Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

They flung Mike’s shroud on the floor by the stairs and covered him with a fresh, dry one. Then they strapped him onto the gurney and rolled it back toward the ambulance.

— Listen, Hood said. You’re going to Norwalk Hospital? Before you go we really ought to tell his family. Or at least drop me there. It’s just up there. The phones are down and my car is…. Do you think you could?

The driver said nothing.

— They’re my neighbors. This boy is my neighbors’ son. My kids have played with him. My daughter was going steady with this boy. This boy right here.

Hood had become firm. His demeanor had changed. He was acquainted with this bad luck. He knew what he was saying.

— Imagine if it was your son, he said.

The driver sucked on his lower lip. He had a prizefighter’s dull glare. Said nothing. But he led Hood out into the driveway, and he held open the back of the ambulance for Hood. Benjamin was going to sit in the back, with the corpse. He was out in the cold air again, in just galoshes and the jacket from last night. He was aware that his hair was mussed, that he needed a shower. They wheeled the stretcher up to the ambulance and hoisted it in. The radio in the ambulance was clear on one point — the temperature would plunge again, in the afternoon. Yes, radio. In that swift moment, when the door was closed behind him, Hood was put back in touch with the all-news format, with its blessed and conflicting voices — Britain slashes budget, Brendan Byrne opposes Jersey Turnpike extension, United Nations peacekeeping force patrols heavily mined areas between Egyptian and Israeli armies, Hall Bartlett’s new film, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, opens to mixed reviews, move in Congress to impeach. The Concord, California, murder case: two popular locals, Walter and Joanne Parkin, their children, their baby-sitter, the babysitter’s boyfriend and her parents all murdered by drifter from the Bronx, Dennis Guzman, and his accomplice, Archie Stealing, also of Concord. Elsewhere in California: an Oakland school superintendent executed with cyanide bullets by unknown terrorist organization, the Symbionese Liberation Army, which objected to the superintendent’s “fascist” policies.

— Which roads are clear? the driver called back.

Hood didn’t know. The two volunteers in the back of the ambulance with Hood stared down at the floor.

They proceeded by guesswork. Here is how Benjamin Hood reached the Williamses’ house. The long way, because of the power lines. Power lines down everywhere. The ambulance, with sirens cutting through the still day, through the subtle tinkling of melting ice, drove back to Silvermine Road and up to Canoe Hill, which was impassable because of multiple fallen trees, down Ridge Road to Rose Brook (past the wildlife sanctuary), back on Canoe Hill, where they went into a slide, which the driver quickly righted, down Route 123 to North Wilton, back down Laurel Road all the way to Turner Hill and then onto Valley Road. They passed the hulks of abandoned BMWs and Volvos and Volkswagens, they passed destruction in every forest and yard. The longer the drive took, the more Hood’s insides knotted. His bowels were full, his life had changed, and he had a lot of talking to do.

THOUGH THE SORTS of love songs Wendy sang in her semi-sleep were all mixed up, though they mixed the Eros and the Agape, gift-love and need-love, pseudo-love and the art of love, courtly or secular love (that conceit of twelfth-century poetry) and the love of God, the love of nature with the fetishism of objects, the love of parents with profane premarital love, she knew as the sunlight streamed into the guest room at the Williamses’ that the house of love was the house she inhabited. Its many windows, dormers, gables, ingresses, and egresses were hers. Its sagging gutters and leaky roof, its unusual additions and secret staircases. Love was a sweet, soft thing and a force that could batter communities. Too late to turn back now, she believed she was falling in love. She was dirty-sweet and she was his girl. Sandy, I’m a fine girl, what a good wife I will be. Precious and few were the moments they two would share. Call out my name, baby, just call it out. I’ll be there, on that midnight train, I’ll be there. Gimme the beat boys, free my soul…

Wait a second. Guest room? Wendy opened her eyes again. She could see her breath, it hovered before her. Sandy’s slow respiration, too, like winter exhaust. She was in the Williamses’ house? Still? She lurched from the bed.

The floors were like ice. She danced. But soon her implacable mood returned. The electricity was off: no heat. She was already here. It was morning. She couldn’t leave the room without running into Sandy’s parents, without running into Mike, and that was just the way it would be now. Anyway, she loved Sandy. Anyway, she wanted to write Sandy’s name on her breasts in indelible marker and to wear his band of gold. Anyway, she wanted to have his baby, to introduce him to marijuana, to watch him grow his first mustache.

She woke him roughly, just to see his expression. She called his name. His eyes opened immediately into regret and panic. Still sleepy, rubbing and scratching, he threw himself into a sitting position. His feet dangled over the edge of the bed.

— Oh, boy…. Oh. What are we gonna do?

Wendy laughed.

She was gathering up her clothes and, including the soiled garter belt from Mike’s closet, carefully concealing it from Sandy, pushing it down into her ski pants, as she drew her turtleneck over her head again.

— We have to get back into my room, he said. You have to get out somehow.

— Huh?

— Don’t talk so loud, Sandy whispered.

— I’m not, and besides, you’re being a prude, you know? Who cares?

Sandy was out of the bed now, looking for evidence of something on the sheets, though there were no stains, looking anyway, the way an alcoholic will go through a metal detector convinced that he probably picked up a handgun somehow. Sandy looked for the abject beginnings of his own sexuality drip-drying there, or for the popped cherry which, according to school-yard sex studies, must have accompanied Wendy’s night in his bed. Then he folded back the blankets, organized the bedspread. Everyone’s bed-making style was their own, Wendy knew, as personal as their fingerprints or their heartbeat. Sandy wasn’t doing anything more than forestalling his moment of coming clean. His neat but imperfect hospital corners would never fool his mom.

The way Wendy saw it, in this enclosed space, in this first flush of morning, they were secure — young lovers like avid readers gazing at the frontispiece of a dusty, inherited volume — refracting the movements of the outside world, of Canaan Parish and beyond. Eventually the door would swing wide. But for now they could just ride the love train.

So Wendy stopped, and removed her turtleneck again, cradling it in the pile of outer garments she held at her waist. She felt the frigid air on her nipples, those small, pink announcements of her sex, and she headed for the door.

— Clock’s stopped, Sandy was saying behind her. She was ravished, and what difference did it make? She was changed. What was the loudest noise a girl could make? What did buildings look like when they collapsed? Did the Pentagon actually levitate? She opened the door and loped without regret across the threshold of the guest room and into Sandy’s room, where G. I. Joe’s execution was still being played out. She began to lift her voice in song, to mumble lyrics from the Led Zeppelin songbook and other head music. Hawkwind. The ringwraiths rode in black!

Her mother’s appearance at this point was swift, stunning, and unpredictable. Wendy cried out, in fact, at the sight of her mother, disarranged, wearing last night’s clothes. Standing in the hall. It was as if her mother had learned the techniques of the sorceress — had learned actual invisibility — and through one of her spells had been observing her daughter’s movements. Her Valkyrie mom. Later this moment replayed itself again and again in Wendy’s consciousness, as if things would have turned out differently if she just hadn’t gone out of that guest room.