Snow Day: a Novella (3 page)

They had us from two angles so now our fort offered no cover. Then Frank showed up and things got worse. Jimmy and Carl threw hard but Frank had a cannon for an arm. Everyone knew it and everyone feared it.

My brother Frank was a sports fiend – baseball, basketball, wrestling, you name it, but baseball especially. He had a nasty fastball that he mixed up with a scary lollipop curve. In fact, he was called up out of Little League to play with the older kids in the Babe Ruth League a year earlier than the rules permitted.

Baseball was one of the few things Frank and I had in common, though we never played ball together. While Frank was pitching in the Babe Ruth League and played for the American Legion team, I was still down in Little League, making my way as a weak-hitting catcher on the team sponsored by Charles Alliots Plumbing.

Our coach – Mr. Deluca to the kids, Uncle Nick to his nephew Andrew, our shortstop – was an interesting character. He was the first and only Little League coach I ever knew who wore a business suit to practice. He sported a salt-and-pepper beard trimmed to a Van Dyke and wore three-piece suits, always black, and he carried a cane with a brass handle in the shape of a horse’s head. He also smoked a lot, like a chimney.

Mr. Deluca always came to practices and games with a friend. We never knew his name, but he wore dark glasses and drove Mr. Deluca everywhere, so we just called him
The Driver
. He was a barrel-chested man, maybe an ex-football player, with a crew cut, who always wore a sport coat, even on the hottest days. It was usually a tacky plaid sport coat that reminded me of Lindsey Nelson, the New York Mets broadcaster renowned for his bad taste in apparel. The driver would chauffer Mr. Deluca to every practice and then stand just behind the backstop, silent and watchful.

Frank said the whole thing – wearing suits and sport coats to baseball practice – was gay. Frank figured that unless you were a cool NFL head coach like Tom Landry or Hank Stram then you had no business wearing a suit on a ball field, especially a baseball diamond. But it never bothered me. If Mr. Deluca didn’t care that my batting average was well below the Mendoza line, then I wasn’t going to care about how he dressed.

At each practice Mr. Deluca had a routine. He hit ground balls to an infielder while still balancing a cigarette between his fingers or dangling it from his lips. The kid scooped up the ball and threw it to first, then it came home to me, where I fed it back to Mr. Deluca and the drill would start all over again with the next fielder. When the ball came in to me from Johnny Bennetti, our hard-throwing first baseman, the ball would zip through the air on a rope and land in my catcher’s mitt with a
hisssss-pop
sound. I thought Johnny had a gun for an arm until I saw Frank fire the ball. Johnny made the ball hiss like a little snake. Frank? His throws hissed like a monster cobra, and man, did they bite.

Frank’s first snowball hit my left ear with an explosion of pain, sending snow and ice into the up-turned hood of my coat and down my back. The impact put me on the ground hard where I could feel the corner of the tin Sucrets box in my back pocket digging painfully into my rear end.

I jumped up and returned fire, missing Frank by a mile. He laughed. Not only was I a lousy hitter, but this catcher had a glass arm as well.

Snowballs buzzed in the air like angry insects, the laughter was contagious and we were making great memories. At least we were, until Jimmy Barnes fell off the garage roof.

Crazy Jimmy, another kid who was lightly dressed for the January snow, didn’t have snow boots. He had on a pair of old canvas Keds with worn soles and he lost his footing pretty easily on the snowy shingled roof. Jimmy shouted, when his feet slipped out from under him.

“Oh, shit!”

What happened next took place in seconds, but for those of us who watched and recalled it later, the sight played out like an old Super-8 movie running through a bad projector. The action slowed and flickered and stuttered, and still does in our memories.

There was an immediate and incredulous cease-fire when Jimmy shouted. We watched, mouths agape, as he fell on his tail and began sliding down the inclined roof. He rolled over, writhing and clawing at the icy slope. In a last futile attempt to avoid the precipitous fall ahead, Jimmy grabbed the rain gutter. Screws creaked and screeched as they were yanked clean out of the wood frame. Small pieces of shingle, wood and tin flew into the air like confetti. As Jimmy sailed through the air, gutter in hand, Lucy let out a gasp. Finally, crazy Jimmy and the gutter landed in our yard, right in the middle of our snow fort. For the few terrifying seconds that followed, we just stared, wide-eyed and silent, wondering if he would get up.

Lucky for Jimmy, his fall was softened in part by our stockpile of snowballs, now reduced to a scattered heap of snow. He staggered to his feet a little stunned, the tangled scrap of metal that was once our rain gutter still clutched in his hand. He tossed it aside, thought about it for a moment, and started to laugh.

Just then, a soft packed snowball splashed against Jimmy’s chest. Shocked, I turned to see who threw it. It wasn’t Lucy or Bobby, and it certainly wasn’t me. I wouldn’t have had the balls to do it, not after what I’d just seen. No, it was Tommy Schneider. He had an idiotic smile on his face and he was giggling.

Jimmy seemed surprised at first, and a little confused. Then he saw who did it, and his eyes slowly narrowed. “Hey, mental case,” he said, a big grin spreading across his face. “You just opened up a whole can of ass-whoop.”

Tommy reached for another snowball.

I shouted: “Tommy, no, run!”

Then I heard it – the cobra-like hiss of a Frank Stone snowball. It came from behind me, sailed right over my shoulder and nailed Tommy smack in the head. The snowball exploded on impact, splashing into fragments, but leaving a dollop of slush on his temple.

Stunned, Tommy reeled backward, red-faced, eyes clenched tight in pain. His slowed reflexes left him exposed. Without pause, Jimmy, Carl and Frank unleashed a rain of icy projectiles on him.

Smack! Smack, smack, smack!

The rest of us were surprised. It happened so fast we could only watch. And, well, it was funny, so we laughed. We all laughed.

Tommy backpedaled and held up his arms, hoping to deflect the snowballs, but his Blackwater P.A.L. t-shirt and faded jeans were peppered with wet slushy impact points. He lost his footing and became an ice skater about to fall, wind-milling his arms and shuffling his feet. His oversized boots formed erratic trails across his snow angel, scarring the holy impression. He scuffled about and finally fell on his seat in the middle of the ruined angel. And still the snowballs rained down on him, stabbing at him like giant insects with icy barbed stingers. Frank and his friends didn’t let up. They gave no quarter, took no prisoners. That was their way. In his eagerness to be accepted, to be like the rest of the kids in the neighborhood, Tommy had unwittingly crossed an invisible line and brought a wave of pain down on himself. The big kids felt obligated to teach him a lesson and the rest of us just enjoyed the show.

We all laughed and smiled and had a good time at Tommy’s expense until the crying began. When the barrage of snowballs finally stopped, Tommy lay on his back in the snow; silent, red-faced and open-mouthed. He was crying so hard that no sound would come out. Then there was a hitch in his chest as he caught his breath and the wailing began in earnest. His cries were piercing and easily carried across our small neighborhood. It would only be seconds before someone’s mother opened a door or a window to determine the source.

Like roaches escaping from the light, we scattered. Over fences, through hedges, we ran as if the devil himself were biting at our heels. No one wanted to be standing next to a wailing Tommy Schneider, especially when his mother emerged from her kitchen onto her back porch, a vantage point which overlooked my own backyard where the battle had been fought and, where Tommy was concerned, lost.

Rudy and Freddy ran inside our garage to hide. Carl disappeared into the neighboring Carlson backyard, while Frank and Jimmy jumped the fence on the far side of the yard and ran south down Persimmons Avenue. Lucy slipped away cat-like, squeezing through a small space between the garage and the back fence. Too big to follow her, Bobby and I went in another direction, running down the narrow pathway between my house and the neighboring Schneider house. We ran past the line of trash cans and stayed low and close to a row of tall hedges that separated the two properties, so no one who might be looking out the Schneiders’ side windows would see us pass. There were no first floor windows on that side of my house, so I knew my mother wouldn’t spot us.

After we cleared the hedges, Bobby and I cut right and hurried down East Glendale Avenue until we reached the far corner of our block where East Glendale met Route 5, a busy two-lane road frequented by commuters and delivery trucks making their way to Route 46, the George Washington Bridge and the five boroughs. We eased from a hell-bent run to a winded trot, and finally stopped for a breather as we turned the corner and were well concealed by some shrubs.

After a few seconds bent over, hands on thighs and sucking wind, we looked at each other. And then we laughed. We laughed until we were nearly ready to piss our Wranglers.

Just the thought of Delilah Schneider, Tommy’s five-foot six, 250 pound mother, busting out of the back door on to her porch like a raging rhino, was too much. We’d seen it before and we could picture it now like a Hollywood Technicolor movie, as clear as Shelley Winters on screen in
The Poseidon Adventure
at the Park Lane Theater over in Palisades Park. She would be wearing a faded one-piece house dress, worn and dirty slippers, a Virginia Slim dangling from the corner of her mouth, her breath fogging in the cold air, and Tommy’s baby sister, Claire, would be tucked into the crook of one arm. Delilah would be angry, yell at Tommy, and chase him into the house.

She was always angry, even more now since her husband closed up his barbershop down the street one day and just disappeared, leaving her with a young son, another child on the way, and no means to pay the bills.

“Tommieeeeee!”

The voice came from the Schneiders’ kitchen window. It sounded like a farmer calling pigs. From our hiding place behind some shrubs three houses away, her voice was distant, but still clear, and it made us laugh even harder. Bobby rolled on the snowy ground, holding his belly in pain, his face red from the gales of laughter that shook him. I laughed, too, and accidentally snorted like a pig, which made Bobby laugh even harder.

“Tommieeeeee!”

We knew that voice, of course. It was Delilah, and we laughed even more when she continued to bellow loud enough for her voice to carry across the entire neighborhood and several blocks beyond. But the laughter didn’t last for long.

The Schneiders’ back door swung open with a
CRASH!

“Get your God damned ass in this house, now!” Delilah screamed. The baby in her arms started to wail as loud as Tommy.

“How many times have I told you to stay away from those God damned kids?”

That’s when the beating began. Bobby and I peered through some shrubs to get a partial view. The Schneiders’ back porch was three houses away and obscured a bit by hedges and shrubs, but we could still see and hear the blows as she slapped her open hand against his shoulders and the side of his head. Each slap punctuated a word.

How! Many! Times! Have! I! Told! You...

The rusty storm door on the back porch, which she had propped open with her hip, creaked and rattled with each blow.

Tommy wasn’t just crying now, he was screaming: “Noooo! No! I didn’t do nothing wrong. No! Stop! I just wanted to play!’

“Get in here, God damn it!”

Delilah balanced the infant in one hand and pulled on Tommy’s arm with the other. He resisted, leaning back with the entire weight of his slim frame, to his heels, trying to pull away. Finally, the massive woman yanked him back to his feet and when she did she started beating him ferociously. She was determined to teach him the price of defiance.

Then Tommy did something that shocked us. He screamed. He screamed like we’d never hear a kid scream before.

“Fuck you, you fat cow!”

The slap Delilah planted across Tommy’s face in return was so vicious, and its crack so loud and piercing, that, even three houses away, it stung us and we flinched.

“Oh, my God.” Bobby whispered.

The blow sent Tommy stumbling back. He tumbled down the few stairs to the snow at the foot of the porch. Still crying, he crawled a bit and then staggered to his feet.

“Get back here, damn it! Get in this house, now!”

But once Tommy gained his feet, he ran, turned the corner of his house, and was gone. Delilah mumbled something we couldn’t quite make out, and then she finally retreated and slammed the kitchen door.

There was no more laughing.

Bobby and I just stood there for a moment, silent. Fat Delilah was always a mean woman, but she’d become worse – much worse – after her husband disappeared. Yet still, we’d never seen her hit Tommy before. I mean, we knew she probably did. All our parents hit us at one time or another, usually because we had it coming, but never in public. They called it discipline, but it came with rules, unspoken as they were. Rule number one: you didn’t hit your kids in public, but behind closed doors you could beat the living shit out of them with a leather belt or a wooden kitchen spoon if your kids had it coming, if the punishment was well bought and paid for.

But for Delilah, it was different. The parental rule book went in the trash beside her wedding album. Tommy, his father’s son and a constant reminder of Delilah’s shitty circumstances, was going to get it whether he deserved it or not.