North Wind

Chapter Two

The lake wasn’t frozen like I thought it would be. There was some ice along the shore, maybe a foot or two out but it couldn’t have been more than an inch thick. The wind was what I immediately noticed standing there on the frozen sand. It was easily twenty miles an hour and maybe thirty-five or forty in gusts straight out of the northwest. Waves off the lake broke on top of the ice breaking it into smaller and smaller pieces leading me to believe that the wind hadn’t been blowing like this for all that long.
“What are you staring at?” Tina said. She was standing next to me, hands in pockets, and face buried in a scarf which was in turn buried in the hood of her parka. “And why the hell are you just standin there in a windbreaker? Aren’t you cold?”
“The bubbles.”
“The bubbles? What bubbles?”
“The bubbles under the ice. As soon as the ice gets broken up the bubbles escape from under the ice.”
“Okay….”
“Just an observation.”
“We gonna go inside?” she said pointing over her shoulder with her thumb.
“You go ahead. I get some of this wood inside for the fireplace. See if you can find some newspapers or something we can start a fire with.”
“Sure, but you need to hurry up out here. Even you can’t deal with this kinda cold for all that long.”
“I hear ya.” I went to the pickup and go my axe and started splitting up as much of the firewood as I could. It musta been sitting in the rack for years, about half of it was well on the way to rotten. It took me about an hour and a half to split what would burn. I stacked it on the deck next to the back door and went inside. Tina had a small fire going in the fireplace, and straightened the wood I dropped on the hearth.
“I was about to come and get you. D’you split wood the entire time you were out there?”
“Mostly. There was a bunch of rotten stuff out there. I separated the good from the bad and split up what I could.”
“Is there enough to get us through the night?”
“There’s probably enough to get us through the rest of the week if we bundle up at night.”
“For real?”
“Yea.” I took off my jacket and realized my shirt was soaked with sweat when the cold air hit it. “D’you bring in the clothes?”
“They’re right over there,” she said pointing at the couch.
I pulled my shirt off over my head without unbuttoning it and dug around in my duffel bag until I found another. Tina sat in what looked like a dining room chair right next to the fire.
“You gonna take off that coat any time soon?”
“Not until it warms up in here.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“Jack, you’re a nice guy, but you are a freak if you can stand in the middle of this room with only a flannel shirt on. I’m cold just lookin at ya.”
I looked at her and smiled. “Could you give me a hand?”
“With what?”
“I need to find us a mattress and some covers so we can sleep here in front of the fire.”
“That is the best idea you’ve had all day. Do you suppose the folks who built this monster left us some stuff behind?”
“Only one way to find out. All the furniture seems to still be here anyway. Depends on how much of a hurry they were in when they left.”
“Of if they even left from here. I’d be willing to bet that this isn’t where they really lived. People who are this comfortable only visit houses like this, they don’t live in em.”
I had to stare at her for a minute. A minute that became two.”
“What?”
“Lifestyles of the rich and famous?”
“My family was… comfortable too, I guess.”
“Surely they went south.”
“Actually they went to Australia.”
“Australia?”
“Australia. I told them there was no way in the world I was going to Australia and that I’d rather freeze to death in Dallas than go there.”
“So they left you here?”
“They left me my ticket. They told me I’d be right behind em after I’d been a couple days on my own.”
“Obviously you never did.”
“I meant what I said. I would much rather freeze here than go there.”
“So remind me what you were doing out on forty-five again….”
“I was coming here to see you.”
“You were coming here to see me?”
“Well, I met up with you. Isn’t that enough?”
“You were heading to Bush weren’t you?”
“No.”
“You were. You were gonna hop a plane out of Bush for Australia. What happened, did they shut down DFW?”
She sat there for a minute looking into the fire and said, “Okay, I was gonna try… I didn’t even get to the damn airport.”
“What’s the bible verse?”
“Bible verse?”
“It says something like there’s no way to figure out why he does what he does, but it’s always for the best.”
“How can you believe that?”
“I have to. I don’t have any choice.”
Tina got up on her tiptoes and kissed me on the cheek as she walked past me and up the stairs. I followed her. There were five bedrooms suites upstairs. Each had a huge bathroom and a closet that had to be twelve by twenty feet square.”
“It’s too bad the water doesn’t work any more,” Tina said staring at the shower.
“It works.”
“Not the hot water.”
“True enough. They really musta insulated this house. I can’t believe the pipes didn’t burst long ago.”
“Lucky us.”
We pulled a mattress, sheets and some comforters downstairs and set up in front of the fire place. There was food in the pantry to last for longer than we’d be staying and the elk quarters in the back of the truck. We were set. Tina worked without saying a word and I figured I knew what was going on in her head. This was the sort of place where she’d lived and socialized, where her family had been.
“You ready to turn in?” I had to say something to break the silence.
“I guess. I can’t get used to how early it gets dark this time of year.”
She was right, it couldn’t be much past five.
“We’ll go find some candles tomorrow. I’m sure there’s some here somewhere. When she made a face I asked,
“Ever thought about continuing your work?”
“What?”
“We could find you or build the instrumentation you need and you could collect data. We could also set up some sort of short wave radio station to get in contact with people down south. Surely there must be universities down there or somewhere that would give there eyeteeth for a contact here in the new great white north. She looked over her shoulder. There was interest on her face.
“You’re kidding.”
I shook my head. “Why not?”
“E…lec…tricity, is why not.”
“Gen..er…ators,” was my answer. I looked right at her, challenging her to challenge me back. She needed something to focus on something that she hadn’t lost. I knew at that moment that I didn’t have the strength then to keep on and carry her along as well.”
“Might be interesting to see what’s going on out there. You really think we could find the stuff I need? Wouldn’t that mean that we’d have to find someplace and stay there permanently?”
“We’d have to find some sorta base for your operations. Someplace that we could set up the infrastructure to allow you to collect and use the tools you need. You’d have to decide where might be a good place.”
“You’d do that for me?”
“It’s something you’d want to do?”
“I was beginning to wonder what I possibly could do any more.”
“You were beginning to wonder how you could go south, because you’d decided for a second time in a month that there wasn’t any real reason to be here, freezin your ass off.”
It was her turn to stare at me. I couldn’t let the silence go on as long as she had so I said, “It was obvious even to me that being in this house is difficult for you.”
Her head fell to her chest and I could see a tear fall from her face to the floor. I took her hand and lead her over to the bed. The tears continued to run down her face as I undressed her down to her underwear, laid her down on the mattress and covered her under all three of the comforters she’d found.
“Aren’t you coming to bed?” she said in a small voice.
“Nah, I don’t sleep all that much. If we’re gonna move outta here tomorrow I’ll have to figure out where to go.”
“We need to go up to A&M.”
“Why?”
“It’s centrally located, we can find the equipment I need and it’s about as far north as I care to live. We’ll also have to make a run back to NT so I can get my gear and computers. You said we’d have power right?”
“I think we can find generators and gas.”
“You think or you know?”
“Nothin much is for sure anymore, but I’ll do the best I can.”
She was up on an elbow now. The tears had made two wet streaks down her face. “You’re gonna hafta build me something to live in where I can be warm.
“I can do that.”
She rolled back under the covers and said, “We’ll start tomorrow.”
I’d really only meant to see what she thought about the idea; maybe talk it over for a few weeks. But, as I sat looking at the fire I soon realized that there was no time like the present. Especially since the present was the whole game these days.