A Christmas Blizzard (9 page)

“Please,” he said. “I’m a good guy. I’m a human being. Give me a break.”

He might as well have said, “I am the ghost of William Tecumseh Sherman” or “I am a man who uses proper grammar” or “I represent the oppressed of the world.”
Not of interest, sir.

“My name is James Sparrow and I live in the Wabasha Towers with my wife, Joyce. I am the founder and CEO of Coyote Corp., makers of 4xPrime energy additive and the parent corporation of BRB and Sparrow Broadcasting and Sparrow Publishing. I am 42 years old and I am perfectly happy to give that all up, and the airplane too, if I can just get out of here so that I can celebrate Christmas.”

She laughed a harsh metallic laugh like skillets clanging—“You? Celebrate Christmas? That’d be like a sheep dancing the schottische. Like a hawk writing a haiku. Be serious, sir.”

“My wife is ill—I want to be with her for Christmas.”

“Your wife is sick of you, is the problem.”

“Please,” he said. “It would mean so much—”

Big-Hair Lady threw back her head and screeched. “HA!!!” She shook her head. “Mister Sparrow, it would mean
nothing
to you.
Zero. Zilch. Nil. Ixnay.
You, sir, derive less real pleasure from this world than anybody who’s ever come through here. You are blind and deaf and cold to the touch and you have no taste and music and poetry and good cooking are lost on you. You’re all tied up in knots about money and getting old and the daily insult of the bathroom mirror. You walk down city streets with no eye for your fellow citizens, you are offered magnificent music and exit early so you won’t get caught in traffic. You think happiness is somewhere out in the future but you have no more idea what it is than you could explain radioactivity. You are a man of stunning ineptitude. Your daddy knew about engines, plumbing, hydraulics and arc welding and pouring concrete, gutting a deer, cleaning a walleye, digging a fish hook out of your thumb, not to get rich but just to get by, and here you are and you feel superior to him and you can’t pour piss out of a boot when the instructions are printed on the sole. You got your fortune because you walked into a bar in Livingston, Montana, just as a drunken chemist got really desperate, but that doesn’t make you worth much in my book, mister. You walk through life like you’re waiting for it to begin any day now. And it’s almost over.”

“Please, I’ll do better.”
Almost over??
What did she mean?

“Couldn’t hardly do worse,” she muttered, and scratched his name off the list. “I’m giving you twenty-four hours to go look around and make your peace. Go. Git. Scram. Out of my sight. And blow your nose, please.”

He turned and ran out the door under the EXIT sign and there he was back on the ice outside Floyd’s fishing shack. The stars shone in the sky, the other shacks were where they had been, the wind blew a little colder than before. He’d left his coat and mittens back there in the giant terminal and the wind was hard and sharp. He didn’t dare go back for them lest the Big-Hair Lady revoke his pass. He stood on the ice, frozen between Forward and Reverse, and was starting to consider the option of freezing to death, when someone called his name. It was his cousin Liz.

 

 

J
ames, what the hell you doing out here?” He stepped toward her to give her a hug and warm up a little, and she didn’t hug him back much, it was mostly all him. She was lean, wiry, a cross-country skier, who liked to ski in snowstorms and once, trapped in a storm, she dug a hole in a deep drift and stayed there for four days, wrapped in a thermal sheet like tinfoil, and was able, she claimed, to lower her heart rate and respiration to something like a state of hibernation and thus conserve her strength. A true North Dakota woman.

“Leo said you were shitting bricks about getting snowbound and then you insisted on coming out and staying in Floyd’s shack so I came to make sure you’ve got a decent sleeping bag.” She walked over to the shack—he took a deep breath—and opened the door and did not disappear into the Other World—no Big Hair there, just the lantern and stove and the cupboard with the sleeping bag on it—and she shut the door.

“Looks like you’re all set,” she said. She looked him up and down. “Kind of cold to go out without a coat,” she said. “Come on over to my shack, I’m just starting a fire.” Her shack stood closer to shore, an 8x10 structure of weather-beaten barn boards, smoke curling up from the stack. The woodpile next to it stood shoulder high. On the shack he could see several signs, EXTREMISM IN THE DEFENSE OF LIBERTY IS NO VICE and WHEN I HEAR THE WORDS GUN CONTROL I REACH FOR MY REVOLVER and NOW IS THE TIME FOR THE TREE OF LIBERTY TO BE WATERED WITH THE BLOOD OF TYRANTS.

Liz was a rabid Republican who believed that the U.S. government had secret agents on her trail, surveilling her with security cameras and satellites, ready to pounce at any time. She owned a steel helmet that deflected satellite rays and carried two loaded .45 pistols in her yellow down vest. Her house was kept hermetically sealed against bacteria that government agents might spray on the homes of patriots. She was a contributing editor of
Freedom
magazine and a leader of the citizen militia Possum Comatosis. She used 4xPrime and got along on two hours of sleep a night, a watchful sentry on freedom’s ramparts. He liked Liz. He had always liked her since they were kids and played Three Musketeers in the court of Louis XIV of France and went swashbuckling around and being French, dueling with i nfidels—“Do me the honor, my good lord, of taking your sword from its scabbard,” she cried and crossed swords with a phantom enemy and drove him down into the creek where he slashed her face,
Mon Dieu!
And she dropped her sword and sank to her knees in abject pain. And then snatched up the sword and drove it through the blackguard’s heart.
Allons!
“Long live the king.” And she was still caught up in swashbuckling except now against the government of the United States.

She opened the door to her shack and he walked in. It was dark except for the red glow from the firebox. At one end was a bench on an elevated platform. No fishing holes in the ice. And then he noticed, atop the firebox, a steel tray with rocks on it.

“I worry about you living down in Chicago and reading the mainstream press, James. You miss out on a lot.” Liz believed that government is a relentless force seeking to imprison us in regulation and any person with a brain fights back, but Democrats, like the majority of people, are lazy thinkers and in the end some sort of armed uprising may be necessary to rescue the country from tyranny.

“Chicago’s not bad. This town doesn’t hold a lot of wonderful memories for me, Liz. This town gave me permanent nightmares and put me into therapy.”

“What you in therapy for?”

He made the mistake of telling her. Pump-handles.

“Oh you’re not one of those, are you?”

He was, actually. He was winter-disabled. Some people had frost phobia or wind-chill anxiety and he had a pump-handle obsession. He tried to explain it to her, his powerful compulsion to put his tongue on an iron pump handle even knowing that the tongue would freeze to the iron instantly and he’d either have to wait for help to arrive—some Good Samaritan—“What’s wrong, sir?”—
Mmmpfl rmnllglgl shrdllrgrgr—
“I’m sorry, sir, I can’t understand you”—so you count to three and pull away violently and rip the skin off. And that was why he lived in a high-rise apartment building and rode around in a chauffeured limo and avoided historic sites during winter months and salvage yards and playgrounds and when things got too bad, he flew to Hawaii.

“And I’m seeing a therapist,” he said. “In fact, several of them.”

“Listen, James. No jerk in an office with a bunch of certificates on the wall is going to talk you out of belief in your own demons. You got to face them yourself.” Her daughter Angie was in treatment for recovery addiction, she said. Angie liked to drink so she went to AA because her boyfriend told her to and then she got to liking AA and went to different groups at different times of day and soon was up to 21 AA sessions a week, three a day, and was trying to cut down, and had joined an Addiction Recovery Dependency group.

Liz went outdoors and got an armload of wood and came back in and said she wasn’t going to let him leave town until they had dealt with this pump-handle thing.

“I’m dealing with it.”

“You’re not dealing with it. I’m family, James. I can tell you things other people can’t. You’re full of b.s. and you need to clean out your system and that’s what we’re going to do now.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She grabbed a shovel from the wall and went outside and he followed—she walked over to a big rectangle cut in the ice and started punching at the thin ice that had frozen over it. And turned to him and told him to take his clothes off and follow her into the sauna.

“Aha,” he said. And then she grabbed the zipper on her big insulated jumpsuit and pulled it from her neck down to her left ankle and stepped out onto the ice naked. His cousin Liz. Her left breast was missing. Just scar tissue. “I had it cut off,” she said. “It got in my way when I aimed a rifle.”

She opened the shack door and now billows of steam came blowing out and in she went. He stepped out of his boots and took off his shirt and pants and stood barefoot on the ice, a strong sensation, pain and then numbness, and a moment of decision,
Yes—No—Stay—Go—
and his life seemed to hang in the balance—a wrong move could lead to oblivion—
Why am I standing here? I am worth millions of dollars. I don’t need this at all.—
A man in his jockey shorts in a stiff wind.
What is this leading to? Run! Beat it! Scram! Get out of here! This woman could eat you for breakfast.
And then he stripped his shorts off and walked to the door.
I am a prisoner here and I am not going to give her the satisfaction of seeing me beg for mercy. For the honor of Chicago and of liberals everywhere—
he opened the door and stepped into a cloud of steam in pitch blackness and closed the door. It was hot in there. Hotter than hot. It scorched his face.
Damn it is hot.
He took a shallow breath. He could see her pale form sitting on the bench and on the firebox, the rocks glowed red-hot coals. A pail alongside. “Throw some water on,” she said. He picked up the pail and sloshed water on the rocks—“Not so much”—he was about to say
Sorry
and caught himself. “In Chicago,” he said, “we like a wet sauna. But whatever you like, Liz.”

“Oh,” she said. “Dry saunas, a person can tolerate longer, that’s all.”

And in that moment he knew he could best her. The tone in her voice. She’d expected him to come whimpering and cringeing into her torture chamber and he’d come marching in as a veteran, welcoming punishment.

“Wet saunas are more intense, but when in Rome—”

He plopped down beside her.

“Want a towel?” she said.

“Don’t need one.” He could hardly breathe. He didn’t know how long he could sit here before his body burst into flame but he was going to sit still right up to the moment of combustion. “This is great,” he said. Sweat poured from him, salt stung his eyes. He wanted to weep for pain.

“Glad you like it.” There was defeat in her voice. It thrilled him. Her hair hung limp on her bare shoulders, she was hunched forward—and then he saw the birch boughs on the bench beside him.

“Ready for some stimulation?”

She started to turn around and he grabbed the boughs and lashed her four, five, ten times, fairly hard. “Hard enough?” he said. “Or do you like it more brisk?”

“That’s fine,” she said. So he lashed her harder. It felt good. He hit her in behalf of Hubert Humphrey, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis, and she trembled—“Too hard?” he cried. “No,” she whimpered. He lashed her good until she cried out, “Thank you. How about you?” and then he jumped up and said, “Time for a swim!” and out the door he went. Steam poured off him in the cold air and pure red-blooded Triumph was in his heart and what is physical pain compared to Triumph? The freezing air blazed on his skin. He strode toward the big dark hole, Liz following a few steps behind him—his body was screaming at him
Don’t do this! We don’t like this! Bad idea! Bad idea!—
but in his heart he knew he was right:
Show No Weakness! No Indecision!
He turned toward Liz and she put an arm over her one breast and a hand over her crotch—“This is great!” he cried. “How did you know I love saunas?”—and turned toward the hole with the same holy devotion as the Christian martyrs stepped into the arena—
All or Nothing!—
and took three quick steps and launched out—
Lord Jesus Christ into Thy Hands I commend my spirit—
into the cold blackness and it shocked him like a sledgehammer—but not in a bad way! No no no—his skin was freezing and his teeth chattered but the core of him was hot and between the two sensations was a center of equilibrium of pure feeling and high happiness and he yelled, “It’s great! It’s beautiful!” which made her hesitate. She stood naked in the twilight, vulnerable and defeated, and he cried, “Thank you, Jesus! Washed in the blood of the Lamb! Hallelujah!” She thought he was crazy.
Good.
He whooped and yelled some more. She was steeling herself to jump but she had lost her momentum and then he put his hands on the ice and hoisted himself up and stood and hugged her and she almost collapsed from the shock. Her thin, trembling body in his grasp. “Praise God from Whom all blessings flow,” he said and he threw her into the water. She let out a pitiful
Eeeek
and he turned away and went into the shack. He put a fresh log in the fire and tossed water on the stones. She was right. He needed a breakthrough and he had broken through. He was all over the pump-handle business. Cured. He had stepped through that door and into the next room, which was beautiful and luminous and shimmering with delicate delights and in that moment he longed for his dear darling wife and wished she were in his arms, her strong shoulders, her broad naked back, her long legs, her sweet face turned up toward his, her Roman nose and dark hair pulled back, her smile, he wanted to kiss her smile and inhale her sweet voice.