Stice breathed. ‘There’s no indoor place’s got thirty-six courts, Inc. Winchester Club’s got twelve is maybe the most. Fucking Mount Auburn’s only got eight.’
‘They’ll have to move us around to different sites. It’s a pain in the ass, but Schtitt’s done it before. I think the real variable’11 be whether the Quebec kids got into Logan last night before whenever it was this hit.’
‘Logan’ll be shut down you’re saying.’
‘But I think we’d have heard if they got in last night. Freer and Struck were keeping tabs on an F.A.A. link ever since supper, Mario said.’
‘Boys are looking to get X’d by some slow-witted hairy-legged foreign girls or what?’
‘My guess is they’re stuck up at Dorval. I’ll bet C.T. is on the case even now. Get some sort of announcement at breakfast, probably.’
This was a clear opening for The Darkness to do a quick C.T. impression, wondering aloud over the phone to the Québecois coach whether he, C.T., should press for them to charter ground transport from Montreal or else rather urge them not to risk travel through the Concavity in a storm in such a generous but disappointed gesture the Québecois would think busing the 400 clicks to Boston in a blizzard was his own generous idea, C.T. wholly open, opening all different psych-strategies to the coach’s inspection, with the frantic ruffling sound of the coach’s French-English dictionary loud in the phone’s background. But Stice just sat there with his forehead against the glass. His bare feet were tapping some sort of rhythm on the floor. The hallway was freezing, and his toes had a faint blue tinge. He blew air out of his lips in a tight sigh, making his fat cheeks flap a little; we called this his horse-sound.
‘Were you talking to yourself out here, or chanting, or what?’
A silence ensued.
‘Heard this one joke,’ Stice said finally.
‘Let’s hear it.’
‘You want to hear it?’
‘I could use a quality laugh right now, Dark,’ I said.
‘You too?’
Another silence ensued. Two different people were weeping at different pitches behind closed doors. A toilet flushed on the second floor. One of the weepers was nearly skirling, an inhuman keening sound. There was no way to tell which E.T.A. male it was, which door back down past the walls’ curve.
The Darkness scratched the back of his head again without moving his head. His hands looked almost luminous against the black sleeves.
‘There’s these three statisticians gone duck hunting,’ he said. He paused. ‘They’re like statisticians by trade.’
‘I’m with you so far.’
‘And they gone off hunting duck, and they’re hunkered down in the muck of a duck blind, for hunting, in waders and hats and all, your top-of-the-line Winchester double-aughts, so on. And they’re quacking into one of them kazoos duck hunters always quack into.’
‘Duck-calls,’ I said.
‘There you go.’ Stice tried to nod against the window. ‘Well and here comes this one duck come flying on by overhead.’
‘Their quarry. The object of their being out there.’
‘Damn straight, their raisin-debt and what have you, and they’re getting set to blast the son of a whore into feathers and goo,’ Stice said. ‘And the first statistician, he brings up his Winnie and lets go, and the recoil goes and knocks him back on his ass kersplat in the muck, and but he’s missed the duck, just low, they saw. And so the second statistician he up and fires then, and back he goes too on his ass too, these Winnies got a fucker of a recoil on them, and back on his ass the second one goes, from firing, and they see his shot goes just high.’
‘Misses the duck as well.’
‘Misses her just high. At which and then the third statistician commences to whooping and jumping up and down to beat the band, hollering “We got him, boys, we done got him!’’
Someone was crying out in a bad dream and someone else was yelling for quiet. I wasn’t even pretending to laugh. Stice didn’t seem to expect me to. He shrugged without moving his head. His forehead had not once left the cold glass.
I stood next to him in silence and held my NASA glass with the toothbrush and looked out over the top of Stice’s head through the window’s upper half. The snowfall was intense and looked silky. The East Courts’ pavilion’s green canvas roof bowed ominously down, its white GATOR-ADE logo obscured. A figure was out there, not under the shelter of the pavilion but sitting in the bleachers behind the east Show Courts, leaning back with his elbows on one level and bottom on the next and feet stretched out below, not moving, wearing what seemed to be puffy and bright enough to be a coat, but getting buried by snow, just sitting there. It was impossible to tell the person’s age or sex. Church spires off in Brookline were darkening as the sky lightened behind them. The beginning of dawn looked like moonlight through the snow. Several people were at their vehicles’ windshields with scrapers down along Commonwealth Avenue. Their images were tiny and dark and fluttered; the Avenue’s line of buried parked cars looked like igloo after igloo, some sort of Eskimo tract-housing thing. It had never before snowed like this in mid-November. A snow-covered B train labored uphill like a white slug. It seemed clear that the T would be suspending routes before long. The snow and cold sunrise gave everything a confected quality. The portcullis between the driveway and the parking lot was half up, probably to keep it from being frozen closed. I couldn’t see who was in the portcullis’s security booth. The attendants always came and went, most of them from the Ennet House place, trying to ‘recover.’ The flagpole’s two flags were frozen and stuck right out straight, turning stiffly from side to side in the wind, like someone in a neck-brace, instead of flapping. The E.T.A. physical-post mailbox just inside the portcullis had a mo-hawk of snow. The whole scene had an indescribable pathos to it. Slice’s fogged breath kept me from seeing anything closer than the mailbox and East Courts. The light was starting to diffract into colors at the perimeter of Slice’s breath-fog on the window.
‘Schacht heard that joke down at the Cranial place from some B.U. fellow with just terrible facial pain, he said,’ Stice said.
Tm going to go ahead and ask the question, D-man.’
‘It’s a statistics joke. You got to know your medials means and modes.’
‘I get the joke, Orth. The question is how come you’ve got your forehead all up against the window like that when your breath’s keeping you from seeing anything. What are you trying to look at? And isn’t your forehead getting kind of cold?’
Stice didn’t nod. He made his horse-sound again. He had always had the face of a fat man on a fit man’s lean body. I hadn’t noticed before that he had an odd little teardrop of extra flesh low down on his right jowl, like a bit of skin with mole-aspirations. He said ‘The forehead stopped feeling cold a couple hours back, when I lost all my feeling in it.’
‘You’ve been sitting here with bare feet and your forehead against the glass for a couple hours?’
‘More like four, I think.’
I could hear a night-custodial crew laughing and clanking a bucket right below us. Only one was laughing. It was Kenkle and Brandt.
‘My next question’s pretty obvious, then, Orth.’
He gave another awkward shrug that didn’t involve his head. ‘Well. It’s sort of embarrassing, here, Inc,’ he said. He paused. ‘It’s stuck is what it is.’
‘Your forehead’s stuck to the window?’
‘Best as I can recollect I wake up, it’s just after 0100, fuckin Coyle’s having them discharges again and there’s no sleeping through that, boy.’
‘I shudder to think, Orth.’
‘And Coyle ‘course just doesn’t even hit the light just hauls out a fresh sheet from the stack under his bunk and goes right back to sawing logs. And I’m wide awake by this point in time, though, and then I couldn’t get back under.’