The Ice at the Bottom of the World by Mark Richard

of a kind of sound like we heard today, they couldn’t stop that sound traveling twelve miles downriver to where I lay on the edgeof a bad blue sleep over Louise, and don’t you know what that sound reached me as, on my sweat-wetted bed, it reached me as Louise screaming my name for help from all those gottdamn Indians. That was a sound, son, that truly traveled your ten of fifteen miles, that sound.
    Bill and Powell were quiet a long time, turning up their long-necked beers and listening to the foam settle back to the bottle bottoms.
    I think I married her because I couldn’t take that sound any more, said Bill. The war started, the sawmill burned, and I’ve been gone almost ever since.
    They seemed to be getting to the end of something, even if it was just the case of beer. Powell had had so much to drink that his questions about love and marriage were just echoes in his head of a thought he could not remember. Bill beat his foot against the sea-locker side. Forget what I said about only being half-married, he said. I got a wonderful wife, I got a wife like all men should have, a wife the kind who will either make you or break you a place in this world.
    Bill stretched back on his sea chest like a body out of its box. I just now see that I am finally home, he said.
    Powell left the garage, looking a little north and then a little south, leaving Bill asleep inside, sleeping the kind of wheeze snort snoring sound a man with one lung makes.
    In the winter later, Powell stood wanting beneath a sky that was a blue-pearl boil frothed in off-white slices that came down out of the morning fog as dirty-feathered seagulls in their turns. The white mists of foggy plumed tongues fell the few feet between heaven and earth and licked at the crystalled fingers of early snow fallen in Doodlum County Christmas week, unusual. Powell stood wanting with his wife at the left-open broken place in the ground made for the later laying in of Bill Doodlum. The gravedigger’s shovel had flung a few spare spades of brown sandy soil beyond the green canvas catch-tarp, making tiny desert valleys in the mountain landscapes of ice.
    In Powell’s coat pocket was the empty nine-shot pistol, Bill Doodlum’s personal choice, the one Louise Doodlum had called Powell to come over and fetch from her, she said, come fetch what she had put Bill Doodlum out of his less-than-one-half-lunged misery with, her calling when Powell and Lisa Lee were sitting around their trailer-home kitchen table cutting out commas, colons, and question marks for Lisa Lee’s grammar class. I did it like he said, careful not to bounce the bullets off the oxygen tank so to blow up hurting anybody, Louise said to Powell, as with a top and bottom hand movement he slipped the pistol away from how she still held it when they arrived, slipping it away as gently as he would have a mitten from a sleeping child’s curving hand.
    Upstairs, Powell pushed open Bill’s bedroom door. Bill was listing to his left off a cloud of pillows, his left arm and hand a little over the sideboard edge of the bed, as if he had awoken with a sudden thought and was reaching for his slippers on the floor. His pale blue pajama top was to Powell a reckless spread of red punctuation, mostly periods and an exclamation. In the gunsmoke smell of after-violence, Powell sensed a building modulation in the room counted off by the clicking bedside clock and the steady hiss of oxygen. At first calming, its sudden familiarity to Powell as sounding like something about to explode urged him back downstairs.
    In the kitchen, Louise and Lisa Lee held each other like wrestlers in a headlock, the thick-wristed arms run up under each other’s same-waved hair and down over the same muscle-wound shoulders, faces in necks talking and fronts not touching. Powell sat at the telephone table in the den watching the two women in the slice of kitchen light, they having already gotten out on the counter the tough steel four-legged