Freezer Burn

Thirty-five

Next morning, early, before time to go, Gidget woke Frost and told him about the brakes not working right the day before.

“I meant to tell you. I’m sorry. It slipped my mind. I woke up thinking about it and knew I had to tell you now, before things got to stirring. Bill told me to tell you yesterday, but I forgot.”

Frost listened and patted Gidget on the back and went outside and lifted the hood. It was just light, but he could see well enough. He checked the brake fluid first thing. Gidget came out and stood by him in housecoat and house shoes, puffing frozen air out of her lungs.

“It’s nothing,” Frost said. “It’s just low on fluid. I got fluid.”

“You don’t know that’s all that’s wrong. It could have a leak. It could be dangerous.”

“Not at all.”

“I will not have you driving that. I don’t care what you say. Not until it’s checked by an authorized mechanic.”

“I always do my own work on the car.”

“And you’re not very good at it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Frosty, baby, if the weather weren’t so bad, maybe I’d go with it. But with all this ice, I say hitch it up.”

“It would be more dangerous pulling it in this weather than driving it, sweetie.”

“I will not have you behind the wheel of that vehicle.”

“You’re serious.”

“I’m serious. The ice isn’t any better today. It’s worse. And if you insist on driving that car, I will go back inside the motor home, and sit there. I don’t feel well anyway. In fact, I feel pretty sick.”

“What’s wrong, honey?”

“I don’t know. Nothing serious. A little bug. What would comfort me is if you would hitch the car, drive the motor home, and let me get some sleep. I could take a pill and rest.”

“I don’t like you taking pills.”

“Now how often do I do that? I’m sick, Frosty. I don’t feel good. You kind of wore me out last night.”

Frost looked happy. “I guess I did. That was good… Was it okay without the glove?”

“Sure, baby. It was fine.”

“First time you let me do that.”

“You wanted to, I said sure, what’s the deal?”

“It always bothered you before.”

“I’m not so bothered now.”

“I’m glad to hear that, honey. Really. I was beginning to wonder. I figured we had a kid, we had to get past that. I-”

“Frosty, I’d love to talk, but I’m freezing my tail off, and I don’t feel good. You do what I told you, hear? I’d like to have you near me today. I just want to take a pill now and sleep, but I get to feeling better, I can come up there and sit with you.”

Frost nodded. “That’s the way you want it. That’s how it’ll be.”

He closed the hood. He drove the car around behind the motor home, started hooking up the hitch. Bill came out of the Ice Man’s trailer and walked around close to the side of the motor home while Frost was working. Gidget opened the door and Bill, looking to see if anyone was watching, slipped inside. “I’m going in,” Gidget yelled back to Frost. “I’m cold.”

“You do that, honey. I’ll be inside in a bit.”

Gidget slipped inside. Bill stood there with his hands hanging. “What now?”

“Hide in the bathroom.”

“Give me some reason. It’s been a while.”

She kissed him hard. “Hurry.”

Bill went through the bedroom and into the bathroom, got behind the shower curtain, and settled down in the tub. He lay there thinking about all the things that made this worth it. Gidget. The Ice Man. A position. Maybe his mother wasn’t so smart after all. To hell with her and her piddling checks. To hell with that whole firecracker deal. It was Chaplin messed that up, not him. It wasn’t such a bad plan, he just hadn’t had the right people.

In the bedroom, Gidget slipped off her shoes and, still wearing her housecoat, got in bed.

Everyone was ready for Frost to lead, but he was slow about getting it together this morning. He wrestled with the trailer hitch and the car awhile. Finally, one of the midgets who had been vocal about the wait and had been known to bad-mouth Frost almost openly popped into his cab and, by means of a setup not unlike the one Conrad had used when he drove the Ice Man’s trailer, bolted. As he drove by he showed Frost a face that spoke of resolution and rebellion. Here was a man determined to make his mark on the world, even if it was a greasy spot. Pete rode up in the front seat beside him. Pete still had a black eye and wore a wool cap pulled over his pin, like a sock tight over a highway cone.

When the midget charged by in a roar of mud and ice and mounted the road that led to the bridge, the others began to grow impatient. Horns honked and lights flashed. The idea of a wagon master had lost its appeal.

Frost finally climbed inside the motor home from the back and took a peek at Gidget.

Gidget lay in bed, feigning sleep. Her face was lineless, soft and sweet-looking as a baby’s. Her hair was pushed back behind her ears, like a little girl about to play baseball.

Frost went through, slid the bedroom door closed, stopped in the bathroom. He took a leak in the commode.

Bill lay silent behind the shower curtain, listening to Frost drain himself. Frost flushed the commode, then Bill heard him washing his hands. Frost went out, closing the bathroom door.

In the bedroom, as Gidget heard Frost settle into the driver’s seat with a squeak, she got up and pulled off her robe. Underneath she had on blue jeans so tight a pubic hair would stand out under them like a cable. She wore a long-sleeved black T-shirt. She dropped her feet into stringless shoes, pulled the ball cap out from under her shirt, put it on, slipped into her coat and went out the back door, closing it gently.

Gidget saw that everyone was watching her, so she walked quickly toward one of the cabs and slipped around front, between its hood and the rear of the Ice Man’s trailer, hoping Frost had not heard her close the door or that he hadn’t yet looked in the wing mirror and caught her walking away. She had counted on the fact he liked to settle in easy, fasten his seat belt, adjust the crotch of his pants, very methodically put the key in the ignition, check his gauges, then his mirrors. He was a creature of habit. Always the same way. Even in bed, always the same way. She stroked him, he stroked her, she sucked him, he sucked her, he mounted her and flapped his hand and finished. Every stroke was the same. She figured you counted them, there wouldn’t be a difference of two or three strokes from one event to the other. He was like that. Ate a perfect amount of bran to make him shit a perfect little turd.

She slid around to the driver’s side of the cab and hung on to the wing mirror, pulling herself up, almost hanging by her breasts. The driver was Potty, of the unclean fingernails.

“Y’all be careful today,” she said.

Potty grinned his two teeth at her. Already he had beer on his breath and a look on his face like he’d like to strip Gidget and bend her over a sawhorse. Of course, every heterosexual male had that look when he saw her. Beside him sat one of the pumpkin heads. Gidget didn’t know his name and really didn’t care. The pumpkin head was playing with a defunct mosquito coil perched on the dash. The coil had been there for years, but it still had blacking on it, and the pumpkin head soon had the blacking on his face. He always did that. Potty thought it was funny. He showed Gidget his two teeth and said, “You worried about me today, sweet thang?”

“Frost just wanted me to tell everyone to be careful.”

“He’s leaving without you.”

“No. No he isn’t. I’m driving the Ice Man’s trailer.”

“You gonna tell everyone to be careful one at a time, baby?”

She smiled. “Guess not.”

She saw the motor home circling around in front of the Ice Man’s trailer. She said, “Be careful now,” dropped off and went around in front of the cab and along the right side of the trailer.

Potty turned to pumpkin head. “Hey, shit face. I think she’s got a little thing going for me, don’t you?”

The pumpkin head made a noise and dribbled some spit.

“You too, huh? Yeah. I think ole Potty may be driving the ole nail soon.”

Potty knew this was bullshit, but it was something to think about.

Gidget got in on the passenger side of the Ice Man’s cab and slid across the seat, turned the key Bill had left for her, pulled around quickly so she would be directly behind the motor home. As she drove, she pushed her hair up under her hat. She took sunglasses out of her coat pocket and slipped them on. She drove as close to the rear of the motor home as she could, a little to the right of the road, hoping Frost couldn’t see her in the left wing mirror, and the right one would only show the right side of the cab.

Inside the motor home, Bill pushed back the shower curtain and slipped out of the tub. He went over to the bathroom door, and very gently opened it and looked out through the crack. He could see Frost behind the wheel. He saw the makeup mirror on the dash, and made it a point to keep the crack in the bathroom door slight.

Bill took a deep breath. His heart was thundering inside his chest so loud he feared Frost could hear it. There was a roaring in his ears. He didn’t even think about turning back. He had to have that woman and he had to have the Ice Man. The thought of Frost with her another moment was more than he could bear. It wouldn’t have mattered if God almighty had told him to stop now, he couldn’t and he wouldn’t. The very maw of hell meant nothing to him. He didn’t fear that maw at all, the maw he wanted was the one Gidget would open up for him to let him go inside her until the moment it all came together and he was falling from on high into something sweet and wonderful that would finally turn to fire.

Frost began to slow down and Bill knew they were coming to the rise that lay in front of the bridge. He felt dizzy, so he took deep slow breaths, trying not to be too loud about it. The motor home slowed more, and then it was almost to a stop. Bill pushed the door open and came out of the bathroom quick and he could see as he went that Frost had spotted him in the makeup mirror, and Frost was about to turn, but Bill didn’t want that. He didn’t want to see the face straight on, the mirror was bad enough. He leaped forward and brought his elbows down on Frost’s shoulders so he couldn’t move, and Frost said, “Bill,” but Bill didn’t answer. He slipped his left hand around Frost’s neck, but Frost automatically dropped his chin so that he didn’t really have the throat at all.

Frost had one foot on the brake, and as Bill tried to choke, tried to adjust his arm, Frost pushed down on the brake harder, so hard Bill heard the bones in his leg snap. Bill put his fingers in Frost’s nostrils and pulled up and Frost let out a noise, and Bill’s left arm slid into place, and now he put his left hand into the crook of his right elbow and put his right hand behind Frost’s head, and with his elbow pointed forward, he began to push with his right.

Frost wasn’t easy. Frost was strong. He came up out of the chair with Bill hanging on him, but his leg was gone and he couldn’t stand. He fell back down in the chair. The motor home rocked forward against the rise in the road, held. Frost pushed up on his good leg and tried to swing his bad leg out and around the chair, and as he did, Bill jumped up and locked his legs around Frost’s waist and fell backwards, and now they were rolling on the floor, Frost trying to reach back and get hold of Bill, but not having any luck about it.

The motor home banged forward suddenly, over the bump, almost on the bridge, then it veered to the right and began to slide as if on butter-greased canvas. They were being pushed from behind.

“Not yet!” Bill screamed, as if he thought Gidget might actually hear him. There was another bump and this time the motor home went right, and then it was falling off the gap between bridge and land. It skimmed the bank with its tires, then hit with a smack and the car fastened to it rose up its rear and flapped down and hung its back tires briefly on land.

When it stopped Bill was lying against the windshield with his arm still around Frost’s neck, and he could see water. The motor home was going under. Frost had quit fighting, and Bill let go of him. The motor home righted itself and floated, but the car that it had been dragging was pulled completely away from the bank and then its weight took it under and it made the motor home’s rear end dip. Bill caught the driver’s seat and held as the front end went up. He saw Frost, unconscious from the choke, slide back and into the bedroom door, his bad leg bent up and behind him like a broken green stick. Bill scrambled to the front door and jerked it open and jumped out into the water.

The water was all the cold needles in the world and they stuck into him and he went mindless for a moment and could not decide if he was dead or alive. He rose up, his knees on something firm, and when he looked down it was the windshield of the motor home, and through it, inside, he saw Frost spinning around and around in the water with his mouth open, his eyes seeming to look at him, his arms spread wide, his destroyed leg wrapped around his good one.

The motor home went out from beneath Bill and sucked him down. He rolled back with the agitation of the river, and in that moment he saw the Ice Man’s cab and trailer up by the gap in the bridge. The cab was poked out over the edge of the road, nodding toward the water, and he could see Gidget trying to scuttle out the window, but the trailer itself was sliding slowly over the ice behind her. It was jackknifing in slow motion. The trailer swung completely around, scraped along the bank, dipped its ass in the water and dove, pulling the cab after it.

It was then Bill knew Gidget hadn’t panicked and pushed too early, but had meant to kill him and Frost both while she had them together. She had meant to do it all along. But it hadn’t worked out just right. The trailer had betrayed her, dragged her down with them.

A weakness went over him worse than the cold and the water. The water churned him about and lashed him and brought him under, and when he rose up on the crest of a brown hill of foam, Gidget’s baseball cap charged by him in a wad. Then he saw that somehow the trailer had gone down and back up with the ass end pointing toward him. The end tipped slightly forward and there was a blasting sound and the back of the trailer ripped open, and the freezer containing the Ice Man, having gotten whipped about and come loose, had sent its weight through the back wall of the old trailer and now it hit the water like a cannonball and rode up on the rolling mounds of water and gained momentum, bouncing up and down.

The trailer’s busted rear end filled with water and it slid beneath the river with a thirsty gulp. Up on the bridge Bill saw the cab and trailer driven by the guy called Potty. A pumpkin head was standing outside the cab pointing at the water. The water rolled and he lost sight of them.

Bill was brought under and up a dozen times, coughing for air, losing sensation in his body, and as he went around a bend in the river, pursued by the freezer, he saw the wet blond head of Gidget bob out of the water, and he saw her washing toward him, swimming frantically.