The Ice Harvest

by Scott Phillips

  He was down to less than a quarter of a tank. Might as well gas her up while he waited for Vic to come back. He drove through the neighborhood and out onto a main artery heading south to the state highway, where he found a Stop ’n’ Rob with gas pumps out front. After a minute’s investigation he managed to get the lid to the gas tank open, but, after sticking the nozzle in and flipping the switch, nothing happened. He leaned into the car and honked the horn, and the attendant’s voice came through over an intercom.

  “Pay before you pump,” he snapped, barely intelligible through the static.

  Charlie went inside and gave the man ten dollars. He was about sixty, with nicotine-yellowed white hair, and he didn’t seem happy about working Christmas Eve. Neither of them said anything.

  Charlie pumped eight dollars and sixty cent’s worth of gas and went back inside. The attendant gave him his change without comment, and as Charlie turned to go he found himself looking at the candy rack. It was four feet high and six feet wide, stocked with an amazing variety of brightly colored candy boxes, and he remembered Spencer and Melissa.

  Next to the candy rack was a spinning rack with plastic bags hanging down from it containing cheap, crappy plastic toys from Taiwan. He spun the rack around, examining the cellophane bags to see if anything there might appeal to either of his kids: misshapen plastic dinosaurs and soldiers, a baby doll a quarter the size of a real one, a jump rope with pale blue handles. He pulled the jump rope and the doll down and looked again at the candy rack. What kind of bubblegum cards did Spencer used to collect?

  “Do you still have those Wacky Packs?”

  The attendant glanced over at him. “Bottom row, far left.”

  There they were. He reached behind the open display box and grabbed an unopened one from the shelf behind it, and he put the toys and the box on the counter.

  The attendant rang him up, scowling, looking out between rings at the Mercedes by the pumps. “Total’s eighteen fifty-five.”

  Charlie gave him a twenty, and when the man handed his change over he thought he heard him mutter “Big spender.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing. I hope your kids have a real merry Christmas with their chewing gum and their crappy plastic toys.”

  “They’re not for my kids. They’re for my sister’s kids.”

  “Sure they are.”

  The man looked away, not caring to pursue the matter any further, and Charlie walked out.

  As he approached Sarabeth’s house he went over in his head all the legitimate reasons Vic might have had to miss their meeting time. It wasn’t as though Vic didn’t make a habit out of being late. Maybe there was something wrong with Vic’s car. What then? They could take Betsy’s Mercedes and leave it at the airport, but if Pete van Heuten had to drive a hundred and fifty miles south to retrieve it later he’d be sure to bitch about it loud and long to anyone who’d listen, and that would eventually get back to Gerard. The Lincoln might be safer, but it was registered to the company and Gerard would be sure to know about it when the airport parking authority figured out it was abandoned and towed it. Not that he’d necessarily be able to track them down just knowing the first airport they flew out of, maybe months down the line, but why give him anything he didn’t have to? Anyway, the Lincoln smelled like vomit, and it was too cold to drive without the heater on.

  He pulled to where he thought the curb might be in front of Sarabeth’s house, a big ranch-style with a circular driveway. A string of tiny white lights ran along the rain gutter, simple and tasteful, just like at her mother’s. He found himself wanting to go inside and wake them all up and try to explain to her and to the kids why they wouldn’t be seeing him again, but the urge was diminished by the knowledge that his departure would have virtually no effect on the everyday course of their lives. With the possible exception of Melissa, his permanent absence would be welcomed by the entire family as the final and inevitable end result of years of partial and temporary absences.

  I’m sitting in a car in front of my ex-wife’s house at two-thirty on Christmas morning feeling sorry for myself, he thought. Maybe that’s a sign I’ve had enough to drink. He got out with the engine running, stepped quietly across the driveway, and left the gum, the jump rope, and the doll on the snowy welcome mat. I should’ve bought a Christmas card, he thought. As he turned back to the car he became aware of the need to urinate again, and he went over to a bush on the side of the house and let it rip, watching the steam rise from the melting snow that covered the bush. Having melted a large patch off of it, he zipped up and got back into the car. Slowly he pulled away from the curb and headed back to Vic’s.

  Coming up the cul-de-sac he realized he’d left all the lights on in the house. He went in through the front door and began turning them off again in more or less the same order he’d turned them on. Where the fuck was Vic, anyway? Just to make certain he checked the garage again. The car was still gone. He stood there in the cold air for a minute, trying to think what if anything was the logical next step of action. He leaned back with his palm flat on Vic’s worktable and it gave slightly, sliding away from him and sending him down onto one knee. With some difficulty he rose and, looking down, he saw that there was a small puddle of blood, still liquid, on the cold cement floor under one of the worktable’s legs. He took in a sharp, audible breath and he felt the skin on his face tightening. He stepped back, looking up and away from it, trying without success to imagine some innocuous reason for the presence of fresh blood on the floor of Vic’s garage. Detecting the first warning flutters of vertigo, he put his palm down on the worktable to steady himself and once again looked down.

  On the bench vise attached to the table directly above the small, dark red pool was more blood, smeared. Stuck to the rough edge of one of its jaws was a ragged flap of skin about half an inch in diameter, the more or less parallel folds of the middle joint of a human finger.

  Charlie spun, slammed both palms to the wall, and threw up. He wiped his mouth on his coatsleeve and ran out of the garage, through the kitchen and the living room to the front door, which he left hanging open as he ran across the lawn to the Mercedes. He got in, started it up, and drove to the end of the cul-de-sac, hyperventilating, and came to a stop. He sat there for two minutes, then three, then five, incapable of deciding whether to turn left or right.

  It was two-forty-five in the morning, and the bars were all closed. He had nowhere to go.

  PART TWO

  12

  He headed north out of town with no particular destination in mind and tried without success to imagine some explanation for Vic’s absence that didn’t imply catastrophe. Five miles outside the city limits he pulled over impulsively at a darkened Skelly station and parked next to a pay phone. He didn’t know Renata’s home number, so on a hunch he tried the Sweet Cage. The other end picked up after ten rings.

  “Sweet Cage.”

  “Renata? It’s Charlie.”

  “You’re in a hell of a lot of trouble, Charlie, you know that? Roy Gelles was in a little after you were. He wanted to know if you’d been around.”

  “Oh.”

  She snorted. “ ‘Oh’?”

  “Can I come over?”

  She was silent for a moment. “Park your car around the block.”

  “I’m not driving my own car.”

  “I don’t give a shit whose car it is, we’re closed and I don’t want any cars in the lot. Park it around the block. Where are you now?”

  “Out in the county. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” Again he felt his groin warming. “You haven’t heard from Vic tonight, have you?”

  “No. Roy was looking for him, too.”

  “It’s probably nothing.”

  “If Roy came to town on Christmas Eve, it’s something.”

  “I guess it probably is.”

  He got back into the car and onto the county road heading back into town. Deacon must have gone to the bank that afternoon to make a last-minute deposit to o
ne of the operating accounts, found it emptied, and called Bill Gerard. It would have taken Roy Gelles two and a half or three hours to drive down, so he’d likely been in town for hours, and he knew as well as anybody where to find Charlie or Vic on any given night. Maybe he had already found Vic. If he hadn’t crossed paths with Charlie yet it had been blind luck on Charlie’s part.

  West of downtown he drove alongside the river, the sky bright orange again, the snow coming down big and slow. He imagined taking Spencer and Melissa sledding on the sloping bank of the river, the way his father had taken him and his brothers and sisters when he was a boy, and he told himself that if he weren’t leaving he’d do just that, though it had been more than a year since the last time he’d taken the kids on any kind of outing. He wished he could call his brother Dale and say good-bye. Dale had a small farm just outside Shattuck, and Charlie hadn’t talked to him in a year, either. Apart from the occasional conversation with Dale, his oldest sister’s annual Christmas letter was his only regular contact with the rest of the family, and he realized that he hadn’t received one this year. He couldn’t remember if he had last year, either.

  In the mirror he noticed a sedan a quarter of a mile back, pacing him along the curve of the river. He stiffened and tried to remember what Roy drove. He became so intent on the car in the rearview mirror that he drove straight into the empty oncoming lane, at which point a bar of red and blue lights atop the sedan began flashing. He panicked, hit the brake, and slid smoothly all the way over to the curb, the cruiser picking up speed and pulling up close behind him with a brief whoop of its siren.

  He got out his driver’s license and grabbed for a clear plastic dispenser of breath mints he’d seen in the glove compartment. He shook the container and rattled a number of the tiny white mints into his mouth, crunching them down as quickly as he could. The cop walking toward him stepped over the curb and onto the snowy bank. Charlie swallowed the last of the jagged shards of mint, rolled down the window, and extended his license.

  “I realize I’m facing the wrong direction, Officer. I slid.”

  “I’ll need to see your registration also.”

  “Okay, but it’s not really my car; it’s my sister-in-law’s.”

  “Have you been drinking this evening, sir?”

  “Just a couple glasses of wine at my in-laws’ house . . . hold on, it’s in here somewhere.” He fumbled blindly through Betsy’s glove compartment, looking for the registration. A Kleenex box, a set of keys, a kid’s report card, and apparently no registration, without which he was screwed.

  But the cop was already handing him back his license. “I didn’t know it was you, Mr. Arglist. You want to be real careful on this. Underneath the snow it’s a solid sheet of ice.” He was polite but decidedly cool. Charlie didn’t know him, but obviously he was one of theirs, which was good because this one looked like he would have dearly loved to haul his ass down to the drunk tank.

  “Thanks. I should probably be getting home.”

  “That’s an excellent idea.” It came out as a command rather than as an actual affirmation of the idea’s excellence.

  “Merry Christmas,” Charlie said as he rolled the window back up. The cop strolled back to his cruiser without acknowledging the remark.

  He parked on a residential street around the corner from the Sweet Cage and walked toward the parking lot. It was so quiet he could hear the bare twigs above his head rustling against one another in the light wind. The lot seemed oddly brighter now with the floodlights off, and the opaque sky cast a pale glow onto the snow like ersatz daylight. Black spatters of blood were still visible against the gray of the snow where Sidney had brought Stroke’s musical career to an end, and there was not a single car in the lot. He walked up to the front door, tried the handle, and found it locked. He gave the door a good solid rap with his knuckle and waited. After a minute he knocked again, louder this time. He moved around to the side door, closer to Renata’s office, and knocked again.

  “Renata?” There was no response.

  He walked to a pay phone on the street corner and dialed the number. He hung up after the twentieth ring.

  The county road leading out to the Tease-O-Rama was slicker than before, and a stiff wind had come up, blowing sparkling clouds of old snow across it. Charlie was no longer completely confident of his ability to keep the unfamiliar car on the road, but he was close enough now to the Tease-O-Rama to walk if he cracked up. He was having some trouble judging his position exactly until he saw the partially darkened go-go girl glowing against the sky. The fact that the sign was still on at this hour bothered him less than the three sheriff’s vehicles grouped together in the parking lot, and his first instinct was to pull off onto the shoulder, turn around, and drive away as fast as possible. He was already easing up on the gas when it occurred to him that the presence of the sheriff’s officers might have something to do with whatever had happened to Vic.

  He parked the Mercedes at the far end of the lot and crossed it to the cinderblock windbreak, where a young sheriff’s officer in mirror shades stood scowling at him.

  “Club’s closed for the evening. Better get along home now, sir.”

  “I represent the owners.” The surly contempt on the officer’s face ticked up a notch, and Charlie suppressed the urge to make a comment about people who wore shades at night.

  “You Cavanaugh?”

  “Charles Arglist. I work with Cavanaugh.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, you need to get in there and speak to my commander, mister, because you had some major difficulties in there this morning.”

  The officer waved him through and Charlie walked around the wind block and yanked the door open.

  Dennis glared at him as he shut the door behind him. “I quit.” His right eye was swollen shut and he held a bloody bar rag against a gash on his left cheek. An officer standing next to him, studiously writing something in a small spiral notebook, looked Charlie up and down.

  “Who’s this? Cavanaugh?”

  “Charlie Arglist. He’s Cavanaugh’s errand boy. This is all his fault.” Dennis swept his arm in an arc around the club. Chairs lay smashed on the stages, the floor was covered with shattered glasses and bottles, and three more officers stood taking statements from a half dozen patrons, several of whom looked worse off than Dennis.

  “You seen Vic tonight, Dennis?”

  “Who cares? Look at this fucking place.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “No.”

  “All right, now. This interview’s not over yet.” The officer turned from Dennis to Charlie. “You, sir, are going to get your turn in just a minute.”

  “My turn for what?”

  “Your turn to speak your piece. Now sit down and be quiet.”

  Charlie looked around and didn’t see anyplace to sit. “I don’t have anything to say. I wasn’t here.”

  “Do you understand what sit down and be quiet means, sir? If so you’d better do it. Otherwise I’ll have to place you under arrest with those gentlemen over there.”

  He gestured with his notebook toward the unhappy group leaning against the wall opposite. Three of them were handcuffed, one of them weeping remorsefully as an officer patiently took his statement.

  The first officer had turned his attention back to Dennis. “So the first bottles started getting thrown. What did you do?”

  Dennis looked from side to side. “Uh, that was when I took it upon myself to fire the twelve-gauge.” He pointed at the ceiling, where one of the acoustic panels was gone altogether. Next to it dangled the pathetically shredded remnants of two more.

  “Usually that quiets things down real quick,” the offi-cer said.

  “Didn’t this time.”

  Half the bottles behind the bar had been smashed, along with a considerable percentage of the glasses. On the bar itself was a sizable pool of sticky blood.

  Charlie looked over the officers and saw no one he recognized. He didn’t think they’d let him leave with
out good reason, but Vic wasn’t here and he had to go find him. There wouldn’t be much point in trying to explain that none of this was his problem anymore.

  “Can I wait outside?” he asked.

  The officer looked up sharply from his note taking, thought about it, and nodded. Charlie walked out the door and past the wall and the first officer. “They didn’t need me after all,” he said in passing. The officer’s upper lip curled a little further, but he said nothing.

  Seated at the wheel of one of the sheriff’s cruisers was a sixth officer, filling out a form of some kind, and as Charlie passed it an evilly distorted face lunged cackling at the window from the darkness of the backseat, slathered with dried blood and leering at him. It was Culligan. He seemed to be missing a front tooth, and the officer barked an unintelligible command into the backseat at him. Culligan settled down and obediently leaned back into the shadows. Charlie got back into Betsy van Heuten’s Mercedes and left.

  Driving away he tuned in to the C&W station to see if there was any mention of the brawl, but the police reporter was long off the air and the news report, when it finally came, consisted of a disc jockey reading national news straight off the wire in a weary monotone. As he passed the city limit he turned to the easy-listening station, where a disc jockey who sounded like he’d been knocking them back for a while ruminated on the meaning of the holiday. This whole goddamn thing was Dennis’s fault, anyway. He never should have taken the dancers’ stage rentals back.