The Ice Harvest (11 page)

But where was it? Jesus, these people gave each other lots of presents.
To Mommy from Susy. To Danny from Nina. To Susy from Santa.
Every possible combination except
To Bonnie from Vic
. He pressed on. Grandma and Grandpa, uncles, aunts, and cousins, all of them presumably Bonnie’s side of the family. And there in the corner, right next to where he’d grabbed the light cord from the carpet, sat a large package wrapped in the same green paper as Little Baby ChewyFace. He picked it up and hoisted it over the other packages. Its considerable weight was unevenly distributed within, and he set it down in front of him and flipped open the tag.
To: my one and only Bonnie, with hope for the future. From: Vic.

He drew a sharp breath and was ready to take the package out the door when a tiny voice stopped him.

“You’re not Santa.”

He looked over his shoulder and saw a dark-haired little girl of five or six, dressed in Smurf pajamas and staring at him with fierce loathing.

He rose to his feet and bent over at the waist, fingers arched on his knees. He whispered his reply, shushing as he raised his right hand and placed its index finger to his lips. “I’m one of his helpers. And you must be Nina.”

“I’m Susy,” she said out loud, condescending. “Nina’s almost twelve.”

“Oh, that’s right.” Presumably Nina was going to be disappointed with Baby ChewyFace, then. “You’re such a big girl, I mistook you for your big sister. Ho, ho, ho.”

“What’s your name?” Her expression didn’t soften.

“Charlie.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Just making sure all the packages are addressed to the right people.”

“You’re stealing our presents.”

“You’re going to wake everyone up. You don’t want to do that, do you?”

“I don’t care. It’s almost morning anyway.”

“How old are you, Susy?”

“I’m five.” She pointed to the package. “That’s from my dad to my mom. Put it back.”

Charlie looked down at the tag and affected surprise. “So it is, so it is.” He put it next to the tree, outside the circle of presents.

“Not there. Where it was. In the back.”

He picked it up again and placed it carefully back in its original spot. “There we go. Well, I guess I’m about ready to head back to the North Pole. Maybe you ought to go back to bed until it’s really morning.”

She stared at him, unconvinced. “I’m too excited to sleep.”

“If you don’t give it a try I’ll have to tell Santa. He wouldn’t like that.”

“You don’t know Santa.”

“That’s what you think.”

“How come you only have one shoe?”

“The other one fell out of the sleigh.”

“Okay.” The little girl sighed, looking resigned, and she turned away from him. For a moment he thought he’d pulled it off, and then she called out over her shoulder, “I’m going to go tell my Mom.”

Charlie knelt, picked up the package, and ran into the darkness of the kitchen to the accompaniment of an earsplitting shriek from little Susy, knocking against the sharp corner of a low counter with his sore hip. He wrestled with the back-door dead bolt.

“Mommy! A guy’s stealing our presents! Mommy!” Her voice had the tone of a rock saw cutting marble. He threw the door open and sprinted as well as he could manage one-shoed through the snow back to the Mercedes. He threw the package onto the passenger seat and turned the engine over, and as he pulled out and away he saw a light come on upstairs.

A mile away he thought he heard a siren in the distance. He pulled into a supermarket parking lot, turned the headlights off, and sat under a lamppost with the engine running. The siren was getting close, howling louder and louder until a police cruiser materialized and blew a red light through the intersection in the general direction of Bonnie’s house. Charlie was relieved that there were a few early-morning churchgoers on the streets. He didn’t know if Bonnie had seen the Mercedes out her window or not, but in any case it seemed best from now on not to be pretty much the only car on the road.

It was time he got back to Renata’s, but first he wanted to take a look at the money. He tore eagerly at the green paper and found a cardboard box duct-taped firmly shut and marked on two sides with a Miller High Life logo. After a failed attempt to loosen the tape with his thumbnail he shut the engine off and tore at the tape lengthwise with the car key. The tape split wide open down the center and he pulled up on the side flaps with a loud ripping sound as the tape on the sides separated from the box. Inside, orange from the light spilling in from the lamppost, were balls of wadded newspaper, and he fished through them until his hand touched something solid. He pulled out a wooden block the size and shape of a blackboard eraser. He began tossing the crumpled newspaper pages onto the floor of the passenger side, followed by another dozen or so of the wooden blocks, until he came to a hand-printed note on a piece of yellow legal paper at the bottom:

Merry christmas BITCH!
Good BYE. VIC.

Stunned, he leaned forward and took several deep breaths to avert panic, gripping the wheel so hard his fingers started to hurt. He had almost no money. Maybe Renata would be willing to front him enough to get out of town. With great deliberation he managed to place the blocks and newspaper back in the box and set it down on the parking lot next to the car, and then he drove away, the pedals hard-edged and hard to hold down under his wet, shoeless right sock.

Again he parked the Mercedes down the street from Renata’s house and limped slowly toward it, his hip worse than ever, the pain in his skull throbbing to the time of his heartbeat. When he got inside he’d take her up on her earlier offer of coffee, maybe ask if she had an aspirin.

He rang the bell and waited. No one came. The screen door was slightly ajar, and he opened it and tried the doorknob. It gave and he pushed his way inside. The lights were still on in the living room and the kitchen, and the house was quiet.

“Renata?” There was no response. Next to a chair by the fireplace an oddly colored paperback lay split open, pages facing down, a title in a language Charlie didn’t recognize running along its cracked spine. In the fireplace the fire still burned, and the newest of the logs hadn’t been going long. He moved down the back hallway, calling her name.

To his left was a half-open door. Inside, the room was dark, and he moved uncertainly by the faraway light from the living room to a frilly table lamp on a nightstand. Turning it on he saw that under it was a lace doily. Renata’s bed was an antique four-poster, covered with a quilt that might have been a hundred years old. The walls were covered with family photos, many of them in recognizably local settings—one was a group photo taken sometime in the 1930s at some company’s Fourth of July picnic at Lake Bascomb, the dock clearly visible in the background. Not one of the photos included Renata, and in fact nothing here seemed to Charlie as though it really belonged to her. It was as though she had rented the house fully furnished with the sentimental relics of someone else’s life and brought nothing with her that might betray the tenant’s actual identity but her clothes and a few indecipherable foreign paperbacks.

The back of the house was locked tight. Down a rickety flight of wooden stairs he found the basement completely empty except for a sump pump and a hot-water heater. Slowly he made his way back up the stairs. Renata was gone, almost certainly with his money, and his range of options was narrowing further with every passing second.

15

A
gain he parked around the corner and approached the Sweet Cage on foot, putting as little weight as possible on the shoeless right one in case of broken glass hidden by the snow. The only car in the parking lot was a black 1980 Lincoln Continental, and for a brief, disoriented moment he thought it was his own company car. On closer examination he realized his mistake; this Lincoln had out-of-state plates. It was Bill Gerard’s own car. There was no one inside.

Two sets of fresh footprints, one male from the driver’s side and one female from the other, led from the Lincoln to the side door. They looked to him to be the only prints made since the snow had stopped. Charlie went first to the side door and tried it very gently. It was locked, and so was the front door. He looked at the pay phone on the corner and tried to come up with a legitimate excuse he could use for needing to get into the Sweet Cage outside business hours. Nothing remotely convincing suggested itself, but he moved over to the phone anyway and dialed information.

“Have you got a listing for a Sidney McCallum?”

“I have an S. J. McCallum on Tennessee and a D. S. on Twenty-third.”

“Give me both of them.”

He tried S. J. McCallum on Tennessee first. S. J. turned out to be a young woman who objected violently to being awakened before dawn on Christmas morning, and though she wasn’t Sidney, the torrent of abuse that came flowing over the line at Charlie was vivid and raunchy enough to suggest some sort of kinship with him. D. S. on Twenty-third stood for D. Sidney McCallum, and when he picked up he hadn’t been to bed yet.

“I can’t help it, I’m still pissed off about my mom and her husband just up and taking off for the Garden of the goddamn Gods with no warning and leaving me with my kids. Plus which that asshole boyfriend of Rusti’s tonight really got my adrenaline going.”

“I thought you were supposed to get tired after a big adrenaline rush like that.”

“Well, I’m not. So what’s up?”

“I got no place to go. Can I come over?”

This caught Sidney off guard. “Yeah. That’d be good. I got something to talk to you about anyway. I could make you some eggs and coffee if you want. Kids won’t be up for a couple hours, hopefully.” Charlie wrote down the address and limped back to the Mercedes as fast as he could.

Five minutes later Sidney let him into his house. “Sorry it’s such a mess. We don’t have anybody over, usually.” It was disorderly but clean, with toys as the predominant factor in the disorder. Charlie looked around the room for a key rack as Sidney led him back to the kitchen. “So, you just been out wandering around?”

“Yeah, more or less.”

“I do that sometimes, after I get off. Nights when I don’t have the kids, anyway. Just get out there and drive around with no particular destination.” He looked down at Charlie’s sock. “Looks like you lost a shoe, there.”

“Yeah.” He didn’t offer an explanation and hoped Sidney wouldn’t press it.

“You want to borrow some boots or something? What size are you?”

“Nine.”

“I’m a thirteen wide. Sorry.” He opened a cabinet. “I can make some coffee, if you want some.”

“I’d rather have a drink, if that’s okay.” There was no key rack in the kitchen, either.

“I don’t think I’ve got anything. I don’t drink at home much, because of the kids. . . .” As Sidney opened the refrigerator Charlie was vastly relieved to see two bottles of Schlitz inside the door. “Hey, what do you know, you’re in luck.” Sidney pulled out one of the bottles and cracked the cap off on the edge of the counter.

Charlie took it from him gratefully and held it before his eyes. Two beers wouldn’t stop the pain in his head, but it would do something toward taking the edge off.

“I think I’ll join you, come to think of it,” Sidney said, reaching for the other one, and Charlie’s heart broke a little as the big man cracked the second bottle open for himself. He took a first expectant sip of his own and his heart broke a little more as he realized that the bottle must have been in the refrigerator for a year or more. The beer was sour and lifeless, bitter as fermented aspirin, but he tried to convince himself that he could get it down. He swallowed the tiny sip with some difficulty.

“Here’s to next year, Charlie,” Sidney said, and took a giant swig that reversed course before it got to his throat, spraying the door of the refrigerator and Charlie’s overcoat with spoiled beer. “Shit! Gone skunky on me. Told you I don’t drink much at home. Yours okay?”

“Yeah, it’s a little flat, but it’s okay,” he said as he took a running shot at another sip. This one tasted worse than the first, and he set the bottle down next to the sink, admitting defeat. “On second thought, it is kind of skunky.”

Sidney shook his massive head sadly and poured both bottles foamlessly into the sink. “I’ll make some coffee anyway. You go on into the living room and sit down.”

Charlie sat down on the living room couch and looked around, trying to picture where the keys might be if they weren’t in Sidney’s pant pocket. If they were, Charlie had no idea what he’d do. The options seemed limited to knocking Sidney cold when he wasn’t expecting it, or asking him nicely if he could please borrow the keys for a couple of hours. Neither possibility held much promise. After a couple of minutes Sidney came out of the kitchen, set a cup of coffee in front of Charlie, and sat down in a recliner opposite.

“So you’re probably wondering what I wanted to talk to you about.” Until that moment Charlie had forgotten that Sidney had mentioned something he wanted to discuss.

“Yeah. So what’s on your mind?”

“You think that kid’s gonna press charges?”

“I don’t know. I doubt it.” He hadn’t thought about it.

“I can’t believe I did it. Makes me sick to my stomach. Feels like a fucking hangover. But he was going after her with a tire iron, Charlie. A fucking tire iron. And that new boyfriend of hers was no fucking help at all. He was curled up there in a fetal position
whimpering
while this guy smashed his driver’s-side window and came after him and Rusti.” He shook his head. “But still. I don’t know why I couldn’t have just fucked him up a little and sent him on his way. Those hands of his are crippled for life, probably.”

“I thought that was the idea. Him being a guitar player.”

Sidney smiled a little at the thought. “Yeah.”

“Look at it this way: it’ll make it harder for him to beat anybody up.”

“Yeah. When I think about Rusti’s black eye I don’t feel so bad. But that’s not really what gets me, Charlie. It’s the principle. I just don’t believe in solving problems with force all the time anymore. Karma and all that shit.”

“But you’re a bouncer.”

“You’d be surprised how many troublemakers’ll walk away quietly with a warning. It’s all in the voice. And the intensity of the stare.”

“Sure, I’ve seen you do it. But sometimes the stare doesn’t cut it.”

“I know, I know. So what do you think the odds are there’ll be charges filed?”

“Who knows. I know the cops pretty well who took him to the emergency room, and they weren’t any more impressed with him than you were, so I doubt they’ll cause you any trouble. He was delirious when they took him away.”

“You ever handled an assault case, Charlie?”

“No. You’ll have to get yourself a criminal lawyer if he files charges himself, but I’d be real surprised if he did. Does he know you?”

“Kind of. He knows I’m the bartender at the Sweet Cage.”

Charlie wrote a name and number down on a Marlboro ad on the back of a TV Guide on the coffee table in front of him. “Call this guy if it comes up. Tell him the whole story, don’t leave anything out, and he’ll have the kid’s ass in a legal sling. Nothing to worry about.”

He tested the temperature of the coffee with a measured sip, then took a long drink. It was hard for Charlie to concentrate on anything but what was happening back at the Sweet Cage. The way he figured it, Bill Gerard and Renata were at that very moment going through his money. His money. Some of it was stolen from Bill, true, but most of it he and Vic had earned fair and square.

The big man sighed and stood up. “You want some scrambled eggs? I’m gonna have some.”

“Sure,” Charlie said, and Sidney went back into the kitchen. Charlie stuck his hands into his overcoat pocket and fingered his own keys, and as he sat jingling them it came to him. He had a distinct mental image of Sidney at the Sweet Cage going to his coat hanging behind the bar to get his keys; he kept them in his overcoat pocket so he’d always know where to find them. He went to the closet by the front door and opened it. He looked through it, trying to figure out which of the coats was the right one.

“Oh, sorry,” Sidney said from the kitchen doorway. “I should’ve taken it when you first walked in the door. Like I said, we don’t have people over very often.” Charlie smiled stiffly and took his own overcoat off to hang it up, as though that had been his intention all along. “I was just going to ask if you wanted three eggs or four.”

“Three, I guess.”

Sidney returned to the kitchen and Charlie saw the coat hanging at the far end of the rack. He stuck his hand into one pocket, then the other. In the second pocket was a large key ring. Quietly he slipped the keys into his own coat pocket and turned toward the front door.

Again Sidney appeared in the kitchen door. “Can’t find a hanger?”

“No, I found one.” He took the coat off and hung it in the closet as Sidney returned to the kitchen.

“Another minute and they’re done.”

If he bolted there was always a chance Sidney would follow and get the keys back, and he’d never get into the Sweet Cage without them. He sat back down on the couch and flipped through the TV Guide, telling himself that Bill and Renata had a lot to hash out and would thus still be at the Sweet Cage on his return. The TV Guide was full of ads for the same cartoon Christmas specials he’d had to watch over and over, year after year when he lived with Sarabeth and the kids. He could still practically recite dialogue from some of them.

Sidney stepped out of the kitchen with two plates of grayish scrambled eggs and set them down on the coffee table with a bottle of Tabasco sauce.

Charlie took a bite of the ashen scrambled eggs, noting something crusty and old sticking to a tine of the fork. The eggs were bland, and he shook a considerable portion of the Tabasco on them.

“How are the eggs?”

“Good, thanks,” he said, and with the addition of the Tabasco it was almost the truth.

“I feel a lot better about all this, Charlie. I owe you one.”

“No, you don’t. The eggs are enough.” Charlie hadn’t realized it, but he really had been hungry. If he had any more time to spare he would have asked Sidney for more, but as soon as the plate was empty he stood up, leaving the plate on the table.

“I guess I’d better get going, then,” he said.

“Yeah, I should get a couple hours’ sleep before the kids wake up.”

It occurred to Charlie that he had no idea how many kids Sidney had, nor anything else about them. “Wish them a merry Christmas from me.”

“I will, buddy. Merry Christmas to you, too. You’re a real friend, you know that?” Sidney got him in a tight bear hug that actually hurt his sides. “Be seeing you soon.”

He opened the door and Charlie headed back to the Mercedes.

“Hey, got rid of the Lincoln, huh?”

“Company car,” Charlie said as he got in.

He pulled into the Sweet Cage lot and parked perpendicular to Bill Gerard’s Lincoln, almost touching it, so that Bill wouldn’t be able to leave without moving the Mercedes or damaging both vehicles. Charlie didn’t stop to ask himself exactly what he intended to accomplish with this maneuver, but he felt resourceful doing it. He stepped out and looked at the snow. There were the same two pairs of footprints leading into the building, along with his own from earlier, and no new ones beside his leading away from either door. At the front door he tried three of the keys on Sidney’s ring before he found the one that slid into the lock and turned. He pushed the door open slowly, made relatively certain the dark front room was empty, slipped inside, and pulled the door quietly shut behind him. The light behind the bar was on, and so was one in Renata’s office to its side. He crept along the wall opposite, listening for voices. Hearing none, he approached Renata’s office.

From inside he could make out the sound of Renata’s breathing. She sounded as though she were laboring at something. He pulled Roy Gelles’s little gun from the inside pocket of his overcoat and pushed the door open.

Renata looked up at him from behind her desk, her hands underneath it. “You’re just full of surprises tonight, Charlie,” she said, her voice low.

He gestured with the revolver. “Let’s get those hands where I can see ’em.”

“Don’t be a fucking idiot. Keep your voice down. You watch too many stupid old movies.”

He aimed the empty gun at her face. “I want to see your hands on the desk.”

“I can’t. Look.” With her head she gestured for him to move around the desk, and with some misgivings he did. Her hands were cuffed to its leg, forcing her to sit leaning forward.

“Bill did this?”

“You’re a genius, Charlie.”

“Shit. Where is he? What if he comes back? This thing’s not loaded.”

The gangster movie aspect of the situation that had thrilled him moments ago had lost its appeal.

“He’s taking a dump.”

“Where are the keys?”

“I don’t know. His pocket, probably.”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll lift the desk and you can slip the handcuffs out from around the leg. We can get out before he gets done in there.”

“Not yet. He’s got your money.”

“How’d he get that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, it sure wasn’t under Bonnie’s tree.”

“He came by the house with it a few minutes after you left. He accused me of being in on it with Vic.”

“Just Vic? Not me?”

“He wasn’t very clear on anybody else but Vic. He’s been trying to get me to talk.”

“How?”

“Pull back the collar of my sweater.” He reached down and pulled at it, and she winced. Three circular red welts marked the right side of her neck.