Mark Spitz or Tug McGraw or O. J. Simpson. He was a citizen of the physical world.

He trudged to the top of his giant slalom again, and again he navigated it flawlessly, coming to the bottom of the slope on his feet. The Russian judges scored him well. The noise of some imagined crowd buoyed him up. He would take the gold and then save the Israeli athletes from their fate. Even the live wire, hissing and spitting, applauded his efforts. Again he executed this stunning turn, this wild communion with air and snow and silence.

When he set up for his fourth frisky plunge, he was aware that he was tired all of a sudden, that the wind was blowing harder, that the live wire was wobbling grandiosely in the wind. He wanted to go home, to be supine in his own bed. But he had a boner, an actual erection, for all this, for toys and dramas and the unknown of sexuality and athletic accomplishment and the future with its distant fuzzy glimpses of business and responsibility. So he couldn't sleep yet. First one more passage along his little corridor of ice.

Mike got up a real bit of speed this time, his arms waving wildly as he listed first this direction and then the other, but when he hit the landing area, he stumbled and fell. Ice was all in his jacket now and in his sneakers, down his socks, down the neck of his ski jacket. His hands were raw and red as he held them up to his face. Fucking shit. Fucking A. He held them under his arms to try and still the pain. He moaned quietly. It was another quarter-mile uphill to his house. And he was just going to get yelled at. If not now, later.

So he decided to sit on the guardrail for a second. To relax.

This is the kind of guardrail they had on the secondary roads of New Canaan: a steel cable stapled onto, at predetermined intervals, substantial wood posts that were then cemented into the embankments on the side of the road. The idea was that if a car struck the cable, the guardrail would give a little bit with the impact, instead of destroying the vehicle and its inhabitants immediately. The problem with this kind of guardrail, though, was that unlike a totally steel construction, which is grounded directly into the earth, this steel cable was essentially freestanding. And therefore conductive. And the live wire hopping gaily beside Valley Road was also touching the guardrail at the moment at which Mike Williams sat upon it. His sneakers, immersed in the snow beneath him, acted as a ground, and what power was not lost—very little—in the movement of electricity along three wooden posts, along seventy-five feet of cable, and through three heavy staples—this electricity passed into Mike.