14 Degrees Below Zero

by Quinton Skinner

  Lewis felt someone present, watching him, but he remained alone amid the heavy snow and the trees and the crushing silence. His hands shook and his chest burned. The seconds were passing, telescoping, and still he hadn’t gone down there to help Stephen.

  His head swiveled. There. Back the way he had come, walking away. It was her. He caught a faint glimpse of her hair pulled back from her face.

  Lewis sprinted through the trees. He caught one more glimpse of her in the snow, moving past an old tangled elm. But when he reached the top, she was gone again.

  “Don’t go,” he said, but in reply he had only the cold and the wetness of falling snow against his face.

  It was the end and he knew it. He drew his coat tight around his neck as he felt the temperature drop.

  In the car, the public radio was prattling on as though nothing had happened. Lewis took the streets back to his house.

  “There’s a travelers’ advisory for greater Minnesota covering the rest of the afternoon and through the night,” intoned Gary Eichten, the afternoon host. “We’re looking at about a foot more snow on top of what we already have, then there’s a front of arctic air moving in by morning—right now, the forecast is for temperatures well below zero.”

  Lewis steered his car through South Minneapolis, past the cottages and four-stackers, the odd turrets, add-ons, the decaying apartments. All was covered in white, as though hiding from him as he steered in a great bubble of silence.

  18. EVERY FEW YEARS A REAL CLIMATOLOGICAL HORROR CAME ALONG.

  Jay parked her car, sort of—she sailed it into a great fluffy mound of snow, her front tires grinding when they made contact with the curb. She switched off the engine and sat there for a minute, letting her breath fog up the windshield.

  This was turning out to be a vengeful witch of a snowstorm. Car headlights shone feebly through the white blanket that comprised the lower atmosphere. The awnings in front of the shops sagged. Every so often the wind whipped up, rearranging the drifts and creating a complete whiteout. A couple of doors down from where Jay was parked, an old guy was quixotically shoveling the path in front of his hardware store. As soon as he scraped the concrete, it was covered anew.

  No one was going to pay her for sitting in her car all morning, so Jay got out—just in time to have her door nearly lopped off by a passing bus. She hugged her car until the thing passed, racing hard as though it knew of a warmer place just over the curve of the horizon.

  Inside the Cogito (she was supposed, she recalled fleetingly, to refer to the place as just Cogito, but found it impossible) the lights were on but the place was silent and shadowy. Snow was piling up on the windows and blocking out the light.

  Phil, Jorge, and Fowler were in the kitchen, each trying scrupulously to pretend that the other two did not exist. Fowler was tossing some meat into a sizzling pan, and Jorge was making a desultory effort at slicing some carrots and onions. Phil was looking at the business section of the Star-Tribune.

  “Howdy, kid,” said Fowler.

  “This is a cheerful scene,” said Jay as she began to extricate herself from her snow-covered boots. She was creating a small lake of water over by the manager’s desk, but it was bad form for anyone to complain about such things given the circumstances.

  “Hey, I get paid the same,” said Fowler, staring at the cooking meat. “But we’re not gonna get anyone in here today. I was just done explaining that to Boss Wonderboy over there.”

  Phil stared at the newspaper as if he hadn’t heard.

  “You people are crazy,” Jorge said, a little sadly. “Going out in this weather? Expecting people to come to a restaurant?”

  “The boss said to stay open for a couple of hours,” Phil said, his voice Wizard-of-Oz-like from behind the headlines. “I don’t see why you want to go home. You don’t get paid if you go home.”

  “I’m just talking fucking common sense,” Fowler said.

  “Last time I checked,” Phil said calmly, “it was impossible to fuck common sense. Might be nice to try, though.”

  “They are both insane,” Jorge said to Jay, as though she was the only one left who hadn’t taken total leave of rationality.

  Jay had indeed thought about not coming to work, when she woke and saw the snow piling up to obscure the curbs and almost reach the wheel wells of cars. But that wasn’t the way things were done in Minnesota. It would take worse to keep everyone indoors.

  “There aren’t too many people out there,” Jay said, peeling off one of her two sweaters and instinctively turning away from Phil, who suddenly took a lot less interest in the paper.

  “I know that,” he said, sitting on his desk. “I’ll be surprised if we get a single customer. We’ll give it an hour and a half, then the boss won’t be able to give us shit. It’s only going to get worse with that cold snap coming in overnight.”

  “Cold snap?” Jay asked.

  “Don’t you have a radio, kid?” Fowler asked with his familiar gruff kindness.

  “Didn’t turn it on,” Jay admitted.

  “It’s gonna get cold, chica,” said Jorge, stabbing the air with his knife.

  “Colder than this?” Jay said.

  “Try subzero,” said Phil. “Major Canadian air mass.”

  “Cruel cold,” Fowler said, with more than a trace of relish. “We’re going to be locked in for days.”

  Jay had received news of this kind many times throughout her life. One did not live in Minnesota without acquiring an intimate knowledge of the variations and many permutations of extreme cold and the things it did to water, air, and the human body. But it was only every few years that a real climatological horror came along—the kind of atmospheric bad luck streak that evoked a very real and pragmatic fear of freezing to death. It was always the same: the air pulled down by chance from the Arctic, the ballooning shape on the weather map as the cold descended into Canada, then crossed the border at International Falls. It didn’t have that much farther to go before it reached Minneapolis.

  “The restaurant business is not going to flourish this week,” said Phil, seemingly inspired by the business analysis he had just been reading. “People don’t go out in weather like this.”

  “That’s because they don’t like to die,” Fowler said, and Jay could see that she had walked into an ongoing philosophical debate in which Phil was grudgingly coming around to the idea of suspending business as usual, while Fowler was advocating apocalyptic panic.

  Fowler, of course, was not a native. He kept glancing at the window, the way the snow kept coming and how the wind rattled the loose sill. Jorge, for his part, seemed resigned to his fate, although if he were going to freeze to death, it would not be before he had made clear his disdain for the entire project of having settled this plot of land at some point in the wilderness of the past.

  “My cousin talked me into moving here,” Jorge explained to Jay, refusing to include the men. “Lots of work. Nice in the summer. And now look.”

  He motioned at the window. Fowler let out a snort of derision.

  “Would you stop it?” he barked. “You sound like a little girl!”

  “Actually, my little girl is taking it all pretty well,” Jay observed.

  “You can call me all the names you want,” Jorge said calmly. “Because you are a fucking crazy man. I don’t even listen. To him.”

  That last part was delivered, of course, for Jay’s benefit. There was no settling things between Fowler and Jorge—who, in fact, deep down, did not like each other, and were not establishing a warm bond beneath their constant antagonism.

  “Excuse me?” said a woman’s voice. “Are you open?”

  She was middle-aged, in jeans and a parka, with an embarrassed-looking teenage boy several paces behind her. She had walked right into the middle of the kitchen without anyone noticing. Now the trio who staffed Cogito wore matching expressions of shock, as though a Tibetan Sherpa had just come into the room and announced that he was setting up base camp on the cutting bo
ard.

  “Yeah,” Phil said, the first to recover. “We’re open.”

  “Pick a table,” Jay said. “I’ll bring out menus and water.”

  “Oh, good,” said the woman gratefully. “I was afraid nothing would be open today. You know, the weather.”

  “Yeah,” Jay replied. “We know.”

  As they left the kitchen the boy shot Jay a look of profound mortification and a desperate need to convey to her that he was on board with nothing his mother did or said. He was sort of cute, in an underage, it’s-all-wrong kind of way.

  The day’s shipments hadn’t come in—presumably the trucks were spinning tires in some narrow alley and contemplating packing it in. Mother and son were generally sympathetic to this, and made do with a sandwich for the boy and a Cobb salad for his mother. Jay pretended to tally up receipts in the corner for a while—there were, of course, no receipts to tally because there had been no other diners so far—and took a kind of distracted pleasure in watching the mother’s efforts to cheer up her highly resistant son. The mother, thin on top and heavy-hipped, seemed genuinely perplexed. The boy had probably been perfectly reasonable and agreeable just a couple of years before. Well, Jay thought, that’s what sex did to people. That stuff going on between his legs had rendered his role in family life superfluous and ridiculous. Testosterone would take him away. That’s what it was designed to do.

  It was somehow like the end of things. Jay felt a sensation that eluded attempts at definition—it was the sort of sense she’d had when she graduated from high school, or when she learned she was pregnant. She was done with something. Sure, it had to do with breaking up with Stephen, but it was deeper than that. It was as though the snow was hiding an old world that wouldn’t reemerge when the thaw came.

  After Mom and Jake (that was his name, Jay learned by eavesdropping) were done with their unspectacular meal, Mom paid and left a halfway decent tip, then they were gone. Jay cleared their plates and glasses, the room silent and dark. She hadn’t even thought to turn on the stereo.

  Back in the kitchen Phil was sitting at his desk with his head in his hands while Fowler and Jorge were engrossed in an argument about which supermarket was best. Jay quickly gleaned that Jorge, despite the limitations of his salary, firmly adhered to the bourgeois creature comforts of Kowalski’s. Fowler, the chef, didn’t need any of that fancy shit to cook for himself and opted for the good, honest, plebeian fare at Rainbow.

  “You guys will argue about anything,” Jay said.

  “Fuck him,” Fowler said, eliminating Jorge from the world with a wave of his spatula. “Hey. You want some eggs?”

  “No, thanks,” Jay said, sounding more despondent than she intended. “I’m not even hungry. Hey, what’s the matter with him?”

  “What’s the matter with him,” Phil said, staring down at the desk, “is that I’m getting a migraine and I left my Maxalt at home and it’s already too late to take it and I’m going to be in hell for the next twelve hours.”

  “Mother of God,” Jorge pronounced, the soul of exasperation. “Go home, man. Get your medicine.”

  “It’s too late,” Phil moaned. “It’s too late for me.”

  “It’s too late for all of us,” Fowler muttered, attacking the grill with his spatula as though it embodied Phil’s headache, Kowalski’s, Jorge, and the weather outside.

  Well, it was official, as far as Jay was concerned. Winter psychosis had set in. There was only so much the spirit could take, and those snowy walls were more than enough without the prospect of the awful cold to come. It was the anticipation that was always the worst, the certainty of the hardship and real physical pain and danger that they would all be up against come morning. The air would hurt the skin, each gentle breeze would jab with invisible needles. Skin can freeze on contact—they drummed that happy little fact into Jay’s head when she was a little girl. To this day she could easily conjure images of great slabs of flesh blackening and slowly dying off, then falling from her cheeks and nose. It happened to people.

  There were no more customers in the next hour. Phil loosened his tie and lay prone on his desk, moaning and pitying himself with gusto. Jorge washed what dishes were to be washed, and Fowler sank into a silent funk without any pretense of preparing specials, or prepping any more food, or behaving in any manner like a chef. Instead he smoked and drank coffee and looked out the front window.

  “Let’s shut this place down,” he said to Jay when she came into the dining room.

  “Looks like the thing to do,” she replied.

  “Should never have come in the first place.” Fowler defiantly stubbed out his latest cigarette on the wood floor, where it left a tidy little burn mark.

  “I would have liked to make more than five dollars in tips today,” Jay told him.

  Fowler looked up at her, seemingly stunned to hear her speak of money, and apparently chagrined at the extent of his own kvetching.

  “Yeah, this sucks for you,” he said. “How’s that beautiful little girl, anyway?”

  “Great,” Jay said. “You know.”

  “What else is the matter?” Fowler asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have a funny look,” he explained. “Like you’ve decided something.”

  “Funny, it feels like I have but I’m not sure what it is,” Jay said. “You know, everything’s more complicated when you have a kid.”

  Fowler, a compact and perpetually self-contained man, had a daughter in Milwaukee whom he saw at most once a year. The reasons for this were vague, almost certainly very complicated, and a source of regret for Fowler.

  “You’ll be all right,” he said. “One shift does not a month’s pay make.”

  “See, I have to be like you,” Jay deadpanned. “More philosophical.”

  This launched Fowler into a wheezing laugh in which his end-times gloom lifted all at once. Probably it was the prospect of another day at Cogito, rather than the weather horrors, that had put him in his terminal state.

  “I think I’m going to go get philosophical with a glass of Wild Turkey at the C.C. Club,” Fowler said, gesturing down the street. “Want to come along?”

  The thought of socializing with Fowler had never occurred to Jay—though she knew his paternal attitude toward her precluded the possibility that he was up to something.

  “Some other time,” Jay said. “I think I’m going to pull Ramona out of day care early. They’ll probably want to close as early as they can.”

  “Snowed in with a bunch of screaming brats,” Fowler said. “No thanks. I’d rather grill burgers all day.”

  “You and me both,” said Jay.

  Jorge and Phil emerged from the back fully done up in their winter gear. Jorge in particular was a sight—his brown face poked out from the big white puffy hood of his coat, as though he were already buried in snow before stepping foot outside. Phil wore no hat, and walked slowly with a queasy expression on his pale face.

  “You all right to drive home?” Fowler asked.

  “Yeah, thanks,” Phil said. He seemed to be fighting not to vomit. “Just gotta get. To bed. Take my pills.”

  Fowler almost laughed, but Phil’s distress was too great for that. Instead he settled for a dismayed shake of his head.

  “What a bunch we make,” he said.

  Jay put her hand on the doorknob.

  “At least we have youth and beauty here to keep us from going completely crazy,” Jorge said with a warm smile.

  It took Jay a moment to realize he was talking about her. And there was no weird come-on beneath the surface—that would have come from Phil, who was effectively neutered for the moment.

  “You do brighten up the place, kid,” Fowler said.

  “Gee . . . that’s nice of you guys,” Jay said, profoundly embarrassed.

  “Go get that little girl of yours,” Fowler said. “We’ll lock up and shut everything down.”

  With a lightness in her step, Jay went out into the snowstorm and
crunched her way down the sidewalk to her car. It was amazing, in a small and quiet way, how much it cheered her to learn that her co-workers actually liked her. They would never know how much their affection bolstered her, because now she realized she had forgotten that she had a place in the wider world outside of Lewis, and Stephen. She had assumed that the world was empty to her, and she useless to it. Now it felt different. She could grow and leave them behind—they could, she and Ramona. Things didn’t need to stay the way they were. It was the kind of wisdom Anna used to impart.

  Jay decided to stop off at the apartment before going to pick up Ramona—she had a copy of Lion King II that needed returning, and she figured once they were home they’d want to lock up and let the elements conduct whatever diabolical business was at hand. She left her boots on, trailing water across the floor to the VCR. Just before she went out, she thought to check her voice mail. The dial tone gave that little stutter that indicated she had messages.

  The first was from a couple of hours ago: “Jay, it’s Andrea. How are you? Nice weather we’re having. I thought I’d invite myself over later and bring a pizza or something. I want to hang out with you guys! Give me a call.”

  Jay switched the phone to her other ear as she worked the Lion King back into its plastic case. It might be nice to see Andrea. It might also be nicer not to see anyone at all.

  It was, she thought as she pressed the button to retrieve the second of her two messages, a hell of a time to have broken up with her boyfriend. She might have liked to split a nice Barolo with Stephen in front of the electronic hearth that night, and a warm body would be nothing to turn down.

  “I’m calling for Jay Ingraham,” said a woman’s voice on the line. “I’m a nurse at North Memorial Hospital. This is in connection with Stephen Grant.”

  Jay put down the video.

  “We got your name from a secretary where he works,” the woman went on. “There’s been an accident and we’re trying to locate Stephen Grant’s next of kin for medical authorization. Please call as soon as possible.”

  The woman gave a phone number. Jay frantically repeated it to herself over and over until she could find a paper and pen. Then she let out a cry she wouldn’t have believed had come from her, had she not been entirely alone in the room.