A Christmas Blizzard (10 page)

 

 

H
e lay down to sleep in Floyd’s shack but was kept awake by feelings of transcendence and finally arose and put a couple logs on the fire, and made tea. He did his stretching exercises. He wanted to call Mrs. Sparrow and tell her he was cured of anxiety now but it was only 6:00 A.M. Five voice-mail messages. The first was Simon expressing concern about the storm, and a second one inquiring about Mr. Sparrow’s whereabouts, a third expressing some urgency about his whereabouts, and a fourth from a Captain McIver of the state police asking him to phone immediately. And the fifth was from her. Her calm and delicate voice. “I just called to say that I am missing you tons and tons and still feeling sort of under the weather so probably Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau is out of the question for me, darling, and it hurts me to say this, but I know how much you want to be there and so even though I miss you like crazy, I hope you’ll go and have a beautiful Christmas, darling. You deserve it. A beautiful and peaceful Christmas, and I love you. I love you so much.”

 

He was hungry and he headed for town across the ice, walking briskly through the falling snow, a new man now, and he wondered if the Big-Hair Woman was going to come after him tonight or if the jump in the lake had maybe won his release from her powers. He wasn’t sure. He walked up on shore and down the street where the Thackers lived and the Enghs, but there were new names on the mailboxes now, Gant and LaFever. Nobody he knew. The name of Sparrow had vanished, too. Brother Benny hanging on in Alaska, running a camera shop financed by James, and Elaine, sad, worn down, alcoholic, in Fort Wayne, living on the checks he sent her every month, two victims of loser romances, bad habits, and no luck whatsoever, and meanwhile everything your big brother touches turns to gold. Unfair. You’re drowning and people pass overhead drinking champagne on a hot-air balloon.

He walked in the Bon Ton Café, stomped the snow off his shoes and parked himself at the counter, feeling mightily empowered. Far to the west, his Hawaiian house awaited him, the floodlights on the roof illuminating the plane of grass and the beach beyond and the white surf, but he was not done with North Dakota yet. An old man stood peering out the big window. “This isn’t over yet,” he said. “We’re gonna see a lot more of this before it’s over. Where you come in from?”

“Chicago.”

“You gotta be lost.”

James shrugged.

“Not as bad as the storm of ’75. That was a bad one. January. Roads were closed for eleven days. Eleven. Thirty-foot drifts. Empire Builder train got stuck thirty miles west of Minot and it took a week to dig those people out. There were children conceived on that train, that’s how bad it was. Eighty m.p.h. winds, thirty-five died in North Dakota alone, and you know something? Most of them were glad to go. That’s how it was.” He took a sip of coffee. “Coffee’s cold, Myrt.” The waitress took a carafe off the hot plate and brought it over.

“Right here in town, a man and a woman were struggling through the storm to get home and finally they made it into the house and she looked at him and she’d never seen him before in her life. She said, ‘You’re not Bob.’ He said no, he was Larry. She said, ‘Where’d my husband go?’ He said he didn’t know, that he saw her reach out her hand so he took it. She said, ‘I wonder what happened to Bob.’ He said he had no idea. She said, ‘Well, as long as you’re here, you may as well come in and get warm.’ And he did. And they’re still together. Had three children. Bob never came home. That was in 1975. January. Sure tells you something about marriage, doesn’t it.”

The wind whistled in the weatherstripping, just like it did in their house when he was a kid. Cold drafts. Once, Daddy woke up in the night, deaf in his left ear—it had been frozen by a cold draft. Never got better.

A man in a snowmobile suit sat on a stool at the counter and Myrt slid a cup in front of him and filled it with java from the carafe in her right hand.

“You don’t take cream, do you, Bobby?”

“You know me better than that, Myrt.”

“Oh yeah. It’s your brother who takes cream. How’s he doing in Florida?”

“He’s stuck there, that’s what. Paid three-quarters of a million for a house that’s now worth about half that and he lost his job and he’s working part-time as a security guard.”

“You ever been to Florida?”

“Why would I want to go there?”

“It’s warm there.”

“If you’re cold, put on a sweater. That’s what I say.”

“I’ve got two on already.”

The snowmobile suit and the waitress didn’t look at James but they were thinking about him, he could tell. They were aiming their repartee in his direction.

“Another reason not to go to Florida, Myrt: no ice fishing.”

“I could live without it if I tried. Nothing but an excuse to drink, if you ask me.”

“Man has to keep off the chill any way he can.”

“My brother never drank at home. A cocktail was foreign to Marvin, strange as an artichoke, but he’d go ice fishing and when they passed the Four Roses he took a hit off it. And that was when he ran off with that woman. She was lost, or so she said, and came out to the fish house to get warm, and he warmed her up all right. Took her off to a motel and turned the heat up. And it all started with taking a drink.”

“I never knew your brother but I do know that a lot of people have perished in winter storms for want of a little whiskey. The death toll among Baptists is staggering.”

“The woman he ran off with was a Baptist. Or married to a Baptist.”

“Well, there’s your motivation right there.”

“I forget—did you say you wanted cream in your coffee?”

“Get away from me with that cream pitcher, Myrt.”

The old man who was an authority on winter had moved over to the counter to get away from drafts. He motioned to Myrt for another cup of coffee. “Gimme the usual.” He looked over toward James. “Man’s got to keep up his strength in cold weather. Back in 1957, the temperature dropped forty degrees in one minute. Went from thirty-two to eight below. Sixteen teenagers were taken to the hospital. No scarf, no mittens, no warm jacket. Same winter we got ten feet of snow and a dozen houses collapsed from the weight on the roofs.”

The phone rang. It was Buzz, at the airport. They had slept aboard the
Lucky Lady
and were eating cold pizza for breakfast. “Visibility is a hundred feet. The runway is iced over. Same with the fuselage and wings. The forecast is for nothing good whatsoever. The Interstate is strewn with abandoned vehicles. They’re opening schools for shelters. Nothing to do but sit tight. You at your uncle’s?”

“Staying at an undisclosed location, Buzz. Trying to get the situation under control, and map out the perimeter.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sitting tight sounded good to him. He’d spent a good night out on the lake and nobody knew where he was and that was a first for him. A solo flight.

“I looked into the possibility of renting snowmobiles but nobody here thinks it’s a good idea. Not with visibility like this,” Buzz said.

“We’ll just sit tight and see what happens,” he said.

“Sorry about this, sir. Storm came up faster and harder than what they predicted. I should’ve been a little more cautious, in retrospect.”

“Not a problem.”

“I know how anxious you were to get to Kuhikuhikapapa’-u’maumau.”

“Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau will still be there next week.”

At the mention of Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau, Myrt, Bobby, and the old man looked straight at him and you could see the question forming in balloons over their head but they didn’t ask. That was Looseleaf, for you. Stoicism, through and through, to the point of stupidity. No surprise, no alarm. Act like it’s nothing. Blizzard, robbery, major coronary—
hey, no problem. Everything’s under control.

And then his phone rang again. A local number. He had a hunch who it might be—the Ojibway storyteller arisen before dawn to await the sun, and he didn’t want to talk to her, not at all—but he had been given twenty-four hours to make his peace and he intended to do that. He opened the phone. “Hi, Faye,” he said. “How’s tricks?”

“Jimmy,” she said. “I’ve been up for hours, saying empowering prayers for you and lighting Shoshone vision sticks. Liz called me at 4:00 A.M. and said you are suicidal. She said you stripped off your clothes and jumped into the lake and she had to dive in and pull you out. What is going on? I love you. We all love you and we support your journey, wherever it may lead, but don’t choose the Death Mother, Jimmy. Don’t embrace the Great Bear of Perpetual Solitude. If there’s anything we can do to help you return to your deeper self you only need ask. I am so very very happy you felt free to use Floyd’s fishing shack, Jimmy. It was his spirit house, I know it welcomed you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Namaste.
The divine in me salutes the divine in you and thanks you for integrating your consciousness with his. He is still there, don’t you think? Didn’t you feel it? I do. Did you see the wolf? He was Floyd’s best friend. I keep wishing the wolf would communicate with me. And sometimes I’ve gone out there at night and heard a woman trying to tell me something.”

“A big-hair woman?”

“I don’t know but she’s telling me to make my peace with the world and that’s what I’m trying to do. Come over, Jimmy. I need to see you.” So he zipped up his parka and, though he hadn’t ordered any breakfast, he slipped a $20 bill under a used coffee cup on the counter. Myrt was watching his reflection in the toaster. She didn’t miss a trick. He headed for the door and she was on the twenty like a bald eagle on a bunny.

 

 

F
aye was a fool but sometimes fools have a good message for us in among their foolishness and so James steeled himself with a cup of coffee and marched down to Faye’s little house with the wind chimes dinging and tinkling on the front porch and the sign on the front door,
Abandon Fear and Prejudice, All Ye Who Enter Here,
and knocked on the door. She was right there, waiting for him. “Come in,” she cried. “Oh you look exhausted. Oh it is good to see you!” She took some white powder from her pocket and tossed it over his left shoulder and the right and dropped some at his feet and then hugged him. “You and I are kins-men, Jimmy. We are family. We are interconnected whether we know it or not. We nurture each other with our common myths and rituals and in each other we find a wholeness of wisdom.”

He heard water dripping from a waterfall trickling into a plastic pond with several rather lethargic goldfish. A tea-kettle whistled in the kitchen and she went to make them a pot of tea. Her hair had an ethereal, see-through red color. He noticed when she turned her back that she’d put on weight. She wore a big white frilly dress and it was broad in the beam. Interconnected or not, the woman was eating like a horse. On the walls were large color photographs—three feet by four—landscapes—corn stubble, a snowy field, a creekbed with three big cottonwood trees rising from it, an abandoned farm site, another abandoned farm site, and then a full frontal view of a naked woman of advanced years, in black-and-white. He didn’t want to look at it but it was hard not to. “That’s a self-portrait,” she said. He had guessed as much. “It took me forty years to get up the courage to do that,” she said. He thought it might’ve been better if she hadn’t waited so long but he didn’t say anything.

“I have so much I want to share with you,” she said. A crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling. A low ceiling and an enormous chandelier, so you had to walk around it. She had glued various clay figures to the chandelier, horses and bears, some Indian figures, a couple of coyote. “I bought that in Tucson,” she said. “And then when Floyd died, I moved back here because his spirit is here and my work is here.” She was storytelling in schools and doing some life-coaching and trying to earn extra money by selling Greenspring organic skin cleanser, moisturizer, eye liner, mascara, and blush, and her sister Liz was boycotting her because some of the products were made in Communist China, so she and Liz were not speaking, but they had often not spoken in the past so it was no hardship.

“How’s your Christmas?” he said.

“Oh Jimmy,” she said. “Don’t you feel it? Christmas is the force field of heightened possibility. It’s not about religion, those myths we were brought up with are only tools to direct us toward the mystery of the under self. It’s about the ecstatic visualization of psychic metaphor. The psychic world is calling us toward balanced consciousness. Don’t you feel that? There is a lightness and spontaneity that is struggling to get through all the commercial static and lead us out of our linear consciousness into a global wholeness. You know about global wholeness, don’t you? ”

He nodded. Yes, of course. “I feel so connected to you right now,” she said. He sensed a hug coming on and he edged away.

She collected spoons and cups. Spoons, she explained, represented the generosity of life. So did cups. Hundreds of them hung on hooks on the wall. Wooden spoons, steel spoons, shallow spoons, deep spoons. “I want this to be good for you spiritually, coming back to Looseleaf, I know you came to see Daddy but really I think you’ve come here to find yourself, and I want to help you if I can. I’ve become a bard, Jimmy. A visionary conversationalist.

“My roots are here. Like yours, Jimmy. And I went away, as you did, because I felt a polarization between myself and my family. I had to live away until I was ready to come back. And when I was, then I was ready to find the road to spiritual growth in the beautiful motherness of the North Dakota prairie. My consciousness simply had to evolve from a reliance on mountain wisdom to a trust in prairie wisdom. There are visionary mother spirits here who want to guide us, but we need to be open to dialogue and the goal of transforming consciousness and opening the winter veil to evolutionary experience that nurtures the diversity of the heart that can make us whole.”