Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

It was a piece of orange fabric lodged under a tree. No, it was someone asleep under the tree, some errant boozer, some other boozer like him. No. Hood knew. It wasn’t someone sleeping. Oh, please. Hood fell to his knees. No. He froze. He whispered religious oaths. In the ice and snow. He held his face in his hands.

Then he decided to run. He was already running. Back toward the car. He slipped. He was up running again. He fell again. Hood was no troubleshooter. He was not resourceful. He had to get out of there before someone saw him, saw the car. He would just leave.

But then fate smiled on Benjamin Hood. It was this simple. Just as he was putting a leg over the guardrail — where Mike himself had fatally sat — Hood found himself flushed with calm. The morning was still. He felt grief, sure, but he felt he could contribute something, too. Grace flickered in him. There was nowhere to run to, particularly. No safe port in this storm. What was he going to do? So he traced his steps back down toward the body.

He held Mike Williams’s blue head in his hands. He fumbled at the boy’s ski jacket, pulled open the shirt beneath, pressed his ear against a Yale T-shirt. No. An emptiness in there like the sound in one of those plastic conch shells. Hood pressed his lips against the lips of the dead boy, the boy he had never liked much, and sang into his mouth. He punched on Mike Williams’s chest the way he had seen people punch the chests of the dead on medical programs. No. He didn’t think it would work, and it didn’t.

The revelation of death was that Mike Williams would be dead as long as Benjamin knelt by him. None of Hood’s remedies would work and none of his wishes, his fervent wishes now, would either. Mike would be dead all afternoon and into the next. This was the miracle. Death was terribly durable. It was the sturdiest idea around. A body was dead, and before long it wasn’t even a body anymore, it was just elements. But it was still dead. Hood was embracing Mike now, caring for him in death as meticulously as he had disliked him in life. He heaved him into a sitting position. Mike was getting rigid now, like any winter thing, even though soft, pliable memories still circled around him. Memories and seraphim.

The ineffectual sun had risen just above the treetops. The temperature would inch beyond zero centigrade. It was two or three hundred yards across the front of Silver Meadow, past its shrubs and walkways and parking lot and security gate, to his house, to Hood’s house, and perhaps three-quarters of a mile uphill to the Williamses’. Hood decided to carry the boy to his house. The decision, made quickly, if with foggy, hung-over reason and with a hundred-and-ten-pound frozen corpse in his arms, was one that would stay with Benjamin Hood for good. Suddenly it seemed, truly suddenly, that this body, this abbreviated life, this disaster, was his.

Of course he intended to give the body back. To Janey Williams, whom he loved, and her husband, to whom he was now bound in a much different way, but he would take care of the situation first. He would exercise an almost parental control over this tragedy. He left his car behind and bore this body up grimly. Its gloved hands brushed across his face. It slid out of his arms and he had to lean it against the bench on the walkway at Silver Meadow, his own matted hair and his glasses brushing against Mike’s, cheek to cheek with the frosty, dead skin of Mike Williams. He needed rest. Each step, with its meager vocabulary of progress — only ten more feet until that blacktop there — seemed interminable.

The security guys rushed down the road toward him, when he got Mike heaved up over his shoulder again. They were sprinting, and, though they looked familiar, there was no way Benjamin could have known that they were the same guys who knew his daughter by name, who had chased his son from the same hillside where this catastrophe had taken place, who had chased Mike out of the bowling lanes the night before. Out of breath, their mottled, black uniform shoes covered in snow, they called out to Hood.

— Is that your boy? What happened?

They stood in a circle around Mike and somehow Benjamin found himself telling them the story. They tried to comfort Hood, who was shaken now and having trouble putting sentences together; at least they tried to comfort him to the degree that one male — in New Canaan — can comfort another. It was Hood’s first dead body. They didn’t pat him on the back, or hug him, or tell him it would be all right. They stood aside, each of them as far as possible from the other. Their heads bowed.

— You better try to get a hold of yourself, one said.

— Are the…? Can you tell me if the phones are working? Hood said.

— We’ve got radio, said the other.

— Well, you ought to call an ambulance then, Hood said. Or the police… or the paramedics. Whoever can get through on the roads. I think this boy — his name is Mike Williams and he lives just up the road… I think he must have been burned somehow. He’s all… he’s burned.

— Whyntcha let us—

Hood pointed at his house, down below the main buildings of the hospital.

— I’m over there. That’s where we’ll be. 129 Valley Road. That’s… I’m going to put him in the other car…. I’ll wait—

And the security men stood by, hands in pockets. When they realized there was no persuading to be done, they sprang into action, jogging toward the little booth with the little two-way radio in it, where reports of college football games and new developments in the unraveling tenure of the President were overwhelmed by the machine-gun blasts of two-way radio static.

Hood’s odyssey across the front lawn of Silver Meadow and into his own driveway, down that meandering path and into the house was as heroic as anything from the epics of the past. He wasn’t quite as execrable as he thought. The magic involved was not visible to the naked eye. There were no swords or orcs or dragons or elves or rings in this adventure, but it was magic anyway. Hood had been transformed on Saturday morning from a self-pitying and disliked and hung-over securities analyst into, however briefly, an agent of sympathy. On the other hand, which life wasn’t heroic? Just living was heroic. Just talking to your family in the morning, before coffee, was heroic.

His home, meanwhile, had been ravaged by the elements. As Hood came up the driveway he called out his wife’s name, and the sound of that name, its elongated vowels, was dispersed across the frozen wastes to echo and reverberate upon the Silvermine River. No answer. He called again. He called Wendy’s name. He carried Mike to the garage, had to drag him part of the way, because Benjamin was starting to feel weak, to where the station wagon was parked. He left the body outside while he started the car.

Except that it wouldn’t start. It coughed feebly and then lapsed into silence. He dragged the body back to the house. Because he couldn’t open the door without setting down his burden. Oh, please open the goddam door. Hood wasn’t at all prepared to find the house empty. Where the hell was everybody?

When he had laid Mike lengthways in the front hall, Daisy Chain trotted out from under some table someplace, his tail wagging wildly, violently. Benjamin swallowed hard on what he now perceived as the outrageous treatment of this dog.

— Poor pooch, poor, old pooch. He let the body slump to the ground. Daisy Chain, skittering desperately at the door, would not stop.

— Need to go out, pooch? Okay, okay. Even you don’t want to be stuck in here, huh?

The dog jumped at the door. And maneuvering around Mike Williams, Ben released his hound, like the rest of his family, into winter. He slammed the door shut.

Then he found out about the pipes. Water was trickling down the walls in the living room. The house had turned into some Revolutionary War fountain, the Reverend Mark Staples’s fountain. Water was trickling, no, streaming down the walls in Hood’s house. The enormity of it took a moment to sink in — as the water itself was sinking into the antique planks and walls of his home. From the ceiling the water came in sheets, and beneath it a large, brownish stain, more than eighteen inches wide, with the curvilinear shape, say, of a Smiley Face, perhaps, or the flame of some Yuletide candle. Rorschach stain. For a second Hood was reminded, in the midst of the crises around him, of the burning of the Yule log, that video loop that played on WPIX for five or six hours on Christmas Day. The water stain was inching outward along the linen-colored paint job. And on the floor of the living room, there was a large puddle of standing water. While the cascades from the ceiling ran down, the puddle trickled through the floorboards into the basement.