“Very cool,” she whispered, as if in a reverie. “But isn’t it a shame that it’s always winter?”
“I don’t really see them as snowflakes,” I said.
“What, then?”
Penny turned to me and must have glimpsed something different in the way I was looking at her, since she glanced away and commented that no one was playing today. The wind, I told her. Sand gets in your eyes and makes the synthetic carpet too rough to play on. In fact, there wasn’t much reason to keep the place open, I continued, and asked her if she’d let me drive her up to Santa Barbara for the afternoon, wander State Street together, get something to eat. I was not that astonished when she agreed. Cognizant or not, she’d been witness to the character, the nature, the spirit of my gaze, had the opportunity to reject what it meant. By accepting my invitation she was in a fell stroke accepting me.
“You can have it if you want,” I offered, taking her free hand and nodding at the snow globe.
“No, it belongs with the others.” She stared out the window while a fresh gale whipped up off the ocean, making the panes shiver and chatter as grains of sand swirled around us. I looked past her silhouette and remarked that the park looked like a great snow globe out there. How perverse it was of me to want to ask her, just then, if she missed Tom sometimes. Instead, I told her we ought to get going, but not before I turned her chin toward me with trembling fingers and gently kissed her.
As we drove north along the highway, the sky cleared, admitting a sudden warm sun into its blue. “Aren’t you going to tell me?” she asked, as if out of that blue, and for a brief, ghastly moment I thought I’d been found out and was being asked to confess. Seeing my bewilderment, Penny clarified, “What the snowflakes are, if they’re not snowflakes?”
I shifted my focus from the road edged by flowering hedges and eucalyptus over to Penny, and back again, suddenly wanting to tell her everything, pour my heart out to her. I wanted to tell her how I had read somewhere that in some cultures people refuse to have their photographs taken, believing the camera steals their souls. Wanted to tell her that when Tom demolished my collection of adoring images of her, not only did he seal his own fate, but engendered hers. I wished I could tell her how, struggling with him in waves speckled with swirling photographs, I was reminded of a snow globe. And I did want to answer her question, to say that the flakes seemed to me like captive souls floating around hopelessly in their little glass cages, circling some frivolous god, but I would never admit such nonsense. Instead, I told her she must have misunderstood and, glancing at her face bathed in stormy light, knew in my heart that later this afternoon, maybe during the night, I would be compelled to finish the destructive work my foolish brother had begun.
2007
LORENZO CARCATERRA
MISSING THE MORNING BUS
Lorenzo Carcaterra (1954-) was born in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City. He began his career as a journalist for the New York Daily News in 1976, first as a copy boy, finally as entertainment reporter, before moving to Time, Inc. as a writer for TV-Cable Week and People, moving on to write for numerous other magazines both as a staff writer and a freelancer, including Family Circle, the New York Times Magazine, and Twilight Zone.
In 1988 he became creative consultant for the TV series Cop Talk: Behind the Shield, leading to a managing editor position for the CBS-TV series Top Cop, which ran for four years. Among much other television work, he has written several unproduced pilots, and in 2003 and 2004 was a writer and producer on Law and Order.
After his first book, A Safe Place: The True Story of a Father, a Son, a Murder (1993), which has sold some 200,000 copies, he wrote the highly controversial Sleepers (1995), a semiautobiographical work about child abuse in a state juvenile facility. With nearly 1.5 million copies sold, the number one bestseller was filmed in 1996 with Brad Pitt, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Bacon, and Minnie Driver. Carcaterra was the coproducer of the Barry Levinson-directed film, which has seen worldwide earnings of $500 million. His subsequent novels have regularly made the bestseller list, including Apaches (1998), Gangster (2001), Street Boys (2002), Paradise City (2004), and Chasers (2007).
“Missing the Morning Bus” was first published in the anthology Dead Man’s Hand: Crime Fiction at the Poker Table (New York: Harcourt, 2007).
I lifted the Lid on my hold cards and smiled. I leaned back against three shaky slats of an old worn chair, wood legs mangled by the gnawing of a tired collie now asleep in a corner of the stuffy room, and stared over at the six faces huddled around the long dining-room table, thick mahogany wood shining under the glare of an overhead chandelier, each player studying his hand, deciding on his play, mentally considering his odds of success, in what was now the fifth year of a weekly Thursday-night ritual. I stared at the face of each of the men I had known for the better part of a decade and paused to wonder which of these friends would be the one. I was curious as to which of the six I would be forced to confront before this night, unlike any other, would come to its end.
I wanted so desperately to know who it was sitting around that table responsible for the death of the woman I loved. And I would want that answer before the last draw of the evening was called.
I tried to read their faces much the same as they would the cards in their hand. There was Jerry McReynolds, wide smile as always plastered across his face, a forty-year-old straight and single man free of the weight of day-to-day worries, a millionaire many times over due to a $5,000 investment in a small computer start-up outfit working out of a city he had never heard of, let alone visited. Jerry never missed a Thursday-night game, boasting of his streak as if he were a ballplayer about to make a move on Cal Ripken Jr.’s long-standing record of consecutive games played. He came outfitted in the same casual manner in which he approached the cards dealt his way, catalog-ordered shirts and jeans, nothing fancy, nothing wild. I could count on him to come in with two high-end bottles of Italian reds and quickly ease into the steady flow of cards and chatter that filled our weekly five-hour sessions. Jerry was the guardian of the chips and kept a small pad and a pen by his side, starting off the game with a $50 feed and dispensing out whites and blues to any player running low or chasing empty. Jerry kept his cards close, doing a quick fold if he felt his hand weak, playing the table as he did his life, on the up and up and without a hint of bluff. In five years of play, I could never recall a time when Jerry left the room with less in his pockets than he had at the start.
I sat back, rubbed the stiffness from the nape of my neck, and tried to recall how I came to know Jerry in the first place and couldn’t quite place it, my cloudy memory confining it to one of the holiday receptions my wife used to host on a semiregular basis back in the days when our marriage still had the scent of salvation. God, how I hated every one of those parties, forced to make small talk in a room packed mostly with her friends since the few I had were seldom invited or welcomed into her cloistered world. I took a long gulp from a glass of scotch and looked back on those long and tedious nights and did a quick flash of Jerry being dragged by the hand in my direction, a glass of white wine in one hand, my wife’s in the other. “You two will be good friends in no time at all,” she said as she made a quick U-turn back into party traffic, her short and tight black skirt giving strong hints of the curvy body that rested beneath, long red hair hanging just off the edge of her shoulders. She was about forty-two then, give or take, and looked at least ten years younger, the quick smile and easy laugh a sweet antidote to the onslaught of age. I wasn’t quite sure how Dottie and Jerry came to know one another and I never did bother to ask, but there was always more to their friendship than they were willing to let on. There was that look between them. You know the kind I mean? As if someone was in front of them telling a joke and they were the only two in on the punch line.