Snowflake, AZ

by Marcus Sedgwick

  It was a little like being on drugs, ’cept I have never been on drugs. Life seems plenty interesting enough without making it more complicated, you know? But I’d heard stories about how people on drugs, they see things that aren’t there, or they see things that are there but see them real weird. They hallucinate, is what I’m saying.

  So the first thing Jenny said was, ‘You wanna see the pope?’

  In Jenny’s own particular part of the desert there were people. They were tiny people, standing in the desert among the plants. They were all made of plastic, and they were all moving. Each one was about two inches high and they were all solar-powered, and they was jigging and dancing and wiggling from side to side. All at once, and there must have been a thousand of ’em. No, maybe ten thousand.

  ‘Neat, huh?’ said Mona, smiling, and I stared.

  ‘What?’ I said, and Jenny said how she’d been given one, years ago, and then she’d started collecting more and then people started giving them to her. And here she was now.

  ‘What was the first one, Jenny?’ Bly asked. He had a big dumb smile all over his face and I liked it.

  ‘Elvis,’ said Jenny. ‘Wanna see?’

  We did.

  So she led the way. She’d put them in little groups of four or five, or sometimes ten and twenty. And on the way I saw aliens and presidents. I saw skeletons and I saw nuns. There was Michael Jackson, surrounded by a group of dinosaurs. There was even a dancing goat and for a second I felt bad we hadn’t brought Socrates. Then she showed us Elvis, and he was dancing away, though Jenny said he was about ten years old.

  ‘Even though he’s dead,’ said Mona, and she began chuckling to herself like it was the funniest thing ever.

  ‘I must have half the world’s plastic here,’ Jenny said, and Mary said how it lasts forever but then she added, ‘Well, maybe it’s better here than in the oceans’ and Jenny said ‘amen’ but I was thinking if half of it was here then the other half was on Sally’s living room table. And a third half in Bly’s shed.

  Mona had a tight hold on Cooper, in case he decided to eat a president or something, but Jenny said it was okay. From time to time she’d lose one to a coyote or something. She showed us how she’d used Krazy Glue to stick a five-inch nail to the base of each and every one, so they didn’t fall over in the wind or the monsoon or what-have-you.

  I was looking at Bly. I remember just watching that big ol’ smile of his and even as bad as I was feeling, something started smiling inside me too. Then he pointed.

  ‘There’s the pope!’ he said and, yup, there he was.

  He was surrounded by two strippers wearing nothing but sashes that said ‘Vegas’ on them and a dancing donkey and some little balding guy with a beard in a gray suit who I didn’t know until Mona said, ‘What’s Lenin doing with the pope?’ and Jenny shrugged and said, ‘I figured they could learn from each other.’

  And Mary said, ‘And what are the strippers learning?’ and Jenny said, ‘Yeah, well, maybe they got as much to tell the boys as anyone else does. Maybe the donkey too. Who are we to judge?’

  And I could see that Mona was looking at me and I also knew that the smart old nanny goat that she was, she could see what I was thinking, namely, what was it all for?

  She said, ‘Even in the games of children there are things to interest the greatest mathematician,’ and everyone looked at her and we all said what? at the same time, so she said, ‘Gottfried Leibniz, 1646 to 1716.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Right.’

  Then things went a little weird. Weird like awkward.

  Mona tugged Jenny’s arm and nodded to the house, and there was a man standing there. A real one, not a two-inch-high plastic one, wearing a hat against the sun and dark glasses. He weren’t dancing neither. And then Jenny kinda changed. She’d been all silly and happy and then she changed and Mona started making noises about how it was time we was leaving and I thought that was weird since we’d only just got there.

  Jenny turned to me and put a hand on each of my shoulders and said, ‘You come back anytime, Ash? You hear me?’ and then we left.

  We nodded at the man standing by Jenny’s gate but we left and on the way back they explained who he was.

  Jenny’s boyfriend. He was a guy about the same age as her, maybe a little younger, and he had the hots for her. But she was in two minds. He wanted to get married but Jenny said she had never been married and what was the point of rushing into things.

  ‘But she’s fifty!’ I said, and Mona said ‘yeah, well, ain’t we all’ and then some stuff about how she didn’t wanna get tied down. That she kinda liked having Steve (that was his name) as a boyfriend but how she wasn’t ready to get committed, not yet. As in get married, or something serious like that.

  ‘So how long have they been seeing each other?’ I asked, and Mona thought for a bit and then she said, ‘About fifteen years, I think,’ and I stared out into the desert.

  Seems that Steve would turn up without asking sometimes and then Jenny would get mad (which I found hard to believe because of her smiling eyes but they told me it was true) and he’d tell her he loved her and why couldn’t they get married and she’d send him away until she was ready to see him again.

  And as we pulled up back at Mona’s, Mona and Mary and me and Bly and Cooper, I thought it sucked that all of us sick people were alone when we might wanna be with someone, while the only person around here who was well had someone but didn’t really care. That seemed to me to be not right.

  *

  We ate our dinner. It was dark early.

  Mona asked what we had all learned today and for a long time no one said anything. Even Mona, who always had something to say. It seemed that everyone was in some kind of funk that night. Finally Bly said, ‘I found out what Jenny’s boyfriend is called.’ And that was all anyone had to say.

  I went to bed, and I was already using two more blankets than when I had first slept outside. The novelty of that was wearing thin, I can tell you. Sometimes I slept in my clothes too, but was still cold, and that was one of those nights when the temperature dropped to freezing even though the days were still warm. It does that when you’re five, heck, almost six thousand feet up.

  And I think I had just got to sleep when something knocked the end of my bed and I set straight up thinking ‘coyote!’ but it wasn’t a coyote.

  It was Bly.

  He was acting funny. I said, ‘What is it, Bly?’

  He had a flashlight that he was waving around but he weren’t speaking, until eventually he whispered, ‘Uh, you cold, Ash?’ and I said ‘no kidding’ and then he didn’t say anything else.

  He sat on the end of my bed and I could only just see him in the torchlight. He was pointing it at the floor now. We looked at each other there in the dark and I smiled real quick and looked away. Then no one said anything and then he mumbled something and I said ‘what?’

  Then he said, ‘Uh, it’s warmer in my shed.’

  And I said, ‘Oh, oh yeah?’ and then he said, ‘Wanna come?’

  I told him yes, I would like that, so we wandered over to his shed and he held my hand because it was dark and I might’ve fallen over a coyote or a goat or something and then we went into his little shed and actually it wasn’t much warmer in there, but he was.

  So we held each other, all night, and eventually we got into just one sleeping bag. And then I finally felt warm.

  And I ain’t gonna talk about that anymore, because a) it took me all by surprise, and b) because when I woke up in the morning, it was late, and I had slept in late too, maybe because I finally had gotten warm at night, and c) I can’t talk about it because of what happened next. Which was that then I went out into the day and found Mona and as casual as I could I said, ‘Uh, Mona, where’s Bly?’ And Mona said that Bly had left, that he had gone. Bly had gone.

  Chapter 6

  K

  Knight of the Happy

  Countenance

  Yeah. I still blame that god-dang
ed goat. Socrates. I don’t believe he ever liked me and I can’t say I ever found a great liking for him, and if he hadn’t eaten my darned sneakers, life might’ve been very different. Like Bly might have not left, because I wouldn’t have been there more’n twenty-four hours, because I’d have left the day I rolled into Snowflake. Maybe the day after. And I’d’ve seen Bly but that would have been that. For now he had done gone and anyway I knew it weren’t Socrates’ fault, it was mine. It was on account of what had happened.

  Mona huffed and puffed around the house and she must’ve said I wonder what will happen next a million times till I wanted to strangle her. I sat and stared at the desert, which is what you did in Snowflake if something went wrong, or even if it went right.

  Mona said, ‘He didn’t tell you nothing?’ and I shook my head, and all I could think about was the night before and how much I wanted him back. I wanted him to come back and I wanted there not to be a little note on Mona’s kitchen table saying, ‘Mona, thanks for everything. You’re the best. I gotta go. B.’

  But there was.

  Mona was getting on my nerves. Because we was both upset that Bly was gone without saying anything, but whereas I was showing I was upset, Mona wasn’t. Sure, she huffed and puffed but she didn’t appear too upset; she made a lot of tea and cuddled Cooper, and Mary came over to talk about her insurance problems and how she was gonna have to find a lawyer but a cheap one, and Mona said there was no such thing and it was fifteen minutes before she even told Mary that Bly had gone. And finally I cracked and I snapped and said, ‘Dammit, Mona, Bly’s gone! Don’t you even care?’

  Mary raised her eyebrows and Mona, she stomped off into the house and I hobbled in after her and then I saw she was crying and she wouldn’t speak for hours. I mean for a long time.

  And when she did, she said, ‘We all have different ways of coping,’ and I said I was sorry over and again and she shook her head and said it was okay. But I felt mean.

  Mona went to blow her nose in the bathroom and when she came back she said, ‘He didn’t even take his goddamn pills with him’ and she had the box of fluoxetine in her hand, and I thought what?

  ‘Those are his?’ I said, which meant he’d lied to me about that, and then I said, ‘but he didn’t seem depressed,’ so I guess I was getting stupider not smarter because of course Mona said, ‘Yeah, well, that’s for why he was taking ’em. Like I said, we each have our own ways of coping.’

  ‘So what was they doing in your bathroom?’ I asked, and she told me she’d made him promise to keep them there, so she could keep an eye on how he was using ’em. So then I had to worry what that meant too.

  She asked me didn’t I ever see that the more Bly appeared to be happy, the more he was hurting underneath, and I said nothing because I hadn’t seen that at all. Maybe just that one time when he told me how other folks have problems too. And at the time I thought he meant other folks in Snowflake, who needed his help, but now I realized he was talking about himself.

  And when Bly laughed, all I saw was Bly laughing. When he smiled, all I saw was him smiling. But now here was Mona telling me that the happier my step seemed, the worse he was.

  ‘The Knight of the Happy Countenance,’ Mona said then and I had no idea what she was talking about. But she added, ‘In the book, the Don is called the Knight of the Sad Countenance. But actually he’s happy with what he got in life. He just don’t know it. Whereas our Bly looks happy, but isn’t. It’s the other way around.’

  So then I had even less idea what she was talking about. But she explained how it was some book I’d never heard of but it was a good book. It was about a crazy old Spanish guy who gets it into his head he’s a knight and it was sad and funny at the same time, and she added, ‘And that’s what life’s like. So that’s what makes it a good book.’

  I thought how happy Bly’d seemed the night before, and then I thought how he’d go missing from time to time, and wouldn’t say where he’d been. And then I didn’t know what to think anymore. Except that it was my fault. Because of what had happened, with him and with me.

  Mona said, ‘You two didn’t have a fight, now, did you?’ and at least I could say ‘no!’ to that without lying, because that much was true. We hadn’t had a fight. Far from it. The opposite. We’d had the opposite.

  Mary was upset too, and when everyone else found out, they was upset: Detlef and Finch and Jenny. And the Sick Birds wondered where he’d got to and who was gonna do their groceries, but Mona told ’em not to worry and that she could take over like she had before Bly came along.

  We kept hoping to hear something, some word from Bly, but none came. I started wondering about that box of pills, the fluoxetine, and I wandered out to Bly’s shed a hundred times and all his other pills were there. And then I saw his mask. But it was the fluoxetine that had me worried and by the middle of the second day I said to Mona, ‘If he stops taking the antidepressants, what then?’ and Mona didn’t laugh or have a joke or anything else to say. She just shrugged and went to make tea, so I followed her and said, ‘But it will be okay, won’t it, I mean, he’ll be okay? He wouldn’t do anything stupid. Would he?’

  Mona stopped making tea and said gently, ‘You’re all for having everything harmless, Snowflake, aren’t you?’ She held my chin with her dry old hand and smiled and it was one of the saddest smiles I will ever see. If I live to be a hundred, which ain’t likely.

  So I worried even more, but over tea she said, ‘Antidepressants. Like I said, we all got our own ways. Worked for Bly, and that’s a good thing. Time was the doctors wanted me to take ’em, but they messed with my head real bad. Made me even worse. You know what? If you look at the little bit of paper that comes with ’em, in the box, it lists all the possible side effects. And one of the possible side effects is suicidal tendencies. This is something you’re taking because you feel suicidal, you understand?’

  I understood, but that didn’t make me feel any better, and then Mona told me about not one, not two, now wait up, three of her friends who’d killed themselves while taking antidepressants, so then I thought Mona why the heck are you telling me that? And I guess she realized that too because she suddenly said, ‘But our Bly’ll be okay. Trust me, Ash, he’ll be okay,’ and she smiled but, heck, the damage was done.

  So I worried and worried until that evening, when there was a phone call ringing on Mona’s line, which happened from time to time, if not often. She went in to answer it and I heard her say ‘uh-huh’ and ‘yeah’ and ‘yes, sure, wait please’ and then she came out and said the call was for me.

  I went inside and I was on the phone for about a minute and then I came back out and set in the red plastic chair while Mona and Mary stared at me till Mona said are you gonna tell us or will I have to beat it out of you? And then I shook my head and told them it was Bly’s father who was on the phone. It was Jack.

  He said he’d heard from Bly. That he was well again and had gone back to finish his training to be a police officer.

  So Mona stared at Mary and Mary stared at me and no one knew what to make of any of that, till finally Mona said, ‘He who has a why to live, can cope with almost any how’ and then she said, ‘Friedrich Nietzsche. 1844 to 1900,’ and I wanted her to shut the hell up about philosophers for one damn minute. But I know what she meant. She meant that Bly wanted to do something with his life, and what he wanted to do was be a police officer. So he had gone to do that. And sickness be damned.

  Cooper came up to me and climbed into my lap while I set there in the red plastic chair, and he seemed to know something was wrong. He weren’t no Socrates, but he was a smart dog. He’d spent all day sniffing around Bly’s shed and back and forth to the house and he knew something was wrong. Now he was just tired and he set in my lap and licked my hand, over and over.

  The dark was coming on in and Mona said, ‘What did we learn today?’ but so quiet I barely heard her, and if I hadn’t heard her say it a hundred times before, I wouldn’t have understood. But her
heart wasn’t in it and she didn’t make anyone say anything, but it got me thinking anyway and what I was thinking I’d learned was this. That love between people is strange, and not simple, and sometimes it’s downright complicated.

  Then I recalled the last part of the phone call with Jack, so I told Mona and Mary.

  ‘My stepdad says he’s coming here,’ I said and Mona asked why, so I told her why. ‘He says he’s gonna take me home.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mona. And that was all she said, and I was feeling funny about that, and then after a long while she said, ‘But Snowflake, this is your home.’

  And I thought, huh. Yeah. So that’s what I learned today.

  L

  Learning to Be Someone Else

  Matters were fraught in Mona’s house the day Jack came to take me back to flatland.

  Before Jack even showed up, the cable guy came. Now, we weren’t sure why but he came to fix the Internet. ’Course Mona didn’t use Wi-Fi, but there was an old wired connection all sealed off in a tinfoil box in the room with the washing machine. And she hadn’t had no problems with it, but the cable guy said he had to update the equipment and then he started asking what speed Mona had and Mona shrugged and I said, ‘She’s got one meg’ and the cable guy said, ‘Well, don’t you want nine megs?’ and Mona shrugged and went off to ask Mary if they wanted nine megs and though she’d told the cable guy to stay in that one room, he didn’t, and then he was walking through the whole house and Mona and Mary started getting agitated on account of all the cologne this guy was pumping out. And I guess he was new to Snowflake, or at least to the Forties, and I tried to explain about MCS to him but then I felt kinda stupid because I still didn’t believe it myself, not really, not a hundred percent, despite the evidence of my own body.

  So that had been the first thing, and then there was the next thing. A good commotion.

  I saw the start of it as I was moving my stuff. My clothes. A few books. That kinda stuff. After more or less three months I was leaving my room with only two walls, but I was not going far. The days were growing short, and the nights cold. And by the way, just because the temperatures were falling didn’t mean that Mona closed any doors or windows. All through the day she’d leave every window and door open and just leave the screens closed to keep bugs out. It aired the house, she said, but what it meant was there was a gale always blowing through the place.