The Snowman's Children

by Glen Hirshberg

  The Snowman had come, although no one was calling him that yet. No one had named a task force after him or held special assemblies about him at school. No psychologists had developed profiles. And no one had offered any speculation about what he was doing with his victims during the days, sometimes weeks, between the moments he took them and the moments he left them, lifeless but unmarked, in tidy bundles in the snow.

  Chapter 3 - 1994

  Back in Louisville, Laura will be waiting, in the paint-spattered overall shorts she slips into every night after dinner. She’ll have her banjo across her knees in bed—she only practices her banjo in bed—and a Rolling Rock on the nightstand, her dark hair pinned back under a black-and-red bandanna. I know she’s expecting me to call. My own fault, really. I’ve become unexpectedly good at the mechanics of marriage: surprise dinners, hugs from behind while we’re doing the dishes, bringing my wife another Rolling Rock before I go downstairs to draw.

  My parents in Lexington will be waiting too, and they will not be pretending otherwise. My mother, especially, didn’t want me to come back here. She told me I was being that way again. By that way she means fixated and daydreaming, under what she terms “the misapprehension that Detroit has any relevance whatsoever” to the mess she worries that I’m making of my life.

  I dial my own number and wait. Three rings. Four. I’m almost hoping Laura’s not home yet, that the bluegrass band she plays with at the Secretariat Club six nights a week had a hot show, and she’s churning through an encore right now, stage-flirting through the smoke with that lingering laugh that comes from somewhere I can’t reach, and later, she’ll punch the answering machine and find my voice and know I called her right away. Because I did. I am calling right away.

  Our answering machine has neither of our voices, just Laura playing her banjo, followed by a beep.

  “It’s me,” I say, and before I can say I miss you, I’m sorry, I’m cold, the roads have split open and the earth underneath is frozen and black, Laura’s voice fills the line.

  “You forgot to pay the phone bill.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re always sorry, Mattie.”

  The ensuing silence is long, familiar. I can hear her breathing. I can see her overall straps rise and fall, feel the snaps come open in my hands. I can smell her beer and banjo-resin smell.

  A thousand miles away, in her bed in her room in her life, Laura starts to hum. “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” She’s humming the high harmony part, the one she sings onstage. It sounds eerie up there all by itself, like bat sonar closing in. I start to ask how her show was and stop. I start to explain again why I had to come here, why this weekend by myself in this place was the only thing I wanted for my birthday. But the explanations lack clarity, even to me, and none of them fill even a corner of the empty space we’ve cultivated between us for almost seven years.

  “I’ve never told you the story behind the WANTED drawings, have I?” I say abruptly, and the humming doesn’t stop but she’s there, listening. Or she’s gone and it’s too late. Either way I have to tell her this. “Laura?”

  Laura just hums, the verse about the guy who left, without any extra intended meaning. It’s the nature of bluegrass; there’s not a song in her repertoire that wouldn’t dig at me tonight.

  I close my eyes and watch as all those disembodied hands slip effortlessly from the places where I’ve buried them and crawl across the last two decades to claim me.

  Chapter 4 - 1985

  By junior year, I had firmly established myself at the bottom of my class at Parsons School of Design, an illustrator at best with a whimsical streak and no genius whatsoever. In October, at the suggestion of a disinterested prof, I’d designed my first planned community: seven ordinary subdivision homes with swimming pools and high back fences, except that these back fences all had secret openings triggered by springboards that flew up or slid sideways on rollers or leapt out of line into the bushes. Owners were encouraged to decorate and disguise their entrances to suit their own tastes. The idea, I wrote when I presented the thing, was to reconstruct the community by unblocking its arteries, so that kids—the lifeblood of any subdivision—could flow freely through it.

  I got my first B on that project. The grade was a gift, really, because the whole thing was pretty banal; even the fences were naive. But I think members of the distinguished faculty were relieved. They’d finally found a pursuit for me that they could, in good academic conscience, recommend, and they probably thought my movement in such a utilitarian—as opposed to fervently artistic—direction would weaken my friendship with Scuzzie Li.

  Once, and once only, I went home with Scuzzie to his mother’s place in Martinsville, New Jersey. The house had huge glass bird feeders suspended from each corner of the sloping, slatted roof, so the eaves were perpetually haunted with sparrows. Scuzzie’s parents—his father was a geographer, his mother a painter—had come to this country from China in the early seventies as part of a cultural exchange program at Rutgers. Only his mother had stayed, keeping young Scuzzie with her. I have no idea whether she defected or emigrated, and when I asked, Scuzzie seemed confused about the difference. I also have no idea where her money came from, but she apparently had plenty of it. She wore paint frocks and black skirts and black tights and wouldn’t look at me at all. She talked incessantly to Scuzzie, following him through rooms and up and down flights of stairs, chattering in Chinese. He rarely answered; instead, he conducted conversations in English with me right over her shoulder. But he’d look at her sometimes, in the middle of whatever we were doing, and she would stop talking for a moment or two. Sometimes, Scuzzie would laugh, but she never did.

  Despite the way he dressed at school—seventies-vintage black leather jackets with big buttons and belts that hung off the back, spandex pants, dress shoes with enormous heels that tilted him forward so he always looked as if he were being forklifted—Scuzzie’s nickname had nothing to do with his appearance. It had grown out of a verbal tic. Instead of saying because, he said bescuz in response to practically anything anyone ever asked him. Whether it was a childhood habit or a deliberate choice, I never knew. But I always thought it suited what he and I both recognized as his peculiarly art-school sort of brilliance.

  Late at night, careening on coffee and ecstasy and spasms of brain energy, he’d erupt out of bed with a canvas under his arm, hurtle past the hall denizens stretched across the floor with their clove cigarettes dangling from their lips and blank sketch pads propped open on their laps, dart through the people clumped on couches in the TV lounge, and disappear into the laundry room and lock the door.

  Hours later, he would emerge with pieces of abstract art that positively vibrated color: veins of obscene orange snaking through reds and tans that gave out two-thirds of the way across the canvas. My favorite, called “Crush,” was a sort of collapsing iceberg of sea-greens swooning into blue, plunging toward black, and finally collapsing off the bottom of the frame. It used to hang over my bed in Louisville, but Laura couldn’t sleep with all that color crashing down on her. Now it hangs in our hallway, safely shrouded in perpetual shadow.

  Scuzzie and I became friends on the first day of school, freshman year. I gave him the top bunk so he wouldn’t bang his head when he lunged awake in the middle of the night with his brushes in his fist. We stayed friends, I think, because Scuzzie’s knowledge of his own inevitable failure as an artist pained him—physically—to the point of paralysis, whereas the ongoing confirmation of my more evident lack of vision came as a profound relief and was very possibly the reason I chose to pursue art in the first place. I’d managed to get as far from Mind Wars and Brain Tables as I could.

  So we went on rooming together, eating together, and failing together, in our separate ways. Scuzzie painted, took drugs, accumulated accolades from the faculty. I curled up comfortably in his wake and stayed unnoticed. And whenever Scuzzie wasn’t painting, we went to the track.

  That winter, Manhattan stayed
weirdly warm all through January while the rest of the country wrestled with snow. In the TV lounge, my fellow weather-channel junkies and I would watch the Accu-map in hypnotized fascination. State lines blurred and faded. Mountains sank to their shoulders in the relief landscape. It seemed as though every city but Manhattan had been erased.

  I was the only one still in the lounge on the morning that Scuzzie emerged from the laundry room with his hands clenched into claws and his hair dyed the color of a bruise. He looked as if he’d been dipped into one of his paintings.

  “Matt-tee,” he said, with more pronounced oriental shading than usual. “Aqueduct.”

  Bleary-eyed, I squinted at his hair, then back at the TV. “Can’t,” I told him, and gestured at the Accu-map. “The snow ate it.”

  “You bet with me today,” he said, limping down the hallway, first on one leg, then the other, heels tipping him all too soon into the future.

  Outside Manhattan, the subway emptied quickly. Our only companions were college students bundled into city-stained ski jackets and scarves, an old guy in a fedora singing Eastern European folk songs, and one black mother whose kids whirled to the window every time the train rose aboveground. The snow lifted off the abandoned buildings and rubble-strewn lots and settled down again like furniture coverings in a deserted house. I watched the kids and shivered backward almost ten years into the drainage ditch at the bottom of our yard, where I had lain in the drifts, head-to-head-to-head with Spencer Franklin and Theresa Daughrety, playing dead-things-rising-from-the-grave. They’d found several of the Snowman’s victims face down in ditches, their bodies warm enough that the paramedics had tried to revive them.

  By the time we reached Aqueduct, I was already remembering the hands. I started to tell Scuzzie about them as we exited the train, which flew from the station in a sucking sort of rush, like air expiring into space.

  “In Detroit,” I said to Scuzzie’s back, feeling a disconcerting pressure in my stomach, “when I walked home from school....”

  Suddenly, he stopped and leaned against the side of the stairway with his hands on his knees.

  “Scuzzie, are you all right?” I asked.

  “I reek.” He was talking about his art, I knew, and by then he had almost used up the venom he could inject into that word.

  “I reek worse.”

  “Today you bet with me.”

  It was the second time he’d said it. He needed to win—or maybe lose—with someone today. Anyway, he was leaving me no choice. If I didn’t bet with him, he wouldn’t translate any of the conversations around us.

  “Will they come today?” I asked him.

  He shrugged, winced, and started up the stairs again. We paid our five bucks and passed through the turnstile into the clubhouse, which shared its smell of electrified urine with every other public building connected to the subway. I followed behind, shaking my tingling hands, looking for Chinese women.

  To this day, I don’t know if they go to Aqueduct all the time or only on specified dates. All I know is that every time he took me to the track that winter, we’d emerge from the stairwell into a bustle of black-haired Asian women clutching racing forms and munching chestnuts, all of them eyeing and chiding and seemingly threatening one another in Mandarin that trilled up the clubhouse walls like birdsong.

  There were fewer of them this day, maybe ten out of the twenty-five or so people bent over newspapers and beer while waiting for the betting cages to open. One of the ten, in an open trench coat and house frock, nodded at Scuzzie.

  “Oh, my God,” I said. “Scuzzie, look outside.”

  “What?” he said, then turned toward the window and stared, the way he did when he circled the Rothkos at MOMA. “Wow.”

  You couldn’t see the track or the starter’s gate or the tower. A miasma—not snow, not fog, but gray-white vapor—had swamped the grounds. Occasionally, shapes or streaks of color would surface: a horse’s haunch, a purple shirt, an unidentifiable bubble of blue. It was like looking through the moon at the rest of the earth. Quietly, relentlessly, disembodied hands climbed toward consciousness. I was seeing windows, my neighbors’ houses in suburban Detroit, Theresa Daughrety sitting up out of the snow and making a mummy-moan.

  “Hands,” I said, and Scuzzie finally looked at me. I kept my eyes on the whiteness that was burying the world. “Kids had disappeared. A lot of kids. They gave these tests to parents, and if you passed you got a hand to paste in your window. At assemblies in school, they told us if anyone came near us on our way home, we should run to the nearest house with a hand in the window.”

  He was looking at me more intently than I’d ever seen him look at me before. “And?”

  “We called him the Snowman,” I murmured, knowing I wasn’t making any sense. I could feel the sting of his name on my tongue.

  “Let’s bet,” Scuzzie said. He sounded angry, almost, though I had no idea why and couldn’t quite focus on him anyway. “You bet with me. Then we go home.”

  I stood still, seeing hands suspended in glass like palm prints from ghost kids.

  Ninety minutes later, Scuzzie dragged me to the betting cage to cash in our exacta. I let him handle the transaction while I stood next to him, still drifting. He handed me eleven dollars. I watched the woman in the house frock behind us as she held out her racing form. All over the margins, and not just in the margins, Chinese characters scuttled on their little legs, carrying off bits of newsprint like raiding ants.

  “You friend demon?” the woman said, when Scuzzie turned around.

  The question scared me. I couldn’t imagine what she meant. I didn’t think she was referring to Scuzzie, or even to me, although I’d been staring at her.

  “I’ll get you home,” Scuzzie said. He had seen what was happening to me as soon as it had started on the stairs leading to the clubhouse. And he’d seemed to understand it before I did.

  On the subway, I tried to talk to him about our bets, his newest painting, anything that might have provided a distraction, but he just closed his eyes, folded his hands over his leather jacket, and ignored me. I finally gave in, sat back shuddering as the train wheels screeched over the rails, and stared into the snow that clung to the windows like gauze.

  He left me alone in our room. Three hours later, I had finished all three drawings.

  They were white sheets of plain typing paper, blank as the snow in the Aqueduct window. Across the top I had spattered word-shaped blotches of ink. At the bottom I wrote dates. Not current dates, not the Snowman’s dates. I don’t know where these dates came from: 10/12/57, 7/23/68, 12/31/91. On the first piece of paper, in the gaping white space between the splotches and the dates, I drew eyebrows above half an almond eye; on the second, a neck with a tie knotted around it but no body beneath; on the third, off-center and floating, I drew a little kid’s hand, or more accurately, the outline of one. I stole a piece of Scuzzie’s canvas and stapled the drawings to it, one beside the other, and across the top, in the blackest paint I could find, I painted the word WANTED.

  Six weeks later, when they gave me the Spring Prize, Scuzzie moved out. He said he wanted to give me more room. He stopped eating with me too, though he continued to come by at least once a week and drag me out to the track to watch horses and listen to the chatter of Chinese women.

  Once, when he’d drugged himself so deep into a stupor that not even light and color could rouse him, he showed me the letter he wrote nominating the WANTED drawings for the prize. He said they tore words loose from language. He said they burned body parts into fossils.

  He said they were terrifying.

  Chapter 5 - 1976

  Maybe it started at Theresa Daughrety’s birthday party, on the day I told her to say no to the Mind War, or later that spring when I began raising my hand for both hot lunch and from-home lunch at school, effectively sabotaging the meal count for the cafeteria. Certainly by Red-Gray Day, June 11, 1976, my semiconscious transformation into a less dependable sort of kid had begun in earne
st, three months before I ever met Spencer Franklin.

  Until then, I hadn’t done anything too thrilling. I put strips of construction paper in Garrett Serpien’s Koogle and banana sandwiches, but everyone put strips of construction paper in Garrett’s sandwiches. I rubber-cemented Jamie Kerflack’s math workbook shut, but he didn’t even notice for over a month. When he did, he just snickered and punched his nearest crony in the arm.

  It was Theresa Daughrety who got removed from the Brain Table for two weeks for talking, not me. She’d been talking to herself, mostly, but talking nonetheless. I still outscored her a good third of the time on tests and quizzes. Once, during the end-of-the-year tournament, I upset Jamie Kerflack in Four Square, and even Mr. Lang, who called me Mathilda because I couldn’t do a pull-up, clapped me on the back. On my final report card, sent home the week before Red-Gray Day, Mrs. Van-Ellis said I’d had a major growth year, and I could do anything. She said one more thing too, which my mother read to my father and my brother Brent at the dinner table that night. She said I’d started feeling safe at last.

  That comment served as documented proof of what I’d already begun to suspect: that smallness, and feeling alone, isn’t necessarily something you grow out of, just something you learn to disguise.

  On Red-Gray Day, I told my parents I needed the wheelbarrow for one of the races at school. Neither of them even looked up from their breakfast. In the garage, I packed the wheelbarrow with handcuffs from my little brother’s cop set, the white painting smock my parents had given me with the easel for my birthday, and the posterboard signs I’d spent most of the night before preparing, and wheeled it into the Michigan summer.

  The light that day was cement-colored, the heat and humidity so heavy that even the cicadas had stuttered to a stop. The only sound was the whirring of air-conditioner units. Cats crouched in the shadows of cars, slinking from space to space on the asphalt in an effort to escape their own body heat. As I wheeled over the drainage ditch at the end of my driveway, the first mosquito of the morning plunged into my arm. I grabbed the skin around it and squeezed until the mosquito ballooned and burst like a tiny soap bubble.