Permafrost

by Peter Robertson

  “Did George tell you about it?”

  “He ranted on about something, about the guy, and his cock, and the girls. He kept shouting as he dragged me out across the road to the dock and onto his boat. He kept talking about the sheer nerve of the fucker and his being right there on our island.”

  “What do you think of George Tait?”

  He shook his head slowly. “The same as most everyone, I guess. He’s loud and he’s essentially stupid. You could argue that he means well. He certainly loves this place more than most of us do. But I’ve never much liked him, although I’ve always tried not to let him know that because he’s a bully and he’s a little intimidating. He’s always scared me some. He certainly scared me to death that night.”

  “You took the boat across the lake to the island?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. We cut the engine a ways from the island and drifted up onto the sandbar where everyone ties up. The old rowboat from the beach was there. It was carefully tied to a tree branch. Both oars were inside it. It had recently been missing from the beach a lot. The kids always used it to play in. Pringle was using it sometimes to get to and from the island. Other times I guess he swam instead.

  “Was Keith there?”

  “I didn’t see him then. George jumped off the boat and into the water as I was still tying up. He grabbed an oar out of the rowboat. Then he stopped.”

  I waited for Sanders to continue.

  “Did I want to take the other one? He wanted to know that. I didn’t really understand. Was I going to help him? He was going to take care of the fucker here and now, he said. And was I going to help him? He wanted to know.”

  “Did you help him?”

  He shook his head. “No. I was too scared to move. So I just sat on the boat and tied knots in the line. They were knots I thought I didn’t know how to tie. I’m not really much of a sailor. That kind of thing comes easy to a lot of people ‘round here but I have to work hard at it.”

  “What did George do?”

  “Called me a fucking coward and left me sitting there on the boat. He walked across the beach with the oar in his hands. He called me a fucking sissy too, as I recall.”

  “What happened then?”

  “Like I said. I just sat there. For a long while. I can’t say how long. I don’t think I was wearing my watch, but I’m honestly not sure. I didn’t hear anything. But much later George returned.” Will Sanders paused. “And he was dragging a man’s body behind him.”

  “It was Keith, wasn’t it?”

  He nodded once. “There wasn’t much of him left. George had beaten his head into almost nothing. The oar was shattered in pieces and all bloody and other stuff hung from it. All pink and soft. Pieces of bone and brain tissue. George threw him into the old rowboat. He pulled the anchor out of the sand and wrapped it tightly around the body. The body wasn’t moving. I thought he had to be dead. I remember hoping he was. Then George pushed the boat out into the water. He pushed us out, then fired up the engine on his boat and got behind the rowboat. He nudged it out into the middle of the lake like we were pushing a stalled car down a road. When he’d found a place he thought was right he picked up the oar and smashed it into the rowboat. The wood was all rotten and waterlogged and it was like poking holes in a wet bag. The old boat filled with water quickly and the body went under with it. There was blood on the surface of the lake for a moment. The boat sank quickly.”

  “How deep is the lake?”

  “At that point? I don’t really know for sure. Perhaps forty feet. The wood was badly rotted and would break up very fast.”

  “And the body?”

  “If it stays down the fish will get to it, until the winter, when the lake usually freezes solid and by the next spring there won’t be much left.”

  “They could still identify the body.”

  “Who are they? And anyway the flesh will be all gone and George had destroyed the teeth inside the man’s mouth. George is a real stupid man but he managed to blunder into committing a pretty effective murder.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I’m just like George said I was. The fucking sissy he said I was. I sat on the boat and said nothing and let George beat a man to death for a stupid lie I only partly believed in the first place. I’m not even sure George was convinced either. And since then I’ve lied to myself about it.”

  “How?”

  “I wanted to believe it. The lie. To think that your friend was some kind of pervert, but truthfully the story never did make much sense. You have to consider the sources. Tammi is a wild kid who likes to make things up and get people into trouble. George is a brutal man who would kill you for a wrong word if he got the drop on you. I didn’t know the truth and I didn’t try real hard to find out. I never asked Beth about it because I knew she’d crumble in a second and tell me everything. She’s not soft, she’s just an extremely truthful person.”

  A big fresh tear attached itself to the sand on Will Sanders’ blood-drained face and carried some of it downstream.

  “I’m sorry about your friend,” he said. “I just sat and let him die there.”

  “There was no trace of Keith on the island when I got there,” I said. “Except for his bicycle.”

  He looked up. “Did I leave that behind? That was a stupid thing to do. I went back to the island a couple of days later, afterwards, to tidy up. I got a fire going and found his clothes and stuff. There wasn’t very much. His life had to have been pretty empty.”

  “Only if you judge a life on the accumulation of possessions,” I said, instantly realizing my own dubious position with regard to that pompous statement.

  “He had a few photographs. One was of a young child. Was it his?” He asked me suddenly.

  I supposed it was. I had forgotten about the child until now.

  “On colder nights, he must have sneaked into the cabin on the island. He’d never taken anything. He’d left the place as tidy as he’d found it.”

  He began to cry again. “We killed a good person, didn’t we?”

  “He wasn’t a perfect man by any means.”

  “But he wasn’t an evil man either?”

  And as I thought back through the years that I had known Keith Pringle, nothing inherently vicious did spring to mind.

  “No,” I said. “He wasn’t evil.”

  “What happened afterward?” I asked.

  “What do you mean afterward?”

  “When I went out to the island that afternoon. When you shot at me.”

  “No. That wasn’t me.” He looked genuinely surprised.

  “There were two men on a boat.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Yes . . .” But suddenly I wasn’t.

  “It could have been George,” he said. “It could easily have been George. But it could just as easily have been half a dozen other God-fearing folk who live nearby and who take a dim view of trespassers.”

  “That sign isn’t close to legal. The island isn’t your private property.”

  He paused to consider. “No. It probably isn’t. But the law tends to get more flexible in rural parts. Much more open to interpretation. You see, everyone here knows everybody else. We owe each other all kinds of favors.”

  I remembered that George Tait had said something very similar.

  I couldn’t think of anything else to say then. Most of my questions now had answers. Few of them were good ones. Few were especially likable. But they all made a sad kind of sense.

  Will had stopped crying. I looked around and realized that Sylvie Tait was nowhere to be seen. Somewhere in the conversation she had left the beach. Had the truth about George been too much to bear? It didn’t seem very likely. He was a known tyrant. But now he was a known killing tyrant. Had she balked at the newly exposed far limits of his brutality? Maybe she had.


  I glanced back at her house and noticed that the garage door was closed. Had it been closed before? I didn’t remember.

  “Would it surprise you to learn that I was a very good lawyer?” he suddenly asked.

  “No,” I said. “It wouldn’t.”

  “What if I told you that I loved my daughter very much, that I always have loved my daughter very much. Would that surprise you?” His voice was odd, coming from a great emotional distance.

  I realized that these were questions that didn’t require answers.

  At least, not from me.

  “I had an impressive list of clients who relied on me to look after their best interests. I got some bad press for the high-profile cases that I won. Certain liberal journalists thought I never took the side of the little guy, that I always represented the gray-suited demons of corporate America. You know a little about my work?”

  I told him that I did.

  “I simply did my job. I did the best I could for my clients. It was as simple as that. I gave them my best work. That was what I did. That defined my work. The company man. My own politics are as liberal as the newspapers who went after me. That’s the ironic part. Let me tell you about one case. Actually it was after the case was settled. This is what happened. The father of a boy who died in a car crash sent me a box in the mail. The burnt remains of a cat were inside that box. His boy had died when his car caught fire. His family had sued the car manufacturer and they had lost. I had won the case for the company. The tires on the kid’s car were found to be nearly bald. He skidded on a wet road with a couple of beers inside him, in the middle of the night, in god-awful visibility, and slammed into a truck full of inflammable material parked on the side of a road while the driver took a crap in a gas-station toilet. The kid was enrolled in a community college. He didn’t have the money for a set of new tires. His family didn’t have the money either, I guess. A sad story. There was no bad guy, just all kinds of bad luck. But I got the fried cat in the box and the old man’s blame because their son died. I got to be the villain.”

  “Transference.”

  “Correct. But it doesn’t make it any easier.”

  “I slept with Sylvie,” he said suddenly.

  “I know that.”

  “That was my one unfaithful act.”

  One apiece. We were even in that regard.

  He asked, “Are you a married man?”

  I told him that I was.

  “A model of ceaseless fidelity no doubt.”

  “No. Not really. We’re close to separated.”

  “As I say. I slipped just the once. With Sylvie. In my defense I would mention that she possesses a certain earthy charm.”

  “You’re making fun of her.”

  “No. I’m spinelessly attempting to alleviate some of my guilt. She made it all very easy. She demanded virtually nothing from me. I’m inclined to believe I wasn’t her only conquest.”

  I suspected that he was correct.

  “But once again, I’m trying to wriggle loose from under my own conscience. A gutless reaction. I should know better. I told my wife about it. That was stupid. The noble and selfless act. She elected to show great understanding and compassion and took me back into the bosom of the family. A pitiable mistake there. Viewed with the luxury of retrospect. We never were the same. That was when we decided to put our house on the market. A fresh start someplace else seemed like the best thing for us.”

  It occurred to me then that while four houses were currently for sale in the Handle, none of the sales actually had anything to do with Keith.

  “I’m like the repentant drunk on the wagon,” he said. “I’m eternally watched by eyes that continually expect to be disappointed at any moment, that expect to be failed. I’m pitied more than a little. You see, I’m of the opinion that in order to be fully loved you also have to be admired at the same time. I think that ideally the two should go hand in hand. I’m still loved, I think I am. I’m just not admired any more. And it isn’t quite enough. And when you factor in the absence of trust, the equation gets very much worse. A terrible mistake to wander. Trust me on this. And an even worse mistake to admit to the wandering. I need to know what kind of man we murdered that night.”

  “It’s not important.”

  “Oh. But it is to me. I want to know. Is the world a sadder place for losing him? Do you think?”

  “I couldn’t say. I knew him a long time ago.”

  “As young boys?”

  “Yes. We came from the same town. We lost touch over the years.”

  “I assume you’re a wealthy man now.”

  “I’m doing fine.”

  “You’re being a trifle modest.”

  “I have more money than I know what to do with,” I said truthfully.

  “That must be a pleasant way to live.”

  “It’s essentially meaningless.”

  “Only to you. To a poor man it would mean everything.”

  “He’d very soon realize it didn’t.”

  “Your friend was a poor man?”

  I nodded.

  “But perhaps a richer man than you in essence? In your estimation?”

  “You’re becoming something of a sage.”

  He smiled a beatific smile at me then.

  “Oh yes. You see, as my life is about to end, I can afford to be of a philosophical bent.”

  “You expect George Tait to come after you?”

  He smiled again. “I hadn’t thought about that. It’s certainly likely. It would certainly be his style. Oh gosh yes, that would be George all right. But no. I’m going to beat him to the punch. I let him take charge before. And a stupid death occurred. This time I’m going to be master of my own destiny.” His laugh was hollow. “For what it’s worth.”

  I didn’t understand what he meant. His voice had retreated far into himself. He was smiling a kind of dazzled grin, shell-shocked, blissed out. I worried about him then. Tait’s revenge might be the least of his worries.

  “Can I ask you to do something for me?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’m asking you to do nothing,” he said.

  “I still don’t understand.”

  A child’s toy surfboard was pulled up from the edge of the water. Made out of white polystyrene, it had been dragged clear, then left sprawled on the beach. A tiny frog poked his head out from under the board, then it shot across the hot sand and into the darkness of the evergreen trees that surrounded the fine powdered ashes that had once and would once again be the scene of merry campfires. A charred log stood sentinel. It had rolled too close to the fire once and was doubtless sorry for itself now. On a wooden swing, a toy car lay abandoned, pale blue paint fading in the sunlight. A model of a Ford Mustang convertible, dating from the middle of the dragster sixties.

  The wind shifted and caught the branches of the trees close to the water. Out across the lake a speedboat full of brightly undressed adolescents brutalized the soft silence, their iced beer and their hormones flowing in tandem.

  Will Sanders pulled off his shirt and walked barefoot toward the edge of the water. The sound of the kids on the boat faded. Idiotically I could think only of the scene in the first version of A Star is Born, where the doomed movie star, played by Fredric March, his fame eclipsed by the fast arc of his young wife’s career, walked into the ocean water to end his torment and the rivalry that had suffocated their once-pure love.

  It was a memorable scene.

  Will reached the water’s edge. Did his pace then falter for a split second? Did he question his actions for a moment? He walked forward again, with unmistakable purpose. The water seemed to rise up and meet him, like a welcoming friend. He walked out. When he was submerged to chest height, he began to swim, a measur
ed breaststroke, his arms barely stirring the water. His technique was awkward, his head ridiculously high out of the water, his swan neck stiff, aloof, rigid.

  I watched him, detached and horrified at the same time.

  His strokes slowed after a short while. He was still relatively close to the shore but I sensed that the water was already deeper than head height, and that he had reached what he felt to be an appropriate distance from the shore, and from safety. He stroked one last time but there was next to no momentum.

  The top of his head went under.

  Then nothing moved.

  It had all the sleek movement and implied symbolism of an elegy, and I watched, now breathless, fascinated by the melodramatic, almost celluloid image.

  But of course life is seldom that prosaic and Will Sanders’ lungs choose to rebel from the hushed tranquility of the moment. He broke to the surface, spluttering and thrashing around wildly, as one part of his body chose to render up a violent protest at his clear and awful intention.

  But he was still far enough out to drown easily.

  As I kicked off my shoes and ran for the water, in my mind was the simple thought that I could still save him.

  But as I ran, I sensed movement. Another person. Another running body heading for the water. I would have some help now. We would pull Will Sanders safely to the shore. We would force the lake water from his lungs. Despite his intentions, we would save his life. These thoughts were with me as I ran. Sustaining thoughts.

  I jettisoned these noble intentions as the second body veered and crashed into me, knocking the wind out from me, forcing me to the ground a foot or so short of the water. Now I was trying instead to lift my head, to spit out the sand that had gathered in my mouth, the sand George Tait was forcing me to eat as he straddled my back.

  When I tried to wriggle out from under him I couldn’t. He held me fast. I lay still and tried to think.

  “You fuck.” He was out of breath, twisting his body to pull something from his trouser pocket.

  “You clever fuck.”

  Please don’t let it be a gun. Please. I managed to turn my head half around. He pulled it out finally, and twisted it around in his hand. I saw that it was a gun.