The Ice at the Bottom of the World (9 page)

Kirby Carter, Bill began again, brought in Pamunkey Indians to run the saw at night for half wages. And on nights was when Kirby Carter had Louise there, mostly
alone, to go in and refigure the books in Kirby Carter’s favor. Oh yes, said Bill, our Louise fixed the books for her daddy, never looking back for it that I know. But what else of it all was that, though don’t look at her now, Louise was all we had for the best-looking girl around, and with her dark-complected, she stirred the Indians, like every net dragger, lumberhand, and boat builder alike, crazy with her looks, but only them around with her alone, working at night for half wages.

Bill lit another cigarette and side-smoked it one-lunged.

So, Bill said, I would court her Friday and Saturday nights over in Carter and she’d ride over with her sister Sundays for church over here. It would be the weekdays in between, Bill said, that no matter how blessed tired I was from pulling net or lifting tongs on my father’s boat, I’d lay upstairs in this very house all frisky-feelinged and blue over Louise. You see, we didn’t have all the liberties you take today, he said to Powell, and Powell took his point.

Bill sipped his beer, looking, leaning out the window a little south and then a little north.

You see, Bill said, I also knew the Indians drank on the all-night shift, not a lot to be fired over on half wages, but enough so’d one or two a year would lose a hand or at least a set of fingers. So you see, I’d lay sweat-bothered and blue twelve miles downriver from Louise every night no matter how tired, getting no
sleep, I’m telling you, listening to the gottdamn tide come in and go gottdamn out, worrying about those gottdamn Indians around my Louise, you know, like you’re on the edge of a bad sleep, until it was time to go out again with my father in his boat. I tell you that was backbreaking work to get tired over too, work like no one really has to do any more, I’m telling you, and Powell said, Yes, sir.

So you see at night, with the Indians a little wet and, to give them their due, working under strings of bare bulbs lit dim from a generator, hardly enough light to see by but drawing every itch and biting bug around, maybe one of the Indians would chain-lever a log on the belt set for the big buzz-saw, and maybe in the bad light he wouldn’t see where somebody’d left a comealong spike in, or maybe he’d be too busy slapping bugs to see where the tree had grown so big it had grown all around a rock the size of a loaf of bread like a tree will do, and maybe the saw would plane off a plank or two before the steam-drive six-inch teeth would try to bite into solid steel or native stone, but then the sound would be out, out from under the open-sided shed where the buzz-saw bit. And let me tell you, they couldn’t shut that saw down fast enough to stop that sound from rousing six miles overland Kirby Carter pajama-ed on horseback, or to stop that reaching screech of a kind of sound like we heard today, they couldn’t stop that sound traveling twelve miles downriver to where I lay on the edge
of a bad blue sleep over Louise, and don’t you know what that sound reached me as, on my sweat-wetted bed, it reached me as Louise screaming my name for help from all those gottdamn Indians. That was a sound, son, that truly traveled your ten of fifteen miles, that sound.

Bill and Powell were quiet a long time, turning up their long-necked beers and listening to the foam settle back to the bottle bottoms.

I think I married her because I couldn’t take that sound any more, said Bill. The war started, the sawmill burned, and I’ve been gone almost ever since.

They seemed to be getting to the end of something, even if it was just the case of beer. Powell had had so much to drink that his questions about love and marriage were just echoes in his head of a thought he could not remember. Bill beat his foot against the sea-locker side. Forget what I said about only being half-married, he said. I got a wonderful wife, I got a wife like all men should have, a wife the kind who will either make you or break you a place in this world.

Bill stretched back on his sea chest like a body out of its box. I just now see that I am finally home, he said.

Powell left the garage, looking a little north and then a little south, leaving Bill asleep inside, sleeping the kind of wheeze snort snoring sound a man with one lung makes.

In the winter later, Powell stood wanting beneath a sky that was a blue-pearl boil frothed in off-white slices that came down out of the morning fog as dirty-feathered seagulls in their turns. The white mists of foggy plumed tongues fell the few feet between heaven and earth and licked at the crystalled fingers of early snow fallen in Doodlum County Christmas week, unusual. Powell stood wanting with his wife at the left-open broken place in the ground made for the later laying in of Bill Doodlum. The gravedigger’s shovel had flung a few spare spades of brown sandy soil beyond the green canvas catch-tarp, making tiny desert valleys in the mountain landscapes of ice.

In Powell’s coat pocket was the empty nine-shot pistol, Bill Doodlum’s personal choice, the one Louise Doodlum had called Powell to come over and fetch from her, she said, come fetch what she had put Bill Doodlum out of his less-than-one-half-lunged misery with, her calling when Powell and Lisa Lee were sitting around their trailer-home kitchen table cutting out commas, colons, and question marks for Lisa Lee’s grammar class. I did it like he said, careful not to bounce the bullets off the oxygen tank so to blow up hurting anybody, Louise said to Powell, as with a top and bottom hand movement he slipped the pistol away from how she still held it when they arrived, slipping it away as gently as he would have a mitten from a sleeping child’s curving hand.

Upstairs, Powell pushed open Bill’s bedroom door. Bill was listing to his left off a cloud of pillows, his left arm and hand a little over the sideboard edge of the bed, as if he had awoken with a sudden thought and was reaching for his slippers on the floor. His pale blue pajama top was to Powell a reckless spread of red punctuation, mostly periods and an exclamation. In the gunsmoke smell of after-violence, Powell sensed a building modulation in the room counted off by the clicking bedside clock and the steady hiss of oxygen. At first calming, its sudden familiarity to Powell as sounding like something about to explode urged him back downstairs.

In the kitchen, Louise and Lisa Lee held each other like wrestlers in a headlock, the thick-wristed arms run up under each other’s same-waved hair and down over the same muscle-wound shoulders, faces in necks talking and fronts not touching. Powell sat at the telephone table in the den watching the two women in the slice of kitchen light, they having already gotten out on the counter the tough steel four-legged five-gallon coffee-maker indefinitely now plugged in for days. Powell pulled the telephone into his lap, thinking who to call, still studying the two women in the wrestlers’ embrace in the kitchen light. These two women, each in their time the closest thing to best-looking the county had, Bill had said, they both with the up-jutting bows of sharp, swelled breasts and the high rounded sterns exactly
built like the workboats in the Bay needed nearby for local waters, boats that bore the names of the captain’s wives, even out there a
Lisa Lee
and a
Miss Louise
from a former husband and a forties flame, the form inspirational and practical, the wide wrists and sturdy legs to keep paint on the houses, to shore up the barns, to wrestle machines that turn the soil and cut the hay, machines that broke down always when the men were gone to sea, the same time as everything else, gone when babies were born, houses burned, cars collided with Doodlum children beneath and at the wheels, the highway patrol saying, What do you expect from children left to run wild with the daddies sending sometimes money from Taiwan or Tel Aviv or a telegram dictated in drunken, divided words, saying,
STRAIGHTEN UP BACK HOME, YOU
, these daddies, these husbands bringing gifts back ten years too late to matter, these women cheated by half-life marriages to half-married men, strangers always coming home, drinking, restless to return to sea, to some little empty bleak strange strip of desert sand in the ice at the bottom of the world, while these women shouldered it all, the everything else, all on those thick-muscled shoulders and sturdy legs Powell admired from the telephone table in the den, Powell holding the telephone in one hand and the pistol in the other, still wondering who to call.

Doc Mackenzie said he had Perry Como on the TV, the Christmas special, was it an emergency? Powell
said no, it didn’t seem to be an emergency, but there seemed to be some circumstances. Doc Mackenzie asked would these circumstances bring Bill Doodlum back to life? and Powell said no, these were more like family circumstances, and Doc Mackenzie said oh, all right, he would pack his bag next commercial break.

Doc was a sideways Doodlum like Powell, that is, marrying high into the family but on somebody’s secondhand time around. For Doc, it was a Hudgins Doodlum off a golf pro in Richmond at the country club where he used to play, Mary Beth Hudgins Doodlum Walker Mackenzie now. Doc had done the Doodlums a favor because, like bouncing genes in the Doodlum clan there were women like Lisa Lee’s own sister, Claudia, who had certain notions, especially after spending some time up North like Mary Beth and Claudia both had, and if Doc had not stepped in when he did to marry Mary Beth, she said she would have gone ahead with her plans to turn her corner of Doodlum County, inherited as potato fields, into a high-walled playground for her Richmond friends to come and sit in the sun naked, playing cards, but Doc gathered up what he called her loose ends, so that mostly what she did now was paint, on pieces of weathered potato-shed siding, picture after picture of seagulls circling Wolftrap Lighthouse, the same pictures in every Doodlum home, piles of which show up unsold year after year at the Fourth of July bazaar, Doc not getting much credit for his stepping
in although the county did need a doctor, taking even one from Richmond, Richmond not being all that far away, but to people used to distant ports and postmarks, Richmond could as well have been Rangoon and just as foreign too.

Doc said, standing beside Bill Doodlum’s bed, that he was surprised Bill did it not having finished the paperback thriller on the nearby table with a bookmark in a place about halfway through, and Powell said that was part of the circumstances he wanted to talk about, that Miss Louise had … but Doc cut him off sharply and said, Son, do I look that ignorant to you? Doc said, I can count eight or nine holes here, any one could have been the only one Bill needed. When I say what I say about him doing it, in my mind and in what I write down he did do it, whether this suffering man pulled the trigger or not. Then, sounding like his raised voice would waken Bill, he said to Powell, Son, this is a suicide under what you yourself said were family circumstances. You didn’t call the sheriff, you called me. What does that tell you to yourself?

Powell looked down at the pistol he was still holding.

Doc sat down hard on the bed, shifting Bill almost over the edge before Doc pushed him back onto the pillows. Bill did this, said Doc. Call Claudia so she can get a head start home and then call the sheriff. I’ll go down and see to Miss Louise. Leaving the room, Doc pulled the bookmark from the pages of the bedside paperback
thriller, losing Bill Doodlum’s place in it forever.

Powell called Claudia, already overdue down from art college for the holidays. Powell called the number three times to make sure it was the right one, and each time before the leave-a-message tone he heard over and over only the trumpeting call of elephants. The Mary Beth Hudgins Doodlum Walker Mackenzie now bouncing gene of notions had struck Claudia Doodlum too, her notions carrying her through a room of men in a way that made them shift with their shirt collars suddenly too tight and an itch to flare nostrils in a scent of some sort, irritating a nervous urge to either murder or make love, and in Claudia’s case maybe both. When Powell first met her at a roadside bar, in his That Man days, he looked from Claudia to Lisa Lee back to Claudia again, instantly thinking, Jesus God, I got the wrong one, until he began to see how her clothes barely contained her, like her lips could barely contain her rippling tongue as she talked in lower and lower growls about anything slick, fast, or hard, Powell recognizing the exciting little lethal dangers in Lisa Lee he loved fullblown and free of rein in Claudia, out of control, Claudia, in Powell’s That Man days, barging in on him and Lisa Lee on the couch into it as far as shirtless, Claudia begging wildly, Strip me naked and tie me up, strip me naked and tie me up and make me watch something
horrible!
and Powell and Lisa Lee, complying, strapping
her into a kitchen chair, sitting her in front of the television, switching it to “History of the Harmonica Part 4 of 6” on Public Broadcast. Even then Claudia moaned and struggled with her bonds, complaining when they would come loose. Powell left a message to come home after the final elephant blast, hanging up, remembering suddenly an old hurt in Lisa Lee’s voice saying one time Claudia had always been Bill Doodlum’s favorite.

In the den, Doc had Louise Doodlum in a headlock on the couch and Lisa Lee was turning his bag out on its side, digging under Doc’s directions. Louise had suddenly begun to pull everything out of the den closet and was flinging it across the room, some of Bill’s books, a Panama have a box of family photographs. Louise took down a balsa-wood clipper model Bill had started and never finished and hammered her heel through it until the hull was flattened, crying, Lisa Lee letting her until Doc said, Enough is enough, Louise, and opened his bag for a shot. This isn’t exactly what I had in mind but it will do, Doc said, slipping the needle into Louise Doodlum’s arm that began to relax and turn fleshy again. This will make you tell us all your secrets, Doc said, noticing his watch and making a motion for Lisa Lee to turn on the color television in the corner. Yes, Louise, said Doc, straightening her legs on the sofa, you’ll be telling us everything you know, every little Doodlum-hearted secret. A green and red smear in the
middle of the television screen opened like a flower into a Christmas show winding up in song. Powell and Lisa Lee gathered up the closet-thrown things and settled Louise Doodlum in on the sofa with blankets and a pillow. I’m floating in the clouds, she informed them all.