The Snowman's Children

by Glen Hirshberg

  “But that never happened, did it?” Theresa asked. “No one ever got bused out of this school, did they?”

  “Nope,” said the new kid, who swung around and faced everybody. “They only bus out of the city, not in.”

  “Bus who?” Theresa said, turning to look at him. I felt a prickle of jealousy.

  “Special kids,” he answered, and his grin was the one he’d aimed at me during lunch count. “Operation Salvage.”

  Ms. Eyre stared at him and leaned forward on her desk. “Operation Salvage? Is that what they’re telling you it’s called?”

  The new kid nodded.

  “Those sons of—”

  “Ms. Eyre!,” came a command from the doorway, and in marched Mrs. Jupp.

  Her hair had finished graying over the summer, and the bun she’d yanked into place looked more like a punishment than a style. She wore the same overabundance of peach-colored lipstick, the same excess of rouge on her cheeks, but her skin seemed to have stretched and thinned beneath it. One smile, I thought, would split her wide open.

  “Welcome back, everyone,” Mrs. Jupp said, and smiled, and didn’t split open. I was watching her, and the new kid, and the way Ms. Eyre was crouching in her chair with the same enthusiasm that Jamie Kerflack generally exuded during class.

  “Can’t wait to get started,” Mrs. Jupp continued. “We have an exciting year ahead. I’m sure you’ve all met our new students, but let me introduce them to you.”

  She started in the back with someone named Marybeth, who’d moved here from Toronto, then Thomas, who’d transferred from a private school because his family had heard such wonderful things about the public schools here, and finally, widening her smile still more, she gestured toward the kid beside Theresa. “Last and nowhere near least, this is Spencer. He’s from Ferndale, and he’s very talented indeed.”

  “We know you’ll make him more comfortable than your parents would,” said Ms. Eyre.

  We all just sat there. She sounded so mad, and her anger seemed aimed at Mrs. Jupp. We’d never met anyone who didn’t like Mrs. Jupp.

  “Ms. Eyre,” said our principal, in her businesslike voice, “could you step into the hall with me for a moment?”

  “Pencils,” Ms. Eyre said to us as she followed Mrs. Jupp out the door. “Paper. We’re taking the math placement test as soon as I get back.”

  No one took out a pencil or even moved. We wanted to hear what they said, which didn’t turn out to be a problem. Mrs. Jupp did not lower her voice, and Ms. Eyre was very nearly yelling.

  “I would think, Ms. Eyre, that Operation Salvage would be a program you’d endorse and support.”

  “Of course you would,” Ms. Eyre snapped.

  “Your tone, Ms. Eyre.”

  “Operation Salvage? We’ll save you from your home and your parents, take you out where the white—excuse me, bright and ethical—people live, and—“

  “Your tone, Ms. Eyre. Whom do you think you’re talking to?”

  In the front row, Garrett Serpien gaped. The rest of us stole glances at one another and looked away fast. Only Spencer Franklin stared openly at the hallway.

  “This happen here much?” 1 heard him ask Theresa.

  She answered, but I didn’t hear her, because Ms. Eyre said, “Let’s see, whom do I think I’m talking to? The We-know-you-were-drinking-even-though-your-blood-tests-and-the-police-say-otherwise Review Board?”

  Mrs. Jupp’s sighs were as loud and efficient as her speaking voice. This one blew through the room, ruffled the paper leaves on the paper tree, and settled us all down. “I knew you weren’t drinking, Molly.”

  “I don’t remember seeing you at the two hearings they held to interrogate me.”

  “I don’t remember your asking me to come.”

  “A note might have been nice. A phone call?”

  “I sent a note while you were in the hospital, remember? And as for the rest, well, I knew you could handle yourself.” For a brief while there was silence. Then Mrs. Jupp said, “Don’t take it out on the children, please. Enjoy being back. It’s what you’ve been fighting for, isn’t it? Besides, just think how much fun you’ll have at this year’s parent-teacher conferences.”

  Ms. Eyre moaned. Seconds later, we heard Mrs. Jupp march down the hall, leaving Ms. Eyre to lean against the doorway with her back to us. When she turned to come in, she was not smiling.

  During the math placement test, she excused Theresa and Spencer and me because we’d already qualified for the new super-advanced math program, so the three of us stood at the back, rolling the first dry rubber cement of the year between our fingers. The clouds that had been gathering all morning began sifting precipitation over the asphalt. This wasn’t snow—not yet—but a fine silvery rain, obscuring the paths that led through the trees and setting leaves vibrating as though something among them were stirring.

  “From my house,” Spencer whispered, “you can hear lions at night. I live by the zoo.” He was shorter than Theresa, almost as short as I was. His red rugby shirt and red canvas sneakers and the sheer novelty of having him here made it seem as if he’d just stepped out of one of our wall-collage travel projects in Mrs. Van-Ellis’s class. He wasn’t the only black kid at school—there’d been at least one in my class every year—but he was the only one bused here, and the only one wearing red sneakers and not taking the math placement test.

  “Do they sleep? The lions?” Theresa asked.

  Spencer shrugged. “They don’t roar much, if that’s what you mean. But you can hear them prowling around. They’re on the other side of the wall in our backyard. They make little shuffly sounds like this.” He made little shuffly sounds with his sneakers.

  “My all-time record for sprinting to the lunch line is forty-six seconds,” I offered. “Round trip.”

  “What’s the two-people record?” he said. We looked at each other, and then instantly, wordlessly, took to inventing a harness out of duct tape. Theresa came up with a name for the sport, though she’d never sprinted for the lunch line in her life and spent most of the time we were constructing the harness staring into the sink. She called it sidecarring.

  After the test, Ms. Eyre waved Theresa and Spencer and me back to our desks in the front. We would stay there the rest of the year.

  Ms. Eyre asked everyone to stand up. “Now look,” she said. “Look right at my face.” The invitation was too tempting to resist, so we all did it. “I’m a stranger,” Ms. Eyre said. “I’ve just driven up to you in my car.”

  “What’s left of it,” I said, tingling, which triggered an eruption of laughter while I stood with my head down, blushing. When I glanced up, Theresa was eyeing me, her little bow mouth bent in surprise. Ms. Eyre stared at me, and after a few seconds she pointed.

  “They warned me about you,” she said.

  No one, to my knowledge, had ever been warned about me. The very idea drove my fingernails into my palms, my chin into my chest. The tremoring in my throat could have been confusion or fear or even pride. When I straightened again, I managed to keep my eyes level with hers.

  “I’ve driven up to you,” Ms. Eyre began again, when we were quiet. Her eyes shone in their black sockets like bat eyes in a cave. We grew quieter still. “Hey, little girl,” she said softly. “Want a piece of candy?”

  The only response was rain pattering on the roof, searching for a point of entry. Then Theresa gestured to the window next to Ms. Eyre’s desk, which had a hand outlined in red tape in the lower-left corner. “Run for the house with one of those hands,” she said.

  “Eagle-eye Daughrety does it again,” said Ms. Eyre, and then blinked, releasing us. “Divide into writing groups. No more than five per group. You can choose your own for now; I’ll choose for you later. Spencer, Theresa, and Mattie, I want you in your own group, please.”

  Two minutes before lunch, Ms. Eyre was called to the office over the PA system, which gave Spencer and me plenty of time to slip into our harness. Our classmates looked up from their
writing pads and snickered. The bell rang. Side by side, Spencer Franklin and I shot out of the doorway, aided by Jon Goblin’s shove from behind, and lunged past chattering students and teachers demanding that we stop, down the hall, and through the library toward the lunch line. Twice, the harness tangled and we had to slow up. Once, Spencer got a half-step ahead of me and almost yanked me into the trophy case, where I noticed a photo of me standing beside the painting of my dad fixing his speakers that had won first prize at the Young Art Fair last year. But by the time we reached the corridor outside Mrs. Jupp’s office, our movements had synchronized, and we were flying.

  Chapter 10 - 1976

  It was the cold, they said, that drove the yellow jackets into the grass. Within a week of Labor Day, frost crept through the trees, plucking the still-green leaves from their stems and driving startled robins and blue jays south in waves. By midmonth, when Indian summer hit, all the maples and oaks were bare, and Mark the Bird Fidrych was faltering in his quest to win twenty games in his rookie season. (He didn’t make it.) Ms. Eyre orchestrated a field trip to the Channel 7 Weather Bureau so we could explain to our parents what had happened to the traditionally glorious Michigan fall.

  Despite his size, Spencer had signed up for after-school flag football, and he’d convinced me to do it too, for the first time ever. He even convinced Theresa Daughrety to come watch the first game. There were girls—quite a few—who came out to watch those games, and one or two who played, but Theresa had never been one of them.

  Mr. Lang ran the league, so of course he put Spencer and Garrett Serpien and me on the same team. He named us Mathilda’s Minions and pitted us against the Goblin Squad for opening day. The game took place on a cloudless Tuesday, on the second soccer field, under the bare trees.

  Jon Goblin kicked off, way over our heads, and jogged beside his teammates down the field. When Spencer blew by his two pals with the ball, they started screaming, as did everyone watching, but Jon just snapped taut like a sail in the wind and surged across the field, freeing Spencer’s flag from his pocket and dropping it on the grass.

  “You’re fast, man,” he said to Spencer, as he coasted to a stop and clapped him on the back.

  “You’re faster,” said Spencer, smiling as if he couldn’t have cared less, so it surprised me when he clapped Jon on the back too and told him, “Won’t help you, though.”

  During this exchange, I stood with Garrett in a half huddle. I was watching Spencer and Jon but also glancing at Theresa, who was studying the sky and roping the black ribbon around in her hair. She looked at Spencer and Jon, and she smiled too, sort of. At least, I think it was a smile.

  “What’d you say that for? You’re just going to make him mad,” I snapped at Spencer when he rejoined the huddle.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  I thought about that and shrugged. “Nothing,” I said, but I’d already figured it out, and it actually felt pretty good. I’d never had enough friends at the same time to feel jealous of anyone.

  “Bomb to Spencer,” Garrett said. “Mattie, you decoy.”

  “No one does it better,” I said, and Garrett looked at Spencer and nodded.

  “He speaks the truth.”

  “You see him run?” I heard Mr. Lang say to somebody on the sidelines. “Legs look tacked to him, don’t they?” I knew he didn’t mean

  Jon, although I wasn’t sure exactly what he did mean. I just knew it made me nervous.

  “On four,” said Garrett.

  At the snap of the ball, I grabbed my leg. The kid opposite me froze. I yelled “Aaah!”—which froze Jon Goblin for a split second. Then I darted past my opponent and ran about five yards from the line of scrimmage, yelling, “Here, here!” while my defender chased after me, calling me dickwad.

  Spencer, meanwhile, was gone, five steps ahead of Jon and streaking for the end zone.

  Garrett Serpien actually could throw the ball. His problem was staying upright long enough. When the count hit three-Mississippi and the rusher came after him, Garrett would usually stagger and fall. He was staggering as he threw this one, which is the only reason that Jon Goblin caught up to it.

  I sometimes think he would have caught up to it anyway. He was the fastest human being I ever saw (or at least ever knew), and the most graceful, and when he leapt up to intercept the pass, I knew Spencer’s bravado of a few moments ago was just so much talk. Jon had power here, not just to run or jump but to bend things to his will. That day, the ball seemed to hang in the air for him, like the last apple suspended from a ghost tree. He picked it one-handed, took two steps the other way, and then the yellow jackets boiled over him.

  They did not come in a cloud. Somehow, I could see every one of them as they rose in dozens, engulfing Jon’s calves and arms and throat. He crumpled. Being Jon, he held on to the ball.

  After a few paralyzed seconds, Mr. Lang ran toward him, waving his arms and screaming. The wasps paid him no mind, which made me think about the way injuries always seemed to stalk Jon. In second grade, he’d suffered a compound fracture climbing a chicken-wire fence. Last year, he’d had appendicitis. Now he’d been swarmed.

  The paramedics carried him off on a stretcher. That night, Mr. Arias, the janitor, took a fine wire screen and dropped it over the hole in the field where the yellow jackets had nested. He poured gasoline

  through the screen, lit a match, dropped it, and flames leapt to life with a soft boom, like an echo of thunder. The lawn whispered as it burned. I didn’t actually see this or get to hear those sounds until our neighbors also found nests in their yards and set them alight.

  As the last of the spectators strayed from the soccer field, I stirred from my mesmerized stupor and spotted Theresa still sitting in the bleachers, twisting her hair ribbon between her fingers. I started toward her and, then saw Spencer climb into the bleachers beside her. They both turned and looked toward me. Part of me wanted to run away, not because I was mad or jealous or anything but because the day had resurrected all my old social anxieties, and the sight of the two of them sitting there, smart and shaken and waiting for me, proved more disturbing than the sight of Jamie Kerflack and all his asshole lackeys pointing at me and laughing. I wasn’t used to having people look at me and wait. I wasn’t sure how to respond. Eventually, I just walked over and sat on the bleacher beneath them.

  “Wow,” said Spencer.

  As soon as I was settled, Theresa got up and walked away. Spencer and I just watched her go. When we realized she wasn’t coming back, we got up too and walked the two blocks to Stroh’s Ice Cream, saying nothing until we were crossing the minimall parking lot.

  “She’s kind of out there, you know?” Spencer said.

  “Yep.” In fact, she struck me as considerably more out there than I was, which was saying something.

  After we’d eaten our cones, Spencer called his mom to pick him up and told me to go home. I said I’d wait, but he insisted. He said his mother wasn’t someone you could just casually meet. So I left.

  The next day, Jon was absent, but Spencer and Theresa took their usual seats, and the three of us went on bantering and competing and sidecarring with increasing familiarity.

  That weekend, my mother came streaking into the house from mowing the lawn with yellow jackets on her legs. She was swearing and laughing, and she wound up lying on the couch while Brent and I brought her RC Colas and my father tended to the stings, spread salve, and spoke to her in exactly the same tones he used with his stereo wires. I spent the rest of the morning sitting on the stoop, listening to the yellow jackets hiss around the hole in our front lawn.

  I was still out there when the Foxes, Mr. and Barbara, walked up our driveway. Mr. Fox was wearing jeans and a dress shirt tucked in tight at the waist. Barbara lagged behind in shorts. Her tan had faded, but not much, and the memory of her leg over mine nudged my thoughts away from my father and the ways I might be like him.

  “Morning, Mattie,” said Mr. Fox. He sounded different. I coul
dn’t tell how.

  Barbara peered over his shoulder. Then, slowly, she smiled.

  “Watch out for the hive,” I told them, pointing.

  My father opened the screen door. Behind him I could see my mother up on her elbows, staring.

  Mr. Fox had combed his hair. Even the hair on his body looked contained. His eyes were red, but a pinker red than usual, the color of new skin around a scab. In a few months, I thought, Ms. Eyre’s eyes might look like that.

  “I’ve been going to Meetings,” he said to my father. “I have a Sponsor and everything.”

  “Good for you, Phil,” said my father, sounding welcoming and relieved.

  Sighing, Mr. Fox dropped his hand on my head and started into the house. Without turning around, he said, “Coming, Barbara?”

  “No,” she said, and sat down next to me. She muttered something else I couldn’t quite hear. It sounded like “Go bathe in it.”

  As they went in, Mr. Fox asked my father if he could keep the screen door open. Barbara moaned and dropped her head on my shoulder. Her black hair spilled down my chest.

  “Is it hard to be home?” I asked, feeling her hair and her cheek against my skin, and she sat up fast.

  “Now I remember why I liked you,” she said, and stroked my back. Then she muttered, “Hard to be in his home. I don’t know why I’m even here. It’s why I left, you know? I have to coax him out of bed, tell him it’s all right, that it’ll keep being all right, stand in the goddamn bathroom doorway and make little comforting sounds so he can go to the. . . .”

  Her voice trailed off. I held my breath, as if I were overhearing adult information I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  Inside, I could hear Mr. Fox talking. Mostly, he rambled, sounding too much like someone at school doing a book report, and an unexpected sadness crept over me. I watched the wasps and the noon light in the trees and on the rooftops, and I saw how people roll around the world—to Vietnam and Africa and Ferndale—and then roll home again like marbles in a maze, and sometimes the world tips over and someone slips through an old slot into a new one, which can lead back to the beginning or on to the end, but never out. There is no out.