Cold and Hard and Perfect by Brian Tibbetts
COLD AND HARD AND PERFECT
The fact that I wanted to fuck her and the fact that she felt the same about me were not big secrets. At least they weren’t secrets between the two of us. We’d talked about it while drunk at parties, but we hadn’t done anything else about it. And we were still hoping that we had managed to hide the want from the rest of them, from our spouses and all the other couples in our little circle of people trying desperately not to grow up.
Her name was Barbara. Not Barbra, Bar-ba-ra, and you would hear about it if you got it wrong the first time. And if you got it wrong again, then you were written off. I hosted her wake several years later and played a punk rock song called “Victory” after nearly everyone had left, and cried almost as hard as I did when my father died. But that was years later. The night at the “cabin” was still years before the heroin came into our lives, years before the dominatrix job in New York, and the tight paisley pants, and the asshole friends that seemed to follow the heroin like dead flowers.
We were at this cabin in the gated mountain community of Black Butte Ranch, a resort in central Oregon that was built sometime in the eighties, judging by the proliferation of T-111 siding and faux-rock chimneys. Black Butte remained a favorite getaway of the somewhat-rich people who lived most of the time in Portland; people who were too rich for a time share in a tropical destination, but not rich enough for a second home on the coast. Calling the place we were staying in a cabin would be like calling The Ramones a punk band, but that was what my silver spoon friends grew up calling it, so we all did to. All six of us couples from our immediate circle were staying at the cabin for the weekend, drinking heavily and playing cards, etc. We were all still childless, and though we didn’t know it, it was the last time we’d end up doing this together.
It was about three or four in the morning on Saturday night. All the other couples had gone to bed; they had been amateur-night drinking Friday night and all day Saturday, and had cashed out early, claiming various excuses for various bedtimes. The truth was, we were approaching thirty, or just past it, all of us, and things would never be as perfect and drunk again. My wife was snoring deeply on the couch, and Barbara, her husband Paul, and I were still up drinking. We had a handle of Evan Williams nearly done; we’d given up glasses for pulling directly from the bottle, moonshine jug style. We played rummy and talked shit, the fire guttering beside us, the wood basket empty except for half of a newspaper.
Paul, the imminent pyro in the group and an all-around pain in the ass (but still my best friend at the time), had a sprained ankle from earlier in the evening when he had participated in a drunken rock-climbing contest on the faux-volcanic rock fireplace we had been sitting in front of. He’d spent the last several hands of rummy bitching about how low the fire was getting, acting sullen and drunken while looking in my direction. “It’s fucking cold out,” I had muttered into the bottle at a couple of his comments, but Paul was either too drunk or too committed to a roaring fire the whole time to hear me.
Finally he slapped his hands down on the table and shakily got to his feet, his stringy black hair hanging in his face. He took a couple of steps toward the sliding patio door before collapsing in a heap on the ottoman, all the while laughing. Barbara and I laughed at him as well. He rolled off the ottoman, onto his hands and knees, and was still laughing as he began to crawl through the soggy carpet toward the door.
Barbara looked at me as if to say, “C’mon, you can’t let him crawl through the snow around the house to the woodpile and back, and you know he’ll fucking do it.”
So I sighed and I got to my feet, stumbling past Paul toward the door. I grabbed my coat and slipped out, trying not to let the zero-degree air get past me and into the cabin. I didn’t want my wife to wake up. I wanted Paul to pass out before either Barbara or I did, but if my wife woke up and made me go to bed. . .
It was fucking cold out – pull-your-hat-down-over-your-ears cold. I got my gloves from my pocket and slipped them on as I shuffled down the icy back steps, into the two-plus feet of dry, east-of-the-Cascades snow. The moon was out and pretty close to full and I got that brief moment in the face of the cold where I understood exactly how fucked up I was, and I almost went down on the icy deck stairs. The moment passed and I made it into the worn track in the snow, leading around the house to the woodpile. I stopped there, curious about the spot where the path I was on diverged from the tracks that lead down to the area around the frozen pond. Like most of the culs-de-sac at Black Butte Ranch, this one had its own pond.
The tracks that lead around the house were fresher and worn deep into all of the snow that had fallen over the weekend. The snow was compacted into the bottom of each of our treads. But the tracks toward the pond had inches of fresh snow almost filling them up, giving them this soft fuzziness, like looking at something on a static-y TV. The fuzziness was beautiful and lonely somehow in the moonlight. “It must have been the moon,” is what I’ll tell my wife later when I try to explain.
So, instead of following the tracks to the woodpile around the side of the house, I started trying to match my stride exactly with the person who had last taken the path toward the pond. I was thrilled with the way the fresh snow compacted under my boots and into the old tracks. I felt it and swore I saw it happen even though it was mostly dark out. What I swear I was seeing was happening under my feet, deep in the snow.
The person I followed through the snow had to have been walking fast, or they were at least a foot taller than me. Though the tracks were the same size as my own boots, the stride was longer than my drunkenness could allow. Those tracks must have been made at least a day or two before, and there were no other tracks heading back.
I was drunk and trying to understand why there were no tracks going back toward the cabin. Who had made these tracks? Where were they now? Was the person whose steps I followed out there somewhere in the night? I thought about my pregnant wife. I thought about a child being out there, a child who could make strides longer than mine, a giant child, with feet like mine out there in the snow, needing help, maybe attacked by rodents. I saw how they felled the giant child, like a pack of wolves, working in unison, following their alpha-rodent. When they’d feasted on the entrails and were satiated, they hollowed out the abdominal cavity and moved in.
I laughed at the picture of a giant child turned rat hutch, and looked up at the moon again, as if we might share the joke together. A little scrabble of clouds tugged across the face of it; it wasn’t laughing. Tipped back, my head filled with booze again, and I tottered backward, messing the tracks. I lurched forward, trying to right myself but over-corrected and landed on my hands and knees. I sank into the powdery snow, compacting it, but my hands pushed through to the frozen pond beneath. I was at the pond already. The path and tracks behind me, the giant baby full of rats was somewhere else.
I got back to my feet, stumbling, and took three reeling steps out onto the ice. I tried to get my balance again and fell. My hands and knees pushed through the snow to the frozen pond.
I laughed again, barking at the night. I remembered Paul’s dismount from the ottoman, laughed about that. I rolled over onto my back, bringing the moon into view again. I was the opposite of Paul in so many ways. The cold from the snow and ice against my back and head felt good and I settled into it, getting deeper, closer to the ice above the water below. The silence that surrounded me as I sank was beautiful, the snow closing in around my ears. It made a quiet night quieter. As I settled closer to the ice under the snow on the pond, I could feel it beneath me, colder than the air, than the snow. I imagined being trapped under that ice, my eyes wide, the bubbles of my last breath billowing against the underside. I started whispering the words to an old song I would never admit to liking.
It’s wonderful
Everywhere, so white
The moon was so white, framed by the tops of the ponderosas and white pines growing from the edges of the pond, too high overhead.
There’s something moving under
Under the ice moving
Under ice
Through water
Under the sound of my whispering, I heard a voice. It was deeper, from a deeper place in my head. It was the same voice from snow camping with the boy scouts in the seventh grade, the same voice from when Asshole Rick locked me in the forty-below of the walk-in freezer at John’s Meat Market for twenty minutes. It whispered its single sentence, like it always did, over and over again: “Relax, everything will be fine.” And the moon was too bright and the music in my head so sweet and I closed my eyes.
Someone shook me but I didn’t want to come up. It was so quiet down there, so calm. My eyes were blurry and the moon behind her head gave her this drunken halo. She was yelling something. But she was drunk, so it couldn’t have been that important. And for a second I couldn’t even tell it was her, yelling at me. But then enough of the light came back into my eyes. I could see her face above me, reflected by the moonlight on the snow. I could see her dark hair hanging down. I awoke and Barbara was straddling me, on the ice, her knees in the snow, her hands in my jacket pulling me up to her, screaming “Wake up!” in my face, over and over again. And I was laughing.
I rose up enough to get my mouth on hers. Her lips were hard and cold and angry at first, scared even. But then they relaxed. She settled her crotch against mine, relaxing her hips and finding my teeth with her tongue and then my tongue with her teeth.
I want to remember it all that way.
But, remembering it that way doesn’t change anything that came after. How she turned from my lips to vomit violently on the frozen pond next to us. How I stood up, rising above my melting snow-angel grave on the ice. How the wind plastered my wet clothes against my skin and rattled my teeth. How we staggered back to the cabin together, having found no wood, instead finding Paul asleep in a puddle of his own chowder on the card table in front of the fire. How I explained my wet clothes to my groggy awakening wife.
Years later, trying to keep up with Barbara and Paul when they traded in cocaine for black tar, the acid smoke rising from the sliding brown stain on the foil, after everything else, I still tried to remember the way it was on the ice: cold and hard and perfect.
But remembering it that way doesn’t change a thing.
* * *
BRIAN TIBBETTS is a writer, musician, print-maker and painter currently living and working in Portland, Oregon.
His work has appeared most recently in Word Riot, Housefire and Unshod Quills.
He is currently (slowly) constructing a website referencing his various pursuits: briantibbetts.com