Date: Mon, 23 May 2005 18:05:57 -0700
From: B Keeper <silvershimmer@earthlink.net>
Subject: "Two Boys, Made Out of Snow"

		       "Two Boys, Made Out of Snow"
				    by
			     Timothy Stillman


We were going to the snowfields of California, circa 1850
someday. But now we were in dead of winter (why is winter called
dead?, it's the most lively of the seasons, it sparkles the blood, it
gets the heart to pumping, it stirs something magical inside us;
summer with its heat and torpid ness and sweat, that makes us not
want to move, not want to breathe, not want to do anything--now
summer is the dead season). Snow falls heavy and deep and fine for
falling into snow piles. And they said my friend was a ghost. They
said they were troubled about me. But they weren't. They were
troubled about their school. And the attendant publicity. And the
grants cut off. All of that. If a boy found another boy to be friends
with, who wouldn't shy away from a discussion of sadness now and
then, what harm could it cause them?

The sky was a pallid kind of watery, unstable gray this
January afternoon, getting on toward sun set though there was no
sun left of winter to set. We were in our heavy clothes and coats,
making snowballs and throwing them at each other; making snow
angels. Kenny was an angel. He was everything good about a not
so good world. He fell feather soft into the feather soft snow drift,
his arms spread out like he was taking off toward heaven but forgot
the direction. I snow angel-ed right beside him, my arms out. Our
hands touched. We were still. The snow rushed hard to our faces.
Some sleet mixed in. Pelting us. It was such a good time.

"He's not real, Bobby. He's an imaginary companion. See,
check the records, go on. He doesn't even go to this school. He's
not registered. A dream can't sign his name. A dream can't be
anything but someone you made up and it will make you sad the
rest of your days if you don't realize this now."

We lay there. I looked over at him. There were snowflakes
on his dark eyebrows. On his face. His tongue tip darted out like a
lizard's to catch the snow that fell on his mouth. His eyes were
closed in peaceful surrender. His face was rosy from the intense
coldness. His hand was cold in mine, as we held our fingers
together and he slipped his hand closer into my palm and I held his
small hand to keep him safe. How small and insubstantial we felt
then. And he was a good expansive feeling.

The school was in Connecticut. A boys' school. For
exceptional children. Read that as: troubled children. The staff
loved to have problems like me. It was their meal ticket. Their cash
cow. They charged a fortune. You could see them almost snapping
their choppers when a kid had a problem. They were blessed four
hundred times over with children with problems. My problem was a
safe one. A mirage. And whoever falls in love with a mirage is
asking for trouble, so they said.

Kenny was a small boy. He was too thin, almost anorexic.
He stumbled sometimes, but I, not much bigger than he, but a bit,
would help him up. He stuttered at times. And he wept sometimes.
Somewhat like I do, though I have more control over myself. The
other boys laughed at us though, equally. It was easier in the
sharing for us.

We lay not talking. I wanted to lie closer to him. I wanted
to hide him in warm clothes and fireplace crackle and safe houses
where no one comes looking for you because they don't want to
find you and are just as glad when they don't. His lips were pale.
His color when he wasn't flushed red from the cold chapping
weather was rather a beautiful pearl color that makes you realize
why man dives deeply into the ocean to find that prize of rare
beauty, and why sometimes man does not come to the surface
again, because once that majesty is found, how do you go back to
the world of sun and land? And why would you want to?

We thought of sadness, since we got in trouble talking
about it. This was a relentlessly happy school. The teachers, the
counselors (more numerous than the teachers) were all so happy it
would make you want to spit. The kids were not happy. They were
relentlessly grim and angry and alone and furious with being alive at
all. So Kenny and I were a welcome relief, drowning in the snows
of our youth, missing being young while we were still only 12 and
13 respectively.

We should have worn our mittens. Our hands were bitterly
cold on the ice crystals. We wore toboggans. Which hid Kenny's
lank somewhat lusterless black hair. Which hid my too mousy
brown hair. I lay there looking at him. Taking in the all of him.
Shamelessly. I lay on the frozen numbness of the ground, and
watched him ease with breathing. Watched the snow like little
visible breath shovels coming out of his nose and mouth. Be me,
Kenny, I thought, my breath going deeply inside me and then
released in my own visibility with great reluctance. Be me and I will
be your illusion and will never let you down or laugh at you and put
you in your place and then go away, like it was my mission in life..

The machinery of boy is a miracle. The machinery of
laughter, yes, even we laughed from time to time, but always in the
parameters of what we were, how we saw the landscape in front of
us and inside us, but we could be happy, in that rather wonderful
melancholy way. We were a team. I wanted this machinery beside
me all my days. I wanted the gears and pulleys and levers and the
something else inside him and outside. Something that you can
never touch or explain. Something that is inside you, maybe. But
inside him, definitely. Trying to get cool on a hot night. Or warm on
a cold night. That's how trying to find this elusive quality is.

Kenny was talking now. To himself. To the gray day with
the sky a personal memory given upward to hold other lost boys on
their own particular quests in this snow country forever amen.
Maybe he was talking to me. To someone else long gone or to
come to tomorrow and leaving me far behind, stumbling, stuttering,
with no one to help me up or hold me or be with me. He was
talking about the snowfields of California, circa 1850. We saw a
movie once about that. We thought it would be nice to be in that
huge empty country of then, and all the echoes of history that must
resound through it. He talked dreams.

And dream talk is always the best. There was a small strand
of hair escaped the net of his toboggan, that made a comma of
ragged sorts on his forehead. How I longed to reach over and brush
that comma. To reach over and to touch his face and warm it with
my chapped hands. We were lovers of cold and somberness. We
were lovers of all the things you think you would like to escape
from. But we reveled in them. If it was lonely and lost like a stray
kitten, these were our provinces. And Kenny was not a ghost. And
neither was I. Those who had power over us, now they were ghosts
but they were too stupid to realize it. You could see straight
through them. Transparent as glass. Kenny and I talk about that,
and laughed about that, often.

"If you're not a ghost, no one can make you one just on
their say so," Kenny and his little high piping voice. "Ghosts have a
right to exist too. More than they." Then we would lose ourselves
in the conundrum, the thread of the thought would be gone, but we
would have each other and that would be worlds enough for us.

He strayed. He never sat in classes. But he was waiting for
me after the end of the day, and we would run to the quad and then
off the quad to a football field nearby, and the world was our
oyster, and Kenny was the pearl and I feared one day soon that
world oyster taking him back like he had never been at all. And then
he would be a ghost. Then he would be a revenant. And so would I.
Cut off from each other ever after.

They don't value us at this school. Not any of their charges.
They partake of us. They own us. Own our problems. That of
course are never ever theirs. They rearrange things in our minds.
They tell us what to think and how to think and what not to think
and how not to think. They are absolutely relentless in this. Kenny
is the only thing that keeps me sane. Though they say otherwise.
Though they don't know what they are talking about.

Before our parents tossed us aside because they had other
things to do, Kenny and I were together anyway. We talked about
this a lot. We had dreamt of each other. We had pretended at each
other. At night we would, in our beds, amidst our parents' fighting
and throwing things and saying things like "Who the hell told you
to get pregnant in the first place I bet he's not even mine!!" that
would be answered with a retort like "Ever heard of a condom,
Ace?", and alone alone, we would hold each other to invisible us.
We birthed each other from our tears, and our terrors and our
insecurities. Somehow I got to be a "real" boy. And Kenny got to
be on the outside, a suspect.

A miscreant wanderer who never studied with us. Never
slept in the open dorm room. Never choir sang with us. Was there
only for me. But I on the inside, was on the outside too. That was
what drew us to each other. That was our starting point.

"When I fall in love, it will be forever, or I'll never fall in
love." Kenny sang that now as we lay in our beloved snow country.
He said it was a record he heard his mother play once. She said it
was from a long time ago, from her own girlhood. The singer,
Kenny said, was Nat King Cole. Kenny said he had the loveliest
voice, that it broke the boy's heart and made him vow to do what
the song said. Then Kenny turned to me, slowly. His eyes looked at
mine. He smiled easily in all that snow coming down round. He held
my hand tightly and then he held me and I pushed myself next to
him. We lay on our sides close together, our bulky clothes and
coats getting in the way.

We vowed our love. And that it would be forever.

They build sad kids mean. And they build mean kids sad. It
is a double book end kind of thing. There is never one without the
other. Except for Kenny and me. We were too frightened to be
mean, though perhaps others took it as passivity. There was no
meanness in us, though. There was that all round us. The other kids
gave us the business too, because they were so lonely they could
die. We tried to understand, but never could.

The classes were dictatorial. We were lectured to. Yelled at
constantly by the teachers, all of us. We learned Latin and Spanish
and Physics and Geometry and how to say yes sir and no ma'am
and thank you very much. We learned to sit in the drafty cafeteria
with the long tables and the industrial prison processed food and we
learned to like the taste of cardboard.

In the open dorm room, the boys sometimes played with
each other after lights out, or played with themselves or whispered
or just cursed or threatened what they would be doing to this
teacher that psychologist when they had the chance by god. Some
of the boys cried in the dorm room. They tried to hide it. I cried and
tried to hide it. But I got the business from some of the bullies
anyway. I learned to cry without sound there in the darkness and
the void. But they knew it anyway. And lay in wait for me.

The counselor's office, where I spend a great deal of my
free time such as it is, and me looking out the window at Kenny
waiting in the snow for me to run to him, was cheerless and bleak
and utilitarian as the rest of this place, Mr. Michelman, which
reminded me of Michelmas which reminded me of Xmas which I do
not write as Christmas because I do not believe in Jesus no matter
how many masses they force us to go to, no matter how many Hail
Marys I am given at confessional to say. Indeed, all of that liturgy
and punishment of the spirit and the "soul" if we have such things
turns me against the whole business, if you want to know the truth.

A delusory man Mr. Michelman. A bore of a man Mr.
Michelman. Mr. Michelman of reality and sunless depths Mr.
Michelman. A man who wants me to face reality. So I look out the
window, defiantly, with him wondering what I looked at, where I
wanted so much to be, with him in the snow, staring at the building,
the window, me, and smiling at me in his don't give up and give in
smile; "not that Kenny again?" Mr. Michelman asked, exasperated.
I tend to make people quite exasperated.

I slipped early on, when I was tricked into thinking these
people really cared about us, and mentioned Kenny, my one true
friend, and I wanted to brag about knowing such a great guy; for
once I was supremely happy, but they shot that down without even
looking at me; and from thenceforward Mr. Michelman and the
other counselors--who have little to do with me; I am Mr.
Michelman's popinjay--but the bastards can't seem to keep their big
mouths shut, and gossip about all of us-- have taunted me and slyly
made me feel like a dope about it ever since; I'd confess everything
to Adolph Hitler before I'd say one more word to these stilted lying
avaricious superior adults again, who know so much by knowing
nothing at all. I said nothing, so he pulled the brown curtains closed
on my view of Kenny. He had to let me go in an hour.

He had other kids he had to pretend to help. He needed the
illusion of helping so much, I guess none of us had the heart, even
the meanest kids, to explain reality to him. So he stayed in his
bubble and knitted all his life like Madame Lafarge, like all the other
counselors did; more fragile far than us. So, afterwards, I would run
to my love. He would smile and laugh and wave me to him. This
dim shadow in a world of shadows, this dim shadow that burned so
brightly. And we would be safe with each other.

Like here and now. As we lay in the snow, side by side.
Holding each other in case the world started spinning too fast and
we were thrown off so we would be thrown off together, and like
Robert Frost said about a different situation, "that would have
made all the difference."

Except for our hands when we made snow angels, we had
never touched before, Kenny and me. I never feared for an instant
he would be unreal or that I would see through him the snowfields
stretching out and the sky gray and daunting and endlessly. He was
soft hearted and he was full of heat that spread to my far colder
body even through our coats and clothes. He put his face beside
mine and I closed my eyes and swallowed hard a couple of times. I
put my hands to his back, to where his shoulder blades were,
though of course I could not feel them. I guess I had hoped to find
wings back there to take me home for I so wanted that.

"We'll run away to California," Kenny said, "we can't go
back in time. But we could live in the mountains where there's
snow. And we could learn how to prospect for gold. We could pan
gold in the streams. We could live off the land and build ourselves a
neat snug cabin and nobody would know where we were or care,
yeah, like they would care anyway. And in our hearts, deep inside,
we'd be--" Kenny paused here, not sure if he was to be laughed at
or not; even the toughest brashest of boys are shy creatures,
diffident creatures, larkspuring one minute, and the next, afraid they
have given away everything they have, and it turns out to be just for
a moment of some stranger's time, and you have nothing left then
to go back to inside yourself.

He finished it anyway, eyes closed, knowing the sound of a
dream dying, "In our hearts we'd be--ah--married."

He waited. He closed in on himself. He knew I would run
away. Okay, this, maybe he was a ghost. Maybe he was a ghost of a
boy from a long time ago or a short time ago that something
horrible happened to. Maybe he was a dream. Maybe he was
waiting to be born and depended on solely me for that. So quick as
a wink, I said, "I love you Kenny Haden. I love you and love you
and love you." I may have said it a million times. He smiled shyly at
me, and then we were up and off and giddy and singing and making
snowballs and tossing them at each other and we ran off into the
night come, and the day, what there had been of it, seeping through,
was turned off and the football field where we ran in and ran from
was quiet and still and there was no one there. No one at all.

Mr. Michelman stood by his office window, idly fingering
the curtain drawstring. He looked out that window and wished
there wasn't such a heavy emptiness out there. Wished he could see
some life. Wished spring would return so boys would play football
again and he could watch them and love them on the quiet in the
secrecy of his mind and the longing of his heart. He went to his
filing cabinet, sighed dyspeptically, and opened the cabinet to the
H's. He tried to find Haden or Hayden or Heden or something like
that. But none of the combinations presented him with any name
close to that. He closed the cabinet, a bit too hardly, making the
green metallic thing clatter its files and drawers some. Where
exactly did that name come to him? Why should it be repeating
itself over and again?

Then he sat at his desk. He got out his paper and picked up
his quill pen, tapping the head of it against his lips. He was writing a
monograph when he had some free time. He wished at this very
moment the stagecoach would make more stops here. He wished he
could get on one and go back East. He wished the books he had
ordered would get here soon on that damn stagecoach. They were
all he had to hold back the ultimate.

He wished he hadn't been mad enough to go with the
wagon train to California. It was so vast and deep and lonely here.
You could travel hundreds of miles and not see a soul, a cabin, no
sign of human habitation. Everything was so very far away from
everything else. And the winters were unbearable. The winters chills
could drive a person half mad; and the snows were so deep in these
mountains, you could lose your horse and buckboard and yourself
in them, and never be found till spring thaw, long away.

The points on a compass seemed not to exist out here. It
was impossibly easy to get lost. And what oddness there was too,
seeing snow on cacti and cow skulls and hearing all those deuced
owls calling all night long, and you wonder if they are owls or if
they are Indians.

He was a school teacher was Mr. Michelman. He only had
one suit, his Sunday go to meeting one, with his vest in the pocket
of which he kept his grandfather's pocket watch to remind him of
home, the pocket watch that he held often, that he clung to, as to his
own personal talisman.

To remind him of --more "civilized"--New York City where
he had grown up and lived his young and young adult life in all that
closeness and tenement buildings. No room to breathe. No room to
move. And the horse manure, the flies' and maggots' and bugs'
closest friend in the necessity of survival known as feeding off what
you can find, in the streets piled up pretty big there and the smell
was always rancid. In summer, god, you didn't even want to
remember what that had been like, and crossing the street had been
a nightmare. So he had come here to be a teacher, to find the wide
open spaces, and god help me I have, he thought.

He lit the candle on his desk. The room flared into stippled
wavery reddish gold light. He saw his charges here. The ones now
and the ones that had been and the ones that would be. They were
farmers' and storekeepers' and sharecroppers' and ranchers'
children.. They were recalcitrant boys and girls from five different
counties. They were--troubled. God, how could they not be? And
in this small school building he was supposed to teach them what
children should be taught. They were sad. They were mean. And
joyed in playing all kinds of devilment on each other. Though never
on Mr. Michelman who was to say the least a stern taskmaster.

Because of the wide distances in this place, some of the
children, who lived fifty miles from here or more, came only very
infrequently or mostly, not at all, learning their real lessons from the
world school that lasts a lifetime of hard knocks, while other
children showed up more regularly, but unexpectedly, raggedly,
having to work on the farms, having to help their parents with
planting, taking care of their cattle or hogs, their horses, having to
help with the harvesting, tending the land, tending stores, begging
sustenance for one more day in this long lost tiresome backbreaking
country.

Mr. Michelman sat back. He stretched his arms. They had
runaways sometimes. Of course you never really called them that.
You never could know at all, until the frantic parents came in their
buckboards or on their horses that were grand, though more often
not, to spread their wiry fears to him about their missing sons. The
girls never ran away. They were not allowed dreams, but why
would they have them anyway, if they were never allowed the
slightest chance of acting them out? Mr. Michelman was grateful
for that at least. Even though he lived hand to mouth on the small
pittance he was paid to take other people's children into his charge.

Kenny and--what was his name again?--Mr. Michelman
checked his records in the candle light on this snowy blowy cold as
ice winter evening early on--yes, Bobby, Bobby Dreedman, though
shouldn't it have been Haden or Hayden? No, why did Mr.
Michelman have that name on the brain? The two kids picked on
the most. How many school yard fights had Mr. Michelman broken
up, the other kids beating Kenny and Bobby half senseless, the two
boys never fighting back, just looking at each other, eyes locked, as
though they were taking sustenance from one another.

They had left, run away perhaps, or had been swallowed by
this endless country, two months ago. Kenny's parents were frantic.
They promised never to fight in their son's presence again. A bit
too late for that, Mr. Michelman thought, musing as he stroked his
heavy gray streaked beard. Bobby's parents had never shown up.
Mr. Michelman had never laid eyes on them. But if Kenny was
gone, so was Bobby. They were always together. They always
would be, in some form or another.

He would go home tonight. He would go home and he
would sit by the fire and he would read a book, a real leather bound
book, not one of those dreadful penny dreadfuls who also came at
such a premium out here that he was learning to like even them; and
he would sleep under his heavy blankets in the coldness of his
cabin. Outside the owls would hoot. Or maybe it would be Indians
pretending at being owls. Pretending so well that they had become
them. Or maybe it was just Kenny and--yes, Bobby--playing
midnight games with him. He always had trouble remembering
Bobby's name especially for some reason, like he was a spectral,
not exactly real, a visitor to this time that Kenny was already in.

Like Kenny was lonely and had no one, so one day Bobby
appeared out of the clear blue. Like Kenny had written him a letter
or something, that said come here. And Bobby was--different in
some odd way, different than all the others. Like he had come from
a peculiar unreal backward almost primitive place and never could
get used to the modern accouterments of the world around him,
such as there were. They left him in the dark. The simplest things he
had to be taught over and again to do.

And Kenny took this too strange Bobby, that the other kids
hooted about, even more than they did Kenny, under his wing,
taught him with gentleness, how to do things here, like how to
saddle a horse, how to read the Bible in Latin, and with the
teaching Kenny became more at ease with himself, seemed far
happier, and Bobby seemed the same as he friend, more and more.
Until they disappeared.

Wherever they are, Mr. Michelman said, almost like he was
whispering a prayer, wherever you are, Kenny and Bobby, be well
and because you have each other, perhaps you will be. Perhaps.
Then Mr. Michelman prepared to go home. His horse at the rail
whinnied, time to hook me up to the buckboard and get me home to
the barn and some hay; time for you to curry me and feed me some
sugar cubes, come on, don't leave me in the snow all night, Mr.
Michelman fancied his horse was thinking, if horses and other dumb
animals can think, you stay in the snow and cold too long you die.

Mr. Michelman had his coat on and put his scarf round his
neck, then put on his cowboy hat, pulled it down low, and walked
out into the nor'easter, blown he was and buffeted by the wind,
snow crystals blowing almost horizontal, thunking him on his large
nose, and thinking, as he petted his horse's powerful neck, made it
whinny again and made it start to dance a bit with impatience, maybe
you don't die in the snow and cold and sleet and pounding night,
maybe, he said to himself and his painted horse, as he brought it to
the buckboard and adjusted everything, maybe it's just the opposite.

He was a man who could admit when he was wrong. He
hadn't always been that way. Something had happened once.
Vaguely. Like a dim image of a snow angel a boy or more than one
boy had made in the snow drifts a long time ago or somewhere up
ahead, some distant misty time the eye can't see or imagine just yet.

Yes, he was a man who could change his mind and be open
to other views. How could he ever have been any other way? He
got on the buckboard, lowered himself on the cold seat, then pulled
the reigns, as he and the horse joggled their way through the snow
that was heavy laden and more heavy falling, blocking the known
world out, making the blue cold soundlessness of white and wintry
all the world there was.

Except for the break heart sounds of the owls at play in the
trees of night and winter long ago now.

Timothy Stillman
B Keeper
silvershimmer@earthlink.net