Like a turtle peeking out of its shell, she craned her neck and lifted her head.
Idling unevenly, the riderless machine nosed into a copse of balsam firs munched by hungry moose till they were the size of bonsai trees. She couldn’t see Bob, but he had to be close by. Her wish was that he was dead or dying, but she’d used up the standard three just getting him to answer the phone, bring back the snowmobile and let himself get knocked off of it with a stick. Dead was too much to hope for. The lever had been long enough to take his head off, but she didn’t think she’d managed that. It might have caught him in the shoulder or the chest. If it hadn’t and had only fouled the skis of the snowmobile enough to dump him, he was probably unhurt.
In which case, Anna was dead.
“Not dead. I’m rising, rising, rising,” she whispered to herself, and she pushed up with one arm till she was on hand and knees. The repetition of words swam through her brain with Ellen DeGeneres’s voice and the face of the blue fish she brought to life in Finding Nemo. Comforted by the nonsense, Anna kept on. Standing didn’t strike her as possible at the moment. Leaning back, she lifted the broken ankle and stacked it on top of the other, toes down. “Ouching, ouching, ouching!” she whispered as she settled the splinted boot across the back of the other. Feet crossed, a travois of bone and sinew, she dragged the bad foot along behind as she inched forward one knee at a time, one hand for balance. “Creeping, creeping. I’m creeping creeping, creeping.”
The changing mantra in the spirit of a gay blue fish kept her moving. The snowmobile was less than four yards from where the limb had swept her off her rock. Four yards wasn’t a great distance. One hundred forty-four inches was. When she had reached “Whining, whining, whining,” and was less than a body length from the Holy Grail of vinyl, plastic and horsepower, she saw Bob Menechinn.
He was on his side across a downed trunk a foot in diameter. Legs and butt were on the side away from Anna – a small blessing but worth counting – one arm was outstretched and his head was pillowed on it as if, as he’d lifted a foot over the log, he’d fallen asleep midstep. The down of his parka was ripped out in a puff of white that Anna first mistook for snow. The branch had caught him in the shoulder. The down was tinged with red; not as much as she would have liked but enough to indicate damage. Bob had been thrown off as she had been thrown from her rock. His body spun in the air, and he landed with his head pointed toward the Bearcat.
Anna dearly hoped this meant he suffered great injuries. Good sense and personal preference dictated she crawl over and bash in his skull with a hard object while he was safely unconscious. Unfortunately her injuries would not allow her the additional fifty feet that dictate would require.
Menechinn groaned. Or maybe it was Anna who groaned. She didn’t wait to figure it out. “Moving, moving, moving,” she whispered and dragged herself the last three feet to the idling snowmobile. The seat was no higher than her sternum when she raised herself onto her knees, but it seemed an impossible distance and for a moment she knelt before it as if in prayer, her mind in confusion. In order to travel, she’d stacked her useless limbs in a pretzel-like configuration, and the logistics of getting herself into the saddle baffled her. She began at the bottom, lifting the broken foot from the opposing ankle, then pulling her knee up. Using the seat for leverage, she managed a standing position, turned and sat on the snowmobile. Another few precious seconds were taken straddling the Bearcat, feet on the running boards, hand on the throttle. The only way to go was forward. She needed the open space on the rocky outcropping to turn around.
Gingerly she eased the throttle open. The engine revved, but the machine didn’t move. She rotated it farther back; the skis broke loose and the snowmobile lurched, nearly unseating her. Then she was on the flat and moving slowly. Bob still lay across the downed trunk, his bare head on the snow.
Maybe he was dead. The thought cheered her as she maneuvered the heavy Bearcat in an awkward circle on the cliff top. A chore that was a moment’s work to the able-bodied took Anna a painful forever.
By the time she got herself pointed back in the right direction, Bob Menechinn was standing at the head of the Greenstone.
The side of his face was a mask of blood and snow. His arms hung at his sides, the huge hands clublike. His eyes were almost lost in the flesh of his face, but the heat and hatred in them bored through the masking beef until they took up most of the space in the world. Moving with the creaking strength of rusted iron, he staggered into the middle of the trail.
Anna had neither the time nor the inclination for negotiating. She opened full throttle and, bent over the handlebars, engine and woman screaming, the snowmobile leapt forward. Banshees of flesh and metal, they shrieked toward Menechinn. The nose of the Bearcat struck him. With a crunch Anna hoped was bone, he fell. The Bearcat’s skis jerked over his leg, jolting the snowmobile. Agony smashed into Anna’s brain, and she clenched her hand on the throttle to stay upright. The Bearcat bucked free of the obstacle and stalled.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Anna muttered in language no self-respecting Disney fish would use and pawed at the key with gloved and frozen fingers. An animal roar rose from Menechinn. In the tiny rearview mirror, Anna saw the hulk of him rising. Biting the ends of the glove’s fingers, she ripped it off and turned the key. The engine came to life and she blessed Arctic Cat.
Then she was moving. The Greenstone took her. She was going to make it.
Without warning, the Bearcat slued to the left, the engine crying like a dying calf, as Bob grabbed onto the back, his weight forcing it to the left into the trees. Anna jerked the handlebars wildly, fishtailing down the steep incline, a moose – a dying moose – trying to bash the wolf from its flanks. The Bearcat sideswiped a tree. Gripping with her knees, as if riding an unbroken horse, she yanked the handlebars the other way and veered across the trail, gaining speed on the downhill run, and banged the other side into a chunk of rock. Bob let out a guttural shriek, and the snowmobile surged ahead, crazy with speed and freedom, hurtling down the narrow trail.
Vision blurred. Black trunks snapped at her face, white strobed till she couldn’t tell where movement left off and hysteria began. Her injured arm fell from where she’d zipped it in a makeshift sling in the front of her parka and the dislocated shoulder tore at the muscles. She started screaming – or kept screaming – her noise melded with that of the laboring engine.
The trail switched back on itself in a hairpin turn, and Anna cranked the handlebars as far as she could. The Bearcat raised up on two skis, the nose fighting for purchase as it was jackknifed to the right. With a slam that brought the black of the trees and the glare of the snow into the tiny pinpoint of an old television going off the air for the night, the snowmobile righted itself. Anna forced her frozen fingers to back off the throttle.
The snowmobile slowed.
Then it stopped. For a long moment, Anna sat on the cooling machine, trying to find the energy to peel her bare hand from the throttle and turn the key. With the cessation of the cries of flesh and blood and the roaring of metal and fuel explosions, the silence was eerie, ringing. Anna listened to the echo of quiet fading into the inexorable softness of falling snow. True silence whispered in where the ringing had been. She drew it into her mind and into her lungs, let it touch the ruined parts of her body. The pain didn’t lessen with the kiss of the quiet, but she ceased to mind as much.