Michael Fontana
ICE
After the snow came ice. It thickened itself around tree limbs, strangled telephone and cable wires so they drooped and sometimes snapped. Several houses around ours were consumed in darkness as the storm wore on. The golf course shut down, leaving me stranded at home with dad. I shivered from the cold but also from dreading days inside with him, alone together, without any means to escape.
He had his newspaper in-hand when I came down from my room, the paper itself wrapped in a thin glaze of ice. He unfolded it on the kitchen table, thawing it there while he brewed his coffee. I sat at the table and watched him pour coffee into his cup, breathe on it to cool it down, fill it with the requisite sugar and stir it together. The scent of it sickened me as it always did. Then he joined me at the table.
“What are you going to do now that you can’t work?” He asked. “This would have been a fine time for you to have a hobby. Too bad you can’t visit your boyfriend.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I insisted. “I’ll text him. I’ll read a book. It’ll be fine.”
“We’re damn lucky we still have electricity.”
“What would we have done without it?” I asked, just to say something.
“What people always have done. Talk. Think. Create.”
The heat kicked on with a loud murmur and it felt good coming out of the vents, initially cold but then warming up, steaming against the windows. I still shivered in my chair. I wasn’t a coffee drinker but was tempted there, just to hold something hot in my hands that I could also pour into my body to warm it from the inside out.
Instead I stood up and picked up a banana, peeled it and ate it. I leaned against the counter by the sink. I wore jeans, a sweatshirt, a scarf and a knit cap even though I was indoors. Dad wore boots, corduroys with paint streaks all over them, a flannel shirt and his customary ball cap. He sipped his coffee loudly, continuing to blow on it, continuing to stir it as if just because he had nothing else to do. We were already bored and the ice had just fallen.
“I’m going out,” I finally said.
“Out where?”
“Outside.”
“It’s a frigging frost farm out there,” he said. “You’ll freeze your fingers off.”
“I’ll bundle up. I’m just bored in here.”
“You’re bored everywhere,” he said. “A typical teenager.”
I ignored him, grabbed my parka, put it over me and then opened the front door to a blast of cold air that nearly knocked me off my feet. I steeled myself against it and walked outside. Everything was solid ice and there was something exquisitely beautiful about how the sun’s muted light hit it. I knew I couldn’t walk far if anywhere at all. My car was sealed in ice and besides, the streets weren’t navigable at this point. Our small town didn’t send salt trucks around often enough to make a dent in the ice, didn’t pre-treat. So waiting was all we could do.
“Wait up,” I heard dad say from behind me. “I’m coming with you.”
I didn’t want to wait. I wanted to run. But I held on and soon he came out too, equally bundled against the cold, his ball cap replaced by a stocking cap with the hood of a winter coat on over that. He breathed and it nearly froze in mid-air between us.
We took tentative steps onto the walk, everything crunching beneath our feet. I wished desperately for it not to be this way so that I could go to work as I always did and look at the vast expanse of greenery there, even though the trees were bare for winter and the grass was stunted. There were still golfers in winter, though not as many as in warmer months. They came and played while bundled up, they laughed and cursed and drank beer and it was all good.
Dad nearly took a tumble on the sidewalk and I had to grab his elbow with my gloved hand to steady him. “Watch your step,” I said absently.
“I’m fine,” he snapped back.
The odd thing was that he immediately headed to his car, a so-called luxury sedan that he drove hard but which had all-wheel drive unlike my little beater. He smashed the ice on the door handles with his fist. Somehow he pulled hard enough on the door that it opened for him with a huge crack of ice. Then he climbed in and started it. “Get in,” he said to me as I stood there confused by what he was doing.
We pushed and pulled at the passenger door until it too gave way and I was able to enter. I sat inside and the heat of the car took a while to get going but once it did it flooded us. The windows gradually melted free of ice, starting with a small hole where the blower struck the glass and then the hole expanding to clear the windshield altogether. He turned the radio on first to a country station, which he apparently decided he didn’t want, and then to a classical one, where he stayed, bobbing his head to the orchestral movements.
“Where are you planning to go?” I asked.
“Anywhere but here,” he said, now tapping his fingers on the steering wheel.
I fought an urge to leave the car and return indoors. I was cold, still shivering despite the heater’s efforts otherwise. But I hung on, like this was going to turn into something better, that maybe in the ice lay something concealed that we could unbury, something precious perhaps.
In time dad put the car into gear and rolled it back and forth as the ice made it difficult to gain traction. He finally was able to pull away from his spot and took to the street slowly, carefully, occasionally hitting a particularly icy spot that caused it to veer but he always turning the wheel to steer out of the slide. A person or two was out, some hacking at the ice with a scraper, others just standing and gawking in awe at the scene. We waved at them as we passed and they waved back.
I don’t know why we didn’t talk. It was like the ice held our tongues in its grip as well. Normally dad couldn’t shut up, needling me with questions about my lack of a real job, my sexuality, my lack of direction. Now he seemed content to sway his head and arms in rhythm to the music, bathing in the heat, concentrating on the slow progress the car made on the icy streets. I liked him there in a way that I didn’t when we were in the house together. This dad was calm, steady and serene. He seemed at last to have found a purpose that he otherwise lacked while stuffed in his living room chair with the TV on.
He finally turned the car into the golf course parking lot, which surprised me. He didn’t golf and certainly couldn’t have on this day anyway. He guided the car through the lot and up to the cart barn where he parked. No one was supposed to park there but then again no one was there to enforce the rule. The car idled and he turned the radio off.
“Why are we here?” I asked.
“I want to see where you work,” he said.
“You never have before.”
“Now I do, smartass.”
“You picked a weird day to do it.”
“Humor your father,” he said. “Show me around.”
He left the car running even as we stepped out. The course was a kingdom of ice now. Only a couple of birds made their way to the feeder to peck out suet. Otherwise the place was gripped in a stillness that reminded me of death. The chill in the air echoed that. We carefully stepped our way over to the door which I unlocked. We entered the office. The heat was on low there so I bumped it up a notch.
“Here we are,” I said, still unsure what he was after.
“It’s nothing much,” he said, taking off his gloves and slapping them against the palm of his hand.
“I never said it was anything exceptional.”
“And yet you spend a good portion of your life here like it is exceptional,” he said.
“It pays my bills and lets me save.”
“I guess that’s something,” he said. “Show me something else.”
I shook my head, questioning his sanity at this point. But I opened the barn door to a new blast of cold air and we stepped inside it. All the carts were parked in their designated spots, plugged into chargers. A wren flew in the rafters. A scent of damp wood saturated the air. “This is where I spend the most time when I’m not outdoors,” I said.
“It’s cold in here. How can you stand it?”
“It’s not always cold. Sometimes it’s baking hot, like in summertime. It just depends.”
“How relative of you,” he said. “Show me something else.”
“There’s nothing else to see.”
“What about the golf course, smartass?”
“It’s impassable,” I said.
“And you’ll let that stop you? Christ, you kids today have no sense of adventure.”
“We can walk it maybe.”
“Then let’s walk it.”
We left the barn and trudged out through the icy pad and onto the course itself. Once we left pavement, it wasn’t so hard to move. The ground gave a little, though not much, under our feet. But by the first tee I could see that he was wearing out. Normally he didn’t exercise and this was a lot of walking for someone so otherwise sedentary. “We can rest here a minute if you like,” I offered.
“Rest, hell,” he said. “Let’s keep moving.”
So we kept moving, toward what I didn’t know. We passed a pond that was sealed in ice. A crystallized sand trap. Flags flapped absently in the winds that blew through. As the course opened before us, the wind had nothing to slow it down and so it beat against our faces. Now I needed to rest. I located a bench between two holes and took a seat on it though it too was caked with ice and froze my ass there.
“Why are you stopping?” he asked.
“Because the wind’s unbearable.”
“Don’t be a wimp. Keep moving.”
“No,” I said. “I’m stopping. If you want to be crazy, then you keep going.”
He didn’t protest anymore but sat down with me. We both shivered. “What are you looking for out here anyway?” I asked.
“Nothing. Maybe I just wanted to see what you do with your days.”
“I keep an eye on things out here, that’s all.”
“And that satisfies you?”
“The money I earn satisfies me. The nature pleases me.”
“It is pretty,” he said. “Even now.”
“You know, when the weather’s nice we never walk together. Why are we doing it now?”
“Because I want to,” he said. “I like winter. I like that everything’s shut down for a day. I like that I didn’t have to fight the morning rush hour to get to work today. I like that my bosses decided it was too treacherous. Screw them. They’re wimps.”
“Then the whole area’s full of wimps,” I said.
“It is. But you and I aren’t going to be today. We’re going to be strong and see the world frozen over.” He grew animated as he spoke and even clapped a hand on my shoulder. I had never seen him like this.
“What’s gotten into you?” I asked.
“Son, I’m bored. Things have been plodding along as they do, which is fine. But I don’t always want to scan sales statistics on corn flakes. Sometimes I want to feel like the abominable snowman, primitive and wild, beat my chest and crush through the ice, you know?”
“I don’t know, but I like that you’re so excited right now.”
“I know I’m hard on you most of the time,” he said. “But just for today, let’s be strong together. Let’s be excited about something. Let’s be intoxicated by the cold.”
“This isn’t going to last, you know.”
“Life doesn’t last. Your mother’s memory is testament to that. So let’s enjoy this while it’s here.”
I had fully decided that this crazy man couldn’t be my father. My father sat in his chair and read his newspaper and harangued me day and night. This man seemed captivated by the world in a way that I had never seen in my father before. But I liked this man a lot. And for some reason, in all the excitement, I stopped shivering. The cold became irrelevant. What was relevant was that the ice hung on everything like mirrors, capturing the dim light of the sun and refracting it everywhere so that all seemed illuminated. The brightness very nearly blinded me. And I loved it for the hours that it lasted, even if we inevitably returned to our captivity.
Michael Fontana is a retired activist, teacher, and fundraiser who lives in beautiful Bella Vista, Arkansas. Recent fiction credits include LandLocked, Subnivean, and Midnight Chem.