The Snowman's Children

by Glen Hirshberg

  “Mattie, be safe,” says my father.

  “And be all right,” says my mother. “Call your wife.”

  “Oh, yeah, thanks for reminding me,” I say, and she recognizes my exhausted sarcasm and laughs.

  “Good night, Mattie,” my mother says, and both of them hang up.

  They will not call Laura. In the almost five years they have known her, they have never developed their own relationship with her, which is also probably my fault. I drop the receiver in the cradle, switch off the lights, and close my eyes. I am not comforted. I am not safe. But I’m starting to feel as if I could sleep.

  When the Snowman finished with his kids, he usually dressed them in their original clothes. He tucked in their shirts and wiped their faces, like a burglar trying to put everything right. He couldn’t hide the slight anal distortions on a couple of the victims, but as far as the police could tell, he did not rape them. Sometimes, he even treated superficial wounds with Bactine and Band-Aids.

  I wonder if you can kill your way free of the things that haunt you. If you can, and that’s why he stopped, then he’s still out there somewhere, with a new car. I wonder what he did with the Gremlin.

  Snatching at the light, I snap the shadows to attention and drag the county phone book onto my lap. I flip through the Ds, pause, flip to the Fs. I’m not ready for Theresa yet, or even for knowing I can’t find her.

  No Spencer Franklin in Oakland County.

  I grab the book for the Detroit Metro Area and locate a page and a half of Franklins: Sol, Spanky, Stan. No Spencer, but there’s an S. on Pleasant Tree in East Detroit. It’s one-forty-five in the morning. I dial.

  The woman who answers sounds wide awake. “Shepherd’s answering service.”

  For several seconds, I don’t speak. I have no more leads, no one else to call.

  “Sir, if you need help, let Jesus— “

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “Wrong number. I hope I didn’t wake you.” I drop the phone into its cradle again and sit there. Finally, extinguishing the lights, I dive deep into the sheets in the general direction of sleep, shunting aside for one last night the memory of the moment somewhere in that goddamn year when all the protective dikes around my life broke apart, and my childhood sank like some mythical Atlantis, and the waves reared up and spirited me off in a sickening decades-long circle toward home.

  Chapter 8 - 1994

  My plan was to get up and start dialing Franklins one by one, looking for relatives, but that alone would have taken me all day. Instead, I grab the phone book and go straight to Jon Goblin’s name. Somehow, I knew it would be there. The book gives his address on Wendy Lane, which, if I remember correctly, lies directly across the creek from his parents’ house. It even gives his wife’s name: Corrinne.

  I don’t even think about it, I just call him. Corrinne answers. I ask for Jon. She says, “Sure.” There’s a pause with kid voices and cartoons in it, and a man gets on the phone. For a second, I feel like a doorbell ditcher who has frozen in place after pushing the button. I can’t speak.

  “Hello?” says the voice again.

  I almost say Hoot-hoot, but think better of it. I wasn’t a member of Jon’s hooting crowd.

  “Jon, it’s Mattie Rhodes.”

  I hear silence, a breath. Then, “Mattie Roy, that slot-car boy?”

  “The same.”

  “Jesus. Corrinne, you know who this is?”

  I know her, I realize. Corrinne must be Corrinne Kelly-Dade, who wore her hair in pigtails and got up at five-thirty every morning to figure skate on Cider Lake. One Christmas break, when I was maybe eight, I stepped out of our house to fish the paper out of the snow and kept walking all the way to the lake in my slippers and sweat pants and overcoat. From the top of the hill I spotted Corrinne and her coach far out past the pier. They were practicing spins over and over. I remember watching Corrinne spin and glide over ice so clear she could probably see the fish beneath her. For all sorts of reasons, I kept my distance.

  “Does she still skate?” I say.

  “Wow. Corrinne? It’s her job, yeah. She teaches at Indolake.”

  When we were young, Indolake was a word of its own, a name like Baltimore or Kroger. But I realize now it’s actually a slurring of indoor lake.

  “And you?”

  “Jesus, Mattie. Where are you calling from?”

  “The Moto-Court near Woodward and Maple. I— “

  “Roger, get down,” Jon snaps, and whoever Roger is dissolves into the world he knows, and I start trembling. I feel like a voyeur, as if I’ve been caught in an adult bookstore and need to get away as fast as I can. This isn’t my life. These people aren’t my friends, and they never really were. But Jon might know where Theresa is, or at least where to look for her. His family stayed friends with hers long after we left. All I have to do is ask. Instead, I invite him to breakfast.

  “Hang on,” Jon says. When he returns, he suggests lunch.

  “Lunch it is.”

  “God, Mattie, I can’t wait to see what you look like after all these years. Want to come here?”

  “I need an Olga’s.”

  Jon’s laugh isn’t quite as infectious as it used to be, but almost. He still sounds close to gleeful. “There’s like twenty of them now, you know.”

  “Is the original still there? The one in Birmingham?”

  “Remember the Continental Market? It’s gone. Olga’s took over that whole space.”

  We agree to meet there at one. I forget to ask if he’s bringing his family. I hear cars croak to life in the parking lot. Some kids are leaving their room on the floor above me, whooping their way into the cold. I wrench my jeans and heavy socks out of my suitcase and dress.

  The second I open the door, the wind crawls under my coat. I clamp my arms against me and gasp. I remember this wind, this daylight so bright that it could cut you open: real winter. By the time I skid across the street, I’m laughing outright. The wind breaks in waves on the ice-crusted cars as newspapers and cup tops and bits of tree branch tumble down the sidewalk. Head down, I burrow forward six blocks into downtown Birmingham. I don’t see a single store I recognize, but I feel as if I’m home anyway. The light catches and darkens under overhangs, among icicles. This day is the color of most of my memories.

  In Shane Park, I look for the giant slide that dropped out of a metal flying saucer and the jungle-gym train with its red metal boxcars and black engine, but almost all the fixtures I played on are gone. In the northeast corner, half hidden in the drifts under the split-trunk birch with its right trunk jabbing off to one side, I find the stone turtle. It looks small but strong enough to carry me on its back. I sit down, rip off my gloves, feel the smoothed-flat grit of its shell. I lived here, I am thinking.

  I lived here.

  I want to call Laura from this park. I want to tell her that I really do want her to come, that I’m sitting on a stone turtle thinking about her and the not-as-gray winter sky over Kentucky. I’m more than aware that it may be too late for me to crawl completely free of this place, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I can’t reach her from where I am.

  I’m remembering my brother Brent charging through the long summer twilight at the Birmingham Fair, which took place in this park. It couldn’t have been later than 1973 or 1974, because the Brent I remember is smaller than I am, wearing blue shorts and sneakers, and still bothering to turn around to see if I’m right there. Even before, as my mother so delicately put it, I ripped him out of his life, he had stopped caring much about me. He didn’t like imaginary baseball, couldn’t imagine what I did with all my alone time, and thought my remoteness was either an act or a plague and undesirable either way.

  I remember my father getting ill at the fair. Brent had successfully browbeaten him into taking us on the Tilt-a-Whirl. When we came off, my father was lurching like an old homeless drunk, so pale and wobbly that some woman wandered by as he was leaning over the bushes behind a bench and said, “Lord. Why don’t you just hand
your children a Pabst right now? You’re teaching them the habit just the same.”

  Censorious comments—he got a lot of them, despite or perhaps because of his reserve in public—always seemed to buck him up. By the time the woman had stalked away he was standing upright, waving at her and saying, “Thanks, good idea,” before sagging onto the bench.

  “Ah, boys, the Midwest,” he said. “No place like it.”

  Then he did what we’d been waiting for him to do ever since he first took us to the fair: He gave us a ticket book apiece, clutched at his stomach while stroking each of our arms, and said, “Go.”

  Instantaneously, Shane Park swelled into a whole wild winking world. There seemed to be no end of corners to round, cavorting teenagers to dash between, new sensations, sweet food, dark shadows. Near the Shoot-the-Stars-Out game booth, I spotted the Daughretys and dragged Brent over to them. Theresa was eating cotton candy in a red summer dress with white lilies printed on it. The Doctor said, “Hello, boys,” and Theresa grinned, but instead of saying anything, she started singing. Everybody’s going/to the fair/to the fair. All your friends are there. I sang with her, and both of us did the hip shimmy that Mrs. Jeunne, the chorus teacher at Phil Hart, would do when she made us sing this. I asked Theresa if she wanted to come on the rides with us, but she just went on singing and looked past me. She’d never been allowed on the rides. “Death traps,” Dr. Daughrety said. “You boys be careful.” He took his daughter’s hand and steered her away.

  In the end, I got Brent to go on the tower-shaped roller coaster with the track that twisted around it like an anaconda, the cage cars screeching as they plummeted earthward. My parents didn’t like us going on that ride. They said kids died on it every year.

  Right up to the front of the line, Brent stood beside me, not talking. When he saw the little wooden clown with the arm stuck out that showed how tall you had to be to get on, he told me, “No. Mattie, Dad said no.” He was maybe a quarter of an inch taller than the outstretched limb.

  “Not tonight he didn’t,” I reminded him.

  “You just think you can scare me,” he said, and he was right. I was having the same tingling sensation that would lead me, a few years later, to clap handcuffs on teachers. Do other things.

  Steadying myself, I managed to smirk at my brother. “Why would I want to scare you?”

  “Because you’re weird,” said Brent, and he sounded his age: five, maybe six. “Because you’re not as scared of this stuff as me.” Then he reached out and took my hand and held it all the way to the end of the ride.

  I am digging at the back of the stone turtle with my fingernails, gulping frozen air until my lungs ache. I see a pay phone near the Community Center across the park. I need to call Laura. But first I need to call Brent. For once, I’m pretty sure I have something to tell him. I take one more breath and hold it until my lungs relax. Then I’m up, off the turtle’s back and running.

  Not until I’ve actually dialed the Lexington area code do I remember that I have to call information. Six weeks or so ago, Brent moved. I never saw his most recent apartment. I’m not even sure I ever called him there. I could get the number from my parents, but my mother would probably cry from gratitude, and I can’t face that now. Anyway, I want to do this for him and me, not for her.

  Brent doesn’t answer, nor does his machine if he has one. The ringing in the receiver wriggles uncomfortably against my ear. I hang up fast.

  This has been our pattern all our lives. At the rare moments when one of us actually feels a connection, the other either can’t or won’t respond. My relationship with Brent is one of the few I have in which the blame can probably be assigned equally. After all, he was making fun of me and my Mind Wars and my make-believe home runs long before we left Detroit. If I was an awfully strange older brother, he was an awfully cruel younger one.

  But I can feel his ghost hand in mine today, and I can see him running alongside me through this park, and I wish he had been home. I wish that this morning we could at least have failed to connect in person.

  Chapter 9 - 1976

  It was the first school day of fall, nearly forty-five minutes past start time, and the entire population of Phil Hart Elementary had gone snow-day giddy. Kids hung in the branches of trees, throwing pieces of carefully packed lunches at each other, peeling the birch trees down to their soft insides and watching them weep. Jamie Kerflack came over to me, stuck out his hand to shake, and asked for a Four-Square rematch. We played two points and then he drilled me in the face with the ball.

  The vandals had apparently struck the night before. Inside, teachers were scrubbing graffiti off the walls and picking bumper stickers off our lockers with nail files and X-ACTO blades. The stickers, black-lettered on white backgrounds, read ARNOLD GROSS IS A CHILD MOLESTER. In assembly later that morning, I asked a new teacher monitoring our row who Arnold Gross was. The teacher shrugged and said she had no idea; she had just moved here from Sandusky and was already sorry she came.

  “Dead judge,” said Theresa, from the row in front of me. I drew my arms to my sides, not liking that she knew. As usual, I wasn’t quite sure what she meant, and she wasn’t explaining.

  “Sandusky?” Jon Goblin asked the new teacher. “Have you been to Cedar Point?”

  Our whole row laughed, and Jon and Jamie Kerflack launched into the story of our classmate Garrett Serpien throwing up on the Cedar Point Mine Ride during a Y-Camp field trip two years earlier. They’d had to shut down the coaster for half an hour to hose his vomit off the track.

  I leaned forward, spotted Garrett at the end of my row, and waited for him to see me. I was the only one from school who’d been with him on that trip. We’d made up the bits about the track shutdown and hosing off his vomit on the bus ride home. Garrett noticed me and smiled, quick and easy. He seemed to be enjoying this as much as everyone else. Maybe he’d gone back and conquered the Mine Ride, I thought. Or maybe he didn’t care. I was thinking about all those Koogle and paper sandwiches he had eaten over the years and the way he walked home cheerfully by himself, swinging his soft-plastic lunch box by its strap; I found myself admiring him, and my admiration stunned me.

  Twenty minutes later, Mrs. Jupp apologized for the delay and said she’d be sending a note home to our parents about an emergency PTA meeting the next night. Then we broke into class groups, and I followed mine to the end of the L-Wing into Ms. Eyre’s room.

  A giant construction-paper tree hung over the doorway. Papier-mâché birds’ nests adorned the EXIT signs. Every inch of every wall sported posters about fire prevention and multicolored INTELLIGENT STUDENTS ALWAYS...lists. On the back wall, by the clock, was a blown-up picture of a bald eagle with the inscription I’ve Got My Eye On You emblazoned below it. Two canaries swung and tweeted in a leaf-strewn cage hung near the window overlooking the blacktop.

  “Hoot-hoot,” Jon Goblin said when he walked in.

  “Caw-caw,” said Jamie Kerflack, right behind him, and all his cronies laughed.

  Theresa selected a desk in front, sat down, and bowed her head, saying nothing to anyone. When Spencer Franklin, the new kid, sat down next to her, she looked up, and I saw her say, “Oh.” When Spencer smiled, she did too, a little awkwardly. Two of Jamie Kerflack’s friends filed past them. One looked at Spencer, then at the floor, and said, “Hey.”

  “Hey back,” said the new kid. He was wearing bright red sneakers.

  “What’s he doing here?” I heard Jamie mutter behind me. Instead of turning around, I let him slip past me and sat down next to Spencer. I watched him speak to Theresa again, briefly, though I couldn’t hear what he said.

  We’d heard rumors about Ms. Eyre’s car accident. It had made the papers; she’d spent most of the summer threatening to sue the school board for libel, because they kept forcing her to provide document after document at public hearings to prove she hadn’t been drinking. But none of our parents had talked about it much, so we all went silent when she walked through the door.
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  In the back, very quietly, Jamie Kerflack muttered, “Holy crap.”

  “Get over it,” Ms. Eyre said, and dumped her books on her desk.

  She was wearing a wire cage cast. Most of the damage had been done to her jaw, my mother told me later. It had to be re-broken, and would have to be re-broken again. Her nose cartilage was so crushed that the doctors had to tape it in place. But the worst, for us, was her eyes. Ringed with black around the sockets, her silver-blue irises resembled nails driven way too deep into rotting wood.

  “Hot lunch?” she said, and began counting. I raised my hand and saw the new kid raise his.

  “Brought lunch?” she said. I raised my hand again, holding in my smile so Ms. Eyre wouldn’t notice my little subversion. The new kid, I noticed, did the same thing.

  “Who’s Arnold Gross?” Garrett Serpien asked.

  I glanced at Theresa, but she didn’t react. Ms. Eyre grimaced and tilted her head back on her neck. We didn’t usually see expressions on our teachers’ faces like the one she was wearing right now until after Christmas break, when they realized they still had six months to go.

  “I’ll tell you who he was,” she said, staring down each of us in turn. “He was a Michigan state judge who decided it wasn’t quite fair that the school districts out here got all the money while the districts in Detroit got leftovers.” She did the tilting-head thing again, this time rubbing her eyes as though trying to scrape away some of the blackness. “A couple of years ago, he essentially ruled that some poor kids”—she said poor, not black—”would get bused to the suburbs and some wealthier kids would get bused to the city. Then he died. And our compassionate and forward-thinking suburban lawmakers and lawyers have been trying to get the ruling overturned ever since.”

  “Bused to Detroit?” blurted Garrett.

  Ms. Eyre slumped into her chair, but I was almost sure she had a smile on her face. The crook from her broken jaw made it look surprisingly friendly.