A Christmas Blizzard (6 page)

And the man and the boy stood and marched in time to the chorus, swinging their arms, and sang at the tops of their voices:

Earl had no enemies and held no grudges and when a new county board was elected in 1953 on a platform of fighting Communist infiltration and decided to abandon hydroelectric for a giant diesel generator and took trips to New Or-leans, Dallas, Las Vegas, and Phoenix to search for the proper generator, and in Tucson met a diesel salesman who took them out to a fine steakhouse and introduced them to three young women named Tammy, Bambi, and Trixie, and the next morning the board signed the contract, and the diesel was shipped to Looseleaf, the hydroelectric plant was shut down, and the diesel got hooked up and ran, more or less, for a couple of years, and the price of electrical power tripled, and Uncle Earl was fired and replaced by the brother-in-law of an anti-communist, that didn’t darken Earl’s nature at all. He just opened a vegetable stand and sold watermelon, sweet corn, peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, and Swiss chard. And he told James, “Don’t worry about the past and don’t try to solve the future. Bravery and adventure! That’s the ticket! Don’t sit and gather moss. Get up, get out, do what you dream of doing, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, and you don’t need to make that particular mistake again, but at least you won’t get old wondering what if you had.”

Like the Christmas Uncle Earl decided to experiment with candles on the Christmas tree. He had seen this in Victorian picture books, the master of the house lighting the candles and the children dazed with wonder, and so he went ahead—secretly, of course—why spoil the surprise?—and bought an 8-foot Norwegian pine and six dozen clip-on candleholders and let Aunt Myrna hang the bulbs and doodads and gewgaws and tinsel and on Christmas Eve he snuck out of the Methodist church during the singing of “Silent Night” and trotted home and hung the candles and then, when he glimpsed Myrna and the children and the Sparrow family and Aunt Mona and Boo and Sherm heading for the house for the oyster stew and the cardamom buns, he took a little gas torch and lit 72 candles just in time for the whole gang to come piling in the front door, but they made a bee-line for the kitchen, not the living room where the astonishing thing stood in its flaming glory, and when he cried, “Let’s all go in the living room!” nobody budged. So he cried out, “Let’s open presents!” But Myrna was already handing out cups of mulled wine. So, in desperation, and as a sort of joke, he yelled, “The tree’s on fire!” And the whole bunch mobbed into the living room and indeed it was and James’s mother, who got there first, fainted at the sight and landed on little Liz and broke her collarbone and she had to be driven forty miles to a hospital, which cast a shadow on the evening. Aunt Myrna said to him, “How could you have done such a thing and not have warned me?” but it was Earl’s way to do things impulsively, with great enthusiasm. And thereby made a vivid Christmas memory for each and all and on succeeding Christmases the mere sight of a cluster of candles brought it all back, the majesty and the terror of it.

 

 

H
e got to Midway at two in the afternoon and the
Lucky Lady
was pulled up in front of the V.I.P. terminal and Buzz was waiting to take the bags from Ramon and stow them in the tail. Buzz had put on his lucky white silk scarf and his leather helmet. The snow was coming down hard. He followed Buzz to the plane and Buzz asked where Mrs. Sparrow was. “She’ll fly commercial on Christmas Day,” he said. “She’s feeling under the weather.”

“We could come back here and pick her up.”

“We could do that. We’ll see.”

Buddy had the coffee made and a basket of fresh croissants and raspberry jam and all the newspapers, which Mr. Sparrow stuffed under his seat. He buckled himself in and looked out the window at a little Cessna wheeling off toward the runway. No interest in newspapers today—he was afraid of what he might find out. The company was wallowing in this recession and his radio stations were tanking—
why had he ever wanted to get into radio? Dumb dumb dumb—
and the Lake Superior Cruise Line was a loser—
who wants to sail the coast of Wisconsin?—
and the publishing division came out with a magazine called
Sleepers
aimed at people with sleep issues and strong literary interests. Not a success. And in November came that nasty article in the
Mid-Atlantic Journal of Medicine
, a little study jiggered by a disgruntled nobody in a lab coat purporting to show that coyote grass is somehow tied (it isn’t) to a loss of language skills. Sales of 4xPrime went in the toilet. Mr. Sparrow’s marketing people met behind closed doors and anguished over the thing and meanwhile the story spread.

When it comes to the rich, people are anxious to believe the absolute worst!

And so this morning he had no idea, none, how much he actually was worth, $230 million or $150 million or $80 million, only that cuts needed to be made, sails trimmed, which led to an unfortunate story in the paper (
Tycoon Reneges On Promise To Boys
), which was picked up by the local TV news (“Faced with major financial losses, Mr. Sparrow opted to back out of a $5 million commitment to the Boys’ Club rather than sell his luxury vacation home on Hawaii, or his private jet”—there, film footage of the interior of the
Lucky Lady
, the wide-ride leather seats, the buffet laid out on a table, and him asleep, head lolling back, mouth open, glasses askew, thirty pounds overweight (W
HERE DID THIS PICTURE COME FROM????
some embittered employee?), the plane pitched forward into its descent and entered a gray cloud bank and went down, down, down, without a break in the clouds. Deeper and deeper it went, like a cage descending into a mine shaft, the cloud getting darker and thicker. And as he looked out the window into the murk, the memory of that old Christmas of the Great Flu came back to him. His humiliation in the snow. And the laughter from the neighbors’ next door—their old pump behind the garage, the handle loose, shaking in the wind, making a sort of low guttural chuckle.

As the
Lucky Lady
descended, Mrs. Sparrow called him to say she felt better but rather heavy and logy. “Maybe you should go on to Hawaii without me,” she said. He told her that he couldn’t possibly think of such a thing but in fact he already had thought of it once or twice. “Please,” she said. “I’m perfectly fine. I want you to go. I’ll come next week.” “Well, I might do that,” he said. “We’ll see.” Meaning that he’d fly to Hawaii that night.

The plane bucketed in the clouds and he felt a heaviness in his gut and then the plane broke through a low ceiling—a few hundred feet—and down over snowy fields, a farmyard with six big blue silos, a windbreak row of poplars, a stretch of corn stubble, a county road with no traffic moving, and then down on the tarmac. Buzz put the brakes on hard and reversed the engines and they stopped in short order and turned sharply in toward the terminal where he could see, through the falling snow, a few figures in parkas waiting beside a pickup truck, its hazard lights flashing.

The Looseleaf Regional Air Facility had been built with federal money back in the Reagan years on the theory that big shots, if they could fly in on their private jets, might build a factory there, a distribution center, a phone center, a warehouse,
something,
to provide jobs to keep young people from blowing away to Minneapolis and Chicago. The Upper Missouri Progress Coalition (UMPH) had gotten the airport built but not many big execs flew in, and not much materialized—a grommet plant that employed 14, the Taxidermy Hall of Fame, his own coyote grass factory (20 employees, mostly seasonal), and that was about the extent of it.

The plane wheeled around to the terminal, bumping over the little drifts. A kid in blue coveralls came running out with the chocks and one of the parkas turned out to be Mr. Sparrow’s cousin-in-law Leo Wimmer. With the furry hood around his face, and the snow falling, he looked like a last survivor of the Shackleton expedition. He stuck his head in the open door and said, “Wow. Nice. This is the way to travel, I guess.” Married to cousin Liz, a second marriage for both of them, undertaken on a weekend trip to a gun convention in Mandan. Leo had a rather blunt personality so everyone assumed alcohol was involved in the romance, but Liz was a ferocious Republican and so maybe it all balanced out.

Buzz peered out the door and looked up at the sky and said, “This ain’t going to be passable for long, Mr. Sparrow. Forecast says there’s a foot or more of snow on the way. My recommendation is that you zip into town and zip back and let’s get airborne in twenty minutes.”

James put on his black wool coat and his fur cap. “Long time no see,” said Leo. “Liz would’ve come but she had a little crisis. She came home from having four wisdom teeth pulled and was zonked on Vicodin and went upstairs to use the toilet and she pulled about a hundred yards of toilet paper off the roll so the toilet overflowed and it was leaking through the dining room chandelier and dripping from the crystal beads and I can’t get up on a ladder because my prostate is the size of a seedless orange and I’m due to go in for a ream job after the first of the year, so I left your cousin mopping up pee off the good rug and I go out to shovel out the car and I get hit by a snowmobile. Isn’t that just the way it is?” And he clapped James on the back. “It’s good to see you.”

“I’m in something of a rush, Leo. Just came to say hi to Uncle Earl. I hear he’s at death’s door.”

“Well, some days he is and others he isn’t. I mean, everybody in North Dakota is at death’s door if you want to look at it that way. But for many of us, the door is locked. If you get my drift.”

James tried to get Leo moving but the ground crew was gathered around, three men who’d never met a man with a private plane, evidently. Leo suggested a picture. His camera was in his car.

“How about we run into town first, Leo? I don’t have much time.”

“Hey, it’ll only take a minute.” But it took sixteen minutes. His car was parked on the other side of the building. He had to search his various pockets to find the keys. The car door was frozen shut since he’d had it washed that morning. They had to find a hairdryer to thaw it out and that took a while. James stood by Leo’s station wagon, shifting his weight from foot to foot, clapping his gloves together, clearing his throat, pacing, trying to move things along with a show of restlessness. Snow was drifting around the
Lucky Lady
. “How about one of you guys get out a plow and make a sweep of the runway?” said Buzz. The ground crew discussed that for a couple minutes, whether plowing now would do any good or just make the pavement slicker. They decided to wait and see. This was the pace of life in Looseleaf. People didn’t jump to a task, ever. Every problem needed to be looked at from all angles, opinions sought, mulled over.

The terminal was a hollow shell of peeling paint and unfinished concrete—two empty ticket counters and a baggage carousel, never used, and a little office in the corner where the ground crew hung out. The smell of burnt coffee in the air, a stack of empty pizza boxes. He called Uncle Earl from the terminal office who sounded pretty chipper for a dying man. “Remember that time the snowbanks were fifteen feet high and you and me had to shovel and throw the snow way up and our arms got tired?” said Uncle Earl. “And we tied clotheslines to our belts so if there was an avalanche they could pull us out in time? Remember that?”

“I thought you were sick, Uncle Earl.”

“Ha! Some people wish I were! Not sick, just feeling a chill. I crawled into my nest here, piled up some quilts and burrowed down like an old rat and was living on peanut butter cookies and water chestnuts, but now that you’re here, I’m fine. When you coming over? Faye’s tickled to death, she can’t wait to see you.”

His cousin Faye was the one he was hoping not to see, recently moved back to Looseleaf after her husband Floyd kicked the bucket in Sedona, Arizona. She was a poet, a painter, and a professional storyteller. She hired herself out to public schools and went around in a beady dress and a feathery hat and told ancient Ojibway myths such as “How The Coyote Got His Name” and “Where The Snow Goes In Summer,” though she was no more Ojibway than the Pope in Rome.

“I was going to come by to see you,” James said. “But if you’re busy, I can come back after New Year’s.”

“Not up to a thing. Waiting for spring. Waiting to hear the bluebirds sing.”

“Let me take care of a few things first.”

“You take your time. I am going nowhere whatsoever.”

 

 

S
now was falling and blowing sideways as Leo drove him into Looseleaf at 5 m.p.h. and he could barely make out the red light on the water tower, the grain elevator by the train tracks, the old high school and the bell tower of St. Margaret’s Catholic church. A grim-voiced announcer on the radio said that people should drive only if necessary and avoid the back roads. “If you get stuck or run off the road, turn on your hazard lights and hang a red flag from your radio antenna. Do not set out on foot. Remain in your vehicle. Conserve body heat by hugging each other. If this is not possible, use floor mats for insulation.”

“This’ll all blow over in an hour. I don’t know what the big panic’s all about,” said Leo. “They’ve got a plow, the boys’ll get that runway clear in fifteen minutes.”

Leo had a habit of slowing down and speeding up in a nervous rhythmic way. He reached for the radio dial—“Don’t turn it off,” said James. “I need to know the weather.”

The announcer was saying, “If you are stranded in a deserted area, stay with your car. When the wind lets up, spell out the word H E L P in the snow and put rocks or tree limbs in the letters to attract the attention of rescue airplanes. Beware of hypothermia and frostbite. Breathe cold air through your nose, not your mouth, so as not to frost your lungs. And when you are around pump handles, railings, or other iron objects outdoors, do not put your tongue on them or your tongue will freeze to the object and rescuers may not be able to hear your muffled cries for help until it is too late.”