White

Ella takes a long swallow, wags her empty beer bottle.

“Want one?” she asks.

My husband declines, I shake my head. She goes off in search of Byrne’s gas-powered auger, another beer.

Byrne and some of the men come down from the bonfire: faces unshaven like stubble wheat, their eyes distant, dark like the open water beyond, dead-serious like Byrne, a funeral of men. Beside Byrne, a six-foot-five Goliath with a shaved head and the incongruity of Bic blue-lettered “L O V E ” etched into the scabbed knuckles of his gloveless hands. He eyeballs us. Him I could imagine burning white crosses on his back forty in Caroline.

Goliath and the men stand as a city crew, watch Byrne position the gas-powered auger on the ice. My husband holds Jaxen back by his shoulders. Byrne pulls the cord and pushes down on the auger. At first the ice resists, bold retaliation, causes the auger to buck and rear under Byrne’s sizeable weight like an edgy steer. And for one splendid moment between the awful rip of noise in the otherwise silent air, amid the burly-shouldered men of few words, between the white spray of impenetrable ice and the purple wheeze of farm gas, when it seems neither one will give way, then the frozen lake relents, groaning uncle as it gives in to the auger making headway, tossing shards of ice like incidental shrapnel at the lot of us.

And in the shatter of a moment, it’s done: two dark-mouthed holes in Lake Byrne, one for Chase, one for Jaxen. I smile; my husband shakes Byrne’s reluctant hand. Chase squirms from my arms and on hands and knees, tiny face pressed to the ice, peers down into the black holes. The men, Goliath and Byrne, retreat back to the bonfire. No words exchanged.

My husband ties J-curved hooks on strands of invisible fish line, so that when Chase and Jaxen raise their poplar branches, the metal-barbed hooks hang in the air as if suspended by magic, by mind freak, some freak of mind you couldn’t otherwise imagine. On the horizon the sky is white, the white air the same temperature as the ice, the white strangers around the fire – enough to turn the rose of your flattish cheeks, the tips of your exposed fingers white white white, frostbite white.

While the boys fish, I go ashore to the bonfire, the smash of people I don’t know save for Ella, her husband, barely-the-brother Byrne. She links her arm in mine, lights a cigarette. The teenage boy and girl finished ravaging one another emerge from the steamy Plymouth and stand dishevelled, replete in their open Hurley/Nikita hoodies around the blazing fire. The boy tosses in bits of wood, wrecked lawn furniture, and as the day progresses/digresses, something inappropriate like a car or one of the broken-down quads will also end up in the fire. There’ll likely be a fight afterwards.

The boy’s mother in the crowd is easy to pick out; she looks exactly like him except for the hailed-out look on her face. The boy rummages through her purse for a lighter but finds an aerosol can of Final Net instead. He looks at his mother before tossing it into the fire. The crowd steps back. No one says anything. The mother draws on her filterless Player’s between the straight lines of her wordless lips. I glance at Ella. She’s filling a red plastic cup with hot chocolate, the piquant pulse of peppermint schnapps. No words, no raised brow for her. The worlds we straddle for one another.