Eric Dimbleby - White Out

As if on cue, the snow got heavier once again, blasting through the trees as if it was being created by a huge machine. Though the temperatures had warmed a few degrees, the storm itself kept battling.

It’s the damn aliens. They’ve got a huge freakin’ snow machine. They just want to go skiing , she thought. Annie accused extraterrestrials of the storm on more than one occasion. Tony had laughed at the notion, but there was something in his eyes that said he might have believed it, if given some time for it to settle in. There was no other explanation, even still, it was as good as any other.

When would it stop? She was sick of asking herself that.

Never, that’s when. Never. Annie knew that now. It would never stop. Not in her lifetime. Maybe in Paulie’s, but not in hers. She would die in the snow. They’d all die in the snow, every last human being.

The Yeti’s (or maybe it was Shiny’s, she could not recall) snowmobile started right up. It hummed better than the other one, so she took that as a good sign. Perhaps it was more fuel efficient than the first one. The key had a little chain hanging off it, and it said “OUTTA MY WAY, PUSSIES!” Fitting. Very fitting, thought Annie.

“Outta my way,” she said to herself, revving the motor and pushing herself through the steadily accumulating snow, looking in the direction of Main Street, and beyond that, her home, and towards her family.

When Paulie woke up, he found the boots. He put them on immediately, marching around the room in them. He couldn’t resist looking at himself in the mirror to see how much he looked like a cowboy. He was freezing his patootie (as his mother would have said) off, but the boots made him feel warm. Such a nice gift. Eggah was the best! And even better, he didn’t have to pay for them like he thought he’d have to. He could pass them on to his daddy for a gift, to make him more like a scallion . Just like Eggah. He couldn’t wait to see his father’s face. For Christmas, Paulie and his mother had picked out a bright red power saw for a gift, but his father didn’t seem too thrilled about it. He’d seemed mad about the gift, actually. Paulie wasn’t sure why. They were always fighting lately, even about gifts, which seemed just plain crazy.

But these boots… if they didn’t make his father smile, then nothing would.

Paulie took off the boots and got on his knees. He sniffed inside the boots. They smelled just like Eggah; like a big, sweaty scallion.

When he came down the stairs, Eggah didn’t even mention the boots. Like he forgot all about it already. Eggah said that his daddy was sick and that he needed his rest. The night before, he hadn’t looked all that sick to Paulie. Maybe a little tired, but not sick. In fact, Paulie couldn’t remember his father ever being sick, even the time he ate a whole platter of deviled eggs at a family cookout and his face turned purple.

Paulie asked for breakfast, but Eggah only growled at him. Very cranky! Very rude! This made Paulie cry, so much so that he couldn’t even see straight, his eyes all blurry from the tears. Eggah was being a meanie and Paulie didn’t like it one bit.

He thanked Eggah for the boots, but Eggah only yelled louder after that. His new friend calmed down some, once he started taking more drinks from the big bottle that daddy usually kept hidden.

Eggah drank a lot of the bottle and burped. He said that, “It’s time you start callin’ me your Dad.” Paulie had stopped crying by this point, but something in the way Eggah said those words made him want to cry again. But he didn’t. He felt like it would make Eggah mad again.

Maybe, thought Paulie, he was angry because he wanted his boots back. Maybe he changed his mind. Suddenly, the boots made him feel really guilty.

“When a big person talks at ya’, then you gotta talk back, ya’ hear?”

Paulie nodded, but he wasn’t sure why. He felt like he shouldn’t have given in with a nod. “Can’t hear you?”

“Yes, Eggah.”

“Not Edgar. Not anymore. Dad . You’re going to call me Dad, just like I called my own pop. You got it?”

“Daddah’s my daddah,” Paulie protested, causing Eggah’s face to turn bright red. He looked like he was eating spicy peppers, like the time his grandparents took Paulie out for Mezzican food. “Daddah’s sick? Daddah’s in the hospital?” Changing the subject never hurt things too much, especially when an adult was sore at you.

“I’m your Dad now. Don’t act like a retard.”

“Not,” Paulie started to say, a new set of tears bursting out of the corners of his eyes. “My Daddah.”

Eggah snapped, “Your Daddah’s dead . You know what that means, ya’ little shit? You know what dead means? D-E-D, he’s dead as all get-out.”

Yes.

Paulie knew what dead was. Just like S.A., the chinchilla. Just like his mom’s great aunt Trudy. Just like the caterpillar he found in the driveway that time, all squished, sticky, and messy. Dead meant it wouldn’t ever play again. Wouldn’t talk. Wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t take naps. Wouldn’t do anything fun. Dead was dead, and nothing else happened after something was dead.

No, his daddy wasn’t dead. People died when they got really old and gray and have wrinkles all over their bodies. That’s what his daddy had told him. His mother had said the same thing. The thing that Eggah was saying was a big lie.

“Got a thick skull on you. Now that I’m bein’ a’charged with learnin’ you something, I’ll get that skull fixed up just right, you bet.”

Paulie went into a full eruption of tears now.

That was when Eggah got super-mad. He said something about his own daddy again ( heleftmeyoushitheleftmeandnowyoursleftyoutoobutyouluckedthefuckoutwithme!!! ), and that’s when he started to hurt Paulie. It didn’t hurt too badly at first, when he whacked him in the arm with a wooden spoon from on top of the stove. Then he picked up a metal thingy, something that looked flat and square. It was the thing his mommy made peanut butter and jelly pancakes with.

The flat thing for making pancakes hurt a lot. Eggah hit Paulie in the back of his legs and he fell down on his knees, crying out for his real daddy (not this mean, mean man that wanted Paulie to call him something he wasn’t). The meanie hit him three more times, each time a little harder than the last. Paulie wanted to be dead, just like Eggah said his father was. It hurt so bad that Paulie closed his eyes, sobbing into the iced over floor tiles. His tears froze and stuck to his cheeks. That hurt almost as bad as the pancake-thing.

“What are you gonna call me, son?” Eggah asked, pacing around the kitchen, practicing swings with the metal flipper. “Gonna call me your pop?”

Before Paulie could respond, he started to see stars in his eyes. His chest was going up and down, like he couldn’t breathe at all. He couldn’t speak because he couldn’t get any air in his lungs.

This only made Eggah madder.

When he hit Paulie the next time, on the back of the head, everything went dark.

Paulie slept.

Annie parked the snowmobile on what once was the throughway of her street, directly in front of their house. Her home was almost unrecognizable. In another week or so, she’d be able to climb on the second floor’s roof without much of a boost.

Only four months earlier, she’d been out at the very same curb, gathering up leaves from the oak trees peppered about their property. It seemed like another lifetime, another world, another person. But hadn’t she been just that—another person? The woman that she was back then was dead and buried, presumably beneath a dwarfing drift of snow, somewhere near the bodies of her captors, somewhere near Tony’s body.