Then they bombarded him from the fort. Fiona was a terrible shot but hurled each snowball with undaunted enthusiasm while Jakob did the damage. He snapped off an arm and blasted away a patch of twigs. If you threw at the body, their snow-Russell just ate the snow and got bigger, so Jakob went solely for headshots, bashing it to icy white pulp until he knocked it off completely.
And even though the world was better off without him, they made him a new head and did it again.
Russell deserved it, of course, on general principles all along and, as of Monday, for concrete reasons that could never be forgiven.
The schools that Jakob and Fiona attended were within walking distance of each other, and on Monday Mom was running late, so she had Jakob hoof it to the primary school and collect his sister and wait. He was running late too.
Of all the days for Russell Burns to have been put on a similar path.
It was Fiona’s backpack that set him off: My Little Pony. She was already crying beside the designated meeting tree when Jakob got there. To be honest, he didn’t like the backpack either, didn’t like to be seen anywhere near the pink thing, but… no. Just no. She was his sister and his job was to watch out for her and he did it, even though he knew it was going to hurt.
He didn’t remember who shoved whom first, but supposed it didn’t matter after that. And it could have been worse – he could’ve come out with much more than a black eye. But while Russell may have known all there was to know about being a bully, Jakob knew a few things about actual fighting. Dad had seen to that, had sent him for lessons. Russell came out of it with a black eye of his own. Plus a bloody nose and two fat lips and a limp. By the end he was down to threats, but in some ways, those were scarier than anything his fists could do.
They gave the snow-Russell a third head and it still hadn’t stopped being fun.
So that took care of the morning of this, the best snow day ever, until Mom called them in for lunch.
An hour later he was hard at it on his Xbox, deep into one more among five or six games he had that all pretty much came down to shooting his way through a bunch of monsters on another planet, or that had overrun the Earth. You couldn’t overthink it, though, because how could they be smart enough to take over a planet if they were stupid enough to keep running at you when it was obvious you had all those guns. As long as you were halfway observant, you never ran out of ammunition – bullets and power cells and rockets, all this stuff lying around everywhere, waiting to be picked up, and that didn’t seem very realistic either.
But this too never stopped being fun, even if there were times when it made him wonder how he would react if Russell Burns brought a gun to school, to finish what had started on Monday. It happened sometimes. Parents tried to keep you from hearing about it when it did, but didn’t have the power they thought they had to control sound.
All of which was another reason why these snow days couldn’t have come at a better time.
Then the house filled with the smell of cookies, Mom and Fiona up in the kitchen going into the cookie-baking business for a few hours, and soon he had a plate of them at his elbow and hadn’t even had to ask.
So that took care of the rest of the afternoon of this, the best snow day ever, until the day, as long as it had seemed, began to feel over. He was back in his room and it was barely evening, but as he stood at his window and stared out at the relentless snow and the waning light of the bone-white sky, lights winking on here and there down the road, at the Crenshaws and beyond, he still sensed the loss of the day. It made him sad somehow, because he wanted more, and he’d get it tomorrow, but it wouldn’t be as fresh. It wouldn’t be today.
It would never be today again.
****
Dad came home furious, his Audi the victim of a crunched back panel. Whoever had done it hadn’t even owned up to the deed, had just left it in its parking space to ruin his day once he found it.
“Is it still considered road rage if you lose it in a parking lot?” he said. “Because if I’d caught the guy, I could not have been held responsible.”
He’d barely made it home in one piece anyway, the roads so choked after a day of nonstop snow, with more to come, that he knew he wasn’t going to be able to go into the studio tomorrow, and even if he could, what would be the point, since no one else was likely to make it.
SNOWPOCALYPSE, they were calling it on that night’s TV news, because they had to have a stupid name for everything big. Although if there were a video game called Snowpocalypse, he had no doubt that he’d want it the day it was released.
This Snowpocalypse, though, was looking not so fun now. Twenty-six hours in, it was coming down at an inch per hour. It was looking even worse than the blizzard of two years ago, when there was so much snow that the plows ran out of places to put the stuff. That first trip into the suburbs was like encountering a series of filthy new mountain ranges. They’d managed to clear the main routes, but on the side streets the snow had gotten packed down into hard ice as dull and gray as pig iron. For weeks, they were driving on slabs of it. Like driving on a glacier, Mom said.
What he’d never seen before, though, was the evidence of where people had fallen. Using salt to de-ice the sidewalks hadn’t worked. No matter how much melted, there was just more ice beneath, so it all refroze into slippery textures as jagged as a cheese grater, and here and there, you’d come across spatters and splotches of frozen blood. It was a horrible thing to contemplate. Everybody had to be wearing parkas, long pants, boots, gloves – they could only have been bleeding from above the neck.
Until seeing this, winter snow had always meant softness and quiet. You fell into it with a soft whumph, and as long as you were down there, you might as well make a snow angel. He’d never considered that winter could hit you in the face like a hatchet.
He’d imagined people on the ground, stunned and watching the red slush form beneath them. And everything hurt worse in the cold. He hoped, retroactively, that they hadn’t been alone, that someone had been there to help.
If it happened to be somebody like Russell Burns, they would’ve just laughed.
****
By Friday morning the snow came up past your knees, and they were already back to a normal weekday breakfast. Fiona ate her cereal with a look like she’d been cheated in a game. Beyond the windows, the snow fort had become an indistinct mound with a dip in the middle, and the snow-Russell’s toppled segments were all but buried. There would be no more justice for him.
Mom went to work in her home office, telecommuting, but while Dad had a mini-studio for himself here at the house, he didn’t go in.
He was one-third owner of a real studio, although bands never recorded there and rappers never dropped by, so it wasn’t like the place generated anything Jakob would’ve made a point to listen to. It was all music for movies and TV and commercials and games – okay, game soundtracks, that was cool – and to hear Dad talk, they were always grinding it out under some impossible deadline. Whenever Jakob had been there, only the receptionist didn’t look completely stressed out.
Dad could always use a day off, but it always made the next one worse.
When he suited up and went outside with a shovel to attack the snow and clear a path to the mailbox, he didn’t ask for help this time, didn’t say a word at all. Jakob could watch from the windows only so long before the guilt grew too heavy. What if his dad had a heart attack out there? It would be his fault for letting it happen. Dad didn’t look like the heart attack type, but you never knew.
And as much as he would rather have been doing anything else, Jakob trooped out to pitch in.
They dug and scooped, they heaved great shovelfuls to one side and the other, they leaned in hard to turn their shovels into plows, and while they eventually fought their way to the mailbox, already the path was filling in behind them. He imagined if they kept going, digging forever, making the impermanent equivalent of the vapor trail following a jet. Look back far enough, and there would
no longer be any evidence of their passing.
There wasn’t even any mail in the box, either.
Nobody could miss his father’s weary disgust with the futility of the mission, but finally he leaned on his shovel, hair sweat-spiky around the stocking cap he wore, and grinned at him, both of them frosted top to bottom with the heavy flakes.
“Be honest. Would you rather be doing this, or sitting in school?”
No question. “This, I guess.”
“You may have a bright future in ditches,” Dad teased. At least Jakob hoped it was teasing. Then his father added, a little quieter, “You and me both.”
Dad didn’t get it. It wasn’t that the schoolwork was hard. That had always come easy. Some of the time it was even interesting.
But school was a place where you had to watch everything you did, everything you said, because for the slightest wrong thing, guaranteed there was somebody ready to use it against you. Your life could fall to ruins in a single lunch hour. If somebody had a camera phone handy, the moment might live forever. It would live longer than you did.
Already it was seeming as if the Russell Burnses of the world were the ones destined to inherit it, because even though they were stupid, there was an endless supply of them, in infinite varieties, and you could look at their eyes and see how little there was behind them. They didn’t feel and they didn’t care. You were either their target, or in their way.
And they were just getting started.
Fiona was on the porch then, yelling across the thick white yard that Mom had made hot chocolate for everyone, and they’d better come get it before she threw it to the hogs. It was their mother’s running joke. There were no hogs. Fiona never seemed to get that. To her, the threat was real. There were hogs; she just hadn’t seen them yet.
“Aren’t you coming?” Jakob asked over his shoulder when he realized he was the only one moving.
And caught his father looking at the front door as if it were the gate of a tomb.
Dad shook his head. “I still have some things to finish up out here.”
Whatever they were, he didn’t seem in any hurry to get to them. Jakob watched from the window, holding his mug with his feet still chilled and his fingers tingling, sipping at the scalding cocoa while his father stood unmoving at the far edge of a yard whose boundaries had been obliterated by the snow. His father was doing some staring of his own, leaning on his shovel like it was a walking stick.
Winter made him funny, February especially. He may not have been looking in exactly the right direction, but Jakob assumed he was still staring at Finland.
Dad had come home with the tale a couple of years ago, his new favorite story of how someone had written and recorded an album. Some band in Finland had rented a big cabin out in the wilds, with its own sauna, because apparently there was no place you could go in Finland where there wasn’t a sauna. They’d gone there at the beginning of the month with their instruments and mobile recording gear and a month’s food and cases of vodka, and left at the end with a finished album.
It sounded like the perfect way to spend a February, his father had said.
Ever since, this had been Dad’s gauge for perfection.
So whenever Dad was there, only not really there, that was how Jakob thought of it: He’d gone to Finland.
****
The next morning, the snow was level with the front porch. The evergreens were burdened with it, stooped like people so feeble they could no longer hold up their heads. It was the weekend now, and the storm showed no signs of abating. On the TV news they seemed embarrassed that they had to keep using the SNOWPOCALYPSE logo, which was starting to look silly, like a kid’s cartoon Band-Aid on a spouting wound, and there appeared to be some real annoyance with the weatherman, too. How could he have missed this? It was only supposed to be a two-day storm.
Disaster finally struck at home, too: They were out of coffee. It only seemed trivial if you hadn’t actually seen their mom endure a morning without it.
Do something, her look at Dad said. DO something.
He suited up and ventured down the hill toward the Crenshaws, who by now weren’t just their nearest neighbor; they were now their only visible neighbor at all, everything past that point lost behind the veil of the storm. It took Dad a long time to get there, and you could barely make him out at their door. They didn’t invite him in, then it took him a long time to get back.
He walked angry, even when wading through the snow. His face was marked by the wind and cold, waxy white here and chapped red there.
“Stu says they’re out of coffee too,” his father said. “I wanted to ask him then what the hell am I smelling in the house behind you? You light coffee-scented incense in the morning now, is that it? Asshole.”
Fiona’s eyes widened in shock, then grew consumed with worry, as if there had to be something only she could do to make everything better. There isn’t, Jakob would have to tell her someday, although by the time she was ready to hear it, she may have figured it out for herself.
After another day of the stuff coming down, during which they all had to work harder to find something to distract themselves with – when they weren’t shoveling or using brooms to knock snow off the evergreens that were getting harder and harder just to get to, or scrape it off the porch roof through the upstairs windows – he caught his mom going through the pantry with an air of solemn focus, counting on her fingers.
“This isn’t the same snow, is it?” he said from the middle of the kitchen.
He had to say it again before she stopped looking at him like he was asking about, what, the weather on Mars, maybe. But this was something she herself recited every year, and it had only been a few weeks since the last time.
Every Christmas Eve she liked to read them a short little book called A Child’s Christmas in Wales, because her own mother used to read it to her. Although the first couple of years that Fiona was old enough to pay attention, she thought it would be about kids swallowed by giant fish, so it invariably left her disappointed.
It took a few years for Jakob to get the story figured out to his own satisfaction, because the man who wrote it hardly ever came right out and clearly said what he meant. He really worked hard to dress it up, but by now it had started to seem worth the effort to try and follow what he was saying.
“But that was not the same snow,” the man tells a kid who believes that the snows of then and now were identical. “Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss…”
This wasn’t the same snow either, he feared.
“Why would you think that?” his mom finally said.
Eternal, ever since Wednesday – the man had described it that way, too. That was the one that sounded more like it.
“It’s just a story. It was just his way of blathering on about how things seem different when you’re a kid. It’s just a bad blizzard out there this time. Snow is snow.”
Except it was obvious that she didn’t believe a word of it, not for a second. Parents always seemed to tell the least convincing lies when it was most important to level with you.
****
And still the snow kept coming down. Or up from below, or out from within, or whatever path it took.
By Sunday night, normally a time to bemoan the inescapable fact that school would resume in a few hours, he noticed there were no lights burning at the Crenshaw house. The next morning – you couldn’t call it day, because it was just a lighter version of the suffocating night – brought an urgent ringing of their doorbell.
Jakob hadn’t gone downstairs yet, and peered out his window to discover a ragged trough churned up the hill, like a single fragile vein linking the houses. There was no digging a path through it now. There was only floundering on top of it, trying not to sink too deep.
He c
rept from his room to watch and listen from the summit of the stairs as his father opened the door to their visitor. Jakob couldn’t see all of him. The angle of the doorway cut off part of him, and his dad blocked some of the rest, but what he could see looked caked in snow and bent with exhaustion. Stu Crenshaw wasn’t the fit and trim man his father was.
“Looks like you guys are still okay for electricity,” he wheezed.
“So far, so good.”
“Ours went out yesterday. Must be a wire down right at the house.”
“That would be my guess.”
“The thing is, we’ve been burning kerosene in a couple of space heaters since then, and…” He let his voice trail away, sheepish. “And we’ve almost run through it already. You wouldn’t have any to spare, would you?”
“I’m afraid not. We’re out,” his father said. “Sorry.”
Mr. Crenshaw started to fluster and bluster. “This isn’t about that coffee thing a couple days ago, is it? Come on, this is our lives we’re talking about, maybe.”
“It’s not about anything other than being out of kerosene. That’s all.”
“Out. You’re completely out.”
“That’s what I keep trying to tell you, that you don’t seem to want to hear.”
“But wasn’t it you telling me in the middle of November how you’d laid in some cans, because of how long it took them to get around to those downed power lines last winter?” Now their neighbor was starting to sound truly angry. “I seem to remember that being you, all proud of yourself for getting that taken care of early.”
“Right… and last month I had to run them into the studio when we had an outage there, so we could keep working under our deadlines.”
This was the first Jakob had ever heard of such a thing. It hadn’t happened. It couldn’t have. Because if it had, they all would’ve had to listen to Dad gripe about it for the next two days.
Better Weird: A Tribute to David B. Silva Page 21