The Ice Storm (23 page)

When Paul reached the panels on the bottom half of page thirty-one, it was as if the entire day, the entire vacation even, were leading up to a single moment. He felt certain then that Stan Lee was in some direct communication with the universe—in the way, say, that The Watcher, that most mysterious Marvel character, was content like some Gnostic entity merely
to know
of the machinations of creation—and that through Lee's spiritually advanced vision, Paul's own destiny was entrapped in the monthly serializations of these kitschy superheroes. He seemed both influenced and influencer in the world of Marvel.

So Reed blasted his son. In his haste and confusion, he used an untested weapon with all the ionizing force of antimatter particles on his own son. The alien glow in Franklin's eyes dimmed, ending the danger of the moment, dimming in him the ancient soup of the Big Bang. But with it went the life in Franklin's eyes, the twinkle of his joyous and questing cognition. To be replaced by darkness.

“What have you done, Reed? You've turned your own son into a vegetable. Your own son!…”

The last panel showed them all—Sue, with Franklin in her arms like some lifeless marionette, Wyatt Wingfoot, Johnny Storm, Medusa, and Ben—turned away from Reed. Reed, devastated, wordless at the enormity of his slaughter. The end of the Fantastic Four. The end. Until next month.

Then the lights on the train dimmed, sputtered, and fell dark. The engine rolled casually to a stop. Paul knew, having logged a number of hours on the New Haven line, that this was just part of electrical train travel. But after ten minutes in emergency lighting he wasn't as sure. Soon these lights, too, began to dim. Ominous darkness. A conductor hurried past Paul's seat, carrying a flashlight, and the other sleepers in his car stirred, turning restlessly, as though, in their dreams, they were being roasted on spits. Out the window, Paul could see the lights along I-95, where the slush was piled far into the lanes. The train was disabled somewhere between Port Chester and Greenwich. The snow fell, a relentless piece of bad news, and the cars crawled along, skidding and spinning. This wasn't a simple delay. When the conductor appeared at the end of the car and gave them the news—'
Fraid we got a downed power line, hope to have it fixed shortly
—mumbling because he no more believed the news than did the restless sleepers in that car, Paul knew he was here to stay.

So he dredged the awful bottom of his loneliness, because the train was as void and still as a sensory-deprivation tank. There was nothing else to do.

He had been on every platform on the Connecticut section of the ride. He had carved his initials in the men's room in Greenwich; he had sat on the fenders of the station cars parked in Darien; he had snuck into the bars in Cos Cob, urinated on the bushes by the station in Westport, flirted with the little girls in Rowayton and Old Greenwich. And he had traversed the southwestern part of the state by car on I-95. It was a noxious artery, more like an intestine, really, a bearer of wastes and bacteria. He knew the hotel between Darien and Stamford that had a Nixon banner on it all through the election; he knew the exact location of each and every HoJo's between here and New Haven; he knew Norwalk Harbor and Five Mile River and Cos Cob Harbor, and the bridges there; he knew the way I-95 came down a hill into Norwalk, the way it divided in New Haven, he knew its view of the Baxter Building as the train pulled into downtown Stamford.

He knew all this, but it didn't change his situation. His short, privileged life on the golden corridor of Fairfield County made no difference to the storm outside. It was different when you were being driven through these towns, or when you were just idling in the train stations for an hour or two. Now he was stranded. He was a stranded kid, a kid on the verge of not being a kid anymore. A kid who would be getting his license soon. A loser from a family of losers. And he was near Port Chester, the only stop on the New Haven line that had a lot of Afro-American residents.

Paul Hood had met a few of them, black people. Though there were none in his elementary school—East School—there were five in Saxe Junior High when he was there. They all came from the middle of town, from the rented rooms above Fat Tuesday's or Pic-a-Pants. Three of them were girls, and they kept pretty much to themselves. When he looked back in his yearbook, in fact, he could never really remember seeing them at all. Except maybe eating cafeteria pizza in a little lunchroom clump. Probably they were so scared they skipped school. The guys, on the other hand, the two black guys were unavoidable. Brian Harris ruled Saxe Junior High. He wore his hair long, in a Black Panther Afro, and this spooked everybody. And he was a superior athlete, but maybe only because every white kid in New Canaan had been brought up to believe that Afro-Americans were superior athletes. This was something Paul's dad had actually told him. In basketball, Brian Harris had developed this double-pump reverse lay-up thing that some white guys were trying hard to copy. All he had to do was walk to the basket—they just let him through. Harris was a walking god in Saxe Junior High. A superhero. They worshiped him.

The other black guy was Logan Krieg and he had a reading problem or something. He had constantly looked over Paul's shoulder in English class. Krieg panicked visibly in class. When he began coming into school drunk or wasted, only the teachers were surprised. Krieg turned all the letters around in his assignments. He wrote baby writing. And then he pleaded with guys he didn't even know, with white students, to cover up for him. Because he was trying to stay out of the special-ed class. He didn't want to be in class with the retards. They all knew he was lying in class, lying about having done the homework, lying about having been sick, lying all the time, caught in this thick web of deceits, until he was immobilized by it. And then he was gone. Dropped out, shipped off somewhere, who knew? He wasn't
friends
with anybody, really.

That was Paul's experience with black kids. There were a few at St. Pete's and they all stuck together, too. They were brilliant and militant. For the rest of his information, Paul had to rely on reports from the idiot box.
The Rookies
had a black actor on it, and there was
Sanford and Son
. And in the dimly lit mausoleum that was his 11:10 Stamford Local, he remembered watching the news one night with his father, the night Angela Davis was acquitted. From the Naugahyde reclining chair that was his dad's chief consolation, Benjamin called out listessly, drunkenly, at the screen:
Fucking communist dyke cunt
—

Port Chester—where he was stranded—was something else altogether. Had Paul been able to leave the train then, to walk beneath its glittering electromagnetic force field, he would have trod streets without a white face on them. He had heard about places like this. These streets were the reason, probably, that his mother had repeatedly told him, when he was a kid, about a friend of hers who had set about crossing the railroad tracks. He had climbed up over an electric train, this boy, shortcutting from one side of the town to the other, and, on top of the train he had
stood
. To get a better view, maybe, or to feel the aggrandizement of standing on a train. But he had died in the process, of course. This story was where Paul had learned about electromagnetism. Because when the guy stood up he hit the voltage lines. The lines running over the train.

After forty-five minutes, the conductor reappeared to tell Hood and the other sleepers the news.

—Ladies and gentlemen, afraid we still don't know when the train will be moving. Best thing is to just stay put here in the car and we'll advise you as soon as we hear anything.

Down to the other end to repeat the announcement.

The next hours, in the deep part of the night, were as slow and ominous as the hours in a hospital waiting room. The emergency lighting dwindled and the sleepers in Paul's car turned uneasily, cursing under their breaths. He wanted that oblivion of sleep but he couldn't manage it. He was beginning to shake a little bit from the cold. He could see his own breath. And he was scared.

Then, sometime in the early morning, a large, hulking shape moved down the corridor. Paul was jumpy, he was expecting the kinetic bad guys of comic books. But it was just an older guy from the next car, a grizzled, gin-soaked—looking guy. In the blue glow of the fading emergency lights, the guy looked a little bit like Stan Lee, creator of the F.F. He was part C.I.A. operative, part elementary school teacher. He was fat, sinister, and jovial, and he fell into the seat across the aisle from Paul.

Paul didn't know what to expect. He figured he was going to be attacked now, or raped, and that he deserved it. After Libbets.

—Seen the John anywhere, young man? the C.I.A. dude said.

—Excelsior, Paul said. Dunno, next car maybe.

The man had a good laugh over something. He hacked up some gunk from deep in himself.

—Hell of a train ride, huh?

Paul nodded. Not wanting to say anything, not wanting to encourage the rapist. But then he did anyway.

—Wish I had a flashlight. Or maybe some lantern, some kinda camping lantern. And some freeze-dried stuff. And a battery-powered record player, a Close-and-Play, and a bunch of forty-fives or something. And comic books.

The man leaned over the aisle.

—And a girl, he said. A little company.

—I wish I was home, Paul said. That's the truth.

The man nodded. The highway was empty, out the window. Sanding trucks inched along.

—You're going to New Canaan, I think, he said. I have a feeling about that. I think I have met your parents once or twice. I think I knew you since you were yea-high. Huh? Like they always say? Yep. That's right.

He told Paul his name. William something.

—Nope, Paul said, I'm … from Stamford. Citizen of Stamford.

Paul was wondering when the conductor might be coming back.

—That so? My mistake. Not Ben's son then, huh? My mistake. Well, I was going to offer to give you a ride when we get there. If we get there. But if you're only going right into town, I won't be much help. Unless you want to share a taxi or—

—No, Paul interrupted him emphatically, my parents will be waiting for me.

—Waiting for you after all this?

—Well, that's what I'm hoping.

—I see.

The older man heaved himself up into the aisle then, and suddenly Paul could see his baggy eyes, his thick neck, his gray, metallic flesh. Up close. The man loomed over him. He clapped a hand on Paul's shoulder. Breath like formaldehyde. This guy was an emissary from Dr. Doom. Only way to explain it.

—I'm guessing you don't want a serious conversation, Paul. That's my guess. And that's fine by me. Have to visit the head in any case. But you have a safe journey.

—Hey, I—

—If you want a ride or something when we arrive, you just look me up. Back a car.

—I'll do that, Paul said.

As the door slammed shut behind the man, Paul gathered himself up and ran back, as far in the opposite direction as he could, past the sleepers and their uncomfortable dreams, waking some as he hurried.
Rapist
, Paul thought,
murderer
. He settled two cars back. He buried his head under his tweed jacket. The things that went through his mind were the things he would have tried to put down, the thoughts he would have purged on a better day. He was thinking about the fellowship of modern sex criminals, guys who got off on the sound of women's screams, elderly men sucking the cocks of little, fat boys, guys who beat up fags and got erections while they did so. Then he was thinking not of Logan Krieg, but of another guy who used to copy from his papers in class, a guy who used to threaten him at Saxe Junior High. Skip Maundy. Maundy used to stop Paul on the way to the cafeteria to demand his lunch money. Since Paul had led his parents to believe that school lunches cost a dollar, though the actual cost was only seventy-five cents, Paul gave Maundy the profit. In order to avoid being beaten up. So Maundy waited for him every day, making jokes like
Hey, Paulie, we've got to stop meeting like this!
HA! HA! HA! HA!

Then Maundy moved into the academic arena with Paul. Coming down the long hallway that ran along the gym, he would break free from his platoon of handlers and harass Hood over by the water fountain.
Pass your test over to me during math. Just do it
. Maundy always smiled during these demands, as though he were engaged in an act of philanthropy.

Paul wished, as in after-school specials, that he had lived to see Maundy brought low, or that he would learn of some terrible tragedy in the Maundy family—his father's cancer, his mother's alcoholism—that would explain their son, the thug. But Paul never told anyone about the situation. He never turned Maundy in. He just took it.

Wendy also lived with the responsibility of isolation in public school. He had seen public school kids turn away rather than talk to her; he had heard her called
whore
and
freak
by the children of judges and social workers. In the dark, under his tweed jacket, Paul got stuck, all over again, on his parents and their chemistry. What kinds of genes gave him a life like this?

And the truth was that the story of Skip Maundy did have a conclusion. Later on, at New Canaan High, Maundy apparently dallied with a retarded girl in one of the lavatories. It was that girl Sarah Joe Holmes. Here's what they said: that Maundy had
pissed on her
, held her down and pissed on her. That was the alleged crime. Held her down, exposed himself, pissed on her, and then smoked a cigarette. Maybe it was just a story someone concocted to explain a horrible situation. But maybe, on the other hand, the miracle of inheritance had produced a guy who felt comfortable in this crime. Paul went over the story again and again.

How did Sarah Joe account for that moment, that moment when the urine splashed across her face and smock, puddling around her? Was Skip sad about it, afterward, the way Paul was sad about Libbets? Paul didn't know.