St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (13 page)

“Don’t let go!” I yelped, even though I was the one holding on to his horns.

Then Dad spun me away from my mother, beyond the edge of our camp. We waltzed straight to the edge of the bluff.

“Look at that, Jacob.” He whistled. “Look how far we’ve come.”

Viewed from my father’s shoulders, the desert stretched for eons, flat and markerless. It was an empty vista, each dune echoing itself for miles of glowing sand. A silent, windless night, where any horizon could be the West. The heat made me mistrustful of my own vision: I couldn’t be certain if the blue smudges I saw in the distance were mountains, or mirages. The wagon trains camped below us were no help. With their snubbed, segmented ends, they looked like white grubs, curling into themselves, each head and tail identical. Tiny fires spangled the dark.

“Do you see, now?”

I peered into the desert.

I had no idea what my father saw out there, or what he wanted me to see. Still holding on to his horns, I pivoted, slow and halting, in a direction that I desperately hoped was West.

“Oh! Yes!”

Dad grinned. The firelight limned the absent places in his hide, the burn marks in his skin. Some of his bull’s hair had come off in my fist. He lowered me to the ground, and then whispered directly into my ear, as if this was a secret between men:

“They say the clover grows wild all over the West, Jacob. So
green,
so lush and dense! So high, son, that when you wade through it, it covers your face….”

Lady Yeti and the Palace of Artificial Snows

“So what happens,” Badger wanted to know, “during the Blizzard?”

Badger sidled up behind me during recess with no introduction, stepping across a yellow line and onto the rubbery surface of the tether court. We’d never spoken before. Badger’s father had given me a ride home from school a few times, and even then we didn’t speak. We sat in a hot, awful silence and waited for the lights to change.

“I dunno.” I shrugged. “It’s Adults Only.”

Badger slammed his fist into the tethered ball. It swung between our faces.

“What do you mean you don’t know? Your father works at the damn place!”

He grabbed me by the shoulders and rocked me a little bit, back and forth on the balls of my sneaks, and it was like we were dancing.

“I dunno.”

Badger’s breath smelled like egg sandwich. He had zillions of blackheads on his pug nose.

“I don’t think my pops knows, either.” My pops mostly did maintenance work at the Palace of Artificial Snows, fixing up the giant snow fans and rewiring the Zamboni. Sometimes he’d bring me along. I’d feed cherry snow to the orangutans and pretend not to notice when Pops flirted with the Ice Witch. (All of the fathers flirted with the Ice Witch, not just mine. I think it was a nervous reaction to her leotard. Her flesh-toned tights and all those rhinestones.) He got me certain perks, sure. Free skate rentals, gelatinous bags of sno-cone mix (“Liquid breakfast!” Pops grinned in the a.m.). But the Blizzard was Adults Only. Even if Pops could have finagled a pass for me, I wouldn’t have wanted to go. Adults Only was shorthand for boring, or scary, or some combination thereof. I’d heard the rumors, and I wasn’t interested.

“Well.” Badger nodded. “We’re going. Next Wednesday. Bring some money.”

“Hey, Pops?” I called out. He was spattered with oil, pretending to be asleep on the couch. “How was the Blizzard?” Flakes of snow or dandruff were stuck to his jacket. I ruffled his hair. I lifted a twenty from his wallet. “Guess what? I made a friend today.”

The bus let us out across the street, by the line of wilting palm trees. We stared at the ugly domed building in front of us: the Palace. It looked like a rusty spaceship, surrounded by filth and Buicks. Humid exhaust floated around the dingy blue stucco. From its nondescript exterior, you’d never guess that the Palace housed two thousand square feet of winter inside.

The Palace of Artificial Snows

Skating Rink

Perennial Snow Banks

Den of the World Famous Apes on Ice!

We walked across the long parking lot. Waves of heat broke against the ugly cars. Black asphalt. Sunlit metal. Secrets locked in trunks. A thirsty Saint Bernard whimpered as we passed, her tongue lolling out a crack in the driver’s-side window. What sort of sadist would bring a Saint Bernard to the tropics? I reached two fingers through the crack and tried to pet her.

“Poor old pup. Shh,” I whispered. My petting was pretty ineffectual. “Shhh…”

Badger drew up behind me with a metal pipe in his hand. He swung it once, twice, smashing through the backseat window.

“There you go, doggy!”

Often it was scary to hang out with Badger.

We saw Badger’s father’s Datsun in the parking lot. He must’ve been in some kind of hurry to get inside—the driver’s-side door was hanging open. What a cheap, evil car. Whenever they drove me home from school, I would sit tall on my coccyx bone and try to resist the slickery vinyl. It smelled like cigarettes and women’s shampoo; or else it smelled like subterfuge and aerosol blasts of lemon. Dark windows, the leering grille of the Datsun.

“See?” Badger said. “I knew he’d be here.”

I nodded. It’s not like there had been any debate about this. Everybody on the island knew that Badger’s father practically lived at the Palace. My pops said we shouldn’t begrudge him this, an icy reprieve from Badger’s mother.

“Looks like a lot of people are here.”

The Palace of Artificial Snows became extra-popular in summer, when it was a frozen oasis on our island. Outside, the world was all melt and swelter. But inside! Sweat froze on your face. Gherkin served fizzy sodas with names like Hoarfrost and Red Penguino. I loved it there. I would skate in tight, contained circles, and dream about winter.

The doors slid open, and we stepped into a polar centigrade.

“Hurry up, Reg.” The doors slid shut. The sun vanished behind us. “We might as well pick our hiding places now.”

We hid under the booth, chewing on yellow stuffing from the torn upholstery until the lights went low. It felt especially chilly over there, in the roped-off section of the Palace:
UN ER R NOV T ON
. The old snack bar had a pleasant, homey dilapidation: split cushions, ancient popcorn on the tables, the flickering blue and violet bulbs. A nice contrast, I thought, to the newer sections of the Palace, and the hideous perfection of the Ice Witch. From our damp square of carpet, we had a view of the whole rink: the plush DJ booth, the rental lockers. To our left, you could hear the hooting of the apes.

They kept the apes in a metal warren of cages by the shoe lockers. To the extent that you can love a mute and captive monkey, I loved those apes. Gorgeous pelts! The orangey red of starfish and pigeons’ feet. Unlike the Blizzard, the Apes on Ice! Show was a treat for all ages. Five o’clock, every Wednesday. Pops and I used to go together all the time when I was younger. Nowadays, that sort of thing would never be legal. It was a pretty appalling extravaganza, even then.

“Hey, Reggie, check out that big ’un!”

Badger pointed at Cornelius, who caught us looking and rattled the bars. But it was an affected rattle—as if he were only pretending to feel wild and dissatisfied for our benefit. Cornelius beat his chest once, and winced. His gray, heart-shaped face frowned beneath a red corona of hair, like a jilted king on stupid rental skates. Those orangutans never tried to escape—they were inbred captives who knew only this artificial winter, the choreographed dances that we bribed them to do. But they’d bite your fingers, if you provoked them. They’d fidget and scratch.

On the other side of the Palace, Lady Yeti was riding the pink Zamboni. She puttered around the rink, one furry hand on the steering wheel. It could have been a Sunday afternoon on an alien planet, and Lady Yeti was out mowing the lawn.

Lady Yeti’s real name was Reba. She worked as the DJ, and the Modulator of the Snows. She had wide, hairy hips and maternal bags under her eyes. I never saw her without her Yeti suit. She was abominable in the best way, a bipedal gorilla with a moon-white pelt. We all loved her. Unlike many employees at the Palace—Gherkin with his split lip, the Ice Witch, my balding pops—Lady Yeti was spectacularly ugly. She was sort of lazy. She got winded from eating. “HI, REGGIE,” she’d roar in my ear, breathing heavy and covered in nacho crumbs. She was the most generous of us; her very body was warm and generous. Kids clambered all over her and hid in the baggy folds of her costume. Spit and candy matted her fur. We liked her much better than the Ice Witch.

The Ice Witch was the daytime supervisor at the Palace of Artificial Snows. Lady Yeti worked nights. We’d arrived right at the transition.

There were rumors that the Ice Witch and Lady Yeti were sisters, or that they were actually the same woman. And it was true that you never saw one with the other. But in every bodily respect, the Ice Witch and Lady Yeti were opposites. The Ice Witch was a skeletal beauty. Cold, quartz eyes, an anemic complexion. Once I caught her licking salt from the Big Soft Pretzel machine. She wore blue earmuffs and pearl-seamed gloves. She chain-smoked Sir Puffsters in the parking lot. The Ice Witch could work a sequined hypnosis on the male skaters, sure. But babies and primates don’t disguise their terror. Infants howled. The alpha orangutans lobbed bricks of ice at her; the orange runts cowered; and the medium-sized apes mostly ate their own feces and sulked.

Lady Yeti’s voice growled over the loudspeaker. “Now presenting…the World Famous…Apes on Ice!”

All at once, fourteen orangutans slid down chrome chutes into heaps of artificial snow. Poof! Poof! Lady Yeti dusted the grainy powder off of them and swung them around the rink. The two alphas, Cornelius and Tang, held on to Lady Yeti’s gloved hands, and the lesser apes knit their skinny gray fingers together, forming a staggered V of monkeys. In a peculiar inversion, the apes wore human costumes: tailored boleros, gold helmets, these special Velcro skates. They must’ve done this act a hundred times, and they still looked terrified.

From the arena seats, if you squinted, you could pretend that the orangutans were skating of their own volition. But Badger and I had a privileged vantage point, low to the ground. We could see Lady Yeti’s tugs on the sequined leashes. We could hear her huffing and cursing:

“Goddamn it, Cornelius, you milquetoast bum! A little help? Pick it up, Tang!”

When I was a kid, I used to get weirdly aroused imagining this, Lady Yeti’s face beneath her mask, her cheeks turning rosy from the strain. She spun the apes in sad pirouettes beneath the colored lights. A neon disco ball freckled their bodies. Their helmets kept slipping over their eyes. The roving spotlight turned the apes weird and beautiful colors, and even Badger crept closer to watch. Pink light danced across their white fur, their golden fur, burgundy, blue, brown.

You know, on the eve of our first Blizzard, we weren’t even friends yet, me and Badger? Which seems impossible to me now. But I could feel us becoming friends, our friendship freezing and solidifying with each hidden minute that we spent together beneath the dark booth. Our legs were tangled. Our round faces parted the red fringe.

“Closing time!”

After the Apes on Ice! Show and the Senior Hockey Hour, the Ice Witch banished everybody from the ice. Usually, this was the time of day when I would unlace my skates and trudge back to the bus with the other kids. But tonight Badger and I watched as the seniors headed off the ice, winking and gossiping, to change out of their uniforms. Most of them, we knew, would be staying for the Blizzard.

The blinds came down. The wind piped up. Lady Yeti was already ensconced in the DJ booth, assembling her records. Peabo Bryson, Chaka Khan. We watched her flip a switch. The Indoor Weather Manufacturer lit up, an industrial palette of yellows and grays. Unseen instruments began to rumble. The temperature ticked down by degrees. My stomach roiled, and I got the vertiginous suspicion that we were descending down, down, down. Frost blurred the windows.

Badger shifted onto his knees. “Did you hear that? They’re coming!”

Adult laughter echoed through the Palace. Footsteps were headed towards us, toward the skate rental counter. I stifled a gasp. These were shoes that we knew: Herb’s galoshes, Mayor Horacio’s suede boots, Sister John’s square-toed oxfords, Chief Bigtree’s gator leather. Half the staff of our school was here: Cafeteria Midge, Principal Yglesias, Mr. Swanson. When I spotted the cheap, tasseled loafers that I knew belonged to Badger’s father, I looked over at Badger. His breath sounded funny. He looked like he was trying not to sneeze.

The adults knelt down and stepped out of their familiar shoes. They grunted into their ski socks, their anonymous skate rentals. Nobody said a word.

“Psst! Badger!” I asked stupidly. “That your father?”

Badger shoved crumbs of popcorn into his mouth and didn’t answer. He was staring straight ahead. His father was bending down on one knee pad in front of us, doing up his laces.

“When I found out he was coming here, I tried hiding his skates.” Bits of kernel gleamed between Badger’s teeth. “I took his gear and shit to the pawn shop.”

“And then what happened?”

Quivering fingers, inches from our noses. Tying double, triple-knots.

“It didn’t matter. He comes anyways. Rentals are three dollars.”

“How did you find out that your pops was coming here?”

Badger didn’t answer. Lady Yeti had spotted us. She was skating over. Those legs! Lady Yeti looked like she could kill a man with her woolly quadriceps. Now she had seen us, there was nothing to be done. She’d have to extradite us to the Ice Witch. We curled in our spines and tailbones, paralyzed, and prayed for mercy.

Lady Yeti got down on her knees with us. She blinked out at us from inside her shaggy costume.

“Huh!” she chuckled. “Shouldn’t be here!” Her tiny eyes looked sad inside her mask. She reached into a secret pocket and emptied out its contents: mostly fur, and peppermints with fur stuck to them. “For when you get hungry, huh! Stay put.” She skated away.

Badger’s father was one of the first men on the ice. He shoved away from the railing, his arms wheeling in the rising wind. His face made me want to like him more than I did. He had black, slicked-back hair and startled eyes. Poor form for a skater, I thought: hunched and eager. A funny buckle at the knees. Something about the way he was moving across the ice made me feel a little sick inside.

Badger’s father was skating towards a stranger. A stranger to us, anyways. She had on a figure skater outfit—diaphanous skirts, ruby spangles, purple tights. It was the show-stopping garb of a petite Olympian. She looked to be about forty.

“Huh,” I said. “She somebody you, uh, you know?”

Badger’s eyes went small and mean. He crushed a soda can in his fist.

“This is all your fault, Reg. Right now if it weren’t for you, he’d be home.”

“I’m sorry?”

Badger pounded and pounded. The can was horseshoe-flat.

“Wouldn’t even
be
a Blizzard if your pops didn’t work maintenance, and your pops wouldn’t need to work maintenance if
you
didn’t exist.”

Often it was hard to argue with Badger.

I tried anyhow: “Uh-uh. Don’t you put this on us. My pops doesn’t have anything to do with the Blizzard. He just unstuffs the pipes.” This was true. Pops rarely even needed his tool box. Mostly he just pulled scarves out of the fans. “Somebody else would maintain the Blizzard if he didn’t. It’s a popular event.”