“Meet you at the cabin,” Johnson said. “Hot dog. This is gonna be fun. I’ll bring my.45.”
“Johnson...”
“Fuck you, I’m bringing it. I got a concealed carry permit now.”
“That’s... really good,” Virgil said.
“I thought so,” Johnson said. “Gives me a certain status.”
—
They rendezvoused at the cabin, Johnson trailering in two Polaris snowmobiles. Virgil, now dressed in his camo deer-hunting suit with ski gloves and a hood, let Johnson unload them. Johnson handed him a helmet, said, “All gassed and ready to go. Follow me out, but try not to run over my ass.”
“I’ll do that,” Virgil said. His suit’s hood wouldn’t fit over the helmet, so he pulled the helmet on and yanked the drawstrings of the hood tight around his neck, making a seal around the bottom of the helmet. As he settled onto the sled, which was already turning over, he hooked the kill switch cord to his suit belt. Johnson lurched down the bank and onto the frozen river, made a wide left turn, and leaned on the throttle.
Virgil followed, and they settled into a steady sixty miles anhour over the relatively smooth, snow-covered ice. The sky was a brilliant pale blue to the east, over Wisconsin, with a sullen gray cloud bank moving in over the bluffs above Trippton, to the west. A good day to ride, but maybe not a good night.
A mile north, they turned out onto the main river, where the ride got rougher, with windrows of snow like soft speed bumps running perpendicular to their tracks. Virgil opened up the machine a bit more, pulled even with Johnson, a hundred feet to one side, as they headed toward a cluster of ice shacks three or four miles downriver.
Though the day was still bitterly cold, he was comfortable enough with the heated handles and the windproof suit; the ride was exhilarating, and he could have done a few more miles, almost regretting it when Johnson swung into a circle that would slow them into the first fishing village.
And itwasa village, maybe like something that would have been built on the frontier a hundred and fifty years earlier. There were several shacks that were built as mock upscale houses, with porticos and pillars; a few like tiny barns, a couple with quarter moons like outhouses; one painted to resemble a brick house, another a bar, and a dozen that were unpainted plywood boxes. There were several tents. There was also an ordinary travel trailer with a couple of tubes extending down from its floor to surround the ice holes beneath; it had a TV antenna on the roof. As they came in, two snowmobiles headed downriver, away from them, and they could see a third one coming out from the direction of the Trippton marina.
Johnson steered them to a shack built to look like a log cabin, with smoke coming out of a narrow tin smokestack, and dismounted and killed the engine. Virgil got off his snowmobile,and Johnson said, “We get out of here early enough, we ought to make a run up the river. For the ride.”
“Good with me,” Virgil said.
As they walked toward the shack, Virgil noticed a small person—couldn’t tell if it was a man or woman—walking toward a semitransparent plastic tent. The person glanced at them once, and again, and again, and disappeared inside the tent, though Virgil could see the body shape moving around behind the plastic sheeting.
Johnson said, “Hey.”
Virgil turned back and found he’d left Johnson behind at the door of the log cabin. “Sorry. Got distracted,” he said, as he crunched back across the ice. “Who’s this?”
“Rick Thomas,” Johnson said, as he led the way to the cabin door. “He’s the mayor of the ice town, and he’s usually around. He sleeps out here, half the time.”
He pounded on the door, and a man shouted, “Who’s there?”
“Johnson Johnson,” Johnson shouted back.
“Go away. I’m getting laid.”
“With whose dick?” Johnson shouted. “Yours ain’t worked since the Carter administration.”
The door popped open, and a man, who looked like a skeletal Santa Claus, peered out at them and asked Virgil, “What’s that on your face?”
“A squid,” Virgil said.
“Huh. Some kind of religious thing, then?”
—
The cabin was snug, warm, and comfortable, with four holes in the floor and four chairs facing one another, two by two, either side of the holes. A single bunk bed, an easy chair, a shelfof books and magazines, and an electric stove and heater made up the rest of the place. A rack of storage batteries occupied the back wall, fed by a diesel generator that sat outside. The place smelled of fish, both raw and cooked.
“I hope you got that generator isolated or you’re gonna gas yourself to death out here, Rick,” Johnson said.
“I’m all caulked and sealed. I worry about it since what happened to Jerry,” Thomas said. “I got a new CO detector on the wall, too.”
Johnson said to Virgil, “Jerry got all fucked up on fumes. Damn near died. He has one of the better spots out here, too. If he’d croaked, there would have been a hell of a fight over his spot.”
