The Ice at the Bottom of the World

by Mark Richard

  It is in town where, before Margaret, I could get my fill of human life, coming in with a fair wind and following the tide down river, paddling my metal flake canoe to get grub in the five-sided store and take on any nets needing mends.

  Rusty’s half-cousin Earl Shackleford Hayes being my best customer, seeing how he’s always ripping up all his rigs running spot and trout off Stumpy Point, everybody knowing how poor the bottom is there, Rusty saying to him, Why do you think they call it Stumpy Point? and then saying to us, Earl’s but half-cousin, half, half, only just a half. Winters, after making groceries and gathering net for work, I’d help in the concrete-crate shed packing boxes of fish, and summers I’d shovel ice, always on Fridays stopping at dark for a drink. Danny Daniels and Scoop would liquor up enough to beat hell out of each other in the crushed-shell turnaround if there weren’t any truck drivers to fight with, me putting in with them together when there were. I could make a day and a night of going into this place I call town doing the business and then the get-together fight waiting for the first after-dark tide to turn. So this was town when I say I sometimes later brought Margaret, not so beautiful but driving the rough men wild with her all-over tan, them helping her out of the canoe when we came gliding up like she was an Indian princess, leaving me to tote and carry three loads of mended pound net to the five-sided store all by myself, her having the way she had on the rough men at the dock in town.

  The way she had on me, Rusty Shackleford said, was a clean shirt and a combed head. I figure that to be about right, that being what of me he could see away from my cut-off-from-the-world cabin. Cut off from so far away from the world I used to walk the clay-bank shoreline naked with a smear of good mud pulled across my shoulders and over my privates against the sun, an osprey feather tucked behind my ear for chiggers and ticks, that being how me and Margaret first met, her digging relics for the state, her figuring where I lived to be where Indians kept a summer camp long ago, her having to walk about forty lengths of bad shoreline at low tide to get to where she could fill plastic bags and pockets full of the pottery pieces and pipe stems I already have so many of I just step on to break. She said her particular interest in Indians took her aback when she looked up and saw me mud-naked and feather-headed forty lengths from a highway and me being without a girlfriend since a season six or eight back, what I can say is that my particular interest in her showed itself with a growth, breaking little mud flakes crumbling to my toes, one of the ways Margaret always had on me when I looked at her.

  What else that Rusty Shackleford didn’t know about her having a way on me was how, after I started getting her to stay over from where she dug relics for the state, she started to clean the outdoor things from the front room of my cabin. First out to go were a stack of busted crab pots, some sawhorses holding up the keel of a skiff I’d been thinking about building for three years, four barrels of scrap and trash, a load of termite wood to burn in the alpine hearth, and half a load of washedup two-by-fours for a someday front porch. She even got me to put all my power saws and axes in the shed, her not knowing how I love to saw and cut up things indoors. What was left was the picnic table to dance on when we drank and listened to Latin records, also my favorite old stuffed chair, and my upright rigs so I could string and mend net throughout the house, her putting screens back up on the windows so flying-through-the-house birds wouldn’t foul in the strung-up netting and cripple themselves. We even cleaned out the old alpine hearth so on those afternoons when the flood tide was up in the windward yard and it was raining hammers and nails and a hundred dozen seagulls were softballed in the leeward lawn, we could stretch out on a quilt in front of a fire and drink hot wine and play Monopoly naked with the big-headed dog snoring nearby. This is what Rusty Shackleford could not have been knowing about, how in this cut-off-from-the-world home Margaret was making my life even more than a clean shirt and combed head can say.

  In the summer, the secret of her all-over tan was us paddling halfway over the Stingray Point in my metal flake canoe, me putting out the little Danforth anchor I’d found in back of Rusty Shackleford’s concrete-crate shed, us naked drinking cold beer laying in the bottom of the canoe, legs crossed over legs and over the side, me telling her the Indian stories I knew, like where lightning takes tall walks and how Stingray Point got its name. That one being her favorite story I used to tell again and again, about Captain John Smith up from Jamestown stinging himself on a stingray, a good story about him spearing fish with his sword and getting stung, his arm swole up and his tongue stuck out, about how they thought he would die so they went ashore out of their boats and dug the grave but instead Smith got drunk off the surgeon’s rum and ate the stingray and lived, and they all sailed away, leaving a big empty hole in the ground for the Indians to come out from the woods to look down into, trying to figure out what for and probably not being able to. This stingray story being Margaret’s favorite, I used to tell her over and over, her listening, soft-sucking on a beer bottle and playing with my privates with her big, all-over-tanned, naked toe.

  In the winter, I used to have to take a butane torch out back to the well house to defreeze the water pump, being careful not to heat up the rocks in the floor to wake the snakes hibernating underneath, this even after, in the sleet and fog somewhere between the cabin and the well house, stumbling through a flock of snow geese on their way south resting in my leeward lawn, their necks as big as your arm, wing muscles strong and hard from their Canada-to-Cuba flight, so big and strong to knock you down if you were to stumble through them, flushing them up unawares which I usually was, so early in the morning fog going out to defreeze the pump.

  In that winter Margaret stayed over, she showed how if you patched a light bulb to the electric pump to burn, it would keep the air from freezing while leaving the snakes alone, and then she took Christmas gift pictures of the snow geese eating the corn she had laid out for them, and in the morning with coffee she’d cook up fried eggs and ham from Rusty Shackleford’s five-sided store instead of just the candy bar or peanut-butter sandwich I was used to, and this after taking a hot shower together with plenty of hot water pumping up from the well house, me soaping Margaret’s back, wondering why hadn’t I thought of the light bulb trick before.

  That coming spring, a mama raccoon had babies in the woodpile, so getting a fire meant dealing with her trying to tear you up, not even being afraid of the big-headed dog Margaret had fed to full grown by then. Getting a piece or two of wood to burn in the alpine hearth was like playing a big set of pick-up sticks, not wanting to move or bother the whole pile lest the mama coon’d come tearing out hissing and chasing me and the big-headed dog back inside the house. This was something Margaret liked to watch, sometimes taking pictures and sometimes pretending to lock us out with the pissed-off mama coon coming at us on our heels. I stopped getting anything altogether off the pile, settling on burning driftwood, which was a ache and a pain to gather. But the sand in it burned the flames in the fire green and were pretty for us to look at, stretched out naked on the quilt late at night. It came spring soon anyway and we didn’t need the fires, and mama coon and what we called the coonettes started coming up on the steps to look in the house and the way Margaret had with people pretty soon the coonettes were all over the place eating out of the dog’s bowl and then chasing his tail around the picnic table I still had in the living room for furniture. I only put my foot down the time they all ate the lime rinds we’d had left over from a batch of gin and tonics, and raving and hissing drunk they ripped open my favorite big covered chair and tore out all the stuffing. I think chasing them all out of the house with a broom and a stick hurt Margaret’s feelings, and looking back on it now, I feel sorry for doing it.

  That is the spring I’m come to tell about, the spring of remembering the mama coon and her babies, what I last remember. And this, the night we were hearing one of those quick-boiling thunderstorms step and kick around the place where lightning takes tall walks, us in the bed in the back bed
room with the big-headed dog sitting on the straight-backed chair to watch like he liked to do, us saying the little secret things to each other that people doing what we were doing say, then me feeling the hair on my arm bend the wrong way like in a chill breeze draft, Margaret’s hair floating from her head like a Christmas tree angel’s wings, still doing it but bracing and waiting, and then a stray step of the walking lightning came down through the top of the tree right by my back cabin door. It all happened so fast with the dog scrambling up on the bed and Margaret naked sliding off and the ceiling breaking open for a tree trunk like a telephone pole to come pile-driving all the way through and still on its way down into the floor. And then it being quiet after the explosion, the tree trunk finally stopping, it smoking and smelling that blue electric smell with the burnt-up sap, me and the big-headed dog tangled on the broken bed, with Margaret having hit hard on her back near the hole in the floor stuffed with tree trunk, her long legs kicking in the air with a sexy view, an even more sexy view when I peeked over the mattress at her fully near the trunk of the tree, a sexy view that even further excited me about now being able to use a chain saw indoors.

  But all wasn’t just all right. When Margaret sat up she said Oh, like she had just thought of something she had forgotten, she pressed her fingers below her belly and then the lights flickered off and in the dark she said we needed to go into town for Della, Rusty’s wife Della, Della who is what we have for a midwife and a cat-gut stitcher of slashed skin hereabouts. Della had delivered most nearby babies that could be gotten to, her delivering about two of her own with just Rusty’s help.

  All was not all right because to my eye Margaret wasn’t showing that she’d had something of ours to carry, and the little quick-boil thunderhead seemed to be more of a front coming through with much of it still downriver letting lightning tall walk through trees. Even dressing in the dark, getting ready, not finding a flashlight that worked, I could tell there was lots of blood by the smell and by the way the dog was nervous. Even getting down to the canoe Margaret was feeling weak, making it worse for her that the tide was out and I had to make two trips down to where the water was deep enough, one trip to drag down the metal flake canoe and the one trip carry her away.

  Big rain like grapes hit us even before I pushed off in the dark, and the big-headed dog yelped and yowled at us from shore. The front moving in was coming at us right up the river bringing with it the turning tide and dirty chop. I couldn’t see, not even Wolftrap Light, not even the number-four channel marker I used to reckon with. As I broke around and free of Stingray Point the breeze freshened harder so I figured best to hug inshore and make my crossing farther down hoping the wind would slack but it getting stronger and me figuring what was the right thing to do when I couldn’t even see the bow of the canoe nor even Margaret wrapped in our fireside quilt laying quiet on pound netting in its bottom.

  The rain broke harder, the canoe taking on some, waves licking the gunwales, my knees wetting, and a slosh around my ankles, me hoping the net would at least keep Margaret up a little out of it. Lightning was hitting something right regular over to south shore, and that was my only hope to see, when it lit the sky bone-white bright. I was pushing us as hard as I could with my best J-stroke but I could tell that not even did I pull my paddle out to dig for another stroke but what the wind pushed us back. I turned even closer to shore hoping for a break but not feeling it come.

  Margaret shifted a couple of times pressing what we had for her to where the bleeding wouldn’t stop, and even in all of it with her getting worse she shifted herself so not to disturb any headway I was making with the canoe, her maybe not really knowing I really wasn’t making any. In a bright burn of lightning I slumped for a second seeing we still hadn’t completely passed Stingray Point, and Margaret, lifting her head seeing it too, asked me to go ahead and talk to her, to tell her the story about Captain John Smith, and even though I had told her it a hundred times, not in that night could I remember a word of it, any more than I could turn us through the wind, so she told it, she told it like I had never heard it before, telling each part like it was a question, like how you tell a story to a child, asking with the sound of your voice, Are you straight on that part of the story yet? And then when she finished telling it she started telling it again until I started to remember it, and then remembered it well enough to tell her, telling her it, and also remembering too what that story is all about.

  I paddled all night pushing back and across, making headway until just before light I was able to make the crossing where the river is a mile wide just up from town, where Rusty Shackleford has his half-fell-down dock. The light coming up was the kind that after a front moves through gives everything a different color in the early morning break. The water sloshing in the bottom of my metal flake canoe had several different colors of blood in it, colors that were all over me and my legs from kneeling, colors running around my wrists like vines from where the skin had wrung off my hands paddling all night, colors black, dark red, and brown everywhere except in the quilt-tucked face of my Margaret, laying still on the net in the bottom of my metal flake canoe.

  I don’t remember much after, except seeing Danny Daniels Shackleford covering Margaret’s eyes while pushing his fingers against his own, Scoop kneeling with us in the mud beside the canoe to straighten out the colored mess in his simple way but not being able to and going to fetch Della. I think I was there when the state people came and the sheriff came but I get hazy, maybe remembering fighting with someone over the fireside quilt they had unfolded Margaret from, maybe fighting with Rusty taking off my clothes with all the state people around, I think I did, and then I started walking the forty lengths of bad shoreline quilt-dragging naked to Where Lightning Takes Tall Walks, to where I’ve stayed just about all until today.

  That must have been so many seasons I can’t count ago. What they’ve caught a few sights of me since is mud covered in summer and quilt ragged in winter, being the haint the kids come to try to spook out at night with their lights, me running clapping and splattering through the mud when the quick-boil storms come marching across the bay, me making to where the tallest shortleaf pines grow, to stand as straight as I can arms spread and face turned up, please begging for just one long-legged kick of bone-white light right between the eyes.

  What I’ve come to see, though, is me laying lately in deep holes dug in the woods, just outside of Rusty Shackleford’s town, and I’ve seen me slipping around at night to where Rusty has my metal flake canoe strapped to the rafters in the concrete-crate shed for me to get when I want, and I’ve seen me creeping under the back door of Rusty’s five-sided store hungry to hear a human voice or two.

  And lately, I see me losing a taste for raw fish and the young robbed from men’s nets and animals’ nests, and I see me lonesome for that big-headed dog I see sometimes sniffing at the tracks I’ve made at low tide, tail wagging but too wall-eyed to think to follow the scent, and me, I get to thinking about Stingray Point and the story where they dug the grave but never the man let them fill it, and I see today from my fresh hole dug in the woods near Rusty Shackleford’s town that it must be Friday night with all the turnaround truck drivers drinking with Danny Daniels and Scoop, seeing how young they aren’t anymore, and seeing how many turnaround truck drivers are up against them, I figure just as soon as that second bottle goes down and the fists come up, I figure I’ll come down out of these woods swinging, putting in together with my friends, getting a fair knock of human life, taking a tall walk back into this town.

  ON THE ROPE

  I HAVE TO TELL MY UNCLE it is just a bread wrapper, a nothing piece of paper thrown up on the fence by the wind. I run out to show to him that that is all it is, but the spell is already on my uncle, and when I come back in from showing, it is just as well I should have stayed outside.

  My gramere says the barge they brought down the bayou coming to get my uncle and his boat slid up on the edge of our backyard. She said the barge came glid
ing up soundless in the darkness with the floodwaters boiling under its squared bow, and she said God was giving her an eye of warning, showing her, See how that barge boils, like it is a man’s head atop a pot the man is boiling in alive. She said she could hear the water bubbling like it was hot and she said the way the flood churned beneath the bow it looked like the barge was coming even closer, but that it was only her will keeping it back, pushing it away from coming into our backyard and taking away my uncle and his boat.

  Some men in green uniforms used a crane to hoist my uncle’s boat up onto the barge. My uncle was afraid they would scratch the polished finish. Gramere said when my uncle came back from where the floodwaters had boiled away everything from the land my uncle did not care what the boat looked like. She said the boat looked like it had been whipped with wires, like it had gone on the barge and been whipped with wires, and my uncle looked like the men in the green uniforms had made him do it. She said the way my uncle was, was like when a man is drunk and whips a dog for no good reason and then when the man is sober he cannot look at it, even though he is a man and it is just a dog, that is how Gramere said my uncle could not look at his boat.

  My uncle said at first when the barge stopped and the men in the green uniforms let his boat into the water he thought they had gone too far south, like the floodwaters had carried them all the way out into the Gulf. He said in the night all you could see was the amber light on the bow of the barge and all you could hear was the sound of the floodwaters boiling all around, boiling away everything from the face of the earth.