Freezer Burn Read online

  “I still don’t have anything against him.”

  “Who says you have to?”

  Thirty-one

  Gidget left him early, while it was still dark. She had gone out of there holding her shorts and shirt together with her hands, leaving him naked in bed. The bedclothes were torn, bloody in spots. He lay amongst their ruin thinking and seeing himself once again as the man on the stool, looking down on the Ice Man, giving the talk.

  He had some random thoughts: Jesus. There ain’t no Jesus. And if there was, this ain’t it. He wouldn’t end up in no freezer. And if he did, and this is him, what’s that got to do with me? Frost pities me, like I’m another freak. He’s the fuckin’ freak. Telling me that bullshit about the Ice Man. Conrad, he was all right. I liked him. It shouldn’t have happened, but it did, even if I didn’t mean it. I didn’t set out to hurt Conrad. It’s not my fault. It’s me and Gidget and that’s all. Fuck Frost for telling me that story. Fuck me for ever thinking there was anything about that thing in the freezer. It ain’t nothing but an exhibit I want.

  Bill showered, cleaned up the bed, and dressed. There really wasn’t anything to do that day, in spite of what Frost had said. They were locked in until word came from Frost. Gidget was supposed to keep things in order, but there was already an established order and she wasn’t part of it, and he had no need to be part of it. Not until he had the Ice Man. Then he would for the first time in his life be important. Someone to reckon with. It might not be president of the United States, but it beat living off the leavings of your mother’s checks. When she was alive to cash them anyway.

  Around noon there was a knock on the trailer door and Bill answered it, hoping it was Gidget, but it wasn’t. It was a dark-haired woman in blue jeans and a loose shirt. She was an attractive, somewhat large woman. She had a plastic trash bag in her hand.

  “Conrad would have wanted you to have these,” she said.

  “U.S. Grant?”

  “Formerly. I’ve lost the beard. I’m through with carnival life. I’m bringing all of Conrad’s goods to you. This bag, that’s the whole of it. Mostly cowboy books. He loved to read cowboy books.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Anywhere. I’m driving my rig out of here within the hour. I’m through. No beard. No work.”

  “It’ll grow back.”

  “For now I’ll shave it. Soon I’ll get something done to it. I’ll find work somewhere, even if it’s banging oil field workers. I’ve had it up to here with this shit. I was thinking of leaving anyway. Now I’ve got nothing to keep me here. The whole thing’s falling apart. Frost, he’s losing control and I think it’s that blond bitch’s fault.”

  Bill took the bag.

  “Well, good luck, Bill.”

  Synora, U.S. Grant, drove her cab and trailer out of there a half hour later and Bill never saw her again.

  Thirty-two

  A week went by and Gidget got a call on her cell phone that Frost had stopped in Oklahoma and had scoped out some new routes for the carnival and wouldn’t be back for another week. It was a pleasant surprise. It gave Bill and Gidget more time together. They used it well. After that extra week, Frost came home.

  The carnival packed up and things went back to the way they were, except they lost the half and half to a transvestite lover from Denton, and the midgets had grown surly in the extreme. Gidget did not knock on Bill’s door, and at night Bill sat on his trailer stoop and watched the motor home, and some nights when the moon hit right, he almost thought he saw Conrad up there, lying down, riding out the rhythm of the couple below. But when he squinted, it was only shadows.

  As for the rhythm, the rocking, there was plenty of that, and Bill hated to know what was going on in there, Frost touching her with that dead leather hand in a black silk glove. He hated it, but he came out each night and watched for the rocking, and more often than not he saw it. He began to grit his teeth a lot and smoke cigarettes. He quit reading the books Synora had left, and on one fateful day when they were parked outside of Tyler, Texas, he took them all out and stacked them and set them on fire. From that point on, he no longer thought he saw Conrad on top of the motor home.

  Some days he saw Gidget, but she never really looked at him. They had agreed on this. Agreed they had to not show any more than common courtesy between them. They were waiting for a moment. The exact right moment. But Bill thought sometimes she was too good at it, like maybe she had given up on him and was going to do what she planned by herself, leaving him out. The thought of this drove him crazy.

  The summer rocked on and went away and fall came. The carnival made its new Oklahoma route, then dipped back to East Texas. A thing called El Niño, a kind of weather current, had, according to the meteorologists, messed things up. The weather was all haywire. There were floods and high tides on the West Coast of the U.S., hurricanes on the East. Water churned in the Gulf and washed the shores of Galveston with great violence. Wads of thunderstorms fell out of the sky at all times. Tornados tore across Texas. Near Corrigan, one even took away the whirligig, which Frost had never given up on, erecting it at each stop. The tornado carried the whirligig and one of the midgets around for a while, spat out the midget unharmed near a trailer park it didn’t spare, knotted up trailers and whirligig together, and deposited them just off Highway 59 next to a car dealership, as if the tornado had created and was displaying a modern work of weather art.

  Winter eased in and so did ice. Hail flailed the land and the trees cracked and bent. No one was really that interested in a winter carnival. Not now. In the old days when the weather was just cold they got business. But now everything was canceled. People were nervous and a little scared. They had never seen it like this.

  Many things changed.

  The whirligig was long gone and the other rides had slowly fallen into disrepair.

  The midget who had ridden the tornado had finally given it up and left them to work at a filling station in Mineola, Texas. The remaining midgets had turned to shoving people about and using bad language freely.

  No one ate breakfast at the table outside anymore. Too damn cold.

  One of the pumpkin heads, a fella called Bim, just up and died one morning on the Texas side of the Red River, and had been buried in a pauper’s grave in Paris, Texas, with nothing but his name on a cheap metal marker. Nobody wanted to stuff him, nobody claimed him. What he got was some dirt and a coffin so cheap it was pretty much a cardboard box, an appetizer for the worms.

  Eventually the carnival, wounded from loss of personnel and morale, wound up at the spot where they had camped so many months previous. The spot where Conrad had fallen from the whirligig and the old Sabine roared by and the willows that hadn’t washed away waved in the gale, clattering now with icy wind chimes. The sky was full of pearly clouds glazed with what looked like soap scum. Hail banged the cabs, motor homes, cars, and trailers like it meant business.

  And while they waited here for the bad weather to pass, there were rumbles throughout the carnival.

  “The Old Days are gone.”

  “Frost ain’t what he used to be.”

  “I could make more money running a side show.”

  “I could do better with a shell game.”

  “I got some land, I can put up a sign. People would stop to look at me. And I could build a snake farm, get some Russian rats. Sew a fifth leg to a calf. Start my own business, stay in one place.”

  “Blow me?”

  “Uh uh.”

  “Two heads better than one.”

  Pause.

  “Okay.”

  Later.

  “Now me?”

  “Uh uh.”

  “Pull me?”

  Whack!

  Some rumbles different, some the same.

  Bill and Gidget were still playing it careful, and Bill dreamed about Gidget and wondered if she dreamed about him.

  The Ice Man, as always, lay silent.

  Thirty-three

  The carnival no
longer buzzed. Frost paid money to the pasture owner so they could lay low by the Sabine for a while, and one day when it warmed a little and the ice melted, he became possessed with the idea it would be grand to perk spirits and order pizza from town for everyone. But when he called on the cell phone to order, no one would come out. He decided to send Bill and Gidget in for it.

  Gidget, wearing her usual pissed-off look, the one that made you want to flatten her face, got in the car on the passenger side, and Frost, wearing only a T-shirt and light pants and slippers, stood on the ice next to Bill as if this were in fact his kind of weather.

  “Get plenty pizza,” Frost told Bill. “Morale is low. Mine included. A little thing like this can lift it. Don’t get any of that stuff with little fishes on it. There’s maybe one midget and some pinheads will eat it. It’ll go to waste.”

  “All right,” Bill said.

  “Gidget’s got the money. She’s acting foul, but she always acts that way when you want her to do something. Don’t pay her no mind. Thing is, I don’t just want pizza, I want some time from her.”

  “All right.”

  “You doing okay, son?”

  “I guess.”

  “Still think about Conrad?”

  “Not much.”

  “I guess that’s good. Not that we want to forget him, do we?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you go on now, and be careful. Ice is starting to thin. I think today is going to be a hell of a nice day. Tomorrow, we move out.”

  “We got gigs lined up?”

  “One a couple weeks from now. But we got to leave here tomorrow. That’s all I’m paid up for, and the old man owns this land isn’t generous or worried about iced-in freak shows. He doesn’t care if we have to swim the river. He wants his money.”

  “Frost. That story you told me, about the Ice Man. It true?”

  “I never said it was true. I said it was a story I got. Sometimes I believe it, and there are days I don’t believe anything. But finally, in the end, you got to believe in something.”

  Bill nodded, unconvinced. He had wanted Frost to come out and say the story was true, that he believed it, that there was something miraculous going on that could change everyone’s life. But he didn’t. And there wasn’t.

  Bill took the keys and got behind the wheel. He backed out easy. As he turned the car around and made for the little road, he could hear ice crunching under his tires. Double Buckwheat, dressed in several shirts and a heavy coat and the bottoms to thermal underwear, wearing laced-up boots, was out by his trailer listening to rock and roll, dancing about.

  “I wish that nigger would fall under the car,” Gidget said.

  “You’re in a mood today,” Bill said. They moved out of the field and onto the slippery road. The ice wasn’t as melted as Frost had thought. It was hard, slow going.

  “I’m just in a hurry, is all.”

  “A hurry for what?”

  “You know.”

  “I figured that was done forgotten.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “Maybe I was kind of hoping it was forgotten.”

  “I don’t believe that neither. We got our time now, Bill.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You heard Frost. Tomorrow we move out. Way we do it, is tonight you mess this car up. Nothing too weird, just undo a brake line.”

  “Cops will know right away.”

  “You haven’t heard it all yet. You undo that brake line. You know how, don’t you?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Tomorrow, before we leave out, I’ll say: ‘Oh yeah, Bill says the brakes are going on the car. You ought not to drive it.’ I’ll throw a bit of a fit, like I’m trying to keep him from being hurt, you see. He’ll like that. I’ll get him to hook it up to the back of the motor home.”

  “What does that do?”

  “He’ll have to drive the motor home. I’ll sleep in the back like usual, only I won’t. He’ll go up front to drive, and I’ll tell him I’m taking a sleeping pill to get some rest, that I don’t feel good. Whatever. I’ll make up something. Before we leave I’ll get out of the motor home and you slip in the back. I’ll drive the Ice Man’s cab behind him.”

  “You better make it farther back. He’ll see you behind him in the mirror.”

  “I got a baseball hat, some sunglasses. I’ll put my hair up and wear them. Unless he’s looking for me, he won’t know. What we’re going to do is going to happen fast anyway and I got to be up front to do it.”

  “Sunglasses in winter?”

  “This ice is uncomfortable to look at, has a glare.”

  “Yeah, all right. It does, don’t it?”

  “You’re in the motor home, in the back. Frost will lead off. He likes to lead. I’ll be behind you. That stretch of road back there, by the bridge. You know which part I mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Before you get to the bridge there, there’s a gap, land slopes off toward the river.”

  “I’m beginning to not like this.”

  “Just listen. What did you do as you came up on the bridge there?”

  “I slowed.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’ve put in a bump there so you won’t go jettin’ across the bridge. I guess because it’s narrow. They want you to stop and consider, watch for cars.”

  “Right. When he stops, you come out of the back and take him from behind.”

  “I prefer taking you from behind.”

  “Just shut up and listen. You put your arm around his throat, and you lock your hand in the crook of your other arm, and you use the arm that isn’t choking like a lever behind his head. Like this.”

  She showed him.

  “If you drop your elbow so it points out, you can choke the sides of his neck, cutting off the blood. He’ll go out, but it won’t strangle him. You start the motor home off the edge and into the water. Just ease it over there and go out the side door and I’ll be behind you in the cab. No one behind us will be able to see what’s going on, and I’ll ease forward and nudge the motor home into the river. You come crawling up like you’re exhausted.”

  “They’ll see you nudge him.”

  “I’ll stay back from you a ways, but when I see you’re getting near the stop, I’ll speed up, and soon as I see you go out the side there, I’ll put on the speed. I’ll be sure to be good and ahead of the others. All they’ll know is I lost control, Frost did too, I bumped him, and he went under. No one will be expecting murder. That choke hold will put him out, but he could come around from it, see. Only thing is, he won’t. The water will finish him. They look him over, they’re not really looking for anything. There’s no marks, you do it right. It’ll just be a sad drowning.”

  “How do you know about a choke like that?”

  “I’ve picked things up here and there. I had a boyfriend for a couple months was a judo instructor. They use that choke.”

  “You sure no one will see me get out of the motor home?”

  “Say they do. It won’t matter. It was going over the edge, you bailed out of fear.”

  “So I got to look like a coward?”

  “You thought Frost was coming right behind you, then I hit the motor home from behind and he didn’t have time.”

  “But I’m supposed to be driving the Ice Man’s trailer. How do we explain that?”

  “What’s to explain? We’re the only ones know about the switch-up. All we got to do is tell the cops you were sick and Frost and I invited you to lay down in the back, and I chose to drive the cab. I’ve driven every damn thing, have a license for it all, so nothing’s suspicious about that. They won’t think anything about me wearing sunglasses and a hat. That won’t mean anything to them other than it’s some kind of fashion statement.”

  “I’m so sick, how do I manage to get from the back and out the front door?”

  “Tell it different then. He asked you ride with him. He’d been thinking about giving you more responsibility with
the carnival. He wanted to talk.”

  They were nearing town now. The ice was more melted there. They drove over to the pizza parlor and went inside and made their order and sat at a table in the back on opposite sides sipping soft drinks through straws.

  “And when he’s dead,” Bill said. “What then?”

  “That’s easy. You and me, baby. And we got the Ice Man. You like the Ice Man, I can tell that for sure.”

  “It’s interesting.”

  “You’ll look better giving that talk than Frost. And me, I won’t have to deal with that hand anymore.”

  When Bill paid for the pizza it cost much more than he expected, and all he got back of Frost’s money was a handful of silver.

  Thirty-four

  It was very cold that night under the car, and the wrench was small and Bill had to hold the little flashlight in his teeth. He didn’t know if he should throw the wrench away afterwards or what, and he couldn’t figure out the brake line anyway. He was lying there freezing, the wrench in his hand, the light in his teeth, trying to remember how this stuff worked. He finally realized it wasn’t going to come to him.

  A pale head poked itself under the car.

  “What you doin’?”

  It was Pete. He was bent down, looking under the car. It looked as if he were wearing his head upside down.

  “Nothing. I’m working on the car.”

  “What wrong with?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How fix it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Bill slid out from under the car on the other side. He could feel the dampness soaking through his jacket, into his back.