Snow Day: a Novella

by Maurer, Dan

  It was a single room, thick with the smell of tobacco ash, stale pretzels, beer, and human sweat, and something else. I couldn’t place it then, but I know it now. It was the smell of decay, perhaps even desperation. The atmosphere was humid, musty and almost cave-like. The accordion-shaped iron radiators against the walls were working overtime and the plate glass window with the faded, chipped lettering that looked out on Columbia Avenue was partially clouded with condensation. The room felt close, an expression my mother sometimes used, but which I hadn’t understood until that moment.

  A collection of small tables littered the floor and the bar stood along the far wall. One look at the place and you’d think it hadn’t been cleaned since the 1920s when it served as a Pharmacy and Notions shop, complete with a soda fountain and ice cream counter. The pharmacy’s checkered linoleum floor still remained, though cracked and yellowed, as did the tin embossed ceiling panels, now stained to almost black from the cigarette and cigar smoke; only now the shelves behind the counter held the likes of Johnny Walker and Dewar’s instead of soft drink syrups, ice cream and candy bars.

  The patrons, only about a half-dozen, were huddled over their drinks; a couple in the corner, and a few solo drinkers. These were people who had braved the State Police warning to stay off the roads and stay inside, just so they could... what? So they could grease the wheels of their own decline? These were not the kind of people I knew, or ever expected to know, or ever wanted to know. I had made a mistake thinking I’d be welcome at the Columbia. There was no Mr. Gower in here.

  I must have pushed on the door a little too hard as I entered because everyone in the place turned to look at me. I took a second to collect my breath, and then walked over to the phone booth in the corner. All eyes followed me and mine followed theirs right back, as if to say: What, you never seen a guy making a phone call before?

  It was an old wooden phone booth, old even by mid-seventies standards, maybe from the ‘20s, like the rest of the place. I slipped into the booth, folded the door shut behind me and sat on the bench opposite the phone. The overhead light in the booth was out, no surprise there, so only a thin band of light bled in from the room’s lamps and the glowing beer signs behind the bar. I picked up the receiver, pressed it to my ear and pretended to make a call while glancing out the window of the phone booth. Ol’ George must have seen me duck into the Columbia. But he wouldn’t come in here, and if he did, he wouldn’t try anything with people watching.

  A bald man with a lined face and tattooed forearms wore a filthy white apron and stood behind the bar pouring a beer from the tap. He eyed me suspiciously as he slid the full and foamy pilsner glass across the counter to a patron, a large man in a plaid sport coat sitting on a stool at the bar. The patron leaned forward on the bar sipping the foam from the lip of his glass, then he casually looked over his shoulder in my direction. When he did, he cocked his head, not unlike a hunting dog when it looks curious about something it’s found in the field.

  I quickly leaned back in the bench, hiding again in the shadows, still doing a lousy job of pretending to make a phone call from a pay phone into which I hadn’t fed so much as a dime. After a moment, I leaned forward for another look at the man with the tattooed forearms and his large, ill-dressed patron. They were talking now, likely talking about me. The big man looked familiar, but he no longer looked in my direction. Instead, he peered past the bartender into the mirror, which cast a reflection of the room and the phone booth. He was watching me in the mirror, watching to see when I would come out.

  It was clear that coming here was a mistake, now the trick was not only losing George, but getting out of the Columbia without someone stopping me. I was a minor in a saloon, after all.

  I took a deep breath, then pushed the phone booth door open and stood up with the receiver still pressed to my ear.

  “Yeah, Sorry, Mom,” I said to the dead line, loud enough for the rest the patrons to hear. “Yeah, I know I’m late. I’m on my way home now. I’ll see you in a few. Bye.”

  I hung up the phone, stepped out of the booth and stole a glance out the front window. There, parked at the curb, was the black Plymouth.

  Ol’ George was still waiting for me; there was no going out that way. I turned to the man behind the bar with the tattooed forearms. He was staring needles at me while wiping a dirty mug with a dirty dish rag.

  I said: “Mister, you got a john in here?”

  My brass clearly surprised him because he stopped wiping the mug and just stood there for a moment, not saying anything. I think he was genuinely surprised that a ten-year-old could have the balls to walk into his place like he had every right to be there, like the kid wasn’t putting his liquor license in jeopardy, like strange 10-year-olds waltz into corner bars every night.

  He didn’t answer at first, and the big man with the plaid sports jacket didn’t turn around either. He just kept his eyes forward, yet in his mirrored reflection I’m sure I detected the faintest smirk crease his lips.

  The man with the tattooed forearms eventually said “Yeah,” and jerked a thumb in the direction of a doorway at the back of the room. “Back there.”

  I headed in the direction of his thumb.

  “Do your business and get out,” he shouted after me. “This ain’t no friggin’ playground.”

  As I started down the length of the bar, I let my eyes pass over the man in the plaid jacket one more time. I saw his expression change. He was looking into the mirror behind the bar, but he wasn’t looking at me. He peered across the room, through the blotches of condensation on the plate glass window that read THE COLUMBIA in reverse. He was looking at the black Plymouth parked at the curb. The cab was dark, its headlights glowing, wipers pulsing back and forth rhythmically.

  It was snowing again.

  9

  I BENT OVER IN THE PARKING LOT behind the Columbia, my hands on my knees, ready to yak. My heart pounded. I took deep frantic breaths, sucking in gasps of fresh oxygen from the January night as snow lightly flaked down on my head. It was an immediate respite from the rank, thick air in the Columbia and I savored it. I’d escaped the bar without being stopped by the man with the tattooed forearms. As I passed through the doorway he had indicated, I continued down the hall, my heart beginning to race, my steps quickening. I first passed the Men’s room, then a small office, my steps quicker still.

  “Hey, kid. Where the hell you going?” the tattooed man shouted.

  Was he following me? And where was ol’ George? I broke into a run, raced past a storage space, a stack of empty liquor boxes toward the fire exit and my freedom. By the time I reached the end of the hall, I hit the fire exit at a dead run, slammed the panic bar with both hands and rocketed through the door.

  The Columbia was located in the same building as the barbershop, just several doors down. Apartments on the second floor, retail space on the first floor, identical layouts in most of the shops – thank God for the architect’s lack of imagination. I guessed correctly that the Columbia’s back room layout would be the same as the barbershop’s and just followed the map in my head to the exit and my freedom. What I hadn’t counted on was the alarm on the Columbia back door.

  Buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!

  It cut the air with an angry electronic buzzing like an alarm clock from the seventh level of Hell. The man with the tattooed forearms was shouting. His words drifted out weakly from inside the bar. They were distorted in my ears by the alarm’s buzzing and my own panting and rattled breathing, but I could still make them out.

  “Screw you, Kid! You little –”

  The sound of both the angry man and the angry alarm were cut off when the door idled shut with a metallic ca-chunk.

  For the moment, I felt safe. The lot was empty. Looking up at the windows of the other apartment buildings that circled me, I saw only a few windows glowing with yellow light behind pulled curtains, but no prying eyes. No one’s attention had been drawn by the hellish buzzing alarm. There was just the distant
sound of infrequent, slow moving traffic from Columbia Avenue that drifted to my ears. My only company was a few gas guzzlers from Detroit, dark and quiet like sleeping beasts waiting for their masters, who no doubt sat sipping axel grease back in the Columbia.

  The snow came a little stronger now. It soaked my hair and plastered it to my scalp, but as cold and uncomfortable as that was, I didn’t care. There was something about being outside and free and alive. I didn’t dare risk walking back out on the street; ol’ George was still parked in front of the Columbia and there was no getting past him, so I started walking toward the back of the parking lot where a fence and a four-bay detached garage stood. I thought there might be a way around, through, or over it; if so, I could cut across several backyards – assuming no more pesky dogs – and over to East Glendale and home.

  I walked to the far end of the lot, passing the back door of each shop in the building to my right, past Al John’s, past the Fabric Shop, the Taxi Stand, and then Mr. Schneider’s barbershop, now no one’s barbershop.

  The landlord hadn’t yet leased the place to another tenant, nor cleaned it out. The barber pole, still lifeless, remained, as did the red and gold lettering on the front window. It had been five months since Mr. Schneider’s disappearance, yet if you peeked inside, as I had the day before, you could still see the barber chairs standing open like inviting hands, and the barber’s instruments all lined up neatly on the shelf in front of the mirrors – scissors, combs, electric shavers – all waiting to be fingered lightly and selected carefully by a skilled hand. They were dust-covered, no doubt, after all these months, but still; it looked as if someone – sadly, not Mr. Schneider – would open the shop the next day and life at the Summit Avenue barbershop would continue.

  The garage was just outside the barbershop’s rear fire exit, beside the dumpster. I’d never noticed it before when taking out the trash, but I looked at it carefully now, like a man puzzling a problem. Get up on the dumpster, then to the roof of the garage, over the fence to the tree behind and down into the dark backyard beyond. It was the perfect plan, if only I could get on that dumpster. I was searching fruitlessly for a box or trash can to help me mount the dumpster, when I heard it, soft and metallic and gentle.

  Ca-chunk.

  I turned and saw it – the panic bar on the fire exit of the barbershop. Someone had pressed it and pushed open the door, but just a crack.

  Who the hell would be in the barbershop? Did someone bump against it, lean against it?

  I glanced around, still alone. The snow continued to fall. Holding my breath, I listened hard, and the sound I heard turned my stomach. It was the throaty, ugly rumble of a car engine in need of a new muffler. The black Plymouth was turning into the parking lot.

  The cone of light from the headlights washed over me, blinding me for a second, before the driver snapped them off and slowly idled across the parking lot in my direction like a growling black animal.

  “Over here!” came a whisper-shout.

  I turned to look, blinked hard to shake the blindness from my eyes and saw him. It was Tommy. He had now pushed the barbershop door open wide and was standing at the threshold, waving me into the darkness beyond. Wouldn’t you know it; the son-of-a-bitch had a key to his dad’s barbershop, and with a little luck, the key to my getting home alive. Maybe I wouldn’t threaten to kick his ass after all.

  Tommy was calling to me; the Plymouth was rumbling and rattling toward me, slowly, steadily, hungrily.

  “Come on!” he said again.

  Tommy disappeared into the dark hallway of the barbershop, and I followed after him.

  Racing through the door, into the darkness, I nearly slipped on the wet linoleum tiles in the hallway, sparing myself a tumble only by bracing my hands against the walls of the narrow hall. It was a dark tunnel, practically a cave, but I knew this place well and hurried forward.

  “Tommy?” I whispered, straining to see or hear him in the inky blackness.

  I felt my way along the hall, stopped when I came to the office door and tried it – locked. I pounded on it. No answer.

  “Tommy?”

  I continued down the hall to the restroom door and pushed it open; the faint smells of stale urine, mildew and dust wafted out.

  “Tommy?”

  Not there. Not anywhere. I pushed forward in the dark, came to the end of the hall and threw open the door leading into the shop.

  A soft light from the street lamp on the other side of the road spilled through the shop’s front window and cast the room in a pale blanket of light cut hard by blades of shadows from the chairs, the door frame and the trees outside.

  It was empty. Tommy was gone – the office maybe? That was it; he must have locked himself in the office. Pussy.

  That was the last clear, rational thought I had before a hand grabbed me by the back of the head and hammered my face into the wall. I was dazed. My knees buckled and I went down. Blood ran from my nose.

  Ol’ George had found me.

  10

  “YOU’RE ONE TOUGH, WEASELY SON-OF-A-BITCH, KIDDO,” George said.

  While in my dazed condition, he had physically picked me up and thrown me into the long row of waiting chairs that lined the room. Facing me now and bent over, he pulled a short length of rope from the pocket of his dark pea coat, grabbed both my docile hands in his claw-like fingers and began binding my wrists.

  “Ya know, kid,” he said, “it’s against the law to trespass.”

  Tommy crying. Riding the Grandville. The accident. The house on Woodlawn Avenue. The dead boy in the cellar. The freshly dug grave. The smell of wet soil and concrete dust. The shovel. The Columbia.

  I saw the day play out in my head, reliving it all in an Owl Creek Bridge kind of moment. My head began to clear and I saw the end coming. But then something inside my skull seemed to rip wide open, and out of that black, steaming mental chasm spewed forth someone, something, that I didn’t recognize, something I couldn’t fathom.

  “Fuck you!” I screamed.

  George just laughed. He laughed at what he thought was false bravado, but it wasn’t. It was something deeper and darker and more visceral; it brought with it pure, hot, steaming rage.

  I drove my boot into his balls with all my strength. He groaned and gasped and his laughter was gone. I felt his grip loosen the slightest bit, just enough that I could pull apart the unfinished knot in the rope and free my hands. But George rebounded. He drove his big, open right hand into my throat, pounding my trachea, stealing my air, robbing my strength, driving the back of my head into the mirrored wall behind me, where a spider web of cracks blossomed. White sparks were skittering at the corners of my vision. The shadows in the room were growing longer and darker and deeper.

  My breath was all but gone.

  Live! Live! Live! Live! I want to live!

  The chasm that had opened in my head and gave me strength was closing now. I struggled to pry it open and sip from its pool of dark, ugly strength once again.

  Live! Live! Live... FIGHT!

  In moments like that, you don’t think, you don’t plan. There’s no hack TV writer from The Rockford Files penning a snappy quip, or an inventive escape. An angry fuck you from a kid whose mother once made him eat a bar of Ivory soap for uttering such language, was as snappy as anyone was going to get from me. No, at times like that – and we all pray they don’t come to us – you don’t think, you don’t speak, you just act. It’s primal; it’s survival, and survival is just rat bastard luck. I was determined to be that rat, gnawing and digging and chewing for life.

  With my hands, now free but still tangled in rope, I flailed in panic like a drowning man. I pounded on George’s forearm, the loose rope whirling about, whipping at both our faces, but his vice-like grip wouldn’t give. I kicked him again and again. When his left hand came up to join his right hand at my throat I squirmed and shifted – and then I saw it; my chance.

  I reached out with my mouth and bit his left hand between his thumb a
nd forefinger. I bit down, hard. I wanted to eat that mother fucker’s hand.

  George began screaming: “Fuck you! I’m gonna kill you, you little shit!”

  Despite the screaming and the threats, his grip on my throat eased a little and I desperately sucked in oxygen through my nose. That one split second gave me air, gave me hope, gave me just enough strength and determination. I rolled back my lips, clenched my jaw, renewed my toothy grip on his hand, and bit down on that bastard for all I was worth, shaking my head violently like a feral cat with a piece of meat.

  And then it happened. I could feel it. I could feel my teeth puncture his skin and tear through his hand.

  George was howling in pain now. His blood was dripping down my lips and when he yanked his hand away, his flesh tore off in my mouth with a stomach-churning ripping sound. It was slimy and malleable and felt like a live slug as it rolled around on my tongue, but I didn’t care.

  George let go and I spit the bloody chunk of flesh into his face. He whined and howled in pain and clutched his bloody hand. The shadows in my head receded, but while my vision cleared my reasoning didn’t. It was pure unthinking reaction. I was a cat twisting and turning, jumping and kicking with my legs, anything to get away. In the distraction of his bloody agony, I squirmed and crawled across the row of waiting chairs, sending issues of Boys’ Life, Sports Illustrated, and Time magazine sliding and skittering to the linoleum floor.

  Get away, get away, get away!

  I wanted to get to the front door. I could see it, I could see through the glass to the lamplit street beyond. I could see freedom. But George followed me across the room. Bloody hand tucked under his armpit, he stayed between me and the front door, like a linebacker tracking a running back along the line of scrimmage, not letting him turn upfield.

  I found myself in the corner with no place to go – no place to go but through him.