"That it has, Jen. It's one of the worst winter storms we've seen in at least two decades, working its way across Ohio over the last 24 hours dropping record amounts of snow in Cadiz and St. Clairsville. So far, accumulations of at least 18 inches have been reported in the area, with another eight to 10 inches expected overnight. Power outages are widespread in Harrison County, and at least one weather-related death has been attributed to the storm after a Steubenville man's body was found in a snow plow. Initial reports indicate hypothermia as the cause of death. The man's name is being withheld pending notification of next of kin..."
* * *
Easerly, Pennsylvania
Thursday
November 22, 2012
Back in the main room of the cabin, Brad returned to find Jimbo still sitting in the recliner near the fireplace, reading an uncrumpled section of the newspaper. Denny was sitting on a sofa that faced the picture window.
“Looks like we have some weather moving in,” Denny said.
Brad joined him on the sofa, looking out at the house on the other side of the lake. Leaden clouds had begun to creep up behind it.
“I think I heard something about snow on the Weather Channel last night,” Brad said. “I guess it’s that time of year.”
Denny turned in the sofa to face his guest. “So, no family to annoy on such a joyous occasion?” he asked.
Brad had been so caught up in the beauty of the house and the lake, absorbing the new and peaceful environment, that he had actually allowed almost an hour to pass without thinking of his former wife and his former life. Once again, just a few innocent words freshened the pain, like new blood seeping from a wound after the stitches had been unexpectedly stretched.
“I guess that’s why your mom took pity on me,” Brad answered. “My first major holiday since my divorce.”
“Been there,” Denny replied. “The first round of holidays is the absolute shits. I won’t lie to you, there’s no way around it. Like some bizarre penance. But like the song says, time does heal all wounds. The pain never really goes away, but you begin to think about it less often as the months go on. At first you can’t even imagine a day when it won’t hurt, but life has a way of distracting you.”
“Where is the fast forward button when you need it,” Brad said.
Denny smiled. “I thought Jose Cuervo was the fast forward button. Figured if I drank enough of it, I could wake up and it would be one year later.”
“I’m embarrassed to admit,” Brad said, “But I’ve been following that line of thinking for the last few weeks.”
“Don’t be embarrassed. There’s no Chilton’s manual out there on how to repair a broken heart. The psychobabble quacks like to sell their books about it, but they’re as clueless as the guy who tried to mentor me. Met him at a bar, a guy who obviously knew his way around life’s little catastrophes. Gave me two idiotic pieces of advice, that of course I glommed onto immediately. First, he was the one that suggested lots of liquor would patch me right up. Second, he recommended that the cure for losing a woman was to run right out and find another one just like her.”
Brad laughed. “Yeah, that’s what a guy needs, more of the same poison.”
“I guess there’s some truth to it,” Denny said. “If you meet someone who finds you marginally interesting, it might salvage some of your ego. It’s your self-confidence that gets squashed almost as bad as your heart. I always thought Skip Stephenson had it about right. You know, the comedian? Anyway, he said ‘I know I’m going to get married again, ‘cuz I want a second opinion’.”
“Did it work for you?” Brad asked.
“I don’t know. Never remarried. That string of one-night stands made me feel less wretched. But it took a while to figure out I had to stop wearing my heart on my sleeve if I was going to find anyone who might stick. For some reason, women really don’t want to hear about your last relationship. Go figure.
“Anyway, the one thing that didn’t work was the alcohol. If you have anything at all working right in your world, the booze will find a way to get that as screwed up as your love life. Not to mention the dreams.”
Brad felt a chill climbing both arms. “I thought I was the only one. That it was me.”
“I’m sure the psycho-bumblers have an interesting explanation, but it just seems to be part of the deal. Your dreams hitting you pretty hard right now?”
Brad could almost feel the remnants of the dream that repeatedly visited him lately. “Yeah. One in particular.”
“The death dream, right?
“Wow,” Brad said, “You really have been through this.”
“My screwed up head found more creative ways to end my life while I slept than I could find ways to live it while I was awake," Denny said. "I have an ear available if you want to open the curtain on it.”
Brad considered this. It somehow seemed improper to open up his secret, psychotic dreams to a stranger, but he also felt a comfort with Denny that he hadn’t felt in a very long time - a sort of kindred spirit.
“It’s usually the same,” Brad started. “In my dream, I wake up in bed. Makes it kind of confusing sometimes, to be dreaming about waking up. Anyway, I wake up in my own bed, and it’s Christmas morning. But it’s not Christmas inside my house. No decorations, no tree, no presents, nothing. And nobody.
“I get up and start walking around the house. It’s usually my old house, where I lived with my wife, but sometimes it’s the house where I grew up. Anyway, I start looking around, and it’s empty. Inside the house it feels like just another day, but I can feel that it’s supposed to be Christmas. I haven’t experienced it firsthand yet, but just the idea of facing Christmas alone is pretty terrifying.”
“It can be scarier than any nightmare,” Denny agreed.
“Anyway, I go to the front door and open it. Outside, neighborhood kids are riding the new bikes they got for Christmas, all the other houses in the neighborhood are decorated with lights and wreaths, there are even Christmas carols playing in the background.”
Denny was a good listener. He nodded in all the right places, but not in a patronizing way.
“Next, I close the door, then fall down in the entryway. I start to cry in my dream. Next thing I know, while I’m sitting on the floor, a revolver appears in each hand. I place the barrels against each temple, then squeeze the triggers simultaneously. I hear the click of the hammer dropping, then silence. In my dream, I never hear the gunshot, but sometimes I sense the two bullets colliding inside my head, crashing into each other and exploding at the center with the combined energy. It doesn’t hurt, and it doesn’t make a noise, but, well, the spooky part is that it feels…almost satisfying. Like after the release of a good orgasm.”
The room was silent, save the crackling of the fire in the fireplace. The wind was beginning to pick up outside the picture window, bowing the tops of the tall pine trees surrounding the lake.
Denny looked at Brad before saying anything, not judging, but measuring.
“There’s a vibration when you squeeze the trigger, a comforting metallic tap you feel in your scalp when you hold an empty gun against your temple and the hammer drops,” Denny said quietly.
An unexpected tear jumped into the corner of Brad’s eye. “You’ve done that too, haven’t you?” he said quietly, more of a statement than a question. Without dropping eye contact, Denny nodded.
“For me, it was always the barrel in the mouth thing,” Denny said. “In my dreams, I could actually feel the bullet going down my throat, spinning as it went. It slid straight down into my stomach like a copper-jacketed pill. I sometimes thought I could taste the lead. It would hit the bottom of my stomach with a kind of thud. Nothing violent, almost comforting.”
Both men sat quietly for a few minutes, each reflecting on the other man’s dream, until Denny broke the silence.
“By the way, Brad, did I remember to wish you Happy Thanksgiving?”
Both men burst into tension-releasing laughter. Jimbo looked
up from the paper, smiled, then turned the page.
“Let’s see if mom has any hot chocolate going yet,” Denny said, then led the way into the kitchen, the heart of any home.
Meanwhile, beyond the picture window, the first few flakes of snow began their fall to Earth.
Chapter Seventeen
Hanover, Maryland
Thursday
November 22, 2012
While most people were gearing up for the big feast, Micah put the wireless internet connection to the test in his room at the Holiday Inn Express near BWI Marshall Airport.
As a boy being raised on a Native American reservation, Thanksgiving wasn't celebrated in his father's home. Once his widowed mother left the rez, she didn't revive the tradition out of respect for her husband. Micah didn't have strong feelings either way, so it wasn't unusual for him to be working while the rest of the country was eating.
While he enjoyed one-on-one interviews with witnesses and tipsters more than document research, he did occasionally get a voyeuristic kick out of reading crime report narratives and police blotters. With bad spelling, worse grammar, and hilarious recollections of slapstick events like escaping farm animals and the creative places kids chose to set off cherry bombs, all told with high drama in dead-serious reports, they often read like a forensic comic strip.
By most government standards, the 200-page report Dr. Dane sent wasn't a lengthy one, mostly a collection of dates going back to the early 1970's, locations specified by latitude and longitude, details of the storms including amount of snowfall, barometric readings, ranges of temperatures, and other meteorological data. Some of the entries also gave a summary of the damage, injuries, or loss of life, and of course whether the person making the report claimed to have seen a Yeti, a Sasquatch, or some other inexplicable circumstance. However, to Micah, the best part of the report was that information hadn't been redacted as was often the case in government documents. Specifically, each entry included the name and address of the reporting party, which to a reporter was a sizeable nugget of pure gold.
In one report, a Michigan woman claimed to have seen Jesus clap his hands while standing on a frozen lake, knocking over an ice-fishing shanty. In another, a couple of teenagers in Wisconsin insisted that a giant inflatable Christmas decoration shaped like Frosty the Snowman had come to life and farted in front of their house, breaking a large picture window. The constable unnecessarily noted in the report that drugs and a couple of errant snowballs may have been involved in the case.
In addition to the more obvious alcohol or chemically enhanced fantasies, there were also chilling entries which referred to incidents caused by entities that the witnesses were inadequately able to describe. The notes mentioned that more than a few of those whose homes were damaged under such circumstances recanted when told their insurance would pay for the damage if it was weather related, but that most homeowner policies provided no coverage for "snow monster hazards."
Others were unshakeable in their stories. Several of them included references to a white "creature" which had physically attacked structures, causing storm-like damage. There were even a few in which the witnesses were personally attacked, suffering injuries that required hospitalization. In almost every one of the rare cases involving fatalities, police officials had noted that the reporting party was under extreme stress or grief that might have colored their recollections.
An entry from 1999 involved a retired doctor whose wife had been killed by what he claimed had been a large, nose-less man dressed completely in white. The report specified that the autopsy showed she died from hypothermia while cross-country skiing in a remote part of Wyoming, but the woman's husband was calmly adamant that it was murder. A footnote explained that the case had been closed after the doctor had died several weeks later when his car had skidded off a snow-covered road and into a deep ravine.
In a 2002 entry from Montana, one in which the witness had actually used the term "Yeti," all of the doors and windows had allegedly been kicked in by the creature. Even when police warned that the report might lead to hospitalization in a mental facility for the witness, the man would not back down on his story.
In his second, more intense pass through the document, Micah's interest was piqued by a report in which a man claimed that a summer home for which he was a caretaker had been damaged by a "white Bigfoot" in November of 1987. The man stated that "it wasn't the first time I've seen a Bigfoot running around in these woods, but it was the first time I ever saw a pure white one." The entry noted that there were two fatalities in the incident. A footnote also mentioned that the witness and his wife spent a lot of time isolated in the woods every winter, and that the man had later filed a report in the spring of 2005 that a Sasquatch had burned down his tool shed.
While he knew that it might be a waste of time and that the man might not even still be alive nearly 25 years later, Micah jotted down the name of Paul Berube, along with his phone number and address on state route 33 in rural Pennsylvania.
Chapter Eighteen
Easerly, Pennsylvania
Thursday
November 22, 2012
By 3:00, dinner was over. The catered meal was delicious, with a fraction of the muss and fuss. Afterward, everyone pitched in with the cleanup. Brad ferried the dishes back and forth between the dining room table and the kitchen, while Denny and his mom kept the assembly line running at the sink, one washing and one drying.
Jimbo had been quiet during the dinner, his pale skin becoming more ashen as the meal wore on. After dinner, he took care of the trash detail, carrying plastic bags out the front door to the trash cans located in the carriage house. But after two trips, his energy began to fade.
“I hate to be a party pooper,” Jimbo announced as he stepped into the kitchen, “but I need to lay down.”
Mrs. Enderrin looked at her husband with a sad but unsurprised glance, as if she knew this was going to happen. She nodded her head slightly, then mouthed a kiss toward him, a tender gesture that seemed almost out of character for the strong elderly woman. No one spoke as he left the room and headed for the back bedroom at the end of the dark hallway.
The moment seemed almost private between Denny and his mother. The dish washing went on in silence.
Once the dining room table was cleared, Brad wandered back into the main room and sat down in front of the picture window. He watched the snow falling with more vigor, dusting the grass and covering the short dock that extended into the lake. He reflected on his conversation with Denny earlier, the commiseration and exchange of macabre dreams. He was surprised how quickly he had moved Denny from a name on the list called “acquaintance” to the short list entitled “friend”. Brad knew a lot of people, but let very few of them into his innermost circle. He believed Denny's non-judgemental attitude and deep understanding was rare in this day of superficial psycho-blurbs and self-help sound bites. Everyone wanted to give advice and tell others how to live their lives, but few wanted to bother listening to the real problem before offering their verbal cure-alls. Denny had lived this, had already tread upon the path that Brad had been walking for the last few weeks. Like all overgrown paths through darkened woods, it was comforting to know that someone had passed through this way before you. It meant that the path led somewhere, and that someone else had survived to come out the other end.
Brad suddenly realized that he was relaxed. It had been so long since he had been able to let his mind drift from the calamity that was his life without the aid of a distilled concoction that he had forgotten the feeling, a sensation that he had always taken for granted. He actually found himself engaged in that most clichéd of endeavors, that of counting his blessings. Here he was, enjoying a family event with a warm family that, while not his own, embraced him as such. It was a beautiful wooded setting, overlooking a picture-book lake, while the falling snow painted everything virginal and white. And he had made a new friend.
His reverie was interrupted by a knock on the front door.
He stood and turned as Mrs. Enderrin came in from the kitchen to answer, while Denny took the opportunity to check supplies in the adjoining pantry.
When she opened the door, a short older man stepped inside, stomping the snow from his rubber boots onto the thatch mat next to the door. He was wearing a red-checkered wool coat with a matching hunter’s cap, and olive green ski pants.
“Happy Thanksgiving, Mr. Berube,” Mrs. Enderrin offered. “Can I take your coat?”
“No, ma’am,” he answered, a thick Maine accent filling the room. “Can’t stay. I just saw’r the smoke from the chimney and figgered you might be up heah. Either that, or those durn townie kids was wreckin’ the place.” His eyes darted around the room, as if he were visually inventorying the interior, removing his gloves to allow the room's heat to warm his hands.
“Just fulfilling the tradition,” Mrs. Enderrin said. "This is Mr. Connerman, our friend and our insurance man."
The small man took two giant steps toward Brad and quickly gave him a firm one-pump handshake. "Good to meetcha," Mr. Berube said.
"Nice meeting you," Brad returned.
“How are things with Mrs. Berube?" Mrs. Enderrin asked. "Is her chemo almost done?”
“Ayuh, she’s finished," the caretaker answered, turning back to the lady of the manor. "She’s lucky, she didn’t lose much of her hay-uh. Doesn’t even need a wig. Doc says everything looks foine, thank Gawd.”
“Can I fix you a sandwich?” Mrs. Enderrin asked. “Make a plate for you and Rennie?”
“Thank you, no,” he replied, taking one more look around the room before again donning his gloves. “Got to get back. But I thought you should know. Weatha service calling for a bad one tonight and tomorra. Say it’s one of them quarta century blows. Spectin’ 16 inches with the first storm tonight, with another right behind it carryin’ another 14 by Friday evenin’.”
Howl of a Thousand Winds Page 11
