St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (14 page)

Badger wasn’t listening to me. His eyes were glued to the ice.

“I wondercould you burn down an ice arena? Or would you have to, like, explode it?”

“Explode it, I guess? But, um, you know, you probably shouldn’t do either.”

Badger was staring from his father to the strange woman and back again. We watched her stoop and pretend to smooth her seamless tights. Badger’s father turned a teenage shade of red. He pulled the woman closer.

“But I wondercould you do it?”

Badger had invented a new word,
wondercould,
a lexical bridge to all sorts of ugliness.
Wondercould
came out in one exhalation. It didn’t leave either of us much room to reflect. Even now, Badger was stroking the red tip of a match.

“Badger…?”

Now Badger’s father and the woman were skating together. She was a good skater, I guess, but I thought Badger’s mother had a more beautiful face. She circumscribed his hurried, hungry slide forward with a lithe figure eight. Her lips were red and parted. Her skirts swirled to a stop.

The match had burned down to Badger’s fingers. I touched a flake of snow to the stick.

“Badger?”

“Shhh!” Badger said. “It’s starting.”

The first snowflake of the Blizzard fell at 7:03. Isolated snowflakes came piping out of the vents, shy, single flakes, and then Lady Yeti flipped some invisible lever. The snow got faster. It got colder and thicker, and we felt a raw tingle in the air.

She turned the knob up to “wintry mix.” Phil Collins crooned his mellow sorrow out of the loudspeakers. Snow blasted our faces. Factory snow. It fell in sheets, these uniform hexagonal crystals. Less unique, I guess, but more reliable than nature. You could taste the hard, mica falseness on your tongue.

At this point, everyone had laced into their skates. Most of the adults were spinning in excitable circles, orbiting one another, sliding forward, colliding, collapsing—then skating quickly back to the snow fans, to hide beneath the starry blasts of snow. From our spot on the ground, we could see their faces. Mayor Horacio kept falling backwards and cursing. Midge did accidental splits. Suddenly ice-skating seemed like the most ludicrous of all human endeavors. What a stupid innovation! Skate blades. Indoor lakes. It had a perverse, fairy-tale logic, I thought, tying knives to your feet and carving out over frozen water.

The Blizzard got going, the adults picked up speed. All that fake snow was disorienting, and we could only pick out about one face in twenty—Badger’s father, then Annie, then old Ned—their features blurred and fleeting, like faces from a dream. Scrawled-on eyes, a black declivity where their mouths should be. Badger’s father was skating with his head thrown back, laughing, letting the ice carry him forward. The music changed to Men Without Hats, and the adults went slamming into one another with a new violence. When it got to be too much, they skated for the “safety snow,” the dry, banked heaps along the outer edges of the rink. From what Gherkin had told me, I knew that this stuff was neither snow nor safe. It was a cold chemical foam trucked in from a plant in Scranton, glowing an unreal, satiny blue. Everybody seemed eager to collapse into it, to tumble into one another. I watched women roll around in it until their bodies became anonymous. Sister John dove headlong into the safety bank and emerged looking like a shrunken yeti, disguised and dripping with snow.

Lady Yeti presided over it all from the raised dais of the DJ booth. Every few songs, a man would skate over to the DJ booth to “make a request.” He would slide Lady Yeti an embarrassing bribe: $5 in quarters, lotto tickets, raspberry cake gooed into napkins. She always accepted. Then the entire rink got that much wilder, that much whiter with snow. At first this confused me:
this
was what they were paying for? And then I got it. I saw it. What these men were purchasing was blindness: a snow cloak of invisibility. They could grab at the passing women without penalty, taunting them, tugging at their skirts. What the women wanted was less clear to me. To be grabbed at, I guess, without judgment.

Mayor Horacio, in a holey, slush-crusted orange leotard, skated over to the DJ booth. He started complaining to Lady Yeti. He had to crane his neck to look up at her, black hair tufting over the sagging elastic. His Adam’s apple looked bulbous and indecent. “Do you see that clear patch over there? Yeah? Of course you do. Because there is no snow there. Because somebody is too busy eating nacho cheese to do her goddamn job….”

This was true. The part of the rink that he pointed to looked weirdly unaffected by the Blizzard. Snow dripped down the walls, melting to a new and worrisome clarity. A short, chubby woman was standing there in full view, exposed in the pitiless winter light. She was trying to fan the meager flurries around her. When she caught Horacio looking, she sucked in her belly. Badger and I recognized her: Midge, who ladled cold noodles onto our plates five days a week. She looked pink and nervous. Carroty curls were pasted to her face. Someone—Badger’s father? Mayor Horacio?—had clawed runs into Midge’s tights. She waggled a wet, uncertain mitten in his direction.

Horacio groaned. “Jesus, would you hurry?” He shoved damp singles at Lady Yeti. “Would you get me some big flurries over there, stat?”

“Hold on!” Lady Yeti growled. Her control panel fizzed and sparked. “Problems. Let me give Maintenance a buzz.”

Uh-oh. I’d been on the receiving end of the emergency calls from the Palace. The “Pops, it’s for you” end. Pops belting up, stumbling out to fix the midnight world.

“Badger? Hey, Badger? We gotta go.”

But Lady Yeti wasn’t dialing my father. Instead, she pounded her hairy fist on the control panel. “There we go! Never mind!”

She cranked the wind up to a 6/7 on the Beaufort scale, just shy of gale force. She turned up the precipitation. And then a white curtain swirled around Horacio and Midge, blotting them out. I breathed a sigh of relief.

“That was close, huh? I thought she was going to call in my pops.”

Badger looked at me dully. “Oh. Where does he think you are right now?”

“Your house. What about you? What did you tell your father?”

Badger snorted. “I’m supposed to be at my house too. Babysitting Mom.”

“Oh.”
If you’re here, then who’s watching her?
But I didn’t want to know the answer.

Badger’s mother was very, very sick. It looked like she caught a bad dream from somebody. She slumped in a motorized chair, heavy with sleep. If you saw her from a distance, she looked like an extension of the machine, a fleshy covering for the machine. Nobody on the island knew the specifics of her disease, but we could see its sly effects. It turned you into some nightmare centaur, a robot in a woman-blanket. Coughs, whirs, beeps, moans, but no movement. So—not that I condoned what Badger’s father was doing during the Blizzard, but I could see why he’d pay to go snow-blind for a while.

I said as much, in my mincing way, to Badger.

“You shut up now, Reggie. Shut up. I’ll bet your dad comes here too and what’s his excuse? There is no excuse. I wondercould you go to hell, Reggie?”

He sent popcorn jumping up from the damp carpet with his fist.

“Look!” Badger dragged me out from under the table. “It’s her!”

Lady Yeti was helping a woman off the rink. It looked like she had taken a nasty spill into a snow fan. Head to toe, she was dripping with it.

“…and he hurt me, he hurt me
bad,
” the woman was sobbing into Lady Yeti’s fur. “He pushed me and he just let me fall….”

“You just told me that story, ma’am.” Lady Yeti was careful to modulate her own booming alpine volume. “Remember? You just got done telling me that very same story.”

“Really?” The woman touched the hollow of her throat and shivered a little. “That same story?”

“Word for word.”

A look came over the woman’s face then, a confused and terrible look. As if she had just stumbled on a set of her own footprints in the snow, and realized that she was lost.

“Well! It’s a good story, anyways! Let’s get ya cleaned up, huh!” Lady Yeti beat the wet flakes out of the woman’s hair. “You better sit this one out….”

We followed the snow-drunk woman into the bathroom.

They even had flurries going in the bathroom, a phony violet-blue, piped in through the high vents. Somebody—my pops?—had rigged up the hand dryers to spew translucence. It must have been a nightmare for Gherkin to clean up. Frost limned the mirrors. The sinks were bowls of freezing slush. All the toilet paper was damp. We could see our outlines in the glass, but not much else. The woman’s face materialized behind us, her eyes shiny and rimmed with red.

“You,” Badger sputtered. “You.” You could tell he hadn’t really planned this far ahead.

The woman fell forward and pressed her nose against the mirror. She gave us a scary, sidelong smile. The flurries blew around the room like tiny moths.

“Should you boys be in here? This is the ladies’ room….”

“Y-y-you.” His teeth were chattering. “You! You’re not my mother. You’re nobody….”

The woman wouldn’t even turn to face us. She was unsteady on the blunt edge of her skates, and allowed herself to topple backwards. Badger held out an unwilling arm to support her.

“Why were you skating with my father?”

The woman giggled. She yanked at her soaking tights.

“Which one’s your father?

Badger shoved her away from us, hard. She fell backwards into one of the freezing sinks, her head thunking against the mirror. Chunks of snow bobbed around her like little icebergs.

“You’re nobody! You’re just some able-bodied bitch….”

He yanked me towards the door. Behind us, we could hear the woman shouting for Lady Yeti. I hoped that she hadn’t gotten a good look at our faces. Now we had our own reason to flee the bright lights.

Beyond the thin halogen glow of the bathroom, the Blizzard raged in earnest. Downdrafts, snowfall, the black sparkle of the rink. The Palace had grown subzero cold. I thought we must be near the cages—you could hear the monkeys howling above the wind.

“Badger, wait up! What was that…?”

“Forget it, forget her. Anyhow, I don’t think she was the right one. Come on. We need to get on the ice. We need to turn this dumb storm off.” He hopped the counter and grabbed us skates.

“Are you nuts? We can’t go out there. Look how dark it is. I can barely see you!”

Which was a lie. Badger was kneeling in front of me, forcing my feet into skates.

“There, stand up. Lace those up. I wondercould you wiggle your toes?”

“I don’t think so; I don’t think—”

And then it was too late, we were right in the thick of it. I could feel the Blizzard working on me, too. As soon as we got on the ice I felt a cold thrill of happiness, an instant forgetting. I flung myself into the wind. So this was the Blizzard. It looked different once you were inside it. Snow-flakes rushed in jet streams all around us. It was wonderful, the speed, the shocking cold of it; it was like outskating an awareness of gravity! We let the gales push us forward and double us back. Sparks leapt from our skates, tiny flecks of light on the black ice, the blades cutting quick and faster beneath us. Overhead, machines were sharpening the wind.

Shortly thereafter, though, the chill grew intolerable. I think that windchill was a deliberate effect, one of the Ice Witch’s spells for profit. It goaded us forward, towards one another. It turned each skater into a heat seeker, a human comet. There was a terrible pleasure to this, getting pelted and bruised, pelting and bruising in circles. All of us went crashing around the rink. Midge was flat on her back with her skates in the air. Coach Crotty did a series of unsightly lutzes. Mrs. Saumat slid into Badger and pulled him down into the safety snow with her, roaring with laughter.

Where was the DJ booth? We’d been around the rink a dozen times now, and we couldn’t find it. I felt a cold, dark lunge in my throat.

Phil Collins started playing from the speakers again. For a while I could still make out Phil’s tinny optimism, threaded through the Arctic winds: “You can’t hurry love, oooh, you just have to wait….” And then it was just shrieking and the screech of fan blades and black ice on the sides of the rink, wind and darkness, snow-drunk faces screaming out at us, distorted beyond recognition. Walls and bodies came at us out of nowhere.

“I got you, Reggie.” Badger’s hands on my shoulders felt warm and secure. “Hang on, Reg, I got you….” We skated forward. Dodging and swerving, bodies whizzing into us and then contracting back. We’d be rounding corners and briefly alone; then lunging forward, helpless, towards another stranger on the ice.

“Sorry!” I slammed into somebody and slid forward. Badger got knocked facedown beside me, jostling a tooth loose. I watched the tooth slide away, too dazed to stop it. When I looked up, Badger was gone. I caught a glimpse of him blowing backwards across the dark rink, his face a diminishing oval.

Something had gone very wrong with the Blizzard. Bodies collided, borders vanished. The spindrift sent freezing eddies through the air, and for the first time I was afraid of real blindness. After a few more loops around the rink, I couldn’t tell where the room ended and my own body began. I struggled to regain my balance. Women sped by me with their makeup running. Men collapsed into the safety snow with their bruised legs tangled together. Poor Badger, I thought, and my pity warmed me. To know your father was a participant in this kind of weather!

And then I heard a laugh that I recognized.

Fear blurred the glass. Not my pops! I thought. Definitely not. It was Mr. Swanson, Mr. Yjonsun, some other kid’s father. But I didn’t stick around to investigate. Backwards skate! I used muscles that I didn’t know I had to push myself backwards, into the dense white center of the Blizzard. I wasn’t like Badger, I didn’t want some monster confrontation. I didn’t even want to be there.

After many numbing, numberless revolutions, I finally spotted the DJ booth and skated towards it. But Lady Yeti had vanished. She’d left a huge white suit with no obvious zipper. Wisps of fur and snow, and no clues. A few mints. I didn’t even know who to look for. Lady Yeti could be anybody out on the ice.