The Ice at the Bottom of the World Read online

  The morning paper proves us to be something new, we are the rats chewing matches, we are the all-this-heat. It has been a long fifteen-thousand-dollar summer and it is time for a break in the weather.

  Charles comes in high over the estate and circles wide to see if there is anything municipal about these mountains. There is a water-tower town to the east and a mirage of airport that turns out to be a shopping center.

  The Crackpot has forbidden us to land in his driveway any more. The last time we did we diverted a sedan of late-arriving guests into a stand of two-hundred-year-old boxwoods. Charles and I both had our feet on the brakes as the wheels screamed and our straining sheetmetal wing flaps buckled and popped like they were about to wrench off. We were running out of driveway and the old house was running up to meet us. The house is so old that because both the rear and front doors were open I could see completely through the place and I saw people crowding out the hallway to flee into the backyard beyond. Luckily our tires caught in the flowerbed brick dividers along the front walk and the only casualties were the red tulips, whose heads blew off in the wash of our propeller as Charles turned to taxi, and a couple of wind chimes and hanging plants on the front veranda became aerodynamic. Drapes in a front room ballooned inward as The Crackpot leaned out and glared as I waved to him hello.

  This day there is a graded space for us behind the estate so Charles spirals over The Crackpot’s barbecue to make our approach. We turn in tight circles over the parked cars, the long white tables of buffet, the barbecue poolside where last time Charles leg-wrestled a state senator and then punched out the son who needed it. We bank and glide and I see Hazel. I see Hazel in ground zero of our concentric descent. It must be her in a shiny gold dress, centered in a scattershot of hard dick. I had heard she was capitalizing on being fine, the prime rate agreeing with her. She is gold and shiny off the wing we are pivoting on, a sun-struck drip off a honey sandwich into a path of ants. As we flatten near the treetops I see it is her face, and her face is the first to look up while the men around her continue to look down, probably deep into her dress.

  This day we are not guests, we are merely grocery clerks, errand boys, messengers maybe. We are not even off the plane, just taxiing, when Hazel herself appears with a small snakeskin valise. I unlatch my door and lean out to fold it open when in a pure grace-Hazel motion she presses in towards me as if to offer a kiss but instead deftly clasps with a ratchet sound the snakeskin case to my wrist with a handcuff. Her lips, formerly puckering to place a kiss, retract across her teeth, making words as she withdraws. Take this right back down to the beach, guard it with your lives, she says. You are done, she says. It’s been real.

  Charles ignores her, ignores me, ignores us. My face, which is still forward and not unready to accept her kiss, is slammed with canopy glass before I can even ask who at the beach will have the key to the cuffs.

  Now Charles looks at me and brings the engine to life. We ascend. We climb higher in the coolness, dipping valleys and turning peaks until we find the rails where they lie below, spun on ledges peeled from rock, shiny with use and overbreak-shaded. Our roadmap home through the plain to where the beaches burn and our neighborhood awaits the arrival of the six-fourteen weather.

  Charles says he smells something. He says he doesn’t think it is his socks this time, let him smell the snakeskin valise. I hold it for him under his nose. Do you smell that? he asks. Charles says that sweaty leather smell is agitated nitroglycerine.

  I start to jimmy the lock on the valise with one of Charles’ newly stolen tools but he says, Don’t, it might be rigged. Then Charles has a theory. Charles believes our final payment is in the snakeskin and that the charge is atmospherically controlled, a barometered bomb that will blow with our descent onto the coastal plain. Charles is pretty calm about this so I ask him if he knows something that I don’t know and he says he just has theories, that no one really knows anything.

  I tell Charles I guess I could at least save him if I jumped out of the plane and Charles says, Yes, I suppose you could. Climb, I say and we do.

  We linger in indecisive spirals over the opening of the piedmont plain, a buzzard on a thermal. Below us in a turn in the track as tight as a cripple’s knees we see a string of black humped cars in a slow, side-binding descent. Charles relates a theory about the train below. He says the kinetic energy stored in the train at the mountain’s peak would be enough to unwind it completely across the state, unassisted by its engines, which he says at this point are merely inhibitions of momentum.

  Over our shoulders we turn to watch the train before we wing away homeward, load after load of the earth’s dead heart mined into shiny black pieces, the car couplings clasped in worn fraternal grips.

  FEAST OF THE EARTH, RANSOM OF THE CLAY

  WE BURY OUR DEAD in the muscle of our town, in the shouldered hillock of clay once an island in a river finished flowing. The rest of town rests around its heart on the low relief of the alluvial plain, the sandy loam long yielded to the weathering ages of wear. From a folding chair on top of Cemetery Ridge you can sort the soil strata by the tops of the trees below, their foliage betraying their roots—the evergreen against the seasonal, roots suitable for the sand or for the loam but not for the clay. Nothing grows well on Cemetery Ridge. Nothing we plant here is ever expected to bloom.

  Behind this ridge they laid bare the clay for the spur line of the railroad. Beneath this raw overhang beside the tracks runoff from summer storms has carved out ragged ditches and hollowed out some caves. If you are a schoolboy in our town, you may be tempted to hole up here in ambush of the evening freight with your slingshot and your can of rocks, and sometimes some shantyweary mongrel bitch will come sniffing around, sniffing out some place to lie in and squeeze out her litter. But in our town Mr. Leon lives in these caves behind Cemetery Ridge. He lives here the best he can, slathering his beard and his bald head, licking his alluvial walls, sucking the mud where it is wet.

  Of the twice we always expect to see Mr. Leon, the first is in the evenings when he slips from the face of the cliffs on his way to our neighborhoods. Mr. Leon roams. Sometimes a dog will bark at Mr. Leon’s full-mudded appearance, a man a patchwork of crusty fractures in dried gray. Sometimes a child, seeing the city-park statue stepped from its pedestal and coming down the street at dusk, will cry. But our dogs do not bite unless you are a thief or plan to become one, and someone will always come out to hush a child, and Mr. Leon makes his way. Bark, you bastards, or, Cry, you little shits, is all that Mr. Leon will say, shaking his fist in that way that worn-out men will, pouring some kind of anointment into the air.

  The other time we expect to see Mr. Leon is at the funerals of our dead—like today. In the middle of this cakebox spread of granite and marble atop Cemetery Ridge we wait for the out-of-town late arrivals and the tick-tock walk of Mr. Leon. The sun is bright off the worn, standing-around suits, mail-ordered and livingroom-tailored. And there are crisp glints of light in the hems of the dresses patched and passed around by the grocery bagful. There is no hurry on this side of the family. They have arrived early and will be the stragglers later along the alleyways of the marble-stoppered clay. While they wait, they break away weeds from around the low-humped inscribed rock, resettle the chipped glass baskets of plastic flowers, the paper pots of front yard blooms. Little words. News, regret, respect. Within reach, these people smooth one another’s arms through the worn clothing, then their hands return to the white that is working in their fingers, the worried twists of tissue, the thick, cupped curls of the handrolled smoke. The men’s chins are held higher today, bolstered by the unaccustomed thick knots of the shoewide neckties they wear. This allows these men a proudness they do not possess, a skin-straightening effect in their faces for a few instants against years in the sun. Some of the women seem to notice this subtle flush of youth restored to their husbands here at the end of a life, and such women work up a little sob just for themselves.

  The other side of the fam
ily arrives in unfamiliar out-of-town cars, shiny. Dark windshields. Music in the last of the caravan that scatters gravel past the paupers’ square up the cart path past where the Beales and the Chessons and the Lamberts and the Warrens are all laid out, and then, instantly, alarmingly, the newcomers park alongside the brass-railinged coffin of our most newly deceased.

  Spiked heels and hand-stitched leather feel for footing, and there are belly thrustings from the long ride, starch crackling. Chatter from the last caravaned car in the back. Singsong handbag indecision. Is it the addiction of tobacco or the obligation of tissue? To hell with it, leave it in the car, it will all be over with shortly.

  The son of the deceased adjusts his entourage into seats adjoining what he calls, over cocktails, his previous administration. There are some missed looks, some coat and shawl tucks, spit whispers and lip-read warnings, but hands manage to cross divides from both sides and there is a quiet conference with the man in black with the book, the noddings to begin it, let’s begin, okay, Father?

  Would that it were so simple in our town. Would that it were so simple to lay in this one old dead lady, to dismiss this bird-calling biddy who lived at the end of the road to Cemetery Ridge. The bird-calling biddy, flinging sometimes to her nearest neighbor, the cave-dwelling Mr. Leon, a nickel or a piece of pie wrapped in newspaper. The bird-calling biddy, night after night, year after year, that phonograph record on her hi-fi turned so far up, her late husband’s world-famous Summerset Birdcalls of Enchantment. Night after night, year after year, the whole neighborhood, the warbling, the trilling, the long deep swooning and the high-pitched chirping. Night after night, louder with her age and the wear on the phonograph record, and her not turning it all the way up to better hear her husband’s calls but to hear him draw his breath before them, like if you lived in our town before he died you could hear him do at every outdoor party with summer and gin, you could hear him draw his breath across the backyard barbecue over the sizzle of grease in the grill, over the rattle of ice in your glass, her husband drawing his breath before setting off over the Eastern Seaboard in search of mates, wooing them through the trees, purging the nests, warning the young. Would that it were so simple in our town to dismiss this old lady, the bird-calling biddy, quickly, the one who played that phonograph record over and over so loud that it was something that you ceased to hear until it stopped and we knew that she was dead, the needles so grooved into the worn-out vinyl you heard just a long raw rumble punctuated by squeaks, birds drowning in the surf of an ocean, the nighttime soundtrack for our landlocked streets.

  Our quiet streets, her vacant house, this new funeral for our dead—and, of course, Mr. Leon.

  Just as we waited for the late arrivals from out of town we wait for Mr. Leon, because this evening the questions from the absent bedridden and from the indisposed will not be about you and how you dressed and how you fared. The whispers will be Did Mr. Leon show up?

  He did?

  Did he … do anything?

  Did he … eat anything?

  A straggler appears on the opposing hill, canebrake stick raised in our direction not so much in greeting as in some self-directed indication of further forward progress. This is a setback for the out-of-towners, those with the two-hour drive and the afternoon appointments. They settle back in impatient folding-chair slumps. A southeast breeze is all that is commencing. It brings up pine scent from the sand-floored forest. The soil spaded at our feet smells sweet, its sugar attracting dime-sized shadows of woods spiders working their ways to the edge of the chiseled clay.

  Mr. Leon spits a large wad of something among the paupers’ places and sets off toward us, leaning heavily in a sideboard motion on his stick. He poles himself downstream the cart path afloat atop his shoes. From the folding chairs, those who know know that Mr. Leon is wearing his finest—the homemade vest of domestic cat, tails adrip down the front, the head of a tom on each shoulder as the top-off to the horror-show epaulettes. Beard, bald head, bib overalls the dull, slathered gray, the milky lusts of some mineral deficiency, Doc says; no doubt a freshly sliced chunk or two from Mr. Leon’s alluvial walls in Mr. Leon’s pocket for a sitdown, sidewalk snack somewhere, maybe even in front of your house if you are a schoolboy and live in our town. Your father might look through the front blinds and then look at you and say, Why is Mr. Leon in front of our house tonight, and you will say, I don’t know, even though you are one of the schoolboys who pelts Mr. Leon with anything you might want to see him stop and bend over to pick up and lick. Rotten produce will do, from behind the Belo Market, where you and your friends can sometimes find Mr. Leon in summer, perched on the broken crates and boxes of spoilage, Mr. Leon eating stick after stick of butter that has soured while you and your schoolboy friends scuff your bicycles closer and closer, taunting him for a curse, maybe even working up a spit to blow into whatever it is he is eating carefully cradled in his clay-caked fingers. But Mr. Leon even does better than curse you. He tells you something, something like Pussy crackles when it’s hot, you little bastards. And then he leaps down with his canebrake stick so that you pedal off.

  Flee, you little shits.

  If you are a schoolboy, you go home and work out in your mind for days what he said. Crackling. And you, you little schoolboy, cannot hear the bacon cooking in your mother’s skillet the same way ever again without suffering a secret thrill.

  Mr. Leon poles himself along the cart path towards us, his backwards-facing yellow tie swinging out from under one side of his domestic catskin vest to slip beneath the other, a pendulum marking time according to Mr. Leon’s own personal schedule of intent, until he sits, winded, on the tombstone of Mrs. Cannady. The police had come to the caves looking for her the day she disappeared. Mr. Leon! they hollered up from the search party along the tracks. Mr. Leon! Have you seen Mrs. Cannady? And if you had been a schoolboy with them, then you would have heard nothing until someone decided to start the climb up the cliff to the caves, and then you would have heard from deep in one of the gray, hollowed throats, sounding out, Drag the lake, you bastards! and you would have seen the men from the fire department fetch the rigging and the police would have shooed you home to supper so you would have cut through the woods around back and climbed the hunting stands high in the trees over the mill pond where from up there, even in the deepening evening green of the pine forest and the algae dark around the water, you would have been the first to see the cold and green lovely glow of the alabaster body come rising to the surface on its hook, shoes and a note on the shore.

  The out-of-town party is showing its restive eagerness now. Hems are kneecapped, furs reshouldered, fingers tap silk shirtsleeves that are timepieced beneath. Mr. Leon pries himself off Mrs. Cannady with his stick and tick-tocks towards us. He proceeds with his stick out-struck now and it wands back and forth like a water rod. Mr. Leon’s shadow seeps upon us until he is so close that the air is cool with the smell of wet clay. He stands before us, an eruption from the ground nearby, snot bulbs mud on the tip of his nose and his eyelids are so heavily crusted with clay that it is difficult to see where Mr. Leon’s eyes are resting until you are sure they are resting on the mound of fresh fill from the grave. Mud forms in the corners of his mouth. The sharp teeth in the cat heads on his shoulders have been bleached somewhat since his last appearance and the flesh has drawn drier back to lend the animals a fierceness in death they did not possess in life. A woman in the front row from out-of-town fans herself with one hand and has the other buried in the jacket pocket of the man beside her. There are many mansions in the house of the Lord, says the man in black with the book. Mr. Leon raises his canebrake stick for silence and climbs atop the mound of fresh grave fill.

  He settles into a crouch upon the mound, shrouded with his catskin vest, his anointing fist in the air. Several people stand and step back. Air begins to blow through Mr. Leon’s narrowing lips, and he blows a fine mist of clayed spittle across the casket’s pall. Mr. Leon draws another breath, and at once we hear the
cooing of the mourning dove, a gentle fluttering touch of tongue that tapers into the chip of the lark cheated by spring. There is the whistling search for the sparrow’s mate, the swallow in its field of straw, and the unanswered call of the bobwhite, unanswered, and unanswered again, then the spiraling screech of the seagull and the mimic of the mockingbird taunting us, a screen-door squeak, the cry of a cat—and then the caw of the crow, admonition, the call to fresh carrion, the feathering squawk of flight.

  Mr. Leon flaps his arms, throwing mud and dust, still blowing the spittle from his foaming mouth, the worn vinyl sound of surf. Then he settles quietly into himself, hunkered on the mound of fill, a little last cooing, his eyes that are blind to us looking out at us all.

  Thank you, you bastards, Mr. Leon says as he reaches down and eats from the lip of the grave.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Of Cajun-Creole-French descent, MARK RICHARD grew up in Texas and Virginia. At the age of thirteen, he became the youngest radio announcer in the United States at WYSR-AM in Franklin, Virginia. His stories have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, Grand Street, Antaeus, and Shenandoah, and he has been the recipient of several prizes for his fiction, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1990). The Ice at the Bottom of the World won the 1990 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for a first-published book of fiction.