The Ice House

by Laura Lee Smith

  Oh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so.

  Johnny turned and started up the hill. It looked like a long walk.

  It wasn’t Chemal’s fault, they would tell him afterward. Not at all. You did the best you could, mate. It was unavoidable. It was these tourists from the Continent, God’s sake, these Europeans! They come over and they’re not used to the left-hand drive, not paying a whit of attention. They drift over and there we are—happens all the time, mate. We’re left to be the ones on our toes. My God, how many Scots have to die in these head-on muck-ups on country lanes? You did the best you could, mate.

  It was Wednesday morning. The Polo was packed with luggage and with Lucy’s collapsed stroller. They’d been coming down from the croft, along the tiny lane hugging the loch: Chemal at the wheel, Corran riding surly shotgun, Johnny and Sharon flanking Lucy’s baby seat in the back. They’d gotten Lucy’s seat buckled in but then couldn’t fit their hands into the small space that was left to buckle their own. But no matter. They weren’t going far. Sharon had orchestrated the details: They’d drop Lucy at Margaret’s and leave Corran at the ferry on their way back to Dunedin. That way he’d only have to walk with the stroller one way today, not both ways. Johnny would have liked to suggest that perhaps Corran could do with a bicycle. But he held his tongue.

  At any rate, the collision happened fast. The driver of the oncoming car was on the right side of the road. Which was the wrong side of the road, no doubt a just momentary lapse of reason but nonetheless a damnable offense, considering the consequences. It was a Range Rover; Johnny caught the familiar logo veering close—oh, God, too close! Had the two cars not met on such a tight curve, Chemal might have had time to correct. But with visibility obscured by the rising hillside, and with the damned other driver on the wrong side, the impact was inevitable.

  Chemal swerved, but too late. The Range Rover caught the Polo’s back fender and gave it a mighty wallop, enough to scuttle it down the steep embankment and launch it into a sideways roll toward the icy waters of Loch Linnhe. Johnny had the sensation that they were flying, and indeed they might have been, but then the shock of cold water rushed across his face and he turned his head to see a chaos of limbs, shoulders, he couldn’t tell who was who—there was Chemal and there was Sharon and there was Corran. There was a baby’s blanket. There were air bags erupting. There was a galaxy of glass shards and the sickening noise of metal on rock. Johnny was thrown toward the front seat.

  The car came to a stop in the loch’s pebbly shallows, pointing nose-first toward the road whence it came. A gasping cluster of bodies climbing; Johnny cleared the car and stood up in waist-high water. He staggered a few steps, then looked back. Though the front of the car was jutting up and the front seat was mostly clearing the water, the back of the car was becoming submerged. He counted: Corran, Sharon, Chemal.

  Lucy.

  Sharon was screaming about the car seat, about straps and buckles. Johnny struggled back toward the Polo through the frigid water, stumbling once and going down, then fighting his way back up. The car was losing purchase against the shifting rocks. Johnny reached one side just as Corran reached the other. Their eyes met across the car’s roofline, and the thin line of panic that bound them then was like an electric jolt.

  The Polo’s rear end was filling with water, and Lucy, strapped in her car seat, was kicking her legs in abject panic. Her eyes were wide, her mouth pursed into a small pink button. On Johnny’s side of the car, the back window was open a few inches. He pulled on the pane of glass, trying to snap it, but it wouldn’t give. He moved back and kicked at it until it caved in. But now the car slid backward a few feet, then a few more, and then the backseat was fully underwater. Johnny dived. He pushed his shoulders through the car’s open window, seeing the white of Lucy’s skin ghostlike through the brown water. He reached for the buckle on the car seat’s T-strap but couldn’t find the plastic button to depress the release. His fingers were tangling in Lucy’s sweater. Don’t inhale, baby, don’t! Where was the button? Corran was now on the opposite side of the baby seat. He knelt over Lucy, his shoulders banging the car’s ceiling as he fought his own buoyancy. He gestured to Johnny—pull the straps, pull the straps!

  They both worked, panicking, knuckles knocking against each other as they fought the wretched straps, fumbled for the button. Corran tried to go for the seat belt securing the whole contraption to the car’s back seat; he couldn’t reach it. The seat belt buckle was on Johnny’s side. But Johnny was wedged in the narrow window space; he couldn’t maneuver his arms to get to the buckle. He couldn’t do it, he couldn’t do it. Get up, get up, get air, get air! A pressure was building in his head, beating like a drum.

  Lucy’s eyes darting.

  The little blue barrette pinning soft hair that swayed like wheat in the roiled water.

  From far away, Sharon screaming, screaming.

  Johnny pulled himself completely into the car’s backseat and kicked around until he could reposition his arms. He found the seat belt buckle. He released it. Corran ripped the whole car seat through his open door and thrust it upward, toward the light. Lucy’s arms were twitching. Johnny watched her from the prison of the Polo’s submerged backseat as he tried to move himself backward and out, but now his ankle was threaded through the flopping seat belt and his knee was in the wrong position, he couldn’t get this figured out at all. Out! Out! Out!

  A curtain of floaters fell across Johnny’s vision. He convulsed backward. His head made contact with the gearshift. The surface of the water, far above, still shimmered. “Kaleidoscopic” was the word, it occurred to him. He felt strangely calm now, watching the movement. White diamonds flashing, shards of blue pulsing, crescents of refracted orange moshing on the rented Polo’s windshield. And then it all stopped, and the world turned a cold, dark brown.

  Seventeen

  Corran’s first recollection of the moments immediately following the car accident were blurry, but they included these: Sharon on her knees on the pebbled beach, deftly extricating Lucy from the car seat; a babbling Dutch tourist on a cell phone, pacing nervously along the edge of the water after having caused the accident; and, blessedly, Lucy crying in frightened, full-throated shrieks. “Sweet dolly,” Sharon was saying. “All right, sweet dolly.” And there was one more: himself and Chemal dragging Johnny out of the water and onto a muddy patch of seaweed, where Johnny hunched up on his hands and knees and started vomiting water. A thick rivulet of blood traced down the side of Johnny’s face.

  “Iceman,” Chemal said. He started to cry. “Iceman.”

  Johnny waved a hand dismissively.

  “I’m fine,” he was saying. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re bleeding,” Corran said. “Your head.”

  Johnny reached up and touched the side of his head. He pulled his hand back and looked at the blood on his fingers. “It’s naught,” he said. He was pale. He was starting to tremble. Corran felt unsteady on his feet, and he looked at his hands to find that Johnny wasn’t the only one shaking. Sharon stood up with Lucy and starting telling people what to do, thank Jesus. She started with the Range Rover numpty, who followed her barked orders, dashed to the boot of his battered car, opened a suitcase, and procured two thick sweaters to bundle around the baby.

  Johnny looked at Chemal. “Stop bawling, kidda,” he said. Chemal dragged a wet sleeve across his face and looked away. Sharon handed Lucy to Corran and crouched next to Johnny. She wriggled out of her wet jacket and wrapped it into a turban around Johnny’s head, then guided him prone. “Breathe, Johnny,” she said. “Just breathe.”

  The police and ambulance arrived impressively quickly, given the remote location of the accident and the fact that the person who made the emergency call—the driver of the wayward Range Rover—was a blubbering mess with fear-hampered English. The paramedics wrapped up the whole lot of them in thick gray blankets and gave a good looking-over to Lucy, who responded to their attentions with lusty, indignant wails. Chemal, God
love him, was clever enough to splash out to the doomed Polo and retrieve from the front seat whatever he could find that hadn’t been submerged, which thankfully included Corran’s cell phone and the two American passports. Then Johnny irritated everyone by refusing to go to the hospital, but eventually Sharon and even the paramedics conceded that the head wound was superficial enough—”Just bleeding like a fucker,” as one of the paramedics inelegantly concluded.

  For his part, Corran watched all the proceedings like a man half-asleep. He didn’t know if it was simply the astonishment of being not only alive but also cold and wet that was getting to him, or if he was perhaps suffering from a mild case of actual shock, but either way, he was dazed, that was for sure. He wanted to get warm. They all did, but walking up the hill to the cottage seemed like an impossibly Herculean feat, given the circumstances. So after the paramedics proclaimed everyone to be more or less in one piece, after the tow trucks arrived to deal with the wrecks, and after the police departed with the Range Rover driver, who had evidently failed his Breathalyzer, Corran did the only thing he could think of to do: He called Margaret to come get them.

  Now they were all seated in Margaret’s tiny living room, possessed of steaming cups of tea and knocking knees around a snapping fire, trying to get warm. Had he not been so shaken up, and had he not been longing so desperately for a hit of skag to settle his raging nerves, Corran might even have found the tableau rather amusing. He looked around the room: He, Sharon, and Johnny were each wearing one of Margaret’s velour tracksuits—Sharon’s a shimmering coral, Johnny’s a jeweltoned teal, and Corran’s, thank God, a sensible black. Margaret herself was wearing her favorite suit—autumnal brown with yellow piping. All the available pantsuits were thus spoken for, so Chemal, who likely wouldn’t have fit in one anyway, was instead outfitted in a voluminous blue fleece robe, which might have been androgynously passable enough had the fleece not been accessorized with tiny appliqués representing climbing roses. Lucy, warm and enjoying the familiarity of a bottle and Margaret’s ample lap, was freshly diapered and bundled in a thick afghan. They all, including Lucy, wore matching socks of the fuzzy house-slipper variety, each a different pastel shade. Corran felt they might have all been in an ad for fabric softener. From where he sat on a flouncy slipcovered sofa, he could see everyone’s clothing draped on drying racks in Margaret’s bright, warm kitchen.

  The discussion was on what to do. All the cell phones except Corran’s were a loss, and they’d been passing his around for the last two hours, making calls and lining up remedies. The car rental company would track down the police report and call the wreckers about the sunken Polo. Sharon called her supervisor at hospice and told her she’d not make the afternoon’s rounds. Corran canceled his ferry shift. Toole was on his way up from Dunedin to fetch Sharon, Johnny, and Chemal. Now there was little to do but drink tea, eat digestive biscuits, and wait for the clothes to dry.

  “It’s a miracle nobody was hurt, innit?” Margaret said for what must have been the hundredth time. “I tell you, they ought to put the other driver in prison. What was he even doing over this side of the loch, anyway? There’s naught this side for the tourists. But he couldn’t stay where he ought to have, now could he?”

  Johnny didn’t look good. Corran regarded him: His father’s hands shook and his face was pale. Now and then he reached up to touch his head—once where the gash from the accident was now knitting itself back together under an oversized Band-Aid, but more frequently to the side of his left temple. He’s thinking about his brain, Corran realized. The tumor.

  “You hitting your head,” Corran said. “Is that affecting your brain thing?”

  Johnny shrugged. Sharon looked at him closely. “You should go to a doctor,” she said. “In Glasgow. Let’s get you in somewhere.”

  Johnny shook his head. “I just need to get home,” he said. “The flight’s tomorrow. I’m fine.”

  Margaret was still on the wayward tourist. “Thing is, there’s all kinds of nonsense spreading over from that side to this. Tourists are just the beginning of it. Used to be you could go weeks, months up here and never see a face you didn’t know. Everyone who was in Port Readie was here because we lived in Port Readie, aye? But now,” she sighed. “All kinds of mess spreading this way. In fact,” and here she pushed her eyeglasses up on top of her head emphatically, “do you know that yesterday I looked up the road toward the beach there and saw some old sot fly-tipping an entire bicycle into the loch?”

  “What’s fly-tipping?” Chemal said.

  “Littering!” Margaret said. “Dumping! And an entire bicycle? What kind of idjit puts rubbish like that in Loch Linnhe? What does he think it is, a landfill? I’d have liked to get him cited for that. Thought about it, too, was going to march out there and get a good look at him, try to get his name, but by the time I got my plimsolls on he was gone.”

  The room fell silent. Sharon looked over at Corran and raised her eyebrows. They both looked at Johnny, who lowered his head into his hands. Okay, now this was actually funny, Corran thought.

  “That’s just awful,” Chemal said. “Who would do that?” He seemed to be trying not to laugh. Margaret looked at him and tipped her head.

  “You needn’t shout at me lad,” she said. “I’m sitting right here.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Margaret,” Chemal said. He cleared his throat and made an attempt to lower his voice. “It’s just, I have a thing.”

  “Poor prosody,” Margaret said.

  “Yes!” Chemal said. “How did you know?”

  “My youngest had that. He couldn’t calculate pitch, is what it was. I cured him of it.”

  “How did you do that?” Sharon said.

  “Got him an app. He uses it on his phone. It’s a voice meter. When he’s talking too loud, it vibrates in his pocket. Works like a charm.”

  “Seriously?” Chemal said. “Oh, man. Miss Margaret, dude, that is awesome.”

  “Well, that’s just what you need, Chemal!” Sharon said. Chemal nodded. He turned to Johnny. “You think I can get Jerry to buy me an iPhone?” he said.

  Johnny didn’t answer right away.

  “Iceman?”

  Johnny looked at Chemal, but it seemed like it took him a moment to focus. “What?”

  “Do you think I can get Jerry to buy me an iPhone?”

  “Oh. Well,” Johnny said. “He might. But you might want to stop calling him an ass-wipe before you ask him.”

  Chemal nodded thoughtfully. “You speak the truth, brother,” he said.

  Johnny was clearly trembling. “You cold?” Sharon said.

  “Nah,” Johnny said. “Maybe just some air.” He got up and walked through Margaret’s kitchen and out the back door into the garden. After a moment, Corran followed. He found his father sitting on a stone bench under a rose arbor. Most of the rose vines had been pruned down to nearly nothing, but a few stubborn blooms remained. Tough little nuts, Corran thought, with it late autumn and cold as holy shite. Johnny looked very small under the arbor. Corran sat down next to him.

  “You don’t look good, Da,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “I’m all right, Corry,” Johnny said. “You got a smoke?”

  Corran shook his head. “I don’t smoke.”

  Johnny turned and looked at him. “No?”

  “Never have. I guess you never noticed.”

  “I guess I didn’t,” Johnny said.

  “It’s not good for you, you know.”

  “I know that.”

  “I like to take care of myself, you know,” Corran said.

  Johnny stared at him. Corran attempted a smile. “A joke, Da,” he said.

  They were silent for a moment. A magpie lighted on the arbor, looked at them, and took off again. From nearby, the ferry horn sounded.

  “I’ve heard about the factory thing,” Corran said. “I’m sorry about that.”

  Johnny nodded.

  “
You might get shut down?”

  Johnny shrugged. “It’s not looking good. We can’t prove our theory about what caused the accident. We’re going to have to take the fall.”

  “What’s your theory?”

  “Meth-head across the way steals ammonia. Messes up the pressure in the tank. Boom.” Johnny ran down the details. An unexplained rupture. No clues left behind. No video surveillance. But that didn’t mean anything, Corran knew. Johnny’s theory was probably dead-on. In Corran’s experience, dealers and manufacturers were always smarter than you’d expect. Brilliant, really: evasive, strategic, and creative criminal geniuses. He had no doubt Johnny’s explanation was plausible. Guy wants ammonia to cook meth and it’s right across the street at the ice factory? Yep, he’ll get it. He’ll put out feelers. He’ll find a way.

  “Somebody helped him,” he told Johnny. “Somebody on the inside.”

  Johnny looked at him. He shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “Our guys are drug-tested all the time. Zero tolerance.”

  “I didn’t say the person had to be a user. But my guess is somebody’s getting paid to provide access. You’re not going to catch your guy scaling the gates because I’ll bet you a quid he’s walking in the front door.” Johnny had stopped shaking his head and was peering at him intently. And this was almost funny, it occurred to Corran, to be sitting here in Margaret’s back garden, schooling his father in the methodologies of drug crime. Good to know all that experience was good for something.

  “Here it is, Da,” he said. “Remember this: They’re never working alone. And they’re always closer than you think.”

  Johnny reached up to his head again.

  “When’s your surgery?” Corran said.