The Ice at the Bottom of the World (13 page)

Hazel said she had to do something, she had to get out of the house. I said would a paintbrush fit her hand and she turned both of hers palm up on her naked knees
and I took a shameless look at t-shirt and panty-contoured symmetry. Hazel asked did the rooms where we would work have AC and I said, Yes and TV too. Cabled color.

Charles did not seem to mind. Charles was trying to develop a theory of debt and as long as I paid Hazel a fair wage he could factor ex–Snow Bunny income into an equation of repayment.

I was also hoping having Hazel having income would allow Charles to subtract from his debt equation his going through my pockets when I passed out, wrecking my car, stealing my clothes and selling my paint. Charles was in bad shape and I took his formulation of debt theory as an encouragement that he was getting better, reading theory formulation as fever broken.

Hazel helped me paint the Sportsman Inn motel walls the Crackpot green for about fifteen minutes, or about the time it takes for motel AC to crank cool and touristproof TV to warm up. Hazel leaned on bunched up pillows across the bed, a patient recuperating from Magic Shows and coal trains and nigger neighborhood heat with eight to ten hours daily of game shows and soap operas. It was really okay all the same with me. Whenever my plaster bucket ran low on tallboy Budweisers and ice she never complained about running over to the 7-Eleven and getting more as long as it was during the midday newscasts or extended commercial breaks. This was well worth minimum wage to me.

Charles should have had a theory about all of this, about what would be inevitable about leaving alone together a man and a woman, day after day, in rooms with beds as central furniture, not even theorizing the tangentials of the man drinking and the woman bored, one day falling into the next like the numbers on the motel doors, doors that lock, day after day, man-woman-bed, man-woman-bed, man-woman-bed. Charles should have had a theory about all of this but apparently he did not.

At home in the evenings after Charles and Hazel would go to bed I could hear them through my Dutch oven hovel cardboard walls doing it, and Charles was even louder about it than Hazel. And sometimes Hazel was so loud that on afternoons when I knew the roofing contractors were at the Sportsman Inn working I would have to grab a pillow and stuff it over her face when things got crucial. But Charles would work himself into something sounding oriental, like he was delivering a karate chop to a stack of bricks. It didn’t bother me all that much but in our neighborhood sometimes porch lights would come on and dogs would bark.

Discretion to Hazel meant waiting until Charles was asleep and the Midnight Howl would come rumbling through to cover our noise and then she would sneak into my room and then we would do it while the house shook and the cabinets chirped and the furniture danced and the roar of the engines would be followed
by the clatter of the coal cars rolling over a crimp in the steel rail out by our house. You could be in bed and count the cars in clicks and clacks, and most trains had about two hundred, so I’d keep a rough count and hurry to finish with Hazel before we ran out of train, before the sudden hushed rush of the last car and caboose, and then Hazel would detour into the john and I would turn against the cardboard wall smelling my own beer breath and thinking of prayers I should say, falling asleep before I could pray them.

The catalyst of this us-equation is an old coal-burning engine painted maintenance yellow. It pulls about a dozen flat beds and boxcars. On the flat beds are cranes to rip old ties and lay new rails, and the boxcars are full of hand tools—a couple are fitted with bunkbeds and a galley for the roving crews. Coming down the tracks one night after eleven thirty this yellow engine approached just like the Midnight Howl, the same dirty rumble, the same blasts of signal at the Eastend crossing that are low and mournful. Hazel and I had just started when what we thought was the Midnight Howl on the tracks outside seemed to pass prematurely, the too-fast rush of the last car’s hush, Hazel howling in the sudden silence, Charles standing in the door.

In a few minutes later, when the real Midnight Howl arrived, we three sat about the kitchen table as we held it in its place, our hands holding on its edges, a seance of the real Charles, the real Hazel, the real me, sitting
beneath the bare-bulbed light as it swung from its cord casting random shadows on our faces wet with sweat and eyes unblinking, Charles’ temples pulsing with every clipped clatter of the passing coal-car wheels, two hundred hoppers of furnace grade fuel thundering past, overloaded and ahead of schedule, click clack, click clack, click clack.

A couple of days after Hazel announced that she was reuniting with her husband, The Crackpot, I stood with everyone else watching the Sportsman Inn burn to the ground. Charles said a business associate of The Crackpot had told him the police take pictures of suspicious-fire-scene bystanders so Charles was not around. Charles had used one of my old paint cans to mix the sodium chloride, topped off by a rubber filled with sulphuric acid. The Sportsman Inn was a clean burn, the first coupon Charles would clip from his fifteen-thousand-dollar crisis-payment book.

I felt a sadness, watching the fire eat out the roof over the indoor sea-water pool. I had been low bid on the interior veneer. There was more exposed beam and cross brace in that place than a Lutheran church. The Crackpot suggested to Charles that he get the keys to the Inn from me, and I gave them to him. I felt a sadness about all of this. Maybe it is because I am a careful painter and I had been extra careful on the exterior trim and hadn’t splattered hardly any paint at all. I don’t
know. Maybe it was just the sadness one feels in the beginning settlement of old familiar debts.

This day Charles and I have been summoned to conclude our repayment business at The Crackpot’s mountaintop estate. I am hoping this is the end. I did not realize in the beginning how easily the debts between us are assumable. We have been purveyors of porno bimbos, we have carried satchels of cash up the coast and body bags out to sea. We have been skycaps to scum, the simple handlers of someone’s thug luggage.

The morning paper proves us to be something new, we are the rats chewing matches, we are the all-this-heat. It has been a long fifteen-thousand-dollar summer and it is time for a break in the weather.

Charles comes in high over the estate and circles wide to see if there is anything municipal about these mountains. There is a water-tower town to the east and a mirage of airport that turns out to be a shopping center.

The Crackpot has forbidden us to land in his driveway any more. The last time we did we diverted a sedan of late-arriving guests into a stand of two-hundred-year-old boxwoods. Charles and I both had our feet on the brakes as the wheels screamed and our straining sheetmetal wing flaps buckled and popped like they were about to wrench off. We were running out of driveway and the old house was running up to meet us. The house is so old that because both the rear and front doors were
open I could see completely through the place and I saw people crowding out the hallway to flee into the backyard beyond. Luckily our tires caught in the flowerbed brick dividers along the front walk and the only casualties were the red tulips, whose heads blew off in the wash of our propeller as Charles turned to taxi, and a couple of wind chimes and hanging plants on the front veranda became aerodynamic. Drapes in a front room ballooned inward as The Crackpot leaned out and glared as I waved to him hello.

This day there is a graded space for us behind the estate so Charles spirals over The Crackpot’s barbecue to make our approach. We turn in tight circles over the parked cars, the long white tables of buffet, the barbecue poolside where last time Charles leg-wrestled a state senator and then punched out the son who needed it. We bank and glide and I see Hazel. I see Hazel in ground zero of our concentric descent. It must be her in a shiny gold dress, centered in a scattershot of hard dick. I had heard she was capitalizing on being fine, the prime rate agreeing with her. She is gold and shiny off the wing we are pivoting on, a sun-struck drip off a honey sandwich into a path of ants. As we flatten near the treetops I see it is her face, and her face is the first to look up while the men around her continue to look down, probably deep into her dress.

This day we are not guests, we are merely grocery clerks, errand boys, messengers maybe. We are not
even off the plane, just taxiing, when Hazel herself appears with a small snakeskin valise. I unlatch my door and lean out to fold it open when in a pure grace-Hazel motion she presses in towards me as if to offer a kiss but instead deftly clasps with a ratchet sound the snakeskin case to my wrist with a handcuff. Her lips, formerly puckering to place a kiss, retract across her teeth, making words as she withdraws. Take this right back down to the beach, guard it with your lives, she says. You are done, she says. It’s been real.

Charles ignores her, ignores me, ignores us. My face, which is still forward and not unready to accept her kiss, is slammed with canopy glass before I can even ask who at the beach will have the key to the cuffs.

Now Charles looks at me and brings the engine to life. We ascend. We climb higher in the coolness, dipping valleys and turning peaks until we find the rails where they lie below, spun on ledges peeled from rock, shiny with use and overbreak-shaded. Our roadmap home through the plain to where the beaches burn and our neighborhood awaits the arrival of the six-fourteen weather.

Charles says he smells something. He says he doesn’t think it is his socks this time, let him smell the snakeskin valise. I hold it for him under his nose. Do you smell that? he asks. Charles says that sweaty leather smell is agitated nitroglycerine.

I start to jimmy the lock on the valise with one of
Charles’ newly stolen tools but he says, Don’t, it might be rigged. Then Charles has a theory. Charles believes our final payment is in the snakeskin and that the charge is atmospherically controlled, a barometered bomb that will blow with our descent onto the coastal plain. Charles is pretty calm about this so I ask him if he knows something that I don’t know and he says he just has theories, that no one really
knows
anything.

I tell Charles I guess I could at least save him if I jumped out of the plane and Charles says, Yes, I suppose you could. Climb, I say and we do.

We linger in indecisive spirals over the opening of the piedmont plain, a buzzard on a thermal. Below us in a turn in the track as tight as a cripple’s knees we see a string of black humped cars in a slow, side-binding descent. Charles relates a theory about the train below. He says the kinetic energy stored in the train at the mountain’s peak would be enough to unwind it completely across the state, unassisted by its engines, which he says at this point are merely inhibitions of momentum.

Over our shoulders we turn to watch the train before we wing away homeward, load after load of the earth’s dead heart mined into shiny black pieces, the car couplings clasped in worn fraternal grips.

FEAST OF THE EARTH, RANSOM OF THE CLAY
 

W
E BURY OUR DEAD
in the muscle of our town, in the shouldered hillock of clay once an island in a river finished flowing. The rest of town rests around its heart on the low relief of the alluvial plain, the sandy loam long yielded to the weathering ages of wear. From a folding chair on top of Cemetery Ridge you can sort the soil strata by the tops of the trees below, their foliage betraying their roots—the evergreen against the seasonal, roots suitable for the sand or for the loam but not for the clay. Nothing grows well on Cemetery Ridge. Nothing we plant here is ever expected to bloom.

Behind this ridge they laid bare the clay for the spur line of the railroad. Beneath this raw overhang beside
the tracks runoff from summer storms has carved out ragged ditches and hollowed out some caves. If you are a schoolboy in our town, you may be tempted to hole up here in ambush of the evening freight with your slingshot and your can of rocks, and sometimes some shantyweary mongrel bitch will come sniffing around, sniffing out some place to lie in and squeeze out her litter. But in our town Mr. Leon lives in these caves behind Cemetery Ridge. He lives here the best he can, slathering his beard and his bald head, licking his alluvial walls, sucking the mud where it is wet.

Of the twice we always expect to see Mr. Leon, the first is in the evenings when he slips from the face of the cliffs on his way to our neighborhoods. Mr. Leon roams. Sometimes a dog will bark at Mr. Leon’s full-mudded appearance, a man a patchwork of crusty fractures in dried gray. Sometimes a child, seeing the city-park statue stepped from its pedestal and coming down the street at dusk, will cry. But our dogs do not bite unless you are a thief or plan to become one, and someone will always come out to hush a child, and Mr. Leon makes his way. Bark, you bastards, or, Cry, you little shits, is all that Mr. Leon will say, shaking his fist in that way that worn-out men will, pouring some kind of anointment into the air.

The other time we expect to see Mr. Leon is at the funerals of our dead—like today. In the middle of this cakebox spread of granite and marble atop Cemetery
Ridge we wait for the out-of-town late arrivals and the tick-tock walk of Mr. Leon. The sun is bright off the worn, standing-around suits, mail-ordered and livingroom-tailored. And there are crisp glints of light in the hems of the dresses patched and passed around by the grocery bagful. There is no hurry on this side of the family. They have arrived early and will be the stragglers later along the alleyways of the marble-stoppered clay. While they wait, they break away weeds from around the low-humped inscribed rock, resettle the chipped glass baskets of plastic flowers, the paper pots of front yard blooms. Little words. News, regret, respect. Within reach, these people smooth one another’s arms through the worn clothing, then their hands return to the white that is working in their fingers, the worried twists of tissue, the thick, cupped curls of the handrolled smoke. The men’s chins are held higher today, bolstered by the unaccustomed thick knots of the shoewide neckties they wear. This allows these men a proudness they do not possess, a skin-straightening effect in their faces for a few instants against years in the sun. Some of the women seem to notice this subtle flush of youth restored to their husbands here at the end of a life, and such women work up a little sob just for themselves.