Soon the sheet came off, caught in a closed door, and the dog, loping and barking, was revealed as a Great Dane. The dog stood up on a thief, knocking him down; he wagged his tail hard enough to topple a pot of glue parked at the edge of a table; he jumped into the bathtub, soaking the groom; and at the end, he was dressed, for reasons unclear, identically to the reverend marrying them.

A couple of the men in the audience said, “Awwww,” before they were sufficiently laughed at. The film ran out, and Leland was in the aisle, next to the projectionist, tapping him on the shoulder until he woke up.

“You have any more of those?”

“More what?” He yawned, brushing Leland’s hands away.

“The dog.”

As soon as the projectionist realized Leland wasn’t going to leave no matter how evilly he was stared at, he searched through reels of film. The dog was called Teddy. He starred in a second one-reeler, Apple Pie Annie. This one was about a poor girl hired by a wicked debutante to bake treats secretly for a boy she was courting. In between several sets of romance, Teddy once again romped and chased and knocked things over.

After ten minutes of this, Leland stood, put his hands on his hips, opened his mouth as if to speak, but found himself unable. He strode to the back of the tent, paused in the flap, and turned. “My dog can pull the pin from a hand grenade,” he exclaimed. “She can uncork a baby pineapple just like that. She can jump through fire. She can jump between DH 4s! Do you know how hard that is? And that dog up there”—he pointed at the screen—“that’s just…”

But no one was listening, so he let the flap drop, and he stalked off, into the unwinding nighttime revelry.

48

It was dark.

Ironside privately referred to conditions under his command as “terrifying.” The skies were now black, with sunrise and sunset being amorphous notations on official charts. No one ever saw the sun. Sentries stationed outside the barracks were driven to screaming that they wanted their shadows back.

The Dvina had frozen, and no manner of ax or hammer could burst the ice enough to free the Allied ships that dotted the harbor, their hulls now imprisoned in ice, side by side with the wooden masts and paddlewheels from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that served as unplanned memorials to beautiful ideas abandoned.

With the Allies bunkered down in blockhouses along the five fingers of the “Hand,” the enemy was launching ever more coordinated attacks. In Dubya, it was reported that Trotsky’s Bolsheviks were using skis and had begun to cloak themselves in white garments so that they were invisible.

The temperature was frequently fifty degrees below zero.

Metal tools couldn’t be used, as they stuck to the skin.