The Ice House

by Laura Lee Smith

  “I told you he’s an idiot.”

  “Yes, you did,” she said. “And I have to concede you are correct, Roy. He’s driving me crazy. And another thing—this OSHA stuff has me a nervous wreck. The little lawyer-boy is making a mess all over the place. Research. For what? I feel like we could all lose our jobs, Roy. Pauline keeps saying a bust at Leonard’s house would break the case. I don’t know. That seems like a long shot if you ask me. Should I go over there myself and buy some meth? Would that give us enough evidence? God. I got three kids. I don’t know how much more of all this I can take.”

  “You need a break, Claire.” He’d given up the pretense of looking for her keys. They weren’t in the office. He stood in his doorway and looked out onto the empty ice floor. Still no crew. “We should go have a beer sometime,” he said. He chewed on his lip, surprised by his own moxie. Claire didn’t answer right away. He laughed a little bit. Like it was a joke. Was it a joke?

  “Ed!” she barked. “I invoice Southeastern every two weeks, not weekly! Stop pestering me!” She sighed into the phone. “I gotta go, Roy,” she said. “Oh, and listen. I just found my keys. They were in the bottom of my purse. I’ll talk to you later, Roy.”

  Roy put the phone into his pocket. He shivered and zipped his parka up a little higher.

  All right, so Florence. Maybe he could open another credit card. He’d look into that.

  Owen Vickers was waiting on the loading bay with a bill of lading. Roy signed it. “That the only one?” he said. Vickers shrugged. He was wearing Oakley snow-ski sunglasses (in Florida) and had the most annoying hair arrangement Roy had ever seen, some sort of gel making it stand up in a ridge along the top of his head. He looked like an overgrown Kewpie doll.

  “I think not,” Roy said. He motioned for Vickers to follow him back to his office, where he checked the delivery schedule and printed out three more bills of lading. “Get the loaders to fill you up,” he said. “Don’t be pulling out of here with a half-empty truck.”

  “Wasn’t my fault,” Vickers said. “They’re the ones loaded the truck.” Roy squinted at Vickers.

  “And you can’t take it upon yourself to tell them to load up more?” he said. “Can we not work together here, Owen? Maybe take a little initiative?” This was maddening. Bold City Ice had had a perfectly good foreman’s position open for months, yet Roy had yet to find anybody on the ice floor who displayed enough potential to be promoted into the job. And wouldn’t you think they’d try to prove themselves? Everybody knew the position was sitting open. Here was Owen Vickers, for example: The guy certainly had enough brainpower in his head to do the job if he’d just apply himself to it, but the little turd was so lacking in the motivation department it was appalling. In fact, the only thing he appeared to be motivated to do lately was shark around the reception lobby, eyes trained on Rosa.

  Which was another thing. Last week Roy had spotted the two of them out together at lunchtime, sharing a cigarette at the picnic tables outside Deb’s Deli. A cigarette! Claire would serve Rosa her own head on a platter if she knew her daughter was smoking cigarettes and tramping around with Owen Vickers, and Roy told Rosa as much later that afternoon when he caught her alone in the lobby. Rosa begged him not to tell Claire, and so far, Roy had complied, but he didn’t like it. We’re just friends, Rosa had insisted. Please, Roy. Please?

  “Hey, Owen,” Roy said now. “Why don’t you lay off Rosa Kaplan?”

  “What?” Vickers said. “I’m not doing anything to her.”

  “Yes, but you want to,” Roy said. Vickers snickered. “I’m serious,” Roy said. “Back off. That one’s off-limits.”

  “Why, you got plans?” Vickers said. Roy looked at him. He extended the bills of lading, but when Vickers reached out to take them, Roy pulled them back. He extended them again. Vickers reached out. Roy pulled them back. Then he leaned in a bit closer.

  “Keep your hands off that girl,” he said quietly. Vickers blinked. “You got me?” Roy said.

  “God, settle down, Grassi,” Vickers said. He reached forward and took the bills of lading. “Let me go run my route before it melts.” He saluted and walked out of the office and over to the loading bay, where he started shouting at the loaders about more product. “Come on, come on!” he said. “Grandpa Grassi says to fill me up!”

  One of these days, Roy thought. Pow. Right in the kisser. The pair of guys loading the truck looked at Roy and grinned, and Vickers laughed and said something else, but a street-cleaning vehicle scuttled past on the road beyond the loading bay at that moment and drowned him out, which was just as well. But what was it with the goddamned street sweepers lately? City of Jax must have a maintenance budget surplus this year, for crying out loud. Maybe he should put in an application for city work. Couldn’t hurt.

  Roy walked back to the surge bin and raked away the ice that had melted during the lunch break and was now sticking together, which made it unsuitable for packing. The cubes had to be perfectly shaped and bone-dry to keep the quality of each bag pristine. The tiniest bit of melting meant that misshapen bricks of ice arrived at the distributors’ receiving docks instead of the rattling sacks of crystalline cubes they should have been; the guys on the floor called it “boner ice” when it hardened like that, a phrase which Pauline and Claire disapproved of but which Roy himself found pretty accurate. In any case, Johnny wouldn’t have it. Chunked-up boner ice was a no-no. Keep it dry, keep it loose, keep it cold. Roy raked the clumps toward an open drain in the floor and let them sit there to melt. What a waste. He hated to see fresh product not being used, but so far, they hadn’t come up with a profitable way to repurpose misshapen ice. One of these days he would figure it out, Roy told himself. Just not today.

  He made his way back to his office and as he crossed the threshold, the toe of his boot caught something in the corner of the doorjamb and sent it spinning. What was that? He leaned over and picked up a Bud Light bottle cap. All right, now this pissed him off. Somebody had brought beer out to the shop floor, which was absolutely verboten in safety procedures and which everybody knew was intolerable to both Roy and Johnny. He pitched the bottle cap into the trash. It was the fucking second-shift pallet loaders, no doubt, a near-useless lot to a one. If he caught them with beer on the ops floor—if he caught them with the idea of beer on the ops floor, even—they were going to wish he hadn’t. No wonder Bold City Ice was dealing with an OSHA mess! Didn’t anyone pay any attention to safety around here?

  Dumbo was wobbling again. Roy left his office and went over to kick at her and then, on second thought, he shut her down completely. He wasn’t going to play the Dumbo game today. They’d have to get by with five icemakers for the afternoon, not six. With Johnny out, it would be all they could do to keep up with ice yield in the coming weeks anyway. No sense letting Dumbo beat the whole factory apart for a few extra spits of ice. The production reports this month were going to look like pure ass, that was for sure. But Roy didn’t see how that really mattered, not while they were in this state of arrested development, prepping for an OSHA appeal hearing that hadn’t even been scheduled yet. Not that he was in a hurry for it. If the appeal failed, the odds of Bold City Ice remaining in operation were slim indeed. And then where would Roy be? And Ally? Goodbye, ice. Goodbye, paycheck. Goodbye, Florence.

  Fifteen minutes later Roy still hadn’t seen anyone come back from lunch. He went to his office and used the intercom to talk into the break room.

  “Hey, team,” he said sarcastically, “how ‘bout we make some ice today?”

  No one answered, but he kept the intercom open and heard the scrape of chairs against the floor, followed by the reluctant shuffling of steel-toed boots against worn linoleum.

  “Thank you, ladies,” he said. “Oh, and Dumbo’s down.”

  “Good,” someone said. “Just shoot her and let’s be done with it.”

  Roy clicked the intercom off. His phone buzzed and he looked at it: a text from Ally.

  DadDadDadDadDad …
96 on my Italian quiz! Ready for

  Florence! ☺ ☺ <3 <3

  Roy got up and paced. He took the maintenance manual for Dumbo down from its dusty home atop a steel file cabinet and flipped through it, trying to put his finger on the cause of the imbalance. It was no use. The machine was such a hodgepodge of old and new at this point, such a jimmied-up claptrap of home-tooled replacement parts and ancient rusting mechanisms that there was no telling where the problem could be originating. Plus, he was distracted with trying to mentally compose a suitably positive but noncommittal answer to Ally’s text. Ah, God, Dumbo. He closed the book. He was beginning to feel like a handicapped icemaker himself, beginning to feel that there would be something quite satisfying, in fact, about having a fullon tantrum and flinging himself against the walls of the office to mimic the thrashing of Dumbo in her housing. He took a breath and texted Ally back.

  Go, girl! <3 you. Proud of you. Mwah.

  All right. Now focus, Roy. Dumbo. She was going to knock herself to pieces if they couldn’t resolve this. Roy was reminded, then, of something Johnny’s son Corran once talked about when he was over for a visit. Corran was a good guy. A little misguided, yeah, but so what? Who wasn’t? He was sweet-hearted and quietly smart, a scrappy little dude, still built like a teenager even now, with a ready grin and the same charming Scots affect as his father. Ally was head over heels with a schoolgirl crush on him for a while when she hit about fourteen and Corran came over for a summer, but Corran, who had more than a decade on Ally, never gave her a look, and Roy couldn’t say he was sorry about that.

  Things had taken a sad turn in recent years, though, and he knew Corran and his father had been at a standoff for quite a while now. Roy didn’t know why Johnny was so hard on the kid. Well, yes, he did know why. Corran got messed up with heroin, which was some scary shit, no joke, and then he blew through the MacKinnons’ retirement fund trying to get clean, only to fall right back off the wagon after the last rehab. It sucked, for sure. But still—it was hard to imagine just cutting your kid off the way Johnny had done. Just the thought of it made Roy a little short of breath.

  At any rate, the last time Corran visited, he told Roy something interesting, about a phenomenon called “ground resonance,” an aviation term describing what can happen if a grounded, running helicopter’s blades slip into an unbalanced, asymmetrical rotation, like a washing machine that slips its bushings during the spin cycle and begins to wobble uncontrollably. In ground resonance, the result to the helicopter can be catastrophic—once off-kilter, the craft can’t regain its balance. In mechanical terms, the center of gravity disconnects from the axis of rotation, and the resulting untethered energy creates violent oscillations that can destroy the aircraft—the rotors collapse and begin striking the helicopter’s body until the entire machine self-destructs. Basically, Corran said, the chopper will beat itself to death right there on the landing pad, before it ever gains even a foot of altitude.

  Roy was pretty sure he knew the feeling. He squinted to look out of his good right eye and catch sight through his office window of the afternoon shift finally taking up their places at the icemakers and catch bins and loading zones. That’s it, boys, he thought. Let’s make some fucking ice before we all go down the drain.

  Nine

  The rigs were easier, Corran MacKinnon concluded. Easier than this. Waterlogged isolation, diesel fumes, bone-chilling cold, even the sickening pitches of North Sea swells—all of it was easier than what he was doing right now, which was walking around in the moonlight outside a tiny crofter’s cottage on a highland hillside above Port Readie, trying to get his nine-month-old daughter to stop crying.

  It was biting and damp, but Lucy had herself worked into such a lather of exertion that Corran doubted she was feeling the chill. He was walking slow circuits around the cottage, rubbing her back, talking to her, pleading with her. She’d been crying most of the evening. The reason they were outside in the cold was that earlier, when he was trying to console her with a bottle in the cottage’s little kitchen, she thrust out a pudgy arm and knocked the bottle to the floor, where the top burst open and sent a spray of formula across the baseboards and under the refrigerator. Corran, clutching the screaming baby to his chest, had felt an impulse to throw the child herself down onto the linoleum.

  That spark of rage frightened him so badly he immediately walked her outside, where he policed himself by imagining that the old man and woman who lived in the house at the bottom of the hill were looking out their window at this very moment, taking in the sight of a shadowy figure jiggling a baby around and around the croft grounds. “Look at that daftie from the ferry with the wee bairn, again,” they were saying. “No mum, nah, she’s a junkie gone to jail, you know. He’s got the wee one on his own up there. At least he’s patient with her, aye?”

  God, she could wail! Corran had tried everything—feeding, diapering, burping, dancing, singing. He’d tried the jumper and the music box, the activity quilt and the stacking cubes, the dummy and the teething ring. He’d tried it all. He called his mother an hour ago, but Sharon just sighed and suggested he try it all again.

  “She’s inconsolable,” he said. “I can’t get her to stop.”

  “What can I really do, Corran?” Sharon said. “I’m nearly three hours away.”

  “I’m going mad here.”

  “I’ll be up this weekend to help you. Maybe just put her in the crib and let her cry it out,” Sharon said.

  “I’ve tried that. She screeches so, it sounds like she’s going to pass out.”

  “Oh, she’s a stubborn thing,” Sharon said. She sounded almost proud. Lucy arched her back and screamed. “The poor love,” Sharon said.

  “The poor me, you mean,” Corran said. He had to nearly yell to be heard over the baby. “What do I do?”

  “Just be patient,” she said. “She’s an infant. She’ll fall asleep soon.” Corran doubted it.

  “Call me back when she’s asleep,” Sharon said. “I need to tell you something.”

  “She’ll never be asleep. Never.”

  Sharon said something else, but he couldn’t hear what it was. Then she hung up.

  The moon over Loch Linnhe was high and Corran could see, even from here, the distant masthead light atop the Drumscaddle ferry, which he would board in less than ten hours for another mind-numbingly boring day of ushering cars up and down the loading ramp to make the eighty-three-second voyage across Loch Linnhe. He’d timed it. About a million times. Eighty-three seconds! The crossing was that narrow. Why did they not build a fucking bridge? How hard could it be? Some days he wanted to build it himself, put all these poor ferry-crossing Highlanders out of their misery.

  Because it was always the same: There was no timetable, just a constant ping-ponging route of the rusted old ferry back and forth from one side of the loch to the other. And no matter how hard you tried, you always ended up driving to the loading ramp just as the boat was departing for the other side. So here you went again—queue up, wait it out, watch the damn ferry puttter its way across the water and execute the laboriously slow process of docking, securing the ramps, ushering the cars off, preparing again for departure. And then eighty-three seconds (that was the quick part!) back across the loch. A bridge, Corran wanted to scream, some days. Build a fucking bridge. But then he’d be out of a job.

  He squinted until the ferry light blurred, and then he followed a ray of mist-softened luminescence down to the west, where from here in the cottage yard he could imagine, but could not see, the tiny village of Port Readie. A village? If you could even call it that: Really all it consisted of was an off-license shop, a tiny post office, and a pub that thank God put out passable cod and chips; otherwise Corran hardly knew how he’d survive.

  There were a handful of cottages there, too, these owned mostly by folks who had jobs across the loch—either up at the shops of Fort William or down in the holiday rentals in Ballachulish. These were the people, Corran had learned, who’d roughed it in
the Highlands long enough to know that living on the west side of Loch Linnhe was an affordably inconvenient way (or an inconveniently affordable way, one or the other) to have an unmortgaged, snug enough little home of one’s own, nestled in the shadow of the same Ben Nevis that the tourists on the east side of the loch were gaping at from the windows of overpriced HomeAway rentals. A stout, windswept lady named Margaret lived in one of the plucky little Port Readie homes; Corran paid her to watch Lucy during his shifts on the ferry. “What’s the difference,” Margaret often demanded, “between that what I’m lookin’ at and that what they’re lookin’ at? Same old mountain, innit?” She’d point at Ben Nevis in the distance, its rocky white top rising stubborn and insistent, like an old man.

  “It is,” Corran would say, nodding. And though the statement was certainly true enough, he had to admit that these last couple of months on his own with Lucy, he’d learned to agree with pretty much anything Margaret said. She’d raised four children by herself up here in the Highlands after her husband died when the oldest was just five. And, as she often said, they all turned out fine, didn’t they? Corran had no idea how they turned out, but as far as he was concerned, if Margaret had done what he was now doing with Lucy four times, and if both she and her fatherless progeny were all still alive, then the venture was a smashing success.

  She was liberal with her advice, but he didn’t mind. Stop with the carrots, the baby’s turning orange, Margaret said. Don’t let her sleep with you, she needs to know her own space, Margaret said. Let her have the bottle, don’t rush the cup. You ever see a teenager with a baby bottle? Corran did everything she told him. She was a godsend. Not long after she started watching Lucy, he stood on the ferry deck one day, looking back toward her house, and he thought he might even be in love with Margaret. Crazy! There she was, thirty years older than Corran, broad as a barn door, coiffed like Prince Valiant, and outfitted day after day in nothing but tracksuits and plimsolls!