Summer's Ice House on a summer day! They said the words, laughing, and moved to peer into that tremendous cavern where in fifty, one-hundred, and two-hundred-pound chunks, the glaciers, the icebergs, the fallen but not forgotten snows of January slept in ammoniac steams and crystal drippings.
"Feel that," sighed Charlie Woodman. "What more could you ask?"
For the winter breath was exhaled again and again about them as they stood in the glary day, smelling the wet wood platform with the perpetual mist shimmering in rainbows down from the ice machinery above.
They chewed icicles that froze their fingers so they had to grip the ice in handkerchiefs and suck the linen.
"All that steam, all that fog," whispered Tom. "The Snow Queen. Remember that story? Nobody believes in that stuff, Snow Queens, now. So don't be surprised if this is where she came to hide out because nobody believes in her anymore."
They looked and saw the vapors rise and drift in long swathes of cool smoke.
"No," said Charlie. "You know who lives here? Only one guy. A guy who gives you goose-pimples just to think of him." Charlie dropped his voice very low. "The Lonely One."
"The Lonely One?"
"Born, raised and lives here! All that winter, Tom, all that cold, Doug! Where else would he come from to make us shiver the hottest nights of the year? Don't it smell like him? You know darn well it does. The Lonely One ... the Lonely One ..."
The mists and vapors curled in darkness.
Tom screamed.
"It's okay, Doug." Charlie grinned. "I just dropped a little bitty hunk of ice down Tom's back, is all."
The courthouse clock chimed seven times. The echoes of the chimes faded.
Warm summer twilight here in upper Illinois country in this little town deep far away from everything, kept to itself by a river and a forest and a meadow and a lake. The sidewalks still scorched. The stores closing and the streets shadowed. And there were two moons; the clock moon with four faces in four night directions above the solemn black courthouse, and the real moon rising in vanilla whiteness from the dark east.
In the drugstore fans whispered in the high ceiling. In the rococo shade of porches, a few invisible people sat. Cigars glowed pink, on occasion. Screen doors whined their springs and slammed. On the purple bricks of the summer-night streets, Douglas Spaulding ran; dogs and boys followed after.
"Hi, Miss Lavinia!"
The boys loped away. Waving after them quietly, Lavinia Nebbs sat all alone with a tall cool lemonade in her white fingers, tapping it to her lips, sipping, waiting.
"Here I am, Lavinia."
She turned and there was Francine, all in snow white, at the bottom steps of the porch, in the smell of zinnias and hibiscus.
Lavinia Nebbs locked her front door and, leaving her lemonade glass half empty on the porch, said, "It's a fine night for the movie."
They walked down the street.
"Where you goi
ng, girls?" cried Miss Fern and Miss Roberta from their porch over the way.
Lavinia called back through the soft ocean of darkness: "To the Elite Theater to see CHARLIE CHAPLIN!"
"Won't catch us out on no night like this," wailed Miss Fern. "Not with the Lonely One strangling women. Lock ourselves up in our closet with a gun."
"Oh, bosh!" Lavinia heard the old women's door bang and lock, and she drifted on, feeling the warm breath of summer night shimmering off the oven-baked sidewalks. It was like walking on a hard crust of freshly warmed bread. The heat pulsed under your dress, along your legs, with a stealthy and not unpleasant sense of invasion.
"Lavinia, you don't believe all that about the Lonely One, do you?"
"Those women like to see their tongues dance."
"Just the same, Hattie McDollis was killed two months ago, Roberta Ferry the month before, and now Elizabeth Ramsell's disappeared...."
"Hattie McDollis was a silly girl, walked off with a traveling man, I bet."