Saints

“Hot Ice” is divided into sections with a topic title for each. It begins with the story of girl who had been molested then drowned in the park lagoon about thirty years earlier, during World War II. According to the story, her father found her body and traveled with it on a streetcar to an icehouse across the street from the Cook County Jail, at 26th and California, in Chicago. Her body is rumored to still be frozen there and to have special, magical powers: Big Antek, an old neighborhood alcoholic, claims that he once locked himself in the meat locker of a butcher shop where he worked and the girl's frozen body, temporarily stored there, kept him alive throughout the weekend. The nun at the local school believes the girl should be canonized as a saint.

This story is discussed by the three main characters of...