The Ice at the Bottom of the World (2 page)

The front tire catches in one of our tin metal truck’s underground tunnels and Uncle Trash takes a spill. The cut crate bolted to the bicycle handlebars spills brown paper packages sealed with electrical tape out into the yard along with a case of Champale and a box of cigars. Uncle Trash is down where he falls. He lays asleep all day under the tree in the front yard, moving only just to crawl back into the wandering shade.

We have for supper sirloins, Champale, and cigars. Uncle Trash teaches how to cross our legs up on the table after dinner, but says he’ll go ahead and leave my brother and my’s cigars unlit. There is no outlook for our toys and my Band-Aid can of nickels and dimes, checking all the packages, even checking twice again the cut crate bolted on the front of the bicycle. Uncle Trash shows us a headstand on the table while drinking a bottle of Champale, then he stands in the sink and sings “Gather My Farflung Thoughts Together.” My brother and I chomp our cigars and clap but in our hearts we are low and lonesome.

Don’t y’all burn down the house, says Uncle Trash, pedaling out the yard to Cuts.

My brother leans out our window with a rope coil and sirloin scraps strung on strings. He is in a greasy-fingered sleep when the strings slither like white snakes off our bed, over the sill, out into the fields beyond.

• • • • • •

There’s July corn and no word from our parents.

Uncle Trash doesn’t remember the Fourth of July or the Fourth of July parade. Uncle Trash bunches cattails in the fenders of his bicycle and clips our Old Maid cards in the spokes and follows the fire engine through town with my brother and I in the front cut-out crate throwing penny candy to the crowds. What are you trying to be? the colored men at Cuts ask Uncle Trash when we end up the parade there. I spot a broken-wheeled tin metal truck of mine in a colored child’s hand, driving it in circles by the Cuts front steps. Foolish, says Uncle Trash.

Uncle Trash doesn’t remember winning Mrs. Cuts in a card game for a day to come out and clean the house and us in the bargain. She pushes the furniture around with a broom and calls us abominations. There’s a bucket of soap to wash our heads and a jar of sour-smelling cream for our infected bites, fleas from under the house, and mosquitoes through the windows. The screens are rusty squares in the driveway dirt. Uncle Trash leaves her his razor opened as long as my arm. She comes after my brother and I with it to cut our hair, she says. We know better. My brother dives under the house and I am up a tree.

Uncle Trash doesn’t remember July, but when we tell him about it, he says it sounds like July was probably a good idea at the time.

• • • • • •

It is August with the brown, twisted corn in the fields next to the house. There is word from our parents. They are in the state capital. One of them has been in jail. Uncle Trash is still promising screens. We get from Cuts bug spray instead.

I wake up in the middle of a night. My brother floats through the window. Out in the yard, he and a stray have each other on the end of a rope. He reels her in and I make the tackle. Already I feel the fleas leave her rag-matted coat and crawl over my arms and up my neck. We spray her down with a whole can of bug spray until her coat lathers like soap. My brother gets some matches to burn a tick like a grape out of her ear. The touch of the match covers her like a blue-flame sweater. She’s a fireball shooting beneath the house.

By the time Uncle Trash and the rest of town get there, the Fire Warden says the house is Fully Involved.

In the morning I see our parents drive past where our house used to be. I see them go by again until they recognize the yard. Uncle Trash is trying to bring my brother out of the trance he is in by showing him how some tricks work on the left-standing steps of the stoop. Uncle Trash shows Jack-Away, Queen in the Whorehouse, and No Money Down. Our father says for Uncle Trash to stand up so he can knock him down. Uncle Trash says he deserves that one. Our father knocks Uncle Trash down again and tells him not to get up. If
you get up I’ll kill you, our father says.

Uncle Trash crawls on all fours across our yard out to the road.

Goodbye, Uncle Trash, I say.

Goodbye, men! Uncle Trash says. Don’t y’all burn the house down! he says, and I say, We won’t.

During the knocking-down nobody notices our mother. She is a flat-footed running rustle through the corn all burned up by the summer sun.

HER FAVORITE STORY
 

I
N
I
NDIAN
, this place is called Where Lightning Takes Tall Walks. I figure that to be about right. What happens here is this is the first landfall those water-heavy thunderheads make when they quick-boil up from across the bay. Long-legged stretches of bone-white light come kicking through the treetops of the tallest shortleaf pines, ripping limbs and splitting crowns. When they leave past, your ears are ringing from the thundershots and there is the smell about of electricseared sap. It is a heart-racer to have happen around you in the day, and at night you still have coming to you the cracking hiss and branching swish in the whole dark of crowns falling so heavy unseen and so close
they push air past your face and the ground bounces you up on your toes.

What I am out here doing in this place where lightning takes tall walks has to do with what happened with me and Margaret when we lived a cable length upriver. My cabin is actually three bends and a cutback along the shore from here and I imagine by now it is run over with raccoons and field mice and black snakes coming in for to eat them. I don’t imagine anybody has run off with anything in it, seeing how the rut down to where my cabin is is generally under a flood tide and mostly washed out up along the last three miles it runs out to the county road. I swam by one day recently and it seems to be all right, allowing for the tree trunk stuck in the roof and excepting for one of the all-glass front windows that is busted out, probably shot that way from somebody in a boat. The big-headed dog I brought home for Margaret wasn’t around, me reckoning now he has run off back to town.

Town is where he came from that I got him, from one of those big turnaround truck drivers who used a softball bat on the animal, saying the dog was mean. The big-headed dog wasn’t mean, though he was wall-eyed, and wall-eyed isn’t something you want to see on a dog—meaning they’re not too bright, not good for tracking or running a trace. That turnaround truck driver got drunk in town—it was a Friday—and beat that big-headed dog with the softball bat until he bled from his
ears and tail and then threw the dog off the end of Rusty Shackleford’s dock. Lucky for the dog it was near low tide so he could lay passed out in half a hand of water without drowning. I had no carry with the turnaround driver with the softball bat, but the dog wasn’t dead at all and it was to have a hard death in the water, cold from a four-day freeze, so I laid the old beat-up mutt on a pound net I had in the bottom of my metal flake canoe and paddled us on home.

Home, I pulled open down the oven door, laying the dog on it under broil to warm him up and dry him out, and what but if the first thing he didn’t do, coming around awake, was to try to take off my damn arm at the shoulder, chasing me around my own house, me finally up on the picnic table I had in my living room and him yapping and snappy, barking below with steam coming off his coat from the oven broil like he was some sort of demon dog from hell.

What it was I never knew Margaret had that settled that big-headed dog, wild as he was, him snockering around her like a puppy, not letting me raise my voice at her lest I get a growl from where he used to sleep most of the time by the alpine hearth. It was just the way she was, the way she had with people, men and dogs alike. She wasn’t beautiful and it didn’t matter, them even in town not saying she was beautiful, though I could tell, by the way Rusty Shackleford and Danny Daniels Shackleford and Scoop looked down her shirt
sideways under her arms, seeing she had an all-over tan at least up top, I could tell that drove them in town wild. What I call town when I say town really being just Rusty Shackleford’s seafood house at the end of a half-fell-down dock with two pumps, a diesel and a gas. Town being where Rusty had a hoist for packing out the local high-rise rigs, a concrete-crate shed, and a motel machine for ice, him having between where it is safe to get good last footing before falling through the rotten planks and the crushed-shell turnaround, a desk he calls his office, a one-room five-sided store, and a shoebox near where the cat named Fishhead sleeps in the window, a place where if ever you were to get any mail in this world you would find it there, most likely already opened up and read out loud to everybody by Rusty, drinking on Friday nights in what this place is I call town.

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.