Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

Stephanie was looking out at the dry winter fields and suddenly said, “The state of Michigan. You know who this state is for? You know who’s really happy in this state?”

“No,” I said. “Who?”

“Chickens and squirrels,” she said. “They love it here.”

My brother parked the car on the driveway down by our dock, and we walked out onto the ice on the bay. Stephanie was stepping awkwardly, a high-center-of-gravity shuffle. “Is it safe?” she asked.

“Sure, it’s safe,” my brother said. “Look.” He began to jump up and down. Ben was heavy enough to be a tackle on his high-school football team, and sounds of ice cracking reverberated all through the bay and beyond into the center of the lake, a deep echo. Already, four ice fishermen’s houses had been set up on the ice two hundred feet out — four brightly painted shacks, male hideaways — and I could see tire tracks over the thin layer of sprinkled snow. “Clear the snow and look down into it,” he said.

After lowering herself to her knees, Stephanie dusted the snow away. She held her hands to the side of her head and looked. “It’s real thick,” she said. “Looks a foot thick. How come a car went through?”

“It went down in a channel,” Ben said, walking ahead of us and calling backward so that his voice seemed to drift in and out of the wind. “It went over a pressure ridge, and that’s all she wrote.”

“Did anyone drown?”

He didn’t answer. She ran ahead to catch up to him, slipping, losing her balance, then recovering it. In fact I knew that no one had drowned. My stepfather had told me that the man driving the car had somehow — I wasn’t sure how a person did this — pulled himself out through the window. Apparently the front end dropped through the ice first, but the car had stayed up for a few minutes before it gradually eased itself into the lake. The last two nights had been very cold, with lows around fifteen below zero, and by now the hole the car had gone through had iced over.

Both my brother and Stephanie were quite far ahead of me, and I could see them clutching at each other, Stephanie leaning against him, and my brother trying out his military-school peacock walk. I attempted this walk for a moment, then thought better of it. The late-afternoon January light was getting very raw: the sun came out for a few seconds, lighting and coloring what there was, then disappeared again, closing up and leaving us in a kind of sour grayness. I wondered if my brother and Stephanie actually liked each other or whether they were friends because they had to be.

I ran to catch up to them. “We should have brought our skates,” I said, but they weren’t listening to me. Ben was pointing at some clear ice, and Stephanie was nodding.

“Quiet down,” my brother said. “Quiet down and listen.”

All three of us stood still. Some cloud or other was beginning to drop snow on us, and from the ice underneath our feet we heard a continual chinging and barking as it slowly shifted.

“This is exciting,” Stephanie said.

My brother nodded, but instead of looking at her he turned slightly to glance at me. Our eyes met, and he smiled.

“It’s over there,” he said, after a moment. The index finger of his black leather glove pointed toward a spot in the channel between Eagle Island and Crane Island where the ice was ridged and unnaturally clear. “Come on,” he said.

We walked. I was ready at any moment to throw myself flat if the ice broke beneath me. I was a good swimmer — Ben had taught me — but I wasn’t sure how well I would swim wearing all my clothes. I was absorbent and would probably sink headfirst, like that car.

“Get down,” my brother said.

We watched him lowering himself to his hands and knees, and we followed. This was probably something he had learned in military school, this crawling. “We’re ambushing this car,” Stephanie said, creeping in front of me.

“There it is,” he said. He pointed down.

This new ice was so smooth that it reminded me of the thick glass in the Shedd Aquarium, in Chicago. But instead of seeing a loggerhead turtle or a barracuda I looked through the ice and saw this abandoned car, this two-door Impala. It was wonderful to see — white-painted steel filtered by ice and lake water — and I wanted to laugh out of sheer happiness at the craziness of it. Dimly lit but still visible through the murk, it sat down there, its huge trunk and the sloping fins just a bit green in the algae-colored light. This is a joke, I thought, a practical joke meant to confuse the fish. I could see the car well enough to notice its radio antenna, and the windshield wipers halfway up the front window, and I could see the chrome of the front grille reflecting the dull light that ebbed down to it from where we were lying on our stomachs, ten feet above it.

“That is one unhappy automobile,” Stephanie said. “Did anyone get caught inside?”

“No,” I said, because no one had, and then my brother said, “Maybe.”

I looked at him quickly. As usual, he wasn’t looking back at me. “They aren’t sure yet,” he said. “They won’t be able to tell until they bring the tow truck out here and pull it up.”

Stephanie said, “Well, either they know or they don’t. Someone’s down there or not, right?”

Ben shook his head. “Maybe they don’t know. Maybe there’s a dead body in the backseat of that car. Or in the trunk.”

“Oh, no,” she said. She began to edge backward.

“I was just fooling you,” my brother said. “There’s nobody down there.”

“What?” She was behind the area where the ice was smooth, and she stood up.

“I was just teasing you,” Ben said. “The guy that was in the car got out. He got out through the window.”

“Why did you lie to me?” Stephanie asked. Her arms were crossed in front of her chest.

“I just wanted to give you a thrill,” he said. He stood up and walked over to where she was standing. He put his arm around her.

“I don’t mind normal,” she said. “Something could be normal and I’d like that, too.” She glanced at me. Then she whispered into my brother’s ear for about fifteen seconds, which is a long time if you’re watching. Ben nodded and bent forward and whispered something in return, but I swiveled and looked around the bay at all the houses on the shore, and the old amusement park in the distance. Lights were beginning to go on, and, as if that weren’t enough, it was snowing. As far as I was concerned, all those houses were guilty, both the houses and the people in them. The whole state of Michigan was guilty — all the adults, anyway — and I wanted to see them locked up.

“Wait here,” my brother said. He turned and went quickly off toward the shore of the bay.

“Where’s he going?” I asked.

“He’s going to get his car,” she said.

“What for?”

“He’s going to bring it out on the ice. Then he’s going to drive me home across the lake.”

“That’s really stupid!” I said. “That’s really one of the dumbest things I ever heard! You’ll go through the ice, just like that car down there did.”

“No, we won’t,” she said. “I know we won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Your brother understands this lake,” she said. “He knows where the pressure ridges are and everything. He just knows , Russell. You have to trust him. And he can always get off the ice if he thinks it’s not safe. He can always find a road.”

“Well, I’m not going with you,” I said. She nodded. I looked at her, and I wondered if she might be crazed with the bad judgment my parents had told me all teenagers had. Bad judgment of this kind was starting to interest me; it was a powerful antidote for boredom, which seemed worse.