Dancer 5
The clerk at the Army and Navy store looked annoyed when I came in.
He said he was hoping to close early on account of the snow and that I would have to hurry.
I bought a back pack, two sleeping bags, Sterno, a portable radio, a knife, an ax, matches, batteries a flashlight, two pairs of brown work gloves, two knitted hats and an assortment of other items before leaving their to catch the bodega before it closed, too, where I was able to buy enough food to fill up both back packs.
I also bought a newspaper, reading some of it while the bodega clerk rang up my purchases. It was filled with news about Puck, in particular, about the killings and the leap off the falls.
I climbed back up the hill, the lights of the few nearby houses twinkling through the veil of snow. I could smell the scent of their wood fires. The icy prickle of snow pierced my wet clothing, soaking me through before I was half way back.
The dark castle was largely invisible, a looming black shape beyond the falling snow, I could just make out and steer for until I spotted the subtle flicker of orange through the main window from the dull fire ongoing inside the main room.
I had to open the front door with his foot -- only to get greeted by the click of a pistol's safety and the cold sting of the metal against my neck.
"What the fuck are you up to?" Puck's weak voice hissed. "I sent you out to make a phone call and it takes you three hours?"
"I had to get some things."
"Why?"
"Because Red Ball can't find you a place and you have to stay here.”
“Son of a bitch!” Puck growled, withdrawing the weapon from my neck as he hobbled back to the fire place, his sweaty face visible by the reflected fire light. "I ought to go down and blow that nigger's head off."
“You’re in no condition to go anywhere, even if there was no blizzard outside.”
Puck glanced out into the dark. The glow of the city showed the growing cover of white and the streaking curtain pressing down on a slant, adding to the accumulation. Puck sagged a little.
“You’re right,” he mumbled, apparently weakened even by his sudden outbursts. “I’ll kill him later Shut the door, will you, it's getting cold in here."
I shut the door with my foot then carried the packages into the den, dropping them onto the floor near the fire place.
"There are sleeping bags and blankets. You'd better get yourself wrapped up," I said. "I'll go get more wood and cook up some food."
"I'm not hungry."
"You'll have some soup."
"Say, what do you think you are, my mother?"
"No, I'm nobody to you," I said. "But I'm certainly not going to carry your dead body off this mountain when this storm is over. You'll eat soup and take aspirin like I tell you, or I'll go back home and let you rot here."
"All right, all right, go get your wood," Puck grumbled and weakly pulled open the brown paper that covered one of the sleeping bags. His fingers fumbled to unzip the bag, and eventually, I did it for him, covering over the shivering boy as he laid down, as if putting a shroud over him.
After I unpacked everything, stoked up the fire, I made my way out into the storm again, figuring to do what I set out earlier to do, and why I purchased the ax.
We needed wood, even wet wood at this point or we’d both die.
When I returned, I dropped the twigs near the fire place, then fitted myself into the other sleeping bag and joined Puck in sleep.
******************
I woke to daylight and my breath steaming out of me
The fire had gone out!
I clawed my way out of my sleeping bag to start it again, grabbing up the few handfuls of twigs that remained. I knew they would not provide enough heat.
A missing link in the stain glass window had let both cold and snow into the room, and showed a significantly white world outside.
Puck stirred as I grabbed the ax and headed for the door,his eyes thick with the glaze of fever. "Where are you going?"
"To get more firewood,” I said “But only God knows where I'll find dry wood in this storm. There must be two feet on the ground outside.”
Puck, too sick for another outburst, merely nodded and I went out.
The snow still fell, filling in my track behind me nearly as fast as I made it.The wind sculpted the snow into huge drifts, yet left large vacancies between so that I could steer through these valleys with the vague idea of reaching the trees below where I hoped I could find some branches that wouldn’t be too difficult to chop.
Fate or perhaps pure luck took me to a site where contractors had erected the skeleton of a house, a future life already shrouded in white.
The wooden framework looked particularly ghostly in the storm, snow dusted its upper surface. Workers hadn't yet picked up all the scrap, and I stuffed bits and pieces into the now empty backpack, and into one of the more sturdy bags left over from our sleeping gear. I also grabbed a few larger pieces that he could drag along back to the castle, where Puck was still sleeping and snug inside his sleeping bag as was I a few minutes later.
******************
"Read it to me again," Puck said, his sweating face shimmering in the fire light, though the glow in his eyes was from pride.
"I already read it to you twice," I said shoving the paper towards him. “If you love the news report so much, read it for yourself.”
“"You know I can't read good, just read it once more, I won't ask again."
I unfolded the paper again and tilted it towards the fire place.
It detailed the account of Puck’s leap off the falls and the report of an eyewitness claiming Puck could not have survived, even though no body had been recovered. The paper also printed some Puck’s notorious criminal career.
“That's Wilson telling them all that about me,” Puck said with a weak laugh. "He would put a bullet in my head if he could shoot straight because I know as much about him as he does about me.”
"Maybe you should get out of town for a while after you've recovered," I suggested.
“And give people the satisfaction of knowing they’ve run me off, no way,” Puck said. "I've got some scores to settle, not just with Red Ball, but with a lot of other people who are supposed to be my friends."
"Just get some sleep," I said. "You need to heal before you go off on your rounds of revenge."
“Yeah,” Puck said with a sleepy grin. “Revenge.”
********************
Puck got sicker.
I thought he might die.
“You need a doctor,” I told him.
“You try and I'll shoot you and the doctor,” Puck said, waving his pistol vaguely in my direction.
So I sat at his side, leaving only to fetch more fire wood with which to keep the room reasonably warm and to heat up the soup I fed him.
From time to time, I even helped him hobble outside to piss the liquid out again.
Puck mumble as he drifted in his delerium, most of it was gibberish, though occasionally, I made out things that made some sort of sense – yet not in any context that allowed me to understand it.
Two days passed since the shooting in the graveyard. The storm had dumped its load on the city, leaving its citizens to slowly dig out.
Puck continued to mumble, often calling out “Momma.”
“Don’t go, Momma,” he yelled at one point. “He didn’t eamnt it. It was my fault. I said it was okay. I wanted him to love me.”
Then later, Puck cried out again.
"You drove her away, you son of a bitch! She caught you trying to stick your prick up my ass -- and she left. She said she hated you. She said she hated me. She said we were two of a kind and deserved each other. She said she deserved better than both of us. But I'm not like you, Old Man. I don't want to stick my prick in every little boy's butt. I don't want to stick my nose in no fucking books, pretending like the world doesn't exit. You say I'm no good. Maybe that's right. But who made me that way? Who's driving me out now when I need him most?"
Then still later, Puck cried for his mother again, begging her not to go, begging her to come back, then eventually, threatening to kill her.
I listened to it all, gripping the arms of the wood chair as if everything was happened to me. Sometimes I dozed and dreamed of the dark shapes playing out this drama, with me as the central character.
I forced myself to remain awake after that.
Gradually, as Puck’s fever broke, his ranting faded and his frantic breathing slowed.
After a while, he slept the way ordinary people slept and I fell into a less troubled sleep of my own, dreaming my own dreams as trouble in their way as Puck’s but at least they were my own.
I saw flashes of TV reports on Vietnam interspersed with the face of my uncle Charlie from the last time I saw him as he walked down the front steps of the house, a sharp figure in full uniform going off to serve his country.
When I woke up, the first was out. Sunlight streamed through the chick in the class. I got up as quietly as I could, gathered what I wanted and eased out into a melting world.
I done by duty.
Puck would survive.
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