A Christmas Blizzard (8 page)

 

 

I
f the wolf charged him, he decided not to assume the fetal position but let out a blood-curdling scream and crouch low and go for the beast’s throat. He thought he felt a knife in the pocket of the parka, and he slipped his hand in and found it among the flotsam, the lengths of string, needlenose pliers, duct tape, and empty snoose can, a Bic pen, some lead sinkers, scraps of paper. He opened the knife. The blade was dull, but it would do. He withdrew it slowly and held it in his right hand hanging loosely at his side. The wolf blinked. He had noticed. Good. A little zap of confusion in the animal’s brain. It was fifteen feet to the wolf and fifteen feet to the door of Floyd’s shack which, he reckoned, he could make in three seconds, but maybe that’d be too sudden. Better to take five seconds to stroll purposefully to the door and open it and slip inside. He guessed the shack was nothing the wolf cared to be part of. Probably it smelled horrible to him, the stench of man and his beverages and his dreadful urine.

“No, not horrible,” said the wolf in a low whispery voice. “Once I was a man myself, like you. I remember the smells. Some of them with fondness. I remember your smell very well.”

“Who are you, sir?”

“We used to camp out here overnight, you and me. There were eight or ten of us, all in one tent.” The wolf glanced toward shore. “Over there by the marsh.” The wolf spoke without moving his lips, the voice simply emerged from him.

“We were in Scouts together?”

“I am your age. Or I was when I died. ”

So it was Ralph.

They were standing on the spot where Ralph’s canoe sank that chill October day in 1992.

He went out duck-hunting in his green wooden canoe, his big rubber hip boots on, and the canoe tipped and he plunged into the chill water and the hips boots filled up with water and he sank and drowned. They dragged the lake for him and two days later his body floated to the surface and drifted toward shore. Floyd found him. Floyd lifted this horrible mass of bloated flesh into his boat and laid his slicker over it and never went hunting again.

“How are you, Ralph?”

A silly question.

“I was a happy man with a sad life and you are a sad man with a happy life,” he said. “Just for your information. You can put away the knife, James. You won’t need it. I’m here to guide you, not attack you. ”

“I don’t think I need a guide, Ralph. I’m doing okay on my own.”

The wolf sneezed and then sneezed again. Or maybe it was laughter. He spoke slowly. “You are a frightened man and you live in vast ignorance. And now you’ve come to a place you never intended to be and there is more at stake here than you know.”

James put the knife away. “Do you mind if we step inside?” he said. And the door to the shack swung open.

He put another birch log on the fire and got down a cup and poured whiskey in it.

“What happened to you that day, Ralph?”

“I was hunting, wading through the cattails, and I shot two ducks with two shots and they plunged into the water a hundred yards from shore. I could see them out there flapping and I got in my canoe to put them out of their misery. My old retriever Jackson had died in March and I grieved for him and it took me a while to get myself a pup and by the time hunting season rolled around, he wasn’t trained in so I had to retrieve the birds myself.”

“I remember, you always hunted alone.”

“I did. I liked my friends well enough but I didn’t go in for drinking in a duck blind and the bad jokes and the loud talk. They didn’t care if they got game or not. I did. That was the point of it. I loved hunting. It wasn’t about killing things, it was about the intense awareness when you sit perfectly still with eyes sharpened, nose to the wind, ears open, your whole being at attention. The hunter can sit for hours of keen attention, hearing every whisper and trickle, every bird chitter and fish splash, the drip of rain, the hush of twilight, the raccoons washing their paws, the little fox learning to make no sound, and why spoil it with the usual yikyak about the sorrow of growing old? Hunting is sacred: why else would you sit there in the cold and damp? It’s all about that awakening of the visceral senses that get dull in the ordinary dry tedium of indoor paper-pushing and the meetings and the sucking up to big shots, and when you picked up a gun and went down to the tall grass, you got free of all that sucking and blowing. That’s why I went, though I knew I should not, after Jackson died, killed by a car that didn’t bother to stop. I loved that mutt. I thought I was over it but I wasn’t. The moment those birds splashed down, my heart felt torn in two, and I paddled out from shore in blind grief, and I grabbed one duck and reached for the other and it squawked and flapped away, mortally wounded, and I wanted to end its pain and I swung at it with the paddle, broke its neck, and myself plunged overboard and I sank quickly, my heart full of regret for Theresa, and I managed to get one hip boot off but not the other, and I sank to the bottom into the mud down beside some turtles and when I awoke, it was dark and I was surrounded by furry things who were snuggling up next to me. I was in a beaver hut. An extended family of beavers, and they brought me bark and moss and lily pads and they put on ceremonies in which they crowned me with a headdress of small sticks and they sang and turned in circles and dipped and nodded in unison. They appeared to be worshipping me. I slept and slept and when I awoke, it was spring.”

“What happened then?” said James.

“I worked in a Denny’s in Fargo for a few weeks, clearing tables, bussing dishes. And nobody spoke to me ever, though I kept asking them why I was there, and that’s how I knew I was dead. Because I didn’t exist. And I wasn’t paid a penny. And one night a woman came and sat in a back booth and asked me to bring her a bowl of rice and beans. I told her I was only a busboy. She wore a blue suit with a gold badge that said
A.T.F.
and she was frightening to behold but beautiful. She said, ‘Your old life is over and your new life is begun. You will spend a time grieving and treading the paths of your old life and seeing everything with clear eyes,’ she said. And she waved a hand in my direction and I became as you see me, a gray wolf. And so I have lived in the creek bed where we used to camp, observing my people, whom I dearly loved, and who, though they are foolish, wasteful, of limited intelligence, and habitually cruel, I now love even more tenderly.”

The wolf came over to James and lay his head on James’s leg and said, “Every year during the Christmas moon, I have the power of speech and this is only the second time I’ve used it.”

“What was the first?”

“I told Theresa that I loved her. She was horrified and slammed the door in my face.”

The wolf’s eyes filled with tears. “I didn’t choose to leave the world and even now, years later, there are times I want to return. And Christmas is one of those times. Christmas and baseball season and the last week of August for the State Fair and the week in April when the blossoms open up.”

“I never cared for Christmas,” said James.

“I know all about that. And it can’t be changed.”

“Why not?”

“You’ve made up your mind and it can’t be unmade.”

That came as a slap in the face to Mr. Sparrow who thought of himself as open-minded, reasonable, able to be moved and convinced by evidence, not some irredeemable dope, and he was about to protest—“It’s only an
opinion—
maybe I need to take another look at the situation—read some books—maybe if I went to work in a soup kitchen for the homeless and got a different perspective”—but the sorrow in Ralph’s eyes stopped him. And then he had a fearful thought.

“Ralph,” he said. “Tell me. Have I died and landed in hell? Will I be here forever? Is this going to be perpetual winter?
Is this it, Ralph? Is this all there is?”
But the wolf was gone.

He opened the door and saw a flicker of tail in the underbrush. “Ralph!” he called. “
Ralph!”
Why had his old friend come to this harsh judgment?

And then girlish voices counting off
One-two-one-two-three
and there were Debbie and Becky and Ginny and Joni and Julie and Nanci and Lori and Gloria, the Looseleaf cheer-leaders in their scarlet and gray middie uniforms and long socks and sneakers and pom-poms in hand and doing a vigorous version on ice of the old school song:

They were all 17 and 18 but their eyes were old, and when he spoke to them, they looked his way without recognition, and when he said their names, they hissed at him,
Sssssssssssssss.
And then trotted off into the colony of fishing shacks and vanished.

A moment of blind panic. Maybe this world was trying to tell him it no longer wanted him in it and that he should have flown to Hawaii because his decision to come here and bid a dying man good-bye was actually not so different from a dive off the Golden Gate bridge.

He could die here. That was a clear possibility. What to do?

What about a National Guard rescue by helicopter, or snowmobile? Maybe he could tell them about his pump-handle anxiety. Couldn’t his analyst Dr. Boemer get word to the governor that Mr. James Sparrow, the head of Coyote Corp., was very likely to come unhinged if the Guard didn’t go in and extract him from this storm?

He guessed not. The governor was a Democrat; Mr. Sparrow was not. And even if he could be persuaded to do it, the story would surely hit the papers:

 

 

H
e needed to settle himself down so he sang the old childhood song that Dr. Boemer had imprinted in him, using hypnosis, to relax him by unconscious reflex. It usually worked. He sang:

But Mandalay was nowhere around here. He returned to the fishing shack with a heavy heart and when he opened the door, he was in a vast room in an airport, a room as big as three 747 hangars and over the loudspeakers came a man’s voice making important unintelligible announcements. James was standing in a long line of travelers waiting to speak to a woman with big black hair who sat on a high stool behind a counter under a sign,
External Travel
. She had several yellow pencils stuck in her hair and also a small telephone on a wire that went to a bud in her ear. She had very serious eyebrows.

The line was not moving. The man at the head of the line was speaking to her and sobbing and she looked at him impassively. He dabbed at his eyes with a hanky. He held out his arms, beseeching her, and she waved him away. The line inched forward. Next in line was a family, a woman and man and a little girl, and they seemed to have a long story to tell—it went on and on and on—and they were dismissed eventually—and then the woman behind them stepped forward and pulled out a violin and took her time tuning it and set up a music stand and a score and started to play. James said to the man in front of him, “Don’t these people realize there are others waiting in line behind them?”

The man turned around and said, “ﻝﺏﻉﺽ ﺭﻡﻉﻝﺍ ﺏﻩﺫﻱﻭ ﻱﻙﻭﻥ ﻡﺡﺩﻭﺩﺍ. ﺍﻝﻕﻝﺏ ﻡﺍ ﻝﺍ ﺕﻅﺍﺭ”

“I’m sorry. Could you speak English?”

The man looked as if he’d been at the airport for days or weeks. Dark circles under his soft brown eyes. A dark stubble on his cheeks and jaw. A white shirt, open at the neck, rumpled. Black hair, gray at the temples.

“I hope we won’t have to wait too long, that’s all,” said James.

The man touched his arm. “ﻱﻡﻙﻥ ﺃﻥ ﻥﻩﺍﻱﺓ ﻭﺍﻥﻩ ﻝﺍ ﻱﻥﺏﻍﻱ ﻭﺽﻉﻩﺍ ﻑﻱ ﺹﻥﺩﻭﻕ ﻙﻝ ﺵﺥﺹ ﻩﻭﻡﻕﺩﺱ ﻭﺍﻝﺕﻱ ﻝﺍ.” he said.

It took some time, during which James lay down on the hard floor and slept and dreamed about Boy Scouts and standing in a straight line with neckerchief tight, back straight, saluting, as the bugler played Taps, and then the man behind him kicked him and woke him up and he scootched forward and slept some more and was kicked and inched forward and kicked and inched, meanwhile dreaming about the tall grass, the precipice, the sharks in the black abyss below, the buzzards circling, and finally he was the second person in line—the man in front of him pleading to go to Chicago where his beloved daughter was waiting for him, she needed him, she loved him, he was her daddy, her precious daddy, but it was no soap, Big-Hair Lady sneered and shook her head, withdrew a pencil, scratched his name off the list. The man slumped down sobbing about the unfairness of it, and then it was James’s turn.

“I too wish to go to Chicago. Or to Looseleaf, North Dakota. I seem to have jumped the tracks of my life and I’m in some strange void and I’d like to get back to my beloved wife and—I don’t care about the money—or Hawaii—just want to see Joyce and get my life back. The familiar life. Okay?”

“Let me see your identification.”

Well, of course he didn’t have any. “I must’ve left it in my coat.”

She was not interested in the idea of his not having identification. It didn’t interest her in the slightest.