Loser (11 page)

The lights from front windows and the lights at the street corners help. It is as if they are looking too. The snowflakes in the light remind him of moths. In the darkness between the lights he cannot see the snow fall. He cannot hear it. He sticks out his tongue to catch a flake.

In the darkness he calls out in a whisper: “Claudia…Claudia…”

Why he whispers he doesn't know.

Maybe it's because he doesn't want to disturb the night any more than necessary.

Maybe it's so she won't hear him, in case she's having fun.

“Claudia…”

The snow is getting deep. It's over his ankles. He wades through it as he waded through the surf at the beach.

It is hard to see between the lights. He whispers into the dark corners.

“Claudia…”

The black canyon of housefronts looms over him. Night into night.

“Claudia…”

He crisscrosses the street, searching both sides, trying to miss nothing, stitching the sidewalks together.

The falling snow covers everything, makes everything white and soft and humpy. It's a guessing game. What was that? What was that? He thinks she is under the snow. He thinks she is playing a game, waiting to be found. He can almost hear her giggle, searchers so close but not knowing. Or she is asleep. A little girl bear cub asleep under the snow. Every hump he thinks is her. He pokes with his boot, flinches in expectation of her exploding up from the snow, like a flushed bird, laughing. But it's only a sled left outside, a junked TV, a plastic bag of trash.

“Claudia…”

Then he thinks, no, she's not still, she's moving,
she's running, rolling in the snow, celebrating. She's unleashed! It's snowing! Unmoving is the last thing she would be.

Every now and then he looks back. The spinning lights are far away now, a fallen spaceship. He loves the distant spinning light. It is his leash. He wishes Claudia had not wanted to be quite so free.

A new light turns the corner ahead. A rumbling. It's a plow, scooping snow like a finger through cake icing. The plow rumbles toward him, its headlights trembling. For the first time in his life he does not reach for a snowball. As the plow passes him an alarming thought occurs: What if she's in the street! He calls out: “Stop!” But the plow rumbles on past and up the street.

Two more blocks and he looks back again. Suddenly he no longer feels he is about to find her any second. All he feels is the silence. He cannot believe how silently the snow falls. He cannot believe she could have come this far. He takes one last look at the distant spinning lights. He turns at the corner. He will go down a block and work his way back toward the light.

Halfway along the block he comes to an alley, and it hits him.

Alley!

The unnamed, unmapped, car-free second streets of the town. Who says she went out the front door into the street, where everyone looks, where every light shines? Who says she didn't bolt out the back door and into the alley? He thinks of the days of his own life spent in the town's alleyways. He feels it, he knows it: This is where she is.

He looks into the blackness. There are no lights here. It is as black as the cellar with the kitchen door shut. This is night's cellar, where night falls to. He takes a step. Another. The light from the nearest streetlamp follows him, loses him.

“Claudia…”

He sends his whisper out ahead of him. His whisper is his eyes, his fingertips.

“Claudia…”

He does not know it is snowing unless he turns his face up.

The snowplow doesn't come here.

He trips over something, sprawls facedown into snow. He gets up, wipes his face. There's snow on his neck, melting under his collar. He takes his hands from his coat pockets, for balance, the better not to fall.

And falls again.

He pulls out his lucky stone. He clutches it in his hand. His hands are wet and cold.

“Claudia…”

Dim light ahead: the next street. The snowfall
reappears. He crosses the street and back into alleyway blackness.

“Claudia…”

He crosses another street, and another. In time he hears the staticky squawk of a two-way radio. To his right there is light through an airshaft, glow silhouettes the rooftops. Voices. He is behind Claudia's house. He thinks to call out: “You're looking in the wrong place!” But he only trudges on, leaving the lights and the voices behind, sinking into the blackness.

“Claudia…”

He squeezes his lucky stone. He puts his hands in his pockets. His pockets feel the same as his hands, cold and wet. How did that happen?

Squares of light to the left and right show the presence of kitchen and back bedroom windows. But they hold their light, it does not reach the alley. It is flat, like yellow paper pasted on black.

He stumbles in hidden potholes, lurches against open gates and chain-link fences and who knows what all in the cold pillowy night.

He trudges on. He no longer bothers to lift his feet.

“Claudia…”

How long can she last? How long can a little girl stay warm, stay alive in a snowstorm at night?

He will find her.

How will he find her?

Will she be crouched and shivering, something he stumbles over?

Will he hear her first, hear her little girl voice laughing and saying, “I runned away! I runned away!”

What will he say when he finds her? He thinks. He thinks. He will say “Aha!” That's all he can think of.

Will she want to have a snowball fight before they go home? Will he say, “Don't be silly”? Will she insist?

He thinks of Polly, his sister. Polly was once as little as Claudia. Polly used to run away too. “Gets it from Donald,” his mother used to say. But that wasn't true. Donald didn't run away. He left the house. There's a difference. Polly
ran away
.

When Polly got a notion, it was “Katie, bar the door,” as his mother used to say. Maybe she should have said, “Katie, get the leash.” But there was no leash and no harness, and if the door wasn't barred, it was Polly down the steps and up the street.

Whoever was closest, that was your job: Get Polly. His father used to say, “Some day I'm going to call her bluff. I'm going to let her walk as far as she wants.” Uncle Stanley said, “I bet she'll walk all the way to Cleveland.”

And one day darn if his father didn't do it, called her bluff, let her go. He stayed right behind her, Donald behind him. When she came to the street she just waltzed on across it, no stop, look and listen for her, his father like a mother duck, watching for cars. When she realized he was behind her, she squealed and ran faster, her little rear end bouncing like a pair of apples.

She didn't make it all the way to Cleveland, but she did make it to Ludlow Avenue, which his father bragged for the next several years was at least a mile from where she started. But in the end she stopped. Funny thing, she never slowed
down, she just stopped, in the middle of the street. She stopped and turned and looked at him and his father and just plopped her apples right down on the street, one car coming to a stop, another swinging around them.

She had been utterly pleased with herself. “I runned away!” she chirped, and the sun was no match for her smile. And Zinkoff saw in that moment something that he had no words for. He saw that a kid runs to be found and jumps to be caught. That's what being a kid is: found, caught. Then she did something that has never left him. Sitting there in the middle of the street, she reached up to him, not to his father but to him, and his heart went out of him and he picked her up and he carried her home on his shoulders.

“Claudia…”

She isn't running anymore. He knows that now. She is waiting.

The lucky stone—he cannot feel it. Did he drop it? He panics. When he comes to the next street light, he looks. The stone is still there, in his hand. His hands have become like the stone,
cold and hard and unfeeling. He lifts the stone and runs its smooth, icy surface along his cheek. He runs it along his lips. He puts it in his mouth, the only warm part of him left.

Back into the blackness.

“Claudia…”

He comes to the end of the alley. He goes down the street, up another alley, sucking on the bubblegum stone, keeping it warm. He blows on his fingers.

He looks up. He can no longer feel the flakes on his face, except on his lips. He wishes he could see the stars. He still thinks of them as his stars. He remembers one of his earliest beliefs, that a number of stars fell to earth each day so that mothers could go about gathering them for their children's shirts. He wishes he still believed it. He stops, faces full to the sky. He closes his eyes, feels the flakes on his eyelids: cold ash of dying stars.

He wants to stop. He wants to go to sleep. He thinks of his bed. He pictures himself in his pajamas. No, first he pictures himself in the bathtub. He has been taking showers because he's big
now, but for this one more time he wants the bath. He lets the water run and run, and his mother doesn't call up, “Donald, that's enough! Turn it off!” not this time. He lets the warm water rise all the way to his belly button before he turns it off, then he slinks down into the steamy everlasting warmness, only his head above. And then into bed, under the covers, curled up, shivering not from cold but with delight, giggling under his soft warm mountain of covers…

He stumbles over something, goes lurching into a chain-link fence. The fence rattles, then spills its dislodged snow with a sound like breath going out.

He yells, he screams down the trench of blackness:

“Claudiaaaaaa!”

Silence.

Surprisingly, the top of his head is not cold. His hair is thick, and the snow that falls upon it keeps getting shaken off by his repeated stumbles and fallings. But his ears, they are freezing. The crests of his ears are so cold they feel as if they're burning. He muffs them with his hands, but his
hands are as cold as his ears. He's going to get hollered at good when he gets home. His mother is always telling him not to go out in weather like this without his hat. She's going to say “Heaven help me” at least fifty times.

He thinks of the Waiting Man. He wonders if the Waiting Man ever thought of going over to Vietnam and looking for his brother himself. And then it occurs to him: Maybe he did. Maybe he did go over there, as soon as he heard his brother was missing in action. Maybe he figured he was the best one to go looking for his own brother, and maybe he went tramping up and down the jungle till his shoes wore out, and maybe he was on his second or third pair of shoes when they kicked him out because it was their jungle not his, and so that's why he came back to the window, he had no choice.

And he sees the front window of Claudia's house, across the street from the Waiting Man, and he sees Claudia's mother, hears a voice from the future, “Yeah, it's a shame. One night during a snowstorm the little girl ran off. Used to wear a harness. Just took off. Whole town came out
looking for her, even the Zinkoff kid. They looked and looked. Turned this town upside down. Never could find her. Now look, her mother sits in that window, waiting for her little girl to come home. Been waiting there for over thirty years…”

He bites down hard on his lucky stone.

“Claudia…”

He comes to the end of this second alley and finds a third and comes to the end of that and finds another. Before one turn he sees red-and-white spinning lights in the distance. He no longer wants to scold them for looking in the wrong place. Seeing the lights makes him feel good now, makes him feel part of a team as he heads down the next alleyway.

He hasn't noticed, but the back house lights have gone out along the way, the kitchens and bedrooms. He does notice, however, that something is different. Noise. The snow has become noisy. A vast brushy noise all about him as of a broom sweeping. He lifts his face, he feels tiny prickles on his skin. It's not snow, but it's not rain either. Within minutes the soft sweeping
sound has become a chittering, as if someone above is sprinkling salt on the world. His footsteps crunch. He reaches down. The top of the snow has become crusty, slick and cold and crusty. Not good for making snow angels. He should have made a snow angel before the snow got crusty. He wonders if Claudia is making snow angels. He wonders if angels are invisible in the snow. He wonders if angels make people in the snow. He wonders if Claudia is an angel…

The tiny grains of ice have turned to freezing rain that pelts his face and runs down his neck and onto his shoulders and wakes him up, which is quite a surprise since he didn't know he had gone to sleep in the first place. But here he is, lying not standing in the snow. He tries to push himself up, but his hand breaks through the crust, and snow like cold cotton runs up inside his coat arm past his elbow. He jumps up. He flaps his arm violently to shake out the snow. The snow falls out, but try to get his icicle of an arm to believe it.

He trundles onward. His head is soaking wet.
He's taking a shower. “Hey Mom, I'm taking a shower!” Does he say it or think it? He's not sure. He's not sure of a lot of things anymore. Things seem to be blending, differences disappearing. He is no longer sure where he ends and the snow begins. Snow is him. Cold is him. Night is him.

He knows himself only by the stone in his mouth, the last faintly glowing ember of what used to be Zinkoff. He clamps the stone in his teeth, covers it with his tongue. He stomps once through the crust, trying to shake the rest of himself loose from the night.

He stomps again and barks into the night: “Claudia!”

Now she's made him mad. “Wait till I get a hold of you.”

A gleam of light. A distant voice. A funny siren, sounds like a hiccup. He calls: “I'm looking here! You look there! We'll find her!”

Or does he just think he calls?

He reminds himself, reminds himself.

Claudia's mother.

The Waiting Man.

One Waiter is enough. There will be no more
Waiters on the nine hundred block of Willow. “Period!” he says out loud.

And falls asleep. He's still walking, but he's asleep as surely as any of those people behind the back house windows. And why not? It's so easy when you are the night and the night is you and you're down to the last stone in your mouth and there's nothing to see anyway—it's all black!—so where's the difference between an eye open and an eye closed?

Until you walk into a garage door.

He bounces rudely off the door and falls on his back into the snow. He's up and slogging onward, turned around now in the confusion and heading back the way he came.

“Claudia…”

Walking…walking…

Thud thud shush shush

“Oh, Mailman!”

He looks up. She smiles. “Come on in,” she says, and he goes in. And what a wonderful surprise: It's hot chocolate time! There's his old Winnie the Pooh mug from when he was little. She pours in the hot chocolate all foamy and
steaming, and then comes the best part, the Cool Whip. She scoops some on but not enough, never enough, because it's his mother now and she's playing the game, she's waiting for him to say “More!” so he says it and she piles on more, and he has to practically sink his whole face into the Cool Whip to get down to the hot chocolate, and it's heaven it's a car…

He has sleepwalked onto a street and into a parked car.

He trundles on. He thinks he's in an alley but he's in the middle of a street. He hears a squawk. The hiccuping siren. He sees a flashing light—red, blue. He's glad they're still out looking for her. He thinks they will find her first.

The rain is coming down harder now, he can hear it, the sound is so much louder. He squints. He tries to see the rain in the streetlight, but he cannot seem to focus. He holds out his hand. He tries to look at it, but his hand will not stay still. He looks up. Nothing falls on his face. The rain has stopped. The snow has stopped. If not the rain, what is that noise?

It's himself. His teeth. They're chattering,
rattling worse than Clunker Nine, shaking like his hand, like his whole body, the lucky stone dancing in his mouth.

Zinkoff is cold.

Pretending is warm.

He pretends he's his dad. With every step he says, “Piece a cake…piece a cake…” He lurches into another car. He punches himself to stay awake. He stomps. He can't feel his toes. Who took his toes? He sings: “Somebody took my toes…” He sings: “Claudiaaaah…oh Claudiaaaah…” He must stay awake, must stay awake, must find her, no more waiting. He spells his favorite word, he calls it out loud to the chitterchattering night: “T-I-N-T-I-N-N-A-B-U-L-A-T-I-O-N.” He sings it: “T-I-N-T-I-N-N-A-B-U-L-A-T-I-O-N.” He hears Claudia calling. She's on Halftank Hill, she's on his sled, on his back, and they're sailing down the hill and she's screaming, screaming, she's Polly, sitting on his dad's shoulders screaming “Go Donald! Go Donald!” And he goes, he blazes like the wind down the sidewalk racing the cars, beating them to the end of the block. “And the Z shall be first!”
declares Mr. Yalowitz. “And the Z shall be last!” declares Mrs. Biswell and the Waiting Man winks in the window and says, “Pass me a snickerdoodle.” Yellow button, yellow button, what do you say? “Get off my team,” says the yellow button. One thousand congratulations. Gimme a T! Gimme an I! Gimme an N!…Whaddayagot? Candles! Get yer candles here! Genu-wine earwax candles, two thousand one hundred and sixty congratulations apiece! Two thousand one hundred and sixty…two thousand one hundred…All aboard! Allll aboard! Next stop Jabip Jabip Jabip good morning young citizens good morning good morning heaven help heaven help help…

The lights are blinding him. The lights are rumbling. He knows that he must turn away, he must get to the alley, he must find Claudia, but he cannot get away from the lights, he cannot move, and a whistle is screaming and a voice is saying, “Hold on, son, I gotcha…”