The Ice at the Bottom of the World (8 page)

So, how was Antarctica? Powell asks Bill, warming him up for what lay ahead, and Bill says, Hot! We go in their summer, he says, for the ice to break up. Louise Doodlum looks at Powell over Bill’s shoulder with what is left of the birthday breakfast, the toast rims, the chicken legs, the blue potato gravy. Powell knew how he came out around Miss Louise, always being That Man, like, That Man this and That Man that, like, Lisa
Lee, how can you have it up in you to let your car be seen in front of That Man’s trailer home so early Sunday mornings, with Tommy John around and what people say, Miss Louise not to Powell’s mind giving him any credit for in fact being the one whose hands shake and throat bobs at the whine of the downshifted Suzuki, missing sleep, listening through Lisa Lee’s snore for her husband’s motorcycle outside his door. Powell looks the look back to Miss Louise until she shakes the birthday plate into a paper sack in the sink.

There’s a desert there in summer, with sand as brown as your boots, Bill tells Powell. And they got the comical penguins. Bill says, You can lay over the ship’s rail looking over at them on the ice in your morning shirtsleeves, them diving and flapping until a killer whale rushes up from beneath, flipping the ice cake and tumbling the birds down the fish’s big open throat. Bill says, It’s all real comical.

Miss Louise starts bump-sucking the vacuum around the men’s feet. Bill says, Come on in the front room, let me show you what else.

Even being July third, the day before the Fourth, the Doodlums have set up in their front room a white plastic bristle-branched Christmas tree hung with red balls and sitting on top a tinfoil angel, Styrofoam-headed with blue sequin teardrops pinned into its white bubbled skull. Laid around the tree is the Christmas left over from the day before, the Christmas Bill missed laid up
in Bombay next to a phosphate freighter. Spread like it had been jerked from the box once and left thrown was a blue silk kimono from China for Miss Louise that even Powell could see that unless somebody would cut Miss Louise in half she would never fit into. For Lisa Lee was a five-foot stuffed kangaroo from Fremantle, Australia, showing a runway smudge where Bill had fallen down drunk with it the length of the airplane steps, Lisa Lee telling Powell how quickly, not even having seen Bill for months, Miss Louise had spun right around right then to wait in the car, and how the stewardesses were surprised at the age of the intended daughter for the gift from the way Bill had talked about her, the only daughter to help her daddy up, Bill having flown the kangaroo beside him first-class and buckled up to Norfolk, Virginia, from Rota, Spain. For Claudia, home from art college up North, was a hand-carved ivory polar bear pulling a sled of six men and a dog. Bill could not remember right away from where it came.

What Powell felt the most uncomfortable with was the antique brass-barreled long musket from the Persian Gulf Bill had brought for Tommy John’s gun collection, Tommy John, the husband Lisa Lee had when Bill set off the year before around the world. Powell held it, sighting outside on Miss Louise getting in her car. Powell wondered whether the parts it needed to fire could be bought nearby or not, when Bill said, I’d cry about it too if I was you. Powell begged pardon. Bill
said, The Christmas angel, the one crying blue tears. Bill said he’d cry too with such an ugly tree run up his rear behind in the middle of July. It’s a joke, Bill said, a Christmas family joke. Powell smiled, pumping air hissing through his teeth as much as seemed required; then they turned their backs and took their leave of all the left-open gifts left over from the Christmas missed around the world.

What Powell was over to ask for was Lisa Lee’s hand, second hand as it was, a little legal holdover from the mixed-up divorce-from-Tommy-John papers nobody had signed correctly and everybody did not want to sign again. Powell and Lisa Lee knew a magistrate to straighten it out. People on the outside said to Powell, People don’t do that any more, the hand-asking, and what Powell said back was, Yes, you do do that in Doodlum County, slim as this finger bit of marshland is into the Bay and as fickle as it is by its connection with the world at George Doodlum Addison’s whim to swing the drawbridge back and forth to let you on or let you off, to keep you in or keep you out. You do that when you don’t share a carved name at all in the cemetery you have never set foot in for fun, spite, grief, or all three.

Powell thought it was convenient that half his trailer home living room wall was papered over with old
National Geographic
maps to hide where the dartboard used to be. He had charted pretty well Bill’s coming home, because back around the world, when Bill was
sailing south of a smushed mosquito was when Powell decided to ask for Lisa Lee’s hand. From then on Bill was a tag of electrical tape in Bombay, with Lisa Lee leaving earrings on the dresser, and Bill was a stick-on gold star from Lisa Lee’s second-grade deportment book stuck in Antarctica about the time Tommy John returned her hope chest swinging from the hook of a tow truck, and set-to-fly-home Bill was a big red thumbtack stuck in Rota, Spain, with Lisa Lee cutting wedding-dress patterns. Powell saw no need to pencil in Bill’s flight over the Atlantic Ocean. We are where he will be next, he said.

With Miss Louise outside and gone in her car up to the church hall to staple paper to the picnic tables for the Fourth, Bill took Powell into the garage to see what else from around the world and to check the long-necked beer and soda pop chilling down in the walk-in. In the garage with the walk-in was Lisa Lee’s hope chest, just like it had been winched down off the tow truck by Tommy John, and right alongside was Bill’s footlocker sea chest shipped in from him coming in home off the high seas. The feeling of sheer weight Lisa Lee’s chest gave off and the banged-around, stillbolted-shut look of Bill’s gave the chests the look of two pieces of unclaimed cargo freight you sometimes see left around the docks that when you finally do open only have in them rusty scrap iron pieces of something odd wrapped in ragged burlap and felt.

Bill handed Powell a cold long-necked beer, and even though it was fairly well before noon Powell felt he would be in this for the duration to try his question so he took it. From his khaki ship’s captain pants pocket Bill pulled a tiny shackle key ring and set to work popping the locks on his long footlocker sea chest. Powell considered that from Bill’s clothes maybe yes, you could tell he had something to do with ships, but in general maybe you would think he stitched canvas or counted stores. A short man, his shrunken-back skin was pale and pearly, shielded from the sun by Plexiglas shades on the bridge of his ship. The thick lenses of black glasses made his eyes look as if they were watering, ready to cry at any time, and in his posture he was a little bent over, maybe from the clutching pain of one lung already removed, the lung punctured in the Pacific he got the medal for, braced on the fantail of a sinking ship with a clustered crowd of Doodlum boys like himself, still firing handguns and carbines up at the diving Japanese until there was nothing left to shoot and no one left to save except himself and a cousin, shot through the lung as the ocean sucked their ship swirling from beneath them, this little stooped-over man with the teary eyes and the trembling hands.

Bill was opening the sea chest to show Powell what else from around the world when Duchess, the Irish setter dog, bobbed her gray-snouted red head in the frame of the garage door, her wet matted hair hung with
thick fingers of mud from chasing seagulls in the low tide. Come ’ere, Duchess, Bill said, but Duchess just looked a little stupidly back and then trotted away even with Bill calling Duchess, Duchess. It has been the same with dogs and kids for twenty-six years, Bill said. No one knows a come-home stranger. Bill started again to dig through the dirty folded-over khaki shirts, bringing up the smell of sour aftershave and, somehow, hot linoleum. Louise says she’s only seen me less than half the married life we’ve had, said Bill, reaching deeper in his locker for a small case like a toolbox. Me, I can look at it in a different way and see it as just being half-married. Half-married, said Bill again. He said, Can you think about that? and Powell, sitting on Lisa Lee’s hope chest, said that he probably could.

Bill unwrapped a pistol out of a greasy leather rag from the toolbox. Be careful now, it’s loaded and I never have the safety on, Bill said. Feel the balance and the grip, it’s Italian with a nine-shot clip. The company gave us guns last year against those boat people in the South China, he said. You don’t know but lots of them are pirates. This pistol is my personal choice, he said, slipping back the slide action.

The gun discharged in Bill’s hands, putting a hole in the riding lawn mower.

Don’t worry, Bill said, I’ve got extra ammo.

Powell was sorry he had let the talk slip away from being married, but he had been thrown off by the half-married
remark. But what really surprised Powell about Bill was the trained quick pull and draw of those watery-looking eyes behind the thick lenses of the black glasses that Powell studied as they talked, eyes sensitive to detect the extra shade of dark in the glittery silver seas, eyes even able to see a hardly appeared slice of fin in sharp peaked chop or a quick dip of waterspout twelve miles out in a closing dusk. Here the bastards come, Bill said, sounding surprised. Look at how they are coming.

They were two jets, two flattened specks on the horizon coming so right on they seemed to swell with speed, two tiny black triangle heads over the channel and lower than the trees on either side, two heads with swayback trailing plumes of exhaust, dirty brown fumes already shifting sideways on the breeze behind so they approached like sidewinders on the silver path of water, heading so straight on into Doodlum County, making their weekly practice run on the drawbridge where George Doodlum Addison sat looking down into the cars passing underneath, hoping for a shot of hem-hiked leg, or, if he was lucky, a peek down Claudia Doodlum’s sundress she always puckered open for his pleasure; here they came, approaching at a speed faster than the sound they made, so that all you thought you could hear when you saw them coming was the empty air in the seam of light they were splitting to get to where you stood until they would be long passed overhead when
the steady leaving roar would follow the explosion so quaking that in the Doodlums’ den there was a crack running down the far wall in the shape of the California coastline that inched a pinch farther down every week they flew. Here they came.

Bill was out on the end of his dock with his toolbox, digging and putting together like a military drill a short-stocked thick black pistol with a breeched barrel big enough to accept a cartridge the size of a soda can. Don’t stand directly behind me, said Bill when the jets were about six seconds away, and Powell did not.

The jets were so low their exhaust boiled in the treetops just as Bill fired his piece. The thing going off like a firecracker in a paint can was the first blast in a chain of explosions that included two sonic booms and a sound that sent Bill and Powell running into the garage to spend the rest of the morning drinking long-necked beers behind locked-shut doors, sometimes leaning to look out the windows a little to the north and a little to the south, one way to check for the Navy to come and the other expecting Miss Louise and a carload of women wired up on double-octane church caffeine coming over for a lunch of peanut butter–fig preserve sandwiches like Miss Louise had said they would.

Bill smoked one-after-another cigarettes, working the side of his chest, pumping one-lunged smoke streams, saying he had only thought a flare would scare the jets off, honest to goodness, he said. Powell said he was
sure they would have heard a crash if there had been one after the jet engine sucked in the flare, and Bill said maybe not, not if the jet had headed right out over the ocean. Powell said there wasn’t even a sign of a parachute, just that horrible grinding noise they heard for a long, long time. It had rained shredded motor metal confetti in the field across the road. If we can stand it until tomorrow, Powell said, maybe we’ll see in the paper if the Navy is missing a jet or not, and Bill said
HAH
! to that. Bill said he knew firsthand how two years before a jet had run off a runway in Virginia Beach blowing up a lady in a station wagon going by, with the two pilots hanging by their straps in a tree with no heads on, having gotten them lost during ejection. Bill saying the Navy cut off all the roads, and the next day where it all happened was nothing but a plowed-under ground with a man riding a tractor laying in rows of peanuts with nothing in the paper. All in one night, Bill said, opening two more long-necked beers.

They sat in the dark garage, Powell on Lisa Lee’s hope chest and Bill on his own, sometimes leaning out the windows to look a little while north, and then a little while south. What did exactly it sound like to you? Bill asked Powell. Powell said he didn’t know, but at first it was like somebody running a giant vacuum cleaner that sucked up something like a bottle cap but heavier, more like a fifty-cent piece, except it was a sound loud enough to hear for ten of fifteen miles.

Powell said, What about you, Mr. Doodlum? and Bill said Call me Bill. Bill said, It is a funny thing about sounds, what a sound will push up out of you like something squeezed from a blister. Bill pulled two more beers from the walk-in. He said, You know Louise is a Carter from Carter, you know about twelve miles up the river, and Powell said Yes sir, he knew that, knowing there were only two counties, Doodlum County and Carter County. Bill said before he and Louise were married her father started the sawmill at the river headwaters, floating logs on barges up and lumber back, back down to Norfolk and up around to Baltimore. Powell said yes, he knew where the pulp mill was, and Bill said, Yes, but this was way before that. This was when not even all the logs came up the river but that Kirby Carter was still cutting out the virgin woods, trees four and five men thick around the trunk. Trees so big Kirby Carter had brought down from Canada by barge a five-and-a-half-foot buzz-saw blade with a stripped-down steam locomotive to drive it. It took two weeks working around the clock to set it up getting running right, and ever it started spinning it only stopped for two things, one for filing the six-inch teeth with hand rasps and oil. Bill opened the side garage door to wet down the azaleas.