Absolute Zero

by Chuck Logan

  “You see, I thought I had it all figured out. And then it turned out, I didn’t.”

  He had to do something physical. Now. Or he would liquefy into a puddle.

  His eyes tracked the room. Books, files, a computer, of course. And a few framed photos on the walls. Broker got up and walked the shelves. Scanned the pictures. Teenage Hank in a ducktail hairdo, lean and tan, standing in front of the obligatory ’57 Chevy. There was a black-and-white framed cover from Life magazine from the forties. And Hank again, a few years older, in faded jungle fatigues squatting with a group of soldiers who wore Screaming Eagle patches.

  Then he walked to the black maw of the fireplace, where a damp log had drowned in a slush of ashes. Nobody had cleaned it. There was no room for oxygen to circulate under the grate, the wood couldn’t burn.

  The wood box was empty. The least he could do was clean out the fireplace and bring in a load of wood. He took the ash bucket and a small shovel and brush from the fireplace that sat next to the hearth. Methodically, he shoveled out ashes, filled the bucket, and used the stiff wire broom to sweep out the hearth stones.

  He took the bucket to the sliding patio door, opened the door, and stepped out onto the deck. Side stairs led to the lawn along the bluff and the back of the garage. As he carried the ashes toward the bed of frost-killed ferns and hosta next to the garage he walked past the kitchen windows and glimpsed Allen and Jolene, two shadows illuminated by the light over the table.

  When he dumped the ashes he saw the heaped rounds of unsplit oak and the empty woodshed built along the side of the garage. Instinctively, his hand reached out and easily unfroze the heavy splitting maul with one hard slap and a yank. Then he kicked aside the damper sections of oak at the top of the pile and found several drier pieces. He put one on top of the chopping block, planted his feet, hefted the maul, and swung. The cold oak shivered and divided like balsa.

  For several minutes Broker lost himself in the rhythm of the work, keeping warm, swinging the maul. Then more carefully he spilt several of the pieces into smaller strips. When he had a pile of kindling, he loaded an armful, turned to the deck, and saw Jolene standing on the steps watching him. Allen stood inside looking out the kitchen window.

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said. She had pulled a bulky blue sweater around her shoulders and wore a pair of scuffed leather slippers that were many sizes too large.

  “Kind of hard to have a fire without wood,” Broker said.

  She hugged herself. “Hank brought in this stuff before he went on the hunting trip and it’s just been sitting.”

  “You have at least two cords of good oak there,” Broker said as he carried his load up the deck back to the studio. Jolene ran ahead to hold the door. Inside, Broker filled the wood box and found a hand hatchet next to the wood box which he used to splinter off some tinder.

  Jolene stood over him with her arms folded across her chest. A pile of old newspapers lay next to the hearth and Broker crumpled several sheets in the grate, added the tinder, and stacked smaller pieces of wood, pyre-fashion, spacing them so the fire could breathe. He took out his lighter, lit the paper, and set the flue. The hot flame from the newsprint was sucked up the chimney. In a minute he had a good fire crackling.

  The flicker from the flames put a hint of color in Jolene’s face. “Nice to have a fire,” she said.

  Broker stood up and dusted off his hands. When he turned he had another of those uncomfortable impressions that Hank Sommer was watching him. Almost like . . . But when he looked more closely he saw that Hank’s eyes were wandering and rotating. The eye business engaged his curiosity. He needed more time, here, in this room. He needed a reason to come back.

  “I have to get going. I’m going to need a ride. It’s not far; I’m staying at a friend’s farm about eight, nine miles away,” Broker said.

  Jolene nodded. “Of course. Allen will give you a lift.”

  For a moment Broker stood looking at Hank. He exhaled. “Words don’t come close, do they,” he said.

  She smiled a utilitarian smile, then walked across the room and straightened the framed Life magazine cover. Broker followed her and inspected the June issue from 1942 that featured Vinegar Joe Stillwell’s face in black and white, looking like a weathered American Mars.

  Jolene smiled and pointed to the date. “I found it in an antiques store; it came out on the exact day Hank was born. I probably shouldn’t have straightened it. What if it was the last thing he touched in this room?” She shifted her feet and started to lose her balance.

  Broker raised his hand to steady her. She caught herself and said, “Thank you; I’m just a little tired.”

  As they left the room Ambush the cat darted through their feet, crossed the floor, and smoothly leaped up on the bed. She curled against Hank’s motionless hands, and then slowly began to lick the fingers of his right hand with her pink sandpapery tongue.

  Hi, Ambush, looky here; Broker is Prometheus, he brought us fire.

  Broker found his reason to return as he followed her up the circular stairs. “You should get that wood split and out of the weather,” he said.

  She turned, studied him, and simply said, “Yes.”

  “Why don’t I drop by tomorrow afternoon and take care of that,” he said.

  This time she just watched him and said nothing.

  “About two,” he said.

  “I’ll make a pot of coffee,” she said, and then they continued into the kitchen. Broker washed his hands in a bathroom off the kitchen while Jolene explained his transportation problem to Allen.

  Allen had put on his coat and shoes and was holding Broker’s coat. “Let’s get going, I have to get back to the hospital and check on some folks.”

  Jolene and Broker said good-bye. They did not mention chopping wood in the morning.

  Allen drove over the speed limit but was very competent behind the wheel. For the first few minutes they chatted, catching up. Broker asked about Milt. Allen described again the insurance fiasco and the weird money-bind Jolene was in because of the trust. Then he delivered a flat, factual overview of Hank’s condition. “His involuntary muscles seem to function perfectly. But Jolene misinterprets his random blinking and eye movement for focused sight.” Allen turned to Broker and grimaced slightly. “It gives her false hope that he’ll recover.”

  “She looks pretty done in,” Broker said.

  “She’s watching him around the clock. So far, her jury-rigged home-care plan is working. In a few days Milt will have him into a full-care nursing home. Otherwise, he’s as good as his heart and lungs, and they are working just fine.”

  “So he could go on for quite a while?” Broker said.

  Allen pursed his lips and they remained quiet for a few miles. Broker asked finally, “The guy who answered the door? He was at the hospital up north.”

  “Exactly,” Allen said. “Well, life’s a come-as-you-are party, and that guy—Earl Garf—is a visitor from Jolene’s previous life. I have to say that when she discovered she was broke, Earl was Johnny-on-the-spot to help her out. On the other hand, he, ah, also moved into the basement.”

  “Maybe he smells a big malpractice settlement,” Broker said.

  The remark caused Allen to study Broker’s profile for a few beats. “Yes, the thought has occurred to Milt and me.”

  “Doesn’t look like the kind of person Hank would keep around,” Broker said. Some of the animus he felt against the younger man weighted his words.

  “Believe me, if Hank was on his feet, Garf would be gone,” Allen said. “They had a fight once. Hank threw him out of the house.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a good scene,” Broker said.

  “I don’t think they’re intimate, if that’s what you mean,” Allen said tightly.

  “Still,” Broker said.

  “Right,” Allen said.

  Then they arrived at J.T.’s and, seeing the birds gathered in a pool of barn light against the wire fencing, Allen said in a dist
racted voice, “Ostriches? They’re a healthy alternative to beef.”

  They shook hands. Broker was hoping that Amy wouldn’t come walking out the door. Allen Falken was thinking that he was saying good-bye to Phil Broker forever. He turned his car and drove off with a final wave.

  J.T. let Broker in and they went into the kitchen where Amy was helping a six-foot-tall thirteen-year-old set the table.

  “Unca Honky, wazup?”

  Broker narrowed his eyes at Shamika Merryweather. “You’re not suppose to be talking like that. It’s definitely not PC.”

  “Certainly not in mixed company,” Shami said straight-faced. “And certainly not at school where it would be abusive and insensitive. But here at home I’m still under my daddy’s strict control, and my daddy says that’s your name.”

  “How tall are you now?” Broker countered.

  “Six foot. How tall are you?”

  “Six foot.”

  “Yeah, but I still have another five years to grow,” Shami said.

  Amy walked up looking very sane and healthy to Broker after his visit to Sommer’s house. “How’d it go with Hank?” she asked.

  “It’s hard to tell. He could be looking at people. But Allen Falken doesn’t think so.”

  “Oh.”

  “Right, that was him in the car. He just dropped me off. Which makes it harder for you to go Sommer’s house, because Allen can ID you.”

  “So what’s next?”

  “I’m going back tomorrow for another look.”

  “Okay, can I take your truck to do my Mall of America junket?”

  “Sure.” Broker rubbed his chin. “Basically, it’s pretty grim over at Sommer’s.”

  “You don’t look grim,” Amy observed.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Broker was not one to dream.

  So the sudden flash of Sommer’s startling acetylene eyes jolted him awake and left him sitting up in the dark on the fold-out couch in J.T.’s unfamiliar living room.

  Shadows strummed the wall above him as the wind pushed the willows back and forth. New night sounds murmured: the creak of the eaves, the furnace fan whirring on.

  Sitting in the dark in one strange house he thought of another strange house. Sommer’s. Multileveled and full of people. Especially Garf, the wild card in the basement. Broker tried to imagine Jolene and Garf together in the cherry sleigh bed while Sommer treaded water in the next room.

  He rejected the image, reformulated it, and put Garf back in the basement and saw Jolene, alone in the king-size bed. Did she sleep soundly or did she toss? Or did she really sleep in the narrow bed at Sommer’s feet?

  Was she a diamond in the rough, or just an opportunist?

  Jolene, Garf, Sommer, and the dead accountant were human puzzle pieces that he couldn’t make fit. And he wondered if Sommer would now be counted among the things he’d never know. Like where his daughter was sleeping tonight. He didn’t even know what country she was in.

  What he did know was that he wouldn’t get back to sleep, so he felt around for his jeans, pulled them on, and carefully made his way between the shadowy furniture toward the kitchen.

  Red digital numbers on the microwave stamped 5:29 A.M. in the dark. A moment later an appliance clicked on with a watery gurgle—J.T.’s preset coffeemaker. Upstairs, on the same schedule as the coffeepot, people stirred. Doors opened and closed. Water ran in pipes.

  Broker went back to the living room, got his travel bag, and took it to the half bath off the kitchen. When he emerged shaved and dressed, he smelled brewing coffee and heard soft footsteps coming down the stairs.

  J.T. padded through the doorway wearing jeans, a blue flannel shirt, and wool socks. He flicked on the light. “Amy’s still asleep. Denise and Shami are coming down for breakfast, so let’s take some coffee into the barn. Feed some birds.”

  J.T. poured coffee into a thermos, sat down, pulled on a pair of work shoes, then got up and reached for a lined denim jacket. Broker took his coat and boots from the mud porch and soon they were walking toward the barn, testing the icy pre-dawn air in their lungs.

  J.T. handed Broker the thermos and two cups, then withdrew a pipe and a pouch of tobacco from his chest pocket. “Even in Minnesota, I can still smoke in my own barn,” he said as he filled his pipe and squinted into the distance over Broker’s shoulder. Broker reached for a cigar and they lit up like two truant kids.

  J.T.’s eyes had acquired a new habit of focusing beyond the person he was with and resting on a point in the sky. Even a blank night sky. He used to be a close watcher of people, and they had pretty much lived up to his expectations. Now he preferred to stay far away from most of them, to get beyond them. Growing his own corn, oats, and alfalfa he’d become addicted to the constant examination of wind, clouds, humidity, and the color of air.

  They walked out to the paddocks, fed the birds there, returned to the barn, and continued to scoop feed into five-gallon plastic buckets and dump them in feeding troughs in one of the two pens that sectioned off the lower level of the building. Broker moved in easily among the leggy hens who drifted away and cautiously returned after he’d dumped their feed.

  The barn was new territory for Broker, with its musty scent of oats and corn fermenting in cold wooden bins and the loft above, heavy with alfalfa bales. He had grown up north of Grand Marais on Lake Superior. He knew something about fishing, hunting, logging, and iron mining. But there were few real farms in the granite bedrock of Cook County, Minnesota.

  “Watch out. They peck at glasses, watches, rings, pens. Shiny stuff attracts them,” J.T. said. Broker shouldered through the birds. He wasn’t wearing a watch. He sure wasn’t wearing a ring.

  Then J.T. held out an arm to bar Broker from entering the second pen. In that pen, a solitary four-hundred-pound male stood nine feet tall, with his thick black plummage flexed, tipped with white feathers. The stubby wings and tail feathers came up and he coiled his long neck at them.

  “Popeye’s my big, ornery male,” J.T. said “When he gets his wings out and his tail up, never get in front of him. He’s getting ready to attack. Always stay to the side.”

  “How come you have him all alone in here?” Broker asked.

  “I, ah, haven’t figured out how to move him back into a paddock. Last time I tried, he cornered me and almost kicked me to death. So I’m going to wait till he’s way, way out of season to try again.”

  The reinforced plywood door to the pen shuddered when Popeye threw a kick as if to echo J.T.’s remarks.

  “Jesus,” Broker said.

  “Yeah. Ostriches throw a mean knuckle. They’re the only birds that have two toes on their feet. Check it out.”

  Broker snuck a look into Popeye’s pen. Two toes, but one was little and one was real big with a thick ugly claw on it. “Ow,” he said.

  “It’s no joke. They can kill a lion with one kick. He could disembowel a man, easy.”

  After all the birds were fed and watered, J.T. led Broker through his incubator and hatchery rooms, now closed down because the birds quit laying their two-pound eggs in September. J.T. and Broker climbed some stairs and entered a long, comfortable studio paneled with barn wood.

  A counter ran around the room and one side held an ammo-loading press and shelves of gunsmith paraphernalia. Farther down the counter a screen saver on a Gateway PC trailed bubbles, sting rays, and an occasional shark. Two space heaters were in place as backup, but J.T. crumpled some newspaper and tossed some kindling in a Fisher woodstove next to his computer desk, and soon had a fire crackling.

  The other side of the room was outfitted with more counters fanning out from an industrial Singer sewing machine and racks of leather-working tools. Sheaves of tanned ostrich leather in black, maroon, and gray—some with a scale pattern, some with quills—hung from the walls. A picture window behind the sewing machine was an ebony mirror, filled with night.

  Broker took the rocking chair by the stove and J.T. sat on the stool at his work counter. J.
T. tossed a leather checkbook case to Broker. “You want to trade up?” he asked.

  J.T.’s first prototypes had been stiff, the stitching not sufficient to hold the leather. He’d brought in a commercial sewing machine, learned a few tricks, and started backing the ostrich with calfskin, and now the items were supple. This new one was a little slicker than the one in Broker’s hip pocket.

  “Shiny leather,” Broker said.

  J.T. nodded. “An experiment. Out of a South African shipment.”

  Broker handed it back. J.T. tossed it aside and picked a sheaf of printer paper from the counter. He poured more coffee and relit his pipe.

  The calm expression of the ostrich farmer was overprinted by the suspicious frown of J.T. Merryweather, former homicide detective.

  “I downloaded this stuff from Washington County: Cliff Stovall was a fifty-six-year-old white guy, a CPA. He died of exposure complicated by self-mutilation . . .”

  “So they’re set on this self-mutilation theory?” Broker said.

  “There it is. The coroner made notes more about what was on the outside of Stovall’s body, than what he found inside.”

  “What’d he find inside?” Broker sipped coffee.

  “Traces of Antabuse and a lot of alcohol. Blood level out of sight.”

  “Okay, give me the outside,” Broker said.

  “Thirteen significant self-inflicted wounds caused by cutting and piercing going back over twenty years.” J.T. raised his eyebrows. “In a world of seriously fucked-up individuals, this guy was a standout.”

  “Nothing about foul play?” Broker said.

  “Nope. Self-mutilation,” J.T. reiterated. “I’m getting pictures sent of the pre-autopsy so I can show Shami the downside of body piercing. She wants to get a nose ring.”

  “So this isn’t the coroner making a diagnosis?”

  “No, they pulled this guy’s medical records. He wasn’t some teenage kid taking a roll-around in the tackle box. The coroner called him an aristocrat of the cutting culture. He was a regular inpatient at the St. Cloud VA on the neuropsychiatric ward.”