Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

Maybe Hood was not thinking clearly, but he followed the water where it led. He left Mike to look after the flood. On the other side of this wall, too, in the front hall closet, more falls fell. The stream ran down onto the floor and in a winding, indirect creek down toward the kitchen. Away from Mike. In the closet, Elena’s furs, some leather items, and a bunch of tennis and paddle-tennis rackets — everything had been touched by the curse of this flood.

Hood ran past Mike and up the front stairs to the second floor. He was guessing that the leak originated in the master bathroom, and, although the wall there had indeed partly caved in, although this water closet was directly above the worst manifestations of the flood, he could find no direct evidence of a burst pipe. He could see in past the Sheetrock, though, into that strange netherworld of wiring and struts and joists that resembled nothing so much as the inside of a human body. He felt he could reach into the thundering heart of his home, and thus into the heart of his family. He felt almost certain that the heart he would find there would be stilled. The frozen part of the plumbing must have emanated from that point. The water flowed out into the hall, down toward Wendy’s bedroom and then disappeared, miraculously. It meant to travel, this water. It was flow. Its motion was no respecter of dignity. It simply moved. And there wasn’t much Hood could do about it. He tried to call the plumber, got right on the phone in his blue-gray bedroom, a deep red rotary phone with a pleasant shape and heft. Then he remembered that the line was dead. He tried the tap and the shower. A sigh, like a last breath, issued forth from each of them.

The house was frigid, wet, and dark. In his perturbation, Hood recalled a lecture he had received from his own father about burst pipes. Like any paternal lecture this one was probably full of half-truths, digressions, polemics, and nostalgic anecdotes from the past. Still, one point stood out. Sometimes a leak skips a whole floor. Sometimes the leak is on the whole other side of the house from where the problem originates. And pipes, he remembered, usually split lengthways.

He didn’t know what to do next, whether to try to find his children, whether to presume they had been spirited away by his wife, who had reached the end of her tolerance, whether to try to shut off the water somehow, whether to further inspect the damage, or whether to do something about Mike, the son of his former mistress.

Each time he passed through the front hall, Mike seemed to have moved.

A strangulated yelp punctuated the silence at the front hall. The dog was back. Scratching at the door.

— Jesus, Hood said to Daisy Chain, letting him in. I have a lot on my plate here. Could you look after yourself for a little while?

Hood fished out a pair of galoshes from the hall closet. He descended into the basement, where the washer and dryer were located. The water in the basement grazed his kneecaps. It seemed to flow out one end of the basement into the Silvermine River, as if Hood’s house had now become a part of the river itself, part of that topographical movement from the Appalachian foothills to the Long Island Sound. The river had reached out to incorporate the Hoods and their residence into itself.

A sort of gushing also issued forth — there in the basement — from a particularly damaged line against one wall. Hood stepped down into that river just the same. It was only because of its motion, Hood thought, that the water wasn’t yet frozen. He shuddered as he waded across to where the washer and dryer protruded — craggy water hazards in that dank loch. He stepped on a pair of roller skates and fell, yelping, against the banister. Drenched to the waist. No theory of the flood, of its origin, would satisfy him now. He wasn’t going to think reasonably any longer. He would abandon all thinking about causes. He decided instead just to take the sheet he saw on top of the dryer up to cover Mikey. The sheet — a blue, floral print that usually covered Wendy’s bed — was drenched. But what were his options? Hood waded through the oily water and up into the front hall again. It was the least he could do.

When he reached the top of the stairs he found that the dog was now preoccupied with Mike. Vigorously, Daisy Chain circulated around the body, sniffing and licking, tail oscillating. The dog seized Mike’s sleeve in its mouth and began to wrestle with it.

Hood clapped his hands feverishly, sheet clamped under one arm.

— Hey! Fuck, Daisy, get the hell away from there. Come on, oh, fuck.

The dog paused to lick Mike’s palm one more time before dancing just out of reach of Hood and into the living room.

He covered poor Mike.

— What, am I going to have to chain you up outside or something? You’re going to eat the neighbors now? Jesus Christ.

He followed the dog into the living room and grabbed it by the collar. — C’mon with me. He locked Daisy Chain in the kitchen. And then, with a Duraflame log from the pile in the living room, he headed for the library. He thought: Naugahyde recliner. He was exhausted and he needed a minute to think. He had learned to build a fire well, in New England. With these instincts guiding him, he relaxed, but he also accelerated the pace of his home’s destruction. The pipes would melt faster.

He was awakened by the ambulance a little later. The ambulance from the police department. Janey and Jim Williams had drifted in and out of his sleep, looking like the parents in a Claymation Sunday-morning television show his kids used to watch. Religious programming. Their worried expressions and wooden movements, their beseechments and entreaties stretched a shadow across his uneasy nap. The police pulled up in the driveway without a siren, and rapped on the door knocker — the doorbell was electric — as though there were no emergency at all. Hood rose after a while. The banging had become a strange, percussive factor in his dreams. The dog was barking, too, in the kitchen.

— Got a call about some burns, the driver said.

Behind him stood two other men, sleepless and overburdened. One scratching under his ski cap. Fully certified Emergency Medical Technicians. The body occupied most of the foyer there. They couldn’t miss it.

— That’s him, Hood said, eyes falling back on Mike.

— He’s—

— That’s right.

The ambulance driver strode past Hood to the draped Williams boy. The other two men retreated to the ambulance to construct one of their foldout stretchers.

— Cold enough for you? the driver said grimly, as he peeled back the edge of the sheet and pressed his hand against Mike’s neck. What do you mean burn? No trace of a burn. Why’s this sheet wet, anyway?

— Well, he’s—

— You weren’t trying to treat him, I hope.

— No, I—

— Where’d you find him? Are you related to him? Hood condensed the story.

— What’s the condition of the roads up there? the driver asked.

— Well, there are some downed lines, Benjamin said. My car is—

— Electrical or telephone? How far was he from those lines? What time did you find him? Why didn’t you leave him at the, uh, at the psychiatric hospital?

The technician had Mike’s jacket and shirt open now and was looking for markings of any kind. But this expert knew the answer, Benjamin could tell, and he knew, too. When the other two volunteers had hoisted the stretcher up onto the front step, the driver pronounced Mike’s fate, as though breaking a spell. He turned over one of the boy’s palms.

— Electrocution, you guys. Electrocution.

— You wanna wire up the—

— No point, the driver said. He’s been this way for a couple of hours, I’ll bet. Radio it in?