The Ice House

by Laura Lee Smith

  “We’ll just have to drive with the windows open,” Johnny said.

  “It’s freezing,” Sharon said.

  “Well, would you rather be frozen or asphyxiated?” Johnny demanded.

  Chemal was sitting stock-still in the driver’s seat, his hands buried awkwardly in his trouser pockets, staring at Johnny. “I don’t think either one of those is going to happen,” he said. His voice was oddly quiet.

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t have the keys,” Chemal said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I put them in my pocket when I got out of the car.”

  Johnny stared at him.

  “Oh, my,” Sharon said. And then, as a unit, they all turned to stare out at the wide expanse of the valley at Glencoe, where a white lamb and its mother were now two fat drops of cream in the distance.

  Chemal cleared his throat.

  “If we fan out,” he said, “maybe it won’t be so bad.”

  The search for the keys cost them an hour’s time and any hope of eradicating the smell of sheep dung, which was now emanating from the bottoms of six shoes instead of just two. But it did, Johnny noted, win them a precious spell of silence, because by the time they found the keys and got back on the road they were all freezing, nettle-ridden, irritable, and, in the case of Chemal and Sharon, blessedly reticent. On the final approach to Port Readie, the weather turned, and a thick wall of what looked like snow clouds gathered in the near distance. The inclines steepened as they drove through the foothills, and Johnny pointed out to Chemal that downshifting might be a good idea.

  “I know that,” Chemal said.

  “Then why haven’t you been doing it?”

  “Because I made a bet with myself that within five minutes you’d point out that I wasn’t.”

  Up ahead, a man was walking along the upward incline, carrying a bicycle on his back. Or rather, he was staggering. The metal frame was hooked over one shoulder and the bike hung down behind him and bumped the backs of his knees. A plastic baby seat was affixed to the back fender. “Watch out for this guy,” Johnny said. “He’s drunk.”

  “I see him,” Chemal said. “You don’t have to point out every little thing.”

  “I just don’t want you to hit the sot.”

  “Have I hit anything yet?”

  “No, but not for lack of trying.”

  “Iceman, you are a pain in the ass. Has anyone ever told you that?”

  “I have,” Sharon said. “Thousands of times. Doesn’t do any good.”

  “Just watch out for this numpty, would you?” Johnny said. “Last thing we need is to run over the town drunk.”

  They pulled up alongside the man and Chemal gave him a good-natured wave as they passed. The man looked over. He was younger than Johnny had anticipated, and as he stared at the stranger on the roadway he was struck with two realizations. One, that the young man’s staggering gait was likely due not to drunkenness, but to the fact that in addition to the bicycle strapped to his back, he also had a corpulent baby strapped to his front. And two, that the man’s wide brown eyes, now staring back at him with the look of someone who had long ago ceased to be surprised by what the world was capable of delivering to him, were very familiar.

  Sharon laughed from the backseat. “That’s no numpty,” she said. “That’s your son.”

  “Christ,” Johnny said. “What’s he doing?”

  Chemal stopped the car.

  “Looks like he’s walking,” Chemal said.

  They waited at the road’s narrow shoulder for Corran to approach, and Johnny watched him in the side mirror. He swallowed a rush of emotion; he’d scarcely admitted this to himself for nearly a year, but the truth was that there were moments, given the state Corran had been in last Christmas, when Johnny wondered if he’d ever see his son alive again. And here he was, trudging up the roadway carrying a baby. Corran was as slightly built as he’d ever been, though he appeared to have lost the rangy angles of his heroin days and had gained a bit more mass. He was still wearing the same type of low-slung pegged jeans, fleece hoodie, and flat skater’s shoes he’d adopted as his uniform when he hit about fifteen. Johnny couldn’t remember seeing him in anything else since he was a child. Here in the Highlands, the chill certainly warranted more than a sweatshirt. Corran gave no indication that he was cold. He approached Johnny’s side of the Polo and bent to look in.

  Johnny wasn’t sure what, exactly, he had been anticipating as far as the big reunion went, but it wasn’t this. He hadn’t talked to Corran in so long that it was hard to muster an adequate forecast of how they might react to each other, although he’d certainly entertained a number of dramatic possibilities: an angry rejection, stone-cold silence, a tearful embrace. But what actually happened when Corran drew alongside to look inside the car and saw his father, his mother, and an unknown kid in an overstuffed KISS Army jacket was as unexpected as it was anticlimactic.

  “Can you take Lucy?” he said simply.

  Sharon opened the back door and extended her arms to the baby, who kicked her feet with excitement when she saw Sharon.

  “Wee one!” Sharon said. “Come on, lovey.” She took Lucy into her arms and covered the baby’s face with kisses. Then she scooted over to make room for Corran.

  “Get in, Corry,” Sharon said. “It’s about to rain, maybe snow.”

  “No,” Corran said. “I’ve got to carry the bike. We went for biscuits and I had a flat tire down below in the village.” He looked at Johnny. “Hiya, Da,” he said.

  “Hiya, Corran,” Johnny said. They gazed at each other for a beat, and Johnny waited for Corran to ask him why he was suddenly materializing without warning on the A82 to Port Readie. But Corran just hitched the bicycle onto his shoulder and pointed up the hill.

  “House is right up at the top,” he said. “Mum knows where.”

  “Put the bike in the trunk, or on the roof,” Johnny said.

  “No need,” Corran said. “I’ll meet you at the house. It’s not far.”

  “But it’s steep.”

  Corran looked at him. “I know that. I do it every day.” He reached through the car to shake Chemal’s hand. “I’m Corran,” he said.

  Chemal grinned and accepted the handshake. “Dude,” he said. “Chemal.” Corran turned and repositioned the bike on his shoulder, then started walking up the hill. The first drops of freezing rain hit the windshield.

  “Should we just go on?” Chemal said. “And leave him with that?”

  “Just go,” Sharon said. “He’ll meet us.” She was absorbed in fussing with the baby. Johnny turned around and regarded them. It was a cute little bairn, he’d say that. Dark hair parted over on the side and held back with a little blue clip. Bright brown eyes staring at him mistrustfully, sweet spots of pink chill in her cheeks.

  “Are we supposed to have a baby seat?” Chemal said.

  “It’s only a half-mile up the hill,” Sharon said.

  “But isn’t it a law?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Safety first,” Chemal said stubbornly.

  “Did you take an extra asshole pill today?” Johnny said. “Would you just drive the fucking car?” He was colossally irritated with this entire situation: sheep shit in the car, Sharon’s unyielding efficiency, a yammering teenage dope for a chauffeur, and most of all, Corran’s wordlessly belligerent gaze. You needn’t have come, his son’s eyes said. I don’t need you.

  “God,” Chemal said. He threw an injured look at Johnny, but then he put the car in drive and started up the hill.

  “You needn’t be such a crank, Johnny,” Sharon said. “And you might watch your language in front of your granddaughter.”

  Johnny turned around to look at Lucy again.

  “What do you think, Grandda?” Sharon said. She took one of the baby’s hands and waggled it at Johnny. “Say hi to Grandda,” she trilled. Johnny waved back at the baby, who stared at him, expressionless.

  “How old
did you say?” he said.

  “Nine months,” Sharon said proudly. She licked the corner of a paper napkin and wiped a smudge of what looked like jam from around Lucy’s mouth and nose. Lucy pointed to her own nose. “Pah,” she said.

  “I know, Lucy,” Sharon said. “It’s sheep dung. It smells terrible.” Chemal was grinning into the rearview mirror.

  “She’s a cutie, Miss Sharon,” he said. “She’s just about as cute as crap.”

  “Isn’t she?” Sharon said. “Bebé bonita!”

  “Sí, muy bonita!” Chemal said.

  Johnny looked in the side mirror, where Corran was now a small figure, receding. He’d be cold and triumphant by the time he got up the hill. Which was just the way he liked things, evidently. Up ahead, the road curved toward a tiny croft and wet winds stirred the trees. Johnny had the feeling, suddenly, that he was light-years from home.

  Twelve

  Pauline was coming to a startling realization: She hadn’t been flirted with this overtly since she was in college. Sam Tulley—he was shameless! Comments about her hair, her eyes, her smile. Over-the-top chivalry, close-talking, subtle innuendos: the whole nine yards. “You remind me of Cameron Diaz,” he said at one point. “No really.” She didn’t discourage him. So what? She’d admit it. She’d even admit it to Johnny, if he’d been here to admit it to. Because it wasn’t entirely unpleasant, being on the receiving end of the attentions of a handsome man nearly two decades her junior. No, it wasn’t unpleasant at all. “You remind me of Ashton Kutcher,” she told him. “No really.”

  But now here was the trouble. Since Sam Tulley had written about the vendor list, dropping a reference to running the Hart Bridge in the process, he seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth. She had held off writing back immediately. It was the weekend, after all. Let him think she was out somewhere, doing something active and sunny and vibrant: maybe kayaking at Salt Run or zip-lining across a pit of crocodilians down at the Alligator Farm, even though what she’d actually done Sunday afternoon was wimp her way through an uninspired half-mile beach jog and then spend the rest of the day on the sofa with General San Jose and Downton Abbey.

  On Monday morning, she replied to the email and sent along the vendor list, just as he’d asked. She’d kept the body of the email professional and brief (why wouldn’t she?) but—in response to the breezy reference he’d made to running the Hart Bridge early in the morning, before traffic built—she included the following remark, which she had considered at the time a stroke of brilliance, but which she was now uncomfortably second-guessing: “Hart in morn sounds great! Where’s best parking?” The genius of this particular syntax was in its ambiguity. Was she confirming his assertion that running the Hart Bridge on an early morning—any early morning, in a general sense—was a good thing to do? Or was she interpreting his oblique reference to the Hart as an invitation to run it together? Ha. Take that, Sam Tulley. If they were going to tippy-toe around some weird little game that he seemed to be initiating, then she was going to hold him to it and make him be the one to nudge his way up to the line.

  Not that there was any line, not that there was anything inappropriate about two athletes (athletes!) comparing notes on a particularly challenging race route. Or even that there was anything inappropriate about two athletes taking on a little training run together. God. Grow up, Pauline. People did it all the time! Real runners often raced together, taking strength from synced pacing, moral support. All. The. Time. It was just that he wasn’t answering. The little shit.

  Clean up your language, Pauline, she told herself. She was starting to sound like Packy. Plus, foul language was a reflection of foul thinking. No need to descend to the level of the crew on the factory floor, whom she consistently chastised for their filthy patois. She’d been trying for years to get Johnny to do something about it. “It’s disgusting,” she told him. “Can’t you make a rule?”

  “Pauline,” he said. “It’s a factory, not a quilting bee. Leave ‘em alone.”

  Ah, but it was no wonder she was using bad language. She was in a bad mood. Johnny’s insane walkabout had her on pins and needles, for one thing. She kept expecting to hear from Sharon or Corran that he was checked into a Scottish hospital convulsing with seizures. Caroline had sent a peevish text last night, asking Pauline when she next planned to visit Packy.

  And then this morning there’d been a hair-related disaster. She had gotten up early to attempt L’Oreal’s Buttercream Swirl low-lights hair treatment. She was long overdue for Salon Belleza but hadn’t had the time to get over there. The L’Oreal box promised that the product would “cover gray and energize your look with face-framing low-lights in a delectable swirl of creamy color!” In the dim bathroom before dawn, Pauline mixed up the formula and pulled on the plastic gloves that came with the kit. But before she could apply the first blob of mixture to her hair, she knocked the little plastic bowl off the side of the sink and watched in horror as it hit the edge of the commode and sent a spectacular explosion of honey-brown hair dye all over the bathroom. She trashed a good towel trying to remove the stain from her forehead and neck, and then she ran downstairs for paper towels and spray cleaner, but the dye had bonded quickly to the paint, and no amount of scrubbing would remove the brown streaks from the walls. The only solution would be to repaint the entire bathroom.

  God! It was always something. She threw the hair color paraphernalia away. Well, fine. She’d paint the bathroom. She’d get it done today, in fact. She’d hit Home Depot at lunchtime for the paint and knock out the job tonight after work. Maybe it would keep her mind off other things. Like brain surgery, for one thing. Like Sam Tulley, for another.

  Vendor list, indeed. Pauline wondered whether Sam Tulley really even needed the vendor list, or if he had simply been looking for an excuse to email her. She hadn’t bothered copying Johnny and Claire on her reply to Tulley’s email request. What would be the point of bothering them with this silly detail? The goal here, she reminded herself, was to manage as much as she possibly could on this end without having to involve her husband, especially as it pertained to the OSHA appeal. He was darned idiotic for taking off to Scotland with a bulging cyst hanging off the side of his brain, there was no doubt about that. But as long as he was over there, she’d make it her business not to add any distractions or concerns to his clearly addled judgment. She was kicking herself for bringing up that ridiculous business about regretting not having a child. What was wrong with her, these days?

  Send/Receive. Nothing.

  She closed her email program. She left her office and went into the break room, where Claire was pulling Styrofoam containers out of the refrigerator and angrily pitching them into the trash. Claire looked up when Pauline entered, then held out an oil-stained cardboard box with the ancient remnants of someone’s pizza.

  “Disgusting!” Claire said. “Have you seen this?” She held out another container and flipped up the lid to display a reddish lump of something covered in a wispy fuzz of mold. “And this?” Here came a brown paper bag, dripping grease from its bulging seams. Into the trash it went. “I tell you, Pauline, this is revolting. Do you know how many times I’ve cleaned out this refrigerator in the last month? I mean come on. These people are out of control.”

  While normally Pauline would have been in wholehearted agreement with Claire on this point—that the communal refrigerator, used by the entire staff, was indeed horrific, a breeding ground for the lowest levels of frigid vermin—this morning she had so many other things on her mind that it was difficult to summon outrage sufficient to mollify Claire. She merely nodded and used her foot to scoot the rubber trash can closer to the refrigerator so that Claire didn’t have to throw so far.

  “I mean, this gets on my last nerve, Pauline,” she said. “Do they think I don’t have enough to do? Do they think I’m their mother? I’d like to have this refrigerator locked up until they know how to respect other people. That’s what I should do. And you get the combination to the lock
only if you come through me.”

  “So do it,” Pauline said absently.

  “I might,” Claire said. She was getting warmed up to the idea. “They have to come see me, and they have to sign an agreement to use the refrigerator. A cleanliness commitment. Like a chastity vow. Something like that. That’s what I ought to do.”

  She slammed the refrigerator closed and stomped to the sink to wash her hands.

  “My last nerve,” she said. “And don’t even get me started on the microwave.” Pauline glanced at the microwave, which looked passably clean on the outside but which, she suspected, would look like a murder scene if she opened the door. As if in warning, the digital clock on the microwave flashed: 12:00, 12:00, 12:00. Piece of junk. Every time Pauline looked at that microwave, the clock had shorted itself out. That was the last time she’d put Roy in charge of buying a microwave for the break room.

  “See, that’s why I don’t use this kitchen,” Pauline said. “Leave it for the ice crew. It’s too dirty and too crappy.”

  “Well, some of us have to use the kitchen,” Claire snapped. “Some of us can’t afford to eat lunch out every day.”

  “I don’t eat out every day,” Pauline said. God, Claire could be testy! “Do what I do,” she said. “Keep a little cooler at your desk for your lunch so you don’t have to use the refrigerator.”

  “Well, that’s inconvenient,” Claire said. “Then I have to fuss with ice packs, all that.” She pitched a balled-up paper towel into the trash can.

  “Oh, wah. Now you’re just being ornery,” Pauline said.

  “I would like to be able to keep my lunch cool,” Claire said haughtily.

  “Hello? Claire? We work in an ice plant? Just stick it out in the storage room.” Or stick it up your—now, stop, Pauline, she chastised herself. Foul language. Foul thinking.