Steve Hamilton: Ice Run

“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.