The Ice House

by Laura Lee Smith

  “Compression valve again, eh, Ice?” The voice belonged to Ed from Sales, who was now squatting on the opposite side of the old icemaker, peering underneath toward Johnny. “A bitch, ain’t it?” Ed from Sales, Johnny thought, wouldn’t know the difference between a compression valve and an expansion valve if said valve were attached to his own undersized pecker. It had often struck Johnny as gratingly miraculous that Ed could so successfully peddle a product about which he had so little concrete understanding. Johnny had lost track of the number of times he’d tried to tutor the man in the physics of refrigeration and the mechanics of fulfillment, with the idea that perhaps with a bit of background Ed would have a little more respect for what went on out here on the ops floor. But it was no use. To Ed, the ice just magically appeared. He was a good salesman; Johnny would give him that. Head of the department, and top seller, every month. But annoying as hell in the process.

  “Expansion valve, Ed,” Johnny said.

  “Have you read your email, Ice?” Ed said.

  “I don’t read email, Ed,” Johnny said, which was not entirely true. He did read email; just not email from Ed.

  Ed suffered a smile. “Well, that must be nice,” he said, in an ingratiating just kidding! tone. “Some of us have to read email.”

  “What do you want, Ed?”

  “I want to request a meeting.”

  “This is a meeting.” Johnny was still on his back underneath the ice machine, one arm snaked up toward the expansion valve and the other shaking a series of hoses in succession, trying to locate the short.

  “I mean, a meeting. Like, where we sit down and talk.”

  “We’re talking right now.”

  “Yes, but you’re not giving me your full attention. That’s why I want to schedule a meeting.”

  Johnny closed his eyes. Being on his back like this seemed to be causing a troubling sense of vertigo. He dropped his arm and took a deep breath, then slid out from underneath Dumbo and stood up, wiping his hands on his parka. He was dizzy, but he fought off a stumble. He looked at Ed, who was beginning to rub his hands together and bobble up and down on his toes, standard choreography for anyone from admin who came out onto the ice floor without a parka and remained for more than a couple of minutes.

  “Shit, it’s freezing out here,” Ed said.

  “What do you want, Ed?” Johnny repeated.

  “It’s not what I want, Ice. It’s what my customers want. Shorter pallets.”

  This again. For months, Ed had been fixated on the boneheaded idea of having the packing crew stack the pallets with fewer bags of ice. Set procedure, which Johnny and Roy supervised with an aviator’s precision, was to have the crew create eight-foot-high cross-hatching towers of ice bags that were solid as a bunker and that fitted squarely with the dimensions of the trucks, thus maximizing shipping efficiency. The pallet towers were a point of pride with the packing crew, in fact. Only the most skilled could throw an ice bag up to the top of a nearly filled pallet and have it land in the proper position before the entire pallet was forklifted over to be stretch-wrapped and stored for shipment.

  But Ed was on a campaign. The pallets were too tall for his distributors’ comfort, he said. They were forced to use stepladders to reach the tops of the pallets in order to break up the shipments for individual orders. Stepladders! Imagine the hardship! So Ed’s genius solution was to reduce the stacked pallets by a foot or more, thus decreasing the number of bags on each pallet and making it easier for his pansy-ass distributors to fill their orders without having to strain their fragile arms.

  “That’s asinine,” Johnny had told Ed, more than once. “That blows our shipping numbers. That costs more money.”

  “We gain market share through customer service,” Ed argued. “Distributors think we’re hard to work with. We’ve got to make it easier on them. Then we make more money.”

  And on like that.

  “Can we at least talk about it?” Ed was saying now.

  “No.”

  Ed sighed. He pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket and extended it to Johnny. “I knew you wouldn’t read the email. So I printed it out for you.” Johnny took the paper and put it into his own pocket, then watched the flicker of frustration cross Ed’s face.

  “Aren’t you going to read it?” Ed said.

  “I’m pretty sure you’re going to tell me what it says.”

  “It’s a complaint. From Southeastern Distribution. They say the high pallets are dangerous. And that they slow down their operations.”

  “And you’re slowing down mine right now, Ed.”

  Johnny moved around Ed and kicked at Dumbo from the other side.

  “I want shorter pallets, Ice.”

  “No, Ed.”

  Ed actually stamped his loafered foot in impatience, and Johnny had to work to suppress a smile. It was almost too easy to get Ed’s goat.

  “Well, what am I supposed to do with this complaint, then?” Ed said.

  “You’ll figure something out.”

  “You don’t respect me, Ice.”

  “I respect what you do, Ed.”

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “Look, what do you want, Ed? You want a fucking hug, or what? I don’t hug, Ed. I make ice. And you sell it.”

  Ed looked away, furious. “And you’re lucky I do,” he muttered.

  “I’m not deaf, asshole,” Johnny said.

  Ed put his hands in his pockets. “You should treat people better, Ice,” he said.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ed. You’re breaking my heart.” Johnny’s phone rang. He pulled it from his pocket and answered it.

  “Where you at?” Roy said.

  “I’m beating up Dumbo,” Johnny said. “And bonding with Ed.”

  “Can you come out front?” Roy said. “To the parking lot? I need to show you something.”

  “I’ll be there in a minute,” Johnny said. “I’ll bring Ed. He needs a hug.”

  “I ain’t hugging his ass,” Roy said.

  Johnny placed a hand over the phone’s mouthpiece and turned to Ed. “Sorry, Ed,” he said. “Roy says he ain’t hugging your ass either.”

  Johnny restarted Dumbo and waited; the wracking imbalance seemed to have subsided, and the old machine clattered back into operation. Ed shook his head and walked away. His lips were moving, but with the machinery racket, Johnny couldn’t hear what he was saying. Though he had some idea.

  Out in the parking lot, Johnny had a moment to look up at the hoary old ice factory, and to wonder how it could be that more than twenty-five years had elapsed since he’d first laid eyes on it, yet only a moment. Then the bespectacled countenance of Roy Grassi appeared at the top of the building’s roofline and pivoted like a bobblehead before drawing a bead on Johnny in the parking lot below.

  “The security lights,” Roy yelled. “One was out.”

  Well, of course it was. The security lights were a fancy and expensive system of façade fixtures that Pauline, skittish about the decline of the surrounding neighborhood, had insisted on installing last year. At the time, Johnny had proclaimed it a waste of money and a concession to the fearmongering of the local news outlets. But now, given the recent increase in drug activity in Little Silver, he had to concede that perhaps the lighting system was a pretty good idea. If only the damn bulbs—at eighty dollars a pop!—would quit blowing.

  “I found the bad one,” Roy hollered from the top of the building. “One dead bulb was shorting out the whole system.”

  Even from this distance, Johnny could see that Roy was sweltering on the rooftop. And no wonder. It was at least ninety degrees here in the parking lot, Johnny realized, which at least had the benefit of a bit of shade from the few moss-draped live oaks that stretched their roots under the railroad tracks to the west and cast long afternoon shadows to the east. He could only imagine the heat up on the blackened roof of the ice plant. Sure enough, Roy looked to be in a hurry to get down. “Let me toss this to you,” he call
ed, holding up a lightbulb the size of a small punch bowl.

  Johnny squinted up at him. Roy had become a blurry silhouette against the sun’s rays, which were so intense they were beginning to play tricks on Johnny’s vision. In fact, there now appeared to be more than one Roy—there were two up there … and now three? Johnny couldn’t get oriented; a formation of green floaters danced across his sight line. He knew he wouldn’t be able to see the bulb if Roy threw it, so he held up his hands in a gesture of refusal.

  “You ready?” Roy said.

  “Yes,” Johnny said.

  The bulb sailed down from the roof and smashed on the blacktop three feet to Johnny’s left, sending razors of glass across two empty parking spaces and clinging to the legs of Johnny’s pants. He rubbed his eyes.

  “Oh, man,” Roy said.

  Johnny looked up. “You numpty,” he said. “What the hell did you think was going to happen?”

  “Well, I thought you were going to catch it, Johnny.”

  “I told you not to throw it.”

  “You did not! You said throw it.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I said are you ready, and you said yes.”

  Johnny squinted at Roy, feeling as he did a fat drop of sweat tracking down his back. Had he said yes? He meant to say no. He searched for an echo in his audio memory. Damn. Maybe he had said yes. Why did he say yes? Everything, today, was short-circuiting. Even his brain.

  Up on the roofline, Roy was shaking his head. “I’ll be right down,” Roy said.

  Johnny kicked at a few of the larger shards of glass and bent to pick up the broken base of the bulb. Then he brushed his hands across his pants, realizing too late that he’d just embedded tiny slivers of glass into his hands. A few minutes later Roy appeared, sweating and carrying a push broom.

  “You should have caught that, Ice,” Roy said. “It was right in front of you.” He looked at Johnny curiously. “You all right?” Roy said.

  “Yeh,” Johnny said, though suddenly he wasn’t sure this was true. He walked back into the factory and paused near one of the catch bins to cool off. He peered into the bin and watched the cubes of ice fall, bright and clean.

  Johnny had come to know many things about ice. He and Pauline once attended a talk at the community center at the Watchers Island town hall. The talk was given by an artist; he was some sort of crystal craftsman, or he worked in glass; Johnny couldn’t remember. But he said the reason people are drawn to glass, and to crystals of any sort, is that the reflectiveness reminds them of where they came from, of some bright nascent place, and Johnny thought it was the same with ice. It was an astonishing substance that most people rarely stopped to contemplate. He considered a simple cube of ice—the outer ridge clear as a diamond, and within, a swirling, smoky core. Ice can vanish in a moment and endure for thousands of years. It can freeze metal and burn human flesh. It can sink a tanker and soothe a baby’s gums. It can crawl. It can rise from the earth. It can fall from the sky. It can preserve a beating human heart in a flimsy Styrofoam cooler.

  At the factory, most men saw it as nothing but a chore. It was the enemy, to them, something to be made, packed, stacked, loaded, shipped. But Johnny never tired of it. Think of it! Water turned to ice. Liquid turned to solid. Who but Christ could take one element and turn it into another? He told Pauline all the time, We are miracle workers. Have you ever seen a frozen waterfall? he asked her. It’s a violation of everything we know: the space-time continuum, the basic laws of physics. Motion is arrested, energy is suspended, the laws of nature are confounded. It’s magic, he told her. It’s the fifth dimension.

  It’s just ice, she said.

  Johnny looked up from the ice in the catch bin. Roy was back inside the factory. He was shouting. Dumbo was convulsing again. Johnny was seized with nausea. He bolted for the men’s room and made it to a stall in time to vomit, but as he straightened up and made for the sink to wash up, the room became a kaleidoscope. The ceiling tiles fell around his head, and the floor buckled and wrapped itself around his knees. The light became liquid. He heard his own voice moaning. And then all was dark.

  He woke to the sound of Roy’s voice.

  Ice, you fell.

  Ice, you hit your head.

  Ice, man, are you with us?

  Two

  Johnny’s father used to have a saying: And as soon you’re oot one load o’ shite, there’s another. Johnny could still picture him, face swollen with alcohol, eyes kind but beaten, drinking Buckfast on the cold stoop of that old east Glasgow flat and waiting patiently for the ascites to set in. From time to time, Charlie MacKinnon’s expression came back to Johnny, and right now was one of those times. It was early afternoon. Johnny was lying on his back in a wickedly cold MRI machine, his head immobilized in a donut-shaped coil. Pauline was waiting outside the scan room, and a radiology tech named Kevin was talking to him through a set of headphones. It had been an uncomfortable day, to say the least: a trip to the ER at St. Vincent’s following the spell in the factory. Then fast-tracked by the attending physician for both a brain scan and a neurological consult. The ER doctor had prattled on about hypoglycemia and stress and sleep deprivation and then ordered up an MRI. “Just to take a look inside there,” he said, tapping on Johnny’s forehead. “Just to see.”

  “You good, my man?” Kevin was saying now. “There’s a microphone. You can talk. I can hear you.”

  “I’m good,” Johnny said, though of course he wasn’t. Good? Define “good,” he wanted to say. If “good” meant submitting to this silly medical fire drill, which was sucking up an entire day’s work, just to appease his overanxious wife, then yes, he was great! So he took a header in the men’s room! So what? A little dizzy spell was all it was. But Pauline had pushed him to agree to a brain scan, for the love of God. At first Johnny refused. There was nothing wrong with him. In fact, he told her, she was probably right that he should have eaten something this morning, so if they could just stop on the way back to work, let him get some food into him, maybe a sandwich or a burger, something solid, he’d be just fine. When she threatened to get hysterical he finally agreed, but not before sending Roy back to the factory to get on production. The damned ice wasn’t going to make itself.

  He was fine. Surely he was. So couldn’t they just get this nonsense over with?

  “About fifteen more minutes,” Kevin said. “I need you to keep real still. We’re going to try to get these scans in one take. But you tell me if you’re not good.”

  “All right,” Johnny said.

  The machine was pinging like a submarine and Johnny had a wicked itch on the side of his face, but he’d be damned if he was going to make a move and risk screwing up this stupid procedure. Screw it up, he’d only have to do it again. He squared his jaw against the itch and counted pings.

  “I want you to be all good,” Kevin said.

  “I’m good, Kevin.”

  “Don’t be nervous.”

  “I’m really not nervous, Kevin.” Johnny imagined the itch as a sharp, invasive sliver of ice poking annoyingly into his cheekbone. He willed it to melt.

  “Eleven minutes, Johnny,” Kevin said.

  “Okay.”

  “Your wife said they call you Ice.”

  “The boys at my factory do.”

  “I bet you feel like ice right now. I know it’s cold in there.”

  “It ain’t warm.”

  “Ten minutes. Be good, my man, be good.”

  The forced stillness was introducing an unwelcome opportunity to think, and now the result was a creeping unease. Pauline’s overreactions aside, Johnny had to admit there’d been something decidedly squirrelly about the way the morning’s little swooning fit—or whatever you’d call it—came on so fast and so effectively laid him out. He hadn’t been feeling right all morning, no doubt about it. And if he was totally honest with himself he guessed he’d admit to a certain disquietude brought on by uninvited ruminations over Corran’s welfare on this, his son’s thi
rtieth birthday. And all right, sure, there was also the ongoing worry over the pending OSHA appeal, a sourly insistent anxiety which had been bubbling since the summer. But those things did not seem like they could have been responsible—either singly or in concert—for the frighteningly psychedelic experience that had leveled him out in the men’s room a couple of hours ago. Could they? He’d always heard stress could take an unexpected physical toll. But fainting? Johnny was not a fainter. Something was amiss.

  “Think of something else,” Kevin said, as if reading his mind. “Just peace out. Take a little nap, even. Go someplace you like, right? Like, the prettiest place you’ve ever been.” Johnny steadied his breathing. He was actually tired, in fact. A nap didn’t sound half-bad. A little mental vacation. All righty. He imagined Pauline out in the waiting room, probably playing a word game on her phone and trying to tune out Fox News on the television. The pings became more rhythmic. The drone of the MRI leveled out. And then damned if he could help it, but when he started to drift into the gauzy fog of a light doze, the first place Johnny went was to a high, rocky hilltop on a tiny island in the Hebrides. With Corran.

  The week before Johnny left Scotland all those years ago, Sharon had got the idea they should all take a farewell day trip. The seaside, she said. Corran needs to have a look at the sea. They borrowed a Datsun Sunny from Sharon’s aunt—red; Johnny could remember it clearly—and they all headed out at dawn, even Toole, driving up toward the coast, looking for the ocean. They passed Loch Lomond and pushed on, northwest, with little Corran jumping all over Sharon in the backseat; this was before car seats—what did they know? They reached the town of Oban, saw the crystal blue of the Hebrides and the seals slipstreaming in the current, but still they kept on—took an auto-ferry over to Mull, then pushed on even farther, a full hour across the rocky backbone of the island to its most western point. There they left the Datsun in a car park in Fionnphort and took a pedestrian ferry to a tiny little island in the Inner Hebrides: Iona. And there, finally, Johnny had the feeling they’d reached the end of the line—had gone as far as they could. There was nothing farther beyond but the wide cold sea.