Story for a Heat Wave Day

Because it's still too hot to think, I present you a story. It's my only published story to date and they only one I think is done enough to post. Also, I feel like it's apt for today, since the heat index is supposed to climb up towards 110. I'm dreaming of winter.

Blizzards

We are an avalanche, tumbling out the door and down the back steps, a whirlwind of hats, gloves, elbows, knees, and scarves, our knit winter wear still searching for the proper appendage as our boots hit the snow, crunching under our weight and leaving proof behind us that we are not ghosts, but heavy footed adolescents. We jostle for position, picking up speed and snow as we land in a heap in the yard where the garden grows in the short months of summer. It was mom who had started it, shouting to get out of the house before we drove her crazy, her voice booming off the walls, loosening the wildness from our dormant bones and sending us rampaging around the house, pulling on our long johns and wool socks to keep us warm in the winter air.

We run the first couple of blocks, shouting at Danny to hurry up, his little legs, two years younger than Keith’s, four years younger than mine, pumping like mad to keep up. Keith and I inevitably slow down and blame Danny for our waning pace, although we are glad to stop, our deep breaths meeting the air like exhaust spitting out behind the cars warming in driveways up and down the road.

“C’mon Danny! You’re too slow.” Keith is hard on Danny because I am hard on Keith. And Danny is hard on our barn kitten Lucy because Keith is hard on Danny.

“Lay off Keith. He’s got short legs and his boots are too big for him.”

“I do not have short legs!” Danny shoves me from behind.

“It’s not your fault. You’re just the baby.” I smirk at him, keeping a twinkle of teasing in my eye.

“I’m not the baby!”

“You don’t sound like it at all when you crying like that.” Keith does not keep any twinkle in his eye. He wears a superman S for sarcasm across his chest, an alter ego to hide his sensitive Clark Kent heart.

“I’m not crying.” Danny sets his jaw and speaks through his teeth.

“Whatever,” Keith says, “Last one to the field is an idiot.”

And we’re off again, us clever boys, calling each other names as we go, now out of earshot of home, mixing in what curse words we know with our taunts, puffing our hairless chests as we run.

The best blizzards are the warm ones, when the air hovers around freezing and the flakes drop like swans, wings spread, spinning and twisting to delicate landings on the frozen pond of the earth. The snow wipes the slate of the world clean; the ground is a blank page, and the trees are crooked and white ice sculptures, towering high and frozen over the earth.

We reach the field behind First Methodist in the order of our birth. Keith takes off across to the far side of the field and begins to stockpile his artillery behind a barrel-chested oak tree. The snow is wet and heavy, the kind where when you hold it in your bare hands for a minute it forms a hard icy shell.

“No ice balls,” I yell. As the oldest, I have a God-given duty to lay out the rules of engagement. I head for a small grove of spruce trees, who’s canopy of branches will protect me against high angled air strikes. I look back to see Danny standing at the edge of the field, staring at the silver branches gleaming off the tops of the trees. “What are you doing Danny! Take cover!”

I sit with my back against a tree and draw armfuls of snow toward me. The air feels warm against my cheeks; my skin is flush from the run to the field and the extra layer of long underwear. I take off my coat and hang it from a nubby branch just above my head, creating a shield of protection from the angle of Keith’s fortress. I make one snowball, then another, then another, stacking them next to the trunk of the tree.

I am packing the fourth bullet tightly when I hear the sound of sleet crumbling against skin. I jump to my feet and turn toward the sound of the impact. I see Danny slumped in the snow and Keith charging out from behind his towering oak, running to the heap of red scarf and blue jacket. I run to Danny, reaching him first, dropping to my knees at his side, the hard snow crunching against my snow pants.

“Danny! Are you alright?” He is lying with his face in the snow and I roll him over to get a better look at him. He pulls his gloves to his face and I can see that his nose is bleeding. “Keith! What the hell did you do?”

“I … I .. He was just standing there and so I …”

“So you threw a snowball at his face?”

The snow is brick red where Danny’s face hit the ground; the flakes are breaking down to crystals and a faint steam rises off the surface of the snow. Danny turns to look at the blood, now thinning out as the ice melts water into the stain, spreading out the pink remnant across the field.

“Cool.” Keith and I turn to look at Danny, his gloves shielding his face, catching the blood that is still running out of his nose. His voice is muffled, from the gloves and the blood, and he sounds like he does when he catches a winter bug and his nostrils run with snot and all his M sounds turn to Bs and his D sounds have a hint of N at the end of them. He takes off one of his gloves and wipes his hand across his nose, catching the blood along the outside of his index finger. He flicks his hand at the snow and we all watch at the blood speckles out across the frozen ground.

“You’re alright?” Keith has opened his telephone booth, parting his hair and putting his glasses back on and is looking worried in his tan newspaperman suit. His eyes are serious and he arches his eyebrows as if it will lift the weight of his concern.

Danny, still sitting in the snow, looks up at him and smiles. “You think I’m some kind of sissy?” He throws his head back in a squeaky laugh and his body follows, tipping backwards into the snow. He waves his arms in semicircles and scissor kicks his legs, mixing in some of the bloody snow, creating an angel who wears a pink stained robe. He looks up into the sun, a hazy circle in the sky, held back by gray winter clouds. The blood is beginning to freeze just above his lip. He is laughing and we can’t help but join him, falling on our backs and flapping our wings through the dense snow.

And now we are snowdrifts, frozen hard and fast to the furniture, plowed into separate corners of mom’s living room, settled like glaciers in our chairs, immutable hunks of compacted ice, stubborn and hard in our middle age, our words coming slow and quiet, like the winter passing outside the walls of our childhood home.

Danny sits in the recliner, one hand stroking the fur of the impossibly old Lucy, the other hand stretching and retracting, trying to find the blood to soothe his aching fingers. The cat curls up in his lap, hunkering down against his soft stomach, trusting him to protect her ninth life, even if he is to blame for the loss of her first eight.

“Still trimming trees, Danny?” Keith clears his throat and coughs out his question. He knows the answer but ask to fill the silence; he’s out East now, but still calls mom every Sunday like a good boy.

“Yeah.” Danny shifts his eyes from his bending fingers to the gray and white fur of Lucy’s back. He makes his living swinging from trees, swooping from branch to branch, a chainsaw clipped to his harness belt. I watch as he turns his attention back to his hands and wonder how many Advil it takes to quiet his noisy knuckles.

“You found anyone to love besides that cat?” Keith’s sarcasm has taken a dark turn since he left home, the last echo of humor silenced by an unbecoming meanness. Mom blames his wife, who stole her boy and moved him to that big city and never stops nagging him, she says.

“Better the cat than that wife of yours.” I see Danny’s face tense instantly and know that he regrets taking Keith’s bait. Keith pushes himself out of his chair and walks across the living room rug to stand over Danny, who remains seated, rocking gently in the Lay-Z-Boy.

“You wanna say that again?”

Danny lifts Lucy from his lap and sets her on the arm of the chair, patting her gently with his huge hand. He is still the baby, but only in years now. He stands, towering over Keith, his momentum carrying his arm with him, his fist full of knuckles, cut and chapped from the dry winter air, swinging around from behind him. The sound of fist on flesh is almost the same as the sound of sleet on skin. Keith drops to the ground, catching the weight of his fall with one arm. He lies back on his elbow, holding his nose with his free hand, staring up at Danny. Blood runs from between his fingers, red drops blotting mom’s white carpet.

Danny sits down in the recliner and lifts Lucy onto his lap. Keith wipes his nose with the arm of his white Henley and stands with a grunt. He walks through hallway and back towards the bathroom. I turn my eyes to the window, seeing the snow come down, feeling the warmth of the blood-flecked rug under my feet, feeling the pulses of both my brothers pounding in the air, the white heat of anger.

When we were boys, mom used to boil water on the stove and I would hold open the back door as she carried the pot to the back steps, steaming in the freezing air. She would toss it out over the garden and we would listen as it landed with the tinny sound of ice on ice, bouncing off the frozen ground, the air cooling the water so fast that it froze before impact.

“It’s looking pretty bad out there,” I say.

The worst blizzards are the cold ones, when the wind blows in from the west across the flat, flat prairie and the temperatures drop below zero and the wind chill scratches frostbite into your skin in a matter of seconds. The air takes the breath from your lungs, a vacuum of cold. The snow gusts across the roads, hiding the black ice that slicks the asphalt like oil. Streetlights shine into a white night, teeming flakes of snow making it impossible to see even the house across the street. The world outside is dark and quiet; the only noise the crack of freezing trees. It is snowing like that now, a wind-whipped whiteout, the streets freezing solid, the trees cracking with ice. The temperature will plummet in the night and we will sleep in our boyhood beds because this is family and there is nowhere to go now but here.