It was a young boy's day, that long ago hot August afternoon when Michael and I were playing catch out in the pasture behind his house. There was the sharp tang of turkey mullein in the air, the distant soft whisper of the creek at our ears. The sky was a forever blue, an empty palette waiting for the stroke of a brush to give it a cloud or a moon or some other such stroke of imagination.
Michael's parents had taken the old Chevy pickup into Redding, hoping to talk Sam Johnson down at Tire Surplus into letting them have some retreads on credit. So Michael and I, we were tossing an old hardball back and forth. He was trying to get his wrist to snap out a curve, but the stitching had gone soft in late July and the ball wasn't having any of it.
“Just throw it straight,” I was telling him.
“I'm trying,” he said. He began a new wind-up, but it never fully materialized.
“What's the matter now?”
“Listen, Lenny. Can't you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“Listen,” he said, shading his eyes and looking toward the sky. “Don't you ever listen?”
I heard the whistle of the wind, and I found myself remembering another time when my Grandfather had whittled a small chunk of wood for me—smooth and conical. He wrapped a piece of shoe-box string around the thick end, turned it upside down and pulled. A whirligig, he called it as it spun its way across the tabletop. I laughed because the spinning was such a surprise, and the sound it made—a gentle windsong like the flap of hummingbird wings—was like someone whispering in my ear, tickling me. That was almost the same sound I heard falling out of the sky that hot August day with Michael.
Then Michael pointed. “There!” he said. “There it is!”
Across the field, next to the road, there was an old oak tree. That's where the chunk of ice crash landed. It snapped off a couple of branches, tore away the old tire swing Michael's dad had put up a summer or two before, and hit the ground with a thud. Dust kicked up, then softly drifted away.
“Christ! Did you see it?” Michael screamed.
I can still see the shimmering heat reflecting back a strange dream-like image of him running through the pasture, like an endless line of mirrored similitudes, all shirtless and wearing frayed cut-offs, all holding on tight to a San Francisco Giants cap with one hand, waving me to follow with the other.
“Lenny, you'll miss everything!”
It seemed odd, that moment. The way a minute will sometimes go cold on you, and everything slows down, dream-like and crystal clear. I could hear his voice, a long squeal of excitement, carrying on the breeze as if it had wings. Did you see it? Did you? Did you? All that exuberance kicking up behind him, and all I could feel was fear.
The chunk of ice was partially buried in the ground, but I saw as much as I wanted to see from where I finally came to a safe standstill. It was the size of a gunny sack, like the ones we used to stuff with hay and use for bases when we played baseball down at the school. It was giving off a chilly vapor; its color—almost glowing through the vapor's tendrils—was gray and cloudy, the way ice cubes left too long in the freezer sometimes cloud up.
Michael knelt next to it, brushed away some strands of hay with his fingers, and smiled. “What do you suppose—”
“You shouldn't touch it.”
“Don't be dumb. What's not to touch? It's just ice, that's all.” He reached out, his index finger long and thin and trembling just enough to be noticeable, and when he touched the glistening mass and nothing happened, he grinned. “See? Just ice,” he said, wiping his finger across his bare chest.
“Right out of the sky like that? Everything as hot as hell today—the grasshoppers are hunting for shade, for crissakes—and a chunk of ice falls right out of the sky? It doesn't make sense, Michael. Not a lick of sense.”
“Sure it makes sense, Lenny. A chunk of ice doesn't just fall out of the sky without some sort of sense to it.”
“Leave it be, Michael.”
He glanced up at me, his expression a question. “Aren't you itching to know where this thing came from? What it is? Don't you want to know everything there is to know about it?”
“Wait till your dad gets back. Let him take a poke at it.”
“Then it wouldn't be ours, would it?”
Michael's eyes were all lit up, and I knew he was dreaming dreams that I couldn't even imagine. That was the difference between the two of us. Michael, he could see the lines of history etched across the flesh-red colors of broken granite, great movements of the Earth recorded there, Neanderthal scratchings, wall paintings, arrow tips. He could see anything and everything, because there wasn't anything unimaginable when he closed his eyes. It was never like that for me. Close my eyes, I'd see black. Open them again, I'd see white.
“Whatever it is you're thinking,” I told him, “forget it.”
He smiled, and I couldn't tell if he was smiling at me or if one of his dreams had just passed through his mind and delighted him. It was a half-smile, a self-possessed smile.
I sat in the grass a few feet away, watched him lift the ice into his lap as if it were a soft pillow.
“It's cold,” he said with a shiver.
“What did you expect?”
He shrugged. “I don't know.” Then he painted his initials in the frost of the smooth surface. MJH. Michael James Hollerman. As if it were the dusty tailgate of his dad's pickup. “Maybe nothing,” he said quietly. He seemed taken by something he was seeing inside that cloudy block of ice, as if he were catching eyes with something that was staring back. “Maybe everything.”
“What are you seeing in there, Michael Hollerman?”
“Shhh,” he said, a finger over his lips. “Can't you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“It's singing,” he said.
“Can't be.”
He started rocking back and forth then. Hear it? The smile on his face had gone cold, almost there but not quite, just a faint curl at the corners of his mouth. Can't you hear it?
I couldn't hear it then.
I'm not even sure I wanted to hear it.
But I know what that sound was like, it was a soft humming sing-song, the mournful cry of tiny voices, a little like the continuous hum-song of the mercury vapor lamp my father had bolted above the loft of our barn the summer before. A little like that, but not quite the same.
“Hear it?” Michael asked. “Singing like the Christ Our Savior Choir on Sunday mornings, a thousand voices all happening at once? Enough to send a chill right through you. Hear it, Lenny? Tell me you hear it. Someone else's ears should be hearing this, not just mine.”
I lied to him, told him I heard.
Then his smile unfolded. “Our secret, right? Just you and me, brothers of the blood and the moon? No one else knows, right?”
“No one else.”
“Not a single soft whisper to another breathing soul?”
“Just you and me, Michael. That's all, just you and me.”
He seemed happier then. “Have you ever heard of such a thing? Have you ever read about the sky raining ice on a hot summer day? Ever? Anywhere? In Egypt or New Zealand, even Iceland? Ever?” He shivered, then wiped his palm across the cold block, gazing again at its fogginess. “What do you think it is, Lenny?”
Something unnatural,” I almost told him, but I knew he wouldn't be listening. Michael was like that. Always an open ear for things that seemed like magic, but throw a warning his way and it was like pouring hot wax in his ears, 'cause he wasn't going to hear you. He just didn't believe anything” could be evil. “I don't know,” I told him.
“But it's ours. Isn't it, Lenny?”
“Not ours, yours. It's all yours, Michael. You heard it first; you were the first one here. It's yours to keep, Michael. All yours.”
He whispered a soft thanks that drifted away in the breeze.
“So what are you going to do with it?”
“I'm not sure,” he started to say, then he tenderly traced a fingertip along the t
op edge of the ice, as if he were wiping away a tear. It was an eerie gesture, deliberate and purposeful, and for a strange moment, I had the uneasy impression that I had just witnessed some sort of an exchange between ice and flesh. Cold to warm. Warm to cold. A communion between animate and inanimate.
“You okay, Michael?”
“You know what it is, Lenny? What it's doing?”
“Singing, that's what you said. Singing its song.”
“I was wrong.”
“Then what?”
“It's dying.” He held his finger in the air—the same finger he had used to trace the outline of the block—and we both watched as a lonely drop of moisture trailed down the finger, leaving a glistening path across his palm and down his forearm before dropping off into the grass. There were tears in his eyes, shining soulfully in my direction, and I knew he was asking me to prove him wrong. “That's what it's doing, Lenny. Isn't it? I know enough to know it's dying, don't I?”
“You can't be sure,” I told him.
“But I know enough ...”
(I shivered, because suddenly everything rational was slipping away from me, and it frightened me that I was almost believing)
“... don't I?”
“It's just a block of ice, Michael. Frozen water, that's all. Something that's already dead can't go and die on you. You breathe in that icy cold vapor long enough, Michael, it plays tricks on you. And pretty soon you're thinking things that just don't make any sense.”
“But the song?”
“The sound of melting ice, the sound of popping air bubbles. Not a song at all. It's a chunk of ice, Michael. Out of the sky on a hot summer day or cold winter night, it's still just a chunk of ice.”
His eyes, dark brown and endless like polished black agates, had glazed over—suddenly looking as cold as the sheen of the ice held in his lap—and I knew he wasn't listening. Maybe it was the song he was hearing, maybe it was something else, something inside himself. But that was the first moment I really understood the difference between the two of us. Like Nightshade and Galloway, we were. Michael all ready to follow his heart, me all ready to follow my brain
In the distance, a cloud of dust came rolling up the road behind the Hollerman's old Chevy pickup. It was late afternoon, the sun still hours above sunset, and the pickup was shimmering behind a curtain of heat waves. I shaded my eyes, thinking, Let your father hold it, Michael. Let him hold the icy thing in his lap and let's see what he has to say about it.
“Your folks are back,” I started to say, but Michael was already off to a gallop in the other direction, his summer-blond hair flapping in the wind, his baseball cap left on the ground where he'd been sitting under the white oak. There was a small damp spot in the dirt where the ice had been melting.
... ice tears ...
“What are you doing?” I yelled after him.
“Saving its life!” he yelled over his shoulder.
By the time I caught up with Michael, he was already inside the garage, bent over, hands on knees, sucking in as much breath as he could hold onto. His face had gone pale, almost as icy white as that vaporous block. He was standing next to a wall of shelving on one side—lined with a hundred jars of canned goods Mrs. Hollerman had put up the last several months—and an old Philco freezer on the other side.
“It was melting,” he said between breaths.
“You're going to keep it?”
“I have to.”
“But ...”
“Promise you won't tell, Lenny. Brothers of the blood and the moon, just you and me, promise. Please?”
I could see the Hollerman's pickup breaking through the curtain of heat waves, coming up the drive, into clear focus.
Please, Lenny?
“I hate this.”
Please?
“There's something not right about that piece of ice, Michael. You know that, don't you? It's not just me, feeling colder than I should on a hot summer afternoon. It's more than that. You know that, don't you?”
... brothers, Lenny, of the blood and the moon …
He didn't have to say another word. Michael had a way about him that made you trust him. Maybe even more than you knew you ought to at times.
“All right,” I told him. “Our secret.”
“Thanks.” His face came alive again, and a half-smile came out long enough to make me feel as if maybe I hadn't made such a godawful promise after all.
But I had.
Next morning, the Record Searchlight carried the story I still keep in my wallet behind my driver's license.
Brothers of the blood and the moon, just you and me, he'd said.
But Michael was Michael. He just wasn't the type to sit still with a secret tucked away in his back pocket, all buttoned up tight where no one could see it. Sooner or later, he had to open up that pocket and take another look. And I guess when that wasn't quite satisfying enough, he decided to invite the rest of the world to get a good a peek of its own.
“I saw the paper this morning,” I told him when I'd finally caught up with him. It was on the noon side of 10:30. Mr. Hollerman was off to Eureka to pick-up something or other. Mrs. Hollerman was in the house, putting up apricots. I found Michael in the garage, of course, standing back in one corner, with one hand reaching out of the shadows and resting on top of that old Philco freezer as if to make sure it didn't wander away from him.
He coughed, from deep within his chest.
“You forgot to tell them about the freezer,” I said.
“I didn't forget.”
“Maybe tomorrow you'll tell 'em, huh? Or the next day? Or the day after that? Because they'll have to know sooner or later, Michael. We gotta tell someone sooner or later.”
He coughed again, and I thought his insides were going to come up. “Do we? Do we have to tell? The two of us knowing, maybe that's more than enough, don't you think, Lenny?”
“Just you and me?”
“Who else?” he said, but it wasn't Michael's voice I was hearing. And the hand that was resting on top of that old Philco freezer, when I looked again, it was a pale, wax-like thing. Not Michael's hand at all. “Don't you see?” he asked. “Nobody can take it from us, Lenny. It's ours. We found it, and it's all ours.”
“Your ears heard it, Michael.”
“There's never been another single soul who's come across such a thing, Lenny. Not one. Not in all of time. We're the first.”
“Your hands touched it.”
“And your hands clapped, didn't they?”
“They trembled, Michael.”
“From what? From fear? Is that what's got hold of you, Leonard Perry? The hand of fear? Your ears so full of wax you didn't hear the magic in that ice song? Is that it? I hear magic, you hear danger? Because if that's what's bothering you, Lenny, then you can forget about it.”
Michael stepped out of the shadows then. Pale as a ghost, but smiling just the same. His eyes were ice-like crystals, pupil-less blue-white orbs all clouded over so you couldn't see into them today the way you could the day before. I wanted to be able to see into those eyes. I wanted to be able to see what was behind them, because it couldn't have been Michael.
“It's not evil,” he said, his cold breath fogging that warm August air as if he were standing outside on a mid-winter's day. “Honest, Lenny. It's not like that at all.”
He reached a hand—all powdery white and icy cold—out to me.
I took a step back.
“It's more like a sleepless dream.” He coughed again, spewed out a cold white cloud that nearly bent him in half. When he straightened up, his face was like a mask, sculptured crystal, hollow and ghost-like. “Remember the full-mooned night the Miller cow gave birth to the two-headed calf? Remember in the back of the barn that night, under the eyes of that full moon, how we each drew blood and pressed our palms together because we knew, we just knew there was something magical about that night? Remember that, Lenny? Because that's the way it is in here.”
(in here?)
> His hand reached out again, further this time, and I knew if I took hold of that brittle icy skeleton it would break off in my hand.
I took another step back.
“Please, Lenny. We can share it. Just you and me.”
“I can't,” I said.
“But there's no one else, Lenny.”
“I can't.”
“Please?”
I backed into one of the garage door springs, felt the jagged edge of metal rip open the back of my shirt, then I stumbled a few steps before turning and breaking into a run.
“Lenny!”
All the way down the drive (dust kicking up with my heels) I kept glancing over my shoulder, expecting to see him there, floating right alongside me, sweating the same way that vaporous block of ice had sweat the day before. But he never moved from that dark corner of the garage, as if he knew he couldn't wander far from that Philco freezer.
“Brothers of the blood and the moon!” he yelled, but I never answered, because I couldn't be sure if it was Michael's voice calling after me or if it was one of those ice songs singing temptations to my heart instead of good sense to my brain.
Brothers of the blood and the moon, Lenny!
Michael died shortly after that.
I went by the Hollerman place the morning after Labor Day to visit, because I couldn't stay away. But it was too late by then.
Mrs. Hollerman answered the door. I guess she had done most of her crying by then. She didn't shed any tears while I was standing there on her porch, and I didn't notice the redness that comes from crying too much. But just the same, they were empty, those eyes of hers. Hollow and cavernous.
“Pneumonia,” is the way she explained it at the time. I guess I could have asked for more. We both knew more than we were letting on.
I stopped by that old Philco freezer on my way back home, thinking if nothing else, maybe I could put an end to whatever in hell that block of ice was all about. The door was ajar, held open with the help of a short length of two-by-four. But the plug hadn't been pulled, there were chilly tendrils rising from the crack. When I looked inside, it was nearly empty. No sign of the vegetables Mrs. Hollerman liked to put up for the winter, or the meat Mr. Hollerman sometimes brought home from his hunting trips. Just a block of melting ice.
Through Shattered Glass Page 16