Blizzard Ambush
By Katherine L. Holmes

Because Grimson didn’t usually falter at talk, he prodded Neil with questions short as those in foreign phrase books.

“T-treacherous?”

He was still cold. Neil was to tell about glaciers in Norway. Before he came ice fishing, Grimson hadn’t been confident that the lake outside wouldn’t be treacherous in March. They were northwest of Minneapolis and their college. Grimson and Neil were crouching again, now at the fireplace in the unheated cottage that Neil’s grandfather had built. Grimson baited the fire with birch bark, paying attention to anything that might take his mind off thawing.

Neil was cautious with his college friend, hoping for a place in the off-campus house that Grimson was leasing for the next year. When Grimson got disgruntled, he could show a fang tooth. Neil had seen it during the morose meditations out on the ice when Grimson could still move his mouth. Grimson had become so cold, waiting for a tip-up flag to shiver in the dormant landscape, that he wasn’t talkative.

Grimson wasn’t even commenting on the brown plaster Indian face that was set in with the stones of the mantel. The year before, 1973, he had been involved in a marathon debate after the news of Wounded Knee, the re-enactment of reservation tragedy. The debate was a draw because the people listening fell asleep from a keg of beer.

Neil heard himself say, “I guess the glaciers can be so treacherous that if they crack, icicles as long as waterfalls crash down. The girl I was with heard one booming once. I walked on a glacier and it was all ropy—as if the river was zapped solid.”

“The girl?”

Before going on about the girl, Neil went to stoke the kitchen woodstove. He returned with a coffeepot of steaming water, poured himself a mug of instant coffee and then paused while Grimson poured himself a brandy and water. Neil wasn’t sure himself how to account for the woman he traveled with in Norway.

“I met her in southern Norway. Not in Oslo. I just wandered around there, feeling as if I’d arrived everywhere at the wrong time. Jet lag, dusk until 2 a.m., nonchalant, non-grinning females. I was so dazed that I went to the art museum so I wouldn’t have to ask directions. But this artist, Krohg, made me feel as if I was going to meet someone.

“I hadn’t talked to anyone about much besides the time and the food. I ate recurring dinners of veal, boiled potatoes, and bland cabbage cooked with seeds. Finally, I went to Bergen for more of it. I have relatives on my mother’s side there. I didn’t know much about my grandfather’s people except that they settled in South Dakota. They had lost any correspondence with their people in Norway.

“At a Bergen hostel, people grinned and gave me directions. So I walked through Bergen, thinking, This is socialism. It’s a fairy tale place, one where the poor quick kid got his share of the castle. I didn’t see any houses that you might call your castle. So I ended up on the porch of my only known relative—Gunnarsen.

“My removed cousin was an audiologist and he kept decreasing the volume of his voice while we were talking. He probably thought I had an American blare. So I concentrated on my strong Norwegian coffee and the braided bakery stuff when another cousin came over, Ilse who was going to the University of Oslo. She said she would show me Bergen. I felt as if I’d caught the fish that gives every wish.”

Neil slurped his coffee, having come to his limit for a monologue. He couldn’t describe the Gunnarsens' house because they stayed on the porch, in view of the other snug houses in their neighborhood. Neil somehow couldn’t tell the Gunnarsens that his budget included accommodations in Bergen at their house. Somehow he had given them the assurance of a rich American when all they could do was remark on the color of Neil’s eyes. He explained he was wearing blue contacts when his eyes had some green in them. The color of a fish that had gone exploring on the Gulf Stream, his Norwegian relatives agreed.

During this, Grimson had set out packages of sausage, roast beef, and bread. He was busying his tongue with frosty potato chips and he was now wearing a blanket cape over his long underwear and his wool sweater. His wool pants were de-icing at the fireplace.

Neil began looking for the duffel bag that contained mustard and stony brownies.

Instead of asking more about Norway, Grimson was staring into the yard with the alert look of the Indian on the mantel. “Neil, why is that Indian on the mantel?” he finally asked.

Past the lacquered logs between which mortar seeped like adipose tissue, the snow had an independent gleam. Even in the dusk, Neil could see tracks stenciled around the clearing of the cottage. Wafts of air were stirring up the snow nearer to the cabin. And then Neil saw that Grimson was watching a snowy owl perched on a stack of wood in the lean-to shed.

“Looks like that owl is gazing at the Indian on the mantel, doesn’t it?” Neil commented.

“Why is it there?” Grimson asked again.

“The owl?” Neil laughed. “I’m not sure about the Indian, not even whether it’s Lakota or Ojibwa or Sioux. I was about ten when my grandfather died. And he never told me much about the Indian or his childhood. But he was just a kid during the Wounded Knee massacre.”

“He never said anything about it?” Grimson said incredulously.

“He only let me know that he didn’t think much of me playing cowboy,” Neil replied, switching on the radio as he remembered his grandfather’s scorn at his cowboy shirt and holsters in that very room. “I’m wondering how low the temperature is going.”

A weather forecaster seemed to stammer through static. “The wind is up and snow is on the way. Three inches are expected from the west by morning.”

“Better eat,” Grimson reacted. He was still shaking his head, but now he seemed to be showing his disapproval of the room too. Its décor consisted of an old pump organ, a wall hanging of a Scandinavian boy and girl flirting across a fence, and striped coverlets on the divans that also served as single beds.

Grimson opened a can of corn and shook it into an enamel camp pan. He was purposeful rather than careful about how the corn fell. Though prone to starting disputes about issues like the Wounded Knee conflict of the previous year, he looked lethargic. Grimson was just under six feet, like Neil in build, but his fashionably unbarbered hair was brown, coarse in texture. Neil’s Scandinavian complexion would redden near the fireplace. They set their skewers for cooking the meat and bread like ice fishing poles at the hearth.

“So what happened with the girl, Neil?” Grimson asked, pouring Neil a brandy and water too.

“First I did the town. Going everywhere with Ilse’s crowd, I mean. So I finally talked to the Norwegians after they seemed so terse when I was on my own. These guys were like Americans with potato chips when they got going on some big topic. They didn’t lead up with small talk either.”

Neil went mute, remembering Ilse’s unbouncing rejoinders to his exuberance at seeing the night skyline. It was flecked with opal gulls and gull-bright sails on the sea that went amber late at night. Her failure to flirt, to blandish him the way women might at a Grimson kegger, made him as somber as the four dollar beers did. He chalked up his low libido to Ilse being his cousin, kind-of. And now, like the Norwegian men, Grimson was baiting him to talk.

“The Norwegians, especially this guy named Trygg, started baiting me about America. We went to a bar after seeing Eugene O’Neill’s play, A Long Day’s Journey into Night. I couldn’t help laughing at how the Norwegian actors played people feeling their drugs and alcohol, not people hiding their effects. But then, I don’t understand much Norwegian.

“I guess I said I had a great time. The next thing I was being challenged to explain the meanings of great and best. They wanted to know why America had to be the greatest and the best. Trygg explained that Norwegians are looking for contentment.

“I’m not the American embassy. And then I thought that Eugene O’Neill or another American might be the best playwright of the century. So I stayed cheerful and got up to get the next round of beer. Then this old stony guy who had been listening at the bar started following me.

“He was babbling in Norwegian so Trygg translated. Everyone there has relatives in Minnesota, a Hansen family in Minneapolis, whatever. This man was sure I had relatives in Northern Norway, where he was from. Just by the bones in my face, he said. I was still connecting the dots on the Norwegian map. But he was a fisherman from up somewhere north near Trondheim. This guy looked so weathered that he seemed scaly, blonde and bald, his eyebrows like fins.

“I told him that Ilse was a distant cousin of mine and that I was wearing contact lenses. Somehow I ended up taking out my contacts and then the hazy fisherman did look like my grandfather. All I knew, I had to admit, was that he came to America from a fishing family. When I told them the name of the place, Trygg laughed at me. The farming didn’t work out in South Dakota, I said. So I told them that the fisherman got his wish in America and became a lawyer.

“The more we joked, I was afraid that the Norwegians might throw me on a boat with Nils from the North. Trygg was laughing because I didn’t know that my grandfather’s family was from a place between Trondheim and Lapland. We’d gone out to the street and I was groping since I’d put my contacts away. The sun was shining and it was nearly midnight.”

Neil gazed at the weather out the cabin window, reliving his worry that he would have to fish his fare to Trondheim. After he helped Ilse pay for the gas, a price as high as a tall tale, he tried the gambling machines installed in the station lobbies. He and Ilse got two lemons so often that they thought they could count on a third one rattling a jackpot for gas. To counteract his sprees with Ilse, he began buying jam, cheese, and bread, what was on all the Norwegian breakfast menus, after an American named Ann had a breakfast picnic with him in the hostel yard.

“A storm is dumping snow to the west. Winds up to 40 miles per hour. Travel advisory tonight for north central Minnesota.”

Neil had switched on the radio again. A sporadic wind was summoning wraith-like streaks of snow and this caused a butterfly net on the wall to sway like a spook’s hood. The pensive owl still made a pale oval on the woodpile.

Grimson replied purposefully but a drinking drawl had entered his voice. “Maybe we should make a dash for it, Neil. It’s less than an hour to town. That snowy owl out there looks as if it’s frozen.”

“If the visibility’s bad, an hour could turn into three hours,” Neil said.

Either Grimson winced from his third brandy or from resenting that Neil was comfortable slouched in his jeans and his elk ski sweater. “Well, I probably won’t find refreshing the excursion I have to make to the pot on the porch.” He pulled on his parka.

On return, he muttered, “I guess the owl’s not frozen.”

Neil hadn’t seen it jump up and shake out its wingspread when Grimson threw out the contents of the old chamber pot. Now it had resumed its post in the woodshed.

Neil had been sorting out the storm and suggested, “We’d better take a short drive with the car to the end of the drive. We could be enmired by morning.”

“There’s not a fourth of an inch on the ground yet,” Grimson retorted, embracing his blanket and hot brandy. “I haven’t finished eating yet. I want to know why that Indian is on the lookout here. And you still haven’t told me about your girl in Norway.” He had a parcel of popcorn now which he spilled, peering out the window at the tee-pee shaped evergreens.

“Probably it’s not much more significant than the Indian in the cigar store.”

“You were there when I got into that argument with Marty, weren’t you? We agreed that the politics of 1973 Wounded Knee was movie gunslinging. Then I said the Indians should have been integrated while Marty thought they should have been given a state. I guess your grandfather took the souvenir shop approach to America. Didn’t he talk about the farmers being afraid when the Indians danced to raise their ancestor ghosts?” Grimson was turning his mug. “I thought Scandinavians believed in ghosts.”

“My grandfather wasn’t much for rumor. He said something funny though when it was snowing. He asked me if my cowboy gun could stop the snow. Then he said, ‘The only uprising out there is winter, Neil. Winter is still the warrior. Snow is the siege.’”

Grimson was pulling on his heated pants and a second sweater. He switched off the static on the radio. “Snow isn’t an uprising, Neil. The brownies are almost thawed. What about mid-summer Norway and the girl?”

“There was the day the Norwegians wanted to discuss Wounded Knee. Ilse met me at Bergen harbor. She had to yell like an American because gulls were blowing in gusts around us. Her friends were meeting at a lake cottage, an hour or so from Bergen.”

Neil stared resolutely at the snow as he had at the sea that day, preparing to pass up another evening of entertainment and practicing tax sums. Ann the American was planning a cheap seaside lunch of flatbread and smoked salmon after she and a friend achieved a postcard view of Bergen, hiking the foothills. At the hostel, Neil had attempted to sell a silver teardrop pin he purchased in Oslo, but without success.

“The minute we went beyond the mountain pass, the weather was tranquil. I saw waterfalls that made me feel as if I was going to a wedding. Goats were hobbling around on rocks like white-whiskered old men whose property you can never have. But the scenery between Bergen and Oslo was a letdown, it was so much like Minnesota. King Olav of Norway prefers to live at his farm outside of Oslo. It looks like a prosperous dairy farm in Minnesota from the road.”

Back to himself, Grimson interjected, “I guess my relations got a better deal at the Land Office.” He laughed and coughed with the popcorn on the fire.

“The cabin we went to was on a secluded curve of lake. I bought salmon from the harbor market. Ilse made dessert pancakes with cloud berries.”

Neil remembered looking for the fastest laugh he’d heard in the north and seeing the Norwegian men sitting with deadpan expressions.

“We had got to talking about the Norwegian government providing apartments and time at home for unwed mothers. I almost felt guilty, having a third beer on someone else’s taxes. After eating, we went fishing. Just the guys, that is. Caught a few panfish.”

Neil had fished as well as the Norwegian men before he asked them about the oil that had been found offshore. Trygg answered that the ocean fishing had been terrible.

Grimson was coughing up his complaint. “Would you go through all this for a few crappies? If you didn’t get a Northern pike?”

He offered Neil the saucepan of popcorn, showing his fang-tooth, a sneer of either disapproval or dislike. “I’ll bet you’re one of those guys who saves money on heat because you’re growing scales.”

Neil was still in his sweater and jeans despite the wind slapping around the eaves and the snow harpooning its way into the clearing.

“The summer scenery after we went fishing was worth the Norwegians arguing about Wounded Knee with me. You wouldn’t believe these guys. Because I was from western Minnesota, they were guilting me about it. But the late night lake and sky were like peaches and paradise while we sipped aquavit. The women had taken care of the dishes. I’ll bet you’re one of those guys who wouldn’t notice that.”

Somehow, Grimson’s food containers were now stacked to his right, in the territory of Neil’s couch. Neil began to tell him about when Grimson would have wished he was there, even if Neil was resigning himself to a dorm room or a cramped dump for his senior year.

“I had older sisters so I noticed how the women were gone when we got back from fishing. When I looked for them, I almost turned to stone. And the Norwegian guys wanted to talk about Wounded Knee. The women had taken off their baggy clothing and they were going for a bathe, nude, in the lake. I talked at the window until I felt that it was against Norwegian form to watch. They demanded to know why Wounded Knee happened and why the longstanding treaties were being settled violently.

“They acted as if I had input into the problem because my parents live near South Dakota. ‘Why can’t you get along with the Indians there?’ ‘How is it that you can’t live with the natives?’

“They made it so personal, as if I approved of the military involvement. I had to say it wasn’t a question of getting along. I hadn’t known any full-blooded Indians at my schools. I said that most Americans only knew the Indian from Hollywood Westerns and that it was a tragedy how the national attention they deserved had to be in the cowboy-western mode. You should have been there Grimson. Arguing and enjoying the view. They were about to run me though a catechism—on aquavit!”

Neil blamed the aquavit on his attempt to kiss one of Ilse’s friends in the kitchen, not so out-of-order a gesture in Grimson’s house. Anitra was dark and indigo-eyed but she gave him an admonishing glower.

Now Grimson was glaring at him. “That’s what I said in my marathon argument! Why didn’t you talk about the conflict between the Indian leaders? Didn’t you remind the Norwegians that there’s a civil rights movement going on? To right wrongs that happened in the way of 18 th century European wars? Why didn’t you have a cause, Neil, instead of just getting excited about the girls? As if you were at a movie. You never make a risky remark, Neil. You know what you do?” Grimson addressed him with a drunken man’s frank dislike. “You get into your boat and you go fishing. But go on, Neil, tell me about the girl.”

Grimson hunched into his blankets, glaring at the frothy fire.

Neil concluded icily, “Ilse and I drove back to Bergen that night. But the girl who went to the glaciers with me was at the hostel. Ann. She goes to school in Iowa. We traveled together after we got to Alesund with the group at the hostel. It’s too awesome to see alone—the fjords from the ferries and the glaciers.

Neil recalled his relief in finding that his first itinerary was affordable. He had smarted from Ilse’s repudiation during their last drive together after he expressed his fondness for her. She had to explain with her cold disapproving glower that the Norwegian women were not trying to seduce him. His American upbringing caused him to misunderstand. She already had a misunderstanding with one of the men who drove back to Oslo.

Now Neil could hear Grimson groaning. “So that’s what you were doing in Iowa over Christmas break.” Then he switched on the radio.

“Eight to twelve inches now expected by morning. Visibility too poor for any highway driving.”

Grimson heaved himself up to lug another log to the fire, causing the radio static to crash like an icicle.

“Don’t put it on yet. We’ve got to go out there,” Neil said from the window where he watched the snow coming rapidly as arrows. “The snow’s clumping.”

His blanket wrapped around him, Grimson peered out. “The owl’s stuck to the post in the shed.”

“You’re seeing a lot of snow out there, buddy.”

“Yeah? You might actually need your ski jacket, Neil.” Grimson tossed Neil’s ski jacket at him and bounded back to his parka and the fire. He scraped at the firewood that was as ashen and specked as the snowy owl.

A geyser of smoke shot into his face as a strong gale soared above them and sealed off the chimney. Grimson pushed the logs with the poker, attempting to re-direct the smoke, and feathers floated around him. He jumped back, yelping and straining to see the Indian on the mantel.

“Grimson! you’re drunk.” Neil prodded him. “We’ve got to go to the end of the drive and walk back. Or should I leave you here?”

“With these feathers? Don’t you think that’s strange?” Grimson was tugging on his boots. But since he had already gotten his wool-bloated arms into his parka, he gripped his laces clumsily.

“There’s no ghost,” Neil replied. “I told you I have older sisters and they’ve got kids. They’ve got a collection of feathers and they were probably in a crevice of the mantel. Or a bird might have tried to nest in the chimney. It’s about as strange as a snowy owl taking shelter in a woodshed.”

Grimson was now sitting on the organ stool, tying a scarf around his face. “That Indian. Maybe it’s a reminder of victory over them.”

Neil shoved a foil package of roast beef into his pocket and, pulling on his ridged ski hat, headed for the door. “Can I call you a fairweather friend, Grimson?” he wondered. “You are really insulting when you’re soused. Just stay here.”

“Why are you taking food out to a warm car?” Grimson yelled, following him.

Neil yelled through the galloping gales and the whooping winds, “There’s a warrior out here. Winter and its ghosts. This is for luck.”

Grimson lowered his head and ran after Neil, shrieking into the blast because Neil was bounding to the woodshed, not the car. He watched Neil throw the meat towards the owl and then the owl’s overwhelming wingspread. They were slogging to the car in the usual blinding of a blizzard.

“A regular ambush!” Neil said, starting the car and tossing a window brush at Grimson.

Grimson cleared the windows, falling on his forearms. Then he speedily shut himself into the car and huddled at the heater. “A hundred headdresses and every flurry fringed on its horse. Let’s get warm first,” he said as the precipitation exploded on the car’s metal.

Neil had to glower, either from disapproval or distrust or dislike. “I don’t want to push a man stuck in the road. Are you even sober enough to walk back without straying into the woods?”

“How did your grandfather die?” Grimson procrastinated while heat burst into his hands.

“He collapsed from a heart attack. He was shaving in the cabin there when it happened. They couldn’t get him to the hospital in time,” Neil replied.

“You mean he died looking at his own face?”

Grimson’s chortle was irking to Neil, too uproarious.

“Did he come out here in the winter?”

“Oh sure,” Neil said. “Ice fishing. Deer hunting.”

“And once upon a time there was a Chippewa around every tree. That’s why that Indian is looking out on the land. Maybe your grandfather was scared,” Grimson said triumphantly.

“I can walk back alone,” Neil informed him. “Build another fire inside. We could be stuck out here two days. How the hell are we going to get along?”

“Oh no, you’re not going anywhere without me, Neil, without a phone or a car. You’ll cross country ski to the nearest heated place tomorrow. We’d better stay together. You’d think you can get around like some ice-encrusted Viking specter.”

Neil lurched forward into the narrow clearing of the road. “If we get stuck, it’s you who’s going to have to get out and push, Grimson,” he said. “Because of your condition.”

© 2010 prickofthespindle.com