Permafrost

by Peter Robertson

  “No. Not really.”

  She said nothing. “I don’t really know. I’d just like to find him if I can.”

  She nodded slowly. “That’s a nice notion. This day and age. Friends looking out for friends. I have to say I kinda like that. Good luck to you then. Hell, clean him up some and send him down here when you do.” She laughed out loud.

  I said I would.

  Three old men sat at the counter. Two wore baseball caps and read the local newspaper without looking up. One wore a real hat in an ancient style I couldn’t quite identify. He turned and stared hard at me.

  Six Formica booths stood clean and empty, except for sugar shakers, plastic menus with bright pictures, red plastic ketchup bottles, and salt and pepper shakers in a metallic holder with napkin dispensers. Everything looked to be meticulously clean, rather than just hastily wiped down between carloads of hungry families, and I was forced to concede that this was not a thriving business concern.

  The old man in the hat spoke up then.

  “That’s some fancy car you got there, Mister.” It didn’t sound anything like a compliment.

  “Thank you,” I said stiffly.

  He looked hard at me. “Folks ‘round these parts, we don’t have a lot of use for imports.”

  I said nothing.

  “We don’t see too many goddam yuppies either. What’s in the picture?” He wanted to know.

  “I’m looking for someone.”

  “Show it here.” He stretched his hand out.

  I hesitated. He wasn’t planning on being helpful. But he may have seen Keith. I slid it over.

  He sneered at it. “Looks like a goddam bum.”

  “Have you seen him?”

  He sneered again. “We used to call them hobos. Made it sound more romantic that way I guess. Like they jumped on boxcars late at night and sang cowboy songs to the moon. Bunch of goddam horseshit. Bums they were then. Bums they are now. Pissing away my tax money.”

  Ginnie spoke up then. “Shut up, Don. You’re too cheap to pay tax anyway.”

  She took the photo back and handed it to me.

  “Don’s not exactly known for his warm personality,” she explained, “or for his generous tipping.”

  “Thank you for your help,” I said.

  “You’re very welcome,” she said. “And be sure to bring him in here for a meal when you do find him. I’ll make Don pay for it.” She laughed hard and loud.

  A minute later she put my pancakes down in front of me, and I ate them quickly, bogus maple syrup and all. They were hot and I was very hungry.

  Don chose to say nothing more, but he stared hard at me as I ate, with his face eloquent in its silence. Don had been cheaply betrayed at some point, and his bitter little eyes followed me even as I left the diner.

  As I drove away from the place, I listened to Paula Cole sing, and my mind fast-scanned backwards, to a previous place, and a previous time, when Keith and I met, face to face, one winter afternoon, under a glittering deluge of shattered glass, of tiny shards of cold light.

  Near the edge of the town where Keith and I grew up stood a red shale playing field, with two sets of rickety goalposts and a wooden hut that smelled of dog piss and served as changing rooms for the amateur soccer team who played there regularly, keen as all outdoors, but terminally hopeless.

  Our town wasn’t large enough to support its own professional soccer team. But since it stood sandwiched between two larger cites that did, the faithful were free to choose between two very good teams, and partake of the long-established and fierce rivalry between the two that was by and large good-spirited, rather than violent.

  The soccer-playing season is a long one, which limps doggedly through the winter months of cold and rain and severely truncated daylight hours. Yet fans are loyal creatures, uncomplaining, stoic souls for the most part, standing on muddy terraces, drinking cold tea or lukewarm beefy beverages, eating greasy meat pies, watching their cherished heroes win or lose, the diehard fan always finding solitary moments to justify this neo-Calvinist self-abuse: a surprise win, a singsong on the bus home after an away match, walking home victorious in the crispness of an early winter’s night, a warm scarf in team colors tied snug and tight, a bag of chips at the corner shop, a hot bath at home, a pint or two with the lads later that night, a chance to relive the goals and the saves and the near-misses.

  On a bitter January afternoon, I stood on the packed terraces and watched the teams from the two nearby cities clash in a tense game that ended in the ultimate of cathartic teases, a goalless draw.

  We left the grounds numb, with both groups of supporters plainly less than pleased with the result. Only the sporting dilettantes like me, who watched the occasional game, perhaps to remind myself from time to time of our nation’s true character, could have been content with the inconclusiveness of the outcome.

  Perhaps the local police were wise. Doubtless they were trained to nose out trouble. The two opposing sets of fans had been separated as they entered the grounds, those wearing red were placed on one side of a barbed-wire fence, those wearing blue on the other. Police with trained Alsatian dogs manned the narrow strip of no man’s land in the center, and on the busy streets outside the grounds, young bored constables rode tall horses and scanned the multitudes for signs of impending violence.

  But thus far things had been quiet.

  On occasion a prominent drunk was pulled by the hair from the terraces for throwing a bottle or dart onto the playing field. Local legend had it that the coppers took the offender to a secluded room somewhere in the heart of the grandstand and beat the living shit out of him, always being careful to inflict damage only to body parts well hidden by clothing. Whatever the case, the police had my sympathy; they were brave souls who could doubtless have found better ways to spend their Saturday afternoons, and were therefore entitled to play for keeps.

  At the final whistle that afternoon, only one set of terrace gates were opened. The police plan clearly was to maintain the strict segregation and have each set of fans exit the premises separately. The crew I had attached myself to were the first to be released. We were the home team followers, and only a few of us had to catch a train to the other city, one that passed through my town.

  We were jeered and hissed at as we left, a few chunks of cold meat pie and nearly empty paper cups flew across the barbed-wire fence as we began to pour out. We responded spunkily enough with volleys of obscene gestures. Someone even dropped his trousers, and exposed a white spotty behind to the unamused red-clad masses, who instantly locked salvos of spit on the pale, fleshy target.

  For the few heading for my town, the station was a ten-minute walk, and the train was due to arrive at the station in ten minutes. It was that tight because no one in authority had factored in the extra time: the fifteen more minutes played after the game was tied at the end of regulation time. I had a good chance of making the train. The other team’s supporters, who were all taking the train, were being held back in the stadium by the conscientious coppers. They were cutting it very fine. The next train after that was four hours later.

  Turning a final corner, the train station was visible, and at that point several things happened very quickly and in a strictly observed sequence. There was the sound of the train approaching and our group began to run for the station, our blue scarves streaming like vapor trails. Close behind, the other team’s supporters had narrowed the distance between us to about one hundred yards. They too had heard the train, and they too were making a dash for it.

  Except for the runners, the street was empty. A flurry of feet echoed on the cobbles. The police were still at the stadium. Shops were sensibly closed early, locked safe and tight. A solitary betting shop stood bravely open, and an off-license was barricaded up more securely than a maximum-security cell. An old man riding a bicycle turned around in the face of the charge and pedaled
sheepishly away.

  In a matter of seconds, close to four hundred people had formed a bottleneck at the top of the narrow stairs down to the railway platform.

  The stairs descended perhaps twenty steps to the glass front of a newsagent’s shop, then they right-angled down twenty more steps to the platform. The train was there. Waiting. Empty. Swing doors wide open.

  The crowd in the back of the bottleneck pushed all the harder.

  I was close to the front when the inevitable happened.

  The shove came from behind, sending me stumbling down three or four stairs. I grabbed at the jacket of the man in front who turned for a split second to face me. His face was scared and angry.

  And it was Keith Pringle.

  I don’t know if he recognized me as he began to stumble himself. The swell caught me and I rushed forward again. I held on to Keith. But as he began to pitch forward I noticed the small figure directly in front of him. A young boy. Seven or eight. Crying. I couldn’t hear his voice, but his mouth was wide open, and tears streamed down his cheeks.

  I tried to pull Keith to me as another swell caught us.

  And then Keith grabbed hold of the boy with both hands, pulled him into his chest and then spun himself around. It was a graceful movement. Balletic. Keith and I were suddenly, implausibly, face to face and being driven forward, irresistibly. Then time stopped. I threw myself at Keith, grabbed him around the shoulders, and held on tight.

  Then our world exploded.

  The doctor who tended to us in the hospital emergency room was a well-spoken Indian gentleman who said we were brave and very lucky. He said Keith’s back took the brunt of the glass. If he had gone through the window face-first he would have done much more damage to himself. He also told us we were mindless yobbos, who made his life a bloody misery on game afternoons when he liked to potter in the garden with his wife. He reckoned we had passed through the glass window so fast we had cleared the worst of the spray of broken glass that had injured a few people behind us, although thankfully no one had been cut too seriously. The hospital was busy treating the numerous injured. Keith had a few superficial marks on the back of his head, some cuts on his neck and a splitting headache. They plucked a lot of glass from my hair but almost none had drawn any blood, although one ear was nicked. A nurse had tenderly combed my hair, searching for stray shards.

  The little boy cocooned between us was unscathed and his frantic father searched us out in the emergency room.

  “Yer both good lads. So ye are.” He kept on saying this and it became his personal mantra. His head was tightly bandaged. He had been right behind us and had caught much more of the flying glass than we had.

  “I telt him to keep holdin’ onto my hand. But the wee bugger widnae hold on.” He began to cry then. His son took his hand. I was glad they were both okay. He shook our hands, still crying, as his son led him away. At the end of the corridor, the boy turned and waved.

  When they had gone, Keith and I sat in silence for a while. We were in a long white corridor, waiting to be discharged.

  He spoke first. “Boring game.”

  I nodded.

  “Got any fags?”

  I shook my head. It hurt a little to do that.

  “The wee kid was okay then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he said.

  We were silent once again.

  Then he spoke again. “You’re at the university now?”

  “Yes. First year.”

  “Any good?”

  “It’s better than school.”

  “That wouldn’t be very hard. How come you’re here?”

  “Christmas holidays.”

  “When do you go back?”

  “Next week.”

  He was silent for a while. Then he spoke.

  “Remember that party?”

  I smiled. “Oh yes.”

  “I was truly guttered. It’s also just possible I might have made a right arse out of myself that night.”

  “You were in a highly emotional state of mind.”

  “But was I an arse?”

  “No,” I had to admit, “not particularly.”

  “That’s a relief. Do you know kissing Joyce MacKay was almost worth all the aggravation?”

  “You’re still a great romantic,” I told him.

  “True,” he admitted. “But sometimes it’s a curse. I find myself thinking about her often. She’s going to be my one big regret I fancy. She’s at the hospital now. A trainee nurse, she is. Can you believe it?”

  “This hospital?”

  He nodded. “This very one. Imagine if she’d seen to us.”

  “It fairly boggles the mind,” I said.

  With little more than a few Band-Aids and a handful of aspirin between us, Keith and I were back at the station two hours later. All the glass had been swept away as two youths chewed gum and applied the final touches to the cardboard and wood that now covered up where the window had been. When they slouched away there was little left to mark the incident.

  We stood on the platform and waited for the last train home. When it came it was busy and we could only find single seats in two separate compartments.

  Several years would pass before Keith and I would meet again.

  Suzanne Vega sang about wounded men with missing limbs and nerves raw and strangely intact, while I sat at a rest stop ten miles past the diner and tentatively sipped the jumbo coffee refill Ginnie had kindly provided me with, possibly as recompense for listening to the doltish Don.

  With nothing else to do I powered up the laptop and got online, where a message from Nye waited. I possess a car phone but Nye doesn’t much like to call me on it.

  I was informed that the store hadn’t yet burned to the ground and that he was coping. Tye had even showed up for work that morning. He asked me how my vacation was going. I replied, being careful to express my gratitude that the store was functioning, and telling him that my trip was going very well. I sent the message, then I called up the weather forecast and discovered heat and rain promised for the next two days. I loaded Word Pro and composed a short note for my broker, asking her to broadly outline the extent of my finances. I called up WinFax and faxed the note to her.

  Nye opts for the medium of electronic mail, while my broker hungers for a fax-driven relationship.

  She is a pretty woman, around my age, who works from a home office and has been confined to a wheelchair for eight years, after her legs were crushed flat in a car accident. She had been intoxicated, and there had thankfully been no other victims. Not surprisingly, she doesn’t drink any more.

  She would, I’m sure, object strongly to the word confined. Two summers ago she bungee jumped during a scuba-diving vacation in the British Virgin Islands. We have never actually met face to face, my broker and I, yet our fax modems screech at each other several times a week. The bungee jumping was reported in a city magazine article, which also ran her picture.

  I stared out of the car window and considered calling Patricia.

  Our house is paid for, worth close to two million dollars, and is in Patricia’s name. ArtWorks turns only a small profit. Perhaps because of the nature of the business, but I suspect more so because I refuse to elevate it beyond the status of hobby to full-blown going concern. ArtWorks belongs in total to me, the land and the building and the business. My most tangible asset. The Lexus is paid for. The Mercedes too. Their combined value is close to one hundred thousand dollars. The mail-order business belongs wholly to Patricia. Even she isn’t aware of that. And it earned her three million dollars in clear profit last year.

  My own assets aren’t quite so simple. I carry two million in life insurance, as does Patricia. I have numerous stocks and shares, but have set aside woefully little for my golden years of retirement. Individual Retirement Accounts had been set up bu
t not added to sufficiently, although I have always meant to. Perhaps five hundred thousand is earmarked in total to safeguard me in my period of dotage.

  Patricia is well provided for, as much by her father as by me. She is and will always be an extremely rich woman, her mother likewise.

  The laptop beeped with an incoming fax message, and I loaded the fax viewer. As of the close of business yesterday my accumulated shares added up to a net worth of close to nine million dollars.

  My broker had attached a brief note, Why the sudden concern? Was I ill? Was it terminal? Was I depressed? Was I thinking of early retirement? Was I considering a new broker?

  I laughed at her last question. Then I thought of my answers.

  I don’t know. No. No. Perhaps. No. And of course not.

  I turned the laptop off and sipped at my now lukewarm coffee. A rich man with little else vital in his life pulls the glass bottle full of pennies from beneath his bed, and begins to count, soothing himself as he does.

  Suzanne Vega was still singing about mental health.

  It seemed to me that I had created a secure world for myself, without touching anyone else in the process.

  Sitting by the side of a road it didn’t seem like much of an accomplishment.

  I started the engine.

  A nameless gas station stood sulking at a curve in the road. The sign overhead said simply GAS, but it was old, and the light above it had burned out. Another sign was peeling from an exposed brick wall. It touted a brand of gasoline no longer in existence, but the price marked on peeling cardboard on the two pumps still working was almost half a dollar less than what was generally charged back in the city.