Snowflake, AZ

by Marcus Sedgwick

  And other people asked Detlef what food you had for German midsummer parties and Detlef looked kinda confused and said anything was fine with him, just bring anything you want to eat. And I drove into and outta town a dozen times, picking up stuff for the party, and I guess if I had been paying attention I would have seen some things that might have set me thinking. Like, now, I can recall a coupla times I saw a convoy of army trucks motoring through town real fast. But I just didn’t think anything of it. There was the party to attend to.

  *

  The day came, and we was all so excited and I could not wait for the evening to come because that was when it was all gonna happen, at sundown on the longest day, which meant it was late by the time things even got going.

  Mona picked me up in her car and when she pulled up there was the witch sitting in the passenger seat.

  ‘I’ve given her a name,’ Mona told me and I said ‘yeah?’ and she said she decided to call her Nancy and I said ‘why Nancy?’ and she thought for a second and then said ‘why not?’

  So Mona and me, we drove Nancy down the dirt turnpike and I had a job stopping Cooper from chewing on her, because he was getting real old by then, and had developed some funny habits. Which Mona blamed on how he had to share his life with a god-danged crazy goat called Socrates, and by that she meant she blamed herself.

  Everyone was there. Everyone. The whole gang.

  It was getting on for eight in the evening. The sun was tipping down behind the hills to the west, and Detlef had set up all these tables and chairs outside. The tables were covered in food and the chairs were already full of people and the Dead Elf said he had to say a few words. So he told us about midsummer bonfires and how they were a real old thing, going way back before Christian times and they were to celebrate the life of the sun on its longest day. How people thought the fires would keep evil things away and make sure the sun came back again the next year.

  He told us he had a surprise for later in the night when it really got dark, and everyone went ‘oooh’ like they have to when you tell ’em there’s gonna be a surprise. But first, Detlef lit the bonfire and then yelled because we’d forgotten to put Nancy on top of it, but when he came over to get it I suddenly said to Mona, ‘We can’t burn Nancy!’ and Mona looked at me for three seconds, said, ‘God-durn it. Why did you have to say that?’ and I told her it was her fault for giving her a name because now she was in my in-group and she shrugged and then she called over to Detlef.

  ‘Hey, Dead Elf, burning witches is off the agenda!’

  Detlef just shrugged and the night came on as the fire took hold and we all started real close to it but soon we was backing off and all saying how hot it was and can you believe it’s so hot this far away? and all those kinda things.

  Someone had put some music on, real loud, and people started eating and drinking too, and though I was never one to drink much in the way of alcoholic drinks, it seemed the right thing to make an exception, so I had a beer or two. Or three. Then Detlef came over and pushed a glass into my hand, a real little glass, and even though I wasn’t a drinker I knew that the smaller the glass, the more you gotta be afraid of what’s in it.

  ‘Schnapps!’ Detlef said. ‘Obstwasser! I had to order it specially!’

  So then because he said that thing about having to order it, I had to drink it. And it turned out that having just one wasn’t gonna satisfy nobody, least of all me.

  Now, by this time, I guess it’s fair to say I was roaring drunk. Not that I actually roared. I felt kinda far away and swimmy but they don’t call it swimmy-drunk. They call it roaring.

  And it turned out I wasn’t the only one getting a little wasted, because right after that second glass, Detlef grinned at me and shouted over the din of the people and the music.

  He said, ‘Using all the light was how my head got spent!’

  And before I could say ‘what?’ he was off to wheel out his big surprise.

  He had everyone hush up and then took us around the other side of the house. It was getting on for midnight and there was almost no moon, just a sliver left before it would be gone for good in a couple days. But there was the stars. Did I never tell you about the stars in the Arizona desert?

  Those days I slept on the porch, those first days? After the monsoon clouds left, when the nights got clear, then how the stars shone! You could read by ’em, if the print weren’t too small. And I never saw stars like that. The Milky Way, you think it’s something people have made up, till you finally see it for real, and I guess now most people see much more of it than before, right?

  So we all stood there and made some good noises about the sky, and someone said, ‘Detlef, what’s going on?’ and he didn’t say nothing. He was away off in the distance somewhere so maybe he didn’t hear, but a second later we saw the flame of a lighter and something fizzed and two seconds later a rocket whooshed up into the sky. A firework.

  It was a big one. Gi-gantic, and when it reached the top of the sky, the explosion, you could feel it on your chest. And he didn’t have just one. There were dozens of ’em. He was scurrying around in the dark lighting ’em up, all of ’em, and in groups of two or three they shot up into the sky and it was wonderful. With all their colors and sparkles. All the sounds, the fizzes and the bangs. It was wonderful, and not just because I was as drunk as a horse.

  There was one of us, however, who wasn’t so pleased. That was Cooper. Now, he was getting old, like I said, and a mite deaf along with it, but those fireworks of Detlef’s, they were loud. As soon as the first one went off, Cooper went nuts. He started barking and running about and then he started howling and as I watched the fireworks I tried to make my way over to find Mona to help her calm him down.

  Detlef didn’t know nothing about it. The noise of the fireworks covered most of it, and everyone going ‘oooh’ covered the rest. And when they was over, everyone clapped and cheered and someone put some music on again but then Detlef found out that he’d upset Cooper.

  ‘I’m so sorry!’ he kept saying, over and over. ‘Mona! I’m so sorry’ and Mona said it was okay, but Cooper was still upset. He was shaking and he looked terrified and I said, ‘Maybe he oughta go home?’

  And Mona agreed but I could see something. She didn’t wanna go home. She was having a nice time, a ball, and the last thing she wanted to do was haul ass down the dirt turnpike when things were just getting going.

  So then I did something dumb.

  I said I’d take Cooper home, back to hers and keep him company till he was a happy dog again. Mona looked at me.

  ‘You been drinking?’

  And I said ‘one beer’ and Mona said, ‘Well, I guess the worst can happen is you squash a jackrabbit’ and she gave me the keys.

  Now I had had more than one beer. And I should not have been driving, but the truth was, I had started to feel bad. It was something I noticed about myself. If we all started having too much fun, I started thinking about someone, a certain someone whose T-shirt I had stolen, and I wanted him to be there, even if it was only the bacteria making me want that. And I think the drink was making the bacteria make me feel that even worse, so yeah, I was helping Cooper, but he was helping me too, for an excuse to leave.

  I bundled him into the car, and sometimes you had to help him get in, these days. This was one of those times, so I lifted his back end while he worked on the front, and then we set off down the turnpike.

  Now, as Mona had said, the worst that could happen was that I might squash a turtle or something, it was just one dirt track and it ran straight through the desert towards Mona’s. But it was bumpy and had been getting worse after each monsoon. So soon enough, the inevitable happened. I pulled up as quick as I could and opened the door and threw up on the side of the road and as I did I remembered what Mona told me all those years back about checking where you’re walking in the middle of the night and what’s in your boots in the first place. If I had just vomited on a rattlesnake, however, there was nothing I could do
but apologize.

  So I was saying sorry, just in case, and pulling myself up into the car again when I saw something coming towards me in the night. Blue flashing lights.

  Straightaway I put two and two together, got four, and I was right. It was the Navajo County sheriff’s office, come all the way up from Show Low, just to see what the explosions in the sky was about.

  In case you are unaware of the rules and regulations concerning the personal use of fireworks in the state of Arizona in the early years of the twenty-first century, I’ll help you out a little.

  Simply put, it weren’t legal. Sure, you could have little fireworks, but only ones that wouldn’t tickle anyone’s pickle. And you could only have them from June 24th on. And this was June 23rd, more or less, until a few minutes later. And big ones? Rockets and things that make explosions in the sky, well, they was downright illegal all the darn time. You might wonder, because I did, about how I lived somewhere where it was just fine to buy an assault rifle but setting off a firework was completely evil. Maybe you got a better answer than I do, but them was the rules.

  So when the prowler pulled up next to me, and they wound their window down, they said, ‘Evening. We got reports of some unusual activity out in these parts. You seen anything?’

  It is remarkable how quickly you can act sober when you gotta. At least, I think I did, but I wasn’t so drunk that I wasn’t worried stupid they was gonna arrest me for drunk driving. Even though the land I was driving on was Detlef’s and so private and I was desperately wondering if that made any difference or not. I mean, it makes no difference to the person you run over and kill, but maybe it would save my neck in court.

  So I said, ‘Yes, officer, I think we may have seen something.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Me and Cooper.’

  The officer peered into the cab and couldn’t see no one so then he looked at me kinda funny.

  ‘He’s my dog.’

  I thought I was doing a real good job of sounding sober. I’m not sure I was right about that. But on he went, the cop, I mean.

  ‘You know where?’

  So then I gave a good old Snowflake shrug.

  ‘I do not,’ I added, in case it wasn’t clear.

  ‘You mind telling me what you’re doing out here in the middle of the night?’

  I did mind, but you don’t get the choice.

  ‘We have been visiting with friends and now we’re taking ourselves home.’

  I said all that convinced it was the soberest anyone ever sounded.

  And of course I was thinking my God how can you not smell that German firewater all over me? But they didn’t. Somehow.

  They drove off looking for terrorists or whatever.

  I found out later that when they showed up, everyone acted innocent and said, ‘Yeah, we saw it too!’ and pointed way out into the desert and thank God it was dark enough that they didn’t see the remains of the fireworks spread all over Detlef’s yard.

  I got home, back to Mona’s I mean, and I shushed Cooper and he was asleep almost as soon as I put him on Mona’s bed. He was one old mutt.

  Then I stumbled back out of the door, and there I saw something in the dark, just two shapes, and those two shapes was Bly’s sheds.

  I could not have told you why I did what I did next. Maybe now, all these years later, I could try to explain. I might try to say that something in me was stuck. Something in me got stuck, or something in me died along with Bly in that shed that night. And somehow, I had not been living since. Somehow, I think my body knew something I could never have worked out with my head. I needed to go in there.

  My body needed me to do it. So I did.

  I was drunk and I staggered over and I pulled the door open and there weren’t much of anything in there. Nothing but the crates he used as a bed, everything else had gone, but drunk as I was, I lay down on the hard crates, and lay there, thinking about what Detlef had said. ‘Using all the light was how my head got spent.’ That’s what he said and the funny thing was that, at one and the same time, I had no idea what he was talking about and yet I knew exactly what he meant, because I felt the same.

  And then it was Bly. I was thinking about Bly, and then thinking I was Bly, and yet, before I knew it, I had passed out.

  slept till the early morning.

  Mona must’ve come home, with a lift from someone else, sometime, but I knew nothing. I slept on my dead stepbrother’s bed and right through till the early hours when I woke with an ache in my head and my whole body screaming from sleeping on a wooden crate for a few hours.

  Then came the thing that happened. The thing that set me rolling off into a whole new part of life.

  As my eyes opened and got used to the light coming down from that little skylight Detlef had once put in for me, and as my head thumped and I decided not to move for a moment or two, I saw something above my head.

  It was a piece of paper, folded in half, and it was tucked into the ridge, at the highest point of the roof.

  Even from where I lay, I could see something else. It had my name on it.

  ‘Ash,’ it said. And it was in Bly’s handwriting.

  V

  Voltaire

  Voltaire, real name François-Marie Arouet, was born in 1694 and he passed from this world in 1778. He was another philosopher who got in trouble for saying what he thought. His views got him locked up more’n once. Sometimes he got in trouble for criticizing the government. One time he got locked up in that place in Paris called the Bastille. He was put in a cell with no windows for eleven months for accusing Philippe II of committing incest with his daughter. Like Mona always said, you thinking things have got any better?

  Anyway, it was just after he was locked up in the Bastille with its ten-foot-thick walls that he changed his name to Voltaire. No one’s sure why. My theory is it sounds cool.

  Now, why am I telling you all about Voltaire? Well, two things. First, he was all for people thinking for themselves and for governments letting people believe what they wanted to. Just like old Socrates, only two thousand years later. So just like Mona said, who’s thinking things have got any better? I ain’t sure I am.

  And second is on account of what was in Bly’s note.

  Now, as suicide notes come, I guess it was kinda funny. Don’t get me wrong, I was no expert on the subject, but you know, when people take their own life away, you hear stories about letters they leave behind. ‘Forgive me everyone, I didn’t wanna but…’ or ‘I’m real sorry, but it’s too much for me to bear’ or ‘y’all stink and I’m glad I’m outta here.’ Whatever it might happen to be.

  So when I saw that piece of paper with my name on it, I figured maybe Bly had left something like that for me. I guess maybe a second and one half passed between me seeing that piece of paper and grabbing it and unfolding it and reading it, and in that second and one half there was enough time to think a remarkable amount of things. Things he might have written in that note. Things like ‘if only we…’ and ‘maybe we could have but…’ or ‘did you ever wish that…?’ but there weren’t nothing like that, and I was to be disappointed.

  On the one side, it had my name.

  On the other side it had three things, and they was as follows:

  One: ‘All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.’

  Two: ‘Eelfoh cooltivay notra jar dun.’

  And:

  Three, there was a thing I thought might be a name: Polloo.

  And as Mona might have said, that was god-dang that.

  Now, unlike the night before when I only thought I was doing a great job of acting sober, in that moment I saw my name, I was as cold as stone and my head clear like water from a well. It didn’t make any sense and I needed time for it to make sense. So before Mona could come out and start on interviewing me, I snuck out and shuffled back home to my place, just down the hill.

  *

  I spent the morning with the piece of paper unfolded on my kitchen table. I set a chair b
y it and stared at it and then I stared at the tea I had made and then at the desert, waiting for the answers to roll in.

  A couple of times I tried going through some of the books I had borrowed or bought or otherwise gotten from my time in Snowflake, but I didn’t have nothing that would help.

  And the thing is, you might have spotted that name, Polleux, right off, but I didn’t. I had only ever heard Mona say it, and the way she said it was not how it looked on a piece of paper. And I knew it looked kinda French, this word in front of me, and I didn’t speak an unholy word of French, not to mention there was that other bit, that looked like gobbledygook, and I didn’t speak gobbledygook neither. But in the end, I realized what the name was. It wasn’t Polloo. It was Polleux! Polleux, the name of that guy Mona had told me about, the first one to come, the first one with MCS. The guy who lived way out in the deep.

  So I stared out in the desert and I knew the answers were out there, after all, just like Stephanie Krokowski had said they would be. Though, to be more precise, I knew I would have to start at Mona’s place, because the way to get to those answers, well, that would be in her head.

  I waited till the afternoon. She mighta had one ginger ale too many, like me. I told myself it might be best to leave her be, so I hung around doing nothing but staring at the desert for hour after hour. I kept putting it off, going up to Mona’s, because the truth was I didn’t wanna share this thing from Bly with anyone. I knew she’d know what it meant, though, and only her, so in the end, around four o’clock it was, and as hot as hell, I drove back up in my truck to her place.

  It was funny. It felt wrong. I didn’t like finding something that Bly had kept from me, and then I thought about those days when he’d go missing and be acting funny and then I thought about his note and how he’d kept the biggest thing of all from me, that he was gonna kill himself. And then it was too much to think of, because if only he’d, I mean, if only he’d said something, just anything, then I coulda, I coulda maybe stopped him. Maybe. And all that hurt more than I can say.