The Weight of Winter Page 12

  “Course, I’ll have to take the thin one,” Billy whispered in Pike’s ear. He nodded in the direction of the girls. “Doctor’s orders,” he added, and punched Pike on the arm.

  “Then you’d better come up with some money,” said Pike. “They’ll expect them drinks.” He felt very content suddenly, there at The Crossroads, at the Betty Ford Northeast. Pike had never been a man to ask for too much. There were days when he felt honored just to have electricity. But now he was in the country he knew best, a land filled with good Nashville music, a warm well in his stomach slowly filling up with vodka, snow flitting down under the bluish pole light. Pike had it all. He could even imagine it was summertime if he wanted to. He could imagine mosquitoes and June bugs banging like tiny alcoholics on the screen door. He could hear Maurice’s bug zapper outside, the frantic zap zap zap, as though it were music, fiery little drums and guitars and pianos. Let others yearn for green grass and tarred roads. It was the magical bug zapper Pike Gifford missed most during the long Mattagash winters. Ever since Lynn had installed one a few years back, he had been enthralled as he listened to it spit out the toasted bodies of June bugs, and garden tiger moths, and millions of mosquitoes. And in his studies, he had come to realize that the bigger the body, the bigger the zap. But he never knew just when he’d hear a big ZAP or a little zap. Pike imagined that’s what those jazz musicians on PBS were talking about when they said improvisational.

  “Well, partner?” Billy asked, and Pike remembered that it was November, that it was snow now silently zapping around the pole light, and that a lot of vodkas would come and go before Maurice saw fit to stoke up the old bug zapper. Billy loudly ordered them another round, eyeing the girls as he did so. He hoped they heard. Big Spender had almost the same musical clang as cocksure.

  “And one for you, too, Sal,” Billy offered magnanimously, knowing full well Sally didn’t accept drinks while working. She scrunched her face at him.

  “Why don’t you just beat your chest and make gorilla sounds, Billy?” Sally asked. She rinsed glasses in water that looked like pea soup.

  “Speaking of chests…” said Billy. He reached mockingly for Sally’s top button. “Yours seems to have disappeared.” Sally snapped some of the pea soup at him.

  “One of them girls is Pierre Latour’s daughter,” she whispered. “The little thin one.”

  “The sheriff?” Billy asked, and Sally nodded.

  “Shit, I didn’t think he was old enough to have a girl that big,” said Pike. He had had to consider Pierre Latour’s features enough the night of the fight, and the morning after, to know them well. “He don’t look that old,” Pike added.

  “Oh, he’s old enough, all right,” said Sally. “How do you think your back might feel, Billy, with Pierre Latour on top of you?”

  Billy gave the girls one last loving scrutiny. “At a time like this,” he said, “a man has to think of his disks first.”

  “I got it through the grapevine,” said Sally, her hands still immersed in the dirty water, “that Pierre Latour’s got a thing going with Amy Joy Lawler. And there he is a married man.”

  “Shame on him,” said Billy. “Imagine.”

  “I didn’t realize he was old enough,” Pike repeated as though in response to Sally’s remark.

  “Well,” said Billy. “You might say that puts the kibosh on my evening.”

  “Too bad,” said Pike. He had refused to tell Billy how he got the cut on his temple, too embarrassed to let it be known that Conrad had hit him. And he hadn’t told Billy about his night in jail. They were close, but there were some things Pike had to keep to himself. The Crossroads was a place where a man could be teased unmercifully. “Too damn bad,” Pike said again. He swung around on his stool, relieved that his last twenty dollars, until tomorrow, would go toward his own necessities and not some young girl’s frivolities. Besides, the thin one was the only decently pretty one, and Pike had learned years ago that, bad disks or no bad disks, Billy got the gold egg while he, Pike, held the goddamn goose with the bloody ass. The other two girls were porkers, and Pike couldn’t see burrowing into all that fat tonight, even if it was freezing outside.

  As Billy badgered Sally to feed the jukebox with some of Maurice’s quarters—marked with a big black X so he could reclaim them later—the door flew open in a small gust of wind mixed with snow. Billy turned halfheartedly to view the arrivals. He was expecting his brother, Ronny Plunkett, at any moment, but there stood Claudette LeClair, her sister Ruby shivering at her side. Claudette was Billy’s old flame, the one just before Rita, his most recent ex-wife. The women began unbuttoning coats, as if to fight. Billy paled.

  “Mayday,” he whispered to Pike, and then turned his back to the women. “Hold on to your testicles. The Gabor sisters are here.” An ex-girlfriend, Billy knew, could be a lot more trouble than an ex-wife. They weren’t as well paid.

  “Hey there, ladies,” Pike said, and waved warmly at Claudette, who had already waved a plump hand at him.

  “Don’t wave, for Chrissakes,” Billy whispered. “I tell you, you’re courting death.”

  “She waved at me first,” Pike whispered back.

  “You sure?” Billy asked.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” said Pike. “You expecting trouble?”

  “With Claudette you never can tell. The Avon lady can ring the doorbell the wrong way and Claudette will beat the shit out of her.”

  “I always wanted to yoke up with that sister of hers,” Pike said. He was trying desperately to rub the indentation out of his hair, the one caused by the constant band of his felt hat. He looked at Billy. Billy had a ring around his head too, like a black halo. If a ring around the head was okay for Billy, it was okay for Pike.

  “What do you see in her?” Billy asked, remembering Claudette’s sister, recalling the immense reach of her overbite. “She looks like she fell outta the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.”

  “Don’t spoil this now,” Pike said. “Her ugly tree ain’t that tall. I was wanting to put the boots to her the whole while you was dating Claudette.”

  “Don’t spoil it?” Billy whispered. “What? My funeral? My life may be in danger, Piko. I didn’t leave that woman on good terms. She even sugared the gas tank of my old car.”

  “The sister didn’t do you any harm, did she?” Pike asked. “Now be fair.” He was thinking. Twenty dollars. Claudette only drank beer, so the sister probably did too. And while The Crossroads didn’t demand the monetary pound of flesh that places in Watertown did, twenty dollars could go just so far, especially with Billy being short as well. They could probably have a couple rounds, Billy could even play “All My Ex’s Live in Texas” a few times, and then they could pick up a couple six-packs in St. Leonard. Pike’s ultimate plan was to convince everybody that a party at Billy’s would be the proper end to a perfect evening.

  “Hey, Billy the Kid,” said Claudette. She clasped her hands on Billy, one on each shoulder, and began a rough massage. “How’s it hanging?”

  “Hey, Claudette.” Billy turned to face her, instantaneous surprise to see her, of all people. “When did you get here?” he asked, as if the place were so full of people how would he know who came and went.

  “Just a second ago,” said Claudette. “You remember my sister Ruby? Ruby, this is Pike Gifford, Billy’s cousin, and trouble since day one.”

  “Hi,” said Ruby. Her mouth was full of gum. “Want a piece?” she asked Pike, who nearly toppled from his chair. Was it going to be this easy? But then Ruby thrust a big pink pack of sugar-free bubble gum into his face.

  “Not just yet,” said Pike, imagining the bubble gum a prize he would ask for in the morning, Ruby at his side, his mouth full of hangover shit. He was thankful that Ronny Plunkett hadn’t arrived yet, his pockets full of retired navy dollars, his tales of espionage enough to turn a country girl’s head, such as the one Ruby sported
on her bony shoulders.

  “And how’ve you been?” Billy asked Claudette.

  “Thinking about you a lot,” said Claudette. “I heard you just got divorced again, and I figured, knowing the Wild Bill, that you’d be here.” She ran a finger around the dark, indented halo of hair on Billy’s head, his hat mark. “You’re still just as cute as a button,” she said.

  “You too,” said Billy, stupefied. The worse he treated women, it seemed, the more they loved him. All except this last one, Rita. But maybe even Rita, like Claudette, would air her anger like dirty bloomers, and then come around again to rub the top of his head.

  “We’re going to the bathroom to brush the snow out of our hair,” Claudette said. She blew Billy a kiss.

  “AIDS,” Billy thought. Could you catch AIDS from a blown kiss? Hell, Claudette didn’t have AIDS anyway. She had a shitload of condoms all over her house, in the medicine cabinet, in the cupboard next to the sugar bowl, on the top of the television, in her laundry basket. And she carried a bushel of them in her purse. She never knew when she might need one, at the grocery store, in church, at a funeral. Claudette often said that the only way she’d have another baby would be an immaculate conception. Billy blew a kiss back.

  “Order us each a beer,” Claudette said, before she and Ruby disappeared through the shaky door of the ladies’ room.

  “Wahoo!” said Pike. “If I’d knowed this was gonna happen, I’d have changed the oil in my hair. I told you I’d get that sister, sooner or later.”

  “I still think she looks like fruit of the ugly tree,” Billy insisted.

  “But she’s got a nice ass, and I appreciate that in a woman,” said Pike. “Yes, sir. I plan to put the boots to Miss Ruby.”

  “Well,” Billy said, and held his two feet up for Pike to witness. “I wore my boots too. Let’s see. That’s four boots divided by two sisters.” Billy scratched his ear and did some invisible calculating. “Sounds to me like a job for a couple of good mathematicians with bad backs.”

  NEW ENGLAND IN WINTER: MEETING AT TWENTY BELOW

  …A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch

  And blue spurt of a lighted match,

  And a voice less loud, thro’ its joys and fears,

  Than the two hearts beating each to each!

  —Robert Browning, “Meeting at Night”

  Sicily Lawler sat in her recliner with the kick-out footrest and did her damnedest to get a single piece of thread through the eye of a needle—a job she could, in her youth, execute with chilling accuracy. Now threading a needle had become as much a chore as finding the same in that blessed haystack.

  “I’m just like a three-year-old dabbling with tying its shoelaces,” Sicily muttered as the thread buckled again, reared back like a reluctant little stallion, and refused to enter the eye.

  “Darn you,” Sicily said. She needed to drag out plan B. At the big kitchen table, which George Craft had made from real cherry that grew far back on McKinnon Hill, and for which he had charged Amy Joy only three hundred dollars, Sicily scattered her tools: needle, spool of thread, dress, button, Bible, and magnifying glass. She held the needle between thumb and index finger, and then, gently so as not to break it, she stabbed it into the wood of the table. It stood steadfast, a straggle of after-the-storm sunshine lighting it up as if it were a silver icicle.

  “There now,” Sicily said. “That’ll teach you to wiggle in front of my poor old eyes.” She readied the thread, moistened it with a dab of spit, then shaped the end into a pointed lance.

  “Okay now,” Sicily told herself. She held the magnifying glass in her left hand, thread in her right.

  “Let’s go in there and get the job done,” she urged, as though she were addressing an entire troop of fumbling seamstresses. The thread inched in slowly until Sicily’s eyes caught it beneath her Super-Magnify glass.

  “Steady,” Sicily said. “Very, very steady,” she coached herself, knowing that at any minute the old hand could start shaking back and forth. And it did just that: a millifraction from the needle’s gape, began its involuntary wobbling, as if Sicily were shaking a thermometer to clear it, or a can of tomato juice to mix it up. Shake well before using.

  “Oh, Lord,” said Sicily. She felt some tears of frustration doing their best to ease out of their ducts, little needle holes themselves. Tears were faster and surer than thread. Sicily plunked the heavy glass down on the table and rested the wobbly hand holding the thread. Little spears of electricity seemed to be vibrating beneath her skin, no doubt sending out those tiny messages from the brain: Too old, too old, too old.

  “Good gravy,” Sicily said, still waiting patiently for the hand to resume its dignity and get on with its work. Surely these weren’t her hands, were they? Surely some thief had come in the night, some youthful Gifford playing a prank, and had taken her real hands away, had left her an old pair of hands, a used pair.

  “If they was gloves,” Sicily thought sadly, “I’d throw them out.” But they weren’t gloves, although purply-brown patches had begun to inch like a lacy pattern across her skin. A pretty design almost, if you didn’t know what it was, what it meant. When frost comes to the vegetables, no matter how artfully it disguises itself on windows and doors and garden gates, when frost and something alive get together, it isn’t a two-sided victory. Frost wins.

  “They say you’re only as old as your arteries,” Sicily consoled herself, although Amy Joy had told her that wasn’t true anymore. What did Amy Joy know anyway? What did anyone under sixty know? You learn a few things, Sicily knew, just about the time you hit seventy. You suspect a few truths about that body’s wear-and-tear business which used to float above your head like gossip. Pretty soon you start to feel the truth about it in your joints, your knees, your elbows, your neck. Sometimes the truth is even bigger, more colorful, three-dimensional as all get-out. Winnie Craft was a good example, with her new chain of pigmented warts, all beaded around her neck as if she were wearing a necklace. No matter that she kept that scarf twirled around her, even in summer, to hide them. Sicily had seen them well enough. Oh, but that nursing home where Winnie was, and Albert Pinkham, and all the others, was a regular hotbed, where warts and moles popped up like little mushrooms, and purple patches spread like so many cucumber vines, a place where things grew, awful things. And Winnie wasn’t so lucky as Zsa Zsa Gabor, who had the money to have all her old-age warts removed. All Winnie could afford was that scarf.

  Sicily was about to try plan C, the elbow of her right arm pushed snugly against her big thick Bible for support. She was just setting her props in place, imagining that one day she would be fooling with plan Z, when she heard Amy Joy, back from her walk, stomping snow at the kitchen door. The magnifying glass flew with well-calculated speed across the table until it slipped off with a heavy clunk onto a chair. The little silver needle was whipped up instantly—Sicily barely had to look for it—out of its posthole and slammed back into the stuffed tomato pincushion with the big green leaves. The dress was wrapped into an instant ball and tucked away beneath her apron, the button dropped deftly into the apron’s pocket. Wear and tear, her foot. Sicily knew that when it came down to survival—when it came right down to being placed against her will into a terrarium of warts—tissues and brain messages and corneas, the whole shebang, stood at attention and got the job done. Sicily quickly opened her large-print Bible and stared down at it with a deep, pious interest. She had by chance turned to St. Luke, and was thankful for that bit of luck from Providence. St. Luke had lots of dialogue from Jesus, which was blood-red before her eyes, easier to read than the black, wavy words of mere mortals.

  “Hi,” said Amy Joy as she unzippered her boots and left them in a pool of melting snow by the kitchen door. She hung her coat and scarf in the kitchen coat closet, then tossed her mittens on the counter in a swath of warm sun. They were crusted with little beads of snow, white and glassy as pearls
.

  “God, it’s beautiful out there today,” Amy Joy said. “The trees are all coated in snow, just like the flocked Christmas trees you see in magazines.”

  “I almost got all bundled up and followed you,” Sicily lied. “But then I thought of something in St. Luke I wanted to read, just to see if I remembered it correctly, and I did, word for word. Lines I memorized during my teenage years, at our old summer Bible school. My memory’s sharp as a tack.”

  “What was it?” Amy Joy asked. She was filling the teakettle with water.

  “What?” Sicily asked. Who would’ve believed for a second that Amy Joy would want to hear Bible talk? She bordered, as Sicily had often told her, on being a freethinker.

  “What was it you remembered?” Amy Joy said. “Recite it to me.” Sicily glanced hastily at Jesus’s scarlet words. Would he help her in a pinch? She read the first red paragraph her eyes fell upon.

  “‘And no man puteth new wine into old bottles; else the new wine will burst the bottles, and be spilled, and the bottles shall perish.’” Sicily frowned. Not only would this convince Amy Joy that she was senile, but as a fundamentalist she had always hated to read about the boisterous drinking parties in the Bible, Jesus sometimes at the vanguard.

  “You memorized that?” asked Amy Joy incredulously. “Stuff about putting wine in bottles?” Sicily was about to panic. Sometimes you couldn’t even pick up the Good Book without wishing someone had had the foresight to censor it. Maybe Jesus would leave the drinking behind and move into smoother territory. Anyway, she was stuck. Amy Joy was still waiting for some sort of explanation, or at least Sicily imagined that she was.