Absent Company

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  At times the rhythmic chopping made Rudy think of hundreds of pairs of hard boots marching across polished wood floors, across fitted stones, across ice. The wind picked up and blew snow across his knuckles, freezing and burning them, finally numbing them. Now and then he would look up at the sky—he could see no approaching storms, but he could feel them. His joints ached. He looked over at B.B., who stared at the grey ice as he worked, who stared into the dark cold water, into nothing.

  “Do you always think about them?” Rudy asked, as he began to saw.

  B.B. said nothing for a few moments, letting his saw make the only noise, scratching and tearing through the ice, the sound rising when it reached the really hard sections, sounding like a cat caught on a hook. “Not always,” he finally said. “But every day, sometime. Paul was already a pretty good man, the way I remember it. Just like Daddy. I’ll never know if I’m as good a man. I was too young when it happened—not much judgment yet. What about you? You thinking about them now?” B.B. asked without looking up, his gaze drawn along with the maddening saw.

  Rudy slowed down his own saw so he could hear himself think. “They’re there, somewhere, even when I don’t have their precise image in front of me. My second wife—this sounds terrible—I think I married her when I did partly so I could start putting an end to the grieving for my first wife.”

  “But you loved her, too, right?”

  “Very much.”

  “I figured. But you still knew what you did, why you did it, and you felt guilty as hell about it. I know about guilt.”

  They widened a highway of dark water towards the center of the pond. By lunchtime the dark water was looking greyer and beginning to freeze again. They had to go back down the expanse, breaking up any new connections frozen in between the floating blocks. The tiny specks of snow in the bright air were growing slightly larger.

  Walking down either side of the carved-out waterway, they used their pikes to herd the blocks to the raceway. A huge hook at the end of the block and tackle allowed them to pull several blocks up the ramp at a time, although sometimes they had to use B.B.’s ancient snowmobile for additional pulling power. Once up in the ice house, they used portable ramps and levers to stack the blocks.

  Rudy kept looking for angular, naked shadows in the stacks of older ice, but he really hadn’t the time to do a thorough search. The new ice blocks, even greyer than the old ones, seemed to trap and absorb the light. The overhead caged bulbs in the ice house made little headway.

  Once surrounded by the towers of ice, Rudy found it difficult to breathe.

  During a rest break, Rudy lay on the frozen pond, a strip of ragged canvas underneath to protect him from the cold, and to keep his skin from adhering to that sticky grey exterior.

  He used the edge of the chopper to scrape away a little of the silver rime. His lips looked blue in the reflection, his eyes dark coals, his snowy skin shifting loosely on the bones.

  In late afternoon the fog rolled in, thicker than before. Although nothing was said, they both increased the pace of their work, despite their weariness. Rudy’s arms grew steadily colder, despite the energy he tried to will into them, the pace at which he pushed them. They looked translucent in the fog-filtered light. Translucent ice skin.

  The fog was turning to cold, to ice and snow. Rudy looked up: he seemed to be standing on the bottom of an ice white sea. He waited for the slow drift of generations of small animal skeletons to reach the bottom of his sea and cover him over. If he opened his mouth he could taste their deaths on his tongue.

  “I think the pressure’s lifting,” he heard B.B. say, although he couldn’t see him for all the fog and snow.

  Rudy looked down at the pond. The grey ice had turned whiter, cleaner. The open expanse of water was clearing.

  The huge white eye in the sky was obscured by eddies and winding sheets of hard-driven snow. Whatever remained of the late afternoon sunlight had diffused, spread itself out so that each of these tiny ice crystals might grab a piece and carry it to the ground. So the world became a darker and colder place as the snow continued to fall.

  Rudy had lost track of B.B. some time ago, although every now and then he thought he could hear the sound of metal hitting ice, the steady pace of the chopper, followed a few minutes later by the sound of the cat being torn apart, its screams muffled from the heavy snow filling its mouth. Rudy had lost his ice saws somewhere on the frozen pond—he had no idea where. He hoped he hadn’t dropped them into the water.

  He wondered how Old Finney had stood it out there. And what kind of wife he must have had, to live with a man who could stand such a thing. He could not imagine a more desolate place to live.

  He stopped himself, not quite believing what he had been thinking. He, too, had chosen to live in this place, and despite all that had happened, perhaps because of all that had happened, he was still convinced that this was the right place for him. Maybe he was as crazy as Old Finney.

  The light was fading rapidly. He could see nothing beyond the few feet of snowy air surrounding him. His feet had gone numb, despite his heavy boots; they felt as if the ice were rising through them, penetrating the skin and infecting the bone. B.B. must have gone back to the shore, he thought. Surely no one could work under such conditions. Rudy turned round and round until he was dizzy, trying to determine in which direction lay his ice house and his home—but the foreground of blowing snow was uniform, and the distant backgrounds of trees or buildings were invisible. He could not find where he had last cut into the ice. He could find nothing.

  Sin otra luz y gufa, sino Ia que en el corazon ardia. It was a Spanish poem he had read many times. St John of the Cross, about the Dark Night: No other light to mark the way but fire pounding my heart. He would just have to choose a direction and go with it. There was a slight movement in the snow falling ahead of him, a slight turning. He started in that direction.

  A pale skirt, twirling. A vague drift of white-blonde hair. That flaming guided me more firmly than the noonday sun. A tiny child’s face, leached of color by the cold, her iced hair floating up around her cheeks and blue crystal eyes.

  Rudy saw the little girl burning up in the snow, the snow becoming flames. She twirled and twirled, dancing, dressed in the flames. His sweet sweet baby, Julie. His daughter Julie burning up in the car with his wife. Was this re-imagining of her death any better? Was ice any easier to take than fire?

  That flaming guided me more firmly than the noonday sun. He watched the child stumbling, first snow and then fire attacking her pale form, and he cried out, but did not run to her. He seldom thought of Julie; he couldn’t let himself think of Julie. The images of her death were poisonous; he shut them out of his thoughts. He could think of Eva and he could think of Marsha, even of the unborn child Marsha had carried. But he had not been able to think of Julie for a very long time. He wondered if she would hate him for that betrayal.

  The girl stumbled and fell to the ice and lay there. Unable to stay away, Rudy stepped slowly through the snow that continued to accumulate on the surface of the pond. He looked down at the small form.

  The child was too thin. Her arms too white, too short. This was not his daughter. Then he remembered that Emily Lorcaster had lost an aunt, a little girl, Old Finney’s daughter. Who had drowned in the pond.

  The blonde head turned and looked up at him. The lips had swollen to fifty times or more their normal size. The child’s head was all mouth. It opened, showing its huge hungry tongue. The small white arms lifted to give him a hug.

  Rudy screamed and stepped back, slipping on the ice, then crawled away from the monstrous child who wanted to hold him, who wanted to hug him, who more than anything else wanted him to remember her. Children were hungry mouths—that’s mostly what they were, “hungry mouths to feed”. They would eat you if they could—not out of malice—that’s just what they were. Healthy, maturing, growing mouths. People fed off each other; it was the only way they could live. O tender night that tied lover and
the loved one, loved one and the lover/used as one! But Rudy had got far enough away. The child’s body diminished, hair disappearing, skin receding to the bone, until finally it was a corpse on a hard slab. It slowly sank into the ice and disappeared. In darkness I escaped, my house at last was calm and safe.

  Rudy got to his feet. Of the surrounding curtain of snow, one portion appeared lighter than the rest. He went in that direction.

  “You cannot know what life is until you have been forced to live with those events which cannot, with any justice, be survived.” His father hadn’t said it like that, not all in one breath like that. He’d coughed and spat and started over again and again and failed in his search for the right words. Finally he’d demanded a piece of paper and a pencil and Rudy had had to help him get the words down with numerous erasures, strikeouts, substitutions. He’d been drunk when he finally delivered to Rudy this final message of his life, two weeks before he’d signed himself into the nursing home. The chemo had left him bald and ravaged his body. He had broken all the mirrors in the house, unable to look at himself anymore. It was because the concentration camp had finally caught up with him; he now looked too much like those who had failed to survive.

  There was much that could not be lived with. His father had been sickened and appalled that he still breathed and walked around, consuming, evacuating his bowels, dribbling his piss like any animal.

  “Rudy …” his father whispered. Rudy came to him and his father clutched his shoulder with a skeletal hand, pulling him up close to his face. “God made a poor choice in me.” The sentence stank of his father’s failing organs. “So many died. So many.”

  Rudy could not bear to think of Julie. Thoughts of Julie were razor-sharp and tore down his throat and through the layers of his belly so that he could not eat, could not sleep. She was too much to survive. God had made a terrible choice.

  After his daughter’s death Rudy had had fantasies of murdering other children in the neighborhood. He’d imagined that he would sneak up to their bedrooms at night and smother them in their sleep. At least he would not let them suffer as Julie had suffered—their deaths would be quick and relatively painless. They probably would have no idea what was happening to them.

  He often wondered how their parents would grieve, what form it would take. He wondered if any would grieve the way he did and whether it would show in their faces. He was not sure he would ever know the full extent of what he felt until he saw its terrible landmarks in the landscape of another’s face.

  But these were fantasies, and they passed. Now when he heard of the death of another’s child he locked himself in his house and railed. And yet even in his screaming he would not let himself think of Julie.

  During those flights of fantasy he had been no better than Old Finney, if indeed Old Finney was guilty of the crimes Rudy and B.B. were accusing him of. Rudy would have brought the world to death if he could, guided by the dark light of his heart.

  He imagined he could see the distant white eye up in the sky again, behind the snow, drawn to the cold ice of the pond. As it began to sink, the eye turned red, the falling snow like frozen flakes of blood.

  Rudy heard a murmur from the pond as the ice around his feet began to break.

  Once the hard ice began to crack, it went rapidly. Rudy opened his mouth to shout as the cold arms of the pond reached up over his body to pull him under, but only cold air came out, the ice of the pond already in him and working its way up to his brain. He pushed frantically with his arms against loose pieces of floating ice, trying to force himself out of the water, but they slipped from his grasp and crashed back into him, forcing him under once again.

  His vision went to grey. Cold infected his thoughts. Cold pushed him farther and farther down into the depths of the pond, the ice skin on the pond growing thicker, expanding downward, chasing him and forcing him into the pond’s dark heart. Where all he’d ever known or imagined dead swam out to greet him, their narrow arms poised for an embrace, their eyes staring wide in their attempts to see all that he was, their mouths gaping in their hunger for their lost lives, their bellies empty and rotted away, the cold of Ice House Pond filling them through every opening. By the hundreds they crowded and jostled him, begging him, forcing him, pressing the issue of the intolerableness of their deaths.

  Rudy twisted away from them, thrashing towards the surface. Old Finney had put them here, not he. These weren’t people he had known, but death made all people the same.

  Julie’s voice was calling him, asking him to come to her room and tell her a story, give her a good-night kiss. But he ignored her, as he had so many times before.

  Rudy gasped as he broke the surface, his eyes wide to the darkness. Even before he caught his first breath, it occurred to him that it had stopped snowing—the storm was gone, the night clear and full of stars.

  He choked on his first icy gulps. The sudden exposure to cold air numbed him. He could barely see an edge of ice a few yards in front of him. He tried to swim, but his frozen clothes made him stiff.

  Suddenly he felt a sharp point at his back. He tried to turn around, but whatever had snagged him was dragging him rapidly with it. He braced himself to be dragged back beneath the surface.

  “Don’t fight it!” B.B. shouted behind him. “It’s just the pike! Have you out in just a second!”

  Rudy could barely feel it when his back bumped up against the edge of the ice. Now that he had been exposed to the dark air, the cold in his limbs had gone to work rapidly, spreading and numbing him clean through to the bone. He barely heard B.B. grunt as he grabbed Rudy under the arms and began dragging him backwards up onto the ice. The big man’s strong embrace barely registered.

  “It’s my fault!” B.B. said breathlessly. “I should’ve been watching you, you being new at this. But I got too busy harvesting the ice, watching the ice, looking at all the shadows under it and trying to figure out what all might be down there.”

  “It’s … not …”

  “Save it. I almost let you drown down there. And one thing this pond sure don’t need is another ghost.”

  Two hours of blankets, hot coffee, and his overactive furnace, and Rudy was beginning to feel a little like a human being again. B.B. hovered over him like a nervous aunt, running back and forth, second-guessing his every need. Rudy felt a little guilty about it, but didn’t make an effort to stop him.

  B.B. collapsed on the floor beside him. “You could use a little more furniture, you know,” he said.

  “I’ve had other things on my mind of late,” Rudy replied. “You could have my chair. I’m feeling much better, you know.… Thanks.”

  B.B. made a gesture of dismissal. “I cut a lot of ice. Most of it’s still floating out there, so I’ll need to break it up a little in the morning—some of the blocks will bond together overnight. But that isn’t a big job. If you’re feeling up to it we can finish filling the ice house, and stack the rest out on the shore. Then you can do with it what you like.”

  “You sound disappointed.”

  B.B. studied his hands. Rudy could see how raw they were, from repeated frostbite and ice abrasion. B.B. finally looked up at him. “I’m no closer now to figuring out exactly what happened here than I was before. It’s true we got some of that old grey ice out of there, and things have calmed down a bit—the pressure is off But what about my father and brother? So you saw things deep down in the pond; I don’t even know what they mean.”

  “It means, B.B., that we’ll have to do considerably more to lure out some of the pond’s secrets; it means that this year the Bay is going to get its ice palace,” Rudy said.

  VI

  B.B. informed Rudy that once they had all the pieces cut, with generous help from the townspeople the castle would require about a day to assemble. A cold day, of course, would be best. Rudy left it up to B.B. to predict the coldest day for the event.

  On the chosen day, the townspeople started gathering by the pond in late afternoon. Some had seen the f
lyers posted around town; others claimed to have heard the news from friends. Rudy was distressed to see that most of the volunteers were elderly, those who had first-hand memories of the pond. Most of the young people appeared to be relatives they’d dragged along with them, no doubt with promises of great fun. The ones who didn’t stand around with looks of interminable boredom immediately occupied themselves with snowball fights or sledding on the ice. Groups of old men and women followed Rudy around wherever he went, telling him stories about Ice House Pond, The Hand, Old Finney, and how the ice was handled back in the old days.

  “Once me and a few pals helped a fellow over to Maryville—put away five hundred blocks in his ice house in one day!” one old-timer said, his tobacco-stained teeth a mere inch or so away from Rudy’s face. The old fellow waved his hands in excitement. “I worked for four of the five ice companies here in the Bay, even worked on one of these here castles. But not for Old Finney. Hell, he didn’t want no help, but I’d be damned if I’d a gone to work for him anyway. Cantankerous sonuvabitch!”

  Rudy nodded and smiled, looking over the old man’s head for B.B. He finally spotted him supervising a motley crew of old men and women and young kids as they attempted to erect a corner of the palace. “So you gonna hire me, Mr. Boss-man?” Rudy looked down at the man. The man winked up at him. Behind the old man a couple of his elderly friends nodded and smiled. Everywhere he looked Rudy saw eager old faces, their bright red lips and cheeks blowing out great clouds of steam.

  “I’m afraid there’s no pay,” Rudy said. “You could just call this a historical ice harvest and castle construction, I guess.

  “Oh, I know there’s no pay,” the old man said eagerly. “Couldn’t make much of a go at an ice house these days, anyway, what with all the Frigidaires and Whirlpools. I just like working with the ice! Hell, I’d pay you!”

  “Then Mr. B.B. can show you where you can help out the best.”

  “B.B.? Oh, B.B. knows me. B.B. knows I’m experienced!”