Too Cold For Snow

the bed, one of his burgeoning collection of what he called Old Tyme Religion, foxed books of theology and memoirs by fusty, self-aggrandised preachers. You could actually buy them by weight from a company that cleared houses for £4.99 a pound and he loved both the scent and the substance of them. And he liked the word they used in the catalogues. Avoirdupois. They were a master class in mildew and moths, thumbed by generations of lonely theology students aiming to find God by study, and a wife in some vestry.  
    With an hour to go before Bee was due Jerry summoned up some vestigial willpower and got up. This was a tiredness unfamiliar to him, and especially unexpected seeing as Bella was coming.  
    He stood on the porch outside and sluiced his chest and underarms using water from the green jug which was set to catch rainwater. He put on his best Paisley shirt and went downstairs where he put on a record of ‘Saturday Night Fever’, which he liked to sing along to. His bullfrog baritone hardly complemented the falsettos of the Gibb brothers but the music set the mood. He spun on the balls of his feet and shook his hips with sufficient vigor to spring them from their sockets. He got his breath back with a beer and then lit a cigarette.  
    Looking out at the silvery threads of water that wove through the grasses and mud of the salt marshes he conjured up Bee’s exotic face. When they first met she reminded him of a Hopi Indian he’d seen in a favourite National Geographic article about the reservation at Three Mesas, Arizona.  
    That first time she was buying masonry nails in Jones’ Hardware and he’d pointed her in the direction of a more dependable brand than the ‘One Hit Wonders’ she had in her hand, apologising in the same breath to old Mr Jones, who raised an eyebrow as he did him out of a sale. For the first time in his life Jerry summoned up the temerity to ask a woman if she’d like to join him for a drink and she said ‘yes’ disarmingly quickly. Mr Jones looked ruefully at his display of nails, now as useful as a chocolate teapot.  
    On that first date Bella teasingly told him she came from Mongolia and said her mother was a hundred and nine and lived in a tiny apartment in Ulaanbaatar. He’d looked it up in the library on the way home and in one of the photographs he found there were ghastly apartment blocks that sprouted in that awful Soviet style as if the builders had decamped from Ceausescu’s Romania. But the people in the photographs had the same physiognomy as Bella, high cheekbones and eyes seemingly protected from wind whipping in over the steppes. She might not have been teasing, after all. She was certainly an exotic in these parts, where inbreeding was evident in many a cross-eyed leer. Like Hawkins the milk, who had the same birthmark on his cheek as his two uncles.  
    Bee and Jerry Lee were still at the Velcro stage of their sexual relationship, still ripping and tearing clothes off each other’s backs as soon as they set eyes on each other, working up a frantic sweat of need and lust and more need.  
    When she arrived, wearing a raincoat and little else, she attacked him with the usual energy, but he was spent after his exertions out among the crops.  
    ‘Bee, you’ve got to stop… I’m having three bloody thromboses here, all at the same time. Stop that or my heart will burst,’ he bleated, his lungs rasping like soldiers in mustard gas, but she took his pleading as part of some elaborate theatrical foreplay. Bella dismissed his imminent extinction and continued with the job in hand.  
    When it was over and Jerry’s breathing had slowed down she looked at him with an intensity he hadn’t seen before, a mix of benign enquiry and fateful fascination.  
    ‘It’s not just physical you know, Jerry. There are several more dimensions to this.’  
    ‘Survival’s the dimension I’m most intrigued by. I fear I’ll be disappointing you all too soon. The age is there.’  
    She laughed, throatily as she loved that expression. The age is there.  
    ‘Nonsense, you’re only in your fifties and I’ve read somewhere that with the right vitamins you’ll be able to stand proud well into your eighties and beyond.’  
    ‘Beyond?’ gasped Jerry.  
    A part of him was relieved. A part of him was shocked by her openness, her complete lack of shame.  
    Their first real date had been a whist drive in Cwmsych where Jerry had won the star prize, a turkey so big he