Ronald Malfi - Snow

“That’s their little trick,” the big guy in the Bulls sweatshirt went on, jabbing an index finger roughly the size of a kielbasa at the check-in counter’s electronic screen. “Right now they know this flight’s been cancelled. Hell, look outside! Doesn’t take a meteor-fucking-ologist to see we ain’t leaving the ground anytime soon.”

The big guy was right: over the past hour, the walls of plate-glass windows had become great sightless cataracts, blinded by twirling, billowing snow. Todd could just barely make out the vague dinosaur shapes of the airplanes out on the tarmac, gray and indistinct beasts fading into the background the longer he looked at them.

“They keep saying the flight’s delayed just to weed out the more impatient travelers,” said the man. He had his pizza box open now and he was trying to gather up the messy slice inside with his overlarge fingers. “They get a few boneheads going up to the counter, changing their flights and asking pointless questions, before they slink away like dogs who’ve been beat for nosing around in the kitchen trash.”

Indeed, a small line had already formed in front of the check-in counter, though it did not seem to be moving very quickly.

“You just watch,” said the man in the Bulls sweatshirt. “Once that line dwindles, they’ll put up the cancel sign on the board. It’s a lock.”

“We could still get lucky.”

“Wanna bet?”

Ha, Todd thought morosely. You have no idea, chubby.

“They do it this way to stem the flow, know what I mean?” said the man. “They don’t wanna get rushed by a hundred people all at once, see?”

Todd ran his hands through his hair and said, “You do a lot of traveling?” With his run of bad luck, he was already thinking this fat bastard would wind up sitting next to him on the flight…if there was a flight.

“I’m in sales. Medical supplies. Pharmaceuticals.” The guy finally managed to wrangle the slice of pizza out of the box, but not without having a wedge of pepperoni land in his lap. “Shit on a stick.” He looked up at Todd with his piggish, squinting little eyes. “How about you?”

“Travel much? No, not really.”

“I meant, what do you do for a living?”

“I’m a lawyer.”

“No shit? Private practice?”

“Personal injury, DUIs, that sort of thing.”

“Gotcha. Ambulance chaser,” said the guy in the Bulls sweatshirt, sliding the tip of the pizza into his mouth. He tore a bite out of it that would put the shark from Jaws to shame. “I get it. There big money in that?”

“I do okay.” He checked his watch: 5:45 P.M. The goddamn flight was supposed to have left two hours ago. He envisioned Justin watching television in the living room of the little house on Calabasas Street in Des Moines, wearing his Turbo Dogs pajamas and sporting his fresh crew cut, while Brianna—Todd’s ex-wife—scampered around the house doing a little last-minute tidying up. She’d been a good sport about all this and Todd silently thanked her for it. After all, it was for Justin’s sake.

It had been almost a full year since he’d seen Justin, back in…Jesus, was it back in March? For the kid’s seventh birthday? That long ago? Of course, he was supposed to have had Justin for three weeks this past summer, too, but life had a way of changing plans without fair warning. This past summer had been a mess—a complete fucking wreck, in fact, thank you very much—and, in the end, his only communication with Justin since March had been over the telephone or through handwritten letters in the mail. Justin’s teacher had taught his class how to write letters and address envelopes—something the boy had been infatuated with since learning it—and it wasn’t long before bulky white envelopes started to appear in Todd Curry’s mailbox, the printing done in big childish capitals, usually in Magic Marker, the stamp crooked in the corner like a poorly hung picture. The letters had touched Todd deeply—deeper than he had thought they could—and it wasn’t until one morning in late July, after returning from a pitiful and humbling weekend in Atlantic City, that Todd had collapsed into tears over a ridiculous crayon drawing of a cat wearing a top hat, with arrows for whiskers, that Justin had sent him. He’d stuck the drawing to the refrigerator in his tiny Manhattan apartment with a Domino’s Pizza magnet…but the drawing had been so accusatory and made him feel so guilty that he removed it after only two days. The next time he spoke with his son over the phone, it was all he could do not to crumble apart again like a sand castle. Something had changed in him. Immediately after the phone call, he’d scrounged through the kitchen trash to retrieve the stupid drawing of the cat in the top hat, but it had been too late—it had gone out with the trash earlier that week. Gone.

Gone, he thought now, and the word resonated like a ringing gong in the vacant chamber of his mind.

“I usually don’t travel on Christmas Eve,” the fat guy in the Bulls sweatshirt was saying, his mouth loaded with pizza, “but this was a big client and I didn’t want no one getting the jump on me. The pitch went fantastic, too. I really hammered them. Wore a suit and tie, the whole nine. Really did the thing up nice, know what I mean?”

“Sure,” Todd said, snatching up his laptop and standing. The last thing he wanted to do was spend another minute talking to Chunky the Pharmaceutical Rep. “I think I’m gonna grab a coffee.”

Chunky looked dejected. “Don’t you wanna see how the flight plays out? We got a bet.”

“No bets. And besides, I thought you said it’s going to be cancelled. That it was a lock?”

The guy shrugged his enormous shoulders. There was nothing but pizza crust left in one grease-streaked hand. “You mark my word, Perry Mason. You just watch and see.”

Todd bustled down the corridor, a few fast-food joints to his left and his right. Any of these places would serve coffee, but his eyes happened to lock on a small bistro called Hemmingson’s at the end of the gangway. Thanks to the delays, it was now well past happy hour. Fuck coffee; what he needed was a stiff goddamn drink.

The place was overpopulated, no doubt due to the multitude of cancellations and delays, yet Todd managed to squeeze his way to one corner of the bar and order a Dewar’s on the rocks without taking an elbow to the ribs. A hodgepodge of Christmas decorations and sports paraphernalia hung from the walls and, despite the smoking ban, someone was puffing away on a cigarette. The TV behind the bar was tuned to the Weather Channel. On a steady replay, the television showed clip after clip after clip of Midwesterners in parkas with fur-lined hoods trudging through the blizzard. These clips were replaced by shots from a traffic-cam along the interstate, where it looked as though the world were made up of nothing but fender benders and police lights. Todd felt something cold and wet turn over in his stomach. When his scotch arrived, he gulped down a hefty swallow in hopes of killing whatever angst was squirming around down there.

“Excuse me, excuse me,” came a woman’s voice from somewhere beyond the crowd of bar-goers. Todd turned around and saw a woman in a cream-colored knit wool cap struggling just beyond the wall of broad male shoulders. “Excuse— shit!” With that, the woman came bursting through the crowd. Overburdened with luggage and squeezed into a knee-length jacquard coat that was maybe two sizes too small, she looked as though she were about to rebound off the lacquered countertop. Todd reached out and grabbed her forearm, steadying her before she completely lost her balance.

“Whoa,” he said. “You okay?”