The Ice House

by Laura Lee Smith

  “That’s very romantic. I bet you think you’re the first person who’s ever thought of that.”

  “Of course not. But I bet you never did.”

  “Turn right.”

  Though the air was cold and a heavy mist still hung over the city, as they drove the sun began to make an effort, and the thick brown skyline of Glasgow began to give way to the palette of suburban Scotland’s autumn foliage: burnt orange, bright yellow, a weak but insistent mossy green, and here and there jolts of bright purple and red. Johnny watched the motorway’s lanes whittle themselves down to two, watched the silver birch and alders multiply until they were approaching the city’s bedroom villages along the Clyde. Chemal was astounded, and uncharacteristically hushed. “The colors,” he kept whispering. “Look at the colors.”

  Johnny pulled up Google Maps on his iPhone and watched the blue dot shimmy down the little roadway in his palm. It was more satisfying, somehow, than looking out the window at a landscape he remembered as quite beautiful but also quite cruel. But the iPhone began to irritate his headache and Chemal was nagging him about international roaming charges, so he pocketed the phone and instead played a game of putting himself inside Chemal’s head—now that was scary—and seeing the country with the kid’s uninitiated eyes. The chill of the clouds. The burning riot of autumn. The sky was smaller here, Johnny decided, pinched and crowded by mountain ranges that bled terrible stories of uprising and slaughter into lonely glens.

  The Polo had a sunroof, and Johnny opened it and tipped his head up to look out at a square of fuzzy blue sky. A wet mist filtered in through the aperture, so he closed the sunroof and contented himself with studying the passing businesses. There were stores and restaurant chains he had nearly forgotten existed: Tesco and Asda, Arnold Clarks and Esso. They passed the exit for the road leading to Easterhouse, and Johnny felt both the familiar gnawing of that hard place and a long-dormant but passionate pride in his little family’s exodus from it. We’re getting him out of Easterhouse, Sharon. The miracle of that old egress was still dazing. The familiar density of the city streets thinned as they moved into the suburbs and through rolling farmlands. They were scarcely out of Glasgow when they saw their first blackface sheep herd, all muddy and gawkish against a straining wire fence, red keel marks like scarlet letters across their haunches.

  “Sheep!” Chemal said.

  “Get used to them,” Johnny said.

  Near Bothwell Johnny told Chemal to pull over next to the Clyde Walkway, and they got out of the car to have a look at the river. Johnny had read somewhere that the Clyde was much cleaner than it had been years ago, now that the environmentalists had gotten after the factories in Glasgow about runoff and waste. But it still looked to him as grim and foreboding as ever. Everything felt heavier here, in fact, Johnny decided. The air. The earth. His own tense limbs. A boat was chugging upstream, probably toting buckets of grayling and brown trout. Johnny remembered. And my God, the chill! Johnny had nearly forgotten. They stood on the bank and shivered. Chemal jumped up and down and threw rocks.

  “It’s cold as shit here. Reminds me of Detroit,” he said. Then he pointed. “What’s that?” A fat brown otter bigger than General San Jose was darting along the bank just downriver.

  “Dog otter,” Johnny said. “They’re hard to spot. Good eye.”

  “Sweet.”

  They watched the otter for a little while. It approached the water’s edge and dipped black hands into the water, feeling around in the silt. It looked like a tiny pianist. “He’s cute,” Chemal said. He was smiling widely. He looked like a little boy. He was seventeen, right? Johnny did the math. Corran would have been around thirteen when Chemal was born. A lifetime ago, but then again nothing at all.

  “Should you be calling your mum? Tell her we’ve arrived?” Johnny said.

  “Iceman. Please. I doubt very much she’s worried about it.”

  “You’re not giving your mum enough credit.”

  “Credit for what?”

  “For putting up with you, that’s what.”

  “Hey, man,” Chemal spread his hands wide. “You take your chances in this life. You get what you get. She didn’t get the golden boy. She got me.”

  “I thought she wanted a black boy.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Johnny handed Chemal his cell phone. “Call your mum, kidda.” Chemal rolled his eyes but took the phone and dialed. He walked upriver and after a moment Johnny could hear the defensive cadence of his voice: “Yeah. No. Yeah.”

  What was it with kids?

  Johnny buttoned his jacket. The cold was cutting through him. He walked a bit to try to warm up, and to try to reclaim some life in his limbs after the long, cramped flight. The walkway, paved and tidy, wound tightly along the river, and now and then he passed a jogger or a young woman with a pram. They nodded at him, and he felt dodgy, dishonest. They didn’t know about him. He looked like any other middle-of-the-road Glaswegian, he reckoned; there was certainly nothing about his appearance that would brand him an expatriate, an American, a Floridian, for heaven’s sake.

  “Ice! Ice! Bay-bee!” Chemal was shouting through the trees from a long way down the walkway behind Johnny. In a moment, he appeared on the path, jogging toward Johnny, his voluminous jeans and sneakers looking like some sort of space attire. “Where are you, Ice?” Rather than a sensible winter coat, Chemal had opted to outfit himself for the trip by layering as many sweatshirts and sweaters as he could under his KISS Army jacket. He looked like a heavy metal marshmallow. With a booming American accent. A woman with a toddler looked at Chemal, then at Johnny, then back at Chemal. So much for blending in.

  “All right,” Chemal said when he’d caught up to Johnny. He didn’t seem to have modulated his voice at all from when he was fifty yards down the path.

  “Shhhh,” Johnny said. “You’re shouting.”

  “I called my mom,” Chemal said.

  “Still shouting.”

  Chemal handed back the cell phone. “I called my mom,” he stage-whispered. “She said to tell you hello.” He walked down the bank to toss stones into the river.

  Johnny looked at his phone. He needed to call Pauline. He wouldn’t say he was scared to call her, necessarily. But she’d been so livid with him over his determination to take this trip that he was, well, a little concerned about calling her. When he told her his plan, and when he added that he’d already paid the airfare for himself and Chemal, she’d stared at him silently for so long that he waved one hand in front her face, trying to focus her vision.

  “I hope you’re joking,” she finally managed. She’d been standing next to the kitchen table, and she sat down abruptly.

  “Well, no,” Johnny said. “I think I need to see Corran.”

  “You won’t even talk to him for all these months, no matter how much I’ve begged, and now you’re going to drop everything and go there?” she said. “This is the worst possible timing. You’re supposed to be resting up for brain surgery.”

  “I know …” he began.

  “Brain. Surgery.”

  “I’m aware of that,” he said. “But I think I need to settle this thing with Corran. I don’t think I should leave it on the hook.”

  “You’re not dying,” she said. “The tumor is benign.”

  “I didn’t say I was dying,” he said. “I said I wanted to see my son.”

  “You’re panicking.”

  “I’m making use of my time off.”

  “And may I remind you,” she said, “about OSHA?” She stood up and started to pace. General San Jose waddled into the kitchen and watched her anxiously.

  “What about OSHA?”

  “About the appeal.”

  “The appeal that’s not even scheduled yet? The appeal we don’t have any grounds for? You mean that appeal?” He walked over and put his arms around her. She stiffened. “Come on, Pauline. We’re probably weeks out from the appeal. And I’m not even allowed to go to the factory, so what go
od am I to Sam Thompson or whatever his name is?”

  “Tulley.”

  “Whatever. If anybody needs me they can call me. I’ll be back in no time. Less than a week. It’s not that big of a deal.” Pauline stood frozen in his embrace, and eventually he let go. When she spoke to him again her voice was so low and steely it was alarming.

  “Let me get this straight,” she said. “You’re taking the juvenile delinquent from next door, and you’re flying to Glasgow with a seizure-inducing tumor in your head, and you’re leaving me to deal with the lawyers and the paperwork and the fact that our livelihood is teetering on the edge of ruin, is that correct?”

  “Well,” he said. He paused. “Yes, I guess that’s pretty accurate.” He thought perhaps he could turn the conversation toward a more comic tone. He was wrong.

  “I don’t even know what to say to you,” she said.

  Pauline. He hated to see her this angry. Tell her, he said to himself. Tell her about the second MRI. Tell her about the fingerlike growths. Maybe then she’ll understand. But he couldn’t. He kept his eyes trained on the General. He was afraid to look in Pauline’s eyes. “Don’t be mad,” he said.

  “Too late,” she said. She picked up her dog and went upstairs. That was the last time they’d spoken before he left.

  Now, standing at the edge of the icy Clyde, he took a deep breath and called her. She was distracted with a household situation.

  “A frog got into the house,” she said. “The General tried to eat it and now he’s throwing up everywhere.”

  “I think that dog’s trying to tell us something.”

  “Like?”

  “Like he’s had enough. That’s a bold move right there. Dogs know frogs are poisonous.”

  “Are you saying you think my dog is suicidal?”

  “I think he’s on the verge.”

  “Well, that’s very nice. I’d like to think he’s happy, thank you very much. Oh, no, General!” she said. Johnny could hear her moving through the house. “He just barfed again. I really don’t need this today, Johnny.”

  “We landed.”

  “I gathered.”

  “You needn’t be so pissed at me.”

  She sighed. “How’s Sharon?”

  “We haven’t gotten there yet.” Pauline was quiet. “You okay?” he said.

  “I better go, Johnny,” she said. “I’ve got puke up to my eyeballs here.”

  “I wish you weren’t mad,” he said. He stomped his feet to try to warm up.

  “I wish you weren’t in Scotland with a tumor in your brain and our business on the brink,” she said. “That’s what I wish.”

  “Cyst.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Cyst.”

  “I love you,” he said. “Let me know if Tupper makes any progress.”

  “It’s ‘Tulley,’” she said. “For the tenth time. Good luck with Corran.” She hung up.

  “That’s sweet,” Chemal said. He’d returned to stand next to Johnny. “Nice to know the romance is still alive. I mean, at your age.”

  They went to the car and got back on the road. Twenty minutes later, they pulled into Dunedin, and Johnny directed Chemal to Sharon’s house on Boscombe Road, an impeccably neat semidetached just around the corner from the grammar school. Johnny hadn’t been here for ages. How many years? He couldn’t think. As he knocked on the door he had a clanging bout of regret. To avoid getting into the whole medical thing over the phone, he hadn’t told Sharon that he’d be bringing somebody else along, somebody being the bouncing, chattering kid on the doorstep with him right now. But he had no time to consider this. Toole threw open the front door wide and stared at them, shocked, before tugging Johnny into a half-hug and extending a hand to Chemal.

  “Come in, come in, why didn’t you call, why didn’t you tell us?” he said. “And who is this lad? And how is Pauline? And why didn’t you call?”

  “I did call,” Johnny said. “Didn’t Sharon tell you?” Toole shook his head.

  “This is Chemal,” Johnny said. “He’s my neighbor.”

  “Howdy-do,” Chemal said seriously. Toole pumped his hand.

  Toole stood beaming at them. “Well, this is a surprise. My God, Johnny! It’s been a long time, mate.”

  Johnny took off his jacket and ventured a look around the tiny living room. So little had changed since he’d last been here. He remembered nearly all of it: the rust-colored carpeting, the flagstone fireplace, the lace-curtained windows, vinyl roll-up shades lapping against the cold panes. Even Toole’s old cigarstore Indian was still here, a four-foot wooden carving of an irritated-looking Native American in a flamboyant headdress, his right hand raised either in formal greeting or, as Sharon maintained, in the universal gesture for “talk to the hand.”

  Toole had found him at a charity shop in Paisley years ago. He had dragged him home in delight, stood him in the corner, and immediately named him “How.” Why someone had gone to the trouble to transport the old statue from America only to abandon it in a thrift store Johnny would never know, but at any rate, How was now a permanent fixture here. Sharon had pointed out more than once that times had changed and that Toole was on increasingly thin ice in terms of the racial sensitivity of his favorite piece of home decor, but Toole maintained that this was no time to be taking the high road; he kept his eye on the resale market and had been watching the prices of similar carvings climb for years. How was going to finance his retirement one day, Toole insisted. And until then, How would remain exactly where he was, standing dour sentry over a tiny, drafty Scottish living room.

  The room, though, did appear to exhibit some upgrades that had been made since Johnny’s last visit. The spindly TV cart had been replaced with what looked like an electric massage chair, and an enormous flat-screen television was now mounted on the wall opposite the couch. A trendy leather ottoman squatted in the center of the room. A laundry basket filled with bright baby toys was tucked in a corner. Lucy. Johnny stared at the toys.

  Toole was firing questions at Chemal. You hungry? You want tea? You’re neighbors, you say? And where’s Pauline? Johnny decided to head it all off at the pass.

  “All good, Toole,” he said. “Pauline’s fine. I just came over for a couple of days. Hoping to catch Corran. Chemal is helping me out. I’ve got a medical thing, not supposed to drive.”

  “A medical thing?”

  “His brain,” Chemal offered. Johnny glared at him.

  “Did I ask you for input?” he said.

  “What, you didn’t tell me it was a big secret!”

  “It’s not a big secret.”

  “Dude, it must be—you’re having a conniption over there.”

  “What the hell?” Toole said.

  “Never mind it. We’re moving on,” Johnny said. Toole raised his eyebrows but agreeably changed the subject.

  “I have a mate who can’t drive,” Toole said. “He has narcolepsy.”

  “Seriously?” Chemal said.

  “Yeh, he falls asleep uncontrollably. Out of the blue.”

  “That’s awesome,” Chemal said.

  “I don’t think he’s so chuffed about it.”

  “You’re not at work?” Johnny said to Toole.

  Toole didn’t answer. Instead, he looked at Chemal. “I write books,” he said. “When I’m not enslaved to the man.”

  “Oh, I hear ya,” Chemal said.

  “When are you ever enslaved to the man?” Johnny asked Chemal.

  “Maybe right now,” Chemal said pointedly.

  “Tea,” Toole said flatly.

  “Sweet,” Chemal said.

  They followed Toole to the little kitchen at the back of the house, and in the light of the garden windows Johnny was surprised by how much Toole had aged—the skin on his neck gone loose and slack, the lines around his eyes drawn a little tighter, a little more weight around the midsection, and, most noticeably, a pronounced limp. Toole, whose first name was Gordon but who went by his middle name, was the last man standing of a
set of identical triplets. His brother Glyn had succumbed to lung cancer at age fifty, and his brother Gerald collapsed in a Sainsbury’s with a massive heart attack at fifty-three. Toole was left with the tough nut of wondering when his own genetic number—identical, right?—might be up. It rattled him.

  For a time, after Gerald died, Toole became obsessed with medical research. He spent hours on health websites, subscribed to Prevention and Men’s Health, even got Sharon to borrow drug manuals from the hospital where she worked so he could brush up on his pharmaceuticals. He gave up drinking, went vegetarian, took up yoga, kept an arsenal of herbal supplements in the dish cupboard. After a while, though, two things happened. One, Toole got thirsty and came to the inevitable conclusion that a life without Tennent’s lager might very well be a life not worth living. And two, he developed an interest in crime writing and realized that his new knowledge of physiology came in pretty handy in developing the forensic details to fit his crime scenes. His first novel—a psychological thriller set in the Victorian Orkneys—had been a modest success, garnering some good reviews in the UK press, if Johnny remembered correctly. He’d written a handful since then, all solid sellers but none profitable enough to allow him to give up his day job as a physical therapist, much to Toole’s heartbreak.

  “I hear you have new knees,” Johnny said.

  “Och,” Toole said. He sat down and pulled up both legs of his trousers, revealing two tidy but appallingly large scars.

  “Dang,” Chemal said.

  “It’s been a nuisance, to say the least,” Toole said. “But I’m told I’ll soon be leaping tall buildings in a single bound. Or something.”

  “So, Sharon’s working, I guess?” Johnny said.

  “Right.” Toole got up, plugged in an electric kettle, and rummaged in a tin for tea bags. For the longest time, Sharon had worked as a labor and delivery nurse at Rottenrow hospital, but several years ago she moved into palliative care and now worked as a visiting hospice nurse. “Went from bringing them in to showing them out,” she often said. Johnny wondered how she could do it, be so intimately involved with a patient during those final, gasping days, but she said she liked it. “It’s usually quite peaceful,” she told him. “You’d be surprised.” Johnny didn’t want to know.