A Christmas Blizzard (12 page)

James was going to say something about Mayo doing great work in transplants, but decided not to. He looked out the window at the Christmas lights on the rambler across the street, a thousand of them burning bright through the night.

“That’s the Guntzels. When he turns them all on at night, I get phone conversations on my radio. I was listening to one when you came in. Man telling his mother why his family couldn’t come for Christmas this year and it was all a tissue of lies about these other things they had to do. Ha. They couldn’t come because they didn’t want to come, was the truth of the matter, and the old lady kept trying to fix it so they could. It was sad.”

James sat down and smelled the gin. “I just saw Faye. She looks pretty good.”

“That’s her art on the wall.” James looked over at a canvas with white drips spackled onto it, entitled
Beginnings, Endings, Connections, Continuations.

“She doesn’t earn much money from her art but she enjoys it.”

“And Oscar?”

“We don’t see much of him in the winter months. He just sort of slows down and he wasn’t going fast to begin with.”

“And Liz?”

“Busy saving the country from totalitarianism, last I heard. Where you staying by the way? I’d have you stay here, James, but Rosana’s got the guest room.”

“It’s okay. I’ve got a place to stay.”

They sat in silence for a while and the old man’s eyes closed. James thought,
What if he croaks right now?
The old man’s chest seemed to be moving but he couldn’t tell.
At what point should I go over and listen for a heartbeat?
And then Uncle Earl smiled and said:

“I had a Swedish grandpa who went crazy here one winter. It was before there were snowplows and he stayed out on his farm for five months straight because he believed there was gold on his land and he didn’t want anybody to steal it. There wasn’t any, and we never could figure out how he came to think there was some, but he was convinced he was sitting on fields of gold. Maybe he read it in a book. His kids he had boarded with families in town so they could attend school and his wife stayed there to see to them, and he was snowbound on the farm week after week through one blizzard after another, living in the kitchen and burning as little wood as he needed to stay alive, feeding the livestock, nobody to talk to, and when they found him in the spring, he was extremely uncommunicative and there was madness in his pale blue eyes. He got himself cleaned up and went to church and plowed his fields but he was mad, and when summer rolled around he got to drinking fermented blackstrap molasses and stayed out late howling at the moon and came home with blood and feathers around his mouth. They sent him to the state hospital in Jamestown and put him in leg irons and my mother wouldn’t let us go visit him but I snuck away, I felt it was my duty, and I found him in a little room, chained to his bed, and he was happy in his own mind, he was living in a castle in Fargo with forty-three servants to wait on him and he was going to spend the winter in Hawaii. He had a pineapple ranch there. It was all clear in his own mind. The state hospital didn’t exist for him. That room with the peeling plaster walls was all a fiction. He was going to Hawaii.”

It was a good martini.

“There was a lot of insanity going around. I remember the faith healer who came to warm us up one winter. From Texas. Waco, Texas. Presbyterian. All a matter of faith, he said. He was a thin man with deep-set eyes, wore a seersucker suit and a straw hat, carried his stuff in a cardboard suitcase, walked into various people’s homes and cried out in tongues and tied fishline to their wrists and sprinkled sparkle dust around them and around Halloween it got down into the fifties, too cold for him, and he was shivering so bad, he couldn’t wash nor shave nor button a button, and he lay there under a mountain of quilts and pleaded with us to give him money for a train ticket home, and we held out until the middle of November and we got tired of having to bring him his meals in bed and we sprang for a one-way ticket to Dallas. We had to drive him to Bismarck to catch the train and we had to put a fat girl on either side of him to keep him warm. And he lost his faith then and there. North Dakota winter made him question the existence of a loving God. He went back to Texas and learned to shuffle a deck of cards so as to put the cards he needed in a place where he could find them. He earned his living playing Texas-draw poker in the back rooms of pool halls and he had beautiful women to keep him warm and the last we heard, he’d been elected to Congress.”

Uncle Earl sat and beamed at him and sipped his gin. “It’s good to have you here.”

“Sorry I haven’t been back to visit you. I meant to.” James stared at the plastic bag, wondering what a liver and pancreas looked like. Did he dare ask for a peek?

Uncle Earl waved away the apology, like a mosquito. “It’s okay.” He beamed some more. For a man who was about to dive underground, he was in a highly jovial mood. “You were a good kid, James. Your mother and dad worried so much about you they never got to enjoy you, but I did. And now look at you. You’re the biggest thing to ever come out of this town.”

“The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

Uncle Earl thought about this for a moment. “I could’ve done more with my life but I’ve got no regrets. I had a nice job offer in Minneapolis once. More money, an office. But the guy who made me the offer had this smirky look on his face like he’d done me the biggest favor and he expected me to kiss his foot—Minneapolis! He was offering me
Minneapolis
! I looked him in the eye and said, ‘No thanks, I’d rather stay where I am. Looseleaf, North Dakota. Good people. ’ Which was true. Leeds Cutter. There was a classy man. Practiced law here. Before your time. Had an office up over the bank. Sat up there and read books and sketched in his notepad and talked about everything except the law, talked about the Milky Way, the Civil War, bird migration, Duke Ellington, the secret of raising corn and soybeans, the breeding of cattle, everything interested him. I never saw him in a sour mood. He and Al and Deloyd and Charlie, we were all best friends. Started the Halloween parade back in 1938, you know. Everytime I saw those guys, it made me happy. No matter what else was going on, we always sat down and shot the bull and had some laughs. Never too busy to stop and talk. I tell you, that is a rare thing these days. So I have no regrets. You can’t put a price on friendship, I say. No man is a failure who has friends.”

“So what’s your big hurry to leave?”

“It is what it is. This’ll be my last Christmas. I can feel it. I’m on my way out, just like that African violet. A race to the finish. My mother took a long time, dying. She’d get close and we’d all gather around her bed and the old worry instinct kicked in and she started asking if we’d had supper and did we have colds and were we getting enough sleep and pretty soon she’d forgotten about dying and the next day she had to start all over. It’s not recommended.”

The old man was starting to nod now and Rosana was in the doorway, smiling, waiting to escort Uncle Earl to his nap. It was past noon. James stood up to go, though he didn’t know where he was going. “See you tomorrow,” he said.

“Good-bye. God bless you,” said Rosana. Uncle Earl was dozing already.

“Want me to help get him to bed?”

“I’ll get him there. I do it every day.”

He touched the old man’s forehead. “Thank you for everything,” he whispered. Rosana reached down and picked up the bag with the liver and pancreas and put her other hand under Earl’s left armpit. “Come on, old man,” she said. “Come to bed, darling. Come, my love.”

 

 

H
e put the crusty old parka back on and a pair of insulated boots and lumbered out the back door and down the alley. The Methodist Men’s Christmas tree lot had balsam firs and Scotch pine and spruce, and a sign said
Closed Pay What U Can
so he took a little spruce and stuck a hundred-dollar bill in the slot and put it over his shoulder. He stopped at Swedlund’s Grocery and bought a bag of strong licorice, a package of Swedish meatballs, a bottle of chili sauce, a box of crackers. He didn’t recognize the lady at the cash register. She said, “You’re lucky, we close at noon.” He was delaying going back to Floyd’s shack for fear of what he might find there—open the door and walk into what? A concert hall where he’d have to sing his aria from
Messiah
? A hockey arena and he’d be the goalie on the losing side? He stepped into Phil’s Happy Hour for a bottle of cognac. The bartender was tall with loose skin, like he’d just lost a hundred pounds or so. It wasn’t early afternoon and men sat at the bar drinking their beer with shots of whiskey and watching an electric Santa in dark glasses play a guitar and sing, “I Yust Go Nuts For Christmas” and none of them seemed amused, though his belly shook like a bowlful of jelly and his guitar burst into flames. An old woman sat in a booth, a bottle of beer in front of her, three empty ones, and yelled into her cell phone, “You do exactly what you want to do because that’s what you’re going to do anyway, so there’s no point in my arguing with you. I don’t want anybody coming to my house for Christmas because they feel they have an obligation to. I would frankly rather spend Christmas alone with a frozen turkey dinner than be with people who don’t enjoy my company.”

The person at the other end tried to get in a word and she said, “No, no—that’s fine—you made your choice, now stick with it. And merry Christmas.” She snapped the cell phone shut and set it down on the table. It rang and she ignored it. The bartender searched under the bar and came up with a bottle of Armagnac. “Kinda steep,” he said. “Forty bucks.”

James gave him sixty. “That’s for you. Merry Christmas.”

The temperature had dropped to forty below zero. He noticed that -40 was as low as any thermometer in Looseleaf went—the little one attached to Earl’s kitchen window, the big one beside the front door of the Westendorp Pure Oil station and the Cobb’s Super Foods thermometer—evidently forty below zero was as much cold as anyone here cared to know about. But he was toasty warm in the big boots and balloon parka that had belonged to the late Floyd. He trudged along the path toward the lake and out onto the ice and got to Floyd’s just as a snowmobile came buzzing alongside, and stopped, idling and sputtering, and it was Leo Wimmers. “Hey,” he said. “I looked for you at Earl’s and they said you’d come out here. Mind if I come in?” He stepped into Floyd’s shack before he could be disinvited and took off his coat and sat down and James poured a couple fingers of Armagnac into a Dixie cup. And one finger into a second cup for himself. For mouthwash.

Leo was hot to talk: “Man’s got to live his own life and not somebody else’s. That’s the dilemma. Floyd got trapped into Arizona. Tucson was Faye’s idea, not his. He had nothing to do with it. She was gone most of the time, running around doing her Ojibway thing, talking up duality and global consciousness and so forth, and Floyd was left to wash the windows and water the lawn. But every January he managed to escape up here for a few weeks and sit in his fish house and enjoy the good life. He loved this old shack. He told me it was just like going to church except you didn’t have to shake hands with people you don’t like.”

Leo took a seat by the fish hole and looked at the bobber in the water. “Liz is always after me to devote myself to the cause, but it isn’t exactly my cause. That’s the whole problem with marriage. Trying to maintain your course and not get sucked into the gravitational field of someone else. She says to me, ‘Why don’t you ever want to go to meetings with me?’ She loves meetings. The Possum Comatosis. The Oak Tree Society. The Citizens For Life. You name it, she goes. Loves to go to town meetings organized by Democrats and yell and wave signs. That’s her. But it isn’t me.”

“I guess I always assumed you were more or less in her camp,” James said. “I mean, you two met at a gun show—right?”

Leo nodded. “I never told anybody this, but I feel like I can trust you, seeing as you’re with the C.I.A. and all. I was there at the gun show working undercover for the F.B.I. And I still am.”

“You’re with the F.B.I.?”

Leo closed his eyes. “You’re the first person I told this to. It’s been a real burden, but then that’s in the nature of the work, and I knew that when I signed on for the mission.”

“Who are you spying on, if I may ask?”

“Liz.”

“The F.B.I. has you spying on your wife?”

Leo tossed back a swig of Armagnac. “She is plotting to overthrow the government of the United States. She and a couple hundred others. She’s serious.”

“And you’re sleeping with her?”

“It isn’t easy, believe me. But the only way I could get into her life undetected was for her to fall in love with me. So I seduced her. They have pharmaceuticals for that, you know. Hallucinogens. Two drops of it on a pretzel and she was climbing on my lap like a monkey.”

“Fifteen years you’ve been sleeping with a suspect?”

“She’s a very nice woman when she isn’t all het up about conspiracies. We have a reasonably good marriage. Except I know that one day I will have to snap the cuffs on her and haul her in for trying to bring down the government. And that is painful, of course. The truth so often is.”

“How exactly is she planning to do that?”

“Internet hacking. She’s got sixteen guys working out of a basement room in the power plant. Your uncle’s retired but he still runs the electric co-op and Liz has established a super-high-speed accelerated Internet center there that specializes in hacking into bank accounts and moving large sums of money around.”

James looked at the little man in the big parka and wondered if a story was being spun here before his eyes. But the little man reached into his parka and opened up a Velcro pocket halfway down the left sleeve and pulled out a badge. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Special Agent.

And then the ice boomed, and Leo winced and got to his feet. “I’ll fill you in on the rest later,” he said, and exited, and the snowmobile engine revved and it buzzed away. It sounded like the cardboard James and Ralph used to fasten to their bike fenders to flap against the spokes and make a sort of engine sound. One summer they rode in and around Looseleaf with flaps buzzing and out the western road to the marsh and laid their bikes down in the tall grass and stripped and went in swimming, the skinny dark James, the skinny blonde Ralph. There was a crystal clear pool with lush lily-pads in an inlet under overhanging cottonwoods and they lay around in there and thought out loud about various things—