The Elegant Gathering of White Snows (23 page)

Mitzie Rogula picked up the
Hill County News
about fifteen seconds after the paper plopped onto her chipped concrete doorstep. She shuffled past the door frame in her ratty slippers, as if arthritis was nipping at every bone in her small body. For a sixty-year-old woman who should be just an inch or two past her prime, Mitzie looked as much like hell as a woman could look.

She had stopped getting her hair dyed three years ago. To call the mass surrounding her long face one specific color would be pushing it. “It's kind of a reddish, blackish, brownish, grayish color,” her only friend in the world, Karen, told her. She was being kind, of course, because Mitzie would have been wise to shave it all off, wear a stocking hat for a few months and start over. What she needed was an Xtreme Makeover.

These days there was no such thing as lipstick or eyeliner or makeup of any kind in Mitzie's house. Delicate worry bags had formed under her eyes. Mitzie likened them to Barbie doll flour sacks, when she bothered to look into the mirror and see them stacking up under her bloodshot eyes. Her skin was dry from the frigid, constant winds that blew every single day of the year in northern Montana.

She sure wasn't having a problem in the weight department. Mitzie was so thin she had taken to using a short piece of rope from her long-abandoned camping gear to hold up an old pair of jeans that she wore six out of the seven days a week.

The top half of her body was usually covered with an old T-shirt, a red-and-black-checkered flannel shirt that only had three buttons left on it, or a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt that had been ripped open at the throat.

Without fail Mitzie wore her pink slippers, those little slip-on kind that make clip-clop sounds like a galloping horse when the rubber bottoms hit the floor. Mitzie had other shoes, but she just never bothered to wear anything but her pinks. Once, about a month ago, she was standing in front of the frozen food section in Albertson's Grocery Store and when she stepped back to focus on the frozen waffles, she got a glimpse of her own reflection in the big glass freezer door. Most people might cry or run from the store if they got a good look at their decomposing self like that, but Mitzie just looked and then looked harder as if she were trying to find something inside of that hunk of glass. Then she turned away without making a sound and headed for the frozen pizzas.

Mitzie had been smoking Salems since about a week before she started menstruating and wearing a brassiere with several inches of padding. While quitting had never entered Mitzie's mind, these days she smoked pretty much the way she had been living for the past fifteen years or so, halfheartedly.

Once Mitzie had lived life with a whole heart, but that was long before her husband George was transferred to the United States Air Force base that was close to the middle of nowhere in Havre, Montana. Outsiders often called this part of Montana “The Armpit of the World.” It wasn't the isolation, the loss of a job she loved, the fact that her children refused to move with her and bunked with their aunt and uncle for two years until they went off to college, that turned her heart. It was George's drinking.

On this particular day when she bent down to snatch up the newspaper, George was embarking on his seventy-eighth day at a detox center down in Great Falls. Actually, this day was the seventy-eighth day of George's eleventh stay at a series of treatment centers spanning from North Dakota to the bowels of the Rocky Mountains. George had seen the inside of every padded room in five states and from the looks of things, he would probably be trying out what California had to offer by early summer.

On her last visit to see him, before she could bother to sit down on the edge of his rather comfortable bed in a room that was nicer than any hotel Mitzie had ever stayed at in her entire life, George pushed the door shut and asked her, “Did you bring me anything to drink?”

George loved to drink more than anything. He loved the way the whiskey or the gin or whatever he could get his hands on seemed to anchor his thoughts and feelings to the world. Once he had loved Mitzie like that too, but that was just for a little while before the kids were born, before the family moved to Montana, before every single moment of his life was centered on when and how he was going to get his next drink.

The saddest part was, Mitzie loved George long after he stopped loving her. She hauled his sorry ass out of every bar and saloon from Canada to Wyoming. She packed him food, checked his car for booze bottles, worked with the counselors at the air base, never bothered once to think about what she needed throughout all of this—turning herself inside out because she thought it was the right thing to do to help her husband.

One Monday morning she woke up and found George lying naked on the living room floor with two women. Mitzie stood in the kitchen, poured herself a cup of coffee and for a few minutes thought about pouring lighter fluid on the three of them and then flinging her cigarette toward the heap. George's flaccid little penis was crunched up in one of the women's hands, and Mitzie stood quietly in her green plaid bathrobe, stirring her coffee with a long silver spoon. She imagined what the penis would look like just as it caught on fire.

That was the last time Mitzie ever had what she would consider a positive thought.

Lucky for George she called the MPs at the air base instead of getting the lighter fluid, and then she let herself become this woman who was now bending down to pick up the newspaper.

The lady across the street, who was certain that any day now Mitzie was going to jump off the roof or paint the house bright orange, was shocked as hell to see Mitzie get her newspaper for the fourth day in a row and wave at her. Last month the poor newspaper boy had finally picked up thirty newspapers in his father's van because Mitzie hadn't bothered to collect any of them.

Mitzie saw what she wanted right on the front page and stood there on the step in the morning sunlight, not lifting her eyes until she had read every single word about the women walkers.

For three days now, Mitzie had been mesmerized by the stories in the newspaper about the women. She found out about the walkers by chance when she pulled in for gas on the way to the grocery store and accidentally hit the radio
ON
button. Otherwise, Mitzie would never have heard about the group of women in Wisconsin.

Mitzie's daughter Elizabeth lived in Wisconsin, but that's not what grabbed her about the story. The one thing Mitzie had wanted to do in her entire life was to go to California and stand on the beach and watch the sun set on the other side of the world. Up until about five years ago when she gave up on every single thing in her life, especially George, Mitzie had actually believed that she was still going to make it there. Now Mitzie was worn down. Except the walkers were making her dream of California again.

She figured there was little she could do for George anymore—he had a terrible disease that was eating him up from the inside out, and he didn't want to change anything. She had given George thirty-nine years of her life, and one thing she knew for certain was that if she gave George another second, it would kill her.

Not that there was much left living inside of Mitzie. There was just one tiny spark. The spark that made her walk away from George for the last time, and then the same spark, just a tiny bit bigger, that made her read the newspaper three and then four days in a row. Mitzie could not stop thinking about those damned women on the highway. From what she read in the paper, she figured they weren't fancy or stuck up or anything. She knew they were just normal, normal like she used to be, and right away she also knew they were riddled with heartache. But strong enough to turn their backs on the whole damned mess.

Mitzie went right into the kitchen, set the newspaper on the table and started opening cabinet doors until she found an old but really good bottle of Tanqueray gin. It was 9:34
A.M.

Mitzie had always loved having an occasional drink with her cigarettes in the evening. When the kids were in bed and George was on night duty, she spent an hour sipping one drink, maybe two, and thinking about her day, about the next day, and about that trip to California. But when George started to drink and then never quit, she stopped drinking altogether and although she missed the little evening rituals, she simply couldn't bring herself to enjoy the taste of liquor, or any other pleasures for that matter.

For an hour Mitzie worked at the kitchen table. Her pen moved across a long yellow tablet, she sipped her drink, rose once to refill it, and then kept on working. After twenty minutes she got up for a phone book and paged through it, touching the pages gently, as if they might disappear if she moved them too quickly, writing down an occasional phone number, holding her glass to the light to see how many ice cubes she had left, turning her head to look around at what was left of her kitchen, and then sitting back down to her paper.

At 10:45
A.M.
, Mitzie put her glass on the counter and walked into the living room to get the portable phone, which normally she used about once a week to call her kids. Her friend Karen called her about as often, and those goofy telemarketers got through once in a while but that was about it. Back in the kitchen she began dialing the numbers on her list.

Mitzie was surprised that it took her less than thirty minutes to line everything up. Everything fell into place so nicely she almost felt like having a third drink. Instead she put the glass in her freezer for later, grabbed her purse and walked right out of the door in her pink slippers.

Bank manager Jack Sprangers ushered her into his office. He opened his eyes in a wide, frightened manner and indicated a chair for Mitzie to sit in.

“Do you mind if I ask why you want to do all of this now?” Jack asked, as he began passing sets of documents toward her.

“Don't worry so much, Jack,” Mitzie said softly, never looking up from the paperwork. “You've been so helpful to get this all lined up for me. I've just been meaning to take care of these things for such a long time now, and well, it's spring, isn't it?”

“It sure is, Mitzie,” he agreed. “You know, you've made a real hunk of money with all those investments, especially the money your parents left you.”

“What money?” Mitzie asked in all sincerity, since George hadn't bothered to reveal her inheritance to her.

“Well, in the past, let's see here now, sixteen years I think it's been since this account was transferred here, and not counting the nineteen times George took money out, let's see, it's still going to net you about $260,000. Then there are the stocks George apparently forgot about, his retirement funds, the house, and oh, two other accounts that we rolled over when you quit working before you moved here.”

Mitzie was trying really hard not to pee in her pants, but the gin had given her a hazy, what-the-hell kind of feeling, and she managed to act as if she had known all of this information all along.

“So, Jack, are you going to get your cut on all of this?”

“Oh yes, Mitzie, I've already pulled out my share, and let's see, the grand total, including the retirement—”

Mitzie cut him off then, her mind raging, her kidneys squeezing. Now that she had so goddamn much money, maybe she'd leave some for George to drink up after all.

“Listen,” she said. “Let's leave the retirement and the house in George's name for now.”

“But, you do know you have his power of attorney?”

“Yes, but this will do for now, Jack. This will do just fine.”

When Mitzie walked out of the First National Bank in downtown Havre, Montana, at 11:31
A.M.
, she had ten grand in cash and a cashier's check for the balance of half a million dollars in an envelope that she jammed into the side of her purse, right next to a ball of Kleenex and a sock that had been there for three years. All she could think about, as she turned the corner and walked into Betty's Beauty Bazaar, was the women walkers and whether or not they had gotten anything good to eat for breakfast.

Kileen, Junanita and Merle almost died with delight when Mitzie walked in and announced that she wanted the most expensive, grandest makeover they had ever given anyone in their entire lives. Good thing for Mitzie that the gals had just renovated the place, adding everything from a makeup booth to a little spa where one of the girls from the junior college worked part-time providing full body massages and coordinating the color of your fingernails to the color of your eyes.

Mitzie didn't think twice about stripping naked and getting into a purple spandex jumpsuit that the gals had just ordered from a ritzy place out in California. The beauty specialists went to work on Mitzie with such enthusiasm, they were too busy to ask her why she was changing her entire appearance. Right at the beginning, Merle asked Mitzie if she cared about the length or color of her hair.

“Well, I've been thinking a nice deep red would look pretty hot,” Mitzie said.

“Oh, my Gawd,” yipped Merle. “That's exactly what I was going to suggest!”

“Short is good too,” Mitzie added. “The shorter the better. That's been my motto with men, by the way.”

Everyone cackled. “Oh, Mitzie. Where have you been hiding, dear girl?”

“Sweethearts, it's a long story.”

That was the end of anything resembling a conversation as scissors snipped and Kileen, the coloring expert of the world, mixed up the dyes and poor Junanita, pissed that she had to cut Justine Ann Blackman's hair, didn't get to help much with Mitzie's but constantly got in her two cents' worth. “Not so short on the sides,” she piped up, and “For her eyes, let's try that new shade of purple.”