We Three Kings

 

The stone clicks against the class, then falls back with a dull thud in the snow at my feet.

Dennis’ face appears at the window, not Dave’s, set against the flickering blue glow of his mother’s color TV, even though most of the shows she watches on Christmas Eve are in black and white.

“Get Dave,” I tell Dennis when he finally pulls open the window and asks what I want.

The blonde head vanishes, leaving me standing in a solemn silent night that is not quite night, missing the hustle and bustle of trucks and buses that have given up their routine this one and holy night each year.

I see my face reflected in the glass just inside the jewelry store’s security gate, one block and I’m already snow-clad walking from my house at the top of the hill.

Inside the jewelry store, a Christmas display has replaced the usual assortment with a train chugging along a track of snow that is snow through a tiny village filled with unmoving tiny people, waiting, or frozen skating on a pond that is really a mirror or riding in sleights that do not move because the horses that pull them do not move.

I see my own face reflected in the frosty glass, not as it is now, but as it was when I was five or six, when this was an A&P store, and my grandmother sent me here to fetch ground coffee and chopped meat, and how amazed I was when the butcher pushed the chunks of meat into the mouth of a shredder and the mean came out of the other side like creeping red worms, and then at the check out where the clerk dumped the coffee beans into the grinder and the scent of it overwhelmed me, even now, all these years later, the store gone, but not the memory.
The door next to the window bursts open; Dave’s long face pokes out. He’s so tall I have to look up to look him in the eyes. He’s annoyed, even scared and wants to know what I want.

“If Momma catches you here, she’ll have my head,” he says.

I ease through the door and into the small space where stairs climb up to the back of the house and the apartments on the second floor and another door leads to the basement. The whole place smells of vaper rub and cigarettes from old man’s apartment next to Dave’s upstairs.

“I need you to come with me,” I tell Dave. I’m warmer, but not warm; I can still see the steam each time I breathe.

“Come with you? Where?”

“To the quarry.”

“On Christmas Eve? Are you nuts?”

“My grandfather is dying,” I say. “His relations are hovering over him like vultures. I can’t stand being there.”

“I’d invite you up, but you know Momma.”

“I don’t want to go to anybody’s house,” I said. “But I don’t want to be alone either.”

“But why the quarry?”

“I can’t think of any place else.”

“Tonight?” Dave mumbles. “And you want me to come with you?”

“Why not?”

“Momma will want me here with her.”

“Your mother’s busy with her movies – and you said yourself she falls asleep have way through them. She won’t miss you.”

“She’d miss me if she woke up and I’m not here,” Dave says. “She says she has a big surprise for us in the morning.”

“You don’t sound too happy about it.”

“I’m not, but Dennis will be.”

Footsteps sound in the hall above, then thud down the stairs until Dennis appears at the curve.

“Momma sent me to find you,” Dennis says. “What’s taking you so long? The movies are starting.”

“Tell her I’ll be right up.”

“Tell her yourself,” Dennis said. “You’re not supposed be down here, especially with him.”

By which, Dennis means me.

“Just get back upstairs.”

“I won’t. You two are up to something – again.”

“He’s wishing me a Merry Christmas. That’s all. Just go.”

Dennis doesn’t go. I’m too impatient to wait him out. The weatherman predicts a big storm and I want to get to the quarry before it comes.”

“Are you coming with me or not?” I ask Dave.

“I can’t. I wish I could,” Dave says.

“Go where?” Dennis asks,

“Never mind where,” Dave says.

“You wouldn’t go anywhere on Christmas Eve, would you?” Dennis asks, sounding a little scared.

“I told you to go.”

“I’ll tell Momma.”

“Tell her what?”

“That you're down here with him and planning to go off somewhere on Christmas Eve.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” Dave tells Dennis.

“Fine,” I tell Dave. “I’ll head out before the snow gets too heavy. I figure I might make the caves up there before the worst of the storm hits. I got matches and there will be wood up there for a fire. If you change your mind, I have some business with the old man at the Sweet Shoppe you might be able to catch up with me there.”

I see a look of regret in Dave’s eyes as I step out. The door closes. The snowflakes fill in my footsteps so I cannot even see those I made on my way down the hill from my house.  I turn the other way heading down Crooks towards Trenton and to those streets beyond to that part of town across the tracks we rarely go to except on  our way to someplace else, beyond Main where on this side the street numbers turn from East to West, and a whole different population exists, different neighborhoods, different gangs, even different churches, although some kids come to our side of town to attend our Catholic school.

Landmarks appear out of the haze of snow, then vanish again. Streetlights take on halos like those the statues have in church. Christmas trees glow inside the front window of houses I pass, happy faces around them, unreal like snapshots from some magazine cover that has nothing to do with me.

I pass Lee’s Tavern – a stucco building with banners advertising sports programing and boxing bouts on TV, known for its illegal sports better, and more importantly, by high school kids who know they can get served there is they are tall enough and let their face hair grow for a few days.

My uncle Harry is a frequent visitor, always too drunk to drive his car out of the bar’s parking lot up the one block to the top of the hill, Charles Lee or his brother Donald, calling our house to tell one of my uncles to come collect him, and sometimes, now that I am old enough, my uncles send me, Harry leaning on me the whole way as we stagger home.

I hear the thud of running feet behind me and turn in time to see Dave's tall shape coming out of the haze of snow, behind him the smaller shape of Dennis appears as well.

“You've changed your mind?” I say.

“Sort of,” Dave says, coming to a breathless halt before me -- Dennis skidding to a stop behind him. “Momma needs cigarettes. The store on Vernon Ave is closed. So, I have to go to the Sweet Shoppe.”

“Why did you bring him?” I ask, meaning Dennis.

“I couldn't stop him. He threatened to tell Momma I'm going to the Quarry with you.”

“Are you?”

“Yes,” Dave says after a long pause. “I don't want to be around tomorrow for momma's surprise.”

“What about him?” I ask, again meaning Dennis.

“Someone has to bring the cigarettes back to momma.”

“You'd better not be going to the quarry without me,” Dennis says.

“You’re not going anywhere but to the sweet shop and back,” Dave tells Dennis.

“I’ll tell Momma.”

“It won't matter by that time.”

“Ff we're going we better start,” I say. “This storm is getting worse.”

“The worst storm in 50 years the weatherman says,” says Dennis.

The new snow pours down, filling in the gaps left by the previous storm, more like ice and than snow as it swirls around me, stinging my face in the space where my clothes end, and sleeves begin.

We walk in each other's footsteps, single file, with me in the lead, my hood up over my head and still the storm gets in, chilly and painful cold, even worse when the snow melts against my neck.

I hear my grandfather's voice in my head, his old tales stirred up with the drifts of snow, of when he grew up and had to make treks like this with his father to and from the mill, or from some house the older man built and needed to finish even when it snowed.

“So, what's the surprise your mother has planned that you don't want to be there for,” I ask Dave when he's close enough to hear me with the wind.

Dave looks back at the Dennis, who is just beyond hearing.

“My old man,” Dave whispers. “She's bringing him home for Christmas.”

“You'll have to see him when you get back,” I say.

“By then it might not be Christmas,” Dave says. “But don't tell Dennis. He doesn't know and he still likes seeing Poppa.”

We hear the buzzing start just as we get to Trenton Avenue, a buzz turning into a grumble and then a roar.

“Cars!” Dennis yells and points back up the hill at the wobbling headlights rushing towards us.

“Who would be crazy enough to drive in this?” I ask.

“Three guesses,” Dave mumbles, staring at the cars as fixated on them as I am.

“Even minks isn't this crazy,” I say.

 “Wanna bet?”

I can't make out the faces behind the steamed windshields as the cars approach. I see them swerve, wheels sending up water as a spray of slush we cannot escape.

“They did that on purpose!” Dennis yell, wet dripping off his pulled down black knit cap.

Dave says nothing just stares after the cars as the rear lights fade back into the haze of snow beyond Trenton, Terror evident in his troubled gaze.

“You're not still scared of that punk?” I ask.

Dave shudders, shakes his head, yet I know he is -- a non-stop victim up at Junior High where Minks sets up court as class bully, carrying on the noble tradition of picking on Dave he started at school number 11 when they both went to classes there.

We are all wet now, and cold, each shivering and staring up at the deluge of flakes falling all around us.

“Come on,” I tell them. “We’ll warm up at the sweet shop.”

Snow blots out the street signs, so they look white and nameless with only our memory of what they are and where we need to walk to serve as guide through the storm.

Harry’s Pharmacy on the corner of Trenton Avenue is closed with its lights turned low and a Christmas display in the window, painting the snowflakes near the window ledge in green and red. A small sign high in the window signifies it as a local post office, where my mother sometimes goes when she is home and well, but not well enough to walk all the way to the real post office on Lakeview Avenue, needing to make out money orders to send to her favorite Catholic charities, a poor woman helping the poor in distant lands when the rich do nothing.

The old man with round glasses who runs this place is colder to us than the store clerks up on Vernon, partly because we do so little business here – his candy always stale and never the kinds of candy we like, candy we can sometimes get at Ollies’ or the coffee shop, and most definitely at the sweet shop nearly Lee Place, just before Crooks Avenue crosses the tracks.

Next along Crooks from the Trenton Avenue pharmacy is a narrow store front, tucked into the back of the larger store, its windows always clouded even when the weather is good, with gold letters on the class advertising coffee – not by the cupful, but by the pound, the lower half of the window filled with beans that the store keep grinds fresh, and which my grandmother sends me to get from time to time when she wants something better than the pre-ground coffee they sell as Weiss’ supermarket on Lakeview and Roosevelt Avenue near the playground to St. Brendans.

John Weiss is an important man in our part of town, a member of all the important business associations, although I most remember him looking over his thin-rimmed glasses whenever he sees me in his store, as if he knows I’m up to no good, and only needs proof to ban me – even though he knows my grandmother and how she sends me to pick up things she forgets when she does her weekly shopping, and me, each time, remembering that time when she sent me to pick up something and I lost the $10 she gave me, and how for days I went back and forth along that two-block stretch searching every inch for it, and knew the wind had taken it or some lucky kid had picked it up.

Lakeview Hardware store comes next, indented from the street by a long driveway, usually filled with pallets of stuff – bricks or bags of dirt, and in season trees and plants, it’s front window glittering with Christmas lights the store also sells, along with snow shovels and bags of salt.

I always think how odd it is for this store to be named Lakeview when it’s located on Crooks Avenue, though I suppose calling its “Crooks Hardware” might seem a little odd.

My uncles know the owner, Daniel Meyer, a man who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II the way my father supposedly did. His wife, Elena, always makes keys for me when my uncles send me here to have them made.

I know their son, a fat kid named Keith, who attends Christopher Columbus Junior High with me and Dave. When younger, his parents always gave him birthday parties to which a lot of neighborhood kids got invited, including the doctor’s son two doors down from my house. I was always jealous. I never got invited.

Keith loves comic books and always reports to me at school about the antics of this superhero or that, from Superman to Batman, although his favorite is a World War II hero called Sergeant Fury. Keith always seemed sad, as friendless sometimes as Dave, but not so daring, and so not much fun, staying home in his room when he can’t get out of working for his father in the store, preferring comic books to people, which I why I listen to his stories, just to make him feel less lonely.

I have expect to see Keith staring out from inside, as if Christmas didn’t mean as much to him as it does to everybody else, and I’m half tempted to turn up the driveway to knock on the door in back where he lives with his father, and to invite him to come along, although I know he won’t, scared of something more than just the worst storm in 50 years, or Minx, or even of the darkness through which we all travel, scared of something inside himself I can’t reach, and he’s too scared to reveal, we passing it like a lost tribe to which he should belong, not super enough to be part of his pantheon of super heroes, just ordinary kids doing something extraordinarily foolish on the most holy of nights.

Then, we march passed a string of house, the Aamco transmission store, a place that I remembered opening before my mother ran away with me to the projects near downtown Paterson, some of the original plastic red, white and blue flags still clinging to string above it, tattered after so many years, coated with snow from the storm.

We pass it and then come to a few brick buildings with a few storefronts in which someone forgot to turn off the barber pole that rotates in red and white stripes, the interior dark, but I can make out the two barber chairs, and can imagine the gray-haired men who cut the gray hair of other gray-haired men, part of a ritual that has gone on there since most of the customers were kids, though no kids go there now, most go to the place next to the coffee shop on Vernon, or to barbers down on Lakeview near School No. 11, and then come to another string of stores – the bakery, the Sanitary Market, the liquor store, and the laundromat on the corner of Curie.

My grandfather knows the owner of this stretch of store, a Syrian immigrant George, who opened the business originally on Lakeview in the 1929 the year my Uncle Albert was born, then moved the business here a decade later, running the bakery and deli, leasing out the rest of the space for the liquor store and laundromat.

The bakery window glows, almost angelic, casting its bright light onto the snowy sidewalk, and us, when our steps finally bring us within its orbit. Inside, a man dressed in white with a white hat and a white apron rolls out dough with a wooden roller, dedicated to this overnight endeavor, needing no star to bring him to a place where he can give his gifts, people will seek him out in the morning, arriving after mass or some other religious service, taking home bits of his wares to share with families at home.

Dennis inches up to the window, pressing his nose against the glass to better look at the baker who is too busy to notice us, even to wave, as if we are invisible spirit caught white against the backdrop of white, haunting places beyond his vision or his imagination – who after all would be crazy enough to be out on a night like this?

Sanitary Market is dark, and if anything stirred inside, we could not see it, nor anything in the liquor store – yet, the laundromat is open, if also vacant, waiting as it always waits – day and night – for some poor fool to come and drop coins in its machines, hobos sometimes taking shelter there, but none tonight.

We cross Curie Avenue to that last block before the sweet shop and the tracks, marking the western most border of our neighborhood, all encased in a thickening should of white that would only worsen during the long night, our footsteps taking us ahead into the very brink of the unknown, even though we all have been across the tracks many times, if only passing through, some friends such as the son of the veteran who lived in the American Legion Post where Crooks met Hazel and his father had installed a World War II on the front lawn, a piece of artillery we all envied, since it pointed straight down Crooks Avenue as if warning us against coming any further.

Normally at Curie, we can see the glow of lights from Getty Avenue, from the 24 hour gas station, the pizza parlor, the diner and the Texas wiener joint, places I sometimes frequent when working at the boat store with my uncle, from which we bring home food to eat when my grandmother’s leg keeps her from cooking.

There is a glow, but vague, like a memory, staining the falling snow in muted colors, from the changing traffic light, or the bright lighted signs above each store, suggesting one or more of them might be open, though our immediate destination was much more visible, a bright oasis even in the midst of the storm, drawing us, hurrying our footsteps if only to escape the cold for a brief moment.

The sweet shop casts a pinkish glow onto the snow, a glow I recognize from those cold mornings when I used to pick up newspapers for my delivery route here, bundles of The Morning Call to delivery to customers along East First Street from the catholic school at Lakeview to the highway near the river, at a time when my uncles mistakenly assumed I had finally planted my feet firmly in the ground and stood on a path to responsibility, when this was only a brief reprieve from mischief I can not cease even if I want to.

A few paper decorations cling to the inside of the store’s steamy windows, tribute to the season, softened by the pile of snow growing on the outside sill, shaping the usually stark store into something less severe, a place that usually serves the stark men who labor in the nearby factories and warehouses along Railway Avenue, east and west, or truckers who stop for coffee and cigarettes before heading out onto the road.

A small clear patch of pavement near the door marks the tentative efforts of the store owner to shovel,  abandoned after one more yard as hopeless as the storm’s ferocity increases, the bear like roar of the winds accompanied by the furious flutter of snow increasing the depth faster than the shovel can remove it, footprints leading to and from the door already seem old, filled in and will soon vanish entirely -- even those as recent as ours.

The pale, pasty glow spilling out onto the sidewalk comes from low-hanging fluorescent lamps inside, lamps hovering over a long counter with red-topped stools, lined up before it, empty now, looking like the tin soldiers my uncles played with as children, abandoned and lonesome.

Through the glass, I can just make out dark shapes near the rear the store,  unhurried figures who seem to have an eternity to get from one space to the next, haunting yet not haunted by the fury of the storm outside,  or by the holiday that keeps customers from coming and going as on this holiest night of the year.

I know the faces even though I cannot see them clearly, the entourage of black men that occupy that part of the store, owning it by mere occupation, surrounding the last table and it's perpetual poker game or rummy, living under a cloud of smoke their cigars generates, the way Marcal Paper Mill generates steam across the river.

I cannot hear them talk except in memory, always the same exchanges, saying the same thing over and over, talking and listening, taking comfort in old tales they have no need to update.

Dave doesn't want to go inside, despite his mission to get his mother cigarettes – even though we have, on other days come and gone from here as routine as church service, seeking the malts and ice cream sodas we would need to travel  more than a dozen blocks down Lakeview – beyond the Route 46 overpass -- to obtain, his long gaze peering through the frosted glass at the stirring shapes as if at ghosts.

 I tell him I'll go instead and take the coins his mother gave him, still warm from his clutching them inside his glove.

I push open the door, a gust of warm air hitting my face, a sweet slap filled with the scent of candy and coffee, newsprint and dust cigar, smoke and something else particular to this place. I smell each time I come here and have smell no place else, of age and memory that are not mine, of longing and of loneliness I share with it, remembering both only when I come here on nights like this or in the early hours when this place seems as abandoned as it is now.

One of the old black men, not taller or shorter than the others, not broader or less broad, rises from the table in the back, older than the others, his face filled with the grain of aged wood, his eyed filled with perpetual laughter and wisdom, his companions have not yet lived long enough to attain, never taking anything too seriously, though when he sees me, his eyes take on the kind look of a grandfather glad about my being there, but puzzled, too, concerned, glancing past me at the flakes flicking at the store’s front window, then at the flakes melting on the hood and shoulders of my jacket.

He seems even older than I remember him, always old, now ancient, testifying to how long it has been since my last visit, my world inflating beyond the boundaries of the old neighborhood and soon I will be too old to settle for ice cream soda or cream soda or any of those small things that I thought as significant until now.

The old man looks at me, knowing already why I have come, knowing that he can't talk me out of where I might be going, knowing to I can't outrun the thing I am running from, knowing I need to find that out for myself.

“I don't want to be there to witness it,” I tell him, and he nods then he asked me about my friends outside and I shrug.

“They're bit nervous about coming in here like this tonight,” I say.

The old man gives me another nod, knowing all about that, too, having seen all of it here at the edge of the world, the place where the white privilege comes to a halt and darkness starts, and the shadows -- unreal yet given shape by illusion and misunderstanding -- become real threatening even, when they are not, when we have been here in over the tracks off enough and should know better but do not.

“So, they'd rather freeze out there?” the old man says with a sad laugh.

“That's about it,” I tell him.

He offers to give us hot chocolate to take with us.

“It gets cold up in that mountain,” he says.

I’m still unconvinced that Dave will come with me, even though he says he wants to, thinking he’ll head back to home with Dennis and the cigarettes – almost as difficult in this storm as going on will be.

“I think you should tell your friends to come inside for a bit anyway,” the old man says. “They need to get warm, even if they’re scared of me.”

So, I wave towards the window at Dave.

He shakes his head.

I wave more harder, tilting my head to say I won't come out until he comes in and Dave, knowing me, knows I mean it, and after a talk with Dennis they both come in looking more like snowmen than I did when I came in, looking far more scared than they should, the old man grinning at them to assure them, but this does not assure them they just stand near the door and shiver.

Then the old man hands each of us a paper cup filled with hot chocolate, hot against the palms of my cold hands.

“Three gifts for three kings,” the old man says, his eyes live with a laugh his lips don't show.

Then I remember the cigarettes hand him the money and he hands me the pack along with three packs of matches, again knowing something I don't know yet or even suspect, the way he knows about my grandpa without me having to tell him.

He even knows or remembers who Dave and Dennis are, and tells them he won't tell anyone they came inside,  only they need to be careful at what we do next, making Dave frown and nod at me for us to leave, and I nod back and thank the old man for the gift and promise him I'll be back when I can get there after everything is over and all the dying is done.

Then, we are outside again, the cold feels colder, the storm more intense, the drifts even deeper so, the footprints of our arrival are gone, no longer even a memory.

Dave takes the cigarettes for me and hands them to Dennis telling Dennis to take them back to their mother.

“What about you?” Dennis asks.

“I’m not going home,” Dave says. “At least not tonight.”

“What about Christmas?”

“Christmas will wait”

“And Momma’s surprise?”

“I won't be there for it.”

“Then neither will I,” Dennis says defiantly.

“Listen, Momma won't miss me,” Dave says. “But she will miss you. Her surprise means more to you than me now go before I give you a whipping.”

Dennis' shoulders sag and slowly with more than a few glances back at us, he heads up the hill and we watch until the snow swallows him and then we turn the other way towards the tracks we can no longer see and the world beyond we can only imagine, filled with dark shadows of factories and memories that are not ours.

We see the tracks only when we stumble over them, slick metal embedded in concrete and asphalt where they cross Crooks Avenue,  rails connecting all the places we know from Paterson to Passaic, our lives stretched across them in a perpetual pendulum of crossing and re-crossing until we know every tie in every flawed rail.

We cannot see the string of buildings on the Paterson side, running along Railroad Avenue, their awning stretched across the sidewalk where fruit and vegetable peddlers display their wares during warmer seasons, and the blocks beyond where farmers bring their goods in fall, baskets and barrels overflowing with a recent harvest, while around them, warehouses collect and ship perishable foods to other places.

My father – who I never met – worked in one of these before he vanished from our lives, a ghost whose photograph my mother in her madness still keeps all these years later as if needing the picture to recognize him if he ever returns.

I see it all in my mind as we cross over into the dimmer part of Crooks Avenue, the glow of bar lights showing from the corner on the western side, shading the snow in blue and red. The street itself seems dark with fewer streetlamps, and many of these broken, or extinguished, leaving large pools of darkness and small islands of light by which we steer.

We can smell the booze and scent of cigarette smoke before the wind whips both away and we steer towards the brighter lights of Getty Avenue only glimpsed from the front of the sweet shop, an oasis of illumination with a pizzeria on one corner, hotdog grill on another, and a diner on a third. The huge white house on the fourth corner is almost invisible in the falling snow, but not the gas station beside it, each institution providing comfort to the lonely who have no place else to go on this night, the lot of the gas station having the remains of a small forest of unsold Christmas trees, nearly covered with the snowfall.

Maybe the sudden brightness blinded us so that we heard the music coming from the cars in front of the hotdog stand before we saw the cars or their occupants until it was too late for us to turn back, windshields frosted over from some excess breathing inside, the music – which is hardly Christmas carols so loud the cars rock

Dave stops. I grabbed his arm and tell him to keep moving, to not let those inside the cars see us, though we are bathed in the bright lights of the hotdog grill in front of which the cars are parked.

This warning comes too late, too as the doors of both cars burst open with those inside spilling out into the night amid clouds of cigarette smoke and the smell of beer.

They are all leather and grease, a tough High School crowd except for the girls, and one smaller almost monkey-like imitation of them, more our age than theirs, though his hair is slicked back, too and he wears the same black leather jacket blue jeans and boots as they do.

He is concentrated meanness, an attitude he has honed since grammar school into a blunt knife edge he is proud to use.

“Minx,” Dave whispers, his voice filled with terror and despair, his tall shape bending to a gust of wind that has nothing to do with the storm.

“I don't believe this,” the stubby Minx howls, the zippers of his jacket glistening with the bright lights as he advances. “It is featherbrain out in the fucking snow like one of Santa's fucking helpers. how about it, big fella? Are you one of Santa's Dwarves?”

“Leave him alone, Minx,” I tell him, drawing the angry even puzzled gaze as if Minx can't figure out what someone like me is doing with someone like Dave.

Minx tells me to butt out -- that this is between him and Dave, always has been and always will be, Dave being Minx’s personal subject of abuse.

I tell Minx I'm making it my business, and this puzzles him even more and then he shrugs.

“I don't want to mess with you,” he says to me. “I just want to wish my giant friend here a Merry Christmas. Is something wrong with that?”

Minx winks at his friends; the girls giggle.

“Well, you did that. So, we'll be on our way,” I say and start to move around the gang blocking the sidewalk.

Minx grabs Dave's arm.

“What's the rush? How about having a drink with me?” Minx says.

“I don't drink,” Dave mumbles.

“Are you refusing to drink with me?”

“Stop it, Minx,” I say and try to intervene. One of the larger boys steps in front of me.

“It's just a drink,” Minx says, then to his friends, “Someone get this boy a beer.”

A beer bottle appears and Mix thrusts it into Dave’s hand, the hand not holding the cup of hot chocolate. Dave looks bewildered staring at one Christmas gift then at the other unable to make up his mind about either.

“Come on, boy,” Minx says. “Just one little sip won't kill you.”

Dave doesn't exactly look at me, just a slight shift this head, not trusting Minx enough to turn away from him or his gang.

He is so stiff he might be turning into the Snowman the storm has painted him into. Then, slowly, he lifts the bottle to his lips, and as he does, Minx tips it and golden liquid drips down Dave's chin on to his chest stomach and legs.

Dave looks like he has peed in his pants.

Minx howls.

“The boy can't hold his booze!”

The gang howls, too, and the girls giggle.

Minx is in mid-laugh when the snowball hits his face.

“You leave my brother alone!” Dennis wails, appearing wraith-like out of the heavily falling snow, his face as red as if he had been hit by the snowball instead of Minx.

I grab Dave's arm and yell for him to run, and we run not back up the hill towards home, but onward across Getty and up Crooks in the general direction of the mountain, crossing that imaginary line in the center of Crooks that marked the boundary between our town and Paterson, and into a part of Paterson we passed through by rarely lingered in, technically part of the southside, yet on the wrong side of the railroad tracks, passing a string of houses and then an old man’s social club, to Main Street – not the downtown portion, but a mini-downtown that began the string of stores that would eventually lead to downtown, all closed up for the holiday, signs snow-covered and dripping icicles, crossing Main to the front of The First National Bank where when I still a small boy I had stood with my mother to watch John F. Kennedy pass, coming from Paterson to pause in front of our city hall before going onto Passaic, while we made our way to the projects in Paterson where we lived on the far end of Main Street, over the river in a part of town few white boys visit, except to pass through on a bus or train.     

We run hard, but made slow progress, fighting through the drifts no footprints had yet marred, as if the hand of God holds us back, giving Minx and his buddies time to regroup and to come after us.

We hear their engines roar as we step over an even more invisible barrier, into a neighborhood we know nothing about, two family houses fading away on this side into brick apartment buildings, and long allies along each leading to dark places our imaginations paint as fearful and dangerous, also snow-covered, dripping melting snow from windows above turning into deadly daggers of ice above us as we pass.

This part of town always scares me, darker, more dense than the part of South Paterson near Lakeview, crisscrossed with allies between the apartment buildings that cropped up later to serve more affluent managers of the silk mills while the ordinary workers lived in hovels near Straight Street and Market Street, blocks that have since become ghetto – though with the managers long gone along with the silk mills, Spanish has replaced Italian as the prominent language spoken by the people who have since moved in, many working in the fruit and vegetable markets on Railway Avenue the way my father once did, or selling from carts or the backs of trucks – many of which are parked in the allies, covered over with tarps to wait out winter for spring when they can do business again.

Behind the apartment buildings and bordering the alley I steer Dave and Dennis down, the ragged top of old wooden fences, stick out of from the snow like a dog’s teeth guarding the small yards beyond.

Christmas lights strung around windows or fire escapes above us, cast all into a strange glow, dream-like in the snow, yet comfortable and safe, with other dim lights from inside the buildings sprinkling a glow of their own out from under the tattered shades.

Dennis says he doesn’t like it here, that he’s heard rumors about this part of town, about a castle-like building located somewhere north of us where lives an army of nuns, not like the nuns I know from Catholic school, more militant, even mean, more like witches than women of God.

I tell him to calm down, even though I recall those same rumors, and from people who I believe have seen the place, and felt as terrified reporting about it as Dennis is, as if expecting some spell to be cast on them for saying anything about it.

We hear the hot rod engines roar from the street we just abandoned, and Minx shrill voice floating out over the wind with threats to kill us if he ever catches us, while urging his high school minions to find us so he can.

“He never stops,” Dave mumbles, huddled beside me behind one of the fruit carts in an alley too narrow to keep us hid for long, stretching back into a maze of other allies, all as snow-covered as the one we are in, some almost impossible to navigate for the drifts.

“There's worse up at the high school,” I tell him, mean kids who claim turf nobody can see, willing to fight over an odd look let alone a snow back to the face.

“I don’t want to ever go there,” Dave says.

“I don't see a way of avoiding it,” I said, thinking how it is just one more step in the journey of life the nuns always used to mumble about, filling that space between birth and death with uncomfortable lessons we can’t read about it text books, yet somehow more valuable than anything that might get reflected in our report cards.

“We can't go back out to the street, Dennis says. “They'll be waiting for us.”

“We’re not going back to the street,” I say.

“I don’t want to go near those crazy nuns,” Dave says, the horror showing in his eyes along with the reflection of the blinking Christmas lights above us.

Then another set of brighter lights shows in his eyes as one of the cars tries to pull into the alley, we’re in.

Even I get scared as the headlights grow larger and the car comes closer, wheels kicking up gravel and snow, flinging both into the sides of the buildings – and then, they stop, wheels spinning, but not propelling the car forward, as frozen as the drips above, locked into that space so that the doors fling open and the boys inside climb out in a flurry of curses as furious as the storm in which we are all trapped.

We see them push and shove, hearing their muffled curses reach us with each gust of wind, the whining wheels spinning in a different direction, and finally, managing to get unstuck by going backwards and out the mouth of the alley in tried to drive into, Minx’s curses rising like an echo above the fading roar of the car, “I’m going to get you, motherfucker!”

I smell the exhaust lingering in the air even though the car has vanished from site, smoke mingling with the falling snow. I see the mark the tires left, and how like our footprints are rapidly vanishing, too, like a bad memory we would forget except for the ever rising and falling roar of engines in the distance telling us Minx and his friends remain nearby, more deadly even that the rumored witch-nuns and the mythical castle people say lay just north of where we are, and in the direction we soon must take.

Then, gradually, silence filled the space left by the fading car engines, muffled by distance and the still-night closing in around us with its white shroud.

“They won't stop looking for us,” Dave mumbles.

“Most likely not,” I say. “They’re drive up and down the streets of this part of town, trying to catch us crossing.”

“So, what do we do?” Dennis asks.

“We stay careful,” I say

Then, we start down the alley to the first drift and, using our arms, we push aside the snow is if we are swimming through ocean waves time has frozen into a single motion, we alone moving through this motionless world, through this drift and the next into an alley even narrower than the one we started in, the rise and fall of engine sounds, muffled at times then loud, beasts coming closer, then moving away, only to grow closer again,  guardians of this underworld through which we pass.

Eventually, the drifts ease and we emerge from our alley onto a snow-covered vacant street, the mark of Minx’s passing still fresh with the two sets of tire tracks down its middle, with one set showing a place where one car slid, then corrected itself – both cars then plunging ahead through the haze with a ferocity nearly as vicious as the storm itself.

“He will hurt us when he catches us,” Dave mumbles.

“Not if you stand up to him,” I say. You're bigger and stronger than he is.”

Dave shakes his head. This is an old conversation we shared since elementary school, with me desperate to hold up a mirror in which Dave can see his real self, but he never does.

I’m nervous about staying on the street, and steer towards the mouth of another alley across the way, where more drifts greet us, our passage the only passage anyone made since the storm’s start, our footprint like the first one some remote island, we carrying on our backs some vestige of civilization we are bound and determined to preserve.

Then, emerging on another street, we see the dark castle-like building standing before us, its stone face freckled with snow, the small stained glass windows lighted from inside with a ceremony we will not share this night, the nuns inside engaged in a celebration of  faith, the three of us lack, we three kings as the old man in the Sweet Shop calls us, no longer bearing gifts he gave us, stumbling through drifts with no way of finding our way home even if we wanted to.

“That’s them!” Dennis moans, his voice dripping fear of this place than even of the prospect of Minx catching up with us. “It’s the witches’ castle.”

“They’re too busy to notice us,” I say.

But I’m nervous, too. I can’t see another alley we can take and know that we eventually have to turn west to Hazel Road if we intend to eventually reach the mountain.

“We should turn here,” I say.

“What about Minx?” Dave asks, glancing over his shoulder at the still vacant and unmarred street. “I can still hear their cars.”

The roar of the engines sound like buzzing, distant, persistent, like gnats we can't shew away, almost inside our heads, trapped and looking for some way to escape.

“He’s down at the South End,” I say. “He must figure we've turned back for home or he's given up and has gone back to drinking. We have no choice. We can’t go back without running into him again.”

And even though Hazel Road is only two blocks away, the snow makes it seem longer, as we are forced to lift each leg high to break the surface of snow that has already filled-in tracks left by Minx when he and his thugs last passed.

When we reach Hazel, it seems like the end of the world, where all the city streets seem to come to an end, beyond which the land falls into a large valley, where the city grid is abandoned, some short streets leading to dead ends, while a single road spins down through an industrial landscape here only to reemerged on Hazel rather south of where we stand, a road we rarely take on foot, filled with dark warehouses and old factories, mostly lost in the haze of snow save for an occasional blinking light, though if we stare hard enough, we can make out their dark shapes against the shroud of snow, as if evil spirits wait among them, spirits we dare not tempt by trespassing.

“We’re not going down there, are we?” Dennis asks.

“I’d like to,” I say, “if only to stay off Hazel.”

Although the buzzing still distant I am nervous about it.

“But once we go down there, we can’t climb back out where we need,” I say. “It’s Hazel Road or turn back.”

“What about Minx?” Dave asked, staring back down Hazel the way we would have come from Crooks Avenue had we not encountered Minx in the first place. The tire marks of their passing have faded into obscurity, and the muffled buzzing of engines tells us Minx is still far away.

“We have to hope Minx has given up on us,” I say.

We turn the other way, up a road that has ceased being a road, with almost no distinction between sidewalk and street except for the lumps of snow covered cars at the curb, and these nearly indistinguishable from the drifts that erase almost all the other features of a landscape we know and remember from our frequent trips to and from the mountain in other seasons, the  parking lot to the Texas Weiner place we pause at in summer to beg drinks of water from,  the car repair places interspersed with a handful of two family houses, some of these decorated with Christmas lights, most of them dark, like blank faces staring out at us as we stumble through these drifts.

We cannot see the mountain for the veil of snow though we know it is there; we feel it large and dark, an ever-present force in our lives we normally see from every corner of our small world and not seeing it now, makes us feel lost, unguided, more desperate to find it and take our place at its feet.

We struggle to plow through the unplowed street, grateful for those occasional places where the plows came earlier, went again, time refilling nearly all of the space again in their absence.

Dennis complains and wants to go home.

We’ve gone too far for that and Dave tells him as much, saying Dennis has had his chance and blew it coming back to throw a snowball that got Minx mad, and set us off course when we might already be at the Quarry if not for him.

“They’re coming,” I say.

The buzz that was a buzz is once more again a roar, low but rising, and coming from the direction behind us, the way we should have come but didn't, Dave's face showing the panic we all feel as I glance around for some place to hide and see -- at first -- only drifts.

I see the concrete near the side of the road hinting of a bridge over a brook or street or train track, and swim through a drive to glance over it into the dark abyss below, where I can just make out two sets of rails running down into the valley.

It is like staring into a dream, where white erases any semblance of a normal world, each edge rubbed into smooth surfaces by the storm, snow swirling like a desert’s sand, altering everything again and again so that each thing I see is different each time I blink, though through it all, like a wound left by a sharp knife, the rails glint from some reflected light, not completely revealed, but just in spots where the wind has pushed aside snow to create a drift to one side of the rails or the other.

Trains pass this place, though I cannot hear them now, only the approaching rising roar of Minx’s cars.

“We got to go down there,” I tell Dave and Dennis, both glancing over and then telling me the way is too full of ice, meaning the narrow space just next to the concrete wall other kids have used to climb down there in better weather, as slick as any ice rink.

The buzzing of the approaching cars gets louder. Down the road I see the wobble of two sets of headlights rapidly approaching us.

“It’s slip and slide or face Minx again,” I tell Dave.

Dave looks to where I look and sees what I see and gives a nod to Dennis, then takes the lead, his long fingers gripping the rough concrete of the bridge, where the concrete is not incased in ice only covered with snow. He lifts his long legs over the guardrail and, precariously balanced, releases his grip, and slowly with a strange sense of falling, slides down the icy slope until we no longer see him. 

We hear his voice as he curses then calls back that he has reached the bottom. Then Dennis repeats this, less slowly, more vigorously his eyes glinting in the dim light with an excitement I do not feel.

I am lone in the storm with the two cars roaring towards me. Like Dave, I hesitate, looking back, fascinated by what I know is approaching doom, thinking some miracle might come to save me, after all those years of my mother’s praying for me. When no miracle comes and the lights grow into larger and larger yellow eyes and I can see the windshields and the shadows of heads inside, I follow after the others, the rough concrete and cold of the bridge biting into my palms and fingers as I cling until I get me feet over the guardrail, too.

I slide down as Dave did, unable to stop, nothing to grip onto, falling yet not falling until Dave and Dennis catch me at the bottom to bring me to a halt as the approaching cars arrive and roar over the bridge, wheels sending down upon us a spray of snow and slush which we endure because we have no choice, standing with knees deep in a drift we might not be able to escape once the cars pass, the roar facing once more into a buss, and then a buss like gnats in the distance, gone but not gone, still gone enough for me to feel safe enough to attempt the climb back up to the road, only not the way we came since that is too slick, to the other side of the tracks where a fluke in wind has left bare rough dirt and stone sticking out of the ice face, allowing us to climb, if not easily, eventually to the top, over the guard rail on the side of the bridge and back out into the snow covered road still fresh with the tire tread marks of the two cars’ passing.

“Where did they go?” Dennis asks, turning around, bewildered, his blonde hair pale in the pale light so that he looks as if he is made of snow.

The sound muffled, yet full of echoes, suggests the cars have turned where we intend to turn, up Broad Street in the general direction of the mountain, perhaps seeking some refuge there or up a little higher along Valley Road we know nothing about.

Dave groans when I tell him this; Dennis says we need to turn back.  

I won’t turn back. There is nothing home for me but dying and misery, despite whatever hardship may lie ahead.

I hear the whine of car wheels in the distance, churning in the snow they way the did in the ally earlier, struggling to get up some steep incline, wheels spinning desperate to find traction, far enough away for me to breathe easier, even as the intensity of the snow around us grows, confirming the forecasters’ warnings, “worst storm in fifty years.”

Still whining about going home, Dave stares out at the road ahead, at the snow, at the deepening drifts, but not at the marks of the cars – which vanish before our gazes, yet ripe with fear as we finally push ahead in the same direction, all three of us scared me might yet meet them again and Minx will get his change to take revenge for the snowball to his face, and for the insult of avoiding him, leaving a more serious sting than the snowball could have.

We move on the east side of the road lined with the frail shapes of two-story wood frame houses, ghostly in the dim light, paint pealing from their front porches, hinting of poverty within, the last vestige of an older Paterson before we reach the place where Grove Street intersects, where the funeral parlor juts out from the Paterson side, a grim reminder of some future we need not be reminded of, where we must turn in the direction of mountain we know is there but cannot see, feeling its potency hovering over us behind the shroud of snow, everything around us seeming remote, and we, insolated, aware of the new development taking place nearby, part of the change of culture from the older homes back in our old neighborhood, new homes filling up the space below Grove and Valley roads, filled with strangers from strange lands some of whom speak languages we never even heard of, which we could not in a million years understand.

Behind us, the closed stores along this part of Hazel fade in the haze as we veer towards the train trestle that passes over Grove, beyond which, we will have to turn again, uphill, towards Valley, the first of the steep climbs I’m uncertain we will be able to make, needing to ascend in order to get eventually to the Quarry itself.

The snow is so heavy we cannot see the road or the houses or even the closed gas station – only the funeral home – landmarks by which we knew to turn west and the train trestle crossing we need to go under. To our right, slightly behind us, a few plastic red, white and blue flags flutter from a rope, beneath which the storm as swallowed a whole parking lot of used cars.

When we come to the turn, it surprises us, more so because of the faded trail of the cars that made the turn as well, sliding on the slick surface beneath the snow before finding traction again to steer straight.

This is not a good sign, Dave tells me.

We press on, the mouth of the trestle appearing as suddenly out of the storm as the turn did. No snow has fallen under it. We stamp our feet, echoes loud, as if we are in a cave. We feel the wind, its howl passing over us like the Angel of Death, thick with flakes of snow.

Dave wants to stay here, safe from the snow; I say it will get colder and the snow will eventually fill up this place, too, and we can’t light a fire here, and there is the risk of Minx returning.

“He won’t stay long up in the mountain in all this,” I say.

Yet what is up hill for Minx and his cars will be uphill for us, too, though I tell Dave and Dennis we only need to walk about a mile – a dreadful up hill, snow covered, drift-filled mile – yet only a mile.

“The castle is close,” Dave says. “We might find shelter there.”

I stare out at the storm and the slope of land we must climb and imagine us trudging the whole mile to the floor of the quarry where we will still face the climb up the side of the mouth to reach the caves at the quarry gate.

The castle has a road up to it and has nooks and crannies along its face that with luck we might find shelter, and perhaps even enough wood from the stand of trees above it with which to build a fire.

“Okay,” I say. “We’ll head for the castle.”

One place is as good as another, I figure, as long as it’s not home.

 When we emerge from under the trestle, we go single-file, Indian-like, or more like Eskomos, me in the lead, breaking the snow with my footsteps for the other two to follow, Dennis in the middle with Dave behind him to keep him from falling behind. I steer by the still visible tire marks, though it is a hard trek, our feet struggling to find traction over the slippery surface just as the cars that preceded us, we turning as the cars turned, up from Broad Street along a steep incline that eventually brings to Valley Road at the foot of the mountain – a mountain we can feel growing over us, but still can’t see, our footsteps breaking ground as the track of the cars fade and we are left to guess by the slant of land if we travel the right direction, each of us feeling lost among the snow-laden trees and the tangle of telephone wires over us.

With each step, the mountain grows on our minds, even in its invisibility, then barely visible, heavy and dark, no light illuminating any of it, as if we are climbing into a vacuum even light cannot escape. Around us, the street we climb is lined with houses, although many of these are dark, too, dampened by the snow, so that even the Christmas displays they have placed on their lawns are covered with snow that only suggests the illumination of colored lights beneath.

Valley Road greets us and we are both humbled and relieve, the mountain side of it darker than we could have imagined with no houses to speak of except the Castle half way up the hill, and a few other abandoned building the city has yet to condemn and clear, while on the other side, like piles of sand against a stony beach, wood frame houses line up, as if to mark the last boundary of civilization and by crossing Valley from one side to the other, we are leaving everything we know behind.

Shadows of strange things show even in the dark slopes of the mountain side, things made vague by the night and the storm, things I feel more than actually see, and fear because I cannot recognize what they are, rumors of beasts that reside here returning from childhood horror stories, we all know aren’t real, but in the dark, in the snow, on the wrong side of this road, we begin to believe in again, and dread, hearing things as if out of some deep dream I can barely remember, as if I am still in that dream, walking and talking, yet with the same dread all dreams stir up in me, the unexpected lurking just out of the edge of my senses of something waiting to lunge at me.

The snow deepens with each step we take, not just the drifts, the track of cars we follow like a long lost Indian trail until it trail away and we stumbled ahead with the mountain and valley guiding us, yet giving us no relief to the up and down our feet must undertake, each of us sagging, the full weight of the storm and the mountain firmly placed on our backs, each of us a tiny Atlas in a very large world, forced to carry our share of the planet, none of us up to the task for this long.

“Look!” Dennis cries.

Dave and I look up to the see the dark ship of a hot rod stranded along the side of the road just ahead of us. This grows clearer the neared we come, tilted from a slide into a drainage ditch, the signs of its struggle to escape mostly lost to the snow that has fallen since, yet not all, a few foot prints in a drift and hard prints on the bumpers testifying to the desperate effort made to push the vehicle out – and effort given up in frustration and humiliation, with the echoes that grandfather and his father before him must have heard a century earlier about getting a horse, and we living in a culture foolishly believing we have somehow overcome what my grandfather and all the grandfathers before him could not, technology unable to defy what nature ultimately intends, even during those brief moments of self-delusion when we believe otherwise.

“They got stuck,” Dave mumbles

“They got careless,” I say. “They played around too much and got punished for it.”

“Punished?” Dennis asks. “By who?”

“God or fate, who knows?” I say.

“You don’t believe in God,” Dave says with a laugh.

I stare out into the woods near us, seeing but not seeing the dram-like things I know must be there, each a lost soul as lost in this world as we are in the storm, things with no more substance than smoke. So, I think we must be smoke, too.

Dave says if the car is here, then Minx must be, too, or nearby, all of them wouldn’t crowd into the other car and abandon this one here, and Dave’s right, a yellow wisp of light flickers through the trees and the scent of burning reaches us, so tender I can taste the wood, hungering for warmth its expiring brings, not quite aware until that moment just how cold I feel, cold deep into the bones, the ache coming on as violently as the storm. It snows inside me as well as out.

Then out of the woods come a crunch of feet on snow or twigs, muffled yet loud in the otherwise silence of the storm. Then voices rise out of the storm itself, violent and angry, a bickering over who is to blame for the disabled car we stand beside, one blaming the other in a back and forth that keeps them both distracted until they come into view, one claiming he heard something here and needs to check the car to make sure nobody’s been messing with it, while the other mocks the first asking who he thinks might be out in a storm like this to mess with a the car: Santa Claus?

When they come around the curve in the road, they see us.

“It’s the dwarves!” one howls.

“Run!” I shout and shove Dave the other way. He bumps into his brother, ne me into both of them, then we all stumble ahead in the director we always intended to go, more quickly now, legs pumping through the drives as if the drifts do not exist.

The one boy shouts and the second, “The dwarves! The dwarves.”

The echoes of this reverberate in the woods until they cease being echoes, picked up and repeated by new voices coming out of the woods from the direction of the fire, one of these, Minx’s, loud and growing louder, shrill and fierce with rage and frustration, a wolf’s voice howling for blood.

Then, Dave stops.

“What are you doing?” I yell, tugging at his sleeve, trying to get him moving again, an impossible effort, like trying to move a bolder after it has ceased to roll.

“It’s no use,” Dave says. “He’ll only catch us anyway in the end. We might as well let him do what he wants.”

“Don’t be stupid,” I tell him. “We’ll be all right if we can get a little higher and off the road.”

Dave nods, but he does not immediately move, a locomotive building up steam inside, fed by fear that has yet to become terror, and even when he lifts his leg, it moves only gradually, only realizing for the first time since leaving the side of the stranded car that we are deep in snow, fear and terror soon growing in him so that he finally manages to run again, through the drifts, not as fast as I want, yet at a gate his legs make it hard for me, and harder for Dennis to keep up with, the road rising under all that snow, a slant that takes us upward without our immediately knowing, knowing slick pavement under the snow making traction difficult for us, and for those who pursue us – and there is pursuit.

Several flashlights illuminate behind us, wobbly eyed staggering the way did do, casting lone fiery lines behind us, and giving shape to the shadows ahead, the snowflakes like fireflies before and behind, spinning around us in the darkness, left over from some hot summer night.

This is not summer; but there is heat, coming from the feeling too much cold gives, the chill wet working through gloves and shoes to freeze fingers and toes, so cold each digit aches.

Dave mutters as we fun, telling me about the time he once saw Minx actually beat someone up, not all talk like most of the Minx bull we deal with in the old neighborhood, like Lenny from Third Street that used to pick on me for years until one day outside a boy scout meeting, I beat him up and his toady Tony Capice on the front law of St. Brendans, me hitting one over the head with his own shoe, while rolling the other way down the hill with my other hand, a row that might have dong on for hours had the scout master not come out.

We have no scout master here to save us, only our ability to keep ahead of the wobbly lights that look like insect eyes, each step bringing us closer to the narrow dirt road into the mountain that we must take if we can make it in time, if we can find it in the drifts.

Minx is mean, Dave keeps saying until I tell him to shut up. I am not afraid. I just don’t want to think about crap like that, and what we will have to do if Minx really does catch up with us, or how I won’t be able to rely on Dave to stand up when I know I will need him.

The boulder that marks the start of the path up appears out of the midst of the storm, like a giant frowning face with an accumulation of snow for eyebrows.

“Turn here,” I shout at Dave, and he stops again.

“What about the road?” he asks. “Doesn’t the quarry open onto the road?”

“This will take us there, too,” I say.

“But that’s straight up into the mountain.”

“It’ll be harder, sure,” I said. “I know it’s steep. But It’ll be harder for Minx, too. He might not want to follow us up it.”

The road, although slanted, is just too flat to discourage anyone, and so direct, Minx will know where we’re bound for, and I don’t want him to know, I don’t want him to violate a place I consider sacred.

I don’t want to spill blood there, his or mine.

Behind us, the lights advance, a multi-legged, multi-headed beast whose shape remains vague in the shroud of falling snow. The lights alone are real, if not too distinct, filled with an expression of rage the fires behind them need to unleash.

“Up,” I say, and up we go, Dennis scrambling into the ditch, then up a path we cannot see because of the fallen snow, there, yet not there, needing faith for our feet to find, and we find it, though we need to grip the lower branches of trees or even the withered remains of thick weeds by which to pull ourselves up.

The snow releases its grip on the landscape along the slated path, the branches of the trees catching some of the downfall so the tops lean in, heavy with the weight, bearing the burden of their shoulders like a great protector we do not expect to find.

The slippery ground still makes climbing hard, and slow, Dennis, the most limber, advancing ahead of us with Dave calling in a hushed whisper for him to wait up, which at times, eh does, then grows impatient, charging ahead again.

We stop when the lights reach the gap of the path below, the beast wavering, seeking signs in the snow as to which way we took and after a moment, realizes we have changed course, and then horribly, it begins to follow, climbing up the path we have taken – only to halt a moment later, some of them below arguing, some do not want to follow up, Minx’s shrill voice urging them on, and only after some moments, the beast again started to follow our trail, curses and threats forcing the less willing boys to comply.

All know the dangers of this path, the hidden holes the quarry mouth contains, a risk even in daylight, deadly on such as snowy night as this.

Dave mumbles about the boy who fell down a shaft here once, long ago, fifty feet deep, after running across a wooden platform, and then a staircase, only to find the staircase missing, and himself falling, landing on a pile of crushed stones at the bottom. There were explosives here, too, remnants of old mining and worse, stone collectors, who blew up small portions of the quarry looking for treasures in the deeps, found, and later exploded by the police the way they sometimes did old military shells they found elsewhere in the city.

The lights wobble below but pause again. We hear the rising volume of voices from below, just now what is said, Minx’s voice still shrill and the most consistent. Then, we seem one or two of the lights moving off, back down the hill to Valley Road, while the four remaining lights start their climb again, up the path we are one, slowing because they can only use one hand to grip the trunks of trees or grab rocks or grass to pull themselves up.

Dave looks at me.

“What do we do now?” he asks.

The air swirls around us with a sudden increasing gust of wind. We should start climbing again. But this time, I won’t move. The next path, when the hill dips, will lead us down to the gap in the mountain and the work area before the gate to the quarry, the ruins of the gravel company works scattered before the mouth of the canyon, abandoned, rusting, no doubt now snow covered.
Behind and above this stood the massive gap we called the gate, a space between two towers of stone beyond which the quarry itself stood, massive in its vacancy, larger that any football stadium with cracked walls all around it instead of seats, nearly sheer, yet broken enough to supply the bravest of us with handholds and footholds that allowed us to climb, especially where the large cracks formed after many dynamite blasts – blasts that rocked and shattered many of the houses on the far side of Valley Road and raised protests that eventually put to a halt the operation, and left the emptiness to us, the drug users, the rapists, and the occasional deluded professors from the college who sought out the bones of dinosaurs here.

The floor of the quarry is littered with boulders the size of cars, strewn about as if dinosaurs have played catch with them, a lone road working its way in from the gate along which dump trucks paved a path, grinding the smaller stone into gravel along their way. A lone building stands near one end which we call a doghouse because it looked like one, and into which we dare new kids to enter, stirring up the rats and bats and other dark things that live inside.

But it is not into the quarry we go this time, but to the crumbling structures standing outside the gate, where old concrete buildings have fallen in on each other, structures in some cases into which dump trucks rolled to be filled with the crushed stone the machine has made more manageable, buildings half buried and so much resemble caves that we have come to think of them as caves, some with openings on each side, some whose other side have sunk down leaving only one way in or out.

“I know if Minx knows where we are going, he will trap us there, so, we need to discourage him from following us,” I tell Dave.

“How do we do that?”

I glance around at the roots of trees that cling to the side of the mountain, gnarled fingers gripping stone to keep from tumbling down, boulders as large as my trunk at home, but other stones, bowling ball-sized, some partly covered with a layer of snow.

“We could roll rocks down on them,” Dennis says, clearly thinking what I’m thinking, but unafraid to say it out loud, bending down to loosen one of the stones sticking up out of the snow along the side of our path.

“We can’t do that,” Dave says, his voice shivering and not from the cold. “Someone will get hurt.”

“Us,” I say, “if we don’t do something to stop them, and I bend to loosen a stone of my own.

“Please, don’t,” Dave pleads.

“Minx!” I shout down the hill, my voice sounding nearly as shrill as Minx’s against the wind.

The lights halt.

“What do you want?” Minx shouts back. “Are you begging for mercy?”

“I just want to let you know I have a Christmas present for you,” I said.

“Is that a threat?”

“Take it anyway you want,” I should. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“I’ll tear your fucking heart out when I catch you!”

The lights start to advance again. I nod at Dennis. He rolls the first stone, an oblong chunk of rock chipped out of the heart of the mountain when the quarry was still a quarry, and this bounds down the center of the path we have just climbed in the direction of the rising lights, veering off at the last moment due to some flaw in the stone or the path.

Minx screams.

I send the second stone behind the first, this smoother so truer to its trajectory and passes straight through the lights below

The howl rises up from Minx and his friends, not the howl of wolves, as earlier, scared howls, angry howls, perhaps even wounded, and the voices against become chatter not intended for us, two more lights turn away.

Dennis has another stone ready.

I shake my head. We wait. No more chatter comes, just the gentle howl of wind, a silence field with some other sound from some other place where no room exists for people like Minx, a howl so intense and filled with anguish I can barely breath.

I’m thinking of my grandfather and the life he lived, and how he somehow managed to get the big house high on the hill he always wanted, a dream coming true that means nothing now except at a place to lay his head and welcome death.

And somewhere out of all this, Minx’s voice rises, a howl of words rising on the howl of wind, reaching up to where we are, as fragile and frail as a deadly flower full of thorns, thick with threats and promises of what we might expect from him in the future, what he will do when he catches up with us again, and then, he, too, is gone, a wisp fading back into the midst of snow, his light extinguished by the growing distance between us, consumed by the dark, leaving only dark behind and before us, through which we still have to make our way.

And the silence grows with each step, our feet crunching through snow is the sound we notice move, an outcry of our journey to those dark things we know scurry in the dark woods to either side of the path we take, not soundless, but diminished beyond what we notice as we stumble towards a place we hope will provide warmth, Dennis grumbling about the cold we once more feel in the aftermath of our rush up the hill, the snow feeling colder and wetter, striking our exposed faces and seeping through the fabric of jackets and boots, each step an increasing ache we cannot relieve until we stop, and start a fire, and this we cannot do in the open, and possibly if we’re lucky, we can in the caves near the mouth of the gate.

Our hill levels off, and then descends into a crevice that separated this rise of land from the steep sides of the exterior of the quarry itself, the right side of the gate, a narrow ledge that extends out from the mountain on the right and ends at the gap, thin and precarious, along which even the bravest of the brave tend to crawl if seeking to reach the end. Longer than the wall on the other side of the gate opening, but not nearly so thick, vulnerable enough that a good quake might bring it down, and we look up at it as we move expecting it to fall upon us under the additional weight of snow, its slanted walls thick with snow-laden evergreen trees, slumped now, like old men leaning on invisible canes, looking down upon us as we make our pilgrimage.

Dave and Dennis look up at the ridge where I led Dave once in better weather, where we leaned over to stare into the crack, where Dave refused to look not because of the height, but because of who it was we saw, and who she was with when all he wanted was to be with her like that, which would never happen, and I see in his stare at his stare up that he remembers that moment, too, made sadder by it, maybe even angry over it, then stares away at the slanted land I lead him down this time, to hear where she stood then, no, not to it, passing it until we come to the gate, a bap in the mountain as wide as a city block, beyond which the quarry itself, its interior gutted the way my uncles might gut a fish, the rush of snow over and through it, blinding us to what we know already is not there, the absence of stone long dragged away to help build a city somewhere else we have never seen, and might ever know if and when we actually see it that our mountain helped build it, at the loss of something hugely important to us here.

Dennis asks if we are going inside, and I tell him no, our path takes us to where the old buildings used to be, stone and steel structures covered in dust in debris, much in the same way the snow covers them now, through which dump trucks passed to collect their share of stone or gravel, half hidden except for the dark gaps we call caves, into which kids crawl on better days with flashlights and candles to explore what so many have explored already, to leave their mark among the many marks already there, not Tom or Becky, but Billy, Bob, Joe and such, or made up names nobody will remember belong to them and nobody cars to know they ever came here.

We are still in the woods above the caves when I tell Dave and Dennis to gather wood, wet or not, we will need it if we indent to get through the night, and we gather it, like farmers gather a crop, and carry int down to where our path joins a wider bath, a dirt track trucks used to get in and out of the gap of the quarry, safer here than the perilous landscape to either side where snow hides sudden pitfalls – holes left from digging, only partly covered by later landslides, long abandonment has causes, we pilgrims finally on the track we need headed to a place we believe will bring us safety and warmth.

A splintered sign stands guard near where the guard house stood, decorated with gang slogans and lovers’ hearts, no one has heard of since, a brief immorality like the gang after which Emerald’s Cave got named after. We pass the guard house, vaguely aware of the rusted cranes ghost-like in the mist of snow behind him, like the bones of dinosaurs we once saw on a field trip of the Museum of Natural History, remote, as foreboding at the mount itself, but fragile, as if a gust of wind could blow each to pieces, and we hurry passed them to avoid being crushed under their downfall, passing all the other markers – signs of how far we have come and how little we have yet to travel before we reach the place we call The Caves, the wind whipping the snow into our faces in a furious rage against which me must struggle, step, by step, the storm determined to keep us back, and we – after all we’ve done – just as determined to keep on, desperate against the cold, hoping the drives have not created tombs we will need to dig up before we can lay our heads down inside them.

We can no longer see where we are headed or even where we have been, so blinding the blizzard has become in this unprotected landscape before the gate. We can barely breath even, moving single file with me in the lead for the reason that I have led us this far, we all knowing this particular part of the planet so well we cannot los ourselves in it regardless of how hard we try or how much we need to lose ourselves, carrying all we have and all we will ever have on our bent backs upon which the snow adds weight with every step.

We do not see the openings to the caves so much as feel where they are, the slant of land as familiar as the sidewalks in our own neighborhood, and we move with the groove, storm blowing over and around us, until we finally glimpse the hump of land, snow covered, yet prominent, and catch glimpse of the six holes still snow-free along one side, not in the quarry canyon, just outside of it, to one side of the gate, which we also feel more than see, looming over us in the dark and snow, like two large hands with palms facing, ready to close yet never able to.

Dave pulls out his father’s army flashlight, something he managed to rescue before our raft sank in the Passaic River and he nearly drowned after I pushed him in. Dave hands it to me and I flick it on, the pale almost yellow light not bright despite the dark of the storm, we becoming the cyclops eye moving towards the first of the black cave openings, the wavering circle of light revealing the tips of brown leaves sticking up through the surface of the snow, leaves fallen from the previous fall and perhaps many autumns prior to that, mingling with the tattered and yellowed pages of sprawled newspaper and wrappers of food not consumed here, perhaps not even on the mountain at all, leaves, newspapers and wrappers more evident inside the cave, moist from some eternal drip coming from some crack in the roof or perhaps some natural spring leaking out of the roots of the mountain itself excavation released.

It is too wet and I move on to the next, and this is wet, too, and so is the third, but when we reach the fourth, we find few leaves, a pile of dry wood and a circle of stones where someone before has used to build a fire.

“In here,” I tell the others, only able to tell the difference between the snow-covered Dave from the snow-covered Dennis by the difference in their heights. Both are so white they might as well be ghosts, as am I.

Dennis sniffs the air in clear distain, mouse-like lacking only the whiskers, and says, the place smells and wants us to find someplace else.

There is no other place, I tell him. The scent here is of earth and stone, less offensive to me than the other caves drunks have used as a toilet. The storm moans outside, wind whirling overhead and around with a renewed fury that won’t let us travel farther, even if there is another place to go – and there isn’t.

“It’ll smell better once we get a fire started,” I tell Dennis.

We dump our sticks on the slab of concrete at the deepest point in the cave, near where someone previously made a fire in a circle of stones. The cave is cramped, not uncomfortable. I clear the blackened coals from the old fire and set the twigs in their place, then break off icicles from the hole in the roof above, a narrow slanted break where two slabs of concrete come together, yet leave a gap out through which fire smoke can rise, black near the edges from previous use.

I am very good at starting fires, even in the midst of snow as I did that time in winter camp with the boy scouts, not by rubbing sticks together as the old scouts used to, using grass and sticks and matches, knowing that soon as the fire starts we will be warm, except that the matches I brought – good, solid, dependable stick matches with red and white tips – are so moist from the snow that covers us they flake and crumble when I strike them on the concrete slab.

We stare down at a fire that is not a fire, and the handful of unstruck matches I dare not strike knowing these will crumble the way the ones I already struck have.

“So, what do we do now?” Dave asks.

I pick up two sticks – the way I’ve seen old scouts do, feeling the rough bark against the cold palms of my hands, rubbing them together, and rubbing more, the cold number fading from my fingers, but no spark ignited the dry grass beneath and eventually I throw down the sticks and start at the growing drifts outside the mouth of the cave we sit in.

Dennis says he’s cold; Dave says we’re all cold. Dennis says he want to go home; Dave says we can’t.

“But Momma’s gonna miss us,” Dennis says.

“Momma is asleep by now, dreaming about what she can buy with the VA check once she brings Poppa home to sign them,” Dave says.

“Poppa?” Dennis says, his head jerking up, his eyes growing wide so I can see the large blacks of his dilated eyes. His face is already too pale to see just how upset he is, though his lips quiver along with his voice. “That’s Momma’s surprise?”

“It was,” Dave says, “but she probably won’t go with this storm.”

“But you don’t know she won’t,” Dennis shouts, voice resounding against the stone walls around us, echoing but in a remote way as if the echo comes from some place far away, beyond our reach, beyond the shroud of snow. “We got to go back there and be there when Poppa comes.”

I tell them both to shut up. I’m trying to think, remember houses half constructed down the hill from where we are, and across Valley Road where on other days someone sometimes sits guard to keep vandals from stealing wood and pipes.

I tell Dave one of us has to go and get some matches from the guard.

“But will anybody be there tonight – Christmas Eve – and in a storm like this?” Dave asks.

“We won’t know until one of us goes,” I say. “I’ll make the trip. You keep rubbing the sticks. Maybe you’ll get lucky and have a fire started by the time I get back.”

“I don’t like us splitting up,” Dave says. “You know this place is dangerous.”

“For me, not for you if you stay put.”

“But what if you fall down into a shaft or something?” Dave asks. “There are tons of them all over this place. You might not see them with this snow, and we won’t know to come and get you if you do.”
“I’ll be careful,” I tell him, trying to recall all those shafts I saw here in better weather, knowing that there are many more than even I know about. But if I stick to the path down to the road and back, I figure I’ll be safe – if I can find the path in the drifts.

I plunge back out into the storm, trying to remember if there are any shafts between where the caves are and the road, remembering only those around the mouth of the gate and the many more inside the huge quarry beyond it.

Snow swirls around my head so I cannot tell for certain which way I am going, relying completely on the slant of land to tell me. Even the footprints of are arrival are gone, never were perhaps, we ghosts or angels in this wilderness of what, unable to leave a lasting mark on this world and perhaps not even on the next, lost sheep without even a borrowed stable with straw to stay in.

Since we took a different way to the caves, I find few markers to hint at the path I need, only a rock here or there that I seem to remember, not really remember, hope I remember is one that I saw once and the slant leads to a street and not the edge of hole I might fall into. I also have only a vague memory of where the construction is, down Valley Road somewhere near to where the highway crosses, not far, but too far in snow like this and with the cold nipping at my nose and toes and cheeks.

I see light first and then a string of houses on the other side of the road, some houses my grandfather built, others built after the war to accommodate homecoming vets, flag poles in front of each though no flags flying in the snow, flush with families that had cropped up like mushrooms as my uncles said, all lost in the haze of snow save for the glowing lights, for which I steer, just desperate enough from the chill to seek shelter, but knowing I can’t abandon Dave and Dennis who I have left behind, the flickering lights of Christmas decorations around the windows only reminding me of why I’ve come to the quarry in the first place.

I can smell the burning of yule logs in the air with just a hint of pine, making me ache for the larger-than-needed tree my uncles routinely stuffed into the living room where the couch usually sits, and under which everybody put presents on Christmas Eve, a bigger tree this year though fewer presented as if all know no one will want to open them if the night sees my grandfather passing as we all expect.

I pass the houses and the lights and the windows thick with frost and the ghostly impression of happy people beyond, and stumble along the road or sidewalk (I cannot distinguish between them with the drifts) and finally come to a place where the houses with people end and the graveyard filled with the skeletons of newly constructed houses stretch out as far ahead of the snow will let me see. I find no watchman, nor matches, nor ghosts of either, but hear the moan of wind through the open sides, as haunting as my mother’s imaginary voices, and as lonely – and the cold makes my fingers numb.

I can go no farther without freezing and so, I turn back, retracing my own now-fading steps until these vanish before me, unmade under the storm’s wrath. Still I need no guide to tell me where the mountain is, a tall shadow against the wall of white, and I steer to where the gap shows, sure it leads to the quarry’s gate, and as it turns out, it does, and the caves, slightly more covered in drifts, I find Dave inside, still trying to make fire by rubbing sticks, his face as red as his hands with the effort, not cold so much as far of the chill that lingers just outside, the wind howling the way wolves howl, with a deadly chill ready to sink their teeth in us if we fail to create flame.

Dave looks up as I arrive. I am an abominable snowman every inch of me covered with snow, fingers and face suffering the assault of snow, as if cut, but I do not bleed.

Dave looks puzzled when I ask him where Dennis is.

“How should I know,” Dave says. “He went out when you went out. I thought he went with you.”

“Dennis didn’t come with me,” I tell him.

Dave drops the sticks and howls, “We have to find him!”

Outside, we find a trace of his trail, a hint at places the wind left less covered in order to create drifts elsewhere, relentless and unpredictable and scary, going off in the direction Dennis guessed we came from, only it isn’t the way we came at all, following not the slant up to the side of the mountain then down the trail to the road where Minx chased us, his trail veers off, and up, and through the nearly closed hands of the gate – beyond which lies the vastness of the quarry itself.

Dave and I follow, our steps filling in the vague space where Dennis’ feet went, sometimes seeing no print at all, just a guess where his foot fell, hope we do not miss some important sign of direction so that we find no next step, yet always do, his track staying true to some mistaken belief in a direction home, steered not by any start he or we might see, just his believe that such a star exists and will steer him home if he keeps faith with it.

Dave screams out a curse with Dennis’ name vaguely attached to it, so I am uncertain what it is Dave curses, though in the distance we hear the muffled echo as if someone curses back, and in the midst of this wee hear a voice that is not an echo and not quite a replay, a sound of fear and pain, echoed and muted, not off the distant walls of the canyon-sized quarry, something closer, more intimate, almost underground, and we ease ahead, feeling the depth of each footstep, knowing we might find something more perilous and deep than the deepest drift.

Dave calls out again, no curse this time, soft and concerned, nor loud enough to draw the distant echoes which might hide the sound of a response.

The response sounds like an echo anyway, closer as we advance, from below, not above, so, we are warned when we come to the edge where we find the freshest footprints and the place where Dennis fell into the hole.

Dave looks down. We can see nothing even using the weak beam of his father’s World War II flashlight. We cannot see how deep it is or where in the depths Dennis is.

“Are you down there?” Dave asks.

“Yes,” comes a weak reply.

“Are you hurt?”

“Yes, my leg,” Dennis says.

Dave, in a crouch looks back at me, his gaze filled with the fury and panic of the story, and a sense of desperation I’ve not seen in him before, not with Minx or that girl, Sue, who lives next door, or even about his father.

“What do we do?” he asked me, his voice so soft the wind whips away most of his words.

“One of us has to go down there and hand him up to the other,” I say.

“You mean I should climb down?”

“He’s your brother,” I say, “And you’re taller than I am.”

Dave gives a stiff nod; he does not otherwise move, just stares down into the hole, unable to see anything there but what he imagined, and from his expression, I guess, he imagines a lot.

It takes a long time for him to sit down in the snow and swing his long legs over the edge, and still longer for him to ease himself over the lip, vanishing into the darkness one terrible inch at a time, hands holding on until gravity pulls him under accompanied by a spray of snow.

I hear nothing of his landing. The wind howls too much for that. I know of his landing only after he calls my name and tells me he’s found Dennis and that he isn’t as deep as he thought, Dennis simply landed badly and is in a lot of pain, and we have to get him out because it’s cold down there, and there are dark things scurrying in the dark corners, things Dave can’t see.

There are always things scurrying in the dark corners of the world, things we do not notice until we are wounded or vulnerable, we believing they exist solely for our benefit, or see us as we seen them, as dangerous or ominous when they are neither, they just are.

I tell Dave to hand Dennis up and I’ll grab him, though I’m not sure I have the strength, wishing at that moment for two Daves to exist, one to lift Dennis, the other to catch him. Then, Dennis’ head appears in the mouth of the hole. I reach down, feel for his arm pits, and pull at him as my legs slip on the snow where I kneel, the weight of us both risking both of us will plunge back into the pit, Dave alone below keeping us from falling, grunting as he pushed, even managing to ignore Dennis who moans about the pain in his leg, and when I managed to Dennis out, and dump him into a drift of snow, I reach down to feel for Dave’s extended hands, this a greater burden even with him finding one wall to press his feet against, he emerging an inch at a time, rising, then slipping back, until his hands find a chunk of stone to grip, then he pulls himself out, and for a moment, knees on the snow-covered ground, each rapid breath adding steam to the veil of falling flakes. Then, he moves to where Dennis is.

“How do you feel?” he asks.

“I hurt, Dave,” Dennis says. “It hurts real bad.”

“We can’t stay here like this,” I tell Dave. “We have to get him back to the cave.”

“He needs warmth and a hospital,” Dave tells me.

“One step at a time. He has to get out of the snow first,” I say, knowing as Dave knows that the cave won’t be much better without a fire, and I know I will have to make the trek back down the hill to the road, to pound on one of the doors there where people burn yule longs and sit around their Christmas tree, from whom I will have to peg for help I do not want for myself and know the help I get will bring me home to a home that will not be celebrating the holiday but the passing of a patriarch.

“You’ll have to keep him warm while I go for help,” I tell Dave as we lift Dennis and sling him between us, half walking him, more carrying him, trying to keep to the path that brought us there so we do not make the same plunge Dennis made in some other hole we cannot see in the dark and snow.

“A fire would help,” Dave says.

“Well, we don’t have a fire, damn it,” I say.

Dennis giggles.

“What are you laughing about?” Dave asks.

“I can make a fire.”

“How?” I ask.

“I still got the matches the man gave us with momma’s cigarettes.”

“And they’re still dry?”

“I think so.”

“Well, keep them wherever you have them until we get back to the cave,” I say, feeling a little better, but not much, knowing without knowing how, that by the time we get the fire started, Grandpa will be dead.”