Tom Piccirilli - The Cold Spot

He slid aside and stared into the cold fireplace, wondering why anybody in Mississippi would ever need one in their house, much less in the bedroom. It was October and nearly eighty degrees outside.

“I always wondered what it would’ve been like,” he said, “if my old man had been able to hold on. If he could’ve ever bounced back from being so broken. But Jonah told me I would be better off without my father. Maybe he was right.”

Lila tensed and reared up, giving him the pout, and brought her small, hard fist down on his belly. It hurt and he gasped.

“Don’t you say that.”

“Ouch.”

“Don’t you ever say such a thing, you hear me now?”

“All right.”

“Fathers are important.”

She was so powerful in her presence, standing up for people she’d never meet, who were already nearly ten years dead. He’d never shared so much with anyone before.

As the sun went down, the shadows lanced the bedroom, growing thicker second by second, stabbing across the sheets. The window was open, a breeze stirring the lace curtains. Despite having shoved his childhood behind locked doors, he could still hear an occasional noise come through. Now he heard the sound of his old man chopping at the ice with an ax, needing to die so badly.

“I hope he’s not dead,” Chase said.

“Your daddy?”

He let out a small snort of surprise. “No, the man who murdered my mother and the baby. I can’t let go of the idea that one of these days I might get a chance to kill him.”

L ila introduced her father as Sheriff Bodeen. A woman introduces her father as something other than Dad or Daddy and you know you’ve got a situation on your hands.

Sheriff Bodeen hated Chase’s guts from the first minute. Bodeen smiled like a three-day-old corpse and kept chuckling under his breath, trying to be a good ole boy. Going, Heh heh heh. Eh heh heh. The sound lifted the hair on Chase’s neck.

Bodeen stood about five-foot-two and had short-guy syndrome, needed to prove he was the toughest son of a bitch in any room he walked into. He had arms thick as tree trunks and with every step he sort of exploded across the room. All rip-tide energy.

His brown uniform was immaculately clean and pressed, buttoned to the throat. He kept his gun belt on. The strap over the butt of his.45 had been snapped loose. This for Sunday dinner, meeting his daughter’s boyfriend for the first time.

When Bodeen hugged Lila he made a spectacle out of it, like he hadn’t seen her for years. Swept her up, twirled her around, kept calling her his little girl, his buttercup. She went with it. Finally he put her down and she left the room to check on the chicken-fried steak she was making for dinner.

Her mother was the quietest woman Chase had ever met. Really big, burly actually, with a lot of muscle to her. She hugged him hello. He couldn’t get his arms all the way around her, it was like grabbing hold of the front end of a Toyota. She squeezed him until he thought his ribs were about to go.

These people, he thought, Christ, there’s a lot of undercurrent here, forget that Southern hospitality shit.

Lila flashed in and out of the living room, either giving him time to get used to her parents or really busy cooking. He had stared at the stuff stewing and boiling in the pots and pans and had no idea what side dishes they’d be eating tonight.

She’d told him to call her mother Mama, but Chase couldn’t do it. He went with her first name. Hester.

Keeping up the friendly front, Bodeen called Chase “son” a lot, but there was serious ice in his eyes, a lot of rage and resentment. It would come out eventually, Chase knew, he just had to wait for it.

The man asked a lot of questions about Chase’s background. Started off casually but got more and more personal while they sat and waited. He drank a lot of whiskey with a lot of ice and appeared a little put off that Chase was sticking to beer.

Chase knew his name had already been run through the system by Bodeen, and the man would be wondering about all the gaps and holes. Lila had come up with a pretty complicated and convincing backstory that would hopefully divert any doubts. It was so involved and complex that Chase couldn’t remember any of it.

Bodeen would know about Chase’s mother being murdered. Jonah had been off the map for too long; Chase didn’t think anybody would ever find a connection between the two of them, but you just couldn’t tell. There might be some small scrap of computer info. Or somebody in the bent life might’ve flipped and given up everything he knew about everybody he knew. It was a chance Chase would take for Lila. They could always run if it came down to that.

Her parents had him pinned in the living room. Hester sat to the left of Chase, sipping a tumbler of rye and patting and rubbing his wrist. It was a vaguely sensual display and really threw him off.

Bodeen, squashing him on the right, said, “You plan on staying in these parts?”

“Yes,” Chase said.

“Never knew anyone from the North who could last more than a year down this way.”

“I’ve been in the South for almost four.”

“On the move.”

“That’s right.”

“Why’s that?” Bodeen asked.

“Because I’ve been alone.”

“And now you’re not so you think you wanna settle down. But I’m talking about roots. It’s a different way of life. We still speak like somebody. We have the advantage of not being as homogenized as other places.”

Bodeen’s use of “homogenized” impressed Chase. It was a word his father had used. He could just imagine his old man sitting here, trying hard to fit in and get along, making the effort not to discuss Russian literature. Maybe saying, “Boy, it’s humid!” because when you got down to it, there wasn’t a hell of a lot of middle ground where they could meet.

“I think I’m taking to it just fine so far.”

“Because of Lila.”

“Yes, because of her.”

Hester smiled at him and kept touching his wrist. Chase smiled back. She smiled more. He tried to smile more but just couldn’t do it, it was tiring his face out. Bodeen finished another glass of whiskey and started chewing the ice.

Lila poked her head out of the kitchen and said, “Dinner’s almost ready.”

Bodeen told her, “Me and the boy are gonna have a quick smoke out back,” and Chase thought, Here it comes, here it is.

“You smoke after dinner, Daddy, not before.”

“I smoke whenever the hell I want and that’s just so. We’ll be back in a couple a minutes.”

Chase walked out the back door with the man and accepted the unfiltered Camel offered from a soft pack. He used to smoke on occasion with the crews but hadn’t had a cigarette since that poker game, when he’d split the filters and flushed them down the toilet hoping the others wouldn’t cap him like they’d done Walcroft.

The smoke burned in his mouth. Bodeen leaned in as if to say something but didn’t. Just rocked back on his heels, then bent forward again. He did it three or four times before getting in close and whispering, “I’ll give you twenty-four hours.”

Chase asked, “For what?”

“To get out of town.”

At least it was right there out in the open now. “That so?”

“I don’t want you ’round my little girl.”

“Why’s that?”

“She deserves better.”

“You’re probably right. But for argument’s sake, who would you consider better?”