“I don’t want to trouble you—“
“It’s no trouble. You get to be my age, you’re grateful for the least wink of sleep. I’m lucky if I get five hours a night nowadays—wake up and my mind is just turning and turning. Where are my manners? My name’s Hinzelmann. I’d say, call me Richie, but around here folks who know me just call me plain Hinzelmann. I’d shake your hand, but I need two hands to drive Tessie. She knows when I’m not paying attention.”
“Mike Ainsel,” said Shadow. “Pleased to meet you, Hinzelmann.”
“So we’ll go around the lake. Grand tour,” said Hinzelmann.
Main Street, which they were on, was a pretty street, even at night, and it looked old-fashioned in the best sense of the word—as if, for a hundred years, people had been caring for that street and they had not been in a hurry to lose anything they liked.
Hinzelmann pointed out the town’s two restaurants as they passed them (a German restaurant and what he described as “part Greek, part Norwegian, and a popover at every plate”); he pointed out the bakery and the bookstore (“What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not fooling a soul”). He slowed Tessie as they passed the library so Shadow could get a good look at it. Antique gaslights flickered over the doorway—Hinzelmann proudly called Shadow’s attention to them. “Built in the 1870s by John Henning, local lumber baron. He wanted it called the Henning Memorial Library, but when he died they started calling it the Lakeside Library, and I guess it’ll be the Lakeside Library now until the end of time. Isn’t it a dream?” He couldn’t have been prouder of it if he had built it himself. The building reminded Shadow of a castle, and he said so. “That’s right,” agreed Hinzelmann. “Turrets and all. Henning wanted it to look like that on the outside. Inside they still have all the original pine shelving. Miriam Shultz wants to tear the insides out and modernize, but it’s on some register of historic places, and there’s not a damn thing she can do.”
They drove around the south side of the lake. The town circled the lake, which was a thirty-foot drop below the level of the road. Shadow could see the patches of white ice dulling the surface of the lake with, here and there, a shiny patch of water reflecting the lights of the town.
“Looks like it’s freezing over,” he said.
“It’s been frozen over for a month now,” said Hinzelmann. “The dull spots are snowdrifts and the shiny spots are ice. It froze just after Thanksgiving in one cold night, froze smooth as glass. You do much ice-fishing, Mr. Ainsel?”
“Never.”
“Best thing a man can do. It’s not the fish you catch, it’s the peace of mind that you take home at the end of the day.”
“I’ll remember that.” Shadow peered down at the lake through Tessie’s window. “Can you actually walk on it already?”
“You can walk on it. Drive on it too, but I wouldn’t want to risk it yet. It’s been cold up here for six weeks,” said Hinzelmann. “But you also got to allow that things freeze harder and faster up here in northern Wisconsin than they do most anyplace else there is. I was out hunting once—hunting for deer, and this was oh, thirty, forty years back, and I shot at a buck, missed him, and sent him running off through the woods—this was over acrost the north end of the lake, up near where you’ll be living, Mike. Now he was the finest buck I ever did see, twenty point, big as a small horse, no lie. Now, I’m younger and feistier back then than I am now, and though it had started snowing before Halloween that year, now it was Thanksgiving and there was clean snow on the ground, fresh as anything, and I could see the buck’s footprints. It looked to me like the big fellow was heading for the lake in a panic.
“Well, only a damn fool tries to run down a buck, but there am I, a damn fool, running after him, and there he is, standing in the lake, in oh, eight, nine inches of water, and he’s just looking at me. That very moment, the sun goes behind a cloud, and the freeze comes—temperature must have fallen thirty degrees in ten minutes, not a word of a lie. And that old stag, he gets ready to run, and he can’t move. He’s frozen into the ice.
“Me, I just walk over to him slowly. You can see he wants to run, but he’s iced in and it just isn’t going to happen. But there’s no way I can bring myself to shoot a defenseless critter when he can’t get away—what kind of man would I be if I done that, heh? So I takes my shotgun and I fires off one shell, straight up into the air.
“Well, the noise and the shock is enough to make that buck just about jump out of his skin, and seein’ that his legs are iced in, that’s just what he proceeds to do. He leaves his hide and his antlers stuck to the ice, while he charges back into the woods, pink as a newborn mouse and shivering fit to bust.
“I felt bad enough for that old buck that I talked the Lakeside Ladies’ Knitting Circle into making him something warm to wear all the winter, and they knitted him an all-over one-piece woolen suit, so he wouldn’t freeze to death. ‘Course, the joke was on us, because they knitted him a suit of bright orange wool, so no hunter ever shot at it. Hunters in these parts wear orange at hunting season,” he added, helpfully. “And if you think there’s a word of a lie in that, I can prove it to you. I’ve got the antlers up on my rec room wall to this day.”
Shadow laughed, and the old man smiled the satisfied smile of a master craftsman. They pulled up outside a brick building with a large wooden deck, from which golden holiday lights hung and twinkled invitingly.
“That’s five-oh-two,” said Hinzelmann. “Apartment three
would be on the top floor, around the other side, overlooking the lake. There you go, Mike.”
“Thank you, Mr. Hinzelmann. Can I give you anything toward gas?”
“Just Hinzelmann. And you don’t owe me a penny. Merry Christmas from me and from Tessie.”
“Are you sure you won’t accept anything?”
The old man scratched his chin. “Tell you what,” he said. “Sometime in the next week or so I’ll come by and sell you some tickets. For our raffle. Charity. For now, young man, you can be getting onto bed.”
Shadow smiled. “Merry Christmas, Hinzelmann,” he said.
The old man shook Shadow’s hand with one red-knuckled hand. It felt as hard and as callused as an oak branch. “Now, you watch the path as you go up there, it’s going to be slippery. I can see your door from here, at the side there, see it? I’ll just wait in the car down here until you’re safely inside. You just give me the thumbs-up when you’re in okay, and I’ll drive off.”
He kept the Wendt idling until Shadow was safely up the wooden steps on the side of the house and had opened the apartment door with his key. The door to the apartment swung open. Shadow made a thumbs-up sign and the old man in the Wendt—Tessie, thought Shadow, and the thought of a car with a name made him smile one more time—Hinzelmann and Tessie swung around and made their way back across the bridge.
Shadow shut the front door. The room was freezing. It smelled of people who had gone away to live other lives, and of all they had eaten and dreamed. He found the thermostat and cranked it up to seventy degrees. He went into the tiny kitchen, checked the drawers, opened the avocado-colored refrigerator, but it was empty. No surprise there. At least the fridge smelled clean inside, not musty.
There was a small bedroom with a bare mattress in it, beside the kitchen, next to an even tinier bathroom that was mostly shower stall. An aged cigarette butt sat in the toilet bowl, staining the water brown. Shadow flushed it away.
He found sheets and blankets in a closet, and made the bed. Then he took off his shoes, his jacket, and his watch, and he climbed into the bed fully dressed, wondering how long it would take him to get warm.