Snowflake, AZ Read online

  It was just a few days after Christmas, and I got the best present I could ever have gotten. I was wrapped up tight in my shed one morning. A few weeks back, Detlef had come over and put a piece of glass in the roof so I could sit in there and read by daylight and stare up at blue sky if I wanted. Why he didn’t put it in the side so I could see out, I guess you’d have to ask him that one. But that morning I was reading and from time to time staring at the blue sky when I heard a truck pull up in the yard and I knew Mona was home and, anyway, her little car didn’t sound like that.

  I was reading a book about how back in the day they sent people with tuberculosis to the desert, to Tucson and other places in Arizona and other places besides, because the dry air was good for ’em. And just as I was reading that, the truck pulled up and I stuck my head out of the door and there was Bly, climbing down from the cab, but real slow. If I had doubted he was sick when I first saw him again, there was no doubting it now. He was gray like Harry, but grayer, and he looked like he’d aged ten years in the couple months he’d been gone. He was hunched over and he moved real slow and he saw me and I scrambled out to him and he mumbled something about driving all night and he fell into my arms and I couldn’t hold him, he always was bigger’n me, but somehow I got him into my bed. I mean the bed that was really his, back in his shed and he was in a daze and he didn’t even seem to know it was my stuff in there and not his. And then he fell asleep just after saying ‘hello, Snowflake’ and smiling a sleepy smile.

  I closed the door and I went to find Mona and we stood with our hands on our hips looking at the shed, inside of which Bly was resting.

  Neither of us had nothing to say, till after a long while Mona said, ‘Well, now where you gonna sleep?’ and shook her head and I realized she meant me.

  Cooper came wandering over and sniffed at the wheels of Bly’s truck and Mona said, yeah, we’re wondering that too. Where’s our Bly been, that’s what she meant, and Cooper left the wheels alone and sniffed about the door of the shed for a bit till Mona said, ‘You’ll see him soon enough, mutt. Let him rest a while.’

  So we took Cooper inside and Mona made tea and we stared at the desert for a couple hours till we were done with that.

  We was all full of questions and from time to time one of us would say, ‘D’you…?’ or ‘what if he…?’ or ‘why do you suppose…?’ but we never finished them questions because we knew the only one who had the answers was lying in his shed, dreaming. Yeah, dreaming, without a doubt. But dreaming of what?

  And in the end, we didn’t have to ask no more questions, because just when we started wondering if we’d imagined Bly coming home and I even went to the front door to see if his truck was really there, the door to the shed opened and out he came. So I rushed as fast as I could back into the living room with Mona and said ‘shush, he’s comin’’ like we was guilty about something though I don’t know what.

  In he came and sat himself in a chair and it was just like he’d never been away, ’cept it was obvious he had. There was the way he looked, for one, and for another, he was quiet, quieter than he’d been before.

  Mona poured him some fresh tea and said, ‘You hungry, Bly?’ and Bly said thanks but maybe later and then no one said anything for a long time and the desert wasn’t helping. The best thing was Cooper who climbed up into Bly’s lap and that gave us all something to do. Watch Bly tickle Cooper under the chin, just how he liked it.

  Finally Mona said, ‘You stopping a while, or…?’ and Bly smiled and nodded his head and somehow shook it at the same time and said ‘I guess’ which was a tad better than a shrug but not much.

  ‘And the police academy…?’ she said next and that did get her a shrug. But Bly also said, ‘Yeah, I guess that didn’t work out’ and it didn’t need saying why. He was not well. He’d tried to ignore the fact that he was sick. He’d tried to do a Dr. B and tell himself it was all in his head and all he had to do was go back to flatland and carry on just like before and then everything would be fine. ’Cept, it wasn’t. He’d ignored his sickness but it did not ignore him, in fact, it took very good care of him and he was laid real low on account of it.

  He told us how he’d kept trying with the physical training but how he kept having to take days off and how they’d keep sending him to the medical center at the academy and when they couldn’t find nothing wrong with him they started laying into him about faking it and was he really sure he wanted to be a police officer or did he just like the idea of it. Heck, you can probably work out the rest, and now here he was back home.

  News always traveled fast in the Forties. So the first to show up was Mary who came in saying, ‘Yeah, I said to myself that’s Bly’s truck. I gotta go see, and here he is!’ And she had about the biggest smile I ever saw her give anything or anyone.

  Mary was the first but not the only one. Before long there was Finch and Jenny came by too. Harry set a chair opposite Bly and started asking him questions about the academy and saying dumb things like ‘I guess it’s like the military, huh? Boot camp? Am I right?’ and all the while not thinking once that here was Bly back because he didn’t make the grade. Even Detlef rolled up in his Mercedes in the afternoon, and each time someone came Bly had to go through the whole story till Mona and me started taking over, speaking for him.

  All the while we could see Bly getting more’n more tired till finally Mona shooed everyone out of her house, save me and Cooper. Socrates was nowhere to be seen and we was all glad about that though I still wouldn’t have said it to his dumb-looking face.

  So then Mona started wondering about where I was gonna sleep and I said I can go back to the porch though I was actually thinking about how I knew that two people could just about squeeze into that little shed. If those two people liked each other. And about how cozy it was if you did. But Mona said, ‘You are crazy, Snowflake. You cannot sleep outside now. It’s way too cold. No, we’ll figure something out.’

  And what she figured out for that night was that I was gonna sleep on the bathroom floor, after everyone had done in there.

  It was the end of December, and it was dark real early.

  Everyone was tired. Not just Bly, but all of us, it had been too much for one day, and it hadn’t been helped by Socrates showing up at sundown in a real mean mood and butting the side of the house for half an hour till Mona ran outside and yelled ‘gah!’ so he rolled over and pointed his hooves at the stars, which was just coming out.

  ‘Dumb goat,’ Mona said and we got ready to sleep.

  Mona went into the bathroom first and got washed up and came out in her old robe, purple and quilted. Then Bly went and got himself ready and came out wearing just a T-shirt and his shorts and I saw how thin he looked and how he’d lost all his muscles in just a couple months.

  There was this funny little thing. We just stopped and looked at each other and looked away but didn’t move. Mona was over by the kitchen, fussing with Cooper, and there was this little moment when Bly didn’t look at me and I didn’t look at Bly, but I wanted to say something so I said, ‘Bly, I am happy you’re home and all.’

  Then he shot a quick look at me and said, ‘O my Lord. Why am I not strong?’ and I said what? and at first he didn’t reply but then he said, ‘Nothing. Nothing. I’m happy to see you again, Ash.’

  He leaned down at me and we kissed real quick, like his lips just brushed me, and then he pulled away without looking any more or saying any more and he went to bed, and I rolled out the mat Mona had given me on the bathroom floor and turned the light off and thought about what he’d said and how I was lying on the bathroom floor and there was Bly, just about twenty yards away in the desert and how stupid that was.

  But there seemed not a thing I could do to change it. All I wanted to do was get up and go out there but it was like there was some giant barrier, an invisible force, holding me back and keeping me on that bathroom floor. And you know, to this day, if you asked me what that thing was, I still couldn’t give you an answer. Not one t
hat makes any kind of sense, anyhow. Because that thing about how often it’s best to say nothing? Well, that idea was about to get a real kicking.

  Anyway, I said to myself, I kept saying to myself, the main thing, the main thing is that Bly is home. And as for the sleeping questions, well, we could sort that out. Maybe they would sort themselves out, somehow, and I got myself to sleep by thinking about that and it made me warm inside like the niacin flush only way better.

  Things did work out. With the matter of the sleeping accommodations. It worked out because as things fell, Bly wasn’t staying, nor ever had intended to, it seemed.

  He was always the best kid, we knew that. Everyone in the Forties, and beyond. Bly was just the best. He was kind and he was honorable, never said a bad word about anyone, and never fell out with anyone neither. All he wanted to do was what he thought was right, and, like Mona said that Nietzsche said, he who has a why to live can cope with almost any how. But what if you don’t have that why? What if that why is taken away from you, and no matter how much you scream and fight, no matter what you do, nothing can bring it back? What then?

  What then, is that it turned out that Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1821 to 1881, was wrong; sometimes a man cannot get used to anything. No matter how much he might want to, no matter how much he might try. And it seems that Bly was one of those men, because somewhere a little ahead of midnight, as Mona and Cooper was sleeping and as I was dreaming, we was all woken up by a loud noise, and that noise was Bly shooting himself in the head with a police revolver he’d stolen from the academy.

  A noise like that, in the open desert at night, you get out of your sleep real quick and your brain is struggling to work out what it heard and what it was but I didn’t need my brain to work it out, because my body already knew, even before Mona and I grabbed our flashlights while Cooper ran around in circles like it was the Christmas party all over again, even before we got outside, even before we opened the door to the shed and saw what Bly had done to himself with that gun.

  Before all of that, my heart already knew that Bly was gone, and this time he was gone for good.

  The police arrived and there were questions and questions and more questions and an ambulance and all I recall was the flashing lights in the night, flashing out across the desert and Bly’s bloody body going into a bag and up onto a stretcher and he was gone forever, and by then it was way, way early in the morning and Mona stared out into the desert like she was seeing something, like she was hearing something, but I guess she wasn’t. I know she wasn’t because as we went back into the house, and everyone had gone, and we was alone, just her a middle-aged lady and me a dumb young kid, with our Bly all gone and all gone in horror, I heard her whisper something to herself.

  And I couldn’t have made it out, save for I’d heard her say it ten hundred thousand times before.

  I wonder what will happen next.

  R

  Role of the COMT Val158Met

  Polymorphism

  There ain’t no point in saying more.

  No, I don’t mean that. What I mean is, I don’t know what to say, or how I should say it. You ever lost somebody? Of course you have, we all have, now. And so you know that when somebody goes, it’s just a bad, bad time. And Time did what it always does when somebody dies, which is to say, it stood still and it kept right on moving, both things together. And because it did that, somehow I found myself stuck over and over again in the middle of a late December night staring at the body of my brother Bly with his beautiful head all a mess, while at the same time I was getting up each morning and eating and talking to Mona and feeding Cooper his chow and avoiding Socrates because I thought I might kill him if he pestered me right then.

  And people came and people went and I was sleeping on the bathroom floor because although the shed was empty again there was no way on earth I was ever going back in there, never mind to sleep.

  From time to time, bits and pieces would come back to me from that night. Like I thought I remembered how, when we opened the shed, Mona sank to the ground and started to howl. How Cooper came over to her and lay down next to her, quietly. Stuff like that. But what can you say? And what’s the point? It felt like the world had ended. No, it felt like the world should have ended, but it didn’t. It just kept right on going and Bly was still gone. He was still dead, and the worst of it was how. How he had done it, to himself. That was the real horror. That, and the fact that I had not just walked out there to his shed that night and lain down next to him. That I maybe could have stopped him.

  That was the real pain. Still is.

  So the days ticked off till one morning there was a phone call to Mona’s house and she picked it up and said ‘oh, hi’ and ‘I’m so sorry’ and ‘yes, yes, I know’ and ‘yes, of course,’ and when she hung up it had been Jack and the date was set for Bly’s funeral and it was gonna be at Jack’s church the day after tomorrow.

  ‘We better get going,’ said Mona and I looked over at her all surprised because I didn’t think there was any way in hell we was going to go.

  ‘But that’s two states away,’ I said and Mona told me it was three in point of fact and I said ‘oh, yeah’ and ‘but how are we gonna—’ but Mona just held a hand up and said, ‘Ash, do you wanna go?’ and I told her that it was the only thing in the world I wanted and she said, ‘Well, then leave it to me.’

  So the following morning we set off.

  There was Mona and Mary and me set in the back of Detlef’s Mercedes and Detlef and Finch up front, taking turns in driving. Then when both of them got tired, Mona did a spell and then Mary and I even did an hour or so but I couldn’t do much more’n that before I was exhausted. And we headed east. East and a little north.

  During other times, it might’ve been a real swell road trip, but these were not other times. These were the times when we was heading to Bly’s funeral and no one had much to say but stare out the window and watch the great nation roll by and I will say this: America was big.

  The plan was we would drive all day and through the night and if we stuck to the schedule, we’d roll up with an hour or so to spare before the funeral, which was ten in the following morning.

  Once or twice, people would try to speak. Mostly it didn’t go too well, and we all fell silent again real quick, but I recall Finch talking about some article he’d read the day before on his news line.

  He said, ‘Ash, you remember I was telling you about placebo?’ and he rattled off the name of that gene that meant you was more likely to get on well with the placebo effect. So I said, yeah, what about it? and he said he’d just read another paper and how it explained that the very same gene was also responsible for how kind folks are.

  ‘Kindness,’ he said. ‘That same little fellow is responsible for it. And he can exist in one of two different forms. That’s called a polymorphism. One’s called val and one’s called met.’

  Now I gotta confess I was already lost, but he went on and on and on about it across half of America until I started to get it. And a bit of me wondered why he thought anyone wanted to know about this, but I guessed he was just trying to find something to say. So we didn’t think about Bly all the time. There was no danger of that not happening, but I guessed Finch was just trying to be kind, the only way he could think of.

  ‘You know that genes exist in pairs, right? So you got two copies of the gene, one from your father and one from your mother, and that’s four different combinations. So you can be val/val, or val/met, or met/val, or met/met. Four combinations, see?’

  Then Finch explained how the val part made you more altruistic, which is to say, you do good things for other people without wanting something back. So if you was val/val you was real generous and if you was met/met, well, you probably know people like that, right? And then there was everyone else in the middle.

  ‘Here’s the thing. The val/val people, the ones who don’t get no help from placebo, they’re the altruistic ones. Whereas the met/met, they get all that placebo�
�s got to offer. And they’re selfish too! How is that fair?’

  And I didn’t say anything to that and neither did anyone else, because, well, what can you say to that? But I do remember thinking that if all we are is down to what our programming says and what the bacteria have in mind for us, then what does that leave for us? Does it give us any choice? Maybe it leaves us with just the choice of putting a stolen police revolver to your head. Or maybe even that ain’t no choice you’re making. You just think it is, but really it’s on account of the bacteria and what-have-you.

  But we made our way. And all we did was stop for food and the restroom from time to time, and that caused some problems. In the car, no one wore their masks, but when we stopped someplace, all five of us would put our masks on and head right into a diner. Some places, the waitresses looked like we was about to do that bank job I was telling you about before, and some places we got yelled at and others it was ok.

  For lunch we was lucky and found a vegan café and they didn’t bat a lash at the way we looked, but then later we was set in a diner and stared at the menu for a long time till Mona said, ‘There ain’t nothing on here that ain’t gonna kill ya’ and made us drive off schedule to a whole food store to get something to eat that wasn’t full of chemicals and in the whole food store someone got suspicious that we were terrorists and called the manager and we had to explain why we was wearing masks and he said he was gonna call the police and we said well, yeah, but do we look like terrorists, and even if we were, would we start our campaign of terror by blowing up mung beans? It all took forever to explain, but in the end we just about bought our food and left. And in this one gas station, Detlef went to the restroom and came straight back. He’d gone without his mask and there was one of them automatic fragrance dispensers in there, so he had to come back for his mask. Or get gassed.