William Krueger: Iron Lake

Cork split off suddenly, moving away from Meloux and toward the cliffs at Half Mile Spring. When he looked back, Parrant had slowed the Cherokee almost to a stop, as if confused. Cork stopped, too, and turned to show himself clearly in the headlights.

“I’m here, you son of a bitch! I’m the one you want!”

Cork stood dead still on the lake. The urgency of fleeing had vanished. In its place was a deep calm, and around that calm, like an aureola around the dark center of an eclipse, blazed a fierce resolve to be done with it.

To kill the Windigo, Meloux had said, you must become a Windigo, too.

A man was never just a man. A man was endless possibility waiting to become.

In the hoary glare of the headlights, Cork changed. He grew. Past the pain of his body. Past the fear of dying. Past the concerns of conscience that kept a man small. He stood huge and full of an icy determination to see Sandy Parrant dead. To kill him with his own hands. He felt no pain in the fingers that gripped Meloux’s knife. He felt no pain in his ribs as he drew himself upright. He felt only a depthless, pitiless cold that froze his heart.

He even smiled as the Cherokee came for him.

The vehicle launched itself across the lake. Cork heard the sizzle of the tires spinning on the ice as Parrant accelerated toward a killing speed. The sound was like the whine of a hungry animal. Death was coming and Cork opened his arms to embrace it, to bring it to him so that he could feed on it. Welling up from a dark place inside him he’d never known rose a cry he didn’t recognize or understand, the howl of a hungry beast. He stood with the knife in his hand, howling beneath the moon as the Cherokee bore down on him. He crouched to meet it.

He didn’t hear the shots. But he heard the shatter of glass and saw the vehicle swerve at the last instant. The Cherokee missed him by several feet, drifting into a lazy spin as Parrant fought to bring it under control. He never did. The end seemed to take a long time. Cork watched it all with a dispassionate appreciation for the beauty of circumstance.

As the Cherokee approached the open water from Half Mile Spring, the thin ice at the edge gave with a crack, as if the earth had split. The jeep tilted, its tires touching water. It rolled to its side, then flipped onto its top. It narrowly missed the open water, and like a new Christmas sled skated across the frozen lake on the bare metal of its roof, hardly slowing at all before it slammed into the base of the cliff on the far side of Half Mile Spring.

A moment of absolute quiet followed. The night caught its breath. Then the gas tank exploded.

Fire washed the cliff and the lake all around with a fearsome, wavering orange. The snow and ice melted on the rock wall and ran like black tears down the face of the cliff. Where he stood, Cork felt the heat reaching out toward him. He watched flames engulf the vehicle and listened to glass exploding from the intense heat.

“Cork!” Jo came out of the dark, the Winchester in her hand. “Are you all right?”

Cork looked at the rifle. “Thanks to you, I guess.”

Meloux materialized beside them. He also noted the Winchester and nodded to Jo. “I thought for sure this old man would not be getting any older. I thank you.”

The Winchester suddenly seemed too heavy for Jo to hold. She handed it to Cork. She felt empty and a little weak and she sat down abruptly on the ice. Meloux sat down cross-legged beside her.

Cork asked, “Back at the cabin, Henry. The Windigo calling. Was that you?”

In the quivering light that came off the burning Cherokee, Cork saw a perturbed look cross the old man’s face, as if he’d been asked a rather stupid question. A glittering dust of snow blew over them and Meloux glanced up at the sky. The northern lights were fading, but the moon was high, looking bright and new as if it had only just been created.

“Whatever it was brought the Windigo here to feed is gone,” Meloux declared.

He closed his eyes and began to sing, words Cork didn’t understand. But he knew what it was about. The song of the dead. Henry Meloux was singing his fallen enemy onto the Path of Souls.

Snow fell on Christmas morning, small flakes, which meant the snowfall would last a long time. It paved the streets and sidewalks of Aurora in trackless white and gave a fresh cover to the dirty snowbanks, like a clean comforter on an old bed. It came down straight and landed soft as dreaming. And Cork, as he turned onto the road to Molly’s, thought it was one of the loveliest snowfalls he’d ever seen.

The big cabin was empty and unlit. The small shabby cabins that lined the lane to the lake stood in two dark rows like silent mourners. Cork walked between them one last time down to the sauna and looked over the lake from the place Molly had hated so much and then loved so well. Crow Point was only a squat gray finger pointing toward something in the distance, something lost in the falling snow. All the signs on the ice that would have marked the desperate struggles there were covered now. The lake wore a face of immense serenity.

He returned to the Bronco and took from the backseat a small Christmas tree in a green metal stand. He’d strung popcorn and cranberries and made paper chains. At the very top, he’d placed an angel he’d constructed from pipe cleaners and a bit of white lace. He didn’t want to go into the cabin-without Molly it would be the emptiest of places. So he set the tree in the snow outside.

“I didn’t do such a good job with the decorations,” he explained as if she could hear, and he held up his bandaged, frostbitten hands to show the reason for his clumsiness. “Even so, I think it looks all right.”

The snow muffled every sound, reminding Cork of the way it used to be in church when he believed in God and felt reverence in the very silence of St. Agnes.

“Jenny was supposed to read a poem at her Christmas program yesterday. I think I told you. She was going to read Sylvia Plath, but she changed her mind. She read Frost instead. ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.’ You know, ‘miles to go before I sleep.’ Jo says she changed it for me. A good sign, I guess.”

He looked down, a little embarrassed by his rambling, although talking made him feel less alone. He saw tracks in the snow near the back door, small hand prints almost human. Raccoons.

“The geese are back. You remember, Romeo and Juliet. It’s nice having them around. Like a couple of old friends.”

Small flakes settled on his face and melted into drops that ran down his cheeks like tears. But he wasn’t crying. He’d cried himself dry already. And if Molly could see him-who knew? — he wanted her, on this morning, to see him smile.

So he did. He smiled upward into all that fell from heaven.

“Merry Christmas, Molly.”

As snow gathered on the branches of the Christmas tree and in the loops of the paper chain and settled lightly on the shoulders of the angel he’d made, Cork turned and walked away.