Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

Never should have unloaded on that slob in The Saloon.

More specifically, he never should have thumped the guy in front of Amy Skoda, who now worried that he was extra-deeply troubled, which added a mighty tweak to her caretaking instincts and brought them up to full erect. So she dropped in every day to check on him, to bring groceries, provide company, and offer her strong but also very soft and warm shoulder to buoy him up. Taking some vacation time from work in the aftermath of the “event,” she reminded him that she was just a call away. .

He made camp in the lodge’s main room with the moose. He’d folded out the sleeper couch in front of the fieldstone hearth and surrounded himself with tissues, tea, and lemon, cough drops and VapoRub. Days unwashed, his hair was a greasy thicket. He lived in baggy long johns and Uncle Billie’s ancient blue wool robe.

He turned away from the telephone, picked up the TV remote, and clicked to CNN on satellite feed. He watched the news until they showed the gritty color images of corpses in a weedy ditch for the tenth time today. Kosovo: UN monitors expelled, refugees running to the mountains, winter coming on. He averted his eyes from the image of a dead child.

He tapped off the remote, went back to the phone, and punched in his voice mail at home. No new messages.

He swore out loud, which caused him to have a wracking coughing fit. When she’d heard his cough, Amy worried about secondary infections and had mentioned pneumonia. She wanted him to go in and have it checked.

Pneumonia was for infirm old people.

He drew the line at pneumonia and antibiotics.

Onward.

He went to the kitchen where two large kettles simmered on the ancient Wolf stove, and turned the heat up under the smaller one. When the loose sage and eucalyptus in it bubbled, he draped a towel over his head tent-fashion and inhaled the steam. He was trying to think positive when he heard a car.

He crossed to the windows and saw Amy’s green Subaru Forester pull up the drive and park. Her choice of vehicle revealed a lot. Knowing her a little better now, he gathered she was a serious student of Consumer Reports . Impulse-buying was not in her nature. She did her research, budgeted her priorities, and then moved decisively to get what she wanted.

And if Consumer Reports posted an index for independent, thirty-something women she would rate first in her class in reliability and crash-worthiness.

And persistence.

Hatless, wearing a tidy blue parka with gray sleeves, she swirled in from the cold with her freckles and her hair bright as Celtic metalwork. She carried a shopping bag in her arms and a saddlebag purse slung over her shoulder.

“How are you feeling today?” she asked, heading for the kitchen.

Broker coughed hello.

“I think you should go in and have that checked,” she said over her shoulder.

“In all due respect, I won’t be going near a hospital for quite a while, thank you.”

“Fine.” She dumped the bag on the kitchen counter.

“You get it all?” he asked, hobbling after her.

“I bought all the hippie cures they had in the co-op.”

“Think you know everything, don’t you?”

“I know some of this stuff has merit as prevention but you’re full-blown. I know a serious lung inflammation when I hear one.”

Grumbling, Broker unloaded the bag: Vita-C, cider, vinegar, oranges, limes, lemons, echinacea, goldenseal, and Siberian ginseng. Cough drops and two boxes of Popsicles. He put the Popsicles in the freezer.

She went to the stove, avoided the cloud of sage, and sniffed the other pot, picked up a hot pad and lifted the cover. “What’s cooking?”

“I found some venison in the freezer so I’m making stew.”

She covered the pot and took off her jacket and hung it on a kitchen chair. Her sweater and jeans were practical and lived-in. He wondered if she ever wore a dress. Probably not. She crossed her arms, looked around at the cozy stocked shelves, the pots and pans dangling on a steel butcher’s rail, and said, “Kitchens.”

“What?” Her tone of voice put him on guard.

“My dad always said you have the best talks in the kitchen.”

“What?” he repeated.

“Your Uncle Billie and my dad are hunting buddies, you know.”

“Uh-huh,” Broker said.

“Well, they talk.” She paused. “About you.”

“Jesus,” Broker grinned awkwardly.

“Well, it doesn’t hurt to talk.”

Broker scrubbed his knuckles in his frazzled hair. “Like about my life, up to and including the present train wreck with Sommer?”

Amy shrugged her shoulders agreeably.

“And talking about it is going to make it better?” Broker nodded his head. “Usually when women say that, it means they’ll feel better if they get you to talk. Okay, let’s talk.”

“Fine. Tell me about your marriage,” Amy said.

“That’s easy. My wife has this Joan of Arc complex. She intends to be a general. Does anybody ask what it’s like to be the general’s husband , home taking care of the kid? Or at teas with the officer’s wives?”

“Women did it for years, why can’t you? Where are you at with being separated from your daughter?”

“I’ve been with my daughter every day for two years. She’s probably due for some full estrogen immersion.”

“Aren’t we light and breezy today, and so adept at small talk,” Amy said.

“That’s me?” Broker gestured offhand. “Food, eat; gun, shoot; woman, copulate.”

Amy planted her hands on her hips. “You know, down in the Cities you might be a bad motherfucker. But up here, guys like you are a dime a dozen.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Broker drew back, a tad defensive.

Amy shook her head. “Sort of sad when a guy like you is reduced to bullying overweight drunks, like that guy at The Saloon. That was all out of proportion. Dave and I talked about it.”

“Great. So now it’s amateur-shrink hour.”

“Dave thinks it’s all coming down on you; your wife takes off, you’re getting older, being on your own, not having any-well, structure in your life.”

Broker grinned. “Lucky for me I got Amy Skoda standing here with the structural integrity of a small skyscraper.”

Amy raised an eyebrow and swatted a denim-clad hip. “Check it out. This is not exactly a cornerstone.”

Broker lowered himself to a chair at the kitchen table and mumbled, “I’m old enough to be. .”

“I know-my brother,” Amy dismissed him with a wave of her hand and plopped into the chair across from him.

“So how was your day?” he asked.

“Oh, wonderful. We had a preliminary root-cause analysis session.”

“Sounds grim.”

Amy winkled her nose. “Allen Falken sent a tape-recorded statement. He said he wouldn’t come in person because his friendship with Hank Sommer could be perceived as coloring his judgment. He did a beautiful job of making me look like a hick.”

“That bad?”

“Pretty bad. But friendly, more like. How do you staff for a five-hundred-year storm if you routinely staff for light fishing accidents in the summer. So it’s like my fault, but he can sympathize because I’m not really up to speed.”

“Really?” wondered Broker. “Right after the surgery, before it happened, he made a point of telling me how sharp you were.”

“I guess he had a change of heart. So the consensus is that Hank Sommer wound up a vegetable because the nurse-anesthetist miscalculated somewhere and the attending nurse failed to monitor in postop.”

Amy’s finger traced invisible water rings on the tabletop. “They’re not sure exactly where things went wrong. He was hypothermic and cold is always a weird variable and can effect the way the body metabolizes drugs. Like it could sequester and hoard them in a sluggish circulation system and release them at odd times.”