“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“My dream is to move to Miami. I would like to serve alcoholic beverages to the elderly at a little Tiki bar on the beach. That will never happen. Your people have a saying, ‘Heavy is the head that wears the crown.’ Very true.”
“That’s not a good approach to life. If you want to get old people drunk, then go get old people drunk. I’m sure there are plenty in the order that would love to take your place. I’m sure as hell not going to stick around here forever. I’m hightailing it to Quebec the second that port is finished.”
“What has Quebec got that we don’t?” Arrluk feigned offense.
Tom gave him what was supposed to be a respectful don’t-be-an-idiot look. “No offense to your home, but it’s fucking cold. If this is summer, I don’t think I’d make it through fall, let alone winter. Plus, my wife still can’t sleep. We blacked out the windows and everything, but she just can’t seem to get acclimated. I think she’s starting to go a little crazy.”
“All women are crazy. White people too, after a week or two in Nunavut. I wish that I could leave, but it’s not possible. You would not understand.”
Unsure what to say, Tom stared silently out the window as his dirty little cabin slid up beside him. The wind sank its teeth into his soppy skin as he climbed out onto his welcome mat. He was dying to get inside, but he stopped to stick his hand inside the car for one more handshake.
“Thank you for trusting me with your secret. It’s nice to know that I have a real friend in this country.”
“You have many friends in this country. I am only the most rebellious.”
Tom smiled warmly as they said their goodbyes and shut the door as gently as one can on an automobile from 1975. When his friend had gone, he stepped inside and left a trail of freezing, drippy garments through the kitchen and into the bedroom. Cynthia was right where he had left her, watching the Soap Channel with her back to him. She ignored him as he walked into the bedroom. There were only two rooms in this cabin, so the back of the couch served as an imaginary wall between the kitchen and the living room. With the temperature of their relationship quickly falling to match its surroundings, the couch was doing an excellent job.
By the time he reached the bed, he was completely naked. He decided to kill two birds with one stone and let the covers dry him off as his body temperature returned to normal. Even beneath the covers, his teeth were chattering loud enough for Cynthia to hear him over the TV. He half expected her to storm in, screaming about how he needed to keep quiet, so he wouldn’t disturb her show. Glancing at the clock, he wondered how long it would take to snuggle away the chill of a dip in the north Atlantic.
When he felt capable of braving the icy climate of the living room once again, he slid out of bed and into a pair of pinstriped slacks. Thermal underwear and sweatpants would have been far more comfortable, but his wife seemed to like him even less when he wasn’t fashionable. This was his reward for marrying sensibly.
When shopping for a wife, he had been taken in by Cynthia’s beauty and all of the nice accessories that she came with; the good job in daddy’s company, connections to the upper crust, and all the money that a sane person could spend. He was so impressed that he married her without even glancing at the hefty emotional price tag. Like many men before him, he had mistaken a combination of lust and greed for an emotional connection.
They were happy enough at first, but after a while, the new sex smell wore off and he saw her for what she really was. No monster birthed by the imagination of man could compare in evil or ugliness to a pretty girl with money. There was nothing he could give her that she couldn’t buy for herself, and therefore he was less than worthless. He tried again and again to form a bond that ran deeper than his penis, but all it ever did was exacerbate his buyer’s remorse. After six years of marriage, the only time they even pretended to be a happy couple was when they were entertaining.
Even the sex was bitter. They never made love. They never even fucked. They just used each other’s bodies to masturbate with. It was ugly and demeaning and every orgasm felt like a small caliber bullet passing through the stop sign of his soul.
Luckily, Tom had been raised to appreciate what he had. He’d been given a lot of practice by his parents who had been hell bent on giving him all the things they’d wanted and never had as children, whether he wanted them or not. He buttoned up his Armani man-blouse and attempted to reconnect or at least get laid. There really was nothing to do in this town, but watch satellite television and copulate. He assumed that was why there were so many children running around.
“I’m back. You want to do something?” he asked, as he rounded the couch.
She glanced up at him and furrowed her brow. “Why is your hair wet?”
“The club played a prank on me, threw me in the ocean.”
“Good for them. You deserve pneumonia for making me live in this hellhole. Do you know what I did today? I watched a marathon of Dynasty. You’ve reduced me to watching Dynasty!”
“You didn’t have to watch Dynasty reruns. We have, what, two thousand channels? Watch something else.”
“It’s all garbage. It doesn’t really matter what I watch. It’s all going to rot out my brain and turn me into one of those fat women that shop at Wal-Mart. If I must make the change, I might as well get it over with as quickly as possible.”
“Come now, dear, you know that can’t happen. This town doesn’t have a Wal-Mart.”
She glared at him as if he had just soiled the carpet. “You know what I mean.”
“Look, I don’t want to be here anymore than you do. If you want to blame somebody, blame your brother. It was his idea to begin with. Or, you could blame yourself for constantly pushing me to make something of myself. We already had plenty of money. If you insist that, I add more to it and get myself into a position of power than you’re going to have to put up with me while I do it. Anyway, you agreed to this. You said that it would be nice to get away from the hustle and bustle of city life.”
“You’re right. I should be thanking you. It is so lovely to live in a place where, no matter where you are, the airport is within walking distance. That should have been part of the pitch. Trees won’t even live here!”
“Well, excuse me for not telling you every little thing. You wouldn’t have come otherwise. What was I supposed to say? Hey, honey, let’s go live in a town that consists of a women's shelter, a church, a primary school, and a bed-and-breakfast. It has an average temperature of fourteen degrees below zero, the milk costs ten dollars a gallon and you have to order a year’s supply of anything you like, because planes can only come and go during certain parts of the year. Come with me to Iqaluit where the sun never goes down and you can drive snowmobiles everywhere and learn all the words they have for ice. Ooh, I almost forgot to mention the museum where you can look at sculptures of polar bears until your eyes bleed. I don’t want to be here anymore than you do, but I did this for you! We’re here because I want to make you like me again, and apparently, the only way to do that is to warp myself to fit your twisted definition of the perfect husband.”
“Is it really so twisted to want a husband that knows that, the phrase “moving up in the world,” denotes the achievement of socio-economical betterment, rather than geographical relocation?” Cynthia grabbed her hair and pulled, not hard enough to pull any out, but enough to calm her down. I am so sick of this argument. Let’s change the subject. Okay?”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“I don’t care, anything else. What did you do today?”
“A bunch of boring stuff.”
“It can’t possibly be any more boring than a Dynasty marathon.”
“Let’s see, I talked to the architect about what kind of iron we should use on the port. Uh, then I had lunch with the secretary of something-or-other. I’m not even sure what his name was. I think he just wanted something to do. I came home, changed clothes and met with my clu
b. They threw me in the ocean. Then I came home.”
“That is pretty boring. What did you do with your club before they threw you in the water?”
“Nothing much, club stuff.”
“Why won’t you ever tell me anything about your club?”
“Why do you care?”
“We may not tell each other everything, but I have to wonder what you’re up to when you evade every question that I ask.”
“There’s nothing to tell, really. It’s a social club for the upper crust of this crusty burg. I got my ring today. See.”
She took his hand for the first time in recent memory and scrutinized his new accessory. It was large and silver in color with a long twisted spike imposed over a black square.
“White gold?”
He let out a little snort. “Nope. Nickel. They have some mines around here somewhere.”
She dropped his hand as if it was covered in shit. “Nice. What is that thing?”
“I think it’s an icicle. Who knows? They do and say a lot of weird stuff and it’s all in their Eskimo language. I don’t understand a word of it. All I know is that they can help me get this damn port built so that we can get out of here. I’m pretty sure they can help me in other ways too.”
“But, what do you do there? Secret societies have rituals and initiations, right? Do you paint each other in peanut-butter and try to talk to aliens?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“What then?”
“I can’t talk about it.”
“Why not?”
“They don’t want me to. The only reason you want to know is that I’m not supposed to tell you.”
“You know what, don’t tell me. I’ll find out eventually, anyway. This will give me something to do other than sit around watching bad television. Time for a new subject.”
“Like what?”
“It’s your turn to come up with something. You didn’t like my idea.”
“Whatever. What do you want to have for dinner?”
“Oh, I don’t know. How about some more blubber?” Her tone was a high performance machine, zero to banshee in zero seconds.
“You said that you didn’t want to have this conversation anymore.”
“This is a different conversation. This one’s about how I’m starving to death because there’s nothing to eat here, but blubber.”
“You haven’t eaten any blubber at all. You’ve had seal and caribou and…”
“Blubber! I want a nice meal,” she said in her best I’m-about-to-cry voice.
“There are still half a dozen frozen pizzas in the freezer. Why don’t we eat one of those?”
“Oh yeah, I suppose I could eat frozen pizza for every meal. I could use the insulation, but you’re going to have to kiss this goodbye if I do.”
She stood and stripped off her shirt. He had lost the argument before her bra hit the bearskin rug. She pushed him down onto the couch and straddled him, running her fingers over her flesh, testing the firmness of her belly, the weight of her breasts, and the elasticity of her nipples.
“What do you think? My breasts would probably get bigger.” She leaned in bouncing them gently on his face. “Are they too small for you?”
This was the way she won all of their arguments. She had a body that would turn Mother Angelica gay, and she’d had a lifetime to learn how to use it. His head and crotch changed consistencies faster than a snowman in a volcano. Not much later, as he was being tied to the bed, he promised to fly her to Paris for the weekend. Though he recognized and resented her manipulative tactics, his body, normally a backseat driver had leapt into the front seat and seized control of the wheel.
She teased him, running her nipples across his chest, pressing his knee into her warm slippery core, sliding her tongue across the chiseled crevices of his torso, kissing his thighs, but never once came into contact with the fish out of water, which twitched in desperation so close and yet so far from the Jacuzzi of her mouth. It was very nice, but something felt off. She liked to torture him, but it didn’t normally go on this long. She straddled his chest, intoxicating him with her pheromones as she ran her labia down his sternum, up again, down, up, down, and up hypnotically.
“So, what did you do with your club today?”
He hated being right. “What? Nothing.”
“You did something. Just tell me what it was.”
He didn’t like where this was going. “I can’t talk about it. Will you please shut up and fuck me?”
She stopped tickling his chest and sat down hard on his stomach. “That’s not very nice. A girl could get out of the mood if she’s talked to that way. You don’t want to ruin the moment, do you?”
His mind was a bubble with more hormones than a seventh grade biology class as he pondered the seriousness of the situation. She obviously wasn’t going to let up, and since she never talked to anyone or left the house, he didn’t see how anyone would ever find out. He didn’t know anything worth telling anyway, so he let her have her way.
“Alright fine, as I said before the Brotherhood of the Needle is a social club where people get together and network their way into powerful positions. Every once in a while, we have to do some silly ritual that doesn’t make any sense to me. The third degree and higher wear ropes around our waists. Third degree ropes are black and they get lighter the higher up you go. The higher ups also wear these funny hats with earflaps and a long pointy thing on top. I would show you the handshake, but I’m a bit tied up at the moment. Anything else you want to know?”
“I already knew all of that. I want to know specifically what you did today.”
“I was initiated into the third degree, whatever that means. They took me out to the pier and stood around me in the circle while I said a bunch of stuff in their language. I don’t know what any of it meant. When that part was over, they put a rope around my waist and I was dragged into the ocean. It was scary as shit. I didn’t know what was going on. I thought I was going to drown. Come to think of it, I wonder how they did that part. I wasn’t going in a straight line. It was more like I was being dragged in circles and then all of a sudden, I was hanging by my waist and everyone was having a nice laugh at my expense. They cut me down, shook my hand, and then it was over. Can we please get on with this now?”
“Say the words.” She smiled victoriously as she moved to fill her end of the bargain, but the lights flickered and went out leaving them in utter blackness. “Ooh, this place is going to be the death of me. It’s going to get really cold if I don’t turn on the generator. Be right back,” she said, as her voice grew distant.
He wanted to scream for her to come back, but held his tongue, fearful that it would come out in a counterproductive tone. He wanted to point out that the sex would be more than enough to keep them warm and they could deal with that later. More than anything, he wanted something, anything, to put out the fire in his lap.
He could barely hear her voice as she said, “That’s weird. The other houses all have power. Oh my God!! Tom, they’re coming! A whole bunch of them. I can see the points on their hats from here. They have torches and guns. They must have heard you tell me their secrets. We have to get out of here!” she screamed as she ran back into the room and jumped on the bed.
Tom was mid-heart attack, thrashing against his bonds when he heard her demonic giggle. She started jumping on the bed like a little girl, giggling and squeaking insanely. “They’re coming to take us away, ha ha. They’re coming to take us away, ho ho he he ha ha. You’ve told their secrets and now the men in the funny hats are coming to take us and eat our souls with little forks, ho ho he he ha ha.”
“Stop it, you’re not funny. Those guys would be really pissed if they knew I told you.”
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist.” She hopped down off the bed and slapped him on the thigh. “Let me go get the generator going and I’ll be right back to make you forget all about it.”
“So, what happened to the power? Could you
tell?”
“It’s a snowstorm, what else would it be?”
“But, it was forty-five degrees less than an hour ago. It wasn’t even cloudy.”
“Welcome to the north pole.” He could hear her voice moving away again
Moments later, after the growl of a gasoline engine had persuaded the darkness to crawl under the bed and hide, Cynthia swaggered in with a can of whipped cream in one hand and a quart of frozen yogurt in the other.
“I’ve decided what I would like to have for dinner.”
***
The next day Tom rolled out of bed and padded to the shower still aching from the previous night’s debauchery. As he scrubbed the lipstick tic-tac toe off his chest, he noticed several itchy white and yellow splotches that hadn’t been there before. Further exploration revealed several more around his crotch and legs, but it didn’t look like any permanent damage had been done. He decided it would be best not to say anything about them. After all, sex that doesn’t leave a mark is hardly worth the effort.
He got dressed, choked down a few pieces of frozen pizza, and said goodbye to his wife. She sat watching her show and didn’t even acknowledge him when he patted her on the head. Everything seemed painfully normal until he opened the front door.
He asked himself how, after thirty-two years of life, he had come to live in a place where he could open his front door in the middle of summer and find the morning paper buried under two feet of snow. He couldn’t have been more surprised if an adlet had popped up and bitten him in his white and tinglies. The muddy streets and grimy little houses had all but disappeared under a blanket of fluffy white mauja. All around him, icicles hung like wendigo teeth giving the impression of jaws that might close on him at any moment. Nevertheless, he had important work to do, so he stepped out onto the palate of the beast, his feet squishing awkwardly on its tongue, and traipsed away in the direction of his office.
Dead Bait 3 Page 7
