Aunt Weezie and Aunt Pet came up on the Southern with the cousins, since Weezie’s scared to fly and Father said there’s no big rush, might as well take the train. The uncles will catch a plane soon as my mother’s body is found and the funeral set. We had another blizzard yesterday. Chief Tower said that in twenty years on the town’s police force he never knew a search to go so slow, but then he was still in school in ’39, last time they had two blizzards in one winter on Cape Cod.
The cousins, all except Sonny, are crazy about the snow. Even Sue Lynn, Sonny’s big sister who’s sixteen and usually worries a lot about her fingernails breaking, is having fun sledding down the hill behind our house and building snowmen with Aunt Pet’s little kids. My brother Hank used to make out with Sue Lynn on the living room sofa at our grandmother’s in Pascagoula, every summer until last year. I asked Hank once if he was going to have to marry Sue Lynn and he said not to be a moron. Since the accident, Hank mostly plays his saxophone alone in his room, and I can’t talk to him.
Besides, Sonny’s here. He’s fourteen, just a year older than me, but better at everything that matters. He already looks like James Dean, with muscles. Sonny can’t believe they don’t have football here. I thought he might want to shoot hoops, but he said basketball is for sissies who like to do sports in their underwear.
Chief Tower comes by to tell my father they have to call off the search for now. “Almost lost a diver. You might want to go ahead and have a memorial service,” he says. Aunt Weezie tries to give the chief a piece of her coconut pie and Aunt Pet adds coffee. He says no thank you, but they offer over and over until he says that would be fine, thanks. He is real sorry nobody thought to warn my mother about the ponds. “Local folks know it’s suicide to walk on a winter pond,” he says, “but outsiders are fooled, especially when there’s all that snow on the ice.”
He is explaining about warm air currents off the Atlantic when Aunt Pet hands him another cup of coffee and wonders aloud why a grown woman would go walking on a pond in the first place. He says he wouldn’t know about that and tells the grownups how the same thing happened to a little girl over in Brewster, just the day before my mother went through the ice. My aunts look real sorry about the little girl and ask lots of questions about her family.
No one asks me what I know. I think maybe I should tell Chief Tower, but he’s busy eating coconut pie with Father and the aunts. I fix some pie and milk for me and Sonny and hang around the kitchen, thinking maybe I’ll talk to the chief on his way out. But he leaves in a big hurry, like somebody glad to get out of a place, just taking enough time to tell me I was missed in the Provincetown game; Truro lost sixteen to eighteen. He’s just being polite; I only play in games when we’re way ahead or way behind and the coach wants to give everybody a chance.
Me and Sonny go outside to try and find something to do. All he says to me is, “Basketball, jeez.” I say it’s all they have here, like I’m apologizing. I toss a snowball at a skinny gray locust tree, but miss. Sonny packs his snowball just right and lobs it square at the center of the tree. “If I had to live in this hellhole, I’d die,” he says.
We moved here because the Air Force told us to. Before Truro, Father was stationed in Abilene, Texas, where everybody was crazy about football, but base kids and Mexicans didn’t get to play much.
Truro’s OK. It’s so small that kindergarten and junior high all go to school together, and lots of people remember my name. I guess that of all the places we’ve lived this would be my favorite, except for the ponds having such thin ice.
Here it’s mostly sand and water — the bay, lots of ponds, and the ocean. As we drove up from Texas, my mother kept going on and on about the Atlantic, talking about how it was a real ocean, not like the muddy bit of the Gulf of Mexico where we swim when we visit Father’s family every summer in Mississippi. She kept describing it: “Cream-colored dunes sweeping to kiss the sparkling blue Atlantic waters.” She said this a bunch of times until somewhere in Tennessee Father screamed, “Goddammitelsa, cut the poetry crap and read the goddammed map!” I thought that was really funny, how Father rhymed crap and map when Mother was the one who wanted to be a poet.
I ask Sonny if he wants to throw the football around some and he says don’t be stupid, you can’t throw a football in two feet of snow. I say the Green Bay Packers play in the snow all the time and they’re national champions. Sonny stares at me and then says, “Jeez, you’re weird, just like your. . . .” He stops before he says mother. Aunt Weezie never liked my mother, who was from Ohio, but Sonny knows she’d whip him herself or have my father do it if she found out he said something un-Christian about a dead person. Sonny doesn’t understand that I would never squeal on him.
I just want him to like me. Last summer he almost did. I’d grown two and a half inches during the year and had learned to catch a spiral. Even my clothes were right, I thought. Father said if PX clothes weren’t good enough I’d have to make my own money to buy better. I took an extra paper route and got two pants and three shirts, all the brand Sonny wore. We got to Aunt Weezie’s house in the middle of the day and she told me Sonny was out back with some other boys, waiting for me to play with them. Aunt Weezie always acted like Sonny and I were friends.
I almost didn’t recognize him. Sonny’d grown about four inches and had a turtle chest. He was tossing the football with two of his buddies; when he saw me, he threw a pass straight my way. I couldn’t get my hands out of my new pockets fast enough and the ball hit me in the stomach like a punch. I fell down, but I laughed with Sonny and his friends. I got up and was brushing grass off my butt when he said, “Hey, Spaz, go change your clothes to something decent and you can go to the movies with us.” Sonny had never invited me to do anything with him unless Aunt Weezie made him. I didn’t even care about the clothes. Finally I’d made it, I was in. And then she ruined it.
My mother was at the patio door, behind the screen, so it was hard to see her but you couldn’t miss hearing her unless you were deaf. “You goddammed arrogant little bastard,” she screeched. She sounded like some big bird caught in a thorn bush, something you see on “Wild Kingdom.” When she pushed aside the screen and charged out into the yard I half-expected to see wings flapping. But it was just her, her usual self, looking like something the cat drug in, as my father put it.
“This boy bought these clothes himself! ‘Everybody who’s anybody wears these,’ you told him last summer!” She was in Sonny’s face. They were just about the same height. Sonny took a step back, put up his hand like a traffic cop telling you to stop. “Hey, Aunt El, calm down. What can I say? Styles change.” He looked to each of his friends and they shrugged. I couldn’t move, but I managed to speak. “Hey, Mother, it’s no big deal. I’ll just go change.” She could have stopped then. She could have said OK, and turned around and gone back into the house and had iced tea with Aunt Weezie, and I could have gone to the movies with Sonny and his friends.
“No,” she said, quiet at first, and then she started shouting, “No, no, no! I won’t have it anymore! Do you hear me! I won’t have it! Every damn summer of this child’s life he’s tried to please you. But you always find some fault. You and your whole pathetic family always. . . .”
You couldn’t hear what she said after that because my father’s hand was covering her mouth. In about two steps he had made it across the lawn, slapped one hand to her face, and with the other dragged her out of the yard and toward the driveway. “Find your brother and get in the Edsel, now!” he commanded me. The car door slammed and GODDAMMITELSA thundered from the front to the back of the house. Before I ran in to get Hank, I glanced at Sonny. He was sucking in his cheeks to keep from laughing.
Sonny is bored now. His hands are deep in his pockets and he looks around like something interesting had better happen soon. “I could have talked Mama and Daddy into letting me go to Mobile for the Mardi Gras this year, if we hadn’t had to come up here,” he says, looking around the field of tall gray locusts. Am I supposed to say sorry? I don’t know. Sonny lets out a long, bored sigh. I wish I’d finished reading that magic book in Abilene last year, then maybe I could do some tricks. I ask Sonny if he wants to go in and play cards. I’m not very good at cards but he probably likes it better if he wins anyhow.
“No, I don’t want to play cards or snow football or anything else dumb,” he says, like I’d suggested we play house. Then he says, real slow, even slower than he usually talks, he says, “Just one thing I’d like to do.” Anything, yes, whatever you want, Sonny, I think, but I’m real casual when I ask what it is.
“I’d like to see that pond Aunt El fell into.” I just look at him. We both know my father said he’d beat the livin’ shit out of any of us tried to go near Slater’s Pond. Sonny reads my mind. “I know what Uncle Brother said. But we’ll just say we were in the woods looking for a decent tree to climb. They all think we like to climb trees,” he says and snickers.
“We” means me and Sonny, like we are together in something. I don’t even look over my shoulder to see if anyone might be at a window. We go into the woods, me leading the way. I hold back the low scrub oak branches so they don’t slap snow at Sonny. We walk fast and don’t talk. A big gust of wind blows and the pine trees sway and dump a load of wet, white ammunition on us. It’s like a blizzard coming from green clouds, all this leftover snow dropping from the pine branches. Sonny stops and swears while he brushes his head and shoulders. I tell him we don’t have far to go and point to a spot of bright blue sky up ahead.
Last Thursday I had to show my father this way to Slater’s Pond. He thought I was being smart-alecky at first, when I said we should look there for her. I was the only one still at home for breakfast that morning, and she asked if I’d like to go hiking over the pond with her after school. “It’ll be like taking a walk over a freshly frosted cake, Jackie. Vanilla creme frosting, or would you rather coconut?” she asked. I told her not to call me Jackie anymore, it’s Jack, and that I didn’t care what flavor frosting she wanted to pretend the snow was. If I decided to walk on the pond I’d go with some kids, I told her. Sometimes she had the dumbest ideas. Snow doesn’t look anything like cake frosting.
“My mother wanted to walk on Slater’s Pond,” I tell Sonny, then add, “She wanted me to go with her, but I said no.” “Smart move,” Sonny says, like he’s talking to a retard. He laughs and I pretend to laugh with him.
We start walking again. The snow from yesterday’s blizzard has a crust on top, so when you walk you think it’s hard at first and then you sink into the soft part underneath. Last Thursday fresh snow was falling, so every step was soft. It was late, almost night, but we could see on account of how white everything was. Father kept calling her name, sometimes long and slow like there were lots of l’s in it — “Ellllllsa” — but mostly fast and mad —“ELSA!” She didn’t answer.
When we got to the pond, he stopped calling her name. The hole was black, and little black waves splashed against the jagged edges of the broken ice. Father took one step onto the pond, but had to jump back. The sound was like a gunshot — like a bunch of rifles firing — when the ice cracked under his weight. Mother was much lighter, so she made it really far out.
Sonny is breathing hard behind me. We’re almost there. Before Father sent me home to call the police, he put his arm around my shoulder. I was surprised how heavy it was. “Your mother didn’t understand that you have to be careful when you don’t know where you are.”
“Yessir,” I said.
And then he said, like a sigh or a whisper, “Goddammitelsa.” He said it so soft and nice that I couldn’t tell him what had happened at the bus stop. I knew I should, but I couldn’t.
Me and Sonny reach the pond. “That’s Slater’s Pond,” I say, like I’m introducing Sonny.
“Holy crap,” he says. “I thought Aunt El fell into a little fishing hole. This is a lake. Must be five football fields across!”
I feel proud in a weird way. “Yeah, well, we call them ponds up here. Kettle ponds, formed by glaciers. Supposed to be a hundred feet deep at the center, that’s why the divers have a hard time finding, you know, finding anything,” I explain.
Sonny squints against the brightness of all that solid snow. I pull a pine cone from a young tree and throw it to about the spot where the black hole would be. It sinks a little, like those hard sugar letters you press into birthday cakes. “That’s where she went in,” I say.
Sonny lands a pine cone next to mine, then says, “Sue Lynn thinks you must really miss Aunt El.”
If something happened to Aunt Weezie, I know Sonny wouldn’t say he missed her. When she tried to get him to put on a scarf this morning he threw it right in her face, and she fake-smiled and said something to Aunt Pet about how boys get to be just like men so soon. I wish somebody had told me to wear a scarf; it’s freezing out here.
“You hear what I said, Jackie? Thought sure a mama’s boy like you would be missin’ her,” Sonny says and sucks in his cheeks.
I drop the pine cone I’m holding so I won’t put his eye out with it. With one punch I knock him into the snow. “You don’t know anything,” I spit the words at Sonny, standing over him, my fists clenched hard. He’s rubbing his jaw. “You don’t know that she was there when I got off the school bus, that she was all out of breath and a mess from running so hard. All the kids on the bus could see her, how she held on to my jacket, her coffee breath right in my face. The fisherman’s daughter had her fat nose pressed to the window and she was laughing when the bus pulled away. Laughing at me and my mother who was crying and wouldn’t let go of me!”
I’m screaming now and Sonny doesn’t think it’s funny anymore. “Hey, Jack, take it easy,” he says and starts to get up, but I trip him. He’s easier to keep down than Hank.
“Do you know why she came to the bus stop? Do you want to know? She was afraid I’d walk on Slater’s Pond. Afraid I’d come here for a goddammed stupid walk over stupid frosting! She’d just found out, just read in the paper about the little girl from Brewster!” Sonny looks so stupid. His mouth hangs open like a slow kid’s. “She came to warn me that the ice could be thin, but I told her I’d already heard about that little girl in school and I didn’t need her to embarrass me in front of the whole bus. I didn’t need her to hold on to me anymore!” Sonny doesn’t move.
“I’M NO MAMA’S BOY!” I shout. I turn back toward the woods and run as hard as I can away from Slater’s Pond. Let Sonny find his own way home.
“Thin Ice” was originally published in The Cape Cod Review, and is reprinted with permission.
Candace Perry’s “Mama’s Story” appeared in Issue 152 of The Sun.
— Ed.
