One rainy Saturday when I was off-loading a supply truck in the warehouse, this skinny kid from Cedar Rapids hops in another truck and tromps on the gas. He always liked to lay down a strip of rubber in reverse. The sound echoing off the warehouse ceiling was pretty cool, I had to admit. He always ended his routine wascoming within inches of the wall behind him and then slamming on the brakes. Everybody liked to watch him. He was a crazy son of a bitch.
But this one day Belaski, this Polish farmer, he was walking behind the truck when the kid was backing up at sixty miles an hour. And the kid didn’t see Belaski and, no matter how loud we screamed, he didn’t hear us warning him about Belaski, either. It’s a terrible way to put it, but he just squashed Belaski against the concrete block wall like a bug. Belaski popped and oozed like a bug, too. The major on duty that weekend made me and my friend and fellow law-school partner Dick Freidman clean up with a hose after the ambulance took Belaski away. No more sense of invincibility for me. Not ever again. And I thought of Belaski now as Mary and I stood there on the skating rink. And I got sad and scared and confused the way I do sometimes because no matter how we try to explain it-through religion or randomness, it doesn’t matter-existence just doesn’t seem to make any sense.
I had a philosophy instructor at the U of I say that the only question that mattered in all of philosophy was Verlaine’s “Why are we born to suffer and die?” All else was irrelevant, my instructor said. And sometimes, without wanting to, I let myself slip into that frame of mind.
But I never stayed there long. I was afraid to.
Even if it all ultimately means nothing, you’ve got to play the game not only for yourself but for the people you love.
Like looking around at the rink now. All the generations. And mostly good people, too. Handing down the best and most sacred things from one era to another.
They made me feel good, these people, watching them tonight. They had a real dignity, the grandfather showing the five-year-old how to skate, the ten-year-old boy blushing when the girl next door took his hand, the six or seven black couples up here with their kids, joining in and being welcomed. Maybe life didn’t make sense but then it was our business, I guess, to impose meaning on it.
I said, “How about a walk?”
“Sure. Where?”
“Oh. Through the woods, I guess. There’s a full moon and plenty of light.”
“Great,” she said.
So we changed into our boots and went for a walk.
We found a winding trail through the low-hanging boughs, still heavy with snow that gleamed blue and silver in the moonlight. The noise and lights of the rink stayed with us for a time, like a memory you don’t quite want to let go of, but then we were in the darker woods, and the silence was deep and wide, broken only by the crunch of our footsteps on the snow and sticks in the path. I knew this area pretty well. My dad and I used to hunt out here. He wasn’t very good and I was worse and in all our years of trying, I don’t think we ever got anything, which was fine with me. I look at dead deer roped across car roofs and it either pisses me off or depresses me.
We came to an open field at the base of a steep, clay cliff. There was a small circular pond where kids swim in the summer.
They also push rowboats and canoes in the water and play around. The pond is too small for motor boats. It was pretty, the pond, and the snow ridged around it, all shimmery and gleaming in the moonlight. The cliffs looked rugged and red and the jack pines atop them were silhouetted perfectly against the winter clouds. Far off, you could hear dogs, and then semis on the highways and then, closer by, the faded forlorn bay of a coyote.
“God, it’s great out here,” Mary said. And then scooped up some snow and made a snowball.
“Bet you I can hit that canoe.”
“Bet you can’t.”
The canoe was a remnant of summer, like the pair of cheap cracked sunglasses you find in the glove compartment around Christmastime, or the tube of suntan lotion you find wrenched like a tube of toothpaste in the back of the medicine cabinet.
Somebody had left the canoe here and it sat in the middle of the pond looking silly and somehow pathetic in its uselessness.
But it made a great snowball target.
“Here goes,” she said.
She didn’t come close, but she came close enough to surprise me.
“Now you try, McCain.”
“I hate to show off.”
“In other words, you can’t do it either.”
God, she looked so great just then, she was the pretty girl up in the Knolls again, young and vital and sweet.
I made a snowball. “Stand back. The velocity’ll probably knock you on your butt.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And there’ll be pieces of debris flying all over when I hit the canoe.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see whose saying “uh-huh” after I hit it.”
“Uh-huh.”
I was Bob Feller of the Cleveland
Indians. I could throw a ball faster than any man alive. And more accurately, too. I was Bob Feller and I was really going to show her my stuff.
I cocked my arm back and threw.
The snowball arced high and looked as if it was going to skid away south of the canoe. But then it dipped abruptly and came down, landing very near the aft end of the target.
“Nice, McCain, but not good enough. How about giving me one more throw?”
“You already had your throw.”
“Afraid I’ll beat you?”
“Hardly.”
“Then give me one more chance.”
She was too pretty to say no to. “All right. One more.”
She made another snowball, packing it good and tight in her red mittens. “I’m going to humiliate you.”
“Sure.”
“I am.” Then, “Here goes, McCain.”
The throw was good but not great. Or that’s what I smugly told myself a few seconds after the snowball left her mitten. But when I saw the trajectory I got this funny feeling that maybe it was great after all. We watched it go up and we watched it come down. Mine had just fallen suddenly from the sky. Hers fell in a graceful downward curve. Even before it landed, she was jumping up and down and slugging me in the arm the way girls do.
From here, it was impossible to tell whose snowball had come closer to the canoe. We were talking less than an inch of difference probably, both snowballs having gone splat very close to the canoe itself.
“I won!” she said.
“Too close to call. We’ll have to go look.”
“Is it safe? The ice, I mean?”
“Probably.”
“Boy, that’s really reassuring, McCain.”
“I’ll go check.”
“Oh, McCain-”
She grabbed me and held on to me. “You sure you want to do this over some stupid snowball contest?”
Every other winter around here, somebody drowns trying to walk out on the ice. One year, two teenaged valedictorians drove their car out on the ice. I didn’t want to be this year’s dummy. “I’ll just go out a foot or so. See what it’s like.”
“Just be very careful.”
“I will.”
We walked over to the snowbound rise above the pond and then stepped ponderously down the small hill until we reached the ice.
“You really want to do this?”
“I’ll be fine.”
But talking about it sort of spooked me. What if I walked out there and dropped straight down to my icy death?
I decided to get it over with. I walked to the pond’s edge, and for some reason looked up at the full moon. And just then the coyote chose to cry again. And that spooked me a little. Maybe he knew something I didn’t. Maybe he had psychic powers, the way those ads in the magazines claim you can have for only $1.99. Or you can get a truss or a bust enhancer, just in case you’re a little skeptical of the psychic powers deal.