Cold Dead Past

by John Curtis

  Jay tilted his head and called to Jack and Tommy, "Help us, you guys! We’re going in!"

  Jack grabbed the still-bawling Tommy by the arm and dragged him over to where the others lay prone on the ice.

  "Grab his other leg," Jack commanded, as he grabbed one of Jay’s ankles. Tommy grabbed hold and they began to pull. It was hard work on the slick ice, but they made progress. First Jay’s chest and then his elbows came back on the safe side.

  Gene was mumbling "omigod omigod omigod" as if it were his new mantra.

  Frank smiled and spoke in a calm, measured voice, "Don’t worry bro’, it’s gonna be okay."

  And then it happened. The weight of so many bodies and the rising surface water were just too much. The ice collapsed and Gene was back in it up to his waist. He began screaming. Frank had to think fast.

  "Quick! Gene! Pull yourself up over me!"

  Gene clawed at Frank’s clothing. It was slow-going as he crawled out of the freezing water. His legs burned from the cold and he shivered uncontrollably.

  "That’s it. Keep going." Frank knew that the only hope was to keep a calm tone. Gene might panic and they could all be lost.

  Jack and Tommy were face down, hanging on to Jay’s ankles for dear life. In his panic, as he crawled, Gene ground one of Jay’s hands into the ice with his left foot causing him to lose his grip just as Frank’s head went under the water.

  The ice whipsawed up, sliding away from Jay, and knocked his other hand loose from Frank’s ankle. It was as if someone had flipped a silent butler to dump the ashes. The ice rose up about a foot in front of Jay, almost brushing his nose, as Frank slid head first into the water, his elbows flailing and feet kicking until he disappeared completely beneath the surface.

  It was almost majestic, the way the big patch of ice settled slowly back onto the surface of the pond and floated in to close up the opening. The seam knitted back together almost perfectly and the outline of the crack and a few new, small holes were the only evidence that anything had happened.

  Jay’s pounding heart in his ears was deafening in the silence that followed. He didn’t realize it at the time, but they told him later that he’d clawed at the ice, trying to kick his legs loose as Jack and Tommy pulled him back from the edge of oblivion.

  Gene just laid there, exhausted, soaked, and shivering. Tommy knelt beside him, vigorously rubbing his legs in an attempt to keep him warm.

  "Guys," he said. "We need to get him up to the house. He needs to get warm fast!"

  Jay got up on his hands and knees. Frank was gone. Swallowed up. He began frantically crawling across the ice, brushing away snow and slush, looking for any sign of him.

  "Jack! Get over here and help me!"

  Jack scrambled to his feet and rushed over to where Jay was searching. He walked along the edge of the crack, or as near as he dared go.

  "Jay! Over here! Oh, God! Here he is!"

  As Jay ran to his side, Jack began kicking the ice as hard as he could with the heel of his boot. Jay looked down. Directly beneath his feet was Frank. His eyes were opened wide. His face was drawn into a tight-lipped grimace.

  Little bubbles of air floated from the corners of his mouth and the water around him had taken on a pink tint that Jay didn’t understand until he saw Frank’s hands. The fingers were bent and the tips of some of them were raw from his attempts to claw his way through the ice. Jay fell to his knees and began beating the ice with his fists.

  Tears stung in the corners of his eyes as a sub-zero breeze whipped up icy granules from the edges of the pond and sent them swirling around him. Below him, he could see Frank disappearing into muck stirred up from the bottom of the pond. Jay kept pounding the surface until the sides of his fists had turned bright pink, long minutes after he’d caught his last view of the pleading look that seemed directed particularly at him.

  Jack grabbed his arm. "He’s gone. Gene’s here. We need to get going."

  He nodded, absently, and shifted his moist eyes to where Gene lay motionless on the ice.

  "We need to get Gene indoors and call somebody."

  Jack walked over to Tommy and Gene. Jay stood glued to the spot for a moment. He felt a shock down his spine and wanted to throw up.

  "Come on," yelled Jack.

  As Jay turned to go, he heard a sound like shattering glass. Hands, the fingers blue and waterlogged, clawed at his legs and clamped onto his ankles like vises. He screamed, but the others couldn’t hear and kept getting farther away from him, half carrying Gene to the edge of the pond.

  He was whipped off his feet and came down hard on his face. The cold, wet ice numbed his skin as he tried to gain purchase with his fingernails. The last thing he remembered as he was pulled down into the water was Frank’s voice, gurgling and tinged with bitterness.

  "You left me."

  Jay let out a howl and sat upright in bed. His eyes blinked as he adjusted to the dim light coming through the drapes. He let out a sigh as his body slackened. Jay’s skin was slick with perspiration and when he ran his tongue along his lips, it tasted salted copper where he’d bitten down hard.

  CHAPTER 2

  The grinding buzz of the alarm clock caused Jay to bite into his lip again. Out of reflex, he came down hard on it with his fist and yelled, "Son of a bitch!" Pain shot up his arm faster than the realization that he’d driven a piece of cheap Chinese plastic into the side of his hand.

  Thin, fresh blood welled up around the plastic and formed into a crimson bead which slowly painted a pinstripe down his wrist.

  "Son of a bitch." This time it wasn’t so much an angry exclamation as an expression of wonderment.

  He jumped out of bed and ran for the bathroom, cupping his other hand around the wound in an attempt to stanch the blood and keep it from staining the carpet and sheets.

  Jay reached the bathroom sink just as the blood started to dribble from between his fingers. It speckled the sink and bloomed out into irregular stains as he reached over and turned the tap on full.

  He picked out the plastic with his fingers and tossed it into the trash. He had to rummage through the bottles in the medicine cabinet until he found the box of gauze pads and a roll of medical tape he’d bought when he’d first moved into the apartment six months before.

  Jay wrapped the tape around his hand a couple of times to hold the gauze tight up against the cut and then tore it with his teeth. There’d be time to do a neater job later.

  The same nightmare every night for two weeks. He didn’t know why. He hadn’t thought about that day and what had happened for years. Then, one night, in the middle of a great dream involving a blonde and a bottle of olive oil, it was like a fog had descended and he was back on the pond. Over time, the dream had become more vivid and frightening. It wasn’t just a dream anymore. It was three-dimensional, HDTV, living color reality.

  Jay banged his knee on the corner of the coffee table on his way through the living room to the kitchen. The half dozen beer bottles he knocked over and sent rolling across the table to the floor reminded him how successful the party had been the night before. Some friends, other people he barely knew who’d attached themselves like barnacles, some people he’d like to get to know more intimately.

  When his book hit the best seller list, he’d suddenly become very popular. By the end of the evening, he had four new phone numbers in his pocket and one offer to do some sexual tricks he he couldn’t picture without a twinge of pain in his lower back.

  As Jay looked at the overflowing ashtrays and empty glasses spread all over the room, he made a mental note to hire a housekeeper with the money from his next royalty check.

  If there was one. He’d been waiting for his agent to call about that. It was amazing how fast money could slip through your fingers. He’d done without it for years and now that he had a bit of it, he found so many things that were impossible to do without. The Piaget watch on his wrist. The new car. This apartment which cost him three times what any reasonable person would pay.
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  Money was his new drug of choice and his royalty checks were his fix. Like any junkie, the further away he was from his last connection, the more his skin crawled.

  He shoved aside the dirty glasses on the kitchen counter and pulled a clean plastic cup from an open package next to the sink. As he ran the water to let it get cold, he dug through a cabinet full of odds and ends looking for a huge bottle of aspirin he’d bought. Five hundred tablets, cheap, at the warehouse store. Some habits of poverty died hard.

  He found it behind the family-sized garlic powder and the double pack of Oreos. He popped off the cap one-handed while filling the cup from the sink with the other.

  The pain in his hand had been superceded by a hangover that was a motherfucker. Just as he the tossed back the aspirin and put the cup of water to his lips, an ice pick of pain jabbed through his temples and ground and twisted into some raw, exposed nerve deep in his brain.

  CHAPTER 3

  Jack Hauser stepped down from the cab of his Dodge Dakota and slammed the door. The hinges squealed and a hunk of rust from down near the bottom of the door broke loose. He looked down at it for a moment and then ground it into the frozen

  gravel with the toe of his boot.

  He rummaged through his filthy, brown coveralls until he hooked his snuff and as he pulled off the lid he said, "Shit."

  The big pinch he pulled out with his dirty fingers just fit into the neat pocket he’d worked in between his lip and gum over the years, right there where the nasty brown stain had formed on his front teeth.

  Jack sucked in his cheeks and took another look at the truck. In better times he’d taken care of it like it was his first-born. It reminded him of himself, now, battered and beaten after ten years and gone to seed. Ever since June had left him the year before, things just hadn’t gone right.

  First there was a flood that wiped out his crop. Then there were the notices from the bank about the mortgage. He was past-due three payments and they were threatening to put him into foreclosure. His beat-up rust bucket pretty much summed it all up for him.

  He spat out a gooey stream of brown chaw juice at an imaginary target halfway between himself and the truck. He didn’t even make an attempt to wipe away the bit of spittle that settled into the scruff of beard at the corner of his mouth.

  Jack just spent a sizeable portion of the ready cash he had on hand to buy some tools and barbed wire to repair his fences. Even though he was about to lose everything, he still had the involuntary reflex that told him to put the farm in order. It was ingrained from years of having it beaten into him by his father. Anyway, there was nowhere else to go.

  Well, that’s what he told himself. He could sell the land and maybe make enough to put away for the future after he’d paid off the bank and a few other bills. There was a lot to be said for the security of a job at the factory in Milford that stamped out parts for those Japanese cars. Even working at a place like the new Wal-Mart on the outskirts of town. He had no kids to leave it to, after all. That bitch June had made sure of that.

  When Jack had thoughts like that, he would open up the locked cabinet in the parlor of the old house and measure out a thumb’s worth of bourbon against the edge of a glass.

  If it were a really bad night, he’d drift off into past dreams and think how things had gone so terribly wrong. Those were half bottle nights, when he’d wake up the next morning with a nasty taste in his mouth and the mother of all hangovers. Nights like that were the reason June had left him.

  As he stared down at one of the lug nuts on the truck, an orange tabby cat came padding out of the barn and across the frozen, rutted mud and gravel. It sinuously wound its way round and between his legs.

  Jack came out of his trance and smiled as he bent down to pick it up. The cat’s name was Rufus. He’d been a constant companion around the farmyard for the past few years. Jack held him up in front of his face and rubbed noses with him before cuddling him up to his chest, listening to him purr for just a moment before getting to work. The thought occurred to him that if you needed friends, a bottle and a cat were welcome in most apartments.

  "Okay, boy," he said, as he set the feline back on the ground. "Can’t stand here daydreamin’about things that can’t be."

  He nudged Rufus along with his boot as he walked to the rear of the truck. The cat ran back into the barn, stepping gingerly over the edges of the ruts so as to not get his paws wet. Jack let down the tailgate, revealing a couple of rolls of barbed wire for mending the pasture fence and a new pulley he hoped would make do for stretching it tight. He let out a loud grunt as he took a roll in each gloved hand and slid them out of the bed.

  When he got inside the barn, he heaved the rolls of wire into a corner beside the door. A hiss from Rufus brought him up short as he turned to go back for the pulley. Jack surveyed the interior. It was empty except for the Farmall, laid up for the winter and waiting for him to repair the hydraulics on the excavator. He couldn’t place the sound and listened for it to repeat as he walked around the tractor toward the ladder to the hay loft. Bits of chaff and dust falling from on high sparkled in the shafts of light that broke through spaces in the barn’s siding.

  As he stood, slack-jawed and squinting at the bottom of the ladder, he heard the hissing again, followed by a loud, high-pitched growl. Jack grabbed a rusty spade that was leaning against a nearby stall and began to climb. The ladder creaked in protest beneath his weight as he climbed with one hand on the rungs. The spade rested loosely in his other hand, banging against the side of the ladder with each step.

  About three-quarters of the way up, he stopped, breathing heavily. "C’mere you damn cat. You know I hate those rats as much as you do." A smile curled his lips at the thought of a little sport.

  Jack’s head popped up into the gloom at the top of the ladder and he swung the shovel up onto the hayloft floor. He turned and took another spit, following the glob as it sailed to the barn floor twenty feet below and disappeared. He heard a howl and glimpsed a dark form flitting quickly across his peripheral vision into a remote corner.

  Cats moved fast, but not that fast. Then Rufus let out a mournful wail that crescendoed into a shriek. Then, sudden silence. Nervously, Jack called, "Rufus. C’mere, boy. What you got?"

  A shaft of light bored down through a hole in the roof, spotlighting a pair of pale hands. The fingers were pressed deep into Rufus’ flesh. He clawed and scratched at them, howling all the while.

  Jack stared. "But there ain’t no blood." Almost before the words could form a frosty mist in the cold air, Rufus came flying at him. He got a mouth full of fur. Reflexively, he drew back, and as he did so, lost his footing on the ladder. When he hit the barn floor, it raised a cloud of dust.

  He lay sprawled on his back, moaning. Jack had to suck hard to take in a deep breath. It felt as if someone had stuck a red hot poker into his side. He could taste the smell of blood in his mouth and hear a gurgle in his throat when he exhaled.

  His vision blurred and there was a dull ache and a warm, sticky wetness at the back of his skull. In the light and shadows that surrounded him he could see a dark shape float down from the roof of the barn and hover over him. He never saw his spade as it was driven into his chest accompanied by the sickening crunch of bone. He glub-glubbed for air like a fish out of water.

  The last thing that Jack Hauser felt as he struggled to breathe was the sudden rush of cool air in his gut as his belly was ripped open. The last thing he heard was the hissing of Rufus, hunched up in a corner with his hair bristling.

  CHAPTER 4

  A few days later, Jay was sitting at a table in a bistro, his fingers massaging his left temple, as his agent, Pat Gilhenny, tried to explain to him for the fifth time why he couldn’t get another advance on his royalty payments.

  Pat was an unlikely choice for an agent. She was a dumpy, orange-haired, matronly type who seemed more like she would be at home fixing corned beef and cabbage or playing with her grandchildren. She’d seen something in
Jay’s work and stuck by him for months trying to sell his book. She’d worked over Titan Books, the publisher, like a she-wolf protecting her young.

  "Now if you had something on the new book, then maybe we could talk to them. Get an advance for that. But you’ve already gone to them twice and they’re not going to go for it again. Not with sales falling off the way they have. Trust me. Just get me some pages and I know that I can get you what you want."

  And there it was. He knew that if Pat said there was no water in the well, then it was as dry as the Mojave. How could he tell her that he’d dried up, too? He’d been trying to come up with an idea for months and couldn’t.

  That wasn’t exactly true. There had been plenty of ideas, just nothing that he could see through to completion. Nothing that he considered worthy of what he thought a first-class author would write. He couldn’t tell her that, not after all that she had done for him.

  "Not to worry. I’m working on this idea. It’s gonna knock your socks off. Trust me." And then he smiled.

  He only hoped that what he’d read wasn’t true, that when you faked a smile, it came out crooked, and if it were, that Pat didn’t know. She smiled. He smiled. The waiter smiled as he came to the table with their double chocolate death cake. As he reached to pick up his dessert fork, her hand slipped across the table and gripped his tightly. She looked into his eyes and said, "I KNOW you won’t let me down."

  When she released his hand, he looked down and saw the red marks where she’d left an imprint of her fingers in the back of it. "She knows," he thought. There was an uncomfortable silence through the cake and coffee, and when it was time to pay the check, Jay tried to save face by snatching it up from the tray. Pat was generous and let him.

  When he got back to his apartment, he tossed his keys on the coffee table and dropped heavily into the plush of his sofa. Why did he lie to Pat? She would have understood if he had just told her the truth. Now he really DID feel obligated to have something for her soon. She knew he was lying and he had to cover his ass.