Snowflake, AZ

by Marcus Sedgwick

  Mona said it a lot.

  ‘I wonder what will happen next.’

  If she didn’t say it half a dozen times a day, she said it ten.

  At first I couldn’t tell whether she was fooling around or being serious, but as time went by, I sorta started to learn that it was both at once. That was Mona. Fooling around and dead serious, both at the same time. All the time.

  Like I told you before, she was a skinny creature. Mona Mochsky. Long gray hair. I figured out later from something she said that she was around fifty-one, but you sure wouldn’t’ve known that. No. And she might’ve been thin but she was tough. And taller than it appeared at first, but you didn’t see that because most of the time, she was more like seven, like a little kid, messing around, joking. She even moved like little kids do. You know, the way adults move one way, and little kids, they move different? Like they never set still, even when they’re setting, they wiggle a leg or two, or rub their hands on the back of their head or something. Mona was like that. And then once in a while she’d stop, like when she was dead beat, and then you’d see a real elegant lady, and these tired blue-gray eyes. Next to Bly, I guess that made her look even tinier too. Because he had grown since I last saw him, he had grown. Not just up, but out. And I tried to figure when exactly it was I’d last seen him and it was more than one year and less than two.

  ‘Hey look,’ said Mona, ‘the rain’s easin’.’

  So we took our tea onto the back porch and sat in red plastic chairs looking out at the desert. The desert was red too. There were scruffy little plants on the ground, here and there, and one scrawny tree every three million miles. The dog came out to say hi, and his name was Cooper. Mona rubbed him on the head and said, ‘Cooper, this is Ash.’ Then she looked at me and whispered, ‘He’s kind of a mongrel’ as if I’d asked what sorta dog he was, though I hadn’t. Then she said, ‘But ain’t we all?’ and Bly smiled, and I thought, yeah, well I guess you got that right.

  It was better outside. That is to say it was overly warm in the house, even with the windows and doors all open, and even with the rainfall it was still too warm, but Mona said it would pass and I asked when and she said ‘soon.’ Which I started to learn meant something different up here, and when I say ‘up here,’ well, that was the next thing I learned.

  ‘We’re over five thousand feet,’ Mona told me. ‘Well, heck, almost six. That’s pretty up.’ And chuckled, of course. ‘Up, up, and away.’

  ‘Might take you a while to get used to it,’ said Bly. ‘You’ll be tired.’

  Mona nodded. ‘You might get a nosebleed or two.’

  ‘Ma’am, I don’t think there’ll be time for getting used to it,’ I said. ‘I just came to find my brother and see what…’

  But I didn’t know how to finish that sentence I’d started, because I could already see Bly looking uncomfortable. I figured there’d be time later for finding out what was happening. With Bly, I mean.

  Mona said, ‘How long you staying, Ash?’ and I had no answer. Not really. ‘I just came to find Bly,’ I said. And I was thinking I guess I might stay a night or two, but anyways I ain’t going nowhere without ditching the circus shoes.

  I looked at Bly.

  ‘Well?’ I said. ‘What happened?’

  But he shook his head again, just like the first time.

  Then no one said nothing, during which time Socrates wandered by, and I wondered if they never tied him up and why he didn’t just escape. I mean, there was this bit of fence around the back of the house, the inside of which Mona called the yard, though what was inside of the fence didn’t look to be no different from what was outside of it. But it had two gates and they left the gates open all the time, so there was nothing to stop Socrates just rolling off into the world. Going to Vegas or something. But then I looked out at the desert and I thought, huh, where the hell is there to escape to? Nowheres. Not really. And anyhow, I couldn’t picture Socrates at Vegas. I could already see he was way too classy for that. So maybe Mona was right, maybe he was smarter’n he looked.

  Mona said, ‘That sure was a coincidence, me picking you up on the road there!’ and I thought not really, since about three people live out here. But I nodded, and anyway, she was right about coincidences. Because it wasn’t the first, and Bly must’ve been thinking the same thing because he turned to Mona and said, ‘You know what they used to call Ash at school?’

  So then her eyes widened up at what was coming and then when Bly told her she burst out giggling like her neck was faulty. She said ‘no’ in that way that people do when they mean ‘what? really?’ and then she said, ‘What? Really? They called you Snowflake?’

  I turned red, which meant yes. I hated that. Was I not sorry to leave my education behind.

  ‘Why’d they call you that?’

  Good question, I thought.

  ‘I guess you’d have to ask them.’

  Mona nodded.

  ‘Idiots, huh?’ Mona said and I nodded.

  ‘I guess Ash just didn’t fit in there,’ Bly said and looked at me. ‘Did you?’

  ‘You two were at school together?’ Mona asked.

  Bly just shrugged, so I said ‘some’ and that set Mona pondering, I could tell.

  I guess I lived in eight states by the age of nine, not one of ’em fancy. Mostly on the road, mostly on to the next place, until for a while we settled: me and Mom and Bly and his dad. Then my mom announced that she was leaving Bly’s dad and that she’d send for me, but she didn’t. So yeah Bly and me went to the same school for a while, and that was the last time I saw my stepbrother, right before he went off to be a police cadet, which is what he’d wanted to do since before I could remember. And now he was here, in the middle of the desert instead, and I was expecting some kind of answer about that.

  I tried a third time.

  ‘Well?’ I said.

  By now you’ll see that Bly had gotten to have this new habit for shrugs, because that’s what I received by reply, and pretty much all I had learned was that Bly was not keen on explaining why he was not in San Francisco being a police cadet.

  So I changed tack.

  ‘Uh, Bly, Mona says Mom was here.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ he said, ‘she was just passing through… with the love of her life.’

  Then there was a pause and then we both burst out laughing at the same time.

  Mona stared at us, so I explained to her all the stuff how my dad had been the love of Mom’s life, even though they’d only known each other for a week before he hit the road. And after that how Bly’s dad had been the love of her life. And then how she’d found a whole bunch of guys, each and every one of ’em the love of her life, till the next came along.

  ‘So I guess she found another one, huh?’ I asked and Bly nodded.

  ‘Trucker down from Nashua.’

  ‘Nashua?’

  ‘Nashua, New Hampshire.’

  ‘Nashua?’

  ‘Nashua.’

  I guess Socrates might’ve had something real smart to say about that, because he just sat on the edge of the porch looking dumber than ever, chewing. The last of my shoe, I figured.

  And I was about to open my mouth again when Bly beat me to it and said ‘Nashua’ in a dumb voice and we both lost it again for a time.

  ‘How’d she know you was here?’ I asked when I stopped snickering, and Bly shrugged and said, ‘I guess Dad told her,’ which told me that I had been the last goddamn one to find out what had happened to Bly.

  So I got a mite angry then, and I said, ‘Bly. I don’t get it. You were gonna be a police officer.’

  You are a ways ahead of me if you know what answer that got me. But after he’d done shrugging, it started to come out. Couple years before, there was Mom and me and Bly, living with Jack, his dad. And I will say this, Jack was a good father, even if we shared not one drop of blood. When Mom set off down the road again, Jack kept Bly and me with him. Signed papers and everything to make me his own. Legal. You know many people w
ho’d do that? I surely don’t. My mother didn’t object. You know many people who’d do that either? Maybe you do.

  But this couple years ago, Bly had gone off to become what he had always wanted to be, while I turned myself in for one last year at school. And then as soon as I could, I stopped going to school and got myself the job in the shoe store. And Jack was fine with that and I lived with him until I found the postcard and then it all came out. Or some of it, anyhow.

  I waited a bit longer and saved some money and got me a great pair of shortly-to-be-eaten sneakers on staff discount and then when I knew I couldn’t wait no more I quit my job and got on a Greyhound bus to the last place I was expecting Bly to be. That being Snowflake, Arizona.

  So Bly shrugged, and when he’d quit with that, he said, ‘I got sick, Ash.’

  ‘Sick? You okay?’

  And yeah, he shrugged, so Mona took over and said, ‘Everyone’s sick, Ash. That’s what we’re doing here. Who else would want to live in the god-danged desert? We’re all sick.’

  I looked at Bly.

  ‘But you don’t look ill,’ I said. ‘You look great.’ And come to that, I didn’t think Mona looked too shabby either. Not for fifty-something.

  ‘You can tell someone has cancer just by looking?’ Mona asked.

  ‘You have cancer?’ I said to Bly, scared to heck.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, Mona’s just making a point. Like before someone knows they have cancer, they might look normal. But really they’re sicker than hell.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Yeah. Of course not. So? What’s wrong?’

  Mona laughed and said, ‘What ain’t?’ and Bly smiled but I didn’t see why he was smiling.

  ‘Hey, Snowflake,’ he said, ‘remember how we used to run away from home?’

  I ignored the ‘Snowflake’ part and said, ‘Yeah.’ Then, ‘No, wait. That was just me. I know I did, but—’

  ‘Yeah, I did it too. We did it together a couple times.’

  ‘You guys ran away from home?’ said Mona. ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Like, six and eight, or something,’ Bly says. ‘And we were serious about it too. Sometimes we’d get all the way to the end of the block, and then we’d sit there.’

  He started laughing and I started up too.

  ‘So why’d you run off like that?’

  Bly lifted his shoulders in that thing we call a shrug.

  ‘I dunno. I guess it was near the end of them being together. My dad and Ash’s mom. Jamie. I guess they argued and we didn’t like it.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘So in the end Mom would come down and haul us back.’

  ‘Was she mad?’ asked Mona. ‘She must’ve been mad. Or worried. Mad or worried. Or both. I guess both.’

  And yup, Bly and I thought about that because it was not something we had thought about before, and then I said, ‘No, I guess not. She used to laugh at us.’

  Mona opened her mouth and then shut it again, and Socrates kept whatever he was thinking to himself. And I wanted to ask what was wrong with everyone up here, but I didn’t know how. Because it’s hard to ask about illness, because perhaps people are dying, or perhaps they’re sad about it, but I wanted to know what was wrong with Bly, so I said, ‘Is that lady Mary sick?’

  Mona nodded.

  ‘Sooo-per sensitive. Anything gets to her. Everything. See, she could smell that perfume on you.’

  So I was about to say do I look like someone who wears perfume? But that would’ve come out rude. Instead I said, ‘But ma’am, I don’t wear perfume. Generally.’

  Mona shrugged and said, ‘Wouldn’t have to be you. Like maybe you hung out with someone who wore a lot. Truth to say, I can feel it a little bit, that’s why I thought we’d be better set out here on the porch, with you downwind an’ all and anyway, it might just have been someone you worked with, or whatever.’

  All through this I was thinking, well, this is a load of hokey, and then when she said that part about working with someone I remembered Sue, the boss at the shoe store, who was kinda sad and I think that was why she wore a ton of perfume, and I mean a ton, and we all used to gag behind her back when she passed by. It was real bad, that perfume of Sue’s, it made your nose itch for an hour or more, even after you left work, and it was not even something decent, it was like old roses or whatever, but it was about a week since I’d quit the store and headed to Arizona so this all had to be hokum, right? And yes, I was just thinking that to myself when Mona said, ‘Like flowers, right? Yup, flowers. Roses.’

  So then I shut the hush up.

  We set in silence, and I was thinking about what they’d said. About how sometimes people don’t look sick, even when they are. And if I had known then what we all know now, I might’ve worked out that sometimes the whole world don’t look sick neither, even when it is.

  But I didn’t. Not then. I guess almost no one did. Those days were still ahead of us.

  Chapter 3

  C

  Canaries

  The rain. There was that. The rain was not to be thought irrelevant. It had started on up again. It came from the sky like ten thousand bullets fired from a thousand guns and I had had enough of getting wet for one lifetime. And then there was the fact that I was wearing circus shoes. Plus the fact that I was dog-tired. Anyway, why do they say that? Do dogs get more tired’n other folk? Cooper seemed okay to me… But most of all, there was Bly and how good it was to see him. I’d come all this way to find him, and here was the thing: I hadn’t got no plan for after that. Somehow that was as far as I had been thinking. Find Bly. And now I had, I had no good-God idea what to do next. So add all these things together and what you got is that I stayed put.

  I guess I coulda turned right around and got on the Greyhound and gone back to Jack. Now, Jack had gone and met someone, finally met someone after Jamie, and I couldn’t fault him. He’d given years to me and I wasn’t even his kid. But when Suzanne, his new lady, came along I knew he wanted to make a new start. He never said nothing. Not one thing. But I knew he needed his new start and that seemed fair because don’t we all? Sometimes. So I’d come all this way for something too, and now I had it, I had no more plans. And yeah, I coulda gone back and Jack woulda had me. But I didn’t. Not for the longest time.

  ‘You can stay here, Ash,’ said Mona, as we sat in the red plastic chairs. ‘Wouldn’t be the first. Right, Bly?’

  Bly nodded.

  He said, ‘Mona is everybody’s first home out here,’ and explained how he’d been here till he got his own place, and I was thinking what, can’t I stay with you, but I didn’t wanna seem rude to Mona.

  Instead I asked where his place was and he said, ‘Over that way’ and nodded to somewhere I couldn’t see out beyond a coupla sheds on Mona’s land. And I still didn’t know how Bly got sick, no more’n I knew what was wrong with him.

  ‘So you can stay here,’ said Mona and I panicked a mite and said to Bly, ‘You don’t got enough space for me?’ and Bly laughed. So I took that as a no.

  ‘Okay, well,’ I said, ‘thanks then, Mona. But just a night,’ and Mona giggled and Cooper looked at her and she looked back at Cooper and said, ‘Come for a day, stay for a lifetime,’ like it was the funniest thing anyone ever said.

  She sat up straight and said, ‘I have a great idea! Bly, why don’t you take Snowflake on the rounds with you?’ and Bly nodded and said, ‘Sure, come on Snowflake,’ and I started wondering why everyone thought it was funny to start calling me that when I’d left school because of it. Well, not exactly because of it, but it showed why I had to leave. I guess.

  Bly was up and around the side of the house and I saw Socrates there and asked Bly where we were going and he saw Socrates too and said, ‘Maybe you wanna put your bag right up high on that top shelf,’ so I did, because I did not want to come back to find the last few things I owned in the world end up inside of a goat.

  Then Bly got this funny kinda look in his eye. He made a big deal of checking
for Mona first, even though she was still out back somewhere.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘next time he gets at something he oughtn’t…’ and then he ran straight at Socrates, who was struggling on chewing one of my laces and the goat did a darn-crazy thing; it fell over and rolled onto its back with its legs straight up in the air and lay there stiff as a table that had died, and I yelled, ‘Bly, what’d you do? You killed him, Bly, you—oh—’ because Socrates was already getting up again. Just like that. Bly was grinning from one ear to the other and then he saw my face and said, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay. Only Mona don’t like me doing it.’

  ‘Doing what?’ I said. ‘What the hell just happened?’

  Bly pointed at the goat.

  ‘That there’s a Tennessee fainting goat.’

  ‘What?’ I said, and then Bly explained how it was a Tennessee fainting goat, just like he said, so I said, ‘And what the heck is that?’ and Bly pointed at Socrates and said, ‘That is.’ And I could see we were getting nowhere. Then Mona came around the side of the house and said, ‘Ain’t you two left yet? You ain’t funning my goat, are you?’ and she looked kind of mad but I had no idea if she really was or not.

  ‘No, ma’am,’ said Bly, ‘I was explaining to Snowflake about how Socrates doesn’t like getting scared. What’s it called now? I always forget that word.’

  ‘Myotonic. Socrates is a myotonic goat and Bly, you oughta know better than to mock the afflicted.’

  ‘Who’s mocking?’ said Bly, who, to be fair, was only grinning.

  Then Mona said, ‘Git!’ so we got.

  In Bly’s truck he explained how Socrates was a kind of rare breed and for some reason, but no one knew why, when they got scared their legs would lock up tight and for a few seconds they’d lie there, feet sticking up to heaven like they’d chewed their last article of clothing. And then, bam! they’d pop right back into life again, and he explained that Mona didn’t like anyone playing that game with Socrates.

  ‘I guess it’s kinda mean on him,’ I said, and Bly nodded but said the real reason Mona didn’t like it was that she was embarrassed to have bought a defective goat, for one thing, and for a second thing, she was embarrassed twice over because she thought she was buying a nanny goat and would be able to have milk from it, and then, when the man brought it, it was a billy goat and good for nothing except maybe as a garbage disposal unit with a white beard and attitude.