The Snowman's Children

by Glen Hirshberg

  “Sing for me,” I said.

  And Barbara, who I suddenly understood would never notice my leg against hers—I’d always known that, but until that moment I’d been kid enough to dream—said, “Okay. But you have to do the response. It’s all call and response. Like this.” She sang a pattern. “Ya-ya, yah-ah-ah-ah-ahhh.”

  She did some throat-clearing and rolled her head around on her neck. “This is about returning to the village from a good hunt.” She smiled, but the smile looked as if it hurt her. She began to sing.

  The first few times, she had to nudge me when my part flew by, but I caught on soon enough. Bit by bit, we fell into a rhythm, Barbara stringing up patterns of words to snap in the wind like sheets on a line, and me following, pinning the melody in place with my refrain. The patterns never changed, but they worked their way into me, and into her, too. We were swaying there on the stoop, still singing, when Dr. Daughrety pulled his Jeep into the driveway.

  Most of the time, Dr. Daughrety would keep his car running when he brought Theresa over. But today, he turned it off and hopped out with her and Spencer. I’d forgotten they were coming. We were going to the hospital to visit Jon, and then to Mini-Mike’s so I could trounce everybody with my Mustang.

  “I want you to meet my friend Spencer,” I told Barbara, gesturing toward the Jeep, feeling proud that she could see me having a black friend and also embarrassed for feeling that way.

  “Is he the one whose dad writes for Creem?” she asked.

  “How do you know that?” I said, startled, but Barbara didn’t answer.

  The Doctor strode straight for us, but halfway up the drive, Theresa broke off from Spencer and walked out onto the grass to crouch on her too-white legs and stare at the yellow jackets.

  “Hey,” I heard her father call after her. An expression flickered across his face, surprise or fear or something, and then slid away, quick as a shadow.

  Still crouching, ignoring him, Theresa looked up and smirked at me. The smirk was about her father, I thought. I began to reconsider my lifelong impression of the United Daughrety Front.

  Beside me, Barbara stopped singing momentarily and mumbled something. But I heard her this time. “It’s the little loon,” she whispered. Then she went on singing. Without my refrain, her melody tumbled away on the air, catching on the pines before disappearing altogether. Behind us, Mr. Fox had returned to the doorway, still rambling. My mother was off the couch and limping behind him, saying, “We’re so glad to see you like this, Phil. Come on Tuesday. Bring a salad.”

  “Thanks, Joe, thanks,” Mr. Fox repeated to my dad, and he came out with his head bobbing and his throat twitching above the hair on his neck, as though he couldn’t quite get something swallowed.

  “Well, hello, Phil,” Dr. Daughrety said to Mr. Fox as he stood on the porch. He said “Matt” to me, and nothing to Barbara. He smiled at Barbara.

  Barbara kept on singing.

  Mr. Fox patted my head. His hands were shaking. I watched him draw his shoulders straight and look at the Doctor, and I suddenly thought he might throw a punch. Instead, he said, “Daughrety.” His watery eyes stayed riveted on Theresa’s dad.

  “Is she casting spells?” Spencer asked, as he flopped down on the other side of me and crossed his red-sneakered feet.

  “She’s singing griot,” I said.

  Barbara stopped. She didn’t finish, just stopped. I wondered if these songs had a finish. “Gree-oh. Silent t, remember? And a griot’s a person, Mattie. A storyteller.”

  “Are you one?” Spencer asked.

  Once more Barbara’s smile looked painful. She was watching the tops of the trees. I wondered if she could see the way out, after all. She stood up and took her father’s hand.

  “See ya,” she said, mostly to me.

  Dr. Daughrety nodded to them as they walked slowly away. He turned just in time to see Theresa stretching one slow tentative finger toward the hole in the lawn. “Thrr-girl, get away from there.”

  Theresa withdrew her finger, but she didn’t get up or look our way. So often, when I think of Theresa, I think of her like this: crouched, with her back turned, watching something I had already seen but seeing something else entirely.

  To my surprise, Dr. Daughrety accepted my parents’ invitation to come in for lemonade. I don’t think he’d ever been in our house before. He’d been invited, but he’d never come. Through the window, I watched my father show off his stumpy speakers on their stumpy stands. They didn’t look like things that would one day erupt into glorious sound. Unlike the Doctor’s masks, they served no mythic function. Dr. Daughrety nodded distractedly.

  Minutes later, they were back at the front door. Theresa was still watching the nest, and Spencer had wandered down to the drainage ditch. Something heavy in the air cast a pall over everything. None of us felt very talkative. Not that Theresa was ever talkative.

  “The father makes me a little nervous,” I heard Dr. Daughrety say. “Bit of a wild man, apparently. What does he do, write for Creem? But she says he’s never around anyway, right?” He glanced down at me, out into the yard, and I had the surprising impression that they’d been talking about Spencer, which made me uncomfortable and a little angry.

  Then my mother said, “Phil’s so afraid of everything,” and scratched cautiously at her leg. My father took her hand to keep her from doing it.

  “Barbara’s scared too,” my father said. I didn’t like him talking about Barbara either, especially to the Doctor. It felt wrong, like a betrayal.

  “I’m afraid that’s normal in families of alcoholics,” Dr. Daughrety said.

  “I think he’s leaning on her awfully hard,” my father said. Dr. Daughrety nodded and said nothing, for once, and my mother sighed and held my father’s hand. It was strange to see him participating in this kind of discussion. He didn’t gossip or go bowling; he rarely called friends on the phone, barely seemed to acknowledge anyone outside the house. But sometimes he said surprising things. This time, he said, “She’s letting him. She hates it, and she stays anyway, and he won’t stop.’’

  “She needs to stop it herself,” said the Doctor quietly. “For her own sake. And soon.”

  Remarkably, all of them glanced at me as well as each other when they spoke. I felt powerful, privileged. I wasn’t anywhere near perceptive enough to recognize or comprehend the guilty bittersweet pleasure of discussing a friend who is falling apart while the friend isn’t there. But I felt it.

  Sometime that fall, I had a dream—daydream, maybe—about honey soaked in gasoline and set alight, turning black as it burned. I dreamed about something giant and invisible flitting among us. The Snowman had taken two children the past winter, a boy and a girl. He hadn’t been christened but he was there, hovering, wasp-like, in the restless, hungry air.

  Chapter 11 - 1994

  The message on our machine is banjo no longer, and it greets no one but me. It says, “Northwest, Flight 252, Mattie, nine-twenty-five tomorrow morning. I’ll be there or I won’t.”

  I should probably process this now, I decide, because I sure as hell need to know what I think before she gets here. But I’m late for lunch, and freezing, and I still have to find Olga’s. Last time I was here, Olga’s was a stand with benches, which Spencer and I rearranged into hurdles as part of our first sidecarring decathlon. Hurdling with our legs tied together involved a sort of kick-hop onto the bench seat and then over the back that we never quite mastered. Spencer blamed me for never getting my leg high enough, and he was probably right.

  I can see the trademark Olga’s pennant snapping in the wind. It’s going to taste like an ordinary souvlaki, I find myself thinking, like something I could get in a mall. I almost wish I’d suggested someplace else. At my feet, little sparkles of sunlight shoot around in the ice like tadpoles. Calliope music floats over the trees from the new carousel in the park with its stable of snow-white horses. I am trying to picture my wife here, trying to feel her hand in mine as I show her the stone turtle,
my old house, the Daughrety place. But at the moment, Laura seems as imaginary as the people I have come here to find. From the freshly painted green bus-stop bench in front of Olga’s, Jon Goblin stands to greet me with the help of a cane. I make a sound like a whimper, but I don’t stop; I even manage to avoid slowing visibly as I lift my hand in greeting. His hair has darkened to tan, but it still curls over his cowlick in the same tumbling wave. He’s still lanky, not so much muscled as honed, a steel spring in a work vest. The vest says JON over the pocket and has screwdrivers in it.

  “My God, Mattie, you’ve hardly changed,” he says, extending the hand that isn’t holding the cane. Then he makes the sound. “Hoot-hoot.”

  I laugh in spite of the compression in my chest, relieved to find that Jon’s teasing goodwill still overwhelms all resistance. “Sorry I’m late.”

  “You’re not late. I came early. I was kind of excited.” He ushers me into the restaurant.

  “Anywhere!” shouts a stout Greek man from the waiter station, his voice loud and confident as a square-dance caller’s. Spotting an open table by the fireplace in the back, Jon points us forward with his cane. He doesn’t so much limp as lean, and I suspect he has had the cane for some time, because it glides with his steps like an extra limb. We’re halfway across the room when the doors to the kitchen flip open and the smell of lamb and cucumbers and newly baked pita floods my senses, and I remember what I’ve been missing all these Olga-less years. There really is a difference. There’s a sweetness in this bread.

  The stout man arrives at our table, his black hair matted, his skin sweaty, as if he’s been carving the lamb from the giant skewers himself between orders. “You need menus?” he asks, as if he can’t imagine we would, then calls “Anywhere!” once again to a new family coming through the door.

  “Souvlakis,” I say. “Lemonade. Right?”

  “You’re asking me?” says the waiter. When we offer no protest, he disappears into the kitchen. Our lemonades arrive moments later.

  “Mattie Rhodes,” says Jon.

  I smile, slurp my lemonade, then gesture at the cane.

  Jon shrugs. “Fell out of a tree.”

  “Bull,” I say, but I think again of wasp swarms and ruptured appendixes and the way Jon used to explode out of his legs like a rocket jettisoning spent sections. I watch him grin, and a new sadness slides through me like an ice floe. It could sweep me out of Detroit if I let it. “You were never lucky about things like that.”

  “I guess not. I did it at U of M the day before the first round of the Soccer Regionals. I was chasing Corrinne’s roommate—Lindy Ames, you remember her?—she stole my shin guards, ran all the way across campus, and eventually threw them up in an oak tree in the quad. I broke my leg four different ways when I fell.”

  He doesn’t say this as though it was the critical juncture of his life.

  “Sounds like something Garrett Serpien would have done,” I say.

  “Garrett’s managing editor of Car and Driver now.” Suddenly, Jon smiles.

  “No shit,” I say, but I’m not really surprised. I knew Garrett would find his way.

  Jon is still smiling. “Mattie Rhodes, the Criminal Mastermind. Right here in front of me.”

  I wince. I don’t want to talk about that now, Jon wasn’t part of it. But I realize I probably should have prepared an explanation for my presence and for my phone call to him.

  The food arrives on plain white plates. Lifting my souvlaki, I can see little white lily blooms of tzatziki sauce in the pita’s crenellations, slices of white onion nestled among the strips of lamb, a wheel of tomato atop it all like a bow. I take a bite, and my father materializes in front of me, lips dripping sauce, eyes shining.

  “I think, if I lived here, I would eat this every day,” I say, around a mouthful of food.

  “That’s because you don’t live here,” Jon answers.

  In between and during bites, Jon tells me about dropping out of school a year after his injury and becoming an electrician. Mr. Alight, he calls himself, plucking at his vest. The Man with Magic Hands. He says he wished he had finished college, but he can’t complain. He likes his job.

  I tell him about designing shopping malls and subdivisions. Mr. Atrium, I pronounce myself. At one point, we look up at exactly the same second, catch the expression on each other’s faces, and start to laugh. What we’re seeing, I suppose, is mostly bewilderment. We were trained early on by virtually everyone we encountered to expect more from each other’s lives than there appears to be.

  Meanwhile, I have begun to notice the similarities in our mannerisms: the way we both make jokes, cocking our heads and pressing our lips together at punch lines to keep from laughing; the way we watch the room more than we watch each other, cataloging faces in that gently judgmental suburban-Michigan way. Seventeen years have gone by, and yet in some ways I have more in common with this man, who wasn’t ever quite my friend, than I’ve had with anyone I’ve known since, including my wife. Maybe the ability to fully engage with other people begins to fade after the age of ten. Maybe that’s why everyone I know who has moved away from their hometown fills up with longing, sooner or later.

  I mop my plate with the last of the sweet pita and feel it float in my mouth like lightly crisped air. Jon talks about his wife, the house he just bought, and his six-year-old son, Roger.

  “You have a six-year-old son,” I say, and Jon blushes.

  “Seeing you makes everything seem unreal, you know?”

  “Everything now, or everything then?”

  “Well, I haven’t hooted since the eighth grade, but I keep wanting to answer you with it. So is that now or then?”

  We both sort of shrug.

  “You’re not teaching Roger to hoot, are you?” I ask.

  I should let this lunch end right here, leave this man to his world and whatever sense he’s made of it, and try some other way to locate whatever it is that has always seemed lost to me. I know that. But I can’t do it. I’ve come too far. And Jon might actually have some answers. “Whatever happened to Joe Whitney?” I ask. I can barely picture Joe’s face, don’t have any significant memory of him. But he’s an easy place to start.

  Jon nods as though he’s been expecting this part of the conversation all along. “Would you believe Harvard Law? Hard to get a hold of, these days. Busy dude.”

  “Marybeth Royal?” I’m stalling. I never even got to know her. She was only there for my last year.

  “God, you should’ve seen her in college,” he says. “She was Homecoming Queen three years in a row. First time that’s ever happened. You know, I was her first kiss. You were there for it.”

  I blink. “When?”

  “Remember the last Mind War? Remember the island in the middle of the lake where we went skating afterward? Where Theresa always used to disappear? Perfect spot, man.”

  This first hint of Theresa shoots off little firecrackers behind my eyes. But I’m still not ready to ask about her yet.

  “Marybeth’s a school shrink now, at Orchard Lake Elementary,” Jon continues, as though nothing has happened. And of course, nothing has, except that I’ve stopped breathing properly. “I saw her once at the circus or Pine Knob or somewhere. Her kid’s right around Roger’s age. She married Wally Beck.”

  I start to nod, stop. “I don’t know who that is.”

  “He came later, I forgot. Cool guy; you’d like him.”

  I’m finding, to my surprise, that I’m awfully comfortable with Jon. I envy him less than I used to, but I like him more. There is less malice in him than almost anyone I’ve ever known.

  “Mattie, what are you doing here?” he says, his eyes grabbing mine.

  I don’t know what to say, and finally murmur, “I wanted to come home.”

  “Home? After all these years?”

  Jon stares at me awhile longer. When I don’t respond, he nods, then goes down the list of people he thinks I knew. I remember most of the names, a few of the faces. He tells me
about two of our classmates who were jailed for tax fraud, and then about Jamie Kerflack, who got drunk after his suspension in tenth grade and drove his parents’ Camaro through the high school’s front window.

  “He got shot to death in Southfield last year, being carjacked,” Jon tells me. “I went to the funeral. Hardly anyone we knew was there. His wife was tiny, maybe five-foot-one. She sat there the whole time crying into her hands. I never even saw her face.”

  It’s hard to imagine that anyone I knew then—other than the Snowman’s victims—could be dead, Jamie Kerflack especially. He was such a stubborn, vicious little bastard.

  Behind me, the door to the restaurant opens, and I feel freezing air on the back of my neck. The Snowman’s breath.

  “Tell me about your wife,” Jon says.

  The words fall from my mouth; they don’t feel like my own. I don’t seem to be thinking them first. “I’m not sure how happy we are,” I say.

  Looking down at his plate, which has been mopped as clean as my own, Jon nods, clearly not knowing what to say. Why should he? I sure as hell don’t. I don’t even know what I’m feeling. It could be love or loss. I can’t tell the difference anymore.

  “What about Spencer Franklin?” I ask steadily.

  “Strange dude,” Jon says quickly. I’m thinking he will say the same about me if anyone ever asks. “He lives in East Detroit somewhere. I saw him on TV not too long ago. He’s some kind of preacher.”

  I stopped listening the moment he said East Detroit, because East Detroit is where I called last night.

  “He’s a what?”

  “He was on Detroit Beat, rapping about the Lord. Larry Loreno wanted to set up a contest, Spencer versus Hyper Horst, the stereo guy, to see who could rap the fastest. Spencer laughed when Larry suggested it. Said he’d give him ten pounds of salvation if he couldn’t beat Hyper Horst’s best spiel. Larry thought that was hilarious.”

  “Larry Loreno,” I say. He was the host of Eyeing Detroit, the show that signaled the end of after-school cartoons on Channel 50. He wore brown leather jackets with fur collars and sunglasses in the middle of winter. I remember him looking about twenty years old, standing in the snow flurries on some gray, empty downtown street corner, rambling on about a new night spot or “the incredibly vital revitalization of this incredible city.”