That frigid morning rang out bright and dutiful as the two boys tramped the snow-covered path from their grandmother’s house down the road towards the small, sleepy horse farm where then they would have put enough distance between them and the watchful eye of their Nana so that they might hurl snowballs at wagered targets with complete and utter impunity.
Owing perhaps to the insignificance of the patch of county abbreviated into a hamlet, the groundwork for sidewalks had never been factored into the layout of most of the area, and so Colin led his younger brother Shawn down the street, careful to yank him by the collar back onto lawns of neighbors in the instance of passing cars so that the day’s majesty would not be cut prematurely short by the onset of needless tragedy.
His mother had told them repeatedly that someday maybe not so far away, the two would only have one another, so that each must look out for the other brother.
Colin took the responsibility to heart, even though it was mostly so he wouldn’t have to sit through the same lecture a thousand times over. But with his father gone and his mother now doting on him in a dozen unfulfillable ways, he sometimes felt as if he were aging out of the joyous idleness that had brough him so much comfort in years past as his thoughts turned ever inwardly toward increasingly somber matters.
“Hi-ho!” Shawn whooped out, grabbing a hold of a low hanging branch with a single gloved hand. “I’m Tarzan, king of the jungle!”
With a clumsy leap-frog hop, he wrapped his arms around the meager branch and pulled down with his entire weight. The branch slipped from his grip as he plummeted down into the snow, but not before it licked him clean across the span of one rosy cheek.
The boy began to wail, and Colin darted quickly over in order to render his brother aid.
He ungloved his hand and positioned Shawn’s chin between his fingers. “Why you always got to go ahead and do stupid stuff for?” he said.
A red welt had risen over the apple of his left cheek and as Colin did his best to assess the damage, his brother just cried louder.
Across the street, Colin caught movement in one of the homes as a curtain swept quickly across the arched window of the home as if someone had been planted there, watching.
Mean old Mrs. Windsor missed nothing and had once come out of her house shouting at him for taking a spill off his bike at the end of her driveway while he was riding down the street.
It was only a matter of time before she emerged, leather faced and rabid from her front door, scolding them for hanging on other people’s trees.
“Come on now, it’s only a little scratch,” Colin said. “I’ll bet we can fool everyone and tell them you got into a knife fight.”
At this, the boy quite his sniveling and smiled.
“You think so, Colin?” He touched his glove to his face and winced. “Does it really look like someone tried to cut me?”
“It does,” he said. “Now let’s get going before the neighbors see your face and call the cops on us.”
Even with the cold temperatures, the sound of melting was all around them as they walked: a nearly constant popping and snapping echoing from the trees. They even heard it from across the reservoir where just that summer, the water level had lowered enough to expose a battalion of old water rotted tree stumps resembling ancient sea creatures that at any moment looked as if they might scuttle from their mud-sodden beds and pursue passing cars.
The water had by then returned to its original level, concealing the stumps from view, and now a thin skin of broken ice floated upon the surface, reflecting a fractured mirror of the blue sky that was visible from the street.
Shawn scooped up a wet patch of snow from the ground and balled it up until it firmed between his hands.
“Watch this,” he said, and pitched it in an arc before it plummeted down into the water with a splash.
Sometimes in the warmer months, you could see men fishing form the small bridge, men with hats pulled low over their faces. But in the few years he had been living at his grandparents, he had never seen anyone catch anything. He wasn’t even sure if there were actual fish in the reservoir. He wondered if he would ever know for certain.
Colin shoveled some snow off the edge of the bridge. It landed on a small patch of ice where the water was most shaded, with a wet plop.
“Let’s keep moving,” he said. The sight of the grey water made him anxious and he could not remove the memory of the stumps from his mind.
The thought of Mrs. Windsor having witnessed the whole ordeal from her living room window vexed him to no end. Who was to say the old bag of bones wasn’t waddling bowlegged through the snow in her robe, on her way to inform his grandmother of the incident?
Another mound of snow crashed through the water and startled him from his reverie.
“Shawn,” he found himself shouting. “Time to go.”
“What’s wrong with staying here,” he said. “Why can’t we just play here?”
“This is not playing,” he said, nabbing Shawn by the sleeve. “Now, come on!”
Colin dragged his brother behind him for a while, but eventually the tension on the sleeve slackened and Colin allowed it to drop while his brother followed behind him near soundlessly besides the crunch of his boots falling upon packed snow.
When they arrived at Leonard’s farm, the horses were already out of their stables with thick blankets buttoned around twitching collars, dully raising their heads now and again at another horse’s behind, or else regarding the cars that passed by with little interest—eyes black, and large as a child’s fist.
Colin had been going there as long as he could remember, and even from a time he couldn’t recall, the pictures of him as young as three or four standing at arm’s length to one of the massive beasts or sometimes extending an outstretched hand across the length of the muzzle—there were many of these.
A sign had been nailed into one of the wooden posts as of late.
“Don’t feed horses. We bite.”
No doubt, the result of some overzealous feeding on the part of patrons with young children who couldn’t have come away with more than an accidental nibbled of the fingers between chewing and a better understanding of boundaries.
A brown dappled mare trotted over as the boys approached, bowing its head obligingly through the empty space in the fencing and allowing the brothers, one after the other, an opened palm stroke across the broad plain situation between its eyes.
“Good horsey,” Shawn whispered, cracking a smile despite the unpleasantness from earlier. “That’s a real nice horsey.”
Colin glanced around to ensure the two of them would not suddenly be descended upon by any reprimanding farm hands, and then stroked the animal’s cheek and down the curve of its massive mandible.
That’s a good horse,” he said. The animal snorted, sending great coils of smoke billowing from its hot, dripping nostrils. “Say, Shawn. I think he likes us, don’t he?”
“I guess so,” he said, and allowed his one hand to return to his side.
Not wanting to appear overly sentimental, Colin dropped his hand back down as well.
The horse, its interest now waning beyond reproach, pulled away from the fence and returned to the other horse at the far end of the pen. The two dug at the cold ground with a hoof and then dipped their noses down into the overturned dirt, searching for what, it was impossible to tell.
All around them now crowded the scent of woodsmoke, and a little further off sat a cottage with great plumes of exhaust billowing from its chimney in a near constant stream. It was as fine of a smell as Colin had even known, even better than the spicy cedar that clung to his winterwear after bringing them out of storage at the start of each season.
The smells held within them memories that the boy could not yet fully transfigure from mere sentiment in his mind. He only knew that if he swelled too readily on any one of these recollections, that he soon felt a tightening in the throat and his eyes begin to water, and so he would twist closed the valve linking him to those things like one would do with a spigot whenever the spirit of something intangibly lost overtook him.
Just past the farm, there was a little dirt lot from where they could hurl snowballs with safety and secrecy. Colin took aim and nicked the side of a stop sign and then very soon after that, nailed the ‘T.’
“The snow’s too wet over here. It’s been sitting in the sun too long,” Shawn said, kicking at a pile of slush with the toe of his boot. “You can’t do anything with snow this wet.”
“Just try it out—like this.” With that, Colin catapulted one and it slammed the face of the stop sign with a pleasant and resounding thwang.
Shawn bent over and packed a pile of dripping snow and tossed it like a falling duck. It didn’t even manage to clear the road.
“Try again now. You’ll get it.”
Incensed by frustration in the face of his defeat, he scraped the earth for as much snow as he could gather in one hand, gathering with it several loose pebbled and combining them with the projectile.
Just as the ball left his gingers, a faded green pickup truck was passing by. The snowball hit the rood and the spread of pebbles scattering across the truck bed sound out like buckshot.
The truck screeched to a halt just past the small intersection and quickly whipped around across the road. Before they even knew what was happening, the truck sat before them sputtering exhaust and idling.
“Oh shit,” Shawn said.
“Just don’t say anything,” Colin admonished.
His hands felt suddenly numb, but he couldn’t be certain if it was from fear or else the snow that had soaked through his gloves.
The man stepped out with the cigarette still in his mouth. A baseball cap pushed his mud brown hair in two bushels down over his ears. His beard seemed strangely grey for a man his age and ran like a rusty Brillo pad down the length of his neck.
“Which one of you threw it?” he said, tossing his cigarette at their feet.
“I did,” Colin said trying his best not to allow his trembling to affect the sound of his voice.
The man gave him a sideways glance and then turned to Shawn. “Nah, I’m pretty sure it looked like this chickenshit right here threw it. I mean, he can barely keep from pissing his pants right now. Just look at him.”
Shawn’s eyes began to water. He stared at the yellow lane divider in the road, his lip quivering.
“Hey kid, look at me when I’m talking to you.” The man reached his arm out to grab the boy by his hood, but Colin swatted his hand away.
“Don’t touch him,” he said, scarcely able to believe the words coming out of his mouth.
“So, you’re the big man here then, huh? Big man and chickenshit. Well, one or both of you gonna pay for what you did to my truck.”
The man lunged at him and without so much as thinking about it, Colin swung the stick at the man as hard as he could, catching him in the side of the head.
The man immediately crumbled to the ground in a heap and Colin grabbed his brother.
“Run,” he shouted, and they arrived back home out of breath and soaked through with sweat. It was all their Nana could do but fuss over how swollen Shawn’s one cheek had become and shouting that didn’t the two of them have any sense between them.
All through the night Colin lay awake in bed waiting to hear the sirens trail in one long wail up the length of his street, and though Shawn wouldn’t speak of it, he knew it had been one small piece of a larger oblivion that had befallen them and driven his hand.
Things would never be the same again, no matter how long he ransacked his soul for it.