“That’s a good one, Leo,” she says.
“You can’t say you haven’t had advantages, Leo,” my mother liked to tell me, acting like she had no clue of the reality of my life away from home, the steady dance I did in the schoolyard between “dirty Indian” and “the Kraut Brain,” always on alert for the way the bully wind might blow.
Since my mother was working every day at the animal shelter office that summer, and my father remained up north, I should have been left alone to ramble through my summer, doing chores and keeping Uncle Lud company. Instead, I was also charged with a physics correspondence course my mother had ordered, another in that series of enrichments she’d sought out. Most days, instead of even glancing through the course, I closed the door to my room, flicked on the computer, and went to lie on my bed, where, in between thinking about Tessa, I filled notebook pages with the steady stream of stories my mother could never quite follow, stories Uncle Lud was determined to bestow on me before he left us. I kept those notebooks secret from my mother, who was already convinced that my slowness in the physics course must be due to the hours I spent listening, a fact she couldn’t quite complain about given the situation. Yet what she didn’t realize was that Uncle Lud wasn’t the only impediment; I couldn’t seem to get past the first section of my physics course. The notion of velocity flat-out stymied me.
“It’s sections, not pages,” I finally managed to tell her, as I did every day. “Units. Self-contained units. They take a while.”
“Hmm,” she said, raising an eyebrow. She watched me bite into my sandwich before she picked up her own and said, “There’s another dog dead this morning at the shelter. This heat gets to them, even with all the fans going. And an old tom torn to pieces by the school.”
“That could be coyotes,” I said. “Or a cougar. A bear.”
“Yeah, you think so?” she said. “Coyotes and cougars and bears don’t break necks, cut off heads and tails, and make an eviscerating art project out of them, do they?”
“At least they’re old ones, gonna die anyway.”
“Going to die, not gonna,” she corrected, then added, “I really hope you aren’t the one taking care of me in my old age, Leo.
“I can’t get them to listen downtown,” she went on. “You’d think it was a regular sport like hockey or basketball.”
“Maybe it is,” I said, thinking of the refuse station and the guns sweating in our hands.
“Oh, boy,” my mother said, “I sure hope not, kiddo. Don’t folks cause enough trouble with the usual games? Trudy told me some fellow and his girl cleaned out a whole crew last week in a card game. The crew was lucky that couple caught them before payday. I guess that pair was lucky too. The crew would have ripped them apart later, laid the both of them out right beside that old tomcat.
“Strangers,” she said, almost spitting the word.
My mother saw the world from the underside up. Trouble everywhere. Lately, she’d been musing aloud about all the trouble that could befall a single soul alone in the world, which led her into thinking about how the world had contracted, what with the computers and all, so that all of them were now within shouting distance.
“Look at you,” she’d say to me, “taking courses from all over.”
We could hear Uncle Lud stirring, the wracking cough that greeted his waking beginning like the strangled barks the dogs let loose with when we chased them outside. All that scraping and baying for breath as they moved from the enclosed world into the next.
Without another word, my mother rose and took a glass from the cupboard, a bottle from the refrigerator. She was not one to put sugar on sorrow. No, the doctors had done their piece, now she’d decided she could only fix the pains that arose, nothing more.
“Here,” she said, pouring chilled vanilla Boost into a jelly jar, sticking in a straw.
I carried the glass to Uncle Lud and knelt beside him until the first bout of coughing subsided and he could hold on to the glass and take a sip or two on his own. Thirty-seven years old, and he might as well have been a hundred, the way he looked. His fever was back, and he was shuddering. A line of sweat creasing along his brow and his thin hands with their broken nails shaking so that when I took the glass back from him, I couldn’t tell what burned more—my uncle’s touch or the shock of ice. Both caused a shiver to run up my arm and neck, and noticing, Uncle Lud reached out a single heated finger and touched the side of my throat to ground me again. To ground us both.
Before he got sick, Uncle Lud had towered over me. Each of his visits would begin by hoisting me high in a bear hug. Even a year or so ago, he could lift me straight off my feet. Imagine that: me, the big-boned nerd, swirling through the air in Uncle Lud’s arms, my long black hair swinging, my new glasses bumping up and down on my face, and a huffing sound, an adolescent version of a laugh, chafing the air with each turn, like I was an engine desperately trying to start. There wasn’t much better, not even when my father, shaking his head, disappeared into the house as if unable to bear the foolish sight of the two of us, already no doubt anticipating the moment Uncle Lud would release me and I would roil in circles, damn near giggling.
Now my young uncle crumpled in my arms—even his bones had shrunk—and as Uncle Lud revived that afternoon, light pouring in around the bedroom shades my mother religiously lowered, I slung my uncle’s arm around my neck and helped him into the washroom. Afterward, I maneuvered Uncle Lud into the living room, settling him gingerly in the recliner with that fresh glass of Boost, a new unbent straw beside him. Then I sprawled on the couch in a show of comradely weariness. With both of us stretched out facing the big back windows and the mountains beyond, I thought it felt a little as if we were embarking upon the road trip Uncle Lud had once promised we’d take together, traveling along in the same direction.
Sometimes when we sat like this, we managed to get the BBC on the radio, a transmission that tickled Uncle Lud. He once told me he imagined the BBC announcers as pompous Claymation figures, entertainingly oblivious of their lack of real substance. One quick-tongued, long-winded, double-talking interviewer, Alexander McAfee, Uncle Lud confided, appeared in his imagination as an animated fox.
“Now, tell me,” asked McAfee the fox as he interviewed a famous rugby hero sidelined by family tragedy, “would ye say ye’ve fully recovered or should I say, can one ever fully recover, or rather, might one imagine that an accident like this one would instead alter one irreparably? I’d say, it quite must, mustn’t it? I guess what I mean is I imagine ye’ve become a different sort of player, not a regular fellow, but a man now, wouldn’t ye say? Perhaps ye are less inclined to be the demon of a bad boy on the field, then, but a true team player, what one might label ‘an honest instigator’ instead of a rabble-rouser?”
Uncle Lud would cackle with each of the fox’s assumptions and self-clarifications.
A fox, he maintained, was in love with the sound of his own voice.
At least a Claymation fox—dressed, as Uncle Lud and I imagined, in a scarlet riding outfit—was.
But that afternoon, the high comedy of the BBC was illusive, a narrow drawer of static that wouldn’t come clear. I flicked the radio’s knob to a local station, but even the endless stream of Traveling Top 40 proved unobtainable. In its place, a news report about fears of a potentially dangerous fire bleated.
Dry lightning and willfully stupid campers were in season along with the unusual heat and the tindered grass, but I wasn’t sure that things would have been different if the heat had held off. Then we might have had landslides or tremors or a spate of death-by-bear. You couldn’t live here all these years and not feel as if the mountainside itself had a soul that flared and suffered and must find its own way of exploding.
“You went up to the refuse station,” Uncle Lud whispered, more statement than question. His throat, I knew, was always raw these days. I knew too that Uncle Lud wanted to say more. He
would say more, I was sure, as soon as he could dampen the dry edge of his throat. I sat up to bend his straw and hand him his glass, waiting until he sipped before I answered.
“All of you?” Uncle Lud asked.
“Not Ursie,” I said.
“She’ll be okay,” Uncle Lud said, startling me. My uncle rarely misread a conversation. “And?”
“And what?” I said.
“Who else?”
How did he know? I wondered. How did he always know?
I almost laughed aloud and Uncle Lud finally smiled, a tiny anxious twist to his old grin.
“A girl who works up at the camp with Jackie,” I said. “Hana Swann’s her name.”
“For now,” Uncle Lud said.
I shrugged, and Uncle Lud read the shape of my morning in that gesture.
“Trouble?” he said as if he already knew she was.
I found myself oddly reluctant to share the truth of Hana Swann.
“Ah, no. She had advice for Bryan, that’s all. Pissed him off, I think, this girl trying to tell him how to deal with Flacker.”
“Did she shoot?” Uncle Lud persisted.
“Oh, yeah, a little,” I said. “You should see her with a .22.”
I could feel a pressure building inside, a push against the truth. Uncle Lud read it in my face.
“She killed something, didn’t she?” he said. “Something besides a rat.”
“A young marten,” I admitted.
“Did you help?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did . . . you . . . help her . . . kill it?” Uncle Lud managed.
Did I? For a moment, I flat couldn’t remember. A part of me imagined I had stepped beside her to steady the gun or that I had been the one to stroll into the broken forest and lift the bloodied creature against me. I glanced down at myself, almost sure I’d see my shirtfront drenched in blood and was both confused and relieved to see only a speck of blood, my own blood, I remembered now, my own tiny accident.
Something spilled inside me, and in a rapid voice that shamed me, a voice that reminded me of my own childish fears, I babbled out how Hana Swann had shocked us all, how she disappeared into the trees, how blood ran down her white arm.
“She’s not afraid of anything,” I concluded. “She was even ready to walk clean back to camp. Claims she’d never had a problem, hitchhiking on the highway or any road.”
“Jackie stopped her?” Uncle Lud said, leaning forward a little.
“Nah, weird thing is, Jackie knows better. Her sister’s friend Minette, you know. They haven’t found her. Jackie feels safe with this girl, I guess.”
I saw again the helpless longing on Jackie’s face, and the rush of desire that had lofted me over Fuller Street to chase Tessa returned. I found myself rising to my feet, as if ready to run after her again, this time with Hana Swann looking on, grinning even as the Nagle brothers’ car came tearing toward me and GF threw open his door.
It came fully into the room with us, a vision of blood, a burst of gunfire, a lonely figure eyeing a stretch of the highway.
In the kitchen, my mother rattled plates and pots to remind us what life entailed. Water ran, cupboard doors slammed. We could hear the pill drawer open and lids pop as my mother began to sort Uncle Lud’s next doses. Uncle Lud’s chest calmed, and he inclined his flushed head toward mine, taking stock of me, including the unnamed absence I felt and the bandaged finger even my mother had missed. A new hurt crossed Uncle Lud’s face.
“Ah,” he whispered in his ravaged voice. “Ah, Leo. You saw her . . . didn’t you? You saw Snow Woman.”
You know this, don’t you? he was almost begging. You have this?
One of my father’s more uncharitable relatives maintains that a great-uncle of my father’s did a huge favor for a medicine man in one of the northern tribes and was paid back with a backhanded curse. Not so, Uncle Lud swears. He was rewarded—not with rich farmland or timber or a hefty bank account—but with an enduring connection to the band itself, one that led my father to fall in love with a Native woman and my father’s younger brother to lose his heart—and soul—to storytelling. So my Uncle Lud, my white uncle, my uncle who should not have known all he did, stockpiled tales the way others amass tables and chairs and cars and suit jackets, all the props of life. This was his fortune, the legacy he was handing to me.
In Uncle Lud’s vast story encyclopedia, one form of the devil is a gentle white lady who places a sliver of ice in your heart and makes you desperate to meet her in the underworld. It is an ancient story, dredged up each generation, whenever a spate of suicides occurred. Some bands call her Deer Woman. Others, Night Woman. When Snow Woman finds you, unless you are the strongest of souls, the most skeptical, or the most protected, the world no longer belongs to you. She has found a particularly easy berth in young Indian men, so eager it seems to flash out of this life into any other. Suicide sounds so desperate; it really does. But following Snow Woman can be damn near noble, irresistible. It is, the rumor goes, an act of pure magic: a disappearing act directed by the devil himself. I’d heard the story a half-dozen times from Uncle Lud. I knew it in my bones. But at that moment it seemed as if I’d forgotten every scrap, and as he watched, I reached for a notebook.
SNOW WOMAN
People go missing. That’s not news, it turns out. It’s how they get lost that’s of interest. Vanishing, according to Uncle Lud, has never been an uncommon event. In the backcountry where he and my father grew up, people still disappear at regular intervals, many from choice, chasing a job or fleeing a failing farm or a hellish wife or a demented acquaintance with a grudge and a storehouse of weapons. Sometimes, the law swoops down when no one is looking, and only rumors are left behind.
Other times, plain old stupidity is the cause.
A perceived aura of invisibility, Uncle Lud says, is the third stage of drunkenness, followed swiftly by a more fatal stage: the belief in invincibility. So there you are, weaving home alone in the moon-starved night, shit-faced in the snow, no worries. Who can even see you? That realization sends you spinning from this world, the once well-known path squeezing down to nothing as if viewed through a closing periscope, the road lost for good, and your last brilliant assumption is that if you are only going to waste time turning in circles, why not rest awhile in that grave-shaped gulley, that pillowy hollow of a snowbank.
Gone, gone, gone.
Another kind of disappearance, less common, of course, is almost never talked about except by those who have nearly fallen victim, but even they quickly learn that their stories are best left unexplored. It was only by chance that Uncle Lud happened to be party to a firsthand report.
This happened in a mining town called Wilton’s Cross, which used to occupy a narrow slit off the old highway—a dozen houses, a sand-brick church up on cinder blocks, and a company store with two back rooms (one for playing cards and one for visiting one of the three women unfortunate enough to have landed there without a man’s protection). The enclave perched just beyond the spray of a waterfall that fell a quarter mile into the river that ran straight through the town under the half block of a boardwalked main street. Wilton’s Cross has all but faded away—kind of ironical, when you think about it—but one of the old mining-company roads ends by the stone bridge that crossed into the old town, and though the boardwalk’s long gone and most of the homes burned in a fire that swept through decades ago, you can still walk across that bridge, find bricks from the church, and hurl one or two toward the falls for luck, if you dare.
Uncle Lud, then a boy of twelve, was on his way back from a championship hockey game, a seven-hour drive from the farm where he lived with my father; their much-older sister, Joyce; Joyce’s husband, Toby; and my grandparents. Toby was the assistant coach for the team that Uncle Lud had barely made, and he had volunteered to drive a few kids to the championship.
The team traveled in three vehicles—a van driven by the coach, a station wagon by a teacher at the school, and one old car by Uncle Lud’s young brother-in-law. Uncle Lud, of course, rode in Toby’s car. On the way home, he sat up front and listened while Toby painstakingly went over the games, the two they’d won and the one they’d lost. His teammates, two big boys from the reserve, unwelcome in the van and station wagon, were worn out and slept with their cheeks against the windows, and eventually Uncle Lud too dozed off, his head tipping forward as he nodded to Toby’s passionate replay.
Some time later, it might have been a few minutes or full hours, he woke from a dream about butter tarts to a heavy bump and a whooshing rumble as if the car had fallen into a hole and Toby was gunning the engine. Behind him, the big boys stirred but snored on. Beside him, Toby was rubbing his tired eyes. He unrolled his window and craned his neck out, and only gradually was Uncle Lud aware that the noise he was hearing was not the car’s engine racing—the car had, in fact, stopped—but the roar of a waterfall about forty feet away.
“I need to walk around,” Toby declared, and so, Uncle Lud decided, did he.
They left the sleeping boys behind and wandered up the empty road to the stone bridge that led into Wilton’s Cross. The settlement was quiet, even then in its last days of pretending to be a town, and no one appeared on the gravel street or peered out a window at them. At the far end of the road, they could see a truck and a derelict school bus framing a turnaround.
“I’m hungry,” Toby said, his stomach growling from the cold air’s bite.
They’d left home with wax-paper-wrapped packets of Kraft cheese sandwiches, with thermos containers of beef stew and chicken, with great boxes of sugar-raisin cookies and a couple of sacks of old apples from the root cellar. Nearly every bite of it had been eaten before they even arrived at the championships, and then they’d gone on to gorge themselves on the city motel’s free breakfasts, slipping stale doughnuts and hard-boiled eggs into their hockey bags as they left. But now Uncle Lud, too, still craving the butter tarts of his dream, was starved and fingering the two dollars he had kept all along in his coat pocket.
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