Ice-Out Read online

  Before dawn, hushed voices rose from downstairs. Owen headed down the attic stairs.

  As his feet touched the kitchen floor, Mom’s voice rose in a tear-filled whisper. “They were arguing last night. He came to bed upset . . .” She was backing out of her bedroom, followed by Mary Austin, the county’s first woman doctor.

  “His heart’s been bad for some time now, Esther,” Dr. Austin replied in her level, no-nonsense voice. “This time, it simply gave out. All those years of drinking took a toll, I’m afraid.”

  “The Lord called him home then?” Mom whispered.

  “Yes, Esther. I’m terribly sorry.”

  Then the doctor turned. “Owen, hello. I’m sorry, but your father—”

  “I heard,” he managed to say, and made his way past the doctor and his mother toward the familiar body angled across the bed, covered from head to feet with a bedsheet. Owen knelt. He rested his hands on Dad’s unmoving chest. His fingertips brushed up against the Saint Christopher medal Mom gave Dad when he’d stopped drinking.

  The clock ticked away seconds, minutes, a lifetime.

  Inhale.

  Exhale.

  When Dr. Austin left, his mother hovered in the doorway.

  “The medal,” she whispered. “It’s yours now, Owen. Take if off him. Please. Before the undertaker comes.”

  As if watching his hands move by someone else’s will, Owen lifted the chain gently over Dad’s lifeless head. He held it in his hand, unsure what to do with it.

  “You wear it now,” Mom said.

  Owen hesitated.

  “Please, Owen,” she whispered.

  Owen slipped it on. Saint Christopher, patron saint of protection. What kind of protection did Saint Christopher give, allowing a father of six to slip away? When Dad quit drinking, he encouraged Owen not to go down the same path. But Owen wasn’t Dad. He could handle a little booze now and then. Yet here was his own father, reduced to a corpse.

  Gathering the edge of the sheet into clenched hands, Owen determined—then and there—no more booze. He’d stop drinking.

  He dropped his head to the edge of the sheet. “Dad,” he whispered, crushed more by the loss of what might have been. Everything he’d wanted to escape—the creamery and the responsibility for his family—was all on him.

  “You can’t go!”

  3

  LATE MORNING, THE SUN HUNG LOW AND PALE. OWEN clapped his leather mitts together to keep his blood flowing. He wore his earflaps down and his wool scarf double-wrapped around his neck, yet a windless twenty-below seeped into unprotected gaps and stung his skin. Huddled into his coat, he passed Erickson’s Fine Grocery, Lou’s Trading Post, then the Ranier Depot and crossed the tracks.

  A week had passed since Dad died. Everything had fallen on him like a steamship anchor. When you’re nineteen—and suddenly responsible for keeping your mother and five younger brothers clothed and fed—every penny, nickel, and dime mattered.

  The check in his pocket taunted him. If he deposited it at the bank, he could order inventory from Studebaker. He forced down his own wishes. He had to return the check.

  Flashes of light caught his eye from the bank’s large windows, topped in half-moon panels of stained glass. The morning sun illuminated leafy patterns of Tiffany glass—a reminder that there were fortunes to be made in this northern frontier. Fortunes made by the likes of E. W. Ennis, timber and paper mill baron, and Harvey Pengler, businessman and bootlegger.

  Ordinary folks came north seeking fortune and gambled their lives—first on gold mines that went bust, then on logging, and lately on promises of fine farmland. However, after clear-cutting, removing stumps, and tilling deep clay, farmers quit working the land and returned to logging. The past week had changed everything; it was one thing to gamble with his own future. He wanted a car dealership, but not if it meant putting the family creamery at risk.

  Under the green awning of a whitewashed, two-story building, Owen climbed the wooden steps to the White Turtle Club. He stepped in, setting off a metal chime on the door. He gazed around, feeling strangely disconnected, as if his brain lagged a few steps behind his body. Above the arched doorway to the hotel’s restaurant, a stuffed moose head with a massive rack of antlers stared down with lifeless glass eyes. From pot roast dinners to all-you-can-eat walleye, to six-inch stacks of blueberry pancakes and the best breakfast sausage patties around, the White Turtle’s restaurant was a town favorite that lived up to its banner: Good cooking! Never leave hungry!

  “Hello there, Owen.” From a door behind the lobby counter, Miss Izzy Larson, a woman ten years his elder, stepped out, ringlets falling alongside her rouge-dabbed cheeks.

  He nodded.

  “So sorry about your father,” she continued, her voice thick as coffee that had been on the burner too long. “Used to come around here more, a few years back. A good egg, your dad. Used to buy rounds for his friends. Those were some swell times.”

  Swell times. He nodded and pulled a tourist brochure off the counter. His eyes glazed over the words as memories rose—like air bubbles long trapped in a pond’s muddy layers—gave way and floated up. “Trail your dad,” Mom had commanded, and by the time Owen was five, he shadowed Dad at the local taverns, trying to slide Dad’s change off the bar counter when he wasn’t looking. Whatever he could sneak went back to Mom’s coffee tin hidden under her bed.

  “Owen, honey,” Miss Larson said, nudging him back to the present. “You’re a little outta sorts, huh?”

  “Oh, sorry . . . Is Mr. Pengler here?”

  She shook her head, setting her ringlets bouncing. “He’s across the street at the bank, but he should be back any second.” She reached below the counter, produced a cigarette, placed it in the end of a long cigarette holder, and lit it. As she inhaled, Owen followed her gaze out the window.

  A man bundled tighter than a fish in newspaper, with only his eyes and nose showing, drove two shaggy black horses and a dray in the direction of the boat landing, likely heading out to cut ice. Every winter, folks cut huge blocks of ice, stacked and stored them in buildings under layers of wood shavings, keeping the ice available all summer for everything from packing commercially caught fish to ice for fancy cocktails.

  Izzy exhaled, smoke swirling up around her head, and leaned on her elbows before taking another drag. “The restaurant opens in an hour for lunch, unless . . .” Her voice turned to coffee with sugar and cream. “Unless there’s something else I can help you with this morning? Something to put a smile on your face?”

  Owen shook his head. God no, he wanted to say. He had eyes and need for one girl, and one girl alone . . . and her name sure wasn’t . . .

  “Well, there’s your answer now,” Izzy replied and promptly turned away.

  Mr. Pengler stepped in and removed his long, wolf-pelt coat. Made from pelts all charcoal gray, it almost seemed alive as he hung it on the coatrack. The top hairs caught the cold February light through the window.

  “Mr. Pengler,” Owen said, smoothing back his uncombed hair. It dawned on him what a fright he must look. For the past week, he’d barely slept. Only now, as he stood, did he measure time in the days behind him. There had been preparations for the funeral, people stopping to share their condolences, both at the house and the creamery. What mattered was that Owen had somehow managed to keep things going. Several local dairy farms supplied Jensen Creamery with fresh milk, which the creamery processed into dairy products that were sold from the creamery’s front counter. He’d bought milk and eggs from local farmers, kept the creamery equipment operating, using the centrifugal separator to turn out the best butter you could buy. Everything was graded, repackaged, and sealed with the Jensen label, and he made sure the deliveries kept going to every restaurant, grocer, and logging camp in the county. With Dad gone, it was all on him. He couldn’t possibly manage the creamery and take on the loan for starting a business.

  He pulled the check from his pocket. “With my dad gone, things changed.” Saying those w
ords made the ache return to his chest and throat. God, he didn’t want to cry now, not in front of Mr. Pengler, who removed his fedora and tossed it onto the top of the coatrack. It found its mark. Then he pushed back his prematurely white hair and with a few sprightly steps, closed the distance between them.

  “Ah, Owen,” he said, wrapping his thick arms and shoulders around him in a fierce bear hug. Then he stepped back, rested his hand on Owen’s shoulder, and looked him in the eye. Only then did Owen see the well of sadness in Pengler’s eyes. “Losing someone you love is the craps,” he said. “C’mon, kid. Follow me.”

  Owen had been so absorbed that he’d completely forgotten Mr. Pengler’s housekeeper—and sweetheart—had died not that many months earlier. “Oh, that’s right, you . . . ,” he said, ready to say more, but Pengler strode ahead, twisting his hand at Owen as if to say, “Leave it.”

  Owen followed Pengler into the restaurant. Under its high tin ceiling, two chandeliers lit the room. White tablecloths topped a dozen wooden tables, each with matching chairs. “It’s not the Palmer House,” Pengler was known to say to new customers, “but everyone likes a nice place and a good meal.” Though some customers turned their noses up when one of the ladies dined in the restaurant—“Can’t they take their meals upstairs?” his mother had said—that didn’t keep most locals away.

  “You and I,” Pengler said, walking behind the counter with its red and silver stools, “we’re going to talk. Time for a soda.”

  “Okay.”

  Behind Pengler, a narrow chalkboard displayed sodas, from “Black and White” and “Strawberry” to “Brown Cow” and “Catawba Flip.” Owen couldn’t decide. But then Pengler turned, reached toward the floor, and opened a short door in the wall behind the chalkboard.

  “Don’t forget to duck,” Pengler said, signaling Owen to follow.

  On the other side of the wall a mahogany bar, lined with empty glasses and bottles filled with booze, stood ready for business. The scent of cigars hung above deep wooden booths and tables with cast-iron pedestals. Since Prohibition went into full swing two years back, many such counters claimed to be soda fountains. But Owen and Pengler were the only two in the “blind pig.” It wasn’t fancy enough to be called a “speakeasy,” the upscale drinking establishments Owen read about in newspapers. This one didn’t have crystal chandeliers, flappers in beaded dresses and headbands, and black musicians playing “smoky, brassy music,” as one reporter put it. Speakeasies were more common in big cities; Sadie talked of a few in St. Paul off Summit Avenue, and a speakeasy on Wabasha Street built in a cave along the Mississippi.

  Pengler grabbed a bottle of whiskey from the bar and poured two shot glasses full.

  Owen put a palm out. He’d decided not to touch the stuff, but he didn’t want to offend Pengler. “It’s too early—”

  “Nonsense,” Pengler said, motioning to a booth. Owen sat down across from Pengler, leaving the shot glass untouched.

  “You lost your father. I’m still reeling from losing my sweet Agnes. Thank God I have young Jimmy to care for, or I’d lose my mind. Or my heart would break to pieces. Or both.”

  Owen waited. He didn’t know what Pengler expected from him.

  “You are not returning that check,” Pengler finally said.

  “But I have to operate the creamery. And you’ve probably read the news, right there next to my dad’s obituary. Henry Ford bought the Lincoln Motor Company for eight million. He isn’t struggling; he’s building an empire. I thought Studebakers, since they’ve been strong for a decade, were the way to go. Now I have my doubts.”

  “Sure, it’ll be tough going for a while,” Pengler said, “but there’s no reason you can’t start getting a few Studebakers from Detroit.”

  “South Bend, Indiana,” Owen corrected him.

  “Okay, so you remember what you told me? Thomas Edison was the second to buy one of their electric automobiles.”

  “Yeah, almost a decade ago,” Owen said, “but they’ve gone to all gasoline since then.” Owen pushed back from the table and sat taller. “Mr. Pengler, I can’t get away to drive ’em up here. I won’t have the time to keep a dealership going.”

  Leaning forward, Pengler clinked his empty shot glass against Owen’s that sat untouched on the table. “That’s why I’m going to help you. You really want to be in this dairy business forever? Your dad was a great guy, but did he really get ahead? Do you want to be slinging around milk bottles the rest of your life?”

  Owen looked away. Of course it wasn’t what he wanted. He felt like a northern pike on the end of a long line, being reeled in, crank by slow crank, as if someone greater than him was trying to take the fight out of him. He had to be responsible.

  Pengler massaged his angular chin. He studied Owen with close-set eyes. “You got brothers, Owen. Not a one of ’em as smart as you. Bet they’ll step up before you know it and be happy to run a little business. But you? You have more potential. I know it. And you know it, too.”

  Yeah, he knew it. He’d been the top of his class, a whiz at figures and dates; his last teacher, Mr. Chartridge, had insisted Owen apply to university. But when he’d returned from school with that notion, his mother disappeared to her room and Dad went for a long walk. There was never money. And besides, none of that mattered now.

  “Next few months,” Pengler said, “while everyone’s waiting around for the lake to open up, I’ll send some guys down there with jalopies—we’re doing a pretty brisk business these days, so there’ll be one-way cargo, not entirely legal cargo one way . . . Anyway, I’ll have my boys drive back your new models at absolutely no extra cost to you. Before summer arrives, you’ll have a small dealership, full and ready to go. They’ll fly off the lot! Whaddya say?” Pengler beamed.

  The check smoldered against Owen’s heart.

  “Owen,” Pengler said, lowering his voice, “I’m disappointed if you change your mind. I thought we had a deal.” He tilted his head, but didn’t release Owen from his gaze. “I can order all the cars I need, but I wanted to give you a leg up.”

  “Why?” Owen asked.

  “Good question.” He rested his chin in his hand. “Maybe I see a little of myself in you. Thought you had gumption.” He paused. “Was I wrong?”

  A knock sounded on the other side of the blind pig’s door. Pengler turned away and rose, leaving his words hanging in the air. “Think on it,” he added, as he walked to the door.

  Owen stared at the amber shot of whiskey.

  Returning the check meant a lifetime ahead at the creamery. Dad left nothing behind. Barely enough to cover the funeral. Owen conjured up himself at seven, ten, and thirteen years old, a kid tracing his father’s unsteady footsteps from tavern to tavern. While Dad knocked back drinks, Owen had to reach up to gather loose change to bring home to his mother.

  Dad had run the creamery every day like a hardworking father, but spent nights out drinking. More than once he’d come home late and let Owen have it with the belt for “not being responsible.” Yeah. Dad taught him that everything comes at a price. The red steel truck that Owen loved more than anything . . . the birthday present when he turned six. He’d forgotten it outside; someone stole it; Dad found it by the railroad tracks, all busted up, and belt-whipped the snot out of him. Owen refused to cry. He would not give Dad that satisfaction. With each whack across his bare butt, he tucked his feelings deeper and deeper away.

  He’d never walk out on his mother and his younger brothers, not until one of them could step in and take over. But the image of his own dealership, of a lot full of shiny, new automobiles, all waxed and polished, chrome bright as the sun, a lot filled with the most beautiful machines ever built on wheels . . . he couldn’t let it go. If he went ahead with his dream, he’d have to be extra resourceful.

  He’d find a way to make it work.

  “So what do you think?” Pengler’s voice floated from across the blind pig. Owen thought he was asking for his decision, then realized he was still talking
to someone at the door. He heard enough to put the gist of the conversation together.

  Ice conditions.

  Whiskey.

  “. . . two feet thick all the way to Kettle Falls,” the voice at the door said. “Darn near perfect.”

  Elbows propped on the table, Owen leaned his forehead into his folded hands. He thought of the pros and cons, the risks and rewards. Then a new surge of energy rushed through him, the same feeling he had whenever he laced up his skates, tottered on the steel blades for a moment, then pushed off onto a lake with fresh, promising, glassy ice. Heck, Owen told himself, he’d never gone through the ice yet.

  When Pengler returned, he didn’t sit. “That other favor I mentioned, I’ll need help soon. Time to decide. Well, Owen?”

  He stood up from the table and shook hands with Pengler. “I’m in.”

  Perfect ice is a rare find. The conditions have to be just right: deep cold, no wind, no snow, sleet, or drizzle. When it freezes just so—glassy and solid—there’s nothing like it. On skates, a guy can get up a head of speed—almost like flying.

  Air clean and bracing.

  Intoxicating.

  Breaths puffing white as you fly along the shore.

  Steel blades carve and glide.

  Arms pump, working in rhythm with your legs.

  Sure, you could wipe out going too fast. You could run into a patch of weak ice. There’s always some risk.

  A guy just had to read the lake. Read the conditions. Keep his head about him. If something goes wrong, you better know how to stop: bend your knees, throw your weight sideways, and send up a spray of shaved ice from knife-sharp blades.

  4

  BEFORE LEAVING THE HOTEL LOBBY, PENGLER STOPPED Owen. “Oh, by the way. You any good at riding horses?”

  Owen laughed. “Ah, no.” He reached for his cap and jacket from the coatrack. He pictured himself, eleven years old, and the dare he’d taken to climb on a dappled mare without a speck of training. The mare reared, bucked, and twisted, and Owen ended up flat on his back, the wind knocked out of him. Jerry, however, who’d grown up with farm animals, climbed on and clung like a monkey, arms around the horse’s neck and digging in his bare feet behind the horse’s shoulders. Unable to toss Jerry, the dappled mare eventually yielded.