Snow Day: a Novella (12 page)

I
DIDN’T GO DIRECTLY HOME.
First, I needed a reason for having ignored the dinner bell, an inexcusable offense in our family. Some story would be required, something to assuage my mother’s anger and minimize the yelling and potential punishment that were sure to come. But most importantly, I needed to get cleaned up before my mother saw me. The blood on my face and hands and coat were hard to miss. I looked like an escapee from a Hammer film.

I decided that my best option would be to circle around the block, slip into our backyard and around to the path between our house and the Schneiders’ and hope that our side door – the door hidden by shadows – would be unlocked. It was. I eased the door open, just a crack, and listened. No sound from the kitchen at the top of the stairs; that was good.

I slipped in the side door, shutting it softly, and then toed off my boots; easy peasy when you’re wearing foot condoms. Then I lowered my aching body lightly and silently down the steps into our finished basement. It was empty. I hurried across what had been my father’s man-cave, with its 18-inch color television set and Barcalounger, then through the door to a small, unfinished work room at the back of the basement. This was where my father once kept his tools and his paints, and where, propped in the corner, still stood a bundle of old fishing rods that he hadn’t touched since child number three came into the world.

I used my father’s paint-stained utility sink and some old rags to clean up. First I rinsed the blood from my mouth and hands. Despite swooshing water around in my mouth like Listerine, there were still bits of George’s flesh stuck in my gums and between my teeth. I dislodged them with the tip of my tongue, picked them out of my mouth with my fingertips, and flicked them into the sink.

I ran the cold tap water over my hands and examined them. The cut on the palm of my left hand from the Grandville’s bumper was jagged, but small and superficial. The cut on my right hand from Luigi’s razor ran across three fingers. It was one clean, straight line, but it was deeper and more concerning, and I hoped I wouldn’t need stitches. My hands trembled as I ran water over them. It was soothing and the pain began to fade as the stream sent thin trails of watery blood into the sink to mix with dried streaks of Dutch Boy’s best. On the whole, the cuts on my hands weren’t all that bad to look at, but they were still a little swollen and red. I knew that when I went upstairs I would have to keep them in my pockets when I spoke to my mother, just to be safe.

I soaked an old paint rag and washed the blood from my coat as best I could, then hung my coat on a peg in the basement beside Frank’s and Rudy’s. Once presentable, I headed upstairs. My mind worked to shape a plausible lie for my delinquency, polishing it carefully as I mounted each tread on the staircase up to the kitchen. To this day, I can’t remember what the story was because I never got to spin it.

As I approached the top of the stairs, something felt wrong. A cold breeze came down from the kitchen, along with a strange, but familiar noise that sounded like static from a radio.

When I entered the empty kitchen, I looked out and down the hall where I had a clear view through the living room to the foyer and the front door, which was wide open to the January air. The static-rich chatter of a police cruiser’s radio drifted in from the street, while red and blue beams of light from the cruiser’s rooftop flashed into our foyer in a circular, pulsing rhythm. My mother wore make-up and had her hair done up. I later learned from Frank that she had planned to go to a Catholic Club dinner that night at Bobby’s parents’ house. There was a widower in the group that took a shine to her and she wanted to look good for him. She was wearing her brown knit sweater over a beige dress and her arms were folded across her chest to help cut the cold night air. She spoke to a police officer who stood on the porch just outside the front door.

The officer held something in his hand. It was my tattered knit glove, the one I’d left hanging from the bumper of the Pontiac Grandville down on Woodlawn Avenue.

M
Y MOTHER BEAT MY ASS
with every ounce of her strength. She was too angry to waste time looking for the wooden spoon, so I guess she decided her bare hands would do. I just laid there silently on my bed, face down, wrapping my hands around my pillow, clutching it to my chest, burying my face deep inside it, bracing myself. She began with one hand, swinging it high over her head and bringing it down with all her force again, and again.

“I told you to never go off the block!” she shouted. “Never go off the block! You could have been killed!”

Soon she was putting all her weight into it; then it became two hands; and soon those hands were clenched into fists, pounding fists that landed blow after blow on to my unprotected rear end –
Pow-Pow, Pow-Pow.

But I swear to God I didn’t care, not a bit. This one was definitely well-earned; bought and paid for. I had ordered up the deluxe package.

Keep it coming
.
I deserve this one
, I thought as she pounded away on my tail.
It’s okay. I’m safe, I’m breathing, I’m in one piece, George is gone, the boy in the cellar is gone, the driver is gone. I’m safe. I’m safe.

Sometimes pain is a good thing. It reminds you that you’re alive.

My mother’s fists were jack-hammering on my rear end. Soon, she was crying. Her tears mixed with her mascara and drew jagged black lines down her face while she flogged me with her bare hands. Her hair escaped the bobby pins she’d used and strands fell about her face. Her unruly hair whipped about as her head bobbed with each successive blow. The yelling was gone. There was only the sobbing and the beating.

In time, she slowed. The tears overtook her; she sat on the floor beside my bed and sobbed. I don’t know how long she sat there because I soon slipped into a deep, impenetrable sleep.

• • •

I woke eight hours later.

Just as I looked over, the Panasonic flip clock on the dresser I shared with Frank turned its leaves. It read 3:00 AM. Frank lay sleeping in his bed on the other side of the room; his breathing deep and steady. Both my hands were bandaged. After unloading all her fear and rage and love and humiliation on me, my mother had returned to wash and bandage my wounds, which she assumed both came from the car accident. I noticed, too, that my pillow felt different. In the soft glow of the night light that had illuminated our bedroom since birth, I saw my pillow case in the corner. It was streaked with blood where my hands had been clutching it and it sat on top of a pile of dirty laundry, waiting to be carried downstairs to the washing machine. My pillow was now covered in a fresh pillow case and it smelled of fabric softener.

I rolled over on my back and felt a throbbing pain in my rear end, and something else, something that was digging into me there. I reached into my back pocket with thumb and forefinger and fished out a flattened Sucrets box. It was completely crushed; like, backed-over-it-with-the-station-wagon crushed. I tossed it over the side of the bed, where it rattled briefly on the hard wood floor. I looked over. Frank hadn’t stirred; his breathing was still regular and deep. The room was silent again, save for the hum and flip of our clock and the occasional soft tick and gurgle that rose from the cast iron water heater against the wall.

I soon fell back to sleep.

F
RANK AND I WERE BOTH GROUNDED FOR A WEEK
, but otherwise, my mother and I never spoke about that night. Not even when she had to pay the ticket the policeman gave her for my part in the accident on Woodlawn Avenue. That’s usually the way it worked in our house. If you didn’t talk about it, it never happened; like the time when the Playboys I had stashed under the bathroom sink disappeared, or when the Lucky Strikes hidden in my underwear drawer suddenly vanished. My mother was good at cleaning house. In the end, everything was wiped clean, and that was fine with me.

The next morning, my mother called the office at St. Mary’s and told them I was sick and wouldn’t be coming to school. She offered them no specifics and they asked for none. I was back to school the following day and, for my mother at least, the matter was closed.

Frank later told me how he, Bobby and Lucy ran down the street after me when they saw the bus turn on to Woodlawn and the accident that followed.

When the three of them reached the site of the crash and saw the mangled bumper, Frank said he nearly shit a brick until he discovered I wasn’t there. He said they assumed I circled back home and were surprised not to find me there. They never saw me fishtail off the bumper or land on the Le Mans, so when I later told him that part of the story he was skeptical. God forbid he should ever give me credit. Frank never said so, but I think he was just relieved that he didn’t have to attend my funeral. He would have been culpable, and God knows there weren’t enough wooden spoons or leather belts in the world to cover that offense.

When Frank, Bobby and Lucy, each in their own way and at their own time, finally asked me where I was that night and what happened, I lied. I told them all I was hiding in the bushes, afraid of being caught by the police who responded to the accident. I never told them, or my mother, or anyone, about what I found in the cellar of that house, or about ol’ George, or about what happened in the barbershop. I never told the police, either. I didn’t have to.

A few days later, it was Saturday, and I was still serving out my punishment – no TV, no ball games on the radio, no going out, no talking to friends on the phone. It reminded me of when they confined Steve McQueen to the cooler in
The Great Escape
, only I didn’t have a ball and glove.

I was eating breakfast by myself in the kitchen, a bowl of Count Chocula and a banana – breakfast of champions. Frank had been paroled temporarily and was delivering his newspapers on the other side of town. My mother was in the basement changing loads of laundry.

When I tossed my banana peel away, something poking out of the kitchen trash caught my eye. It was the latest issue of the
Hudson Dispatch
, the paper that Frank delivered each morning. Below the fold on the front page, there was a photo with a story that gave me a chill.

After checking to be sure my mother was still downstairs doing laundry, I went back to the kitchen table with the paper and looked it over.

The headline read:

It was the picture that caught my eye first. The photo featured a business-like head shot of an old man in a suit jacket and striped tie. There was a logo on the breast pocket. He had wavy white hair, a lined face, and wire-framed glasses. He wore a reassuring smile, but his teeth were bad and there was a gap between his front incisors. According to the story, the man, George Sanderson of Hackensack, had been reported missing by his sister Geraldine, several days ago. She was deeply worried, so the police opened a file.

I was pretty certain Geraldine would never see her brother again, not if the man with the Lindsey Nelson sport coat had anything to say about it. I wondered what they might have talked about before Mr. Deluca’s driver buried ol’ George somewhere in the Meadowlands.

When I turned the paper over to look above the fold, I had my answer.

 

Boy Found Murdered;
Police Open Investigation

 

Blackwater, NJ – January 18, 1975 – An anonymous phone call led police to the body of a 10-year-old boy in the basement of a property on Woodlawn Avenue in Blackwater. After notifying the child’s family, Police have identified the boy as...

The idea that Mr. Deluca’s driver might have coerced ol’ George into revealing a few secrets before he buried him didn’t surprise me, nor did the idea that he might have tipped off the police to the boy in the cellar. That’s not what sent me rushing to the kitchen sink to vomit up my breakfast.

It was the photograph at the top of the front page that started my stomach heaving. I had barely started reading the story when I saw the picture. I stared hard at the photo of the young victim, examining his face, looking into his eyes, wondering if it could be true. The image of the dead boy staring right back at me had a freckled complexion and an odd, shrunken ear.