Running on Snow by Bruce Snyder

I trudged into the kitchen, pulled my socks up over my long johns, and grabbed the parka we keep by the door for outhouse trips in the middle of the night. When you’re freezing, half asleep, and unable to hold it anymore you don’t want to hunt around for a coat and boots. The weathered Sorels sat under the coat hooks, rubber soles peeling back from the leather uppers, the thick flannel inserts compressed and frayed from years of use. I tugged them on and braced for the cold.  

People figure if you live in a place like Puma, you’re used to it. I don’t know what “used to it” really means, I just know what’s coming. As a kid, every year I watched the days shorten up until I worked chores in the dusk and soon in pure blackness. The starlight is fairly bright when there are no clouds, but even so, it gets hellaciously dark.  Then the snow comes. Four, maybe five feet deep, crusted so you could ski or snowshoe on it. Some nights the moon was so bright I’d have a shadow in the middle of the night. Still amazes me. I didn’t get used to that.

I duck out into the wind, which always blows in North Dakota, it’s just a question of how hard. Tonight, it’s strong, I’d guess about thirty miles an hour. I don’t pay much attention to weather reports. We keep spare parkas, shovels, blankets, flashlights, a gas can, candy bars and a full canteen in the truck. You don’t play around and let the gas get down to less than half full and stuff like that.

It’s so cold tonight the hairs in my nose stick together, they pull a bit when I sniff.  The cold makes my nose run, gives me little icicles in my beard. I stumble to the outhouse, pull open the door, shed as little of my clothes as possible, and sit down cursing on a seat that might have been chiseled from a block of ice. It’s a good thing the human butt is relatively insensitive to cold or no one would live around here at all. 

Which gets me thinking about my sister Helen staying warm down in Miami. She called the other day to see how Frenchy’s doing, that’s our dad, what we’ve called him since whenever. Helen said how sometimes she misses the peace and quiet of Puma. It’s certainly quiet tonight. Aside from my own breathing, sniffling, and assorted other bodily noises, there’s silence. Only the wind shushing its way over the flat land, moaning now and again as it bends around the corner of the house and barn.

So I’m sitting and thinking, about why I’m here waiting for Frenchy to die, why Alice left me year before last, why and why and why. It’s getting to me. I been listening to country and western oldies… you never know until she’s gone… or,  you picked a fine time to leave me…  I’m drinking too much, but what the hell.  Frenchy was always swearing at his fate: damn this and damn that and why’n the hell, and so on. I’m beginning to agree with his outlook.

He generally felt screwed over, as he put it, and when he was either joking around or seriously pissed, he’d point straight at the sky, look up and holler…screw you, you sonofabitch…get off my ass.  Which Helen and me would find very funny, but sometimes you could laugh and sometimes you couldn’t or Frenchy’d for sure be on your ass.  He was pretty ok when he was wrangling freight for Burlington Northern.  Then his back gave out, bills piled up and, well, he was not, generally speaking, a happy man. When my mother died of cancer in ’62 he really got mean and it was good that Helen finished high school that year so she could move out. I stuck around and took it, watched him hit the bottle. He’d holler at me but I was too big to wallop.

Finally, it got too much, and I decided I had to get out because by that time I hated the place and I didn’t feel much for Frenchy outside of since he was my father I owed him a yearly postcard, an occasional phone call.   For want of something better to do, I joined the Marines.  Dumb ass. Since basic didn’t kill me, they shipped me out to ‘Nam before you could say chop suey. Right. Two years, near the DMZ, based at Khe Sanh. People killed, blown apart, just pieces of flesh, bone sticking out…kids…so I went a little nuts. Every time I closed my eyes, I’d see bodies and hear screams.  Had my rifle in my mouth when my sergeant grabbed me. He had me evac’d to Okinawa. I was boarded out a couple months later.  Finished and done.

The VA put me through vo-tech, and I was working at the nursing home in Fargo, bought a place. I married Alice, God it’s four years ago, and we had the kids and it was okay for a while. I can’t say I was really happy but I had a home and a little money so I couldn’t kick too much. Life isn’t about being happy; it’s something you try to get through without too much pain. 

But things got tangled up and about two years ago Alice told me she was done. “I can’t do this anymore,” she said. Okay, that was it.

 I’d been laid off from the third shift at the packing plant months before; couldn’t live on what the nursing home paid.  Plus try to pay support.  I didn’t have any place to go.  And Frenchy was losing his marbles. His mind began failing about three years ago and first thing I knew of it was when the Halsecks called me in Fargo that they could hear him shooting his rifle in the middle of the night and they couldn’t imagine why. Then he got into a hassle at the Crossroads Store refusing to pay for his goods because he swore he’d had’em when he came in. If they hadn’t known him, they probably would have called the sheriff. Instead, they rang me up.  My uncle Lucien was killed in the mines some years before.  So I was it, all he had.  I came back to Puma to look after the old man. Keep up the ranch and get a job.  And here I was and here he was and that was over a year ago.

Jesus, my guts are locked up in a cramp, my feet are burning with the cold and my crotch is numb. As a kid running errands in winter I was pretty often numb between the legs. Used to put a couple of socks in my jockeys for insulation. Gotta laugh, back then I kind of wondered if it would come back, if any permanent damage was being done down there. Maybe, I thought, that’s why there aren’t many NoDaks, the guys are all limp-dicked from the cold. 

But now I hear something funny out there, a faint crunch-crunch, soft but somehow I know it’s not a small sound, it’s just far away. Got a rhythm now, crunch-crunch…crunch- crunch…crunch-crunch.  The wind? A snow squall? Or what? Something doing a slow jog over the snowpack?  Makes me a little nervous and I wonder if I can get off the goddam pot and go in the house because I’m so damn cold it isn’t funny. Another cramp. I stay put.

Minutes pass. The sound is still soft, but it has that pattern or rhythm to it. Now the wind  dies down and the crunch, crunch is more clear. My brain goes to the sound of Viet Cong creeping through the tunnels, gear rustling against the muddy walls with every slow step.

The crunch-crunch is the only sign that there is anything else besides me out here on this lonely night. I don’t believe in very much, probably not God, and for sure not ghosts or goblins but the sound, the steps, coming toward me don’t pause, don’t seem to turn to any side. They or it is coming closer and I’m trying to figure out what the hell it is.

The bears are all laid up for the winter and the wolves almost always travel in packs, not solitary, not likely anyway. Same for deer or caribou — should be two or three, and they’d more likely to stick to the spruce windbreaks and patches of bare weeds on the prairie, not light out for parts unknown.  Cougar? They’re solitary but not given to travel a few miles from no place to no place. Livestock are asleep in the barn.  A human? Who the devil would be strolling around outside on a night like this?  I had been groggy, now I’m alert.  

My bowels unlock, maybe because I’m getting a little scared. The sound is pretty close. I clean up and start to pull my long johns up but it’s right outside now and I freeze. The steps or whatever slow down then stop. Jesus. The outhouse is pitch black except for streamers of moonlight that make it through cracks in the siding and under the tin roof. I don’t breathe. Two minutes, maybe five. Time slows down in situations like this.  My brain is crackling with memories of incoming while I’m nose down in a paddy, scared crapless.    

Then, one at a time, with a certain gradualness, the sounds start up again. Slow, no hurry at all. It’s going away and I let my breath out in a large steamy cloud of relief. It’s gone. Can’t believe it but I break into a little sweat, frost on my forehead, my eyebrows.

I get back to the house, and damn the door is gapped open.  I thought I shut it good when I came out. I stumble in slamming it behind me.  I look in on Frenchy, he’s in bed, quiet, covers all twisted up.  I don’t know what the hell is going on but I have to lay down before I fall down.  Every particle of strength is gone from me. The bed is icy cold, and so am I.  I fall into bed, pull blankets over me, and put my frozen hands under my thighs to try and get a little heat from myself. 

What happened? Maybe Frenchy got up.  But he didn’t go outside, I can see that his boots are dry.  He sometimes roams the place at night muttering, messing with things.  I can’t leave him alone anymore; he wandered out a couple months ago. It was milder then or he’d ‘a’ died before we found him by the creek with just his underwear on. Old bastard was so scared he was sobbing like a child.  Some nights he wakes up, thinks he heard something and decides someone is breaking in. Can’t say how many times he’s waked me up to get the ‘prowler’ as though any living thing could wander out here and break in. But that’s how his mind, or what’s left of it, works. Anything is possible, anything could happen when you don’t know where you are, when it is or why, well why anything. Scary to wake up with the old man staring down at me but I’m used to it by now. He doesn’t mean any harm, just so fuddled up he’s lost in time, in space.  

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The alarm goes off at 4:30. I’m up early to plow the two miles to the road which doesn’t help much because spur 42 is closed behind some pretty deep drifts the wind put into the road. Then I dress and feed Frenchy. Weekdays he’s at Mrs. Wolfkill’s until I do chores and head over to Sam’s Feed where I work part-time.  Won’t get there today, that’s for sure.

I get up and wash, still feel a little sick and weak. The memory of last night is vague and I wonder if I just had a strange dream, but  my Sorels are sitting in a puddle, laces splayed out like worms on the drive after a rain. There’s some snowmelt tracked in by the kitchen door.

I get the coffee going, set up the eggs so all I have to do is dump them in the pan when I’m ready to fry them. And go into his room. I almost hate to get him up because right now it’s just peaceful here, lonely but peaceful. When he’s up, it’s lonely but not peaceful. 

Frenchy’s blankets are gnarled in a knot. He’s lying half on top of them. He’s got on his long red underwear and thick socks.  His eyes are open, staring from that gaunt face. He lost a lot of weight this past year, arms and legs are like sticks. He’s not breathing. His face is white, gray really, like it’s matching his hair. And he’s cold. Not just his hands, but the flesh of his chest, his belly. I listen for his heart but I know he’s gone. I pull his blanket up over him. Then I sit looking at him, at the walls, at nothing, for about a half-hour. 

I’m not frightened by death. Saw a lot of it in Nam. Working at the nursing home those years I saw a fair number of people die. They just laid still and stopped breathing; at least they weren’t blasted to pieces. The nurses didn’t turn a hair, they’d seen so much of it.

But this was my father for all that he wasn’t very good at it. I thought about his years of anger and disappointment and just what plain misery he’d been to himself and most others who knew him and maybe tried to love him some. He was a hard man to love. Looking at him like this I see him stripped bare, helpless like that day at the creek, a baby then, and strangely now. Death had laid back the years, smoothed and tightened his face. Death made the young man he once was appear again for one last time on this earth.  

After I finish my coffee and eggs I go in and get him in some clothes.   Doesn’t seem dignified for a man to lay there dead in his underwear. His hair and beard are wild but it seems silly to shave him. Anyhow I’m not up for that but I can dress him so he looks a little better.  We don’t have a phone, but I have my CB radio from the truck and manage to reach Frenchy’s daycare and even the funeral home in Fargo. The mortician says we need a death certificate, so I let the sheriff know he passed.  Plows figure to reach us by Wednesday or Thursday. Frenchy’s body is so light he’s easy to carry outside. Best preservative we have, twenty below weather.

Frenchy stares up at the cloudless sky, pure blue like truth or time. The sunlight is so bright my eyes are tearing, the day simply beautiful any way you look at it. I don’t feel the cold this morning even though all I got on is jeans and a flannel shirt. Can’t bury him until Spring anyway, so I lay him down on the snow. Later I’ll wrap him in a blanket and tarp.  There’s a meat locker in the barn – he’ll just fit.

On a whim I head out back by the outhouse to where I’d heard the crunching sound, where I think it stopped as best I could tell. I don’t see anything. A couple hours of that wind would fill in any tracks; cover up anything, quick too. I’m still puzzled; what the hell was that?  Heck could’a been old man Halseck’s barkless husky, biggest damn dog you ever seen, doesn’t make a sound except when it’s panting or running.  Had to be the dog.  Unless it was my old man got out the door trying to find some ghost in his dreams.  Whatever, it sure gave me the willys last night. 

I don’t let myself think too much more about it.  I look at my old man, almost as pale as the snow itself, and it seems like he’s finally telling me something useful, something that I can use and need to hear. You can curse your fate or you can look at that blue sky and make of it what you can. So I’m smiling down at him as I comb his hair and his beard and button his shirt up to his throat.

Bruce D Snyder

Image: pixabay.com – Snow scene with buildings