A Christmas Blizzard (13 page)

Planes overhead: where are they going?

Do your parents have sex?

When will we die and what will happen then?

If you could be anyone in the world right now, who would it be?

What if a meteor hits the Earth and knocks it off orbit so that North Dakota becomes the tropics and the Caribbean is the new North Pole?

What if God told you to kill somebody, would you do it?

What if you had a million dollars?

The two of them were mostly agreed on basic principles: the planes were headed for California, carrying criminals and movie stars; parents did not have sex anymore—they had tried it once or twice and it didn’t interest them; we will die when we are extremely old, like in our fifties; we would be either Clint Eastwood or Steve Cannon; if North Dakota became the tropics, it would be horrible and nobody could stand it; you would kill that person, but only if you were 100 percent sure; you would take your million dollars and put it in the bank at 3 precent interest and roam the world, Asia and South America, stay in ritzy hotels, eat steaks and ice cream, have a heckuva time.

It was from the shore near the pool by the cottonwoods that Ralph launched the canoe to go retrieve the dead ducks that October afternoon. He was 25 years old. Seventeen years ago.

He and James used to skate on their long blades at this end of the lake, side by side, hands behind their backs, watchful of the spot off the end of the point where a spring bubbles up and the ice can be soft. People had gone through the ice there and in very cold weather, that would be the end of you, but they were two skating together so the other one would help the guy out of the slush and get him to shelter.

And Ralph saved his life once, out in the muskeg, north of there. Their scoutmaster Elmer took Troop 147 camping on the coldest night in January though some parents said, “What if one of the boys wanders away? He could die of exposure.” Elmer said, “That will teach them to stick close together.” They pitched a big canvas tent and built a bonfire and stood by the blaze, their front sides burning hot and their backsides freezing, and Elmer told the inspiring story of the Scoutmaster who rescued a boy who broke through the ice into the freezing water and saved him from hypothermia by stripping off his clothes and lying naked in a sleeping bag with him, warming him with the heat of his own body, which seemed extremely weird to the boys, and then they crawled into their sleeping bags and flopped down together in a big heap like sled dogs and slept, while keeping one eye open for Elmer.

James woke up in the middle of the night, in bluish moonlight, his breath billowing in the air, his bladder full and almost bursting, and he humped out through the flaps and was about to unzip and pee in the snowbank but then thought of Elmer’s story and was afraid and trundled over the ridge and down a ravine and through a grove of birches to where Elmer couldn’t see him—and pulled out his thing and the piss blew out of him with tremendous force, making an arc twelve feet long, steaming hot when it came out and when it hit the ground, it was a stream of ice chips that dinged like coins on the ground. He wrote in the snow, “Theresa, I love you” and then imagined the ice making its way up the arc toward the source of the stream and promptly stopped and zipped up, and then couldn’t remember the way back to the tent. His tracks were not discernible on the hard crusted snow. The landmarks were unfamiliar. He climbed to the top of the ridge and saw no lights at all. And then he saw a steel pole sticking up out of the snow. A surveyor’s rod. And a voice in his head said,
You are going to walk over and put your tongue on it and there is absolutely nothing you can do to prevent this.

He cried at the thought of his imminent death. The tears froze on his cheeks. The voice said,
Why wait? Why postpone the inevitable? Put your tongue on the rod. You know in your heart you will do it and you are right, you will. Do it now.
He thought of his weeping mother following the long pine box carried over the frozen ground by six townsmen in heavy parkas and his own body riding inside, in the cheap satin plush, and the preacher hurrying the prayer of commitment, his teeth chattering, and then the coffin falling slowly down into the depths of the frozen earth, and then a hand touched his shoulder and he jumped six feet and turned and it was Ralph. “You better come back,” he said. James followed him up the ravine. “Why did you write my girlfriend’s name in the snow?” he said. “That’s a different Theresa,” said James, lying. “You don’t know her. She’s not from here.” “That better be the truth,” said Ralph.

And now Ralph had returned in the form of a gray wolf to give James the benefit of his insight. An amazing fact but then the world is full of them.

 

 

H
e stepped out on the ice and walked around back of the shack to take a leak and for the
n
th time was stunned by the beauty of the fresh snow, the frozen lake shining, cold and beautiful. And thought of his own death. He had come into the world around Christmastime and maybe he’d be leaving it too, to satisfy nature’s craving for symmetry. The world would exist without him in it. The Coyote Corp. would get absorbed by some other nutrient conglomerate and vanish and his radio stations would go on yakking about horse hockey and Mrs. Sparrow would go on going to plays and nothing much would change. Mortality. It’s in the back of your mind, but once you’re aware of it back there, it moves to the front.

And then a light tap-tap-tap-tap on the door. Someone inside Floyd’s shack, inviting him in. A strange sound. People around here knock three times—
knock knock knock.
Or some people knock five—
knock knock knock knock knock.

This was four:
taptaptaptap.

He zipped up and kicked clean snow on top of the yellow snow and walked around the shack and opened the door and walked into a coffee shop where a young man with a prominent beak and big eyebrows and a shaved head stood at the counter, the espresso machines behind him, and a cap on his head that said
Coyote Coffee.
The room was full of customers perusing newspapers or tapping away at laptops, young women in black, young men in billboard T-shirts, not a parka or pair of mittens in sight. An Asian man stood looking at the pastries, he wore a shirt with the Golden Gate bridge painted on the back. He smelled of a rich fragrance James had never encountered before.

The man behind the counter said, “May I help you?” and James said, “Where am I?”

“Parnassus Street. The Inner Sunset. San Francisco.”

“Aha. Then I’ll have a large latte with an extra shot. And a biscotti.”

“For here, or to go?”

Well, that was a very good question. But not one he could answer. On the other hand, why would a person buy a latte on Parnassus Street in San Francisco and take it out onto a frozen lake in North Dakota?

“For here,” he said.

He knew without looking that he would not have money in his pocket—
of course
he would not have money in his pocket—that is in the nature of fables. The pocket is empty. Money buys you nothing here. All is fate and magic. And when the latte was made and the tall cup and the biscotti set down on the counter and he had explained to the coffee man that he was extremely sorry but he had no money on him, he had left home without it—the man grinned and said, “You’re very funny, Mr. Sparrow. You own this place. Coffee’s on the house.”

He carried his coffee to the one empty seat in the café, at a table in the window where an old Chinese man sat dozing over his newspaper.

“Is this seat taken?” The Chinese man opened his eyes and gestured for him to sit down.

Outdoors, a trolley swung around the corner screeching and a woman pushed a stroller past with four sleeping babies in it, a full load.

“Pardon me,” said Mr. Sparrow, “but I don’t have much time. Twenty-four hours, in fact, and it’s almost up, and this being a fable—and I think I know how fables work—you’re supposed to speak some sort of wisdom to me. I mean, it’s pretty obvious—one seat open in the whole café—and so maybe we could get right to it and if there’s something more I need to do to win a reprieve, then I’ll have time to do it. Okay?”

The old Chinese man looked at him and blinked. “Sparrow?” he said.

“Sparrow.”

He reached into his pocket for a looseleaf notebook and paged through it slowly, looking at each sheet on which he had written dense lines of script in a fountain-pen hand. “Is this about sins of the flesh? Minnesota?”

“No, no, no—I’m from Chicago. I’m the guy who used to not like Christmas and then I was given twenty-four hours to get straightened out and my cousin Liz chopped a hole in the ice and I jumped in and it sort of unblocked things for me—anyway, the name is Sparrow. S-p-a-r-r-o-w.”

“Oh.
Sparrow
. Yes. Mr. Sparrow.”

The old Chinese man peered at him closely and poured hot water into a tea cup and then flinched—he’d spilled some on his leg. James wasn’t sure that a wise man in a fable should be doing that sort of thing, but he waited.

“This morning I saw a sparrow in a tree, a variety of sparrow I’ve never seen before. A blue-billed one. He looked at me with a cocked eye and I waited and waited and finally he flew up and dropped a slip of paper at my feet, a message meant for you. It says, ‘Today you will be very lucky with the number three if you wait at the trolley stop where the lady with the red parasol spoke to you about your brother Frank.”

“I have no brother Frank. My name is Sparrow. James Sparrow.”

The man dropped a teabag in the hot water. “James Sparrow? ” James nodded.

“Ah yes. Very good. Very very good.” The old Chinese man closed his eyes again and leaned his head back against the wall and seemed to snooze for a minute and James was about to nudge his foot and then the old man said softly, “I am in touch with the one who rules your fate, whatever you wish to call her.”

James felt his heart clench and the room seemed to inhale and contract. He felt a coronary occlusion coming on and in two seconds he’d pitch forward onto the floor and lie there, trying to draw breath.

And then his phone rang. It was Mrs. Sparrow.

“Darling? How are you?”

“I’m fine. Enjoying a heckuva snowstorm.”

“How’s Uncle Earl?”

“He got himself an attractive Indian caregiver and now he’s sitting up and taking nourishment. Listen, sweet-heart—”

“How soon do you think you can leave?”

“Airport’s still snowed in, darling. How’s your flu? Did you go see the doctor about it?”

“I did and he says I’ll be fine.”

“Good. Darling, if you don’t mind—”

“I called to ask you a really big favor, if you’d be able to come back here and let’s go to Hawaii together.”

“Of course.”

“I miss you.”

“I miss you.”

“I mean, I miss you terribly. Would you mind?”

“No problem.

“You’d tell me if it was, wouldn’t you?”

“It’s not.”

“I know, but you’d tell me if it was, right?”

“Darling—”

“You’re the most giving and generous person I know.”

“May I call you back in an hour?”

“You’re busy, aren’t you.”

“It’s all right.”

“Listen, I’m sorry I bothered you.”

“Darling, I’ll come back for you. I just need to figure something out.”

“I’m probably interrupting something. You’re probably in the middle of a meeting right now.”

“I am, but it’s okay.”

“Oh my God. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll call you back—” Another trolley came rolling by.

“Where are you? What’s that bell clanging?”

“It’s a long story. Later.” He clicked off the phone.

The old Chinese man said, “You are a lucky man, Mr. Sparrow. You almost married Theresa Donderewicz and that would have been a terrible mistake. It was December. You were nineteen years old and desperate to be loved and she seemed willing and you went for a walk at night and wound up in the cemetery and you lied to her about how you planned to go to law school and the truth was, you’d been kicked out of college for extreme non-attendance, but you told her you’d take her to Paris. You didn’t know how desperate she was. She went to Fargo and planned to sing and dance and amaze people but found out she wasn’t at all amazing in Fargo, only adequate, that Looseleafers cannot astonish in Fargo, so she cried for three nights, standing under a stoplight, hoping to be discovered by someone special, then went home and saw you. You seemed like a live possibility. So she invited you home and took you into the basement and you two sat on a bed and kissed for a while, and took each other’s clothes off and were just about to intertwine and then the basement door opened and her father called her name and she answered. You hid in the corner. He came down the stairs and saw her lying under a blanket and she told him she couldn’t sleep in her own bed because it was too warm upstairs so she came down there, and then he saw your shoes and your pants. He cursed and went galloping upstairs to get a gun and you snatched up your clothes and ran out the back way, naked on a bitter cold night, and made it to Uncle Earl’s and he took mercy on you. He told Mr. Donderewicz that you’d been sitting in his kitchen playing pinochle and he described the game in great detail and Mr. Donderewicz, though suspicious, went snarling away, and your life was saved. Had you done what you intended to do, you’d be driving a truck of liquid nitrogen and enduring your father-in-law’s rages.”

James remembered Theresa. How desperate he was that winter. He’d come home broke and disheartened and worked shoveling sidewalks, and lived in his parents’ attic for a month, and every morning Daddy asked him, “When are you going to do something with yourself?” And he didn’t know.

“There were numerous occasions when you almost ran off the tracks,” said the old man. “I could go down the list if you like. You applied for a job at Radio City Music Hall on that trip to New York when you were 26 and so starstruck by New York and the Rockettes and the Christmas show and the tap-dancing Santas. It was a production assistant job and they passed you over for a guy with a B.A. from Princeton and now he’s running a road show of ‘Walden: The Musical’ on the junior college circuit and heavily medicated. And the slip of paper from the drunken chemist—you almost sold that to your marketing man for a hundred grand. You were in debt and you’d met Joyce and gone to Mackinac Island with her and the offer sounded good to you. And you asked her and she said absolutely no.”