The Snowman's Children

by Glen Hirshberg

  “Maybe he ties you up,” I said. I leaned back and closed my eyes.

  Brent is curled up—in a basement somewhere—on a concrete floor, against an old furnace that makes occasional kicking sounds way down inside, as if there were something alive in there, about to be born. There’s a window high on the wall with a white shade drawn, an overhead light spotted with bug wings, exposed pipes. The Snowman appears as a shadow, and Brent screams, “Fuck off!” at him, but his voice comes out croaky, and his lips are sucked in tight, the way they get on fast fairground rides.

  “Does he feed you?” Spencer asked, half dazed, as though he’d been dreaming, too.

  “Chef Boyardee,” I said. “He wants you to like it.”

  “Do you get dessert?”

  “Ho-Hos.”

  “Gross,” said Spencer. “My mom says the stuff in Ho-Hos causes cancer.”

  “I heard some guy got cancer from a Whopper.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “There was a tumor in the meat. A guy bit into it, and it squirted all over his face, and then he got cancer.”

  “You’re sick, Mattie.”

  “I’m just telling you what I heard.”

  It was a delicious night.

  The next afternoon, Spencer and I walked to the Burger King for lunch. A new snow had fallen overnight. The world looked familiar again, except for the little hands outlined in red in every other window we passed.

  We hadn’t even cut past Cider Lake when we spotted our first policeman. He was leaning against a lamppost, snapping gum in his mouth. When he saw us, he smiled, then swore and fished a Chap-stick out of his uniform’s shirt pocket. As soon as we’d rounded the bend, Spencer grabbed a handful of snow and pitched it at the nearest house. It hit the cedar siding next to the front door and popped like a big wet bug. At the next house Spencer did it again, except this time he hit a window, and we took off down the block.

  “What are you doing?” I asked after we’d slowed.

  “Marking territory,” he said. “A little game we play with the cops in our neighborhood. Especially white cops.”

  I thought the words sounded weird in his mouth. “You don’t like white cops?”

  Spencer shrugged. “It’s just a game.”

  Dropping a few steps behind my friend, I scraped some ice-crusted snow off the hood of a station wagon and pegged him in the back of the neck. Laughing and screaming, we scrambled up the hill behind the Marathon station and hit Telegraph Road, red-faced and sopping. The cuffs of our jeans hung heavy over our boots and dripped snow into our socks. Our soaked scarves cleaved to our necks so we couldn’t get our gloves underneath to peel them back and ease the itching. Together, we stomped into the Burger King parking lot.

  Always on Saturdays, this was one of the places where kids in my neighborhood went, but more kids were there today than I had ever seen before. Dozens of my schoolmates were seated around tables in the same configurations that they usually formed during recess or outside lunch. Older teenagers were milling around the parked cars, kicking through snowdrifts in the center of the lot and throwing ice balls at the no parking signs on the curb. First- and second-graders were crawling all over Burger King’s pathetic plastic swing set and tent full of red plastic balls. I had never seen anyone using that equipment before. The ordering line stretched out the door, and by the time we got to the counter, they’d run out of french fries. Spencer got the last hamburger patty. Everyone who came after us got fish.

  Quite a few parents had come with their kids, most of them standing sheepishly in the back like chaperons on a field trip. Every now and then one of them would say something and the others would frown and shake their heads and search the crowd for their children, who ignored them.

  For a while, Spencer and I lurked near the counter, listening to three girls we didn’t know tell maybe ten other girls that they took intermediate ballet class with Amy Ardell on Saturday mornings. She wore green leotards, they said, and got the teacher mad because she wouldn’t put her hair in a ponytail.

  I spotted my brother crouched at a cluster of tables among most of the other nine-year-olds he knew. I couldn’t help but wonder how he did it. Friends flocked to him.

  “Isn’t that your brother?” Spencer said over my shoulder, and started in his direction. I wished he hadn’t, because I knew Brent would rather I left him alone.

  “Hey, Brent,” said Spencer cheerfully, and snaked two french fries from my brother’s tray. “Thanks, man. Bite of my Whopper?”

  Brent looked at where the two missing french fries had been. He had his hood up and his red ski jacket wrapped around his shoulders. He wanted me gone so much that his hands, palm up, kept twitching on the table like rolled-over spiders. It wasn’t that he hated me. He just never knew what I was going to do. I’d seen him have the same reaction to my father once or twice. I’d had that reaction to my father too.

  Without acknowledging us, Brent slid over one chair. I sat down next to him and nodded, but he wasn’t looking at me. I wanted to say something older-brother-like and smart and not embarrassing. But I couldn’t think of anything.

  Spencer took another fry.

  “Don’t,” I said, and then—because it was the only thing that came to mind—I started to sing, “I am Leonardo, I am a retardo, I live on the ninety-ninth floor.”

  It was, at least, a brother memory, a stupid song from a long time ago that we’d learned somewhere and sung endlessly in the backseat during car vacations. It did nothing to make Brent happy I was there. I kept singing anyway, and eventually he said, “Shut up, weirdo,” but he sounded less harsh than either of us might have expected.

  Spencer took a fry from the kid next to him. His name was Randall, I think, a tiny sometime-friend of Brent’s whose top lip turned out slightly and looked perpetually fat. I don’t think Brent liked him much. Randall shrank back against his chair.

  “Jesus Christ, kid, don’t be scared of me,” Spencer said.

  For a second, Randall didn’t move. Then, with no warning whatsoever, he jammed his little elbow into Spencer’s ribs, ripped his tray out of reach, and announced, “I ain’t scared of you, butt-wad.” He stuffed a fistful of fries into his mouth while Brent bounced up and down with glee.

  I thought Spencer might actually be hurt, from the way he clutched his side. Then he smiled. “Hey, Mattie,” he said, in his most resonant voice, the one that would become his Shepherd voice. “Think we should tell them what we saw last night, over in that basement near the lake?”

  Everyone at the table went quiet. Several tables of kids around us went quiet too. My little brother stared straight at me for the first time all day, his face scrunched into a question mark.

  I shrugged.

  Only Randall kept eating, folding fries into every corner of his mouth like tabs of X-ray film from the dentist. He chewed awhile, glared at Spencer, and finally, with his mouth full, he said, “What’s grosser than a dead eleven-year-old in a garbage can?” A good thirty seconds passed before he swallowed his fries and continued. “A dead eleven-year-old in ten garbage cans.”

  All of us burst out laughing, although we already knew the punch line. It had been a dead-baby joke, but it was a Snowman joke now, which made it ours.

  Chapter 16 - 1977

  Never in my life had I come up with so many excuses to go outside as I did in the weeks following Amy Ardell’s death. When the Snowman kidnapped and then killed Edward Falk and Peter Slotkin one weekend apart after two major snowfalls, I offered to walk the neighbors’ dogs, left my lunch box—on purpose—at the new bus stop at the end of our street (Mrs. Jupp insisted we all take the bus, no matter how close we lived to school; no more walking), and did anything else I could think of to get out, especially right before dinner when the dark pooled under the maple trees. The whole neighborhood became a sort of haunted-house ride, complete with winter light, drifting snow ghosts, and at least one monster. Sometimes Brent would come with me. Often I spot
ted other kids who’d gotten out also, and we’d chuck ice balls at each other, shoot glances at the twitching shadows, giggle uncomfortably, and finally race back inside.

  Evenings, I did my homework early so I could watch the nine o’clock Special Update with my parents. Assorted news reports detailed the progress of the investigation. One revelation involved the discovery of a mild sedative in the blood of each victim, leading police to draw conclusions, at last, about the Snowman’s method of murder: “He drugs them just enough to put them to sleep,” a police department spokesman said. “Then—very gently, wearing gloves, so that he leaves no marks of any kind in the skin—he just closes up the victim’s nose and mouth. Like this.” The spokesman made a delicate pinching motion in the air, as though picking a bug off a plant.

  Most nights, though, there were no revelations, just footage of kids crossing streets among a phalanx of cops or cars churning through slush in a shopping-mall parking lot. The reporters informed us that all we could do was wonder where, when, and how this inhuman monster will strike next. Every night, my father would ask my mother why we had to subject ourselves to this horror while she would sit on the couch under her half-knitted quilt, hypnotized. Later, she’d creep up to the doorway of my room, not knowing I was awake, and lean into the hall light so that her silhouette stretched across the floor like the shadow of an evergreen.

  School got stranger with each new kidnapping. Within five minutes of the first bell, a messenger from Mrs. Jupp’s office would appear at the door of our classroom and wait as Ms. Eyre took attendance. When she said the name of a kid who was missing, the rest of us would swivel toward the empty seat and then one another until someone said, “Oh, yeah, I talked to him yesterday. He’s sick.” If no one said anything, the whispering would start, and it would continue all day long.

  Ms. Eyre had had more surgery on her shattered cheekbones over winter break, and her face looked less ghoulish now. She’d grown paler, though. All those surgeries and treatments required that she shield herself from even the wintertime sun. She looked frail, like a china plate someone had broken and glued back together, minus one or two tiny all but unnoticeable chips.

  At recess, an all-new team of elderly volunteer security guards would station themselves at twenty-yard intervals along the perimeter of the woods. They’d face the playground, not the world outside, so they could keep us in sight. Sometimes, when the industrial-colored Detroit snow clouds closed over the school, I imagined an army of Snowmen emerging from the woods and mowing down the helpless guards in rows.

  In the classroom, Theresa dominated as never before. At the end of January, we had Gunning for Gum Balls Day. Any right answer earned a pull on Ms. Eyre’s candy dispenser. Theresa earned her first pull five minutes after class began by reeling off sixteen consecutive world capitals. The last of them was Reykjavik, which she also spelled. The machine yielded three gum balls to her tug. When Theresa put gum balls in her mouth, it meant she was satisfied or bored and would let someone else win for a while. This time she put them in her pocket, and on her way back to her seat she delivered invitations to her birthday party and the 1977 Mind War. She invited Spencer and me, Jon Goblin, and Marybeth Royal, the new girl from Toronto who always wore button-up skirts with the bottom button left undone so you could see her knees. Whole days, I remember, my eyes would drift toward that bottom button, the open clasp.

  “Shit,” Spencer murmured as Theresa returned to the Solitude Desk. “She’s in no-mercy mode.”

  By lunchtime, she had earned fourteen pulls on the gum-ball machine, and Ms. Eyre had ruled her ineligible for the afternoon session. Spencer and I had earned the only other pulls, a couple a piece, mostly while Theresa was in the bathroom. I beat her on Current Events, which had pretty much become Snowman Trivia. That day’s question involved a psychological profile from the morning paper. I still remember the article, which was printed alongside a sketch drawn from the police psychologist’s best guess.

  At recess, I gave all my gum balls to Garrett Serpien. The insides of those balls had no flavor whatsoever. It was all on the coating, a strawberry spray. Once that wore off, it was like chewing your tongue. Meanwhile, Theresa spent the entire lunch period wandering between the guards near the perimeter of the schoolyard. It was Spencer who noticed her dropping gum balls in the snow, one by one.

  “I don’t really know how to talk to her,” he said to me and Jon and Garrett and Marybeth. “It’s like talking to a goldfish. A goldfish that can spell Reykjavik.”

  Everyone nodded, me included. I felt guilty, standing there, not because of anything I’d done but because it all felt new and thrilling to me: being just another neighborhood kid, having at least one shared demon, not understanding Theresa because I was more like everyone else—except that I would rather have been with her. I wanted to fire an ice ball at her like a harpoon so I could drag her back to us.

  In February, Detroit experienced a dry spell. The temperature rose above freezing, and hysteria over the Snowman hit a peak and then dulled just a little. Cops still closed around us at intersections and escorted us through crosswalks. Parents still left work by three so they could be at the bus stop ahead of their children. But at least they were allowing us to play outside on the 40-degree days, after issuing the usual precautions. The nine o’clock Special Update was cut from thirty minutes to fifteen. Psychiatric profiles and columns about possible leads sank below the fold of both newspapers into a semipermanent home at the bottom right corner of the front page, outlined in blue. No one believed he was gone; we could still feel him, like the weight in the weather before a storm. We were just sick of talking about him.

  My parents had their usual argument on the morning of Theresa’s birthday about whether the Mind War was healthy for me. This year, however, I went into the kitchen and announced, “Someone really needs to destroy her. For her own good.” Then I smiled.

  They both looked at me, my baffled father and my lonely mother. I don’t know what had made me realize she was lonely.

  “You do that,” my father said. “Bring us home an Honor Feather.”

  My mother put down the baking pan she’d been drying on the counter and said, “If someone doesn’t get her out of that house, there’s going to be trouble. Huge trouble.”

  My father jerked as if she’d stuck him with a safety pin. “Jesus Christ, Alina. What kind of trouble, exactly?”

  “Sorry,” she said, and dropped her head on his shoulder. I thought she was about to cry. I had no idea what was going on.

  “What about some sympathy for him?” said my father. I thought he meant the Snowman for a second. Then I had no idea what he meant.

  My mother made a sound that could have been a laugh or a sob or neither, but my father seemed to understand it, because he stopped talking and touched her hand with his.

  Moments later, Mrs. Franklin honked out front and I grabbed my coat from the hall closet. My mother followed me to the front door, stuck out her head, and waved. Mrs. Franklin didn’t turn off the car or roll down her window to the cold, but she waved back with one gold-mittened hand as I piled into the front seat of her rust-wracked Impala next to Spencer.

  We slid down the street, and the bright morning light flashed and faded through the bare trees as the sun slipped from cloud to cloud. Neither Spencer nor his mother said anything. When we pulled up in front of the Daughrety house, I got out of the car, let Spencer slip wordlessly past me, then turned back and said, “’Bye, Mrs. Franklin. Thanks.”

  She said something I didn’t hear because Spencer pegged me in the ear with a snowball, and I swung around and raced after him. We threw each other to the ground in the Daughretys’ front yard and rolled around a little; then Spencer got to his feet, spun on his heel like an army sergeant, and tromped onto the Daughrety porch as his mother drove away. He jabbed a finger in the doorbell and yelled, “Hellooo? It’s wet out here.”

  I swear to God, I remember my next breath, a sweet stinging thing, opening like
the petals of a frozen flower and sticking in my lungs. There are days, long strings of days, when I believe I’ve never dislodged it since.

  Barbara Fox opened the door in her stocking feet. She acted as if she’d always been there. She had been, it turned out, for months, just not when anyone else was around. She was wearing a kilt, knee length, with her hair in a black bow not all that different from Theresa’s. Thinking this gave me all sorts of queasy sensations I tried to ignore. She took Spencer’s scarf, his coat, and my coat, and as our hands brushed she squeezed her fingers around mine.

  “Are you baby-sitting?” I said, almost naturally, knowing it wasn’t true. The queasiness inside me got worse.

  “I’m here to watch you rout the Queen of Silence,” she whispered in my ear. Then she squeezed my hand again, lined up my butt with her foot, and nudged me forward into the hallway. She’d lost her African tan; she was pale, wan, a Detroiter again.

  During the next hour, I hardly saw her at all, mostly because I avoided her. Theresa had burned the popcorn balls, but her father took a tray of them around anyway. They tasted like raspberry sauce over crunchy ashes.

  “Looks like brains,” Spencer said, but he ate one anyway.

  I sat with Jon and Spencer. Marybeth Royal came with the girls from Theresa’s church, though she sat closer to Theresa than anyone else. A few times, Theresa whispered something in Marybeth’s ear, and both of them giggled. It was a strange sight, Theresa giggling with a girl. When I leaned over to say something to Jon, I found him watching Marybeth. Every time she smiled, he did too.

  Theresa’s presents seemed lifted from some generic birthday-party catalog. The best were a bright red backpack and a hand-carved doll that had probably come from one of the booths at the Ethnic Festival downtown. Spencer and I bought her a miniature gum-ball machine. You’ll need this when we start beating you in class, we’d written on the card. She smiled when she read it and said “Thanks,” but she didn’t look up. Then she said something else to Marybeth, who giggled again.