Chapter 1

It was the kind of night that started out like most bad nights, with little to do and little interest in doing anything good. We had gotten drunk and Geoff and Flounder and Alexis had smoked a joint, so at the appointed hour, when the room got just a little too stuffy and a little too dry and not even opening the window relieved us of the acrid haze of stale pot smoke, we wrapped ourselves in our coats and hats and scarves and gloves and walked right out into the coldest night of the century.

It was the middle of February. I was a freshman in college. I remember that night, really, as if the memory itself froze in my brain -- as if that night froze it there. It's murky and distorted and inert as frozen things are. It sits there, more a thing than a memory, like those drifts of snow

The snow. It piled up at the corners of parking lots where the plows deposited their evening sweeps. By February, drifts loomed fifteen, twenty feet high and growing. Students stole cafeteria dinner trays and slid down them day and night in drunken displays of bravado, standing on them like surfers, racing each other. One sophomore lost his balance and ended up cracking his head open on a buried fire hydrant. His screams woke up the entire quad at three in the morning. His trail of blood to the infirmary became encased under a quarter inch of ice that fell that night, preserving it like some archaeological relic of prehistoric drunkenness. It was there for weeks. From that point on, whenever a student became too drunk and ended up passing out or throwing up all over himself, someone would surely chime in, “Time to hit The Bloody Way,” and drag his sorry a*s to the nurses.

“Let’s go to the arboretum,” said Geoff.

A table. A bong. Cans of watery beer. Me, Dougie, Stephen, Alexis, Geoff, Flounder.

“Are you f*****g crazy?” wheezed Flounder. “You gotta be outta your mind.”

“C’mon? Let’s do it. Let’s go to the arboretum.”

“Why do you want to go to the arboretum?” asked Flounder.

Ah-bah-ray-tum.

Boston Southie, Flounder was.

“Let’s go to the river,” Geoff insisted.

The room was silent and still.

“Jesus, you’re f*****g sick,” Flounder wheezed back.

Flounder had a big head like a misshapen pumpkin, flushed and ruddy, out of which he expelled wheezes of laugher and cigarette smoke and spittle.

“What?” said Geoff. “Let’s just walk down there. That’s all. That’s all I’m saying.”

“I’m not going near that river,” grunted Dougie, a harmless creature from Rhode Island who grew up near the ocean and probably just missed his boogie board.

 “Let’s do it,” said Alexis. “Let’s do it. I’m in. This s**t is crazy!”

Alexis was already wrapping his scarf on as he said this. He was practically out the door. Alexis was ADD. Smoking pot made it worse. He stood at the door. We looked at each other. A flurry of coats and scarves. I had been drinking. I didn’t smoke pot. I was depressed as hell because I hated all these idiots. I was always somewhat sick in the stomach, always on the verge of puking. It’s probably because I didn’t eat enough. I hated that place, hated everything about it. I hated the cold and the snow and those stuffy, overheated dorm rooms and those fifth graders drinking watery beer and smoking pot. But I also remember  -- murky, very murky --  but I remember feeling a kind of grotesque pleasure in seeing just how bad it could get with these fellows. Just enough, it would seem, to go to the river.

And so down we went, stumbling through drifts, down plowed paths and over plowed mounds, though powder and ice, past entombed stone walls, the gleaming mounds of which made some sort of sluggish, dull sense of the arboretum in the moonlight. Ah! It didn’t always snow...it only seemed to...but on this night and others there were these impossibly clear skies, the Milky Way a smudge of gray against the densest black. And the moon...was it always so sharp and insensate?

We found our way to the river by moonlight and by the time we reached its rounded banks my face was numb as a frying pan.

“All right, you f****r,” wheezed Flounder. “We’re here. You satisfied?”

“No,” said Geoff.

We looked out at the river. It wasn’t very large. At its widest point it was perhaps twenty feet across. Here, where it bent slightly to the south, it was on the order of fifteen feet. The cold had done a job on it. It was well frozen over in large chunks, but as with most rivers even in the coldest of climes, not entirely. Its black water trickled under and over white ice and snow making that lovely, innocuous sound so adored on relaxation tapes in health food stores.

“I’m not going over it,” said Dougie.

“Yeah, we all are,” said Flounder. And then he laughed. “Jesus Christ.”

“It’s perfect,” said Geoff.

He was right. It probably was just as it had been that night twenty-five years before when those three students ventured out of their dorm rooms, probably at a similar hour, drunk, bored as hell just as we were, with nothing better to do than to walk down to the arboretum in the freezing cold to ponder the river. And then, inconceivably, all three of them at once traversed the river’s fragile shell. And dissapeared.

A hiker found them the next day -- the three of them clustered in the same spot in a little rivulet, their frozen arms clutching each other in the black water below, their milky eyes gazing up through four inches of ice clear as glass.

“C’mon c’mon c’mon!” cried Alexis pacing around the bank of the river. “Let’s do it! It’s a cinch. It’s frozen right over!”

“I’m not going over it,” muttered Dougie again.

We were all going over it. We all knew it the moment Geoff had suggested going to the river. We were all that drunk, or high, or drunk and high, or stupid. We were all that bored. Or depressed. Or suicidal.

“You think it’s thick enough?” asked Alexis, suddenly stopping in his tracks and exhibiting a twinge of apprehension.

Geoff placed a foot on the ice and put some weight on it. His foot wasn’t actually on the ice at all, but on the snow on top of the ice. At the banks, the ice was covered in snow. Further on, the wind had done a good job of whipping a good deal of it away. His foot crunched through the snow and he wiggled it to clear away a patch of ice underneath.

The ice revealed itself. A substance of depthless black. It reflected nothing. It spoke of nothing beyond. He tapped at it.

“Frozen solid,” he said.

Out over the center, water flowed out of several gaps, gulping back into cracks a few feet downstream. A few rocks jutted out -- an encouraging sign that the water was not deep here. But not a guarantee. Nothing in this dark and cold and at this river was a guarantee -- not the rocks, or the seeming thickness of the ice, or the weeks of freezing temperatures. No one who had seen the famous pictures of those three students staring lifelessly up through the ice could guarantee anything on this river.

“We’re either all in, or we’re all out,” said Geoff.

He turned to us and gazed at me with those slit eyes, small and close set, and I looked into that pinched face and remembered seeing him on the first day of school, when I first ventured into our shared room. It was one of those hallmark experiences where the rug is instantly and cruelly pulled out from under you. He was standing there with his parents: his father, a walking beer belly in Boston Red Sox garb, and his mother, a worn out Patty Duke lookalike with sagging everything and frizzled hair. Geoff " small-headed, beady-eyed, pointy-nosed " reminded me of a junkie who’d just walked out of some dive bar in a bad part of just about any depressed town. He seemed somehow unnaturally short, as if something had stunted his growth, as if he lacked key nutrients in his diet for the proper formation of muscle and bones. When he saw me, an insidiously sly look came over his face as he smiled. There was something malicious in it, as if he had accurately read my pallor and was already devising a plan for my downfall.

I suppose it was a sign of his success that I was resigned to risk my life to fulfill his idiotic plans. Weren’t we all resigned to it? Again, that grotesque pleasure, that taste of vomit at the back of my throat.

How had I become so utterly powerless?

“Jesus Christ,” Flounder said again. It seemed about all he could say, now. 

“It’s not so bad.”

He stepped forward as he said this -- Stephen -- a pale moon face wrapped in black.

“You just have to stay on the white spots, the snow. Wherever it goes black you step over. And you go quickly. Distribute your weight evenly on both feet. Don’t get stuck in the snow. Don’t let your weight build to crack the ice."

I didn’t know Stephen well. I regarded him as a lonely kid from down the hall who roomed with Dougie and hung out with us every now and then and didn’t say much or seem to offer much at all. It thought it was just by chance he was with us that night.

“You just have to watch for one thing," continued Stephen. “Where the water goes over the ice. You slip -- you fall. You fall -- ”

He didn’t complete the sentence.

Geoff turned to Dougie.

“All or nothing.”

By now, Dougie must have known there was no escape. He must have only been trying his best not to piss his pants.

“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” cried Alexis and before anyone could say a word he was out there, screaming and hooting like a madman, sliding and skipping away, sliding and skipping, sliding and skipping, over the black parts, over the watery patches and scrambling up the other side.

“Jesus Christ!” barked Flounder as he roared with laugher. “Alexis, you f*****g crazy b*****d!”

Alexis hooted and hollered from the other side.

“Yeah! Yeah! You do that you b******s! You do that! You do that s**t! Let me see you do that s**t! F**k yeah!”

“He did it right,” noted Stephen.

Alexis continued to cackle from the darkness on the other side like a crazed woodland spirit.

Before we knew it, there Stephen went. Silently. And without flailing his arms, as Alexis had. He did a kind of dance over the ice, sliding and skipping. There was a precision about it, simple and effortless, and then it was over. He landed his feet on the other side, walked up the bank and sat down in the snow. Only Alexis clapped and hollered an approving applause.

Geoff turned to us: “All or none!” he said and then he too darted out over the ice. Not so gracefully. He hit the middle part too hard, it seemed. In the moonlight it was hard to tell, but it looked like he landed a foot into one of the black gaps, at which point he slipped and fell forward onto the heels of his hands. There was a sickening crack -- a bone? the ice? My stomach churned. But Geoff rebounded, shot back up, swayed uneasily for a moment, but seemed stuck.

“Move!” cried Flounder.

But Geoff didn’t move. He stayed right where he was, standing right in the middle of the river.

“Jesus, move, Geoff, move!” cried Flounder.

“Move!” screamed Alexis.

But Geoff just stood there. He turned his face to us. He was laughing. He flexed his knees.

Flounder squeaked Geoff’s name out. He couldn’t get anything else out as Geoff stood there, laughing, bouncing his legs on the ice in the middle of the river. He wasn’t stuck on anything. He was just insane. 

“It’s f*****g solid, man!” yelled Geoff. 

And then, calmly, he just walked over to the other side and crunched up the bank, laughing.

Flounder and I looked at eachother at the same time. Then Flounder burst out laughing.

“F**k this s**t,” he said.

And then he calmly walked out over the ice like he was taking a stroll in the park. 

Flounder wasn’t exactly a lean boy. Although he was addressed to his face by his proper name, Jerry, everybody called him Flounder behind his back. He drank too much even by college binge-drinking standards, he perspired profusely, and despite his ruddy cheeks he always had the sickly sheen of someone coming down with the flu. But there was more -- an awkwardness about his body, his movements. Even sober, he had an unpleasant way of flopping around, tumbling down the hall like a sack of potatoes. His flesh seemed to hang off his body disproportionately, throwing off his weight. On the numerous occasions I found myself having to help others drag him down The Bloody Way, I felt the cool mass of skin under his neck buffet my hand like a slab of raw meat.

Imagine this picture of grace sauntering out upon the same iced-over river that had swallowed three students whole. I lost my breath. First Geoff bouncing his legs, taunting the river like the imbecile he was, and now Flounder, all 200-plus pounds of uneven, unbalanced flesh, just walking out there. I saw the white and I saw the black and I saw Flounder’s feet and on the other side I saw three pale faces in the night: madness, triumph, certitude.

Flounder went down so hard, so quickly, I couldn’t imagine he hadn’t been pushed or pulled. It was as if invisible hands had come up out of the ice and yanked his ankles. At the glistening point where the water freely flowed over the ice, he went straight off his feet and flat on his back. There was a thud. He didn’t move. That was it. No horrible crack. No crashing through the ice. No panicked grappling at the edges before going under.

Silence. The gurgling of the water.

My God, I thought. You don’t have to fall through the ice for it to kill you.

And then I saw it. A slab of ice tilting upwards, like the bow of a sinking ship, rising under the weight of Flounder’s upper torso, the bottom half sinking, and with it, Flounder. Water filling in now around the still body -- that horrible black water, the stuff of the ice itself. Death. The river would have him, like it had the others. The river would consume him. 

A body, a form, shifting on the surface of the ice. From the looks of it -- Stephen, on his belly. Wiggling out there. Wiggling and reaching. He grabbed hold of Flounder’s foot. A boot. The others behind held onto Stephen’s feet. Grunting. Snow crunching. Gradually, the body began to clear the gaping hole, the slab of ice turned downward and then, as Stephen gave a final yank, the ice broke free with a crunch and the water flowed through and over the newly formed opening, breaking new fissures in the ice, which in turned peeled away. Flounder’s lifeless body disappeared to the other side, like a kill being dragged into a cave. 

I stood and watched the river erupt. It roared an empty roar. An angry roar. It hadn’t gotten what it wanted. 

Author's Note

Yes, ignore grammer and spelling. This hasn't been professionally edited. If you would like to see the next chapter, let me know. And thank you for taking the time to read my writing!