The Ice at the Bottom of the World

CONTENTS
 

STRAYS
 

A
T NIGHT
, stray dogs come up underneath our house to lick our leaking pipes. Beneath my brother and my’s room we hear them coughing and growling, scratching their ratted backs against the boards beneath our beds. We lie awake, listening, my brother thinking of names to name the one he is setting out to catch. Salute and Topboy are high on his list.

I tell my brother these dogs are wild and cowering. A bare-heeled stomp on the floor off our beds sends them scuttling spine-bowed out the crawl-space beneath our open window. Sometimes, when my brother is quick, he leans out and touches one slipping away.

Our father has meant to put the screens back on the
windows for spring. He has even hauled them out of the storage shed and stacked them in the drive. He lays them one by one over sawhorses to tack in the frames tighter and weave patches against mosquitoes. This is what he means to do, but our mother that morning pulls all the preserves off the shelves onto the floor, sticks my brother and my’s Easter Sunday drawings in her mouth, and leaves the house through the field next door cleared the week before for corn.

Uncle Trash is our nearest relative with a car and our mother has a good half-day head start on our father when Uncle Trash arrives. Uncle Trash runs his car up the drive in a big speed, splitting all the screens stacked there from their frames. There is an exploded chicken in the grill of Uncle Trash’s car. They don’t even turn the motor off as Uncle Trash slides out and our father gets behind the wheel, backing back over the screens, setting out in search of our mother.

Uncle Trash finds out that he has left his bottle under the seat of his car. He goes into our kitchen, pulling out all the shelves our mother missed. Then he is in the towel box in the hall, looking, pulling out stuff in stacks. He is in our parents’ room, opening short doors. He is in the storage shed, opening and sniffing a mason jar of gasoline for the power mower. Uncle Trash comes up and asks, Which way it is to town for a drink. I point up the road. Uncle Trash sets off, saying, Don’t y’all burn the house down.

My brother and I hang out in the side yard, doing handstands until dark. We catch handfuls of lightning bugs and smear bright yellow on our shirts. It is late. I wash our feet and put us to bed. We wait for somebody to come back home but nobody ever does. Lucky for me when my brother begins to whine for our mother the stray dogs show up under the house. My brother starts making up lists of new names for them, naming himself to sleep.

   Hungry, we wake up to something sounding in the kitchen not like our mother fixing us anything to eat.

It is Uncle Trash. He is throwing up and spitting blood into the pump-handled sink. I ask him did he have an accident and he sends my brother upstairs for merthiolate and Q-tips. His face is angled out from his head on one side so that-sided eye is shut. His good eye waters when he wiggles loose teeth with cut-up fingers.

Uncle Trash says he had an accident, all right. He says he was up in a card game and then he was real up in a card game, so up he bet his car, accidentally forgetting that our father had driven off with it in search of our mother. Uncle Trash says the man who won the card game went ahead and beat up Uncle Trash on purpose anyway.

All day Uncle Trash sleeps in our parents’ room. We in the front yard can hear him snoring. My brother and
I dig in the dirt with spoons, making roadbeds and highways for my tin metal trucks. In the evening, Uncle Trash comes down in one of our father’s shirts, dirty, but cleaner than the one he had gotten beat up in. We have banana sandwiches for supper. Uncle Trash asks do we have a deck of cards in the house. He says he wants to see do his tooth-cut fingers still bend enough to work. I have to tell him how our mother disallows card-playing in the house but that my brother has a pack of Old Maid somewhere in the toy box. While my brother goes out to look I brag at how I always beat my brother out, leaving him the Old Maid, and Uncle Trash says, Oh, yeah? and digs around in his pocket for a nickel he puts on the table. He says, We’ll play a nickel a game. I go into my brother and my’s room to get the Band-Aid box of nickels and dimes I sometimes short from the collection plate on Sunday.

Uncle Trash is making painful faces, flexing his redpainted fingers around the Old Maid deck of circus-star cards, but he still shuffles, cuts, and deals a three-way hand one-handed—and not much longer, I lose my Band-Aid box of money and all the tin metal trucks of mine out in the front yard. Uncle Trash makes me go out and get them and put them on his side of the table. My brother loses a set of bowling pins and a stuffed beagle. In two more hands, we stack up our winter boots and coats with the hoods on Uncle Trash’s side of the table. In the last hand, my brother and I step out of our
shorts and underdrawers while Uncle Trash smiles, saying, And now, gentlemen, if you please, the shirts off y’all’s backs.

Uncle Trash rakes everything my brother and I owned into the pillowcases off our bed and says let that be a lesson to me. He is off through the front porch door, leaving us buck-naked at the table, his last words as he goes up the road, shoulder-slinging his loot, Don’t y’all burn the house down.

I am burning hot at Uncle Trash.

Then I am burning hot at our father for leaving us with him to look for our mother.

Then I am burning hot at my mother for running off, leaving me with my brother, who is rubber-chinning and face-pouting his way into a good cry.

There is only one thing left to do, and that is to take all we still have left that we own and throw it at my brother—and I do—and Old Maid cards explode on his face, setting him off on a really good howl.

I tell my brother that making so much noise will keep the stray dogs away, and he believes it, and then I start to believe it when it gets later than usual, past the crickets and into a long moon over the trees, but they finally do come after my brother finally does fall asleep, so I just wait until I know there are several strays beneath the bed boards, scratching their rat-matted backs and growling, and I stomp on the floor, what is my favorite part about the dogs, stomping and then watching them
scatter in a hundred directions and then seeing them one by one collect in a pack at the edge of the field near the trees.

   In the morning right off I recognize the bicycle coming wobble-wheeling into the front yard. It’s the one the colored boy outside Cuts uses to run lunches and ice water to the pulpwood truck Mr. Cuts has working cut-over timber on the edge of town. The colored boy that usually drives the bicycle snaps bottlecaps off his fingers at my brother and I when we go to Cuts with our mother to make groceries. We have to wait outside by the kerosene pump, out by the tar-papered lean-to shed, the pop-crate place where the men sit around and Uncle Trash does his card work now. White people generally don’t go into Cuts unless they have to buy on credit.

We at school know Mr. and Mrs. Cuts come from a family that eats children. There is a red metal tree with plastic-wrapped toys in the window and a long candy counter case inside to lure you in. Mr. and Mrs. Cuts have no children of their own. They ate them during a hard winter and salted the rest down for sandwiches the colored boy runs out to the pulpwood crew at noon. I count colored children going in to buy some candy to see how many make it back out, but generally our mother is ready to go home way before I can tell. Our credit at Cuts is short.