Shall We Go Under the Ice Together?

The Man Stumbled boarding the airplane: Wengell caught his elbow, held him up.

"Thanks, "he said, "Damned bifocals," Wengell said don't mention it or something of the sort. Afterward it came to him that he knew the man, the idea seeping, drifting into his mind, tantalizingly, in the way many memories, many ideas had begun to do in the past few years, When the stewardess had finished the oxygen-mask demonstration. Wengell leaned into the aisle and caught her eye, She came to him a child of 22 or so, flat-bellied. tanned. cool.

No. she was terribly sorry, there was no passenger list aboard.

The man in B2." Wengell said. "I'm next to positive he's an old friend, someone I haven't seen in years, But I need to be sure, before I speak to him. Would you just check his ticket? If I'm right, the name will be Samuel Cole."

"You're right," she said, "we know him, Mr. S. T. Cole. Cambridge, Mass,"

He smiled his thanks. When she came back with the drink wagon, he asked for bourbon and water. He took half the drink in two slow swallows, placed the glass carefully in the middle of the tray, lighted a cigarette, He waited in contented patience for the ease, the slow-down, the balancing. He looked at the tall glass, these whiskey, dark-brown here, tea-tan there against the ice lumps, the surface shimmering in microwaves under the infinitesimal vibrations of the engines. The windows seat beside him was empty. An ocean of cloud. snow-bright in the sun. and, a long way off, a contrail quartering their course.

Sam Cole, Short. Fatter. but still strong: when he'd caught his elbow, he'd felt his forearm, hard and beefy still. Sam Cole. He has as much to do with my being alive today. Wengell thought, as my mother. Ah. an exaggeration, but not by much, There was a story in his family, going to Billy Wengell's curiosity, so marked, his mother had always said. even when he was six months, a story that he'd leaned from a window of the apartment on Belmont Street, ten floors up, to see his father park the car, leaned to wave, standing on the window seat, his mother had caught him by an ankle--"a pitcher of martinis in the other hand," she always finished, "and I never spilled a drop," Sam Cole had done that much. No, he'd done more.

Wengell took another drink. The icecold of the glass delighted his finger tips, as the stuff it held was delighting his mind and his body, Watching a film, a Western, some unremembered night, the scene, regular in the folk drama as the shoot-out, two cowpunchers in off the trail, six weeks from the last drink, grabbing the bottle of white mule, upended, shuddering, gasping. eye-popping, what does it taste like? the other one said and his buddy, Damned if I know, and in the row behind someone saying, I'll never understand why a man would drink something that does that to him! No, Wengell thought, you never will, a good thing or a bad, damned if I know,

Sam Cole, Staring at the seat back ahead of him, Wengell saw the frozen lake again, the narrow sheet of blue water 30 feet from shore, the little brown dog. It was a Saturday morning. very cold, bright sun, crystal Minnesota air. Behind him, up the long slope, the house, red brick and white wood trim, a big house, fat and solid on the ground, seven chimneys sprouting off the roof, It had been built 40-odd years before, around 1900, built for what it was, a fraternity house, dormitory on top, 15 bedrooms, complete to the chapter room opening secretly behind the canned-goods shelves in the basement. The dog, puppy, the cook's dog, Mrs. Melvin's, had followed Wengell down the lawn, shaking its paws in the snow, and it was nosing now along the pebbled shore, Ears up, sniffing, it padded onto the ice, skidded, sat down, levered itself up again, Wengell smiled, He made a little snowball, bowled it down the hill. It rolled three or four feet onto the ice; the puppy ran for it. skidded again, Wengell rolled another, bigger; and perhaps because it was bigger, it ran the whole way, all the way to the open water. Four or five feet away, the puppy saw the water, braced his legs, locked every-thing up and slid, slowly, most comically, into it. He came up immediately. turned himself, hooked his front feet over the ice, No good, He wasn't strong enough, the water weighed him down, whatever, clearly he could never make it, He was for drowning. Run back to the house? Rope? Ladder? The dog wouldn't last that long. Yell? Who'd hear, through double windows and over the radio, volume knob up against the stop as always? Wengell edged out on the ice, Halfway, it popped, a sharp snapping sound. He stood rock still, holding a big breath, but it held. He went flat and crawled to the puppy, crawled halfway back, shoving the shivering, skinny-looking thing ahead of him, Then he picked it up, wrapped it in his jacket and ran for the furnace room.

It was a party night, that Saturday. Late in the afternoon, in the big living room. a couple of freshmen rolling two gallon jugs of gin and vermouth back and forth from one couch to the other. tradition, running back to the years before Roosevelt killed Prohibition--1932?--when the jugs held straight A, distilled water, juniper essence, Four-foot logs in the fireplace, A cribbage game, louder than usual, in the cardroom, Petey Jensen, half-stoned already, winning as usual, easily, negligently, never counting the holes as he pegged, just dropping it in, no one ever challenged him anymore, or counted after him, Bing Crosby on the box, where the blue of the night meets the gold of the day, serene and liquid over the frying-pan crackle of the record. probably 500 plays behind it. At the window--it must have been 20 feet long, that window, Wengell thought--Tony Braccio, blue-black and square-looking, silhouetted against the orange sunset glowing on the lake, dusk sifting down like blue sand to snuff it out. Braccio was not. Wengell knew, watching the sunset glowing on the lake, dusk sifting down like blue sand to snuff it out, Braccio was not, Wengell knew, watching the sunset, He was thinking that in a couple of hours he'd have to go to a sorority house, pick up a blind date, bring her here and, in cold sobriety, push her around the floor, dancing like a bear, the lumps of muscle on his back tensed stone-hard under her hand. Well, it had been like that Wengell remembered, a whiff of roast beef from the basement kitchen, somebody bragging how much date dope--vanilla ice cream and gin beat up on a malted mixer--he was going to pour into his girl, and then ... nothing, 19 times in 20, in those days.

The party, when it came on the screen of his mind, was vague and edge-less for Wengell. Black tie, pastel, shining, silky evening gowns, beautiful girls, they really would be beautiful or at any rate terribly good-looking, maybe two semipigs in the whole crowd, blinds, or somebody's sister, Kappas, most of the rest, or Gamma Phis. If you were a sophomore, as Wengell was then, and you brought a girl from outside the circle, from one of the dormitories, God forbid, or even from a fringe sorority like Sig Delt, an upperclassman, or maybe a couple of them, would have a little chat with you next day. Nothing would be said directly, you'd just be offered help. There'd be someone for you to meet, that sort of thing.

At the window end of the room, grouped around the big Bechstein, a five-piece band, skinny-looking jokers, working their way through school on the sax or whatever, and waiting on table somewhere. A chaperone couple. usually old Something Thompson, a professional alumnus, the kind who knew all words to all the verses of all the songs, red-face and happy, and his wife, worrying behind him, smiling, when he hit the punch bowl. Noise, Seventeen kinds of tremendous noise, it seemed to Wengell. Everybody smashed. That was the main idea. You took a run at the evening like someone going for the broad, jump, the whole point and purpose was to get smashed and have it to brag about in the morning. Maybe three wouldn't: Braccio, who lived for his muscles, Pete Elsworth, who genuinely hated the stuff, and Mike Down, ulcer.

Wengell's date bored him and he bored her. She had been set up for him, as in a brokered marriage, She was a Gamma Phi, like him a sophomore, and she was his date because she'd been told to be, Two times was the deal, maybe three, and then she'd be free to turn him down and say yes to somebody who rated her: white-blonde. violet eyes, a great shape--well, a little flat, but that was before big ones counted so much. The thing to do was dance a lot and, shout at each other, and drop a few martinis or whatever was going. It wasn't that Wengell didn't have a girls of his own, he did; and not only that, he was laying her, which was more, he knew well, than most of these aces were doing with theirs; but she was a barb--barbarian--and she lived in a dorm, so she might as well have been a Zulu with a chicken bone in her nose. For lower-classmen, a formal party was a must: You could be in the infirmary or you could be at the party, And he had brought her to the fall formal, and next day he'd had the word. Still... .

Sam Cole had been a junior that year. Wengell didn't know much about him. He laughed a lot, he kept himself in shape, he drank only on parties, an odd beer other times. He got good grades. stylish, say Bs and --Bs. A practical, solid man. Plainly, much money; for one thing, he drove a Chrysler roadster. He seemed to be kind. and not abrasively and condescendingly, as was the form with some upperclassmen. Wengell had thought, as a freshman, that he owed Sam Cole a great deal, owed him his membership in the fraternity. At the (continued on page 148) Under the ice Together? (continued from page 126) end of initiation, three days and nights of it, no sleep and some quite unpleasant happenings, the pledges were taken, singly, blindfold, into the chapter room, for, they were told, the final ceremony. In candlelight, and in the buzzing recitation of much Greek ritual, the pin was fastened to whatever the pledge was wearing--a shirt, usually. He was called brother, and brothers swarmed around to congratulate him. And just then, one, shouting No, by God, he was goddamned if he would stand for it, this son of a bitch was going to be sworn over his dead body, this one would rush the pledge, grab the pin and tear it off, the front of the shirt with it. General horror and dismay. A fight would start, three or four brothers would hustle the poor pledge out, give him a drink, console him, put him in a room alone while they hurried back to the basement to straighten things out. It had been Cole who'd fought for Wengell, and until his sophomore year, when he'd been told, of course, that the pin-ripping happened to every pledge, was merely the final refinement of Hell Week, he had truly thought of him as brother. He knew they couldn't be friends. Money stood in the way, for one thing, and politics for another. Cole, like practically everybody else in the house, was a straight-up Hoover Republican. Anyone for Roosevelt--in his view, a New Dealer--was even money to be C. P. So, you didn't talk about it. The fraternity code of courtesy was iron-hard. An occasional crack--"What's the late word from Moscow, Billy?"--was OK, but anything serious was dead out. Wengell might be a longhair, oddball, but he wore the pin, and his father had worn the pin, and that was that. Still, and knowing all this. Wengell sometimes wondered what he was doing there, much as he liked the place, much as it meant to him, an oasis of security for him, a stranger among people who believed utterly in everything he did not, people he was meant to love and who were meant to love him.

Looking back, Wengell could remember Cole taking over the drums for a set, and he could remember bumping into him at the bar, making room for him to come out with three glasses in each hand, but that was all. Everything happened afterward. It was the thing, after a party, to go to a bar. Terry's, a famous speak-easy in the old days and still run like one. Sign-in time for the girls was 12:30, so it would be around one when everybody had got to Terry's and sunk a couple of her beers. (For good friends, she'd still drop in an ounce of A, scooping it out of a round-bottomed bowl next to the sink.) Saturdays, the place was solid, practically back to back, a tight mix of the fraternity crowd, barbs, town people, an occasional instructor, usually economics, truck drivers, cops off duty, a few hustlers and a few more who might be.

As nearly as he could remember afterward, Wengell had been standing somewhere around the middle of the room, his back to the bar, half a beer in his right hand, talking to no one, looking at nothing in particular, when he felt a hand jammed inside his starched tight collar; instantly he was swung so hard the beer glass flew out of his hand, the collar popped, he spun, slid along the floor, turning, until he thumped against someone's knees. He got up fast, half-sobered by fear and fury. Sam Cole, glass of beer in his left hand, the collar in the other. They told Wengell, next day, that he'd gone out of control on the street, while they were trying to put him into the car; but he knew it had happened then, when he saw the collar, because that was when the blackout started. What happened then, they said, he ran at Cole, yelling, hit him twice, got knocked down instantly and was getting up when everybody swarmed in to stop it. It took four of them to get him into the car, a green Plymouth touring car with side curtains up. They carried him into the house, undressed him, shoved him into a shower--he slumped in a corner of it--and turned it on full cold. When he began to shiver, they took him out, rubbed him dry, put him in pajamas and bathrobe. Halfway through this process, he tried to dive over the railing into the stair well. He didn't remember any of it. When he picked up the thread, he was sitting on the couch in the music room and Sam Cole was sitting at the other end. Sam was talking. He seemed stone sober. He was speaking softly, placatingly, persuasively, he was saying. "Look, Billy, I'm sorry, but you can see how it happened, can't you? because after all ... look. I'm really sorry... ." After a bit, Billy began to think about the dog. Mrs. Melvin's dog. He turned off Sam Cole entirely. He was trying to remember when he'd gone out on the ice for the dog, how many days ago. When he had worked it out, one day, that day, that morning, he turned toward Sam Cole, who was looking down at his bare feet, and jumped for the door, the far side of the living room, just past the piano. He hit it running, it opened out, and he was on the porch. A hard turn left, and he came out from under the roof, there was ice on the floor there, he fell, crashed into the railings, but caught one of them, pulled hard, and was on the steps without having stopped at all. He felt marvelously strong and quick. At the bottom of the six steps, another turn, he fell again, up in the same motion, bouncing almost, jumped the other three steps and was on the lawn, the downslope straight to the lake, maybe 100 feet. He half turned for one look. Cole was six or seven feet behind him, he'd known somebody was there, he'd heard him fall twice, but Sam's arm, reaching, was nowhere near getting him, and the others, behind Cole, were hardly on the lawn. He could see the ice now, and the strip of open water, black as coal in the moonlight: he was going to make it, he knew just where he was going to leave his feet and dive, flat, he'd come up to 20 feet out, under solid ice and snow, they'd mill around, yelling for shovels, but no hope, all done, and that notion, a happy one it seemed at the instant, was the last he remembered.

He woke on a bottom bunk in the dormitory. It was morning, early, pale light. He was lying on his back. He raised his right hand to his face, or tried to: a loop of clothesline around it, under the bed, to his left wrist. A big freshman, John Mellaston, sat on the next bunk, looking at him gravely, blankly.

"Good morning, John." Wengell said.

"Good morning. Billy."

"You can untie me now, John. I'm all right now."

Mellaston shook his head. "I'm sorry, I can't," he said. "We have to wait for one of the seniors to get up. Seven o'clock. Joel Kellogg said he'd be up. Can I get you some orange juice or anything?"

"No, thanks."

Joel Kellogg came around at seven, stretching, yawning, tying a bow in the belt of a mouse-gray bathrobe.

"Are you all right now. Billy?" he said.

"I've got a hangover that would kill a Siberian goat," Wengell said, "but I'm all right."

"No more of this foolishness?" Kellogg said. "I've got your word? Because I'm responsible."

"No more," Wengell said. "I must have been out of my mind."

Kellogg nodded gravely to Mellaston. He couldn't untie the knots. He went off and found a knife somewhere.

"Do you know what happened?" Wengell asked him.

"Well, just at the end I do." Mellaston said. "Sam saw he wasn't going to catch you, so he dove for your knees, a real old-fashioned flying tackle: and when you hit the ground, you were knocked out cold. You never did come to, but they got some med student from next door to look at you. He said you were OK, so they tied you in bed. Jerry (continued on page 176) Under the Ice Together (continued on page 148) Smith watched you till four, then he woke me up. That's about it."

It was a standard Sunday morning, everyone moaning hangover and scuffing down improbable quantities of corn flakes, sausage, eggs, quarts of milk. When Wengell came downstairs, everything that touched his senses was dead normal. Sunday-morning-after-a-party breakfast noises, air, tone, colors, everything, and he knew instantly that the form had been laid down, and what it was: Nothing had happened. Brother had not raised hand against brother. It had never happened. This seemed eminently sensible and civilized to him. He was grateful. He would go along with that, he would go along with all his heart. Later, of course, someday privately, maybe tomorrow, he would talk with Sam Cole, and find out. But for now ... there was an empty chair next to Petey Jensen.

"How now, mate?" Jensen said. "You scored, last night. I hear? Did you in fact score on that gentle blue-eyed popsy, and she so virginal? And you so virginal, comes to that? You scored, in fact, or not?"

Wengell never had the talk with Sam Cole. It might have happened in the first week after the party, but somehow it did not, there was no good chance, no reasonable opening. And then with every day it mattered less. After all, last week was medieval history, last month almost one with Nineveh and Tyre. Billy Wengell didn't really think about that night again until a September day two years later, coming back to school, going into the house for the first time, knowing that Sam Cole wouldn't be there. But he thought about it as time wore on, he thought about it quite a lot. It nagged at him. Why? And where had it started?

Well. There he was, S. T. Code. Cambridge, Mass., in B2. The seat next to him was empty, the man was playing gin in the lounge up forward. Wengell's little tenth-pint bourbon bottles rolled empty on the tray. He got up.

"Sam." he said. Cole looked up, blankly, "I'm Billy Wengell."

"For God's sake!" Cole said. He stuck his hand up. "Come on in here, sit down. My God, it's been thirty bloody years, hasn't it, at least?"

"I don't want to know," Wengell said. "A long time, anyway."

"What are you drinking?"

"Bourbon, but I've had mine. Two to a customer, you know. And I see you've had yours."

"I'm not a customer." Cole said. "And no friend of mine is a customer." He punched the call button. He ordered four bourbons, he didn't say "please" and the girl didn't even blink.

An hour later, somewhere over Hoover Dam, they had got through most of it, who was dead and who wasn't, who'd married whom, and what a damned shame, a 20-story apartment building where the house had stood, wiped off the face of the earth, not a trace, might as well never have existed, too bad, too bad.

"I wondered what had become of you. Billy," Sam Cole said. "I don't believe I ever saw anything about you in the alumni magazine. Didn't expect to. You weren't the type, writes in saying I was just promoted to assistant manager at the widget works."

"Not me." Wengell said. He sketched it in: the year on the freighter. France, the War, the piano-playing time, steam radio, TV, the studios, the weekly N. Y.--L. A. commute.

"I've always wondered." Cole said. "When you're up there in front of an orchestra, waving that stick, are you really doing anything? Excuse me, I'm ignorant. But are you?"

Wengell laughed. "Keeping time," he said. "Giving them the beat. Well, you see, the work has been done before, in rehearsal. You build the train in rehearsal: performance, you run it down the track and hope a wheel doesn't fall off."

"Does it give you a big feeling of accomplishment? That you've done something?"

"I guess so. Some people more than others. For me, on a free choice, I'd rather be playing. Not in the orchestra. I could do that any time. Alone, Concerts. That's what I wanted to do. But I was only very good, very competent; and for a pianist, that's nothing but a license to starve to death."

"I'm tone deaf," Cole said. "It's just noise to me. I sometimes wonder what I'm missing." He started at Wengell, a pugnacious, hard-looking man. "Although, at that. I've been too busy. To hear much music, I mean. I got the notion I had to make as much money as my father left me, and that was quite a lot. So I've been hustling. Dollar here, dollar there. Picking it up. When you know money, it's just a game. Like poker. And that's about it. Except for fringe benefits, like I can get twenty drinks if I want them. The stewardess knows I have the idea I own thirty-five percent of this airplane. I pay thirty-five percent of her salary. Big deal."

They were perhaps 5000 feet over the cloud level, there was little relative movement, the plane was floating there, lightly, magically held between the rolling floor of snow cloud and the illimitable blue stratosphere.

"Billy," Cole said. "Do you remember that night at Terry's, after the party?"

"I do, indeed," Wengell said.

"The next day, and the day after, and for a long time. I thought I ought to tell you I was sorry about that. Right chance never seemed to come."

"I wanted to talk to you about it, too. At least I should have thanked you. After all, you did keep me out of the water. Not to put too fine a point on it, you did save my life."

"I was thinking about myself," Cole said. "Just selfishness, Normal. When I saw you were too fast for me, I got scared. I knew about that open water, I knew what you were up to, and it would be my fault. So I took off and dove for you. I remember thinking I might break your legs, that ground was like concrete, but I didn't care, long as I stopped you. That's the truth."

"Why not?" Wengell said. "It was a bad time. It was a bad night."

"Oh, I don't know." Cole said.

"The part I never did understand," Wengell said, "was there at Terry's, when you hit me that shot from behind. What was bugging you? What had I done to you?"

Cole twisted in the seat to look at him. He seemed to have to move his whole upper body in order to turn his head any distance. His eyes were a bright washed blue.

"Not a goddamn thing that I know," he said. "Maybe I'd have hit anybody who was standing where you were. Maybe I was just sore that night. Maybe it was you--I have to admit there were times, listening to you talk, I'd say to myself, that son of a bitch. He knows things I don't know where to look up. And I figured you were a goddamn radical of some kind, fixing to burn down the country. I don't know. I was drunk. I was smashed."

"So was I." Wengell said, "What got me about it. I think, was the initiation bit, when you knocked Ally Manton on his ass, when he grabbed my pin ... even after I knew it was a put-on. I wanted to believe it wasn't ... I wanted to believe I had one real home in my life finally and all that ... still, there were times, as you say, when I'd look at you and think that bastard has more money than he knows what to do with, and I'm up against the wall... ."

The engines came down, the airplane slowed against the soft air, the flaps crept out of their holes, the seat-belt sign lighted.

"The real thing about the bit on the lawn, the real thing, to be honest," Cole said. "I was scared, as I said a minute ago, you'd go in the water, and it would be my fault. But I was scared of more than that. I knew if you went in the water. I had to go in the water. I dealt the hand, and I had to play it out. And I didn't think anybody, going under that ice. was coming up again."

An hour later, somewhere over Hoover Dam, they had got through most of it, who has dead and who wasn't, who'd married whom, and what a damned shame, a 20-story apartment building where the house and stood, wiped off the face of the earth, not a trace, might as well never have existed, too bad, too bad.

"I wondered what had become of you. Billy," Sam Cole said. "I don't believe I ever saw anything about you in the alumni magazine. Didn't expect to. You weren't the type, writes in saying I was just promoted to assistant manager at the widget works."

"Not me." Wengell said. He sketched it in: the year on the freighter. France, the war, the piano-playing time, steam radio. TV, the studios, the weekly N. Y.--L. A. commute.

"I've always wondered." Cole said. "When you're up there in front of an orchestra, waving that stick, are you really doing anything? Excuse me, I'm ignorant. But are you?"

Wengell laughed. "Keeping time," he said. "Giving them the beat. Well, you see, the work has been done before, in rehearsal. You build the train in rehearsal: performance, you run it down the track and hope a wheel doesn't fall off."

Does it give you a big feeling of accomplishment? That you've done something?"

"I guess so. Some people more than others. For me, on a free choice. I'd rather be playing. Not in the orchestra. I could do that any time. Alone. Concerts. That's what I wanted to do. But I was only very good, very competent; and for a pianist, that's nothing but a license to starve to death."

I'm tone deaf," Cole said. "It's just noise to me. I sometimes wonder what I'm missing." He stared at Wengell, a pugnacious, hard-looking man. "Although, at that. I've been too busy. To hear mush music. I mean. I got the notion I had to make as much money as my father left me, and that was quite a lot. So I've been hustling. Dollar here, dollar there. Picking it up. When you know money, it's just a game. Like poker. And that's about it. Except for fringe benefits, like I can get twenty drinks if I want them. The stewardess knows I have the idea I own thirty-five percent of this airplane. I pay thirty-five percent of her salary. Big deal."

They were perhaps 5000 feet over the cloud level, there was little relative movement, the plane was floating there, lightly, magically held between the rolling floor of snow cloud and the limitable blue stratosphere.

"Billy," Cole said. "Do you remember that night at Terry's after the party?"

"I do, indeed." Wengell said.

"The next day, and the day after, and for a long time. I thought I ought to tell you I was sorry about that. Right chance never seemed to come."

"You interested in a 'nooner'?"

"I wanted to talk to you about it, too. At least I should have thanked you. After all, you did keep me out of the water. Not to put too fine a point of it, you did save my life."

"I was thinking about myself." Cole said. "Just selfishness. Normal. When I saw you were too fast for me, I got scared. I knew about that open water. I knew what you were up to, and it would be my fault. So I took off and dove for you. I remember thinking I might break your legs, that ground was like concrete, but I didn't care, long as I stopped you. That's the truth."

"Why not?" Wengell said. "It was a bad time. It was a bad night."

"Oh. I don't know." Cole said.

"The part I never did understand," Wengell said, "was there at Terry's, when you hit me that shot from behind. What was bugging you? What had I done to you?"

Cole twisted in the seat to look at him. He seemed to have to move his whole upper body in order to turn his bead any distance. His eyes were a bright washed blue.

"Not a goddamn thing that I know," he said. "Maybe I'd have hit anybody who was standing where you were. Maybe I was just sore that night. Maybe it was you--I have do admit there were times, listening to you talk. I'd say to myself, that son of a bitch. He knows things I don't know where to look up. And I figured you were a goddamn radical of some kind, fixing to burn down the country. I don't know. I was drunk. I was smashed."

"So was I." Wengell said. "What got me about it. I think, was the initiation bit, when you knocked Ally Manton on his ass, when he grabbed my pin ... even after I knew it was a put-on. I wanted to believe it wasn't ... I wanted to believe I had one real home in my life finally and all that ... still, there were times, as you say, when I'd look at you and think that bastard has more money than he knows what to do with, and I'm up against the wall... ."

The engines came down, the airplane slowed against the soft air, the flaps crept out of their holes, the seat-belt sign lighted.

"The real thing about the bit on the lawn, the real thing, to be honest." Cole said. "I was scared, as I said a minute ago, you'd go in the water, and it would be my fault. But I was scared of more than that. I knew if you went in the water. I had to go in the water. I death the hand, and I had to play it out. And I didn't think anybody, going under that ice, was coming up again.

"I thought, if I made the water, you'd stop." Wengell said.

"No. And that scared me. But, you know something? Looking back. I don't see why it did. Or I wish it hadn't."

"You do?" Wengell said. "You mean that?"

"I mean that." Cole said, "I mean it. Nothing's happened since, in these thirty years, to give me any different idea."

"There's nobody holding you," Wengell said. "Is there?"

Cole turned around again. He smiled, in a way.

"I figure there are about fifty people holding me," he said. "How many holding you?"

"I don't know," Wengell said. "Thirty?"

"You see? I'd have liked it better, under the ice, when I could have, than the way I've got to go now, and nothing to say about it."

The no-smoking sign came on. The turbines dropped another few hundred turns. It was all spread out below now, greens, browns, pinhead cars creeping on the freeways.

"So don't thank me." Cole said. "I didn't do you any favor." He cinched up his seat belt. "Did you ever go back," he said. "after you graduated?"

"No." Wengell said. "I never did."

"I did." Cole said. "Bad mistake, of course. Nothing the same. Hell, those were good years. Good people. Remember how it was, you'd come into the house, you'd know where you were, good people, good place to be ... hell, you know what I mean, remember that?"

"Sure, I remember that," Wengell said.

"All downhill from there," Cole said. "There's nothing in thirty-five percent of this, twenty percent of that, and all that crap, to plug a hole like that hole. For me. You? Waving that stick up there?"

"I don't know," Wengell said. "I haven't thought a great deal about it, that way."

The gin player came down the aisle. Wengell stood. He gave Cole his hand. "See you again, maybe." he said.

"Every good reason to doubt it." Cole said. "Nice this time, anyway, Nice talking with you."

The stewardess came by, checking belts.

"Was your friend glad to see you?" she said. "Did he tell you what you wanted to know?"

"No." Wengell said. "Turned out to be somebody else. Would you believe it, somebody else?"

She smiled, shook her head in mock bafflement.

"And you seemed so sure," she said.