Ice Country

  Buff’s family’s place is a dilapidated wooden structure that’s half the size of our sturdy house. Unlike our thick, full-trunked walls, their walls are constructed of thin planks with chunks of mud frozen solid between them. It does well enough to keep the cold air out, but only when there’s a fire going in a pit in the center and you’re wearing three layers of clothing. For Buff, going to Fro-Yo’s means a bit of real warmth he can’t get at home. I want to help him recover that right more than anything.

  My hands are too cold to pound on another door, so I just open it.

  Inside, there’s chaos.

  One of Buff’s little sisters is shoveling spoons of soup into her mouth so fast that it’s dripping from her chin, while he tries to get her to eat slower. One of his younger brothers, who’s practically a clone of Buff, is running around naked as Darce tries to corral him into a melted-snow bath. Yet another little-person is painting streaks of brown on the wall with his hands. Only it’s not paint. It’s mud, which he’s collecting from a mushy pit on the dirt floor. The unmatched assortment of beds against one wall are scattered with a few more dozing children. Buff’s father isn’t there—another late night at the lumber yards.

  When Buff sees me, he shoots me a thank-the-Heart-of-the-Mountain look, grabs his heaviest coat, and pushes me out the door, shouting, “Darce, I’m going out—be back late.” He slams the door behind him. “What took you so freezin’ long,” he snaps, his eyes darting around as if more of his maniac siblings might be hiding outside somewhere.

  Smirking, I lay down my trump card. “Joles,” I say, not admitting to the five minutes of peace I spent on the mountainside.

  His face softens and his eyes focus on me for the first time. “Alright, alright, you got me. C’mon.”

  We make our way through his neighborhood, catching a few glances from the lucky few who happen to have windows in their huts, giving us looks and shaking their heads as if we’re no more than common hooligans. Don’t they know we have an almost perfect pub-fighting record? I stare right back at them, give them a growl, and a few of them shrink back and out of sight. I laugh.

  “Do you have to do that?” Buff says.

  “Yah,” I say. “What’s eating you, man? You’re acting all uptight tonight.”

  Buff’s steps are more like stomps beside my easy footfalls. “I am not uptight!” he snaps, proving my point. He realizes it, shakes his head, and says, “I don’t know, I’m just nervous and frustrated about…” His voice fades into the night breeze.

  “About Fro-Yo’s?”

  Stomp, stomp, stomp. I stop him, put both hands on his shoulders. “It’ll be fine, all right? We’ll get the money, get our pub rights back, maybe even get real jobs afterwards. Then we’ll start our climb to the top, where it’ll be full of White District ladies dying to take us home to meet their parents. But we’ll reject every last one of them.”

  Buff snorts. Finally my easygoing best friend is back. He slaps my arms away. “You can reject them all you want, but that doesn’t mean I have to.”

  “Whatever pulls your sled,” I say.

  We trudge along in silence for a few minutes. “Hey,” I say, remembering Looza’s pouch. “Want to share my stew?”

  Buff flashes me a do-you-really-have-to-ask look, so I hand him the pouch. He slurps at it, groaning in delight. “You made this?” he says between his slurp-chews.

  “Naw. It’s Looza’s.” I grab it back after he sucks in another mouthful. “Leave me some, man.” I ease some of the chunky liquid past my lips, relishing the perfectly balanced combination of flavors. Looza may not trust me to do the right thing by my sister, but she sure can whip up a good stew. I finish it off, wishing I’d asked for two servings, and then tuck the empty pouch in my pocket to return to her tomorrow.

  We fight our way back up the same hill I just descended, and with each slipping, sliding step I wish we’d agreed to meet at my place. After a lot of heavy breathing and near falls, we reach the path to the Red District. It’s not really the kind of place most people would want to go at night, but we know our way around better than most.

  As we pass a two-storied wooden structure on our left, a dark-eyed, silky-haired head pops out of a doorway, spilling soft reddish-orange light on the snow. “Hi, boys,” a lustrous voice drawls.

  “Evenin’, Lola,” Buff says. “It’s a cold ’un. Better keep that door shut to keep the warmth in.”

  With a full-lipped smile that says she lives for contradicting people, Lola takes two strutting steps outside into the snow. Her feet are bare and she’s wearing a sheer, lacy dress that lets through more than its fair share of light. Underneath she wears only the barest of essentials, something lacy up top and down below, leaving little to imagination. She’s got to be freaking freezing her perfectly sculpted buttocks off, but if she is, she doesn’t show it.

  “Sure you won’t reconsider my previous offers?” she says in a seductive, lilting tone, swaying her hips side to side, in a way that’s completely different to how Looza was earlier when she was mixing the stew.

  “Uh, well, I think, we have to…” Buff is a tangle of words.

  “Sorry, Lola. Not tonight,” I say. Not ever. When I find the right girl and the time is right, I certainly won’t be looking to pay for it.

  “Another time, perhaps,” she says with a wink.

  “Uh, yah, you too,” Buff says nonsensically as we walk away. He looks back several times.

  “By the Heart of the Mountain, you’re pathetic sometimes,” I say.

  “Says the King of Bad Breakups,” he retorts, magically finding order to his words again.

  “At least I’m the king of something.”

  “Hopefully we’re both the kings of boulders tonight,” he says. “Did you get the silver?”

  I screw up my mouth. “Yah, but it’s only twenny.”

  “Iceballs! It turned out I only had ten.”

  “Son of a no-good, snow blowin’…” I spout off a few more choice words. With only thirty sickles we’ll be lucky if they even let us in the Chance Hole.

  “Sorry. Darce had to use the rest of it to fix a hole in the wall.”

  That brings me back to reality pretty quick. “Buff, I’m sorry. This is my fault. I never shoulda started something with Coker.”

  “Icin’ right it’s your fault,” he says, but he’s grinning. “But he did have it coming to him. And it was kinda fun, at least until that freezin’ stoner dropped that stool on our heads.

  I grin back. “It was fun, wasn’t it?”

  Buff claps me on the back. “Like you said, Dazzo, we’ll fix things, just like we always do.”

  ~~~

  We know we’ve reached our destination when the pipe smoke starts curling around our heads.

  Against the stark white of the winter scenery, the gray smoke almost seems to take on a life of its own, with fingers that grab and clutch without ever actually touching you. The smoke wafts out from a stone staircase that descends cellar-like beneath a two story building that, based on the sign on the door, claims to specialize in Custom Doors. Other than in the White District, there’s not much demand for that sort of thing these days—most of us are just happy to have any type of door—so I suspect it’s just a front for the gambling operation.

  Heavy voices rumble from below like distant thunder from some fire country storm. Moments later, a short man emerges from the cellar, looking distraught, glancing behind him with wary eyes, as if he’s likely to get knifed in the back. Which, coming out of a place like that, he just might.

  He’s heading right for us, but not looking where he’s going. We just stand there, watching him, waiting for him to notice, but he keeps on coming. When he finally looks up, he’s so close he barely stops before running smack into my chest. “Oh,” he exclaims, twitching so hard that his knitted cap flops off his head and into the snow, revealing a head as bald as the day he was born. Buff reaches down and picks it up.

  “Uh, sorry…and thanks…and, uh,
sorry,” the man says, taking the cap and sort of bowing with his hands clasped together around the edges. He’s jerking every which way and can’t seem to keep his eyes focused on us for more than a few seconds. Each time they dart away, it’s toward the cellar steps.

  “Are you waiting for someone?” I ask, nodding toward the steps.

  “Oh, nay…nay, nay, nay, nay, nay! Most definitely not. But I really don’t know how I’ll…never mind, it’s not your concern.” The odd little man scurries off, his feet sinking into the snow up to his knees. “Not enough sickles in the world…ever pay them back?...What’ll Marta say?” he mumbles to himself as he plods away, trying to replace the hat on his head. But his hands are so jittery he can’t get it right, and eventually gives up, settling for cold ears until he gets to wherever his destination is.

  “He lost big time,” Buff says. I nod, wishing it wasn’t true. Although perhaps if other patrons of the Chance Hole are losing, that means there’s plenny of room for us to win.

  I hang onto that thought as we descend the steps. There’s no smoke or voices now, as the thick door at the bottom is closed again. A man as big as a boulder with legs like tree trunks stands in front of the door, thick arms crossed over his chest.

  “I ain’t seen you two before,” he says in a voice that suggests his father is a bear. Given the thickness of his beard, his mother might be a bear too.

  Buff lets me do the talking after his unfortunate tongue tie up when he spoke to Lola. “You haven’t. Usually we play small time, but we’re looking to up the ante tonight.” Yah, with the all of thirty sickles we have to play with.

  He looks me up and down with a crooked smile, as if he doesn’t believe for a second that we’ve got the stones to play with the high rollers. My nerve falters under his gaze, but I don’t let it show on my face. When his heavy brown eyes return to mine, he says, “Buy-in’s twenny sickles, five-sickle ante per hand, betting starts immediately.”

  When he opens the door the smoke and noise hit us like a morning fog.

  Chapter Four

  Inside is full of snakes. Not the slivery brown rattlers you’ll find in the woods sometimes in the heart of summer, but the greasy, venom-eyed, hustling kind who work the Red District underground. There are a dozen tables and all appear to be full. The slap of cards, jingle of coins, and groans of loss or shouts of victory muddle into one stream of sound that represents one thing and one thing alone: greed.

  Here is where fortunes are made and bigger fortunes are lost. Just by stepping through this door we’ve proved that we belong, certainly more than the bald-headed man with the unsteady hands who left earlier.

  Through the pipe smog, I scan the crowd, laughing when a chubby guy with a lopsided smile scrapes a pile of coins from the center of a table while a hooded man slams his cards down. For every winner there’s a loser.

  “Advance?” a nasally voice says from beside us.

  A pointy-nosed woman sits at a desk, stacks of coins in front of her.

  “Excuse me?” I say, being as polite as possible.

  She lifts a hand to her curly red hair, shakes her head, rolls her eyes. Maybe we don’t belong here after all. Even she knows we’re new to this scene. Slowing her pace, she says, “Would. You. Like. An. Advance?” She motions to the coins.

  Forget trying to act the part. This woman appears to be offering us money—which we desperately need—so I need to understand. Keeping my voice low, I say, “Look, you know as well as us that we’re new to…all of this.” I wave my hand across the room. “We’ve played cards plenny of times, but never in a joint like this—for high stakes. So can you please explain how it works. The advance, I mean.”

  She sighs, seems to resign herself to the fact that I’m not going away without some information. “Most of our…customers…are high rollers. They play for big stakes and they don’t back down. You think they carry hundreds of sickles in their pockets? Forget about it. They come here empty handed, and we keep a tally of their balance. We can also advance you silver so long as you’re good for it. We can do up to a thousand sickles the first time, until you’ve proven you’ll pay it back. Then we can go as high as ten thousand.”

  A thousand sickles? Ten thousand? I haven’t ever seen that kind of wealth in my life. “You’ll give me silver?” I say slowly.

  She laughs, which comes out as nasally as her voice. “Not give—loan. Each day you don’t pay it back, the balance goes up by ten-hundredths of the amount you owe.”

  Buff and I look at each other. The green of his eyes almost looks silver, as if he’s been staring so hard at the piles of coins that they’ve gotten stuck there. “What do we do?” he asks.

  I shrug, trying to think. If we keep doubling our thirty sickles each time we play, we won’t really need anything else. But we could also lose it all in the first round.

  I lean in, so only she’ll be able to hear me. “How far will thirty sickles get us?”

  “Thirty sickles each?” she says, tapping her chin with a long, white finger.

  “Uh. Thirty sickles total,” I admit.

  Her nostril-heightened laugh is back. “You’re joking, right? Didn’t Ham tell you the buy-in’s twenny? You won’t both be able to play if you’ve only got thirty sicks.”

  Decision time. Take the money now, or one of us has to walk out the door. Or we could both leave. But then where will we be? No money, no jobs, no pub. I steel myself and go for it. “We’ll take thirty sickles,” I say.

  “Minimum advance is one hundred,” she says flatly.

  “Make it two hundred,” I blurt out before I can stop myself.

  Buff nudges me, his eyes wide and green again. I shrug. Just go with it, I mouth.

  Nostril-voice counts out the coins and hands them to me. “Welcome to the Hole. May you have bad luck,” she says, smirking. I hope she says that to all the customers, but I have a feeling she brought it out special just for us.

  I lead the way, skating between the tables like I belong, even though inside of me Looza’s stew is sloshing and churning, like even it knows we’re doing something we shouldn’t. The slap of cards is like a hammer to the back of my head, which starts to ache again.

  Every table appears to be full, except one, which has two chairs pulled out at an angle, as if whoever vacated them left in a hurry. One of them was probably the nervous-looking bald guy’s. They’re still playing, but the game almost seems friendly, as if they’re just having a bit of fun, without care as to whether they win or lose. Seems like our kind of table.

  I approach, ducking my head to draw one of the gambler’s eyes. A round-faced guy with double-pierced ears looks up at me with a smile broader than Looza’s hips. His eyes are blue and twinkling with red flecks under the lantern light. “Hey, kid. You want in?” His tone is light and friendly. We’re just here to enjoy each other’s company, it seems to say.

  “Sure, thanks,” I say, feeling more and more at ease. It almost feels like the cards we normally play back in the Brown District. Only we’ve got a hundred sickles each that aren’t ours to play with. “Mind if my buddy joins, too?” I ask, motioning to Buff.

  “The more the merrier,” he says.

  I give Buff a hundred sickles from the advance, and keep the same for myself. That should be plenny to get us started. Sliding into a seat, I watch Buff do the same. He looks less pale than before, as if he’s settling into things, too. We watch as the players finish out their hand, tossing in bets of a few sickles each, and laughing when the merry-eyed guy with the big smile wins a nice pot of perhaps forty sickles when he shows double boulders.

  A friendly game amongst friends. The others at the table appear equally easygoing. On my left is the guy who invited us to play, and on my right is a thin, clean-shaven guy with a long face that almost touches the table. He’s got at least two hundred sickles piled up in front of him, perhaps double what I’ve got. On either side of Buff are twins, each with jet-black hair and knit caps that they’ve kept on despite the relat
ive heat of the crowded cellar. They’re all quick to smile and don’t seem to mind parting with their silver if it means one of their buddies wins.

  “Ante’s five sickles,” Pierced-Ears announces.

  Buff and I grab a five-sickle piece each and toss it in the center of the table. The other four do the same. Excitement builds in my chest at the prospect of winning even the ante, which is five times the normal one-sickle ante I’m used to. Twin-Number-One deals, two cards each, facedown. I’m feeling more and more at home. This is my element. I’ve been playing boulders-’n-avalanches since I was old enough to understand the rules. I’ve always been good at it. This is just like any other game.

  I peek at my cards. Twin boulders! What are the chances? I think. I do my best to hide my excitement behind a blank stare, but my heart’s beating so hard I swear the others can hear it. Pierced-Ears takes a look at his cards and rolls his eyes, tosses them in the middle. “I’m out,” he says. A small stone and a minor tree branch. He was smart to fold. No chance of winning with cards like that.

  Twin-Number-One dealt, so it’s Buff’s turn to bet. He glances at me but I can’t read him. Glances back at his cards. “Five sickles,” he says, tossing in another coin. There’s no way he’s got my hand beat, but it doesn’t really matter. Me taking his money is as good as him keeping it. We’ll split all the winnings anyway. Twin-Number-Two nods and tosses in some silver. Long-Face chews on his lip and then does the same.

  My bet. I’ve got to play this one slow, or they’ll know right away I’ve got something good. I toss in the minimum required to stay in the hand, five sickles. We skip Pierced-Ears since he’s out. Twin-Number-One throws his cards in the middle, facedown. Another one out.

  It’s time to show the first of the draw cards. An arrow. No impact on my hand, which is already very strong. Unless someone else has twin arrows, I’m probably still winning.

  Back to Buff. He passes, lets the bet go to the twin on his left. The twin places his cards on the table, stretches his arms over his head, and then throws in two large coins. Twenny sickles. Already the pot is heating up and I’m starting to worry the remaining twin does have something good, like two arrows, which would leave him with a triplet, automatically beating my twins. Across the table, Buff’s eyes widen.