The Weight of Winter Read online

  “You think you’re it, don’t you, punk?” Pike asked his son. He said this carefully, each word measured out slowly. He saw Conrad stiffen, his facial muscles tighten. “You think you’re the bull’s dick, don’t you?” Conrad stared hard at the TV and said nothing. The little game of kidding each other was over. Pike saw a soft tremor, like a tiny spurt of electricity, course through Conrad’s right arm. It was trembling. As his father watched, Conrad took the arm out from beneath his chin and plunked it on the floor. He seemed embarrassed by it. Pike threw another pillow, this time roughly. It mashed against Conrad’s nose, then fell to the floor. Tears filled the boy’s eyes, but he kept them on Rambo. Rambo was blasting the Commies, giving them what they deserved and then more.

  “You think you’re Rambo, don’t you? You pale little trickle of horse piss.”

  “Leave him alone,” said Lynn. She was standing in the doorway to the living room, a hand on one hip, a dish towel in the other. “He ain’t done nothing to you.”

  “Oh, look who’s here!” Pike squealed. “It’s Miss Rambo. You must be here to rescue this little faggot!”

  Conrad jumped to his feet and stopped the movie. He pushed eject and waited until the tape popped out and into his hand. He grabbed the box it came in, a picture of Rambo with his gun on the cover, and bounded away up the stairs. In seconds a door slammed. Lynn went back into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. She stared inside, not wanting anything from there but simply waiting.

  “You let them kids rule the roost,” she heard her husband say. He had come into the kitchen to empty the last of the vodka into his glass. Roost. Lynn stared at the seven eggs sitting happily in their little nests, roosting.

  “I’m the one who has to put food on this goddamn table,” Pike said, thumping the kitchen table as he spoke, “and I can’t even sit in my own living room and watch a goddamn Wop in peace.” He was thinking how Billy would be polishing off his first drink at The Crossroads, probably ordering a second while he pumped quarters into the jukebox.

  Lynn stared at the food in the refrigerator. Carrots. Milk. A huge bucket of margarine. A liter of generic cola. Pork chops. A few scraggly strips of bacon. The cheapest cuts of chicken and meat that money could buy. She’d had fifty-some dollars in food stamps that week. Leftover cream-style corn, also generic, sat beneath a transparent wrap that was too cheap to stick to the dish. A slab of cut-it-yourself bologna, what the kids called Canadian steak, lounged in a corner. A bushel of bright red hot dogs, full of God knows what, looked almost pink and flowery in the fridge’s light. This mess of chicken parts and other unthinkable remnants would have to feed the six of them for more than a week.

  “You want to stare at something cold, go out on your back porch and stare at the goddamn sky,” Pike said. “It’d be a hell of a lot cheaper on our electric bill.” The electric bill. Last month’s had been $128.40, and she had gone to her mother, had bitten her lip, swallowed her pride, jumped down from her high horse—all the things her father had predicted she’d do—to borrow money to pay the bill. A very angry woman from the electric company had phoned and warned her for the last time. Cold weather or no cold weather, kids or no kids, the juice would be turned off.

  “Please don’t tell Daddy,” Lynn had asked her mother. “You know how he loves to say he told me so.”

  “Well,” her mother said as she handed over the money, “he did tell you so.”

  Pike had been on workmen’s compensation for two years, another family characteristic. A baffling back injury sustained in a trucking accident had put him there and had linked the destiny of the Giffords again with that of the Kennedys.

  “Just say you got the same back problem that President Kennedy had,” Billy had advised Pike. “Except he got his in a boating accident.” Billy had been using Kennedy back as the excuse for his own disability, and it had worked so well that he saw no reason why two Mattagashers couldn’t suffer from the same malady. So he had given the mysterious ailment to his cousin Pike, as though it were some kind of gift. No one felt sorry for Pike. He’d been hoping to acquire a good injury, nurse it for life, as his father, the senior Pike, had advised him to do.

  “Get in the habit of wincing every third step,” the elder Pike had explained, in an effort to teach the younger Pike how to evade the false-claim detectives sent out by workmen’s compensation. But even with this steady income, the checks were not so high that a family of six could relax, and Lynn always felt lucky to see half of Pike’s check. The Crossroads saw the other half.

  The children came in from outside and stomped snow from their boots. Julie and Stevie, the seven-year-old twins, made a dash for the refrigerator.

  “Stay on that rug,” Lynn said as Julie reached past her and grabbed a string of hot dogs, four of them, tied together with small red umbilical cords.

  “Give me one,” Stevie begged. He grabbed at a hot dog so greedily that it broke from the string and came away in his hands.

  “No, Stevie. Get your own!” Julie cried. “These are mine.”

  “Put them back!” Lynn shouted. “I’m gonna make a hot dog casserole for supper tomorrow night.” But she didn’t have the energy to go after the hot dogs. Pike’s next move was more important than hot dogs anyway. She stared at the chicken breasts and wings and thighs still oozing juice in a poorly wrapped package and remembered a segment on 60 Minutes that exposed chicken production for what it was. Still, Pike and the kids kept on eating it. Who’d even be able to tell if Pike ever got salmonella?

  “You got three,” said Reed, age ten, who was next in line to Conrad. “Hot dog face,” he said, and slapped a wet mitten, beaded with snow, across Julie’s nose. She began to cry.

  “Shut up!” shouted Pike. “A man stays home for a quiet evening with his family and he has to listen to all this wailing about hot dogs. Besides, according to that Ralph Nader, all hot dogs is, is rat shit, and there you are fighting over them.” Julie quit crying and bit into the bright red hot dog.

  “They’re red like that ’cause they’re made of pure blood,” Stevie whispered to her. “Rat’s blood.” But she ignored him by biting off a second large chunk.

  “Did you buy us some Megabuck tickets, Mama?” Reed asked. “It’s up to four million dollars. No one won again last week.”

  “I bought five,” said Lynn. She stared at the small lightbulb inside the refrigerator and realized that she, too, was forced to come on at the most surprising moments, to the commands of other people.

  “Stevie’s putting on my turkey outfit!” Julie cried. “Make him take it off, Mama. Miss Kimball said we ain’t supposed to wear them until the night of the play.” Stevie paced about the kitchen, the turkey’s bill opened to show his face, the red plastic wattle shining brightly.

  “Gobble,” Stevie said, now feeding the turkey’s mouth a red hot dog. “Gobble, gobble.” Julie began to cry.

  “Stevie, put them damn hot dogs back,” Lynn snapped. “And take off that foolish suit.”

  “Let him wear it,” said Pike. “He’s just being hisself.”

  Julie stopped crying and clapped her hands. “Stevie’s a turkey,” she chanted. “Stevie’s a turkey.”

  “Are we gonna watch Rambo now?” Reed asked his mother. Lynn closed the refrigerator door and retreated to the cupboard. She took down some IGA popcorn and tore a hole in the plastic bag.

  “Look, kids,” Pike told them. “Miss Rambo is gonna pop popcorn with her bare hands.” The kids all tittered, still chilled as icicles. Tonight it was Conrad’s turn, as usual. Things hadn’t changed. That was all that mattered.

  “Just don’t say anything,” Lynn thought. “Swallow your pride. Bite your lip. Do all that shit you’ve been doing a lot of lately.” She dug the old popcorn popper out from its spot on the bottom shelf where she kept her pots and pans.

  “Did you rent Rambo, Mama?” Reed asked, and dropped his soggy mittens
on the rug.

  “Put them on the register to dry,” Lynn said. She wondered how she was going to last through six months of winter. She wasn’t ready for it this year; there was no doubt about that. Not another winter with Pike anyway. “Once the kids have their Christmas, that’s it,” she’d already told her sister Maisy that morning, when the first snow had begun to fall. “I’ll do a little spring cleaning come April and Pike Gifford’s gonna be among the trash I throw out.” But this time she couldn’t catch hold of the thought as she had on other occasions. This time, this day of the first big snow, was different. “You’ve been promising to do your spring cleaning for years,” Lynn told herself as she poured a couple capfuls of vegetable oil into the popper. “Every year’s the same. All you throw out is old clothes, and broken dishes, and good intentions. And every year Pike Gifford’s roots go a little deeper.” It would be a long wait until spring, and now, with no hope looming up ahead even if it was false hope, with no ear of corn in front of the donkey, how could she endure?

  “Ow!” Stevie screamed. He had touched a finger down in the oil of the popper, which was hot enough to be sizzling.

  “What would make you do that?” Lynn asked in exasperation. “Reed, break me off a piece of my aloe plant.” She blew on Stevie’s finger. “That’ll take care of it,” she said. “Aloe’s the best thing for burns.”

  “You ought to put it on your biscuits, then,” Pike said, and the kids laughed again. “It’s not me,” each thought unconsciously and felt a rush of relief. “I ain’t seen a biscuit come out of your oven yet that wasn’t black. You been making nigger biscuits ever since we was married.”

  Lynn tossed the rusty beads of corn into the oil and watched them spin in the heat.

  “You rent Rambo for us, Mama?” Reed asked again as he rubbed the sticky medicine of the aloe plant onto Stevie’s finger.

  “Yes,” Lynn said. “I did.” She placed the lid over the cooking kernels. “Conrad has it upstairs. He’ll come back down when the popcorn’s ready.”

  Pike had finished the last swallow of the vodka. He slammed the empty glass down in the sink so hard that a crack streaked up the side of it. Billy was probably trying to get up a game of cribbage, right at that minute, down at The Crossroads, the jukebox urging him on.

  “By God, he won’t watch a television set of mine,” Pike threatened. “Not with the kind of mouth he has. When he learns a little respect, maybe then.”

  Lynn sighed, a soft sigh, more like the sweet rush of wind when it’s filled with snow, tired, heavy, sleepy. She turned and looked at her husband as he leaned against the kitchen sink. He was well named. He looked enough like the older Pike Gifford to be his clone. Or maybe his ghost, come up the snowy hill from the old river, booze-heavy, vengeful. He had that dark, curly Gifford hair, a bushel of it. Huge, dark Gifford eyes. A Gifford swagger when he walked, wagging that lean, long Gifford body like it was a tail or something special. And he was more than a near clone of the elder Pike. He was a repetition of all the older man’s mistakes on the planet.

  “Like father, like son,” Pike Gifford Jr. had made mention of many times. It was his favorite toast. Lynn had seen him hold his glass up to Billy’s and sing it out. Like father, like son. Now the senior Pike was dead. No one knew where the excessive booze left off and the heart attack began. But the heart, with more than enough help from the spotted liver, had taken away Pike Gifford Sr. and left a younger version in his son. Lynn looked at her husband. She had—hadn’t she?—loved him once. Once, she had defied her own family to marry him.

  “Why don’t you go on out, then,” Lynn said, each word spaced carefully, fiery words, all the letters sizzling like popcorn kernels. “Why don’t you go on out and find Billy. You know he’s waiting for you at The Crossroads.”

  Pike’s eyes gleamed. What was it that was so damn exciting about a game played well? The power of it, that was what. Those Donald Trump types, they know only a part of the secret, sitting around their oval tables and chewing the big business fat. They know how to mold deals, shape concrete and steel into tall buildings. But Pike Gifford knew well that real power comes from bending and shaping human beings.

  Julie climbed into his lap and put her arms around his neck. “Ain’t you gonna watch Rambo, Daddy?” she asked. “Ain’t you gonna watch that big Wop?”

  “So,” Pike said to Lynn. “If it’s a choice between me and that little bastard upstairs, you’ll take him?” He plunked Julie down flat on the balls of her feet, and grabbed his jacket from one of the nails Lynn had driven into the wall by the front door to accommodate a family of jackets. “I try to make these kids mind,” he said, “and you jump in and stop me. Well, by Jesus, you put up with them.”

  “Gladly,” Lynn whispered, but Pike heard her. He spun around and caught her by the throat with one hand, pushed her against the kitchen sink.

  “What?” His face was red with fury. Lynn closed her eyes. She felt his fingers prodding deep into her throat, cutting off her air supply. “Don’t let him see it,” she told herself. “Don’t let him see the fear.” Then she was strangely surprised to realize that there was no fear. Not even a morsel. The corn was popping now, against the plastic of the lid, angry faces popping loudly in hopes of escape. Lynn closed her eyes. Pop. Pop. She remembered, once, when he had touched her neck at the Watertown drive-in, a sweet touch, his fingers running like petals along her skin, his lips following. Pop. Pop. Pop. Then the fingers left, left red prints on her throat, little forget-me-nots in the snow, but left. Lynn opened her eyes and saw the front door closing. She stood in the kitchen and stared out past the frills of the curtains. Pike was at the car, wiping snow away from the windshield with his arm. Then he disappeared behind the wheel. The headlights blazed on, catching the snow in the very act of falling, catching the power of the snow. It would control their lives for another six months.

  “I could’ve stayed upstairs,” Conrad said, peering over her shoulder. “I could’ve watched Rambo tomorrow.”

  “Never you mind,” Lynn said. “The popcorn’s almost done. It’s a night to be in, watching the TV. Not out there.” She looked back again to see her husband’s taillights drive off into the storm. She wondered how many days, how many weeks, how many months now she had been hoping something would happen out there, some tragedy—a bar fight with a broken bottle, a twisted, metallic car wreck, a bleary liver suddenly exploding. Something that would assure her that the man she married would never come back home again. She wondered what day it was that the fear had turned to hate.

  “I hope they don’t close The Crossroads,” she heard Conrad say, his throat tight with emotion. And she knew what he meant. At least he ain’t home here all the time. Lynn was thinking the same thing.

  “I’m going headfirst into winter with a real bad attitude,” she thought.

  LUMBERING PITFALLS: ELVIS COMES FORTH AT RADIO SHACK

  Jesus said, Take ye away the stone. Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh… And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth.

  —John 11:39, 43

  Davey Craft shoveled his front porch and then scraped a narrow path out to the mailbox. He would call his father later and ask to borrow the pickup with the plow on it. Davey turned his face upward to the gale and surveyed the sky. The bulk of the storm had fallen the day before, and when the kids had managed to go off to school that morning, there had been hope that the storm was over. But now the flakes were beginning to swirl again, and snow hung dark above the treetops.

  Davey watched as the cloudy puffs of his breath mushroomed into the cold and then dissolved.

  “Damn,” he said, and the word burst out of his warm mouth, took shape in the air before him like a little ghost. It would be a long six months. Already his skidder was broken. The piston had snapped and then pierced the block of the motor. It would cost him forty-five
hundred dollars to repair it. Forty-five hundred he didn’t have. He didn’t have a savings account with forty-five cents—where would he get that kind of money to put into his checking account?

  “Daddy?” A child’s voice came to him above the scraping of the shovel, and Davey saw a blurred face behind the living room glass. A small white hand waved. It was Tanya, his only girl, home sick from school again. It was getting to be a habit with her. Davey waved back. If the snow came more thickly than this, his other children would appear out of the drifts on the long yellow bus, a streak of sunshine in the storm. But in Mattagash, Maine, buckets of snow had to come down before school closed. Otherwise, the kids would be going to school all summer to make up the snow days.

  Davey Craft stomped the snow off the shovel and then his boots. He leaned the shovel against the door where he would find it again in a few hours, after the gusting snow had filled in his work. Inside, his wife was peeling potatoes at the sink. The sick child lay on the sofa watching a Disney movie on the VCR.

  “Still coming down?” Charlene asked.

  “Is the Pope still Catholic?” Davey tossed his wet mittens at the rack Charlene kept near the back door for wet winter things, or the limp summer things the kids wore to swim in the river. The mittens bounced off the top of the rack and dropped heavily to the floor.

  “Don’t be throwing things, Dave,” said Charlene, who didn’t bother to look up from the potatoes. “The kids are bad enough.”

  “What did the doctor say about Tanya?” Davey asked as he unlaced his boots.

  “He took another blood test, this time for mono.” Charlene cut the potatoes in half and then plopped them all into a pan of water. “He thinks that might be why she’s tired all the time.” She snapped the burner of the stove on high and waited as it turned orange with heat.