Peter Geye - Wintering

Inside the shack Gus noticed a four-foot spruce leaning in the corner. Harry said, “Merry Christmas, bud.” And, sitting on the small table, the twined moose antlers. Gus stood there, unable to move.

Harry took the frying pan from the hook on the wall and went to the stove and started cooking their Christmas dinner. “Get that mandolin out, eh? Play us some carols?” he said over his shoulder. “That tree smells like Christmas, don’t it?”

Gus didn’t answer. Nor did he get up for his mandolin. Not yet. He just stood there looking at his father and the Christmas spruce in turn, then taking in the rest of the shack. The bearskin on his father’s bunk, his daypack at the foot of his own, the pitiful shelves over the stove, his dirty clothes, his father’s coat hanging by the door. Seeing it, he took his coat off and hung it over his father’s. The tree did smell like Christmas, but never had a day been so at odds with the very concept.

The oleo in the pan was smoking now, so Harry laid the hare in to fry. The smell of the spruce disappeared with the scent issuing from the pan. Gus wanted an orange, a ripe, juicy orange. He’d received one in his stocking every Christmas morning since he could remember. No sooner did he think about that than he felt like a fool. Wishing for an orange. He thought again of the plane flying right at him, straight up the lakeshore. In his mind he could see Charlie Aas’s face through the windshield. Of course, that was impossible. Still, he could see Charlie’s stupid grin.

“So he’s found us,” Gus said. He stepped over to his bunk and sat on the edge. “I thought there was no chance of that. I thought we’d just starve to death up here.”

Harry turned, holding the frying pan in his hand, and he lowered it so Gus could see fat from the hare spitting out of it. “Starve to death, my ass.” He smiled and turned back to the stove, stirring the chunks of rabbit. It did smell fine.

“What’s he going to do?” Gus said.

Harry nodded, stirred the meat once more, and said, “I suppose he’ll pay us a visit.”

“What does that mean?”

“I suppose he’ll land his plane out on the lake. He and whoever’s with him will follow your tracks here to the shack. I doubt he’ll knock on the door.”

“When?”

“Whenever he wants,” he said, then salted and peppered the rabbit. “When he’s good and ready.”

Gus took his mandolin from its case, laid it in his lap, and tried to shake the image of that plane flying toward him. When his father set the plates of food on the small table and called Gus to join him, he just sat on his bunk and stared at the floor.

Harry took three big bites before saying, “You’d better get over here. Don’t think I won’t eat this whole rabbit.”

Still Gus did not get up.

“Come on, bud. Eat a little supper. It’s a hell of a sight better than that lutefisk your mother cooks up each Christmas Eve.”

Gus started playing then, a sort of medley of Christmas songs. He’d figure out the chords and muddle through the first few bars and then give up and go on to the next. “Silent Night.” “What Child Is This?” “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.” “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” Thinking of the words to the songs was a help, but he didn’t sing them. Only played round and round. Harry finished eating and sat back in his chair, listening.

After a while Gus started playing something else, a farrago of deep and troubled notes. He played without looking up or stopping. After an hour he got up and ate the plate of hare and wiped his hands on his pants, then played for another hour. The wind now so fierce he could only hear that and his song.

“Snuff out the lantern when you’re done,” his father said later.

Gus stopped playing. “Go ahead and turn it off now,” he said, then kept playing in the dark. By the time he set the mandolin on the floor under his bunk, Harry was snoring soundly. The wind was still rocking the shack, whistling through it, making its own song. Gus couldn’t hear the fire ticking in the stove, or his own breathing. So he listened for the words to the song he’d been playing that night. They came to him in those last moments before sleep and were slowly lost in his dreams.

—

Gus woke up when a candle his father was holding lit the cabin from where he stood at the window. The glass was glowing inside and out, flickering like a strobe light. The wind had quieted but still had some legs. Walking to the window himself, Gus saw his father had the pistol in his free hand.

He looked out the window, pressing his hands around his eyes and against the glass to see better. Out on the bay, a great blazing fire lighted up the thirty yards between it and the shack as well as its own smoke rising into the sky above the flames, now twisting wildly in the wind.

“What is it?” Gus said.

“I’d call it the tip of the iceberg.”

—

They did not light the lantern. In the husky dark of the shack they dressed and drank coffee and Harry reloaded the pistol. The sound of bullets snapping into the clip was paralyzing.

Before the sun rose through the trees they stood out at the remains of the fire, still smoldering and smoking: the scorched skeleton of one of the canoes loaded with all their meat, a can of kerosene smudged black, a dozen unburnt ends of split oak, all of it charred and stinking and ringed and soaking in a slurry of soot and ash and melted snow. Harry knelt and prodded the ashes with a gunwale from the canoe that had broken off outside the fire. Cigarette butts littered the ground around it.

“Add arson to the list of his crimes,” he said, slowly circling the ashes, stopping to inspect the boot prints in the snow. Then he walked the trail leading away from the fire for perhaps ten yards and stopped to scan the length of the bay and the woods on either side.

He looked back at Gus standing there. “Well, bud, we’d better find our dancing shoes.”

Harry walked back to the ashes and knelt and poked them once more. “Looks like he cooked up all our meat.” He pulled a charred-black strip from the steaming heap. “I bet the cache’ll be empty.” He nodded. “But we should check.”

Gus bent at the waist and vomited in the snow, stood upright, then bent and vomited again. He wanted to think it was the dreadful stink coming off the ashes — burnt meat, lacquer from the canoe, the kerosene used to light the fire — but it wasn’t this that made him sick. It most certainly was not.

Harry patted his shoulder and led him silently back to shore. He climbed the ladder and peered into the cache for only a second and climbed back down. “Sure enough,” he said. “Son of a bitch.” He gazed out at the ruins of the canoe. “We should see if we can find the plane. See if they’re still around.” He looked at Gus.

“One of us should stay here to watch the shack,” Gus said.

“I want to stick together. I don’t want to leave you alone.”

“We’re going to starve now,” Gus said. “If he doesn’t just shoot us first.”

“He’s not going to shoot us. And we’ve still got food to eat. He’s only testing us. That’s good. It’s his first mistake.”

Gus didn’t answer, simply went into the shack to gear up. When he came out he had his pack on, the rifle slung over his shoulder, his snowshoes under his arm. “I’d rather walk than ski.”

“Okay,” Harry said. He brought his own snowshoes out and they both put theirs on as the sun topped the trees. Side by side they followed the tracks up the bay.

Three men had left them. At the mouth of the bay Harry pointed at an empty fifth of whiskey. The tracks continued north of the bay, though wind had obscured them. Harry stared out across the ice, and Gus did, too.