Three or four inches of snow had accumulated in the trailer bed, drifting against the two-foot-high walls. Harry brushed it out with his hands.
The wind gusted behind them, wailing like Apaches in a Western movie, rushed under the trailer and made it bounce lightly up and down on the ice.
“I still think you should drive,” Pete argued when the gale subsided slightly.
Harry was nearly finished cleaning the snow out of the trailer. “I drove my own buggy straight into an ice chasm—and you’d trust me with yours?”
Pete shook his head. “Man, do you know what’s wrong with you?”
“I’m cold and scared.”
“Not that.”
“Well, I have neglected clipping my toenails for weeks. But I don’t see how you could know.”
“I mean what’s wrong inside your head.”
“This isn’t an ideal time for psychoanalysis, Pete. Jeez, you Californians are obsessed with therapy.” Harry brushed the last of the snow out of the trailer. “I suppose you think I want to sleep with my mother—“
“Harry—“
“—or murder my father.”
“Harry—“
“Well, if that’s what you think, then I don’t see how we can just go on being friends.”
“You’ve got a hero complex,” Pete said.
“For insisting I ride in the trailer?”
“Yeah. We should draw straws.”
“This isn’t a democracy.”
“It’s only fair.”
“Let me et this straight—you’re demanding to ride in the back of the bus?”
Pete shook his head, tried to look serious, but couldn’t repress his smile. “Honky fool.”
“And proud of it.”
Harry turned his back squarely to the wind and pulled on the drawstring at his chin, loosening his hood. He reached inside the neck of his coat and got hold of the thick woolen snow mask that had been folded against his throat. He tugged it over his mouth and nose; now not even a fraction of his face was exposed. What the mask did not cover, the hood and the goggles concealed. He drew the hood tight once more and knotted the drawstring. Through the mask, he said, “Pete, you’re too damned big to ride in the cargo trailer.”
“You’re not exactly a dwarf yourself.”
“But I’m small enough to curl up on my side and get down out of the worst of the wind. You’d have to sit up. It’s the only way you’d fit. And sitting up, you’d freeze to death.”
“Okay, okay. You’re determined to play hero. Just remember—no medals are given at the end of this campaign.”
“Who needs medals?” Harry climbed into the cargo trailer and sat in the middle. “I’m after sainthood.”
Johnson leaned toward him. “You think you can get into heaven with a wife who knows more dirty jokes than all the men in the Edgeway group combined?”
“Isn’t it obvious, Pete?”
“What?”
“God has a sense of humor.”
Pete scanned the storm-whipped icecap and said, “Yeah. A real dark sense of humor.” He returned to the cabin door, glanced back, and with considerable affection again said, “Honky fool.” Then he got behind the handlebars and closed the door.
Harry took a last look at that portion of the icefield revealed by the backwash of the snowmobile’s headlamps. He did not often think in metaphors, but something about the top-of-the-world gloom, some quality of the landscape, required metaphors. Perhaps the nearly incomprehensible hostility of the cruel land could only be properly grasped in metaphorical terms that made it less alien, less frightening. The icefield was a crouching dragon of monstrous dimensions. The smooth, deep darkness was the dragon’s gaping mouth. The awful wind was its scream of rage. And the snow, whistling by so thickly now that he had trouble seeing even twenty feet, was the beast’s spittle or perhaps foam dripping from its jaws. If it chose to do so, it could gobble them up and leave no trace.
The snowmobile began to move.
Turning away from the dragon, Harry lay on his left side. He drew his knees toward his chest, kept his head tucked down, and folded his hands under his chin. That was all the protection he could give himself.
Conditions in the trailer were even worse than he had expected—and he had expected them to be nothing short of intolerable. The suspension system was primitive at best, and every irregularity of the icecap was instantly transmitted through the skis and wheels to the cargo bed. He bounced and slid from one side of the narrow space to the other. Even his heavy clothing could not fully cushion him from the cruelest shocks, and the ribs on his right side soon reverberated with soft pain. The wind roared at him from every direction; blasts of frigid air searched busily and relentlessly for a chink in his arctic armor.