Permafrost

by Peter Robertson

  Then he called me a stupid, nosy yuppie fuck and smashed the handle of the gun once into the back of my head with a sickening force that only registered for a split second.

  I woke up to George Tait’s words hissing close to my ear.

  “You just missed yourself a drowning,” he said.

  I sat up. My head hurt. He stood before me. Over me. He had the gun in his hand. His hand was steady. The gun was pointed at my face.

  Behind him the lake stretched out toward the island in a calm, unbroken mirror that reflected the sky full of gathering clouds at the close of the day.

  I sat up and the quick motion made my head hurt. There was no sign of Will Sanders in the water. How long had I been out?

  “You left him to die,” I said.

  George Tait smiled unpleasantly. “No sense stopping a man doing what he wants to do, is there?”

  He put the gun closer to my face.

  “You’ve been a real fucking pain these last few days,” he said. “You should probably be made to die now.”

  I started to talk. “How long do you think you can do this kind of thing before the real law comes after you? You think you’re safe? You’re not. I’m not a tramp. And Will was a well-known lawyer. We’re not nobodies. We can’t just vanish away.”

  He pretended to look confused. “Will killed himself. What in the fuck does that have to do with me?”

  “I’ll say you drove him to it.”

  He smiled. “But you’ll be dead, too.”

  “Then they’ll get you for killing me.”

  “A fat lot of fucking good that’ll do you.”

  “I’ll be past caring. On the other hand, you’ll be getting your asshole reconfigured in prison for the rest of your sorry life.”

  He sneered. “Big fucking talk. But I could maybe let you live. Then it’ll be my word against yours. They’ll never find your friend out there and Will isn’t going to say much of anything now.” He pulled himself up proudly. “I’m a respected man around these parts. Folk will take my side for sure.”

  “You’re seriously deluding yourself. Most of the folk think you’re a bully and a moron. Even your wife won’t back you up.”

  He laughed at me. “My wife? I married myself the town pump. Didn’t know it then. Pretty little thing she was. Still is. I guess. For what that’s worth. She hasn’t even the guts to leave. Just drinks and fucks anything that moves when I’m not around and pretends she likes me when I am.”

  “You mean like Will Sanders?” I said.

  He shrugged. “Whatever. She only picked herself losers. And usually she did it away from the lake where no one I knew could see her. Will was her first real serious fuckup, and blowing your little pal in front of the kids was just too fucking much.”

  “You knew.” It wasn’t a question.

  He shook his head in fake sorrow. “It was a lame fucking story from the start, and getting Tammi to talk wasn’t what you’d call real hard. I maybe didn’t go to college, but I’m no fucking idiot. After I’ve taken care of you, me and Sylvie will be having a good long talk. But until then, she’s still scared enough of me to say what I want her to say. So there’ll be two of us against just the one of you and anyway, you’re forgetting the most important part. As far as folks are concerned your friend was nothing but a pervert, and he died just like he deserved to do, and at least four people are gonna testify to that.”

  I shook my head. “We know that’s not right. Eventually the truth will come out. One of the children will break down and say that it was just a story. That Keith was getting his dick sucked by your tramp wife.”

  He grinned nastily. “But that’s nothing but a fucking lie. That didn’t happen. Why, there’s just no way that could have happened, your honor.” He was almost laughing now. “Face it, pal. You’re seriously fucked.”

  I shook my head.

  He pushed the gun closer. His voice grew soft. “Now I want you to take back what you said about my wife.”

  “You just said it yourself.”

  The words came very slowly. “What I can say and what you can say are two different fucking things. I want you to take it back.”

  I shook my head.

  “Then you’re going to have to die.”

  “You keep forgetting. If you kill me it isn’t going to be handled by the local police yahoo you suck up to at church rummage sales. Big time professional cops from the big city will be all over you. And even if Sylvie takes your side at the start, she’ll break down after a while, and then you’ll be finished.

  His eyes shifted out across the water to the island. “I still haven’t heard you take it back.”

  “She had an affair with Will Sanders.”

  “Maybe Will led her astray.”

  “Get real.”

  But I was wasting my breath.

  George Tait’s notions of reality shifted like soft sand underfoot.

  “You don’t understand this place. Any of this stuff. This is a community, out here. A private place. We live away from the big cities and the rules you slick urban fucks have to follow. We don’t have drugs and we don’t have sex perverts walking the streets. We all know each other’s names. We all go to the same church. We’re all white and we all tan easy. Hell, I’m no racist, but you can’t deny that life’s a whole hell of a lot easier if we’re all the same color and stuff like that. We all dress the same. Buy the same piece-of-shit Madras shirts from the spring sale at the place in town right on Main street. We’re a bunch of lily-white fucking clones. Tomorrow we all go to the town meeting where we all vote the same way and elect the same dumbass mayor we been electing for the last fifteen years. He’s a jackass but we all like him. Saturday we all go to the school soccer game. They lose every fucking game. Afterward, there’s a church corn boil in the afternoon if the weather holds up. It’s my turn to bring the Kool-Aid for the kids, the cheap jug white wine for the pastor’s prissy wife, and the beer for the rest of us. Sylvie’s in charge of bringing bread and hot dog buns which is about the easiest fucking thing in the world to do but that’s about her speed, especially after she’s had a few drinks.”

  “It sounds just like heaven.”

  “Don’t try and be fucking clever. We’re all the same here. That’s what I’m trying to say. There’s some safety in numbers. That’s what I’m talking about. We’re safe here. You come up here and stir things up, and we close ranks on you. That’s the way it works. You can’t get in our way. Pervert or not, your little friend didn’t belong. Simple as that. And maybe that’s all the reason we need to kill him. He was trespassing on private property. Our private property.”

  He seemed to have finally arrived at what to him was a logical conclusion.

  “Will Sanders might have argued with some of that.”

  “Will hadn’t the balls to do things right. He was a big talker with a big space where his spine should have been attached. A good family man mostly, when his dick wasn’t twitching at the sight of my wife, but still a sorry-assed piece of shit for all the fancy cases he won and the big companies he saved from all these little hurt guys with their little pinhead lawyers who couldn’t talk the way Will could for the big retainers from the car company guys in the good suits.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  He smiled almost ruefully. “How the fuck should I know? I guess maybe I wanted to get things a little clearer in my head. It’s surely helped. It might make you feel better too.”

  “About what?”

  He smiled. “About dying,” he said. “Now would you care to say something sweet about my wife?”

  “Would it really make any difference?”

  He pretended to mull it over. “I guess not,” he finally said.

  When he placed the gun in the middle of my forehead he sighed, like it was a distasteful chore someone had to perform.
When he began to squeeze the trigger I closed my eyes.

  There was no epiphany. I didn’t hear soothing voices or see a warm white light reaching out for me through a tunnel of soft clouds. I waited to die. Maybe I thought of Keith. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I wanted to hold him responsible for my eminent demise. But then again, maybe I didn’t.

  “Hey?”

  He suddenly pulled the gun away. I opened my eyes. He was looking with some confusion somewhere past my head.

  “No,” he said. “Please, Hon. NO.”

  There was a sharp sound.

  George turned his head away at the last moment, and the bullet from the gun Sylvie Tait was holding ripped away half his skull and sent blood and brain matter oozing onto the sand like rich red wine onto a pristine white tablecloth.

  Sylvie walked barefoot across the burning sand and dropped the gun at the feet of her clearly dead husband.

  “He keeps a lot of guns around our house,” she said. “And I’ve never much cared for the habit.”

  Her dark tanned foot touched his blood. She pulled it away, then stared down, her face curious, as if unsure what it was, and how it got there.

  I was still sitting.

  She sat down beside me.

  “Maybe I should run away. Start myself a new life in a new town far away from here. Would you like to start a new life with me? With a killer woman? We could live on an empty beach somewhere. You have plenty of money, don’t you? I could dye my hair and change my name. Maybe they wouldn’t come looking for me. Why should they bother with me?”

  “You know that they will.”

  “But why should they? That’s not fair. It’s not like he was a good man. Everyone knows he wasn’t. He killed your friend didn’t he? He drove Will to kill himself. He’d have surely killed you.”

  She was feverishly intent on establishing her self-justification. I wanted to tell her that if she hadn’t lied to George he wouldn’t have killed Keith. But I wasn’t sure of that anymore. If she hadn’t stayed with him none of this would have happened. If she hadn’t been so fearful. But there were too many improbables, too many ifs.

  The reasons weren’t important.

  It was possible for George Tait to have killed Keith for no good reason at all. Or simply for trespassing. Or for borrowing the old rowboat. Or for sitting and talking to Connie on the beach. Even just for being on the beach, his beach, for being an unwanted stranger, and for stumbling uninvited into the superficially ordered world of George Tait, which was at heart a false world, that didn’t cotton much to the presence of strangers, of random patterns that disrupted the smooth surface.

  “So. If I don’t run away with you,” Sylvie asked, “what will happen to me next?”

  I didn’t have a good answer, or one that she would have been delighted to hear. I could have told her that she’d rid the world of a nasty presence. It would have been the truth. But I could also have told her that the world wasn’t going to show her any great expression of gratitude for her action. That also would have been the truth. I hoped the legal system would go soft on her.

  She had, after all, saved my life.

  But I was saved from having to answer her.

  Perhaps George Tait was fundamentally right. In these parts, he was the law, and strangers like Keith and I were the outlaws. Perhaps my death would have been as unnoticed as Keith’s was. And perhaps the local townspeople would have closed ranks, and left George to administer his border-town justice.

  But in this instance, he was mistaken, or at least he was overoptimistic. Because, at the sound of the gun, someone nearby had done their duty, and had thought to call the police.

  The siren grew shrill and loud as the marked car skidded into the parking lot beside the beach, its roof lights pulsing.

  George’s good buddy, whose name completely escaped me for a moment, got out of the squad car and slowly approached us. Idiotically, his handgun was drawn.

  Unknowingly, he was the first of the townspeople to pay his last respects to his good neighbor.

  EIGHTEEN

  It was two hours later when I was able to leave the beach. I had told my story to local police chief Andy Borland, who obligingly gave me his name.

  My story took close to half an hour, told straight through, then Sylvie Tait told hers for a second half-hour. The time in between was occupied by Borland and the ambulance crew checking the body, photographing the body, using the traditional yellow tape to seal the death area off.

  It surprised me that Borland allowed Sylvie and me to eavesdrop on much of each other’s stories, but, as a result, I can attest that there were few discrepancies between the two tales.

  It became increasingly obvious that Andy Borland had hated George Tait. He never came out and said it, but I soon realized as he gently coaxed Sylvie through the events that he was anxious for us to collaborate, to present a united front.

  He was hell-bent on serving up George Tait as the one and only villain, and short of outright lying, we were being silently encouraged to aid in this endeavor.

  I should mention at this point that we were more than willing to oblige.

  A share of the blame for the whole sad business had to belong to Sylvie Tait, her scene on the beach with Keith, and her clumsy attempt to cover it up, which, for all her hard work, had come to be believed by virtually no one. She had primed and loaded her husband like a gun and he had come out firing wildly. But that was slightly unfair. George Tait was an incendiary device all by himself, and Keith and Will Sanders were dead at his hands, one directly, the other, indirectly.

  Sylvie had been married to a brutal man for a long time and most of her natural defenses no longer functioned. She wasn’t a criminal. She wasn’t a killer. She had saved my life, for without any doubt George Tait would have killed me.

  So as I spoke to Borland I managed to recall every detail of George’s cruelty, every dark aspect of Keith’s death, as it had been related to me by Will Sanders. Did I embellish? Not really. But who would know or care if I did? All three men were now silent.

  I didn’t choose to relate the nature of Keith and Sylvie’s encounter on the beach that night. I rather let it be known that George killed Keith for stepping into the Handle and upsetting George’s unofficial reign as unelected tyrant and psychotic town booster. Sylvie too said nothing on the subject. It would be her secret. The cop was more than happy to nod along, more than willing to believe the tale as we related it to him. He didn’t need any another reason. George was George. And that was clearly reason enough.

  As he sent us on our way, he asked if we would like to think about what we had said and submit something to him in writing. We both agreed. It was surprising the way the cop was handling the investigation, but the chance to think about what had happened, and put it down in black and white, was welcome.

  The cop, I’m quite sure, was hoping for an additional nail or two for the Tait coffin, and was also intent on making the whole business look as official as possible.

  Sylvie walked away. I turned to do the same, as the two-man ambulance team got into a hasty conference with the police chief. Before I could leave, I was called over.

  It transpired that one ambulance attendant was unable to swim. This was sheepishly admitted. The other one could. But the police chief also couldn’t. This fact was relayed in a forceful manner meant to discourage any adverse comment. Borland wanted Will Sanders’ body out of the water fast, and, incredibly to me, was more than willing to hand the chore over to the one orderly and me.

  Equally strange was my ready agreement.

  We both waded gingerly into the water. The body wasn’t too far out. Not floating on the surface. Not sunk to the sand below. Will Sanders lay in a shallow parody of purgatory a foot or so beneath the surface, his face upturned, a pale and pasty white, his eyes bugged, staring in vain, his mouth futilely wide open.

&nbs
p; We pulled him to the shore and the non-swimming orderly took over from me to help load the corpse into the ambulance, after a flurry of triplicate forms were signed and divided between the two caring arms of the public service.

  After Will’s body was examined in vain for signs that he had died in any way other than drowning the cop began a slow methodical walk around George Tait. He stopped and made short notes. He bent down to bag George’s gun, the one that had been in his hand, the one he had used to hit me with. He had taken the other gun earlier, the one dropped by Sylvie. He had taken a blood sample. He had photographed from several positions. Yet he kept on walking, around and around, as the two orderlies leaned against their ambulance, waiting, watching impassively.

  “You should get going now.” He spoke to me softly.

  “I wanted to ask you something,” I said.

  “Go on.” It was a noncommittal answer.

  “Where was George hiding?”

  He smiled. “Inside his garage with the door closed. I guess there’s a peephole. He must have been watching you for a while. When it got to a good part he opened the garage door and came out. You must have been too busy to see or hear him coming. Sylvie was hiding in the house and heard the door open. She watched George walk toward the beach, then she turned away and shook for a while longer, ‘till she got up the nerve to come out with one of George’s guns in her hand. Her timing was pretty good for you. So was her shot. Jesus Christ. She couldn’t have killed him faster if she’d tried.”

  One of the orderlies had recommended an inexpensive motel close to town that, in his own words, “wasn’t the biggest shithole on the face of the planet.” I told him I would be happy to pay more. He laughed at this foolishness and told me it was also the only decent motel in town, cheap, shitty, or otherwise.

  I asked the chief if he needed me for anything else.

  “You leaving town tonight?” he asked me curtly.

  I told him I would leave tomorrow morning.

  “Fine. We have your address. Write up your statement, and be careful with it. Very careful. Get everything in it. Don’t forget any stuff.” At that point he looked at me meaningfully. “Then drop it off when you leave. The station’s on the main road out of town. There’s no way you can miss it.”