Snow Day: a Novella (7 page)

Beeeeeeeep! Beeeep, Beeeep, Beeeeeeeeeeep!

The driver had one hand on the wheel, one hand on the horn and a mix of anger and fear in his eyes. I couldn’t see a way out. If I let go like I’d seen Frank and Jimmy and the others do, I’d be crushed. Then I remembered...

Swing to the side
! S
wing to the side and roll out of the way!

Frank called it fishtailing. It was his only instruction to me before my turn at the suicidal game came around. Was he looking out for me? Did he think I was in jeopardy of getting flattened by a bus when he imparted those words? No, but neither did he want to be embarrassed in front of his friends when his younger brother couldn’t get more than five feet on his first attempt at bumper skiing. He had a neighborhood reputation to uphold, after all.

Before my turn came, before the Grandville had turned off of Route 5 onto Woodlawn and our ambush, and before the city bus that was about to flatten my skull had turned off of Persimmons Avenue onto Woodlawn, Frank grabbed my arm and pulled me aside so the others couldn’t hear us.

“Don’t screw this up,” he said. “You’re only getting one chance at this. Then we gotta go.”

I yanked my arm from his grip and said foolishly, and with not a little indignation: “I know what I’m doin’.” But, of course, I didn’t.

“Be careful of fishtailing,” he said. “You don’t wanna fishtail. You’ll get thrown right off before you even start.”

Now he had my attention. He explained that if you grip your hands too close together on the bumper you’ll start to sway back and forth in a fishtailing motion. He made the motion with his open vertical hand, waving it back and forth to demonstrate. Sometimes your momentum can toss you from side to side until you’re finally thrown off the bumper. He had instructed me to keep my hands far apart when I gripped the bumper so the strength of my arms and shoulders could control the swaying motion, and I had complied.

Beeeeeeeep! Beeeep, Beeeep, Beeeeeeeeeeep!

The bus drew closer, the hissing sound of air brakes pumping uselessly mixed with the blaring horn. The Grandville’s driver tapped his own brakes. His red tail lights flashed in my eyes. At this, the panicked bus driver’s body jerked up behind the steering column. He now stood behind the wheel, forcing all his weight down on the brake pedal. His air brakes hissed louder, like a bucket of angry snakes. Metal groaned somewhere in its undercarriage, and then the tail end of the bus started to slide to one side, beginning its own fishtail. I could see it in the bus driver’s eyes and in the locked up tires just 15 feet behind me. He was losing control.

I’ve gotta swing! I’ve gotta fishtail!

I tried to reposition my hands closer together but
I couldn’t do it!
My grip released, but I couldn’t get my hand off the damn bumper! It was tangled. A bolt on the underside of the bumper had pierced the old knit glove I wore on my left hand and tangled itself in the weave like a barbed fish hook in a trout’s mouth.
Damn it!
I was whining now, whining like a beaten puppy. Tears would’ve come next, but I was too scared to cry.

In my family, on snowy days, it was always a race between me and my brothers to see who would get the only pair of leather gloves we kids were permitted to wear. It was an old pair my Dad had left behind. They were waterproof. You could throw snowballs all day long and keep your hands dry and warm. But if you were late to the shoebox of gloves my mother kept in the foyer closet, your only alternative was one of the shitty wool knit pairs. They got wet fast and were pretty worthless after 30 minutes of playing in the snow. Frank usually got the leather gloves, whether he was first to the shoebox or not. Now the shitty, wet, ice cold, knit gloves I wore were about to get me killed.

Beeeeeeeep! Beeeep, Beeeep, Beeeeeeeeeeep!

The horn blared its frantic rhythm, the bus driver cursed, and the air brakes hissed in protest as I yanked repeatedly at the glove. I didn’t realize it at first, but my lips were moving and mumbling something. It was a prayer, the words spilled over my tongue so fast they were hardly comprehensible, even by me.

Hail Mary, full of grace. Our Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb...

My glove tore. I felt a hole rip open at the bottom of the middle finger. The bolt dug into the palm of my hand there, drawing blood, but I didn’t care, and indeed barely felt it. I continued yanking my hand away from the bumper, but the damned thing still wouldn’t give.

...Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners...

Frantic, I thrashed my whole hand about, pulling and twisting and banging and finally, by some miracle, my hand pulled completely free of the glove, which continued to dangle beneath the bumper. I quickly shimmied to the end of the bumper, swaying my head and shoulders. I whipped back and forth, gaining leverage, building momentum.

...now and at the hour of our death...

And then I let go.

My momentum whipped me off the bumper, all 80 pounds of me, and threw me into the parking lane along the curb. I was Johnny Rocket, all right. Yes siree, Bob. See the flying rocket boy break his God damned neck. At that moment, all things considered, I’d rather have been touching a flaming match to an M-80 with a short fuse. I was doing worse than that when you think about it. Crazy Jimmy only lost half a finger. I was about to lose my shit altogether; all the marbles. The smiles and laughs were gone. The thrill of my victory was over and I was about to feel, as Jim McKay used to say on
ABC’s Wide World of Sports
, the agony of defeat.

Coming off the bumper, I hit a patch of slick, hard ice, picked up even more speed, and then hit the side of a sloping snow drift at what must have been close to 35 miles an hour. The drift formed a ramp, and like Evel Knievel at Caesar’s Palace, I shot up that snow ramp in a flash and caught some serious air. My arms and legs flailed and kicked, looking for purchase, finding nothing but the darkening sky until I finally skidded hard off the camel-backed crown of another snow bank and came to a thudding stop on the trunk of a snow-entombed Pontiac Le Mans. The blare of the bus horn and the scream of the air brakes were traded for a glass-shattering, metal-twisting crash as the bus slammed into the rear bumper and trunk of the Grandville, which had stopped to heed the light at the corner of Woodlawn and Broad.

...Amen.

I lay my head back in the snow on the Pontiac’s trunk. My breath came in gasps. My heart still hammered against the inside of my rib cage, which ached like a son-of-a-bitch. I looked straight up through the branches of the tall, barren maple trees into the early evening sky. I was still alive. I made it.

But the peace only lasted a moment. From the street came the sound of the Grandville’s door flying open, then the bus doors creaked and folded open, too. There were voices.

“What the hell were you doing?”

“You okay, Mister?”

“Look at what you did to my car!”

“Did you see that kid?”

I poked my head up from the snow that surrounded the Pontiac Le Mans and looked around. They were less than two doors down the street from where my aching body lay. The Grandville’s owner saw me over the bus driver’s shoulder.

“Hey, you! Kid!”

The bus driver turned around and shouted: “Hey, you little shit! You could have been killed. Come here!”

Without a thought I rolled off the Pontiac’s trunk, slid down the snow bank, and ran as fast as my clopping, snow-caked boots would allow.

“Hey, come back here you little bastard. Look what you did!”

I couldn’t tell which one of them yelled those words, and I wasn’t going to turn around to find out. I ran back up Woodlawn Avenue, looking for a place to cut through someone’s backyard so I could cross the block unseen over to East Glendale, down near the garden apartments where Crazy Jimmy lived. Then I could walk up East Glendale toward my house, putting plenty of distance between me the mess on Woodlawn Avenue. I ran past a quiet house with boards on the windows and no car in the drive, and chose this place to make my crossing. I barely noticed the snow-capped For Sale sign in the front yard as I ran up the driveway. My plan was to run along the side of the house, through the backyard, into the back of an adjoining property, and out onto East Glendale.

That was the plan until I turned the corner of the house. There, at the end of the driveway, stood an arched trellis flanked by tall hedges. The archway was entangled with twisted, dead vines and branches that looked like a halo of wild, wiry hair, frosted white with snow and ice. In the pale light of a nearby street lamp, the trellis arch was a face held back, mouth agape in mid-scream, and in that mouth there was nothing but empty blackness.

Now, I like to think that in a saner moment even a ten-year-old would have thought better of crossing through that passage. The lack of a visible exit, the darkness beyond, the Medusa-like trellis; all of it shouted
Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here!

But until then, to me, Hell and its minions were just corny rubber-masked actors Bobby and I laughed at in old Hammer horror films late at night on Channel 9’s
Creature Feature
during sleepovers. And so, without a thought, I crossed that cryptic Rubicon and rushed headlong through that gaping mouth like the devil was behind me instead of ahead of me.

The darkness was disorienting. The archway opened onto a narrow side yard. My hands groped ahead of me. I was swimming in blackness, but kept running. My shin smashed into something metal and I went down hard in the snow, knocking into an overturned trash can that rang like a metal drum when I hit it. I scrambled in the snow, pushed the trash can aside – making that hollow drum sound again – bounced up, and kept running until I hit a chain link fence that rattle-hissed when I ran into it. At eight feet high, it was too high to jump. There was no way I could climb it. I pushed at the gate – no good; grappled at the latch – padlocked.

I turn around to face the street again. My eyes were adjusting to the dark now; I was cornered in an enclosed side yard. The house, with a side door that displayed a No Trespassing sign, was on my right and tall, thick hedges stood on my left; the trellis ahead and the street just beyond. The place was a pocket of thick shadow in an already dark corner of this neighborhood. The side yard was littered with discarded remnants of some by-gone family’s life. The trash can, the bent bicycle frame I had barked my shin on, and a baby carriage without wheels were among the items that made up the bone yard of someone’s American dream.

The blood, from where I cut my palm on the Grandville’s bumper, trickled down my hand to my fingers. I shivered. I was scared and I was trapped.

And then the pain started; it was a runner’s cramp, sharp and nearly incapacitating, in my right side. At least I hoped it was a cramp. Was it something worse? How far did that car throw me? Did I break something, a rib maybe? Would my mother need to take me to the hospital? If so, I would surely get caught and certainly blamed for the accident that now snarled traffic at the intersection of Woodlawn and Broad.

This was no small thing. This wasn’t breaking one of my mother’s holiday dishes and hiding the pieces so she wouldn’t find out until next Thanksgiving. This wasn’t even getting caught stealing a few pieces of Bazooka from Jack’s candy store down on Columbia Avenue. I’d gotten the wooden spoon across my tail for that one. My mother didn’t let up until the spoon broke in half and her anger was spent. It wasn’t the deed that earned the severity of the punishment as much as it was the embarrassment my mother felt when the shop owner showed up on our front stoop, telling her in a loud, indignant voice that her son was a petty little thief, while the neighbors looked on. It was like I said. In those days, corporal punishment was fine when the kid earned it, when it was bought and paid for. But sometimes, like when your parents were red-faced with embarrassment, you got a little
more
than you earned. Sometimes, you got a God damned buy-one-get-one-free sale. I was afraid to imagine what I had just purchased with this stunt.

I gasped for air, leaned my head against the house’s shingled siding for a minute, and prayed the nightmare would end. But my fear was too great to stop for long. Were they coming? I couldn’t get caught.

Don’t get caught. Don’t get caught.
These words were beating a rhythm in my head.

My breath was still coming in deep gasps and visible in the cold air when I finally dared to see if I was being followed. I stepped back from the house and, being careful to stay in the shadows, peered out at the street through the arched trellis. No one followed me, not yet, but down the block I could see the accident.

Daylight was gone and the scene was lit by street lamps. The hazard lights at the rear of the bus flashed. The Grandville’s tail lights lay in shards on the icy road and the trunk was crushed, the metal rippled like an accordion bellows. Several bus passengers stood around in the road talking. The bus driver smoked a cigarette and just shook his head. Meanwhile, the owner of the Grandville trudged up the snowy walk of a house across the street. He knocked on the door. An old woman answered, and when she did the soft yellow light from her foyer lamp streamed out onto the dark porch where the Grandville’s owner stood shivering, no doubt asking to use the phone to report the accident, maybe to call his girlfriend to say that dinner, the movie, and their extra-curriculars were now out of the question.

Tap...tap, clang...

The sound made me jump. It came from behind me. I turned around to see the gusting wind playing with the overturned trash can, lolling it back and forth, the handles flapping –
tap, tap
– against the sides as the can rolled and gently bounced against the bicycle frame with a soft –
clang
.

Tap...tap, clang...

My options were fading and my nerves were fraying. As my sight adjusted to the dark even more, I scanned the yard one last time for a way out. My eyes fell on the side door of the house and the No Trespassing sign, but I just shook my head. That seemed like a really bad idea.