Page 57 - WTP Vol.IX #3

The boy gives the man a confused look before tilting his ear toward the ice. After a few moments, Beard’s deadpanned face slides into an open-mouthed grin. The black in the man’s molars and the red in the boy’s face, even under the cover of night, show clear as day.
Columbia’s voice carries across the frozen lake as he peers into his cell phone, face reflecting its light, and yells back:
“Still no bars!” Beard grunts.
“Can you really build a fire out here?” Condensation from the boy’s breath accumulates on the wool of his scarf as he speaks into the fibers.
“You betcha,” says Beard. “How’s it not melt through?”
Beard pulls a bag of sunflower seeds from the front pocket of his jacket on the ground and dumps a couple dozen into his mouth. He sucks on them for a while and then spits out two halves of an empty shell. “Just doesn’t.”
catch on his beard.
A few more freckle the snow at his feet. The boy starts to laugh, too.
When they stop, the boy looks over towards the hole he cut in the ice. “I wish I hadn’t found him like that.”
It had felt like the auger had hit something soft, like pushing on an inner-tube that bobbed up and down under the ice. At first, he thought it was a dead fish floating up. Then he saw the face.
“Well, you did,” says Beard. “Can’t take that back.” Beard spits another empty seed next to his feet. “I s’pose people in town will wanna know what hap- pened to him. ’is family already good as buried him.”
“He got kids?” says the boy.
Beard nods his head. “Two.”
Columbia squats down and looks into the hole, turn- ing his head and shining the light on his phone down into the water.
He scoops out some ice with the skimmer. A quick flash precedes the sound of a camera shutter.
“Can we build one?” the boy asks. “What’s that now?”
“A fire on the ice. Can we make one?” His eyes look brighter than they have all night, even brighter than before he found the body.
“Don’t know how long we got. Might come out here and say we’s takin’ off. We ain’t even got no wood.” The boy slumps back down and continues to use his feet to plow the snow around his bucket into two small piles.
“We wouldn’t leave him here, would we?”
“Might.”
“We could pull him up. Bring him back to town.” The boy’s voice quivers a bit. His eyebrows furrow under his stocking cap.
Beard rubs the side of his face, scratches at the base of the course hairs. “We can’t get’m out. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t. Don’t got the right tools. No, that’s a job for someone else, not us.”
The boy sniffles and rubs his eyes with his thick
The boy turns away.
“You think I’m shittin’ you?”
“You said that thing ‘bout the fish already.”
“I was shittin’ you ‘bout the fish.”
“But not the fire?”
“Nope. Ice this thick, you burn a house on it, ain’t gonna fall through.”
“No shittin’?” says the boy, and the man laughs so hard that a few wet seeds fall out of his mouth and
gloves.
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