The Ice at the Bottom of the World Read online

  The girl Genius held under the green and red plastic lanterns comes to the beach and shucks her clothes in Genius’ motel room. In her bag are eleven bathing suits. Genius watches her swim from the boardwalk. He can hardly keep up walking along the boardwalk with her swimming in the surf against the current. She breaks splits in the rip curls and shimmers through faces of breakers. The lifeguards wave red flags that match their swim trunks and blow their whistles but they see they could never catch her. Her feet are long because she is tall and her long feet slap the water when she turns like the tail of a bottlenose dolphin. When she wades out and drips water over Genius’ big belly she is not even winded. I felt the water go clean and warm just past the breakers, she says. There were big shapes moving deep under me but I wasn’t afraid. The Gulf Stream, thinks Genius.

  By dawn Genius has crept out of his room, leaving the young girl sleeping. Barbara at the front desk is face down in a pizza take-out box. Out in the parking lot Genius watches the offshore winds push cloud cover up over Arctic Avenue and the bat kite spins and dives side to side in horrible motions from the high-voltage wire it’s tethered to. The bat kite’s wings are ragged and its skeleton is bent but its flight is furious in the gusts that are pushing everything out to sea. The lifeguard stands stand empty, facing the waves coming in on the tide that seem hesitant about their break and collapse onshore. Genius strips down to his big belly and wades in the cold surf, cold because the wind has pushed the top of the water out to sea and stirred the deep cold bathos out of its cold black to break the breakers instead. Genius wades in and flipper fins his hands and feet out past the breakers until he is blown along with the foam seaward and then arches his spine so his big belly bulges out of the water and a motel guest from shore with binoculars would see what looked like a white-domed man-o-war way out or a child’s beach ball deflating and ocean going. Genius thinks it isn’t as pleasant as he thought but he knows how the Gulf Stream runs hot and clean just beyond the black swells he’s pushing through so he relaxes and arches his back with his eyes open watching the pushed-up cloud cover cover the bluing black in the west, where below the drop in the west the beaches, the boardwalk, and the motels that border the boardwalk are now not lost behind one or two swells but lost for good, even when the canyons rush the big-bellied flotsam up to the peaks and down the canyon walls somewhere beyond even what he can see as bigger than his big belly, the big black swells of it all.

  FISHBOY

  I BEGAN AS A BOY, as a human-being boy, a boy with a secret at sea and sentenced to cook in Big Miss Magine’s stone-scoured pot, my long fish body laid, tail flipping, into that solid stone pot, scales ripped and skin slipping from my meat tissue-threaded in the simmer, my body floating from my long, fish-bodied bones, my bones boiled through and through down to a hot bubbly sweet steaming broth, lisping whispers of steam twisting to the ceiling, curling in your curtains, speaking to you in your sleep.

  I began as a boy with a whistling lisp and the silkentipped fingers of another class. A boy with put-away memories of bedclothes bound tight about the head being knocked with a hammered fist; the smell of cigar and shoe leather, a slipping, gripped throw from a car into a side-road swamp. A given birthright there of a swimming, slithering beginning of life, holding water back to breathe through sour mudded filth and green surface slime. Put-away memories of pushed back bloody gums gnawing slugroot, the ripped frog muscle spasms tickling my tongue and the all-night chorus of croaking reproach; the bitter-centered snake eggs washed down with the stagnant sulphured water, all of it back up again splashing around my ankles, sunk in mire, new creations of life, wiggling and squirming, spasmed, web-footed, and scaled, and tiny dead reptilian eyes like pretty black beads in pearl. Sleeping for warmth in winter with wild dogs and precious suckled bitch’s milk in exchange for an ear ripped with hair for the puppies to chew; sleeping with snakes for summer cool and puncture bites that clear infected eyes and sharpened my hearing to hear the sneeze of a rat to catch as a toy for this boy I began as, with still through it all the prissy wrist, the toe-pinched walk, a boy, who, had he any sisters, Big Miss Magine said, should have worn their handed-down dresses. This was me as that boy, to turn to fish when he went to sea, waiting the length of his short life in his cartonated box, waiting for the one boat to come in to the place where hardly any boats come.

  Some boat.

  Any boat.

  A boat to brave itself through where the sea dunes and the sand waves folded over, no channel in and no channel out, a boy at the ready with his butter-turned knife to slice meats like fists from shells like plates.

  That boy.

  I had always been that boy in the cartonated box, waiting for the purple bus to pass through the places my whistling lisp would not let me speak, places I can whisper to you now with the ease of escaping steam, dark continent-calling places, places misplaced, name places like nothing in this language you and I share, places edging the round cratered lake where something large struck a long time ago, places along where the blacktop sinks through soft-bottomed bogs and erupts up the other side, a serpentine plumbing of the earth’s thin surface, the purple bus leaning over bubbling quicksand corners, pushing with sand-spinning wheels and water-washed pipes, its white-eyed driver blind and dreaming them along the road he drove, steering the bus to where I always slept in wait.

  And always I slept in my cartonated box listening in the early morning chill for the tottering of the bus into the rutted fishhouse lot, the sprung springs and ratching bad brakes, faces and elbows stuffing against the side windows as women reached beneath the seats for old jars of cold fish stew and grease-streaked brown bags of fried pork or some night animal snared on a porch or caught in a closet, and I would wait in my box with my thumbs tucked under my chin for Big Miss Magine to unburden from the bus’s breaking back, wait for her to slip her lips like a big brown frog through the hole in the box I watched the moon at night, and I would watch, no matter the season’s turn, how the blowing slow of her big black breath would blue into a settling spread of fog, her words, before laying her eye like a painted egg against the moon-cut hole looking in to me, the human-being boy, her, her words saying, You is mine, Fishboy, you is all mine.

  And then I would be the Fishboy, fetching in with the other ones of those who came along on the big purple bus from around the cratered lake, the lake an hour across and a minute deep, with, in its middle, a speck of heaven fallen so heavily it sent a wave against the tide, the metal in its middle drawing steel and iron so a spoon set on a table slides off across the floor and swims a spooning spin through the peat-soaked water down to what draws it; me fetching in with these that live around the lake with crude tattoos and coiled mazes cut into their faces with the talons and sharpened quills of owl and osprey, nothing in their houses but clothing, cloth, wooden stools, stone bowls, and kettles; me fetching in to haul over the forty-weight baskets of redgilled brown fish with blue eyes and bottom-dwelling shellfish like plates and platters, dumping them for the big black women to slice out fillets with thin-bladed knives with just enough curve, like a bent stiff prick, to work out the flesh of fish with a plunge and slicing of meats left limp, leaving the cutting out of the hard, pink-shelled shellfish to a red-rimmed drunk, a softskulled child, and me, the human-being boy, the Fishboy, Fishboy running between filling baskets of fish and shellcut in my tied-around-the-neck plastic fronted apron, slipping on the gut-spilt floor, watching the little flat-bottomed skiffs pack out with a basket strung from a boom and wondering would a big boat ever come, would a big boat ever come with room for me; and when one would come, it would be me begging pardon for a chance to wade down into waist-deep icy black bilge water in the hold, unloading the trash and swimming in the filth to unstopper the draincocks of fishheads and rotten stock so the storage bins could drain dry, washing dark ’tween deck bins with a rag on a stick, stacking in the boards for more of the fifteen tons of sparkling sharp ice I would shovel, bloody knuckling the crystals pink, praying out lou
d, Please Captain, please Mate, see, it’s me, the Fishboy! See, look here, clean there, and stacked right, fore and aft! Please, see, see how I’ve worked, see how I’ll work until I choke on the frozen smoke … and then, but always I would hear the holler, More fish! More shellcut! Fishboy! Then up the hold ladder while the hatches clatter down, and then not the Captain, not the Mate, not a winchman, nor even the cook but the lowliest seaman whose work I’d saved and done in the hold as my own would come out of some down-corner bunk or from around a corner of a hose shack, eye glazed and trouser stained and say, Get along there, Fishboy, this is union scripts, my lovely, get off now, you, no papers, no work! and I would be lifted up from the deck by the side of his hard-swung boot and I would sail hearing his rotten rodent-tooth laugh, Thanks for the help in the hold! and I would slap the cold wet concrete apron of the pack-out pier next to the stacked-up baskets of fish and shellcut, doubly full now for me to catch up, for me to carry straining and slipping across the cutting-room floor, watching out the open side of the shed the union scripts casting off, and I would turn not to look, hoping anyone seeing the wet on my face would think it only the scales thrown by the fishes’ flipping tails, emptying the baskets along the table deeper into the cutting shed darkness until the last fish would slide beneath the upheld fillet knife of Big Miss Magine, pointing at me, saying in the low black-breath whisper, almost in fog, You is mine, Fishboy—you is all mine.

  Soda Time!

  Fishboy!

  Lunch bags and glass jars come out with the big black women drying in the cold sun on the broken-down dock, perched on pilings like feathering blackbirds, speaking that around-the-cratered-lake gobble talk and paying me a nickel to dive down into the fillet-gutted waste water that sluices through the cutting shed, emptying out into the creek, paying me a nickel to go down to where the soda machine lies at the bottom, fallen through its place on the dock and still plugged in underwater. Get me a cold soda, Fishboy, a red one! and holding my breath for as long as it took I could, I could even hold it long enough to steal a cold soda for myself and sit on the bottom of the gut-watered creek, watching tiny fish feed in the clouds of waste that bloomed overhead in the water while I drank.

  These were the long days in the short length of my life as the Fishboy, the sun slipping into the cratered lake like a figure eight of flame. I would make the last go-around call for fish to fillet and shell to cut, letting the big black women have their pick of the rotting fish left from the bottom of the union scripts or local boats, letting them take the souring fish with the milky ruined blood home, wrapped in their front-tied plastic aprons, the women drunk on finishing the last work of the day and laughing at my whistling lisp, singing, Finish fish! Finish fish! Take home your finish fish! And I would shuffle dead tired through the sand with my own finish fish, usually just the head of some dull-eyed carcass I’d simmer into stew over a driftwood fire beside my cartonated box, shuffling with it tucked in my apron in my pinched-toed walk, not looking at where the purple bus’s back would bend beneath the flat worn-footed weight of the big black women, and I would wait until the white-eyed driver at the wheel would fall asleep to dream them home, wait until I was sure the bus was gone before I would peek out my moon-cut hole, but the bus would roll quietly over the dusted-up sand, never as far as I thought, and no matter how long I waited, waited until I thought it was safe to press my eyeball to the moon-cut hole, I would always see one seeing back, in the corner of the bus’s back window, the bus leaving the lot on its way around the cratered lake, always a red-blue-purple-painted egg of an unblinking eyeball staring straight back into my own.

  THE THEORY OF MAN

  I LOOK FOR ME and my best ex-friend Charles in the pages of the morning paper. I peel and spread the print, peel and spread the print that the sun over my shoulder yellows. Everything is about the heat. I read to Charles about the man who was fishing for smallmouth bass and landed a pair of sand sharks instead. Charles digs around in his newly stolen toolbox and says, Bullshit and I say, True fact, it’s in Tommy’s Tidewater Tacklebox. A marine scientist says the freshwaters are thinning, the sea creeping brackish. I peel and spread through Metro. Another altercation at the courthouse, city fathers fistfight over rules of order, police report gunplay over parking places. There’s an artsy photo of our empty reservoir, a bunch of hundred acres of jigsawed cratered clay. A five-hundred-dollar fine for watering your lawn, the mayor earns two while hydrants are wrenched open and dry. On the front page a fuzzy photo of the deer that stumbled into town to lick plate glass. The editorial fear is of fire.

  I still don’t see us, I say to Charles. Charles says, Check comics and classifieds.

  Behind full-page auction bid ads for businesses on the skids are the news-filler pages with items of no conclusion or consequence. I see the police are still shaking their heads over the double murder-suicide in Charles’ and my neighborhood. We were definitely out of town for that one. Paper says they had to use jackhammers to open cemetery topsoil. There was funereal heatstroke at the service even though everyone knows the Baptists have the best AC in town. You drive by their Sunday-sermon marquee and it remains the same, it says to Please Pray for Rain.

  Charles is attempting torque shoulder-deep in the aircraft engine when the ratchet designed for high-performance Italian sports cars slips its grip on our Mr. Goodwrench sparkplug. Charles withdraws his bloodcreased knuckles and with all his might flings the wrench up on the roof of an old abandoned hangar. From out of the hangar comes a coo and flutter of pigeon reposition but nothing ever feathered flies.

  Here we are below Obits, I say, beneath the survivors’ lists of our town’s most recent departees, the terminally coughed, the unwakeably napped, the head-on windshield-sculpted.

  Read us, says Charles. Charles wraps his metrically split fingers in the front of his shirt.

  I read us to Charles. I read us under Beach Blaze Termed Non-Suspicious. It says the investigators of the early morning fire that completely destroyed the Sportsman Inn failed to find any evidence of arson, and that Fire Chief Willie Warren stated spontaneous combustion is not all that uncommon in unseasonable heat such as we are experiencing.

  Charles says he shares two theories of unexplained fires with Willie Warren, sponny combo being his second favorite. Read on, he says.

  I read on about how Chief Warren says it could have been started in the basement by old paint cans and rags left lying around in all this heat, or he says it could have been started by—Guess what, I say to Charles and Charles asks with hope, Rats chewing matches? and I say, That’s right, that’s the chief’s second theory. Rats chewing matches has always been Charles’ favorite.

  Charles smiles and turns to let his face fill with sun. His open eyes have that soft-focus glaze I recognize as further theory formulation. This morning he has been working on a corollary to his secondary theory of this summer’s heat. Charles says the planet has entered an orbit too near the sun. He says, Have you noticed how the sun doesn’t rise like an orange ball any more? He says it is more like a curtain of flame lifting on the horizons around us. As usual, Charles’ theory is tainted with truth. At nine o’clock already the sidewalk concrete sizzles your spit.

  I pass my hand as shadow in front of Charles’ face and Charles resumes his adjustments. He says some of the gauges aren’t working, exactly, do I mind? I say, No, let’s go, we’re going to be late. I fold up the newspaper to show us to Our Boss the Crackpot as Charles drops the cowling and kicks away the chocks from the wheels. We bounce through the grassy parking square motoring onto the runway. Gas is sloshing in the tanks we could not afford to fill. Which ones? I ask Charles as he opens the throttle and lets off the brakes. The runway begins to rush beneath us, the trees at the end float trunkless in the mirror of their own mirage. Charles says, Which ones what? and I say, Which ones aren’t exactly working? Charles burns his nose underbiting a cigarette as he pulls the wheel to his chest. We lift to climb pre-treely and I count pine needles brushing past. Nothing
works exactly, he says.

  My forward view of the earth is dimmed by a splatter of wind-driven drivelets of oil across my side of the front-canopy glass. I point this out to Charles who notes that there are certainly none on his side. I turn in my seat to stare through the glass in my door.

  The ocean is a haze of evaporation. In our harbor ships are held by thread against tips of rail along the shore. They wait for the trains that come down from mountains dead with coal. The fingered spread of switchyard rail reaches for the ocean like it is an oasis. These are the tracks that spear the heart of our neighborhood, Charles’ and mine and all our neighborly neighbors. In our neighborhood the tracks are littered with pieces of coal the size of dice flung from the rumble of the two-oh-eight, the six-fourteen or the eleven-fifty-seven Midnight Howl. In winter sometimes one of our neighbors’ children is caught on the tracks in the early dark December brings. Sometimes a neighborhood child will apparently become engrossed in a trackside splatter of slop tossed from a conductor’s dinner or become busy savoring the last puff on the butt of a soggy cigar spit from the window of a passing caboose. In the kind of neighborhood we live in if the engineer is ever aware that he has struck something on the tracks he’ll look along there next time through for cattle hooves or children’s shoes before checking his watch and reaching above his head for the whistle cord to signal his arrival home.

  Charles knows to follow the tracks west, a black and steel stitchery straight through cut-over forest and parched earth, the crop failures similar shades of old brown paste. I think about finishing the newspaper but I am succumbing to the rapture of flight. The coastal plain slips beneath the green rumpled roll of the pineskinned piedmont. Drunk on the obscurity that altitude affords, my eyelids become heavy as I contemplate a landscape as interesting as Astroturf carpet.