My feet were numb and my hands were cold. The winds drove past the collar of my parka and up my sleeves. My nose and cheeks hurt and even my eyeballs felt cold. It was time to turn around. The milkiness of the broad hill before us and around us was getting darker, which meant more weather coming on. It was time to fill his aluminum water dish and lock the dog in the kitchen and go to work. I tried to turn around, and my feet were slow to move. I had difficulty lifting them and wasn’t surprised when I fell. He was over and at my face, licking me, delighted with our new game. I lay where I was and closed my eyes. He shoved his muzzle into my face and I felt his paw on my chest.
“Good game, huh?”
I heard myself breathe out noisily, then take in icy air with less pleasure. I listened to that for a while, and the little snorts of the dog.
I said, “Okay.”
He left off, because he knew the tone. It meant not okay. He was waiting nearby, and I ought to be standing by now, in motion. Of course, a man doesn’t walk away from his house through a field of deep snow one morning in February just before work and lie down until the winds cover him with blown snow and then die.
“I didn’t say anything about dying,” I said. My mouth wasn’t working right, or I didn’t want it to be. That was it. I sounded like someone trying hard to be drunk. I didn’t like that sound, and I rolled onto my side and, when the dog returned, because he suspected action, I leaned a little of my weight on his shoulders and I got to my knees and then stood.
“Good trick,” I told us. “Good.” I took my glove off and found the biscuits in the pocket of my coat, and I gave him one.
“Aren’t we clever,” I said.
Fanny’s car was in the drive, which had been plowed twice since she’d been stuck. The winter was the worst I could remember for snow, and for getting up to fight through the cold and ice and balky motors and the difficulty of simply walking between two points, a feeling in the air of not enough oxygen. Drivers on campus were cranky and less and less thoughtful. The snowplows seemed to come less frequently, though we needed them more. Fanny still drove, I was certain, with her knuckles white and her mind not focused on the surface of the road. I was glad to see her car, to know she’d made it home. But I was also a little sneaky in my approach to the side porch, because I had a need to come and go unnoticed.
She was in the kitchen, though, waiting, still in her uniform, with a heavy white sweater tied by its sleeves around her shoulders.
“You look terrible,” she said. “What happened?”
“I took him for a walk,” I said. “I haven’t been very good, the last few days, about exercise and stuff.”
“And stuff,” she said.
I said, “Stuff.” I saw that she’d made coffee, and I went for a cup. “How was work?”
“Quiet.”
“Good.”
“Dr. Kalubia’s wife came to the ambulatory clinic and announced that her husband was a frequenter of whores and a carrier of diseases. He gave her venereal warts, apparently.”
“That doesn’t sound terribly quiet.”
“Warts are very quiet. You wake up quietly one morning and you have them. No noise.”
“But she wasn’t quiet.”
Fanny shook her head and smiled her tired smile. “But she got done pretty quickly,” she said.
“What’d Kalubia say?”
“He asked if I would like, some night, to meet him at the Red Roof Inn and have a drink.”
“Warts and all.”
“It takes a lot of energy and will to be a doctor, I guess.”
The dog lay on his round bed, panting, looking pleased to have extended himself that much. His stiff tongue stuck out dopily, and he watched us like he understood what we said.
I said, “I’ll be late if I don’t leave now.”
She nodded. She looked so sad.
“Winter camp for the overindulged,” I said.
“You like them.”
“Some of them.”
“You’re good with kids.”
Which had unwittingly led us, of course, to where we didn’t want to be. Dear Archie: What do you do when everyplace you try to go ends up the place you didn’t want to get to?
I said, “I had the funniest thing happen outside.”
She clasped her hands and moved them below the surface of the table. I knew she was holding them in her lap. I had seen her do it at the doctor’s office, waiting for news.
“No,” I said, “I just fell down and it was so deep, I could barely get up. Old friend to man over there ambled up and I leaned on him. That was all. It was like one of those ‘what weather we’re having’ remarks is all. About how much snow we’ve got in the back field, on the hill.”
“What were you doing on the hill? There’s nothing there this time of year except snow.”
I stood to carry my cup to the sink. “Exercise,” I said. “And I wanted to confirm the rumor about there being so much snow out there.”
She hung her head like she was very nearsighted and trying to study the tabletop. She said, “Jack, you’re a little insane.”
I went over to her. “It’s better than being a lot insane,” I said.
I was talking to the back of her head. I leaned down and kissed it. I put my hand on it and felt the shape of her skull, the springiness of her hair, the heat of all her life going on. I was surprised. I had expected to find it cool underneath my fingers. I kept my hand there, and what I wanted was for information to flow between us. I wasn’t thinking so much about facts, because there weren’t many. Her, me, the house that nobody lived in with us except for a noble, unbrilliant dog — those were the facts. The rest was more like feelings, except it wasn’t anything simple like love or hate. It was in between feelings and facts and we needed to know them, I thought.
She said, “You’re squeezing the back of my neck, Jack.”
She kept her head down. I rubbed at the soft flesh under the base of her skull. I said in the voice of the half-drunk marine who had squatted behind me in Phu Lam, “Well, we’re just seeing Flash.”
I caught what I wasn’t meant to. I didn’t know all 2,200 of them, of course, but I was familiar with a lot of faces and ways of walking. I knew the habits of some of them — the kids who walked alone at night with a heavy rhythm, the ones who sat on the steps of the bookstore and chain-smoked, the students approaching the library with their heads down because they were defeated before they began. Usually, they paid no attention to us. But this one noticed me. She didn’t want me to see her. Any kind of cop will feel it. I had seen her at the other end of the first-floor lounge of the freshman dorms as she woke up. They call them first-years now. The man in freshman isn’t fair. It isn’t female.
But she was female and young and as deep in trouble as anyone I knew. I saw her there. Later, I saw her smoking outside the dining hall. She was dressed like the rest of them, but she wasn’t. Jeans jacket and a sweatshirt, jeans torn at the knees, bright woolen gloves. But the students here were mostly clean and so were their clothes. Hers weren’t and her hair looked lousy. I only saw their hair dirty if they did hard drugs or were writing poetry that semester or wanted to die. They wore their long-billed hats backward when their hair was dirty. This one didn’t look like any of them. Her face was supposed to be tough, I think, but mostly it looked sad and cold and worried.