A Christmas Blizzard (7 page)

“Pump handles!” cried Leo. “How ridiculous! Who’s going to put their tongue on a pump handle?”

“Kids might. You never know. They’re dangerous, I know that.”

And then came the meaty voice of the Governor saying that everything that could be done was being done and that he was monitoring the situation closely along with federal officials and people should stay in their homes and remain calm.

Go back to the plane, go back to the plane.
He thought they were heading for Uncle Earl’s house but then Leo turned left on Fillmore.“ Where we going?” James cried. Leo said, “I promised Liz you’d come say hi.”

“Leo, I’ve got to get out of here today—”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get you out.”

“We’re looking at a very small window here.”

“Where you got to get out to?”

He was about to say “Hawaii” and then thought better of it. A man headed for Hawaii might not get the cooperation from a North Dakotan that he was hoping for. He said, “I’m on a secret mission, Leo—I wish I could tell you more but I’m working for the C.I.A. and I’m dropping provisions to a patrol that’s probing the border into Saskatchewan. Canadian Intelligence—CanTell—is slipping some of their boys across and we need to find out why. ”

“Dangerous?”

“The Canucks play for keeps, Leo. Some of our guys have driven into automatic car washes and never got out alive. Those big rollers busted the windows and they were waxed to death. Lots at stake. The whole border west of Detroit is pretty much in play. Parts of it never were marked clearly. You’ve got iridium deposits up there, mica, quartz, oil-fields—and the combination of quartz and oil is extremely significant.”

The snow was coming down harder. And then Leo slammed on the brakes and they skidded to the left and just missed Jack Cobb crossing the street and James cranked down the window. “Sorry!” he said.

“Jimbo! Boy O boy. I shoulda let you guys run me down, I coulda collected a million bucks for mental anguish! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!” Jack reached in and shook his hand. His breath smelled of cheese and coffee, dead muskrats, and rotten lumber. “What’s new with you, Jimbo?”

“Trying to get out of town.”

“Thought you left a long time ago.”

Mr. Cobb laughed. It reminded him, he said, of a joke about the small town so small that—what? How did it go?

“The small town where the population stays the same because every time a baby is born, a man has to leave town,” said James.

No, that wasn’t the one. But this joke was about having babies.

“The one about the man and his wife who had twelve kids because they lived near the train tracks and when the midnight train came through and woke him up, he’d say, “Well, should we go back to sleep or what?” and she’d say, ‘What—’”

No, but it was about sex.

“I’ve got to run, Jack. Really. Got to catch a plane.”

“Aw, nothing’s flying in this weather, Jimbo. Come in and have a beer. It’s been years.”

Jack was opening the van door now. “Let’s have a look at you, for cripes’ sake.” He saw the black wool coat and let out a low whistle. “Nice coat. How much that set you back, Jimbo?” James had to wrestle the door from him and pull it shut and lock it and even then Jack pounded on the glass. “Think you’re hot stuff? Well, you’re not. I wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire!”

“Immaturity knows no age limit,” said Leo. By now the snow was coming down thick, big fluffy flakes like chicken feathers, and now Leo couldn’t figure out which way was west. He turned left onto a street that didn’t feel like the right way but James didn’t say anything because the street was so familiar, and then it dawned on him—His street! His old street. Davis Avenue. And his boyhood home was up ahead on the right. The little white story-and-a-half frame house with the two oaks in the front yard.

He used to walk down that driveway to school and turn right to take the long way around and avoid the Durbins who lived between his house and school and who were laying for him. He used to shoot baskets in that driveway, back before the garage was brought down by carpenter ants. Come December and the Arctic blast, their old Ford coupe sat out in the open and froze to the gravel. Daddy put the key in the ignition and it was like trying to start a box of hammers. So he brought out a bucket of hot coals and put them under the engine block to warm up the crankcase oil to where it’d move and then James had to get behind the wheel while Daddy pushed it down the slight incline of the driveway and at just the exact right moment, James had to pop the clutch and if he timed it exactly right the momentum of the car turned over the engine and it fired up, and if he didn’t do it right, the car jerked to a stop and Daddy had to call up Mr. Wick to come over with jumper cables and to be beholden to Mr. Wick was something Daddy preferred to avoid. Mr. Wick was a Democrat and an agnostic, or the next thing to it.

He told Leo to slow down as they came to his old house and Leo stopped. There was a new garage plus a deck where the old incinerator used to be, where he used to burn the trash including aerosol cans that said, “Danger: May Explode If Exposed to Open Flame.” And the driveway where the old Ford coupe rolled slowly, creaking, little James hanging onto the wheel and peering out through a tiny aperture in the frost on the windshield, the car jolting over the bumps, bouncing like a wild bronco, the shock absorbers frozen solid, the boy hanging on to the wheel, his foot slipping off the gas pedal as Daddy cried, “Now! Now!” and trees flying past while the boy hung on and then he popped the clutch and the engine roared and the car jumped forward and he slammed on the brake and remembered to hit the clutch too and the old Ford sat there, shaking, and Daddy opened the door and said, “Get out before you kill it.”

And off he trudged to the bus stop, feet crunching on the snow, the sound of sharp cracks that might be trees cracking or maybe the earth itself. A planet with hot molten rock in the middle, that is frozen solid at the top—something has to give. The earth cracks wide open and limbs fall off trees and pin you to the ground. Or maybe you walk across the snow and step into a bear trap.
Whack
! it breaks your leg. Or you step into a deep hole, and there’s a bear in it, a bear who has eaten nothing but dirt and leaves for weeks and is very hungry. Winter was a world of anxiety for young James. Bears, bear traps, trees falling, and then there was the fear of Communists. They could come skiing down from Canada, across an undefended border, and line the children up in the play-ground and give them a choice: either say “I hate America and I don’t believe in God whatsoever” or else put your tongue on a frozen pump handle. What would he do then? He knew what he’d do, he’d renounce America and God and the Communists would all clap and cheer but God wouldn’t like it and in the next instant the boy would be in hell, flames licking at his feet, burning people walking by.

“What are you so quiet about?” said Leo.

“It’s not the right road,” he said.

“It’s not?”

It was not the right road. It was the road that went past the road to the airport and by the time they figured that out, James had come to the sad realization that he was not going to fly to Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau tonight. It wasn’t going to happen.

He told Leo to stop and he got out of the car and stood in the street, in the hush of snowfall. Nobody was out shoveling, everybody was sitting tight. The electric carillon at the Methodist church was playing “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” where the sermon on Sunday, according to the marquee, would be “Behold Him, O Ye Peoples.” Whiteness glittering everywhere, the wind whipping up little eddies of snow on the drifts across the frozen tundra. The old house on the corner was Daryl Holmberg’s and there was old Daryl in the living room, blue TV light flickering on his sleepy face, his old classmate, a Methodist deacon now but back then he liked to torture smaller nerdier boys and throw jagged iceballs at people. James’s dad’s friend Archie Pease, who lived across the street wrote a column for the
Weekly Binder
(“Pease Porridge”), and next door was Rochelle Westendorp, the town librarian, who was mad at James for being so rich and not giving much to the library. And Paul Werberger, a bachelor who lived with four dogs and six cats and collected old magazines and played the banjo. And then his Aunt Mona’s house was up ahead, a little cottage under a giant Norway pine, where she lived until Gene passed away and then she fled North Dakota for Ventura, California, and never was forgiven for it. Ventura was warm and sunny year-round, and she loved it there and did not miss anybody at home very much, and never came back to visit. So when she died, alone, happy, in her home on Catalpa Avenue, the relatives raised the money to fly her body back and bury it in the cold ground of Looseleaf, North Dakota. All alone, by the back fence.
Mona Sparrow, 1915-1998.

 

 

A
nd now they were at the airport, and the
Lucky Lady
was good and snowed-in. A stiff wind out of the northwest whipped the snow across the flats in eddies and a drift had formed around the plane’s nose, almost up to the fuselage, and there were deep footprints through the snow to the stairs. He walked up and opened the door and heard loud static and blips from the radio and fragments of sentences, a distant male voice, very clipped and official. Buzz was sitting crosswise in the left-hand seat. Buddy was sleeping in the back of the plane. Buzz turned the volume down. James peered out the windshield. The lights at the end of the runway—gone. The revolving beacon atop the terminal—visible dimly.

“We’re stuck, aren’t we?”

Buzz nodded. “Turns out to be a bigger storm than what they thought,” he said. “Two storms converged. Curvature of the jetstream flattened out and two fronts sort of intermixed. So we’re not going to be moving anytime soon.”

“Any estimate?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

He walked back to the car slowly. It wasn’t his way to make up stories but he needed an excuse not to go to Uncle Earl’s bedside right now. The thought of it made him almost cry—holding the old man’s hand and—what? Saying the Lord’s Prayer? Singing “Kumbaya”? He sounded chipper on the phone, but—what was the real deal? “I’m on this mission,” he told Leo, “and it’d be better if it weren’t general knowledge that I’m in town right now. It’s very complicated. We’re using the blizzard for cover. It’s all a front. Confuse CanTell. Businessman snowbound. It’s to throw them off. I wish I could tell you more. Is there an undisclosed location where I could spend the night and nobody be any the wiser?”

“I thought you were going over to Earl’s.”

“Tomorrow. Got to think of the mission first.”

Leo thought for a minute. “Well, probably your best undisclosed location would be Floyd’s fish house seeing as how he’s dead. Faye still has them tow it out on the ice every year. Nobody ever uses it.”

He could sleep the night in a dead man’s fish house. Why not? Better than being a guest. He just plain wasn’t up for a bunch of grief and hand-holding tonight.

“Where can I get some warm boots?”

“All of Floyd’s stuff is out there. Help yourself. It’s the fish house with the Christmas star on the roof. I’ll drive you out there.”

And Leo swung left at the next corner and a minute later he was driving onto the vastness of Lake Winnesissibigosh, heading for the fish houses out towards the middle of the lake, a long string of them, ghostly in the falling snow. The ice was 23 inches thick, according to Leo, yet it gave off banging sounds like an underwater howitzer, and Leo coasted to a stop. “I don’t know about this,” he said.

“It’s nothing. Ice expands and contracts. Happens all the time. I grew up here. I remember.”

“You sure?”

He was sure. He was pretty sure he was sure. On the other hand, he didn’t have to stay out here. No. He had a cell phone, he could call the pilots and tell them he wished to spend the night aboard the
Lucky Lady
where the rear couch folded out to make a queen-size bed, but he couldn’t do that with Leo there, listening. Let Leo think him a coward, a cake-eater. No way. He’d decided to be a C.I.A. agent—so he’d be a hero. No way out. He had to sleep in the fishing shack. Leo dropped him off a hundred yards from the shack—“Looks to me like there might be a soft spot up ahead”—and James climbed out. An electric star shone brightly on the fish house roof.

“Why’d he put that there?”

Leo said Floyd needed the star because he often was drunk.

“He lived out here?”

“If you were married to Faye, you might, too.”

“Well—” said James, and Leo said, “Yeah. Guess I better head back.” But he didn’t move.

“Getting late,” said James.

“Looks like it,” said Leo.

“So anyway—”

“Good to have you back.”

“Good to be back.”

“Ten years is a long time to be away.”

“Well, I don’t really know anybody here—”

“Hard to know anybody if you never come around. I’m just saying.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway—”

James thanked him and closed the car door and Leo did a big U-turn and headed for shore at a good clip and James stood in the enormous silence of the snowfall and looked across the snowy drifts on the broad reach of ice toward the lights of Looseleaf barely visible in the distance. He thought, “This is the beauty of an obsessive irrational fear like the one I got. You focus on that and your other fears recede. Probably men ran screaming into ferocious battle, into the teeth of the beast, swinging their broadaxes, who were terrified of spiders.” General George S. Patton could not bear the sight of sheep. Lindbergh, flying the Atlantic solo in his little plane, was terrified of women. Genghis Khan rode horseback because he had a well-documented ant phobia. So he, James Sparrow, had benefited by this silly obsession that he had struggled manfully to overcome and consulted specialists about—psychiatrists, hypnotists, a nose-throat-and-tongue man at the Mayo, a yogi, hydraulic engineers, and so forth—but in fact his “pump problem” was a sort of magic that kept worse phobias at bay. He had never been a hypochondriac, never worried about business failure, never agonized over the lack of purpose in his life.
Be thankful for your afflictions. Some of them may be assets in disguise.
Soon his nose was running and he felt an ache in his chest from the cold air.
Breathe through your nose, not your mouth
, said Mother. So lovely was the night, he kept right on walking out past Floyd’s fish house toward the other shore.
Quite a day
, he thought.
You start out on the 55th floor of the Wabash Tower thinking you’re going to take a trip to Hawaii and you wind up in an old wooden shack on a frozen lake in North Dakota.
The snow descended in a steady silent sound, a sort of continual hush. He walked almost to the bushy shore and then sensed something moving in the underbrush and a chill panic touched his heart. He turned around and walked, walked, walked—resisting the urge to run—to the shack with the Christmas star and opened the door and went in. A small dim room, plywood floor, two holes to fish through. A stove, a chair, a table, a broad shelf on one side to lie down on and beneath it, a cupboard. There was a hook on the door and he hooked it shut. He balled up some newspaper from a stack and stuffed it in the stove and lit it and got some kindling going and put in a couple birch logs and the place warmed right up. He got a little tin pot out of the cupboard and filled it with snow to melt to make tea in the morning. The fish house was quite cozy. He dug into the cupboard and found a half-full quart bottle of Paul Bunyan bourbon and a pint of peppermint schnapps, a few old
Playboys
(“lissome lonesome Kelly Jo, 23, lounges by the pool, sipping a cool limeade. ‘Though it was my first time, I was quite relaxed about posing nude, having always felt that the body is a thing of beauty’ ”), a copy of a John Sandford novel,
Lamprey
(“the tall angry man hurtled past the line of patrons at the coffeeshop including a child of three or four years old like a cougar going for a snow rabbit and snarled, ‘Gimme a java, toots,’ at the startled barista, an attractive woman of perhaps twenty-four or twenty-five, and when an older woman behind him said, ‘Uh, there is a line here, sir,’ he turned and shrieked, ‘You dumbheads can eat weasel poop for all I care,’ and pulled out what appeared to be a .45 caliber pistol and fired two shots
bam bam
through the woman’s left breast which flopped bleeding from her blouse like a small wounded animal such as a weasel or pocket gopher”), which he tossed in the fire, which flared up, and he dug out an old sleeping bag and laid it across the cupboard to sleep on and was about to crawl in when he heard snuffling outdoors and opened the door and walked out and looked around and turned to go back in the shack and there, sitting motionless beside the shack was a gray wolf in the light of the blue moon. His eyes were greenish-yellow and unblinking. His ears perked, his forelegs braced, his fur rippled. His tail lay curled and quite still. James stopped. A shock to see but deep in his brain his old Scoutmaster Elmer told him that, faced with a hostile dog (or, in this case, wolf) you must face him squarely and not attempt to run. No panic, no sudden moves. Square your shoulders and plant your feet and calmly look over the wolf’s head as if observing something beyond. The animal had been waiting for James to come. That was his take on the situation. This was not happenstance. This was a personal encounter.