It was long past my bedtime. Mick had gone to sleep in the room we shared, where I’d been writing cross-legged on my bed, so I’d relocated to the kitchen table. My father looked in on me before he turned in, obviously amazed to see me slaving over homework.
“Don’t burn that midnight oil too late, sonnyboy,” he cautioned.
Quiet in our flat was when the motor of the refrigerator grew audible. I could hear its hum, and the toilet trickling, the crinkle of cooling radiators and, from down the hall, a harmonica, maybe Shakey Horton or Junior Wells still faintly playing on the bedroom radio tuned to the black rhythm and blues station that Mick and I listened to on the sly before we went to sleep.
“I’m going down to the basement and put my blue light on,” Sam Evans, the DJ, would announce at midnight.
What blue was that gravestone emerging from the dirty snow in spring? As blue as the blue light in Sam Evans’s basement? The ghostly blue of Blue Island rising from the lake? Or the cold blue of the lake itself? Norky once described it as “turn-your-balls-blue” in an oral presentation. For a time after that we referred to Lake Michigan as Lake Blueballs.
It had actually offended Camille. “Sometimes people look but don’t see what’s beautiful all around us, like the lake,” she wrote in To Change the World. “It’s a melted glacier, an Ice Age turned to sweet water. I love its taste.”
I slipped my jacket on and went out the back way and walked down the alley that led to an Ice Age so fierce the air felt crystallized, as if the snow tailing off the roofs might be flecks of frozen oxygen. It took a conscious effort to inhale its sharpness, yet instead of cursing the cold, I had a thought that maybe the purpose of winter was to make you realize with every breath that you were alive and wanted to stay that way. I thought about Ralphie and the other kids I knew who already were dead, some from accidents, some, like Peanuts Bizzaro, murdered. Peanuts had seemed indestructible. In winter, we’d all go to watch him fight at the steamy Boys’ Club gym. He was a boxer who’d prided himself on not getting hit. He made boxing something daringly beautiful, like diving off a high board. One night I stood in an audience of guys outside the Cyclone fence surrounding the warehouse lot on Rockwell — a lot with floodlights mounted too high to bust with rocks — where Peanuts was dancing, jabbing, throwing combinations, and repeating, “I’m fast, I’m flashy,” though under those lights and the bluish shadows they threw he appeared to move in slow motion as he methodically beat the piss out of a much beefier kid from the Ambros. The kid, called Dropout by the gang buddies cheering him on, had wanted to box at the Boys’ Club, but he was obviously heavier than Peanuts’s welterweight class, and when the boxing coach refused to let them put the gloves on, Peanuts offered to take it outside. Dropout wasn’t even trying to box anymore. He was grabbing and kicking, and Peanuts was nicking him with his fists, calm and cool as a matador, asking, “Am I fast or what?” Then, from outside the fence, came a single pop that echoed off the stacks of oil drums. Guard still up, Peanuts went down to one knee. Dropout kicked him over, then scaled the fence and took off with his buddies.
Peanuts tried to climb the fence but slid back. Out of nowhere, his older brother, Tony, came running and nearly cleared the eight-foot fence in a jump. He wrapped his Levi’s jacket around Peanuts, who was shivering, turning blue under the lighting, and repeating, “No fair, no fucken fair.”
Ralphie never had a fighting chance. I thought of him, and of Peanuts, of Gino Folloni and the others all buried under earth frozen too hard to break with a spade. They couldn’t feel the cold because they were the cold. Maybe they could hear the wind, but they couldn’t see how even colder than earth the boulder of moon looked through the flocked branches of back yard trees. I stopped, made a snowball, hurled it, and the snow knocked from the tree maintained the shape of branches in midair for a moment before disintegrating. I wasn’t wearing gloves, and my hands burned numb. Suddenly, I felt choked up, and I started to run as if I could outrun the feeling — which, in fact, was what I did, sprinting down three blocks of alleys without stopping to check the cross streets for traffic, but there weren’t any cars and finally, when my nostrils and lungs felt at once frostbitten and on fire and I could no longer remember why I was running or if there even was a reason, I stopped and turned around, jogging home under streetlights that looked as if they, too, should have been exhaling steam.
The kitchen was filled with a dizzying warmth. It would have felt warm if the only sources of heat were the overhead light and the humming refrigerator motor. There, on the gray Formica table, lay my smeary blue ballpoint pen and three-holed loose-leaf papers, my story, and the scratch paper on which I’d listed various kinds of blue. I tried to reread my story and couldn’t. The only thing left to make it feel right was to compress it in both hands like a snowball before throwing it into the trash bag under the sink.
Everyone handed in compositions but Chester and me. Sister Lucy didn’t say anything to Chester, but she told me to sign my name on a blank sheet of paper, title it “Christmas Composition,” and below that to write “Dedicated to Ralphie.”
On the last day of class before Christmas vacation, when she returned the compositions, she handed the blank paper to me marked with a red F. Written in red ink was the comment “I see that your gift this Christmas was an ENORMOUS nothing.”
After returning the papers, Sister Lucy placed a scratchy record of carols on the portable turntable, and while it played she announced what we all already knew, that Camille’s essay would represent our class at the Christmas Pageant that year. As was customary, Sister Lucy asked Camille to read her story aloud for our class. Camille rose to read at her desk, but Sister motioned her to the front. Camille was to be our valedictorian, too, the first one ever at St. Roman, and Sister Lucy had begun coaching Camille on her oral delivery in preparation for her speech at graduation.
“A Christmas Carol for Ralphie: A True Story,” Camille read, her quiet voice in competition with the “Ave Maria.” She enunciated carefully, eyes glued to the page, rouge burning on her cheeks. She appeared to be overheating, and she partially unbuttoned the navy blue cardigan she’d taken to wearing over her school uniform.
“Try looking up at your audience from time to time,” Sister Lucy suggested. “Eye contact, that’s the secret.”