The Ice at the Bottom of the World Read Free Page A

barrels of scrap and trash, a load of termite wood to burn in the alpine hearth, and half a load of washedup two-by-fours for a someday front porch. She even got me to put all my power saws and axes in the shed, her not knowing how I love to saw and cut up things indoors. What was left was the picnic table to dance on when we drank and listened to Latin records, also my favorite old stuffed chair, and my upright rigs soI could string and mend net throughout the house, her putting screens back up on the windows so flying-through-the-house birds wouldn’t foul in the strung-up netting and cripple themselves. We even cleaned out the old alpine hearth so on those afternoons when the flood tide was up in the windward yard and it was raining hammers and nails and a hundred dozen seagulls were softballed in the leeward lawn, we could stretch out on a quilt in front of a fire and drink hot wine and play Monopoly naked with the big-headed dog snoring nearby. This is what Rusty Shackleford could not have been knowing about, how in this cut-off-from-the-world home Margaret was making my life even more than a clean shirt and combed head can say.
    In the summer, the secret of her all-over tan was us paddling halfway over the Stingray Point in my metal flake canoe, me putting out the little Danforth anchor I’d found in back of Rusty Shackleford’s concrete-crate shed, us naked drinking cold beer laying in the bottom of the canoe, legs crossed over legs and over the side, me telling her the Indian stories I knew, like where lightning takes tall walks and how Stingray Point got its name. That one being her favorite story I used to tell again and again, about Captain John Smith up from Jamestown stinging himself on a stingray, a good story about him spearing fish with his sword and getting stung, his arm swole up and his tongue stuck out, about how they thought he would die so they went ashore outof their boats and dug the grave but instead Smith got drunk off the surgeon’s rum and ate the stingray and lived, and they all sailed away, leaving a big empty hole in the ground for the Indians to come out from the woods to look down into, trying to figure out what for and probably not being able to. This stingray story being Margaret’s favorite, I used to tell her over and over, her listening, soft-sucking on a beer bottle and playing with my privates with her big, all-over-tanned, naked toe.
    In the winter, I used to have to take a butane torch out back to the well house to defreeze the water pump, being careful not to heat up the rocks in the floor to wake the snakes hibernating underneath, this even after, in the sleet and fog somewhere between the cabin and the well house, stumbling through a flock of snow geese on their way south resting in my leeward lawn, their necks as big as your arm, wing muscles strong and hard from their Canada-to-Cuba flight, so big and strong to knock you down if you were to stumble through them, flushing them up unawares which I usually was, so early in the morning fog going out to defreeze the pump.
    In that winter Margaret stayed over, she showed how if you patched a light bulb to the electric pump to burn, it would keep the air from freezing while leaving the snakes alone, and then she took Christmas gift pictures of the snow geese eating the corn she had laid out for them, and in the morning with coffee she’d cook upfried eggs and ham from Rusty Shackleford’s five-sided store instead of just the candy bar or peanut-butter sandwich I was used to, and this after taking a hot shower together with plenty of hot water pumping up from the well house, me soaping Margaret’s back, wondering why hadn’t I thought of the light bulb trick before.
    That coming spring, a mama raccoon had babies in the woodpile, so getting a fire meant dealing with her trying to tear you up, not even being afraid of the big-headed dog Margaret had fed to full grown by then. Getting a piece or two of wood to burn in the alpine