The Mammoth Book of Pulp Action

Smile, Corpse, Smile! Bruno Fischer

I am a neat, precise man. The holes I chopped in the ice were as round as manholes, and about half the size. There were an even half-dozen, formed in a semi-circle. The flags attached to the tip-ups were gaily red and stiffly proud in the wind cutting across Teacup Pond.

I am also a man who likes comfort, even when ice-fishing. On the shore, a hundred feet from my lines, I had built a modest fire of small logs. A stump served as my seat. When one of the flags tipped, I rushed out on the ice and hauled in that line — with, I hoped, a pickerel at the end of it.

I was waiting for the thirteenth pickerel when I saw the hand.

The third flag from the left dipped. That hole was the farthest from the shore, and as I strode out to it, I recalled that it was the only one out of which I hadn’t yet taken a fish.

I didn’t take one out that time. There was nothing on the hook, except the wriggling minnow I used for bait. I let the line slip back and started to return to shore and the fire. Out of the corner of my eye I caught movement out to my left. Again that third flag was bobbing frantically, as if urging me to hurry before whatever was on the hook got away.

Hurriedly, I pulled up the line, and at once the lack of resistance told me that I’d drawn another blank. Something down there was playing with me, perhaps one of the large turtles that inhabited the pond. I bent far over, peering down into the clear blue water below the ten-inch shell of ice, and I saw the hand.

It seemed to be reaching up for me — not as if to grab for me, not in menace; but there was something in the curve of those soft fingers that appealed for help. It was a woman’s hand, young and unlined, and the nails were painted with a bright red lacquer.

Good God! I thought. Somebody has fallen through the ice.

I leaned forward to grip the hand and pull up the woman who belonged to it.

I didn’t. It would have been impossible to pull anybody up through that very small hole. But that wasn’t it. Nobody could be down there.

I lifted my eyes. A few hundred feet away, children were skating. Across the fifty-acre pond other men were ice-fishing. There was no break in the ice anywhere. Indeed, the ice was so thick that one of the fishermen had driven his car right out on it.

My gaze returned to the hole. All I saw now was the line, wavering slightly, disappearing in the water. The tip-up was erect.

I rose to my feet, and under my fleece lined sport coat I was sweating. I laughed. In that sharp air the sound of my laughter was very loud. I did not know why it frightened me. I returned to the fire.

A woman’s hand imploring me for help. Except that it couldn’t have been a hand. A turtle or a fish or a rag, and the water had distorted my vision of it. So it was nothing.

Well, if it was nothing, why didn’t I stop shivering? It was the wind. Then why was I sweating as I shivered?

I kept my eyes on that third flag. It remained upright. So did the other five. I lit a cigarette and put another log on the fire.

The sun was sinking over the west rim of the pond. The wind got nasty. The children who had been skating went home. The fishermen across the pond pulled up their lines. I had walked over there a while ago and had seen that their tip-ups were home-made — either brush or whale-bones from old-fashioned corsets. Only one of them used store-bought tip-ups like myself, and he was the one who had driven his car out on the ice and stayed later than the others.

He liked his comfort even more than I did. Probably he had the car heater on and was listening to a football game on the car radio as he watched his flags. That was overdoing comfort, even for an ice-fisherman.

The fish no longer bit. I decided to call it a day and went out to the tank I’d chopped in the ice, leaving two or three inches of ice at the bottom as a floor. I had filled the tank with water, and there my even dozen pickerels swam, or would have if their long, somewhat vicious-looking bodies weren’t packed almost solidly. A good catch — they ran from thirteen to twenty-one inches.

I strung the pickerels on a cord and then went from hole to hole, pulling up the lines and tip-ups. I started at the left. I don’t know why, but when I reached the third hole, I got down on my knees and peered. And I saw the face.

It floated just under the surface of the blue water, shimmering as if seen through a veil — or in a dream.

Did I say float? No, that gives an impression of being static, and that face was anything but that. Grave black eyes looked up at me. A small red mouth was slightly parted, as if about to speak. Long, fair hair flowed back from a smooth brow. She was rather young, with a small round chin and a rather childish pug-nose.

I had never seen anything so unutterably lovely, and perhaps it was her loveliness that was so terrifying.

I leaped up. I ran, forgetting that there was ice under my feet, and I sprawled full-length. I lay there, panting, and the coldness of the ice went through my coat, my pants, my gloves. Only it wasn’t the ice. The coldness was deep inside of me.

I got up and walked to the fire and dropped down on the stump. After what seemed a long time, I heard a car start. The fisherman who liked his comfort drove his car off the ice. The sun was sinking and I was alone on Teacup Pond. I sat there.

“Jed,” I heard a woman call.

For one mad moment I thought that it was the woman under the ice calling to me. It was as if I had been waiting for that, for a sign from her, wanting it and at the same time dreading it. Then I looked up, and sanity returned. Laura Machin was coming towards me across the frozen meadow which fringed that side of the pond.

Laura was an attractive woman who was married to my best — and perhaps only friend. She wore a fur coat and a scarf over her blonde hair.

“Of all the unsocial guests,” she said amiably. “Here you come up for the weekend and spend all day Saturday on the pond. Do you intend to spend the night here too, Jed?”

“I was just about to leave.”

Laura saw my catch on the ice and went to pick it up. I pulled up the remaining tip-ups. I saved the third from the left for last, and I hauled it up without looking down into the hole.

“How long has this pond been frozen over?” I asked Laura when I returned to shore.

“Three or four weeks, since the beginning of December.”

“Frozen solid?”

“Solid enough for skating, and there’s been no thaw since then. Why do you want to know?”

“No particular reason,” I said.

Side by side we started to trudge up to the house.

“The trouble with you, Jed,” she said, “is that you like being alone too much. Don’t you ever want to have some fun?”

“I do have fun.”

“You mean like fishing?” Laura snorted. “Going off by yourself and freezing in the cold and having only fish to commune with! Jed, it’s not normal.”

“Well, I like it,” I said.

She hadn’t any answer to that, so we walked the rest of the way in silence.

Dave Machin was a commercial artist who didn’t have to be tied to a city by a job, so recently he and Laura had bought a house overlooking Teacup Pond. They had invited me often, but during my summer vacation I had gone fishing in Maine, and as I worked in a bank I hadn’t my Saturday mornings off, which gave me too short a weekend for a three-hour train trip. But this morning I’d got off in return for a lot of overtime, and I’d come up and spent the whole afternoon on the pond.

No, I wasn’t social, even with my best friends.

Laura returned to the subject, while we were eating in front of the fieldstone fireplace.

“Dave,” she said, “we’ll have to do something about Jed. Next time he comes up here, we’ll invite a girl for him.”

The corners of Dave’s bright blue eyes crinkled. He was one of those tall, thin, slow-moving, drawling men. “No soap, honey,” he said. “I’ve tried it for years. Jed’s a woman-hater.”

“I don’t hate them,” I protested. “I merely resent their possessiveness.”

“It’s fun having a woman possess you,” Laura smiled across the table to her husband. “Isn’t it, darling?”

“Yes and no,” Dave replied judiciously. “All the same, Jed, you’re missing a lot.”

“I suppose so,” I said. And all of a sudden I saw a pair of black eyes and red lips parted as if about to speak to me, and lovely, vibrant youth. And that face, glimpsed in water, was somehow more real and more desirable than the face of any woman I had ever known.

In bed that night I still saw that face. Perhaps, as Laura had said, I was alone too much. And now I couldn’t sleep because of a woman who didn’t exist.

From where I lay in bed, I could look through a window and down a thousand feet of slope to the pond. Under a slice of moon, the ice was dull grey. Nothing was there. That was sure, definite, logical. All right, then, go to sleep.

I couldn’t sleep. Presently I dressed and slipped out of my room. I put on coat, hat, gloves, arctics, and I took with me the short-handled axe and a flashlight.

At the pond, I found that the six fishing holes were rapidly freezing over. I knelt at the third hole and chopped through the floor of ice. The water was black in the night. My hand shook as I directed the flashlight beam down into the hole. The water was still black.

Why had I run away from her when she had been there? I had deserted her when she had come to me, and now she was gone.

I stood up, shaking my head angrily. I was being absurd, worse than absurd. There could not have been anything but water. And there wasn’t.

I returned to the house. Downstairs, I shed my outer clothes and went up the stairs.

A door opened, and Dave Machin stood there in blue and white striped pyjamas. “I heard you come in, Jed,” he said. “Where were you?”

“Out for a walk.”

“What did he say, darling?” I heard Laura ask.

Past Dave’s shoulder, I saw her sitting up in bed, with a blanket held to her throat.

“He said he went for a walk,” Dave told her.

“At three in the morning?” Laura said. “He’s crazy.”

All right, I was crazy. Probably even crazier than she thought.

I turned towards my room, then stopped and turned back to Dave who remained planted in the doorway. “Listen, Dave,” I said. “Do you know a black-eyed girl with a round little chin and a nose you could flick off with a finger? I doubt if she’s more than twenty. Maybe only eighteen.”

He stared at me and then looked around at Laura.

She sat up straighter in the bed. “Amelia Hopkins!” she said.

He nodded and brought his gaze back to me. “I didn’t know you knew her.”

“Well, I—” I said, and stopped. “What about her?”

“She lives about a mile down the road, with her parents. Or lived there. She disappeared.”

I started to speak and my voice got stuck. I cleared my throat. “When did she disappear?”

“About a month ago, wasn’t it?” Dave asked his wife.

“The day after Thanksgiving,” Laura said. “Just about a month.”

“It seems that a man she was in love with threw her over,” Dave told me. “She took it hard. She walked out of her house and never came back. There was quite a search for her. She must have run off, perhaps with a man.”

“No,” I said. “She didn’t run off.”

“So Amelia Hopkins came back?” Suddenly he laughed. “Holy cats, Jed, you didn’t go out tonight on a date with her?”

Didn’t I?

From the bed, Laura said, “Mrs Hopkins passed the house today and stopped to talk. She didn’t tell me that Amelia had returned home.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. I crossed the hall to my room.

Through the walls I heard Dave and Laura talking. I couldn’t distinguish their words, but I could guess what they were saying about me. I sat down at the chair by the window and looked out at the frozen pond.

When I came down late to breakfast next morning. Sunday, Laura said gaily, “You can’t fool us, Jed. Amelia Hopkins is living in the city, and you met her there. Isn’t that it?”

“No,” I said.

She gave Dave a triumphant look. “What did I tell you? He doesn’t want to talk about it because he’s in love with her. Last night he took a walk to brood about her. Jed’s the kind of man who’ll fight falling in love and doesn’t want to talk about it.”

“At least you ought to let her parents know she’s alive and safe,” Dave advised me.

I pushed aside my bacon and eggs. “Can’t you people let me alone?”

Laura opened her mouth, but Dave beat her to it. “Sorry, Jed. A man’s entitled to his private life. How about some skiing this morning? I hear the snow’s fine on Wicket Hill.”

“I’d planned to go fishing,” I said.

Laura got angry at that. She was too well-mannered to say anything, but her face showed that she considered me a hell of a guest, going off by myself and returning only for food and a bed.

The day had started out crisp and clear, but by the time I reached the pond the sky was blacked out by threatening clouds. I didn’t care about the weather. I set to work chopping out the holes I’d made yesterday, now almost completely frozen, and planting a tip-up beside each hole.

I started on the extreme left hole, and at the third hole I pretended that it was nothing, that it was just another fishing hole I was cutting. But when I broke through to the water and peered down and there was no face, I was bitterly disappointed.

It was as if I had found something infinitely precious and then had lost it.

I cut the rest of the holes, baited my lines, adjusted the tip-ups, then stood there waiting on the ice. I didn’t build a fire or even go back to the shore where I could sit.

Children were skating at the east end of the pond, and near the opposite shore men were fishing like me, for pickerel.

A mean wind whipped across the pond. Random snow-flakes drifted down. The children disappeared, and some of the fishermen started to pull up their lines.

Through the arctics my feet got numb. Through the woollen gloves my fingers tingled with cold. And the flags did not tip. In an hour or more I hadn’t got a single bite. But I wasn’t after fish. I was waiting for the third flag to signal to me.

The snow came down more heavily. The last fisherman was leaving when the third flag dipped.

I rushed to the hole, and she was there.

Her face was turned up to me just below the clear, blue surface of the water. Snow fell into the hole, and, kneeling, I bent over, protecting her face with my body. And it was as if the water were gone and everything else were gone and we were alone together. Her black eyes glowed and her red mouth parted. She smiled.

She smiled the way no woman had ever smiled to me. I smiled back. We understood each other.

Snow fell about me and the harsh wind tore at my clothes, but deep inside me I was warm. I felt a sense of well-being, of fulfilment, such as I had never known before.

I have no idea how long I knelt there on the ice before Dave and Laura Machin came down to the pond for me. I heard their voices and looked at them over my shoulder. For the first time, then, I was aware that I was covered with snow and so stiff that I could scarcely move.

I didn’t want to move. I wanted them to go away.

“My God, Jed!” Dave said. He put his hands under my armpits and tried to haul me up to my feet.

I fought him. And when Laura went to his aid, I fought her, too.

“Jed, what’s come over you?” Laura cried.

Her words woke me as if from a dream. All of a sudden I was ashamed and afraid. I sagged against Dave.

“I... I must have dozed off,” I muttered.

“Sure,” Dave said gently. “Can you walk? Here, lean on me.”

I twisted my head to look down into the ice hole. She was gone, of course. They had frightened her away.

They led me back to the house. They made me comfortable in front of the fire and fed me hot coffee. There was nothing much wrong with me. Not physically. In a little while I thawed out.

Lunch was very late that day. And after we had eaten, Dave took me aside for a man-to-man talk.

“What’s eating you, Jed? The way you acted last night and then today at the pond.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” I stood up. “I’m taking an earlier train back to the city.”

Dave nodded. “I’ll drive you to the station.”

Laura didn’t come with us; she had work to do around the house. As we drove down the road, I kept my eyes averted from the pond.

Suddenly Dave stopped the car. “I just remembered. You left your fishing tackle on the pond.”

“I’ll miss my train if I go for it,” I said.

At the station, there was a five minute wait for the train. We stood on the platform without saying anything to each other.

The train was pulling in when I made up my mind.

“Dave,” I said, “Amelia Hopkins is in the pond, under the ice.”

“What?” he said.

“She’s under the third fishing hole from the left, facing the lake. You’ll be able to locate it in the snow because the tip-ups are still planted and showing.”

The train had come to a halt before the little station.

“How do you know?” He asked, watching me intently.

I didn’t want to talk about it. I wanted to get away from that town quickly and forever. I said, “I saw her,” and ran for the train.

When I mounted the steps, I glanced back. Dave stood gawking at me.

On Monday evening, Dave Machin came to the small furnished apartment where I lived alone. He settled himself in my one comfortable chair, stretched his long legs, lit his pipe.

“They found Amelia Hopkins in the pond,” he said solemnly.

“Yes.” There was nothing else I could think of to say.

“After you left yesterday, I went to the sheriff,” he told me. “The sheriff was sceptical, and, anyway, he preferred to wait till the pond thawed. I went to Amelia’s parents and they insisted that something be done at once. So this morning the sheriff brought a gang of men to cut a big hole in the area of that third fishing hole of yours. They used grappling hooks and almost at once brought up the body.” He paused and then added, “The pond is thirty feet deep there. You couldn’t have seen that far down through the water — not even three feet down in winter through a hole.”

“She floated up to the surface,” I murmured.

Dave shook his head. “The body was caught in roots or some other kind of growth. The grappling iron hadn’t an easy time tugging it loose.”

I looked down into the bustling, noisy street.

“Obviously she committed suicide when the man she loved turned her down,” Dave continued. “She drowned herself in the pond and a few days later it froze over. She’d been down there nearly a month. It required the local dentist to identify her positively, through work he’d done on her teeth. The water and the fish didn’t leave much of a face — much of anything.”

I wished he hadn’t put it into words. I just sat there, unmoving, not looking at anything now.

Dave rubbed the bowl of his pipe against his cheek. “You’ve never seen her, Jed. You were never in that neighbourhood before Saturday. Yet Saturday night you described her to me perfectly.”

I said slowly, “She came up to the fishing hole looking the way she had in life. She wanted me to see her the way she had been — so very beautiful.”

“Cut it out, Jed!”

I said as if speaking to myself, “Don’t you see that she was as lonely down there as I was at the top?”

He got out of his chair and stood staring down at me. “Jed, surely you don’t believe that?”

“I don’t know,” I said.