Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Nigh

Arnold’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “I’m out,” he said. He tossed his cards down.

“Dammit, Dad,” Bernie said. “It’s my bet, you’re supposed to wait for me and Jaco to go before you fold.”

Arnold stood, hitched up his flannel long john bottoms by yanking up on the red suspenders attached to them. “I’m retired,” he said. “I don’t wait for shit, eh?”

He glanced up at the ratty cabin’s peaked wooden ceiling, eyes squinting as if he were looking for something. His hand blindly felt around the table for his glasses. Then, George heard something—the same sound Arnold must’ve heard seconds earlier: the distant, deep roar of a jet engine.

Arnold put on his glasses. “Assholes,” he said. “That’s all we need is some damn plane spooking the deer.”

Jaco giggled. There was no other way to describe the sound: Most men “laughed,” Jaco made a noise that would have been more at home in the body of a twelve-year-old girl showing off a tea party dress than a forty-year-old man wearing the same snowsuit he’d had on for five straight days, taking it off only to handle his business out in the woods.

“Deer should be scared of something ,” he said. “They sure aren’t scared of us. Are we going to at least try to hunt this year?”

Arnold grabbed his can of Pabst. “If we run out of beer before the snow stops falling and the plows pass by, sure. Good thing we got twenty cases, eh? I’m going to take a leak. Jaco, try not to freeze to death, you damn pansy.”

The old man opened the cabin’s rickety door and stepped out into the winter night, letting in a strong gust of crisp wind and a scattering of blowing snow.

Jaco shivered. “See what I mean? Freezing my balls off when we could be somewhere insulated.”

“What balls?” Bernie said.

Jaco had more money than the rest of them combined. Every year for the last three or four deer seasons, he’d begged to get a better cabin. He even offered to pay the difference. But straying from the path was not allowed—since George and Jaco and Bernard had been old enough to drink they had come here with Arnold, and here they would continue to come when their own sons were old enough to join, and keep coming until they either died or grew so old they couldn’t handle two weeks of bitter Upper Peninsula cold.

Bernie scratched at his beard. Not even a week in and it was damn near full. The guy had some kind of mutation, of that George was sure.

“Bernie, put up or shut up,” George said. “Ten dollars to you.”

Bernie reached for his money, then paused—he looked up to the cabin’s thin, peaked roof, just like his father had moments earlier. Jaco did the same, as did George. That jet had grown louder. Much louder.

The empty cans of Pabst started to rattle like ominous little tin chimes.

“Oh, jeeze,” Toivo said. “My head hurts so bad it’s roaring .”

The cabin door opened and Arnold rushed in, stumbling from the long johns pulled halfway up his thighs, the suspenders flapping wildly.

“Get down, eh? It’s right on top of us!”

George was about to ask the man what was going on, but the jet engine grew so loud it had to be right above the cabin. George dove under the table, bumping it hard as he did, sending empties and cards and money flying. He hit the wooden floor hard and lay there for only a split second before it seemed to bounce up below him, the entire cabin rattling like a big box of dry wood.

Moments later, George opened the cabin door and rushed out into the freezing night. Jaco, Bernie, Arnold, and Toivo came out behind him, all pulling on jackets or stomping feet into heavy winter boots as they walked. Falling snow ate up the sound, but the woods were even quieter than normal, as if the low-flying jet had intimidated the entire landscape into a terrified silence.

When the sun had gone down six hours earlier, the trees—both lush pines and bare-branched hardwoods—had been blanketed in blazing white. Most of that covering had fallen off, swatted away by the jet’s roar to join the thick snowpack already on the ground.

Clouds blocked out all but a dim, hazy glow of the moon. The only light came from the naked bulb above the cabin’s door.

George glanced at the cabin roof. It, too, was suddenly bare, just a few clumps of snow sticking to the weathered tin. He was a little surprised to see the cabin had remained in one piece. Pots had fallen off hooks and crashed around the wood stove, and all kinds of bat and bird shit had rained down from the old roof, but the one-room building seemed to be fine.

Jaco’s Jeep Grand Cherokee had two feet of snow on it and around it. Other than the Arctic Cat—which was so buried it was little more than a snowbank—the Jeep was the only way to go the crash victims, or to get them help.

Arnold pointed north. A wall of trees lay in that direction, but if you walked that way for about five minutes you would come out on the pristine shore of Lake Superior: untouched, icy rock beaches lining dense, snow covered forest that stretched forever, the black water reaching out so far it vanished into the night.

“The thing was going that way,” Arnold said. “Dark as it is out, the clouds should be lit up where it crashed. We’d see a fire from miles away.”

“Maybe it landed,” Jaco said.

Arnold hawked a loogie and spat it onto the snow. “Where, exactly, might it land? Ain’t no airport around here can even take a prop plane let alone that big-ass thing that flew over, eh?”

Twice in rapid succession, Arnold had said thing instead of plane or jet .

“Mister Ekola,” George said, “what exactly did you see?”

George had known the man since the second grade at Ontonagan Elementary, since the first time Bernie had invited he and Jaco home to play. Even now that George was in his forties—with a son of his own—he couldn’t bring himself to call Arnold by his first name, no matter how many times the man asked.

“Lights,” Arnold said. “Lots of lights. Goddamn big , eh? Don’t know what it was… but it wasn’t a jet.”

Bernie threw his hands up in frustration. “Dad, it was a jet. Your eyes are old as hell, remember?”

Arnold pointed to his glasses. “Had these on. Know what I saw.”

“It was a jet,” Bernie said.

Jaco walked to the cabin’s corner, taking big steps to push through the thigh-high snow. “I’ll check around back,” he said. “Maybe something out that way.”

Toivo rubbed at his temples. “Arnold is right, Bernie—there’s no airports around here. A jet makes that much noise could maybe land on da highway, but other than that, it would have had to crash, and if it crashed, we’d see fires or something.”

George pulled his cell phone from his pocket. “If it was a plane, maybe there’s news coverage. Let me see if I can get a signal.”

“Your phone hasn’t got shit all week,” Bernie said. “I left mine inside, I’ll grab it.” He turned and trudged back into the cabin.

George yelled after him: “And grab the flashlights.”

They had rushed out of the cabin expecting to see pillars of flame, had grabbed coats and boots and little else. Whatever was going on, they needed to slow down, think things through. Being outside at all in this weather could kill. If they were going to go through the woods looking for Arnold’s mystery non-plane, they had to use their heads.

George couldn’t get a signal. Being in the middle of the woods in one of the most rural and remote places in America, he wasn’t surprised. He put the phone away.

“Hey, guys?”

It was Jaco. He’d gone all the way behind the cabin and come around the other side. He was leaning heavily on the corner, as if he were suddenly exhausted. “You need to come see this. Right now.”