The Ice House

by Laura Lee Smith

  “Shouldn’t you be resting?” she asked him.

  “This is resting,” he said. He was hunched over a vise, trying to wrench loose a stubborn bolt. A sheen of sweat glossed his face and arms.

  “I’m worried you’re exerting yourself.”

  “Uph,” he said, leaning into the wrench. “Didn’t you say you were going to the factory?”

  “I am. But I’d feel better if you’d come in the house and watch TV or something. It’s too hot out here.”

  “Uph.”

  “Or can’t you just sit and read a book or something?”

  “Uph.”

  She threw up her hands. She went to the kitchen and filled up a glass with ice water, which she took to the garage and left on the workbench. He’d broken the seal on the bolt and had moved on to adjusting a lathe.

  “Please don’t have a seizure while I’m gone,” she said.

  “I’ll try not to, Pauline.”

  Fine. There was little else she could do for Johnny now except keep the proverbial boat afloat, which meant getting to the factory and taking care of business. Plus, it would get her mind off things. She drove away from the house, feeling a satisfying ache in her calf as she stepped on the accelerator. She’d done five miles this morning. Not bad at all, though the last mile had been a struggle and more than once she’d almost caved in to the desire to cut her stride and just walk for a stretch. But she’d pushed through, and she was glad. Five miles without stopping meant she was right on schedule for the training plan she’d mapped out: incremental mileage increases for the next two months, plus interval and incline training every three days. Then the nine-mile Gate River Run in March. The race was an intimidating prospect—an unforgiving course including two bridges—but she was pretty sure she could finish it. Maybe. If she stayed the course with the training.

  She shook her head. Listen to yourself, Pauline! “If,” and “pretty sure” and “maybe”? What kind of weak thinking was that? She spent so much time reading runners’ magazines and blogs that she had a full repertoire of motivational quotes she could summon at times like this. So let ‘em fly:

  Never give up.

  Dream it, dare it, do it.

  Attitude is everything.

  She thought of Rohan Bergonia. He was something of a celebrity in runners’ circles, known as much for his split times as for his enormously popular “Get Runspired” podcast, which Pauline listened to when she needed a little extra motivation. He was rather ridiculous, she had to admit—a breathy and overly earnest little guy of absolutely indiscernible ethnicity—but he was good for serving up an extra dose of drive in the form of inspirational clichés when the tank was really running low. Go hard or go home, he said. Forget “can’t.”

  And her favorite: Failure is not an option.

  Failure. Oh, Rohan, easy for you to say! Sometimes she felt marked for failure, even when she catalogued the many clear successes of her lifetime. College-educated. Happily married. Successful in business. Financially stable. What else was there? And yet, she was dogged with a silly, niggling idea that she was fundamentally predisposed to fail in some significant way, given that she’d been raised in a place that had borne failure as a cross since its inception: Laudonnière—just east of Jacksonville, on the south bank of the St. Johns River’s final winding course before it spit itself outward into the Atlantic.

  The neighborhood had been named by a city manager in the 1950s, somebody who’d fished around to name the new development and had settled on Laudonnière, charmed by the French name but ignorant of its namesake. Pauline had looked it up. Turns out her childhood neighborhood was named after the failed sixteenth-century French Huguenot René Laudonnière, who had royally bunged up the one job he was charged with: to lead a small group of intrepid colonists setting up camp at Fort Caroline. The fort was the first French settlement in the newly discovered Florida, and Laudonnière was placed in charge and told to keep the peace while awaiting the arrival of his boss, Jean Ribault, from France.

  By the time Ribault arrived, the settlement was in disarray—hungry colonists mounting a revolt and pissed-off Timucuan natives demanding repayment for the food they’d advanced Laudonnière. Fiscal mismanagement, in a nutshell, and poor internal communications to boot. Ribault promptly sent Laudonnière packing back to France in humiliation. And what does the city of Jacksonville do? It names an entire neighborhood after this clown. What a cluster. What a celebration of failure. Unreal.

  Pauline piloted the Prius across the bridge out of Watchers Island, where a young woman in a bright yellow shirt was running up the incline. Pauline slowed to watch her. The girl was fast. A steely stride, unwavering. Back straight, arms pumping. Very impressive. The last time Pauline had tried this bridge she was hunched and panting on the incline, her stride so short she was nearly shuffling, and she had to stop and walk the last hundred yards to the top. Which didn’t bode well. If she couldn’t take the wimpy Watchers Island span, how did she think she’d manage the Hart Bridge—epic finale of the Gate River Run?

  Just over the bridge she stopped at Starbucks. She’d made a deal with herself a long time ago that if she had to put up with a fifty-minute commute each day to get from Watchers Island to the factory in Little Silver, then she darn well deserved a decent cup of coffee for the ride. In the Starbucks parking lot, the rain had left deep puddles, and a layer of steam carpeted the blacktop. As Pauline approached the building, a portly old woman in a capacious denim dress was struggling to step off a steep curb while balancing two cups of coffee and a mound of pastries on a cardboard drink carrier. Pauline approached her and took the tray while the woman made it down the curb.

  “Thank you, darlin’,” the woman said. “Very kind.” She was out of breath.

  “Let me walk you to your car,” Pauline said.

  They crossed the parking lot to a frost-colored Buick, where an elderly man sat in the driver’s seat, reading a magazine.

  “My husband does not walk as well as I do,” the woman said. “Which isn’t so damn good! Ha!”

  Pauline smiled. The woman opened her car door, sat down heavily, and regarded Pauline. “Oh, honey. I wish I had your youth,” she said.

  Youth? Pauline supposed everything was relative. She tried to think of something deferential to say. “I wish—I wish I had your knowledge,” she managed.

  The old woman laughed, tickled. “Oh, sweetie. That doesn’t mean anything,” she said. She took the tray from Pauline. The old man leaned across from the driver’s seat.

  “I know you,” he said. “You’re Packy Knight’s daughter.”

  Pauline’s stomach contracted.

  “I owned a distributorship on the Westside for years,” the man said. “Logan’s? You remember us? I’m Bob Logan. We used to get our ice from Packy.”

  “Oh, yes,” Pauline said. It was steaming in the parking lot. She could feel her makeup beginning to melt. She glanced toward Starbucks, where the air-conditioning inside the building had created rivulets of condensation on every window. She smiled wanly at the old man.

  “We closed up shop a long time ago,” Bob Logan was saying. “But I remember Packy! He was a piece of work! He still around?”

  Pauline started to shake her head, then caught herself—Lord, what was wrong with her? Her father wasn’t dead. He was all but incapacitated with Alzheimer’s and had been for some years, but he wasn’t dead. She ought to be more sensitive to the distinction. “Yes,” she said. “He’s around. He’s not too well these days, though. He’s …” She searched for the right word. “He’s diminished.” Diminished. It sounded so feminine. It didn’t seem the right word for her father at all. Destroyed, she might have said. Vanquished. And by his own bungled neurons, of all things! Bob Logan looked pained to hear it; not everyone, Pauline knew, would have shared his sentiment.

  “Aw, nuts,” Logan said. “Dementia?”

  She nodded.

  “He still know anybody?”

  “He recognizes my sister
and me,” she said. “But he’s slipping up on everybody else. Sometimes he remembers stuff from years back but can’t remember what happened yesterday.”

  “And your mother? Jo?”

  “She died twenty years ago. Ovarian cancer.” Though she’d had long years of practice in making this report, it still sometimes took Pauline by surprise to say it. Mama. Scent of lavender and talc. Van Cliburn on the eight-track. Lipton tea bags by the gross. Ah, Mama. Pauline clenched a fist and let her fingernails dig into the heel of her hand. Sometimes that helped.

  “Oh, I read about your factory in the paper,” Logan’s wife said. “You had a big accident there, didn’t you?”

  “Blew the hell out of the neighborhood, was what I heard,” Logan said.

  “Not really,” Pauline said. She felt a familiar defensiveness flaring up. “It wasn’t as bad as the news was making it out to be. Nobody was hurt.”

  “Coulda been, though,” Logan added helpfully. “Coulda been folks killed, matter of fact, don’t you think?”

  Matter of fact. Fact! What did Bob Logan know about fact? Pauline was getting a little tired of people in town—from the Times-Union editors to her busybody neighbors on Watchers Island to this old fart before her—thinking they knew the facts about what happened at Bold City Ice last summer. Please. She was there. She knew what happened.

  The facts of the accident were these: At 4:07 on a stultifying afternoon, a rotting branch fell from an oak tree in the factory yard and hit a tank filled with nine hundred gallons of pressurized anhydrous ammonia. The vessel ruptured in a blast that shook the building, sent a chill down Pauline’s spine, and sent a long white plume of ammonia snaking through the streets of Little Silver. Johnny and Roy knew what to do, of course: shelter in place, keep everyone inside, call the police and the first responders to secure the neighborhood, and pray that the residents of Little Silver would have the sense to heed the warnings and stay indoors, until the wicked ammonia vapors dissipated, which, thank God, they did.

  Then came the aftermath—those oppressive weeks of fending off news reporters, absorbing community ire, and trying to address factory morale. The OSHA investigation was swift and damning: The investigator found two gaps in the maintenance logs on the ammonia tank—minor gaps!—and that was all it took. A few weeks after the accident, certified mail delivered a devastating document: a Citation and Notice of Penalty from the United States Occupational Safety and Health Administration to the tune of $750,000 for violations of safety standards. Those were the facts.

  And yet—it was maddening. Johnny insisted that the tank was properly maintained and always had been. Somebody had been a shitty record-keeper, he admitted, but he and Roy maintained those tanks to a T. He said he’d stake his life on it. Then why did it rupture? Johnny and Pauline had a theory: The drug activity in Little Silver was reaching a tipping point, and every junkie in the world knew that anhydrous ammonia was a critical ingredient in making meth. If someone in the neighborhood decided to scale the fence and tap into the ice factory’s ready supply of meth-making ammonia, you could bet good and damn well he wasn’t going to follow safety procedures to do it. A loosened bleeder valve, a break in a seal, even abrasions on the feeder hose—any one of these factors could have contributed to the rupture, Johnny said, and any one of them could have been caused by an overzealous meth dealer tapping ammonia in the middle of the night. Criminal tampering—it was a perfectly reasonable conclusion.

  But OSHA needed proof. Johnny and Pauline met with the OSHA area director to present their theory. The man was sympathetic, but immovable. “We’ve identified path of failure,” he said. “Your factory is liable.”

  “We want to appeal,” Pauline said.

  “Well, that’s certainly your right,” the director said. “File a notice of intent. We’ll get you in the pipeline to have a hearing scheduled.” They lawyered up and hunkered down. And now they were waiting.

  Not that any of this was Bob Logan’s business, of course. Facts. I’ll give you facts, she wanted tell him. You’re getting on my last nerve, as Claire would say. That’s a fact. Pauline looked at the old man in the Starbucks parking lot and bit her tongue in forbearance.

  “Shame about your daddy,” Logan was saying now. “I’m sorry, honey. Packy Knight—we go way back.” How far back? Pauline wondered. The image of Bob Logan swinging an ax handle alongside her father on a steaming summer night suddenly presented itself. That far back? She looked at the man: old white guy, probably in his late seventies. Fat with prosperity. Expensive golf shirt. Cushy Buick. He fit the bill. She watched as Logan pulled a brown paper napkin off the tray of pastries on his wife’s lap. He plucked a pen from the glove box and wrote his name and phone number in a spidery hand on the napkin, then handed it to Pauline.

  “If your daddy comes to himself at any point, you ask him to give me a call,” he said. “He might remember me. I’d like to say hello to old Packy. He was a force to be reckoned with, wasn’t he?” She took the napkin and told him she would. Bob Logan finally eased himself over toward the driver’s seat and backed the Buick out of the space, leaving Pauline standing in the damp lot. Logan’s wife rolled down the window and waved as they drove off. “Don’t get old!” she called out.

  Pauline tucked the napkin into her purse and walked into the Starbucks. A force to be reckoned with. Well, that was one way to put it. And maybe Bob Logan knew better than most. As a young man, Packy had been one of a mob of whites who marauded in the streets of downtown Jacksonville on a summer day in 1960, wielding ax handles to beat bloody a group of blacks who had staged a sit-in at the lunch counter at W. T. Grant to protest segregation. Some of the white men wore Confederate uniforms. Some carried nooses, lest anyone miss the message. The brutal day went down in history as Ax Handle Saturday. A handful of whites were arrested, though most withdrew unchecked into the safe web of local cronyism.

  But even Packy and his companions couldn’t hold back the tide of civil rights. By spring the next year, the same blacks who had led the initial protest were eating their hamburgers and drinking their malts alongside wide-eyed whites at the lunch counters of Woolworth’s, Cohen’s, Grant, Kress, and McCrory’s. Packy never spoke of Ax Handle Saturday, but Pauline had read accounts of the beatings, and one night when she was a senior in high school, she heard her mother whispering into the phone to a woman from the Junior League. Jo twisted the phone cord as she spoke. “I don’t think he meant to hurt anyone,” she said. “He was just—I don’t know—caught up in something, you know what I mean? It was the times, is what I mean.”

  Pauline retreated to her bedroom that night and lay awake for a long time, staring into the darkness, her chest clenched in shame and confusion. In the morning, Packy was in the kitchen, making bacon. She watched him turning the meat through roiling grease. She told him she was thinking of becoming a vegetarian, and oh, he laughed. “You playin’ like one of those hippie-dippy types now?” he said. “Shee-ut. Eat some bacon. You want that this little piggy died in vain?” She watched his thick white hands until she felt nauseated, and then she went to school hungry.

  Pauline hadn’t even been alive on Ax Handle Saturday. She reminded herself of this regularly. She could hardly be held accountable today for the decades-old actions of her father, despicable though they might have been. Still, old-timers in Jacksonville knew the score, knew Packy had been one of the Ax Handle whites, and some were proud of him for it, even today. Others were angry, nursing grudges. Pauline had lived under this shadow all her life, had tried to distance herself any way she could, even while running the same business on which Packy had built his name and his fortune. Fifteen years ago, she changed the name of the ice plant from Knight’s Ice to Bold City Ice, telling Packy it was an effort to give the company a hipper brand, appeal to the younger generation of distributors and consumers. But the real reason was that she didn’t want to be associated with Packy Knight. The White Knight. She’d been thrilled to change her own name to MacKinnon when she marr
ied Johnny.

  Packy still lived out in Laudonnière, in the big house on the river, but he was quelled with dementia and medication now; he was physically fit enough to shuffle around the house but he spoke little and rarely went out, preferring to spend his days staring blank-faced at what seemed a never-ending marathon of Judge Judy and Ellen episodes while his live-in caregivers cycled through their shifts.

  But it was true, what she’d told Bob Logan—Packy still recognized his two daughters. She almost wished he didn’t, and she’d made the mistake of voicing that sentiment once to her sister Caroline, with whom she was familiarly cordial but not exactly close, a fact which took years for Pauline to admit to herself, but which was strangely freeing when she did. “Then it wouldn’t make any difference if we visited or not,” she’d told Caroline. “I mean, it’s not like he enjoys seeing us. I don’t think he enjoys much, at this point. Maybe he’d be just as happy to forget he even has daughters.” Caroline, who primly kept up weekly visits with their father (though Pauline was sure these were executed more out of a self-righteous ambition to impress the caregivers than out of any genuine filial sentiment), scolded her for it. “He’s not going to be here forever, Pauline,” Caroline said. “You’ll feel rotten if you just ignore him and then he ups and dies. Selfish and rotten.” Pauline wasn’t so sure.

  Did she love her father? She’d stumbled into a debate with Johnny once over this. They’d been sitting on the porch with a bottle of cabernet, and she’d been tipsily chiding him about his estrangement from Corran. “You can love a person and not love his behavior,” she’d said. “He’s your son. He’s your family.”

  “I do love him,” Johnny said. “Don’t tell me I don’t love him.”

  “Then make peace with him.”

  “It’s not that easy.”