A few Presidents ago my wife Rusty and I were cuddling, watching TV on the throwaway couch my older brother Dale and his wife Ellie had given us with the crickets living inside. You never saw them because they only snooped around when we were sleeping — the crickets I mean — and since our waterbed was in the barebones Sardine Room, they didn’t bother us, except when they got to fiddling at the moon. Anyway, Rusty and I were waiting for the purple-lipped weather guy with the black-rimmed glasses and the voice you buy from one of those mail-in broadcasting schools. We didn’t give a hoot about the weather — it was what grew from his scalp that attracted us. This tidal wave of thick red hair made his face look like it belonged to a 12-year-old boy, kind of underdeveloped, except for the lips and nose, and you never knew what to expect from it — the hair I mean. Usually it resembled a fireman’s helmet. One time it must have got tangled up in his microphone before he went on the air. The wave stood straight up and drooped forward at the ends like a fountain spewing strawberry soda.
Didn’t matter what he said about the weather. It was always the same, like there was only one season. Last time it snowed in Poso was a generation ago. Snow was always topping off the mountains surrounding us, but we were buried too deep in the valley to get any. When I asked my mom as a kid why the snow always stayed in the mountains, she leaned over in the warm kitchen with its stacked cabinets climbing to the ceiling, the smell of warm biscuits in the air, and a coil of auburn hair dangling over one eye, and whispered in my ear, “Sweetheart, that’s where the angels live.”
No one would have believed the weather guy if he had predicted snow. Besides the chances being near zero, who would take him seriously when he looked like a cartoon character? It would have been like watching the President come on TV from the Oval Office wearing a conservative gray suit and a tie with a naked lady painted on it. Anyway, the weather guy was going on about mostly clear skies and mild temperatures — a normal catch-all fall winter forecast — when I noticed Rusty had fallen asleep. The flickering blue glow on her face, the small freckles on her nose and the innocent way her head was cocked reminded me of a small child.
In the morning, snow covered everything in sight.
Rusty got to her knees, crawled to the window, rocking the waterbed with waves, and looked out through the dimestore curtains. “Snow! Snow everywhere! I’ve never seen so much snow!” She sprang out of bed naked and prancing like a young doe in the skinny strip between the waterbed and the wall you could punch your fist through. “Can you believe it!?” The sunrise painted a rose-colored nightgown on her belly, which was just starting to hint of something small and compact growing inside. “I’ve got to get ready for work. Can you drive me?”
She and Ellie worked at a vintage gas station just across the tracks. The all-girl crew attracted a steady flow of weirdos — carloads of hooting teenage boys, lonely men in junkers, businessmen in boat-like Lincolns and Buicks and an occasional Cadillac. Dale and his gang of co-conspirators worked across the street at a Datsun dealer. They usually found excuses for hanging out at the station whenever they could. Then there was Old Tex, who’d come by to get damaged packs of cigarettes for free. That and a kind word from Rusty or Ellie. They were always nice to him even though most everyone else, including me, thought he was filthy and disgusting.
But somehow the unexpected snow changed everything that day.
When we stepped out on the porch that morning we crossed over into fantasyland — like a Christmas card scene. The snow was a fine powder you could sweep with a broom. Orphan — our tiger-striped kitten, lifted his paw, shook it, looked around at the while landscape like he had been mysteriously misplaced, and squeaked out a pathetic mew. Then he carefully placed his paw back into his first paw print and considered his next move. I scooped him up and took him to the van where he rode on the back of my seat next to my shoulder.
The dead grass was blanketed with sparkling cotton, and the roads with all their potholes were perfectly smooth and quiet. The neighborhood dogs yipped, puffing clouds of vapor. Cars, what few that were out at daybreak, seemed to tiptoe around corners with slippers on. Everything was white with magic. Every tree, every house, every turn in the road revealed something unexpected. It was like seeing everything for the first time, like the world had been made new again.
The few people who were on the sidewalks, people I didn’t even know, waved at us when we passed by, smiling. It seemed we had all woken up that morning and found ourselves living inside a 1950s black-and-white family TV series. The postman, the mayor, the garbage collector — everyone was equal this day. Our smiles were frozen in place, part of the script.
Tall birches lined the street leading to the gas station, their trunks sporting new white tuxedos on one side. On the leeward side, their natural bark appeared yellowed by comparison. Just before we reached the tracks, bright red apples topped with fluffy white hats hung like Christmas ornaments hanging from an apple tree. When we crossed over the old tracks that needed repair, you couldn’t even feel the shock.
*
We pulled into the station and there stood Ellie inside the station’s big display window with all the leftover blow-up Christmas toys hanging in it, exposing the Irish gap between her two front teeth as she smiled and waved. Dale joined us inside the station where we had hot coffee and stared out the window through the menagerie of pathetic inflatables. Rudolph looked like a Doberman with a cold, a slow-leaking snowman appeared to be dying of starvation, and of course there was a bright red Santa. Dale, in a moment of inspiration, had deliberately overinflated him with compressed air, stretching him all out of proportion. The old gentleman was grotesquely swollen and puffy, as if afflicted with some runaway glandular disease.
We sipped our steaming coffee, remarking on how unusually good it tasted, and decided it had something to do with Poso’s first snow in 20 years. Then Dale spotted Tex coming from a block away.
“Here comes Mr. Weirdo,” he said.
“Don’t make fun of him,” said Ellie. “He can’t help it.”
Tex always wore two coats, no matter the weather. He had to, not having any other place to hang them. On the outer layer he wore a fake leather jacket with phony sheepskin lining and giant brown plastic buttons that were supposed to look like tanned rawhide. On the inner layer was an old pinstriped suit coat like you see hanging on the rack at Goodwill stores. His slacks, wrinkled and dirty, were a poor match for either coat. Dead grass hung from his cracker caboose. No one could guess where he got the boots. It was the smoothworn cowboy hat — his trademark — that set off the costume. Dale said it was a genuine Stetson. It was what made him recognizable from blocks away. That and the fact that he stood six-and-a-half feet tall and weighed a scant 140 pounds.
“What’s that he’s carrying? said Dale.
“Well, well,” I said, “looks like a purse.” Ellie blushed, as if she knew something we shouldn’t know.
Tex knocked on the display window and put his long white gray-stubbled face next to the deflated snowman hanging limply beside the globular Santa. He held up the purse and made a goofy face that displayed a mouthful of missing teeth, knocking the Stetson off his head trying to press his nose against the glass. Rusty laughed and Ellie blushed a deeper red. When he opened the door, the smell of eternally unwashed clothes befouled the room.
“Here, Ellie,” he said, “kinda late but I got you something.” It was a pathetic black plastic purse fit for a nine-year-old girl.
“Oohhh,” said Ellie, beet red, “How nice!” She set it on top a marked-down case of 20-weight motor oil. “Thank you, Tex, that’s real nice. You didn’t have to.”
Rusty jabbed her in the ribs and said, “Well, aren’t you going to give him his?”
Ellie disappeared into the adjoining room and Tex turned to Rusty and said, “Got something for you, too.” He reached his long splotchy pink and white hand into his outer coat pocket and pulled out a string of pearls.
“Oh my,” said Rusty, “this is something real special. She held them up and admired them. Anyone could see they were nothing but cheap plastic pop beads. “Thank you, Tex, you didn’t have to do this.”
“Well, it’s the thought that counts, ain’t it?” he said. “It’s the least I could do for you girls who’ve been so nice and all. Then he bared his brown-stained front tooth, his bloodshot eyes twinkling.
“Here, Tex,” said Ellie, returning with a carton of damaged cigarettes. “Hope you had a real nice Christmas.”
“Luckies!” said Tex, taking the carton as if he didn’t expect it. “I really appreciate it.”
“Well,” I said, straining to be cordial, “what do you think of this snow, Tex?”
“Oh not much,” he said, exploding in a coughing fit, rasping and wheezing. It was sickening. Ellie looked at Rusty and Dale shook his head and snuck out the door. When Tex got his breath, he sounded like an old radio that had a severe static problem. Rusty and Ellie thanked him again and went outside to work. Tex pulled his Stetson down on his brow, and as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, said, “Well, I’m on my way.”
“You must be hoping this snow goes away soon,” I said.
“Don’t matter much to me,” he said. “Snow today, snow tomorrah.” He opened the door and let in a cold draft. “On the other hand, it might ever not snow again.”
I took the long way home by going through downtown, just to see what it looked like. Orphan hopped up on my shoulder. It was still too early for most townspeople. The old two-story buildings that made up 7th Street seemed comfortably settled in the snow. An occasional cracked wall faced a deserted white parking lot. The grasses and scattered weeds that had managed to draw life from the cracks in the asphalt from the hot summer and dry fall were covered over with snow. Now and then a sprig of yellow poked through as a reminder of the real world.
At the corner of 7th and Main there stood Tex all alone, talking to himself and blowing on his long hands, the carton of Luckies bulging inside his outer coat. I didn’t think he would see me, all wrapped up in conversation with himself, but when I turned the corner he looked up, nodded, and tipped his Stetson. I nodded back and drove on, and an eerie feeling came over me — like we were strangers in an unfamiliar town meeting for the first time.
Two blocks away was the town’s only hotel, if you could call it that. The clown-faced whore stood in the recessed entrance, smoking one of those long brown cigarettes. She had a way of looking at you like she wasn’t actually looking at you. In the next block was the tarnished statue of Teddy Roosevelt, and then came the new courthouse building. It was all business, that building, all gray concrete with dozens of little square windows and fluorescent lights inside that never seemed to shut off. In the small park area next to the courthouse, early-bird kids were building a snowman. From the looks of him they were going for height, not form. He was too tall and skinny. Construction had been suspended by a raging snowball war.
Back at the house, I made a couple of calls about temporary jobs, but I was more interested in what was going on outside. Through the old window, I could see more kids playing across the street in the schoolyard. The old black steam locomotive that had been donated was resting on a short section of track at the edge of the schoolyard. Usually, kids were scrambling all over it, but this day it stood alone. The kids were too busy running and tumbling in the snow. Its giant steel wheels were covered with quarter-moons and a white sheet lay over the top. It had already started to melt.
I remember when we were kids Dale wrote a freshman term paper on the Donner Party. I thought about the name back then, how it seemed such a strange way to describe a snowbound wagon train full of starving people. Dale had taped together sheets of scribbled-on paper that ran the length of our bedroom floor and spilled out into the hallway. He would snip out a section here and tape in a piece there. “I know what to say,” he kept saying, “I just don’t know what order to say it in.”
“What’s there to say?” I finally offered. “A bunch of people starved in the snow?”
He looked at me like my brain was made of swiss cheese and his eyes bugged out like they always did when he wanted to make a big deal out of something. “They had to EAT each other, dummy! Just to stay alive!”
For a while I didn’t know if he was telling the truth or just trying to scare me. Every time I’d look at the surrounding mountains I’d think, “Why did all that snow happen there, all at once, instead of a little at a time being spread around more evenly? Like maybe even right here in Poso once in a while.” What bothered me most was this terrible thing happening, if it really did, up there in the mountaintops, where the Angels lived.
So one day I asked Mom. “If the Angels really cared about those Donner people, wouldn’t they have done something to stop it?”
Mom smiled down at me. “Angels have their own ways, son.” Realizing that this didn’t get through to me, she put her hand on my shoulder and said in that special tone she had for explanations that didn’t make sense but had to be believed anyway, “Sometimes things that seem terrible to us” — and she brushed the coil of hair from her eye — “are things that God wants us to forget.”
*
On the 5 o’clock News the purple-lipped hair-hatted weather guy was predicting more snow. Seemed like he was eager to hop on the bandwagon now that the magical white stuff had finally come to town. This made me think he was probably wrong again. Not in Poso. Not until my son was born and grown up, with a little baby of his own on its way. You see, there’s this unwritten rule that governs our little world here, and it never changes: One snow per generation, no more. It’s kind of like that Bible verse: To everything there’s a season. A time to be born, and a time to die.
I picked up Rusty at the gas station and drove home by the downtown route once again. This time I chose to leave Orphan at home, since he was sleeping. Rusty sat next to me with her hand on her belly. She looked tired. I swear she had grown noticeably in the few hours since I’d seen her. Like the little life inside her was maturing at a miraculous rate. Her freckles seemed to recede into her face and she looked older. I had always thought of her as young. A girl. But now, at the end of this day, I was seeing her as a woman for the first time. A tired woman.
At the corner of 7th and Main, Rusty said, “Where’s Tex? He’s always here when I get off.” She looked up and down 7th as we sat there idling at the corner. “I’m worried about him.”
“Well,” I said, “maybe he went out to the underpass today.”
“But he’s always here at this time, right here at this corner.”
“If it’ll make you feel better,” I said, we can go out there and have a look.”
I turned and headed out to the Interstate. Before I lost my job, I used to drive through the underpass on my way to work. A lot of times I’d spot a crumpled heap with a cowboy hat. I’d always think, “This guy is pathetic, a real eyesore.” But now that I’ve been without work for a few months, I find myself thinking in a different way. A small town like Poso could do better. It’s not like there’s hundreds of them. There’s the Bottle Man and the Crazy Preacher and Tex, that was it. But Tex is different. The others are trapped in their own little bubbles, but Tex almost seems like part of the community.
On the other hand, maybe all these guys fall into the same category as the Donners — people that God wants us to forget. At least for now. But when things turn around and people go back to work, things could change. Maybe the city council or the county or the federal government might think about doing something. But for now, I guess it’s just too bad. I’m kind of surprised they all haven’t been run out of town by now.
We slowed down when we passed by the underpass and there was a crumpled heap of clothes lying there, curled up. “See?” I said. “He’s okay. Now can we go home?”
“Wait,” she said. “Go back. I didn’t see him moving at all.”
I found a place to turn around and headed back. I admit by now I was beginning to worry, too, but not as much as Rusty. As we approached the underpass and slowed down, suddenly Tex raised his head and looked to see who it was.
Rusty said, “Don’t stop, I don’t want to embarrass him. Keep moving.”
But it was too late. Tex, visible in my rearview mirror, was sitting up now, grinning his goofy grin. He had recognized us. He wasn’t embarrassed in the least, but I was.
“He looked okay, didn’t he?” said Rusty.
“About the same,” I said. “I think he’s okay, except for his terrible cough.”
“Good,” she said. “I mean, good he’s okay.”
I felt relieved, for Rusty mainly. I hate to see her worry. She works so hard as is. But as I drove toward town again, I kept seeing Tex sitting there with that silly grin. Something seemed different, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. He seemed almost happier than usual. Maybe that’s what it was. It was a special day for everyone, even Tex. We had gotten all worked up over nothing.
When we drove past 7th and Main, it was getting dark. There at the old hotel was the clownfaced whore, smoking like always. Old Teddy was still guarding the park, and the lights in the old courthouse were still burning. The kids had completed the snowman, which was melting now and not as tall. But he was imposing in his own way. Nothing fancy. No eyes and no mouth. Just a plain face without features.
That’s the moment it all came together. Rusty must have seen what I saw.
“Did you see that?” she said, smiling. I nodded, feeling warm inside. That’s the one thing I’ll never forget about this rare day when snow came to Poso —that old Stetson had transformed a simple snowman into a dignified creation.
Next day there wasn’t a trace of snow anywhere.
***
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