Snowflake, AZ

by Marcus Sedgwick

  We were riding down the dirt tracks now and Bly waved his hand at the wet desert.

  ‘These are the Forties. Forty acres each. That’s what Mona’s got. Forty acres of sand and nothing. And Mary too. But first we got rounds to do down in the Twenties.’

  ‘So what are we doing?’ I said, and instead Bly explained how Mona gave him somewhere to live when he arrived. Then he explained how Mona had let him go on living on her property and even paid him to run errands for the people who were too sick to go to Snowflake and get their own groceries, or whatever. And that’s what we were doing now, taking groceries to a bunch of the sickest folks.

  ‘I been into Snowflake this morning. Got stuff for four of the guys. Hey, I might’ve been the one to pick you up, instead of Mona. That would’ve been an even bigger coincidence, right?’ and I thought ‘not really’ but I never liked to disagree with Bly, not ever.

  Instead I said, ‘Why the heck is it called Snowflake?’ and he said, ‘That is a weird story, kind of another coincidence. It was named after these two gentlemen, Mr. Snow and Mr. Flake. This is eighteen-something I’m talking about. Mr. Snow and Mr. Flake. What are the chances? And anyway, they were the founders of the town, so they got to choose and they decided to call it Snowflake.’

  ‘They coulda called it Flakesnow.’

  ‘Yeah they coulda, but I guess that would’ve been dumb.’

  ‘Just saying.’

  ‘So’m I.’

  ‘Funny kinda name, though, right?’

  ‘That’s nothing. There’s a town down the road called Show Low. Named after two men playing poker. Gambling for the land, and they couldn’t get a winner, so finally one of them says, “Lowest card wins?” and then this other guy drew the deuce of clubs. Show Low.’

  Well, there was nothing to say about that, so I shut up and looked at the desert for a few minutes more until I couldn’t look at it no longer and I said, ‘Bly, what’s wrong with you?’ but he said, ‘Here we are! The Sick Birds!’ because we were pulling into a yard between two little houses, metal sidings and roofs like Mona’s but even smaller.

  Bly leaned over to me.

  ‘Mona calls ’em the Sick Birds but we don’t say that to their face. It’s just on account of their name’s Byrd, is all. They’re sisters.’

  ‘I can see that,’ I said, because through the wet windshield I could see the two women, one on each porch, keeping outta the rain, and they might have been identical. Bly said they weren’t, they just looked almost like it. Then he said, ‘Help me with their stuff?’ so I did.

  We got two boxes out of the back seat of the truck, one for each of them, and Bly whispered, ‘That’s Sally and the other one’s Dolly. You take Dolly’s and I’ll do Sally,’ and we went over and Bly called out, ‘That there’s Snowflake,’ nodding at me as he went into Sally’s house and I was trying to avoid falling over in my clown shoes and I wanted to say, ‘No, I’m Ash,’ but by then Dolly was saying hello and asking if Bly was my brother and I said yes but was wondering how she knew about me and then Dolly said, ‘Mona just called to say you were coming,’ so that explained that.

  I kinda tried not to stare at Dolly, but it was hard. She was real pale. Pale, like she was covered in flour. And she looked kinda dry, which added to the flour thing. She had real dark rings under her eyes too. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was that she seemed confused, like when you just wake up and you don’t know where or what the hell you are? Dolly seemed like that, confused, over nothing, so when I said, ‘Where’ll I put your box?’ she said ‘box?’ and looked like I’d asked her the hardest question in the world.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I guess I said then, and I repeated, ‘Where’ll I put your box?’ and Dolly showed me through into the kitchen that was just a corner of the main room, like at Mona’s. And like Mona’s this place was covered in Reynolds Wrap too, floor to ceiling. Apart from that, well, it looked more or less normal, and newer than Mona’s.

  Dolly watched me, still with that look on her face. Confused. Then she said, ‘You sick too?’ and I shook my head and assured her that I was not sick. Maybe tired from the bus.

  Then I saw something to make me wonder. As I was leaving, I saw a table in the center of the room, a large round table, and the whole darned top of it was covered in bottles, those little white plastic bottles, like medicine comes along in, and I guess there were two hundred bottles set right there. A sea of plastic bottles. An ocean. Now you might be thinking ‘so what?’ but I think back and I can recall that there was something not right about it. I stared at the table and felt guilty like I was looking at her unmade bed because there’s also something not right about seeing an unmade bed, the bed of someone you don’t know. I believe.

  And I think Dolly caught me looking so I looked away and said, ‘Where’s that Bly got to?’ and headed out. We got back in the truck and Bly said, ‘Well, what did you make of them canaries?’ and I said, ‘Because they’re called Byrd?’ and Bly shook his head.

  ‘No, that’s more coincidence, I guess. They’re called Byrd. But we’re all canaries.’

  To which I said nothing but must’ve looked kinda dumb because Bly started the engine of the truck and said, ‘We’re all canaries, Ash. Everyone here.’

  We rolled out into the desert again, and he started to talk. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘in the olden days, when there was a coal mine, there was no way of knowing if there was poisonous gas down there, gas that would kill the miners, because you couldn’t smell it. So what they did was, they’d get a canary in a cage and lower it down the mine shaft, and if it came up singing, then they knew it was safe, but if it came up dead, then they knew there was gas down there. See?’

  And still I did not see, not at all. Not then.

  D

  Dead Elf

  Sure, I can tell you now how stupid I was back then. And I guess I wasn’t stupid, just ignorant, which ain’t the same thing, they say, and for once they’re right. I had done with school but I hadn’t begun to learn nothing, not yet. That time was coming. And what a fine and eager kid I was, I was then. From here, believe me when I say, I can still see all the way back to my brightness and feel it like yesterday, my chomping child, o eager little scout of the world’s adventures! And, yes, I’ll guess there was already a little tiredness in my bones, but I was ready to learn something, and Snowflake was the place I learned it.

  Then Bly said to me, ‘We’re gonna go see the dead elf,’ but I wasn’t listening. I guess I was still thinking about what he asked me before, about the sisters, and I said, ‘I guess Dolly seems kinda sick’ and I thought about the table full of bottles and I said, ‘She has all those pills. She needs all those pills?’ and Bly shrugged and said, ‘If she wants to get well’ and I said, ‘But that’s crazy. No one needs all those pills,’ and Bly didn’t reply.

  Then I caught up and said, ‘Did you just say dead elf?’

  Bly looked at me and said, ‘You feeling all right?’ and I reckoned I was just dog-tired. That’s why they call them Greyhound buses, I guess. You don’t get much sleep. Maybe none.

  ‘We’re going out to see Dead Elf,’ Bly said. ‘He’s this German dude. He built his own house, way out. To be sure it’s safe. Actually he’s called Detlef, but I call him Dead Elf sometimes, because that’s what Mona calls him sometimes.’

  ‘He built his house?’ I said, as we bumped down the road, but when I say ‘road,’ you don’t go thinking it’s the interstate or something. It was a dirt track, like all the rest I’d seen, and it was bumpy as hell and filling up with water in places, and it went on for miles.

  ‘Who, Detlef?’

  ‘Detlef, right. He’s sick too?’

  ‘Uh-huh, yes he is.’

  ‘Then how’d he build his house?’

  Bly looked at me for a time, across from the wheel, then back straight ahead.

  ‘There are all different types of canary, Snowflake.’

  ‘Will you quit calling me that?’ I said an
d Bly said, ‘Maybe.’

  Then he said, ‘Thing is, Detlef was real, real sick. I mean one of the worst Mona’s ever seen, she said, when he got here. He lived with her a coupla years and got himself cleaned up, and then he built his place. He was real careful about how he did it. And he’s way off grid here, so that helps with everything. So, if he stays out here, and doesn’t go to flatland, then he’s pretty well. But if he goes back and hangs around with normies, he gets sick again pretty quick.’

  ‘Flatland?’ I said then and Bly said that flatland was where the normies lived, which is to say, normal people, people who weren’t canaries, and flatland was anywhere that wasn’t out in that patch of desert outside Snowflake at five thousand feet, well heck, nearly six.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Is that like you?’

  Bly nodded.

  ‘And Mona. And some of the others. If we stay here and keep ourselves clean, things ain’t too bad. I mean, I still have bad days. Like if I spend too long in flatland, I’ll pay for it later. But I’m careful as I can be.’ And he pointed at the mask I’d seen him wearing before, which had been setting on the dash the whole time. Then he went on and said, ‘And Detlef is more or less the best of us if he stays out here, but last week he had to go to New Mexico. And he’s been laid up ever since he got back. Which is why you and I are bringing him his groceries.’

  I guess you can tell I wasn’t really buying any of it. This canary stuff. But I also knew Bly and I knew he wouldn’t make something up like being ill. He wouldn’t fake it. But maybe some of the other folks were. So what I thought was, well, let’s just see where this is all heading.

  So I said, ‘But why go to New Mexico, if it’s gonna make you sick?’ and Bly said ‘funeral.’ I looked at him real close, and I could not figure out what the look on his face meant. But something told me to shut up.

  After two or three miles of bumping we pulled off the dirt turnpike. Now I knew for sure we were in the middle of nowhere, because not only was there the damn desert, but you couldn’t see one other house, not one, whereas at Mona’s you could see two from the front porch and one from the back, way off in the distance.

  I looked around as I got out of the truck. The rain had left us for a time, and over on the horizon in the haze were some low mountains, which I guess is where the six thousand feet came into it. But as far as you could see, in any direction, there was no sign of human life, nor barely anything else neither.

  ‘Why’d anyone want to live out here?’ Bly said, looking at me. ‘That’s what you’re thinking, right?’ And I nodded, because yes, that was exactly what I was thinking. Bly said, ‘This is nothing. This is the center of the freaking world compared to some folks. There’s the first guy who came here. Mona was one of the first, but this very first guy, he used to live in the Forties, but now he lives way out in the deep.’

  And Bly nodded towards the mountains. The deep.

  ‘Twenty miles that way.’ He paused.

  ‘Twenty miles, huh?’ I said. It was the first time I’d heard of this first guy, but I wasn’t really paying attention. And when I speak about him again … well, by then things had gotten real weird. Before I could say anything else, Bly fixed me real serious and said, ‘No one wants to be sick, Snowflake. No one. Don’t let anyone ever tell you different. Grab the box.’

  I had no time to wonder what Bly meant because I was peering at the back seat again and there was one box that had ‘Dead Elf’ with a smiley face after it written on the flap and it was full of candy bars and hot dogs and boxes of Twinkies and bags of chips and tins of beer, so I said, ‘We having a party?’ and Bly said, ‘Nah, that’s just what he eats.’

  Then we met Dead Elf.

  He came out on his porch and held up his hand when he saw Bly coming. He was a big blond guy, skinny, but way over six foot, and he had one of those open kinda faces that make you relax straightaway. He stuck his hand out for a hello and I was scared he was gonna break my fingers because his hands were like shovels or something, but I guess he was one of what folks people call a gentle giant.

  ‘You out of bed today?’ asked Bly, and Detlef said, ‘Getting there’ and then ‘You must be Snowflake,’ so I knew Mona had rung ahead again.

  ‘My name’s not—’ I was saying, but Bly and Detlef were yakking away about this and that and a lot of nothing. Bly said to me, ‘You wanna see his place? It’s cool, he built it himself.’

  ‘You’re German?’ I asked Detlef and he said that, yes, he was but he’d been living in the States for about thirty years and maybe I could still hear his accent, which I could, a little. It was more in the way his sentences trotted along than in any one word.

  I told him how there was supposed to be some German blood in my family, a ways back.

  ‘On my father’s side,’ I added, looking at Bly, and he was probably wondering how the hell I knew that when my mother had only known my father for a week and he was also probably wondering when I had learned to make dumb conversation like that. But Detlef was friendly, like the fact that my mother spent seven days with a guy whose third cousin might’ve once seen Munich made us old family friends. And he showed us around the house.

  He pointed at the walls.

  ‘Pretty cool, huh?’ he said, and I couldn’t see nothing but a wall and then he explained that like Mona’s they were covered in Reynolds Wrap but he’d figured out how to paint it with white clay watered down, which covered it up and looked just like normal white plaster. And still I had no idea why you’d paper your house with tinfoil.

  Then he showed us his phone. See, he said he got buzzy even if he used a landline telephone. Buzzy. He said lots of canaries did. So he’d invented a way around it. He had a wooden telephone, like the part you hold in your hand, and he’d carved that himself. It had holes where the earpiece and the mouthpiece would be, and from these holes there was two tubes that ran off and was connected to the actual telephone handset. So you could use that and keep the real one away from your head.

  ‘Wanna call someone? It works!’ he said, like I had doubted it for one second. ‘I made them for a bunch of folks now.’

  He showed us around the shed out in the yard, and inside was everything electrical, kept away from the house so all the ‘bad stuff’ was far enough away not to give him any trouble. And when I started thinking but he still has an oven and a kettle and what all in the house so there must be electricity there, he saw me thinking that, because he explained that unlike most other houses, he’d built a special converter that turned AC into DC and his house was run on DC which was just fine, because it was only AC that gave him trouble.

  Well, that seemed neat, and Detlef sure was a smart guy, because he’d done it himself. He said he’d been an engineer in flatland, so he knew how to do this stuff. He’d fixed up his car too, by which I mean he’d stripped out all the electrics he could and left it as basic as could be, and that way the electromagnetic radiation and so forth was way down as low as low.

  We stood looking at his car, the three of us, hands on hips, like we was connoisseurs of motor vehicles, which was hilarious because I knew precisely nothing about cars. Still don’t. Anyways, we were looking at this big old dirty heap of a thing, and though you might think the rain had cleaned it up it looked like the rain put as much dust on the car as it took off of it. Monsoon season, Arizona.

  ‘You’re gonna see a few of these around here,’ said Detlef. ‘1984 Mercedes. The color was called “Icon Gold.” These cars, they last forever. But the real thing is that they were the last car to be made simple enough. You can strip almost all the electrics, make ’em clean. They still run good.’

  Then he said, like he was only just figuring it out, ‘Bly’s your brother?’ and I said yes and he said how it was real nice to meet me. Then he said, ‘You’ll be staying a while?’ and I said no, and then he looked confused and said, ‘But you’re sick too?’ and I said no, I wasn’t. And I was thinking why does everyone keep asking me that?

  ‘Not sick?�
�� said Detlef.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I mean, I’m tired,’ and I explained how I’d come in on the overnight Greyhound and that you don’t get no sleep on a Greyhound and then I said my joke about how that’s why they call them Greyhounds because they leave you sick as a dog. And then I figured no one was laughing and I said, ‘I mean, tired as a dog. Dog-tired,’ and then it was even less funny.

  I really did feel tired by then and Bly said we’d better go home and by that he meant back to Mona’s.

  So we bumped our way back down the dirt interstate and I was looking out at the desert and the shrubs and the occasional house in the distance and the rain had still left but it was hot and sticky and I felt my head swimming round like I was underwater, and I remember thinking one thing to myself, which was along the lines of ‘what the heck is going on?’ and then I blacked out.

  Chapter 4

  E

  Environmental Illness

  So. As I was saying, I passed out on the way home from Detlef. But I wasn’t out for long. Leastways, I woke up and figured I was on the porch at Mona’s. They had me set in one of the red plastic chairs, with my feet on another. That sounds like we was two different things, my feet and me, but that’s okay, because that’s more or less how I felt. They’d propped me up so my head was against the wall and put a blanket across me, and I opened my eyes and said, ‘Huh, it’s raining then,’ and there was Mona and Bly looking down at me with their hands on their hips like I was a 1984 Mercedes that some German guy gutted.

  I wasn’t awake for long either. I just had time to hear someone say, ‘I wonder what will happen next’ and then I went off to sleep. Guess I was dog-tired, and maybe there’s something to that, because of the two of ’em, it was Cooper that spent most of his day lying around with his tongue hanging out and Socrates who was always busy nosing around for the next item of clothing to consume.