I decided to go around by the front though I wasn’t supposed to track through the parlor. The snow came to my thighs, but I was thinking of where the kid lay on the kitchen table in all that dough, pasty with whiskey and water, like spring had come all at once to our kitchen, and our all the time not knowing he was there, had thawed the top of his grave off and left him for us to find, stretched out cold and stiff and bare; and who was it that was going to have to take him to the Pedersen place and give him to Missus Pedersen, naked, and flour on his bare behind?
2
Just his back. The green mackinaw. The black stocking cap. The yellow gloves. The gun.
Big Hans kept repeating it. He was letting the meaning have a chance to change. He’d look at me and shake his head and say it over.
“He put them down the cellar so I ran.”
Hans filled the tumbler. It was spotted with whiskey and flecks of flour.
“He didn’t saying nothing the whole time.”
He put the bottle on the table and the bottom sank unevenly in the paste, tilting heavily and queerly to one side — acting crazy, like everything else.
That’s all he says he saw, Hans said, staring at the mark of the kid’s behind in the dough. Just his back. The green mackinaw. The black stocking cap. The yellow gloves. The gun.
That’s all?
He waited and waited.
That’s all.
He tossed the whiskey off and peered at the bottom of the glass.
Now why should he remember all them colors?
He leaned over, his legs apart, his elbows on his knees, and held the glass between them with both hands, tilting it to watch the liquor that was left roll back and forth across the bottom.
How does he know? I mean, for sure.
He thinks he knows, Hans said in a tired voice. He thinks he knows.
He picked up the bottle and a hunk of dough was stuck to it.
Christ. That’s all. It’s how he feels. It’s enough, ain’t it? Hans said.
What a mess, ma said.
He was raving, Hans said. He couldn’t think of anything else. He had to talk. He had to get it out. You should have heard him grunt.
Poor poor Stevie, ma said.
He was raving?
All right, is it something you dream? Hans said.
He must have been dreaming. Look — how could he have got there? Where’d he come from? Fall from the sky?
He came through the storm.
That’s just it, Hans, he’d have had to. It was blizzarding all day. It didn’t let up — did it? — till late afternoon. He’d have had to. Now what chance is there of that? What?
Enough a chance it happened, Hans said.
But listen. Jesus. He’s a stranger. If he’s a stranger he’s come a ways. He’d never make it in a blizzard, not even knowing the country.
He came through the storm. He came out of the ground like a grub. Hans shrugged. He came.
Hans poured himself a drink, not me.
He came through the storm, he said. He came through just like the kid came through. The kid had no chance neither, but he came. He’s here, ain’t he? He’s right upstairs, right now. You got to believe that.
It wasn’t blizzarding when the kid came.
It was starting.
That ain’t the same.
All right. The kid had forty-five minutes, maybe an hour before it started to come on good. That isn’t enough. You need the whole time, not a start. In a blizzard you got to be where you’re going if you’re going to get there.
That’s what I mean. See, Hans? See? The kid had a chance. He knew the way. He had a head start. Besides, he was scared. He ain’t going to be lazying. And he’s lucky. He had a chance to be lucky. Now yellow gloves ain’t got that chance. He has to come farther. He has to come through the storm all the way. But he don’t know the way, and he ain’t scared proper, except maybe by the storm. He hasn’t got a chance to be lucky.
The kid was scared, you said. Right. Now why? You tell me that.
Hans kept his eyes on the whiskey that was shining in his glass. He was holding on hard.
And yellow gloves — he ain’t scared? he said. How do you know he ain’t scared, by something else besides wind and snow and cold and howling, I mean?
All right, I don’t know, but it’s likely, ain’t it? Anyway, the kid, well maybe he ain’t scared at all, starting out. Maybe his pa was just looking to tan him and he lit out. Then first thing he knows it’s blizzarding again and he’s lost, and when he gets to our crib he don’t know where he is.
Hans slowly shook his head.
Yes yes, hell Hans, the kid’s scared of having run away.
He don’t want to say he done a fool stunt like that. So he makes the whole thing up. He’s just a little kid. He made the whole thing up.
Hans didn’t like that. He didn’t want to believe the kid any more than I did, but if he didn’t then the kid had fooled him sure. He didn’t want to believe that either.
No, he said. Is it something you make up? Is it something you come to — raving with frostbite and fever and not knowing who’s there or where you are or anything — and make up?
Yeah.
No it ain’t. Green, black, yellow: you don’t make up them colors neither. You don’t make up putting your folks down cellar where they’ll freeze. You don’t make up his not saying anything the whole time or only seeing his back or exactly what he was wearing. It’s more than a make-up; it’s more than a dream. It’s like something you see once and it hits you so hard you never forget it even if you want to; lies, dreams, pass — this has you; it’s like something that sticks to you like burrs, burrs you try to brush off while you’re doing something else, but they never brush off, they just roll a little, and the first thing you know you ain’t doing what you set out to, you’re just trying to get them burrs off. I know. I got things stuck to me like that. Everybody has. Pretty soon you get tired trying to pick them off. If they was just burrs, it wouldn’t matter, but they ain’t. They never is. The kid saw something that hit him hard like that; hit him so hard that probably all the time he was running over here he didn’t see anything else but what hit him. Not really. It hit him so hard he couldn’t do anything but spit it out raving when he come to. It hit him. You don’t make things like that up, Jorge. No. He came through the storm, just like the kid. He had no business coming, but he came. I don’t know how or why or when exactly, except it must have been during the blizzard yesterday. He got to the Pedersen place just before or just after it stopped snowing. He got there and he shoved them all in the fruit cellar to freeze and I’ll bet he had his reasons.
You got dough stuck to the bottom of Pa’s bottle.
I couldn’t think of anything else to say. What Hans said sounded right. It sounded right but it couldn’t be right. It just couldn’t be. Whatever was right, the Pedersen kid had run off from his pa’s place probably late yesterday afternoon when the storm let up, and had turned up at our crib this morning. I knew he was here. I knew that much. I’d held him. I’d felt him dead in my hands, only I guess he wasn’t dead now. Hans had put him to bed upstairs but I could still see him in the kitchen, so skinny naked, two towels steaming on him, whiskey drooling from the corners of his mouth, lines of dirt between his toes, squeezing ma’s dough in the shape of his behind.