The Ice at the Bottom of the World Read online

  FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 1991

  Copyright © 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989 by Mark Richard

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1989. The Anchor Books edition is published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The author expresses his thanks to those publications in which his work was originally published: Antaeus, Equator, Esquire, The Quarterly, and Shenandoah. Some of these stories have also been published in the anthologies From Mt. San Angelo, New Stories from the South, and Pushcart Prize.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Richard, Mark, 1955–

  The ice at the bottom of the world; stories by Mark Richard.—1st Anchor Books ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3568.1313124 1991 90-47572

  813′.54—dc20

  eISBN: 978-0-8041-5054-5

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v3.1

  TO CLAIRE

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgement

  STRAYS

  HER FAVORITE STORY

  ON THE ROPE

  HAPPINESS OF THE GARDEN VARIETY

  THIS IS US, EXCELLENT

  THE ICE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD

  GENIUS

  FISHBOY

  THE THEORY OF MAN

  FEAST OF THE EARTH, RANSOM OF THE CLAY

  About the Author

  Thank you, God, for all my friends always having for me a pillow and a blanket, a place at the table, some dollars to put in my pocket. Bless especially the boys from the original Thunderbird Lounge—Brian, Scott, Melvin, Terry, John, Joe, Carl, and Stan. Bless the Eminent Cheese and Hola, Casey and Denise. Bless Gordon; Tom, too. Rest Jim Boatwright. Bless the girls Maggie and Temperance and Julie, and bless that one girl, Pamela Sue, whose faith never fails and whose love always brightens. Bless them all and thanks again.

  Yrs., M.R.

  STRAYS

  AT NIGHT, stray dogs come up underneath our house to lick our leaking pipes. Beneath my brother and my’s room we hear them coughing and growling, scratching their ratted backs against the boards beneath our beds. We lie awake, listening, my brother thinking of names to name the one he is setting out to catch. Salute and Topboy are high on his list.

  I tell my brother these dogs are wild and cowering. A bare-heeled stomp on the floor off our beds sends them scuttling spine-bowed out the crawl-space beneath our open window. Sometimes, when my brother is quick, he leans out and touches one slipping away.

  Our father has meant to put the screens back on the windows for spring. He has even hauled them out of the storage shed and stacked them in the drive. He lays them one by one over sawhorses to tack in the frames tighter and weave patches against mosquitoes. This is what he means to do, but our mother that morning pulls all the preserves off the shelves onto the floor, sticks my brother and my’s Easter Sunday drawings in her mouth, and leaves the house through the field next door cleared the week before for corn.

  Uncle Trash is our nearest relative with a car and our mother has a good half-day head start on our father when Uncle Trash arrives. Uncle Trash runs his car up the drive in a big speed, splitting all the screens stacked there from their frames. There is an exploded chicken in the grill of Uncle Trash’s car. They don’t even turn the motor off as Uncle Trash slides out and our father gets behind the wheel, backing back over the screens, setting out in search of our mother.

  Uncle Trash finds out that he has left his bottle under the seat of his car. He goes into our kitchen, pulling out all the shelves our mother missed. Then he is in the towel box in the hall, looking, pulling out stuff in stacks. He is in our parents’ room, opening short doors. He is in the storage shed, opening and sniffing a mason jar of gasoline for the power mower. Uncle Trash comes up and asks, Which way it is to town for a drink. I point up the road. Uncle Trash sets off, saying, Don’t y’all burn the house down.

  My brother and I hang out in the side yard, doing handstands until dark. We catch handfuls of lightning bugs and smear bright yellow on our shirts. It is late. I wash our feet and put us to bed. We wait for somebody to come back home but nobody ever does. Lucky for me when my brother begins to whine for our mother the stray dogs show up under the house. My brother starts making up lists of new names for them, naming himself to sleep.

  Hungry, we wake up to something sounding in the kitchen not like our mother fixing us anything to eat.

  It is Uncle Trash. He is throwing up and spitting blood into the pump-handled sink. I ask him did he have an accident and he sends my brother upstairs for merthiolate and Q-tips. His face is angled out from his head on one side so that-sided eye is shut. His good eye waters when he wiggles loose teeth with cut-up fingers.

  Uncle Trash says he had an accident, all right. He says he was up in a card game and then he was real up in a card game, so up he bet his car, accidentally forgetting that our father had driven off with it in search of our mother. Uncle Trash says the man who won the card game went ahead and beat up Uncle Trash on purpose anyway.

  All day Uncle Trash sleeps in our parents’ room. We in the front yard can hear him snoring. My brother and I dig in the dirt with spoons, making roadbeds and highways for my tin metal trucks. In the evening, Uncle Trash comes down in one of our father’s shirts, dirty, but cleaner than the one he had gotten beat up in. We have banana sandwiches for supper. Uncle Trash asks do we have a deck of cards in the house. He says he wants to see do his tooth-cut fingers still bend enough to work. I have to tell him how our mother disallows card-playing in the house but that my brother has a pack of Old Maid somewhere in the toy box. While my brother goes out to look I brag at how I always beat my brother out, leaving him the Old Maid, and Uncle Trash says, Oh, yeah? and digs around in his pocket for a nickel he puts on the table. He says, We’ll play a nickel a game. I go into my brother and my’s room to get the Band-Aid box of nickels and dimes I sometimes short from the collection plate on Sunday.

  Uncle Trash is making painful faces, flexing his redpainted fingers around the Old Maid deck of circus-star cards, but he still shuffles, cuts, and deals a three-way hand one-handed—and not much longer, I lose my Band-Aid box of money and all the tin metal trucks of mine out in the front yard. Uncle Trash makes me go out and get them and put them on his side of the table. My brother loses a set of bowling pins and a stuffed beagle. In two more hands, we stack up our winter boots and coats with the hoods on Uncle Trash’s side of the table. In the last hand, my brother and I step out of our shorts and underdrawers while Uncle Trash smiles, saying, And now, gentlemen, if you please, the shirts off y’all’s backs.

  Uncle Trash rakes everything my brother and I owned into the pillowcases off our bed and says let that be a lesson to me. He is off through the front porch door, leaving us buck-naked at the table, his last words as he goes up the road, shoulder-slinging his loot, Don’t y’all burn the house down.

  I am burning hot at Uncle Trash.

  Then I am burning hot at our father for leaving us with him to look for our mother.

  Then I am burning hot at my mother for running off, leaving me with my brother, who is rubber-chinning and face-pouting his way into a good cry.

&
nbsp; There is only one thing left to do, and that is to take all we still have left that we own and throw it at my brother—and I do—and Old Maid cards explode on his face, setting him off on a really good howl.

  I tell my brother that making so much noise will keep the stray dogs away, and he believes it, and then I start to believe it when it gets later than usual, past the crickets and into a long moon over the trees, but they finally do come after my brother finally does fall asleep, so I just wait until I know there are several strays beneath the bed boards, scratching their rat-matted backs and growling, and I stomp on the floor, what is my favorite part about the dogs, stomping and then watching them scatter in a hundred directions and then seeing them one by one collect in a pack at the edge of the field near the trees.

  In the morning right off I recognize the bicycle coming wobble-wheeling into the front yard. It’s the one the colored boy outside Cuts uses to run lunches and ice water to the pulpwood truck Mr. Cuts has working cut-over timber on the edge of town. The colored boy that usually drives the bicycle snaps bottlecaps off his fingers at my brother and I when we go to Cuts with our mother to make groceries. We have to wait outside by the kerosene pump, out by the tar-papered lean-to shed, the pop-crate place where the men sit around and Uncle Trash does his card work now. White people generally don’t go into Cuts unless they have to buy on credit.

  We at school know Mr. and Mrs. Cuts come from a family that eats children. There is a red metal tree with plastic-wrapped toys in the window and a long candy counter case inside to lure you in. Mr. and Mrs. Cuts have no children of their own. They ate them during a hard winter and salted the rest down for sandwiches the colored boy runs out to the pulpwood crew at noon. I count colored children going in to buy some candy to see how many make it back out, but generally our mother is ready to go home way before I can tell. Our credit at Cuts is short.

  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

  IN INDIAN, 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 so
mething 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.