Whiteout Conditions

by Tariq Shah

  We were walking out when we heard a voice go, “No, no, no no—you don’t get to pet my dog. No one does. Only me.”

  And there came Gavin from around back, coming toward us, sweating awfully. Glistening streaks ran down his face, darkening his sleeveless shirt.

  He knelt next to Ray and casually took him by the back of his neck, suddenly trying to be neighborly. “Now, you know this is private property. You know this is my dog,” he said to Ray, shaking him lightly as he spoke. “You stay right there,” he told Ray, and Ray obeyed. So did I.

  I saw Vince approach, storm-faced, pick Gavin’s hand up off Ray, and the whole world seemed to be reversing course at light speed. Vince was mad as a hornet, though Gavin had all kinds of weight on him, had all kinds of weird cunning. But Vince was spry. I almost couldn’t watch.

  And Gavin was a little shocked, watching his own hand get lifted away like a hot pan taken off a burner. But then his eyes grew keen, sort of bright with a weird joy he seemed to want kept secret. But I’d seen it before—we all had, at one time or another. With Gavin, you never knew what you were going to get—sadism or whimsy, Hook or Peter Pan. But, however he did choose to behave, it was always with a wild leer like that, trying to be hid, trying to be—harnessed.

  Sometimes he was the alligator, too. Endless appetite, never too far.

  Shrugging off that small invasion of his personal space, he gave a sharp whistle to grab the dog’s attention, and after giving chase around the pickup a little while, managed to horse collar Bullets. “Sit down,” he commanded, and twisted the collar until the dog did as told. Just as quickly, Gavin’s mind changed.

  “Move, dumb dog,” he said, and dragged Bullets back over to the truck, where he leashed him up again.

  “Go easy…” Vince said. I could tell he spoke before thinking, the way he studied the dirt after the words left his mouth.

  “I know, I know,” he replied, sorry as a cardinal caught whoring, as he got up from his feet with a little whine, came over to us, and loped a long sweat-slick arm over Vince’s shoulders. He began walking Vince around, talking to him. Casual as can be. Vince even let him do it at first, even when Gavin got real close and was whispering into Vince’s ear.

  “I love the dog, I do. Lot of responsibility in raising animals. You have to be firm…”

  When Vince tried shrugging Gavin’s arm off his shoulders, it became a headlock. The snare was triggered. Though he was much taller than all of us, his body was somehow both gangly and obese, like a tortoise in a too-big shell. Gavin worked him, smothering Vince in his armpit. Then he pivoted our way as Vince grunted, doing what he could to break it.

  Gavin, playing the heel, mildly staring at me and Ray as Vince toiled under his flabby hold. Bullets, going into hiding under the pickup.

  The seconds under that ugly gaze of his felt twisted and— outside of time, though it must have been only a moment, him watching us with this lazy, sleepy face, relishing our helplessness. Vince bucking madly then, throwing elbows into Gavin’s doughy paunch. Ray starting to cry.

  And then Gavin, grating his knuckles back and forth over Vince’s scalp, muttering “keep fighting,” bringing the whole thing to a hard boil until he finally quit it.

  Vince, deep red and sucking air, turning away to smear off the sweat.

  “We’re just playing around, don’t be scared,” he said to Ray, this idiotic leer on his face. And as if it would prove his point, Gavin snatched at Ray’s towel. There was a brief mock tug of war. He gleefully hammed it up a little, then released him, chuckled and scratched at his prickly throat.

  “It’s too hot,” said Gavin, himself out of breath. “Parents, cops—you tell anyone, you’ll be sorry…”

  We all edged away until reaching the road. Gavin, bent double, hands on knees, watching us like a cross bull in the shade, before wandering around off to the backyard again, leaving the spilled trash all over the failing grass, where a couple Styrofoam plates cartwheeled from a weak breeze into the shrubs.

  I took a final look behind me and there was Bullets, who barked some happy barks of goodbye before loping off to thrash around with the beach towel Ray’d left behind.

  We walked most of the way back in a shaky, hyper, post-fight rush of disbelief. Vince smoked about ten cigarettes along the way. In a few days, there would show, along his neck, his clavicle, a swath of soft gray bruising, the imprint of Gavin’s arm where he’d gripped him. He said not a word about it. Sometimes bruises are a badge.

  The subdivision was a ghost town. As we passed the wood sign reading “Orchard Park” at the turn-in, it felt recently evacuated, which I took to mean the power had returned. Vince said nothing at all for a long time, until he noticed Ray had gone silent too.

  “You good?” Vince asked.

  Ray nodded. “Thanks, man,” he whispered, and making his limp arm into a kind of swung weapon, playfully thwacked at Vince’s side. Little dude code for love you.

  “Next time it’s your turn.”

  Ray studied the grass, sounded a nervous moan. He looked to me, his expression—Is that so? But I ignored it as though he wasn’t there at all.

  Still, he kept looking, his hands wringing themselves.

  Then Vince scooped him up, put the boy’s scrawny frame on his shoulders, gave him a lift back home, where we found the living room already growing comfortably cold.

  *

  After the news report concluded, I didn’t call immediately. I’ve never been good with phones, and as the minutes went by, I became less certain what I saw was real. I stared at the gray television screen, convincing myself it had been, but my thoughts wouldn’t stay still in my mind long enough to chart a logical course of action. I sat still like that until I felt about to explode. And when I rang Vince up it went down like this:

  “May I speak to Vincent Von Jovic, please?”

  “Who’s calling.”

  I go, “Vince. Goddamnit, it’s me, it’s Ant. Antioch.”

  “Ant. Your voice finally dropped.”

  “I know. It’s doing wonders for my love life. Sorry it’s been so long. I’ve been busy. We’re all busy, right?”

  “How are you? Ahem, what can I, I mean—”

  “I’m fine, I’m the same.”

  “Cool, yeah, good. Well this is probably about Ray then, I’m guessing.”

  “I’m calling about Ray, the Ray Gun, yeah. The news is saying all kinds of stuff. And I don’t know, I just wanted to call. You and him were—you two were close, so—I mean, I was kind of friends with him too, you know?”

  “I get you. Well I don’t know, really. How to put this, I mean. There was an accident, night before last. We had an attack.”

  “What happened?”

  “No one’s really sure how it started or like, what exactly—or the play-by-play, know what I mean? Police are still investigating, so we’ll probably never know. But Ray died. On the way to the hospital.”

  “Oh, god…”

  “Kind of sucks.”

  “Oh, Christ. I’m sorry, Vince.”

  “Well… you should tell that to his mom and dad, maybe.”

  “Yeah, I’m calling them next. Think I have their number still. If I don’t I’ll let you know. How are you holding up though? I mean, like—”

  “I’m maintaining. Funeral’s in a couple days. I’m kind of just helping out the family with everything, you know.”

  “Well listen. I’d like to come out and attend. If that’d be all right with everyone.”

  “Must be expensive to fly out and all that hassle. It’s nice of you, but don’t feel obligated.”

  “If it’s all the same to everyone, I can book a seat right now. Least I can do. Vince—sorry I’ve been so off the radar.”

  “Hey, man—things happen. Like you said, we’re all busy…”

  “Still, though. I wanted to say it.”

  “Wow, Ant. Listen to you. Sound so grown up. It’s a two-way street though, I suppose. House full of kids is not co
nducive to the usual outreach efforts…”

  “I’m sure they keep you and Caroline on your toes. So we’re straight, right? It’s all right I come?”

  “Not gonna bar you, Ant. I’m heading up Saturday. I was gonna hit up a motel or something that night—service is Sunday. I’m working all day Saturday though, wouldn’t get in until late. It’s way up in Big Bend. Dan and Marcy got some relatives up there that don’t travel so well, so… if you want a ride up with me, I can come get you.”

  “No way. That’d be great. We can catch up.”

  “If you like.”

  “I’ll call you back later and let you know my details.”

  “It’s a plan.”

  “Sorry again.”

  “Yeah, I heard you the first two times. You and me both. Sorry all around.”

  *

  I was thrilled to have a little brother. Mom and I and Vince went on all kinds of shopping trips for stuff for the baby, and she’d get us prizes for being good on the way back home—sundaes, or tacos, sometimes comics, once a gerbil. I was eight or nine at the time.

  She wanted a girl. A little baby girl to offset me and Vince. We were goons.

  She was surrounded at all times by us savages always breaking stuff, wreaking havoc, profaning her home. She longed for a daughter who she could take to piano lessons and ballet class, to help her cook and bake cakes and sugar cookies, though we liked doing that with her too.

  I wanted to be a big brother, to have someone who could test out sketchy sled runs. We could, I thought, gang up against Vince when he was being a dick, because he’s a little bit older and was a little bit bigger then. And nice things too. I could, I thought, teach him how to throw ninja stars, and it would be, I thought, fun to have someone to play GI Joes with.

  So Mom and I had this bet that if the baby was a girl I’d do all the house cleaning for a full year and if the baby was a boy, she’d buy me a Lamborghini Testarossa when I turned sixteen. I’d remind her every day about it. Sometimes, I’d hear her call my name. I’d be like, yelling back, “What?” and she’d be like, “Just come here, idiot!” And I’d go around and find her, wherever she was, and usually she was scrubbing the toilet, or spraying the trash can with the hose, or holding up Dad’s stinky underwear. “Hope you remember that bet,” she’d say, pinching her nose, and I’d run away, screaming.

  I remember hearing her on the phone with Dad, having a kind of serious discussion. She looked fine to me, but she told him she was bleeding. I asked her what’s wrong. I didn’t see any blood, and I was an expert, even then. She just hung up, waved me toward her and said, “You’re a good kid,” into my ear. “You have a good heart.” And I remember crying because she was crying, hanging onto me for dear life. And because I just knew the bet was off.

  *

  We’ve been driving for about an hour through Chicago’s toll-choked upper limits when I try playing a Stones cassette I’d found on the floor, but Vince’s tape deck munches it up. We’re cruising along quietly for a little bit when he goes, “Why’d you leave, Ant?”

  “Like it’s some state secret.”

  “Mall gig money not enough for you?”

  “Should it have been? Should I have been grateful for the privilege of playing Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in front of a Cinnabon for the rest of my life while some dead-eyed teen in an elf get-up clangs a bell for Salvation Army donations?”

  “You know what we all think?”

  “There’s not enough roofers in Algonquin?”

  “We think you’re embarrassed by us. We think you’re ashamed.”

  “Who’s ‘we’ exactly? Why’re you bringing this up now?”

  “Just making conversation. We got a ways to go still and I thought—what better time to drill down to the heart of things?”

  “How about later?”

  “When suits you?”

  “When’s the moon finally escaping earth’s gravity?”

  “Have to check…”

  “You check and get back to me.”

  “We treat you like one of ours, you know.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “Caroline thinks you’re in trouble.”

  “I don’t talk to Caroline so I don’t know what she’s getting at.”

  “She hears things. We all do. Even Uncle Josef.”

  “Hear whatever you want. Uncle Josef? He’s digging a bunker in his backyard, did you all hear about that?”

  “You know, we could’ve been cold.”

  “Yes, and I could’ve been a roofer in Algonquin. Gosh, maybe even a carpenter. Who knows, if I’m lucky, maybe get my balls zapped one day. Look, I left because I just left. It seemed like the thing to do. Sue me.” I started to laugh.

  “You know what you smell like?”

  “Does this tape deck do anything other than mangle tapes? You got an aux cord or something in back? I can plug in the Discman.”

  “You smell like death, Ant. You’ve got it all over you.”

  “Why don’t you just drive and keep your eyes on the road?”

  “Dee-ee-ay-tee-aych. You stink of it.”

  “Good to know. Thank you for pointing that out. Anyway, you got your answer.”

  It’s quiet again, but I can’t quite leave it alone. I happen to like the way I smell.

  “…Seriously though. Do I?”

  “You and me both, brother. We reek of it.” He starts laughing, the laughing becomes hacking, he hawks something up, and he swallows it back down.

  *

  Before I moved away, I visited my grandparents, Paul and Dorothy, one last time. When I was a kid they had owned a meek and merry home with cable TV, a pool table in the basement, and toward the back, a hovel my grandfather had fashioned from stacked electronic and radio equipment—requisitioned from his days in the Air Force and then as a company man at Motorola—wherein he would while the hours away, tinkering, lit by the blue-white flashes of his soldering iron.

  They didn’t have any toys, though. Visiting them as a boy, I’d quickly exhaust my imagination playing with whatever I’d brought with me from home. I would moan and groan to my grandmother that there was nothing to do. I was so bored.

  Sometimes I bugged her to the point where she’d put me in her lap and we’d explore the back issues of National Geographic magazine they had dutifully collected over the years.

  I learned about the long-necked women of the Maasai and their lion-stalking men. I saw Kenya’s grand and wicked creatures—the jackal and croc, the wildebeest and laughing hyena. “I want to go there,” I would say.

  “That would be nice,” she would reply, turning the page.

  I learned about Tokyo, Hawaii, the Yukon, Mongolia, saw macaws as blue as lobsters, the petunia-petal skirts of Istanbul’s dervishes, violet wildflower prairie fields, deserts at the bottom of the sea.

  We agreed to visit them all. Over the years, we even made it to one or two—Cahokia Mounds, Mammoth Cave—though they weren’t as moving as the pictures.

  By the time I made that last visit, they’d swapped their home and everything in it for a condo, had both weathered numerous open-heart surgeries. Grandpa, the imperfect excision of a brain tumor. She had become fragile, he’d lost his marbles, and both needed a nurse in the home to keep them up and running.

  I brought them McDonald’s cheeseburgers, fries, and Cokes. We ate, the golf game on mute, played rummy until the sun was just a pink cuticle barely making it over some far-off trees.

  I lost the last round. And when that happened, Grandpa laughed like a young man, a specific chuckle he had that I tried to mimic to perfection, and thus keep forever in my head. A humble, knowing, easy laugh of a man thankful for the blessed fortune life graced him with. Then he slipped back into his dementia as I collected the cards and wiped the string of saliva from his mouth. And though they were alive, I cried in the shower when I got home. Six months later, when they were both dead, it felt like yesterday’s news.

  *

  Now,
with the sunset’s cider glow banished to the lip of the imperial sky’s horizon, it’s easy to feel the end of the world is near. The freeway’s clotting with outbound traffic; the local streets below it are blue and empty now. The city looks to be on its last legs, has the feel of Pompeii.

  As the shadows lengthen, earlier and longer each day, I’m imagining them remaining that way for all time. I sometimes think we have instincts guiding us away from our personal or collective extinction, or luring us toward it. Or simply one single instinct that tells us it’s there, that the end is coming, wherever it may be at the moment. The atmospheric pressure is bombing out. It leaves the kind of cold that could split skin if you go gloveless very long and catch a wrap on the knuckles. The kind of cold that chaps nostrils. The air can barely hold onto the earth. Even the cars look miserable out there—unwashed, wretched masses queuing up for the succor of a bread heel, every last tailpipe chain-smoking as gridlock sets in.

  I tell Vince to pull off somewhere because his check engine light’s on, but it should have been obvious, given his car’s state of disrepair—the light’s been lit like that for ages.

  “I check the engine all the time,” he says, “and know what I see? A freaking engine.”

  “Check engine means there’s something wrong. Like, low oil, or a belt’s about to break or something.”

  “That’s what the oil light’s for. Think I don’t know how to drive?”

  “I’m not saying anything…”

  “Ah, c’mon. I’m joking. These days cars are all electronics and they short sometimes. Nah, the engine’s good to go. I had a guy look at it just last week.”

  “Okay, good to know, you could’ve said that.”

  “Had the guy change the oil, the filters, put air in the tires. I even filled up on wiper fluid.”

  “Fine, I got it. I’m just saying how come the light’s on, that’s all.”