38. Sacha #2
"Because I'm going to telephone her the second you walk out that door," Earl said, "and it will go better for you if you get there first."
I did not get there first.
By the time I came through the door of the diner there were nine people in it and none of them were eating. Marge had the cordless phone in one hand and a legal pad in front of her with a column of names down the left side and check marks beside seven of them.
"Sit down," she said, without looking up. "Somebody move over and let the man have the end."
"I am not staying."
"You'll sit, and you'll drink a coffee, because you haven't slept and I'm not sending a man onto a lake shaking." She wrote something. "Halvorsen is coming. He says he will bring the bag and also the other bag, and he wants you to know he hasn't asked what that means."
"Marge, listen to me."
"Doris has the church hall open with the heat on, so there's somewhere warm to put people if it comes to that.
Kenny Lindqvist has the club groomer at the north landing with a full tank, and I've told him to sit in it and not move it one inch until somebody says so.
" She finally looked up. That woman has been taking the measure of strangers over that counter for forty years. "There we are. Now you may talk."
"You cannot do this."
"That is not a sentence that has ever worked in this room."
"These are not men who fish," I said. "They are hired, they are armed, and the one who runs them is a professional. Nobody from this town goes near that water, and nobody sets a wheel on that launch road after six. I am not asking, and it is the only condition I have."
"Not one of us is setting foot on that water," Marge said.
"Look around this room. We're old and we're cold and we have got sense.
" She tapped the pad with her pen. "What we have got is fourteen telephones and every road out of this county on them.
If a vehicle comes off that lake tonight, I'll know the color of it before it reaches the stop sign. "
An old man in the third booth turned around at that. He is well past eighty and he had his hat on indoors, and I have stood beside that man at the fuel pump a hundred times.
"You would be him off the ridge," he said.
"That is me, and I am ashamed to say I have never once asked your name."
"It's Sivertsen, and I have fished that lake since I was a boy of nine.
" He worked his jaw. "Then you had better hear this.
The springs came further out this winter than they have in my lifetime.
There's soft going a good hundred yards west of the ridge, out past the third point, and it was never there before.
Two boys nearly went in this winter and the lake took the seat off their machine. "
I sat down in the booth across from him without deciding to.
"Draw it for me," I said. Marge put a paper napkin in front of him and a pen in his hand. He laid out the east side of that lake from memory, and his line matched my nine holes and then carried a hundred yards further west than I had measured, and he tapped the far end of it twice.
"That's the place," Sivertsen said. "You would never know it to look at it. Nobody knows it who wasn't taken out and shown."
He had just handed me my own thought back across a table, sixty years older and a good deal better earned.
"Who taught you that?"
"My father, in 1951, and he had it from a man who lost a horse out there." He pushed the napkin across to me. "You bring that girl back. She took a photograph of my hands. Nobody has ever done that."
Somebody at the counter asked whether they should be bringing food to the church hall.
Somebody else said the last time the whole town had been up at once was the ice storm in ninety-eight.
A third voice held that this was already the better night of the two, on the grounds that nobody in ninety-eight had known anything and tonight there was a plan.
Two men began arguing about whether the north landing gate was chained.
Marge crossed a name off her list and dialed the next one.
I let all of that go over me with my ears ringing.
"I asked for a plow," I said, to nobody in particular. "I appear to have been given a committee."
"You get the committee," Marge said. "The plow comes with it."
There was one more thing to do and I did it alone.
I went back up the ridge in the middle of the day. I sat in the shack with the stove open and the dog against my leg, and I thought about Danny for the last time as the man who has been carrying him.
He was twenty. He carried boxes up a stair for wages, and at the end he had a hand around my wrist and he asked for his mother, and I did not have one thing in the world to give him.
For three years I have treated that as a bill with my name on it.
Every good hour that came near me was held up against it and turned away, and I called that conscience, and conscience is not what it was.
It was a man arranging to be punished, and quietly enjoying the arrangement, because a punished man is excused from trying.
Kos told me on the telephone that he had been sitting with it since the month it happened, saving it. He and I have been doing the same work on that dead boy for three years from opposite ends, and only one of us had noticed it.
I cannot give Danny back. There is no arrangement, no year of quiet, no amount of standing very still that gives a boy back to his mother. What I can do is refuse to let that man make a second one out of her, and out of what she is carrying, on my water, in my sight, while I am still breathing.
So I am not going out there to die well. I need that clear before any of it starts. For three years I have been quietly courting the notion of a good death, and that is a coward's plan wearing a good coat.
I am going out to come back.
Tank put his head on my knee and I put my hand on it.
"Hold the house," I said. "That is your work tonight, and I will want you standing in that doorway when we come up the road."
I loaded the truck at four. The rifle in the oilcloth has been lying in the rafters of their own boathouse for four days. The snowshoes are under the lodge steps and the line is in the crawl space, and the small bag went in behind the seat, and not one thing in it is a firearm.
At half past five Earl Dombrowski laid a four-foot windrow across the county launch approach with the wing down, and telephoned to tell me it was the finest work of his life.
At six the last of the color went out of the sky and the lake turned the flat gray of a thing waiting.
Every job I ever fixed, I won by knowing the ground better than the other man. Kos chose to make his stand on a frozen lake, in my woods, on my ice. He thought that made him untouchable. It just meant I already knew exactly where he was going to fall through.