Karlyn Coleman Ice Roads Leif kneels down on the black seat of his old Arctic Cat, pulls on the choke, and yanks the rope. The sled’s engine revs. He lets it grow louder as the gas flows through the cold veins of the machine. He circles around the bar’s gravel parking lot and points the machine toward Lake Mille Lacs—out where he’s been told his sixteen-year-old daughter might be, miles from shore, ice beneath her, storm clouds pushing down from above. High on a wooden pole, a floodlight gives off a greenish burn. He can see a girl, not his daughter, waiting for him near the shore. He slows down and lets the machine idle. “I’ll show you where she’s at,” the girl says. The girl came into his place just as he was starting to scrub down the grill—her head covered by the hood of a faded blue sweatshirt, her voice shaky and fast as she leaned over the counter telling him that Caroline was out there in a fish house messed up from a bad batch of meth. He told her to meet him out back. He didn’t like the way she looked at the tip jar silently counting the dollar bills inside. He didn’t trust this girl. She was part of a pack that sniffed out Caroline six months ago when he brought his daughter back from California. They could smell Caroline’s recklessness, her rancor, the stench that comes from being born to shitty parents—a mother moving from one man to the next, a father who hadn’t seen his daughter in nine years, now in charge of her, trying to raise her in an apartment above a bar. The girl shivers, pulls her sleeves down over her hands. “You aren’t dressed to go out there.” Leif cuts the engine and looks at the black military boots on the girl’s feet, the blue sweatshirt zipped up to her chin. “A cold front is moving in.” It is the end to the thaw—a thaw that had hovered over the North for the past week, opening up rivers and creeks, creating currents that licked at the underbelly of the frozen lake. No one had seen such a heavy thaw, not in the middle of January. A truck had gone through on 52 u Crab Orchard Review
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