II.
Reality seems to sink him further into the snowmobile that has become his cot. He hears again, in the same dulcet remonstration, “don’t gotta do this, Floyd”, followed by the MC’s echo—“Son of a Gun… Son of a Gun…”
It will take some time to get used to an imposed nickname. From forever he’d been known as ‘Pink’, his parents in love with the Wish You Were Here album and Dad, in particular, singing to the baby Floyd, “and by the way, which one is Pink?” Then, around the start of second grade, Aerosmith came out with Nine Lives and the song that logged the most radio time: “Pink as the bing on your cherry, Pink, ’cause you are so very…” Needless to say, Floyd had to run with such a moniker, his propensity to blush being the capper.
“You don’t gotta do this, Floyd,” he thinks he hears again, even as nothing really can go wrong. Waterskipping is faux danger, he’s determined—probably safer than maneuvering through a glade at high speed. A snowmobile is neither boat nor jet ski, but fast enough to use its tread the way that geese take off from water, paddling like crazy above their erstwhile float. Nothing to crash into, really, if the edges of ice could slow momentum and make the forty yards hard to cover. And if the mass of the machine succumbed to gravity, so what? The sinking would be relatively slow, the scuba dudes would jump in right away, the life vest designed to tilt the body backward, a little like Floyd’s position now, looking up to baby blue, mesmerizing....
“Dude, you’re up,” the MC prodding with his megaphone, a tone between bemused and crowd-cackling amused. “Haven’t been drinking, have we?”
Groggily but honest, Floyd affirms, “no sir. Just,… meditating. Mental imaging.”
The MC decides this rationale is worth relaying. “Folks, we got ourselves here a meditator. Zen and the Art of Snowmobile Maintenance!” More of the crowd laughs than gets the allusion, a part of pageantry the MC is supposed to pull off.
Clumsily, Floyd rolls to his position as a driver and reviews what he’s supposed to do. Fist pump the crowd, for one—that seems to forgive all other misgivings. Then rev up (oops—can’t do that without ignition) and adjust the helmet—just like ski jumpers as they’re perched way up there on a crossbeam. A second fist pump can’t hurt, swelling the support of those who know him as ‘Pink’—he hears smattering of such—or ‘Floyd’—a few more of them—or ‘Son of a Gun’, as the MC wants to hype. “Rev that bad boy up,” he hears the megaphone as a plea to get this done.
“Will do,” he says under his breath, the condensation fogging up his visor. “Now or never” not only revs the bad boy up, but jerks it toward the water’s open arms.
It’s hard to say a million things go through Floyd’s head—maybe more, as dendrites operate. Of course he wouldn’t hear the color commentary—“Pink’s outta his league”; “Jesus! does he have control?”; “straighter, Floyd, goddamit!”—nor could he adjust beyond the present tipping point. His grip of the throttle doesn’t release until the machine itself accelerates too aggresively for holding on. Just before the lane of open water, Floyd falls off the back and wanly watches the behemoth veer toward the crowd. His own momentum slides him to the drink and, despite the life jacket, under the side of ice opposite of where the snowmobile has decided, as it were, to go.
No fight or flight within him, Floyd reviews his life. “Fitting, this. The ignominious end to the banana peel guy. No shake innocent enough, everything in place to be dismantled. A clown that makes the rodeo less safe. And now the scuba divers will risk their lives for me—magnet of mortality…”
He claws the least dark ice and manages to minnow himself to the edge. He surfaces with a gasp of air and horror to see what the snowmobile has done. The scuba divers, in fact, are running in fins toward the melee; the MC must be one of the stricken, as his megaphone has gone mute against the general outcry. The distant engine scream continues to simulate a Texas chainsaw massacre. Floyd flaps his arms to get out, lend a hand, apologize.
“You stay put,” he hears somebody whisper—one of the smoky altos he’d love to have known beyond a second date. He can’t see her, his eyes straining to take in the carnage the snowmobile—well, he—created. The water is uncannily cooperative, now that he can breathe. The life vest keeps him bobbing as a box seat viewer of this frozen scene from hell.
He hears again, “you stay put, Floyd Gunnison.” Now the smell of menthols curls into his nose and a mitten strokes the scar above his jawline. The water has receded and, like any mirage, the accident has faded into white, then black, then nothing upon eyelids opening.
He feels the cushion of the dormant machine. The MC’s getting impatient. “What’s it gonna be, there, Son of a Gun?”
There’s logic here to be thought through. “I just saw what could have been,” he glistens to the alto.
She laughs at that. “You saw what, exactly?”
Blinking to wake up for real, he leans up on an elbow and with the other arm traces the line toward the crowd the snowmobile should avoid. “I just have to be damn sure not to steer it that way.”
She imagines the unimaginable, but only for a couple seconds. The MC fills the gap with some verbal adverts and then proposes to the crowd (not Floyd) a countdown, compelling the lady to walk back behind the cordon. “Ten! Nine! Eight!” and she’s halfway there.
The MC stops at five, seeing Floyd run from the machine and slide to her side a marriage proposal.
Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (2021)
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