Rust and Bone Read Online Free Page B

clear. I reached the edge and extended a hand. The supporting ridge broke away and my chest and head slipped below the surface. Cold black water pressed against my eyeballs. I caught movement through the brown water and grabbed something—smooth and slim, perhaps a jacket sleeve—but the cold made my fingers clumsy and it slipped through. The lake shoved me back and forth, currents stronger than I’d imagined. Sinewy shapes turned over in the murk, shapes like seal pups at play.
    I broke the surface snorting streams of water, wiping away cords of snot. I stared into the swirling blackness in search of movement, a leg kicking, fingers grasping. I plunged my arm in, stirring around, hopeful: a few strands of eelgrass draped over numb fingers. Not knowing what to do, I called his name. “Jake!” The word echoed uselessly across the flat expanse.
    When my voice died away I heard it: a sustained resonant thump. I couldn’t tell where it came from. The ice trembled. A dark form was pressed to the chalky sheet a few feet to the left, trapped beneath the surface. It twisted and thrashed, beating the ice.
    I crawled towards the shape—crawled on my hands and knees like a fucking infant . Ice pocked with craters and boils from thawing and re-freezing. I saw a dim outline down there, a creature of crude lines and angles. The ice shuddered; fresh-fallen snow jumped off the surface, resettling. My fingers spread across the milky whiteness and ears plugged with frozen lake water, a frantic buzzing between.
    I made a fist with my right hand and brought it down. The ice buckled, splintered, but held. Pain shot up my arm to the shoulder, a white-hot bolt. I raised the right again—my lead hand, the dynamite right—smashing the ice. It broke and my fist plunged into the darkness, grasping frantically, closing on nothing. A powerful current caught hold of Jake and he drifted sideways, beyond my grasp. Something passed through my fingers—a bootlace?
    I tracked the shape beneath the ice. The freezing water on my arms crackled like dull metal. My teeth chattered and I called his name. Maybe I was screaming.
    Passing beneath a patch of perfectly clear, glasslike ice, I caught his face through the scalloped sheet. Lips and nostrils robin’s egg blue, the rest a creamy shade of gray. Cheek flattened to the ice, the buoyancy of flesh pushing him up. Eyes so blue, luminously blue, pearlescent air bubbles clinging to the dark lashes. A sinuous white flash below, silky curve of a trout’s belly.
    My right hand was badly broken: knuckles split and flesh peeled to the wrist, a lot of blood, some bones. I slammed my left hand down. The ice fractured in a radiating spiderweb. Water shot up through the fissures. My hand shattered like a china plate. Didn’t feel a thing at the time. Jake stopped clawing, stopped thumping. His eyes open but rolled to the whites beneath the fine network of cracks. I hammered my left hand down once more, breaking into the icy shock of the lake. I snagged his hood but the hole was too small so I clawed with my free hand, breaking off chunks, razored edges gashing my fingers to the bone.
    Finally the hole was wide enough for me to pull him through. A long swipe of mud on Jake’s forehead, hair stuck up in rapidly freezing corkscrews. His nose broken and me who’d done it, smashing ice into his face. I gathered him in my arms and stumbled uphill to the house. “Please,” I remember saying, over and over, a breathy whisper. “Please.”
    Ernie Munger, a flyweight mending a broken rib, had spent a few summers as a lifeguard. He administered CPR while the cook rang for help. Munger’s thick hands pumped the brackish water from Jake’s lungs, pumped life back into him. Jake was breathing by the time the paramedics arrived. They snaked a rubber tube down his throat. Afterwards I stood by a large bay window overlooking the lake. The hole, the size of a