The Weight of Winter

by Cathie Pelletier

  “Fifteen for two,” said Pike, and put down a five. He took his two points, jabbing the holes of the pegboard with great gusto and then staring sadly at the two holes he had yet to peg. Ronny quickly played a jack.

  “Twenty-five,” he said. Pike looked at his opponent, his cousin Ronny Plunkett, with steely eyes. To be skunked by Billy was a different matter. Billy was the best damn crib player in Aroostook County, bar none. But to have Ronny—who was, even though Pike liked him greatly, a bit of a stuck-upper—trounce him thusly would be a shameful thing. Pike might have to stay home with Lynn and the kids until December, when that fresh sheet of paper would flap nicely from the microwave. What hurt Pike even more was the way folks seemed to read his name over and over while they waited for their pizza.

  “Thirty,” said Pike, and gingerly placed another five on the table. Ronny squinted his eyes and pondered the sum. Pike had seen that look before, usually at the breakfast table, all those years he had spent growing up in Ronny and Billy Plunkett’s house. It meant Ronny was about to take the last slice of toast.

  “Well?” asked Pike. “Is it a go?” Surely it was. He was merely being ceremonial. The idea was to get as close to thirty-one as possible. Ronny would need another ace. Pike had two of the precious things in his own hand. What were the odds Ronny had one? Pike felt a victorious swell roll up in his stomach. It was a wonderful feeling to be beaten badly but not skunked. Ronny might’ve smoked hashish with strange Turkish women, but he didn’t know diddly-squat about cribbage in Mattagash, Maine. Pike was almost surly.

  “I don’t know,” Ronny said, and scratched his head. “Thirty, huh?”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” Pike’s asked. He could almost see the last slice of toast disappearing again, and then the words Pike Gifford, by Ronny Plunkett appearing on the horrible tally sheet of the damned. “Do you have an ace, or don’t you?” Pike pressed. “Is it a go, or ain’t it?”

  “Oh, looky here,” said Ronny, “at what was hiding from me.” He produced the ace of clubs. “Thirty-one for two,” Ronny announced, and then pegged the two holes he’d just won. Pike stared, flabbergasted, at the pair of aces in his hand. He still needed to peg two holes. If he didn’t, he would give Ronny Plunkett an opportunity to hold his nostrils tightly together, scrunch up his face, and shout pa-yew! But with two aces in his hand, there was only one way Pike could score now. And that would be if Ronny had the fourth ace.

  “One,” Pike said solemnly, and let his ace of diamonds drop, onto the table. Ronny squinted his eyes and stared at it.

  “Let’s see,” he said. “If I played another ace, it would give me two points for the pair, wouldn’t it?” Pike’s Adam’s apple bobbed suddenly in his throat. Was it possible? If by the chance of Providence it was, then Pike would be able to put his last ace down and peg six lovely holes for three of a kind. He would even get an extra, though unnecessary, point for playing the last card. “Please Jesus,” Pike thought, even though it was tacky to ask help from a man he barely knew, albeit he bandied his name about. It wasn’t that Pike didn’t believe in him. He most surely did. But Jesus was like the man from the bank. You didn’t want to really consider him until he was looming in your face. Suddenly Pike was acutely sorry that he had taken Conrad’s money. He had planned all along, however, to return it the minute his disability check arrived, and Pike wanted God to know that, just in case the Divine One was there in Mattagash, watching the cribbage game with interest, reading the innermost thoughts of Pike Gifford’s mind.

  “But I ain’t got an ace,” Ronny said quickly. “I got a four.” He plunked his last card down. “It all adds up to five,” he said. “You need a ten to score, Piko. Or another four. You got either one?” Sally giggled softly from behind the bar. While waiting for the ruckus still going on outside to eventually come through the door, she was monitoring the cribbage game.

  Pike stared at Ronny’s cards. A ten, a jack, an ace, and a four. A four had also been cut on the deck. Pike rapidly tallied his cousin’s score. The son of a bitch had ten points, more than enough to win. And since Pike had dealt, Ronny could take his score first.

  “But you get a point for having last card,” Ronny said, mockery in every word, and Pike recognized it as such. “Here,” said Ronny. “I’ll take it for you. Oh darn. Look at that. You only needed one more point to get your smelly ass past the skunk line.” Pike looked at his little steel peg, teetering so close, one hole away from a scorching embarrassment. He took a very large gulp of his beer, the foam creating a cool ring around his lips. Screw Conrad and his money. Pike should have known better than to offer any pact up to a God who obviously didn’t play cribbage.

  “What’s that awful smell?” Ronny asked suddenly, straightening up. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear it was piss à la skunk. Can you smell it, Sal? The last time an odor like that hit me in the face, I was lying headfirst between a Turkish whore’s legs.” Pike kept his eyes on the cards before him. The beautiful aces and fives ran together, but he didn’t see them. Instead, he imagined the letters of his name shaping themselves once more on Sally’s list, followed by the coup de grâce…by Ronny Plunkett, World Traveler and Whore Expert.

  Sally wiped her hands on the bar towel she kept pinned to a belt loop on her jeans. “Where’s my marker?” she asked, searching behind glasses on the bar. “I’d better beat the rush hour.” Outside, the raucous sounds seemed to be building. Sally expected a group of snowmobilers to come piling through the door at any moment in a crinkling rush of snowsuits and stomping feet. Now they’d have some new entertainment to stare at while they waited for their pizzas. Pike watched thoughtfully as she scrawled his name for a fourth time on the skunk sheet. He felt as though he himself were dangling there before curious spectators, his ankles and wrists firmly bound in Sally’s stock. Just as Sally finished the last t in the surname of Pike’s nemesis, another Plunkett burst through the door.

  “Jesus!” Billy cried. He was cradling his Damn Sea Gulls! hat in his hands. It appeared to be red with blood. “Don’t you see what’s going on out there? Lock the goddamn door!”

  Sally had just added a third strip of Scotch tape to the skunk list, securing it further, lest a breeze, especially one from Pike’s mouth, should blow it away. She tossed her marker aside and hastily abandoned her position behind the bar. Maurice, napping on a cot in the back room until he relieved Sally at six o’clock, heard Billy’s distress signals and came wide awake. Ronny jumped off his stool, propelling it several feet behind him. He grabbed a full bottle of Miller Lite beer from the bar, a killer instinct picked up from twenty years in the navy. Pike armed himself with the pegboard—an inch-thick, foot-wide board that some decorative genius in Taiwan had cut into the shape of a large, solidified 29—then abandoned it for a Michelob.

  “What is it?” Maurice cried. “Is that blood?” He pointed to Billy’s dripping hat and then turned a medium snow white.

  “No, it ain’t blood,” Billy groaned. “Didn’t any of you see what’s out there?”

  “We was playing some crib,” said Ronny, proof that they hadn’t been just sitting around idly.

  “Maurice,” Billy said. “You better go out there. We got trouble.” He stepped back so that Maurice could peer out the frosted window in the front door. Sally crowded up on his left shoulder, Ronny and Pike to the right of him. It was Prissy Monihan they saw outside, with a small horde of demonstrators huddled about her.

  “What’s that they got in their hands?” asked Pike.

  “I can’t tell,” said Maurice, and his warm breath melted a small patch of frost from the window.

  “Get off my foot, Maurice,” Ronny advised.

  “Looks like Windex bottles,” said Sally, her female expertise kicking in. More of the winter’s frost evaporated from the pane, enlarging their view. “That’s just what they are,” Sally confirmed. “Windex bottles.”

  “Well,
it ain’t Windex in them,” said Billy, still wringing out his hat. “It’s red food coloring.”

  “What?” said Sally. “Why?” Then she knew. The new minister, Thornton Carr, promenaded into view, a placard strapped to his back which declared: The Blood of Our Children Drips from This Building.

  “What’s that mean?” asked Maurice. “I know this old building is on its last legs, but it don’t have a leakage problem.”

  Thornton Carr walked at a mournful gait across the dooryard. Prissy, Elsa Carr and her two teenage daughters, old Sarah-Tom Fogarty, and Wilma Fennelson, who was a distant cousin to Maurice, belted out what sounded like a hymn to the listeners behind the paned glass. Then Thornton cut an attractive pirouette and began the march back. The front of his placard warned: We’ll Spray Anyone Who Enters. Sally read the words slowly, and looked down at Billy’s hat. So did Maurice, then Ronny, and Pike.

  “Correct-o,” said Billy. “They blasted me.” It would seem the damn seagulls were not the only creatures capable of dumping on Billy Plunkett’s hat.

  “What’ll we do?” Sally whispered, her face pressed closely to the window.

  “Friday night is my biggest night,” said Maurice, a hollow ring behind his words, the sound of an empty cash register spitting up zero.

  “You’re gonna have to go out there and see what they want, Maurice,” said Billy. He hung his hat on the usual deer antler, the brown plaster of Paris spill now speckled with bloody spots, an apparent signal to the seagull responsible that a visit to some ornithological proctologist might be in order.

  “Me?” Maurice asked indignantly. “Why does it have to be me? Why can’t somebody else go?” Pike Gifford slunk back, away from the group, hoping to escape notice. He imagined the others spinning around at any moment, pointing accusing fingers at him and chanting, “Him! He’s the only one on the skunk list! Let’s sacrifice him!”

  “Because it’s your cash register, Maurice sweetheart,” said Billy. “You’re the man who pays the bills.”

  “Just barely,” Maurice said meekly.

  “You’re the only one who can handle the problem,” Billy added. Maurice highly doubted this, but he opened the door and inched out into the cold afternoon. The afternoon sun was casting a fine golden sheen on the snow, the automobiles, the telephone wires. It even bounced nicely off the pinkish frames of Prissy Monihan’s glasses. Maurice heard the big door to The Crossroads close behind him, as though it were the door to the blessed ark. He took an invigorating breath of cold air and smiled.

  “Nice day, ain’t it?” said Maurice.

  “You ought to burn in hell, Maurice Fennelson,” Prissy announced. Scenes of being bombarded with countless streams of red food dye unfolded in Maurice’s vision of things to come. Whatever he did, he needed to avoid getting shot. With the windchill factor what it was, he would be something akin to a large cherry Popsicle by morning. Maurice eyed the Windex bottles warily. Remembering the rattlesnakes he’d seen on Nova, he decided to stay a body’s length away from Prissy, and judged her to be about five feet long.

  “You’re gonna have Satan’s pitchfork jabbing you in the backside for all eternity,” Priscilla added.

  “Other than that, what can I do for you?” Maurice asked. Actually, it was probably nice and warm in hell, the thermostat rarely dipping below eighty. In Mattagash, it was already well below freezing and not yet dark.

  “You can close this den of iniquity!” shouted Prissy. “That’s what!”

  “I’m making a living here,” said Maurice.

  “No you ain’t,” said Prissy. “You’re making a killing, and it’s our children who will pay the price.” A soft smattering of applause broke out around her. It had often been said of Priscilla Monihan that her personality problems began the day she missed out on Mattagash’s only social protest, one her mother had helped launch. The ladies had ousted a downstate stripper, an event that was still spoken of with pride in some circles, reverence in others.

  “I ain’t ever sold a drink to a minor,” Maurice said, which was certainly not true. “Now why don’t you women just go on home where it’s warm, and knit something?”

  “They made livings in Sodom and Gomorrah, too,” Elsa Carr shouted. “And you might say they got closed down in a big way.” Maurice stared at Thornton Carr, a most henpecked man indeed, and pitied him the scrawny little wife and the buck-toothed daughters. Thornton looked as though he agreed with Maurice that knitting somewhere warm would be a grand idea.

  “The Bible ain’t against a man having a drink,” Maurice tried to reason, forgetting that he was dallying with the unreasonable. “You just name me one place in the Bible where it says drinking’s bad,” he challenged, an act of folly. Maurice would be hard-pressed to even find a Bible. Prissy, on the other hand, slept with a well-worn copy under her pillow. And it was Maurice who had always been so fond of saying that if a man bets you fifty dollars he can make the jack of clubs jump out of the deck and spit tobacco juice in your eye, don’t bet him. It’s his trick. “You’ll get an eyeful of tobacco juice every damn time,” Maurice liked to add.

  “‘Be not among winebibbers,’” Prissy recited. “‘For the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty.’ You’ll find that in Proverbs, chapter twenty-three, verses twenty and twenty-one.” Maurice cast an even-eyed look at Prissy.

  “Name another place,” he said, and then listened sadly.

  “One Corinthians,” Prissy quoted. “‘Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.’” Maurice looked behind him at the faces in the window. She’d nailed them all with that last verse, except that Tommy Felch, the effeminate nurse at Pine Valley was not among them. There was so much tobacco juice in Maurice Fennelson’s eye that he was obliged to lean back against the ancient wood that had gone, years ago, into the making of The Crossroads, wood cut by one man and, most probably, hauled by one horse. A faint spell overtook Maurice and he closed his eyes.

  Prissy had gone on to recall other biblical books, but above her voice Maurice heard an approaching sound. It could have been those hay wagons of yesteryear, or a single old workhorse twitching out a white pine that would become a beam in someone’s living room until it rotted with time. But Maurice opened his eyes and saw that it was none of these things. It was Booster Mullins, in his maroon Bronco with the sun-yellow plow. Maurice wished suddenly that Booster would lower that plow and clean the driveway in much the same manner that Jesus had seen fit to clear the Temple. A bucketful of biblical riffraff would make a nice thump when tossed into the Mattagash River. But all Booster did was pull into the yard, kill the ignition, and jump out. Maurice winced. Without the Bronco, Booster was fair game. Maurice looked up at his sign, the one with the two beautifully bluish rivers arching up to join themselves. Where Good Friends Meet. A bitter irony.

  Booster edged past the pacing minister and stood back to read his message.

  “We’ll…spray…anyone…who…enters,” Booster read, and was immediately hit in the face with a blast from old Sarah-Tom’s container.

  “Not unless he enters the bar!” Prissy said, grabbing the old woman’s wrist.

  “What’s that?” asked Sarah-Tom.

  “NOT UNLESS HE GOES INSIDE,” said Prissy.

  “Okay,” said Sarah-Tom. “Why didn’t you say so?” Maurice thought old Sarah-Tom had died years ago. Prissy really was digging them out of their graves, even in the wintertime.

  “You do that again, you old biddy,” said Booster, wiping the cold red wash off his face, “and I’ll stick that Windex bottle so far up your ass you’ll squirt ammonia every time you open your mouth.”

  “It ain’t Windex,” said Maurice, a muffled voice from the rear.

  “What’d he say?” asked
Sarah-Tom. Just then Billy Plunkett opened the door to The Crossroads and stepped out.

  “What are you doing, Maurice dear?” Billy asked. Maurice Fennelson would be a full-fledged woman when it came time for him to die. Billy was certain of it. And he shouldn’t have sent a woman to do a man’s job.

  “Resting,” said Maurice. Pike and Ronny filed out the door with Sally, behind them. Billy turned to survey the crowd. The minister, a new arrival from Virginia or some other clime southward, had begun to shiver noticeably in his boots. He was bearing his heavy placard as though it were the very cross that had caused all this trouble in the first place. His two daughters, their buckteeth pearly white, seemed dazed by it all. Then there was old Sarah-Tom, named for her husband Tom Fogarty and therefore distinguished from the other Sarahs in town. Behind Sarah-Tom stood the gangly Wilma Fennelson, a Mattagash spinster, known since childhood as “cucumber face” because of the elongated shape of her head. The minister’s pigeon-faced little wife rounded out the picketers.

  “Ladies,” Billy said, and made a gesture to his head. “I’d take off my hat, but then one of you fuckers has already done that for me.”

  “You’re a drunk, Billy Plunkett,” snapped Prissy. It was true that she’d missed out on the campaign against the stripper, the way some young men miss out on a war. Her mother had promised to wait for her, that autumn day thirty years earlier, but Prissy had come home from high school to walk through an empty house, to hear the sounds of being left behind—the tinkling chimes on the back porch, the gush of water rushing through the pipes, the sudden squeaks in a floor. She had stood and listened to the heart of the house, steady and dull and lonely, and had promised herself that, from that day forward, if ever a Mattagash boat was launched toward some righteous cause, it would be her foot that pushed it from shore.

  “You’re a vulgar drunk, Billy Plunkett,” Prissy said again, and then cast a paranoid eye down the road toward Watertown. Where were they?