“I didn’t take myself out of the loop. Corran kicked me out.”
“That’s your interpretation.”
“Anyway, he wouldn’t talk to me even if I did call him.”
“That’s not the issue. The issue is that Anna’s going to prison. For a long time, and to tell you the truth, I’m relieved. I’m sorry, but she’s somebody else’s worry, not mine, and Corry has a far better chance of staying clean without her around. But here’s the next thing: Corran’s on his own with the baby now. And I don’t know about that.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s fragile, is what I mean. I really believe he’s cleaned himself up this time, but that doesn’t mean I consider him exactly fit to raise a child.”
“I thought he was out on a rig?”
“Well, he had to take leave of that. You can’t take care of a baby from the middle of the North Sea. He’s got himself up in Port Readie in some mate’s little cottage, trying to make a go. Got Lucy in day care, and he’s working on the ferry at Loch Linnhe. I’m proud of him, on the one hand. But on the other, I’m worried. How’s he going to manage, Johnny? I mean, how is he going to do this?” She paused. “Ah, but she’s the sweetest little thing, Johnny. You should see what a sweet thing she is.”
Johnny tried to envision it: Corran on his own, taking care of a baby. It was impossible to summon the mental picture. And while he agreed with Sharon—it was a good thing, in the long run, to have Anna out of the picture—it was hard to reckon how Corran, who for the last decade had been hardly able to care for himself, was going to care for a baby.
“Anyway,” she said, “I just thought you should be up to speed. I know you and Corran are not getting on. But still. You never call me, so I decided to call you.”
“I’m bad with communication.”
“Among other things.” Funny how Sharon could pick up right where she left off—that same kindly acidic tone, that same disarming directness. When Johnny first met her, he had mistaken her asperity for aggression, and he was both aroused and intimidated by it. But he came to understand that was not it at all. She was simply tough in her loving, as impatient and demanding as a lioness. Being loved by Sharon was a like an assault of affection, a contact sport.
“How are you doing, Sharon?”
“I’m all right.”
“Yeh?”
“Sure. We’re getting along. I’m finished with chemo, thank God. Remind me never to get breast cancer again, aye? Now just working all the time. You know, same as ever. I tell you, I think every day about bringing little Lucy down here with us, but we just can’t. Toole had his knees replaced, did I tell you that? Och, what a pain in the ass he’s been in the recovery. He wouldn’t do what the doctor advised and do one at a time. Had to bang them both out in one go. What a numpty. Who opts to disable both of his legs at the same time? My husband, that’s who, Johnny. Why do I marry daft men, can you tell me that? I thought I’d go mad with the fetching-tea business. Hell of a road back. But getting better, day by day.”
Johnny told her to hang tight. He thanked her for the update. He hung up. A vision of Corran holding a baby on a cold Argyll hillside appeared, and he took a deep breath and pushed the vision back. He felt a chill and looked down, then kicked reflexively to dislodge a pale frog, nearly translucent, that had landed on his ankle and clung, desperate, trying to move up the leg of his trousers.
Christ. He was being invaded. Everywhere, breached.
Inside the garage, the air was hot and stale. Johnny turned on a window air conditioner—a secondhand junker that had been holding on through the last few summers, keeping the garage bearable, if not comfortable. The unit wheezed once, then died.
“Bag of shite,” he said to it. The heat. It was the only problem with this garage—it got so damn hot out here. Other than that, it was perfect—a full three cars wide, with space for both commuting vehicles plus a project car. It was more of a machine shop than a garage, really, and Johnny was proud of the accumulation of tools he’d acquired through the years. Welders, grinders, shears, and a press brake, even a lathe and a full-sized milling machine hulking next to the water heater. It could get a little cramped at times, but he didn’t mind. On weekends, he could pull cars out to the driveway for the day to make more room for working.
Johnny pushed the button to open the garage door. It clanked up the tracks, hell of a racket, and in came the wet smell of salt air, the clatter of cicadas, and a shrieking gull, not far. He maneuvered around the VW Beetle parked in the garage, thinking, as he did every day, about how much he’d like to banish that damn time-waster so he could fit in his real project car: a gorgeous 1972 Chevelle with a throaty V-8, close to mint! All it needed was a bit of bodywork to the right front quarter-panel and some attention paid to the interior, which ought to be doable enough, if he could ever get to it. And getting to it was exactly the problem, in terms of both time and access, because for the last two months the Chevelle had been criminally parked along the side of the house and relegated to a car cover, thanks to the bloody 1977 VW Beetle taking up prime garage space.
What a disaster this Beetle was proving to be. An albatross. It was a project car he’d taken on with Corran years ago. The idea was that they’d work on it together during summers and that Corran would have it to run around Watchers Island in when he came for visits. Johnny never liked the idea of the Beetle, but he gave it a go after seeing Corran’s teenage eyes light up when they’d stumbled on the banty little car in a used car lot behind the ice plant. Ah, let him have it, he thought at the time. It would be good for them—something to work on together. He bought it and had it towed out to the house. The problem was that Corran had scarcely begun to learn his way around the engine compartment when he discovered heroin, and that was that.
Johnny’d hung on to the car for years, waiting for Corran to come around and show a renewed interest, but no more; he’d had enough of looking at it. Only thing to do was sell it. Both instinct and the Internet VW message boards told him the wisest step was to just unload the car for parts—quick and simple. But something else, some niggling perfectionism, perhaps, was telling him to pull the heap back from decay just enough to tease some adventurous buyer with the idea of restoration. He’d get it running first, then sell it. Just because he hated Beetles didn’t mean everybody did. No sense giving the wretched thing a death sentence.
He went back into the garage and moved around, turning on lights and tools. He liked this part of the day. Normally he was the first one to get up, having developed in his youth a peculiar feeling of urgency in the mornings, a restlessness to get stuff done that often sent him out to the garage in the early dawn to fiddle away an hour or two on a project or to work on tooling a part for one of the icemakers before heading to the factory for the day.
This morning, though, he’d been slower to rise. After Pauline’s alarm jarred him out of sleep, he remained in bed for a while, staring at the ceiling and stubbornly not thinking about his brain cyst by turning over possible solutions for the latest problem on the VW—how to unfreeze a pigheaded piston that was locked up in a cylinder. He’d been struggling with it for nearly a week now, but it was thus far intractable. A few days ago, in a near-rage, he’d spent hours pulling the engine. He then propped it on its side and left a forty-pound battery parked atop the frozen piston, hoping that the weight of the battery would eventually press the damn thing loose in its housing, but he didn’t have high hopes.
Now Johnny pulled the battery off the piston, then gave the piston a diagnostic thunk with a ball-peen hammer. Still stuck, immovable as granite inside the cylinder. This thing was going to total the engine if he didn’t get it loose. He’d seen the likes of it before. That time back home in Glasgow, the piston immobilized in his Triumph motorbike. He’d beaten on the cylinder for more than an hour before dousing it in oil, tying a thick rope around the cylinder head, and suspending the entire bike from a blackthorn tree in the back garden to let gravity do the work.
It was still hanging there when Sharon and Corran had come back from the shops, and Corran—what was he then, two? three?—had laughed so hard at the sight of a motorcycle hanging in a tree that Johnny was afraid the boy would wet himself. But that was many years ago. And there was no hanging a Volkswagen from a tree.
However, Johnny was nothing if not tenacious. In fact, Pauline accused him of being stubborn past the point of clear thinking, but he admired a little intransigence in a person. He respected it; it bespoke temerity. There was a famous wrestler in sixth-century Greece, Milo of Croton. He was said to have lifted a calf every day from the calf’s birth. Once the animal was grown, Milo was lifting a full-sized ox. This was the kind of tenacity Johnny admired. This was what the world was lacking today. It was nearly the end of October. By Christmas, he would finish this fucking Beetle.
He leaned over the engine, placed a block of wood on the piston head, and hit the wood with the hammer. Then hit it harder. Harder. Harder. On the fourth swing, he hammered the tip of his index finger and let out a grunt of pain before the hammer clattered down into the engine block. He straightened up. This stupid car. He didn’t know if he hated anything as much as this stupid car.
“Why are you fussing with it, then?” Pauline had asked him, more than once. “Just sell it as it is. Let someone else fix it.”
Johnny fetched the hammer, leaned back under the hood, and continued banging at the piston.
An hour later, Johnny had made no progress on the VW. He retreated to the house and cooled off with a shower. He washed the coffeepot and unloaded the dishwasher, then checked on the frogs. Fewer, but still a crowd. General San Jose didn’t want to come down for his breakfast, so Johnny brought the bowl of kibble up to the bedroom and left it on the bed atop a bath towel. Pauline had created a monster. He wandered through the house and tried to decide what to do. He felt like a child, confined to the house. He tidied the bathroom and folded a load of laundry, mostly runners’ singlets and sports bras. He took his steroid medication and peed on a sugar test strip, which he had to do twice a day to make sure the steroids weren’t causing diabetes. Good times. He tried to read but couldn’t concentrate, and then he spent a fretful period wondering if the reason he couldn’t concentrate was the parasitic cyst on his brain. My God, couldn’t it have been anywhere else? He thought about other parts of his body that could more comfortably host a tumor. A finger, he decided. Or a toe.
This was abysmal, Johnny thought then. What a waste of a day. He should be at the factory, shouting at the loading crew to hurry up, kicking at the conveyor motor on Dumbo to get her working again, comparing distribution logs with Roy in the break room. How was he supposed to do this for two weeks? There was nothing to do but think, and that was going to get him nowhere. He went upstairs and fetched the General to take him out back for a pee. Then he locked up the house, turned toward the beach, and started to walk.
I want you gone. The sentence was becoming a refrain, insistent and unwelcome. Johnny’s ears began to ring with the incantation. He breached the dune and headed south along the waterline, listening to the crash of surf, willing it to drown out the words.
Five
Vic’s House of Crabs was dead. This was not unexpected, given that it was three o’clock on a weekday afternoon. Not a time Johnny would normally have found himself stopping in at Vic’s for a cold one. But thanks to his intracranial tenant, as he’d come to think of it, things these days were decidedly nonnormal. The notion of visiting Vic’s had come to him while he was strolling along the beach, and he’d slapped his pocket reflexively to see if he’d brought his wallet, which, thankfully, he had. He’d reached the pier and ascended the dunes toward Vic’s, reasoning that if he couldn’t drive to his factory and make ice, he might as well make the most of a sunny afternoon with a quick pint before Pauline got home. Meds be damned. Besides, Dr. Tosh hadn’t said anything about not drinking a beer or two while taking steroids. And Johnny—well, Johnny hadn’t asked.
The crab shack was a curmudgeonly little building, all bleached white cinder blocks and salt-rotted trim. It was parked on a concrete boardwalk pointing east toward the ocean, so that while its patrons parked in back, in the pier parking lot, they had to walk around to the front of the building and face, Zen-like, the saline spray of the Atlantic before entering. Vic’s had a roof that slanted upward in the front like the brim of a baseball cap, and this brim formed an overhang under which, later on, the beachgoers would queue at the walk-up window for quick-serve crab sandwiches and hush puppies, while the eat-in and take-out set crowded the small interior of the little restaurant, if it could be called that, with only its six wooden stools along a counter under the beach-facing windows.
But that would be later. For now, the surfers were still in the ocean wresting the final rides from a dwindling nor’easter. The toddlers were home for their naps. The Jacksonville commuters had not yet returned to the island, and the seniors were still at home, holding out impatiently for Vic’s five o’clock early-bird specials. In fact, at the moment, only one of the six stools at the window counter in Vic’s House of Crabs was occupied, and it was by Johnny himself, who was nursing a beer and watching a thunderhead track south.
The crab shack’s front door banged open, and in came an argument. Johnny turned on his stool and saw the group of old men he’d come to think of as the Bocce Quartet: Sid, Tony, Errol, and Bill. They came to the beach every day to play bocce on the courts just behind Vic’s. Or at least, ostensibly to play bocce. What they really came to do was drink sangria from a plastic jug, ogle bikinis, and goad each other into a series of overblown debates that served little purpose, as far as Johnny could see, other than to pass the time and keep the old men away from their wives for a while. But the debates were generally quite entertaining, and for lack of anything better to do, Johnny was feeling inclined today to order a second pint and settle in, even though the old geezers could get carried away. The last time Johnny had seen them in Vic’s they were so worked up over Social Security he thought he’d have to physically intervene.
Sid Hoying was his favorite. He was ancient—had to be in his nineties, Johnny would guess—but was the most energetic of the bunch, badgering and haranguing the others long after a debate had died a slow death, long after the other men had thrown up their hands, refilled their paper cups with sangria, and returned balefully to the bocce court. Sid had been retired for years from a long career as an attorney for the City of Jacksonville, though he still kept his generously proportioned nose in every bit of city business he could. He’d been a progressive back in the day, had raised the ire of many of his contemporaries by taking a hard line on the small group of white thugs—Packy Knight cleverly not among them—who’d been arrested after Ax Handle Saturday, though despite Sid’s efforts most of the culprits still got off light.
He was around during Jacksonville’s 1968 consolidation with Duval County, too, and the city’s subsequent effort to minimize some of the pains of its recent past through a more positive branding campaign. There was a famous photo of Jacksonville mayor Hans Tanzler posing with a new sign at the county line after the big consolidation brouhaha. In the photo, Tanzler is standing on a high ladder with the actress Lee Meredith, who’d been enlisted by a PR firm with a connection to Hollywood to bring a little sex appeal to the moment. Meredith strikes a wildly seductive pose at the mayor’s side—chest thrust into Tanzler’s face, one long tanned leg extended out at her side. “Jacksonville,” the sign proclaims, “Bold New City of the South.” On the ground, a man holding the ladder has the good fortune of the best view in the Bold City that day: the underside of Lee Meredith’s microscopic miniskirt. And that was Sid. “Finest day of my career,” he often said. He had a framed enlargement of the photo hanging above the television set in his living room.
The topic today appeared to be reverse mortgages.
“You’re letting the bank eat your equity!” Sid was saying to Tony. “Don’t you want to have money to leave your kid
s?”
“Not particularly,” Tony replied. “Have you met my kids?”
“You’re using the most expensive credit there is!” Sid said.
“Equity-rich equals cash-poor. This just reverses the equation.”
“What if you have to go into a home?”
“I’m not going into a home. Shoot me first,” Tony said.
And so on. Sid looked over and saw Johnny.
“Johnny!” Sid said. “Tell him. He’s getting raped!”
“You’re getting raped, Tony,” Johnny said mildly.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tony shot back. “This is about money. We gotta make our own way here, you know. You’re used to that socialism over there in England.”
“I’m not from England.”
“What, then. Scotland, then.”
“Even socialists like money, Tony,” Johnny said.
“Ah, bullshit,” Tony said.
Sid peered at Johnny. “It’s Wednesday,” he said. “What are you doing here on a Wednesday afternoon?”
“Took the day off.”
“Well, that’s a first,” Sid said. He patted the leather case of bocce balls he’d laid on the counter. “Play a round with us.”
“No thanks,” Johnny said. “That’s an old fart’s game.”
“Of which you are one,” Sid said. Most days Johnny would have let this slide. But today it got his goat. He was only fifty-three!
“Sid, you’ve got forty years on me,” he said.
“You think so?” Sid said, genuinely surprised.
“I do.”
“It’s funny,” Sid said. “I don’t remember getting this old.”
“You’re old, Sid.”
“I guess you’re right, Johnny.” Sid pulled out an empty stool and climbed atop it like a spider monkey. “Then I suppose I better get moving,” Sid said. “I still got drinking to do.” Bill, Errol, and Tony took stools at the end of the row and continued their quarrel. Johnny’s phone buzzed in his pocket, and he fished it out to see Pauline’s name on the screen. He answered.
The Ice House Page 10
