The Ice at the Bottom of the World Read online

  Charles shakes me awake so I think we are near where we are supposed to be going so I touch Charles’ hands on the wheel. The nose lowers. Trees begin to limb and houses window. I see that we are still far short of the mountains. Charles has spotted a coal train fullthrottled for our neighborhood and the switchyard ships beyond. Once again I will be made to endure one of Charles’ displays of aggression toward trains for which I am partially responsible. Our gentle descent breaks into a strut-screaming kamikaze plunge, a wingwobbling strafe out of the sky-spread sun. The geometry of sound that our intersection with the train makes scatters wildlife and livestock alike. We climb for altitude to dive again on the train from behind. Charles checks us back above the lead engine and in a clearing ahead we dip alongside. The engineer gives us the finger with both hands in gloves firemen wear to protect their wrists from sparks. I obediently take the wheel at powerline level while Charles unbuckles his pants and presses his pimpled rear end against his side of the canopy glass. Charles has everything between his legs squeezed behind him, presenting the engineer with what Charles calls a Flying Fruit Salad. The engineer now shakes a walkie-talkie at us. Tora tora tora, locomotive fuck, says Charles as he settles in his seat and lifts us up into the sun.

  It goes to this. I have known Charles all his life. There were never any symptoms of aviation in his family. No crop dusters, no barn stormers, no ace pilot heroes. Our heroes rode horses and slaughtered their enemies who were easy to find in fields and forests and floating in off the seas. Our heroes never had to look up to seek out and slay any extra.

  Charles says his interest in flying began the morning he woke up in the cabin of a small plane heading high out over the Atlantic without a pilot. This was during the beginning of Charles’ wild years, when Charles would disappear for days with real estate people up to Atlantic City or to some hunting lodge on the Eastern Shore. I was never invited along although I knew some of the real estate people through when they would call me up to paint a house that niggers had lived in and they wanted to sell it with Colonial colors to white people, the Williamsburg blue, the Duke of Gloucester cream. They would call me up to roll white people paint over the purple passion walls in the bedroom and please for God’s sake take down those squares of mirrors off the ceiling over where the bed used to be.

  So Charles says one morning he sort of came to remembering he was on a private plane to somewhere some broker was flying himself to, but the broker had passed out during a midflight fantasy in the back with one of the party girls. The automatic pilot had overflown the landing field a few hours earlier, its alarm beeping having finally woken Charles up. Charles says he sat in the empty pilot’s seat and studied all the dials and gauges and levers and pedals and buttons and after about fifteen minutes decided he could take the auto pilot off, him figuring the switch to do that with as being a black lever like a match stick near where you turn numbers on a dial to set the computer-compassed course. So Charles put his feet on the pedals he knew controlled the rudder, wrapped a hand around the wheel, and with the other flicked the auto pilot off.

  Charles, on wings, dipped the plane and then lifted the nose, what he says is the natural inclination among novice pilots, to lift the nose, and that is what Charles did until the plane was swallowed up in a rolling cloud of cumulus. Charles says he noticed the charms on the ignition key ring were hanging at an odd angle and his head lightened. Then some little red lights shone brightly and the engine noise slid up and down the octave scale, and then, as he pushed and turned the wheel, the key ring charms went spread flat on the flight panel like bedside table change. The broker and the party girl bundled in a roll against the back of Charles’ seat and the girl screamed as the broker pushed her off. Charles said the feeling of plummet was oddly satisfying, like as a kid him coasting his bicycle down Jackson Hill Road at night towards the main intersection in town, and he would close his eyes and take his hands off the handlebars, giddy with broken boredom as he became a willing hostage to momentum, gravity, gyroscopics, and the chancy prospect of sudden impact. Charles said in that pure moment when the plane ripped out of the bottom of the cloud and earth eased up from below he developed one of his first theories. He said that fear is only in the implication of science, that death is only in its application. After that incident Charles had a twelve-week subscription of the Christian Science Monitor sent to our house but after Charles wrote Pray for Payment over the second and third invoices and mailed them back the newspaper stopped appearing in rolled tight little bundles like batons that were handy for hurtling at garbage-tipping dogs that strayed into our yard.

  Charles moved out of our neighborhood in the second season of his wild years and I didn’t see him much. He was living in unsold condos that his real estate friends built. When they sold the one he was living in he would just move into another. He had taken up flying and said it was going great. He would call me up from the airport on Friday evenings to tell me where he was flying some real estate people to and tell me the hours he was accumulating. From what I got over the phone Charles was a client softener. He had real estate credit cards for restaurants and bars and free tickets and cars and all the blow you could blow. Once when I was low bid on the interior trim for Sandpiper Keys Condos Charles brought some clients around where I was on my hands and knees with a detail brush and Charles walked them through to the deck around the kitchen and up the back to bypass me where I was working. On Friday evenings after a while the phone would ring and I would be outside, drinking a beer on the porch, picking paint from underneath my nails with a pocketknife, waiting for the six-fourteen to roll past, and I would let the phone ring and ring, not answering, and after a while the phone calls on Friday began to stop coming altogether.

  I had a feeling I would see Charles again when his real estate friends built so many condos and projects that there weren’t enough people with that kind of money to buy them. Not in our town or the next few out in the radial spread. My own business was falling off. I was getting by on a little renovation, termite damage, and an out-of-town out-of-control car off Beekman’s Curve that made a drive-through out of this lady’s dining room and den. I had heard Charles was out of the real estate business and into the blow clientele of teeth-gnashing snot-nosers with heart palpitations. You would see his car out in front of the Rendezvous Lounge which everybody knew was being watched by the two undercover feds in the schoolyard across the street playing catch with a couple of mitts and a tennis ball.

  I began to see Charles again after the evening he called me up to come over and see the Magic Show. I went over to the room he had rented at Big Bill’s Beach Cabanas and Charles met me at the door with a revolver to my throat until he threw the bolts on the lock and then spent five minutes folding back the edge of the drapes asking me was I followed. He had this real blowbitchy, snow bunny type with him then, plastic high heels and a three-day dress. For the Magic Show Charles dumped a Zip-Lock bag of powder into a mixing bowl and then spooned chalky white baby laxative into it saying Abracadabra … two ounces into … FOUR ounces! Through this substance excess our transformations into the anti-us were truly magical, almost biblical in their purity. The anti-me, the anti-Charles, the anti-Snow Bunny Bitch.

  The anti-Charles went out and scurried the perimeter of Big Bill’s Beach Cabana, a pistol-packing rat in a crease of wall and floor. I listened in spellbound fascination at the unfolding account of the anti–Snow Bunny Bitch’s life in words of one syllable, the fast-food fry cook with aspirations dentally hygienic. The anti-I searched her sentence fragments for an opening among the most common flossing mistakes so that the anti-I could tell her my own story, the frustrated portrait artist trapped in a world of low-bid trim and latex, but her points on popcorn trapped in the rear molars were so perceptive I could only sigh, longing to draw her near and smell her sour breath and fish-fried hair, longing to kiss her filthy neck and shiny ears just to taste the bitter unwashed wax within. How wonderful the magic!

  Soon after, during hi
s fifteen-thousand-dollar blow crisis, Charles, and this, his girl Hazel, came to live with me in my trackside Dutch oven hovel. Hazel said she had never actually lived in hell before but I betted her that she had visited often. I told her I hoped she would not be put off by my neighbors who are niggers or by my scab-blackened front yard. What happens is, sparks shower from the wheels of coal trains braking their descent from the coastal plain into our port city. Sometimes small, well-formed flames carpet the railway, igniting the coal dust and the dice-sized chunks of coal my neighbors don’t collect in summer. Sometimes these well-formed flames sneak out of the ditches and march across my front yard, combusting everything in their path, including the garbage-tipping stray dog Lincoln Logs of fossilized shit, and then I have to get up off the porch where I have been watching all this drinking beer and wave pee across their sorry little columns to turn their advance. I said again I hoped she would not be put off by all of this and she and Charles took their bags and went into the house.

  That was in the hot spring of this long hot summer though it feels a hundred years ago, before the fifteen-thousand-dollar debt crippled Charles’ mind and before what I did to him next. Charles was still of the mind to formulate theories. His primary theory of the blistering summer heat was that, like all adult stars its age, our sun was toying with total collapse. Although its plumes seemed to surround us, that was only so it could get one last look at its only worthwhile creation in this insignificant solar system. Otherwise, said Charles, if you look directly into the sun every day like I do, you will notice that the core is growing almost imperceptibly smaller.

  This has been one of those summers where no air moves. Hazel was miserable in the heat and miserable with the trains. You have to understand that when the coal trains come through you can feel their approach a couple miles off. Then the floors shake, soup in pots sloshes and tables vibrate across the floor with chairs dancing between their legs. Anything glass and touching in the cabinets above the sink will clink and sing like you have a flock of hopped-up songbirds in there eager for release.

  What turned us all this summer was when Our Boss-to-be, The Crackpot, bought the Sportsman Inn to renovate and I was low exterior bid. Charles said he knew the guy in a funny, third-hand sort of way and told me to get my money up front. I got it in cash and with the outdoor work and pocket money by the middle of June I was beer bottle brown and drunk even asleep. I’d come home from work and Charles would be on the phone asking someone please not to have him killed for a lousy fifteen thousand dollars, goddamnit, and Hazel would be naked on the floor of their room in front of the box fan I bought them. I would take a beer out on the porch and watch my neighbors unscissor folding aluminum lawn chairs along the tracks, awaiting the arrival of the six-fourteen, waiting for it to cleave the heat and shed some breeze.

  It was always my theory that Hazel was getting ready either to leave Charles or to lose her French-fried mind the night she came out and sat on the porch with me, t-shirt and panty shameless. She asked me why didn’t I go up on the railroad shoulder and enjoy the six-fourteen arrival of weather with my neighbors and I told her I didn’t want either to lessen their opinions or to live up to their expectations by falling down drunk into the ditch between where they sat and where we were. I told her I had just won low bid on the interiors of the rooms at the Sportsman Inn. The Crackpot had naturally picked out that blue-green southern seaside resort color for the rooms, a color you never see in nature except maybe when the sky is getting ready to drop down a waterspout that will come ashore and suck up all the tourists taking pictures of its approach with sun-lotion-smeared camera lenses. Some color paints I can paint all day and some honestly give me the creeps and I throw out the brushes and burn the drop cloths later.

  Hazel said she had to do something, she had to get out of the house. I said would a paintbrush fit her hand and she turned both of hers palm up on her naked knees and I took a shameless look at t-shirt and panty-contoured symmetry. Hazel asked did the rooms where we would work have AC and I said, Yes and TV too. Cabled color.

  Charles did not seem to mind. Charles was trying to develop a theory of debt and as long as I paid Hazel a fair wage he could factor ex–Snow Bunny income into an equation of repayment.

  I was also hoping having Hazel having income would allow Charles to subtract from his debt equation his going through my pockets when I passed out, wrecking my car, stealing my clothes and selling my paint. Charles was in bad shape and I took his formulation of debt theory as an encouragement that he was getting better, reading theory formulation as fever broken.

  Hazel helped me paint the Sportsman Inn motel walls the Crackpot green for about fifteen minutes, or about the time it takes for motel AC to crank cool and touristproof TV to warm up. Hazel leaned on bunched up pillows across the bed, a patient recuperating from Magic Shows and coal trains and nigger neighborhood heat with eight to ten hours daily of game shows and soap operas. It was really okay all the same with me. Whenever my plaster bucket ran low on tallboy Budweisers and ice she never complained about running over to the 7-Eleven and getting more as long as it was during the midday newscasts or extended commercial breaks. This was well worth minimum wage to me.

  Charles should have had a theory about all of this, about what would be inevitable about leaving alone together a man and a woman, day after day, in rooms with beds as central furniture, not even theorizing the tangentials of the man drinking and the woman bored, one day falling into the next like the numbers on the motel doors, doors that lock, day after day, man-woman-bed, man-woman-bed, man-woman-bed. Charles should have had a theory about all of this but apparently he did not.

  At home in the evenings after Charles and Hazel would go to bed I could hear them through my Dutch oven hovel cardboard walls doing it, and Charles was even louder about it than Hazel. And sometimes Hazel was so loud that on afternoons when I knew the roofing contractors were at the Sportsman Inn working I would have to grab a pillow and stuff it over her face when things got crucial. But Charles would work himself into something sounding oriental, like he was delivering a karate chop to a stack of bricks. It didn’t bother me all that much but in our neighborhood sometimes porch lights would come on and dogs would bark.

  Discretion to Hazel meant waiting until Charles was asleep and the Midnight Howl would come rumbling through to cover our noise and then she would sneak into my room and then we would do it while the house shook and the cabinets chirped and the furniture danced and the roar of the engines would be followed by the clatter of the coal cars rolling over a crimp in the steel rail out by our house. You could be in bed and count the cars in clicks and clacks, and most trains had about two hundred, so I’d keep a rough count and hurry to finish with Hazel before we ran out of train, before the sudden hushed rush of the last car and caboose, and then Hazel would detour into the john and I would turn against the cardboard wall smelling my own beer breath and thinking of prayers I should say, falling asleep before I could pray them.

  The catalyst of this us-equation is an old coal-burning engine painted maintenance yellow. It pulls about a dozen flat beds and boxcars. On the flat beds are cranes to rip old ties and lay new rails, and the boxcars are full of hand tools—a couple are fitted with bunkbeds and a galley for the roving crews. Coming down the tracks one night after eleven thirty this yellow engine approached just like the Midnight Howl, the same dirty rumble, the same blasts of signal at the Eastend crossing that are low and mournful. Hazel and I had just started when what we thought was the Midnight Howl on the tracks outside seemed to pass prematurely, the too-fast rush of the last car’s hush, Hazel howling in the sudden silence, Charles standing in the door.

  In a few minutes later, when the real Midnight Howl arrived, we three sat about the kitchen table as we held it in its place, our hands holding on its edges, a seance of the real Charles, the real Hazel, the real me, sitting beneath the bare-bulbed light as it swung from its cord casting random shadows on our faces wet with sweat and eyes unbl
inking, Charles’ temples pulsing with every clipped clatter of the passing coal-car wheels, two hundred hoppers of furnace grade fuel thundering past, overloaded and ahead of schedule, click clack, click clack, click clack.

  A couple of days after Hazel announced that she was reuniting with her husband, The Crackpot, I stood with everyone else watching the Sportsman Inn burn to the ground. Charles said a business associate of The Crackpot had told him the police take pictures of suspicious-fire-scene bystanders so Charles was not around. Charles had used one of my old paint cans to mix the sodium chloride, topped off by a rubber filled with sulphuric acid. The Sportsman Inn was a clean burn, the first coupon Charles would clip from his fifteen-thousand-dollar crisis-payment book.

  I felt a sadness, watching the fire eat out the roof over the indoor sea-water pool. I had been low bid on the interior veneer. There was more exposed beam and cross brace in that place than a Lutheran church. The Crackpot suggested to Charles that he get the keys to the Inn from me, and I gave them to him. I felt a sadness about all of this. Maybe it is because I am a careful painter and I had been extra careful on the exterior trim and hadn’t splattered hardly any paint at all. I don’t know. Maybe it was just the sadness one feels in the beginning settlement of old familiar debts.

  This day Charles and I have been summoned to conclude our repayment business at The Crackpot’s mountaintop estate. I am hoping this is the end. I did not realize in the beginning how easily the debts between us are assumable. We have been purveyors of porno bimbos, we have carried satchels of cash up the coast and body bags out to sea. We have been skycaps to scum, the simple handlers of someone’s thug luggage.