My Blizzard

The blizzard shook the whole town like a cuff on the head and in ten minutes our house was not visible from the park across the street. It was a blessing and it obliterated the Christmas Day funk that had fallen over everything. There had been a two-day thaw and the old snow and raw grass had been only grim, even with the colored lights along the eaves in our neighborhood. I tucked my pants into my boots and pulled on my Klondike flaps hat and, in my dad’s Navy pea coat, I plunged into the storm. It had erased the world and the drifts were almost a foot deep. I walked backwards around the Little League diamond which was crazy under so much snow, the two dugouts and the home-run fence an arc of snow until I saw a figure down by the bandstand, and I knew it was Newton. He was staggering around kicking at the snow waiting for me. We were excited and walked in circles for a while knowing something would happen.

“Did you get a bike?” he asked me, and I remembered the shiny Sears bicycle I’d found by the tree. It had chrome fenders. I’d forgotten all of that in this amazing snowstorm; this was so much better than Christmas. We were both nine. This was fifty years ago and it was a day I want to tell about.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s black and chrome.”

“I got six birds,” he said, “and a coop kit and a feeder. They’re rollers.” I knew his dad would help him put the coop together behind their garage where his older brother kept his pigeons.

“Where are the birds?” I said.

“We pick them up next week. I got the pictures. Did you get any clothes?”

We were standing now behind the bandstand, but still the snow blew through relentlessly. “Yeah,” I said. “Dress pants.”

“I got a million socks,” he said. “I don’t understand how you can get clothes for Christmas.” He said it like he was going to fix it when he grew up. “Come on.”

He led me out past the lump of snow that we knew was the stone drinking fountain. Walking was like some kind of survival drill.

“Let’s pelt cars,” he said. We’d always hid behind the long row of park bushes and thrown snowballs at cars. I loved to throw snowballs, to throw in an arc ahead of the car and watch the car drive into it. My favorite was the bus, because it never slowed after the snowball hit. Sometimes cars would slow or stop and somebody would chase us and once a guy caught Newton after a long run and threw him down in the snow. Today, there were no cars. Indiana Avenue was a blank heaping plate of snow in the blizzard. We made some snowballs and waited, and then we walked out into the street and stood absolutely still in the storm looking both ways.

“It’s like the Twilight Zone,” he said. “Watch.”

He fell backwards there. As far as I could tell, we were in the exact center of the street. He made a snow angel. It worried me, but after he did a second angel, I did a couple there on Indiana Avenue just off Eleventh West.
“Ho!” Newton called and I scrambled up into the biting snow before I could be run over. He was pointing to two headlights coming our way dimly. In a minute we could see the lit square above the windshield: the bus. It was going very slowly.

We backed off the street a few feet and watched it come like a big riverboat down the snowy river and we made a few snowballs, but it was going ten miles an hour and we didn’t even throw. When our angels fell under the wheels, Newton cried out, “Ahhhh!” and then we both ran behind the bus, and hooked the bumper and hunkered down sliding on our boots for half a block and then we rolled into the snow and watched the whiteness swallow the frosted bus lights. We walked in the beautiful new crisp bus tread for a block or two, sort of lost, the whole neighborhood on each side in disguise, and then we were on the bridge and the old river was below us, cut and narrowed into a new contour by the falling snow.

This was the edge of our knowledge. We were not to cross the bridge and we were not to go down by the river. Across the way were the oldest houses in the city and they were not fine houses, but shelters built long ago in this lowland and they weren’t even all facing the same way, but two dozen wooden houses built wherever they could be. There were apple and pear trees here in profusion and we stole apples and pears all summer long. Everyone in our neighborhood carried a little tiny Morton Salt container in his front pocket along with a pocket knife and, in Newton’s case, matches. We’d steal the apples and then sit in the park and salt the slices and eat them like pirates on furlough. We’d been chased from the yards over there by men and women who didn’t have children and who knows what they would have done if they’d caught us.

I watched the snow falling into the dark water and like everything else it wanted to hypnotize me and then I saw Newton appear on the riverbank running past Millard’s house. He was going to slide down the embankment, and I saw it all. We’d been down there twenty times, all forbidden, and we had thrown things in the river and thrown rocks at bottles, and now in the curtain of snow, Newton left his feet and slid down the hill and he was too fast and it was like something crazy: He went right into the water. We’d never been in the river, not once, not even in the summer. I knew there was no way he was going to stop and he was going faster when the snow parted and he disappeared into the Jordan River.

I ran around the bridge and could hear him swearing. I slid down the short hill on my feet as if skiing and I had to throw myself down to stop and I met him where he crawled on all fours onto the snowy riverside. “Oh shit,” he was calling over and over. His face was white and he was crying and he kept repeating those words. He was soaked and stood with his legs apart and his arms out. “Am I going to die?” he said.

“No,” I said. “Let’s go home.” The snow was thick and I had him by the elbows. I didn’t know if he was going to die or not. You die in the books. His house was two blocks away. He was trembling and a little bluish, but he could walk and I dragged him up toward Indiana Avenue. We fell several times getting to the top, and when we did, we heard a scream.

“What the hell?” he said, and we turned and saw something across the river behind one of the strange houses and it was a figure playing with a black dog. The person was waving a red cloth and the dog was jumping and tearing at it. The person screamed again and it was a woman and then she screamed again and fell down and then she cried, “Help me.”

Newton had stopped crying, but he was very wet and very worried. “Let’s go,” I said, and we pushed through the wind-driven snow. In a minute we couldn’t see the figure anymore, but there were still screams and now the dog was barking, muffled through the storm.

Newton pulled his arm from me; I guess we’d been holding gloves, and he said, “Go see what that is and I’ll see you later.” Moving had warmed him up and he was going right along.

“OK,” I said and turned away, the snow now at my back. There still wasn’t a car on any street, and it was impossible to determine where the streets even began. Everything was gone. Across the bridge I saw the woman and the dog in the river bottom. Now the dog was doing a sort of dance around the woman who was on her knees in the snow. The dog had the red cloth and waved it like it was a game. I called, but he kept at it, and then I crossed the bridge and descended the slope, falling finally and sliding down on my butt.

It was a woman and she was naked. I have no idea how old she was, but her face was savaged with crying and she was only white and blue, and in some stories the person who was me would look away, but I did not look away, and I saw her body entire, the hair below her belly and her hanging breasts white in the white universe. There are more than a thousand whites in this world. She was terrified of the dog and I stood between her and the dog and now the dog wanted to play with me and I saw the red rag was a shirt and I grabbed one end and then quickly reached and snagged the other end from his mouth. He bounded on me with his front paws. He was heavy, but I pushed him down. I wadded the shirt up and stuffed it inside my coat and I pushed the dog away again. I have never handled a dog that way in my life, but I was ready to kick him. He sat, perplexed. The shirt was gone.

Now I felt the woman’s hands on my back and she pulled herself up and leaned against me barefoot in that snow. “Is this your shirt?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said. She had taken my arm now and was leaning against me, her hair in strings. There was blood on the inside of one of her legs and her arms were marked red where the dog had raked her.

“Where do you live?” I asked her.

“There,” she said. She pointed to the second house, one side coated with the blown snow.

“Can you walk?” I said. “I can’t carry you.”

“Yes,” she said. She was acting as if it weren’t cold at all. I have no idea what the two of us looked like climbing up the river hill, but I pulled her up the incline and I watched her all the way feasting on the strangeness. A word came to my mind: disorder. There was some disorder she had. I’d never seen such a human.
The dog was gone along the river and I could see him heading up toward the iron bridge. There were four snowy steps at her house and I pushed her up these. She looked real for the first time now against the old house and she stumbled against the door before disappearing inside.

This is when I remembered the shirt and I just dropped it there on the wooden planking.

The snow fell unabated, great sheets of eternal snow on Christmas Day, real snow that I could now feel melted in my boots and around the cuffs of my gloves. I had to walk over to Newton’s and see how he was. My mouth was shut and I walked in the magnificent weather, the firmament of snow holding me up.