The Pricker Boy (18 page)

Finding that game system was like discovering the sticks and hammers left behind by cavemen. We actually enjoyed ourselves, even though the TV was black-and-white and we had to whack it if the picture went out. Our favorite game was called Berserk. You were dropped into a maze and had to kill a bunch of robots. The robots shuffled like the monsters in old science-fiction movies where the actors were afraid they’d trip over their rubber suits. It was easy. The real fun of that game was laughing at ourselves when one of us accidentally got shot.

Pete’s parents weren’t home. I know because he started giving the video characters profane names and shouting at them when they got zapped. He never would have done that within earshot of his mom, but between us it just made it all the more funny. And my family couldn’t have been around either. I know because of what happened next.

We were playing our bazillionth game of Berserk when Pete turned down the volume on the TV. He paused and listened, holding up his hand to quiet me when I asked him what was wrong. Then I heard it too. The whine of an engine fighting against its driver. Wheels spinning. The rise and fall of the RPMs as the gas pedal was rocked up and down.

Pete and I grabbed our coats and left through the basement door. It was one of those dry winter nights when the air slaps your cheeks as soon as you walk out. We hadn’t even bothered to put on our caps or gloves, but we weren’t
about to run back inside to grab them. Somewhere down the edge of the pond someone was trying to drive a car out onto the ice.

Pete and I ran across the frozen ground toward the car. As we got close, the car’s wheels must have caught hold of something, because the headlights bobbed and started moving across the ice. The car fishtailed out over the deeper water.

Dad had told me earlier that day that the ice was probably safe. He emphasized the word “probably” by saying it very slowly and then repeating it again in that annoying way that parents have of explaining why they’re about to tell you not to do something. It’s as if they think we’re from a foreign country and that we’re struggling with this troubling new thing called the English language. “So I think it would be better to wait for a few more days of cold weather before you go out there,” he’d said.

That afternoon Pete and I had tested my father’s theory by going down to the cove, out of sight of the house, and hacking through the ice with a hatchet. We stayed over the shallow water. We’re not
that
stupid. But we also decided that the ice was a good six inches thick, which was plenty safe, so we did some runnin’-and-slidin’ for a few hours. That’s what Pete and I always called it. Runnin’-and-slidin’, a name that avoided any unnecessary confusion.

Just in case, we’d stayed over the water that was five or so feet deep. Okay, maybe seven feet. Okay, maybe ten.

The car started heading out toward the center. Luckily for
the driver, the wheels lost traction again, and even though he gave it all the gas that he could, the car didn’t budge.

Runnin’-and-slidin’ over the shallows is one thing, but that car was maybe a hundred yards out in the darkness, and it wasn’t smart to head out that far until the ice fishermen had been out there for at least two or three days. The ice fishermen are good indicators of how thick the ice is. If they’re out drinking beer in the center of the pond while boring through the ice with a giant drill and they don’t fall in, then it’s probably safe. Even then I’d give the ice a good stomp every now and again to make sure that it didn’t crack even slightly under the blow.

“Is this safe?” I asked Pete. My ears were beginning to sting, really sting, and I knew already that when I got back to the house and finally started to warm up, I’d get an earache like you wouldn’t believe.

“Probably not,” Pete said. “Not for us, and not for him.”

I’ve never understood why ice breaking in movies sounds so lame compared to the real thing. In movies, cracking ice sounds like the crackling of dry leaves, just magnified. You hear a
crack crack crack,
and then one big
crack,
and then the water swallows a person or a car or whatever is stupid enough to be out on ice that even drunken fishermen would be afraid to walk on.

In real life, ice rumbles. It squeals in wobbling spasms that start at one end of the pond and ripple all the way across. Usually the spasms are harmless, just the ice shifting and expanding like miniature tectonic plates. But when the
ice made those sounds that night, underneath the body of a car that was spinning its wheels, that was another situation altogether.

I stopped about thirty feet from the car. “I don’t know, Pete,” I said. “I think that thing may drop at any second. It could take us down from right here when it goes.”

“Stay here,” Pete said. “I’ll go.” He started inching his way forward, all the time calling out, “Hey!”

It was Hank Paulding’s Impala. I could smell thick exhaust coming from the motor. It was a monster of a car, long and wide and a guzzler of gas. Hank always told us that he was going to fix the rust spots and paint it cream yellow and take it out to car shows.

“Hey!” Pete called out to him.

Hank stopped gunning the engine and rolled down the window. “Oh hey,” he said. “Hey, hey.”

“It’s me, Hank. Pete?”

“Oh yeah. Pete. Hey, Pete.” His voice sounded thick and sleepy. It was clear that he had found his way to the bottom of a bottle of something. “Hey, Pete, give me a hand. I gotta get out of here. She’s back. I gotta …”

“I think you’re stuck, Hank,” I heard Pete say. “How about we leave the car here and worry about it in the morning? Come on, I’ll walk with you back home.” Pete spoke to Hank as if Hank were a kitten he was trying to coax down from a tree.

Hank started wailing. “No, no, ain’t gonna go back, no way!” He started hitting the gas again. I heard ice spasms
radiating out from underneath the car. One of them passed right between my legs.

Pete looked back at me and shrugged his shoulders. I thought he was going to walk back and tell me that we should just go to his place and call the police. If Hank fell in before they got out there, at least he wouldn’t take us down too. But instead Pete walked right up to the open window.

“How about I give you a push, Hank?” Pete asked.

“Yeah!” Hank said. “We’ll get it moving. You and me, Stucks. I mean … Pete? Is that you, Pete?”

“Yeah, it’s Pete. Tell you what. You give it a little gas, and I’ll go to the back and give you a push. But gentle on the gas, Hank. Just a little bit.”

“Okay, just a little.”

I thought Pete was crazy. Even if he did get the car moving, it would only send Hank out farther, and then Hank might hit a thin patch over one of the springs that fed the pond. Pete sometimes had a sick sense of humor, but this wasn’t funny. It might even be murder or something. I ran up to Pete as he walked to the back of the Impala.

“Pete, what are you—”

“Stucks, stand here next to me. Hey, Hank? Stucks is here with me! We’re going to push you together!”

“Okay. Good, good,” Hank called back.

“Give it a little gas, Hank! Just a little!”

Hank pressed the gas pedal, but Pete didn’t touch the car at all. He waited a few seconds while the wheels fought
the ice, then told Hank to ease it off. I heard more squealing and popping from the ice.

“I don’t know, Hank,” Pete said as he walked back to the open window. “Stucks and I pushed as hard as we could, but the wheels didn’t budge. I have an idea, though.”

“Yeah?” Hank said. His eyes were glassy from the booze. Tears had streaked his face.

“Yeah,” Pete said. “How about this?” Pete’s voice was still calm, as if it were a spring afternoon and Hank was just stuck in the mud. “I think your wheels have gotten too hot. I think they’ve been spinning so much that the heat’s built up in the rubber. So now they’re hot and they’re just melting the ice and you can’t get going over wet ice, right?”

“Yeah,” Hank said. “Wet ice can grab tires on ice when it’s hot.…”

I heard a sharp
ping
in the ice followed by several crunching rumbles. Pete shifted his feet from side to side. I saw his hands shaking. It was only then that I realized just how scared he was.

“So maybe we get out and take a little walk, and we let those wheels cool down. In twenty minutes or so the wheels will be cool”—the ice wheezed and then wailed like a giant banshee—“and we’ll come back here and give it another shot. That sound good?”

“Uh, sure, Pete. That’s a good plan.”

Pete pulled open the Impala’s rusted door. He quickly reached into the car, shut off the engine, and stuck the keys in his pocket. Hank stuck one foot out, but he kept
slipping so bad that he couldn’t even get the other foot out of the car.

“Stucks, I need your help here,” Pete said desperately. I rushed over and we grabbed Hank under the arms. We pulled him from the car, and he immediately fell on his face, smacking his cheek against the ice.

“Oh, oh,” Hank moaned. “Please help. I can’t walk too good.” He was bleeding out his mouth. The guy stank. It was worse than his usual stink. Now he had hard-alcohol breath on top of it. We reached down and hoisted him back to his feet.

“Cars are a bitch, huh, Hank?” Pete said as we stepped away from the car. He was trying to sound calm so that Hank would come along with us easily, but he was straining against Hank’s weight. In my head I was pleading with the ice to hold out for another minute or two.

“Yeah, cars are no good,” Hank slurred.

We were about ten feet away when the ice under the car started shrieking. I could feel the vibrations up to my knees. It wasn’t just a single explosion this time, though. They continued in smaller, individual aftershocks as the fault lines expanded.

We started moving faster, but we had no traction, and Hank was dragging us down. I think … I think that for a second I considered dropping Hank and making a run for it. If it had been anyone else but Pete with me, I probably would have.

Thirty feet away and we heard what I can only describe
as a dragon groaning, and then the most terrifying sound yet. Water splashing.

The cracks were still traveling along under our feet. We let Hank fall to the ground and started dragging him by the shoulders of his coat, but we had waited too long. The ice under our feet split, and all three of us dropped down into the water.

It took a second for the cold of the water to hit me. When it did hit, it knocked the breath out of me as surely as a punch to the stomach would have. For a brief instant I remembered Ed Giles, our local loudmouth, telling me that “when you fall through the ice on a really cold winter day, you’re actually better off, because that water is always going to be warmer than the air.” Well, I can tell Ed Giles for a fact that when you hit the pond water in the middle of winter, the cold takes a quick breath and then starts ripping your life away. No exaggeration, Ed. I don’t know what your winters are like down there in the Florida Keys. Up here, the cold air plays fair, but the water takes the cold right to your soul.

My legs were kicking against the water and the broken ice. It had to be less than ten seconds before I stopped feeling my legs altogether. I was flailing.

“Stucks!” I heard Pete shout. “Stucks, put your feet down!”

I barely heard him through my panic, but I did as he told me to do. My foot didn’t reach the sandy bottom of the pond. But it did reach the submerged edge of Hank’s rock pile.

Pete and I clawed over the rocks to the shore, pulling Hank along with us as we went. I looked back and saw the Impala slide sideways under the ice.

We dropped Hank and collapsed onto the ground. Our breath flew out in clouds. Behind us the pond gurgled and belched as it swallowed the Impala down.

“Hey, Hank!” Pete wheezed. “Don’t forget where you parked!”

Once Pete and I got our breath, we helped Hank up and got him walking. We caught him whenever he stumbled. Our clothes stiffened as the water in them froze.

Hank’s house is built on the side of a steep hill, and long stilts level out the front. The house loomed overhead, but the windows let out a lot of light from within. At night Hank’s place always makes me think of a really bright streetlight. You don’t want to look at the light, though, because Hank often walks around naked up there.

Hank looked up at his house and fell backward to the ground. “No, no, no!” he wailed. “I can’t go up there! Don’t make me go up there!”

Pete’s voice was still soothing, gently coaxing. “But Hank, it’s your house. And we can’t go out driving anymore, because we don’t know where the Impala is. You gotta go home.”

“No, she’s up there! She won’t leave me alone!”

I felt my skin prickle, and it wasn’t from the cold. Every once in a while Hank would tell us that his house was haunted by a pale, long-haired young woman. Sometimes
he would wake up at night and she’d be standing at the foot of the bed, staring at him. Sometimes she would stand in the corner and wave her finger at him. Perhaps strangest of all, she would sit down and watch television with him. He spoke about her so matter-of-factly that we never considered that he was pulling our leg. We knew that he believed it, and that meant either that he hallucinated, which seemed beyond even Hank Paulding, or that his house really was haunted.

“I can’t go back there!” Hank shouted. “I gotta get out! Where’s my car? Stucks, can you see my car?”

“No, Hank, I can’t,” I said, and it couldn’t have been any further from a lie.

“Come on, Hank,” Pete said. “You gotta go home.”

Hank started to crawl across the ground away from his house. “No, no! She’s up there!”

Pete smiled at me. “Well, maybe it’s not so bad. When was the last time you had a date, Hank?”

I laughed, but Hank was too far gone to catch the joke. “She’s been following me all night. Right at my elbow! Her face is rotting but she keeps staring!”

“Damn, I’m cold,” Pete said to me. “My coat’s frozen stiff. Really. We need to get inside.” He pulled at the edge of his coat, and it didn’t bend. “Hey, Hank! What if I stay here with you, and Stucks goes up to your house to make sure she’s gone?”