Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

“But you see what I’m getting at?” Allen asked.

“Yeah, you and Milt want me out of the picture.”

Allen laughed politely.

And Earl joined him, ha-ha. But then Earl surprised him with his answer. “I hear you. No bullshit, Allen, this is a class magic trick you put together tonight. You got us off the hook. And I won’t fuck it up. But let me tell you one thing about Jolene. She’s loyal. She and I have been on and off for years, but we always took care of each other. And we’ll keep doing that. The question is, what are you going to do?”

“I’m doing it,” Allen said.

“I mean, are you going to get moral qualms if the boy-girl thing with you and Jolene doesn’t work out the way you want it to, which, count on it-with her-it won’t.”

“It’s not like I want to marry her,” Allen said.

“I hear you, look what happened to the last guy who did,” Earl said with a straight face.

Allen attempted to control the mirth welling up on his face and then decided, no, it was spontaneous, and that was part of the reason he was in this. So he let the laughter come out.

Earl joined him and soon they were both caught in a laughing fit.

“I don’t know if this is appropriate,” Allen said, struggling to get his composure back.

“Why not, we’re going to win it all. No need to be greedy, there’s enough to go around,” Earl said.

Allen drove the last mile back to the lodge trying to feel less paranoid about Earl. They got out and tramped up the steps.

“Okay, we clean up, bundle Hank back in the van, and go home.”

“Sounds good,” Earl said, twisting the doorknob.

Earl balked and spun around. “It’s locked.” In a sudden fit of anger he pounded his fist on the door. “C’mon, Jolene, open the fucking door. It’s cold out here.” Then he turned and smashed at the door with his good elbow.

Nothing.

Allen reached to restrain him. “Don’t, you’re leaving marks on the door, we don’t want it to look. .”

Earl flung Allen off. “Get your fucking hands off me.”

“We can’t afford complications,” Allen shouted. “Stop trying to break in the door, it makes it look like somebody was here. It’ll ruin everything we’ve done. What if there’s an alarm?”

A thought briefly crowded the anger from Earl’s eyes. Then he narrowed them. “There’s no alarm out here. So what’s going on?”

“I don’t know. She locked the door.”

They stood for a moment, shivering. Allen, stamping his feet, said, “Let’s go back to the car and sit a minute; maybe she’ll open the door. She had to hear you beating on the door.”

They got back in the Saab and Earl turned on the radio and got some college station out of Duluth and he made an attempt to listen to a discussion of gay, lesbian, and cross-gender issues on campus. Rankled, he banged off the station.

“Jesus Fucking Christ, can you believe this shit? You know Bob Dylan came from up here? Now this?” He kicked Allen’s dashboard. “Like fucking Iraq,” he muttered cryptically.

Several minutes of very awkward silence went by.

“What do you think?” Allen asked.

“She’s up to something,” Earl said.

Allen said, “There’s always an open window. My dad used to say that; let’s try the windows.”

They heaved out of the car, hunched their shoulders, and immediately began to shiver violently. “We have to take it easy, the cold is making us a little nuts,” Allen said as diplomatically as he could. “You go around that way, I’ll go the. .”

“Uh-uh,” Earl disagreed, and pulled the pistol out of his pocket for emphasis. “We go together.”

Seeing the gun, Allen felt a deep tremor of fear start in his chest, and the wellspring of the stammer that had tormented the first sixteen years of his life started up. The procedure was starting to unravel into human-system failure. He nodded. “Right, let’s go together.”

Methodically, they began working their way around the lodge and found it to be a very well-built, one-story structure of cedar planks with tightly fastened combination storm windows. And all the curtains were drawn and the lights were out. There was a mud porch but the backdoor was locked.

Furious, Earl kicked at this rear door and screamed, “Jolene, quit fucking around. Open the door.” He stepped back, squared his shoulders, and shook his head. “This is bullshit.”

Allen watched it rear up, the thing he feared above cancer cells and hidden arterial bleeders-human irrationality-as Earl swung the pistol and shattered a pane of glass on the back door. He pushed the gun hand through the broken pane and twisted the doorknob.

“There, we’re in.”

“You cut yourself,” Allen said in a dull voice, pointing to the red smear on the Earl’s rubber glove.

“Just a nick,” Earl said, moving into the a darkened room, feeling for a light switch.

“Don’t touch anything. Let me bandage the hand and clean up the blood. It’s evidence. Think.”

Being in from the cold improved Earl’s mood slightly but he still growled, “I’ll think after I find what Jolene’s up to.” He eyed Allen suspiciously, as if to say: What are you and Jolene up to?

“Your hand,” Allen repeated.

“Okay, let’s fix it up.” Earl had stopped calling for Jolene. Now they proceeded cautiously, turning on lights as they went. They moved from the rear of the lodge down a central hallway, past the door to the room into which they’d moved Amy.

Allen noted that the door was closed. As he went by he tested the knob. It rotated half a turn and stopped.

Locked.

But by then Earl was in the main room and had turned on the lights. “What the fuck?” he blurted.

Hank was gone from the daybed.

“The bedroom door is locked,” Allen said.

“Jolene, goddammit!” Earl roared and moved his gun from the weak fingers of his left-hand sling, which had been carrying it, so he could hold the cut on his right hand close against his chest, to stop blood dripping on the floor. Heedless of the blood trail, now he transferred the pistol to his bloody right hand.

Allen, still stunned by the cold, struggled to recover his concentration. Flashes of personal terror helped. He had to think. He had fallen in among the patients and his plan had collapsed for want of qualified help.

He moved swiftly to his bag, knelt, and forced his stiff fingers to function. He took out sterile gauze pads and a roll of adhesive tape. Earl watched him intensely; but not so intensely that he saw Allen slip the scalpel, handle down-a number-ten blade in a number-three holder-up the cuff of his jacket.

But then Earl held up his hand in a less hostile, moderating gesture. Allen came up from a crouch, balanced on his toes, with bandages and tape in his left hand; the haft of the slender stainless steel knife rested out of sight, just above his right palm. He steadied his eyes on the red skin just below the notch of Earl’s sternum.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Earl said, his eyes swelling.

“What?” Allen asked.

“The scotch. It was right there,” Earl pointed to the desk next to the fireplace. His face was pained.

“So?”

Earl shook his head. “Aw, Christ, Jolene ? What a time to fall off the fucking wagon.”

There was this sleep-ocean and he was sinking to the bottom, down in the dark where he bumped into fish without eyes, who were blind dreams.

The whiskey on his tongue tasted like cold kerosene. Dingleberries of frozen blood stuck to strands of his hair. Then, a dream with eyes swallowed him and he was surrounded by an empty playhouse where he was the only one in the audience, while up on the stage a cast went through the wooden motions.