As Simple as Snow Page 5

  Anna and I spoke before and after school, and almost never once classes began, but we were in constant contact. She would leave notes and postcards in my locker, or send them along with one of her friends. I would open a textbook and there’d be a note from her, folded neatly and placed at the day’s lesson. I suspected that she knew a number of magic tricks, could pick locks and get into my locker and leave things there without my knowledge. They weren’t your usual notes. She would relate conversations she had overheard, interesting facts from class, stories from the newspaper, even other people’s notes. “Found this near my locker this morning: ‘I hate you. I never want to see you again. You said it wasn’t true but I saw your car outside her house. You lie, and I can’t take it anymore. I hate you. P.S. Call me later.’”

  I was unprepared for her outpouring of energy and enthusiasm and attention, and at first it overwhelmed me. I thought that I would never be able to keep up with her, that she would be bored with me. Instead things became easier. Her energy was contagious and I wanted more of her attention. We talked on the phone, but she preferred to send text messages or, better yet, IM or e-mail, where she could reference websites and send me along a trail of other information. She was constantly changing her name on my buddy list, using people’s initials and making me figure out who they were: A.B.C. (Anna Belle Cayne), E.A.P. (Edgar Allan Poe), J.T.R. (Jack the Ripper), E.M.H. (Ernest Miller Hemingway), A.A.F. (Abigail Anne Folger), G.A.H. (Gary Allen Hinman), E.W.H. (?).

  After maybe five or six weeks, she stopped putting postcards in my locker and started sending them to me through the mail, along with letters and large envelopes filled with things she had found interesting, magazine and newspaper articles, or even random objects like a key (“I found this near your house. What do you think it opens?”), photographs (“Who are these people?”), and letters or notes she had found on the street or left behind in classrooms. It was a constant stream of stuff, and I didn’t know if she wanted me to send her things in return. Much of what she sent me I puzzled over for a while and then discarded (the key, for instance, looked as if it went with luggage or a briefcase, and I wasn’t going to sneak into every house in the neighborhood to find out which). I could identify some of the people in the photos, and she seemed pleased with what I could tell her. She didn’t seem to really care whether I had a response to what she sent or not—her enjoyment appeared to come from sharing the item with me and sparking some train of thought. I never sent her anything; I stuck to the phone or the computer, but even then there was no way to keep up with all the things she sent me. Everything seemed to interest her, and it made me interested as well. Sometimes her interests uncovered things that were secretive and personal. She sent me a handwritten note she had found: “I need help with Carl,” and in her handwriting asked, “What does this mean?”

  carl

  My friend Carl Hathorne was a drug dealer. “I don’t care,” Anna said when I told her, and then laughed. “It’s always the popular ones you have to watch out for.” Carl wasn’t like a superstore, big-box pharmacy dealer, though. You couldn’t buy whatever you wanted; he had a limited inventory. He sold whatever drugs he could easily get his hands on, which meant that he sold his younger brother’s Ritalin, and he sold his older sister’s Prozac, and his mother’s Prozac too. He would sneak into their rooms and swipe a few pills and then sell them around school. It was an easy way for him to make money, and he started going to the junior high school and buying drugs off kids, mostly Ritalin, and then selling them to upperclassmen. He would buy the drugs for no more than a dollar a pill and sell them for anywhere between two and five dollars. He didn’t sell drugs to anyone younger than a sophomore, but he had no qualms about paying nothing to the younger kids. I once mentioned that he was ripping off kids who didn’t know the value of what they were selling, and he lectured me. “Value is relative,” he said. “A quarter is a lot of money to some people, a quarter of a million is not to some other people.” Carl is the only person I knew who talked about things like “supply chain,” and “distribution models,” and concepts like “lifetime value of a customer.” I have no idea where he got this stuff—maybe he was born with it.

  He made good money, but he never got greedy. He knew he had to be careful. There were too many ways to get caught. He could get caught by his family for stealing their drugs, he could get caught by the teachers or principal for selling the drugs, and he could get caught with more supply than demand, but that was hardly likely. There were too many kids who wanted drugs, even in our small school. I had asked him once if it was true that the Goths used drugs. “They’ve never bought anything from me,” he said, but you couldn’t take Carl at his word about that stuff. He was like a doctor protecting his patients’ confidentiality. Everyone seemed to know (or suspect) that if you needed something, you went to Carl, yet no one seemed to know who ever actually went.

  He had one prime attribute going for him: Everyone liked him. Carl was the most popular person in our sophomore class; he might have been the most popular person in the whole school. He treated everyone with respect and appeared to genuinely like people. And all the teachers liked him, all his customers liked him, all his suppliers liked him. “It’s a service industry,” he said. “It’s just good business. Where would I be without my suppliers and where would I be without my customers?” He’s the only person I knew who talked about a moral code. “The Ten Commandments are okay,” he told me, “but Dale Carnegie’s better.”

  Carl could usually be seen wearing a worn-out blue blazer, every pocket stuffed with scraps of paper. They were reminders of who owed him how much and when it was owed, or whom he had to meet to collect from or transact with. Everything was written in a cryptic code he had invented, some obscure shorthand that he could decipher in a second, but that no one else would understand. Each pocket even meant something; it was a whole system. “I’m on top of it,” Carl said. He certainly was. He carried The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, the Financial Times, and The Economist around in his backpack. He kept notebooks, detailed logs of all of his transactions. He would transfer the notes on the scraps of paper into his notebooks, which were filled with a different code. I sometimes wondered whether that’s why he and Anna got along—they each kept their own set of strange notebooks, tracking the town in their own ways, chronicling our lives from two different points of view.

  Carl’s notebooks never left his room. He locked them in a gray two-drawer file cabinet beside his desk, and unlocked the file cabinet and removed the ledgers only to record the scraps into the notebooks’ orderly columns. “You’ve got to keep them balanced,” he said. I asked him why he was so sensitive about them, since they were all in code anyway. “You have to do everything to protect your customers,” he told me. “Besides, any code can be broken. It just takes time. It also makes me feel important.” Carl was important, by the look of the number of notebooks he kept locked up. He showed me one once. Of course it made no sense to me, but he pointed to the column where he tracked the money he had collected. “A perfect record,” he said. “I’ve never lost a penny.” It could have been true, knowing Carl. He had a way with people. His notebooks aligned perfectly with the world. He was in control; the columns confirmed it. People asked, Carl gave. Carl offered, people accepted, on his terms. Everything was an agreement.

  Carl’s other constant was a blue Notre Dame visor, with the interlocking ND removed, so you could see only the darker blue shadow where the logo had been. He had bent the bill of the cap, but then blunted the left side (his left) so that it pointed skyward. “I had to have it trending up,” he explained. His father wanted him to go to Notre Dame. “He’s going to be disappointed,” Carl said. “But that’s all right, he’s used to that.” When he first said this, I thought that Carl was referring to other disappointments, not related to him, but now I’m not so sure.

  Carl was practically the only friend I had, and we’d been friends almost since birth. He used to live a few blocks away and his mothe
r looked after me during the time my mother was working. They moved to a different house, a mile outside town, but we still see each other at school and hang out whenever he’s not taking care of business. Sometimes I think that Carl is my friend only because we’ve been friends for so long, that if we met for the first time tomorrow he would never be my friend.

  I was worried about telling him about Anna and me, especially because of his reaction the first day we saw her. I told him about a week after the football game. By then he already knew. “Good for you,” he said. “You’re definitely one of the more interesting couples in school. Just don’t let me catch you wearing makeup.” Carl knew me better than that.

  When we were younger, my mother used to pick Carl and me up after school, but that stopped when I was in the fourth grade. “You can walk home,” she said. “It’ll be good for you.” Carl’s mom picked us up sometimes, but that couldn’t be relied on when she started having trouble at home, and then stopped altogether when they moved. Carl had business to take care of now anyway. I don’t know what my mother had to take care of during the day. She talked on the phone with her friends, maybe, or ran over to Hilliker, about ten minutes away. She used to hang out with Mrs. Hathorne during the day, and frequently she would do things with Mr. and Mrs. Hathorne (my father rarely joined them, preferring the sanctuary of his den), but they stopped being friends. I thought it was Mr. Hathorne’s fault.

  He was a drunk, that was the start of it. Carl’s father wasn’t one of those guys you had to go and drag out of the bar or anything like that. He would drink by himself. He would drive his car to the liquor store in Hilliker or Shale and then find some back road and park his car and drink until all the bottles were dry.

  He sold cars in Hilliker, and his wife first suspected something when there was a noticeable decrease in his monthly paychecks. He wasn’t making the commissions he used to. She would call the dealership and he wouldn’t be around. Then he would come home late, smelling like alcohol. She told him that it was a problem. He said he would quit. He didn’t.

  He missed more work and finally was fired. Still he didn’t quit drinking. Finally Mrs. Hathorne asked my mother to help. She must have been desperate. My mother took the initiative for once and called a bunch of his friends and family together, and a few of Mrs. Hathorne’s friends too, and they held an intervention. They all told him that he had a problem and that he needed to get it taken care of for his sake, for his family’s sake. A couple of days later he went down to Joplin and spent three weeks in rehab.

  It was when he got back that Mrs. Hathorne stopped wanting anything to do with my mother. She stopped seeing a lot of her friends, as if they had been the cause of all the trouble. Or maybe she was embarrassed. Then the Hathornes moved north of town. It was only a few miles away, but it might as well have been the North Pole. Carl and I still hung out, but our parents never socialized anymore. You never saw Carl’s mom.

  Everyone saw Mr. Hathorne, though. After he got out of rehab, he spent his days down at Gurney’s gas station. Gurney’s was a full-service gas station; you had to go to the other end of town, to Downey’s, for self-serve, and the gas was usually the same price. You would see him anytime you went by, sitting in a black plastic chair by the front counter, sipping on a big cup of coffee. Every once in a while he might get up and clean someone’s windows, but he never pumped gas. He wasn’t working. Derek Gurney or his twin brother, Erick, did the work. Carl’s dad sat and sipped.

  Carl’s mother waited before she said anything to her husband about going back to work. She gave him time to adjust to his sobriety. But Carl thought differently. “Why doesn’t he just sit on the road with a sign around his neck that says, ‘I’m a drunken out-of-work bum’?”

  Carl’s father sat at the gas station for a long time. It was the only place I saw him anymore. One day after school, in the middle of October, I guess, Anna and I were walking down along the river and Carl came out of the woods, holding his hand over his right eye. I was a little embarrassed to see him, since I’d been ignoring him since I started hanging out with Anna. It was nothing personal, it was just all Anna, all the time.

  “Are you all right?” Anna asked him.

  “I will be.” He took his hand away and revealed a swollen mess.

  “That’s going to look good in the morning,” I said.

  “What happened?” Anna said.

  He looked at her with his left eye and then at me. He didn’t want to say. “Customer dissatisfaction.”

  “Do you want to go after the guy?” I asked.

  “No, I’ll take care of it later.” He looked at my hand. I would have gone after the guy, even with my splint. I was about to say so, when Anna spoke.

  “Put a raw potato on it. It’s the best thing.”

  “How do you know that?” I said.

  “It’s an old witch’s trick,” she said. “I can also put a curse on the person who did it.”

  “That you can do,” Carl said.

  I invited them both over to my house. Carl didn’t want to go to his own. And he didn’t want to be seen around town with a swollen eye. That would be bad for business. So we walked to my house.

  We went in through the garage and into the kitchen, which was a mistake. We should have gone in through the front door—that way we would have avoided my mother. I should have known better; I spent every afternoon avoiding her, and here I led Carl right in on her. When we walked into the kitchen, my mother and Carl’s dad were sitting at the table, drinking coffee.

  “Anna and Carl are going to hang out for a while,” I said.

  My mother was startled. She got up from the table but then sat down again. “Okay,” she said. Carl’s father didn’t say anything. Carl didn’t say anything. Then, without looking up, Mr. Hathorne said, “Tell him to get out of here before I blacken the other one.” He hadn’t even moved his head; he spoke directly to his coffee. My mother looked at Mr. Hathorne. We quickly went upstairs to my room.

  “What do you think that’s all about?” Carl said.

  We didn’t say anything about his eye. I don’t see how Mr. Hathorne could have beaten his son and then made it over to my house. I wasn’t going to bring it up unless Carl did.

  “What do you suppose he’s doing here?” he said.

  “Maybe he’s been helping my mom out,” I said. “She’s always getting somebody to do her work for her.”

  “Maybe they finally kicked him out of the gas station,” Anna said.

  “Maybe she’s trying to help him,” I said.

  “Maybe they’re having an affair,” Carl said.

  Carl’s dad was at the same table, drinking coffee, a few nights after that. It got so that Anna and I wanted to see if he was there, but we didn’t want to go at the same time. It made us uncomfortable. Carl always asked if we had seen him. “You’d think that if something was going on they wouldn’t just hang around drinking coffee after,” Anna said. “You’d think she’d get him the hell out of there before anyone saw him.”

  “But maybe since we saw him that first time, they figured what the hell,” I said.

  “It’s strange,” Carl said.

  It got stranger.

  One night I came back later than usual from Anna’s after school. I was late for dinner, which is usually a crime in my house, but that night no one said anything about it. I walked in the door and there were my parents, sitting at the ends of the table as usual, and there was Carl’s father, sitting at the table with them, at my spot. He was even eating off my plate. I didn’t know what to do, so I stood there in the kitchen with my coat on, looking at my place at the table.

  “Where have you been?” my mother asked in almost a friendly tone.

  “Over at Anna’s. I lost track of time. I’m sorry.”

  “Well, get a plate and get some dinner while it’s still warm,” she told me.

  Nothing more was said. I sat at the table across from Carl’s dad.

  After dinner I went up to my room a
nd called Carl. “What happened at your house?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Your mom didn’t say anything?”

  “No.”

  “Well, guess what happened over here.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Your father ate over here. And my dad was here too.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “The three of them were sitting there as normal as can be.”

  “Your dad didn’t do anything?”

  “None of them did anything. We all ate dinner and then I came up here and called you. I think your dad left a few minutes ago.” Carl said that he would call me if anything happened at his house, but he didn’t call.

  Carl’s father sat at my place at the table for the next five or six nights, and then it was over, without a word or a warning. This episode had ended, and no one said anything about his being in our house.

  my heart, previously

  Anna Cayne wasn’t my first girlfriend; I had dated Melissa Laughner in the spring of the same year. There was nothing wrong with Melissa Laughner. She was smart and nice and pretty, tall and thin, with straight brown hair. She wore glasses, sometimes, and she was quiet. Near the end of March her younger brother, Adam, had told Carl that she liked me, so I called her up one night and asked her if she wanted to go see a movie or something. She did. On the Friday of that week, her father drove us to Hilliker, where the nearest theater was, dropped us off, then picked us up when the movie was over. She said barely a word the whole time.