A Christmas Blizzard (2 page)

And then that night they had a big stupid argument about going to her family’s for Christmas. So yesterday, hoping to make up with her, he dragged himself through Marshall Field looking at velveteen cocktail dresses and bright blouses and silk pantaloons, thinking,
Anything I like, she won’t. Guaranteed. So give up.
He looked at a miniature Swiss village made of porcelain with clock tower and church steeple and people sliding down a hill on tiny toboggans and couples skating on a pond. Looked at books. Big luxurious picture books.
The Twentieth Century in Pictures
. He opened it. And then closed it. What does a beautiful woman need to know about the wretched mistakes of great men and the insanity of war? The past is over and done and let’s dance on into the future.

He stopped in the music department and a boy with four earrings in each ear, and a strange hairdo like a small animal crouched on top of his head asked, “Are you looking for something?” and James guessed he was not. He looked at digital cameras, telescopes on tripods, a long-haired sheepskin from New Zealand, luxurious white turkish bathrobes and cosmetics, where a woman with skin the color of oiled almond spritzed a liquid on a card and rubbed some on the back of his hand for him to smell and whispered, “For whom are you shopping today?” and James said, “For a woman I love who I had a fight with.” The almond-skinned woman smiled and said, “This will do, then.” And he bought it. For almost a thousand dollars. An ounce of something called PH.

He clicked a switch on the console and the wall opposite the bed lit up with a bright projection of a map of Chicago and a blinking light at 59th and Cicero where
Lucky Lady
was parked at Midway Airport. He could call Simon, asleep in the servant’s wing, and have him call up the driver Ramon and the pilots Buzz and Buddy and the plane could be airborne in two hours. But he could not, could not, could not, turn off the song. He was upright now, feet on the floor, looking for the light switch. The iClock said 5:42 A.M. He poked some dark circles on the touch pad and a different song came on:

It was the Moondog show on AM77 which sometimes in bouts of insomnia he tuned in for a fitful hour or two to hear the Moondog talk about Fanny May and how she tormented him with her passionate ways followed by tears of regret and then long passages of indifference. He poked the pad again.

He knelt down on the floor to search for the plug and snaked his hand far under the bed but couldn’t reach the outlet. The choir was calling for the faithful to come, which brought back painful memories of Christmas growing up in Looseleaf, North Dakota—of the scrawny Christmas tree and Mother worried it would burst into flames and they would die in their sleep of smoke inhalation and Daddy worried that Mother would spend them into bankruptcy and they would have to go live in a public institution and wear orange jumpsuits and pick up trash along the highway.

“Darling?” he said in a clear voice. “Darling—” She opened her eyes, the comforter pulled up to her chin, her dark hair splayed against the pillow. She pulled an earplug out.

“How do you turn this music off?” She looked up at him in wonderment. So he repeated the question.

“It’s voice controlled. You just say
OFF.”
And the music stopped.

 

 

“What time is it?” she said.

“Almost six o’clock.”

“Why?”

“It just is. I’m sorry I woke you. Go back to sleep.”

“I can’t.” She sat up. “God, I am so sick. Some horrible flu virus. I was sitting next to this blowhard at the meeting of the ballet board and he was sneezing all over me. No hanky, nothing—just leaned back and barked and let fly with thousands of tiny beads of infection flying in the air.”

“You’d feel better if we went to Hawaii.”

“Oh darling, you go—it’s okay. I can’t bear the thought of getting on a plane. I am sick to my stomach.”

And with that, she threw off the covers and leaped toward the bathroom in three bounds and slammed the door and he heard water running in the sink and other more visceral sounds and he was transported back to the terrible Christmas when the Dark Angel of Projectile Vomiting visited them. Oh my gosh, what a vivid memory it was. Twenty-five years ago and still he could feel the gorge rising in the pit of his stomach, the acid bubbling up, the muscles tightening. He was 17 and that day in school he had suffered the most harrowing humiliation of his life, standing in front of twenty leering choir members as Miss Forsberg said, “Tenors, open your mouths, you can’t sing with your mouths shut. Basses, read the notes. They’re right in front of you.” And nodded to him and he started to sing, “Why do the nations so furiously rage together,” and what came out was
Wfmrghghghgh
and the sopranos screeched like hyenas, and Miss Forsberg said, “Again!” and he screwed it up again. Choked. He slunk home from choir, running the gauntlet of snowballers—and in Looseleaf, the snowballs were
hard
and thrown sidearm with deadly accuracy—and he found Mother making the stuffing to put in the turkey and weeping over their imminent deaths which she could see clearly:

Mother checked the Christmas tree frequently for signs of combustion and he tried to tell her that he wanted to quit choir forever as she poured fresh water into the tree stand and snapped off dry branches. Meanwhile Daddy was ranting and raving about money. “I will never understand to the end of my born days,” he said, “how someone can leave a room without turning off the light. How much exertion does it take to reach up and snap off a light switch? You must think we are Hollywood stars made of money to see this house with lights blazing at night.”

Mother heard the word “blazing” and shuddered at the thought. A Christmas tree blazing up and burning down your house. The irony of it: you bring a thing of beauty and magic into your home, and it turns around and kills you. The lights left on too long, the tree not properly watered, the family exhausted from the festivities, and in the wee hours—
poof!
spontaneous combustion! A deadly conflagration. The family vaporized. She felt weak in the knees and had to sit down. And then felt sick to her stomach.

Daddy looked at the stack of presents under the tree and cried out, “You’ve gone mad! You must think I am made of money! What possessed you, woman? I am only a municipal employee. I am not Santa Claus.”

And that was the year she gave James a dictionary for Christmas that had been owned by someone else. He was hoping for a telescope, a pair of Bass Weejuns, sunglasses, a transistor radio, a pair of cords, but he got a used dictionary. Wrapped up in used Christmas wrapping with old creases in it. A used dictionary and inside you could see where someone had erased the words
Monique, Happy Birthday
. He showed it to Mother and she said, “Oh.” That was all she said.
Oh.

Projectile vomiting was going on upstairs in the little frame house and the smell of Lysol was heavy in the air. Elaine and Benny were sicker than dogs, moaning in their twin beds, feverish, achy, nauseated, a basin by the bed into which they yorked up their Rye-Krisp and ginger ale. James stood in the door and told them to forget about Christmas. “You expect Santa to come and get your germs and spread them to every other boy and girl on this planet so that there is a mass epidemic of vomiting and diarrhea all over the world? What sort of Christmas would that be? Santa coming down the chimney and leaving your germs and the boys and girls wake up in the morning in a pool of green poop? Of course Santa isn’t going to come. Forget about it.” They put their hot little faces into their pillows and sobbed heart-wrenching sobs and he went downstairs and soon began to feel queasy.

And just then, as he heard Mother pour buttermilk into a bowl to make custard, the Dark Angel touched his shoulder and he had to dash to the bathroom—and the door was locked. He knocked. Daddy said, “Go away.” So he had to dash outdoors and there, in the snow, it exploded out of him at both ends. Oh my. Oh dear. Stomach and bowels. Chunks of many colors. He scooped up snow to hide the disgrace but it soaked right in. He took off his pants and heaved them out into the dark, into a deep snowbank, and washed himself with snow, and snuck into the house full of Christmas lights and radio choirs and slunk up to his bed and spent two days of invalidism, lying very quietly, not eating anything or thinking about eating or wanting to hear about anybody eating, feeling like the object of a cruel experiment.

 

It was very quiet. He knocked on the bathroom door. “Are you all right?” There was a groan from inside. “Would you like a ginger ale? Some toast and tea?”

“No,” she said. She opened the door. She had washed her face and she looked up at him all beautiful and needy and he put his arms around her. “There’s no need to suffer,” he said. “How about I call a doctor?”

“No need to waste a doctor’s time. It’s the common flu, darling, or whatever that jerk was passing around. I guess I’ll just stay in bed for Christmas.”

He was going to say something about Hawaii and alternative medicine and decided not to. He put on a robe and walked barefoot across the thick gray angora carpet. A mirror hung on the wall and he ducked it. Didn’t want to see his face just now. His bland face with the light green, almost yellowish, eyes—“gecko eyes,” cousin Liz called them when they were kids. And into the hallway overlooking Lake Michigan and past the library and the dining room into the kitchen and out onto the terrace. Snow was falling. His big oak hot tub sat by the railing. He pulled off the insulated cover and steam boiled up into the cold night air. The floating thermometer said 110 degrees. He stripped off his pajamas and climbed in and sat, water up to his chin, snow falling on his head, and looked out into the darkness of the lake and thought about Hawaii. The sheer beauty of their estate at Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau—and how, after a day or two, the sheer tranquility of the house and grounds worked its wonders on them. Some evenings, they would walk down the great lawn to the beach and drop their robes and walk naked into the sea and swim out a hundred yards and float there as the sun went down, to see the lights come on in the great house and the lanai and the portico around the pool, an ivory palace under the sheltering palms, as they floated in the arms of the everlasting sea, inhaling the salt air and the sweet blossomy breeze, listening to the chef’s little daughter play her one Chopin étude and the two of them transcended the Midwest and entered into a state of buoyant blessedness.

 

 

H
e was not sleeping well these days—ironic, considering that his financial empire was built from an energy drink called 4xPrime made from ionized chlorophyll from coyote grass; a broad-stemmed plant devoured by coyotes during mating season, that, to put it simply, gives you high energy and focus from dawn to midnight and then the equivalent of eight hours of sleep in just two hours. FourxPrime swept like prairie fire through the professional and managerial ranks in the late 1990s, word of mouth, no ads, completely under the media radar, a secret greenish liquid that millions of people knew about—a few drops in your coffee or tea and you were a monster of productivity. It didn’t work for everybody. Maybe only 20 percent of 4xPrime consumers got the full benefit, but for those people, it was rocket fuel. They worked late into the night and napped and awoke before dawn feeling fresh and ambitious and showed up at the 7:00 A.M. meeting full of fresh brilliance and maintained a killer pace all day and took home a briefcase bulging with work and delivered it in the morning all tidy and polished and never complained. All thanks to a grass that coyote eat to give them stamina to flirt and skitter and howl at the moon. The Sioux warriors who ate Custer’s lunch were tanked up on coyote grass.

James bought the formula for $1250 from an old chemist in the Wrangler Saloon in Livingston, Montana. The man was in his cups and falling off the barstool and James was on the road selling aluminum shelving and peanut brittle. He was 32 and had no bright prospects in life, he was stumbling along from one budget motel to the next, a life of discolored TVs and lumpy beds and breakfast rooms with a ten-gallon dispenser of Cheerios and stale sweet rolls and bitter coffee. That fall, in South Dakota, he bought a ski mask and took up bank robbery, which he liked. There was stress, of course, and a constant fear of failure—you thrust the note at the teller (“Yes, you’re right. This is a robbery. Don’t push that alarm button and nobody gets hurt. Put all your money in this bag and hand it over. Nice and slow. And then go to the bathroom and stay there for one half hour.”) and what if she laughed in your face and told you to take a hike? The “gun” in your pocket was nothing but a corn cob. On the other hand, the money was good and you kept banker’s hours. And there was plenty of time off between jobs. So there was the good and the bad. He had robbed banks in Mitchell, Pierre, Rapid City, and Billings, and was in Livingston to pull one more bank job and while he sat in his car in the parking lot, the ski mask on top of his head, composing the note, two men galloped into the bank wearing Halloween masks, pistols in hand. Their eyeholes must’ve been not lined up right because they ran right into a sculpture of a boy and his dog—one hit the boy, the other the dog—and whacked themselves in the groin and fell limp and helpless to the marble floor where a female security guard sprayed them with pepper spray. The sheer humiliation of it—to run around in Donald Duck masks and have your gonads dinged by a work of art and then get a shot of pepper in the snoot. James Sparrow gave up bank robbery in that minute. He threw away the mask and ripped up the note and went to the bar to celebrate when the old chemist leaned over and breathed on him and asked for a loan. James gave him a ten-dollar bill. The drunk looked at it and burst into tears and pulled out the formula, scrawled in pencil on Holiday Inn stationery, and offered it to him for a hundred bucks. “This is great stuff to put the lead in your pencil,” he said. The man had been fired after thirty-two years at Monsanto. He was on his way to Tucson to see his sister Kathy, he said.