The Passing of the Ice

A Story by

HARRY MARK PETRAKIS

THAT morning, standing before Toby’s desk in the dispatch office, Mike felt the moment of his discharge had come. The straw boss sat overflowing his chair with the great rolls of fat around his waist and loins, his heavy fingers leafing through the papers on the desk.

“How you feel today, Mike?” Toby asked.

“I feel fine,” Mike said. “I feel like an iceman. How do you feel?”

“You look tired, Mike,” Toby said. “A man should not look as tired as you so early in the morning.”

“We are all tired,” Mike said. “But a heavy man covers his weariness and a skinny man shows it to the bone.”

The straw boss sat stiffly at the desk staring intently at the papers, as if he had forgotten anyone was there. His way was to loosen his grip just enough to allow a man to think he might escape, and then clamp his big hand on him tighter. Mike had seen others squirm and sweat before the desk. He showed no fear, because his dread was not of the fat man but of being forced to accept the measure of his days.

“Somebody left ice out.” Toby spit the words between his thin lips. “An old hand like you should watch there is no goddamn ice left on the trucks overnight.”

“I’ll watch,” Mike said.

Outside the office the loaded trucks stood idling with the blocks wedged beneath the wheels. The voices of the drivers and helpers carried in a chorus of curses and laughter. J. C. would have his truck gassed and loaded with the cakes of fourhundred-pounders stacked to the tail gate.

“Why don’t you give up?” Toby said, and his voice was a harsh and ugly whisper. “You can’t move around on the cars like you used to. It won’t be long anyway.”

Mike felt a violence deep in his belly, the fury of a temper that had plagued his younger days. He waited until the hard knot eased, and tried to speak quietly.

“I get around,” he said. “I work twice as hard because I know you don’t want to lose me.”

“Get out.” Toby’s eyes were bright in anger. “Get out, old man, and do your work.”

Mike left the office. Outside he stood for a moment in the spring morning with the smell of the earth fresh and cool, and found himself trembling. He walked across the roadway to where J. C. waited in the cab of the truck, feeling that Toby had risen from his desk and was watching at the window.

“Roll your truck, Mike,” Sargent cried from behind the wheel. “We late now.”

On the running board of the next truck, tall and lean-flanked Noodles swung an arm toward the sky.

“O sun,” Noodles sang. “You have displayed your backside long enough. Winter has been fierce and the icemen are weary. O sun, grow strong and warm poor old Noodles.”

From the tail gate of Noodles’ truck, his helper Gomez waved a greeting to Mike.

“This is the season,” Gomez said, turning his face to the sky, “the time I would like to own a small farm and work in the fields.”

“You, a farmer?” Noodles said. “Gomez, you couldn’t grow foam on a glass of beer.”

“You making noise with your mouth,” Gomez said. “My father was a farmer. I would have been a good farmer.”

“Sure you would have,” Mike said. “Lay off quail hunting every night with Noodles, and save your money. Get back to the farm.”

When Mike reached his truck, J. C. kicked out the blocks that wedged the wheels and swung into the cab beside him.

“Let ‘em roll!” Mike shouted savagely. “C’mon, you dead-rumped coal hikers that call yourselves icemen. Roll them loads!”

Noodles waved and hollered something that was lost in the roar of the motors.

A few moments later, after driving with the windows open and the air cool against his cheeks, Mike’s trembling had eased. J. C. rode in silent fury beside him.

“The bastard was on you again,” J. C. said. “The bastard was riding your back again.” His black cheeks corded, and each curse came bitten from his mouth.

“What you talking about?” Mike said. “He poured me a cup of coffee and shared his chocolate doughnut with me. You got that big and friendly man all wrong.”

They looked at each other and smiled. J. C. laughed. Mike felt the old pleasure returning, the rocking feel of the wheel in his hands, the pull of the loaded trailer, and a good friend beside him.

“You can smell the spring,” Mike said, “in a few more weeks the summer, and then another year almost gone.”

“To hell with the season,” J. C. said. “Icemen freeze in winter and roast in summer. You know the ice don’t care what time of year.”

“Amen,” Mike said.

MIKE knew the ice. He had worked with the pick and tongs for almost forty years. Sometimes in the summer, with the dry railroad cars waiting to be iced, and in his rushing back to the hill to reload, he forgot for a little while that the icing was not the way it had been. Bungo was dead, and the great Orchowski no longer roared his wild songs from the top of the cars. Each year brought more icing machines, and the old icemen were gone. Now in the beginning of summer the young wandering Negroes and the Irish gandy dancers came to work on the trucks. They were strong without skill and lifted to show off their strength. Foolish young men who tried to lift the threeand four-hundred-pound blocks with their backs or with their arms. Mike tried to teach them how to lift by using their legs and how to hook the tongs just the right distance from the score marks. But he worked beside them uneasily, aware how a man could be maimed or crushed by the carelessness of others.

There were a few good men among them. J. C., the young Negro on his truck, had some of the strength and spirit of the old icemen. Noodles knew how to handle his Hilift. The dark and bitter Sargent could cut and throw the way Chino once had. But they were just a few among the sportive young men who came for the summer pay and took no pride in their work and left wearily in the autumn.

Mike had been the smallest of the giants, and now he was alone. But time and the ice had not left him untouched. Each year the burden of his back and legs began earlier in the day, until by the middle of the afternoon his muscles were knotted and each movement of icing was scored with pain. More and more often he was seized with a strange despair that he could not go on icing any longer.

He could not do much of anything else. He could eat and drink and sleep and in season go to see a ball game. He could lie in the darkness next to Zeba and sometimes still feel the wild and sudden tenderness that briefly let his weariness drop aside. Afterward he could not help but laugh, remembering himself as a bantam rooster and the women as the hens. Of all the women he had known and loved, only Zeba remained. She had never been very pretty, and she was no longer young. Little pouches of flesh had gathered beneath her chin, and in the morning he noticed how the strap of her slip was held by a pin, or how the seam of her stocking might run all around her leg. But in the evening there was hot food on the table. When he brought J. C. home, she baked them spareribs and went down to the corner and brought them back cold beer. She was kind to his friend, and for this he was grateful. When it was time to go to bed, Zeba rubbed Mike’s back and legs with ointment, her big warm hands bringing a temporary comfort to his body. Afterward they lay side by side, and she spoke of the years they had spent together. She talked low and soft in the dark room, and knowing his weariness, she did not ask a question or expect him to say a word. Sometimes she laughed at something she remembered, secretively, yet always including him. He would feel himself easing into the darkness and her voice fading and the last low stirrings of her laughter.

How come I let you be my driver?” J. C. bared his teeth in a broad grin. “You too skinny to be a good driver for a big boy like me.”

“Fat ass don’t make a good iceman,” Mike said.

J. C. laughed and struck his big fist against his chest.

“Never been an ice crew like us,” he said. “Someday we going to ice together in hell. Damn devil going to say, ‘J. C., where that skinny driver you come down with? Oh, there he is hiding in the cab. All right, now you both here, let the numberone ice crew start to work and cool off hell.’ ”

“You crazy.” Mike smiled. “I taught you all I know, and now you wear your pants too high. Between tall pockets and big feet you got a head like a sponge.”

“I’m an iceman,” J. C. said. “All icemen got a sponge for a head. It goes with the job.”

“Amen,” Mike said.

When they reached their first stop, at the Harley Depot, the yardmaster located their cars on the spur. Mike pulled the truck alongside the first car to be iced, and carrying their picks and tongs, he and J. C. swung up on the back of the truck.

The elevator rose slowly to the height of the car. They began to work, cutting the blocks into chunks to fit the bunkers. Swiftly they fell into the rhythm, and the ice flew. To save their wind they did not speak, but J. C. hummed a broken snatch of melody. Their picks rose and fell, and the ice split into chunks for the tongs to grab and throw. They moved quickly and surely on the narrow runway. They closed the lids and lifted the plugs with a steady pull. As fast as they finished a car they moved on to the next.

A little past noon they stopped for lunch at Chino’s small bar on Laramie Street. They ordered beef sandwiches garnished with pickle and onion, and steins of lager beer. Sitting in a rear booth of the darkened room, Mike was grateful for the chance to rest among the warm shadows.

Chino, bent with arthritis but still taller than most men, came to sit in the booth with them. He had been one of the icemen with Mike in the days of Bungo and Orchowski. When his joints became inflamed and his body twisted, he bought an interest in the small bar. He kept it shadowed, as if ashamed to be seen by the men who still worked the trucks.

“How’s business, Chino?” Mike asked.

“Ain’t doing nothing,” the old iceman said gloomily. “We get a little movement at lunch, and the rest of the day is like a graveyard. See.” He motioned with his stiff and swollen fingers around the room.

“Sure,” J. C. said. “You stop watering your beer and stop making sandwiches so skinny, you get some more business.”

“You just a punk,” Chino said. “You don’t know like Mike and me know. The ice is passing. There ain’t no more trade from the locations. In a few more years the machines will do all the icing and the last icemen will be working in the goddamn coalyards.”

Mike shut his eyes, and for a moment the years fell away and he worked with Bungo and Orchowski, and Chino was a tall young giant, wilder than all the rest.

“You remember?” Chino said. “Mike, you remember how it used to be?”

“I remember,” Mike said.

Chino twisted his head around like a frightened bird suddenly trying to take flight. He raised his hand from the table and held it for a moment poised in the air and then slowly lowered it again to the scarred surface of the wood.

“It ain’t no use thinking about how it used to be,” Chino said. “I think and think but it ain’t no use. Things are just the way they are and nothing can change them. The old ice days are gone, and they ain’t never going to come back.”

J. C. finished the last of the beer in the stein and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You make it sound like we all dead now,” he said.

“You just a punk,” Chino said. “You don’t remember the ice trucks lined up for blocks. Tarpans and Shaws and the crews from Proviso. A few years back, even after I was off the Hilifts, they would fill this place for lunch. But not one of them a damn iceman like we was in the old days. Ain’t that right, Mike?”

Mike stood up to leave, suddenly not wanting to listen to Chino any longer.

“You still talk just as much,” Mike said. “By God, Chino, you talk as much now as before.”

“I got a right,” Chino said. “Business is bad and my back hurts and all I got to do is sit and remember.”

“Stuff it,” J. C. said. “Trouble with you is you see the whole world hung up. You ain’t the only man pushing to see daylight.”

“Listen, Chino,” Mike said. “Tomorrow make the beef a little leaner. Today was too much fat.” He put his hand briefly on the old man’s shoulder and felt the block of strength beneath the swollen joints.

Outside, the sunlight hurt their eyes, and for a moment they stood squinting while the shavings of ice melting on the truck dripped into puddles in the gutter.

“He’s right about one thing,” J. C. said. “You the only iceman left. Rest of us don’t count for crap.”

“Chino and me make noise with our mouths" — Mike shook his head and spoke gruffly — “because we can’t shake our rumps the way we used to.”

He climbed into the cab of the truck. J. C. walked to the other side and swung in beside him.

“He’s right anyway,” J. C. said. “I know the old man is right because you the only hump at the hill don’t scare when Toby talks. Rest of us call him bastard but inside we sweat. Maybe it’s how you think about the ice. Not like the rest of us, just a job. I see you close and I know.”

Mike turned the key, and the motor kicked over with a roar. Then he reached over and brought his bunched fist down hard on J. C.’s leg above the knee. The helper bellowed with a cry of pain that almost drowned the noise of the motor.

“You’re right,” Mike said. “No one any damn good but me.”

J. C. rubbed his leg and began to laugh.

“Daddy,” he said. “When I grow up, daddy, can I be an iceman like you?”

They laughed together, and Mike pulled the truck from the curb and started back to the hill to reload.

BY the time they got to the big ice storage house at the top of the hill, the rest at lunch had worn off and Mike was aware again of the burden of his body. He backed the truck to the edge of the platform. He waited with his tongs at the ramp while J. C. opened the heavy door and entered the icehouse. In a moment the helper backed out swiftly dragging the first four-hundred-pound block, his powerful back and big-muscled arms handling the ice easily.

Mike watched him and marveled at his strength and realized that even in his prime years he had perhaps not been as strong as J. C. Yet he still could have beaten him at work, because cutting and throwing the ice were like something he had been born to do, the main reason he had been put on earth. Now, like Chino said, it was too late. No good to hide in a dark bar and remember the way it used to be in sunlight. No good to hang with the ice and fall under weariness and age.

“Sometimes,” Mike said, and there was a fierce edge to his voice, “I want to drag out that ice and cut it down and throw it as far as I can, throw it to hell and gone. I want to empty the big house once of every last block and scatter every last damn chunk over the hill. Make the fat man sit up. Make everyone understand that after forty years an iceman don’t just lay down his pick and tongs with a goddamn whimper.”

J. C. paused and watched him silently for a long moment and then finally flashed his big white teeth.

“You too little to empty the big house,” he said. “A little chewed-up runt like you can’t do it alone. You need J. C. help to cut down the big house.”

“Shove it,” Mike hooted. “The only edge you got is a fat head and feet six sizes bigger than you need.”

Together they put on the last blocks to make a full load. They climbed back into the cab, and Mike started the truck down the hill. Another truck passed them going up the hill to reload, and Noodles and Gomez waved from the cab.

In front of the dispatch office, Toby stood by the gas pumps waiting for them.

“Hot dog,” J. C. said. “Run over the bastard.”

Mike stopped and braked beside the pumps and kept the motor idling. Toby looked up at him unsmiling, and as he stood there without the partial cover of his desk, the great rolls of fat hung upon his frame and made him appear rooted, like some shapeless and heavy-footed animal, to the earth. In that moment Mike was aware how unlike the icemen the fat man was. Where they were lean and quick, he was leaden and slow. Where they tried to sing in their work, he was angry with envy and reminded them it was a burden.

“You took a long time loading,” Toby said.

J. C. shifted restlessly beside him, and Mike did not say a word but marveled suddenly how clearly he saw the place of the fat man in the passing of the ice.

“When you come back in,” Toby said, “put any ice left into the big house. Don’t let any ice sit overnight on the damn truck.”

“OK,”Mike said, and for a moment he pitied the fat man and his load.

That night in the darkness of their rooms Zeba moved closer to him in the bed, and her body assaulted the pain that rioted through his bones. He felt the pressure of her full breasts against his arm, and he twisted in the bed, curling closer to her warmth.

“Steep,” she said, and her voice was soft and husky in the darkness. “Sleep, my old rooster, sleep.”

He touched her, but there was no desire in his hands and no wish for her to respond. He wanted only to rest, to banish weariness and pain.

When he fell asleep, in a restless dream the first days of the ice returned. He saw again the great heaving horses pulling the dray, hauling the ice with block and tackle. He worked swiftly beside the wild young men and cut and threw, and then he stood alone. There was only the mournful face of Chino and in a mist the lost faces of the giants and over them all the cloud of Toby, soft and angry, waiting for him to fall and for the mountains of ice to crumble.

He moaned in his sleep and felt Zeba’s fingers and dimly heard her comforting voice. He moved gratefully against her body and slipped again into fitful sleep.

IN THE beginning of September, the pain which had cramped his body through the summer cased up. He was not sure whether he felt less weary because of the shorter hours on the truck or the first clear, cool days. In the early twilight, driving back from icing at one of the depots, he sang loudly, and J. C. joined in, and the two of them bellowed over the roaring of the old motor. Later, as they unloaded the few remaining blocks into the big house, a great round and orange moon hung in the sky above the hill.

September was the time of year the drivers and helpers lingered in the locker room after punching out. A few more weeks would see most of them gone, so they talked of the journeys they would make, following the sun. They would recall the rumble of the freights and the small dark towns they swept by in the night and, finally, the great sweet orchards with the ripe fruit like little pieces of sunlight. They talked confidently of returning in the spring, and at those times Mike tried to convince himself that perhaps he and Chino were wrong. The winter would be quiet as it had always been, but in the spring the Hilifts would rock down the hill again. The dry cars with empty bunkers would stand in long trains. The young Negroes would come up from the South, and the husky gaudy dancers would tumble in off the freights, and among them would be another Bungo or another Chino, and they would bring the mighty ice days back. Even as he told himself that story, he did not really believe it might be true.

There was a day near the end of September. His pain returned fiercely late in the afternoon as they iced dry potato cars at Dart Street. He stood for a moment uneasy and surprised. It had been weeks since he had felt it quite so sharply.

A little later, uncomfortable in his chest and stomach, he had to catch his breath, and on a car runway he let go his tongs and straightened up quickly, feeling a cramp knotting in his chest. The ice seemed to become heavier through the afternoon, and by the time they finished their last car and were on their way in, empty, his arms and back felt stiff and raw. When he pulled up the hill and parked, Noodles and Gomez had just unloaded the few blocks of ice left on their truck into the big house, and the four of them walked together down the hill.

The locker room was thick with smoke and laughter and the jubilation of men leaving to eat and meet their women. Mike sat on a bench in the corner beside a paned window and rested his head against the wall. He wanted to wash and change to the clean shirt hanging in his locker, but suddenly he was far too tired for the effort that required. J. C. came over and shook his shoulder gently.

“C’mon, daddy,” J. C. said. “Your lady is baking spareribs and I’m invited. You feel better after some of them ribs.”

Noodles turned from his locker and laughed.

“Couple of pigeons picking for ribs,” he said. “Old Noodles going picking for something else with more meat on it than them ribs.” He winked broadly and flexed his biceps. “I seen a gal today,”he said. “She come out of no place while we was icing and just stand and watch. Pretty gal with big eyes and hair like golden corn.”

“Sheik,” Gomez said. “Oh, sheik.”

“I told her, honey,” Noodles said, “honey, you need an iceman?”

“She was shaken with your hot charm,” J. C. said. “I bet she took one look at you and fell right down under the wheels of your truck.” He laughed down at Mike, who tried to smile against the stiffness in his cheeks and around his mouth.

“She told me —” Noodles said slowly. “She told me she got an electric icebox.”

“Sheik,” Gomez said, “tell them what you told her then.”

“I told her” — Noodles grinned and slapped his leg — “I told that gal wasn’t nothing better than hand icing by an iceman who knew his stuff.”

“That’s what he told her.” Gomez shook his head and chuckled.

The room seemed unreal to Mike, the stiffness spreading to his arms and a slow pounding beginning in his head. Through the grimy glass of the window he could see the shadowed rows of frame houses further down the hill with their kitchens lit for supper. And far over the edge of the city the sun had left a strange red glint in the twilight.

“I could tell that gal was crazy about me,” Noodles said. “She probably still there waiting for me.”

“I had a gal crazy about me once,” Sargent said. “Waited for me every night when I got off work. I borrowed two dollars, and we chased down a preacher. Now we got six kids waiting for me every night when I get off work.”

Mike wanted to sleep. He felt suddenly that it would be comforting to be able to lay his head down on the bench and close his eyes and have J. C. and the young icemen close by.

“You all right?” J. C. said. “Daddy, you with me?”

The faces of the men around the room blurred, and in quick panic Mike struggled and recalled them and then lost them again. In sweeping darkness and without moving he seemed to be stretching for something just out of reach. A terrible heat suddenly blazed in his chest, and he wanted to cry out, but the wonder of what was happening kept him silent. He was torn by tear and a strange joy. In the moment of deciding which was stronger, the heat burst within him.

The voices of the men fell away and there was silence in the room. J. C. stood beside the bench, and Noodles came to his side.

“He’s sleeping,” Noodles said. “He just fell down asleep.”

The others moved and gathered uncertainly around the bench.

“He’s dead,” Sargent said quietly. “I seen them in the army. I know the look. He’s a dead man.”

“You talk crazy!” Noodles snapped at him. “Old Mike just sleeping!”

“Goddamn!” Sargent said savagely. “I know a dead man when I see one. Was you in the army and seen the dead piled up like me, you know too.”

“Someone call a doctor,” Gomez said in a shocked voice. “Someone better go for a doctor.”

“He’s dead.” Sargent shook his head. “Doctor don’t do no good for a dead man.”

“Jesus Christ,” Noodles said, and made a quick sign of the cross. “Jesus Christ.”

For the first time J. C. moved and bent slightly to peer closely at Mike and straightened up and looked around at the circle of men with a stunned and terrible grief on his face.

“He was tired and just died,” J. C. said. “He been an iceman a long time, and he got tired and he died.”

The silence spread again, and no one moved. One of the men cleared his throat, and another shifted restlessly from one foot to the other.

“Phone the fat man,” Sargent said. “Tell him to turn off that TV. Tell him an iceman died.”

J. C. reached down and put his arms under Mike’s back and legs and lifted his body. He held him easily against his chest. He left the locker room, and no one made a move to follow.

He carried the body to the top of the hill. Once or twice he stopped and for a moment stood unmoving beneath the dark sky pinned with a crescent moon. He started walking again toward the row of parked trucks, and bracing the body against his knees, he opened the cab of Mike’s truck and slid him in upon the seat. He fumbled on the floor and found Mike’s pick and tongs.

He crossed the hill and climbed the ladder to the big house’s platform. He opened the heavy door and in the pale light of the moon saw the blocks of ice in glistening rows waiting to be loaded on the trucks in the morning.

He hooked his tongs on a block in the nearest row and dragged it swiftly through the door to the edge of the platform. He swung his pick and split the scored block. The chunks fell apart, and he switched back to tongs and caught up the chunks one after the other, and swinging them between his legs, flung the ice out into the darkness. When he had finished one block he went in and dragged out another and cut it down and again scattered the ice across the earth. He worked faster and faster, and shattered shavings of ice stung his cheeks. He kept dragging out the blocks and cutting them down and heaving the ice into the darkness. His breathing became hoarse and tight in his chest, and he cut desperately and threw more savagely. He dragged out block after block, throwing further and harder, the chunks cracking against other chunks that littered the ground.

When the big house was empty, he stood for a moment on the platform, his lungs heaving for air, and then with one great and final fling he hurled the pick and tongs far out into the night.

He climbed down the ladder and walked through the field of broken ice back to the truck. In the cab he moved Mike’s head gently to rest against his shoulder. He turned the key, and the motor roared like an animal coming awake. He wheeled the truck out of line and started down the hill to take Mike home.