Permafrost

by Peter Robertson

  I told him I could fax it to him.

  He laughed at that. “Too fancy for us,” he said.

  As I left the beach, I watched him. He continued to circle the body. Did I imagine him edging closer and closer? Zeroing in on a metaphysical second kill, this one beyond flesh and blood, this one going after the reputation, the sights set on the personality.

  It was open season on George Tait now, and I didn’t care.

  I did find the Shady Nook Motel easily. It was where the orderly said it would be. Not terribly far from the car rental office, or the supermarket, where I had daringly abducted Sylvie Tait.

  It was as plain, as cheaply anonymous, and as ill-named as I expected it to be. A bored girl named Jeanette, with hair like Reba McEntire, took my credit card at the front desk and handed me a key without a smile. She was watching a sitcom on a tiny television beneath the desk, and I was fortunate enough to have approached her during a commercial break.

  “Is ordering dinner a possibility?” I asked. It was still early, not yet eight, still light outside, still warm, but I felt I had lived several lives inside the trappings of the last few hours and I was tired, soaking wet, and my head was sore and liberally covered with dried blood where the late George Tait had hit me.

  But for some odd reason the prospect of room service was an inviting one.

  It was also clearly an unrealistic one. Jeanette looked at me oddly. Perhaps I had spoken in Farsi or more likely she had finally noticed my appearance. There was no room service available at any time. There was a burger place across the road.

  “It’s real good food they got there.” Jeanette spoke without much enthusiasm. As she handed me a copy of my credit card receipt a flurry of canned laughter signaled that Rosanne was about to begin again, and that I could no longer count on her undivided attention.

  Laid out across the soft queen-size bed and facing a washed-out print of what I took to be Mount Fuji enveloped in suggestive mist, I licked the remains of a cheeseburger from my fingers and fired up the laptop. When I logged onto CompuServe, I found a three-page message from Nye.

  He was as always succinct and ruthlessly efficient. Patricia had called, and he had been apprised of my marital situation. As always I had no secrets from Nye. With a shock I realized how little I knew of his life away from ArtWorks. With another shock I realized how little I had thought about ArtWorks in the past few days.

  But we all need to get away sometimes.

  He was, he informed me, swinging over to my house in the morning to remove all traces of my presence from the property. Neither he nor Patricia thought the process would take terribly long. He would pick up some clothes for me there, and at the stores he knew I was partial to, if it was required.

  He knew my size. He knew my taste. He knew my budget.

  He had also, he added, found me a place to stay.

  As a past master of subtly shaded nuance within the emotional confines of electronic mail, Nye was able to inform me of all this with evident hesitation. Aiding me in leaving my wife smacked of emotional territory, was, by nature, uncharted waters for Nye and I.

  He had always liked Patricia very much. I knew this. And the feeling was, I think, firmly reciprocated. How could they not have found common ground? They were painstakingly precise people occupying key positions in my life. As it transpired, it was Nye who actually occupied the key position, while poor Patricia had been unknowingly been benched a while back.

  But in one other way, they differed markedly. I felt sure that Nye was fulfilled. And Patricia clearly wasn’t.

  At the moment, however, I felt a little sorry for him.

  He would not like being placed in the position of aiding and abetting our marital destruction. On the other hand he was brutally organized, and my life would have to be placed on an even keel as quickly as possible. I needed a place to stay. Ergo, Nye had found me one.

  I was now in possession of a short-term rental, a small, sparsely furnished loft a stone’s throw from my business. My clothes would be there, a computer would be up and working, the hard drive freshly loaded with the programs and files that had once resided in the machine back in my old study.

  My new domicile would boast a table and a chair and a bed. There would be gleaming white walls and pale, stripped wood. Patricia had filled a box with my few knickknacks—a handful of the modern history books I professed to love but seldom found time to read; the computer manuals I loathed but read, rather than admit my ignorance to Nye; and a good coffee machine.

  In a pathetically short time, my gossamer-thin life would be effortlessly crated and unpacked, just as it was before.

  Contact had been made with my lawyer and my broker, and faxes had been brandished and exchanged. Things were moving quickly and efficiently. Between Nye and Patricia there would be scant room for sentiment or indecision. If I would activate WinFax Pro on my laptop, Nye would divert the waters and begin to send them on with all due haste.

  I knew better than to argue, and did as I was instructed.

  In conclusion, Nye said, my art-framing business was ticking along uneventfully, although Tye, my most wayward of employees, had threatened to seek employment elsewhere. There had been a tearful delegation of my female workers before Nye, begging him for a softer attitude from the management (Nye, in other words) toward tardiness and sloppy framing work. Nye decided on a policy of appeasement and we were thus still in possession of Tye the terminally tardy.

  Nye ended by referring to our recent conversation and his plans for squeezing a little more money out of ArtWorks. I sensed trepidation. But he would try. Perhaps he thought I would soon be that particular American sub-species, the alimony-paying man, and that I would need ready cash by the bucketful from here on in.

  I sent a short note back, thanking Nye for everything, and asking him to continue to shamelessly mother me. I knew he would read it within the half hour, as he could only keep his hands away from a keyboard for so long. I also raised the possibility of my taking a little more time off, knowing he would be happy to see the back of me, but would probably not choose to phrase it exactly that way.

  I switched to Word Pro and began to write my statement for the police. It went quickly and remained mostly true to my verbal version on the beach. It would have gone faster, but the faxes began to pile up in the background. I was soon faxing back, restating that the title to the house was in my wife’s name only, moving sums of money from me to her, instructing lawyers to expedite the divorce proceedings, pleading no contest. The lease for the loft even showed up. Nye had thought of everything. The papers were beginning to blur, but I was still aware enough to recognize a rental agreement when I saw one.

  I left the room to find more ice for the large Diet Pepsi that had come gratis with the burger, which I had anticipated barely touching, but which was already half gone. When I returned after a successful sortie, the incoming faxes had finally ended.

  With Nye’s expert help, I was well on the way to casting myself adrift.

  When the statement was finished, I read it over carefully, spellchecked it, saved it, sensibly made a backup on a floppy disk, switched WinFax from download to upload, and prepared to unleash an electronic blitzkrieg.

  I used my memory, and media databases, and when all else failed I called directory assistance. I faxed and e-mailed my version of Keith Pringle’s death to seven major newspapers, two in Chicago, one in Detroit, one in New York, one in Washington, one in Los Angeles, and one in London. I made sure to send one of the Chicago copies to the woman who had written the original piece on dying tourists in America, the one that had mentioned Keith by name.

  Would the story be of any interest to them? I suspected that it might, especially in Detroit and Chicago. But truthfully, I wasn’t sure.

  It was to be a paper trail, an electronic burr that would ensure that Keith’s death wouldn’t remain the sole propert
y of one strange cop in a small town.

  But I wanted a little more insurance on that score.

  So next came the authorities, the Chicago and Detroit police, the British Consulate, the Department of Immigration and Naturalization. I even toyed with the White House.

  In the case of the consulate fax, I once again fine-tuned the direction of my communication, this time singling out Phoebe Chalmers, the woman I had spoken to on the phone.

  When I had finished, I closed WinFax and kicked the burger wrappers off the bed. The soda was empty and the ice in the bottom of the plastic cup had melted to a warm, pale brown. My stomach felt obscenely full and my mouth tasted horrible. When I looked at my watch it was almost ten thirty.

  On an impulse I checked CompuServe for messages before turning off the computer.

  There was one.

  It was from Nye, and it simply said—good luck.

  I woke at 1:37 in the morning, pulled on dry clothes, and drove back to the Handle for no good reason. The yellow crime tape had claimed more ground, the bodies were gone, and it was too dark to see the blood.

  The dock remained accessible.

  The nighttime view was odd, or it seemed that way, given the frame of mind I was in. There were lights across the water, unblinking, static, house lights no doubt. Except for one area that was completely black. I was initially confused. Then I understood. Foolishness Island was blotting out a part of the other side of Paddle Lake like a blanket of dense fog.

  I watched the stationary lights. Every once in a while, a pair of vehicle headlights moved like a shooting star on the coast road. Or at least it looked that way. The darkness was sufficient to obscure the demarcation between land and sky.

  What was I doing here?

  I turned back toward the beach. The Handle was dark, except for a dim light in Connie Alexander’s front room. I thought of ringing her doorbell.

  It was a foolish thought.

  I drove back to the motel in silence.

  Sonny Landreth’s loud delta guitar filled the interior of the Mercedes early in the morning, as I pumped gas at an Amoco station perched on the far edge of town.

  I had handed my statement in at the police station earlier. The office had been open but empty. Perhaps the chief was stuffing his face with doughnuts at a nearby diner. Perhaps not. He wasn’t an especially fat man.

  Much more likely he was up and already investigating the murder-suicide that took place yesterday out at the Handle, the murder-suicide that would surely make him a famous man in these parts, for a little while at least.

  I signed the document in the empty office, dated it, added my address, then scored my address out, added my work address and phone number, and then quickly left.

  If there was only one cop in town and he was otherwise occupied with the solving of a murder, then it followed that I was free to speed. Examining the argument for flaws, I detected none, and gunned the black convertible out of the gas station and onto an open road just as a ferocious guitar instrumental began.

  I opened both passenger windows and resisted the urge to shout some form of childish obscenity at the proverbial dust of the town as I endeavored to quickly shake it off.

  My feeling of euphoria prevailed. I was glad to be leaving Paddle Lake. My less-than-noble quest was over. My joy didn’t extend as far as my going home. It hadn’t been much of a home I had left behind, and it had been further eroded in my absence. But I was able to take pleasure in leaving. At the Handle a rock was lifted, and I had watched with some fascination as the creatures underneath froze, then scurried about in the harsh sunlight, frantic to reclaim their shelter, angered and aroused and exposed. There were people like Connie that I had liked, people like Sandy that I had lusted after, people like Will that I hadn’t fully understood, people like Sylvie that made me nervous and sympathetic at the same time, and people like George Tait who just plain terrified me. As I drove they all resonated inside me. They surely would for a while. But I knew I would carry the memory of George Tait for a lot longer than the rest.

  Driving fast, it took less than an hour to reach the exit for Harmony, the town where Bridget Cassidy resided. I slowed down. A mile and a half to go. I thought about her tanned arms, thin and sinewy inside the sleeve of her faded shirt, the bleached hairs like soft down, the smoothness of her legs as she sat, the leafy pattern of the fabric on the small couch, and the yellow/white sunlight applied like a balm to the living room in her compact, comfortable house, set halfway up the sand-sprinkled road that bottomed out onto a stretch of seldom-used beach.

  She had formed an indelible image. Or at least her aspect and her topographic location had.

  But now, more fully aware of the skittish nature my emotions had adopted in these past few days, I hesitated. In my present state, untold legions of women were capable of laying claim to my loyalties simply by breathing loudly in the same room. It was almost sitcom funny. I was clearly in classic rebound mode. The ironic aspect of this was that I had been in this state before being fully aware that I had anything from which to rebound.

  But now I could more easily identify my malaise. The next step would be getting a firm grip on it before I became a leering midlife buffoon. I already had the sports car, after all.

  Descending toward reality was made easier by the growing suspicion that I had barely registered with Bridget; she saw a friendly man perhaps, a concerned man, chasing after her missing quasi-relative for good and loyal reasons. Had she totally missed the personal agenda, the purely selfish rationale?

  I didn’t for a moment believe that she saw a likely lover, any more than Sandy Weller did. Sandy saw availability, horniness, and a chance for fun. She could probably locate horniness with her eyes closed and her hands tied behind her back. And she had never promised me anything but fun.

  Bridget had been quietly focused on a missing man, the one she herself might have fallen a little in love with, while, just possibly, on the far periphery of her vision, I lurked, a would-be good knight anxious to find his own personal grail.

  She had feared the worst about Keith when I had seen her. Like a parent knowing something, but not knowing it for sure. She would find out soon, as this was the heartland, and bad news was seldom slow in coming.

  And she would grieve in the soft, understated manner in which I suspected she did everything.

  She would remain an indelible image.

  As Sonny Landreth’s slide guitar spluttered and died, the exit for Harmony came and went.

  The next five days and four nights limped past. I had my new place and my few possessions were geometrically arranged in it.

  On the fifth night, I yielded to the demands of the traffic, and opened the large bay window to the mega-bass radio of passing cars that boomed their multicultural rap up at me. Once, bizarrely, I even heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

  I stood motionless in the milk-white room, my face pressed against the screen that filtered the humid, city-stained air that occasionally hitched a ride on a stray breeze coming westward from the lake.

  I had lived my married life in climate-controlled rooms, in germ-destroying environments, chilled to a frigid state by silent running air-conditioning, and now I wanted it hot and natural.

  The previous tenant had attached potted plants to the metal bars that ran waist-high outside the window, denying me a fast three-floor descent and a squashed impact on the parking lot below. They were mostly sunflowers and they were dying slowly and beautifully, their long petals intact and stiff, dry and turning brown around the edges.

  One floor above me, the roof of the building housed a dozen lounge chairs and a scrupulously clean pool that got energetic if sporadic use from the hundred or so affluent young people who, for whatever perverse or practical reason, were doggedly determined to rent rather than own.

  On the fifth night, I was alone, as I had been on the previous
four. A sound system would have been nice, but it had remained in the house with Patricia. I had borrowed a CD boombox from the office, and Joan Osborne was singing. I had brewed coffee. I had also guiltily wolfed down a chili dog with onions from a hot dog stand a block away, so life was therefore not altogether wretched, even if my breath was.

  Connie Alexander had written me a letter that had arrived care of ArtWorks. I hadn’t opened it until now. I sipped my coffee and began to read.

  The case of the Paddle Lake suicide-murder was moving along nicely. The death of Keith Pringle, an indigent foreigner, was being attributed to George Tait, a local handyman. Will Sanders’ death was to be ruled a misadventure. No charges were being brought against Sylvie Tait for the shooting of her husband.

  Sylvie was quietly assuming the aura of martyr. She was still in her house, and the neighbors, even Connie herself, were beating a path to her door with casserole dishes and offers of babysitting. As I had expected, the case had been large and brutal enough to draw the legal big guns, and the local police chief had been suitably praised for his diligence, but then forced to give up the case. Federal agents and hardened urban cops had descended en masse.

  Two houses away, Will’s wife, Chloe, was distraught and heavily sedated. His daughter Beth was doing okay, and there Connie was at her most helpful, as the youngster had begged to be allowed to stay with Connie, and Connie was more than happy to oblige. They gardened and walked the beach and played board games indoors when the rain or the photographers drove them inside. The Handle had fast become a mecca for the media. Al and Al Jr. at the jet-ski store were in clover, as was Sandy Weller, whose house was full of newspaper sharks with easily padded expense accounts. Sandy was also busy with a handsome local man much younger than herself, and poor Connie had trouble keeping the scent of naked envy off the pages. Tom Younger had strongly advised his four Handle clients to hold out for a higher price, in light of the area’s newfound notoriety. I was powerless to decide if this was a wise or foolish strategy.