Dead of Winter

by Gerri Brightwell

  Fisher doesn’t even look at him. Christ, Grisby can do a deal with a guy and not recognize him ten minutes later. You’d think he wouldn’t be surprised by the bad luck that brings down on him, but he is. Fisher lets his eyes close for a moment, lets the gentle darkness behind his lids wash around him, but behind it all his head’s throbbing. He says, “My sinuses are acting up—what you got?”

  Grisby’s head swivels toward him. “For real?” He sighs, then pulls off one glove and digs in his parka pocket. He holds up a small plastic bottle. “Give you these for what I paid for them—what d’you say? Thirty bucks a pop.”

  “Vicodin?”

  “Only the best, man.”

  Fisher nods. “OK, OK.” Up ahead, the supermarket stands out bright against the night and he pulls into the parking lot, holds out his hand for the bottle. “You wait here until I’ve dropped off the cab, OK? Reggie sees you, he’s gonna freak.”

  Grisby stares out the window. The moon’s half-full and hanging low in the sky, a world away from this frozen town. “No way, man.” He turns back to Fisher, the plastic bottle tight in his hand. “No way, I mean, what you want me to do? Go stare at fresh produce for an hour? Check out the low-fat low-sugar wheat-freaking-free organic breakfast cereals? And what if it slips your mind to come get me?”

  Fisher leans on the wheel. “D’you get banned from there too?” He sighs, though Grisby doesn’t answer. “Fuck it.” He steps on the gas and steers the cab back toward the main road. “When we get down there, go warm up my car. Don’t come in, understand?”

  “Whatever lights your wick, Captain, sure thing,” and he does a mock salute.

  3

  HERE’S THE THING about Grisby: he’s twitchy as a squirrel, and with good reason. He’s a lost soul, a menace to himself, a stranger in his hometown, a permanent accident-waiting-to-happen. If he drives downtown for a drink at the Klondike he’ll come out and get lost looking for his car and have to call Fisher to come fetch him; if Fisher isn’t wearing his bulky old ex-pipeline worker’s parka and his red wool hat, most likely Grisby’ll walk right past him. He doesn’t recognize faces. He recognizes people by their clothes, their glasses, their limp, and if you take that away it’s like he’s never seen them before, never mind that he’s just spent six hours working his shift with them in the kitchen of the Great Alaska Pancake House, or used to date them, or is dating them right now. It’s nothing personal. It’s just that something’s not right in his head.

  No wonder he gets jumpy—he can’t tell which Safeway manager threw him out for selling Percocet in the bathrooms last month, or which teenage freaking asshole pulled a gun on him when he showed up with the Vicodin the little fucker wanted. For one memorable week, six years ago now, he was a driver for Bear Cabs, except he got lost driving a fare down the one and only road that leads from the airport, then couldn’t find the Sheraton, the largest, tallest, most visible hotel in the whole of downtown. Fisher thought he was new in town and took pity on him. He’s a sucker for lost causes. That week he spent his shifts driving around with his phone pressed against his ear giving Grisby directions, but that only worked some of the time because if Grisby couldn’t tell which street he was on, there was no hope of saving him from himself. Then when Grisby offered a fare something for his headache, Reggie got to hear about it and Grisby was history.

  Grisby makes a fine short-order cook, though: all that nervousness gets funneled down his arms into his twitchy hands, and those hands snatch and tilt and twist, ladling out pancake batter, flicking over bacon, scooping up scrambled eggs like he was born to it. And when the rush’s over, he sits on the plastic garbage can in the backroom and pops something to calm himself, and sucks down a can of cola, then another, the bulb of bone at the corner of his jaw bulging as he widens his mouth and the corrugated tube of his throat flexing as he swallows. He’s got the pared-down, thin-skinned look of a much older man, someone worn down by constant vigilance because hell, the way he’s so twitchy you’d think the world was out to get him. And who’s to say it’s not when it gets all of us in the end?

  4

  THE ROAD OUT to Fisher’s place has a precipitous turn where it curves back on itself. It’s easy to misjudge, especially in the dark with a little Vicodin buzz on, so Fisher slows way down. On both sides the road drops off where gold was clawed from the ground by titanic dredges, holes as broad and deep as the foundations for skyscrapers. Across one of them the road barrels out then switches direction a full ninety degrees, then switches again to climb the hill past Goldpanner Trail and Paydirt Road, Grubstake Street and Hardluck Alley, then Luckystrike Drive where Fisher turns. Here the road straightens out and he holds the wheel with his knees while he fumbles the plastic bottle open and tips a second Vicodin into his mouth. The pill’s dry and sticks to his throat, and he almost gags before he gets it down.

  In the tunnel of his car’s headlights birches bend under the snow frozen onto their branches. “Next year,” Grisby’s saying, “I’m gonna move to Hawaii. No more of this bullcrap, winter lasting eight months and a cold that freezes your balls off. I’ll get me a job in one of those resort hotels, and when my shift’s done, I’ll be down on the beach catching waves. You too, man—why not? That’s the way life should be.”

  Fisher knows it’s nothing but talk. That’s the thing between the two of them, this kind of shooting the shit because, hell, what hope is there that either of them is suddenly going to break through to a better life and be a better person to match it? But this evening the words spin around Fisher’s head like midges. He pictures it—Grisby on a surfboard with his pigeon chest, his too-big glasses, his bone-thin arms. He pictures himself with his flabby belly white as a fish flesh, his tree-trunk legs, his gnarled toes with their yellowed nails, the thick slope of his shoulders, his big face with its uneven skin and eyes that, even to him, always look too small, designed for another face altogether. The trouble with Hawaii, he thinks, is that Grisby’ll still be Grisby, and he’ll still be him.

  “Fuck Hawaii,” he says. “That’s just a different load of bullcrap.” The car lurches and creaks. The road here’s just snow packed down on top of dirt, and that snow’s been molded into an uneven track with a ridge in the center high enough to scrape the underside of his car. On either side run grooves where tires have passed hundreds of times, and at the bend sits a hollow where each summer rain washes away the earth, but now, in the heart of winter, every vehicle tilts and jerks.

  Grisby says, “Wait ’til that freaking second Vicodin kicks in, man, and feel the love, because you don’t mean it. You just can’t imagine Hawaii right now, that’s all. All this dark and cold,” and he waves a hand toward the windshield, “it makes you forget it’s not like this everywhere. Right now—right this freaking goddamn minute—people are lying on beaches and thinking, Fuck, it’s so hot and sunny, what’ll I do with myself? Imagine it, Fisher. That’s what I call a happy problem. That’s what we need—happy problems instead of our freaking sad-ass problems, like: Did I plug in my car? Did my heater go out? Am I gonna die because I locked my keys inside my car and it’s fifty-seven below? That’s what bullcrap is.”

  Ever since Grisby’s dad died and his bitch of a step-mom moved to Hawaii, it’s been like this. A window has opened up in Grisby’s head and he can’t stop himself looking through it at another world, and bringing every conversation around to Hawaii, like he’s talked himself into believing it’s in reach, or could be before long. But where the hell would Grisby get the money to move there? When Grisby needed a new pair of snow boots he had to buy a pair of beaten-up, scuffed-up white bunny boots at the Salvation Army, that’s how bad things are. His dad left everything to his wife, never mind that she hates Grisby with a steady loathing and always has. She didn’t even tell him she was leaving town. Grisby only found out when he went round to fetch some of his dad’s ashes and a woman with red-dyed hair and bad breath opened the door and even Grisby knew she wasn�
��t his step-mom. He thought he’d got the wrong house until she said, “Last owner sold up and left after her husband died, month ago now. Place was a right mess, if you don’t mind me saying.” She’d cleaned up so good she’d dumped the ashes into the old outhouse at the back of the property, and telling Fisher about it over a beer Grisby had cried, like he’d forgotten there’d been no room for him in his dad’s rotten heart.

  Through the trees a flash as Fisher’s headlights catch his trailer. Three years ago, when the price of heating oil skyrocketed, he covered it in foil-sided insulation. Now it gleams like a relic from the space program that fell out of orbit and landed intact. Behind it, barely visible, the outer walls of his unbuilt house rise like a stockade. He’s known people driven by the endless light of Interior summers to put up a house in four months: walls, a roof, windows and doors, enough to live in and spend the winter sheet-rocking the inside. How come in six years he’s gotten almost nowhere? He recognizes this thought: it meets him every time his car pitches up the last few yards of the driveway.

  Grisby’s still going. “Man, you can pick them in your garden. Juicy and warm—”

  “Yeah yeah, I get it,” says Fisher. He turns off the engine. “Hawaii’s paradise. Right.”

  “Your problem,” and Grisby swivels to face him, “is you don’t have any imagination. That’s what’s gonna get you away from here. If you can’t imagine someplace else, you’re never gonna be someplace else. Know what I mean? Look at what you’re working on—your house, for fuck’s sake. Every fucker in Alaska wants a house in the hills with a great goddamn view, and to build it with his own hands and all that shit. And for what? So you can look out at all the freaking snow? And all the hills covered in snow? And the mountains covered in snow? Really? What’s that all about?”

  Everything’s quiet except for the ping and snap of metal cooling too fast, and they sit there, staring through the darkness at the snow. Already the heat inside the car is leaking away and their exhaled breath hangs in the air like jellyfish, at least until Fisher huffs and rubs his face with both hands. There’s a raw stinging behind his left cheek, and another above his eyes. Soon the second Vicodin will have eased those pains away and he’ll sink into his armchair and stare at the TV with his dog by his feet and let his thoughts drift off like balloons. Hell, he won’t even care if Grisby yanks on the cord for the blinds so hard that the whole damn thing comes off the wall, or uses his towel and leaves it on the bathroom floor, won’t care until tomorrow, and anyway, he can always call in sick. What the hell’s it matter? Soon there won’t even be a Bear Cabs. That thought slides across his mind. Fewer cabs than last year. Drivers jumping ship to other companies, though only Ella got hired by City Cabs. Reggie won’t admit there’s a problem. Him and his freak of a son working dispatch now that Jordie’s gone. Fisher should leave too. Get out while the going’s good, but hell, not yet. Not yet.

  It comes quickly, that second flood of Vicodin, like dawn breaking inside his head and turning everything golden and beautiful. He was rooting in the snow for the end of the power cord to plug in his car and now he straightens up with it in his hand, ice against his lips where his parka collar’s zipped up past his mouth and he doesn’t care. Everything about the night is sharp and lovely: the air so dry it freezes the moisture right out of his breath; the stars quivering in the darkness. He sees them through the porthole of his hood with its thin fur tendrils covered in frost waving slightly, and he might as well be a sea creature looking out from the center of an anemone, and this the ocean floor he’s lumbering across with the cord in his hand, back to the dark shape of the car.

  By the time he’s shoved the plastic plug onto the metal prongs and the orange glow of the idiot light’s blinked on, his fingers are numb inside his gloves. Everything’s slowed down a little. He sees himself tread through the snow toward his trailer and pull his keys from his pocket. He sees the keys slip through his fingers, and himself stooping to pluck them out of the snow. On the front steps his boots thud and squeak and the sounds travel right through him, like he’s no more than the wooden steps, a thing made of rigid parts pinned together, then he pushes the key into the lock and feels the sweet click as it gives. From behind him comes the slam of a car door then Grisby’s right there, jumping from foot to foot, saying, “Fuck it’s cold, man oh man.”

  Enough ice has built up on the doorstep that Fisher has to shoulder the door open. His shoulder should hurt but it doesn’t. Instead all he notices is the curl of fog rolling across his carpet and vanishing against the far wall where his DVDs are stacked. In here the air’s swampingly warm and layered with smells: the pizza he ate last night, the bathroom that needs cleaning, the clothes and bedsheets that need washing, and over it all the woolly stink of dog.

  “Paxson?” Fisher calls. “Pax? Come on, boy.” From the bedroom doorway comes a stiff-legged dog the color of old snow. He has sad eyes and bent ears, and pushes the bony dome of his head against Fisher’s shins.

  Grisby treads across the carpet with his boots on, leaving lenses of compressed snow behind him. In an instant the TV’s spitting out sound and light. Local news and Grisby snorts. “Christ,” he says, “look at that backdrop. Looks like it’s made of cardboard. If she sneezes it’s gonna fall over. And that hair! Man, someone take her hairspray away from her, please,” and he snorts again. Floating on the screen beside the newsreader’s head, a photograph of a young man with hair so blond it’s almost white. Where his collar should be hang the words Missing trooper.

  Grisby calls out, “Some cop doesn’t show up to work and he’s missing? Man, they’re short on news. And the cops themselves can’t find him? Christ, we’re in Interior freaking Alaska—there aren’t that many places to look.” He lets himself drop into the recliner and kicks out the footrest, says, “Ah, who gives a fuck,” and switches to CNN.

  On the screen a photo flashes up of a girl in pigtails and a pink T-shirt, then there’s footage of her parents and an old guy who’s a friend of the family who’s crying and shields his face from the camera. Grisby calls out, “What is it today? Nothing real happening, so it’s all about cops and little girls who’ve disappeared? Wanna know what I think?” and he half turns to Fisher. “That old nutball did it.” He gestures toward the screen with the remote because there’s the old guy again, caught by the camera with his face wrinkled in sadness and his head hung low. “Look at him. Who lets some old perv babysit their kid? And he’s the last one to see her? Freaking cops need their heads examined if they can’t work that one out.” Along the bottom of the screen runs BREAKING NEWS, and Grisby settles himself into the recliner, calls out, “Hey man, got a beer?”

  Fisher scratches Pax behind the ears until the dog lets out a chesty rumble. A cloying stink rises off him, and a gluey thread of saliva dangles from his mouth. One day before long, Fisher thinks, he’s going to come home and call out, “Paxson!” and the dog won’t come. He’ll keep calling his name as he crosses to the bedroom, a way of warding off what he knows he’s going to find: his dog dead and stiff at the foot of his mattress with his eyes gone dull. What a job it’ll be to wrap him in a blanket and carry him outside. Not to bury him, not unless it’s summer and the ground’s thawed—but to where, then? He doesn’t know. But he’s had that picture in his head for weeks now, him in his parka with the dog in his arms, has tasted the pain of being left so utterly alone that his soul will ache. What was Paxson to begin with but a way of filling the emptiness left when Janice moved out and took Breehan with her? A stupid thing, to get a dog when he had to give up the house and find a place of his own to live, but wasn’t that him all over? Besides, there was a strange comfort to be found in looking through ads with their No Dogs or No Pets or Extra Deposit for Pets, proof of what he’d just discovered, that the world didn’t want him.

  Pax’s bowl is still half full. Not a good sign. He isn’t even whining to go out and he’s been in here since morning. Fisher flips on the outside
light and wrenches open the door. Pax ducks his head against the cold and Fisher grabs him by the collar and hauls him through the doorway. He stands by the closed door listening for the sound of the snow creaking under the dog’s feet so he can let him back in. It doesn’t take long. Twenty seconds, maybe. Barely long enough for Pax to have gotten down the steps. Either Pax has already pissed on the bedroom carpet, or he’s going to, Fisher thinks. The thought feels far away, a possibility not a problem. Nothing’s a problem when you’ve taken a couple of Vicodin.

  “Hey man,” Grisby calls out again, “where’s that beer?” With Grisby here everything feels thrown out of its usual orbit. Grisby snaps his fingers at Pax to make him lie down, and the dog wants to, but he won’t: there’s his blanket folded up by the recliner, but it’s Fisher he wants to sit by, and Fisher’s busy hanging his parka on a hook by the door, and even when he’s finished he doesn’t sit down but tosses a beer to Grisby and opens one for himself. Then Fisher leans against the small table where he eats his meals and lets the cool fizz of the beer wash over his tongue. If it wasn’t for the Vicodin, he’d be all on edge, he’s sure. That’s the way it goes when his sinuses are bothering him, as though he’s slightly out of sync with the world. Instead he feels poured full of honey.

  Only now does Grisby pluck off that ridiculous fur hat he wears. Without it his head looks fragile and misshapen, long and narrow as a bean. His hair’s thick and dark and flattened like it’s been licked down, and his face is lit by the colors of the TV because he’s tilted slightly forward, away from the backward lean of the chair. He lifts his beer and takes a swig, wipes his hand over his lips. “Christ,” he says, “look at me—what a sucker. It’s that freaking music that makes it sound like something’s about to happen and all that breaking news crap. Nothing’s going on. They don’t know shit.” He aims the remote like a man shooting another man down and blinks the TV through one channel after another until he settles on cartoons.