The Survivors (17 page)

He skids to a stop. “What?!” he calls.

“You're frightening Emily! And Brush, too. I saw him go running—he'll never come back if you keep roaring around,” she shouts.

“Good!” Miles says, and powers up for another run.

His mother comes back onto the porch of the cabin. “Go do that somewhere else!” she calls. “I can't tell you how annoying it is.”

“Fine,” Miles says. “See you later.” He revs the motor and heads into the woods and down the snowy trails for one last dash through the woods before supper.

AFTER MILES HAS GONE, SARAH
looks for Brush, who is nowhere to be seen. She checks the usual spots: the sawdust pile near the sawmill shack, the edge of the brush near Emily's pen, the hill overlooking the cabin. No dog. She shivers. The air is damp and cold in the late afternoon. Snow is falling again. She feeds Emily and, after a last look around the silent yard, heads into the cabin.

“Miles back yet?” her father asks, coming in with another armful of firewood.

“Not yet.”

He glances through the window, then kneels by the stove and tends the fire. Her mother tends to the woodstove—she's making corn bread for dinner. Sarah herself curls up close to the woodstove with a book, one of her old favorite fantasy novels; but she can't concentrate.

She steps into the kitchen area, which is warm and smells good. “Need any help?” she asks her mom.

“Not really, dear,” Nat says cheerfully.

Sarah goes to the small window and looks out. The light is grayer still, and the yard is silent and ever smaller because of the thickening snow. No Brush. And no Miles.

She goes back by her mom and perches on a stool. “How did you meet Dad?”

Her mother pauses. She turns to Sarah with a smile—and a glance at Artie, who is lost in his music. “At the university in Minneapolis—I thought you knew that.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Sarah says impatiently. “But how did it happen?”

“I stalked him,” her mother says, stirring the yellow batter with a wooden spoon.

“What?!”

Her mother laughs. “He was in this intro to music class I had to take—what do I know about music?—and I thought he was cute. Brown, curly hair. Totally absorbed in the lessons. It was like there was no one else in the room except him and the professor. And your dad knew his stuff. He asked questions that no one else had even thought of—including the professor.”

“And?”

“And there's nothing like being ignored that makes a woman competitive,” her mother says.

“So you made the first move?” Sarah presses.

“You could say that, yes,” her mother answers. There is color in her face now; maybe it's the warmth of the kitchen or maybe it's the memory. “The semester was almost over before I mustered up courage. I managed to walk out of class next to him, pretending to be totally confused about that day's lesson.”

“You played dumb! No way!” Sarah exclaims.

Her mother picks up on the teasing. “I guess I did, yes. Hey, sometimes we girls gotta do what we gotta do.”

“What happened next?”

“That particular day?”

Sarah nods.

“We went to the student union, had coffee, and went over the lesson—it was musical notation, I remember—and he showed me how to tap it out with my fingers.”

“That's sort of romantic,” Sarah says. She glances at her father.

“I thought so,” her mother says. “Especially when he got impatient and said, ‘You're not quite getting it. Here, give me your hand.'”

“Whoa,” Sarah says.

“Exactly,” her mother answers with a sideways glance at her husband. “So he took my hand in his, turned mine palm up, and did this slow, drumming thing on it with his fingers while I read the chart.”

“How come you never told me this?” Sarah asks.

Her mother shrugged. “I don't know,” she says with a serious look on her face. “I should have. Long ago. Back at home, there was never time.”

They are both silent for long moments.

“Anyway,” her mother says, “gradually he stopped drumming on my palm, and I stopped looking at the chart. We just looked into each other's eyes.”

“And you were still holding hands!” Sarah adds.

“Very good!” her mother says, and laughs.

Sarah looks across the kitchen to her father, then out the little window, to the gray-blue sky. “That kind of thing will never happen to me,” she says, and sticks out her lower lip.

“Why of course it will!” her mother says; she drops her spoon into the bowl with a clatter and comes over to wrap Sarah in a big hug.

Sarah begins to sniffle and lets her mother continue to squeeze her. The moment might go on forever but for an odd thudding on the porch, then a scratching on the door.

She and her mother look quizzically at each other.

“Brush?” Sarah asks, and hurries to the door.

But it is Miles. Miles lying there, covered in dirt and snow, with his left foot turned the wrong way.

“Accident.” He groans, and slumps in the doorway.

THE CRASH IS NOT THAT
wild. No soaring hang time. No big air over an invisible hump in the trail. No tumbling rollover down the riverbank. Just a low-hanging oak branch covered with snow that he didn't see—then a camera flash inside the bowl of his helmet.
Boom
, like a gunshot, and a rushing sound all in the same instant. Like a roadside bomb that starts with light and sound, then blows him backward on the Polaris seat.

He hits the edge of the jump seat, which flips him up in the air. His left ankle slams another branch, or maybe the ground when he lands—something hard. He has a flash of an icicle falling, breaking—but then it's a tunnel of light closing, a ring of brightness shrinking smaller and smaller to a single black-and-red spot. Then lights-out.

He comes to. Sort of. He's lying on the trail a few yards behind the Polaris, which sits there, idling. He can't move. His eyelids flutter closed, then open again; but the rest of him doesn't want any part of moving.

The snow is soft. That's a good thing. He is lying on his back inside a little snow globe, the shake-up kind; the only thing moving is the slanting, drifting snow above and all around him. A snow kaleidoscope turning and churning up a sick-to-his-stomach swirl of the falling snow. His left leg hurts.

Not badly.

Hurts at a great distance.

Soldiers with missing legs and arms still have pain in the amputated limbs—“ghost pain,” it's called—which doesn't seem fair. He has a far-off, separated, distant kind of pain that's already crawling closer. His leg hurts in pricks and pokes—a hurt that streams a tiny message: “I'm comin', and I'm gonna hurt REALLY bad.” He concentrates on holding back the big pain as long as possible.

Keeping the big hurt far away.

He vaguely remembers tumbling backward—being swept off the snowmobile as if by a giant broom. He moves his arms, his leg (his good leg); he can feel his spine, his neck; his hands clench and unclench—all of which is a good thing. Everything works except his left leg way below the knee. Best not to move any of that. Best to keep it far away. In another time. Another life.

Then the dam breaks and the pain comes: a surge of cold water filled with razor blades of ice or fire, a spear heated to white-hot iron, then driven into his ankle. A wolf howls nearby, but it's his own animal voice rising to a scream. He has never heard that sound come from his throat, that wail from his body. He flails his head from side to side, reaching up to tear off his helmet, which is cracked across the top like a dropped hard-boiled egg. Not that removing the loser helmet helps lessen the pain. The wolf howls again—which can't be him, because his mouth is full of snow—and then he sees it, to the side, a few yards away: an actual wolf. He blinks. It's not a real wolf; it's the wild dog. Brush. He lowers his muzzle as he ends a short howl.

“You,” he whispers to the dog.

Brush watches without expression.

“What do you want with me, you bastard!” He groans. Brush tilts his head slightly as if trying to read his lips.

“You think you've got me now? Well, you don't,” Miles adds. He touches his pocket, feels around, and finds his trusty hunting knife. He yanks it free and holds it in the air. “Cut your throat.”

Brush has no reaction, and Miles drifts back inside the snow globe, where the world is silent and soft. When he looks again, Brush has shape-shifted; now he sits almost within arm's reach.

Miles jerks up the knife. “Some of this? Come get it,” he mumbles. Brush only sits there, staring, without expression. Miles turns his face sideways into the snow—which burns on the surface of his cheek and helps keep him awake. He struggles to one elbow, then two. Sits up. The woods around tilt sideways—someone tipped the snow globe—and Miles closes his eyes to make the trees stop moving. Either the woods are tipped or something inside his head is at the wrong angle. Keeping his eyes shut will not get him back onto the snowmobile.

Get home.

He opens one eye this time. Back in the suburbs, when he was in seventh grade, he and some friends each stole some booze from their parents, mixed it with Mountain Dew, and got drunk. Throwing up, dizzy, never-drink-again drunk. As then, using one eye is best; trying to see with both eyes gives him double vision. Two of everything: two trees, two Polaris snowmobiles waiting to take him home. One eye will get him home—if he can crawl aboard.

He takes a breath. Concentrates. Separates his ankle pain from the rest of his body. Begins to drag himself toward the mumbling Polaris. He's a snow angel fanning slowly backward.

His progress is inches at a time. The broken bone near his ankle follows like an animal caught in a leghold trap; it howls on the inside as it keeps dragging itself forward. He pauses for a short nap but jerks awake and flails outward with the knife, just in case. The dog stays just out of arm's reach.

Miles flashes on the cheesy old black-and-white television series
Lassie
. Lassie the Wonder Dog, who would always save the day. Lassie, who would run back to the cabin, barking wildly, to sound the alarm and bring help to save little Timmy, who is trapped by a rattlesnake in the dry streambed with a rumbling flash flood approaching. If Lassie was here, she would lick Miles's face when he passes out and keep him awake. If Miles was Timmy, he would somehow have a paper and pencil (perhaps he took the long way from school) so he could write a note, tuck it under Lassie's collar, then send her racing home for help.

Brush only watches. His eyes are as blank as gray sky, his mangy brown body as unmoving as a tree stump. With a surge of adrenaline, Miles back-scrabbles close enough to grab the side of the snowmobile. After a deep breath he heaves himself aboard—one lurching motion to compress the pain in the shortest time span possible....

It isn't until he comes to that he realizes he passed out again; and he finds himself sitting upright on the seat, slumped over the dashboard. Below, one foot is pointed forward, the other foot is turned outward. He cracks the throttle partway open and heads down the trail.

Toward home.

He makes it to the yard, parks as close as he can to the cabin, then considers what to do. He rules out screaming—he doesn't want to scare his family—so he does what any normal person would: crawls off and drags himself up the steps, then raps weakly on the cabin door.

AS THEY ARRIVE AT THE
hospital emergency entrance, they look like survivors from the Donner Party. Her father and mother rode with Miles in the tow sled, keeping him propped up and alert, and his leg elevated. The three of them sit immobile, covered with snow spun up by the snowmobile. When Sarah kills the engine, her parents stir like bears emerging from a winter den.

Miles groans—which is a good thing—and Sarah leaps off the machine and hurries inside to get help.

“We've had a snowmobile accident!” Sarah calls. The attendant rings a buzzer, and two people in white hurry out through the swinging doors. “Wheelchair or gurney?” the first one calls.

“Ah, wheelchair probably,” Sarah says. “Or maybe not. I don't know!” Her voice breaks; it's as if she has been holding her breath the whole trip.

“Gurney,” the other nurse calls, and they hustle toward the entrance.

Outside, her parents are crouched beside the sled holding Miles's hands. “We'll take it from here,” the nurses say to Sarah. Within a short minute they slide Miles onto the flat stretcher, then scissor it upright onto its wheels, where it locks with a sharp
clack
.

“Good driving, Goat Girl,” Miles mutters as he rolls past.

“Piece of cake,” Sarah says.