Eric Dimbleby - White Out

The world seemed different in those days. The world was changing, no matter what his father would admit.

It’s just a little snow, kiddo. It’ll let up any day now. Once it starts to melt, you’ll forget all about this. Once your mom gets back, it’ll be like none of this ever happened. The world isn’t ending, no matter what those cuckoo birds said on the radio.

The man on the radio said something about the a-pok-a-lips . Paulie still couldn’t decipher what that actually meant, but it seemed pretty bad. The guy’s voice was all shaky and gravelly, like he was scared of some kind of ghoul that lived in the closet. He said that all the people were going crazy, fighting over heating oil and food and all the things that people needed to survive. The guy on the radio had scared the heck out of him, even more than the dream-monsters.

When his father found him listening to the radio, he snatched it away, unplugging it and hiding it away at the top of the bathroom closet. Paulie loved to listen to the radio, so he was pretty cross at the time, but now that their electricity was gone, it didn’t matter much anymore. They had plenty of batteries stashed in the basement, but his father said they needed to conserve those in case things got worse.

Paulie had asked what worse meant.

Don’t worry about it. I didn’t mean that. Things won’t get worse. I promise you.

His father never answered questions like Paulie hoped he would.

What’s worse? Paulie asked a second time.

Daddies were always full of promises, but Paulie supposed that went with the job. Not everybody had good fathers, and his mom had assured him that his father was better than most.

As he stared at the pretty crystals hanging from the roof, Paulie wondered where all the mailmen had gone. It was bad enough outside that even the mailmen were scared to go out now. Paulie imagined their mailman (a chuckling man with a long black mustache who called himself Skipper) walking around with their letters, chasing them down as they blew out of his hands from the wind. And when the letters were scattered on the ground, he’d have to go after them in snow that went all the way up to his tummy, not to mention that the letters were mostly white, so they would blend in with the snow. Like those silly lizards called kuh-mee-lee-ons . Poor Skipper, he might catch a cold hunting down all those letters. Paulie laughed out loud at this image. His imagination was pretty goofy at times.

Paulie gathered up some of his action figures and his bright red fire truck, and then walked to the stairs to visit Eggah and his father. He really wanted to get a better look at Edgar’s boots again. He wondered if his father would wear boots like that if he got his mother to buy him some for Christmas next year. It would be an amazing Christmas present, if his mother helped him find some. Or maybe, if he had enough money in his piggy bank, Eggah would sell them to Paulie. He seemed like a nice guy who might do something like that, but he was also pretty in love with those cool boots.

Placing his truck on the floor at the top of the stairs, Paulie turned back towards his bedroom, ready to pop open the little plastic piece on the bottom of his red, white, and blue piggy bank. There probably wasn’t enough money in there, not enough to buy the boots from Eggah. After all, they seemed to be Eggah’s favorite thing. They were worth far more than the change he had. He didn’t know much about money, but he knew things like boots required the green pieces of paper, not just the shiny ones.

Paulie could barely keep his eyes open. The day seemed a distant memory to them both. Even though he’d napped by the fire earlier in the day, his energy was dwindling. The chilled air was getting the best of Christian’s son.

“You like Eggah, Daddah?”

“Edgar. Yeah, he seems all right,” Christian answered his son, thinking back on the oddities of the day. Only thirteen hours earlier, the stranger had showed up at their window. And in record time, the man settled in as a regular in their household. Something in that fact disturbed Christian. Some people were just comfortable no matter the situation. Given that Edgar was a self-purported rambling man, perhaps that was his unique way of living.

“He’s a scallium,” said Paulie, but Christian couldn’t understand the word. “He said so.”

“Stalin?”

“No,” Paulie replied, his eyes drooping as he shook his head from side to side. “Scallion.”

Christian nodded, pulling up the blankets close to Paulie’s chin. “A stallam,” he said as if it was a common enough phrase, admitting defeat in deciphering the word. Annie was great at translating for Paulie’s sometimes jumbled up four-year-old speech.

Annie kept drifting in and out of his thoughts, especially as he watched Paulie slipping into the tranquility of sleep. Once upon a time, Annie would have been by his side, assisting in the transition to bedtime. Not now, and not recently. They separated in their parenting duties more and more, opting to be two separate entities raising a child on shifts. He wondered if Paulie ever suspected that they were the same person (two wardrobes, two masks) playing two roles in the theater that was their life.

What would Annie think if she returned before Edgar was on his way again? Sure, he was a wanderer, but that didn’t mean he didn’t grow roots every now and then. In fact, Christian was more than happy to have another adult by his side, even if it wasn’t his wife. Edgar could bring value to their survival. He would be a drain on their resources, but he could also procure further resources, if things got really desperate. They’d guzzled down a half pint of bourbon during Paulie’s naptime, reminiscing on their very different lives—Christian as a domesticated house cat, Edgar as a free spirited drifter without a place to lay his head. They’d had a damn good time, even with Edgar’s peculiar sense of humor and distractingly bizarre comments (“You ever smell yourself smile?” or “Sometimes I feel like Jesus is living in my mouth.”)

Annie would flip her lid if Edgar was staying in their home.

All the more reason to invite Edgar to stay on as a long-term guest. Maybe it would piss Annie off enough to make her think twice about abandoning her family for pretty-boy coworkers in the future. She would continue to deny that it was on purpose, but Christian was never one to underestimate the power of the unconsciously self-destructive being. Annie had too good of a life to be faithful, to stick by the people that loved her. Instead, she was probably out there, dead in the snow and ice, perhaps sexually satisfied as she greets the afterlife.

“I miss Mammah,” said Paulie, looking up to his father with eyes that reminded Christian of Annie’s—pulsing and deep, drilling deep into his being. “She okay?”

“Your mother’s fine, I’m sure. She’s with her friend Tony. He promised to take care of her and get her back to use safely.”

“Eggah friends with Mammah too?” the boy asked next, prying his eyes open with his tiny fingers, in an attempt to regain focus as sleepiness overwhelmed him.

“I don’t think they know each other. Edgar came here because he was sick. Because he needed somebody to help him.”

“We hep?”

“Yep, we certainly did. We saved his life, Paulie. It was a good thing we did,” said Christian, rubbing Paulie’s cheek as the boy let out a nearly infinite yawn. Paulie smiled at this statement. He clutched his tan teddy bear close to his chest. “You’re a brave boy, you know that?”

Paulie nodded.

“And when your mom gets home, I’m going to tell her how brave you are. She’ll be so proud. Just like your dad,” Christian whispered, leaning across the bed, putting out the candle with the tips of his fingers (something that Paulie usually enjoyed, for its daring nature, though he was too tired to respond at this moment). Now Christian could only see the outline of his boy’s face, beneath the moonlight that snuck in through the skylight of his and Annie’s bedroom.