The Ice at the Bottom of the World (6 page)

We still had plenty of canal to cover before we broke out into open ocean. The dogs raced along beside us on the bank of the canal as far as they could but it was a game to them now, their wolf-like leaps mellowed out into tongue-flapping lopes. A couple of neighbors on down the canal came out to watch and the wake and spray from Buster cutting along ass backwards threw
water into their yards. One of Vic’s cousins, Malcolm, was working in a boat and seeing us coming he held up a pair of waterskis pointing to Buster laughing as we passed, but I could see open ocean so I throttled down and leaned hard forward to balance against the rising bow. I was glad I had enough forward thinking of my own to pull Steve Willis into the boat starting us over about Buster because I could look at him in the stern watching the big horse carcass we had in tow by a stiffed up leg, and looking at Steve Willis I could see it was sinking in on him that when Vic came home from Norfolk and threw me out of the back acres by the canal it would be Steve Willis himself being thrown out too.

I burned up about three hours of fuel looking for the right place to cut Buster loose. One problem we had was one time we stopped to idle the engine and pull up a floorboard so I could check the oil and while we set to drifting Steve Willis noticed that Buster floated. You could tell how the body was like a barrel just below the surface that it was the air or the gas or whatever was in Buster’s big belly keeping him afloat. When I got up from checking the oil I threw to where Steve Willis was standing in the stern a marlin spike and he looked down at the spike and then he looked up to me like he was saying Oh no I won’t punch a hole, and I looked back at him wiping the oil off my hands, looking back like Oh yes you will punch a hole, and when it came time for me to cut Buster loose out near the number-nine
sea buoy and it came time for Steve Willis to punch a hole, I did and he did and it was done.

So here we are really feeling bad about what we finally ended up doing to Vic’s horse Buster, us drinking about it in the First Flight Lounge after we called Vic’s wife at home and she said Un huh and Nunt uh to the sideways questions we asked her about Vic being home yet, trying to feel out how bad was the tragedy, and her hanging up not saying goodbye, and us wondering did she always do that and then us realizing we’d never talked to her on the telephone before.

After we tied up Vic’s rig in the ditch behind the First Flight Lounge we started to wonder if shouldn’t we have let Vic had his say about what to do with his finally dead horse, so therein started us having the lack of forward thinking and of Big Thinking, and instead we were left to second guessing and after we had left the rig with its better-feeling hum and came in to drink, with the drink buzzes coming on ourselves, we started to feel naked in our thinking, especially when a neighbor of Vic’s came in and shook his head when he saw us and then walked back out.

So what Steve Willis and I have done is to get down off the wall the tide chart and figure out where the most likely place for Buster to wash in is. We’ll head out over there when the tide turns and wait for Buster to come in on the surf and then drag him up to take him home in a truck we’ll somehow Big Think our way to fetch
by morning. The tide tonight turns at about two thirty, just about when the lounge closes, too, so that is when we think we will make our move to the beach in front of the Holiday Inn, which is where we expect Buster back.

So Steve Willis and I sit in the First Flight Lounge not having the energy to begin to think about where we are to live after having to get ready to be kicked out of Vic’s acres, much less having the energy to Big Think about pulling a sea-bloated horse out of the surf at two thirty in the morning. Here we are sitting not having the energy to Big Think about all of this when Vic walks in barefooted and says Gintermen, gintermen, another one of the ways he says things because he can’t read nor write and doesn’t know how things are spelled to speak them correct.

There is a nervous way people who don’t drink, say, preachers, act in bars but that is not Vic. Vic sits at our table open-armed and stares at all the faces in the place, square in the eye, including our own we turn down. He sits at the table that is for drinking like it could be a table for anything else. Vic says he saw his rig tied up in the ditch behind the lounge on his way home from Norfolk, would we want a ride home and come get it in the morning.

Steve Willis and I settle up and stand to go out with Vic who says he’s excited about the good deal he’s come back with. Looking at Steve Willis I still see it’s to me
to start telling Vic about us having to wait for his favorite animal in his animal group to wash up down the beach, all at our hands.

Out in back of Vic’s truck Vic runs his hands over six coin washing machines, something he does to all his new good-deal things to make them really his own. Vic says he got them from a business that was closing down, won’t his wife be happy. Vic says our next change for rent will be to rewire the machines so they can run without putting in the quarters, what did we think. I start to tell Vic about Buster and the tragedy in the garden. I can’t see Vic in the dark when they turn off the front lights to the First Flight Lounge but I can hear him say Un huh, un huh as I talk.

When I finish the part with Steve Willis and I waiting for the tide to turn Vic says Come on boys, we ought to get on home oughten we. All three of us sit up front of the truck riding across the causeway bridges home. All Vic says for a while is Well, my horse, my old horse, not finishing the rest, if there is anything to finish, and I get the feeling Vic is rearranging groups in his mind like his animal group things and his human group things and his good-deal-off-people things, and maybe making a new group of really awful people things with just me and Steve Willis in it.

But then Vic starts talking about how in change for rent Steve Willis and I are also going to build a laundry platform with a cement foundation and a pine rafter
shedding, and Vic starts to talk like, even after taking rearrangement of all his things in all his groups, everything still comes up okay. Vic says oughten we lay the foundation around near the downside of the shanty where Steve Willis and I live so the soap water can drain into the canal, and after we figure how to put the sidings and braces up, oughten we put a couple of coats of paint on it to keep the weather out, maybe in change for some rent, and what color would us boys say would look good, and Steve Willis and I both sit forward and yell Ackerine! at the same time, us all laughing, and me feeling, crossing the last causeway bridge home, I’m happy heading there as a human in Vic’s acres again.

THIS IS US, EXCELLENT
 

M
Y BROTHER GAINS HIS PORPOISE
on my pony in our race along the alleys home. I handlebar-heave through some side-skidding garbage and hold him off at the turn. I back-jam my pedals for my famous gravel-scatter through our chain-link gate. I try to knee up fast to do my Duke McQuaid sidesaddle dismount but my toes catch on the crossbar and my brother slips in along my side. Either on TV it’s “Danger: Duke McQuaid” or “Ocean Secrets,” hundredth millionth. We elbow-to-rib wrestle up the back cement steps. I punch my brother in the boxwoods. I am pulling in the door.

I do the Duke McQuaid dive-from-the-back-of-the-buckboard through the den door down in front of the
TV. The TV is already excellent, warmed up. My brother claws the wall coming in off the kitchen and surfs on the hall rug in on top of me. I’ll break his wrist in one snap for him to touch that dial. But what we’ve missed coming in the alley the back way is our dad’s car out front with our dad home, and with our dad home is our mom, backhanded backside down between the coffee table and the sofa for company we’d better keep our asses off of. What we’ve missed here is our dad helping our mom up for another blap across the mouth.

This is excellent! I do the Duke McQuaid drag-away-your-wounded partner with my brother, then we spin out with toenail traction on Mom’s Shine-Rite floors down the hall to our room for shoes and shirts, leaving it all, leaving on the TV, it having sports on it on anyway. So much sports on makes it less the chance for our dad to have an interest in coming down the hall to beat our asses. It’s just our mom this time.

This really is excellent. Now we get to go snag a ’za at Psycho Za, my brother and I getting to order the Manic Size Train Wreck ’za with double everything hot. We get two orders of Logjam Fries and two Gutbuster SuperSodas, no lids or sissy sticks, please!

Our mom just has coffee to go with her Jesus homework. The lady next door brings the homework over to her in little books. For us she brings usually some green apples and some Christian outlines you can cut out of God and the Apostles. My brother and I stick the cut-outs
in the spokes of our bikes with clothespins to rattle some clatter up and down our street until Mr. Murdock comes out and says, Stop it! He says, Here’s a quarter for you and here’s a dime for your brother, just, please, Stop it!

Our mom drinks her coffee cold, usually, not to burn the swole lip she has, the main reason for us going to Psycho Za. She sits while we eat and makes lines under the words in the little books the lady from next door brings over.

My brother and I have been snagging ’zas at Psycho Za when it was way before called Psycho Za, like the summer it was called Miss Romano’s Pizza Palace, then Pizza Feast, then Earl’s. When it was just Earl’s I was little and my brother came in a sling and I would only have a soda or some snow cream and our beat-on mom just had cold coffee and cigarettes, no Jesus homework yet. Then our dad backhanding and giving our mom money for it after, I worked up through sodas and snow cream to pinball at Earl’s, pizza burgers and playing with the knobs on the cigarette machine at Miss Romano’s with my brother in a plastic chair, and finally us snagging some Manic Size ’zas at Psycho Za, leading to a ride on the Rocket Sling later in the park.

Talk about it, excellent! Sometimes on the ride my brother almost throws up the Train Wreck and sometimes he almost doesn’t.

Then there are the nights when our mom calls up the
lady from next door to come over to Psycho Za and this is not real excellent. Some nights our mom’s pencil points break and we don’t have a sharpener in her purse. Some nights her coffee soaks through her Jesus homework and her split lip beats in hiccups against her bent tooth. On these nights my brother and I know not to breathe Train Wreck breath on each other or jerk on the cigarette coin return over and over for pinball quarters until somebody says, Stop! We just sit there and work over our food while the lady from next door works over our mom, pulling tissues and gold sticks of makeup from her secret-compartment purse. Sometimes, if it is something we should not see that she should do, she and our mom go back into the ladies’ room for a long time, taking along the purse we are never left long enough with to go through. Whenever we can, we look in it, but mostly all we ever see when our mom’s head is tilted back and the lady’s back is turned, mostly only all we ever see over the Train Wreck down inside her purse is something looking like God or an odd Apostle.

What else is not real excellent about the lady from next door coming over to Psycho Za is that later she won’t get in the Rocket Sling down at the amusement park with us. She just sits on the railing talking to the man with the cast on his arm running the ride. You should tell him, whoever he is, every summer different, about the way the clutch handle slips and breaks your arm. Usually it happens into the summer when the ride
has been pretty good ridden and the handle starts to click like one of those piano clocks, back and forth, back and forth, until one night the handle wants to lie down flat against the place where the men running the ride like to rest their arm, waiting for the ride to be run. Every summer somebody different has it happen, it’s just always the same kind of cast over the same kind of arms, arms like with amusement-type tattoos that look deeper blue in winter when you see them doing some job else, like taking out restaurant trash or reaching for cigarettes through bars in the windows of the jail downtown.

And the next-door lady not getting on the Rocket Sling means that our mom will not get on either. And even with our mom behaving at home so our dad has to blap her, still me and my brother have to have her for the feeling we get when she screams excellent, us spinning around, tucked under the metal bar that other people eating fried mess and French fries have greased up, the rocket cockpit like a chicken wire box you can see through, you can almost stick your finger through the wire and touch the two bolts that hold you on, that keep the rocket on the ride. First you go up rocking slow and you can study the painted rust in the cracks of the metal arms with the bulbs lit in between where they are burned out, and then up, turning heavy, the rocket cockpit sloping me against my brother and my mother, you can smell Train Wreck and coffee, the ride
taking your breath up until you spin around calm at the top at first, above our town and the ocean black ink you are on the edge of, and maybe a secret pinball quarter you were saving for yourself falls out of your shorts about now, you knowing the man running the ride can hear the silver bounce down while he watches in the sand for it to land, him waiting for it to rain change from people’s pockets every time, like you wait all summer to show up and see his broken arm in a cast because nobody, even you, told him to watch out for that slipping stick on the clutch that starts and stops the ride.