As Simple as Snow (11 page)

There were things to do, which is a radical notion in school. Usually you just sit there and listen to the teacher tell you things, instead of actually getting a chance to do them yourself. Mr. Devon, however, erased that step and had us immediately drawing and painting, and even trying a little sculpture and pottery. Surprisingly, a lot of the kids hated doing stuff. Maybe they wanted to sit around and have Mr. Devon lecture us on the proper way to hold a brush or draw. I liked his class. You didn’t have homework and you didn’t have to take notes or read a textbook. Best of all, very little attention was paid to a right way or wrong way to do anything, and most of the activities were fun. For instance, Mr. Devon would put a large block of drawing paper on an easel and have one of us go up and draw something on a section of one sheet—a third or fourth or fifth of it, depending on how he had folded it—without letting the rest of us see it. Then another person would go up and, still without knowing what the previous person had drawn, continue the drawing, and then another person would do likewise, and so on until the sheet of paper was filled. The image was always strange, funny, startling, unexpected. After we had done a number of these drawings Mr. Devon explained that the technique had been made popular by the Surrealists. He then showed us some examples of theirs.

Mr. Devon started teaching in high school my sophomore year, and one morning before school he came up to me. “Maybe you can help me out,” he said.

“Sure,” I answered.

“I have this sculpture in my truck that I need help bringing in. It’s a little too heavy just for me. Do you think you could give me a hand for a minute?”

I looked up and down the hall, hoping to find a football player who could help Mr. Devon instead, but there was no one.

“I guess I can help you.”

He had an old beat-up Chevy that looked as if it had driven through the woods in a straight line, hitting every tree in the way. It was caked with mud, and the passenger side of the front windshield was cracked from top to bottom.

“Don’t worry,” Mr. Devon said. “My car’s in better shape. I use this for hauling stuff.”

In the bed of the pickup was a wooden crate about the size of a thirty-two-inch TV. It was a lot heavier than that, though. I was sure I was going to drop it any minute, but I was afraid to stop.

“You need a rest?” Mr. Devon could tell that I was about ready to drop the crate, and whatever was inside was going to smash to bits on the sidewalk. I kept hoping someone would come along and help, but nobody did.

“I’m fine,” I said, and tried to move faster.

Somehow we made it to the back door of the school. From there it was about thirty or forty feet to Mr. Devon’s classroom. We had to put the crate down in order to open the door, and then we dragged it through the doorway.

Mr. Teller, one of the custodians, was coming down the hall. “Hold it right there,” he shouted.

“I think we’re in trouble,” Mr. Devon said.

“What do you mean ‘we’?” I said. He laughed.

“Don’t kill yourself,” Mr. Teller said. “Let me get a handtruck and haul that thing out for you.”

“Actually, we’re coming in,” Mr. Devon told him. “This goes in my room.”

“All right. Same thing. Just go on about your business and I’ll bring this into your room. There’s no reason to break your back when I’ve got a handtruck right around the corner.”

“Why didn’t you think of that?” Mr. Devon looked at me. “Come on, let’s go inside and wait for Mr. Teller.”

“I’d better get to class,” I said. “I’m already late.”

“Let me write you a pass,” he said.

I followed him into his classroom. He fished around in a cluttered desk drawer and found a blank pass. “Are you sure you don’t want to stick around and see what’s in the crate? It will only be a couple of minutes. Besides, I could use your help in getting the sculpture out.”

“Yeah, I can do that,” I said.

He went into the hall and helped Mr. Teller put the crate on the dolly. They wheeled it into a corner and lifted the crate onto the floor. “Thanks, Mr. Teller,” Mr. Devon said. “Thanks for having the brains in this operation.”

Mr. Teller left and Mr. Devon started opening the crate. “So what do you think about football?” he asked me.

“I like it,” I said.

“You ever thought about coming out for the team?”

“It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?”

“A little, but we don’t have our first game until next week. There’s plenty of season left. You should give it a try. We could use you.”

“Where?” I said. I doubted that they could use me.

“I was thinking in the secondary. Cornerback, maybe.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Well, think about it. Or better yet, come to a practice. Just watch. See if you like what you see, and then decide. I bet you’d be good at it.”

I actually believed him. Despite my better knowledge of my capabilities and talents, I believed him. I showed up for practice and got my gear—helmet; pads; jersey with number 45 on it, in home and away colors—got my locker, and was out on the field, running drills. I had to borrow a pair of cleats for the first practice, and had my mom go out and buy them the next day. She drove up during practice and handed them to me on the sidelines of the field. But that was later.

Mr. Devon got the lid off the crate. He lifted out a bunch of packing material, under which the sculpture was wrapped in a gray blanket. We reached in and lifted it carefully out onto the floor. Mr. Devon unwrapped it and then stepped back to look. He stood where he could see the sculpture and me at the same time.

It was abstract, a suggestion of something. It was a big bulb of a grotesque blob on a stem, the shape of a head without any of the features of a face, or rather the features torn off in bits and then put back in all the wrong places. That’s what emerged out of the gray stone, almost like concrete: a torn face, grimacing, like someone being tortured or in the dentist’s chair. Or the way I imagined I was going to look during my first game of football. There were too many misshapen surfaces, globs of stone obscuring detail and anything recognizable, until it was just a creepy blob, but you could feel the tension in it, the struggle or violence. It was vague and powerful, and disturbing. I didn’t think anyone would like it sitting there in Mr. Devon’s classroom.

“What’s it called?” I asked.

“Is that your ‘Do not disturb’ sign?”

“You think it’s frightening enough?”

“It’s a little creepy,” I admitted. “Unsettling.”

“What if I told you that some people see it as happy, as exciting or joyful?”

The minute he said it, the object looked different. He suggested it, sure, but the thing did look different now, not menacing or violent, but like something contorted from a laugh, maybe. I could see it.

“Okay,” I said. “Which is it?”

He shrugged. “I just made it. I don’t know what it is. Here’s your pass.” He handed me the yellow slip of paper and I headed off to class.

“Thanks for your help,” he called after me. “And I’ll see you tomorrow.”

 

 

 

“Have you ever been drunk?” Anna asked me. We were sitting on the couch in the basement, listening to the shortwave. Her parents had gone out to dinner, which meant that they would be gone a few hours. It was at least a fifteen-minute drive to the nearest restaurant.

“I’ve never had the chance,” I said.

“You’re in for a treat, then.” She went to the wall of stacked boxes and dug efficiently until she pulled out a bottle of vodka. “Straight up or in something?”

“I’d better have it mixed with something.”

She went upstairs and came back with a jug of cranberry juice and two tall glasses with ice. She filled the glasses about a third with vodka and then topped it off with cranberry juice. “Try this,” she said.

It was like drinking something too cold that makes your brain freeze for a second or two. The force of it tapped the inside of my forehead and made me alert, opening my senses. I drank some more, and that initial sensation disappeared. Now it was just cranberry-juice taste.

“What do you think?” she asked me.

“It’s good,” I said.

“Can you feel it? Can you taste it? Can you tell that it’s going to change everything?”

“Not really. Let me try some straight.”

She held the bottle in front of her, waving it at me, teasing. She came and sat on my legs, facing me. She leaned into me and kissed me until my lips and tongue were tingling and numb. “You have to know,” she said, “that the world is never more perfect than when you’re drunk. It’s perfect.” It was perfect. The way she smelled and tasted and felt. The way her hair fell into my face as she leaned over me, dimming the lights behind her, the way the shortwave crackled quietly in the background, repeating its code like a chorus of some song somebody must know somewhere. It was all perfect. She tilted my head back slightly and held the bottle to my lips. It tasted bad, overpowering, but I didn’t mind. She kissed me again and then took a drink of her own.

“So what was it that attracted you to me?” I asked her. I would never have been able to ask her that sober.

“You just seemed so plain and normal that I thought you needed a little weirdness in your life,” she said.

 

 

 

I left before her parents came home, and as I made my way through the dark streets, I realized that I was unsteady, drunk. I shivered and felt damp, my teeth chattered and I started running, or at least tried. The snow on the lawns was deep, and I struggled with one lunge after another, happily laboring along. After a few yards, I felt warm again and the world seemed amazing. The lights of the houses reminded me of the illuminated windows in the Advent calendar my mother placed in the front hallway every Christmas. As I walked, the stars trembled brightly above me. The world seemed to spin faster, lurching anxiously into the night, yet I didn’t feel any closer to home. It was fine to be stuck in time when I was with Anna, but my nose and face, feet and hands were cold and I wanted to get to my bed, crawl in and go to sleep. I ran down the streets and cut through lightless yards, gaining some time; the pace made my head lighter and my legs weaker. The snow suddenly rose in front of me and I realized I had fallen. Snow had gone into my mouth and nose, and I sat up and laughed. I called Anna. “You should be out here with me. I’m rolling around in the snow like an idiot all by myself. You got me this way, you should be here taking care of me. It’s no fun out here alone.”

She laughed at me. “We can’t be together all the time,” she said.

“Why not?”

“It’s just not possible. I have things I have to do on my own. So do you.”

“No I don’t.”

“You got along fine without me before,” she said.

“You don’t know how untrue that is.”

“Well, you never know, you might have to again.”

“Don’t even say that as a joke,” I told her.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, and hung up. I picked myself up and ran into the darkness.

I was sitting on the floor of my room when my mom came in. She wasn’t happy. “I shouldn’t have to tell you to take your shoes off when you come in the door,” she said. I had forgotten. It had never entered my mind. She stood there glaring at me as I tried to take off my boots. They were dripping melted snow onto the floor. They didn’t have much of a tread. How much of a mess could they have made? My hand kept slipping off the heel as I tried to pull my right boot away from my foot. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t coming off, until I saw that I hadn’t untied it. I pulled slowly on the lace, and the brown string stopped in a knot. I had a hard time picking the knot loose. My mother was still watching me. She didn’t say anything. At first I was glad, and then I became angry. I wanted to yell at her. “You know I’m drunk, and you’re not saying anything!” I tried to say, “I’m sorry,” meaning about the boots, but my tongue had gone to sleep; it felt as if it had been shot full of novocaine. Finally I got both boots off and put them on a T-shirt on the floor. My mother glared at me for a last time, then left the room. I immediately wanted to tell Anna about it, so I went to my computer. I saw that she had sent me an e-mail:

 

 

She knew that I couldn’t understand French (and she couldn’t either, as far as I knew), but she left it to me to translate.

carl is dead

“Why don’t you write Carl’s obituary?” she said. I didn’t want to. “Come on,” she said. “I need it for my notebook. You know him better than I do. You can do a better job than I can.”

In the end, I wrote it. I wrote it twice. In the first one, I had him dying old and rich, after a happy life with plenty of money and no worries. He was married and lived in a big mansion, and was friends with everyone. Anna didn’t like it.

“It’s not very interesting,” she said. “There’s not a lot of detail either. I mean, it could be anybody’s. Tell me about Carl. Make it interesting. Make him interesting. And have him die young. Like now. Write an obituary as if Carl died now.”