The Driftless Area Read online

  He hadn’t played the cello much since high school and the calluses were gone from his fingers, but still he brought it out from the corner sometimes and played the theme from the movie Martian Summer, which was a good song and slow enough that he could still make it sound all right.

  The lawyer was calling from the clubhouse of the golf course, where he was in a card game with the prosecutor, and the lawyer and the prosecutor had made a deal on Pierre’s case, which was to be heard on Tuesday.

  “How are the cards going?” Pierre said.

  “I’m behind. But that’s how I play.”

  “Are they dropping the charges?”

  “They are and they aren’t. Come on up, I’ll tell you all about it.”

  Pierre put on his boots and laced them up and picked up his father’s old ice skates in the kitchen. He took them down the back stairs to the alley and slung them in the trunk of his car.

  The road lay black and narrow with a coat of ice you might not know about until you hit the brakes—at which point you’d find out fast—and the wind carried a grit that was part snow and part dirt and swept the windshield with a dry metallic sound.

  Shale was on a plateau in the Driftless Area and the ridges ran north from it, dense with forest and moving apart like the splayed fingers of a hand. It used to be said that the glaciers steered around the Driftless Area entirely, but as Pierre understood the modern geological point of view, this was not accurate, though he liked to think it was—to picture the glaciers lifting their blue foreheads, taking their bearings, and splitting up with an agreement to meet down the line.

  The road ran out along the ridge and gradually veered off and down into the shadows of the state forest that rose in banks on either side. In a few miles Pierre passed the Jack of Diamonds, where he would be working later that day, and a little farther on a movie house called the Small Art Cinema. They were the only businesses between Shale and Lens Lake, and each occupied a fringe of gravel carved out of the part of the forest known as Fay’s Hill.

  Pierre went up along the lake and west on the Eden Center Road. The sky was cloudy, the highway empty, and lights shone in house windows, though it was only midafternoon, creating an excellent sense of isolation that made most any destination seem profound and mysterious.

  This was true even if you were going to the Lens Lake Country Club. It gave off a sadness that was a residue of the wasted summers beneath the snow. White hills rolled into nothing and the ball washing stations stood here and there like random red sentries in a cold country.

  Carrie Sloan—or Carrie Miles, as she was married now, to Pierre’s friend Roland Miles—worked in the clubhouse and had written a poem about the course in winter. She did not think much of the poem, but Pierre had read it and he remembered it now:

  Pain is in the water,

  Despair is in the rough,

  Envy takes a mulligan

  And Death has seen enough.

  She’s coming to the clubhouse

  To have a drink with you.

  Her foursome takes forever;

  She’s on the green in two.

  Carrie had written a number of poems about the golf course, and they leaned toward the fatalistic or existential. It was not that her life was so tragic but that she found gloom more interesting than the everyday world.

  Pierre walked into the clubhouse and saw the five men playing cards at a table near the fireplace. They weren’t talking but only picking up cards and looking at them and putting them down. He wasn’t about to stroll up to the table, as he felt that any little word could mess up the flow of the game. And so he stood watching until his lawyer saw him and got up.

  They talked beneath the large aerial photo of Shale on the wall. It was forty years old and the funny thing was that there had been an accident on Main Street just before it was taken, although you wouldn’t know this unless someone explained it to you.

  That is, you could see the cars and the people standing in the street, but it didn’t look like anything out of the ordinary. So, really, it wasn’t that funny, it was just called funny.

  “This will be over on Tuesday, right?” said Pierre.

  The lawyer was a small man in his middle thirties with a serene smile and enormous eyeglasses, covering a great expanse of his face.

  “That depends on you,” said the lawyer. “Were you in my office Friday?”

  “Yeah, I read all the magazines.”

  “I thought so. Sorry about that. I got tied up with some ungodly quitclaim and the people are dead and nobody knows anything. But here’s the deal. The prosecutor and I were kicking something around, and I wanted to know what you think before we kick it any further.”

  “Okay.”

  “They drop the trespassing. I know you’ll want to hear that because we’ve talked about it. They don’t have it. They know they don’t have it. Forget it. It’s gone.”

  “Which one is the prosecutor?”

  “He’s the one over there. He’s looking at his watch. Now he’s hitting it, like maybe it isn’t working right.”

  “Should I meet him, since I’m here?”

  “I wouldn’t. He’s way down.”

  “How are you?”

  “Almost back to nothing.”

  “Well, they shouldn’t make the charge if they don’t have it.”

  “Of course, we would say that, but they’re not us,” said the lawyer. “It’s how they do things, and that way they have something to trade. Is it right? In a perfect world, I don’t guess it is. But try finding that world.”

  “And in exchange, I do what?”

  “Plead out to the public intoxication.”

  “Guilty.”

  “As charged.”

  “I thought I’d get out of this.”

  “You are. I’m coming to that. Because what you do is turn around and apply for Accelerated Rehabilitation, and they won’t contest it. So no conviction is ever written down; there is no conviction, if you complete the prescribed thing. Which is half a dozen classes on alcohol and so forth.”

  “This is my best option.”

  “And a good one, I think.”

  “I was intoxicated.”

  “Sure you were. Why else would you barge in somebody’s house you don’t even know?”

  “But it wasn’t trespassing.”

  “I just said that.”

  “Because they asked me, in the house. When I said I would do a trick, they said, ‘Fine. Do it.’ ”

  “And dress up a little bit for court. That’s the other thing. Dress like your father did. That was a man who was a sharp dresser and a hell of a guy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know, I felt bad when they died. But then I thought about it, after while, and I thought maybe that’s what you would want. To go together, I mean.”

  “A lot of people said that,” said Pierre. “And I don’t know that it isn’t true.”

  They looked down. Chair legs scraped on the tiles and the prosecutor crossed the room, cracking his knuckles.

  “Tell me something I don’t understand,” he said. “What motivates someone to call a twenty-dollar bet when here I sit with three kings and get knocked off by some illegitimate fucking straight?”

  “I don’t know,” said Pierre’s lawyer. “The way some people play, it defies logic.”

  “I mean, kings? Come on. You can’t not play them.”

  “No, I agree with that. You’ve got to play kings. Say, this is Pierre Hunter.”

  “Oh, sure. The trespasser. Are you with us here, so we can all get on with our lives?”

  “Yeah. It’s fair.”

  “Kings,” said the prosecutor, unable to get over how he had lost the hand.

  Pierre left the clubhouse, opened the trunk of his car, and took out the ice skates. He walked down to the frozen creek and sat on the footbridge to put the skates on. Then he tied the laces of his boots together and slung them over his shoulder.

  He set off down the creek, skating
east. He would wear the good clothes and be humble in court. The evidence called for humility. Yet he was not troubled. When he did foolish things he had a way of putting them behind him, as if he did not know the person who had done them. And it was just as well, he thought, for they could not be called back.

  The creek meandered across the golf course, through a field of brush and low hills, and down to the northern shore of Lens Lake. Pierre got on the lake and headed south. The lake was long and ringed with gray hills and yellow bluffs, and it made for a fast skate what with the wind at his back and the long silver plane of the ice. He was no great skater, but traveling in a straight line in this way he felt strong and athletic.

  Going back of course was another story, but he did not have to go back, because the Jack of Diamonds was not far from the southern end of the lake, and he could walk from the lake to the tavern, as he had many times, and catch a ride back to his car at the end of the night.

  In the middle of the lake a crosscurrent moved in from the west and little twisters of old dry snow rose and fell and the wind riffled the swelled and foxed pages of a magazine lying on the ice. Popular Mechanics, Pierre saw as he went by. It seemed odd. He turned a wide circle back to see what was on the cover. It was a story about the U.S. government’s top-secret plan for dealing with UFOs should they arrive.

  As it happened, Pierre had seen a UFO when he was young. It was a classic sort of flying saucer with lights around the perimeter, and it buzzed the Hunter house and seemed to sink behind a row of grain bins down the road. No one believed him. Why would they? The next day he went looking for traces of the landing without luck. But he’d had an interest in aliens ever since and did not want to know what the U.S. government had in store for them.

  So he skated on, digging in with the blades and raising his arms to increase the sail capacity of his coat.

  Pierre hit bad ice at the southern end of the lake. It came up on him, or he came up on it, without warning. Sometimes because of the light there are shadings that you can’t see until you are almost on top of them. And he never worried too much about the thickness of the ice because it had always been thick enough. He had skated over dark ice many times without a trace of give.

  This time, though, he tried to turn back, because he saw that the field into which he had gone was deep and ominous, surrounding him on three sides. But he was moving too fast. The quick stop with shaved flying ice was a maneuver beyond his skill level. He did get turned around but not by much and the wind carried him backward into the thin ice. There was no groaning or cracking, none of the slow collapse that you would expect. Instead the ice gave way at once and Pierre disappeared into the water.

  The light went out and he felt the cold before he understood what had happened, obvious as it was. It felt more like fire than ice, as if his skin were cracking in pieces. He had nothing to stand on. His own boots were floating up from his shoulder and bumping him in the face.

  Kicking and thrashing he made the surface after a time and swam to the ice that last held him up and laid his arms out on it. It seemed solid enough. He hung there breathing hard and looking around. It was a quiet day on the lake. Fishing houses stood far off like archaeology. Somewhere beyond the bluffs a snowmobile droned in fitful progress.

  His face was cold in the wind. With a soaked sleeve he scraped water from it. Not much help in that. It seemed that if he could push up on his arms he might simply fall forward onto the ice. So he tried that, but as he moved up and put weight on his elbows the ice broke again and he was back in the water. Three times he did this and three times fought back to the receding shelf of ice. Then he tried bringing a leg up, thinking maybe he could get a blade to catch. But the landing of his foot broke the ice again, only now it was a longer piece that broke. All he was doing was making an ever-widening channel of open water.

  After twenty minutes he was too cold and tired to go on heaving himself up and breaking the ice. He thought of calling for help but this seemed so close to defeat that he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t make a sound. He rested on the ice and watched the light going out of the sky.

  Pierre heard someone asking if he was all right. He looked up. A woman in a long orange coat and fur lined hood stood some distance off on the ice. She had a coil of rope, a mallet, and a stake.

  “Hang on,” she said.

  She dropped the rope, fell to her knees, and hammered the stake into the ice so that it angled away from Pierre. She took the stake in both hands to test the hold and then wrapped the end of the yellow and orange rope around it three times and tied it off in a double knot.

  She got up and walked toward him, playing the rope out along the ice.

  “Don’t come any closer,” said Pierre.

  “I won’t.”

  Some twenty five feet away she stopped and threw the remaining coil toward him. It took several tries before the rope fell within reach of his hands.

  “Just get a good hold on it,” she said.

  Pierre gathered the line and closed his hands around it. The woman in the orange coat went back and took up the slack and wound it around the stake. Then she set herself sideways behind the stake, planting her left foot against it, and began pulling in the rope. And in this way Pierre at last reached ice that would hold him and he slid onto it and turned onto his back and lay there looking at the sky.

  “Don’t get up,” said the woman. “Just roll away from the water. You want to keep your weight spread out.”

  Pierre did so. His boots that were still tied over his shoulder got in the way and he freed them and slid them away from him. Cold and exhausted, he nonetheless felt self-conscious to be slowly rolling across the lake. Then he got up, retrieved the boots, and walked to her on the blades of his skates.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “I was up on the hill and I saw you skating,” she said.

  “Then there were some trees in the way, and I could see where you would come out, but you never did.”

  She began coiling the rope and Pierre looked at the stake, which was a length of rebar with a red epoxy coating.

  “Have you done this before?” he said.

  “No. But I’ve thought about how I would.”

  Then she put the rope over her shoulder and took the mallet and knocked the stake through the ice and into the water.

  “Come on,” she said.

  They made their way to the shore, giving wide berth to the wandering slick of watery ice. She said her name was Stella Rosmarin and she lived in a house on the bluff. They crossed the narrow beach and came to stone steps that rose east to west across the rock wall. Pierre sat down to remove the drenched skates and replace them with the boots that were in the same condition. He told her his name. Then they went up.

  It was a yellow two-story house in a clearing set back a hundred yards from the edge of the land. Sashes of frost were in the windows and evergreen trees stood all around with their dark branches separated by the weight of snow.

  They went into the house where it was warm and Stella put her hood back and took her coat off and hung it on the back of a chair in the kitchen. Pierre had imagined that she would be beautiful—reflexively, as he did when hearing women’s voices on the radio—but he was not prepared for how beautiful she was.

  Slender, in a white thermal shirt and deep green corduroys. Curved hips, narrow waist. Brilliant shoulders, delicate yet purposeful, like wings. Strong arms—as he knew. Long and graceful neck. Thick dark hair down her back. Full serious mouth. Dark eyes. Some hurt or concern in the eyes that he could not trace.

  He stood looking at her with the water from his wool coat dripping around his feet.

  “You need to get out of those things,” he said.

  “I can change over to the bar,” he said. “But I would take a ride there if you could.”

  “I don’t have a car,” she said.

  “Do you have a clothes dryer?”

  She showed him the back room where the washer and dryer were. He c
losed the door and got undressed and put his coat and clothes in the dryer. A big green towel was in a wicker basket and he dried off with it.

  Then she handed a white bathrobe around the door and he put it on and tied the cord and put the green towel around his neck like a millionaire taking it easy at the health club.

  The robe was thick and soft and smelled like the inside of an orange peel. It occurred to him that she had worn it, and now he was wearing it, and so it was like touching her, once removed.

  They drank tea and whiskey at the kitchen table as his clothes rolled around in the dryer and his boots steamed in the oven.

  “I think I saved your life, Pierre,” she said.

  “I think you did too.”

  “You should never skate alone.”

  On the table there was a bonsai tree in a terra-cotta tray with pebbles and moss and tiny branches that bent to the side as if blown by the wind.

  “And now I owe you a great favor,” said Pierre, “that only I can do.”

  “Is that how it works?”

  “Doesn’t it? In stories, anyway.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “You wouldn’t know till the time comes,” said Pierre.

  “A messenger arrives. Your horse is waiting. You know. The hour is upon us.”

  “Do you ride horses?”

  “No. But you’d be able to all of a sudden. You’d find that you could. Or not, and you would fall off.”

  “Maybe you have hypothermia,” she said.

  “What are the symptoms?”

  “Confusion, I know.”

  “Actually I feel pretty good.”

  “So do I.”

  “Do you live here all the time?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “It seems quiet.”

  “This place was left to me,” she said. “I came from Wisconsin two summers ago. I needed somewhere to stay, and there was no one here, so it seemed to make sense.”

  “Why did you need somewhere to stay?”