From the Indie Side (3 page)

In the story, Frost is indeed discharged. He
returns to America, where his family is disillusioned by his
strange rants about the winter lands. Frost’s wife takes the
children and leaves him. He is unable to hold a job, and
eventually, as he grows old, his eldest child returns and puts him
in a retirement home with medical supervision. To his death, Frost
talks of almost nothing except for winter and the Snowlings. He
hammers at a typewriter, producing page after page of complete
drivel—rambling passages about quests and kingships and storms and
gods and ice. He is found dead in his room one morning, his lips
blue, skin pale and drained of color. His body radiates cold.

The story ends rather abruptly. Frost dies,
and when he opens his eyes again, he stands in the winter land,
surrounded by the Snowlings, revered and welcomed into their tiny
arms. The story is a curiosity at best, readers seemed to think,
and only a few letters to Gendry mentioned it. None celebrated it;
one reader described it as “neither fantastic nor wonderful, but
interesting.”

It was the only story of Froestt’s that
Gendry would publish, though he received a plain yellow envelope in
the mail, once per week, for the rest of his life. When Gendry died
in 1974, the envelopes were marked “Addressee Deceased” and
returned to Froestt, who never submitted another story to any
publication ever again.

* *
*

The old man wakes up with a start. He looks
to his right. His water cup is gone, replaced with a human being.
All of the chairs around him are occupied now, and he struggles to
sit up, aware that he has slumped a little toward his neighbor
during his unexpected nap.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers loudly into the
person’s shoulder.

The room feels almost full, and the old man
suddenly feels very out of place. He doesn’t belong here, really.
He is not an accomplished writer, only a persistent one. The small
apartment he occupies in the retirement community is mostly
unfurnished, except for a twin bed and a lonely chair and end
table. The rest of the room is stacked with cartons. They are
ancient and so stuffed with paper that their squared-off sides
bulge, their flat bottoms sag. At some point over the years he ran
out of cartons, and could no longer find the model that he
preferred, so he simply began stacking loose paper on top of the
boxes. Towers of typing paper clutter the apartment. He has filled
the cabinets in his kitchenette with pages. The icebox contains
reams of them. His dish rack has never seen a dish, but holds
several hundred loose sheets of paper that fold and curl over each
other.

He has written of the winter lands for more
than sixty years. His writing has not improved with practice. It
employs a passive voice, and is richly populated with fragments of
sentences, and he has never learned the difference between an
adjective and an adverb. He frequently shifts from a first-person
perspective to a third, and sometimes misspells his hero’s name,
using Frost and Froestt interchangeably.

A woman writer stands at the dais now,
reading from a short story that is, so far as Froestt can tell,
about a bastard who gets his in the end. She reads nervously, but
with a certain shaky confidence, and at her last line—“He sits up,
looks around, and never sees the car that lops his head off like a
cantaloupe”—there is a polite smattering of applause.

Froestt can only see the woman’s legs as she
walks away, and the legs of the man who steps up to the dais next.
His pants are well pressed, his shoes shiny brown leather. His
voice is reedy and he says, “We’ve got a few minutes before Heidi
Johannsson arrives, time for one last reader. Any volunteers?”

Several hands go up—the old man can hear the
rustle of sleeves and pages—and he lifts his cane into the air and
waves it around.

The man at the dais hesitates, and then the
old man sees a familiar pair of legs approach the dais—the girl who
brought him water and helped him to his seat. He lowers his cane,
certain that she will intervene for him, and she does.

“The gentleman with the cane,” the fellow at
the dais says, and then the woman appears at Froestt’s side to help
him up. She walks with him to the dais. His feet squelch in his
shoes, his socks damp with sweat. She notices, and with kindness
asks if he will be all right. He nods and whispers a rattly
thanks.

Froestt is small and hunched at the dais, and
cannot crane his neck enough to see the man who has welcomed him
there.

“What’s your name, sir?” the man asks.

“Jonathan,” Froestt says.

“Jonathan,” the man repeats. “And your story?
What will you be reading to us today?”

He tips the microphone down. Froestt clears
his throat and says, “I’ll be reading from my novel.”

“What’s your novel called?”

“The Forgotten Winter Lands,” he says.

“Catchy title,” the man says. “I assume
you’ve been sending it to publishers?”

Froestt can feel the crowd’s alternating
curiosity and disinterest in his story. Sweat dribbles down his
nose. He shakes his head and says, “No publishers. It’s not
finished yet.”

“Well, I wish I could say that I hope we’ll
see it on our shelves one day,” the man says. “But I wish you luck
in your writing, and let’s all give Jonathan a round of applause
for joining us today.”

The soft patter of hands fades quickly. The
woman from before steps up and helps to adjust the microphone to
Froestt’s height. She covers it with her hand and says, “You’re
sure you’re okay? I can’t take your coat? You seem awfully
warm.”

“Thank you,” Froestt says again. The
microphone squeals a tiny bit.

He cannot see the audience, but he can feel
their stares. The thin trickle of sweat down his ribs is now a
steady stream. It soaks into his clothing, and then his coat.

Someone whispers, “The poor man is going to
have heatstroke in that coat.”

The coat quickly soaks through and turns
almost black with moisture.

“The Forgotten Winter Lands,” Froestt reads,
his voice like a crumbling wall. “Chapter One.”

A puddle collects at his feet. Moisture drips
from his nose, from the soaking flaps of his hat. His glasses fog
with condensation, so he removes them, and holds his pages closer
to his face. The paper becomes soggy in his hands, and the ink of
his words begins to run, but it is no matter, for he knows the
words by heart after all these years.

He puts the paper down on the dais. By now
the audience is chattering audibly about the poor man and his
condition. Someone says, loudly, “Give the man some water,” and
another person says, “That’s unnatural. Someone should call an
ambulance.” Froestt hears the words
overheated
and
pass
out
, but he ignores them, and narrates his story aloud.

“John Frost was a sniper of the highest
order,” he says. “He is known for taking all of his shots and not
missing one. Never even the hardest of them.”

Someone groans softly.

“His friend is Martin Jankel, and they have
been friends since the beginning,” Froestt continues, closing his
eyes. He feels his breathing even out, and the words soothe him.
His heart, pounding so hard moments before, calms to a patient
thump-thump
, and each pattern of beats further from the
beats before. “Jankel is the spotter in their sniper team, and
Frost is the sniper, and they are both quite good. Together and
apart, but mostly together.”

Froestt’s clothing grows saturated with
water. It drips from his sleeves, from his dangling hands, from his
chin and nose and brow. The puddle around his feet spreads. It
leaps and dances with each falling drop from above.

“I have to ask you to stop,” says the host,
who steps delicately through the widening pool of water and puts a
hand over the microphone. “Sir, are you—what is going on? Are you
all right?”

“You look terrible,” says the girl. “Come,
sit down while we call an ambulance.”

Froestt shakes his head. “I’m quite all
right,” he says. “Call an ambulance if you must, but please, let me
read until they arrive.”

“Sir,” the man protests.

Froestt leans back as far as he can, until he
can just glimpse the man’s eyes.

“Please,” Froestt says. “I’ve truly waited a
lifetime for this.”

The man looks at the girl, then back at
Froestt. Then he raises both of his hands, palms out, as if to say
All right, it’s not my problem—I tried
. He backs away, then
says, loudly, “Let’s continue.”

Froestt nods and turns back to the
microphone.

“On the day that it all happened, Frost and
Jankel were sent to the hills beyond an enemy post,” he reads.
“Their task was to assassinate a very evil general. He was the most
evil general there was, at least at that moment of the war. This
was World War Two.”

Another groan from the audience.

Froestt’s eyes close as he imagines the
words. Sixty years of words—millions of them, stacked carefully in
his apartment, unread, unpublished. He is old, he is tired, and he
supposes he intends to read here until his novel is finished. He
will ad-lib the ending if he must, but the ending cannot be told
until—until he knows what it is.

The ambulance arrives at the front of the
shop, its turning lights washing the gallery and the shelves in
blue and red. Two uniformed men enter, carrying a collapsed
stretcher between them.

Froestt doesn’t look up, but the host
approaches him again. “Okay, sir,” he says. “They’ve arrived. Why
don’t you come with me—”

“My ending,” Froestt says. “Is this it?”

The man says, “Yes, sir, it’s time for you to
go.”

He puts his hand on the dais and reaches for
Froestt’s arm. Froestt recoils, just a bit, and leans on his cane
heavily. The twisted wood makes a cracking sound that reverberates
through the shop, and someone gasps, and then the cane shatters
like ice. Brown and black shards explode outward like little frozen
chips, and Froestt’s eyes widen, and he stumbles backward, away
from the host.

“Whoa, there—” the host says, and in that
moment four people dash toward the dais: the host, the woman who
had brought Froestt his water, and the two emergency personnel who
have only just arrived, and who drop their stretcher as they run
for the old man.

The girl is somehow quicker than them all,
and gets one hand behind Froestt as he tumbles, and she feels his
heavy wet wool coat go slack as he falls, and then she hears
someone scream, and Froestt crumbles into a shining wet pile of
clothing and snow, and the gallery falls utterly silent.

* *
*

The rest of the program is rescheduled for
the following day, and the host dismisses all of the guests from
the store, and locks the doors. He returns to the dais, which has
been moved aside, and watches as the ambulance technicians shuffle
around, unsure what to do.

“Lucy,” the host says to the girl, who still
rests on her knees beside the melting heap of bluish snow.

She looks up at him. “He was real,” she says,
dazed. “I touched him.”

“I think you should let these men talk to
you,” he says, nodding at the medical team.

“He was real,” she repeats.

The men take her out of the store to the
ambulance to check her over. When they’ve left, the host walks over
to the damp pile of snow and old clothes and kicks at them with his
toe. The old man is gone, as if he had never been there. The snow
fades quickly under the shop lights, turning to water and running
away in rivulets across the wood floor.

“Huh,” he says.

There’s little else to say.

He bends over and grabs the collar of the old
man’s coat and picks it up, shaking out clumps of snow. The collar
has a label, and on the label the words
J. Froestt
are
written in black marker. The words are smeary and damp, the ink
bleeding deep into the label’s threads.

The host folds the coat at the shoulders and
lays it over the dais, then sighs and goes to the back of the store
and into a closet, and comes back holding a mop, and gets to
work.

Short stories have an advantage over the
novel, I think. In a novel, readers expect answers. They demand
closure. But in a short story, there are no such expectations.
Ambiguity is not anathema to the short story, and so when I write
the odd short story now and then, I find myself stepping away from
the microphone just before the final note plays. “The Winter Lands”
is no different. Who are the Snowlings? What do they want from John
Frost? Was Jonathan Froestt’s perpetual novel-in-progress not a
novel at all, but a work of nonfiction?

Having spent over thirteen years writing a
book called 
Eleanor
, I know a little something about
novels that never seem to end. I’m attracted to the idea of writers
who fall so deeply into their stories that they can’t seem to find
their way out again. Jonathan Froestt may have taken that habit to
greater extremes than others I’ve known.

But 
Eleanor
 will be
published in 2014, and I’ve written a few novels that aren’t too
difficult to find. In addition to being invited to contribute to
this anthology, I also designed its cover, something I do quite a
lot of these days. More of both—my books and my cover design
work—can be found at my web site (
http://www.jasongurley.com
).

Many thanks to David Gatewood, Brian Spangler
and Susan May for inviting me to be a part of this fine collection
of stories. I’m honored, and humbled to share these pages with such
amazing independent authors.