PERMAFROST
A MYSTERY
Peter
Robertson
ALSO BY
PETER ROBERTSON
Mission
Colorblind
GIBSON HOUSE PRESS
Flossmoor, Illinois 60422
GibsonHousePress.com
© 2012 Peter Robertson
All rights reserved.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9855158-2-9 (ePub)
Cover design: Christian Fuenfhausen
DEDICATION
for my family
ONE
I sat in my car and read about Keith Pringle in a Chicago newspaper article. His name shimmered above the page, like heat above asphalt, and I shivered, with what was the only premonition I had ever had in my life.
He was already dead, my premonition told me.
* * *
It was a warm and hazy summer morning, already close to eighty degrees with matching humidity, and not yet seven, by the digital clock on the sleek wood dashboard of a black Mercedes SL600 convertible, or the thin gold Raymond Weil wristwatch beneath the lightly starched white cuff of the cotton oxford shirt I had bought one lunchtime on an impulse from Neiman Marcus.
The cellular phone was silent. The roof of the car was down in an attempt to capture the best part of the day. In the trunk the CD-changer located the fourth disc in sequence, and Rickie Lee Jones sang “Rebel Rebel,” by David Bowie, a song from my youth, with which I would have liked to identify.
What had the day promised before I read the newspaper? I can no longer remember. I am wealthy, I suppose I should mention, by any conventional standards. I am white and male and European-born and not yet old, and all I possess has come remarkably easily, without stress or undue compromise, and is therefore largely worthless, to my selfish eyes.
A large white car, perhaps a late-model Chevrolet, the kind of car favored by older male drivers in passable off-the-rack suits, had abandoned the road and stood, still hissing in some annoyance, on the parched and ill-tended grass on the shoulder. The car was empty and a bright red tow truck blocked two lanes of traffic in an effort to get at it.
Horns naturally honked, and the heat, and the promise of still more heat, made the good people angry and impatient. I just sat and waited and after a while unfolded my newspaper and skipped impatiently past the front page to the meatier sections inside.
I had no pressing engagements, and I don’t have a boss with a scowling eye fixed permanently on a time clock or an evaluation slip.
I do find that people often mistake my complacency for contentment.
The article in question concerned the numerous hazards befalling European tourists in large American cities. I scrolled down through the fatal signs, the easy-to-identify rental cars and the shoddy maps, the dark streets on the wrong side of town. It appeared that virtually every state had at least one harrowing tale to tell.
Near the bottom of the page, Michigan’s roll call of death was the smallest. Yes, an official agreed, they had their tourists, and yes, one was possibly missing. He was a British man, a Mr. Keith Pringle, who had been vacationing in the northern part of the state, where the population was sparse, but where tourism was quietly encouraged. Mr. Pringle was believed to be visiting a close relative, the article stated, but he was now also believed to be missing for close to two months. I noted that everything was only believed at this early stage. The British Consulate was naturally concerned, if essentially noncommittal, but the skilled woman journalist was able to hint darkly that this was indeed another hapless innocent, fallen to a rampant new crime wave.
The title of the article was “Innocents Abroad.”
* * *
Keith’s name came at me from the page like a freak wave from a still sea, because he and I had been friends as teenagers. No, the term friends is perhaps too presumptive, and too intimate. We had known of each other, and we had met occasionally.
But he was preserved in a piece of memory I keep, and tend, if seldom access, from a hometown I have never managed to bring into any kind of emotional focus, but which is a memory, or catalog of memories, that, at times, resonates with more intensity than the present day.
* * *
Now I was far from home. As was Keith Pringle. He was believed to be missing, whereas my position in the world is well documented.
I fed my premonition. It remained intact and had even blossomed some. I now knew for certain that Keith lay dead only six hours from me, from my expensive car, and my listless and shiny life.
But the six hours translated into thousands of miles, and almost twenty years distance, and a gently growing alienation, from the small and timid place where we had both started out.
But the distance wasn’t that important, because I was going to find him.
TWO
It was hard to spot where one city ended and the other began, but somewhere in the crisscrossing suburban transition, the small Scottish town where Keith Pringle and I lived struggled to exist.
I grew up there, through my youth and the sullen years after my father, who I barely knew, died. Later, I still languished there, deep in an uncertain eternity of high school, handicapped by shyness and the chronic fear of physical contact with either sex, for whatever reason.
I lived there until I went to college at eighteen and blossomed into a demon lover and rugged sportsman who, in truth, existed only in my lurid imagination.
Our town had one bank and four pubs, it had council houses that looked in essence as pretty and as cared for as anything bought and paid for, or at least cheerfully brokered by the ever-willing building societies.
A betting shop owned by a minor sporting hero of a few years past was the older male’s social focus in a high street that was a little too narrow for two lanes of traffic, while the co-op claimed the bulk of the elderly female allegiance. The four pubs duked it out for the loyalties of the rest of the adults.
* * *
The town school was too small for the town children, so that some were farmed out to zealously progressive comprehensives in the two cities, and the rest were housed and educated in prefab huts intended for temporary use, but which were still standing and functional four years ago, when my wife and I took a more or less pointless emotional detour on a rare trip home to visit my mother.
* * *
It was one of my few whimsical moments. It was one of my wife’s few indulgences.
I remember stopping the car, getting out, expecting the warm jolt, some pleasing form of spiritual connection, the headlong thrust into reminiscence and reverie. But the huts all looked just as they had. There was no halo of nostalgia. They were just prefab huts.Old. And quite ugly.
My wife has less soul than I, I suspect, and was clearly uninterested, pausing politely, a slightly pained look on her smooth, sculptured face, reminding me that my mother was expecting us for dinner, and that she dealt badly with even a marginal disruption to her routine.
I got back into the rented car and we drove away slowly, moving like a lost tourist between the parked cars on the high street, which had never been widened, and never would now, because of the new bypass that catapulted the commuter traffic from city to city, without pausing to acknowledge our little town as it squatted, sulking, in the shadows of the concrete that stretched heavenward.
At a zebra crossing a lady guard with a huge orange lollipop of a sign took three children across the street quickly. One was crying. Two were laughing. An old man in a cloth cap and a Harris tweed jacket shiny at the elbows left the betting shop smiling like a fiend, and with a flourish entered the public bar door of the closest pub. Ill-gotten gains. He clearly felt f
lush, and would soon feel all the flusher.
Once the children had crossed, and left the sanctuary of the guard’s domain, the crying one lashed out at one of the others and produced tears on a smudged cheek with his little hard fist. Now two cried, and the smiling boy was left out.
Why are children so relentlessly, callously horrible? Is it simply safety in numbers?
When I was fifteen I met Keith Pringle at a bad and otherwise uneventful party, where he chased after stupid, undeserving love, and got his nose bloodied for his trouble.
I don’t now recall the name of the person who gave the party. It’s very possible I never knew it. Doubtless a friend of a friend of a friend. Or else word of the event spread, and beer-fuelled teenage radar picked up the signal. You know how it is.
But I do recall the music, and the dark living room stripped of furniture by wise parents, the smell of cigarettes and spilt beer on carpets, and Brut aftershave applied a little too liberally.
Three delirious boys swayed like waves in the ocean in the center of the room, their arms spread across each other’s shoulders like a Russian folk dance, drinking their warm beer from cans that never emptied.
They were loud, and they were drunk, or else they were pretending to be.
The song was “Jet” by Paul McCartney & Wings, and the year was perhaps 1974. I wore a navy brushed denim jacket and gray loon pants with a flare that fully covered my scuffed suede shoes, and I wore a leather thong around my neck and another around one wrist, and if it’d been a decade earlier I’d have been a real honest-to-God hippie. If my mother had let me grow my hair as long as I wanted.
Were there other people sitting on the floor in the corner of the room? In a just world there would be a lonely, pretty girl who was interesting once you got her to start talking and who would want to slow dance, and put her head on your shoulder when you took a chance and pulled her that little bit closer.
“My heart is like a wheel. Let me roll it to you.”
A slow song. Jesus be praised.
But instead there was a drunken girl leaning against a wall, sullen between floods of tears, whose name was perhaps Jackie. She would dance with you if you asked, and she was undeniably pretty, but she would also try to kiss you with her dark red mouth all slack and wide open and her breath still smelling of sick.
You could kiss Jackie and feel her tits ‘til they were raw and get as far as you could in the corner of the room, maybe get the finger up her in the forgiving darkness.
And the next day, if you had been unfortunate enough to have been seen by your friends you could always tell them you were drunk.
Near the end of the night Jackie would give you her phone number on a piece of paper as her sober friends finally would find her and drag her away. And by then one of your mates had seen you and the word had spread and you had some fast explaining to do later.
So you never called her, even though you’d liked her by the end of the night, and you’d stopped seeing how far you could get, and had started to talk instead.
You quickly left the living room in the small semi-detached and it didn’t happen that way.
The kitchen was the talking room and the official sobering-up room. There, a girl in tight brown brushed denim flares and long straight brown-red hair and a milk-white complexion was making instant black coffee for some of the wasted boys, all pale and repentant and chastised under the bright fluorescent light.
A bedroom was reserved for necking couples. A single bed was piled high with winter coats for camouflage. But underneath the coats a tired, cocooned soul slept one off.
So the neckers were forced out onto the front porch, where their breath puffed in the bitter winter night, and they clinched on the steps, as the streetlights shone a pallid yellow that made the frost glitter on the ground. But they kissed furiously anyway, inept in their haste, their teeth clacking together, as they sought to generate a heat of their own.
The dining room was empty, except for Keith Pringle, who was huddled in the corner, cross-legged, crying into his hankie, which was wet and pale red with his blood and his tears.
We smiled at each other tentatively.
I knew him very slightly, no more than a face in the school corridor, either running or loitering between classes. A tall, gangly youth with a head full of curly brown hair, the palest blue eyes, all legs and trousers when he walked, like a pair of scissors standing upright.
His eyes looked horrible now. Just damp slits cut into snow.
“Do you by any chance have a Kleenex on you?” He spoke between sniffs, his speech muffled by lips that were bruised but uncut.
I didn’t. I shook my head. He was a pitiful sight, but you had to admire the politeness of the question.
He touched his nose gingerly. There was something still damp and dark under one nostril.
“It really hurts.” He let his hand run up through his hair so that it dragged a little of his blood with it.
“I wonder if it’s broken.” He spoke this last quietly, despite his misery; clearly he was bemused at the prospect.
“Jesus. What happened to you?” I asked him.
“Oh, nothing much,” he said. “Jules Sweeney just gave me a kicking.”
It should be mentioned that Jules Sweeney was known as something of a bastard, especially to those younger than him. He was one of the three rapturous singers in the living room, and his steady girlfriend was the brown/red haired girl in the kitchen, dispensing her coffee to the chastised paralytics.
I was fifteen years old. Jules was sixteen. Keith was only fourteen then and ripe for the sadistic attentions of Jules.
“He can be rather unpleasant,” I helpfully offered.
Keith nodded in agreement. “Especially when he thought I was going after his Joyce.”
Jules’ girl was Joyce McKay.
“I tried to tell him that I wasn’t, but the fucking bastard wouldn’t listen to me.”
His voice caught, and then Keith Pringle sobbed, and his pain and his anguish came gushing out and it made him forget that we were strangers, and that we lived in a country where this sort of cathartic emotional release wasn’t the norm, wasn’t considered proper, unless you were plastered beyond belief, and I suspected that Keith wasn’t even close to that stage.
“I really fucking wasn’t!” He was almost howling at me now. “Honest I wasn’t. I wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
We weren’t friends. A curt nod in the hallways. He lived close by. And his mother knew my mother and they talked about nothing things and the treachery of the weather as they waited at the bus stop.
Yet here he was unzipped, fully exposed in his anger and his despair, trapping me, uneasy now in a place between embarrassment and amazement.
I wanted to get away. I wanted to spare him his unguarded pain. But I was unable to, and in truth, I was unwilling to miss a single word or revelation.
“So he’s just talking to me, like we’re good mates, then he hits me in the face. He waits to do it in front of her, so I know it’s just a game he’s playing. And she’s trying to pull him away from me as if she’s shocked and concerned. But she’s just playing too. She’s really laughing and feeling like she’s the damsel in distress getting her honor saved. The cow. The fucking cow. So I try to say something then. To try and explain to him that he’s wrong about . . . but he wasn’t going to listen. He’s having a good time now. And his mates were there too now. Standing behind him. And they were laughing, taking the piss out of him about a second year kid necking with his girl. They were just making him go more mental.”
He paused. Then his voice sunk to nearly a whisper. “When she told him about the tits I thought he’d kill me then.” I must have looked confused. “Joyce was talking to him, telling him stuff like I was forcing her to kiss me. She said I wouldn’t let her go. She said I tried to feel her tits.”
> He shouted. “I fucking didn’t! I truly fucking didn’t! I’ve fancied her all my fucking life. But I never would. I just couldn’t do that. Not to her. Not the way I thought of her. Then his mates took me outside. In the back garden. They held me while Jules hit me. When I fell he kicked me in the stomach and I was sick all over myself and he didn’t want to hit me anymore then because he’d get it all over his good clothes.”
I hadn’t actually noticed the smell until then.
He asked me for a cigarette, which I didn’t have. I went to the kitchen and scrounged one up and brought it back to him. He took it with a half-smile, lit it with a stainless steel Ronson lighter in a shaking hand that was smeared with mud and God knows what else, and took a deep draw.
“Thanks,” he said shakily. And then he was silent for a moment, as he smoked hard.
I asked him. “Why did Joyce lie about you?”
He thought for a moment. “To make Jules jealous,” he said finally. “And to save herself from getting found out for trying to get off with someone behind his back.”
“Is that what really happened?”
He nodded. “She was here at the start of the party, before most folks got here. Jules was probably still in the pub with his mates. Getting himself pissed up. She came over to me and asked me for a fag. I had some then so I gave her one. She said a fag deserved a kiss and she kissed me then. It felt like it went on for hours and hours and she got most of her tongue down my throat.”
“You didn’t think to put up a fight.”
“No.” He smiled. “It never occurred to me.”
I couldn’t help asking. “So how does she kiss?”
He managed a rueful grin.
“Like a great big, perfumed Hoover. I was about an inch away from heaven. I’ve fancied that horrible woman forever and the awful thing is that I think I still do. I must be mental.”
Once again Keith’s words were loose, leading him like a lost dog, into the unacceptable, the heart-zones. Maybe he really was very drunk. But I doubted it. He was simply adrift, beyond a certain point, when all his inane utterances assumed an added weight, and a measure of resonance.
Permafrost Page 1
