2
“The dead are drinking here tonight,” said Ira as she joined the man at the table. They were in a town bar where the hard-drinking people went, a tough place where everyone looked up each time a new person entered from the icy street. The drinkers didn’t look away once the door shut and the blast of cold air was absorbed into the bar’s steamy atmosphere—they just kept watching emptily the way the dead stare. Ira looked right back at them and narrowed her eyes.
“I don’t feel like going home.”
“You feel like coming with me,” the man, who was not drunk, stated, “but you can’t because if you do, you will have to sleep on the other side of my wife.”
“Is she good-looking? Or is she ugly like you?” asked Ira, but she smiled to show she meant he was the opposite of ugly.
The people had turned away to resume their conversations, to drink or argue. Thirty or more sat scattered in the booths or at the tables, some in unzipped snowmobile suits or dressed in camou-flage hunting parkas. The man sitting beside Ira had given her the only friendly look in the place, so she’d sat down next to him.
“C’mon,” said Ira, smiling, “ugly like you?”
The man said with a kind of shy reluctance that his wife was beautiful, but for the scar on her lip. He passed his finger slantwise across his own mouth, and Ira remembered the woman he spoke of. Instead of mentioning her name, people often made a sign for her like that, and everybody knew who they meant.
“I’m almost beautiful, too,” said Ira. “I would be except for what’s in here.”
She tapped her breast over the heart, casually, then she took a drink of the beer that the man had just bought for her.
“Maybe you could clean that up,” the man suggested, nodding at that place Ira indicated.
“I’m trying to,” said Ira. “Alcohol kills germs.”
She took an abrupt swallow of her drink and tapped her face with her fingers. “I’m getting sterilized inside. You won’t catch anything from me.”
“Even if I did,” the man said, “my wife would cure it. She knows a lot of these old-time medicines?”
His voice rose as though he was asking a question of Ira, who nodded just as if she was giving a real answer to his question. She drank her beer, had another, and then one more. Now she was just drunk enough. She didn’t want to get any drunker, but she also did not want to get sober, not yet, not by any means. As she’d already said, she wasn’t ready to go home. She said it again in a vaguer, softer way than before.
“I’m not ready to go home.”
“Don’t say that around just anybody,” said the man, chiding her in a friendly way. “There’s dirty men in here.”
“Where, where,” said Ira, looking openly at the drinkers now. Their stares seemed comical. “I want a dirty man.
“But not that one,” she went on, following the chin-pointing nod of the man who was buying her drinks. “I’ve had him and he’s no good. His wife hired someone, maybe hired your own wife, to put a medicine upon his wiinag so it droops when he thinks of anyone but her.” She laughed and made a sad face as she held up her finger and then slowly curled it into her palm.
“I don’t want to go home, but I don’t want that, either.”
“What do you want?” asked the man.
“I want something else,” said Ira. “I definitely want something else.”
“Maybe you want spiritual help,” said the man.
Ira lowered her face and then cast her eyes up at him and shook her head back and forth.
“What are you doing in a bar, anyway?” she said. “What do you mean spiritual help? You don’t go talking about spiritual things when you’re drinking.”
“I do,” said the man. “I’m like that. Different because I know how to handle my drinking. Therefore, in a bar, I can talk of these things as though I was a regular person.”
“I’ll tell you what,” said Ira, “you’re not a regular person. You’re a windigo. You’re made of ice inside. You turn your drinks to slush in your belly, then you try and offer me spiritual help and you say your wife is beautiful, she has a scarred lip, she knows medicine. There’s something not right about this conversation.”
Ira pushed her finger around the lip of her glass, then scooped up some foam. She stuck her finger in her mouth. Looking at him curiously, she continued. “You know what I mean? Something off.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” said the man. “You’re a good-looking woman. You’ll get laid.”
“Any time I want,” said Ira, tossing her hair back, fluffing it with her hand like an old-time movie star, “I look in the mirror, don’t I? You should see me naked, but you never will. I’m so good-looking when I’m naked that it hurts to look at me. I have a painfully good-looking body that makes men beg like dogs. But you’ll never see it.”
“Another beer.” The man signaled.
“Thanks,” said Ira. “All the same, you’ll never see it. Just think. There you’ll be in the rest home. You open your mouth like a toothless old bird and they pour soup down your gullet through a funnel. You’ll be thinking to yourself, If only I’d seen her body, what she looked like under that sweater, that parka, those jeans. Maybe I could resign myself to drinking soup through a funnel. But no. You’ll always wonder.”
“I don’t need to see you that way, really,” said the man. “I can tell. Of course, to raise children right, your looks don’t matter.”
“You got that right,” said Ira, shifting in her chair, frowning at the black plastic ashtray, tipping it critically back and forth. “Kids, they don’t care. They think you’re beautiful anyway, no matter what. I should go home. That’s where my kids are. They’re sleeping anyway.”
“You hope.”
“Well, it’s cold. It’s very cold. They’re not going out of doors.”
“It is very bad, this cold.”
“This dry cold.”
“And it’s still going down.”
Now for a few moments neither did speak, as they were both caught up in their private worries and thoughts about the cold. The man knew his wife had the car and he hoped she would remember to start it in the middle of the night, otherwise the battery would go dead. In this kind of deep cold you had to run the car every four or six hours, unless you could plug it in someplace. He’d looked ahead. He had a heater for it because he really did work. Sometimes if you covered the hood up with blankets, to keep the wind off, that helped too. His wife also talked to the car, treated it like an animal and told it when it was going to be fed. Sometimes she was joking when she did that, sometimes she was serious. Sometimes she put tobacco down beside its wheels before a long, tough trip. She didn’t drink. The scar was put upon her face when she was just a little girl.
“I don’t know.” Ira was talking again. “I should have a reason. I just don’t want to go home. I don’t know how I would get there anyhow, through the bush. I got a ride into town, here, before I knew it was going to keep on getting colder and colder like this.”
“Maybe you should come home with me,” said the man in a transparently false tone of voice, “I was bullshitting you about my wife.”
“No, you weren’t.”
“Well, I am pretty sure that she is at her sister’s with the kids and with the cold going deeper like this they will not be coming home. Do you want me to make a phone call?”
“I’m just that drunk I don’t have good judgment right now. Do you have an STD?”
“What’s that?”
“Oh right, your wife and her medicine. I’m just sure she fixed it,” said Ira. “Where do you live anyway?”