“Same way as most,” Corran said.
“Aye, but at’s a good one.”
“How’s the metal factory?” Corran said. Both men shook their heads.
“Och,” Nick said. “It’s a crippler. Don’t get us started. But at least it’s Friday night, thank God Almighty.”
“Problem with a factory,” Angus said, “is that there’s no finish line. You’re never, ever, ever fucking finished, see? Make fucking metal all day long. What does that get you? A chance to do it again tomorrow. It’s a fucking nightmare, innit, Nick?”
“You can’t look at it that way,” Nick said halfheartedly. “You’ll go mad. You see, what I do, is I tell myself I’m making things, not just metal. I’m making saucepans and airplane wings, what have you. Puts it more in perspective, aye?
“Ah, you’re making fucking metal, same as the rest of us.”
“Watch your dirty mouth in front of the bairn, would you?” Nick said.
Angus looked at Lucy, shamefaced.
“Christ. I’m sorry,” he said.
“I don’t think she knows what you’re saying, Angus,” Corran said.
“Anyway,” Nick said. “It’s a living.”
“My da owns a factory,” Corran said. He surprised himself by offering this information. “In Florida. Ice factory.”
“Well, he’s doing it right then, if he owns it,” Angus said. “Them that own it don’t mind it. It’s only them that work it that mind it.”
“And why are you not over in Florida with the ice factory then?” Nick said.
“I’m not interested in Florida.”
“But aren’t you interested in the money?”
Corran shrugged.
“Was me, I’d be over there. Making ice and staying warm,” Nick said.
“Ah, leave ‘im,” Angus said. “Maybe he doesn’t get on with his da.”
Lucy knocked her biscuits off the table and watched blandly as they scattered across the floor. Corran took a napkin and swept them up. Doesn’t get on with his da. Was that how you’d describe it, then? Corran hadn’t seen his father since last Christmas, and they’d hardly parted on good terms. He ran his tongue across the inside of his bottom lip, remembering the gash that had lingered there for weeks last winter after he returned from Florida—the gash that resulted from Johnny’s hand connecting with Corran’s face. The last he’d seen of his father was the disgusted, stone-faced countenance of a man who’d evidently decided he’d been disappointed by his son for the final goddamned time. Johnny had stood at the window in his house on Watchers Island when Corran shuffled out the front door toward the cab that would bring him back to the airport, back to Scotland. He didn’t say goodbye. Good ole Dad, Corran thought, articulating in his mind his best Yankee accent. My old man.
It wasn’t that Corran hadn’t had it coming. For God’s sake, he understood why Johnny was angry. Corran had been off the chain for a long time by then; he was well aware that much of his behavior—shit, most of his behavior—had been horrific for at least a decade. And he understood that Johnny was frustrated, tapped out, pissed off. Completely justifiable. Corran couldn’t have expected anything different. He’d put them all through the wringer—Johnny, Pauline, Sharon, and Toole—thanks to the smack, and for ten long years he’d given them little occasion to hope that he’d ever be anything but a junkie. He’d had little hope of that himself. There were days, even today, when he still had little hope.
Except here was the thing: Last Christmas, Johnny had made it very clear, after the fiasco over Pauline’s wedding ring, that he wanted Corran out of his life. Forever. “I want you gone,” he’d said, and Corran hadn’t heard from him since, though surely news of Corran’s daughter and his nine-month triumph of sobriety had reached Johnny’s ears by now. And all right, Corran thought, maybe it was true that he didn’t have a whole lot going for him right now except sobriety. No education. No money. A shitty job on the Drumscaddle ferry to try to make ends meet and buy food for his daughter.
But he did have a small measure of pride left. And he’d be damned if he was going to be the one to blink, the one to come crawling back to Johnny with a simpering apology in his hands—again. Especially for something that—for once!—Corran didn’t do! Johnny had accused him of stealing Pauline’s ring, a crime Corran didn’t commit. Granted he’d been on quite a bender at the time, and granted there were heroin-induced gaps in his memory for much of that Florida visit, but Corran wanted to believe—no, he needed to believe—that he was a decent enough human being that even in a delirious panic for skag, he would not have stolen his stepmother’s wedding ring off her nightstand and sold it to buy more drugs. He wanted to believe his father thought that, too, but alas, such was not the case.
He wants you to admit to taking Pauline’s ring, Sharon told him.
I want him to admit he’s being an asshole, Corran responded. Because I didn’t take the ring. Even Sharon looked doubtful. Which made Corran even angrier. After a while, the fact that everyone wanted him to own up to the theft had become an offense itself. Johnny said he did. Corran said he didn’t. And there they were. A Mexican standoff. Fine.
When Corran was growing up, Johnny visited a few times a year and flew Corran over to Florida whenever the idea seemed to strike him, but Corran had always gotten the feeling that it was more out of a sense of obligation to Sharon than anything else. Fatherhood was easy for Johnny: Show up now and then, write some checks, and then exit stage left, go back to sit on a sunny Florida beach and enjoy the spoils of ice. Sure, Johnny sent money. Plenty of it—all through Corran’s childhood and right on into the financial catastrophe of Corran’s drug addiction. And sure, Corran was grateful. Absolutely. God knew it took a great deal of pressure off Sharon and Toole, who were always staring down the voracious working-class maw of credit cards, home equity loans, and car payments.
But grateful or no, and money or no, Corran had grown up thinking that Johnny might have loved him in a very abstract, duty-bound way, but that his father didn’t particularly like him. Corran couldn’t remember—apart from the fisticuffs last Christmas—a single time when he and his father had ever touched each other, except for a formal handshake, even after months spent apart. A single time! It was baffling. There were photos around Sharon’s house of Corran as a very young lad—sometimes up on Johnny’s shoulders, sometimes standing against his father’s knees, Johnny’s hand on his head. But Corran couldn’t remember any of those instances, and they had certainly ceased to occur by the time Corran reached adolescence. Sharon was the hugger in their family. Not Johnny.
In the months since Corran had gotten to know the blessings of Lucy’s soft skin and the saving grace of her fine, sweet-scented hair, the memory of his father’s austerity was gradually changing, taking on a hue more akin to resentment than to its familiar bewilderment.
Sharon tried to defend Johnny. “It’s hard for him, Corran,” she’d say. “He doesn’t show affection well, that’s all.” Which was bullshit. Corran had nothing against Pauline whatsoever—he loved her, in fact, considered her nothing short of a saint—but one look at Johnny going moonstruck over his second wife the way he’d been doing for the past twenty-five years was enough to demonstrate that the old man did have a heart. He just didn’t open it much.
Johnny had always maintained that he left Scotland to earn a better income, and that this better income (which was indeed forthcoming) was won through great personal sacrifice in order to provide a better life for Corran Boniface. Good fate! Corran had heard that one all his life, and the irony of the moniker these days was not beyond him. But Corran had another theory about Johnny’s departure for the States and, more precisely, about Johnny’s decision to remain there: His father found two loves in America. One was Pauline. The other was money. And he wasn’t about to let Corran get in the way of either of them. In fact, the exact location of Corran on Johnny’s list of personal priorities was vague indeed, and as the years went by and Corran’s life became m
ore problematic, as he watched his father counting the costs—both personal and financial—of Corran’s drug problems, he came to one conclusion: His father didn’t particularly want him. If Corran ever had any doubt, last Christmas had erased it.
I want you gone, Johnny said. Corran had agreed. It was probably the best for them both. For ten months now, he’d held the line. And he wasn’t going to apologize to Johnny, because he didn’t take Pauline’s ring. Of this, he was ninety-nine and three-quarters percent certain.
He just wouldn’t have done that.
It was cold in the pub. Corran pulled Lucy’s jacket around her shoulders and fastened it at the neck to keep it in place. It looked like a cape. Superhero Lucy. She was staring at a TV above the bar, which seemed to be airing a cop show of some sort. A police officer was taking a crowbar to somebody’s windshield. The program title ticked across the screen: “World’s Wildest Police Videos.” Brilliant. Corran stared at his daughter, wondering if he should let her watch this.
“I didn’t get on with my da,” Nick was saying. “Nasty piece of business, he was. Beat the living piss out of you just as soon as look at you. I couldn’t be done with him quick enough.”
“Mine was all right,” Angus said. “Very kind, really. But depressed. He’d been an officer in the war, but when he came back it was nothing but foundry work. That was the only job he could find. A big comedown. I don’t think he ever got over it.”
“He died?” Corran said.
“Aye, he died. Ten year ago,” Angus said. “And the poor thing is still knockin’ about purgatory.”
“You don’t think he made it out of purgatory yet?” Nick said. “He won’t never. On account of the priest didn’t give him last rites.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My da was on his deathbed,” Angus said, “and the priest was called to give him the rites. But when the priest heard who it was, he wouldnae come do it. They’d had a row, see, years before, over one owed the other money. Da and this priest. So my father died without the rites, because that fucking priest wouldnae come.”
“They have to come. They’re required.”
“Well, he wouldnae.”
“They should have got another priest.”
“There was no other. This was way up Dornoch.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, even by the standards of the church,” Corran said. “Think of all the people who die without last rites. Think of soldiers. Think of car accidents.”
“Yes, but if you die on a deathbed, of sickness, you’re supposed to have the last rites. Otherwise, why’d they even make them?” Angus protested. “Ah, it’s a mess,” he sighed. “I just console myself with knowing that fucking priest has my father’s soul to answer for now.”
Angus looked at his cell phone, then pulled the buzzer gadget out of his trouser pocket. He pushed the button once, then twice, and stared at the phone expectantly. They all sat in silence, waiting, staring at the phone. After a moment, Angus put the buzzer back into his pocket and signaled the barmaid for another beer.
Lucy started to fuss. Corran paid his tab. He said goodbye to Nick and clapped Angus on the shoulder, but now the man was staring at his beer, deep in thought.
“My poor da,” he was saying. “My poor, poor da.”
Corran picked up Lucy and exited the pub. The wind hit him like a fist. He turned his body to shield Lucy from the chill, but she started to cry again anyway. He went for the stroller. The little shopping district on the other side of the loch was lit up, and he instinctively looked at his watch. Those numpties better get on the last crossing, he thought. Ferry would be shutting down in an hour. Ah, so what? He was off shift. He shouldn’t be worried about it. Funny, the useless habits you develop. Then he imagined Angus’s wife over at the co-op, and an image presented itself to him: a rejected peanut-sized vibrator, buzzing like a jumping bean and gathering lint at the bottom of an oversized shopping bag. He actually laughed out loud at the notion, just as he was leaning over to put Lucy—who was starting to cry in earnest again—back into the stroller. The baby fell silent. Corran regarded her.
“Hae ye never heard me laugh, Lucy?” he said to her. He did it again. She stared at him, two fat teardrops wobbling on the bottoms of her eyelids. And then her face—ah God, Lucy—broke into a smile.
Corran circled his belt around the stroller handle and then hooked it through a belt loop on the back of his jeans. It was easier to pull the stroller up the hill than to push it. He gave Lucy a bottle and she was content then, lying back in the stroller and staring up at the stars with a bellyful of biscuits. He tucked the blanket tighter around her, fastened the safety harness, and started to walk. He remembered he was supposed to call his mother back. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked for text messages. Nothing more from Jintzy, but one from Sharon.
Your da called. He’s coming over, be here tomorrow. He’ll ride up with me this weekend.
Corran stopped in his tracks and gazed up at the star-sprinkled firmament. Oh. Well, brilliant. Just fabulous. His hands were freezing and it took him a few moments to get his fingers to text accurately.
Tell him no, he typed. He waited. The phone pinged Sharon’s response.
He’s already en route. Texted from Charlotte.
Johnny! This was beyond annoying. Corran pictured his father arriving at the house on Boscombe Road, bantering with Sharon and working his way through a few pints at the kitchen table with Toole. Then, just like in the old days, lumbering a little unsteadily through the house and up to the second floor to drop his duffel bag on the floor next to one of the single beds in Corran’s little room at the top of the stairs. He’d kick off his shoes—work boots they were, the only kind of shoes his father ever wore—and hit the bed, hard. “Made it!” he’d announce to the ceiling. “Jumped the puddle!” Just in case the fact of his arrival had gone unnoticed. Johnny MacKinnon. The one and only.
A flash of anger coursed through Corran’s veins, and then was replaced by something else he couldn’t quite name. Remorse? No, not that. Grief, maybe. Maybe grief. Well, shit.
What are you trying to do to me? he texted his mother. He turned the phone off. Nothing good was coming from it tonight. He took a step forward to take up the slack in the belt and felt the weight of his daughter behind him. Then he and Lucy started back up the hill.
Ten
For Johnny, the first great relief of landing in Glasgow was that the pressurized tumor in his head had not exploded. Bully. The flight had been nightmarish enough—nine hours of Chemal’s fidgeting plus an overly talky woman seated behind them and a throbbing headache that Johnny worried indicated an altitude-induced compression on the meningioma in his overtaxed brain. The woman was fixated on the topic of CrossFit. Johnny wanted to slam her head into the side of the beverage cart when it came up the aisle. This was alarming—such vitriol!—but also satisfying. He slipped pleasantly and fully into the fantasy. Then he dozed for a little while, but only in the fitful upright manner of humans on airplanes, and he was jolted awake more than once by the sound of his own wet snoring. Not that he was the only one. Transatlantic air passengers were a motley crew, he decided, looking around at the snoozers and droolers and twitchers. What a weird business this was.
The second great relief, which Johnny experienced after they’d secured the car rental and navigated the spaghetti of airport exits, was that Chemal seemed, as he’d boasted, completely adaptable to Scottish driving. Even jet-lagged and directionally disoriented, he appeared to have simply flipped a switch and reversed his Americanized instincts to effortlessly manage right-hand-drive, left-side-roadways, and even the daunting roundabouts that Johnny had seen completely flummox a good many older and more experienced American drivers who couldn’t take the pressure.
Pauline, for example, had refused to drive a car in Scotland at all after her first memorable attempt at a roundabout in Glasgow years ago, when she’d been caught on the inside lane for a half dozen rota
tions before she could brazen her way out to the perimeter to exit, after which she’d promptly pulled the car over and relinquished the wheel to Johnny. “What the hell?” she’d said, sweating and exasperated. “Could that design be any stupider?” The design was actually quite brilliant, Johnny told her—a roundabout kept the traffic moving and eliminated gridlock on Scotland’s already congested roadways, but Pauline was having none of it. “Absurd,” she kept saying. “I think it’s some sort of national joke to play on Americans.” Johnny smiled but held his tongue.
Chemal, on the other hand, had it under control. The rental was a mite-sized four-cylinder Volkswagen Polo, and Johnny at first balked at the wretched irony of this state of affairs. Crossed an ocean, and still sentenced to a Volkswagen? But the woman at the rental desk said they were out of everything else, and it was either take the VW or wait two hours for another car to be returned.
“Pick your battles, Iceman,” Chemal said. So the Polo it was. Chemal took the wheel, and Johnny was left free to navigate the route out of Glasgow and down the M74, where the village of Dunedin nestled itself against the eastern bank of the Clyde. Johnny had worked it out with Sharon: The plan was to land in Glasgow and drive straight to her house to nap off the jet lag and have a wee visit. Sharon said she’d put in for time off from work so she could join Johnny for a few days in Port Readie to see Corran. And Corran’s baby. Johnny was still trying to get used to this idea. He was relieved, actually, to learn that Sharon would come along.
“I don’t feel jet-lagged at all,” Chemal said now. He yawned. “Just regular tired.”
“We gained time,” Johnny said. “Get ready to merge here. Going east is a win—you get ahead of it. Going west is a lose.”
“What if you just kept flying east?” Chemal said. “You keep flying into earlier time zones. Pretty soon you fly into yesterday. You keep going. Fly into the day before. And the day before that. You’re turning back time. Ever think of that, Ice? Like, you can go back and redo stuff you like to do. Or see people who are gone. Or do things differently than you did them the first time. Make new decisions. Reboot. Fuckin’ A.”
The Ice House Page 18