The Blizzard Party

by Jack Livings

  My father’s teeth were bared and he’d stopped breathing. His eyes clamped shut and his brain fired a monstrously pedestrian message of utter surrender: an image of the fish that had brought him to the spot on which he was about to perish. Throw the bag! Throw the bag at the cab! his brain told his body. Of course his arm did not move. He was helpless, about to meet his end in the manner he’d always imagined. The taxi kept coming, floating across the surface, drawing ever closer, growing larger and larger until it broadsided the snowbank with an exquisite boom, a shattering noise that resonated up through the concrete and snow, into his feet, setting his organs ashudder.

  By exactly the type of coincidence that my father didn’t believe possible, between the cab and him, frozen deep within the snowbank, was a row of newspaper boxes encased in ice, each one bolted to the sidewalk so no one could boost them, and to which a winter’s worth of trash bags, cardboard, and ripped-out plasterboard panels had all attached to form a substructure as solid as concrete, so that instead of blowing through the pile of snow and making a red blotch of my father, the ton and a half of inevitability sprung up on its creaking shocks and came thudding back down, wheels spinning madly, and shot directly at a Chevrolet Caprice marooned near the corner of 78th. The violent tearing sound of the big aluminum bumper gouging the snowbank ricocheted off the buildings on either side of the canyon.

  The cab shot right, away from the snowbank, clipping the Caprice’s bumper and swerving into the intersection, where a berm created by crisscrossing snowplows loomed twice the height of the cab. It plunged through the pile like a football team storming the field, the snow exploding in a shower of festive chunks.

  Its engine revving and retreating, pulsing, one might say, it then ran two blurry stoplights before sliding into a right turn, in the direction of Riverside, headed the wrong way down a one-way street. The sound of the engine faded and there was nothing left but wind and clanging street signs.

  Mother of Christ, my father whispered.

  He could see down the sidewalk that the dark figure was still closing the distance. It appeared that he was carrying something on his back.

  Lightning flashed and thunder rolled across the sky.

  17.

  Manny was pulling a double because Dolan, the night man, hadn’t been able to get across the bridge, and he’d been praying for a respite from the couples who’d been showing up all night for the Vornados’ party, though up to that point never more than a few at a time, traipsing into the lobby as though their arrivals had been timed by a precise randomization equation, completely unpredictable, making it impossible to catch a wink, but finally there’d been a lull and he’d been able to tuck his chin and close his eyes just long enough to zone out. He wasn’t even bothering to call up, anyway. No one was answering. If Chewbacca walked in, it was PH1, enjoy the party. He might as well be asleep. He lifted an eyelid just in time to see my father heading out the lobby doors, the faint smell of charred fish lingering behind him.

  When Manny heard the muffled whump of the cab hitting the snowbank, he sat up on his stool. He thought about it for a while, arguing with himself about whether Mr. Saltwater might be involved, and whether it was his responsibility to check on him if he was, and he was still arguing with himself when he pulled on his overcoat, slipped the rain rubber over his hat, and went out. Resigned but nonchalant. Like to check that the pavers had been sufficiently salted.

  He watched my father through the spike-topped gate, closed and locked tight at all times, and, like its twin on the opposite side of the courtyard, adorned with curlicues, stylized smoke buoying APELLES in a golden rainbow. A door-shaped gate within the gate allowed residents in and out, and Manny pulled it open and stepped through, the iron clanging behind him. He noted that my father did not turn in his direction. Manny knew he had heard the gate, and something about my father’s arrogant posture reminded him of a lieutenant he’d served under whose perverse interest in the suffering of others, the godlike detachment from the world and its inhabitants, had earned him the unrelenting hatred of his troops. In late 1971, that man, a Lieutenant Spitz, had been standing atop a wall of sandbags watching a stream of villagers, worldly possessions strapped to their backs, traverse the access road beyond the base perimeter. His disdain for the Vietnamese was well known, and though he’d arrived green as a gooseberry, he had a million names for the locals: jungle bugs, slicks, slants, zipperheads, squats, squints, treads, quans, poons, TPs—toilet paper or target practice, no one knew which—besides the standard dink, duck, gook, sloat, Charlie. They poured out of his mouth like runoff from a storm pipe, as though before shipping out he’d made a list and was working his way through it. It was too obvious an attempt to win the approval of his men, and he was an embarrassment to them.

  According to Spitz, the villagers who lived near the base were paddy niggers. Manny’s platoon had a good sergeant who’d suggested to the lieutenant that he might want to deescalate the rhetoric a hair, but Spitz, who took all advice as a challenge to his authority, stepped it up and deployed the term in the presence of all races of troop, holding the eye of any Black soldier who might take issue. He managed to further distinguish himself by displays of piety, praying aloud in the mess, engaging Christian leadership initiatives around the camp, holding meetings Wednesday nights to read passages from the scripture. In his spare time he got blow jobs from the girls who hung around the gate. Manny had his opinions just like everyone else, but he minded his own business. He followed orders and adhered to the military code of behavior. The lieutenant was too much personality for Manny, too often proclaiming what he was or wasn’t to actually be anything at all.

  Paddy niggers, Spitz had said from his perch on the sandbags, shaking his head every so often at their primitive stupidity. The previous night’s shelling had finished their rice fields once and for all. Their animals had been shot, blown up, or appropriated long ago, and their village itself had been reduced to a seam of mud that reeked from the base’s latrine runoff. Where in hell they think they’re going? the lieutenant wondered aloud.

  No one, least of all Manny, called up to him, Hey, boss man, look sharp! as he stood like an olive drab Statue of Liberty atop the escarpment, tracking the villagers through his Nash-Kelvinators. A decent lieutenant never would have been up there in the first place, wearing his collar bars, no less, but there he was, scanning to see if his hooch boy was bugging out, and if half the men were praying that a VC sniper was dialing in on his forehead, the other half weren’t going to take the high road and hold it against them.

  All the same, they jumped when the binoculars exploded, at the thudding sound of the slug crashing through glass and plastic, the flying black wedges of plastic and metal and the gray and pink spray of his head webbed out all over the bags behind him, and after he’d begun to fall, there’d been the crack of the rifle rolling across the red, white, and blue side of the valley. Someone had mailed that shot from a long, long way off. Down on the access road, the villagers hit the deck.

  Manny had peered through an embrasure and seen the villagers lying in the road, mounds of gear atop their backs. American tracers were flying over them but not a one moved. He didn’t understand them when they spoke at him, always in a frenzy, always shouting, always desperate, and though his heart went out, what could he do? He was scared shitless, too. A few of them who provided goods and services were allowed in and out of camp, but Manny didn’t want anything to do with them. Seemed like bad luck. The lieutenant had let them tidy his tent and service his needs, and yep, sure enough, look how that turned out.

  After Spitz got killed, command flew in another cardboard cutout to replace him; clueless, but at least the new one washed his own fatigues and didn’t fraternize with the locals. Manny’s tour was up by the time that lieutenant was killed.

  Mr. Saltwater might have been there, he was thinking. Manny recognized the sickness hanging about him, the ineffable detachment. There were rumors about the man, of course, that he’d b
een Army intelligence or CIA. Manny knew better than to believe chatter from the tenants, but you could get a bead from the old ladies who dressed up and put on hats just for the ride down to the mailboxes. They’d been around. They knew things. Mr. Saltwater’s wife was nice enough. The kid was polite. Deliveries of books, mostly. Pizza on Sunday night. When spoken to, Manny nodded or shook his head, as appropriate. He was himself affable, didn’t know nothing about nothing, except that from where he stood, Saltwater was an odd bird. Fair tipper, though Madam appeared to handle that end of the business. No one would ever accuse Saltwater of wearing out the finish on the front desk. Manny classified him the same as everyone else who lived in the building. Standard New York grade-A nutjob.

  Mr. Saltwater, sir? Manny called into the howling wind, the snow clotting on his coat.

  My father turned his head slightly, but his eyes remained locked on the figure in the distance.

  Sir, anything happen out here?

  Nope, my father said.

  Uh-huh, Manny said. If there’s anything I can help you with, you’ll let me know?

  Absolutely, my father said. He reached over and gave the doorman’s woolen arm a squeeze. I’m alive! he added.

  Very good, sir.

  There’s an issue with the chute on fourteen. Brunn, my father said. I had to get these fish out of the apartment. I did a real number on them. Had to get them out of the building.

  Yes, sir, I can take that down to the incinerator for you … Manny didn’t bother to finish. It was February, the dead cord of winter wrapped tight around a dark matrix, ice atop snow atop ice atop snow, and they were standing in a blizzard. What the hell was he standing in a blizzard for?

  Why don’t we just pitch the bag, Manny said, and get back inside?

  Roger that, my father said. He casually tossed the bag toward the street. The wind spiked it into the snowbank.

  For all Manny cared, my father could stand in the snow until he froze to death, as long as he went across the street to do it. But standing on the sidewalk in front of the Apelles, my father had made it a financial issue for Manny. If something were to happen—and it would, even in a blizzard, it would, god help him, that would be his luck, wouldn’t it, at best Mr. Saltwater would only get mugged, mugged by the only mugger out in the whole city, and a man like him would probably fight back, which all the libertarian types did, which would guarantee blood, which would find its way back to Manny’s hands, his neglect having resulted in a tenant’s beating, and there’s only so much the union can do in a situation like that—Manny would be culpable, so he, too, would have to stand in the snow and wind freezing his ass off until this nutjob decided to conclude his meditation, or whatever he was doing. Assault might be the least of Manny’s worries. My father, it occurred to him, was the type who might die from exposure because he got lost in his own head.

  The streetlights were horizontal. Manny was losing contact with his toes and ears. He clamped his teeth together and bounced on the balls of his feet.

  My father wasn’t much better off. After the initial blaze of heat that came in the moments after the incident with the taxi, his trapezius had clinched tight against his neck, an ammoniac ache transmitting up to his skull and down the trapdoor to his spine. He was snorting vigilantly to counteract the copious streams of snot escaping his nostrils, and his jaw was set in concrete.

  Waiting for someone? Manny said.

  No, not in so many words, my father said.

  Probably someone coming to the party, Manny said, tipping his chin at the figure down the block.

  Some nut. I don’t know, my father said.

  * * *

  The day before, my father had caught the first train home from Montauk, leaving my mother and me to snowshoe and skate with the Vornados. We were going to have fun. He’d thought he’d better get out before it was too late.

  On the subway from Penn Station, a blind man had come tapping into his nearly empty car and had pitched a finely cadenced oration delivered in oaken tones that carried cleanly from one end of the car to the other, touching on his personal journey as a man, his failures and struggles, the temporal nature of existence, before landing on the emotional appeal for whatever a kind soul might be able to spare. The change in his cup had rattled as he’d walked, and he’d paused directly in front of my father, facing the wrong way, which my father assumed was intended to sell his state of terrible existential loneliness, a nice piece of stagecraft to underscore the fact that not only was he a blind beggar, but he was bad at it, miles more pitiable than your run-of-the-mill retinopathic pencil salesman. But it had backfired. He’d overcooked it. This wasn’t the Peoria Playhouse, kiddo. If only he’d shuffled a few feet farther down the car, canted himself at a diagonal—no, it was too pathetic by half. My father looked at the man’s shoes, disintegrating brogues held together with twine, the pants and coats in triplicate … and he felt a pang, and then he thought what he always thought, which was, what difference did it make if the guy was president of the con artists union? Who the hell would choose to live this way? Was it really so impossible to believe that the man was blind? If my father said nothing, and if no other passenger verbally identified himself—a likely scenario, as the only other passengers were a couple of winos sleeping it off and a solo passenger at the far end of the car—then for all the blind man knew he was floating in space, shaking his cup at the galactic void. What if he’d stopped in front of my father not to sell it but because he was hopelessly wretched at begging, so wretched that he had been relegated to roaming these wretched tunnels, addressing empty cars, rattling his cup at empty seats? No, my father thought, it couldn’t be a con. His spirit couldn’t take it if it was a con.

  Genuine blindness, then. And what a relief, because my father was then freed of his fear of making eye contact, which was what all the mental acrobatics had been about in the first place, because even after all these years guilt was writhing around inside him, down beneath all the dead skin encasing his soul. Sure, the city was a bathypelagic zone, but the company line—that he had to protect his own tender heart with a thick callus—was bullshit. The truth was, he couldn’t give because he couldn’t take on the man’s burden, not even for a second, and if he looked him square in his fake blind eye, he’d have to help. My father was already carrying too much.

  The IRT screeched northward, lights flickering, and the blind man moved on, tap-tapping, pausing at the sour scent of the drunks, giving the cup a cursory shake, passing on. As the train neared 66th the other passenger at the far end stood up, just as the blind man positioned himself in the same exit, facing into the car, giving no indication that he intended to disembark. The other passenger was well dressed, wool coat, hair parted crisply, polished oxfords. He positioned himself directly in front of the blind man. Even from fifty feet away my father heard clearly what the man said: Get the fuck out of my way, you blind fuck.

  The man looked down the car at my father. For commiseration, or to stoke my father’s outrage—either way, seeking acknowledgment that he’d meted out some of the casual abuse that kept the city lubricated, but my father refused to look away from his own reflection in the opposite window. The poor bastard must get it a hundred times a day, he thought, his insufferable life made worse every time he mustered the strength to shake the cup.

  But, then, really, don’t get sentimental. Which of the men was more deserving of pity? Which was blameless and which one’s mortal soul in jeopardy? Surely the beggar had earned his seat in heaven. Would Jesus extend his kindness only to the halt and lame? Wouldn’t a truly benevolent savior go to the ends of the earth to recover the powerful evildoer who has strayed so much farther from His grace? Furthermore, he thought, which one of these men might be Jesus in disguise, come to the door in the dead of night, a frightful visitor asking for a place to lay his head?

  And then my father wished he, too, could tell the awful blind beggar to fuck off, just for being so perfectly weak, ruined, so utterly blameless.


  He said nothing. He was not an active participant in the drama of the world. A bit player, at best. But those bit players are not to be discounted—where was almighty Christ without the soldiers who erected the cross and nailed him to it? He’d be sitting on his crossbeam atop Golgotha tossing pebbles at the vultures, waiting for someone to make him the savior of the world, that’s where. Whose sacrifice was greater? Jesus gave up his life, briefly. But the soldiers who nailed him up sacrificed their eternal souls. Just like the Jews who had sent him to his death in the first place: forever reviled, symbols of callous humanity, the lost, the unsaved. Without them, Jesus would have died of old age, arthritic, a little nostalgic for his fiery youth.

  My father knew his role in that play. He’d have stood by the side of the road and watched as Jesus passed by in his crown of thorns and then he’d have gone home to scratch onto parchment what he’d seen. Watcher, voyeur, a receiver open to all channels, dutifully taking the world’s transcription, a living, breathing skein gulping down the rank matter of life, distending, bulging, and when he couldn’t swell anymore, shitting it out onto the page. It was a task he took very seriously, staying out of the light. He’d made his own soul insignificant, an afterthought in a corner of limbo so that he could filter the lives of others like a baleen inhaling krill. A watcher. Because when he took part in the pageant he became dangerous, a weapon. He had done it once before, and it had made him a murderer.