Against the Siberian Express, anything wasn’t nearly enough better than nothing. After a while, Bryce and Susan spread all the blankets they had on top of the bed. They got in, fully clothed, and wrapped their arms around each other.
“I’m still cold,” Susan said.
“So am I.” Bryce nodded. “Well, if they find us frozen, we’ll be one lump of ice, not two.” He squeezed her tighter.
“You say the sweetest things,” she murmured. For some reason, Bryce suspected her of imperfect sincerity.
He couldn’t stay wrapped up with her all the time, not unless his bladder froze solid. When he flushed the toilet, he hoped it would work. They insulated pipes here, but not against weather like this. Sooner or later, those would start freezing up.
On his way back to bed, he pulled back the curtains and the blinds and the shade so he could look out the window. He saw a tone poem Whistler would have been proud of. White snow fell from a gray sky onto white drifts. The drifts might not have been as high as an elephant’s eye, but they were gaining on it.
“What do you see?” Susan asked. She was too sensible to come out from under the covers herself unless she had to.
“Outside of a couple of woolly mammoths, just snow.” Bryce adapted a line from Groucho Marx: “Inside the woolly mammoths, it’s too dark to tell.”
“Ba-dum-bum! Rimshot!” Susan said, and then, “Invite the poor things in for coffee. I’ll bet they’re freezing out there.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised.” Bryce got back into the bed. As he chastely snuggled with his wife, he said, “Remind me again why I wanted to move to Nebraska.”
“It’s called a job.” Susan pronounced the last word yob, as if it were some strange foreign term, possibly borrowed from the German. “They give you money for it.” That came out as moh-nee, as if it also didn’t belong in English.
“Oh, yeah.” Bryce nodded as if he’d forgotten. He wished he had.
After a while, bored by doing nothing under the covers, he started to do something. Susan slapped his roving hands away. “If you think I’m going to take my clothes off for you, Buster, you’re out of your ever-lovin’ mind!”
“You don’t have to take ’em off,” Bryce said—reasonably, he thought. “Just slide some of ’em down a little. Hey, what else have you got to do right now?”
“Now there’s a come-on line,” Susan muttered. But she rolled over so her back was to him. With a minimum of disrobing, the deed was done. Fornication with next to no bare skin wasn’t nearly so much fun as fornication with lots of bare skin. It was a hell of a lot better than no fornication at all, though.
Bryce thought so, anyhow. “See?” he said, setting a hand on her bare hip. “We’re warmer now.”
“Oh, boy.” Susan quickly made sure that hip wasn’t bare any more. Then she rolled over to face him again and gave him a kiss. “You’re crazy. I love you. I must, or else I’d be crazy, too.”
They got out of bed to use the john, to eat, to make hot coffee for themselves if not for the woolly mammoths, and to check the Weather Channel and CNN for views of what the Siberian Express was doing to the Midwest beyond their frozen apartment and frozen Wayne. By then, the storm had got down to St. Louis, which didn’t even come close to being built for blizzards like that. It was heading for Memphis and New Orleans. They were even less ready. Ready or not, here it came.
For Marshall Ferguson, the Siberian Express was a noise in another room. When the house had power, he saw a lot of white on white on the TV. Newscasters gave forth with the number of people found frozen. It was up into the hundreds by now.
His own problems were more immediate. He remembered hearing about someone who set out to be a writer. Naturally, the fellow cast his eyes on the tip-top markets like Playboy and The New Yorker. He declared he wouldn’t bother to submit to any market that paid less. Either he starved or he found some other line of work, because you sure couldn’t make a living that way.
For one thing, you were competing against the entire literate world. All the top writers aimed their top stuff at places that paid best. For another, those magazines weren’t likely to buy more than one story a year from you even if you were Salman Rushdie or Stephen King. No matter how well they paid, they didn’t pay well enough to let you make a living on one story a year, or even on one story a year to each if you could do that.
And selling pieces for two hundred bucks here, or four hundred fifty there, didn’t feel the same after the big check from Playboy came in. His friends wondered why he couldn’t do that all the time. So did his father. Dad nodded when Marshall explained the facts of a writer’s life to him. He might understand them once he heard them, but they sure didn’t make him jump up and down.
They didn’t make Marshall jump up and down, either. If he weren’t living at the house where he’d grown up, if he didn’t pick up money on the side sitting for James Henry and Deborah, he would have had to look harder for a real job. He didn’t get as much from his mother as he had because James Henry was in school and had teachers to babysit him.
After he took a shower and dried his hair one evening, he came downstairs. “Do you know somebody named Sophie Lundgren?” Kelly asked.
“Mrs. Lundgren? Sure. She taught me Spanish at San Atanasio High,” he answered. “Hay un elefante en mi ropa interior.” It meant There’s an elephant in my underwear. Mrs. Lundgren hadn’t taught him that, but he wouldn’t have been able to work it out for himself without what she had taught him. After a second or two, he thought to ask, “How come?”
“Because she called a few minutes ago—wants you to call her back. I wrote her number down.” Kelly paused, too. “Sophie Lundgren taught you Spanish? She sure doesn’t sound like she’s from Mexico City.”
Marshall shrugged. “I just work here. But yeah, she did. Hey, this is L.A. People here do all kinds of shit you wouldn’t guess from their names.”
“Well, you’ve got that right,” Kelly said.
“What did she want?” Marshall asked. “I don’t think I’ve heard from her more than once or twice since I graduated, and that’s, like, a while ago now.”
“She said she was calling some of the students she liked best. She’s moving—moving a long way, I think. She wants help weekend after this one hauling boxes out to a truck. She say’s she’ll buy dinner for everybody who shows up.”
That was bound to be a cheaper way to move than paying professionals. Still, Marshall had liked Mrs. Lundgren. Seeing her one more time might be a kick. “Where’s the number? I’ll call her back.”
“It’s on a Post-it by the landline phone.”
“Okay.” Marshall ambled over. So it was, with the name in Kelly’s neat, legible script. Accurate was the word for Kelly, all right. Marshall dialed the number. It had a 310 area code, so it wasn’t too far away.
Ring… Ring… “Hello?” Yes, that was Sophie Lundgren’s voice—a whiskey baritone, or near enough. Marshall didn’t know that Mrs. Lundgren poured ’em down, but that sure had been the rumor. Her voice did nothing to disprove it, anyway. If he’d taught high school for umpty-ump years, he figured he would have drunk, too, in self-defense if for no better reason.
“Hi, Mrs. Lundgren. This is Marshall Ferguson. I hear you need some moving help weekend after this one. What time, and where do you live?”
“Thank you so much, Marshall!” his old teacher exclaimed. “Yes, Saturday a week, starting right after lunch.” She gave him the address. It was down in Torrance, but this side of the Del Amo mall—not too far to get to by bike. He wrote it down on the Post-it, too. Next to Kelly’s, his handwriting looked even sloppier than it did on its own.