The
Snowman’s
Children
Glen Hirshberg
Cemetery Dance Publications
2011
Copyright © 2002 by Glen Hirshberg
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Cemetery Dance Publications
132-B Industry Lane, Unit #7
Forest Hill, MD 21050
http://www.cemeterydance.com
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
First Digital Edition
ISBN: 978-1-58767-292-7
Cover Artwork © 2011 by iStockphoto.com
Digital Design by DH Digital Editions
For my parents and my brother
For Kim and Sid, with snow
And for M.S., J.R., K.M., and T.K.,
whom I did not know and have never forgotten
Chapter 1 - 1994
In the dark, through the stinging sleet, the lightless buildings of downtown Detroit seem to tilt toward one another like sunken ships on the ocean floor. The streetlamp bulbs have all blown, so that everything wavers in the hissing shadows. Even the traffic lights float like buoys cut adrift to ride the Friday-night ghost current. I have the car window cracked open despite the cold. All I hear is the furtive slosh of tires and a faint industrial whistling. At first glance, this place looks exactly the way I left it seventeen years ago. Or maybe it’s just the new snow, having its usual effect on me.
A long blue Buick coughs to life, pulling out from a row of apparently abandoned cars, its driver hunched forward in the cone of illumination from the dome light. She doesn’t look my way as she slides past. On the corner, a decapitated lamppost sticks sideways in the cement, next to a tiny grocery with a hanging sign in Arabic, its electrified sliding door half open. I see figures moving up and down the aisles, carrying boxes. They could be looting or restocking or relocating or scavenging. Slowly, I turn for the Woodward Corridor.
The snow is already gray, and the smell of earthy air washes through the window. Disabled cars line the roadway, and I weave carefully between them as if I’m following an unseen lead vehicle out of the city toward Troy. I’ve got my own Trojan horse, too: a rented 1986 Olds with 78,000 miles on it and no defroster. I actually asked the guy at Rent-a-Wreck if he had any AMC Gremlins. Blue ones.
“Huh?” he said, and gave me a towel for the windshield.
I turn on the radio and find WJR, which is running the headlines:
Woman with Alzheimer’s found locked in an East Detroit house with fourteen dogs; police currently searching for her son.... Execution-style shooting on Gratiot..... Wings win in San Jose....
Then it’s out to another roving reporter who is holding his microphone into the night. There, he says. Hear it? And you really can hear it: the roads breaking apart like ice over a lake.
It’s the thaw, says the reporter. Yesterday’s unexpected balmy weather, after two months of subzero temperatures, has affected the roads, and even though we’re back to freezing tonight, the asphalt has already split, and cars are plunging into the potholes.
Not until Nine Mile do the landmarks get familiar, and only a few even then. The Detroit Zoo water tower materializes dimly out of the dark over Ferndale. If I took a left, a right, drove five more blocks, I’d be at Spencer’s house, where all three of us growled in our sleeping bags on the night the lions jumped over the zoo’s retaining wall and escaped. That was early winter, 1976, before almost any of it.
I’ve driven past the corner where Mini-Mike’s Slot Car Emporium used to be before I think to look up, but I already know it won’t be there. In the only letter she ever sent us, maybe two years after we were gone—a greeting, five cryptic lines about finalizing her divorce and having trouble with her car heater in the frigid weather; nothing at all about her son except that he seemed “distant, still very angry and hurt, but okay, sometimes”—Spencer’s mother enclosed an article about Mini Mike’s heart attack and the Emporium’s closing. Across the top, she had scrawled, “Just thought you’d want to see this.” She also included a magazine photograph of Dr. Daughrety standing on a podium in front of a small crowd at Phil Hart Plaza downtown, accepting an Outstanding Motor City Citizen award. My mother showed the photograph to me, took it back, and murmured, “Son-of-a-bitch” over it as though praying or proclaiming a curse. Then she lit it on fire.
The girl at the Troy/Birmingham Moto-Court is pretty, ponytailed, not yet twenty. She’s popping grocery-store sugar cookies into her mouth and listening to music that bubbles the pads of her headphones. She doesn’t flinch when I sign at the register, after only a slight hesitation. My real name. Why should she flinch, and why should I care? She would have been maybe two years old then. And it’s not as if I killed anybody.
Not quite.
Chapter 2 - 1976
It started during the week of my fifth Mind War. Jon Goblin had ruptured his appendix, almost died, and wound up in the hospital most of the winter, which is why I was the only boy at Theresa Daughrety’s tenth birthday party.
All that snow, hip deep, as though the clouds had snagged themselves on the earth and unraveled. The ice crust on top of the drifts sliced into my calves as my feet sunk downward. I was staggering toward Theresa’s, head down to protect my eyes from the wind, passing the birch trees the neighborhood kids had picked barkless.
From the bus stop at the end of our block, I could see her porthole window through the maples. Shapes moved behind the glass, not faces or even bodies, just shapes; and in the silence, in the snow, I felt like a fish swimming up to nuzzle the hull of a ship. A remora, perhaps (I’d read about them, over and over, in my Strange True Fish Tales book), mistaking this house for a whale.
Theresa opened the front door. Behind her, the first of her father’s masks, black and horned, scowled from the wall. Healing masks, Dr. Daughrety called them. He’d accepted—often requested—them, he told us, as tokens of appreciation when he’d served as a self-described “idealistic young physician” on various Native American reservations and while traveling in Peru and Kenya. The masks were meant to scare the bacteria out of you. They hung all over the walls at peculiar angles because, according to Dr. Daughrety, “Sickness slinks and slouches. There’s not a virus in the world that’ll come at you upright.”
Once you knew what they were, they should have been comforting. But every time I entered that house, I felt helpless, paralyzed. All those carved faces with no eyes and misshapen mouths made me freeze, then tremble. Not, I think, because of the masks themselves, but because of the terrifying things their existence suggested were loose in the air, things that could sneak inside you.
Jerking my attention from the walls, I looked at Theresa. She was wearing white—white what I don’t recall—with a black ribbon through her short blond hair. I can’t tell you much about her face. Even then, before any of it—except the death of her mother, years earlier—her eyes seemed to lurk under their lids and then flash at you, way too far into you. I didn’t do much looking at people’s faces back then, but I knew that Theresa’s eyes, when they flashed at you, were brown and eerily opaque, the color of rain on the ground. She had a little extra cheek on both sides, and her mouth was always arched and poised like a bow.
Around the room, ten other girls, mostly from our class at school, sat clumped in their usual groups on the white leather couches or the shag carpet that rose to meet them like a luxuriant la
wn. It was the first time I’d been there without Jon Goblin. They were family friends, the Goblins and Daughretys, and celebrated holidays together. The dawning awareness that he wasn’t coming thrilled through me, freed me for a while from the glare of the masks.
“Happy Birthday,” I found myself saying to Theresa, and smiled. Quite possibly, that was the first thing I’d said to her in a month. The year before, by unspoken agreement among all the members of our class, we’d begun to rearrange our desks by gender so we could nurse our newly awakened awkwardnesses from a comforting distance.
I might have gone on and said something else, because I felt almost sure, for once, that she was happy to see me, but as I held up the birthday present I’d brought her, Dr. Daughrety stepped smoothly between us.
“Mattie. Welcome. Way too long since we’ve seen you. Look, Thrr-girl, a gift from the arch-rival.” He took my present, shook it, and slipped it into the pocket of his cardigan. When his hand reappeared, it had a popcorn ball in it. “Pre-Mind War eats?” he said, and tousled my hair and walked away.
I remembered his face so fiercely that I sat down and drew it one night in high school, several years later and thousands of miles away. The drawing got me into Parsons.
He was bald, and his skull shone like the hood of a car. He had the least liquid eyes I’d ever seen, metallic gray, and they looked screwed into their sockets. Nothing he tried—not what he called his “friendly guy” mustache, not his Mr. Rogers sweaters, not his relentless smiling—did anything to soften him.
“It’s a decal,” I told Theresa. My voice shrank into my turtleneck, away from Dr. Daughrety’s masks.
“For the People Eater?” she asked quietly, glancing over her shoulder but grinning.
“It says, FEAR in little rub-off letters. I designed it myself. It’ll fit on the bumper or the grille.”
Theresa’s father had given her the People Eater, a custom slot car, for Christmas, which was a surprise, since he hadn’t yet allowed her to come racing with Joe Whitney, Jon Goblin, and me. She’d named it for the Minnesota Vikings’ front line and the pickle sandwich at Avri’s Deli on Long Lake. It was faster than any of the cars the rest of us rented at Mini-Mike’s Slot Car Emporium. But Theresa couldn’t drive it very well.
“I made the popcorn balls,” she said.
I tried mine. It cracked open like a frozen apple. Red watermelon-flavored juice trickled into my mouth.
“If you spit these, they’ll stick,” I announced.
Before she could dare me—the way she used to do in second grade when we sat together at the Brain Table—Dr. Daughrety materialized again in the dining room doorway.
“Will the co-favorites take their marks, please?” His smile made me shudder.
Over his shoulder, against the plate-glass window that ran the length of the living room, I could see the table that had been prepped for the Mind War: twelve chairs, five on each side for the birthday guests and one at either end for Theresa and me, so we could stare each other down. Pads of scratch paper had been placed before each chair, as well as a calculator, pocket dictionary, and two Ticonderoga pencils, the kind with the tips that splintered if you pushed too hard. The Honor Feather rested atop my pad of paper because I’d won last year, for the first time since I was six.
“Watch out for him,” my mother had warned me at breakfast. She meant Theresa’s father. “He’ll do anything if it means helping her win. I don’t trust him. I never have.”
Still in their clumps, the rest of Theresa’s guests slipped off the couches and drifted toward the table like debris being washed into a gutter. A few of them glanced at Theresa or me. Only a couple of them smiled. They looked the way I almost always felt: vaguely intimidated by something I couldn’t quite name.
At age ten, Theresa already had a game face: bow mouth drawn taut, eyes narrowed. Jon Goblin’s mother called it the Thousand-Yard Squint. Even her hair seemed curled into a fist. Theresa wore that face in the super-advanced math program we got excused from our fifth-grade class to go to every morning at ten-thirty. She wore it the whole week of the Young Poets of America Contest. She even wore it in art class during clay-project month, when she had no chance of beating me.
“Mattie-man?” Dr. Daughrety said. “Thrr-girl? Ready?”
The Squint had settled over her but hadn’t hardened yet when I opened my mouth and said, “Tell him no. I dare you.”
I don’t know why I said that. I liked the Mind War. But I liked the thought of sabotaging it, with Theresa’s help, even better. Of course, Dr. Daughrety could have dismissed my little coup attempt with a wave of his hand. But he didn’t. He just folded his arms over his chest, leaned against the wall next to one of his masks, and waited, watching his daughter.
For a moment, something bloomed beneath the surface of the Squint, naked and colorless. I told my mother about it later. She shivered and shook her head.
“Don’t worry, Mattie,” Theresa finally said, her smile even chillier than her father’s. “Runner-up gets all the popcorn balls he can eat.”
Her father patted her arm, and I shrugged and nodded. At the time, I still considered myself a legitimate threat to what I’d once heard the Doctor call the “Daughrety Superiority.” I knew I wasn’t her equal anymore, but a threat, surely.
I took my spot at the table with the others, brushed the Honor Feather forward, and one of the girls next to me poked at it with her pencil, then looked across the table at a friend and snickered. If she’d looked at me, I might have snickered too. I liked the game but not the Feather, which was pink and puffy and meant mostly that I was a target for humiliation. But no one was looking at me except the Doctor and his daughter.
And the teeth mask.
Now I could be wrong about this. I don’t think I am, but I could be. Back in second grade, when Theresa and I played together in each other’s backyards almost every afternoon, I slipped on some leaves and fell on a rake in the Daughretys’ neighbor’s yard, and I ended up lying inside the Daughrety house with my eyes squeezed shut for almost an hour while the doctor tended to the gash on my forehead. As I remember, he sent Theresa out of the room so she wouldn’t have to watch. Then he stroked my hair and said occasional reassuring things. The blood kept welling out of the rent in my skin and into my eyebrows before he wiped it away.
“Letting things cleanse,” he said.
I didn’t scream. I don’t think I said a single word until I opened my eyes.
The teeth mask was white except for the teeth, which were black and long and looked less like teeth than needles jammed into the red-lined gums in the lipless mouth. There were no eyes in the white sockets, so the thing seemed to be gazing inward, rolling every piece of itself as far away from pain as it was possible to get and still, for a few more seconds, be alive. For the next three years, every time I turned out the light, I saw the teeth mask flash in the last split second of not-dark.
It is possible that the Doctor treated me on his dining room table or on the rug underneath it, and I’m just remembering wrong. But I think we were on his living room couch. And I think the mask was hanging over it. And I think he moved it, on Theresa’s tenth birthday, to the one place where he knew I would see it. Despite what my mother may have thought and sometimes said, Dr. Daughrety would never, ever, have given Theresa hints about upcoming Mind War questions. He would have considered that insulting to his daughter. But he wasn’t above employing the home-field advantage.
“Boy and girls,” the Doctor said. “Ready?”
I just stared at the mask while the snow ticked against the windowpane and everyone else picked up their pencils to try at least. I wanted to look away; I kept telling myself to do so. But I couldn’t shake my eyes free. Those empty sockets drew my gaze like black holes sucking in light. Distantly, I heard the Doctor take a long breath and begin.
“One-twelfth times negative 1/18th.”
“Negative 1/216th,” Theresa said, before anyone’s pencil had touched paper. She hadn’t
even reached for her own.
The Doctor made a scratch on the score sheet and continued. The whole point of the speed round was to obliterate the noncompetitive. I was still stunned to paralysis by that fanged and leering face, unprepared.
“Reporters for the Washington Post who— “
“Bernstein. Woodward,” said Theresa.
Another scratch.
“Inaugurate. Define it. Spell it.”
This was particularly cruel because nine months later, in the midst of the election, everyone in the room could have answered it. Now, everyone would remember that Theresa Daughrety knew it—and knew how to spell it—first.
By the time I shook out of my stupor and beat Theresa to a Michigan geography question about Mackinac Island, it was already too late. I snatched up my pencil and ignored the calculator—if you had to use it you were already doomed—and began burying the rest of my classmates as we raced into the word-problem round. I didn’t get anywhere near catching up to Theresa. But I did look at her once, not far from the finish, and without thinking about it I grinned. She immediately grinned back. Then the next question flew, and we hurtled after it.
Later, in the last of the twilight, Dr. Daughrety took us all skating on Cider Lake. Theresa glided far ahead while I lagged behind. I was happy to be out of the gaggle of girls and stumbling along on my own until I fell and found myself face down on the ice with my eyes jammed shut. No matter what, I did not want to look into the lake. When I opened my eyes, I saw ice, gray and opaque as steel.
My father once told me this was a man-made lake, which I took to mean that swimmers somehow had left parts of themselves behind in it. After that, being in the water didn’t scare me as much as being over it, on skates, did. I didn’t want anything reaching through the surface to grab me. Even more than that, I didn’t want to see anything under there that could. Shoving down with my mittens, I scrambled to my feet and slipped once more after the vanishing partygoers.
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