by Lou Sylvre
Falling Snow on Snow
By Lou Sylvre
Beck Justice knows holiday sparkle and snappy carols only mask December’s cruel, black heart. He learned that lesson even before he landed on the streets eight years ago, and his recent step up to a tiny apartment and a busker’s permit for Seattle’s Pike Place Market has done nothing to change his mind. But one day in the market, Oleg Abramov joins his ethereal voice to Beck’s guitar, and Beck glimpses light in his bleak, dark winter.
Oleg, lucky to have a large and loving family, believes Beck could be the man to fill the void that nevertheless remains in his life. The two men step out on a path toward love, but it proves as slippery as Seattle’s icy streets. Just when they get close, a misunderstanding shatters their hopes. Light and harmony are still within reach, but only if they choose to believe, risk their hearts, and trust.
Table of Contents
Blurb
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
More from Lou Sylvre
About the Author
By Lou Sylvre
Visit Dreamspinner Press
Copyright
To musicians, to veterans, and to those who light candles on December nights.
Acknowledgments
THANK YOU, Seattle, for being a great city (as cities go). Thank you, Dreamspinner Press, for believing in me and investing resources, expertise, time, and effort in my work. Thank you, family and friends, for being family and friends.
“Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don’t listen, and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.”
—Oscar Wilde
“Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.”
—Victor Hugo
Chapter One
BECK’S GRAY blankets were vintage Army surplus wool, and if he thought about it, they itched. But they kept him warm, and that was still a miracle for him, so he slept well under them, and even when he did notice the itch, he didn’t grouse about it. It hadn’t been so very long since those two blankets were all that lay between him and winter’s killing cold.
Now the old clock he’d bought at Goodwill squealed its alarm, and Beck rolled out from under the covers and off the Murphy bed that constituted the epitome of luxury in his mind. As he did every morning, he padded on stockinged feet into the kitchen, plucked a bowl of yesterday’s nonreusable leftovers from the fridge, and took it up to a hidden corner on the roof. King Coal, the one-footed crow he’d befriended, would dine on it at leisure. Beck wasn’t sure how, but the old black bird kept all the competition at bay, claiming Beck’s daily offering for himself as if it was some sort of tribute. It made Beck smile, though, to see the down-and-out bird prosper.
At 5:45 a.m., the winter morning remained every bit as dark as night. Despite the frigid air, Beck stayed on the roof for a few minutes to take in the view. He could see to the high-rises across Lake Union from his vantage, but what he paid attention to were the nearby backyards—each one seeming shabbier than the next—and the myriad windows in the four-and five-story apartment buildings that dotted the neighborhood.
Holiday lights burned in many of those windows, mostly left on all night. If he’d been a violent sort, he would have wanted to throw things, shatter the windows in an effort to cut the cords that kept them lit.
Beck, he told himself, you would think they were pretty if they weren’t about the holidays.
I fucking hate Christmas. I fucking hate December. Ergo I hate the fucking lights.
Pretty sure it would be bad karma to start the day on such a negative note, he reminded himself out loud, “But you know what? I have an apartment!” In fact, he had two hundred square feet of studio apartment living space, with a microwave, a fridge, a bed, a shower. And—more importantly—a roof between him and Seattle’s cold rain.
Back inside, he pulled the window shades to shut out the chill, the dark, and the deceptively pretty holiday lights, and then switched on the wall heater, savoring the instantaneous desert wind hitting his ankles and knees.
“Parcheesi!” he called softly a few minutes later. “Come get breakfast, cat!”
He filled her kibble, gave her clean water, and dutifully scratched her fur, the color of which reminded him he actually had a small jar of marmalade in the fridge.
Breakfast, then. Instant coffee and noninstant oatmeal with canned milk, a few raisins, and a pat of butter—all of which came to him compliments of the King County food bank—and a teaspoonful of the marmalade, which he’d splurged for after he’d scored his permit to perform inside Pike Place Market. While he sat near the heater and ate, he studied the marbled oranges and yellows of the preserve. Summer in a jar, he thought, which warmed him, made him smile, and let him forget the season and all its phony glitz for just a few seconds.
He was glad he’d bought the marmalade, which had been a “today only” special at the Hilltop Safeway. Usually, he saved his limited food cash for lunches, which he’d eat during a break from the long days he worked playing his guitar for donations at Pike Place Market.
He loved playing music—it kept him alive. And he loved not having to cower under a sidewalk awning outside in the cold to play it. He loved that the people passing by in the market were a bit more likely to toss him some coin than the ones on the street—especially the tourists. Lots of tourists in the market.
But he didn’t love the job. Not right now.
December.
Figgie pudding, red-nosed reindeer, kings of orient, barumpa bum bum, on the fucking housetop.
He played the season’s music, the songs full of family and false cheer, because that’s what the shoppers wanted. It was what people would pay for this time of year, but every “Jingle Bells” and “Joy to the World” grated on him. There was nothing all that joyful about Christmas, and probably not Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or Ramadan and Eid—though he knew less about how people celebrated those. Being honest with himself, Beck admitted the existence of quite a lot of “holy day” music he loved even though he professed no religion. Old chant, liturgical hymns. Those held a kind of peace, or sometimes poignant longing that reached his heart. But if he played those, he wouldn’t be able to pay the rent. Occasionally he got a request for “The Dreidel Song” or “Oh Kwanzaa,” which was a change of pace, at least, but people didn’t want to shop to the tune of “Maoz Tzur” or “As I Lay on Yoolis Night,” beautiful though they were.
Regardless of which holiday was front and center, Beck knew December had the blackest heart of any month. The days came cold and dreary more often than not, and shopping bags might be full of pretty things, but he felt sure they were empty of anything resembling humanity and compassion. He happened to know those smiling, gift-laden daddies and grandmothers easily passed right by broken children on the street without a second glance.
Beck Justice! You’re being negative again. Stop. You have a lot less to bitch about than you did last year, you know.
“Yes,” he agreed with himself, and told the supremely disinterested Parcheesi, “We have an apartment. Lucky, right?”
She mewed, and he took that as assent. After all, Parcheesi had been homeless too.
As he luxuriated in the rich extravagance commonly called a hot shower, he let his mind wander to thoughts of the gnarly, tightfisted old man whose improbable kindness led to Beck acquiring this apartment near Twenty-Third and Denny Way, his very own tiny urban paradise.
Tracing good fortune back to its source, Beck owed hi
s shelter, his full stomach, his warm clothes, and his ability to pay for these things to the secret kindness of one unlikely individual, Dooley, of Dooley’s Pawn and Loan. Dooley’s shop fronted Sixteenth Avenue in White Center, one of the economic low points in the greater Seattle area. Along with the other shops in the block, its brick façade had seen brighter days, and the display windows were crammed with a variety of obsolete electronics, beer steins and bric-a-brac, musical instruments, and power tools. Of course, Dooley’s real money came from the business he did in guns, and he had a decided knack for knowing when to lose the paperwork on those. His tendency to be tightfisted with a loan didn’t hurt his bottom line either, nor did his policy of never holding something a single day longer as collateral than he had to. If you were late to pick up your pawn, you paid the selling price—no second chances.
A lot of people Beck met on the street didn’t like Dooley one bit, and that seemed perfectly understandable. Yet when the crusty older man found Beck shivering through a frigid predawn February morning under some cardboard in the gravel behind his shop, he’d taken him inside and given him coffee. And gloves. And a pack of saltines with a tin of sardines.
“Come back tonight. Half past five. Clean the place up. Sleep in the storeroom.”
Instead of saying thanks, Beck asked, “You trust me?”
“No trustin’ about it. You gonna be locked in. Cain’t get out lest you set off the alarm. Ain’t gettin’ away with a damn thing.”
Beck never had to sleep outside again. Soon he was working for Dooley almost full-time, and Dooley paid him cash money. With an address, he was able to get medical benefits and food, and every day he got stronger. When Dooley said, “Time for you to move on, boy. You been gettin’ ’spensive,” Beck had nothing but gratitude for what the gnarly old man had given him, but at that point, he was ready for change. He bought a banged-up but beautiful Seagull Coastline folk guitar from Dooley at about half what someone else would pay, and spent the rest of his hoarded cash on the deposit and two months’ rent for his tiny but perfect apartment.
Then he started peddling his music on the streets.
That had been right at summer’s end, a fair-weather time of year in the Puget Sound region, and Seattle was both generous and an outdoors kind of town. Beck sought out lucrative spots day by day, parking himself just outside a festival one day, on a busy street corner the next. A few times, a tavern owner called him inside to play for the weeknight patrons, payment coming in the form of a meal and tips. He would play mostly blues then, wringing truth from his beat-up acoustic with things like “Black Mountain Rag,” changing it up with Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven” or Neil Young’s beautifully sad “Birds.” The weather held right through October, and the world had generally treated Beck well. And in November, after he got the chance to start playing in the Market, he woke one Thursday morning to find his zest for life had returned.
Too bad December came snapping at November’s heels.
JUST AS Beck was mentally shoring up his resolve with a pledge to outlast the hated holiday month, the shower went suddenly cold, and Beck cursed his carelessness. He knew the hot water would spend itself in about four minutes now that a hard frost happened more nights than not. If he didn’t want to be shocked out of his reverie with a cold blast, he couldn’t afford a retreat to memories while showering.
At least they were the better memories this time, not the bitter ones.
Following close on that thought, some of those unsavory recollections threatened to play themselves out in his mind, but he shut them down, pushed them back. Thoughts of his parents, of being young and on the streets, thoughts of a beautiful, treacherous lover named George—they’d all have to wait. He’d never survive through the month of merriment if he let himself tumble down into the dark places.
He stepped out of the shower, stood in front of the heater to quickly dry and dress, and sat on the bed with his guitar.
Gently strumming through a few undeliberate chords, he gazed out the tall window and drank in the muted sunrise. Heavy gray clouds banked over the city as usual, but a haze of golden sunshine snuck beneath them. No matter the season, it seemed to say, summer is always coming.
Beck laughed aloud and, after calming the startled Parcheesi with a few chin scratches, began to play. Inspired by the thought of summer, he wove melody over a base line, rendering “Sumer is a Cumin In,” which most people who’d ever heard of it at all thought of as “The Cuckoo Song.” The title wasn’t misspelled; it was old. Thirteenth century old.
When it came to music, Beck had lots of favorites—blues, slack key, classical, acoustic rock. Whatever seemed like the right thing to play took the role of favorite for the moment, and this morning, it was the hollow harmonies and complicated, wavering and jumping melodies of the Middle Ages. As strange as it seemed, this music had been a gift of his years on the streets.
He’d been sixteen when he first heard it, on a night when he’d snuggled into the blankets he’d laid out in the shrubs behind Trinity Episcopal. Earlier he’d picked up a recent copy of The Stranger and was leafing through it in the last light of the late September day when he heard singing. Not just any singing. Voices like something from another world. It was only a group of local women—the Medieval Women’s choir—but he didn’t know that then, and the sound came to him so pure that tears came to his eyes. He’d started loving early music that day, and every chance he got after that, he played it—by ear at first, and then he started spending his coins on yellowed, cracking sheet music from thrift stores and secondhand bookshops.
Beck couldn’t sing—carrying a tune was all well and good, but his voice had been ruined by a near fatal bout of pneumonia during his second winter on the streets. His guitar could sing, though, and it rendered those ancient melodies in graceful, shining lines of silver and gold whenever Beck’s fingers asked it. This morning he started slowly, remembering as he often did that someone—he could never find out who—had famously said “Make love to every note.” It seemed apt, though it reminded him annoyingly that playing notes on his guitar was the only lovemaking he was likely to do these days. He played through “Danger Me Hath, Unskylfuly” and “Blow, Northerne Wynd” before thoughts of Christmas flash and bang sent him back to the blues, and they carried him through until it was time to pack up his guitar and go.
After the cold and damp of the fifteen-minute walk to Pike Street, he splurged on hot coffee and walked around the market window-shopping, greeting the few fellow performers who were there at the early hour, and warming up his muscles before he found his first spot for the day and set up.
Chapter Two
THAT DAY and each day that week, Beck slogged to the market through the rain, warmed up his hands, and quenched his resentments for ten hours, eight or so of which he played Christmas carols, smiled at tippers, joked with overburdened shoppers, and encouraged little children to sing along with “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Etcetera. After an hour in one spot, he and every performer was required to move on and let the next busker in line take the spot. Sometimes he could move right to another location, but sometimes that meant he had to be in the queue for an hour before he could settle in to play again. Occasionally he’d spend the hour window-shopping or people watching, but neither activity was good for his mood, so he always brought a book.
When George had left him for greener pastures—green as in money—he’d left behind a few things. Not much, because while they’d been together, they’d mostly lived—like many of the homeless—in one or another of the tent cities in Seattle, and it was hard to accumulate much in the way of belongings while living that kind of life. The villages of tents weren’t permanent, and when the lease was up, so to speak, a person had to be ready to move on. But George had liked to read when he wasn’t panhandling, and he’d amassed a paperback fortune consisting of Lord of the Rings, three of Jane Austen’s novels, and eleven gay romance novels.
Beck hadn’t read any of them while George w
as still around. For inexplicable reasons, he’d schlepped them around with him during the months between George’s desertion and Dooley’s rescue, and when he got his apartment, he’d made a shelf for them next to his bed out of a plastic crate he’d found at Value Village, and then he’d finally started reading them. Having individual love-hate relationships with each of the books, he was currently working his way through them for the third time.
He liked the way he fell in love with the characters every time. He dreaded the way he felt so much more alone when he reached the end.
On a break during Thursday that week, he finished one, and consequently he felt irritable, unsettled, and basically shitty. Then he started to play, and if it wasn’t bad enough he had to play trite Christmas songs, some smartass designer-shoe-wearing teenager had started hollering lyrics at the top of his unpleasant voice, driving away anybody who might have been tempted to toss a few bills into his guitar case. So when at that moment George came strolling by on the arm of some uptown old man and, without even a nod Beck’s way, tossed a bill into his case, Beck’s mood turned black as coal dust. He wanted to shout at George to keep his damn money. He wanted to grab the bill and catch up with George and rip it up in his face.
If it had been a dollar bill, or maybe even a five, a ten, he would have done it. But it was a damn fifty-dollar bill, and Beck could not afford to feed his pride at the expense of his belly. He plucked the bill from the hoard and stuck it in his sock—like the music whore I am.
That night it snowed, big flakes falling all around Beck as he made the trek back to his tiny, warm home, white silence tamping his bright ire into sullen pain. Wool blankets pulled over his head like a cowl and wrapped like a shroud, he stood on the roof watching the frantic march of the holiday city slow to an obliging crawl, the people bowing in their unprepared surprise to the weather’s superior forces. Back inside, he left the lamps off and sat on his bed cross-legged—Parcheesi taking advantage of his lap—and stared out through the window, wondering what he thought he might see.
