Hot Ice (Characters)

Characters

Big Antek

Big Antek is a local character known throughout the neighborhood. He is an alcoholic who has worked at numerous butcher shops, cutting off fingers out of clumsiness and drunkenness until he only has a few left. Young people like Eddie and the Santora brothers go to Antek because they know that he will buy liquor for them.

During World War II, Big Antek served in the navy, ending up in a hospital in Manila. When he returned home to his neighborhood he found his name included on a plaque commemorating those who had died in battle. Some time later, when he was already solidly within his cycle of being fired for on-the-job drunkenness at butcher shops, he locked himself in the freezer of one on a Friday night and claims that he would have died if it had not been for the legendary girl drowned in the lagoon, whose body, frozen in a block of ice, was in the freezer, radiating energy that magically kept Antek alive until Monday morning.

At the end of the story, Eddie and Manny, who have been out all night, come to Antek to ask him to buy them some more alcohol. They tell him that the old icehouse, where the girl's frozen body is allegedly stored, is marked for demolition. Antek convinces them to go there and try to retrieve the body. He waits outside while the younger men go in and imagines their movements inside, seeing in his mind's eye the hallways that they would go down and blocks of ice melting in front of them until they actually find the girl.

Eduardo

See Eddie Kapusta

Eddie Kapusta

Eddie is one of the main characters in this story. It is through his perspective that readers are first told the story of the girl frozen in ice, with the details that Eddie remembers hearing ever since his childhood. He is a young man of Polish descent in a neighborhood that is increasingly becoming Mexican. He is close friends with Pancho and Manny Santora.

Eddie, whose last name is the Polish word for "cabbage," is characterized as an observer. While Pancho is a religious fanatic and Manny is a realist, Eddie does not have any such clear-cut perspective. Instead, he is noted for his devotion to his friends. For a long time during the period covered by the story, he loses contact with Manny because he has to quit high school and work a night job to pay his bills, but then, one spring day months after they have seen each other, he goes to Manny's apartment, and they resume their friendship just as it had been before. When Manny turns angry about losing Pancho and goes to the county jail to shout obscenities at those inside, Eddie would like to stay away, but he feels obliged to go along rather than letting Manny get into trouble alone.

While they are out on the street drinking, Eddie takes Manny to see one of his favorite window displays, the neon palm tree at the Coconut Club. He explains that his hobby ever since he was young has been looking at the decorations in windows, indicating that he is more of an observer in life than a participant. While Manny attends Good Friday mass, Eddie sits in the back of the church. It is there that he realizes that his life has been full of mourning for the living, which would account for his affection for the way the neighborhood once was but will not be any more.

In the end, though, Eddie shakes off his moroseness and becomes an active participant, presumably helping Manny steal the frozen girl from the icehouse and take her to the lake, where she is set loose from the suspended animation that has held her for decades.

Padrecito

See Pancho Santora

Manny Santora

In the story, Eddie describes Manny as a realist. He is one only by contrast to his older brother Pancho, who spends his childhood fantasizing about being a religious figure. In grammar school, Manny found it difficult to deal with the nuns who considered him a disappointment after his pious brother, and so he transferred from the Catholic school to the public school, which he seldom bothered to attend.

When Pancho is in jail, Manny is devoted to him, visiting him regularly until Pancho asks him to stop; after that, Manny still goes to the jail with Eddie, walking around the walls at night, shouting out Pancho's name. After Pancho disappears, Manny becomes angry and abusive when he goes to the wall of the jail, shouting offensive comments that make the prisoners inside angry enough to chant in unison against him. He continues to go back, taking a chance that the guards will arrest him, until Eddie refuses to go with him, at which point he loses his anger almost immediately and gamely offers to do something else, as if he had not been full of rage just moments before.

Manny's devotion to the memory of Pancho drives him to follow a ritual that Pancho made up of going to seven churches on Good Friday, even though he and Eddie have been out all night drinking and taking drugs and are beyond the point of exhaustion. While Eddie finds it difficult to keep up, Manny follows the ceremonies with the interest Pancho would have shown.

Manny's true personality is shown in a childhood memory that he shares with Eddie. He recalls being at the lakefront once in the middle of the night while his family was fishing for smelt. He swam away from shore, relishing his freedom and the touch of the water, only coming back because he thinks of his uncle on the pier, desperately calling for him. His dream of escape is mirrored in the end when they leave to release the girl in ice at about the same place in the lake, giving the freedom that Manny once desired.

Pancho Santora

Pancho is the oldest of the three friends who prowl around together at the beginning of this story, the older brother of Manny. He is devoutly religious and always has been, though his fascination with religion manifests itself in unique ways. As a child, he pretended to be a priest when he was playing in the back yard with the other children, which led to his nickname, Padrecito, or Little Priest. He served as an altar boy and spent money on different colored shoes so that they would match the different colored vestments that priests wore on various feast days. He believes in the miraculous powers of the girl in ice because he believes in miracles in general. The nuns at his grammar school love Pancho, and later in his life, after he has fallen into trouble with the law, Eddie notes that Pancho would have been fine being an altar boy all his life, that it was his vocation.

In high school Pancho is a member of a street gang called the Saints. He is arrested on a charge that Dybek does not explain in the story, and at his trial laughs at the judge who tries offering him the option of going into the military instead of going to jail. In jail, Pancho's spirit deteriorates. After a few months he tells his brother to stop visiting, because he does not want to be reminded of the outside world until he can go into it again.

Pancho's eventual fate is not explicitly given: everyone in the neighborhood knows that he is gone from the county jail, but there are dozens of rumors about what happened to him. Some people say that he hanged himself or was killed by another inmate; others say that he became a trustee and escaped; others say that he was transferred to another jail for the mentally ill; and others say they have seen him walking the streets of the neighborhood or lighting a candle in church or riding by on an elevated train. In the end, he has become as much of a neighborhood legend as the girl frozen in ice.