The Ice at the Bottom of the World by Mark Richard Page A

five-gallon coffee-maker indefinitely now plugged in for days. Powell pulled the telephone into his lap, thinking who to call, still studying the two women in the wrestlers’ embrace in the kitchen light. These two women, each in their time the closest thing to best-looking the county had, Bill had said, they both with the up-jutting bows of sharp, swelled breasts and the high rounded sterns exactlybuilt like the workboats in the Bay needed nearby for local waters, boats that bore the names of the captain’s wives, even out there a
Lisa Lee
and a
Miss Louise
from a former husband and a forties flame, the form inspirational and practical, the wide wrists and sturdy legs to keep paint on the houses, to shore up the barns, to wrestle machines that turn the soil and cut the hay, machines that broke down always when the men were gone to sea, the same time as everything else, gone when babies were born, houses burned, cars collided with Doodlum children beneath and at the wheels, the highway patrol saying, What do you expect from children left to run wild with the daddies sending sometimes money from Taiwan or Tel Aviv or a telegram dictated in drunken, divided words, saying, STRAIGHTEN UP BACK HOME, YOU , these daddies, these husbands bringing gifts back ten years too late to matter, these women cheated by half-life marriages to half-married men, strangers always coming home, drinking, restless to return to sea, to some little empty bleak strange strip of desert sand in the ice at the bottom of the world, while these women shouldered it all, the everything else, all on those thick-muscled shoulders and sturdy legs Powell admired from the telephone table in the den, Powell holding the telephone in one hand and the pistol in the other, still wondering who to call.
    Doc Mackenzie said he had Perry Como on the TV, the Christmas special, was it an emergency? Powellsaid no, it didn’t seem to be an emergency, but there seemed to be some circumstances. Doc Mackenzie asked would these circumstances bring Bill Doodlum back to life? and Powell said no, these were more like family circumstances, and Doc Mackenzie said oh, all right, he would pack his bag next commercial break.
    Doc was a sideways Doodlum like Powell, that is, marrying high into the family but on somebody’s secondhand time around. For Doc, it was a Hudgins Doodlum off a golf pro in Richmond at the country club where he used to play, Mary Beth Hudgins Doodlum Walker Mackenzie now. Doc had done the Doodlums a favor because, like bouncing genes in the Doodlum clan there were women like Lisa Lee’s own sister, Claudia, who had certain notions, especially after spending some time up North like Mary Beth and Claudia both had, and if Doc had not stepped in when he did to marry Mary Beth, she said she would have gone ahead with her plans to turn her corner of Doodlum County, inherited as potato fields, into a high-walled playground for her Richmond friends to come and sit in the sun naked, playing cards, but Doc gathered up what he called her loose ends, so that mostly what she did now was paint, on pieces of weathered potato-shed siding, picture after picture of seagulls circling Wolftrap Lighthouse, the same pictures in every Doodlum home, piles of which show up unsold year after year at the Fourth of July bazaar, Doc not getting much credit for his steppingin although the county did need a doctor, taking even one from Richmond, Richmond not being all that far away, but to people used to distant ports and postmarks, Richmond could as well have been Rangoon and just as foreign too.
    Doc said, standing beside Bill Doodlum’s bed, that he was surprised Bill did it not having finished the paperback thriller on the nearby table with a bookmark in a place about halfway through, and Powell said that was part of the circumstances he wanted to talk about, that Miss Louise had … but Doc cut him off sharply and said, Son, do I look that ignorant to you? Doc said, I can count eight