Ice Storm

by Cadle, Lou

“My real name is Raysan, and I’ve never figured out how to get ahead of that.”

  “Like Japanese? Ray-san?” Her voice dropped to a theatrical whisper. “A lesson learned without pain is meaningless, Ray-san.”

  He laughed. He’d never heard that before, though it sounded like something from anime. Coming from her, it was a teasing comment he didn’t mind. “Do I look Japanese?”

  “No, you look”—she considered for a long ten seconds—“Greek Cypriot. No, or you’re from Malta? Or Algeria?”

  “Wrong.”

  “What are you, then? Ethnically, if that’s not rude.”

  His eyes drifted back to the fire. The tension in the firefighters was visibly easing. There were still two guys on the roof, but they didn’t seem so busy. The fire must be out.

  Ray said to the girl, “It’s not rude. My mom’s white. My dad is part South African black, part Boer, part Ceylonese, part Malaysian.”

  “He’s boring?” she said.

  Ray laughed. “Sometimes. Usually! But I meant—”

  “I know what you meant. Boer, right? Like the Boer Wars. I got that from South Africa.”

  So she was smart—and knowledgeable. Ray liked that in a girl. “I’m taking AP World History with Mr. Hardin this year. You should take it next year if you like history.”

  “Maybe I will. I have to get through this year first.” Her tone of voice suggested that wasn’t a sure thing.

  The front door to her house opened. “Julia, get in here! You aren’t dressed to be outside.”

  “Sorry,” she said to Ray and turned to go.

  “Hey, do you game much?” he said to her back.

  She turned to face him but kept walking backward toward her house. “A little. Skyrim mostly. See you around.”

  “Yeah,” he said, hoping he would. She had seemed too tall and awfully pale at first, not to mention geeky with those glasses, but he was geeky too. She was sort of cute. He smiled at the mother standing inside the doorway and gave her a friendly wave, trying to make a good first impression, not that it mattered. He’d likely never have a chance to make a second impression.

  He waited alone, missing Julia’s company, watching until the fire was obviously out and the drama over. The woman firefighter called to him, “You should get inside before the weather gets worse. It’s going to be bad out here in an hour or two.” She pointed at a tree right by him. He looked up and saw that ice was sticking to its branches now, a thin coating of clear crystal. It’d glitter if the sun came out. But the sky was dark gray, darker than it was when he got out of school. And the sleet was coming down harder.

  She loaded a coiled line of hose onto the truck. When she finished, she glanced his way and frowned. “You close to home?”

  “Yeah, I live just over on Verdun.” He pointed.

  “So do we. Moved there this year. What block are you on?”

  He told her.

  “We’re about three blocks up from you. Nice neighborhood.”

  He shrugged. There weren’t shootings or anything like that, and there were elsewhere in the city, so he supposed it was nice, but none of the houses on his block was a palace. Regular people lived there, not rich people, just regular people like him and his mom.

  “Go on now. Your folks will be worrying what with the weather turning bad, so get home soon.”

  He aimed toward home, but had only moved two blocks from the fire when he saw a car go out of control.

  Chapter 4

  He turned onto a side street, and noticed the sidewalk was a bit slicker underfoot here. Because of less traffic or because it was more shaded or what? The roads must have been slicker too, because an SUV took the corner and kept turning, slipping out of control, its rear end swinging around, as if anxious to reach the destination sooner than the front of the car.

  As it swung close to him, Ray hopped back, lost his footing, and went down. The car swept past him without touching him. He was back on his feet before he could think, driven by adrenaline rather than thought.

  He saw the panicked face of the driver, who turned the steering wheel one way, then the other, fast both times. Not that it mattered. The car was going where the car was going, no matter what she did now. It skidded around until it was faced entirely backward, and in almost a movie sort of slo-mo, slid right toward an older car, something really long and American, with four doors. The SUV’s back end hit it with a crunch, and it came to a stop, the engine still running.

  Ray’s logical brain re-engaged and told him it was physics, all of it, the skid, the momentum, the stopping when meeting a fixed object that wanted to stay at rest. He only had freshman general science, but he knew the basic physics of it anyway. His heart was pounding, and had been from just after the moment he’d been afraid it might hit him, but he wasn’t feeling afraid now. His body was slow to catch up to that fact.

  A man came boiling out of a house, wearing only a T-shirt and frayed jeans. “You hit my car!” he shouted.

  Ray moved into the street to see better, keeping well back from the angry man, and looked at where the cars met. Her car had taken most of the damage. And the guy’s car was ancient, older than Ray, for sure. The man pulled at the woman’s car handle, and she flinched back. But the doors must have been locked, and he couldn’t get in.

  “You stupid bitch!” the man screamed.

  Ray had no idea why he was so angry. It was an accident, really something that was unavoidable once the skid started. It’s not like she had aimed for the other car.

  The woman fumbled around and came up with something she held in front of her face—a cellphone, he guessed. She was probably dialing 911. He sure would be. The man kept yelling, “It’s your fault!” and calling her names.

  Actually it was nobody’s fault, but Ray wasn’t going to argue with a crazy man, and right now, that man was crazy angry. Ray’s mom didn’t yell at him, not like that, and usually when she raised her voice at all, she stopped at “Damn it, Ray,” before she took a deep breath and had herself under control again. His dad didn’t yell ever, and spoke so softly you had to lean in to hear him, happy or angry or however he felt. And though Ray heard yelling at school often enough, it still scared him. He didn’t know why people got so angry. But they sure did.

  The guy in the t-shirt could have a gun, he realized. If he did, Ray couldn’t—shouldn’t—do anything to help the woman. Though even with no gun, the angry guy could pound the crap out of him. Ray backed off, pulled out his cellphone, and took video of the crazy guy screaming at the woman. He kept backing off as he recorded it.

  “Hey, you!” the man said to Ray, catching sight of him filming. Ray turned tail and ran. Two lies today and one act of cowardice. A pretty average day where he failed to be the person he wanted to be.

  He did stop a block later, saved the video, and called the police—not 911, after a moment of consideration, but the general number—to tell them to come and help the woman. The phone rang and rang, no one answering. Finally, he gave up. The woman would have gotten through to the police by now, and either she’d have figured out to drive away from the yelling guy, or the guy would have calmed down. Right?

  Right, he insisted to himself. He stood where he was, though, listening. There weren’t any gunshots, at least, so that was good news. He couldn’t hear any yelling, either, so probably the guy had worn himself out by now. Or gotten cold and gone inside.

  He checked his phone again and closed out of the camera app. It was only 4:02. Seemed like a whole day had passed since AP History, not two hours. He headed for home, crunching through the fallen sleet that was starting to stick to the sidewalk.

  Turning the last corner onto his own block, he saw, coming toward him from the opposite direction, the weird old lady on his block. Not crazy, really, but strange. Certainly not crazy like that screaming man had been. But the woman didn’t seem to care what she wore, and her front yard wasn’t a lawn but a garden, and she had sometimes gardened out there in a nightgown. Not a see-thro
ugh nightgown, thankfully, but a nightshirt, like in an illustration of Scrooge from a childhood book he’d had. She was usually barefoot in the summer. Other times, when she wasn’t in that nightshirt thing, she wore stuff in strange patterns, and clothes that were mismatched. In winter, she wore hats like he’d never seen anyone else wear. She had been beating a drum on her front porch once. Not crazy, probably. And not angry like that ranting man. The lady was just a little… off.

  But they were going to pass each other at her front walkway, so he prepared to be polite. “Hi,” he said.

  “Raysan,” she said. She must have overheard his mother calling him that.

  “Ray.” He’d convinced him mom to register him that way in high school so that he didn’t get extra hassle about his name, but somehow despite trying to leave it behind, it stuck to him anyway.

  She was pulling a kid’s wagon loaded with a tote bag of probably groceries and a case of bottled water. “You have plenty of food for the storm?” she asked him.

  “Sure. Mom cooks ahead on weekends. Lots of meals in the freezer.”

  “But plenty of crackers, peanut butter, apples? Food that doesn’t have to be cooked if your power goes out? Water in bottles and soda or juice?”

  “Yeah, we have that.” He thought so. And sliced cheese in the fridge. Peanuts. Maybe even a few oatmeal cookies were left from his mom’s batch this weekend. They weren’t that good because she cooked healthy, which meant not much sugar went into her cookies, and they were more like tall crackers, or some weird hybrid child of cookie and cracker.

  “Good. You’d better get inside then before it really starts coming down.”

  “Do you need help with your groceries, ma’am?”

  “Just Eve. No ‘ma’am’ needed.”

  “I can carry them up your front steps.” He glanced at them. They were painted wood, and the lowest two were glazed over.

  “I’ll manage. Thanks all the same,” she said, and she turned up her front sidewalk.

  Ray walked the two doors down to his house but turned to make sure she was okay. She was standing in the garden to the side of the steps, where her footing was secure, and loading the case of water onto her porch next to the bag she’d put there. She wrestled the wagon up. She came around and went up the three steps to her house, holding tight to the railing. She had been right; she had managed just fine. His own house’s front landing had one concrete step up, not yet too icy, and he took it, got out his keys from the outer pocket of his backpack, and pushed the key into the lock.

  He was home.

  After dumping his pack on the counter and hanging his jacket over the back of a kitchen chair, he opened the fridge and inventoried it, curious after the neighbor had asked him if they had food. Not super-full. His mom shopped every two weeks and was due to shop again in two days. But there was a block of cheese, half-eaten, about six thin slices of deli ham, apples, and oranges. A loaf of wholegrain bread, two-thirds gone. Something in a covered plastic bowl. He checked. It was a vegetable salad that she took to work for her lunch, so off limits to him. Milk for cereal, just a couple of inches left. He grabbed an apple and ate it while he looked through the choices of meals in the freezer, labeled neatly in his mom’s handwriting. Pork loin-squash-cooked apple. Meatloaf-green beans-boiled potatoes. Roasted chicken-mashed potatoes-broccoli. Ham and cheese casserole, and though it didn’t say so on the label, she usually put spinach or kale into that. That was all that was in the freezer except for a half a package of corn kernels. The ham casserole sounded best right now, but he might change his mind in an hour.

  He carried his backpack into his room, logged onto his computer, and uploaded the video of the angry guy yelling at the car wreck into a video editor. He played around with it a bit, making a version with the guy’s face blurred out, but it wasn’t funny or interesting enough to bother uploading to YouTube. And he’d been too far away because he’d been scared of the guy for it to be a good video. Most of the frame was filled with the street and sidewalks.

  He hoped that woman who’d skidded her car was okay now, was home and safe and her car was in the shop and all that. Maybe he should have tried to help her somehow. But after another few minutes of worrying about it, he couldn’t see a way he could have. He thought about calling the police again, but it made no sense to do it at this point. Her situation would be resolved by now. But he saved the video just in case. Maybe they’d need it for evidence or something.

  Next he opened his computer journal, putting in the password, a lyric from an Arctic Monkeys song he liked last summer separated by the last four digits of his cellphone number rather than by spaces. He’d have to pick another song this summer and change his password. He had a chart going at the top of his journal. The date was already entered, and he put in “2” under the column for lies and “1” under the column for screw-ups. There was a column for good stuff, to counteract the bad, but he couldn’t think of anything to put there. He’d give himself one for carrying the old lady’s groceries, but she hadn’t let him, so that wasn’t fair. An offer of helping wasn’t enough. He had to actually help. Avoiding getting hassled or beat up didn’t count. It was a good thing for him, granted, but not something he instigated and saw through, just a reaction to a situation. Maybe meeting that girl counted, but really, no, because it was a happy accident, she spoke first, and it might come to nothing, not love, not friendship, maybe not even to her remembering his name. The most he could credit himself for was not being too shy to talk back to her. Probably not worth a full point.

  He had gone to the gaming console and turned it on when he remembered the A on the history paper. Would that qualify as a good thing? Mmmmmmm-no. It was only school, and it has been assigned to him. If he wrote an article and had it published on Medium or something, he’d count that. If he did an extra-credit assignment, sure. But not routine homework. Maybe he’d crack a hard level on a game for his good thing. The day wasn’t over yet, so he had a chance at that.

  Ninety minutes later, hunger pangs forced him to stop gaming. The light outside had faded toward dusk, and there were no lights on in his room but the glowing screen. He stood, stretched, and flipped on his bedroom light, then the hall light, the bathroom light while he peed, and then the kitchen light. The ham and cheese casserole went into the microwave on reheat.

  When it was ready, he took his microwaved meal and a fork to the TV and turned it on to a local station’s evening news. They were talking about the weather, even during the news part. There were shots of wrecks way worse than the little one he’d seen, though nobody was shown screaming at anyone else, and there was a long line of headlights on a highway, not moving. A panning shot showed the container ships in the harbor glazed with ice. Hot female reporters stood in fuzzy-hooded jackets and fake-frowned while they talked about police and wreckers and road conditions. Old guys in offices were interviewed about what was being done to help stranded motorists. A fleet of power company trucks was shown from earlier—it was still daylight in the video, so it had to be earlier—as the newspeople reassured everyone that when the power went out, those trucks would be out there filled with people to fix it.

  The power was fine right now. But they sounded like it was a sure thing it wouldn’t be. Not that you could entirely trust the news. But he wondered if he should do anything to prepare for the power going out. He thought of his cellphone, and during a commercial break went to plug it in. Good thing he’d had the thought. The battery was low.

  He had eaten the whole container of food, enough for both his mom and himself, though she often threw together a bagged salad or canned fruit salad to stretch out the meal for them both. He was stuffed.

  After he had run water into the plastic container his dinner had been in and left it to soak, he went to the back window while the news played on in the background. Not much was visible out back. Around in front, the streetlights were on. What he could see out there through his windows in the streetlight was pretty, with the trees all covered
in a coating of ice and the streetlight glinting off nearby limbs. Sleet—or freezing rain, the news called it—was still falling.

  He went back to the sofa to watch the weather forecast. It must be real and serious because the weather guy wasn’t being all jokey like usual. “The worst ice storm to hit Virginia in years,” he called it. “The frozen precipitation will fall at least through ten tomorrow morning, and depending on how much the front moves tomorrow, maybe until nightfall tomorrow.” He was pointing to the map, with its front boundary lines and red “L” for the lowest pressure. The forecast low temperature was 30, and the forecast high for tomorrow was 33 degrees. That was weird, them being so close, wasn’t it? The weather guy must have read the question in Ray’s mind because he explained that’s why freezing rain would fall rather than snow. If it got colder, it’d snow. If it got warmer, it’d rain. Hovering right around freezing would make it turn into freezing rain or sleet. But no matter what exactly fell, something wet and cold was going to fall out of the sky onto them for at least the next two days.

  The news ended and some old sitcom came on, so he turned off the TV. He checked his phone for texts and sent a short one off to Brew. After five minutes, there was no reply. He was probably busy with his family.

  Normally, Ray could stay inside all night and entertain himself with YouTube or gaming or reading or drawing, though he wasn’t very good at drawing. But the walls of the house brought a sense of oppression tonight. He felt mildly stir-crazy, part boredom, with a touch of nervousness about being alone. Mostly, though, it was a kind of rebellion that drove him. He shouldn’t go outside so he wanted to go outside. The urge grew fast until he couldn’t fight it any longer. He grabbed his jacket off the chair and yanked it on. He wouldn’t take his key or lock the door, and he wouldn’t go far. He just wanted to get out of here and stand in open air.

  The instant he opened the door, he heard the sleet. It sounded like heavy rain, but crisper. And he felt it, hitting his head. It melted pretty quickly on his face, but in the streetlights, he could see it wasn’t melting anywhere else. The tree branches illuminated by lights were coated, gleaming unnaturally. Though it was natural, wasn’t it? Simply Nature being Nature, a more natural form of ice than ice cubes in the freezer.