The Ice at the Bottom of the World Read Free

tan at least up top, I could tell that drove them in town wild. What I call town when I say town really being just Rusty Shackleford’s seafood house at the end of a half-fell-down dock with two pumps, a diesel and a gas. Town being where Rusty had a hoist for packing out the local high-rise rigs, a concrete-crate shed, and a motel machine for ice, him having between where it is safe to get good last footing before falling through the rotten planks and the crushed-shell turnaround, a desk he calls his office, a one-room five-sided store, and a shoebox near where the cat named Fishhead sleeps in the window, a place where if ever you were to get any mail in this world you would find it there, most likely already opened up and read out loud to everybody by Rusty, drinking on Friday nights in what this place is I call town.
    It is in town where, before Margaret, I could get my fill of human life, coming in with a fair wind and following the tide down river, paddling my metal flake canoe to get grub in the five-sided store and take on any nets needing mends.
    Rusty’s half-cousin Earl Shackleford Hayes being my best customer, seeing how he’s always ripping up all his rigs running spot and trout off Stumpy Point, everybody knowing how poor the bottom is there, Rusty saying to him, Why do you think they call it
Stumpy
Point? and then saying to us, Earl’s but
half
-cousin, half, half,only just a
half.
Winters, after making groceries and gathering net for work, I’d help in the concrete-crate shed packing boxes of fish, and summers I’d shovel ice, always on Fridays stopping at dark for a drink. Danny Daniels and Scoop would liquor up enough to beat hell out of each other in the crushed-shell turnaround if there weren’t any truck drivers to fight with, me putting in with them together when there were. I could make a day and a night of going into this place I call town doing the business and then the get-together fight waiting for the first after-dark tide to turn. So this was town when I say I sometimes later brought Margaret, not so beautiful but driving the rough men wild with her all-over tan, them helping her out of the canoe when we came gliding up like she was an Indian princess, leaving me to tote and carry three loads of mended pound net to the five-sided store all by myself, her having the way she had on the rough men at the dock in town.
    The way she had on me, Rusty Shackleford said, was a clean shirt and a combed head. I figure that to be about right, that being what of me he could see away from my cut-off-from-the-world cabin. Cut off from so far away from the world I used to walk the clay-bank shoreline naked with a smear of good mud pulled across my shoulders and over my privates against the sun, an osprey feather tucked behind my ear for chiggers and ticks, that being how me and Margaret first met, her digging relics for the state, her figuring where I livedto be where Indians kept a summer camp long ago, her having to walk about forty lengths of bad shoreline at low tide to get to where she could fill plastic bags and pockets full of the pottery pieces and pipe stems I already have so many of I just step on to break. She said her particular interest in Indians took her aback when she looked up and saw me mud-naked and feather-headed forty lengths from a highway and me being without a girlfriend since a season six or eight back, what I can say is that my particular interest in her showed itself with a growth, breaking little mud flakes crumbling to my toes, one of the ways Margaret always had on me when I looked at her.
    What else that Rusty Shackleford didn’t know about her having a way on me was how, after I started getting her to stay over from where she dug relics for the state, she started to clean the outdoor things from the front room of my cabin. First out to go were a stack of busted crab pots, some sawhorses holding up the keel of a skiff I’d been thinking about building for three years, four