The Weight of Winter

by Cathie Pelletier

  Pike said nothing. He was weighing his situation, his position with his good buddies, his place in time. What a bitch time was. Lynn had come in at a six o’clock place in time, and she had looked great in those tight jeans and that cranberry-red jacket, good enough for Pike to try to pick up, as if she were Ruby with the overbite instead of his own wife. Then she had moved to twelve, had climbed up the clock to join him at the bar, and during that move, a lot of changes had occurred. The jacket now had spots on it, and a couple of cigarette burns. Lynn’s crow’s-feet were noticeable to him, and so were the dark roots where the natural color of her hair had sprouted up, and the wheezy way she had of breathing through her mouth. It was all a matter of one’s position in time, Pike realized, of observation at a distance.

  “‘All my ex’s live in Texas,’” George Strait announced from the jukebox. “‘That’s why I hang my hat in Tennessee.’” Lord, what Pike would give to have his green felt fishing hat dangling from a rack at the Grand Ole Opry instead of from the jagged deer antlers at The Crossroads.

  “I want you to give him back every cent,” Lynn said. “You done a lot of low things in your day, Pike, but stealing from your son is the lowest.”

  “I didn’t steal it,” Pike said. He canted his head toward Lynn’s face, doglike, hoping his words would not drift behind him. This domestic problem was nobody else’s business. “I borrowed it. I’ll give it back to him the minute my check comes.” It was good to have George Strait singing loudly about his own marital woes. The last thing Pike wanted was for the regulars to learn why he’d bought so many rounds lately. He imagined Sally putting up another sheet next to the skunk list, one called: Fathers Who Have Stolen from Their Sons. But Lynn wasn’t budging. With Beena’s face rising like a wintry moon over her shoulder, she stood stiffly, waiting.

  “He’ll get it back within the week, for Chrissakes,” said Pike. “Am I keeping him from playing the stock market or something? Is he on the phone to Donald Trump? He’s a kid. He can wait a few days.”

  “How much you got left?” Lynn asked again, and this time she took her hands out of her pockets. Pike could see that she had knitted them into fists. Surely, he thought, she wouldn’t—but she did. The blow came from a backhand and caught his left temple, knocked the glass he had raised to his lips into a shattering of broken pieces on the bar.

  “Oh Jesus!” said Beena. She grabbed Lynn’s arms. Pike had risen with his beer bottle snugly in his hand, had lifted it to strike back, when Billy grasped the bottle firmly in his own hand. He spun Pike around.

  “All right, Piko,” he said. “Calm down. It’s all over.”

  “Shit!” said Pike. “You see what she did? She hit me in the face for no reason at all. I was gonna buy them two bitches a beer one minute, the next minute—whack-o!”

  “You know what I come down here for,” Lynn said. Spears of hair had escaped from the elastic band she’d bound them with and were now straggling about her face. Her voice was shaking. She’d had no idea until the second it happened that she was going to hit him. Another time, she would have cried then and there. But not now. He enjoyed them too much, her tears, grew strong from them as if they watered him, nourished him. She would cry in the car this time, with Pike safely distanced from her, with Beena steady at the wheel.

  “You know why I’m here,” Lynn repeated. “Don’t make me come back with the sheriff. I’m giving you two days.” Pike shrugged, then thrust his middle finger up to the back of Lynn’s retreating cranberry-red coat. The movement of her rear in the tight jeans meant nothing to him now. She was just a woman moving away from him in time, a bogey moving from twelve o’clock back to six o’clock, and then out the creaking door.

  “Cancel the priest!” Ronny shouted, and laughter rippled uneasily about the bar. The dancers stood frozen, in the middle of their two-step, watching Pike.

  “What’s the matter?” Pike asked them loudly. “Ain’t you ever seen a bitch before?” Now the laughter washed more easily about the room. Time was changing things. Time was erasing and healing with just seconds to do its work. Time was lapping up the mess.

  “Here, soldier,” said Maurice, and slid a free beer down the bar to Pike. “I treat all wounded veterans to a drink.” Billy’s second song had started, “’Til I’m Too Old to Die Young,” and the words were milky and soothing, familiar to Pike. And so was the happy shape of the beer bottle, built like a woman when Pike thought about it, sleek throated and hippy, the way he preferred them.

  “What was Lynn talking about?” Billy asked when he was sure the rest had found other entertainment. Most of the crowd had gathered around Ronny, who was explaining a technique that involved Oriental girls and baskets with ropes attached to the ceilings over the beds in whorehouses.

  “She’s crazy,” said Pike.

  “She might be crazy,” Billy said. He took a quick drink of his beer and then snapped open the shell of a peanut. “But what was she talking about?”

  “Conrad lost some money, who knows how,” said Pike. “She wanted to know if I’d seen it.” He flipped two quarters at Billy. It would be worth hearing George Strait sing about his own luck with women one more time if it meant getting Billy’s mind on something else.

  ***

  When Maurice insisted on picking up the drinks, Pike was just getting started.

  “It’s only a quarter to one, Maurice, goddamnit,” he protested. “What’s wrong with just one more?”

  “Laws are laws,” said Maurice, mopping down the bar, a look of stern jurisprudence on his brow.

  “Fuck you!” Pike shouted. He slammed the empty bottle on the bar and laughed to see how quickly Maurice quivered. Billy was right. Maurice was slowly turning into a goddamn woman.

  “It’s stoked up,” said Billy. He had gone outside to start the Dodge Ram so that it would be toasty by the time he dragged Pike off the bar stool and headed for home.

  “I’m driving my Chevy,” said Pike.

  “No you ain’t,” said Billy.

  “I gotta go home,” Pike said. “I hid me a bottle of Smirnoff behind the couch.” Billy thought about this. A couple of shots of vodka would be a warm ending to another boozy night. It was so cold out he’d thought he’d never get the Ram started. It had sputtered and moaned before it finally caught. Now it sat with a heavy gray cloud of exhaust fanning up around its ass, like a spruce grouse, warming itself nicely.

  “I’ll drive you,” said Billy. “But I want your butt in and out of that house in no time flat. And don’t bug Lynn. Leave her be.”

  “That’s my house,” Pike insisted. “If I want to sleep there tonight, I damn well can.”

  “No you can’t,” said Billy. “You got a room reserved at my house tonight.” He hoisted Pike off the stool and together they launched themselves across the floor.

  “See you tomorrow!” Maurice shouted behind them as he unplugged the Budweiser sign.

  “Fuck you, Maurice, you cheap son of a bitch,” Pike yelled. “You seen the last of my ass.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Maurice. He unplugged the jukebox, giving George Strait’s throat a needed rest, and then snapped off the Michelob light. “And the Pope ain’t got any money,” Maurice added. “Tell me another one.”

  ***

  Pike was on his hands and knees, reaching behind the couch in search of his vodka bottle, while Billy waited outside in the Ram. But there was no bottle. He had put one there, hadn’t he, just before Maisy’s birthday party? Surely that wasn’t the one he and Billy had drunk as they sat parked on the rim of the old gravel pit, watching the sky turn pink with dawn. That had been Monday night. The Crossroads was closed on Sundays and Mondays, and yet Pike and Billy had toasted every goddamn Gifford ancestor in memory on Monday night, while a cold wind sifted the loose snow off the gravel pit’s top and then layered it neatly far below. They had drunk a bottle of vodka and Pike had complained tha
t they would die of carbon monoxide poisoning, what with the heater running to keep them warm. Where had they gotten the bottle of vodka? Billy had told him that newer models of automobiles don’t carbon-monoxide someone, that you need a faulty leak.

  “This Dodge Ram is a goddamn fort,” Billy had said, tipping the vodka bottle up to his lips and rapping his fingers on the steering wheel with great emphasis. “You’re safe here, my boy.” And it was true, Pike did feel safe, but then, any time he got together with Billy and vodka he felt safe. Billy and vodka were family. And Monday night, when the bottle was empty, they had stood outside the Ram in the oppressive cold, solid as brothers, while Pike heaved the empty bottle up toward the incoming dawn. There was something about their lives, a clue almost revealed, as the bottle caught the icy light, turned end over end over end, then disappeared into the blackness at the bottom of the pit. All good memories, but where had the bottle come from in the first place?

  Pike rummaged a hand along the floor beneath the sofa and still came up with air. His thoughts clouded with doubt. It was just possible he and Billy drank that damn bottle Monday night, toasting the windchill factor and the constellations in the sky over Mattagash. Or, and this occurred to him in a quick flash of anger, someone in the goddamn nuclear family had stolen it from him. He heard Billy toot outside, a bleat almost, filtering in from the cold. Pike smiled. Billy sounded like some old cow out there waiting to be milked. Just as he was arranging his thoughts, ideas as to where the bottle had gone, he heard the bottom stair step, that old telltale step, squeak. Pike looked up to see Lynn, wearing pajama bottoms and one of his old thermal underwear tops, peering at him out of sleepy, half-closed eyes.

  “What you doing here, Pike?” she asked. “You know you ain’t welcome here.”

  “This is my house,” said Pike.

  “Not anymore,” said Lynn. “You broke the final straw when you took that poor kid’s money.”

  “I borrowed his goddamn money!” Pike shouted. “He’ll get it back.”

  “You better mean it,” said Lynn. Her hair was still straggling down from the elastic band, the mascara she had applied so diligently beginning to blacken the area beneath her eyes. She looked to Pike like some sleepy raccoon, and he smiled at this. Billy tooted again, a soft little peep.

  “It ain’t funny, neither,” said Lynn.

  “Mama?” a voice asked from the top of the stairs. It was Conrad. “He down there?”

  “Go back to bed, sweetie,” said Lynn. “I’ll handle this.”

  “Maybe he’s lying,” said Pike. “Maybe he ain’t saved any money. You ever seen it? Ask yourself that. All he’s ever saved is them stupid jams and all that sugar. He ain’t nothing but a little fag.”

  “You already admitted taking the money,” said Lynn. She had left the stairs and was standing in front of her husband, her thin hair flailing about her face. Reed and Julie and Stevie now appeared on alternate steps, their hair tousled, their eyes adjusting to the dimension of light in the room below.

  “Get up that stairs and back into bed!” Lynn shouted up at them. “Now!” She pointed a straight angry finger, and the children disappeared, all except their feet, which remained quietly on the top step.

  “I want my money back,” Conrad said. He had followed Lynn down the stairs, and now he stood in the living room, his pajama bottoms clinging to his thin hips, his T-shirt spotted with purple Kool-Aid.

  “Conny, go back upstairs,” Lynn pleaded. “I’ll take care of this.”

  “Conny,” Pike said with disgust. “What kind of name is that for a boy anyway? You ain’t nothing but a three-legged little fairy, collecting sugar and jam. Why the hell can’t you collect fireflies, or rocks, or something like that?”

  “You give it back to me,” Conrad shouted. He made a feeble attempt to swing a fist at his father, but Pike caught the thin wrist and held it tightly. He pulled Conrad’s arm up over his head, as though he were a champion fighter.

  “And the winner is…!” Pike announced. Conrad was becoming more interesting as he grew older. And now that he was confronting Pike head-on these days, there was no telling what entertainment waited in the years up ahead.

  “Let him go!” Lynn said, and she beat her fists on Pike’s back. Billy tooted wildly again, the headlights of the Dodge Ram peering in at the house like the eyes of some indifferent God who preferred to keep his distance. Pike released Conrad and reached for Lynn instead. She had hit him once already tonight, in front of his best buddies, in front of womanly little Maurice, in front of everybody who mattered to him. But she had better think twice before she raised a hand to Pike Gifford Jr. again. And now that he thought about it, she had probably taken his bottle of vodka. He had put a bottle under the sofa, of that he was certain. He pushed her against the wall and held her there, his hand locked tightly about her throat. Conrad might be at an age where he almost winded Pike, but one-handed was all he needed for Lynn. Pike edged his wife up the wall, forcing her to stand on her tiptoes. Julie began to whimper, a soft whine at first, then rising in pitch, like some little northeasterly. Conrad saw his mother’s face, a blush of fear spread across it, her eyes wide and darting.

  “Quit it!” he screamed at Pike. “You’re choking her.” He jumped on Pike’s back and wrapped his thin arms about his father’s neck. But Pike tossed him off easily with a shrug of his shoulder, and then readjusted his grasp on Lynn’s neck. She would never, ever steal another bottle of his, and better yet, she would never hit him again in front of the whole goddamn world.

  Conrad was frantic. Lynn’s face was now a deeper red, her eyes trying desperately to focus on Pike’s face. “Please,” her eyes were saying. “Please don’t.” Conrad pushed Julie against the wall as he raced past her, up the stairs, and into his room. Where was the bat? Dammit, he had told Reed to always, always put it back under his bed when he finished playing with it. It had been to Conrad the greatest statement of his life so far, the only safety he had felt among the numbers of his family. Now it was gone.

  “Reed!” Conrad shouted. He beat his hand frantically about the floor beneath the bed, spilling and scattering the shoe box of jams. He didn’t care anymore about the jams. How could his mother eat them, how could she enjoy them some sunny, happy morning, as he’d always imagined would happen once Pike Gifford was gone forever, if she was dead? The jams scattered like berries about the floor, but still no bat.

  “Reed!” Conrad shouted again. “Where’s my bat? Didn’t I tell you to always put it back?”

  Standing in the bathroom doorway in his underwear, Reed was white-faced, dazed as a patient in some institution who has been roused up in the night and forced to answer a difficult question.

  “I was batting snowballs with it,” Reed said. “I left it out in the backyard.” His voice broke in midsentence, modulated. If only he weren’t already ten, it would be so nice to cry.

  Conrad pushed past him, out into the hallway. He had to think quickly. He was his mother’s little man, wasn’t he, her protector? She had never come right out and said it, but he knew she was proud of him for having stood up to Pike once before. And besides, if he didn’t, who would? Who could? He heard Julie’s scream rising from below, the steady smooth whine of a tiny freight train. He’d never find the bat in time. Reed could have left it anywhere out there in the deep snow. And then Conrad remembered the gun, Pike’s automatic rifle he used for killing deer, in and out of season, the occasional moose, and the slew of warm, feathery partridge during bird season. Conrad remembered the gun the way some children remember homework, that unavoidable thing always put off until the last minute. He dashed down the hallway and into Lynn’s bedroom. He pushed the clothes in her closet aside, spilling some off the rack, until he found the cool barrel leaning back against the wall. Lynn had insisted Pike keep the gun there, away from Julie and Stevie, who were too young to understand the danger. The bullets, Conrad knew, were in thei
r little box and tucked away in Pike’s sock drawer. He grabbed them, shoved one steadily into the chamber of the gun, and cocked it.

  Downstairs Lynn had managed to push Pike back long enough to loosen his grip on her throat. She had brought her knee up swiftly, hoping to make contact with his groin. But Pike had arched himself away in time.

  “Kick him in the balls,” her sister Maisy had instructed her. Lynn thought of Maisy now. Pike’s hands were back on her throat, and she was growing dizzy again from want of air. Maisy had been a good sister to her. She remembered Maisy’s sincere face as she had explained HALT to Lynn.

  “Never do anything when you’re hungry, angry, lonely, or tired,” Maisy had said. With Pike cutting off her air supply, Lynn felt adrift from all of it, as though her life and the participants in it had become a hazy dream. But Lynn had a question for Maisy. “What do you do when you’re all of them things, Maise?” Lynn wanted to ask her sister. “What do you do then?”

  “Let her go!” a voice commanded Pike. He jerked his head quickly to see Billy standing in the doorway.

  “She’s got her a mouth, Bill,” Pike said sheepishly. “You know what they’re like. This one’s worse than Claudette and Rita added together. This one’s got one hell of a mouth.” Pike was a bit embarrassed to be caught in a domestic fight by his best barroom buddy, his near brother, but surely Billy would commend him later, at The Crossroads, for not taking any shit off a damn woman.

  “Get away from her!” Billy said. Lynn made a soft little squeaking sound, a mouselike plea for air.

  “Bill, I’m telling you,” said Pike. He readjusted his grasp on Lynn’s neck. “She comes down to the goddamn Crossroads to slap my face, then she hides my bottle of vodka.” Lynn closed her eyes. She no longer cared if Pike killed her. Maisy would take the kids. The kids would be better off with Maisy. It was time this craziness stopped. HALT. Her head fell to one side just as Billy lunged for Pike.