The Ice Harvest

by Scott Phillips

  “It’s been fixed about six times already. Tonight it chewed this one up so bad I’m not sure I can save it.”

  “Slow night?” he asked.

  Lenny spread his arms out and swiveled them around at the empty store. “Had one drunk come in about eight-thirty, fell asleep in booth two. Otherwise it’s been like this since I got here. Don’t know if it’s the holiday or the storm, but at least it gives me a chance to repair the movies.”

  “Too bad you have to work on Christmas,” Charlie said.

  “I don’t care. My family’s back east and I’m an atheist. Just another night as far as I’m concerned.”

  “You don’t celebrate Christmas at all?”

  “Not really . . . wait a sec, though, let me show you something. It’s in the trunk of my car.”

  He went outside and Charlie moved behind the counter, examining the box to the movie the young man was repairing. On its cover a blond-haired woman grimaced in pained forbearance, eyes closed, crimson upper lip pulled excitedly back to reveal her teeth and tongue. The title was Backdoor Housewife, part of the “Anal Connoisseurs” line. On the bottom of the box were reproductions of the cover art of a variety of other titles in the series: Cornhole Teacher’s Aide, Rectal Nurse, Buttlove Babysitter, Anal Pom Pom Girl, Dirt Road Debutante—all the vicarious Super-8 sodomy an anal connoisseur could ask for. He looked again at the photo on the box, comparing the woman’s impassioned facial expression to Cupcake’s look of deadpan ennui when photographed in the same situation, and decided that Cupcake probably didn’t have what it took for a big career in porn.

  The young man returned carrying a large cardboard box. “I did this for a studio arts class.” He pulled out a canvas-covered object about a foot high and set it out on the counter next to the film cutter. “Ready?” Charlie nodded, not really very interested.

  He pulled the canvas off. Standing over a prostrate Santa Claus doll was a Mrs. Santa doll, naked except for a pair of black boots, her nipples and pubic hair luridly painted in and a crude whip in her hand. Beneath her the Santa doll had on a tiny white slip, and his hands were tied together. They both had cherubic, smiling faces. “It’s called ‘Here Comes Santa Claus.’ ”

  “That’s nice,” Charlie said.

  “They sell these dolls at craft stores. People buy ’em and make their own little Mr. and Mrs. Santa outfits for them. Anyway, they come in the package dressed in just their underwear; she has on a slip and he has on a pair of boxer shorts. So this just sort of suggested itself.”

  “How do you mean, suggested itself?”

  “I got the pose from one of these.” He scanned the S&M rack and came up with a magazine called Dominant Bitches. He flipped through it and handed it to Charlie. There was a photo of a couple in this very position, although the dominating female and groveling male were considerably younger and fitter than Mr. and Mrs. Claus. “I got an ‘A’ on it.”

  “Sounds fair to me,” Charlie said.

  Lenny replaced the canvas and put the dolls back in their box, then moved back onto his stool and resumed splicing. “So what do you think? Can we get another projector?”

  Charlie winced at the thought of promising a cash outlay, even knowing he wouldn’t have to make good on it himself. From the time he and Vic had started keeping the second set of books he’d become monastically frugal with all corporate expenses, and the purchase of a replacement projector, necessary though it might be, was something he would have struggled against until it became inevitable. On the other hand, why argue about it?

  “Sure,” he said. It would be Deacon’s problem in two days.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No, why would I be kidding?”

  “I don’t know, but I was expecting to have to bug you about it for six months. That’s great, Charlie.”

  “Merry Christmas, Lenny,” he said.

  Rolling eastward on the access road on his way to the state highway, half-listening to an AM police report about an office Christmas party that had degenerated into a drunken brawl leading to seven arrests, he felt the need to pay a farewell visit to another outpost in his Westside empire. He jammed his right foot solidly down on the brake pedal and once again found himself spinning wildly on the ice, far faster than he’d spun in the Lincoln, and for a moment he actually thought he was airborne. Even as he realized he’d completely lost control he found himself analyzing the relevant differences between the Mercedes and his trusty Lincoln. Lower center of gravity, he thought calmly as the outskirts of the city rotated around him, that’s why it got away from me. There was a terrifying jolt and a deep, loud thud as the Mercedes came down off the side of the road into a ditch with its engine dead, its lights still on and the radio still offering its cautionary tale of yuletide revelry gone too far.

  He sat there shaking and silent for thirty seconds. Then he twisted the ignition key off and then on again. The engine turned over instantly, on the very first try. He slammed it into reverse, back into forward, and back again, and in less than a minute of rocking he was out of the ditch and sailing west again on the access road. This wasn’t a bad car at all. He had to admit he wasn’t sure if even the Lincoln would have started right up and taken him immediately out of the ditch. After he got settled again he’d have to get himself one of these.

  A mile down the access road he saw the light of the port-a-sign, bright yellow and buried in snow past its trailer hitch:

  FRI NDLYEST MASAGE IN TOWN

  COPRATE RATES NEW MASUESES

  Atop the concrete-block building stood a cracked plastic sign with a crudely painted silhouette of a female nude and the words MIDAS TOUCH MASSAGE. Three cars were parked out front, all of them under a foot of drift and without visible tracks leading to where they sat, and tracks and depressions where at least two other cars had been parked at some point in the not-too-distant past.

  He stopped next to a rusted-over green Dart, switched off the ignition in the middle of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” and got out to survey the damage the ditch had done. More dings on the front end, but as far as he could see the undercarriage wasn’t leaking. He’d check the snow under it for fluid when he came out.

  A thirtyish woman with short, spiky blond hair and a great deal of faith in the corrective powers of cosmetics sat behind a desk reading a thick paperback romance. She smiled seductively at the opening door, the smile evaporating instantly but without malice at the sight of Charlie.

  “Oh, it’s you. For a second there I thought I was going to have to get back to work.”

  “Merry Christmas, Ivy.” Her eyes were already back on her book. “Slow night?”

  “Course it’s slow; it’s Christmas Eve and there’s a blizzard and most people have better things to do than drive all the way out of town for a twenty-dollar hand job.”

  “Any customers at all?”

  “A few. Mostly guys who’ve just been to church with the wife and kids and want to talk dirty. Why do you suppose guys get like that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, we had two of ’em tonight out of like maybe four total. Madelyn was with this guy in there, I thought he must be hurting her. He was yelling ‘Fucking filthy whore!’ over and over so loud I could hear it out here in reception, so I checked through the mirror and there he was, standing there in his three-piece suit with his pants down around his ankles and his dick in her mouth, had her by the goddamn ears, looked like he wanted to kill her. I would’ve gone in except she knew I was watching and she gave me the high sign. Afterward he tipped her fifty. Dollars. He left this on the desk on his way out.”

  She handed him a cheaply printed pamphlet entitled Is Dancing Christian? Beneath the bright red cursive title a couple of crudely drawn kids, a boy with a crew cut and a girl in bobby socks, jitterbugged with satanic abandon.

  “I hope you assured him that dancing is strictly forbidden here. Did Madelyn leave yet?”

  “Her shift doesn’t end until two.”

&n
bsp; “Give her another fifty out of petty cash. Christmas bonus. Same for yourself.”

  She narrowed her right eye at him. “Nuh-uh. You’re drunk. I heard what happened down at the Tease-O-Rama tonight.”

  “What’d you hear?”

  “I heard you waived stage rentals on Cupcake and Francie, and after you left Dennis made ’em pay it back.”

  “He did what?”

  “I talked to Cupcake. What she said was, Dennis said you were drunk, and Bill Gerard better not find out you were comping drinks and waiving stage rentals, and all he needed was for Deacon or Vic to walk in and find out about it and fuck up everybody’s Christmas.”

  “Goddamn that Dennis. When I do something I don’t care whether he agrees with it, I just want it to stay done. Shit.”

  “Calm down, Charlie. It’s a nice gesture, I just can’t accept it.”

  “I’ll write out a receipt and sign it. It’ll be my responsibility.”

  “Huh-uh.” She was back in the world of the paperback, and he might as well have been alone in the room.

  “All right, here . . .” He took his wallet out of his pocket and peeled off a fifty. “Merry Christmas. Here’s another one for Madelyn.” He put two bills on the desk.

  She left both bills sitting there for a second, then picked them up. “Thanks, Charlie.”

  “Who else is there?”

  “Well, there’s Lynette, she already went home, and Tina didn’t work tonight . . .”

  Charlie took two more bills out of the wallet.

  “And Cupcake’s usually in one night a week.”

  He gave her another.

  “This is a lot of money, Charlie.”

  “Is that everybody?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good, ’cause I got less than fifty left.”

  “You sure about this, Charlie?”

  “I’m sure. I got plenty of money; don’t worry about that.”

  “You want a blow job, Charlie?”

  He replaced the wallet in his hip pocket. “I’m not doing this because I wanted a blow job.”

  “I know that. I meant more like a Christmas present.”

  “Thanks anyway. I gotta get going. Have a merry Christmas.”

  “Oh, yeah, I’m having one already. Thanks for the bonus, though.”

  Outside there was more snow on the Mercedes, but no fluid underneath it. Truly a fine car. If he had the time he’d head back to the Tease-O-Rama and set Dennis straight about the stage rentals, but he wanted to stop for a quick one at the Midtown Tap before he moved on to Vic’s, and after that he was out of town. Maybe he’d phone Dennis from the Tap.

  The Midtown Tap was dark and warm, the Christmas lights ringing the room had been turned on, and Andy Williams droned over the PA singing “The Little Drummer Boy.” The bartender acknowledged Charlie with a slight wave of his hand as he served an elderly couple at the far end of the bar. There were maybe twenty people scattered around the room, none of them looking too cheerful.

  “I’d like to get my hands on that goddamn drummer boy,” the bartender said when he finally made his way over to Charlie. “I’d wring his fucking neck. Pa rumpa pump pum.”

  “Not your favorite Christmas carol?”

  “None of them are. It wouldn’t be so bad if Tommy didn’t make us play the same goddamn tape over and over all night. I bet I have to hear the same twenty carols two or three hundred times each between Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

  “That’d dampen your Christmas spirit, I guess.”

  “But none of ’em’s as bad as ‘The Little Drummer Boy.’ ”

  Charlie nodded in agreement, then jumped at an unexpected slap on the back. Tommy stood behind him, in a dark brown jumpsuit and a wide-brimmed fedora, hands on his hips, staring at him as though his presence there was a source of great puzzlement.

  “How you doing, Charlie? Is Lester bitching about the music again?”

  “Damn right I am. It drives people away.”

  “Yeah, yeah, and right up till Thanksgiving you were saying the same thing about Peter Frampton. Drives people away, my ass.”

  “It does. They hear it all day long on the radio, in the supermarket, in the shopping mall; they come to a bar they don’t want to hear that shit anymore. Especially the ‘Little Fucking Drummer Boy.’ ”

  “Watch your mouth, Les, you’re talking about the fucking Bible now.”

  Les sighed. “ ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ is not in the Bible, Tommy.”

  “What the fuck do you know about what’s in the Bible, you fucking atheist?”

  “I know ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ is a cartoon they show on TV every Christmas and it was never in the Bible.”

  “Shut up and get Charlie a drink and leave us alone. We gotta talk.”

  Lester shrugged wearily and fixed Charlie a CC, water back, and went down to the far end of the bar to sulk.

  “Did you get the envelope?” Charlie said.

  “Yeah, luckily. What’s the matter with you, leaving it with Susie?”

  “She gave it to you, right?”

  “Sure, and then she hassled me for forty-five minutes, wanting to know what it was. Christ, that chick’s annoying. She says you used to fuck her. Is that true?” His nostrils flared slightly at the thought.

  “Close to ten years ago. No shit, you should have seen her then.”

  “Was she any smarter than she is now?”

  “I think she had a few more brain cells on active duty.”

  “So what the fuck are you giving it to me this early for? We don’t have a delivery until the thirtieth, right?”

  “I wasn’t sure I was going to see you before that.”

  “I fucking hate it when people start to improvise, Charlie. Makes me nervous things might change. You and Vic are still with me here, right? Gerard is still in the dark?”

  “Of course he is,” Charlie said. For the time being he was, anyway.

  “He’d fucking better be. So how’s your Christmas? You see your kids and all that shit?”

  “Yeah. Saw them earlier.”

  “Good for you, good for you . . .” He scanned the room. “Look at these poor, pathetic assholes, nowhere else to go on Christmas Eve. You guys were open tonight, right?”

  “Three hundred and sixty-five days a year, Tommy.”

  “Somebody’s gotta stay open. That’s what I figure. Let the staff bitch all they want.”

  “Shit, that reminds me, I have to make a call.”

  The phones were next to the men’s room and directly underneath a loudspeaker rumbling Jack Jones’s version of “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Charlie signaled Lester to turn the volume down, but Lester shrugged helplessly. Apparently the issue had come up before. He put a quarter into the slot and dialed.

  The phone at the Tease-O-Rama rang about twenty times before Dennis finally picked it up. “Tease-O-Rama,” he snapped.

  “Dennis, it’s Charlie.”

  “I can’t talk right now. My hands are totally fucking full and it’s your fault. I got a clubful of angry customers and nobody to dance for ’em.”

  “What do you mean, nobody to dance?”

  “Cupcake and Francie walked out.”

  “What for?”

  “No reason.”

  “Bullshit, I heard you made ’em pay back the stage rentals I refunded.”

  “You never should have done that, Charlie. Now look what I’m in for.”

  “Don’t blame me; you’re the one who tried to make them pay the stage rentals back.”

  “I gotta go, Charlie. The house is buying a round, just so you know. These guys are pissed.”

  “I’ll see if I can’t find the girls and get ’em back to work.”

  “What’s the fucking point; we’re closing in twenty minutes. You guys don’t pay me enough to put up with this kind of bullshit on Christmas Eve.”

  Charlie looked up at the big black clock, its fluorescent violet markings competing with the blinking ring of co
lored lights surrounding it. It was twenty minutes to two. He hung up the phone. It was time to head for Vic’s anyway.

  11

  Vic lived in a new two-story house that belonged to Bill Gerard. It was at the end of a woody suburban cul-de-sac on the east side, just a few blocks from where Sarabeth and the kids lived. Most of the other houses in the neighborhood had opulent Christmas decorations, and in the early evening during Christmas season the surrounding streets were typically jammed with cars full of people driving slowly around, taking in the lit-up plastic crèches, six-foot candy canes, and Santa’s workshops. For holiday decor Vic, whose local notoriety had not made him a popular neighborhood figure, had contented himself with a single pine wreath with a red velvet ribbon on the front door. Charlie rapped on the door’s glass and waited, then rapped again louder, then gave up and rang the bell. It was seven minutes after two, and the house was dark inside.

  He went around the side of the house past the garage, noting several sets of tire tracks, all of them partly filled in with fresh snow. He stood on the back porch and looked through the glass into the kitchen. There was no sign that the house was occupied. He knocked and waited. Had Vic cleared out on him? Charlie had both plane tickets, but with the amount of cash Vic was holding the price of an overseas plane ticket could certainly be considered an acceptable loss. He reached for the doorknob and found it unlocked.

  “Vic?”

  There was no answer. The house was furnished in much the same empty fashion as Charlie’s condo. He flipped on the living room light. Nothing seemed out of place. He moved to the bar and poured himself a double shot of Vic’s good Scotch, which was already sitting out open on the bar, next to an ice tray full of lukewarm water. He began wandering around the house turning lights on, room by room. He checked the basement and found nothing out of the ordinary, found much the same in the laundry room and the kitchen and the downstairs bathroom. Upstairs in the master bedroom he was relieved to find Vic’s suitcase, packed but open, lying on Vic’s bed. “Vic?” he called out again.

  Downstairs again, he opened the garage door. Vic’s car was gone; probably he had thought of something he needed and didn’t make it back by two. Vic wouldn’t have bothered to leave a note. He went back to the living room to wait and turned on the television. The only thing on at that hour of the morning was an old pirate movie and a pre-sign-off sermonette. He watched the pirates for a few minutes, then stood up and turned it off as he felt himself beginning to drift into sleep. He couldn’t afford to let himself get drowsy again, not with a two-and-a-half-hour drive ahead of him. The thought of the drive made him wonder how much gas was in the Mercedes.