Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [91]
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