by Alan Cumyn
Uncle Lorne had been in the war and was still nervous, even though it had been over for many years. He’d spent a lot of his time fixing boilers down in the bellies of ships. Since the war Uncle Lorne had worked fixing boilers in buildings, and usually he smelled like a boiler. That’s how he was most comfortable, oily and alone. Mrs. Foster brought over some ginger cookies one evening and Uncle Lorne dropped them on the kitchen floor, his hands were shaking so much. Then he stepped on the cookies by mistake, his feet were so big.
Owen knew he didn’t want to end up like Uncle Lorne. So he steeled himself about getting used to girls. He didn’t want to leave it too late. Every morning when he woke up he said to himself, “Today I will talk to Sylvia.” He repeated it while he was getting dressed for school. He would look in the mirror with his comb in his hand and say, “Hello, Sylvia, how are you today?”
It was easy in the mirror. When he was walking down the lane to school he’d look very closely at the weather and practice saying, “It’s a pretty day, isn’t it?” or, “Kind of cold, eh?” He would have about a mile to practice whichever phrase he thought was most appropriate. By then he would be in the village and close to the cross-street where Sylvia lived. She only had to walk about a hundred yards to the school.
One day Owen arrived at the corner at exactly the same time as Sylvia.
She wore a blazing orange ski jacket and red boots that made her look like fire against the snow banks. Owen fell into step with her. It became blazingly hot. Owen caught her eye and got ready to say, “I heard it was supposed to snow.” But when he opened his mouth odd blocks of noise came out — “spoozzleo” and then “h-h-hurditsno” — and he panicked. He sped up and pretended he hadn’t said a thing to her. He was quickly several paces ahead, but then was facing a red light. He considered plunging into traffic. But his feet stopped for him, and then he was trapped, Sylvia beside him again. She did not look at him, and he did not look at her, and it took hours for the light to turn green.
Owen’s heart pounded for the rest of the day. “Why was I so stupid?” he asked himself. “Was it so hard to just say one simple thing to her?” Impossible. He was as bad as Uncle Lorne, and would end up living alone in a basement reading car magazines.
On the walk home Owen raced ahead of Sylvia, hoping that maybe she’d be impressed by his speed at least. That night he gave himself a long lecture before going to sleep, and in the morning his mind was full again of the easy things he could say when he saw her.
But he kept missing her for the next several days. When he finally did get to walk beside her again he found himself blurting out, “Nuttle-rug!” Then he pretended to be clearing his throat and looked in the other direction.
Owen wanted to ask someone what to do, how to handle this impossible situation. But his brothers would have made fun of him, and his father would never have understood. It seemed, though, that Uncle Lorne might know about this sort of hopelessness.
One night Owen found himself drawn to the basement, where Lorne had retreated. Owen crept down the creaky stairs. Uncle Lorne seemed like a deer in the forest that you had to approach quietly. He looked up as soon as Owen’s head appeared. He wasn’t on his cot reading magazines, as Owen expected, but hunched over the old workbench.
“What do you want?” he demanded. He was using his body to shield part of the workbench from view.
“Nothing,” Owen said. He sat on the stairs. He was trying to think of how to ask his question, of what his question might be.
After awhile Uncle Lorne seemed to forget that he was there, and went back to work. He was using an old pocket knife to carve a block of wood. Owen couldn’t imagine what it was supposed to be. But he sat transfixed, staring at the long, strong fingers, the worn, black, razor-sharp blade, the curls of wood shavings coming off the block and falling to the floor.
The next evening Owen came back. Lorne didn’t seem to mind him watching from the stairs. Night after night something odd and beautiful began to emerge from the block of wood. It was a bowl of some sort, with intricate gargoyle faces peering over the rim. It had a rounded bottom now and strange grooves. Lorne carved and shaped, then sanded it smooth. Then he oiled and varnished and polished it, over and over. He muttered to himself sometimes, but rarely said a word to Owen. The silence became something that they seemed to share.
One afternoon Mrs. Foster visited. She brought some more ginger cookies and her hair looked less dusty than usual. Within a minute of entering the kitchen she asked Margaret whether Lorne was in.
Margaret said, “I don’t know. He’s so quiet that sometimes I have no idea if he’s in or away.” She turned to Owen. “Go and see if your uncle’s in.”
Owen went down the stairs. The gargoyle creation was gleaming on the workbench, stained a beautiful dark brown. Owen approached it carefully, looked at it in awe.
“What do you want?” Lorne asked, and Owen whirled around. There he was on the cot!
“Mrs. Foster’s here,” Owen said quickly. “She wants to see you!”
“What?” Lorne sat up with such a jolt that he nearly upended the cot. He ran a big dirty hand through his hair and blew out a hard breath, as if he had just been punched in the stomach.
“I’m not here,” he said.
When Owen told her, Mrs. Foster made a little noise, “O.” Then she and Margaret talked about knitting, and the boys ate ginger cookies.
Some minutes later Uncle Lorne suddenly appeared in the kitchen and thrust the carving at Mrs. Foster. She screamed and put her hand up, as if he was trying to hit her.
“I thought you weren’t here?” she said. “What’s this? ”
He seemed unable to speak.
“Thank you, Lorne,” she said. She recovered and took the thing from him gently. “It’s an ashtray.”
“For your daughters,” he said, too loud.
“But they don’t smoke!”
Owen could see from the knots in Lorne’s eyebrows that he hadn’t meant to say that at all, that he’d meant something completely different. But he was so confused, he probably thought he could never possibly explain himself now. So he said, “Hahh!” Then he grabbed back the ashtray and retreated down to the basement.
In the morning Owen found the ashtray in the garbage. He slipped it into his schoolbag. He couldn’t bear to think of his uncle throwing out something he’d worked on so hard, something so strange and fascinating. But it also seemed to have interesting powers, like Doom Monkey’s Atrocious Hat. The longer Owen carried it in his bag, the more confident he felt.
Then one morning, Sylvia reached the corner just as he was looking up.
“Not so chilly today,” Owen said, right in her direction.
Sylvia said, “What?” and he repeated the phrase perfectly. Then they walked together the complete hundred yards to school, without saying another word.
Some days later, when they met at the corner again, he was able to say, “It’s very sunny,” without getting any of the words wrong. Then the next week he said, “Pretty windy today,” and she was able to understand every word.
They never said anything else after that, but it meant that he could walk beside her until the school door. Sometimes during the day she glanced across the room at him.
Then he got an invitation to her birthday party. It was a hand-made card of blue construction paper with a big picture of a cake on it, carefully colored. Inside it said Owen’s name, the date and time of the party, and the address of her house.
He put the invitation in his schoolbag, looking in every so often to make sure it was still there. The glory of it burned inside him for days. Now at night instead of giving himself a stern lecture about being a coward, he said to himself, “I’m going to Sylvia’s party!”
The party was the following Saturday, but he had to keep it a secret. When the day arrived he watched the clock closely. He knew that he had to l
eave by twenty to two if he was going to get there at two o’clock.
At one-thirty his mother told everybody to get their coats on because they were driving into town to buy new shoes.
“I don’t need new shoes!” Owen said, but his mother said that he did.
“But I can’t!” he blurted.
“Why not?”
Owen tried to think of a quick lie but nothing came to him. Soon the whole story was out.
“You’re going to a girl’s birthday party?” Andy asked, and without waiting he and Leonard ran around screaming, “Girl’s party! Girl’s party! Girl’s party!”
Margaret said, “You’re certainly not going dressed like that!” She marched him upstairs to strip off his old clothes and wash his neck and behind his ears. Then she forced him into gray flannel pants and a scratchy collared shirt with a fussy clip-on bow tie and a blue blazer jacket. Then she made him put on his shiny black shoes which really were too small.
“Girl’s party! Girl’s party!” sang his brothers.
“Did you get a present?” Margaret asked. “What time does it start?”
“Two o’clock,” Owen said. The question about the present took him by surprise. He’d forgotten completely!
“I did get a present,” he said, to shut everyone up. His mother offered to drive him to Sylvia’s house but Owen said he could get there on his own. He didn’t want his brothers seeing where Sylvia lived.
He put on his winter coat, which didn’t completely cover the tails of his blazer, and pulled his boots on over his cramped shoes. Then he went off in the wrong direction, to confuse his brothers, and doubled back through the woods when he was out of sight. He had his school bag with him, and secretly he’d put in some wrapping paper and tape.
In the woods he wrapped up Uncle Lorne’s hand-carved ashtray. Then he ran the full mile to Sylvia’s house and arrived only about ten minutes late, puffing and sweating, his feet sore in those tight shoes and the flannel pants rubbing roughly against his legs.
He was the only boy at the party! There were six girls, including Sylvia, all in pink dresses with pink or white tights and shiny, buckle-up shoes. Sylvia’s house was beautifully new and clean, with no holes in the roof, and the basement was just like the upstairs. It had carpets and paneling, a leather sofa and a huge dollhouse where Sylvia and her friends spent most of the afternoon.
Owen stayed upstairs helping Sylvia’s mother ice the cake. Every so often he would go downstairs and look at the girls. The dollhouse had a doll living-room set and a doll kitchen and even a doll bathroom with a toilet and a sink.
It was as if Owen had come from a different planet and didn’t understand the language of these aliens. So all he could do was watch for awhile, then go back upstairs.
He fit in better when the cake was served. He ate six pieces one after another, a personal record. Then it was time to open the presents.
The pink girls huddled around Sylvia while she unwrapped two brand-new dolls, a tea set, a brush and comb set, and a flowery book with blank pages to record her secret thoughts. Then it was time to open Owen’s present.
It was pretty heavy, and because he’d wrapped it in a hurry in the woods it almost fell out of the paper by itself. Sylvia turned it around and looked at the gargoyles and the little grooves for the cigarettes. Some of the girls started laughing.
Sylvia looked at Owen for the first time in the whole party and said, “What’s this supposed to be?”
Owen felt worse than Uncle Lorne in the kitchen with Mrs. Foster. He tried to think of what to say, but now everybody was laughing. The laughter spread faster than the fire in the ditch, ugly and unstoppable. Why had he ever thought of giving her Uncle Lorne’s ashtray?
Owen ran over to Sylvia, grabbed the ashtray, then held it high in the air.
“I am Doom Monkey the Unpredictable!” he announced. “And this is my Atrocious Hat!”
He plunked the ashtray on his head and raced around the house. The girls had no choice but to chase him and try to capture the source of his extraordinary powers. Even though they were girls and fast runners, they were slowed down by their long dresses and for hours he managed to squirm out of their grasp.
At the end of the party, furniture was tipped over, there was cake and ice cream in the carpet and on the walls, in hair and on flannel pants and dripping from pink puffed sleeves. The dollhouse had been raided and restored three times, and the Western Hemisphere had been kept safe for civilization.
“Thank you for your wonderful present,” Sylvia’s mother said at the door when Owen was leaving. Sylvia nodded her head a little bit. She was wearing the ashtray and the gargoyles were hanging upside down. “Did you make it yourself?” Sylvia’s mother asked.
“It was made in the canyons before the beginning of Time,” Owen said. “And will survive the swirling of a billion storms!”
“Well, it sounds very special,” Sylvia’s mother said. Sylvia seemed to be holding her breath, waiting for him to go.
“It held a hunchback’s heart and has been used by the Emperors of China and Bolivia,” he continued. Now that he was brave enough to talk in front of Sylvia, it seemed he couldn’t shut up.
“I’m sure she’ll treasure it,” Sylvia’s mother said.
“As long as she dreams of true love and stays away from switchback roads in moonlight,” he said, “it will provide extra-terrestrial protection!”
“What?”
It seemed the only thing left for him to do was to propose marriage, but he had no ring. So instead he stepped backwards and fell down on some ice. He didn’t look back, but ran the full mile home, as if the hunchback in the canyon was after him, with the Emperor of Bolivia not too far behind.
Winter Nights
ANDY HAD A CRYSTAL radio that he kept in the closet in the boys’ bedroom and took out late at night. It was plastic with a lot of dials in front and wires in the back. When he stretched the antenna to its full height and wired it to the curtain rod, he could usually pick up alien spaceships transmitting from other galaxies. They used whiny buzzing noises to communicate with Earth. Andy would sit by the window listening, hoping to learn the secret of their codes.
Sometimes Owen sat with him and listened, wondering what Bzzzzz — wheee! — eeeeooo — zzzrrbb! could possibly mean, while Leonard slept alone in the big bed. The two older brothers would look out the window and speculate as to which star the radio signals were coming from, and whether a total invasion of Earth was imminent.
One night the radio noises changed suddenly, and the whiny buzzes turned into rapid bursts of electric noise: Blat! Zappa-zappa! Scud! Krakka-takka! Glurk! Andy got a pencil from his desk and, using a table of weights and measures found at the back of his arithmetic book, deciphered the following message: “Hilltop! Knock! Zurge!”
“What does it mean?” Owen asked.
“We have to go to the fort,” Andy said breathlessly. “They’re contacting us!”
“But why the fort?”
“Because it’s on Dead Man’s Hill,” Andy said. The boys called it that because it overlooked the graveyard. That’s where they had built a snowfort the weekend before.
“What about Leonard?” Owen asked.
“He’d be too scared,” Andy said.
“Maybe not,” Owen said. “Remember how he spoke to the Bog Man’s wife on Halloween.”
So they woke up Leonard and the three of them snuck downstairs and pulled on their snowsuits and heavy boots. Their parents and Uncle Lorne were sleeping, so the boys had to be quiet.
It was bitterly cold, the air so frozen it was still and heavy, and the snow on the path to Dead Man’s Hill was packed so tight it squeaked beneath their boots. Andy carried his radio and a big new battery he’d bought with five months’ worth of allowance. It had meant missing many issues of his favorite comics, but now that they were about to me
et aliens it would be worth it.
The boys knew what flying saucers looked like from watching television and reading the newspaper. But the picture on their television set was often blurry, and it skipped up and down. Most of the stories in newspapers said the spaceships had bright lights, and the aliens used ray guns and wore silvery spacesuits.
“What if they don’t like us?” Leonard asked, halfway up the path to Dead Man’s Hill. “If they’re invading the Earth then maybe they don’t mean to be our friends.”
“Aliens are superior beings,” Andy said. “It’s not a question of like or don’t like. They just want to meet with some typical Earthlings. It’s better that they meet us instead of generals or something.” They had seen one movie in which the aliens who were invading were actually very nice but the generals had exploded hydrogen bombs at them, which made them angry.
The top of Dead Man’s Hill was perfect for snowforts because the wind swept big drifts of snow against the rocks there. The boys had simply dug into the side of the biggest drift, and in time the cold air had iced over the insides so the structure was strong. It was cozy inside out of the wind, with the three boys snuggled in together. Andy had brought a candle for light but the little flame added a lot of heat too. This was their own place that they had made together.
Andy hooked up his radio to the new battery and fiddled with the dial. Soon the radio came alive with buzzing and whining sounds, some crackles and burps. Then this came on:
“This is Alan Winter bringing you another edition of Winter Nights, three hours of commercial-free radio.”
The voice was deep, slow, soothing and clear. It was the first Earthling program the boys had ever picked up on Andy’s radio.
“I have a thought for this night,” the voice said, “before I open the telephone lines. Nights like these remind me of a winter long ago, when after the snow and cold there was a day of rain and then more cold, an arctic air mass parked on top of us like a bubble. And all the water on top of the snow froze the world into a skating rink — streets, lawns, parks. The motorists cursed, slipped and slid into ditches, and pedestrians floundered. But on skates it was as if we had wings. From across our lawn and through the park and onto the river — one huge, continuous skating miracle.”