Ice Country (2 page)

And his friends aren’t gonna sit back and
watch things unfold either; they jump on me in less time than it
took for the White District witch to cheat on me, swinging fists of
iron at my head. One catches my chin and the other my cheek. I jerk
backwards, seeing red, blue, and yellow stars against a black
backdrop, and feel my tailbone slam into something hard and flat.
The wooden table collapses, sending splinters and legs in every
direction—both table legs and people legs. I’m still not seeing
much, other than stars, but based on the tangle of limbs I’d say
the table I crashed into was occupied by at least three Icers,
maybe four.

I shake my head and furiously try to blink
away the dark cloud obscuring my sight, feeling a dull ache
spreading through the whole of my backside. When my vision returns,
the first thing I see is Buff hammering rapid-fire rabbit punches
into one of the stone cutter’s, sending him sprawling. The area’s
clearing out, with patrons scampering for the door, which is a good
thing, because Coker gets ahold of Buff and throws him into another
table, which topples over and skids into the wall.

Me and Buff spring to our feet
simultaneously, cocking our fists side by side like we’ve done so
many times growing up in the rugged Brown District. Buff takes
Coker’s friend and I take Coker. We circle each other a few times
and then all chill breaks loose, as the fists start flying. After
taking a hit in the ribs, I land a solid blow to Coker’s jaw that
has him reeling, off balance and stunned. I follow it up with a
hook that sends a jolt of pain through my hand, which is likely not
even a quarter of the pain that I just sent through his face. He
drops faster than a morning turd in the outhouse.

I whirl around to find Buff in a similar
position, standing over his guy and shaking his hand like he’s just
punched a wall. The guy he was fighting was so thick it probably
was
like hitting a wall. We stand over our fallen foes,
grinning like the seventeen-year-old unemployed idiots that we are,
enjoying the aliveness that always comes with winning a good,
old-fashioned fair fight.

Yo’s glaring at us, one hand on his hip and
the other holding an empty pitcher. I shrug just as his eyes flick
to the side, looking past us. The last thing I hear is a
well-muffled scuff.

Everything goes black when the wooden stool
slams into the back of my head.

I
wake up to a slap
in the face. Not a loving, caring slap when the doc smacks a
newborn baby in the butt to get it to cry, but a stinging, full
handed palm across the face that snaps my head to the side and will
likely leave a fierce red handprint on my cheek. I’d be lying if I
told you it didn’t conjure up memories of at least one
ex-girlfriend.

“Yow!” I yelp. “What the chill?”

As I blink away the wave of dizziness that
spins my vision in blurry swirls, I hear the sharp crack of palm
flesh on cheek flesh. For a moment I’m left wondering whether it’s
an echo from me getting slapped, but then I hear a similar outburst
from someone close by.

I close my eyes, fighting back the urge to
vomit as the spinning room gradually slows. “Buff, is that you?” I
slur.

“Dazz?”

“Yah.”

“You breathin’?”

“Nay,” I say.

“What the freeze happened?” Buff asks.

Before I can answer, a third voice chimes in.
“You two and your icin’ prideful stupidity tore up my pub, is what
happened,” Yo bellows. Yo. The slapper. I’ve never seen a day when
his hands were clean. I’ll have to wash my face a half-dozen
times…just as soon as I can figure out the difference between up
and down.

“Sorry, Yo,” Buff says diplomatically. “It
won’t happen again.”

“That’s two fights last week and three this
’un. Nay, it freezin’ won’t happen again, ’cause you ain’t welcome
back.”

My eyes snap open and I see three Yo’s
standing over me, looking angrier than a skinned bear in a
snowstorm. His thick mess of beard is right over my face and I
clamp my mouth shut for fear of getting a hairy appetizer before
lunch.

“But, Yo, you can’t do that—we’ve
always
come here.” Buff’s words come out as a plea, which is
exactly what it is. I expect if he was physically able to, he’d be
on his knees with his hands clasped tight, praying to the Heart of
the Mountain for Yo to reconsider.

The red hot anger leeches from Yo’s face,
leaving him paler than one of the Pasties from the Glass City out
in fire country. “You think I don’t know that?” he says, dropping
his voice to a whisper. “Chill, I practically raised you boys.”
Wellll, I wouldn’t go that far. I respect Yo and how well he runs
his business, but honestly, I’d rather be raised by wolves, and not
the tame, gentle kind who pull our sleds; the sharp-fanged vicious
ones who are known to drag children into the forest.

But at the same time, there’s a degree of
truth to his words. Most of what we’ve learned about life has come
from our time spent in Fro-Yo’s. First, when we were just kids,
brought by my father after school to “learn how to be men,” and
then, after he caught the Cold and passed on, we kept going back.
Yo could’ve turned us away, because we were too young without
having a parent there, but he didn’t. Knowing full well from the
gossip that my mother would probably never be motherly again, he
served us wafers and goat’s cheese and gumberry juice, never
charging us a thing. And we learned how to be men, or at least the
ice-country-tavern version of men, drinking hard and fighting
harder.

Look where it’s got us.

I don’t say a thing, because the memories are
caught in my throat.

“C’mon, Yo, we were provoked,” Buff says,
less nostalgic than me. Really what he means is that
Dazz
was provoked, and even that’s a lie. There’s a chilluva difference
between saying a few nasty words in someone’s general direction and
throwing a full-force punch between the eyes, although sometimes
the nuances of good behavior and manners are completely lost on
me.

“No ’scuses, boys,” Yo says. “Look, the best
I can do is that I’ll consider lettin’ you back if you can prove
you’ve changed your fightin’ ways.”

“And how are we supposed to do that?” I ask,
finally dislodging the memories from my windpipe.

“Get a job. Pay for all the damages. And if I
don’t hear about you startin’”—he cocks his head to the side
thoughtfully—“or endin’ any fights, I’ll let you come back.”

I groan, but not from the pounding headache
that I suddenly feel in the back of my head. From where I’m lying,
his requirements seem impossible. Bye, bye girlfriend number
two.

“Sure, Yo, whatever you say,” Buff says, but
I can hear the dismay in his voice. “We’ll prove it to you.”

“Now you best run home and put some ice on
those heads of yours. My oak stools pack a wallop, all right.”

He helps Buff to his feet, and then me. We
stand side by side, two fierce warriors, swaying and unsteady on
our feet like we might topple over at any moment. Some
warriors.

Buff flops a heavy arm around my shoulders,
nearly knocking me over. I cling to him just as tightly. We stagger
for the door like drunks, open it awkwardly. Before we leave, I
look back and ask a final question. “Who hit us from behind?”

Yo shakes his head. “You’ll just go and start
a fight if I tell you.”

“Naw, Yo, I just wanna know how we lost. We
don’t usually lose.” Never, really.

Yo closes one eye, as if he’s got a bit of
dirt in it. “One of those stonecutters,” he says. “The third one,
who you both thought was out of the picture.”

We close the door, welcoming the cold.

~~~

“Yah, she was pretty icy,” Buff says, “but
there are plenny of fish in the ice streams.” The thing about that
is, I’ve gone ice fishing twenny times this winter and I ain’t
never caught a freezin’ thing.

“Yah,” I say, not really agreeing. It’s just
a bit of bad luck, I tell myself, referring to the three broken and
mangled “relationships” I’ve left in my wake. If bad luck’s got
two-mile-long legs, a deadly white smile, and more curves than a
snowman, then that’s exactly what I got.

“You’ll bounce back. We both will,” Buff
says, scraping a boot in the snow. We’re sitting in a snowdrift,
having never made it home. Neither of us has much to go home to
anyway, and there’s plenny of snow and ice to treat our throbbing
heads.

“How?” I say, adding another clump of snow to
the snow helmet I’m wearing. “How in the chill are we supposed to
get enough silver to pay for everything we broke?”

“There’s always boulders-’n-avalanches,” Buff
says, referring to our favorite card game of the gambling variety,
another vice we picked up the moment we turned sixteen and were
permitted into the Chance Holes.

I feel a zing of energy through my bruised
body. It’s a longshot, but…

“How much silver do you have to put on the
line?” I ask.

Buff shrugs, removes the snowball he’s
holding against his skull, chucks it at a tree, missing badly.
“Twenny sickles,” he says.

I frown, scrape the snow away from my own
head, doing the math. Combined we have maybe fitty, give or take a
sickle. Probably a quarter of what we need to pay Yo back. We’d
have to get awfully lucky at b-’n-a to win that kind of silver. I
pack the snow into a tight ball, launch it at the same tree Buff
aimed for, missing by twice as much.

I look up at the gray-blanketed sky, striped
with streaks of red, like bloody claw marks, where the crimson sky
manages to peek through the dense cloud cover. When I look down
again, I know:

We have no other choice—we’ve gotta try.

Luckily, cards have nothing to do with
throwing snowballs.

~~~

The bland gray of the daytime is long past,
giving way to a heavy night. I end up stopping at home to get my
last bundle of silver coins. When I pry it from behind the bearskin
insulation we’ve got pressed against the stacked-tree-trunk walls,
it feels lighter than it should. Turns out I’ve got even less than
I thought, only twenny sickles. The missing sickles are probably
because Mother found my stash and stole what she needed to buy
enough ice powder to keep her in a sufficient stupor to forget
about me and my older brother, who she says, “Reminds me of your
father more than anything.”

Wouldn’t want to do that.

Not that it matters. If she didn’t find some
of my silver, she’d have found another way. She always does. That’s
one thing I’ve learned about addicts: they’ll get what they need
one way or another. Sell a piece of furniture, steal it, trade
something. Whatever it takes.

I don’t confront her about it, because it
wouldn’t do any good anyway. She barely knows I’m there, sitting
blank-eyed and cross-legged in front of the dry, charred fireplace
logs, holding her hands out as if to warm them on the invisible
flames. “Oooh,” she murmurs softly to herself.

I sigh. If we do win anything tonight, I’ll
have to find a better place to hide whatever’s left over after
paying Yo back. Like somewhere in another country, fire country
perhaps.

Shaking my head, I light a small fire so my
mother doesn’t freeze to death.

My brother, Wes, isn’t around, because unlike
me, he has a job doing the nightshift in the mines. Ain’t much of a
job if you ask me, but without his dirt-blackened face we’d have
died of starvation months ago. He’s only two years older than me,
but if you asked him, he’d tell you he’s ten years my senior in
maturity. Not that I’m arguing.

Given our situation, I should’ve gotten a job
a long time ago, when I turned fourteen and school ended. Or at
least at age sixteen, when most guys do, after they’ve had their
two years of fun. So why am I seventeen and wasting my life away? I
wish I knew.

My little sister, Jolie, is staying with a
neighbor down the street until my mother can pull it together. The
way things are going, she might be there forever. Although I’ve had
a pretty shivvy day, not seeing Jolie’s smiling face at home is the
worst part. She’s only twelve, and yet, I swear she’s one of the
only people who really gets me. Her and Buff, that is.

I leave my mother babbling to herself about
how the Cold is growing wings and flying above the clouds, or some
rubbish like that. The warmth of the fire I made chases me out the
door.

It’s colder than my ex-girlfriend’s
personality outside. Even with my slightly-too-small double-layered
bearskin coat that I won playing boulders when I was fifteen, and
the three thick shirts underneath it, I’m instantly frozen from
head to toe. When the wind blows it goes right through me, like I’m
naked and made of brittle parchment, and I find myself running just
to keep warm. My bruised skull aches with each step.

Before heading to meet Buff, I stop at our
neighbor’s place to see Jolie. Although not rich by any stretch of
the imagination, Clint and his wife, Looza, are better off than us,
which I’m glad for. It means Jolie gets a decent place to stay,
three warm meals a day, and a taste for what it’s like to be part
of a real family. Selfishly, I want my mother to get cleaned up so
my sister can come home, but I know that might not be the best
thing for her. Either way, I’m glad she’s close by.

I rap firmly on the door, feeling every thud
echo in my head. On the third knock the door opens and Jolie pokes
her head out. “Dazz!” she exclaims, breaking into a huge smile that
instantly warms my frozen body and soul. Her dark brown hair is in
a long, tight braid down her back, almost to her waist. It’s not
done exactly like how I would do it, but it’s close enough. When my
dad died and my mother lost herself, I had to learn how to braid
real quick, because Jolie wouldn’t have it any other way.