The Snowman's Children

by Glen Hirshberg

  “At least no one’ll notice you, Ma.”

  I would have laughed if Spencer did, but he wasn’t joking. He was angry.

  “Just consider it my costume,” Mrs. Franklin said, lifting one boot and waving an arm in the air like one of the prize girls on The Price Is Right.

  “What about the other three hundred and sixty-four days of the year?” Spencer snapped.

  “Just imagine how embarrassed you’ll be if your weird-dressing mom takes your friends out trick-or-treating and leaves you alone in your room,” she said mildly. “I’ll be waiting upstairs.”

  Theresa had plopped herself down on one of the cots, her morbid face blank, even closer to dead under the white makeup.

  “Why are you so mean to your mom?” I asked Spencer.

  “She bugs me,” said Spencer. “Let’s go.”

  We collected paper bags from the kitchen and met Mrs. Franklin by the front door. She didn’t speak to us until we’d passed the Tonka trucks and were standing on the sidewalk. Then she touched Spencer’s arm and said, “Longview and Pine. Fifteen minutes. Got it?”

  “Got it,” he said, and raced away down the block.

  Theresa and I just stood there, unsure what to do. Mrs. Franklin was gazing into the branches of the frozen oak trees, humming. It seemed to take her a while to notice us. Then she said, “Go on, kids. Just make sure you meet me where I told him.”

  We’d almost caught up with Spencer when two high school kids in leather jackets and rubber zombie masks jumped out from behind a pine tree and screamed. The effect might have been tremendous, except that one of them got a good look at Theresa as he lunged our way and said, “Jesus Christ, what the fuck is that?”

  Spencer had come back for us, and he clapped one of the high school kids on the back. “Hey, Murder,” he said.

  “Spence,” said the zombie, still staring at Theresa. “You got scary-ass friends.”

  “Don’t I know it,” he said, preening and jiggling his fake fat around. “We can’t stand here talking. We got food to get.”

  We left the zombies by the pine tree and started down the block. There were fewer red-tape palm prints in the windows here, and fewer trees or expanses of unbroken snow, which meant less whiteness reflecting the moon. Spencer seemed to know each gaggle of little kids and every meandering high schooler who passed. Once or twice, he introduced Theresa and me, but mostly he just tugged us along behind him. Always, he kept moving. I felt like I was being taken on a hayride through some haunted country that had proven to be farther from my own than I’d expected.

  At the first house, a scarecrow man sat on the porch under a red lamp with a candy bowl in his lap. I wasn’t sure he was fake until we’d all cajoled each other close enough to jab our hands into the bowl and grab a fistful of Three Musketeers, then scramble backward.

  We were one minute late getting to the corner of Longview and Pine, and Spencer’s mother was seething. “Corner of Lake and Dryden,” she said to Spencer. “Fifteen minutes. If you’re late, I call the cops. Got it?”

  “That’d embarrass you more than it would me,” Spencer said.

  “I am no longer capable of being embarrassed,” Mrs. Franklin said.

  We went on. I had the hum from the air-hockey table in my ears, the crunch of my boots in the snow, and it felt strange, lonely-strange, to settle into this new but comfortable rhythm. I was part of a whole world I knew nothing about, but at least it didn’t make me nervous anymore to have more than one friend walking beside me. It was the first time I had ever wanted to leave home and live somewhere else and the beginning, I think, of my restlessness. Not the beginning of my trouble, and certainly not the end, but a resting place, perhaps, a haven where I felt grounded and safe for a while.

  We checked in with Mrs. Franklin two more times. The last place we stopped was a house without shutters, where cheerful paper skeletons dangled from the porch beams and jerked in the wind, more like tap dancers than hanged men despite the wire nooses suspending them. On a rocking chair with one runner sat a pumpkin with a wig of gray hair and cardboard glasses. Beside it lay an old leather book, and on its spine was a word I did not know: GRIMOIRE.

  Spencer didn’t yell trick—or treat—or even ring the doorbell. He just reached forward, unlatched the door, and yelled “Hey!” into the house.

  “Nice,” I said.

  “Shut up,” said Spencer.

  I heard footsteps behind us and turned to see Mrs. Franklin step up to the bottom of the porch stairs and wait.

  “Hellooo?” Spencer chanted into the open doorway. “Hellaaay?” He was finally acting like the Spencer I knew at school, making exaggerated Fat Albert noises, his laughter radiating all over everything like a searchlight.

  The two residents of the house came to the door huddled so close together that they looked attached. They were old, black, wrinkled, without much hair. The hair they had was white.

  “Well,” the woman said, beaming at Spencer. She picked up something we couldn’t see behind the door and held it out in front of her. It was a plate of homemade brownies, still steaming. I smiled, nodded, thought of Adam Stork, took one step backward, brushed one of the paper skeletons, and set it dancing.

  “Don’t be a baby,” said Theresa. She hadn’t said a word since we had left Spencer’s house, but now she shrugged past me and grabbed a brownie off the plate.

  Then Spencer did something I had never in my life felt comfortable doing, even to people related to me. He reached out and stroked Theresa Daughrety on the arm, while she bit into the brownie.

  “You’ll be eating these,” Spencer said to me over his shoulder.

  I took one, after tugging off my glove first. The brownie felt like someone’s hand, warm and dense and soft when you pressed it.

  “Get up here,” the woman said. It took me a few seconds to realize that she was talking to Spencer’s mother.

  “I’m fine, thanks,” Mrs. Franklin said behind us.

  “She didn’t ask how you were,” said the man. His voice was mostly a whisper, but it crackled and popped like something wet on fire. “She told you to get up here.”

  “We’ll sic Monster on you,” the old woman said. Spencer laughed, and Mrs. Franklin swore. Then she climbed the steps anyway, slid past us, and took a brownie.

  “If Monster were home, you wouldn’t have said a word to me,” she said.

  No one spoke for a while. Spencer, Theresa, and I retreated to a dark corner of the porch to watch the street, the snow, and one another.

  “Grandparents?” Theresa asked, around a mouthful of brownie.

  “Sort of,” said Spencer. “They’re my father’s stepbrother’s parents.”

  I had no idea why, but the peace I’d been feeling all night left me then, as quickly and lightly as a bird lifting off a telephone wire.

  “Monster?” I said.

  Spencer grinned. “My uncle. My dad’s stepbrother. He doesn’t like my mom being white. He doesn’t like anything. He’s pretty cool.”

  By this time, Mrs. Franklin was talking quietly to the old woman, and her shoulders had slipped down to a more relaxed position under her gold coat.

  “Boy,” the old woman said suddenly, and Spencer immediately returned to the doorway. I watched the old woman’s lips draw all the way flat as she leaned forward to kiss him. Her husband bent in unison, so that both of them were kissing his cheeks simultaneously. “Take the rest of these home,” she said, handing him the plate. “And be nice to your mother.”

  Mrs. Franklin made a snorting sound and started down the steps, shaking snow from her red hair. She reminded me of Ms. Eyre, defiant and sad.

  “Maybe next time Monster goes on vacation you can invite us all over for dinner,” she said.

  “You know that’s not fair,” the old woman said softly. “Good night, Susan.”

  “Good night. Come on, kids.”

  We’d gone maybe five steps when cop cars leapt from the shadows at the end of the street and came squea
ling toward us. Red and blue flashes of light filled the air like thousands of discolored fireflies. The cars skidded to a stop and then cops were everywhere, yelling at everyone.

  “Everybody go home,” they shouted, waving nightsticks. “Stay away from the bushes and trees and get inside. Please go home, right away!”

  Mrs. Franklin stopped dead and waited for us, then put an arm around Spencer’s shoulders.

  “Ma’am, get these kids home now,” said one of the cops. He looked like the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island, overweight and white and puffy, with red cheeks.

  “Why? What’s going on?”

  “Lions,” he said, and ran off.

  “I knew it,” Mrs. Franklin snapped. “I knew this would happen sooner or later. Goddamn it.”

  At the Franklin house, we sprawled on the green shag carpet and watched the TV news together in Spencer’s living room. On the screen, everyone was hunting for lions. Somehow, three of them had escaped over the Detroit Zoo wall near Spencer’s house. The cops had caught one of them right away, but the other two were still out there, slinking through backyards full of swing sets and clotheslines, which must have seemed much more like a jungle than the jungle-style environment the zoo had created for them.

  “Oh, my God, that’s right outside,” Spencer said, and we rushed to the windows to watch the passing camera crews. One cameraman was creeping between the Tonka trucks in Spencer’s yard, glancing from his camera to the hedges and the snow-streaked grass. He looked terrified.

  Later, when Spencer’s mother had gone into the kitchen to get us milk, all three of us snuck to the front door, cracked it open, and, after counting to three, stepped out onto the porch.

  “Listen,” said Theresa, but all I could hear were power lines humming through the bare trees.

  “Get the hell in here,” said Mrs. Franklin behind us, and we scurried back inside.

  Eventually, we went downstairs and played air hockey and Murder in the Dark. It was well after 1 A.M. when Mrs. Franklin came down with a half-eaten brownie in her hand, wearing a nightdress that flashed like her overcoat, and ordered us to bed. But it was 2:30, according to the flashing digital clock mounted to the wall, before we stopped whispering about the wild beasts lurking in the bushes, sniffing us out. And it was very nearly light when we growled ourselves to sleep in our sleeping bags, listening for the snapping of twigs, the low and feral sounds of a whole city tilting dangerously toward dread.

  Chapter 13 - 1994

  Three hours have passed since Jon Goblin went home, and I am standing in Shane Park’s grove of evergreens where the flying-saucer slide used to be. My fingers have frozen in my pockets, my knees have locked, and my lips have crusted over. If I stay here much longer, some kid will mistake me for a jungle gym and climb me.

  It’s the kids I’ve been watching. They race over the snow through the tree shadows, their footprints charting their movements in a frenetic cursive all their own. On benches or beside swing sets, in tiny groups or alone, adults slump in varying attitudes of exhaustion or amusement or, most often, both. Today, at least, in the winter sun, it seems as though Detroit has not carried its Snowman with it, or the failed renaissances, or the plant closings and downsizings, or even the riots. And I am as invisible to the citizens of this place as I am to the gatherers in Mr. Morelli’s plaza in the Canaletto painting. But none of that makes what happened here any less disturbing.

  Eighteen years ago tomorrow, twelve-year-old Courtney Grieve had a fight with her mother, stalked out the front door, and disappeared into a snowstorm. She was gone for fifteen days, the next to last of which was Christmas. She came back dead, her head laid carefully atop a pillow, her body lying alongside the John Lodge Freeway. So much time was spent discussing the significance of the pillow that no one connected her murder to the disappearances of James Rowan and Jane-Anne Gish the previous winter. Three victims into his spree, the Snowman remained a shadow figure, unrecognized and unnamed.

  There would be more victims, at least nine children in all who would have become adults I’d never meet but now feel like my own children instead. They followed me to art school and then to Lexington. They have prowled the periphery of my marriage with their mouths open, as if they’re preparing to speak. I am sick of them.

  With a grunt I force myself into motion, striding across the square and out of the park toward the Moto-Court. My nose and cheeks are so numb I can barely feel the wind against them. In my coat pockets, my hands lie like dead pigeons against my ribs. It takes me several tries to fumble my key into the lock and open the door to my room. My skin begins stinging as soon as I’m inside, and finally the stinging becomes so fierce that my eyes well up. I don’t want to look in the mirror. But when I do, my face is red, not frostbitten, and blinking back at me through a haze of tears.

  I sit on the bed and drag the phone book across my lap, flip it open, and scan the page and a half of Daughretys. There are no Theresas listed, but there is one T. The number is in Orchard Lake. I remember going to Orchard Lake once very late on a school night. “Skate-driving, Mattie, watch,” my father had said, and spun the steering wheel to the left and then to the right, and the car slid softly from lane to lane. Our destination had been a bookstore called Iris, with giant pupils wearing spectacles painted on the door.

  “Ruth?” says a male voice on the other end of the phone, as if it’s a password, not a name.

  “Hello?”

  “Who is this?”

  “No one you know, I’m fairly certain,” I say. “But maybe you can help. I’m looking for another Daughrety. You are a Daughrety?”

  The man doesn’t respond, but he doesn’t hang up either.

  “The Daughretys I need lived near Cider Lake in 1977. A doctor and his daughter.”

  “Which lake?” says the voice.

  My breath stops, starts again. “Cider Lake.”

  “Sorry,” says the man. “I knew a motorcycle mechanic and his two daughters over on Crandall Lake. Big Lions fans.”

  “Okay,” I say, “thanks,” and hang up. Part of me feels relieved, which makes me angry.

  Just to try it, I dial Theresa’s number that I dug out of my mother’s old red address book the last time I was at the house. The number you have reached, says the icy prerecorded voice of dead ends nationwide, and I put the phone down.

  The problem, I have decided, and one of the primary reasons for coming back here, is that none of my stories have endings. Spencer, Theresa, Scuzzie, Laura, the Snowman: all of them just go on wandering through my head, their paths crossing and recrossing; none of them ever lies down to rest.

  I remember the day in May 1987, three and a half weeks before graduation, when Scuzzie Li packed up his colors and his box of Daily Racing Forms and left Parsons for good. The furor over my WANTED drawings had long since died down by then, and Scuzzie had returned to his position of prominence, winning the Spring Prize for the third time in our senior year. I, meanwhile, had returned to near anonymity, although everyone treated me differently after my lone artistic awakening. They seemed suspicious, almost, and at first I thought they wondered if I’d stolen my only original idea. But Scuzzie corrected me while writhing on his bed early one morning, in the middle of a free fall from a crystal-meth high.

  “They think you’re an idea bomb,” he muttered. “Tick-tick-tick, go-off, boom.”

  I didn’t see Scuzzie much during those last two years. He continued to eat with me, and he’d drag me off to Aqueduct every now and then. Once, he took me to a cafe called the O-Mei on Mulberry Street for dim sum, and I learned something about where he got his work habits. The food arrived on carts that never stopped circling the room, piloted by white-robed waitresses whose tiny hands dealt plates of dumplings in a whirl of skin and silk and steam.

  But the smile he turned on me when I arrived in his doorway on his last day at school hit me like a blast from a fire hose, obliterating all doubts about his decision to forgo graduation. In all the time we’d spent tog
ether, I’d never seen him look so close to happy.

  I sat on his bunk and watched him arrange paint tubes in pyramids in a deep square tin box. I’d come to tell him to stay and also, I think, for reassurance that I hadn’t let him down. He’d never told me I had, but every time he came to my door, he’d sneak a look over my shoulder to see if the idea bomb had gone off again.

  “Final project,” he said, wiping his hands on his leather pants. “Don’t even know which tube is which.” He wasn’t quite focusing on me. Whatever he’d shot into his body this time had burned his pupils red.

  All the tops had been twisted off the color tubes inside the box. The tubes were pointing in every possible direction like a gnarl of veins in an arthritic hand. The colors inside weren’t what the labels said they were anymore. They’d been mixed into Scuzzie’s trademark spooky, glowing shades and somehow sucked back into the tubes. Affixed to the lid was a square steel plunger. When the lid shut, I realized, the plunger would crush the tubes.

  “The final insult,” Scuzzie said.

  I sat, trying to make sense of it. “Is that the title?”

  “Oh, no, no. I call it, Organ Donor Box. Dedicated to you.” He bowed.

  I lifted my foot and very nearly kicked it over. I wanted to strap him to his bed and keep him there until he slept. What stopped me was knowing Scuzzie’s dreams. He’d been having failure dreams. In one, his father floated over the ocean from China to stare at his paintings and floated away again. He’d been dreaming that, he said, since before he could speak, back when he had nothing but colors sloshing around in his brain. I knew what it was costing him, every day, to stay here. He knew he would never be a significant painter. And I loved him a lot.

  I smiled at my friend, then shoved my palm down into the tubes.

  Paint shot everywhere. I have no idea what he’d done to those tubes, but they exploded, splattering colors all over the box, onto the carpet, into my hair. When I lifted my hand, I saw no palm print, just pieces of fingers and half-joints floating in the glowing muck. Scuzzie hadn’t moved to stop me, and he didn’t laugh. But he lurched forward when I was finished so we could peer together into the tin.