JAMES SARAFIN

A CLARITY IN THE ICE

THE NIGHT'S RAIN HAD washed the glacier clean, making its face shine a pale but
scintillating blue, except where seams of silty gravel ran through it like rock
riddling a piece of quartz. Two-hundred-foot cliffs of ice enclosed three sides
of a meltwater lake accumulated at one end of a huge bowl in the glacier's
surface. In the other direction, southcentral Alaska's Chugach Mountains filled
the horizon like the rim of an even huger bowl. Carl Saville stood on the
glacier's sun- and rain-roughened surface and waited for the children to finish
playing on the ice. Their shrill voices echoed off the lake like inhuman
laughter. In rare moments of quiet, Carl could hear the wind moaning through the
jagged pinnacles of ice above.

Carl first knew the surge was coming from the little tipples forming around the
edge of the lake. His heart pounded in his ears and he tensed his legs to jump
as he felt the trembling grow in the ice underfoot. Time enough to shout one
quick warning....

"Look out!" The echo came back out of the bowl just as the ice groaned, cracked,
and heaved. Carl scrambled to keep his feet, his bare hands churning into the
hard granular surface. His eyes darted, scanning cracks that might widen into a
deep crevasse, like the one that had almost killed him years before. The surge
stopped even quicker than it started.

The teacher and fifteen fourth-graders were mostly on all fours, screaming. As
Carl stood upright the little girl nearest him burst into tears. His own hands
stung from contact with the sharp, cold ice. The kids milled around him as Carl
struggled to keep his own fear from showing. He'd better reassure them; if
people started thinking the glacier was a dangerous place, he would lose a lot
of business.

"Remember how I said the glacier flows like a slow, slow river?" He waited for a
few of them to nod before going on. "Sometimes the ice gets caught on the
ground, then suddenly comes free, jumps ahead. But it doesn't happen often, and
it's over now."

"Isn't it time to go back to the bus?" the teacher said.

Carl's walking tour had brought them a mile out on the glacier, and he started
them up a long ravine that was the quickest route out of the bowl. He let the
teacher lead them on while he waited for stragglers. The last boy turned to
study him. He seemed a bit taller than the others, with light brown hair, cut
short but unevenly, and bright blue eyes. Carl recalled that this boy had
listened attentively to his glaciology lectures, and realized he was going to
ask a question.

"Are you really my grandpa?"

The air around Carl seemed to shimmer, like a wave of cold coming off the wall
of ice behind him; he felt light in the head and queasy in his stomach. He
hadn't known this was Eric's class, hadn't even recognized him. Carl could only
nod. Then he noticed the boy's shoe was untied and went down on one knee.

Just as he finished tying Eric's shoelaces, Carl saw another pair of eyes
looking up out of a clear seam of ice below him.

He straightened his back and blinked. The eyes had looked bluer than the glacier
ice, which had been crushed dense enough to absorb every other color of the
spectrum. They had looked as blue as his own. He could feel the sun's heat on
his face and the chili breeze coming off the glacier against his sweat-dampened
back. A reflection, he decided, rubbing hard bits of accumulated dust from the
corner of his eyes.

"What's the matter, Grandpa?" Eric asked.

"Nothing," he said. "Your joints get a little stiff when you're my age." Carl
knew his grandson saw him as old, with hair and beard mostly gone to gray, face
and hands tanned a leathery brown, and eyes creased into a perpetual squint from
years spent on the bright, reflective ice.

The boy ran ahead to join his friends, and Carl dropped again to one knee. A
thin rivulet of meltwater ran down the ravine and over the clear seam of ice,
which was about four feet long, a window into the glacier. Carl used his left
hand and forearm to dam the rivulet for a better look. The chill water coursed
over his fingers and the slick, deeper cold of the ice made his arm ache at the
old break.

The eyes stared back out of an upraised, bearded face. Couldn't be a reflection,
not a foot below the surface. There was a man down there, trapped, frozen in the
ice.

"Mr. Saville?" The teacher called from up the ravine, uncertain of the path.
Carl took one last look into the ice and was up and moving, legs swinging into
his hiking stride, up and stepping long over each meltwater pool, to the top of
the ravine. He led the class onto a stretch of "black ice," where the glacier
was thickly covered with silt and gravel, rolling in gentle hills almost to the
parking lot. At one place they had to cross a meltwater stream running high and
fast under the long June sun. Carl stopped in midstream to help the children,
lifting each in turn across. When Eric's turn came, Carl tried to speak but
could find no words; then the boy was gone, running to join his classmates. As
he splashed out of the stream, Carl's hands tingled with warmth from holding
Eric under the arms.

Carl watched his grandson, kicking up dust with the other boys, and wondered
what he was like, really. What was his favorite sport, did he collect baseball
cards? What did his face look like when you handed him a present? Was he
noticing girls yet?

He'd have to talk to the boy to find out anything. But what could you say to a
grandson you didn't even recognize?

It was easier to wonder about the frozen man. The only way a man could get in
the ice like that was if he'd fallen into a crevasse, then was covered by water
that froze with almost perfect clarity. Carl knew of no one who had disappeared
in this vicinity. Unless someone had killed him and hidden the body there.

Or maybe the man had fallen in when this section of ice had been higher up the
valley, thousands of years ago, and been carried along in the glacier's
inexorable flow. He recalled news reports of a Neolithic traveler who had been
found well-preserved in a glacier, high in the Alps. This must be the same
thing; Tanaina and other Indians had once inhabited this area. He should
probably call the Anchorage newspaper --the publicity would be good for
business.

Vegetation appeared before they left the glacier, a few hardy grasses and weeds
actually sprouting in the gravelly soil on top of the ice. They dropped down and
went up a dusty trail, through a grove of stunted willows, to the gravel parking
lot Carl's bulldozer had carved on the terminal moraine years before.

Most of the children went to the school bus, but Carl noticed Eric heading
toward a brown Jeep Wagoneer with rust-rotted fenders and knew he'd missed his
chance. Carl's own son, Dan, got out of the Wagoneer to talk briefly to the
teacher. Then, without acknowledging his father's presence, Dan drove off with
Eric.

Carl waited until the dust had settled from the Wagoneer and bus, then drove his
ATV back to the small gift shop and museum in front of the log house where he
had lived for many years. The gift shop had a sliding window abutting the road
so his single employee could collect the admission fee. Carl didn't own the
glacier, but he did own the only road to it. Anyone could look from the distance
and higher elevation of the highway, but if they wanted to "WALK ON THE
GLACIER," as his highway sign advertised, they had to pay Carl -- or those
trespassers next door.

Carl stopped the ATV by the window and asked, "Did you collect from the guy in
the brown Wagoneer?"

Raymond, a summer college hire who knew few of the locals, replied, "Yeah,
sure."

Eric was already in fourth grade, and Carl had been cheated out of any part of
the boy's life except for a few brief glimpses through the windows of cars
passing on the road. Dan had chosen to live among the trespassers and help them
steal his own father's livelihood.

Carl and his wife Rebecca had homesteaded in this valley back in '65, after they
noticed all the tourists stopping to photograph the glacier. He bulldozed a
gravel road downslope from the highway, and by the following summer the Savilles
had a log cabin built and their first sign out on the highway.

Then Bill Davison came and figured out that most of Carl's road lay on a section
line, which had a public easement reserved by law. He got a court order to use
Carl's road and build one of his own on down to the Davison homestead, which
also fronted the glacier. And Davison put out his own sign, with a large
painting of the blue ice done by his daughter, Clara.

"God put the glacier there," Davison had told him, in their only face-to-face
argument. "We've got as much right to homestead and run a business as you."

So Carl lost half of the business he had developed. Tourists only came in the
summer, and two families struggled where one would have thrived. For more than a
decade, no Davison or Saville said a word to the other. Or so Carl and Rebecca
believed, until their son announced that he was marrying Clara.

Carl hadn't spoken to Dan since then, not even at Rebecca's funeral, after the
cancer had eaten away her pancreas. Dan had made his choice, to abandon his own
family and live with his wife and child on a five-acre parcel split off from the
Davison homestead. Carl thought his son would see what kind of people they were
when Clara finally left him and Eric for a motorcyclist from L.A. But Dan
continued to help manage the Davisons' resort -- as if Davison were his father!
Davison there with the son and grandson both.

Now Carl saw the way to show them something the trespasser and the disloyal son.
The man in the ice -- what a find! He could put out a new sign: "SEE THE ICEMAN
-- 10,000 YEARS OLD!" The tourists would line up to get in.

Carl grabbed Raymond to help rearrange the museum exhibits. He could put the
iceman in his old eight-foot freezer, replacing the lid with a plexiglass
skylight. It would be perfect right beside a display case of Tanaina artifacts
-- stone figurines, antler tools, fur clothing, woven willow baskets -- which he
had acquired in trade over the years. On a posterboard in the back of the case
his late wife's handwriting explained why the Tanaina had avoided the glacier.
Legend told of a man who once tried to cross the ice to hunt on the other side.
The glacier shook in anger, to warn him, but the hunter continued on. He came
upon a sheer cliff of ice and was looking for a way up when he found the body of
a man who had been killed in a fall. But something was strange -- the dead man's
clothing and weapons looked just like the hunter's. And when he turned the body
over, the face was his own! The hunter fled in terror, back to his village,
where his family and friends greeted him with great joy. They said he had been
gone a long time, they feared he was dead. When he told his tale, all knew he
had traveled into the spirit world.

Carl didn't tell Raymond anything. It might not be legal to display a human
body, but if no one knew where it came from the state troopers would probably
believe the exhibit was just a tourist rip-off, at least for a season or two.
Maybe just long enough to bankrupt Davison.

He drove his old pickup to the highway, then east to a roadside lodge. From the
parking lot there the glacier could be seen snaking back thirty miles from his
resort, branching into the high peaks which amassed year-round snow from clouds
roiling in from the Gulf of Alaska. He knew the geology, from all the years of
handling tourists' questions and guiding visiting glaciologists; but still, when
he saw the glacier like this, in its entirety, it seemed not to belong in the
forested valley, as if it were an intrusion from somewhere else. Seeing it now
in the sun, its walls and spires glowing in the green and brown valley, reminded
Carl of a picture of a fairy city in a book Rebecca used to read to Dan, of how
Carl would come home late from work to find Rebecca reading softly to their son.

He went into the lodge and hired the bar waitress, a part-time artist, to paint
the new sign. Back home, he'd barely settled into his chair for the evening when
the telephone rang. Ken Janssen, one of the few locals who would talk to him;
most resented having to pay, just like the tourists, to use his road to hunt or
reach their mining claims. But Ken understood business, and Carl purchased from
Ken's general store.

"So what's going on back there, Carl?" Word traveled fast in the valley. "I
heard you're putting up a sign with a picture of a caveman in a block of ice."

"Setting up a new exhibit," Carl told him. "The Iceman. Thousands of years old,
at least."

"Oh, come on. It's not real, is it?"

"Why don't you come find out. Should be ready by Friday."

Ken laughed. "You offering discount tickets?"

"Sure, the same discount you give me."

On Thursday, with the freezer ready in the museum, Carl locked up for the
evening, loaded some tools on a trailer hooked to his ATV, and drove out across
the black ice. When he reached the ravine he noticed the water level in the lake
had dropped; the recent shift in the ice must have enlarged the subsurface
drainage. With more water now seeping below to make the ground slick, the
glacier could well surge again soon. It took only a minute to locate the dark
shape of the man frozen in the ice.

Carl began digging with a pick, using a shovel to clear the broken ice out of
the hole. He had decided to dig a circular trench around the upright body to
avoid damaging it. The resulting ice cylinder could be raised with a hand winch
attached to a pole tripod, which he had previously used for lifting moose
quarters and car engines. Carl had worked hard with his body all his life and
kept at it steadily until the early morning dawn. The air had become cold, and
he zipped his jacket tight around his neck, blew on his hands, and continued.

As he chopped and dug Carl could see, in the increasing light, the form of the
man locked in the ice cylinder taking shape in the center of the trench. But he
couldn't distinguish any features of the man's body or clothing because the pick
had gouged and scratched the ice. When the trench reached a depth of six feet,
Carl stopped to erect the tripod, fastening the winch cable to three ice screws
set into the cylinder. He resumed digging at an angle, below the frozen man's
feet, until he could break the cylinder free of the underlying ice. Then he
jacked the cylinder up, backed the trailer over the edge of the hole, and tried
to lower the cylinder onto the trailer.

It only slid back into the hole. He tried to back the trailer further, but the
ATV tires skidded against the weight of the cylinder. He finally had to give up.

The jagged pinnacles of ice beyond the lake cast deep shadows over the bowl, but
he could see the first leak of sunlight striking the top of the ridge above the
ravine. He climbed the ridge, found a small boulder protruding from the ice, and
sat looking down the valley while the sun warmed his back.

So what was he going to do now? There was no way to load the heavy ice cylinder
by himself. He'd have to bring Raymond out here after all, just take the risk of
whether he'd keep his mouth shut. He should be showing up at the resort,
unlocking the gates pretty soon now. Automatically, Carl checked his bearings by
looking toward home -- then he rose and looked hard.

Instead of the familiar resort he had built and added to over the years, there
stood a much larger, modem hotel, several stories high, with uniform windows and
balconies facing the glacier, all the glass reflecting the morning's golden
sunlight. Through the glare he made out a tour bus near the front door. And the
road and parking lot were not dark simply from the morning shadows -- they
appeared to be paved with asphalt!

Some kind of mirage. Different densities of air over the glacier, reflecting the
image or distorting its direction. But there was no big hotel like that anywhere
nearby. He must be so tired he was hallucinating. He stumbled down into the
ravine and started the ATV toward home. When he topped a rise he was relieved to
see the mirage was gone, that he was heading toward his own familiar resort.

Carl went to bed dead-tired and as he slept he had a dream about something that
really happened to him long ago, one late September day. He is walking out on
the glacier, using the elevation to scout for moose in the valley, walking on
and on. By noon the morning's sun disappears behind dark clouds and snow starts
to fall, big, heavy wet flakes that obscure the valley below. He comes to a
slight depression running in a long line across the surface. The ice in the
depression looks clearer, more granular than elsewhere.

As he crosses the depression, the glacier surges on him for the first time. He
feels the quivering underfoot, hears the booming cracks all around, then hears
and feels the deep, massive groaning of the ice. Carl sees cracks forming on
both sides of the depression, and as he lifts a foot the surface gives way -- he
drops into a hidden crevasse.

Nothing in his life has ever shocked him so much as this fall into a vertical
crack barely wider than his body. His toes and fingernails scrabble futilely on
the slick wet ice. He finally smashes to a stop some thirty feet down, where the
crack narrows, his rifle slipping from his shoulder and clattering out of sight
into the depths of the crevasse.

Carl feels only cold and pain, from the bone protruding out of his left forearm
and in his chest where he's wedged tight in the crevasse. The close, cold walls
of ice still seep water from the morning's sun, sucking out his body heat. Heavy
snowflakes sifting down the crevasse obscure even the sky above. Somehow he
lifts a leg and right arm, finds purchase to move up, removing the tightness
just enough to breathe.

He rests a while, but the pain and cold only grow. He has to climb out.
Everything is white and featureless, without depth around him; he only knows up
from the direction of waterflow. Bracing his broken arm against his chest, Carl
works his way up an inch at a time with his feet, knees, and good arm. A dozen
times he almost quits, relaxes, drifts off into the white nothingness.

Here the dream diverges from Carl's reality. In real life he had somehow found a
last bit of will to inch on a bit more, crawled out on the surface just above,
and staggered home. But Carl's greatest, secret fear was how close that last bit
of will had been to not coming. In the dream it doesn't come, and he hangs
wedged in the crack, staring up, big wet snowflakes covering his staring eyes
....

He was awakened by laughter and voices coming faintly through the museum door. A
group of tourists stood around the empty freezer, Ken Janssen among them. Ken
had apparently been making jibes at Raymond's expense, but his attention shifted
when he saw Carl.

"Don't look now, but your iceman thawed and walked out on you!"

The tourists laughed. Carl had forgotten -- he'd asked Raymond to pick up the
new sign and put it out on the highway this morning. He tried to pull himself
together, to shrug off the chill remainder of his dream.

"Carl," Janssen went on, "you're supposed to be lying down in there! And what
happened to your caveman suit?" Carl could tell that behind his smile, Ken was
actually mad about paying the toll and finding an empty freezer.

"Sorry, folks," Carl said. "We're still just setting that up, but we'll give you
free passes to come back tomorrow." Better than offering refunds.

But now he had no choice but to close up for the day, something he had never
done in tourist season. If he didn't get the iceman on display, everyone would
be talking about him, calling him an old kook. He shooed the tourists off as
gracefully as he could and sent Raymond up to lock the gates.

"You look about due for a vacation," Janssen said, before he left.

One quick cup of coffee later, Carl was driving toward the glacier with Raymond
riding on the trailer. They saw no one all the way to the lake, which had
drained further, leaving deposits of silt where the water had receded. The ice
cylinder still hung from the tripod, and Raymond needed only one glance inside
it.

"Damn! You really did find an iceman!"

Carl felt a moment's relief -- he hadn't hallucinated that much, at least. He
had Raymond pull on a rope tied to the bottom of the cylinder, while he backed
the trailer into it, hoping to tilt the cylinder enough to lay it down on the
trailer bed. But the sun must have softened the ice around the screws; the
cylinder had only begun to tilt when the screws pulled free, ping ping ping, in
rapid but separate reports.

The massive cylinder hit the edge of the trailer hard enough to bounce Carl in
his seat, then kicked back and smashed into the ice at the edge of the
excavation.

"God damn!" Raymond said. "That sucker almost nailed me!"

The cylinder lay across the hole, cracked all the way through and sagging in the
middle. No way to get it on the trailer now, Carl decided. The thing must weigh
a ton. He gave Raymond the shovel, he took the pick, and they began breaking the
ice carefully away from the body. Carl worked at the foot; he didn't want to
risk seeing those eyes that looked so blue under the ice.

The first thing that came free was a pair of leather boots. Modern hiking boots.
Couldn't be.

"Uh, Mr. Saville, you should check this out. I don't know who it is, but this
guy looks sort of familiar."

Carl needed only a glance at the face Raymond had uncovered to confirm his
suspicion: not a Tanaina Indian, but a white man. As they chipped away, not only
the boots but the rest of the clothing proved that the man had died within the
last few decades. Maybe someone had hidden a body here.

When they finished Carl stood up and finally took a good look at the man's face.
Suddenly, his legs wanted to run; he looked wildly around at the ice.

"Who is he?" Raymond asked.

The kid was right, the frozen man did look familiar, like someone Carl had seen
long ago or in a dream. "I don't know, but we're going to have to call the
troopers."

They dragged the body across the hole and lifted it onto the trailer, tying it
down with a plastic tarp. The man was frozen stiff and hard, knees slightly bent
as if he were crouching when he died, one arm extended and the other clutched to
his chest.

"You drive. I'll walk." Carl had that queasy feeling again; he was afraid he
might throw up if he tried to fide.

As the ATV disappeared over the top of the ravine the sound of its engine
abruptly died. There was no sign of Raymond or the vehicle all the way back to
the resort. Not his resort anymore, he saw as he approached, but the big hotel
with all the glass. Carl waited for the mirage to vanish each time he dropped
out of view, but only saw it grow closer on the next rise. He climbed the
moraine and stood looking at the asphalt parking lot. In a little while a
shuttle bus came by and stopped. The driver, wearing a red jacket, tie, and name
badge, motioned him to get on. Carl found a seat mechanically as the bus started
up.

"Sir, you shouldn't be walking out on the glacier without a guide," the driver
told him. "People have fallen or disappeared back there."

Carl looked carefully at the features along the road and surrounding mountains.
This was his road, by God, which he had cut out of this wild valley two and a
half decades ago -- except for the paved surface. The driver tried to chat, but
Carl remained too stunned to reply. When they reached the glass hotel he knew
that ground too, where his resort had been for years. The driver asked him if he
needed help and did he have his room key, and Carl shook his head. What was his
room number?

"I don't have one."

"I'm sorry, then." The driver's manner grew more abrupt; apparently he acted as
a security guard too. "This is a private resort. If you're not a guest of the
hotel or with an authorized tour group, I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

A tour bus unloaded people at the front door, two bellhops removing bags from
the luggage compartment. Carl wanted to look inside the hotel, but the guard was
insistent. The guard watched as he walked up the road toward the highway, until
he rounded the first bend. Carl had no idea where he was going.

In half a mile he saw a brown Jeep Wagoneer coming from the highway. It left the
asphalt at the curve, staying on the section line road, raising a cloud of dust
as it hit gravel. Carl turned to follow before the dust had settled. He had
never before set foot or tire here, never looked past the tall spruce trees at
the Davisons' property line. Around the first curve he saw the Wagoneer parked
in front of a small cabin among the tall spruce. The road should have continued
on to the Davisons' lodge, but just past the cabin it had been blocked off with
a mound of gravel and was overgrown with weeds and small trees beyond. A black
Labrador retriever ran from behind the cabin, barking at his approach. A boy
opened the cabin door, called the dog, and came out on the porch.

"Hello, Eric," Carl said.

The boy looked at him while the Lab sniffed his leg.

"Hi." Dan's voice came from the door. "Can I help you?"

"I .... uh ...." Carl realized his son did not know him. "I used to live around
here, but things seem to have changed."

Dan's manner softened. "Oh, I thought you were from the resort. Would you like
to come in, have a cup of coffee?"

Carl saw from the door that the cabin had little more than a living room,
kitchen/dining area, and two back bedrooms. He took the cup and a seat at the
table across from his son, while Eric hovered nearby. The cabin smelled of
coffee, of recently baked combread, and faintly of sweat from a pair of work
coveralls which had been hung by the back door. Pans and utensils hung on the
kitchen walls, and in the living room were tools and a single Machentanz print
of a doomed Eskimo hunter sitting, spent, on an ice sheet that had broken free
of the mainland. Though tidy, the cabin showed no female presence.

"So, where did you used to live?" Dan asked.

"Up the road a ways." Carl waved vaguely. "I used to know your folks. What
happened to the Saville place?"

Dan frowned. "The Japanese bought Mom out six years ago, and my in-laws' place,
and a couple others' for good measure. Tried to buy this too. Then they built
that glass monstrosity -- where it could block our view of the glacier."

Carl could see the big hotel out of the kitchen window through a clearing in the
trees.

"This place is all that's left of the original homesteads in this valley," his
son continued. "I never sold out; too many good memories, growing up around
here."

"How much land do you own?"

"We've just got the ten acres here, me and Eric. Got it for wedding presents,
five from Mom and five from my in-laws."

"Did your wife...does she want to stay here too?"

"She divorced me and moved to L.A. She got our savings, and I got the place. And
Eric here -- the better of the deal."

Some things hadn't changed at least. Carl came to where the question remaining
was the one he had been afraid to ask.

"What about your father? I'm surprised he ever sold out."

"Oh, you don't know about Dad? You must have been here a long time ago. He
disappeared, on the glacier we think, back in the fall of '68. Never did find
his body. Mom had to struggle to keep the place, but the Davisons -- my in-laws
-- and other neighbors helped us out."

Carl did not respond, trying to throw off the conviction he was dreaming, having
one of those dreams where everything was almost like real life, only different
in a few awful ways.

His son continued reminiscing. "I was just nine when he disappeared, but I have
memories of him that are so strong it's like he's still with me sometimes. I
remember how hard he used to work, not getting home until I was in bed, but
coming in to talk if I was still awake. I remember him taking me fishing a few
times, and once, not long before he died, we hiked up a mountain and found some
fossils and rocks. I wish I could remember which mountain it was, 'cause I've
always wanted to take Eric there."

"Do you want to see my rock collection?" Eric asked.

"Sure." Carl's mouth had gone dry. He looked in the cup, but he'd drunk all the
coffee except for a few brown drops that coated the bottom as he rotated the
cup. He could remember those times too, plus the times he had come home too late
to speak to his son and just stood for a while watching him sleep. He noticed
Dan was looking at him strangely.

"So you've lost both your parents," Carl said, quickly.

"Mom? No, she's still alive. Moved to Anchorage after she sold out. We see her
about twice a month."

"But....I heard she'd died. Of cancer."

"Nope. Still spry and healthy when I saw her last week."

It all came back to Carl then, Rebecca's dying, too sharp and clear to have been
a dream: five months of agony, half the time in the hospital, then home in bed
when hope had gone. Hair falling out in thin gray wisps on the pillow. Her face
wasting away until nothing but her hard bitter eyes showed above the bed covers.
"Why didn't we at least go see our grandson?" she had asked him once, near the
end.

And here, wherever he was now, it hadn't happened that way at all.

This had continued too long and consistently real to be a dream; he had actually
gone somewhere else, where things were better. Here his Rebecca still lived --
no cancer! His son remembered him fondly. And he could talk to his grandson.

Eric came running with a cigar box and dumped his rocks on the table. Dan shook
his head and smiled; and Carl suddenly realized, sitting there, that all three
of them had the same blue, blue eyes. And knew he did not want to leave this
place, even if he lost his own resort. He would tell his son who he was, go find
his wife.

"Rebecca," he croaked. "Do you have her phone number?"

His son had been watching him closely. "Well, who did you say you were? No
offense, but she and her husband like their privacy, and I don't give out their
number to everyone."

"Her husband? You said...he...was dead."

"No, I said my father died years ago. But she re-married about five years
later."

The ceramic cup spun out of Carl's hand and broke off its handle on the floor.
His Rebecca lived here, in this place, but she belonged to someone else. He
couldn't believe it; she had always been so loyal, and he had never thought of
remarrying after her death. But of course, she had been a lot younger then. He
bent to pick up the cup pieces and mumbled an apology.

"So who did you say you were?" Dan repeated.

And Carl realized he would never be believed, that he wouldn't even know how to
explain it. He had to get outside and think.

He stood up. "Just an old friend," he said. "She probably wouldn't even remember
me. But I guess it's time to go. Thanks for the coffee."

He left his son and grandson watching him from the front door as he went back up
the road. There was nothing for him here. Rebecca was lost, as much as in his
own world, and his son believed unshakably that he had died long ago. His death
must be on record, and he had nothing, not even an identity.

He walked back toward the big hotel, leaving the road for the trees before the
last curve, moving through the thinning vegetation, the wild rose, lupine,
fireweed, and grasses, until he crossed over the moraine. If he went back to the
ravine by the lake, maybe he could return home. Somehow that part of the glacier
now existed in both worlds, created in two separate streams that must have
diverged twenty-five years ago. Maybe the surge had opened a door, causing the
two streams, like braids of the glacier itself, to twist and come back together.
Maybe he and the frozen man couldn't exist together in the same world, except
there, where the streams converged.

Maybe a man's world was only a possibility, what he created from his own choices
and actions. And every time he made a choice, especially a difficult or
important one, one that couldn't be unmade, the other possibility and all the
consequences flowing from it came into existence somewhere else. But the man
couldn't exist in both possibilities -- and didn't belong in the one he had
rejected.

The lake was almost gone, all drained except for a small pool in the center of a
bowl of muck. Raymond stood waiting by the excavation, looking as relieved to
see Carl as Carl felt to see him.

"I ran out of gas," Raymond said. "Came back to look for you, and didn't know
where you went." "Where is it?"

"Not far, back there." Raymond pointed up the ravine. "You must have walked
right by it."

"I guess we shouldn't have disturbed the body," Carl said. "We'd better put it
back where we found it. Go get some gas at the resort and bring it back."

Carl didn't dare leave the ravine again. After Raymond had gone he climbed on
the ice ridge. He couldn't see Raymond or the ATV but still saw the big hotel.
He went back down and waited. After a long while he heard the ATV coming down
the ravine.

He left the tarp around the body as they replaced it in the hole; Carl couldn't
look at the frozen man again. He wanted to stay with the ATV but didn't feel he
could drive, so he rode on the back. They had just started up when he heard the
glacier. The glacier groaned deep and low, a sound felt all over the skin as
much as heard, like the song of the mother god of whales in the ocean depths,
the sound coming out of the crack splitting the floor of the ravine, right
between the wheels.

"Get it out of here!" He jumped off and Raymond gunned the ATV, up and out of
the ravine, which was opening again into the old crevasse. Carl stumbled and
slipped trying to run up the ravine, straddling the widening crack. From behind
he heard the tarp sliding against ice, turned, and saw the body disappear into
the crevasse.

The ice suddenly groaned louder and the ravine collapsed in a broad line before
his feet. Carl jumped.

CARL WALKED UP the winding gravel road from his resort, and turned onto the
section line road. Beyond the second bend, in the tall spruce trees where he
knew he would find it, he walked steadily toward the cabin he had never seen in
this world.

The boy was playing with a dog in the yard and saw Carl approach. He came
running up, stopped, and looked with big eyes.

"Hello, Eric."

"Grandpa! What are you doing here?"

"I thought I'd come to see if maybe you'd like to go look for fossils up on
Shale Mountain."

"Sure!" The boy's face shone with excitement. Then he hesitated and looked at
the house. "I need to ask Dad if it's okay." They were both walking toward the
cabin. "Do you think he can go too?"

"Yeah. I took your dad fossil hunting up there when he was a kid. I bet he'll
remember that."

The boy left him, running ahead. A man couldn't unmake his choices --but he
could always make new ones. Carl felt his heart hammering in his throat as he
stepped up on the cabin porch. But he didn't turn back.