Sixty Days and Counting

It was a familiar experience for Frank, and yet this time he was following the lithe and graceful figure of his lover or girlfriend or he didn’t know what, descending neatly before him, like a tree goddess. Some kind of happiness or joy or desire began to seep under his worry. Surely it had been a good idea to come here. He had had to do it; he couldn’t have not done it.

The trail led them into the top of a narrow couloir in the granite, a flaw from which all loose rock had been plucked. Cedar beams were set crosswise in the bottom of this ravine, forming big solid stairs, somewhat snowed over. The sidewalls were covered with lichen, moss, ice. When they came out of the bottom of the couloir, the stairboxes underfoot were replaced by a long staircase of immense rectangular granite blocks.

‘This is more like the usual trail on the east side,’ Caroline said, pointing at these monstrous field stones. ‘For a while, the thing they liked to do was make granite staircases, running up every fault line they could find. Sometimes there’ll be four or five hundred stairs in a row.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘No. Every peak on the east side has three or four trails like that running up them, sometimes right next to each other. The redundancy didn’t bother them at all.’

‘So they really were works of art.’

‘Yes. But the National Park didn’t get it, and when they took over they closed a lot of the trails and took them off the maps. But since the trails have these big staircases in them, they last whether they’re maintained or not. Mary’s dad collected old maps, and was part of a group that went around finding the old trails. Now the park is restoring some of them.’

‘I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘I don’t think there is anything like it. Even here they only did this for a few years. It was like a fad. But a fad in granite never goes away.’

Frank laughed. ‘It looks like something the Incas might have done.’

‘It does, doesn’t it?’ She stopped and looked back up the snowy stone steps, splotchy here with pale green lichen.

‘I can see why you would want to stay here,’ Frank said cautiously when they started again.

‘Yes. I love it.’

‘But …’

‘I think I’m okay,’ she said.

For a while they went back and forth on this, saying much the same things they had said at the house. Whether Ed would look at her subjects, whether he would be able to find Mary …

Finally Frank shrugged. ‘You don’t want to leave here.’

‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘I like it here. And I feel hidden.’

‘But now you know better. Someone looked for you and they found you. That’s got to be the main thing.’

‘I guess,’ she muttered.

They came to the road they had parked beside. They walked back to his van and she had him drive south, down the shore of Jordan Pond.

‘Some of my first memories are from here,’ she said, looking out the window at the lake. ‘We came almost every summer. I always loved it. That lasted for several years, I’d guess, but then her parents got divorced and I stopped seeing her, and so I stopped coming.’

‘Ah.’

‘So, we did start college together and roomed that first year, but to tell the truth, I hadn’t thought of her for years. But when I was thinking about how to really get away, if I ever wanted to, I remembered it. I never talked to Ed about Mary, and I just made the one call to her here from a pay phone.’

‘What did you say to her?’

‘I gave her the gist of the situation. She was willing to let me stay.’

‘That’s good. Unless, you know … I just don’t know. I mean, you tell me just how dangerous these guys are. Some shots were fired that night in the park, after you left. My friends were the ones who started it, but your ex and his friends definitely shot back. And so, given that …’

Now she looked appalled. ‘I didn’t know.’

‘Yeah. I also … I threw a rock at your ex,’ he added lamely.

‘You what?’

‘I threw my hand axe at him. I saw a look on his face I didn’t like, and I just did it.’

She squeezed his hand. Her face had the grim inward expression it took on whenever she was thinking about her ex. ‘I know that look,’ she muttered. ‘I hate it too.’ And then: ‘I’m sorry I’ve gotten you into this.’

‘No. Anyway, I missed him. Luckily. But he saw the rock go by his head, or felt it. He took off running down the Metro stairs. So he definitely knows something is up.’ Frank didn’t mention going by their apartment afterward and ringing the doorbell; he was already embarrassed enough about the hand axe. ‘So, what I’m still worried about is if he starts looking, and, you know, happens to replicate what my friend’s friend did.’

‘I know.’ She sighed. ‘I guess I’m hoping that he’s not all that intent on me anymore. I have him chipped, and he’s always in D.C., at the office, moving from room to room. I’ve got him covered in a number of ways – a spot cam on our apartment entry, and things like that, and he seems to be following his ordinary routine.’

‘Even so – he could be doing that while sending some of his team here to check things out.’

She thought about it. Sighed a big sigh. ‘I hate to leave here when there might not be a reason to.’

Frank said nothing; his presence was itself proof of a reason. Thus his appearance had indeed been a bad thing. The transitive law definitely applied to emotions.

She had directed him through some turns, and now they were driving around the head of Somes Sound again, back toward her place. As he slowed through Somesville, he said, ‘Where should we put my van?’

She ran her hands through her short curls, thinking it over. ‘Let’s put it down where my car is. I’m parked at the south end of Long Pond, at the pump house there. First drop me off at the house, then drive down there, and I’ll sail down on the iceboat and pick you up.’

So he turned at the firehouse, drove to her camp and dropped her off at the house, feeling nervous as he did so. Then he followed her instructions, back toward Southwest Harbor, then west through the forest again, on a winding small road. He only had a rough sense of where he was, but then he was driving down an incline, and the smooth white surface of Long Pond appeared through the trees. The southern end of its long arm was walled on both sides by steep granite slopes, six or seven hundred feet high: a pure glacial U, floored by a lake.

He parked in the little parking lot by the pump house and got out. The wind from the north slammed him in the face. Far up the lake he saw a tiny sail appear as if out of the rock wall to the left. It looked like a big windsurfing sail. Faster than he would have thought possible it grew larger, and the iceboat swept up to the shore, Caroline at the tiller, turning it in a neat curlicue at the end, to lose speed and drift backwards to shore.

‘Amazing,’ Frank said.

‘Here, wait – park your van up in those trees, just past the stop sign up there.’

Frank did so and then returned to the craft, stepped in and stowed his daypack before the mast. The iceboat was a wooden triangular thing, obviously handmade, more like a big soap box derby car than a boat. Three heavy struts extended from the cockpit box, one ahead and two sideways and back from the cockpit. It was an odd-looking thing, but the mast and sails seemed to have been scavenged from an ordinary sloop, and Caroline was obviously familiar with it. Her face was flushed with the wind, and she looked pleased in a way Frank had never seen before. She pulled the sail taut and twisted the tiller, which set the angles of the big metal skates out at the ends of the rear struts, and with a clatter they gained speed and were off in a chorus of scraping.

The iceboat did not heel in the wind, but when gusts struck it merely squeaked and slid along even faster, the skates making a loud clattery hiss. When a really strong gust hit, the craft rocketed forward with a palpable jolt. Frank’s eyes watered heavily under the assault of the wind. He ducked when Caroline told him to, their heads together as the boom swung over them as part of a big curving tack. To get up the narrow lake against the wind they would have to tack a lot; the craft did not appear able to hold too close to the wind.

As they worked their way north, Caroline explained that Mary’s grandfather had built the iceboat out of wood left over from when he had built the garage. ‘He built everything there, even some of the furniture. He dug out the cellar, built the chimney, the terraces, the dock and rowboats …’ Mary’s father had told them about this; Caroline had met the grandfather only once, when she was very young.

‘This last month I’ve been feeling like he’s still around the place, like a ghost, but in the best kind of way. The first night I got here the electricity wasn’t on and there was no sound at all. I never realized how used to noise we’ve gotten. That there’s always some kind of sound, even if it’s only the refrigerator.’

‘Usually it’s a lot more than that,’ Frank said, thinking of how D.C. sounded from his treehouse.

‘Yes. But this time it was completely quiet. I began to hear myself breathing. I could even hear my heart beat. And then there was a loon on the lake. It was so beautiful. And I thought of Mary’s grandfather building everything, and it seemed like he was there. Not a voice, just part of the house somehow. It was comforting.’

‘Good for him,’ Frank said. He liked the sound of such a moment, also the fact that she had noticed it. It occurred to him again how little he knew her. She was watching the ice ahead of the boat, holding the boom line and the tiller in place, making small adjustments, splayed in the cockpit as if holding a kind of dance position with the wind. And there they were barreling across the frozen surface of the lake, the ice blazing in a low tarnished sun that was smeared out in long bars of translucid cloud – the wind frigid, and flying through him as if the gusts were stabs of feeling for her – for the way she was capable, the way she liked it out here. He had thought she would be like this, but they had spent so little time together he could not be sure. But now he was seeing it. His Caroline, real in the sunlight and the wind. A gust of wind was a surge of feeling.

She brought the iceboat around again, east to west, and continued the smooth curve west, as they were now shooting into the channel that began the other arm of the lake’s Y. Here the north wind was somewhat blocked by the peninsula separating the two arms of the lake, and the ice boat slid along with less speed and noise. Then another curve, and they were headed into the wind again, on the short arm of the Y, running up to a little island she called Rum Island, which turned out to be just a round bump of snow and trees in the middle of a narrow part of the lake.

As they were about to pass Rum Island, something beeped in Caroline’s jacket pocket. ‘Shit!’ she said, and snatched out a small device, like a handheld GPS or a cell phone. She steered with a knee while she held it up to her face to see it in the sunlight. She cursed again. ‘Someone’s at camp.’

She swerved, keeping Rum Island between the boat and Mary’s place. As they approached the island she turned into the wind and let loose the sail, so that they skidded into a tiny cove and onto a gravel beach no bigger than the ice boat itself. They stepped over the side onto icy gravel, and tied the boat to a tree, then made their way to the island’s other side. The trees on the island hooted and creaked like the Sierras in a storm, a million pine needles whooshing their great chorale. It was strange to see the lake surface perfectly still and white under the slaps of such a hard blow.

Across that white expanse, the green house and its little white boathouse were the size of postage stamps. Caroline had binoculars in the boat, however, and through them the house’s lake side was quite distinct; and through its big windows there was movement.

‘Someone inside.’

‘Yes.’

They crouched behind a big schist erratic. Caroline took the binoculars back from him and balanced them on the rock, then bent over and looked through them for a long time. ‘It looks like Andy and George,’ she said in a low voice, as if they might overhear. ‘Uh oh – get down,’ and she pulled him down behind the boulder. ‘There’s a couple more up by the house, with some kind of scope. Can those IR glasses you use for the animals see heat this far away?’

‘Yes,’ Frank said. He had often used IR when tracking the ferals in Rock Creek. He took the binoculars back from her and looked around the side of the boulder near the ground, with only one lens exposed.

There they were – looking out toward the island – then hustling down the garden path and onto the ice itself, their long dark overcoats flapping in the wind. ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘they’re coming over here to check! They must have seen our heat.’

‘Damn it,’ she said. ‘Let’s go, then.’

They ran back over the little island to the beach. A hard kick from Caroline to the hull of the ice boat and it was off the gravel and ready to sail. Push it around, get in and take off, waiting helplessly for the craft to gain speed, which it did with an icy scratching that grew louder as they slid out from the island’s wind shadow and skidded south.

‘You saw four of them?’ Frank asked.

‘Yes.’

Skating downwind did not feel as fast as crossing it had, but then they passed the end of the peninsula between the two arms of the lake, and Caroline steered the craft in another broad curve, and as she did it picked up speed until it shot across the ice, into the gap leading to the longer stretch of the lake. Looking back, Frank saw the men crossing the lake. They saw him; one of them took a phone from his jacket pocket and held it to his ear. Back at the house, tiny now, he saw the two others running around the back of the house.

Then the point of the peninsula blocked the view.

‘The ones still at the house went for the driveway,’ he said. ‘They’re going to drive around the lake, I bet. Do you think they can get to the southern end of the lake before we do?’

‘Depends on the wind,’ Caroline said. ‘Also, they might stop at Pond’s End, for a second at least, to take a look and see if we’re coming up to that end.’

‘But it wouldn’t make sense for us to do that.’

‘Unless we had parked there. But they’ll only stop a second, because they’ll be able to see us. You can see all the way down the lake. So they’ll see which way we’re going.’

‘And then?’

‘I think we can beat them. They’ll have to circle around on the roads. If the wind holds, I’m sure we can beat them.’

The craft emerged from the channel onto the long stretch of the lake, where the wind was even stronger. Looking through the binoculars as best he could given the chatter, Frank saw a dark van stop at the far end of the pond, then, after a few moments’ pause, drive on.

He had made the same drive himself a couple of hours before, and it seemed to him it had taken about fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, to get to the south end of the pond by way of the small roads through the woods. But he hadn’t been hurrying. At full speed it might take only half that.

But now the iceboat had the full force of the north wind behind it, funneling down the steep granite walls to both sides – and the gusts felt stronger than ever, even though they were running straight downwind. The boat only touched the ice along the edges of the metal runners, screeching their banshee trio. Caroline’s attention was fixed on the sail, her body hunched at the tiller and line, feeling the wind like a telegraph operator. Frank didn’t disturb her, but only sat on the gunwale opposite to the sail, as she had told him to do. The stretch of the lake they had to sail looked a couple of miles long. In a sailboat they would have been in trouble. On the ice, however, they zipped along as if in a catamaran’s dream, almost frictionless despite the loud noise of what friction was left. Frank guessed they were going about twenty miles an hour, maybe twenty-five, maybe thirty; it was hard to tell. Fast enough: down a granite wind tunnel, perfectly shaped to their need for speed. The dwarf trees on the steep granite slopes to each side bounced and whistled, the sun was almost blocked by the western cliff, blazing in the pale streaked sky, whitening the cloud to each side of it. Caroline spared a moment to give Frank a look, and it seemed she was going to speak, then shook her head and simply gestured at the surrounding scene, mouth tight. Frustrated. It was magnificent; but they were on the run.

‘I guess them showing up so soon suggests I tipped them off somehow,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ She was looking at the sail.

‘I’m sorry. I thought I needed to warn you.’

Her mouth stayed tight. She said nothing.

The minutes dragged, but Frank’s watch showed that only eight had passed when they came to the south end of the lake. There were a couple of big houses tucked back in the forest to the left. Caroline pulled the tiller and boom line and brought them into the beach next to the pump house, executing a bravura late turn that hooked so hard Frank was afraid the iceboat might be knocked on its side. Certainly a windsurfer or catamaran would have gone down like a bowling pin. But there was nothing for the iceboat to do but groan and scrape and spin, into the wind and past it, then screeching back, then stopping, then drifting back onto the beach.

‘Hurry,’ Caroline said, and jumped out and ran up to Frank’s van.

Frank followed. ‘What about the boat?’

She grimaced. ‘We have to leave it!’ Then, when they were in his van: ‘I’ll call Mary when I can get a clean line and tell her where it is. I’d hate for Harold’s boat to be lost because of this shit.’ Her voice was suddenly vicious.

Then she was all business, giving Frank directions; they got out to a paved road and turned right, and Frank accelerated as fast as he dared on the still frozen road, which was often in shadow, and seemed a good candidate for black ice. When they came to a T-stop she had him turn right. ‘My car’s right there, the black Honda. I’m going to take off.’

‘Where?’

‘I’ve got a place. I’ve got to hurry, I don’t want them to see me at the bridge. You should head directly for the bridge and get off the island. Go back home.’

‘Okay,’ Frank said. He could feel himself entering one of his indecision fugues, and was grateful she had such a strong sense of what they should do. ‘Look, I’m sorry about this. I thought I had to warn you.’

‘I know. It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault. It was good of you to try to help. I know why you did it.’ And she leaned over and gave him a quick peck of a kiss before she got out.

‘I was pretty sure my van is clean,’ Frank said. ‘And my stuff too. We checked all of it out.’

‘They may have you under other kinds of surveillance. Satellite cameras, or people just tailing you.’

‘Satellite cameras? Is that possible?’

‘Of course.’ Annoyed that he could be so ignorant.

Frank shrugged, thinking it over. He would have to ask Edgardo. Right now he was glad she was giving him directions.

She came around the van and leaned in on his side. Frank could see she was angry.

‘You’ll be able to come back here someday,’ he said.

‘I hope so.’

‘You know,’ he said, ‘instead of holing up somewhere, you could stay with people who would keep you hidden, and cover for you.’

‘Like Anne Frank?’

Startled, Frank said, ‘Well, I guess so.’

She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t stand it. And I wouldn’t want to put anyone else to the trouble.’

‘Well, but what about me? I’m staying with the Khembalis in almost that way already. They’re very helpful, and their place is packed with people.’

Again she shook her head. ‘I’ve got a Plan C, and it’s down in that area. Once I get into that I can contact you again.’

‘If we can figure out a clean system.’

‘Yes. I’ll work on that. We can always set up a dead drop.’

‘My friends from the park live all over the city –’

‘I’ve got a plan!’ she said sharply.

‘Okay.’ He shook his head, swallowed; tasted blood at the back of his throat.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Nothing,’ he said automatically.

‘Something,’ she said, and reached in to touch the side of his head. ‘Tell me what you just thought. Tell me quick, I’ve got to go, but I didn’t like that look!’

He told her about it as briefly as he could. Taste of blood. Inability to make decisions. Maybe it was sounding like he was making excuses for coming up to warn her. She was frowning. When he was done, she shook her head.

‘Frank? Go see a doctor.’

‘I know.’

‘Don’t say that! I want you to promise me. Make the appointment, and then go see the doctor.’

‘Okay. I will.’

‘All right, now I’ve got to go. I think they’ve got you chipped. Be careful and go right back home. I’ll be in touch.’

‘How?’

She grimaced. ‘Just go!’

A phrase which haunted him as he made the long drive south. Back to home; back to work; back to Diane. Just go!

He could not seem to come to grips with what had happened. The island was dreamlike in the way it was so vivid and surreal, but detached from any obvious meaning. Heavily symbolic of something that could nevertheless not be decoded. They had hugged so hard, and yet had never really kissed; they had climbed together up a rock wall, they had ice-boated on a wild wind, and yet in the end she had been angry, perhaps with him, and holding back from saying things, it had seemed. He wasn’t sure.

Mile after mile winged by, minute after minute; on and on they went, by the tens, then the hundreds. And as night fell, and his world reduced to a pattern of white and red lights, both moving and still, with glowing green signs and their white lettering providing name after name, his feel for his location on the globe became entirely theoretical to him, and everything grew stranger and stranger. Some kind of fugue state, the same thoughts over and over. Obsession without compulsion. Headlights in the rear-view mirror; who could tell if they were from the same vehicle or not?

It became hard to believe there was anything outside the lit strip of the highway. Once Kenzo had shown him a USGS map of the United States that had displayed the human population as raised areas, and on that map the 95 corridor had been like an immense Himalaya from Atlanta to Boston, rising from both directions to the Everest that was New York. And yet driving right down the spine of this great density of his species he could see nothing but the walls of trees lining both sides of the endless slot. He might as well have been driving south though Siberia, or over the face of some empty forest planet, tracking some great circle route that was only going to bring him back where he had started. The forest hid so much.

Despite the re-established Gulf Stream, the jet stream still snaked up and down the Northern Hemisphere under its own pressures, and now a strong cold front rode it south from Hudson Bay and arrived just in time to strike the inauguration. When the day dawned, temperatures in the capital region hovered around zero degrees Fahrenheit, with clear sunny skies and a north wind averaging fifteen miles an hour. Everyone out of doors had to bundle up, so it was a slow process at all the security checkpoints. The audience settled onto the cold aluminum risers set on the east side of the Capitol, and Phil Chase and his entourage stepped onto the dais, tucked discreetly behind its walls of protective glass. The cold air and Phil’s happy, relaxed demeanor reminded Charlie of the Kennedy inauguration, and images of JFK and Earl Warren and Robert Frost filled his mind as he felt Joe kicking him in the back. He had only been a few years older than Joe when he had seen that one on TV. Thus the generations span the years, and now his boy was huddled against him, heavy as a rock, dragging him down but keeping him warm. ‘Dad, let’s go to the zoo! Wanna go to the zoo!’