The Ice Harvest
TABLE OF Contents
to Anne, with all my love
“
The Ice Harvest,
which suggests James M. Cain by way of Carl Hiassen and Quentin Tarantino, has the deep-seated wickedness to suit a title that says you reap what you sow. . . . Tight, readily cinematic . . . rendered by Mr. Phillips with the kind of pitch-black humor that found its way into
Fargo
and is alive and well here. . . .
The Ice Harvest
has the grit that goes with its territory. And the gimlet-eyed Mr. Phillips, unlike any of his characters, has a bright future.”
—
J
ANET
M
ASLIN
,
The New York Times
“
The Ice Harvest
is a delightfully mean-spirited book. Bleak in its humor, darkly funny in its bleakness, it has the unmistakable feel of classic noir fiction. I’m sure Jim Thompson and James M. Cain would’ve loved it, and I can’t think of any higher praise.”
—
S
COTT
S
MITH
,
author of A Simple Plan
“[An] astonishing debut novel from a writer who manages to put a funny, modernist spin on a piece of our noir past: Jim Thompson frosted with a blast of Jonathan
(Motherless Brooklyn)
Lethem.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A deliciously nasty little book . . . Phillips writes in a spare, straightforward prose style that’s perfectly suited for the Midwestern setting. It also allows for flashes of wicked wit. . . . An unusually tense and enjoyable story.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
Wichita, Kansas
Christmas Eve, 1979
PART ONE
1
A
t four-fifteen on a cold, dry Christmas Eve a nervous middle-aged man in an expensive overcoat walked bare-headed into the Midtown Tap Room and stood at the near end of the bar with his membership card in hand, waiting for the afternoon barmaid to get off the phone. She was about forty, heavy in a square way, with a shiny face and dishwater blond hair that looked like she’d got shitfaced and decided to cut it herself. He knew she’d noticed him coming in, but she was taking great pains to pretend she couldn’t see him. To do so she had to stand at a peculiar angle, leaning her hip against the back bar and looking off toward the back door so that she was facing neither the lawyer nor the mirror behind her.
The only other drinker at that hour was a small, very slender young man in a fully buttoned jean jacket who sat leaning with his elbow on the bar, his cheek resting on the heel of his wrist with a cigarette between his index and middle fingers, its ash end burning dangerously close to the tip of his oily pompadour. His eyes were closed and his mouth open.
The lawyer unbuttoned his overcoat and stood there for a minute, listening to the barmaid’s phone conversation. She had just the start of a drinker’s rasp, and if he were just hearing her on the phone and not looking at her he’d have thought it sounded sexy. She seemed to be having some kind of roommate trouble involving a fender bender, a borrowed car, and no insurance, and it didn’t look as though she’d be noticing him anytime soon.
He couldn’t remember ever seeing the Tap Room in daylight before, if the failing gray light filtering through the grime on the front windows qualified as such. It was a deep, narrow old building with a battered pressed-tin ceiling and a long oak bar. On the brick wall behind the bandstand hung a huge black-faced clock with fluorescent purple numbers, and running the length of the opposite wall was a row of red Naugahyde booths. All of this was festooned with cheap plastic holly and mistletoe. Around the walls seven feet or so from the floor ran a string of multicolored Christmas lights, unplugged at the moment. This is my last look at this place, he thought, mildly surprised at the idea. He hadn’t been out of town for more than two or three days at a time in fifteen years.
A squeal from the barmaid interrupted his reverie. “Jesus Christ, Gary, you set your hair on fire!” Young Gary looked up in cross-eyed bewilderment at the hiss of the wet rag she was patting against his smoldering forelock. He protested weakly and unintelligibly as she snatched his cigarette away from him and ground it out in the ashtray, then put the ashtray behind the bar. “It’s obvious you can’t be trusted with these anymore,” she said as she confiscated his cigarettes and lighter. He started to say something in his own defense, but stopped and closed his eyes again, resting his cheek back down on his hands. “You’ll get these back tomorrow,” she said. “You want another drink?” Gary nodded yes without opening his eyes.
Now she looked up at the newcomer, feigning surprise. “Oh, hi. Didn’t see you come in.” She gave his membership card a perfunctory glance. “What can I get you?”
“CC, water back.” She turned without a word and busied herself making his drink, following it with another for Gary. “Is Tommy in back?” the man said as she set the drinks down.
“Nope. He’ll be in tonight.”
“Could you give him this for me?” He handed her an envelope.
“Sure,” she said. She took the envelope from his hand and turned it over a couple of times as though looking for a set of instructions.
“Tell him it’s from Charlie Arglist.”
“Charlie Arglist?” There was genuine surprise in her voice this time. She lowered her head, cocking it to one side, giving him a close look. “Charlie, is that you?”
“Yeah . . .” At that moment he was certain he’d never seen the woman before in his life.
“Jesus, Charlie, it’s me, Susie Tannenger. Wow, have you ever changed.” She stepped back to let him get a better look at her. The Susie Tannenger he remembered was a lithe, pretty thing, at least six or eight years younger than he was. He had handled a divorce for her about ten years earlier, and in the course of the proceedings her husband, a commercial pilot, had threatened several times to kill Charlie.
She came around the bar and gave him a hug, a hard one with a discreet little pelvic bump thrown in. Her ex had had good reason to want to kill him; he had taken out his fee in trade, at her suggestion, on his desktop.
“Isn’t life funny? Are you still a lawyer? Hey, Gary, check it out—this is the guy that did my first divorce!”
Gary looked up, focused for a split second, then grunted and returned to his private ruminations.
“Charlie, this is my fiancé, Gary. Shit, I didn’t even know you were still in town; we gotta get together sometime.”
“Yeah, we should do that.” Charlie knocked back his drink and set a five-dollar bill on the table. “Well, I got some Christmas shopping left to do. Nice to see you again, Susie.”
She swept up the bill and handed it back to him. “Your money’s no good here, Counselor. Merry Christmas!”
“Thanks, Susie. Same to you.” He went to the door. It was getting dark outside, and Susie hadn’t yet turned the overhead lights on. From that distance, in that dim, smoky light, he almost recognized her. “And a happy New Year to you both,” he said as he pushed the door open and stepped out onto the ice.
When the door closed Susie sighed and looked over at Gary, whose head had migrated down to the bar and who had started to snore. “There goes the second most inconsiderate lay I ever had,” she said.
Who gives a shit if I say good-bye to Tommy or not anyway? Charlie thought. He was warm and dry behind the wheel of the company car, a brand-new black 1980 Lincoln Continental, the finest car he had ever driven. He was headed west with no particular destination in mind. It was dark and overcast, one of those days where it was impossible to tell whether the sun was still up or not, but as yet it hadn’t started to snow. He passed the Hardee’s across the street from Grove High, watched the kids hanging around in the parking lot the way he had when he was in school, back when it had been a Sandy’s. His kids wouldn’t go to Grove, close as they lived to it; they’d be assigned to one of the newer and presumably nicer schools farther east. Good for them; fuck all this nostalgia crap. He pulled a flask from the inside pocket of his overcoat and took a long drink. Now might be a good time to stop by the Sweet Cage; the afternoon shift would be ending, and there were a couple of the daytime dancers he wanted to see one last time. It was a little after four-thirty, and he had nine and a half hours to kill.
Charlie had both hands resting on top of the wheel, trying to screw the cap back on the flask, when he caught sight of a police cruiser just behind him to the left, gaining slowly. He quickly gripped the steering wheel with his left hand and lowered the flask in his right, spilling a little bourbon on his pant leg.
“Ah, shit . . .” He looked down at the stain, just to the right of his crotch. “Looks like I pissed my fucking pants.” He looked up as he felt the car swerve, catching it at the last possible moment and swinging back into the right-hand lane. The black and white pulled up alongside him and Charlie looked calmly over. The cop on the right rolled his window down and Charlie did the same.
“Road sure is icy, Counselor,” the cop shouted, his face pinched against the cold wind.
“Sure is, Officer.” He tried to remember the cop’s name.
“You’re doing forty in a school zone, you know.”
“Shit. Sorry.” Charlie let his foot up off the gas, and the cops slowed down with him.
“Never know who’s gonna clock you around here, Mr. Arglist.”
“Thanks. That’s one I owe you.”
“Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas, guys.” He held up the flask and drank them a short toast and they accelerated away, laughing and waving. That was a lucky fucking break, he thought. He switched on the AM radio and rolled the tuner knob between thumb and forefinger until he found an adenoidal police reporter giving quick but detailed accounts of a fistfight in a tavern, a foiled daylight burglary, and a rash of car thefts at a local shopping mall. He closed his report with a message from the chief of police admonishing shoppers to lock their cars and take their keys. He was followed by an equally adenoidal country singer’s bland, stringy rendition of “The First Noël.” Charlie took another sip and wondered who the hell burgled in the daytime, on Christmas Eve yet.
2
I
t was slow going at the Sweet Cage; the after-five office crowd were all at home tonight with their families or getting hammered at office parties. Besides Charlie, only a handful of sullen college kids and a retired postal worker named Culligan were on hand to appreciate the artistry of Rusti, a pudgy, redheaded twenty-year-old with a black eye and a Farrah Fawcett-Majors hairdo. A crude, bluish tattoo of a bird flitted above her left nipple, and the words
FREE BIRD
encircled her right as she danced to her usual slow, languorous rhythm, pointedly ignoring as always the tempo of the song on the jukebox. She held her elbows out to her sides and moved them back and forth in a crawling motion, her hips rotating in counterpoint, head nodding arrhythmically, eyes vacant. Charlie had asked her about the glazed look once, and she explained that as soon as her bra and panties fell to the stage and no further concentration was called for she entered into a trance state during which she communicated with the dead and could no longer hear the music to dance to it. Charlie had nodded gravely, politely declining her offer to contact any of his dear departed.
One of the college boys, a kid in a sheepskin coat and hiking boots, stared at her churning on the tiny, circular stage with a particular sad intensity, seemingly about to cry.
Charlie watched him from the bar, wondering if he was a rejected swain. The bartender, a large, pop-eyed man with unkempt, curly black hair, also had a watchful eye on the boy. “Who gave her the black eye, Sidney?” Charlie asked.
“Her asshole boyfriend did it two days ago. I wanted to break his fucking hands. She begged me not to, said he was real sorry, and how it’d never happen again, all that shit. Said she loves him.”
“Jesus, that’s too bad.”
“I’m still gonna break his hands, Charlie, swear to Christ.”
“Is it that kid staring at her?”
“No, that’s just some kid, says he went to high school with her. The boyfriend’s a skinny little fucker, thinks he’s gonna be a big rock star.” Sidney banged out a chord on an imaginary guitar.
“Hence the breaking of the hands, rather than the legs or arms.”
“You got it. You know how many bones there are in the human hand?”
“Not off the top of my head.”
“Me neither, but I’m gonna break all of ’em.”
The office door opened and a tall woman in a charcoal gray pin-striped suit and black heels stepped behind the bar. Her hair was black with a few wisps of gray, tied into a severe bun at the back of her long neck, and her face was untouched by laugh lines. Her exact age and origins had been the subject of idle speculation for years; she might have been thirty-five or fifty-five, and her accent was so mild and Americanized that it was impossible to pin it down to a specific country. Charlie had heard arguments for French Canada, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Brazil, Russia, and Portugal, none of them any better thought out than random stabs in the dark.
She looked out at the sparse crowd and shook her head. “People think because it’s Christmas all of a sudden they can’t look at tits and ass.”
Sidney nodded. “God and Santa Claus, they’re both watching.”
She came around the bar and took a seat next to Charlie, spreading some legal documents in front of her. Sidney handed her a bottle of beer. “Hi, Charlie.”
“Hi, Renata. How’s it going?”
“Shitty.” She kept her eyes on the papers, tight-lipped and squinting. “I may have to move the club outside the city.”
“Really?”
“Either that or put G-strings on the girls, or quit serving beer. I don’t see any way around it now. Looks like there’s going to be no nude dancing in beer taverns inside the city limits.”
Sidney slammed his fist down on the bar hard enough that everyone in the room jumped except for Rusti, whose adagio mingling with the beyond continued uninterrupted. “It sucks!”
Renata patted his shoulder soothingly, without looking particularly sympathetic.
“Fucking town’s turning into a real shithole. I’m about ready to leave, I really am.” He folded his solid arms across his chest, scowling and petulant.
“We’ve always done good business out in the county,” Charlie offered as consolation.
“Yeah, but you don’t get the downtowners after work, do you?” Renata said. “That’s my bread-and-butter trade. What the hell kind of tippers do you get out in the county? Your girls can barely pay their stage rentals. Shit, I may have to try putting G-strings on ’em, see if it really does slow things down.”
Sidney’s fury had not abated. “Bullshit! People come in here, they want to see pussy and drink beer! G-strings and soda pop, my ass.”
Renata shrugged. “Yeah,” she admitted, “pussy is what they want, all right.” She looked at the papers spread out on the bar and sighed.
“I don’t know, I’d say you’ve got at least two potential swing votes on the commission. It’s not a lost cause yet.”
“Yes, it is. And there’s no swing vote, believe me. I’ve tried hard with both of them. We’re stuck.”
“Maybe so.” It wasn’t of any practical concern to him at this point, but he hated to see Renata backed up against the wall.
“Wish I could get my hands on that picture of yours, Charlie.”
“Which picture?” Charlie said.
“You know goddamn well which picture. Trouble is, Bill Gerard has no sense of solidarity.”
Sidney snorted. “That’s a picture I’d like to see on the front page of the morning paper,” he said.
Charlie leaned into the bar, an idea starting to take form. What did it matter what happened to the photo, once he was gone? It was one more way to fuck Deacon and Bill Gerard and the whole bunch of them, let them wake up Christmas morning and find that their ace in the hole had vanished along with Charlie and Vic and everything else.
“Sidney, I’m buying the counselor’s beer tonight,” Renata said. She got up from her stool and moved behind Charlie, placing her hands on his shoulders, her long, sculpted red nails pressing through the fabric of his coat and shirt. Blood surged instantly to his groin and his scalp began to tingle, and he felt more warm blood gathering itself in his cheeks. She gave him a couple of affectionate squeezes, and he was sure she was reading his mind. “Talk to you later, Charlie.” She walked away from the bar, toward the front door. “Back in a couple hours,” she called out to Sidney without looking back. With the sole exception of Rusti’s heartbroken classmate, the attention of every male in the room was riveted on the movement of Renata’s pin-striped hips. There had never been a dancer at the Sweet Cage who came within shouting distance of Renata’s league, and no one Charlie knew had ever seen her remove so much as her suit jacket.
When the door closed behind her with a muffled thud they all watched it for a moment, then reluctantly turned their attention back to Rusti or to their beer, looking as if they had just awakened from a pleasant but unrealizable dream. Culligan, his attention span shortened by years of daytime drinking, was the first to recover, and he applauded wildly as the song on the jukebox ended and Rusti returned to the land of the living. “Give her a tip, boys; she puts on a good show,” he cried, his voice cracking with delight. Gleefully he reached into his breast pocket and handed Rusti a ten, which she placed into a highball glass on the edge of the stage. “Come on, fellers, don’t be stingy. She puts on a hell of a show.” A couple of the college boys reluctantly pulled out their wallets and started thumbing through their cash supplies. The boy in the sheepskin coat continued to mope, glaring now at Culligan. “See that there?” Culligan continued. “That’s a redhead snatch; that’s the real thing. Ain’t no dye job on Rusti, nosirreebob, that there’s one-hundred-percent natural red hair pie.” This was the old man’s natural redhead variant on the standard spiel he gave after every dancer finished; Rusti didn’t seem to be hearing it, but the look on the boy’s face moved from loving despair to murderous rage. Culligan licked his upper lip with an obscene slurping sound, his watery eyes shining dementedly. “You ain’t never tasted no snatch like that one, I’ll guarantee you—”
The boy rose from his chair with something between a sob and a war cry and leaped onto Culligan, whose chair gave under him with an audible crack. “Shut up, shut up,” the boy sobbed over and over.
“Fuck,” Sidney said, reaching down for his baseball bat. Charlie moved to one side to allow him to vault over the bar, and the big man strode across the room, thumping the bat into his left hand. Rusti looked down on the scene in horror. “Donny!” she yelled. “Quit it! Get up off of him!” Donny seemed not to hear her. His comrades rose up nervously as if to come to his aid, but a glance from Sidney was enough to get them moving backward and away from the struggle.
“I’m a cripple, I’m a cripple,” the old man howled, “don’t hurt me!” In fact Donny was just holding him down in a bear hug, and Charlie almost felt sorry for the lad when he heard the impact of the bat on his knee. The boy screamed in pain and shock and rolled off of Culligan and lay there holding the knee, wide-eyed and breathless. Culligan, realizing that he was essentially undamaged, sat down in another chair.
“Sidney, stop! That’s enough!” Rusti cried from the stage. Donny looked up for a moment at her, heartened by this show of compassion from his beloved, and then the bat caught him on the right shin, at which point Rusti jumped down from the stage and threw herself over him, weeping. “Donny, Donny, did he hurt you?”
Breathing hard, Sidney leaned jauntily on the bat like a cricket player. “Fuckin’-A I hurt him.”
The three boys who were still standing started to move for the door. “Hey,” Sidney barked, straightening up and extending the bat toward them. They froze where they stood, terrified. He swung the bat in the direction of the highball glass with its lone ten-dollar bill. “Tip the lady.” They stepped dutifully forward and around their fallen comrade, and each stuffed a couple of dollars into the glass before heading once again for the door. “You don’t have to leave, boys,” Culligan cried out, his short-term memory too feeble to hold much of a grudge. “Stick around for Amy Sue’s number; she’ll get you good and hot.”
“Yeah,” Sidney said. “Stick around. Your buddy’s gonna have to wait outside, though.” Donny still lay on the floor, weeping in Rusti’s arms.
“Donny, Donny . . .” She cradled him gently, brushing his hair with her short fingers. “Poor little Donny baby.” He said something nobody could make out. “What? I can’t hear you.”
He spoke up. “Ronny,” he said. “My name’s Ronny.”
Amy Sue, a skinny brunette in shiny blue bikini panties and a matching bra, was punching up tunes on the jukebox. She looked over the room, only mildly discouraged at the size of the audience. Her first song came on and she climbed onto the stage and started to dance.
“All right,” Sidney said, tapping Ronny’s hiking boot with the tip of the bat. “Time to go, pal.”
“Come on, Ronny,” Rusti said. “We’ll go sit in my car while your buddies watch Amy Sue.” She helped him to his feet and covered herself with the robe Amy Sue had just removed; then she took the sheepskin coat from her unsteady, blubbering champion and put it on. He didn’t seem to notice, overwhelmed simultaneously by the pain in his knees and by the unexpected attention of his feminine ideal. She accompanied him outside and his friends shrugged and sat back down. They still had most of a pitcher of beer left.
Sidney got back behind the bar and set a fresh beer down in front of Charlie. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said, “what’s next?”
Despite his earlier endorsement, Culligan found himself losing interest in Amy Sue and he limped over to Charlie, bracing himself on the scuffed Formica tables as he passed them. “Any chance you might be heading out to the ’Rama tonight, Charlie?”
An hour ago there hadn’t been, but now there was the matter of getting the photo out of Bill Gerard’s hands and into Renata’s. “Yeah, I guess I’m heading out there now. You need a ride?”
Culligan’s head bobbed idiotically. “Sure do.”
Charlie swigged his fresh beer down to the foam and slid off his bar stool. “I’ll be back later,” he told Sidney.
“Bring some customers back with you,” Sidney said. “We’re not gonna make shit tonight.”
“I will,” he said. Amy Sue stared after them as they headed for the door, hurt that they were taking off in the middle of her act. Neither Charlie nor Culligan gave her a second thought on their way out.