Pete Hamill - Snow in August

At Corrigan Street he repeated the process: head down, crouched, falling once, then up again, until he reached the shops untouched by the wind. Away off, about three blocks, he could see the ghostly shape of a trolley car. Its lights were on but it wasn’t moving. High above the avenue, the cables that gave the trolleys their power were quivering like bowstrings. Michael paused under the shuddering marquee of the Venus, gazing at the showcards offering The Four Feathers and Gunga Din . He’d seen both at least three times and tried to conjure warm images of India or the vast deserts of Africa, with Fuzzy Wuzzies charging in the dust and British soldiers sweating in the heat. The images only made him feel colder. And for the first time, he was afraid.

I have to go now, he thought. I have to turn this corner and go up Kelly Street, past the armory, past the Jewish synagogue, have to cross MacArthur Avenue, have to turn right at the park. I have to do this now. With the wind at my back. I must go. Not just to serve mass. No. For a bigger reason. If I turn around and go home, I’ll be a goddamned coward. Nobody will see me turn and run for home. But I’ll know.

He turned the corner into Kelly Street. There were three-story houses to his left, the humped shapes of parked cars to his right, and around him and under him and above him he heard a high, thin, piercing whine, the savage, wordless wolf call of the wind: penetrating him, lifting him and dropping him, driving him past the soaring drifts that concealed buried cars. The whine was insistent and remorseless. Who are you , Michael Devlin, the voice said, to challenge me ?

Then he looked up and his way was blocked. A giant elm had been smashed to the ground from the front yard of one of the houses. As the tree fell before the wind, it had crushed the fence of the house and collapsed the roof of a parked car, and it was now stretched out to the far side of the street. The branches of the tree seemed to reach toward the white sky in protest. Snow gathered on the dying trunk. The windows of the crushed car had exploded, and snow was drifting onto its seats. The boy thought: If the tree had hit me instead of the car, I’d be dead.

Holy God.

He pushed through loose waist-deep snow between two parked cars and crossed the street, skirting the murdered tree, until he reached the side of the armory. This was no refuge. Behind its barred windows, the armory housed a boxing ring and dozens of old jeeps and National Guardsmen called “weekend warriors.” But its sheer redbrick walls rose a forbidding six stories above the street, and no doorways offered shelter. The boy saw now that the armory’s copper drainpipes had burst. High above the ground, shoving their way from the ruptured seams of the drainpipes, giant icicles stabbed at the air, defying the wind. They were thick, muscular icicles, a foot wide at the root, sharp as spears at the tip. Michael Devlin remembered photographs in the encyclopedia of stalactites, gray and dead; these icicles looked just as primitive and ancient and evil. And all of them were aimed at him.

He turned his eyes away from the icicles and trudged on, wishing again that he had a wristwatch. Seems like hours since I left the house, he thought, but maybe it’s only been minutes. I don’t really know, and the storm doesn’t care anything about time. He thought: Maybe this is crazy. What if the church is closed too? What if Father Heaney took one look at the storm and decided to celebrate mass alone in the rectory? What if the electricity has failed and the altar is dark? And suppose another tree falls, or a monster icicle, and hits me? Without warning. Nobody to shout: Watch it, kid. It would just happen. And I’d be left here in the drifts, without a dog or a friend or a scout from the mining camp. My mother would have to bury me and she’d be left completely alone. Or I’d end up crippled, a drag on her and everyone else. In one of the Jack London stories, a prospector broke his leg in a storm and his best friend was forced to obey the wisdom of the trail by shooting him in the head. Otherwise both of them would die.

Then, moving over a piled ridge, Michael imagined his father in the snows of Belgium. Many Americans had been killed there by the Germans in what was called the Battle of the Bulge. Thousands of them. He saw his father in full uniform, with a helmet and heavy boots, carrying a gun, and the snow driving even harder than this Brooklyn blizzard, and the wind whining, with the goddamned Germans somewhere up ahead in the blinding storm: as close, maybe, as MacArthur Avenue, as near as the synagogue. Unseen. Hidden. Ready to kill. Did Tommy Devlin think about turning around and running home? Of course not. He wasn’t a goddamned coward. But did he have a friend with him? Or was he alone when he was shot, his blood oozing red into the white snow? Had he lost all feeling in his hands and feet before they killed him? Did he cry? Did he hear wolves? Did he think of Mom? Home in the top-floor flat on Ellison Avenue? His blue suit? Did he think of me?

Suddenly, Michael Devlin heard a voice.

A human voice.

Not the wind, but the first real voice he’d heard since he left home.

He stopped and gazed around at the deserted world.

And then, through the slanting sheets of icy snow, he saw a man peering from a door on the Kelly Street side of the synagogue. A man with a beard. And a black suit. Like the man in black who called to Billy Batson from the dark entrance to the subway. He was waving at Michael.

“Hallo, hallo,” the bearded man called, his voice seeming to cross a distance much wider than the street. “Hallo.” As if coming from another country.

Michael stood there. The man was beckoning to him.

“Hallo, please,” the man shouted. “Please to come over…”

The voice sounded very old, muffled by the falling snow. A voice as plain and direct as a spell. Michael still didn’t move. This was the synagogue , the mysterious building in which the Jews worshiped their God. Michael had passed it hundreds of times, but except for Saturday morning, the doors were almost always closed. In some ways, it didn’t seem to be part of the parish, in the way that Sacred Heart was part of the parish, and the Venus, and Casement’s Bar. The synagogue rose about three stories off Kelly Street, but Michael always felt that one dark midnight, it had been dropped on the corner from somewhere else.

That wasn’t all. To Michael there was something vaguely spooky about the synagogue, as if secret rites, maybe even terrible crimes, took place behind its locked doors. After all, didn’t everybody on Ellison Avenue say that the Jews had killed Jesus? And if they could kill the Son of God, what might they do to a mere kid in the middle of a blizzard in Brooklyn? Michael had a sudden image of the bearded man tying him up, then heaving him into an oven, or bricking him up behind a wall, like the guy in “The Cask of Amontillado.” He saw a headline in the Daily News: BOY VANISHES IN STORM. And started to walk on.

The bearded man called to him again.

“Please.”

Michael stopped. There was a note in the man’s voice as he said the simple word please . The sound of distress. As if a life could depend upon what Michael did next. There was pain in the word too. And sadness. Maybe the bearded man was just that: a bearded man, calling for help in a blizzard. Not some agent of the devil. They were like two men in the trackless Arctic, specks in the ghostly wastes of a dead world.

If I walk away, Michael thought, it will be for one reason: I’m afraid. The Malemute Kid wouldn’t walk away. Neither would Billy Batson. Shit, if Billy Batson had walked away from the man in the black suit he would never have become Captain Marvel. And my father, Tommy Devlin, he would never walk away. Not from a thousand goddamned Nazis. And definitely not from a man who said please in that voice.