Child of My Winter

by Andrew Lanh

  “But we still don’t know the cause of the problem he’s having with Professor Winslow,” Hank concluded.

  Brandon was stretching his limbs, yawning, preparing to leave. “Does it really matter, guys? There’s something wrong with him. He wasn’t supposed to be born. He’s like a special ed kid or something.”

  “Enough. Brandon, maybe a little sympathy? It doesn’t sound like he’s had an easy time of it.”

  Brandon shrugged. “Guys, nobody gets a free ride in life.”

  “The fact that he’s here at the college tells me he’s doing something good.”

  “His family is a bunch of free-loaders, money-grubbing welfare frauds.”

  “You know, I spoke to him earlier,” Hank said. “He was sitting in the lounge outside of one of the dorms, doing homework with another kid.”

  I was surprised. “A friend?”

  Hank shrugged. “I don’t know if he’s a friend. I don’t know him. A dark kid, bushy hair. Wearing a frazzled sweater, the kind immigrants from East Europe, like East Germany, wore. Or the Middle East. You know, like decades old and…”

  Brandon spoke up. “Oh yeah, Darijo Delic. That retard. One of the Bosnian students here. A Bosniak, whatever the fuck that is. Two or three. Scholarship kids from Hartford. Boo-hoo refugee or maybe the son of refugees from the Balkan wars of a few decades back.”

  “I don’t know him,” I said.

  Brandon, brimming with information, said, “Because you’re not savvy to the collection of nerds floating around this campus. Information Technology Systems creeps. Computer Science. Nerdville.”

  “That’s charitable, Brandon.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Hank, maybe you should invite Dustin to the party on Thursday night.”

  Brandon protested, “No. He won’t fit in.”

  “I’m the guest of honor, Brandon. Right?” Hank said gleefully. “State cop on campus. The Asian-American Alliance—what do you call them?—for Asians.”

  Hank shredded the rest of his Styrofoam cup, the jagged pieces strewn on the table. Brandon couldn’t take his eyes off them. Resigned, he said, “Hey, you are the cop here. I follow the law of America.”

  Hank smiled at me. “I already invited Dustin when I saw him earlier.”

  I caught Hank’s eye—a look that said maybe I did, maybe I didn’t.

  Brandon laughed. “And he said no way, right?”

  Hank went on, “I told him I was a state cop. People tend to obey state cops. Without question. That’s the reason I became one. So people would listen to me. Remember that, Brandon. Dustin has to show up.”

  “And he said?”

  “He’ll be there. He doesn’t want to be arrested.”

  “Christ.” Brandon got up, slung his backpack over his shoulder. As he left us, he rapped his knuckles emphatically on a table. “Christ Almighty. The shit I gotta deal with.”

  Chapter Five

  Snow began falling early Thursday morning. I spent a few hours at my office in Hartford, pulling together the rudiments of a new investigation for Cigna. Then my partner, Jimmy Gadowicz, stumbled in, remarking it was nice to see me make an appearance at the office so early.

  “It’s ten o’clock,” I told him.

  My cell’s sudden signal, a split-nerve buzz, always startled him.

  “I don’t see why you can’t use a real phone.”

  I showed him the text from Hank:

  Don’t be late for party at Silo.

  He grumbled, “Why are you going to a party on a Thursday night?”

  Another dental-chair buzz a second later:

  You know how you are.

  “Goddamn him,” Jimmy said loudly.

  “It’s snowing out, Jimmy.”

  He squinted at me. “And now you’re the local weatherman?”

  I waved goodbye as I gathered my laptop and briefcase. “A real old-fashioned nor’easter, they’re predicting.”

  He called after me. “The problem with you is you was born in a tropical climate. You don’t have real weather there.”

  “Monsoons? Typhoons? Tsunamis?”

  “I was in Nam protecting your people. Lot of thanks I got, by the way. Never saw one monsoon.” He waved an unlit cigarette at me, then settled back in his chair. “Just lots of bullets headed my way.”

  As I drove back home to Farmington, swirls of light snow drifted along the curbs. I found myself thinking about Jimmy. The crusty old man, a wisenheimer by his own definition, gloriously overweight in his uniform: a Patriots XXL sweatshirt, appropriate pizza stains on the collar, a drizzle of brown sauce from General Tso’s chicken takeout from China House down the street. A man who, as far as I know, only made one professional concession at my behest—he no longer smoked those stink-bomb cigars he got from the bodega on the corner. At least in the office. Okay—he’d sneak a cigarette now and then. His battered Ford Escort was another matter altogether, the ashtray a wonderland of discarded butts. He was the Vietnam vet who took me in, trained me when I fled life as a traumatized cop in Manhattan. The grumpiest man I ever met—and the kindest.

  Gracie Petroni, my landlady, trailed after me as I climbed to my second-floor apartment. Fresh from a walk to the post office one block over, she was dressed for the Arctic Tundra in an ankle-length Persian lamb coat from four decades earlier, a fuzzy knit cap emblazoned with an outrageous cloth hibiscus, and a scarf so flowery it belonged on the swaying hips of an Hawaiian wahini. “Snow coming,” she announced, breathing down my back.

  “I know.”

  “You going out?”

  “I have a late class—and a party.”

  An octogenarian ex-Rockette who owned the canary-yellow Victorian house I lived in, Gracie believed she needed to protect me—a fortyish man with a job as a PI—from the elements. All the elements. She danced up a storm at Radio City Music Hall back in the fifties, then moved with her husband to the quaint Connecticut town, lost him early, started renting out the second and third floors of her home, and enjoyed bossing her tenants around. I let her because she was a woman easy to love.

  Now, frowning, she wagged a bony finger at me. “Nobody goes to a party on a Thursday night.”

  “I already heard that from Jimmy.”

  Her eyes got wide. “Now and then the man makes sense. As I say, now and then.”

  She followed me into my apartment, unraveling her clothing. As I hung up my coat, Gracie strolled around—“This rug looks new, Rick. Salvation Army again?”—and gazed from my windows down into the street. “Yes, snow. Lots of it.” A heavy sigh. “Dreams of Florida again.”

  “Never,” I insisted. “What would I do without you, Gracie?”

  “You got a point there.”

  Shuffling around my kitchen, she put on the teakettle, rummaged in my cabinets for the Chinese white lotus tea that I drank, arranged cups on a table, and sat down, watching me. “What’s with you?”

  Bewildered, I glanced at her. “What?”

  “You’re not in focus.”

  I sighed. “Things on my mind.”

  Suddenly her eyes settled on Ben Winslow’s new book that he’d inscribed the other night. I’d tossed it on an end table.

  She pointed. “They mentioned this guy today in the Hartford Courant.” She reconsidered. “Indirectly. I mean, that lunatic minister out in Bristol is on the rampage again.” She chuckled. “The old saying is that any press, even bad press, is good for folks in the spotlight.”

  I got interested. “Tell me, Gracie. What did he say?”

  She shrugged. “The usual nonsense. Threats of lawsuits against your friend. His church is the word of God. Divine inspiration. Your friend—a stand-in for Satan. You know the drill.”

  “What do you think, Gracie?”

  Her voice got low, slow. “I’m a Catholic, Rick. God-fea
ring, of course. I’m not into frenzy and waving hands in the air like I’m swatting mosquitoes away. We talk about that Reverend Simms at our Confraternity of the Rosary, you know. He’s on local TV.” Gracie broke into a rumbling, thick voice, ‘“You place your dollar bill on the TV right now and say the name of Jesus. Put that bill in an envelope and’…You know the rest. ‘Jesus is the golden key to your hidden riches. Send your dollars, you poor folks, and the gospel of prosperity will magnify your donation into…millions.’”

  I laughed. “Does it work?”

  “I wouldn’t know.” She tapped the back of the book jacket, her fingers on Ben’s cherubic face. “This here guy is Simms’ mortal enemy. Of quackery, sham, all in the name of religion.”

  I glanced at the cover. Hardly a glossy best-selling cover—stodgy blue, discreet lettering, typical university press.

  “Last time Ben received death threats when he wrote about Reverend Simms.”

  Gracie grumbled, “Yeah, nice touch. Kill in the name of Christ.”

  She pushed the book away and headed into the kitchen to quiet the whistling teakettle. “Who reads this crap, anyway?”

  ***

  Though I usually walked the five streets to the Farmington College campus, I decided to drive. The snow was falling steadily now, blanketing the bushes and sticking to the asphalt. The wind picked up. A rough night, and I needed to drive to that student party after seven, although that idea was losing any appeal. On snowy nights I relished my cozy home, the old Victorian rooms creaky and whispering from the drafts, the cast-iron radiators buzzing and clanging. A good book. Reheated pizza that I’d forget to eat.

  The campus was dizzy with the possibility of class cancellation. A snow day, everyone a school kid again, nose pressed against the window. The commuting students scurried in, backpacks slung over shoulders, their shoulders crusted with flakes of snow, but the dorm students, lazily drifting in twos or threes, seemed eager to curl up on the sofas in the Student Union. Anything better than class. My students, Criminal Justice stalwarts, were ex-marines and army grunts and high-school tough guys who never missed class. They narrowed their eyes in disapproval if I walked in minutes late. Punctuality was always a good idea when addressing steely-eyed students who kept guns in their glove compartments.

  Stopping in the faculty lounge on the way to my office, I spotted Sophia Grecko sitting in one of the deep-cushioned side chairs, a closed art history text on her lap. She had her head tilted to the side, facing the wall, and as I passed she shuddered. The text slipped to the floor. I reached for it, and she offered me a wan smile of thanks.

  “What’s the matter, Sophia?”

  Fingers splayed, she made an it’s-nothing gesture, but her face tightened. She glanced around the room. Two or three other faculty members were clustered at the other end, lost in an animated conversation. Sophia mouthed one word: Ben.

  I slipped into a chair next to her. “You okay?”

  She drew in her breath. “We had words.”

  “Everyone in love has words.”

  “We never do.”

  “But…”

  “He’s a different man the last few days. That’s what we fought about. I don’t like secrets. In my marriage, a hundred years ago, that’s all we had—secrets. I never want that again.”

  “What happened?”

  She puffed out her cheeks. “You know, I wander in and out of his apartment. The nag from upstairs.” A beguiling smile. “Usually he likes it. But I surprised him because he was lost in thought, gazing at the computer screen in his workroom. I peeked over his shoulder.”

  “And you saw?”

  A quick breath. “He was on the FBI site.”

  That surprised me. “Research, Sophia? He’s a sociologist. Who knows what he’s…?”

  Her hand flew up in my face. “I glanced down at a pad by him. ‘FBI,’ it said. And a phone number. To report a crime. That phone number.”

  I was silent a moment. “Still and all…”

  “Yes, yes,” she said, panic in her voice. “But he shut down the computer so fast, put his hand over the pad, and…and accused me of being a snoop.”

  “Maybe you surprised him.”

  A cynical laugh. “I certainly did.” She grabbed the thick art history book, cradled it to her chest, and stood. “I’m sorry, Rick. His mood lately is like a cancer that touches everyone. You saw it on Saturday, right? It’s been a week of—hell. Me—now I spread it to you.”

  “We’re all friends.”

  She threw back her head and echoed, “Friends.”

  Headed to my class in the Dodgson Building, I swung by the College Union to get a cup of coffee. Dismissed students were flocking into the cafeteria, bustling, gleeful, on holiday. As I maneuvered around chatty students, I saw Dustin Trang standing by a bank of windows and staring out at the snowstorm. As students rustled by him, he never moved. His ungainly parka was draped over a chair near him, a book bag on the floor, but around his neck wound a bulky scarf. Strangely, he was wearing a T-shirt and those ridiculous rolled-up jeans. A boy dressed for any number of seasons.

  “Hey, Dustin,” I said to the back of his head.

  He jumped around so quickly I stepped back.

  “Hey.”

  “I didn’t mean to startle you. You like staring out the window?”

  He turned his head back to the window and placed his hand on the ice-cold glass. For a moment, concentrating, he ignored me, his face close to the glass. His head didn’t move. Frozen in place, quiet. I debated what to do.

  “I’m making you uncomfortable.”

  Suddenly he faced me, a blank look on his face, then he turned back to the window. “Snow,” he said slowly. “I love when it snows.”

  I pointed out to the snow-covered quad. “And we’re gonna have a lot of it, they say.”

  He still didn’t look at me. “When it snows, everybody gotta stay inside.”

  “You like that?”

  His palm moved against the glass. “No one can see you in the snow. It’s like the world becomes wiped out.”

  “Some think it’s pretty then,” I said lamely.

  He glanced back at me. “That’s when the world looks best. When you can’t see it.”

  Still holding his hand on the window, he arched back his head, gazing up to the heavens. A thin smile on his face, he shut his eyes, then popped them open. “What do you want?”

  Startled, I stared at his stretched-out arm pressed high on the window. Such a skinny arm, exposed in that faded white T-shirt, a thin pole of bone and almost no flesh. No bicep. A stick of dark wood. His head above that oversized scarf looked disconnected from his body. A bobble head in Barney Google eyeglasses with those emphatic black frames.

  “I thought I’d say hello.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You going to class? Don’t you have Professor Winslow’s class in a bit?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “But you drove to campus on a snowy day?”

  When he faced me, his look was distrustful, angry. “Where else do I got to go?”

  “You could go to class.”

  “What do you want?” But he seemed to regret his sharp tone because his eyes flickered. He rapped on the window, then dipped down to retrieve his book bag. He slung it over his shoulder and pushed by me, brushing my sleeve. Startling himself, he squeaked out a feeble “I’m sorry” but kept moving. He forgot his coat so he had to step back, pull it off the chair. He kept his head bowed.

  I watched him walk away, not in a straight line, but, peculiarly, a crooked wobble, shifting left, then right, as though he were desperate to escape gunshot.

  Across the room, sat Brandon Vinh, his legs up on a chair, his arms folded over his chest, his head resting against a wall as he followed Dustin’s curious departure. When he caught my
eye, he nodded and pointed a finger at me, a gesture that communicated camaraderie, a mutual understanding that the skinny boy fleeing the Union was crazy. A young girl walked in, stepping aside as Dustin shuffled past her, and she waved to Brandon, who called her over. Laughing, she gave him a hug. When I walked by them, Brandon gave me a conspiratorial wink. I ignored him.

  ***

  By six o’clock the weather app on my phone declared a full-fledged blizzard striking Connecticut, so I dismissed my class and watched them flee. Other instructors did the same. I went looking for Hank who’d be in the seminar room two buildings over, but when I read my texts I discovered his seminar had been cancelled earlier. He’d texted:

  No class no party no fun tonight.

  I texted back:

  Where are you?

  His reply:

  Home where everyone belongs on a night like this.

  A quick smart-aleck coda a moment later:

  Did you notice it’s snowing?

  Ben Winslow, bundled up and loaded down with books, was leaving his office, but he spotted me. He darted back inside, closing the door. Strange, I thought, but not surprising. Since last Saturday he’d hidden out in his classrooms or office, avoiding the faculty lounge, even turning away when I approached him on the quad. Talking with Liz one night, telling her how bothered I was, she summed up: “Embarrassment, Rick. As long as we’ve known Ben, he’s the hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy, the campus clown. ‘Like me, like me, like me. Please like me.’ The activist who is afraid to hurt anyone’s feelings.”

  “He didn’t hurt my feelings.”

  “I talked to Sophia after the party. He was…down. Really down. Not the perfect host. After that Dustin kid skedaddled down the porch and into the cold night, he got so quiet. You were there. That awful silence. All of us gathering our toys and going home. He feels he offended us.”

  “He’s hiding from us?”

  “Yes.”

  So now I considered knocking on his door, but I didn’t. Instead, I dropped a book at the library, chitchatted with a graduate student manning the circulation desk, and headed to the faculty parking lot.