Snow Day: a Novella (5 page)

That’s how Tommy came to be my neighbor. Before that, he lived with his parents in a basement apartment in Jimmy Barnes’s building, over on the corner of East Glendale and Broad Street, about a quarter mile down the road. The distance and circumstances put Tommy on the fringe of our lives back then, but we still knew who he was.

So I was not only surprised, but chagrinned, when I found out Tommy would be my neighbor. It was Frank who broke the news to me that the mental case – that’s what Frank always called Tommy – was moving in next door. He said he heard the news from some old white-haired guy, probably the realtor, who was removing the For Sale sign next door and placing it in the trunk of his car.

Anyway, it wasn’t long after moving his family into the house next door and putting a freshly minted “Under New Management” sign in the window of
his
barbershop that the carefully woven pieces of Mr. Schneider’s new life began to unravel. He discovered the business was heavily in debt to the landlord, something ol’ Luigi neglected to include in the business records, but by then Luigi and the old lady in the back office were gone and Schneider’s name was on the lease. To make matters worse, business dried up almost immediately. Most of the old men stopped coming, and what kind of living could the guy make giving a few neighborhood kids the same crew cut every few weeks? He couldn’t figure out how the old barber had made it all work until one of ol’ Luigi’s special customers, one of the men who visited the back office, paid a visit. When he asked if Mr. Schneider took bets too, it all made sense.

In time, Mr. Schneider started making book to earn money. But I guess he didn’t have ol’ Luigi’s golden touch when it came to that kind of business. Soon, the frequency of my own meager pay envelope became erratic. And then, strangers began to visit the shop while I was working. They clearly weren’t there for a shave or a haircut. No, these men would take Mr. Schneider roughly by the elbow and lead him into the back office where they spoke to him privately, while I stayed in the front, usually reading an old copy of
Boys’ Life
and keeping an eye out for the customers who came less frequently.

Finally, one day after school when I showed up for work at the usual time, I found the door locked. The shop was dark and the ever-twirling barber pole was dead still. There was no Mr. Schneider, and I was out of a job.

The police even came to talk to Delilah. I guess she called them when Mr. Schneider didn’t come home. The police cruiser was double-parked in front of the Schneider house with the lights flashing. The windows were open and the radio crackled with casual, indecipherable chatter. Two disinterested police officers spoke to Delilah on her front porch, while I and the rest of the neighborhood kids looked on from the sidewalk. My mother, being the good neighbor, was there to help and console Delilah. Mom held Tommy’s little sister Claire while Delilah spoke to the police, crying and wiping away tears with the soiled handkerchief that she kept in the pocket of her house coat.

When the neighborhood kids asked for my take on it, I said I thought maybe Mr. Schneider just decided he’d had enough, enough of the barbershop, enough of the money problems, enough of fat Delilah, Tommy, enough of everything, and just split. That’s what I told them, anyway. But if I had to confess; if the young and overzealous Father Booker from St. Mary’s locked me in a dark confessional, slid open the screen, and said “
Spill it, kid
”? Well, then I’d probably tell the truth, that I thought maybe those rough men who used to visit Mr. Schneider sometimes were the ones who’d had enough. I really did come to believe that one morning Mr. Schneider had arrived early to open the shop, only to be met by some of those men, who escorted him into a car and took him away.

But I never found myself in the confessional with Father Booker. The aging and half-senile Monsignor Lovell was always my choice for the cushy penance he handed out, so my version of the story hasn’t come to light until now. And over the years, my imagination has filled in the blanks. How could it not? You see, Schneider’s Barbershop was just down the street from our house and right off of Route 46. Make a quick left and it’s a short trip to the swampy Meadowlands.

On that day, I saw only the still barber pole and the shadows that veiled the shop as I cupped my hand to peer through the glass door. But today, in my mind’s eye, I can picture it – two big men usher Mr. Schneider into the back seat of a black Lincoln Town Car with white-wall tires, a third man waiting behind the wheel. The two men sit on either side of Mr. Schneider in the back seat. One of them has his meaty fist clasped tightly around Mr. Schneider’s upper arm as he addresses the driver.

“Let’s go.”

“Where to?” the driver asks.

“It’s your choice. We get our shoes muddy either way.”

I don’t know. Maybe it didn’t happen that way. Maybe Mr. Schneider did run off with a Marilyn Monroe look-alike and is living the good life in Miami with ol’ Luigi and the old woman. Sure, maybe that’s how it happened.

Hell, I was just ten at the time and while I could make some guesses, all I really knew for sure was that our barber was gone and Tommy didn’t have a dad anymore, and now the big kids were pelting him with icy snowballs and laughing like it was a booth game at the annual St. Mary’s Carnival. And I was laughing right along with them, and I felt like shit about it.

Still do.

D
ELILAH AND
T
OMMY WERE GONE.
The sound of the slamming kitchen door faded from our ears and we just stood there in the deep snow, shivering, silent. Finally, after a minute or two, Bobby stood without a word and started walking west along Route 5, and I walked with him.

This was our usual path when ditching trouble. There were no homes on our block that faced Route 5. The highway cut across the back of our neighborhood. Both the street and the sidewalk that ran beside it were obscured from our neighbors’ windows and the prying eyes of our parents by tall trees, hedges and assorted garden sheds in various states of decay.

When we ran from the crying Tommy Schneider, the logical thing to do would’ve been to keep running across the street and down the road, to just keep going. But for me, at ten, to cross the street without express permission from my mother was forbidden. In fact, it was sacrilege. Oh, sure, she sometimes paroled us when it suited her, like when she needed someone to pick up an order for her from the pharmacy or the butcher shop, or when I went to my job at the barbershop. But those were sanctioned and monitored excursions. Otherwise, we lived by my mother’s concrete commandment.

Don’t go off the block
, she always told us. That was the primary ground rule we lived by at that age.
Don’t cross the street, don’t go off the block
. Our neighborhood block was tiny in comparison to most and contained just six homes. Shaped more like a triangle than a square city block, our neighborhood was an anomaly in the neat grid pattern that was endemic to most Blackwater, New Jersey neighborhoods. It was like an island – to my mother an oasis – and I suppose she thought it was a reasonably safe playground for Frank, Rudy and me to spend our unsupervised time. It never dawned on my mother that we only lived one street over from Route 46, the main artery that ran from the New Jersey Turnpike to the George Washington Bridge and all points north. And so I’m sure it never crossed her mind, that someone could grab one of her sons, toss him into the dark trunk of a nondescript sedan, and in seconds disappear into the flow of traffic. Whether they were taken someplace close or someplace far, it wouldn’t matter. It was all about access. And if she never understood that, at just ten years old, how could I?

Don’t get me wrong. My mother, Phyllis, or “Mrs. Stone” to the kids in the neighborhood, always tried her best to make things right for me and my brothers. We loved her for that. She always kept our lives in perfect order; the house always clean, our clothes always laid out each morning, our church envelopes always filled with a dollar for the Sunday collection, our class trip permissions slips always signed on time. She even made a point to wear make-up and a nice dress most days after her house work was done. Everything had to be right. Even when my father left us, she made sure it happened right.

We came home from school one day and he was gone, his clothes and shave kit and car went with him. My mother never let us see her cry over my father, though I know she did, late at night, behind her closed bedroom door. At the time, she just told us our father would rather live with someone else; that it wasn’t our fault, it was hers, and that was the end of the conversation. My mother was Catholic. She’d been going to church since they said the mass in Latin. The word divorce never came out of her mouth. Just as she cleaned the house, she had a way of keeping our lives clean and untarnished, at least as much as she could. That was her way.

But while my mother was a caring and well-meaning woman, she was not especially savvy when it came to the depths of human depravity. With American history, shorthand classes and home economics as the cornerstone of her high school diploma, much of her education came from her subscription to
Better Homes and Gardens
, or her romance novels, or copies of
The Canticle
that she sometimes picked up at church. But mostly, it came from the nightly news.

In those days the six o’clock news was filled with stories of Vietnam and Watergate, and before that it was moon landings, and assassinations and race riots. They were bigger-than-life events in other cities and other countries. Their distance and magnitude set them apart from us; made them less immediate and real, I guess. They were national stories in newspapers you only read on the weekends or watched on a 21-inch glass cathode-ray tube in your living room. They might have made our parents feel pride or sadness or disgust, but never fear. Not those types of stories.

Tales of missing or abused children almost never made the news. Certainly Walter Cronkite, the personality by which our parents set their moral compass, was not one to feature stories of children being snatched from shopping centers, or from their own backyards. At least, he didn’t then; it wasn’t until a few years later when six-year-old Etan Patz went missing while walking two blocks from his Manhattan apartment to the school bus one morning in 1979. That’s when Walter and the network news boys finally woke up. That’s when things started to change and parents awoke from their 1950s-induced coma. But that was still four years away, so who could blame my mother for thinking the magical incantation
don’t go off the block
was a reasonable way to keep us safe?

Lucy caught up with us as we slowly circled the block. She appeared from between some hedges that bordered the rear of the Carlson family’s backyard, and fell in step behind us as we walked in the dwindling daylight.

“Hey, wait up,” she said.

We acknowledged her, but kept walking, slogging through the snow as we continued our circle of the block, hoping that by the time we returned to my house things would have cooled off a bit.

“Did you guys see what Mrs. Schneider did to Tommy?”

“Yeah... We saw,” Bobby said, and the silence resumed. Lucy understood and just nodded.

I pulled the dented tin of Sucrets from my back pocket and popped open the lid, four foil-wrapped cherry-flavored lozenges remained. In Sister Mary Jean’s English class they were deemed legal. It was a candy that passed for a medicine; at ten, a Catholic boy’s salvation. You were supposed to let them dissolve slowly in your mouth, but the temptation to bite them into little sugary bits was always too great to resist. Now, though, they were the right distraction at the right time. I offered up the tin box. Each of us took one, with one left for later. I returned the tin to my back pocket, and we walked and crunched in silence as we made our way along Route 5.

By that time of day, traffic had grown enough to turn the blanket of heavy snow, at least a foot of the stuff, into a compressed sheet of ice, especially on busy roads like Route 5. Cars moved cautiously along the surface, passing us on our left. We trudged along the covered sidewalk through the virgin snow; picking our knees up high, driving them down again, piston-like as we walked. Thank God I wore boots with foot condoms to keep my feet dry. Yes, foot condoms. That’s what we called it when our mothers made us slip sandwich bags over our stocking feet before slipping them into our boots. Not only did it make it easier to get your foot into a boot that was a size too small – my mother was always trying to save a dime – but it was also the best way to keep your socks dry after a long day of slogging through the snow.

Lucy picked up her pace and passed me, trying to be casual about it, and fell in beside Bobby as we walked.

“Hey, Bobby,” she said. “You going to the dance next month?”

Bobby, caught a little off guard, just shrugged. “Not sure, maybe. I don’t know.”

“Yeah, I don’t know either,” she said.

It was obvious – to me anyway, if not Bobby – that Lucy was fishing for an invite to the St. Valentine’s Day dance at school. Lucy was no fool. She had noticed Bobby checking her out, too, and she knew it wasn’t the first time. I guess she’d been looking for a quiet opportunity to start working on him, and now she found it. But Bobby was a ten-year-old boy, and some of us boys could be a little slow on the uptake when it came to girls and motives, so Lucy was going to have her hands full. I slowed my stride and put a few feet between myself and the awkwardness that was going on ahead of me. They talked in low tones and pretended I couldn’t hear them. So I pretended that I didn’t.