And there’s something in George’s subconscious about all of this, the rushing, the foot stomp, that has always been an unsettling undercurrent to him. For he shouldn’t remember that part at all, but he does. And today, in walking in his spikes in a blizzard back toward his company truck, that beginning part, the rushing and colliding with another in the Strand, is strangely clear as a bell.
But George shakes away strange thinking and continues on in his remembrance of Martha. Steeped now within the outside world of the blizzard, a howl of wind greets him, or some howl. Cope? Nahh, just the wind. It ain’t Old Cope. Can’t be still out in the world, no, not Cope. I miss you, Cope. I miss you, Martha.
George walks on in the onslaught of snow. He walks slow, safe, in his grip shoes.
Back in that high emotion day in the Strand, as he knew she would, when Martha flipped to the copyright page to check the copyright date in the planted leather Dickinson, for she had a collection to curate, Martha gasped. Therein, written on Richard’s Mountain letterhead, was this note:
Martha,
Live, extended
in this heavenly displacement
in this 99th way
in this run of ducks;
In our pages of,
crimes of love
tangled by, magnificent lies—
devil-tooth spies
slick guys and Queens.
I love how you love them
Hover above the tree lines
and gorge streams;
Rise beyond their laws and their lessons
Engraved for those, stuck in snows,
Hiding in grasses,
deep treads in spring mud
Float in our world of lawless reigns
on page prints with cracked spines
Our time or no time
In book aisles,
By wolf dens,
Bar stools and dog walks
I ask thee,
Please save me.
Marry me,
It might not have been worthy of Dickinson, but it was nature centered and spoke of the freeness that love brought. The protection. He’d wanted to throw into a magical maelstrom all the locations where they loved being together, Vermont, duck hunting, walking Cope on mountain trails, the Strand, in books about all kinds of tales, as if some gravity-free, magical heaven in which they lived, always in love’s safety.
Anyway, this was his intention, a rather subjective inspiration he gleaned in sneaking reads of Martha’s Dickinson collection, after Martha fell asleep at night. This proposal, this very poem, was a full year, night after night, in the planning and editing and fretting he’d be able to rise to the exalted pedestal Martha deserved.
He watched while she read, her eyes widening in surprise.
He held his breath.
Martha looked up, at first in a stare, no smile.
And then, Martha smiled. Martha broke down and cried. Martha said yes, and Martha gasped, and said yes, yes, yes, a gorgeous, unending song of yesses.
“This is the best poem ever written in the history of all poems,” Martha said through yesses and tears.
They forehead-to-forehead rolled their heads together in the poetry section of the Strand; Martha clutching the proposal note to her heart, and George clutching the Dickinson to his heart. George swears that in memory of this moment, a blackness, or a presence, some something was watching them with evil eyes, in the shadows of the perpendicular stack. He swears he felt that evil presence exactly then, and not in retrospect, after what happened to Martha four hours later.
George is five feet off his truck now, and those four lines he drew on the side are all gone. The Richard’s Mountain decal has been re-covered in side-swept sticky snow. Drifts of snow lean half-up the chained tires, and the white roof of the truck has its own flat hat of snow, as does the hood. So isn’t it odd, George thinks, that his footsteps are still visible by his driver’s door?
Those aren’t my boot prints.
George quick presses the unlock button on his universal company fob, yanks open his door, and his heart fills with fire. Raging, wild, destructive fire.
The cubby is empty.
Martha’s special leather Dickinson is gone.
So, too, is George’s hunting knife.
George backs away from the door. Looks everywhere all over the parking lot, but it is hard to see. The snow is falling sideways, and seemingly, upside down in this wind. He sees no moving person. The howling wind further obscures his senses. He notes the outlines of cars and trucks in the parking lot. Kyle’s is gone.
Had to be fucking Kyle, that prick. Bob, Eli, the others, they’re still in the bar and wrapping up to come to shift. Kyle’s got a universal fob. That prick.
George is alight now. He jumps his big body into the cab, yanks the door shut. He cranks on the engine and immediately heat blasts into the double cab and up on the windshield. He hits his powerful windshield wipers, which makes short life of the layer of snow that accumulated while he was inside.
He doesn’t wait for the engine or cab to heat; he jams into reverse, rocks the tires back and forth a few times, and guns the gas to launch out of his parking space, swerving onto the mountain road, which, thanks to the Mountain’s extra tax payments, has been plowed and salted ten times already tonight.
Richard’s Mountain is the Vermont mountain that consistently holds the record for most open lift days with clearest access roads. And such aggressive maintenance means the mountain is always short on, and therefore, hiring staff. Always.
That bastard, Kyle! I’ll knock him into next winter!
George’s rage to get to the mountain and find Kyle, who surely took his knife and book, makes George feel he is driving through the thickest of road shadows, snagging his progress. He can’t get there fast enough.
A fear tickles at the back of George’s mind. He looks in his rearview mirror and sees headlights approaching. He thinks maybe the headlights approach too fast, but whoever is behind slows and keeps at a distance. In truth, although the roads are plowed and George thought he was gunning it, he crawls, as does whoever is behind him, at 20 m.p.h.
In looking again in his rearview mirror, a sudden recollection replays in his mind. That same day, the very day he proposed to Martha, they were driving home to Vermont. She was smiling in a cushiony happy way in the passenger’s seat of George’s civilian Volvo, as they crossed the Mid-Hudson Bridge. It was then that George, like tonight, had a creepy feeling on his neck when he looked in his rearview mirror. Tonight, as he does the same, he tells himself he is not seeing what he saw back then, again, now, tonight. Back then when he looked in the rearview on the Mid-Hudson, in broad daylight, there, in the car behind, the driver of a gray Ford four-door wore a robot head make out of a cardboard box. Two holes for eyes. Red balls, or suction cups, were glued on as buttons. And wires, maybe un-bent hangers, were antennas.