The Ice at the Bottom of the World (7 page)

And then, Down! you rocket-spin, going face first down. What you are seeing are just the bits out of a bigger thing, like when you and your best friend go through the trash behind the Ebb Tide Motel and find the instant camera pictures of naked people doing naked-people things, except when they get ready to go home from vacation they rip up all the naked pictures into the little bits you and your best friend find pieces of, hardly ever enough to put together, except for that one you don’t even show your brother, the one of that fat lady with the scary titties, and how you keep one titty scrap and your best friend keeps the other, him also keeping the knees but you keeping what is real excellent scary, her happy face, you can see how funny she thought her vacation was with scary titties and sunburn.

So on the Rocket Sling you are seeing these little
pieces of the put-together picture so that when the ride really gets excellent spinning fast, mostly what you see are the spinning smears of the bulbs burning bright, and like ripped scraps, sometimes maybe you see the shoes of the breakable-armed man and sometimes maybe you see a far summer star, all the time smelling Train Wreck breath and coffee breath and breeze off the ocean ink where it’s deep black night and scary because you can still look up and see the two rusted bolts that hold your rocket on and you think the bolts might break and you are going to fly right off the rocket ride arm, you are going to be slung right out of the park way out in the ink, all strapped down and locked in, to blub-blub sink without no one’s reach, where nobody could ever possibly find you. That’s the real excellent scary part, that feeling, and that feeling won’t come if the lady from next door is there and your mom won’t ride the ride, because what brings on that feeling most is when your mom rides wedged in tight with you and your brother on nights like this, when your mom will scream the excellent scream, the scream that people you see in snatches on the boardwalk stop and stare for, the scream that stops the ride next door, the scream that tells us to our hearts the bolts have finally broken.

   My brother and I have been having off from school. Our mom won’t let us go because of my black eye. I
took it like a Duke McQuaid. I like to look at myself in the mirror and then spit in the sink like it ain’t nothing to it at all.

We are at home alone so when we see the lady next door going up her walk my brother and I put our mouths up to the window shade and yell, Nosy Bitch! Then we lay down on the company sofa we’re not allowed on and laugh. Our dad has said that Nosy Bitch was the one who called our school. They took us in the sick room and asked us was everything all right at home, did we tend to fall down and hurt ourselves. I told them our dad can beat up whoever he wants to. Nosy Bitch!

About an hour later that Nosy Bitch comes knocking at the back door while we’re watching TV. We crawl in the cave behind the company sofa while the TV plays all the way up so I know she can hear it and I don’t go to the door. I ain’t coming out to face a rope around my neck, Nosy Bitch, you’ll have to break down the door and shoot your way in. But she keeps tapping the glass like I know she won’t go away until I go see, so I get up and go down the hall touching all the cousin pictures and then I make sure the toilet isn’t running where my brother had been in there for about an hour and I take long linoleum slides in my socks across the kitchen floor and still I see her shadow on the curtain in back. It could be the shadow of a man with a loaf of bread under his arm.

It’s just another bag of those green apples she’s
brought us and a book of Jesus homework for our mom. She asks me, Is she here? and I say, Nah, she ain’t here, and she says, Well, tell her I came by, and then before she leaves she looks over my head into the kitchen like she’d like to nose around in there so I close the door and watch her go back in her house through the shade.

Outside, me and my brother take some side-gnawing bites out of a couple of the green apples until we catch the Murdock cat in a run underneath some cars. We clobber him a few times with some apples to his brains until he makes a flat-eared dive into the storm drain. We see him down between the grates pushing against a ledge to keep out of the water so we chew some apples until they are the right size to throw through the grate. The cat has to swim away with apple mess all in his hair.

We make a few checks in the storm drain grates down the street but they run dry so I figure the Murdock cat has hit a turn in the pipe. We set back home when the mail truck stops and waits by a box while the mailman reads somebody’s magazine. I line up for a shot like a bomb in a covered wagon but I’m off a little and the apple splits on the edge of the mailman’s mirror and the mailman gets a face full of mess.

I don’t do a Duke McQuaid. I run, pushing my little brother in front of me, pushing him so hard he starts to fall, then I grab him up before he does to push him
ahead some more. The mailman has dropped the magazine in the middle of the street to chase us. I try to run us towards home without really going there. I run us the direction of our house where I know whose fence is weak and where whose garage will lock. We turn the alley two people’s yards up from our chain-link gate and I figure: the dark of the magnolia next door! I throw my brother over the black-rotted whitewash and angle myself through a pushed-in plank and that is where we see them.

In that place, so always shady and the dirt is always damp, under where the magnolia has knotted limbs and leaves like plastic, the breakable-armed man is dragging a rake towards where the lady next door is bent over a basket. They both have stopped in mid what they’re doing to look at us, and I see that the man’s arm is white without his cast, his skin has been shaded by it from the sun. There is a tattoo of Jesus I would recognize anywhere on his white-shaded arm. The face of Jesus is blue ink and the beard is roughed with the real hair of the breakable-armed man. The tattoo looks somehow excellent, a wanted poster alive from the TV show I want to be.

   Storm has come and taken our power off so we look into my brother’s eyes with a flashlight for any change. His eyes are still like when you are bored at home on
rainy days and you start to draw but you don’t know what to draw so you just draw a dot and then you circle on and on the dot until it’s a big black hole in the middle of the paper.

All around my brother’s sick bed made up on the company sofa with a sheet and a pillow are stand-up Christian cut-outs of God and the Apostles. We have two of one, the one with the sheep up his sleeve. Our mom has made the green stuffed chair the place where she prays for my brother and waits in the dark with the flashlight.

Our dad is out in the car listening to the radio scores because the power is off to the TV. We know not to bother him. This afternoon Mr. Murdock came over and then my father grabbed me by my belt and collar like to clean a saloon bar with. I was lucky. When I hit by the TV I didn’t taste blood or anything and when he came over I knew to stay down and just study his shoes, to just watch for the toe parts to swell, to get ready for him to bend down and pick up my head.

For my brother it was a simple palm-push but my brother’s head was too close to the wall. I have told him a hundred million times to stay away from the walls even when the walls make corners. He was too close so when his head got pushed it sort of bounced off the wall and back to our dad’s palm like to kiss it, and then he fell out on the floor like a girl on the playground having a spell.

There is brought-over apple pie from next door smelling up the kitchen. Before the storm the breakable-armed man was in the neighborhood looking down into the storm drain grates. He had both hands around the bars and was kneeling over them like a man in a facedown prison.

From the window where I sit near my brother I can hear Mr. Murdock calling his cat. The radio plays out in our dad’s car. In the dashboard lights I can see his outline like a backwards Christian cut-out. A candle is lit in the window next door. For as long as you look at it, it never flickers.

   This is us, excellent, a family night out. Not even have we not had to go to Family Fish House to eat but we’ve come to Psycho Za to snag! Our mom has her hair fixed and has on the too-big red plastic parka with our dad’s name on the front. Our dad has said for us to have anything we can think of we want on the list of things to eat. What I’d usually do is split the Manic Train Wreck with my brother but he is still acting funny about eating and stuff, like he’s not all the way woken up and his eyes are like old fish-tank water. When he cries it’s more like a hiss, like how a soft knife sounds when you split a green apple open.

Our dad has wads of quarters in his pockets for me and my brother to play pinball but my brother leans in
the booth against our mom with his dead eyes while our mom pets his hair and our dad watches our car in the parking lot for somebody not to break in and steal it. There are still stacks of quarters when our food comes so I know I can tilt and push the pinball harder.

I eat my Brainbuster Burger heavy on the Super Goop and dig around in the catsup puddles with a Terminal Case of Logjam Fries but everyone else doesn’t look down at their plates, like the food isn’t good enough to eat. The family-night-out meal comes and goes with just me working on the platters, and then we get up and I show our dad where to pay while he strums quarters in his pockets and then we all stand out by the newspaper racks in front of Psycho Za like nobody knows where we are or which way home.

I see this is excellent so I say Rocket Sling! Rocket SLING! and our mom looks at me and says, It’s too late, way too late for the Rocket Sling. She says, It must be closed, and my brother mashes his face on her pants leg. Our dad says, Everybody get in the car.

I think at first our mom is right when we see the park shutting down with canvas wraps over the kiddie boats and there’s just an ice cream crowd through the gate coming out. The more our mom says, No, the more our dad turns his fingers on her arm to lead us in.

This is excellent! Just us and the Rocket and the breakable-armed man. He is changing lights on the metal arms from a box of white sleeved bulbs. He comes
down climbing off the gears and hitches up his pants. He opens a rocket cockpit and he does it in a way to make us feel that if he had a watch he would look at it because it is late. The boardwalk is empty, the Roll-Go-Round next door is dark.

Our mom would no sooner get us in the rocket. My brother has his face in her pants zipper. She says, Please, to our dad. Our dad steps into the rocket and his weight works on the bolts that hold him on overhead. We stand by the ramp and wait. Come on, he says, we’re going all the way tonight. He waits and we wait and then he starts to climb out to pull us in so I step up but the breakable-armed man moves faster and I watch his tattoo arm bring down the bar across our dad and snap the cockpit shut. I am still close as he slips in the clutch to bite a gear and our dad rocks a bit, porch-swinging, before the bolted-on arm lifts his rocket slowly to the top.

With his lopsided weight on the empty ride, the steel arms bend and bounce his one slow spin down, and in the bottom light I see a white-knuckled grip around the greased metal bar. Up he goes, his outline at the top before he rockets slung out full, to fall faster where we stand. The breakable-armed man leads us around behind the waiting line railing and then he drifts off backwards like as soon as he is in the dark he will run all the way home.

We are left alone in all this light. The bulbs running past throw shadows, the gears gnaw themselves against the motor. We cannot move to stop or move to go. We can only watch from behind the bars of the railings as around and around and around the rocket with our dad spins in perfect catching ups and perfect catching downs until there is the sound of metal breaking free. Something zings by my head like a bullet on TV. Things are starting to shake apart, things are coming loose, pieces of metal are rattling around the rockets and are being spun out of the light into the ink slapping the beach behind us.

Our mom takes a step towards where the breakable-armed man should stand. She has to drag my brother. He is green-apple screaming. We can hear more pieces falling as our dad rockets past. I look at the clutch handle I would never go near in a hundred million years. It is vibrating so fast it is a blurring thing in two places at once.

I see Dad up, I see Dad down. Breaking-loose metal hits against our clothes and we shield our eyes with our arms. We can’t look and we can’t not see what will happen next. I see something else and it is excellent, in the outline of Dad as he is slung up, still for a quick, quiet second before he is slung back down, and down I see him see the scrap of me, and then up I see his
outline, his arms grabbing at the air and spreading space, and then down I see from his pockets the busted wads of silver sling into the sand, and then up I see him excellent, snatching in the dark at the things that will fall to our feet from heaven.

THE ICE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD
 

B
ILL
D
OODLUM WAS HOME FROM THE HIGH SEAS
, having all the holidays he missed at once. Powell was over early. Louise Doodlum was just taking up Bill’s plate of birthday breakfast that he missed coasting south through the South China Sea.