As Simple as Snow Page 2

  There were tons of rumors about them. They were burnouts and vegans. They had pierced their bodies in strange places and had tattoos of runes and symbols and foreign languages all over. They were Satan worshippers, witches. They performed strange occult rituals involving decapitating animals and drinking blood. There were rumors that the guys in the group had taken the girls as their wives, and that they all shared them with one another. They engaged in bondage and torture and self-mutilation. They had sex with corpses. They were all gay. If you believed everything, they were tattooed Satan-worshipping Goth Mormon homosexual S&M piercing necrophiliac drug-using vegetarians. It was a small school, and they must have known what was being said about them all the time behind their black backs, but they never responded. They were mysterious and odd and no one liked them.

  I would have gone on ignoring Anna Cayne forever, except for the fact that she spoke to me first. If I had known that she was coming my way, I would have done everything in my power to avoid her. She wasn’t the person you wanted to be seen with. She wasn’t someone you thought would talk to you first either. She sneaked up on me. It was the end of September and I was in the library stacks, wasting the rest of my lunch hour, trying out a new theory, a suggestion one of my teachers had given me. I had taken On the Road by Jack Kerouac from the shelf and turned around, and there she was, standing quietly a few feet away, calmly staring at me.

  “Burroughs is better,” she said.

  “I don’t know about that.” I looked at the book in my hand and then looked past her. It should have indicated to her that I wanted to get by to check out the Kerouac. She didn’t pay any attention. She stood her ground and gave me a slight smile. She had more to tell me.

  “He shot his wife, you know.”

  “I know,” I said. I didn’t know. I didn’t even know whether she was talking about Burroughs or Kerouac. I was just hoping that she would stop talking and let me get away from her as quickly as possible.

  “They were playing William Tell. They were drinking at a friend’s apartment, and Burroughs pulls out a gun and turns to his wife and says, ‘It’s time for the old William Tell act,’ and she puts a glass on her head, and then he shoots her.”

  “Really?” I said. Then she told me the whole story about William Burroughs and how he was the grandson of the inventor of the adding machine and how he was friends with Kerouac and is in On the Road as “Old Bull Lee” and his wife is “Jane” and how even killing his wife didn’t do anything to curb his fascination with guns and that he used to make paintings with cans of paint and a shotgun. The words streamed out of her; she could have been making it all up, for all I knew, but I actually wanted to hear more.

  “Did he go to prison?”

  “It happened in Mexico,” she said, as if that was all the explanation I needed.

  There was an awkward pause; I wanted her to continue, but she had finished. I panicked and said, “I suppose you’re looking for Stephen King,” and moved to let her go around me and deeper into the stacks. She looked at me as if I were an idiot. I could feel an embarrassed blush fill my face and I was afraid that she might turn and leave. A couple of minutes before, I had wanted desperately to get away from her, and now I was hoping that she would stay and pay more attention to me.

  She stayed. “He’s only written two books worth reading,” she said.

  There wasn’t a pause, but a full stop, and I stood waiting for her to speak. If I hadn’t asked her to name the books, she never would have divulged her opinion. She had an intriguing way of speaking. Her sentences were icebergs, with just the tip of her thought coming out of her mouth, and the rest kept up in her head, which I was starting to think was more and more beautiful the longer I looked at her.

  “Carrie and The Shining,” she finally said.

  “I’ve read The Shining,” I said, happy to have something in common.

  “One to go,” she said. “And then you can be done with Mr. King.”

  She was looking for H. P. Lovecraft, whom I had never heard of. He wrote horror stories, she said, in the early 1900s. She read anything, but she especially liked books (fiction and nonfiction) about the supernatural. She continued to move through the stacks, and I followed her. She was done talking, so I watched her scan the rows and rows of books, selecting authors and titles I would probably have never heard of, like Yukio Mishima, James Baldwin, and All the Little Live Things, until she had an armful. I went to the front desk and checked out both the King and the Kerouac while she simply walked out with hers and waited for me by the door. “I’ll return them when I’m finished,” she said. I had the feeling that she did that sort of thing all the time. The rules didn’t apply. I had to get to class, but I wanted to keep following her, I wanted her to talk to me more. By the time I had thought of saying something else to her she was disappearing down the hall.

  i don’t want to bore you, but . . .

  This is what you should know about me: I’m bland. I’m milk. Worse, I’m water. Worse yet, I’m a water glass—at least water can change shape or become some other form, like ice or vapor. Instead, I’m bland and rigid and everyone can look right through me and see that there’s nothing. I’ve got nothing. I’m walking wallpaper. I almost wish I had a broken nose, or a cauliflower ear, or a scar across my face, something that you would remember. If there were something on the outside to grab some girl’s attention, she might see that I was a good person, a quality person. Most girls just look once and don’t see me, and move on.

  When I was a freshman I tried imitating the cool guys in class. I went out and bought the same clothes that they wore and tried to wear them the way they did, but I ended up looking like an idiot. Something was missing. The clothes were cool, but I wasn’t. There was nothing to be done; I was stuck with who I was. Everyone seemed to have something on me. The geeks had their own look, same with the Goths, the jocks. They all had some way that connected them with someone else. Even the retarded kids had better style than I did.

  “Wear what makes you feel comfortable,” Carl told me. “If you’re comfortable, people will be comfortable around you.” It was easy for him; he knew what he was doing. But I took his advice and started wearing jeans or khakis and a plain shirt and sweater. Anna called it the “harmboy” look, somewhere between hip and farmboy, she said. I liked Abercrombie & Fitch clothes, but I hated the fact that their name was on everything. They put it on the pockets and sleeves and tails of their shirts, and the backs of the pants. I didn’t want to go around advertising some company, so I took off the labels on the shirts and pants and sweaters my mother bought for me. Most of them came off all right, you just took a small pair of scissors and cut the thread in the back, and the thing unraveled and the label pulled right off (if my mom bought me anything with the name printed on it, I would either wear it underneath something or not wear it all), but removing some labels left holes in the sleeves or at the bottom of the shirt. That was my only defining characteristic: a few holes here and there. I wore some Carhartts once in a while, which no one else wore except the shit-kicking farm kids. “Bussers,” we called them. Bryce Druitt had been a bus rider, and he was also a Goth. He was the only Goth on the bus, which might explain why he was such an ass. He had a chip on his shoulder about something, although he shouldn’t have. He wasn’t really a farm kid, though; he lived over near Hydesville, about fifteen minutes away. That was the only other town where they rode the bus to our school. The rest of them were farm kids. Bryce was a senior, which meant that he no longer rode the bus. He drove.

  Bryce Druitt had started as a jock. He played football and ran cross-country, and was one of the best basketball players in the school. He started on the varsity team when he was a freshman (that was the only team the school had; we didn’t have enough players for another squad), and helped lead them to the second round of the state championship. The funny thing about that was that the old court in the high school, built in the 1940s, no longer met the minimum state requirements and so our team
had to play every game of the season on the road. A new gymnasium was built at the end of the season. It was a big ugly metal building plopped down between the school and the football field. It had a cramped, dingy weight room, and a small balcony that was never used for anything. But it had a great basketball court, and bleachers that folded up into the walls so you could fit almost the whole town in the metal box for meetings and dances and whatever else people could think of, but they never thought of anything, so the place was always empty, except for games. Everyone was looking forward to the next season. Everyone was looking forward to seeing Bryce, a year older, a year better. He was a strong, tall blond athlete who had secured himself in the school’s elite and who had everyone’s admiration.

  When football practice started at the end of summer, Bryce didn’t show up, and when school started he had a shaved head and was dressed all in black. He wasn’t the first, but he was the one they cared about.

  Bryce Druitt was a world away from me—he lived in another town, he drove, he was a Goth, and he was a senior. We never should have had anything to do with each other, and I wish he wasn’t in this story at all.

  locker

  To be honest, I wasn’t much of a reader before I met Anna. I was in the library only to see if I could meet someone. This was advice that was given to me by our coach and art teacher, Mr. Devon. “It’s a good way to meet girls,” he told me as I handed in my helmet and uniform and pads. “It gives you something to talk about with them, you know, breaks the ice a little. You have to think about it, though. Don’t just grab the first book you see, or the books everybody else is reading. You want to stand out from the crowd.” Mr. Devon always seemed to be hanging out with some girl in the hallway between classes, or after school, so I figured he knew what he was talking about. Besides, I didn’t really have anything to lose. I thought about where to go in the library and what books to try out. I didn’t want to get stuck with any nonfiction—that seemed like too much work—and I wasn’t going near poetry or any of that romantic stuff. That left fiction (or encyclopedias and other reference books, if I wanted to attract a very particular, peculiar girl, the kind you didn’t need a book to attract in the first place). I finally decided to go after books that I would actually want to read and that would attract a certain type of girl, somebody interesting and smart, or who at least thought I was smart. I ended up picking Jack Kerouac because I knew that few other people in my class would even know who he was and I guess because he was kind of like someone I hoped to be. He was a cool guy for a while in the 1950s, a James Dean type, and maybe I thought that some of that would rub off on me if girls saw me with his book. If I could be more like Jack Kerouac, then maybe I wouldn’t need to hang out in the library to meet girls. For me, it worked the first time out. I guess Mr. Devon didn’t think that football was going to do the trick for me.

  I was too light, for one thing, but I was fast and had good hands, so he put me in at wide receiver. I didn’t start or anything like that, but I saw some action and wasn’t entirely horrible. We lost every game anyway, so you had to be completely worthless not to play. I had maybe a dozen or so passes thrown to me, even caught one for a touchdown, but it was called back on a penalty. Then in practice after the fifth game of the season I broke the index finger on my left hand. Even my injury lacked any sort of glamour or interest. I had caught a pass in the flat, maybe ten yards from the line of scrimmage, and was tackled by three or four guys, and somebody stepped on my hand as they were getting up from the pile and my finger snapped like a twig. It didn’t hurt, but it swelled up immediately and turned blue and purple. The assistant coach, Mr. Ham (he was an enormous guy, so no one ever made fun of his name, not even behind his back), walked me back to the locker room like I had a broken skull or something. He even offered to call my parents for me. I told him that I used the phone with my right hand, which got a laugh out of him at least.

  My mom picked me up and drove me to the hospital. They took X rays and a day or two later told us what we already knew. The season was going to be over before the broken finger could heal, and my parents wanted me to quit, and I didn’t try to talk them out of it, and Mr. Devon didn’t try to talk me out of it, and that was that. It might have been different if I had been a starter. I imagined myself pulling down a game-winning pass with one good hand and the other heavily taped. Of course that didn’t happen. “Put some weight on and study the playbook and we’ll see about next season,” Mr. Devon told me after I had cleared out my locker.

  The morning after she had talked to me in the library, Anna was waiting by my locker. At least I like to think that she was waiting there—she might have just been standing near it with some of her friends. They were grouped together as they always were, only this time in a different spot. I saw her as I started to open the lock, and gave her a quick nod when she saw me. She left her friends and came over.

  “Did you finish Kerouac yet?” she said.

  I laughed. “No.”

  “You’d better get a move on, we’ve got a lot to accomplish.”

  “Like what?”

  “You’ll see,” she said. “Maybe.”

  I opened my locker and found a note she had left for me. “Dear HP—There’s a whole world all around more interesting, wonderful, terrifying, mysterious, amazing than any novel ever written. Pay attention. Take a chance. Dare life. Love, craft.”

  Over the following months, she would always call me different names in her notes and letters, and never sign anything with her own name. Sometimes the references were obvious, and sometimes I didn’t know what the hell she was trying to tell me. This one seemed obvious. She had been looking for H. P. Lovecraft in the library, but then I started thinking about it more, thinking too much perhaps. Could both the HP and the pun at the end refer to the same thing? It would mean that the postcard was addressed to and written by the same person, so I began to think that the HP didn’t refer to Lovecraft at all, but was short for “higgledy-piggledy.” I didn’t like that so much. Maybe she was making fun of me, or trying to humiliate me. That moment made all the difference; two paths were clearly marked: Turn my back on Anna’s difficult attention and continue with my life, or respond to her, follow her, and watch the world I thought I knew reveal things I had never imagined. Of course, at the time I was unaware of any of this. I just followed whatever instinct I had. I wasn’t sure if I liked Anna. Although I thought she was beautiful and sexy and all that, she was scary, mysterious. I knew there could be trouble. I think I knew it even then.

  I threw the note away, but by the time I reached home I regretted it.

  1 october

  She had left a postcard in my locker. The front was a photograph of some old Mexican guy, who, I discovered, was Pancho Villa. On the back was written: “Lora—Good-by—if you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico—ah, that is euthanasia! A. Bierce.” This was Goth flirting, this was Anna Cayne. This one was a keeper. I taped it to my bedroom wall; it was the first of many to go there. Each one was a little puzzle, and now I know that each was a piece of a larger puzzle too. It was a game, and I spent most of that night trying to think of some clever comeback, but she had me at a disadvantage. She was smarter. I spent the rest of that night thinking about her.

  4 october

  I had wanted to ask her out after we talked in the library, but it didn’t seem to make any sense. What would the rest of the school think? I would be linked with the Goths and further alienated from everyone. Of course I was alienated already. On Friday I saw her in the hall before class and went up to her.

  “I finished,” I said.

  “Finished what?”

  “Both books. Both. Kerouac and King.”

  “Good for you,” she said. She was cold and distant, quickly walking away from me. I had to follow her.

  “I was th
inking that maybe you could help me pick out something else.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “You’re on your own.” She stopped and looked straight at me. Her eyes seemed to be looking at something behind me, gazing straight through me and then off into the distance. “I’ve got to go to class.”

  That was almost the end of it. But I was getting my coat from my locker at the end of the day when she came up to me. She was in a hurry. “Here,” she said. She handed me two slim paperbacks: This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski and The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. “Read these,” she said.

  “More dead guys?” I said.

  “No one can disappoint you when they’re dead.”

  I took the books and started to walk away.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know. Home, I guess.”

  “I’ll walk with you.” We left school and she said she wanted to walk down by the river. “Are you in a hurry to get home?”

  “Never,” I said.

  The Furniss River was about a half-mile east of the school. It cut through town and ran south, bending around until it flowed eastward for about a mile before it snaked south again. It was a small river, no more than a quarter of a mile across, but it was deep and had a strong current, especially in the spring and fall. Two bridges crossed the river, one at the south end of town and one that ran into Main Street just north of the middle of town. Main Street, which defined the business district, was only five blocks long and consisted of two restaurants (The Oaks and Burke’s), three bars, a post office, a public library, a liquor store, two pottery stores, a used-book store and a video store, a bait-and-tackle store, a canoe and kayak rental shop, a small grocery that was almost worthless (you were better off going to Gurney’s gas station at the south end of town—at least they never ran out of milk and other staples), and an art gallery where local artists sold their stuff.