A Christmas Blizzard (3 page)

“You can’t get to Tucson on a hundred bucks.”

The man said he had enough money for a Greyhound ticket. “They gave me a nice severance package.”

“Where’s your stuff?”

The man pointed with his right foot at a small red knapsack on the floor.

“That’s it? That’s all you got?”

He nodded.

James got Kathy’s phone number from him. He called Greyhound and bought the ticket and called her and told her to pick up her brother Wednesday morning at 11:30 A.M. and handed him $1,250. He had enough dough, he thought it would be good luck to share. The man wept. He made James take the formula. James said, “I’ve got no use for that,” but the man insisted. “The world needs this,” he said. “That’s my baby. You take good care of her.” He slipped the paper into James’s pocket. And he picked up the knapsack and tottered out the door more or less in the direction of the depot. James took the formula to a lab in Chicago and, after some trial and error—part of the formula had been lost to whiskey stains—they came up with a compound that seemed to work. James marketed it through the Internet back when the Net was like a secret society, and within a year he had a factory in Antigua going full-steam and a mailroom with fifty employees shipping the packages out by the truckload. Oddly, 4xPrime had little or no effect on James. It only made him gloomy.

A chance meeting with a whiskey-soaked chemist in a redneck bar in Livingston, Montana, a pool game in the background, a wiry guy with a cigarette on his lower lip and smoke in his face lining up a shot and Waylon Jennings singing about rainy-day women and a couple of them hanging around the pool game, and some scrawls on a motel notepad, and there was the start of Chapter 2 of his life, along with his hiring of some smart marketing people and a wizard accountant, and then he met Joyce and married her, and America poured money on his head, and now he was cruising at a comfortable altitude in life, and if he ran into turbulence, he could retreat to his Hawaiian estate, Kuhikuhikapapa’-u’maumau, a hundred acres walled off on the leeward side of Lanai, the old plantation house and guest house and his studio and the beach house and the pool, surrounded by fragrant frangipani trees, with a thousand yards of white beach. You could swim in the morning and around one o’clock, Angelique would appear with iced mint tea and crabcake sandwiches, and fresh sliced mango. In the afternoon, you lay in a cord hammock, napping, reading, amusing yourself, and nothing bad ever happened. Nothing. It wasn’t even an option.

 

 

H
e walked through the long dark living room and across the pale maple floor of the kitchen that faced north toward Lincoln Park and got the urge to pack his bags and run. The sadness of blank windows of the Hancock Tower nearby. The headlights of cars on the Outer Drive heading for the salt mines and slaughterhouse. The red flasher of a chopper whumping overhead, probably taking a fat man with chest pains to the ER. A life of pork roasts coming home to roost. Black curtains drawn on the 55th floor of the Winfrey: probably in mourning for a loved one. The city lay under a thick blanket of clouds and he could feel the cold steel gates of winter closing down on him. He opened the cupboard and pulled out a package of rice cakes.

“Is everything all right, sir?” He jerked, his neck almost snapped. Simon had a bad habit of padding up silently behind him and barking. “Sorry, sir, didn’t mean to startle you.”
Embarrassing.
The rice cakes were strewn all over the kitchen floor. He checked his pajamas to make sure he hadn’t wet himself.

“If you’re hungry, sir, I can whip you up a little omelet. Egg whites and low-fat cheese and salsa. Cranberry juice.”

“No thank you. And I wouldn’t mind if you poured that cranberry juice down the drain.”

“It’s good for the urinary tract, sir.”

“My urinary tract is good enough for the purpose.”

“Yes, sir. Of course.”

Simon was picking up the rice cakes. “I’ve packed everything for the trip if you want to get an early start. The plane is ready, sir. It’ll take Buzz and Buddy no more than half an hour to be ready for take-off.”

“Mrs. Sparrow is under the weather.”

“I have two doctors on call. One here and one at Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau. And by the way, you may not want to read the paper this morning, sir.”

“No?”

“It’s that little pushing incident two days ago on the street.”

“You’re joking. The jerk in the Santa Claus suit?”

“Don’t trouble yourself over it. These things blow over. A day or two and it’s all chaff in the wind, sir.”

“Let me see it.”

“Let the lawyers deal with it. You get on the plane and fly to Kuhikuhikapapa’u’maumau and have yourself a good time. Relax in the sun. Have a massage under the kamemehamuhikana trees. Smell the hanihani bushes. Drink your dandelion-burdock juice. You’ll be a new man.”

“Hand over the paper, Simon.”

Mr. Sparrow had had his jousts with the press before. When you are worth $230 million, it is more or less inevitable that someone will want to pee on your parade. But the encounter on the street outside Marshall Field was so minor, so nothing, he couldn’t believe it had made its way into the
Tribune
and yet there he was, just below the fold, in full color, looking smirky and arrogant and ticked off, coming out of the Bunyan Club on Michigan Avenue, heading for his town car, a buxom young woman trailing him—Sophie, his marketing person, they’d just had lunch, but the picture suggests far, far more—and the photographer had just yelled at him, “Hey, Bird Man, how about a big cheesy grin?” and he turned to see who the yahoo was, and there’s the picture. And alongside it—

“See?” said Simon. “I told you not to read it.”

“I didn’t shove him. I put my hand on his shoulder. The guy was hectoring me to put more money in his pail. I said, ‘You’re not the only Santa Claus around’ and he called me a cheapskate and a lot more and I said, ‘Back off, fella,’ and put my hand on his shoulder.”

“I never should’ve told you about the story. Now I’ve gone and ruined your day. My bad. I am so so sorry.”

Simon poured him a cup of coffee and put cream in it, too much cream, which he made a habit of. A bad habit, along with many others, including the self-accusations. A Midwestern habit. Simon tried to act like an English butler and say things like “Very good, sir” and “Brilliant” but he was from Sioux Center, Iowa, and his real name was Steve. He’d worked for the Sparrows for eleven years, ever since their marriage, and Mr. Sparrow wished he could fire him, but Mrs. Sparrow liked Simon. He was, after all, a cellist.

“Snowstorm in the Rockies,” said Simon. “Thought you should know.” He put a newspaper down in front of James.

“Why are you showing me this?” said James. “Let’s not start the day with a downer, okay?”

“Beg your pardon, sir. Thought you’d find it of interest. How is the new clock radio working out? Mrs. Sparrow said there was a problem.”

 

 

M
rs. Sparrow had no appetite for breakfast. She had lost last night’s dinner and taken a glass of Everwell Crystals to quell the uprising and now she needed to get her mind off it. She thought she would feel better if she took a brisk walk to the Art Institute and looked around in the French Impressionists section and visited the Matisse ballet dancers and Edward Hopper’s nighttime diner with the lonely customers and the fry cook in white, which reminded her of Al’s Breakfast Nook in Minneapolis where she spent an unhappy year going for her M.F.A. in creative writing where she learned that, despite the effusive praise of her instructors, she was not a writer. She was clever and facile and could spackle bright words on a page in the shape of a poem but she lacked heart. The fry cook in Al’s had more heart about making a western omelet than she had for poetry. Breakfast was the high point of her day, the artist at the grill and the happy complaining of his clientele, and when she looked at the Hopper painting, she always cried. Sat on the bench fifteen feet away and wept until some kind soul asked if she was all right and she smiled up at him and said, “Never better.” Which was true.

Mrs. Sparrow cried often and cried beautifully, and he had learned in eleven years of marriage that crying was part of her make-up and didn’t indicate unhappiness and the worst thing he could say was, “What’s wrong?” Nothing. She was clearing out her system, as simple as exhaling. She cried looking at certain paintings, and hearing
Madame Butterfly
and at Mimi’s death in
La Bohème
, and at movies when the heroine is diagnosed with a deadly disease or the boy is ridiculed by his father or the lovers bid each other a chill farewell, and she wept at
A Christmas Carol
when Scrooge is guided by the Ghost to see the happiness of his early years and his love of the bountiful Belle, all of it destroyed by his sour passion for earning money. She loved those redemptive stories in which some cruel hard-hearted skeptic hates Christmas and then sees a bright star in the sky, or a candle in a window, or a child’s face lit up in wonder, and his heart melts and he falls to his knees and repents.

“I wish you’d come see
A Christmas Carol
with me,” she said. “The ghosts are wonderful this year. And Scrooge is electric.”

“I saw it when I was a kid and found it terrifying. No need to repeat it.”

She smiled at him sweetly. “I wish you enjoyed Christmas. Somehow I feel it’s my fault. I haven’t given you the Christmas you deserve.”

“I might like Christmas more if it were in June,” he said. “There’s no good reason for it to be December 25th. There is no snow and ice in the Christmas story. The shepherds were out in the fields, for God’s sake. Only reason they put it in December was to take over the old pagan holiday of Saturnalia and Christianize it, just like you’d buy up a theater and turn it into a church.”

“It’s the spirit of it that hits you so hard, darling. You’re sentimental and you have to guard against it and that’s why you put up that hard exterior. It’s the sure sign of a soft heart.”

Nice of her to think so, but not true. Not true. Christmas brought back powerful, painful memories of winter in Looseleaf, North Dakota. The little white house and the wind blowing and the ice on the windows and the side of his little fist melting the ice to make what looked like midget footprints. Tiny people walking barefoot on ice.