A Christmas Blizzard (16 page)

“Your drug habits don’t interest me, Faye, and they’re of no interest to the government. And neither are you. But bank robbery is.” He turned to James. “Mitchell, Pierre, Rapid City, and Billings. Ring a bell?”

James faced him just like he’d faced the wolf. “I think you’re barking in the wrong culvert, Mr. Krainis. It’s Christmas and you’re a guest here. And no longer a welcome one.”

The F.B.I. agent pulled a snub-nosed revolver out of his breast pocket and aimed it at James’s chest. “There’s no holiday where crime is concerned,” he said. He walked slowly around the table, his eyes flitting from side to side lest anyone should attempt a sudden sneaky move. Oscar had jumped to his feet and Rosana had come into the room holding a whisk. “Nobody move so much as an eyebrow or this roscoe’s gonna start talking,” he said, as he sidled around Uncle Earl’s chair, stepping onto the plastic bag containing the liver and the pancreas. The old man let out a shriek and the F.B.I. man jumped back. Uncle Earl clutched his abdomen. “I’m leaving!” he yelled. “I’m out of here! I got only seconds to live! Better come give me a hug right now and don’t wait. The shades of night are falling fast! The curfew bell is a-ringing! I can hear them calling! It’s the moaning of the bar! Heading out to sea! O yes—the end is nigh!” Liz knelt down by his side and Faye grabbed him, as the G-man backed toward the door. “No sudden moves,” he said. “I’ve got you covered.” Just as an old gray-haired lady in a black silk dress and a veil stepped smartly into the room and pulled out a pump handle and swung it and hit him right in the elbow, in that tender spot that everyone knows so well, and he dropped the revolver and grabbed his elbow and jumped up and down in pain, crying out
Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh
. His long training as an F.B.I. agent had not prepared him for the vulnerability of this particular bone.

Uncle Earl laughed to see it. Despite his bruised organs, the sight of the agent dancing in pain and emitting high-pitched squeals amused him, and he chortled and slapped his thigh. He said, “You were the most boring son-in-law a man could have, Leo, but I see you had terpsichorean talent we hadn’t known about. And now I’d be obliged if you’d just get in your car and drive away.”

“Can’t drive away. We’re snowbound,” said Mr. Krainis in a wounded voice.

The old woman in the doorway said, “You’re not snowbound anymore.” It was Joyce, dressed up as Mrs. Manicotti. She looked at James and gestured with her thumb. “You,” she said. “Come with me.”

She led him out the door and as they left, there was a tremendous roar in the street and a burst of flame. Simon was there, fussing and all proprietary, and Ramon and Buzz and Buddy, holding onto the ropes of an enormous red-and-green hot air balloon, the basket balanced on the snow, and the pilot in it, pulling the lanyard that switched on the burner that heated the air inside the bag, which rose six stories in the air. “Where did you come from?” James said.

“I rode the North Coast Limited train,” Joyce said. “This is the engineer.” She pointed to the old Chinese man from the coffee shop. “The balloon was in the baggage car and it looks like we arrived just in time to save you from Leaven-worth.” She took off the gray wig and the black silk dress and under it was the green cashmere number he’d given her for Christmas three years before.

He helped her into the basket and climbed up behind her and Simon started to swing himself aboard and lost his grip and fell off into a snowbank (“Arghhh!”) as the burner roared again and up they rose on Christmas Eve, the stars in the sky, exactly as you see on Christmas cards. Shimmery flakes fell through the air. A lovely night, the old streetlights sliding away beneath them and the lights of Christmas trees in houses, snowy branches on the bare trees, walkers out, even a jogger or two in Spandex outfits and face masks, looking up and waving as the balloon rose over the town. Headlights moved slowly on the streets of town and beyond, the highway lay under undulating swells of snow, a vast white blanket. The burner blasted another long blast of flame and then silence as they floated over the gray treelines, the lights in the windows of the barns and farmhouses twinkling for miles around. Up above, nebulae spiraling in the winter sky, and all around them the chill pristine beauty of the world of stillness. “Heading south-southeast,” said the pilot. “Should make Fargo around two in the morning. Roads are clear in Fargo, the airport is open. We’ll get you on a 6 A.M. flight to Minneapolis and you should be in Chicago by noon.” The burner blasted again. “Better go below and stay warm,” he said, and they crawled down below the deck and into a warm nest of down blankets and lay in each other’s arms.

“I have news,” she said.

“I figured it out,” he said.

“I’m expecting a baby.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“You’re not upset?”

“I’m happy as I can be.”

The rigging groaned as a gust of wind caught the balloon and then the burner roared and they rose with a whoosh.

She fell asleep in the rocking of the basket and he snaked his hand under the woolen blanket and into her dress and onto her bare belly. It was firm and he thought he could feel something tremble. Inside slept his child, so newly formed it was neither boy nor girl yet, just a seed showing a sort of head and tail, but pushing harder toward completion, an entire person.

 

 

W
hen Mr. Sparrow got back home to the Wabasha Tower from a blissful week with Mrs. Sparrow floating in the warm salt sea, he told Simon to find him a homeless man who was his, James’s, size and buy him several winter outfits (and spring ensembles) from a good store and bring the old clothes back to James.

“If this is a test and the correct answer is, No, I won’t,” said Simon, “then No, I won’t.”

But he returned a few hours later with a green garbage bag full of filthy disgusting rags and a video of the previous owner, a gaunt toothless man named Roy Ypsilanti standing in the doorway of Nieman-Marcus in a new down coat, black wool trousers, a fur Cossack cap in his hands, which he clutched like a trophy. He smiled a sweet gummy grin and said, “Thank you, Mr. Sparrow. You are a gentleman and a Christian.” And teared up. James turned the TV off.

“I don’t know what you’re going to do with the clothing,” said Simon. “But at least let me wash it.” He opened the green bag. It stank.

“Washing it would obviate the point.” James pulled his shirt off over his head and then dropped his trousers. He pulled on a pair of tan corduroys that smelled of rot and excrement. The zipper was gone, the fly closed with a strip of duct tape, and the waist tied with a length of clothesline. He pulled on a crusty sweatshirt and a sweater, and a torn plastic poncho, and looked at Simon and grinned. “Who am I now?”

“If you need a personal reference, I’m here to help.”

He put on the man’s busted black leather shoes and picked up the garbage bag and said, “Checkbook.” Simon handed him the tan leather-bound checkbook.

He boarded the service elevator and descended to the garage—the elevator stopped on the 14th floor and a woman stepped in and then quickly stepped out—and in the garage he walked down the aisle of cars and past his red Audi convertible and up the ramp—the electric eye flashed and the big door opened—and up into the cold January morning he went, around the corner past the wine store and the Café Monet and down the street to St. Ansgar’s.

He went to four churches that Sunday morning and in the first one, three ushers gently took him by the collar and ushered him out the door and one got on a cell phone and called for reinforcements while another told James where he could find a homeless shelter. “It’s six blocks away, you can’t miss it,” he said. “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was naked and you gave me raiment,” said James. “Exactly,” said the man. “That’s what they do there.”

In the second church, he was allowed to sit in a rear pew but was closely watched by two men alongside him and one up front. A family sitting in the pew in front of him got up and moved. The minister in the pulpit kept glancing James’s way uneasily, as if a dog had wandered in.

In the third church, a man invited him to come downstairs and join a discussion group that was meeting to talk about homelessness. “I came to worship,” said James. The man said he thought James would find the discussion group more up his line.

Finally, in the fourth church, a woman in a white cassock and silvery cape smiled at him and reached for his hand and said, “Welcome. We’re so glad to see you. We are happy you joined us for worship today.” And meant it. It happened to be St. Giles Cathedral, a big stone Gothic pile with a choir in fancy robes and starched collars, but they were genuinely friendly so he pulled out his checkbook and wrote the church a check for a stupendous amount of money and handed it to the smiling woman and said, “That’s for real. Not a joke.” She did not look at the check but put it in the collection plate in a mess of tens and twenties, which she placed on the table behind her and said, “I love your 4xPrime. Couldn’t live without it. And I had a dream about you last night, Mr. Sparrow. I dreamed that you were on our Christmas Committee.”

“It’d be my pleasure,” he said, and it really was his pleasure, and he is still on the Christmas Committee twelve years later, organizing the annual Christmas Dance and pouring the excellent cranberry punch and teaching people how to do the Christmas reels. And that is his daughter Serena by his side, the golden-haired girl with the big smile, and his wife Joyce tending to the musicians. They do the Christmas Dance the week before the great day and sometimes they fly to Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau and sometimes they stay in Chicago and once they flew to Looseleaf and walked out on the lake, the three of them, hand in hand, as the moon shone down and lit up the ice like a circus ring and there by an old shack with a Christmas star on the roof they stood and waited for the wolf to call from the woods and he did. A long joyous cry from the dark.