by William Gay
It’s another crazy rumor, Claire said. She probably started it herself. No one freezes to death anymore.
Her orderly accountant’s mind seemed to have considered these figures and rejected them and Jenny was still somewhere in time, smiling her one-cornered smile and pushing a dark strand of hair out of her eyes the way Tidewater had seen her do a thousand times.
There were other phone calls each with its attendant piece of the puzzle and finally the story told itself.
Her boyfriend, or anyway a man, had let her out at three o’clock in the morning at the foot of the grade that ascended toward her house. Apparently he had taken her to the housing project but for some reason she had been locked out. Ice was already frozen on the hill and continually freezing faster and the man had turned at the foot of the hill and driven back to town. She’d drunk a little vodka and she was taking pills, some kind of medicine the man guessed. She could walk all right though.
♦ ♦ ♦
IN THE MORNING Jenny’s mother had gone out to put a letter in the mailbox in case the mailman made it up the hill, and found Jenny frozen to death in a small stream of water that wound through a washed-out gully below Jenny’s house.
And seen, Tidewater guessed, Jenny in her shroud of ice, black fringe of lashes frozen to her cheeks and pale face composed like some marvelous archaeological find, some pretty girl flash frozen eons ago and ten thousand years gone in the blinking of an eye.
He felt at some odd remove from things. He sat before the fire not feeling its heat with a book open and unseen upon his lap. He was trying to enter and relive the past, Jenny’s past, his own. To replay every word and act of her life and so locate the exact moment when the canker appeared on the rose, when the fairy-tale wood darkened and the trees bore thorns, when a cautionary word could have turned aside fate.
It was impossible. No action was separate to itself but led to its echoes like ripples on water, words were not only words but symbols for things left unsaid.
Just at nightfall he drove Lisa and Claire to the funeral home, hunched over the wheel and sweating out every mile, icy beads of perspiration tracking down his rib cage. The van shifted and veered, the chains skirling on the ice, as if they negotiated some new-medium not just unfamiliar but alien.
The funeral home was dimly lit, he supposed by an emergency generator. He thought he was going in the door but abruptly he stepped aside for Claire and Lisa, the room overpowering him, images of crepe and velvet and old polished wood, images that were not in the room but in his mind.
What in the world are you doing? Claire asked.
I’ll be back in a little while.
But where are you going?
I don’t know. Uptown. I need to see somebody from the power company, if there’s anyone around tonight. I’d like to find out when the power s coming back on.
Well, it probably won’t be on tonight. If there’s any place open you may as well get something for supper that doesn’t have to be cooked. Get a pizza or something.
Beyond her he could see the dim sepia room with its air of waiting, a cozy paneled vestibule just one door removed from eternity. Why don’t I just have one delivered and you can eat it here, he said.
She gave him a cold cat’s look and opened her mouth to speak but he pulled the door gently to and went back up the sidewalk to the van.
The town looked surreal, like some town forsaken and abandoned. After some cataclysmic fall, after the failure of dreams and human will itself. Some of the businesses seemed to have generators but candles flickered room to room in private dwellings and he drove on toward the part of town where he could see that streetlights still burned.
There was a bar called Wild Bill’s open but scarcely populated save by its habitual ancient drunkards who sat crouched about the room like troglodytes. The place was poorly lit by gas lanterns and in the hollow yellow light appeared cavernous, the sidewalk curving inward, the dark wall beyond the pool table and hushed jukebox like the entrance to a tunnel moving on into the dark.
Tidewater ordered a bottle of beer and paid for it and sat beside an alcoholic old sign painter named Lee. He had never known Lee’s last name.
You painting many signs these days, Lee?
The old man’s eyes were rheumy and his toothless mouth loose and wet. He always looked obscurely angry, the world itself seemed to have done him some grievous wrong.
I’ve quit, the old man said. Nobody wants a regular sign anymore. Last one I done was this little old Swiss maid or somethin. Little Swiss maid totin a milk bucket. Had on this little cloth cap, blue with while dots. I thought, if I ever get this bitch painted, that’s it for me. Somebody else can paint the next one.
Life gets more complicated, Tidewater said. Somebody’s always raising the ante on you.
Did you notice all that ice?
Well, trees are laying on power lines everywhere and the electricity’s off It’s kind of hard to miss it.
I believe this is it. This is the beginning of the end.
The end of what?
Every goddamned thing there is, Lee said. I believe it’s comin the end of time. Did you hear about that girl in the Harrikin froze herself to death?
I heard about it. I don’t think that means it’s the end of time though. I just think it means it’s cold.
Maybe anyway it’ll do something about these damned mites.
These which?
These mites. They’re suckin the blood right out of me, eatin the meat right off the bone. A month from now the wind’ll blow me down the street like a paper sack.
As if he’d humor him Tidewater leant to peer closely in the poor light. I don’t see anything at all.
You can’t see mites with the naked eye and anyhow they’re not here now. The old man raised his watch to the glow of the lantern. They take off ever mornin about seven o’clock like a bunch of, blackbirds. Come ten o’clock at night they’re back again. I don’t know where they go but there’s gettin more of them all the time. I believe they’re bringin their buddies.
I’ve got to get on, Tidewater said. I need to find somebody from the power company. Anyway all this talk about the end of time depresses me.
You’d think depressed if you had these mites to contend with, Lee told his back as he went out the door.
It was still raining and the windshield was frozen over with a thin membrane of ice. He waited until the defroster melted it then drove on toward the lights. Full dark had fallen and above the haloed streetlamps the wet sky glowed a deep mauve.
The Pizza Hut was open though almost deserted and while they prepared his pizza he sat in a booth by the window and drank a cup of coffee and watched the freezing rain track on the glass and the sparse traffic accomplish itself on the highway. Little by little a nameless dread had seized him and cold grief lay in him heavy and gray as a stone.
When the pizza was ready he paid and went out. He laid it in the seat across from him. He opened the box and looked at it. As was The Lightpainter’s wont he had ordered the top of the line, a supreme deluxe jumbo with everything there was on it, a pizza so garish and begarbed as to serve as a satiric comment on the very nature of pizza.
He cranked the van and drove laboriously out of the parking lot. He could smell the hot pizza and he opened the box as he drove into the empty street and bit the end off a slice and began to chew. The cheese was tasteless and had a quality of elasticity that made it grow enormous in his mouth the more he chewed it. He couldn’t swallow it and at last he rolled down the glass and spat and then he took up the pizza and hurled it into the street. The white box went skittering across the ice like a Frisbee. He drove on.
He was not surprised to see that he was driving toward the Harrikin, though the road was perilous and even with the chains on the van spun on the hills and once slid dizzily sideways, so that for a moment the headlights swept the frozen woods in an eerie frieze, the trees tracking palely off the glass in elongated procession.
He drove on into
frozen night. Once he had to halt and plot a course around a fallen tree. Once he passed a downed power line where an ice-loaded tree had broken it, the high-voltage wire writhing and dancing and snapping bursts of blue fire.
The house when he arrived at it was lightless the way he had known it would be and it seemed deserted. It set pale and haunted-looking against the dark hills. In the driveway the tractor for an eighteen-wheeler was frozen to the ground, its chrome appurtenances sheathed in ice. He withdrew a flashlight from the glove box and got out with it. He approached the ditch.
It was very cold and the silence was enormous. It was broken only by the sound of trees splitting and branches breaking far off in the woods, like sporadic gunfire from some chaos that had not reached him as yet. Palms on knees he stood on the lip of the gully and peered into it. His breath smoked in the air and froze whitely in his mustache and beard. He wondered what she had thought. If she had thought, if her mind had been put on hold by ninety dollars’ worth of medicine. If memories and plans and dreams had already seen the writing on the wall and were fleeing her like rats scuttling over the decks of a burning ship.
He played the light about the rim of the ditch. He found a pink comb layered beneath the ice like an artifact suspended in amber. He studied it at some length. Perhaps it was a clue.
He heard an engine laboring up the hill and he turned. He could hear snow chains spinning on ice, the headlights washed the trees and a pickup truck turned into the driveway, the sealed beams framing him like a searchlight where he stood.
Doors slammed and a man and a woman got out of the truck. The woman incongruous in a knee-length black dress and high-heel pumps. She came teetering across the precarious ice like some grotesque beetle. Jenny’s mother. The man stood silhouetted before the headlights. Tidewater wondered was he Jenny’s father, brought back under truce by this mutual grief. The man unpocketed a flat half-pint bottle and drank from it then canted it against the inscrutable heavens as if he’d gauge its contents.
You morbid freak. What the hell are you doing here?
For a moment Tidewater stood in silence, trying to think what to say. He made some sort of obscure arms-spread gesture, a mutated shrug. Before he could speak the man pocketed the bottle and approached. You need to move it along somewheres else, he said. There’s people in mournin here if you don’t but know it.
I know, Tidewater said. I’m Charles Tidewater. I—
I know who you are. Move it along, you’re blocking the driveway.
No, you don’t understand, Tidewater said, the words tumbling out in a drunken rush, She was like a daughter to me. I loved her. It all seems impossible, that she’s … I had to come out here. I drove without knowing where I was going. I thought there might be a reason, a clue.
A clue? There was a trace of amusement in the man’s voice. I’ve got a clue for you. Get back in that van and haul your ass somewheres else before I call the law and have you arrested for trespassin.
I don’t want any trouble, Tidewater said.
Trouble wants you, the man told him.
You stole my daughter, the woman said suddenly. Her voice was thin and vicious, hardly more than a hiss. You carried her over there and turned her against her own family. And then when your precious daughter was tired of her you ruined her. You and your hippie ways. Got her on dope and everything else. No telling what else you did to her. Just no telling.
He had raised his hands to protest but she launched herself at him like a harridan. Blood-red fingernails raked his cheek, clawed wildly for his eyes. The Lightpainter stepped backward and his feet slid and kicked the woman over and he fell with her to the earth then rolled into the ditch. Ice cracked the back of his head and he lay on his back staring upward into the freezing rain. He could see the woman’s head and shoulders above the lip of the ditch, her glasses gleaming dully like enormous pupilless eyes. Then the man helped her arise and they turned away, out of his line of sight.
Just call the law and let them come get him, the man said. That’s what they get paid for.
He knew that he was lying where she had lain. He knew without seeing them that long straight strands of brown hair, like horsehairs, were seized in the ice where they’d snapped when they pried her free. As they’d snapped in the bloody permafrost of the heart.
After a while Tidewater got up. He could feel his clothing peeling away from the ice. He went down the ditch run to where it shallowed and clambered out. He got into the van and cranked it and sat with it idling and his hands cupped over the heater ventilator until he could feel warm air. He knew he had to drive away but he did not know yet to where. He knew that his life had changed, finally and irrevocably, but he did not yet know to what. The light painter felt like one of the rustic agrarians in his own paintings who had thrown aside brush hook and pitchfork and attained an almost undetectable motion, easing from the pastoral landscape that had sheltered him toward the white void of chaos at the picture’s edge.
My Hand Is Just Fine Where It Is
WORREL WAS SITTING on the stone steps drinking his third cup of morning coffee when he saw the Blazer turn off into his driveway. The softwood trees were beginning to green out in a pale transparent haze but the hardwoods were bare yet and he could see the red Blazer flickering in and out of sight between their trunks, the bright metal of its roof flashing back the sun like a heliograph. He’d seen it come a hundred times before, but its appearance was still as magical as something he’d conjured by sheer will, and he hoped the magic held through even such a day as this one threatened to be.
He rose from the steps when he heard Angie downshift for the hill and drank the last of the coffee and tossed out the dregs. He set the cup on the edge of the porch. When she parked the Blazer in the yard he was standing with his hands in his pockets. It was March and the wind still had a bite to it around the edges and he leaned slightly into it with his shoulders hunched.
She cut the switch and got out and stood by the car. She wore dark glasses and pushed them up with a forefinger as if she’d have a better view of him. She looked at him with a sort of rueful fondness.
I didn’t know if you’d be ready to go or not, she said.
Yes you did.
Well I don’t know why. I can’t see why you want to come with me.
I don’t want to even talk about it, he said. Are you ready?
She smiled. Ready as I’ll ever be, she said.
She slid back under the steering wheel and he came around to the passenger door and got in. She had the motor going but was waiting for him to kiss her and he took her into his arms and kissed her mouth hard. When he moved his face back from hers, her green eyes were open. She always looked at him as if he were the only one who had the answer to some question she had been thinking of asking.
Well, she said. I won’t even ask if you’re glad to see me.
She felt thin in his arms. He could feel the delicate bonework of her shoulder through her flesh, through the silk of the blouse she wore. She’d been thin ever since he’d known her and he always tempered the strength with which he held her but now she seemed thinner. If he held her as tightly as he wanted, he felt he’d crush her. Yet the flesh of the face turned toward him looked new and unused, scarcely touched by the abrasions of the world or its ministrations.
Where’s Hollis?
He had to work. They didn’t want to let him take off.
The son of a bitch, Worrel said.
Don’t say that. He offered to take off anyway and go with me.
The son of a bitch, Worrel said again.
He doesn’t know the whole story anyway, Angie said. He just thinks it’s tests. I couldn’t say the word malignant. You’re the only one who knows everything.
She said she loved him and he had no cause to doubt it. They were like a drug in each other’s veins. A crazy bad-news drug, their hands trembled with the hypo, the needle prodded for an uncollapsed vein. The drug they used was rare and dangerous with unknown and catastrophic side e
ffects—you couldn’t buy it, it had to be stolen under cover of darkness when other folks were asleep or their attention had wandered.
If he didn’t call or if he made no effort to see her, she came to see about him. She always seemed a little harried, almost distraught, glad to see him still there. It was as if she expected to see the house open to the winds and him gone without a trace or a word of farewell, gone to Africa to search for diamond mines or to South America to save souls. But Worrel had given up on prospecting and had come to feel each soul responsible for its own salvation and he was always there. In bed she’d cling to him and call his name as if she were trying to call him back from the edge of something. Warn him.
There had been a time when she was going to leave Hollis for him but the violence of his own recent divorce had sobered her, given her pause. There were other lives to be considered. Hollis had said in no uncertain terms there would be a custody battle. She was not in a good position for one. Hollis was in an excellent position. He was a good provider and a steady worker, and he was also faithful, or at least discreet. Angie and Worrel had started out careful and discreet but the power of the drug had surprised them and things had gotten out of hand: at some point, like drunken teenagers trashing a house, they had kicked down the doors and smashed the windows and sprayed their names on the wails in ten-foot-tall graffiti.
Everything fled from Worrel in the aftermath. Everything: house and car and vindictive wife. Disaffected and disgusted children fleeing at a dizzying pace like animals scuttling out of the woods from the mother of all forest fires, little scorched and smoking Bambis and Thumpers hell-bent for elsewhere, and Worrel himself seized in the soft grasp of her flesh scarcely noticing.
He studied her profile against the shifting woods of late-winter sunlight, a little stunned at the price he had paid for so tenuous and fragile a portion of her life, though he never doubted she was worth it.
THEY WERE DRIVING out of Ackerman’s Field and nearing Nashville when she glanced over at him. Did you find a place yet? she asked.