“Now, police and fire stations are on emergency power. So are the hospitals. WSBC television and the radio stations are still in business, and the Gazette has told us they can publish tomorrow. I don’t know how many people will be able to watch TV, because a lot of people won’t have electricity. A lot of us may have to change our living habits, at least for a few days. We’ll keep you as up-to-date as we can, not only on the storm’s progress but on the progress of repairs.
“A lot of us here at the station may not be going home tonight, and maybe you’re stranded where you’re listening right now. You should think about staying there, folks. Better an inconvenience than a tragedy. One thing is certain. This is some weather, even by Bessemer standards. I think we’re all going to remember where we were on the night of the ice storm.”
He turned off the radio.
Two
Sleep was a desolate kingdom. He had been afraid to close his eyes at first, afraid of what he would dream, but at long last, surrendering to exhaustion and beer dregs, his body yielded.
He had stripped off his spattered clothes in the dark of his apartment and tossed them into the bathtub to run water over them. As the cold water ran into the tub (there was no hot water), he squeezed the wet clothes and mashed them against the side of the tub. In the glow of the flashlight, he could see that the water running off the sleeves of his shirt was pink.
It was cold in his apartment. He stood for a few minutes in his flannel pajamas before the small gas stove as the orange-and-blue flame warmed a little cocoon of air around him. The flame reminded him of the priest’s fireplace.
He turned off the stove and got into bed, curling himself in a fetal ball under the blankets. Once, twice, three times he awoke, and each time he thought he saw flames. He had to convince himself anew that he had not gone to sleep in the priest’s house, that he was not staring into the dying embers in the priest’s fireplace.
When he awoke, he shivered, yet his skin was wet. He felt his face with his fingertips, touching the little cuts from his fall in front of the priest’s house. It had really happened; he had killed a priest.
On and on he roamed in the kingdom of sleep. Sometimes he groaned, tried to call for help, but he could not make word sounds.
Finally he opened his eyes not to darkness but to gray—the first pale hint of the January dawn.
His head ached from the beer, far more from the horror of what he had done. He did not want to get up yet, even though he knew he would not get back to sleep. He swung his legs onto the floor and stood up. The hangover was the worst he had ever had. He did not know if he would faint, did not know if he would be sick.
He was cold. He put on his robe and started into the tiny kitchen to make coffee. But first he turned toward the bathroom. If there was nothing in the bathtub, he had dreamed it all, and he could cry with joy.
Automatically, he flicked the light switch; nothing happened. But there was enough light for him to make out the sodden pile of clothes in the tub.
He went to the kitchen and put on a pot of water. He made instant coffee, as strong as he could stand it. From the small refrigerator (there was no light inside it) he plucked a piece of bread and nibbled at it as he sipped the coffee.
He had to go to the Gazette. The ice storm would be one of the biggest stories of the year, and he could not call in sick. It was out of the question. He was certain the Gazette would publish the next day: the newspaper had long ago bullied the power company into running underground lines into the Gazette, and in any power failure the Gazette got service as quickly as the hospitals.
He drank his coffee and thought, I have killed. I am forever different because I have killed. The thought alone was enough to make him shiver, even without the coldness of the room.
He had driven home safely, had negotiated the driveway with his car and then his feet, had made it into the darkened front entrance without meeting anyone.
He swallowed hard to keep the bread down and gulped some more coffee. He opened the curtains, gazed out at the gray streets and buildings.
Ice. Ice on the limbs and branches that hung low over the walks and street, ice on the cars that had been parked since before the storm, ice on the telephone and electric lines that lay like angel-cake frosting everywhere.
He was forever different now, different from the utility crewmen he saw across the street. How they slipped and slid, the utility workers, clumsy like children in snowsuits as they groped for footing and grips while stumbling about in their bulky yellow costumes.
He envied the utility workers: they would go home to wives and children who loved them.
He had killed; he was forever different.
Should he try to drive to work or walk? The Gazette was about two miles away. He didn’t know what to do.
He fished a green plastic garbage bag out of the cupboard, went into the bathroom, and knelt next to the tub. There was enough light now for him to see the pink residue quite clearly. Trying not to look, he picked up the garments, one by one, wrung them out, stuffed them into the bag. When they were all in the bag, he turned on the water to rinse out the tub.
No hot water. Of course, no hot water. The furnace was out. How could he get himself clean? God, he wished he could stay home.
He would throw the bag full of clothes into a Salvation Army bin. But was that safe? What if they traced the clothing labels back to him somehow? What if—?
He had to wash them, with hot water and soap. And he had to get himself clean. He remembered how his hands had felt after they grew slippery from swinging the bloody golf club, how something had spattered into his face—
God, had he washed his hands last night? Yes, he had; he remembered. Before he left the priest’s house he had washed his hands.
But this morning he felt dirty again, his body soiled from beery sleep and … from what he had done.
He heated another pot of water, a much larger one, and carried it into the bathroom. He put the plug in the sink, filled it with the hot water, and dropped the bar of soap in. Then he took a clean washcloth, soaked it in hot, soapy water, and ran it across his face. He closed his eyes; how good it felt, the cleansing.
He washed his hands, his arms, his armpits. Up and down his torso, across the shoulders, down his back as far as he could reach. He washed his entire body, trying to make himself clean. He had killed a priest.
As he washed and rinsed and toweled himself dry, he felt like a naked boy, ashamed.
He put on clean underwear, then socks, then a clean pair of corduroys and a heavy shirt. Warmer now. Better.
He made himself more coffee, gnawed at another piece of bread. He was stronger physically, though he could not stop the shiver deep in his soul, where he was afraid to look.
He went into the bathroom. After his stand-up bath, he had left most of the water in the sink. It was still warm. One by one, he took his wet garments out of the garbage bag and immersed them in the sink, wringing out the soapy water and putting each garment into the tub. He ran tub water over the clothes—the water was so cold it made his hands ache—then squeezed out as much rinse water as he could. It took him a half-hour to wash and rinse all his clothes, but when he was done, the clothes hung from the shower-curtain rod. He rinsed the sink and tub two, three, four times.
If the landlord should come in while he was away, and if he happened to look into the bathroom, he would see clothes drying over the tub. Was that so strange for a bachelor? No, at least not while the power was out, he told himself. Besides, girls were always washing their panty hose and drying them in the tub.
He put on a sweater. It was almost eight-thirty. He had to go to the Gazette. He would call and say he was coming but that he might be late.
He picked up the phone. Nothing. Of course, no phone.
He put on a pair of thick, old work shoes and a heavy coat, grabbed his car keys, and opened his apartment door a crack.
Quiet, gloomy corridor. No one around.
He locked his
door and started down the stairs.
“I think we’re in luck.”
The voice of the landlord, who was just coming out of a second-floor room, put him close to panic.
“Luck?”
“With the power. I hear from the electric company that we might be one of the first sections of town to go back on line. Old part of town, we got more than our share of police and fire stations. Could be tonight, tomorrow morning. Rest of town, who knows?”
“That’s good.”
“You don’t sound too peppy.”
“No.” He turned to go down the stairs.
“Say, you work at the Gazette. You might be interested in this. Did you hear what happened?”
They found a dead priest in a house …
“No, what?”
“The oldest oak tree in the city fell over. The one up in the park. Saddest goddamn thing I ever heard. Be a great picture.”
“Thanks. I’ll tell the paper.”
“Mister, I hope you’re not planning to drive.”
He had started to walk down the driveway when the booming friendly voice of the utility worker stopped him. He turned.
“There’s hardly a block in the city that isn’t clogged up with trees and wires and our trucks,” the utility man said.
“Really?”
“Really. You’re better off walking.”
His shoes got decent traction, but his footing was still uncertain. He walked slowly, taking short steps.
The utility worker had been right. Telephone and electric wires, tree branches and limbs, lay everywhere. The wires and limbs were grotesquely thick with ice. Icicles hung from wires and limbs, from building gutters and signs, from the bumpers of encrusted cars.
He shuddered. What if he had waited even a little longer to leave the priest’s house? Would he have found it impossible to get home? Suppose he had skidded and crashed only a few blocks from the priest’s house.…
He had killed a man, a priest. With all his might, he tried not to think about how the body had looked, how the club had felt in his hands.
Had the body been found? If it had, that meant the police were looking for him. For him.
No. The body had not been found. How could it have been? No way. That meant it was still lying on the dirt floor of the basement, all curled up, with the golf club sticking—
Suddenly he knew he would be sick. He slipped and slid toward the curb, put a hand on the icy hood of a car, and threw up in the street. He stood, looked around. He was glad no one had seen him.
He wiped his face with his handkerchief, let the cold air dry the sweat from his forehead.
He started walking again. He felt a little better, braced by the cold air. He guessed the temperature was about thirty degrees.
A police car appeared from a side street, turned, and came toward him with its red light flashing. Right up on the sidewalk it came. His legs went weak, and the terror hit him square in the stomach.
The police car turned back into the street, then slowly up on the sidewalk again to get around a downed pole, then back to the street. It passed him slowly, its light still flashing, the siren silent.
He had never seen the streets of Bessemer like this. The only sounds were the putter of chain saws, the drones of emergency generators and utility trucks, the occasional shout of one repairman to another. And now and then the soft tinkle of icicles being shaken loose.
Just ahead of him, an elderly woman, bird-thin and frail and bundled against the cold, emerged hesitantly from an apartment building. She had taken only a few steps when her feet went out from under her and she fell with a thud onto her back.
“Easy. Easy. I’m coming. Don’t move. Don’t move.”
In his haste, he half-slid, half-skated toward the old woman, who sat up and turned her head toward him.
“Easy. Easy. Don’t move yet. I’ll help. Easy.”
“Oh, I just … My legs just went right out …”
“I know, I know.” He was kneeling next to her now. “Did you break anything? Can you tell?”
“I don’t, I don’t think so. My legs just went …”
“Okay. We’ll get you up. Easy.”
He planted his feet as firmly as he could, put his hands under her arms, slowly straightened his legs. She was so light, he was able to haul her up without straining.
“Easy now. Easy.” He was afraid her trembling would send them both to the pavement. “All right now. You’re okay.”
“Oh, thank you. I, I need my prescription …”
A doorman came out of the apartment building, nodded his thanks, put his own strong arm around the old woman’s shoulders, steered her back inside the building.
“Thank you, young man,” the old woman said.
The Gazette’s parking lot had only a fraction of the cars it would have had for a normal weekday morning. Some of the cars were ice caked.
He gave a halfhearted smile to the security guard, who waved him through. He stopped at the men’s room at the top of the stairs, hung his jacket on a hook, and turned on the hot water. Thank God the Gazette had hot water.
Even though he had washed earlier, he had to wash again. He washed his face, his hands, his arms all the way to his elbows. He started to dry his hands, then stopped, holding the palms in front of his face. These were the hands that had killed.
He dried himself, combed his hair, studied his face. He looked pale and tired.
The door burst open and in walked Ed Sperl, the police reporter.
“Lose your power?” Sperl asked.
“Yeah.”
“Me, too. Son of a bitch, could be two or three days before we get it back. Goddamn big trees.”
“Hmmm.”
“Fall on the ice?”
“What?”
“Your face. It looks like you fell.”
“I did.”
Ed Sperl went into a stall and slammed the door.
He didn’t like Ed Sperl. He hurriedly finished drying and left.
With a sense of dread, he walked down the corridor toward the newsroom. If they had found the body, he would hear about it right away. Everyone would be talking about it.
He couldn’t think of it as a murder. A killing yes, but not a murder. It had been an accident, almost. Or self-defense.
“Hi!” Marlee West, a feature writer in her twenties, greeted him near the door.
“Morning.”
“I was just on my way for coffee. Can I get you some?”
“No, no thanks.” He dearly wanted more coffee, but Marlee was by nature friendly and curious, and he didn’t want to talk to her much just now.
“Lose your electricity?” Marlee asked.
“Yeah. You?”
“Sure did. I came to work dirty, like a lot of other folks. Oooh, what happened to your face?”
“Fell on the ice.”
“Oooh. You okay?”
“Yeah. Well, I gotta see what I’m supposed to do today.”
Marlee laughed. “That’s easy. The only story in town is the ice storm. See you later.”
The city editor, a potbellied, balding man a few years from retirement, looked up at him. “Check the hospitals,” the editor said. “A lot of them are getting their phones back. Get a rough total of the injuries, serious and otherwise, and give your stuff to rewrite.”
He nodded and went to his desk. He would stay on the phone, lose himself for hours.
Three
CITY REMAINS PARALYZED
AFTER FREAK ICE STORM
By Gazette Staff Reporters
Much of Bessemer lies paralyzed under a glistening ice crust spawned by a storm that has made travel perilous or impossible and knocked out power and communications.
Travel is expected to remain hazardous for two to three days at least. Electric and telephone lines serving tens of thousand of homes and businesses lie in gleaming tangles throughout the metropolitan area …
Meteorologists blamed the ice storm on an occurrence one c
alled “really quite unusual” for Bessemer. At ground level, temperatures were below freezing, and several thousand feet up they were colder still. But between the cold ground and the cold upper atmosphere lay a huge pocket of warm air.
Thus, snowflakes that formed in the upper air turned to raindrops as they fell through the warm pocket, jelled as they hit the low-level cold air, then turned to ice on the ground, pavement, wires and trees …
Travel in and out of Bessemer came to a virtual standstill. Bessemer Airport was forced to close this morning, after airport crews ran out of the deicing compound that is sprayed onto the wings of jetliners.
One of the last planes to get out of the city was a charter “golfers’ special” flight bound for Florida. “We had a lot of anxious-looking travelers standing around the terminal, wondering if they’d get out,” said Airport Manager Ralph Goode. “They don’t know how lucky they are.”
Four
Father Brendan Sullivan bumped the curb as he parked and was glad that no one saw. Son of a bitch, maybe he did need to get his glasses checked again. What had that smart-ass German optometrist said to him at the last exam two—no, three—years ago? “At your age, Padre, you may need to get your eyes checked more often.”
Padre, indeed. At my age, indeed, Father Sullivan huffed as he climbed out of the car, slowly so as not to aggravate his back.
Lucky for him it was a clear, crisp morning. The wine from that morning’s Mass was still hot in his blood, and the cold breeze that lifted his white hair and slapped his cheeks perked him up considerably.
He recognized Father Barrow’s car, parked about fifty feet or so in front of his own. The younger priest’s car was streaked with road salt and frozen slush. Goodness, lad, you’re carrying this poverty stuff too far if you don’t get your car washed at least once a winter. A fine messenger for the Lord you’d be, rolling up to a shut-in’s house in a car like that.
All right, young Father Barrow. If you’re here, you’ll have some explaining to do. If you’re here … Well, he must be, Father Sullivan thought.
Night of the Ice Storm Page 3
