by Maurer, Dan
I rolled over on my back and felt a throbbing pain in my rear end, and something else, something that was digging into me there. I reached into my back pocket with thumb and forefinger and fished out a flattened Sucrets box. It was completely crushed; like, backed-over-it-with-the-station-wagon crushed. I tossed it over the side of the bed, where it rattled briefly on the hard wood floor. I looked over. Frank hadn’t stirred; his breathing was still regular and deep. The room was silent again, save for the hum and flip of our clock and the occasional soft tick and gurgle that rose from the cast iron water heater against the wall.
I soon fell back to sleep.
14
FRANK AND I WERE BOTH GROUNDED FOR A WEEK, but otherwise, my mother and I never spoke about that night. Not even when she had to pay the ticket the policeman gave her for my part in the accident on Woodlawn Avenue. That’s usually the way it worked in our house. If you didn’t talk about it, it never happened; like the time when the Playboys I had stashed under the bathroom sink disappeared, or when the Lucky Strikes hidden in my underwear drawer suddenly vanished. My mother was good at cleaning house. In the end, everything was wiped clean, and that was fine with me.
The next morning, my mother called the office at St. Mary’s and told them I was sick and wouldn’t be coming to school. She offered them no specifics and they asked for none. I was back to school the following day and, for my mother at least, the matter was closed.
Frank later told me how he, Bobby and Lucy ran down the street after me when they saw the bus turn on to Woodlawn and the accident that followed.
When the three of them reached the site of the crash and saw the mangled bumper, Frank said he nearly shit a brick until he discovered I wasn’t there. He said they assumed I circled back home and were surprised not to find me there. They never saw me fishtail off the bumper or land on the Le Mans, so when I later told him that part of the story he was skeptical. God forbid he should ever give me credit. Frank never said so, but I think he was just relieved that he didn’t have to attend my funeral. He would have been culpable, and God knows there weren’t enough wooden spoons or leather belts in the world to cover that offense.
When Frank, Bobby and Lucy, each in their own way and at their own time, finally asked me where I was that night and what happened, I lied. I told them all I was hiding in the bushes, afraid of being caught by the police who responded to the accident. I never told them, or my mother, or anyone, about what I found in the cellar of that house, or about ol’ George, or about what happened in the barbershop. I never told the police, either. I didn’t have to.
A few days later, it was Saturday, and I was still serving out my punishment – no TV, no ball games on the radio, no going out, no talking to friends on the phone. It reminded me of when they confined Steve McQueen to the cooler in The Great Escape, only I didn’t have a ball and glove.
I was eating breakfast by myself in the kitchen, a bowl of Count Chocula and a banana – breakfast of champions. Frank had been paroled temporarily and was delivering his newspapers on the other side of town. My mother was in the basement changing loads of laundry.
When I tossed my banana peel away, something poking out of the kitchen trash caught my eye. It was the latest issue of the Hudson Dispatch, the paper that Frank delivered each morning. Below the fold on the front page, there was a photo with a story that gave me a chill.
After checking to be sure my mother was still downstairs doing laundry, I went back to the kitchen table with the paper and looked it over.
The headline read:
Local Realtor Reported Missing
It was the picture that caught my eye first. The photo featured a business-like head shot of an old man in a suit jacket and striped tie. There was a logo on the breast pocket. He had wavy white hair, a lined face, and wire-framed glasses. He wore a reassuring smile, but his teeth were bad and there was a gap between his front incisors. According to the story, the man, George Sanderson of Hackensack, had been reported missing by his sister Geraldine, several days ago. She was deeply worried, so the police opened a file.
I was pretty certain Geraldine would never see her brother again, not if the man with the Lindsey Nelson sport coat had anything to say about it. I wondered what they might have talked about before Mr. Deluca’s driver buried ol’ George somewhere in the Meadowlands.
When I turned the paper over to look above the fold, I had my answer.
Boy Found Murdered;
Police Open Investigation
Blackwater, NJ – January 18, 1975 – An anonymous phone call led police to the body of a 10-year-old boy in the basement of a property on Woodlawn Avenue in Blackwater. After notifying the child’s family, Police have identified the boy as...
The idea that Mr. Deluca’s driver might have coerced ol’ George into revealing a few secrets before he buried him didn’t surprise me, nor did the idea that he might have tipped off the police to the boy in the cellar. That’s not what sent me rushing to the kitchen sink to vomit up my breakfast.
It was the photograph at the top of the front page that started my stomach heaving. I had barely started reading the story when I saw the picture. I stared hard at the photo of the young victim, examining his face, looking into his eyes, wondering if it could be true. The image of the dead boy staring right back at me had a freckled complexion and an odd, shrunken ear.
It was Tommy.
15
I ONLY SHARE THESE EVENTS because Dr. Jeffreys suggested it. He gave me some bullshit line about survivor’s guilt and how I never saw Tommy that night – not alive, anyway. He said putting it all on paper might help me sort things out. It hasn’t.
Sally doesn’t know about my weekly lunch-time sessions with the doc. As much as I love her, she wouldn’t understand. What’s worse, if she knew I was seeing a head doctor, she wouldn’t stop digging at me for details and that would only lead to an argument. She’d come at me with a mental crowbar – prying, cajoling, guilting, shaming and withholding in order to get me to open up. She’s the touchy-feely, share-your-emotions type and she can be relentless when I don’t reciprocate. I’ve learned to fake it, and that works for us.
After all, how could I tell her? How could I explain to her that Tommy did visit me that night; that he still visits me and has for many years? He only comes on the eve of a snow day, but he comes without fail. He’s with me now, in fact. He’s sitting right over there, in the corner of my study, in my reading chair. He still wears the same BLACKWATER P.A.L. t-shirt and faded jeans.
When he first came to me after that night, he still looked like the little boy who just wanted to play. But time has eaten away at him. I guess painful, heartfelt secrets that you take to the grave are like a bacteria buried in a deep cut, they fester and swell and destroy the flesh. That’s how it’s been with my vision of Tommy. Time eats away at him, at me. I think that painful decay began the moment I heard the back door of the black Plymouth Valiant slam shut; the same moment I wondered if I should have called him over and offered him the last lozenge in the Sucrets box.
The decades have taken their toll on Tommy. His smell has grown rank, like rotted onions and cabbage. His odor is a herald to his coming and that alone is enough to start my bowels turning and burning. His appearance has grown worse, too. His clothing is loose and ragged now and his red hair is mostly gone, just a few desperate and tangled strands cling to his dead gray wrinkled scalp. His flesh has putrefied and shriveled and begun to lose its hold on his bones. His face is separating from his skull and slipping, just a little. And though he’s still a boy of ten, the sag makes him look like a sad and aged stroke victim. His shrunken ear has twisted some and droops a bit. His eyes are yellow and sunken and seeping a green septic pus. It runs down his face like tears.
And when he speaks; oh, God, help me. His craggy voice gurgles and his mouth is full of swollen, writhing maggots. They roll and squirm on his tongue when he forms the stuttering words. They are words that stab at me.
I’m
your pal, B-billy...
I j-just want to p-play, Billy...
Let’s play, B-billy...
I refused to answer his calls to play. I don’t talk to him, haven’t tried for many years. After a while, he stops asking to play, but keeps his vigil. He taps his finger sometimes on the arm of the chair; licks his shredded lips with a black tongue, pushing aside the maggots that sometimes squirm at the corner of his mouth.
He waits; for what I’m not sure, maybe for me. I’ve thought about joining him in the eternal blackness he crawls out of on snow days, about going to play with him there. But I dismissed that idea long ago. No, that would be too easy. Like I said, some punishments are well-earned, and this one’s been bought and paid for; the deluxe package. So now on the eve of each snow day, I just take my bitter medicine, suffering through the dreams that replay that horrible night, and I endure his visits until the dawn comes and the morning light gleams on the fresh snow crystals and he’s gone.
No, I won’t show this confession to Sally; I love her too much for that. I will burn it in the fireplace. Some secrets, like Tommy, are best left buried, even if they won’t stay dead.
At least he only comes on snow days.
16
IT IS STILL SNOWING.
I’ve been writing all night and the snow hasn’t let up since I started. My iPhone reads 5:00 AM. I expect it will chime any minute with a text message from Holy Name Elementary to confirm what I already know. My sons will have their snow day.
I will not wake them at six o’clock to shower and eat and catch the school bus. I will let them roll over and continue to dream peacefully – probably of snow. How lucky for them.
In time, they’ll wake on their own, and go to the window, and smile at the virginal blanket of white that makes everything seem new and clean and safe and fun. When they come to me and ask if they can go out to play in the snow, I will tell them yes. But I will give them this one warning:
Don’t go off the block.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Dear Reader:
Snow Day is a salute to the old campfire stories of our youth, but like the tasty Tootsie Pop that it is, I hope you find a little more to chew on inside. At least, that was my intention when I wrote it.
People will sometimes ask a writer the age-old question where do your stories come from? I’ve seen many scribes shuffle uncomfortably and toe the ground in an “aw, shucks” kind of way while trying to answer that question. Whether reluctant to reveal trade secrets, or just at a loss to explain the magical muse that visits them at the keyboard, they struggle to articulate an answer.
Not me; not with Snow Day. It has a very clear origin, and while it happened many years ago, I can still put my finger on exactly where, or rather from whom, the idea came. Like a snowball in an old cartoon short that might have played before the feature at the Park Lane Theater, it started small, but it grew as it rolled downhill and blended with other ideas until it became the story I finally wrote.
The inspiration for Snow Day was first born from something my childhood friend Michael DiNapoli said to me. It was after we were grown and married and entrenched in the day-to-day responsibilities of adulthood. We hadn’t seen each other for many years and when we reconnected and reminisced he said something that stayed with me.
He said: “We lived an idyllic childhood, didn’t we?”
His words were more statement than question and he smiled broadly when he said it because he truly meant it. At the time, I didn’t think much of it. I politely agreed, of course, and the topic of our conversation moved on to the current whereabouts of old friends and family like Holly, Nicky, Jimmy, Sammy, Peggy and the rest. But while the conversation moved on, his words stuck in my head, like sun-melted gum that sticks to your Keds. It was there and it wasn’t going away. I tried to forget about it, but of course I didn’t. I couldn’t.
When I became the father of a daughter (an honor requiring double the usual dose of parental vigilance), I was constantly reminded of my own childhood and Michael’s words in particular. Over the years, my wife and I were fortunate to raise a beautiful, smart, talented and caring young woman. But the choices we made along the way were different than those our parents made; they had to be. After all, we live in a different, more frightening world today; more care is required. In short, it’s more dangerous today than it was when we were kids... isn’t it?
Really?
I began to wonder, was it truly the way we remember it? Or, to put it another way, is it the lens through which we view our past that makes it seem idyllic and not necessarily the times in which we actually lived? Like Billy Joel says, we didn’t start the fire. So, over the years, Michael’s words became less a statement and more a question that rattled around in my mind. Did we live an idyllic childhood? And if we did, what really lay around the corner that we never saw? What might have happened if we went off the block on the wrong day, at the wrong time, and met the wrong person?
And so, the snowball went rolling downhill; slowly at first, then faster and bigger and darker until it became Snow Day.
Writing this tale has been a lot of fun. I certainly had plenty of material to inspire me, and sifting through my childhood to find just the right pieces to build a snow castle of fictitious characters and events convinced me of this: we did live a rich and fulfilling childhood. Not perfect – we kids, and our parents, made plenty of mistakes – but it was loving and memorable and safe... mostly.
Michael was right, in the end. Many of our childhood clan did indeed live idyllic childhoods. It was one that Norman Rockwell might have thought worthy to capture on canvas and mythologize for all time, if he’d had a love for wide collars, bell bottom pants and 8-track tapes. God knows my friends and family have done so in our hearts and in our minds. But the other, darker truth is this: despite the warm memories we hold, courtesy of the loving community that bore us, we were never far from danger while we played on or off the block, never far from being the boy in the cellar. No one ever is; not then, not now. In those days we just chose to close our eyes to it. It was easier and more comforting that way. The blindness set us free.
In this story I decided to revisit 1975 and open my eyes, just a bit, to peek beneath the blindfolds we willingly wore as children, to see what might have been if we had made the wrong decision. What I found chilled me. I hope it does the same for you.
Thank you for reading.
Robbinsville, NJ
March, 2013
P.S.
I’d love to know what you think about the story. Feel free to write a review on Amazon.com, or share your comments through my web site, Facebook page, or Twitter feed. Thanks.
Web: www.danmaurer.com
Tw: @danmaurer
Fb: www.facebook.com/danmaurerauthor
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Maurer, a former publishing industry professional and digital marketing strategist, now writes and publishes fiction full-time. Snow Day is his first published work.
After graduating from East Carolina University in 1988, Dan spent seven years working in trade book publishing, including stints in the editorial departments of both Doubleday and Houghton Mifflin. While supporting Doubleday’s Editorial Director and Houghton Mifflin’s Editor-in-Chief, Dan helped shepherd many notable book projects through the production process; among them John Grisham’s The Firm, Richard Price’s Clockers, and Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger’s Lost Moon, which became the film Apollo 13.
Dan eventually transitioned to a career in digital marketing. He went on to devise and implement digital marketing strategies for brands as varied as Curious George, Peterson Field Guides, and The Polar Express. After leaving trade book publishing, he spent many years working in other industries, leading digital marketing initiatives for companies such as Citizen, Dun & Bradstreet, RCN, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and others.
In his free time, Dan is also active in live theater. He is a member of an acclaimed New Jersey theater company and has won awards for his prod
ucing, directing and sound design.
Dan lives with his wife and their daughter in Robbinsville, New Jersey.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to John Maurer for his book cover design and for his never-ending support, Rob Gougher for his photography, Lynn Baskin for lending his voice talent to the audio edition, Paul Maurer for his help in recording the audiobook, and Vicky Czarnik for her copyediting prowess. Also, I extend my sincerest gratitude to the many beta readers who reviewed early drafts of this work. Their feedback was instrumental in making this story the very best it could be. Any shortcomings herein are entirely my own.
And finally, heartfelt thanks to Michael DiNapoli, for the memories that have lasted a lifetime, and for the inspiration they provide.
DISCLAIMER
Snow Day is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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