Joe admired the big fish, oohing and aahing. “Since I walked out all this way…” he started to say.
“You want to check our licenses,” Hans finished for him. All four men started unzipping and unsnapping their coats, digging through layers to find their wallets.
“Do you know anything about that light under the ice over there?” Hans’s son asked as he handed his license to Joe.
“What light?”
Hans pointed across the lake. “We noticed it this morning when we came out,” he said. “It was still dark, and it looked like it was lit up under the ice. It was kind of creepy.”
Joe looked where Hans was pointing, and he could see it. On the far shore, beneath the black wooded bluff of the shoreline, was a faint yellow glow.
“Are you sure it’s not a reflection from somewhere?” Joe asked.
“Where?” Hans asked back.
Joe squinted. “How could there be a light under the ice?”
“That’s what we were wondering,” Jack said. “We were going to walk over there and check it out, but the fish started hitting and, well, you know.”
Joe nodded, handing back all of the licenses, but he continued to look across the lake. As it got darker, the glow became more pronounced.
Hans’s son said, “Jesus, it’s getting cold all of a sudden.”
“We’d best head back,” Jack said, reaching down to clear a skin of ice from the top of his fishing hole so he could reel in.
“Let me know what you find over there,” Hans said to Joe. “I’d go with you, but my feet are starting to freeze.”
“That’s because you have old feet,” Hans’s son said, cracking open a beer.
“Not so old I can’t kick your ass with one of ’em,” Hans said.
Jack hooted.
Joe smiled and left.
He shuffled across the lake as the sun set. Hard white stars flickered in the sky, followed by a thin slice of moon that seemed too cold to bloom full. Joe felt icy fingers of cold probing into his collar and up his sleeves. He knew his feet would freeze, even in his thick Sorel Pac boots, the moment he stopped walking.
There was no doubt that there was light under the surface of the lake. It now illuminated the very ice he was walking on, so his feet looked like black silhouettes. It reminded him of being on a hip dance floor once when he was in college. He remembered dancing very badly on it. Another crack on the lake brought a moan that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. The moan echoed softly back and forth across the lake.
He stopped and stared. Something was sticking up through the surface of ice in the middle of the glow; something thin, spindly, and black. His first thought was that it was a tree branch.
The surface of the ice changed as he walked. There was a rim of broken ice plates, then a slick surface. Ice told stories, Joe knew. Whatever happened could be seen and felt by examining the ice. Something had crashed through here, and the water had recently frozen back over it.
It was a frozen human hand, reaching up through the ice, not a branch. As he stood above it, he could see the body below, and the source of the glow beneath the surface: headlights. He felt his heart race as he stared, and a line of sweat broke out across his forehead, beneath his wool cap. He could see her face beneath the ice, despite the bolts of thick black hair that slowly whorled around it in the current. Her eyes were open, looking upward, her mouth set in a pout. She wore dark clothing. There was a light band of flesh between the top of her black jeans and the bottom of her coat. Her name was Jessica Lynn Antelope, and she had been a basketball star.
The story the ice told him was this:
The night before, the pickup truck that was now on the bottom of the lake had gone off the old two-track road that rimmed the bluff. It must have been going fast, he thought, to have launched this far into the lake. The truck had crashed through the ice and settled on the deep floor of the lake, with its rear end down first so the headlights pointed up. The engine was obviously killed in the water, but the battery held enough of a charge to power the lights a day later.
Jessica Lynn Antelope had been in the pickup, either as the driver or a passenger. She had attempted to swim to the surface toward the hole the truck had made. Whether she’d drowned before she froze to death would be a toss-up. Joe wondered if she realized, before she died, that her grasping hand had broken through the rapidly forming new skin of ice into the twenty-below air. As the water froze, it had trapped her arm and held it fast in its grip. Now her body swayed slowly in the current, her hair sweeping across her face in a fan dance.
He said, “Jesus,” and dug in his parka for his cell phone to call the sheriff.
Joe waited in his pickup on the shore of the lake — engine running, heater blowing full blast — for Sheriff McLanahan and the tow truck to arrive. His toes in his boots burned as they thawed out. He was still annoyed at the tone of the conversation he had had with McLanahan.
“You found her, huh?” McLanahan had said with a heavy sigh.
“I think it’s her,” Joe had said, remembering Jessica from seeing her on the basketball court. She had gained weight since those days, her face was round, like a hubcap.
“Her mother called a few hours ago, said she hadn’t shown up this morning. We always give missing person calls a few days if they come from the res, since those people vanish for days on end most of the time.”
“‘Those people’?” Joe repeated.
“You know what I’m talking about,” McLanahan said. “They operate on Indian time. If they say they’ll be someplace at nine, there’s no reason to worry until one or two. Same thing with the missing person calls. They always show up somewhere eventually, usually hungover.”
“This is Jessica Antelope we’re talking about,” Joe said.
“I know, I know. But she hasn’t played in five years. You know about her.”
Joe did. He had heard. And he had seen her a few times since. But he chose to remember her from the basketball court, when he and his daughter Sheridan would drive to the reservation simply to watch her play. Sheridan had idolized Jessica Antelope, studied her, tried to emulate her on the court. But despite Sheridan’s grit and determination, she could not run as fast, pass as cleanly, or score forty points a game. Jessica had a blinding crossover dribble that compared legitimately to those of the great NBA point guards as she brought the ball down the court, and she left opponents flailing at air in her wake, and fans gasping. Joe had never seen a girl play basketball with so much natural grace and style, and neither had anyone else. Sheridan still had photos of Jessica Antelope, clipped from the Saddlestring Roundup, taped to her wall. Jessica had led the Wyoming Indian Lady Warriors, made up of only seven Northern Arapaho girls, to the state championship game, where they lost, 77–75, to Cheyenne, a much larger school. Jessica scored fifty-two points in the loss.
But the scouts didn’t care about the loss. Jessica Antelope had been offered full-ride scholarships to over twenty universities, including Duke and Tennessee, the national powers. Instead, Jessica stayed on the reservation to take care of an ailing grandmother, she claimed. Then she gained weight, a lot of it. She drank beer and liquor with her friends. She took crystal meth, the scourge of the reservation, and was arrested for dealing it. Joe had seen her several times in the elk camps of out-of-state hunters, where she’d been hired as a camp cook. Joe suspected she was chosen for other services as well, and it pained him. Those hunters had no idea that the chubby twenty-two-year-old Northern Arapaho scrambling their eggs was once the greatest basketball player in the state of Wyoming.