Iced

It was cold the night I went to pick up Clayton Bennett's Jeep, the tail end of the coldest day of the season so far. In Montana the calendar demarcation of winter from fall is nothing but a technicality. Up here, in the shadow of Canada, other people's idea of winter usually starts before Halloween, and this autumn had been no different: parka weather, thick frost on windshields, breath like gauze even in the afternoon sun. But not until the morning of December 20 did we feel the imminent promise of an animal frost and know that a deep heart of winter cold was screaming in from the north. A cleansing wind had raked across the valley floor, and by morning the river was viscous with ice. Pushed down from Canada, the air reeked of the tundra, of glacier-churned dirt and stunted lichen. It was this smell that signaled that the first subzero snap of the season was on its way. I had just gotten Bennett's file that afternoon, and from what little I'd read I'd figured on one of those rare easy-as-pie jobs. My boss, Flip, had given me a set of dealer's keys. All I had to do was get in the Cherokee and drive away. I'd planned on paying my visit sometime in the next couple of days, but when I heard on the radio about Bennett's death I thought I'd better head over to his office right away. There was no telling who else Bennett owed money to, and I wanted to be the first person there to collect. Normally, it would have taken a while for news like this to hit the airwaves, but Bennett had been stabbed in a drunken brawl and the two Indians the cops suspected had disappeared. Local radio stations were broadcasting descriptions of the couple, urging everyone to be on the lookout. The place was crawling with cops when I pulled into the parking lot of the Super Six Motel, next to Bennett's office. I'd told myself to grab the Jeep and get out of there. I'm not too fond of anyone with a badge, and I had no intention of sticking around. But when I saw the scene unfolding in the river bottom, curiosity got the better of me. I didn't know much about Bennett, only that he had run a charter business, a shifty little outfit called Big Sky Adventures that took tourists on backcountry flyovers and down to remote lakes for fishing. His office and makeshift apartment were in a shack on the northern bank of the Clark Fork, right across the river from the vacant tract of land where the old paper mill and tepee burners used to be. It's a downtrodden section of town, a final vestige of the ugly industrial West that Missoula was still part of when I was a child. Before the yuppies from California arrived, cleaned up the waterfront, and passed laws that kept the mines upstream from dumping cyanide in the river. Before the quaint farmers' market and the latte bars and cafÉs selling veggie burgers and frozen yogurt moved in. When I stepped out of my Ford truck onto the slick blacktop, the time/temperature sign at the casino across the street blinked, its lighted display changing from 16 to 18 degrees below zero. I took a breath and felt the tissue in my lungs freeze up. Behind the concrete hulk of the motel and Bennett's shack, the river bottom was lit like a movie set. A stand of leafless cottonwoods stood in stark relief, their trunks a pale and ghostly white. The river was close to frozen solid, and the milky crust of ice shone under the halogen glow of spotlights. In its center was a narrow rush of water, black and sinuous as an adder. This time of year the hours of darkness far outnumber those of daylight, and even when the sun is above the horizon it seems diminished. So there was something obscene about the brightness of the lights on the river and the naked trees. They had pulled Clay Bennett's body from the weeds on the low-water island where he had been discovered and were carrying him toward us to shore. It took four men to hold the stretcher. They wore fishing waders under their ranch coats,Siler, Jenny is the author of 'Iced' with ISBN 9780805064384 and ISBN 0805064389.