“Help me!” he screams, his eyes darting madly. Expecting what? Duck hunter? Ice fisherman?

No. No one comes here in the winter, and just to be on the safe side I’ve put up a sign, I’ve locked the gate, I’ve wiped the footprints.

“Help me! Heelp meee!” he screams.

The words hang for a moment and then freeze onto the ice.

His lips are turning blue. His skin, red.

He’s whispering. I can barely hear. I lean in. “Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch,” he says.

Words are finite. The set of all the words that will ever be spoken is small and the subset of each human’s allotment is tiny. These could be your last. Is this really what you want to leave the Earth proclaiming?

“Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.”

Apparently so. Well, you’re going to have to give me more than that if you want to get out of this alive.

After a minute the mantra changes but not by much: “Bitch, bitch, bitch, get you, bitch, you’ll see, won’t be fun for you, get you, teach you, yeah, bitch.”

But then he whispers something else. Something surprising. “Bitch, you’ve got no goddamn shame.”

That’s more like it. Where did that line come from? Shame-how old-fashioned. Hector says that shame was one of the casualties of the twentieth century. Hector comes out with a lot of stuff like that. Hector says that Cuba is a woman’s mouth, her lips squeezed together in a grimace, bruised and twisted at one end from all the beatings she’s taken over the years. You’d dig Hec, maybe we could get him a job in Hollywood. A character actor. A cigar-chomping Miami cop. Do they still make cop movies?

“No shame, get you, bitch…”

But you’re wrong. I have no morals, no husband, no children, but shame I have by the bucketload.

He starts to scream again.

“Help me! Help me! Help me!”

The duct tape is still in the backpack. I could cover his mouth, but what’s the point? Let him scream.