Free The Ice at the Bottom of the World by Mark Richard

look of two pieces of unclaimed cargo freight you sometimes see left around the docks that when you finally do open only have in them rusty scrap iron pieces of something odd wrapped in ragged burlap and felt.
    Bill handed Powell a cold long-necked beer, and even though it was fairly well before noon Powell felt he would be in this for the duration to try his question so he took it. From his khaki ship’s captain pants pocket Bill pulled a tiny shackle key ring and set to work popping the locks on his long footlocker sea chest. Powell considered that from Bill’s clothes maybe yes, you could tell he had something to do with ships, but in general maybe you would think he stitched canvas or counted stores. A short man, his shrunken-back skin was pale and pearly, shielded from the sun by Plexiglas shades on the bridge of his ship. The thick lenses of black glasses made his eyes look as if they were watering, ready to cry at any time, and in his posture he was a little bent over, maybe from the clutching pain of one lung already removed, the lung punctured in the Pacific he got the medal for, braced on the fantail of a sinking ship with a clustered crowd of Doodlum boys like himself, still firing handguns and carbines up at the diving Japanese until there was nothing left to shoot and no one left to save except himself and a cousin, shot through the lung as the ocean sucked their ship swirling from beneath them, this little stooped-over man with the teary eyes and the trembling hands.
    Bill was opening the sea chest to show Powell what else from around the world when Duchess, the Irish setter dog, bobbed her gray-snouted red head in the frame of the garage door, her wet matted hair hung withthick fingers of mud from chasing seagulls in the low tide. Come ’ere, Duchess, Bill said, but Duchess just looked a little stupidly back and then trotted away even with Bill calling Duchess, Duchess. It has been the same with dogs and kids for twenty-six years, Bill said. No one knows a come-home stranger. Bill started again to dig through the dirty folded-over khaki shirts, bringing up the smell of sour aftershave and, somehow, hot linoleum. Louise says she’s only seen me less than half the married life we’ve had, said Bill, reaching deeper in his locker for a small case like a toolbox. Me, I can look at it in a different way and see it as just being half-married. Half-married, said Bill again. He said, Can you think about that? and Powell, sitting on Lisa Lee’s hope chest, said that he probably could.
    Bill unwrapped a pistol out of a greasy leather rag from the toolbox. Be careful now, it’s loaded and I never have the safety on, Bill said. Feel the balance and the grip, it’s Italian with a nine-shot clip. The company gave us guns last year against those boat people in the South China, he said. You don’t know but lots of them are pirates. This pistol is my personal choice, he said, slipping back the slide action.
    The gun discharged in Bill’s hands, putting a hole in the riding lawn mower.
    Don’t worry, Bill said, I’ve got extra ammo.
    Powell was sorry he had let the talk slip away from being married, but he had been thrown off by the half-marriedremark. But what really surprised Powell about Bill was the trained quick pull and draw of those watery-looking eyes behind the thick lenses of the black glasses that Powell studied as they talked, eyes sensitive to detect the extra shade of dark in the glittery silver seas, eyes even able to see a hardly appeared slice of fin in sharp peaked chop or a quick dip of waterspout twelve miles out in a closing dusk. Here the bastards come, Bill said, sounding surprised. Look at how they are coming.
    They were two jets, two flattened specks on the horizon coming so right on they seemed to swell with speed, two tiny black triangle heads over the channel and lower than the trees on either side, two heads with swayback trailing plumes of exhaust, dirty brown fumes already shifting