STEPHANIE DICKINSON
Snow Flower
The car from the past executes figure-eights, then skates over the frozen tracks made less than an hour ago. He steers under the bridge heading out of Cheyenne into the iced-over highway. The snow is falling like a white shawl. More figure-eights that slide the car toward the shoulder, and then deep ditch. The driver smells your fright. It suffocates when the odor is so strong. "I'll take you to my apartment, if that's what you want," you say. “Trust me.” You wait for his answer. “Throw your clothes in back,” he says.
Back seat. No altar laid with palms, candelabra and incense. But you’ve come scented in jasmine and ginger lily.
From a distance, you wonder how great your own culpability. Your older self wants to see its younger self through time--the riskier one, the inviter of trouble, the impulsive self. The stupid one.
And there is the landscape of Wyoming. Geological time. You could see it everywhere. Black Rock, Steamboat Mountain, Wind River, the Killpecker Sand Dunes. Not fields or pasture or prairie grasses, but land’s stone and stick vastness. Unbroken by buildings, such space conveys a sense of time before human consciousness. A state, its natives proudly claim, where cattle outnumber people. Then too there is human time. Once the Crow lived in the valleys of the Powder, Wind, and Big Horn Rivers. The Arapaho’s raiding parties divided into bands of “the ugly people” and “red-willow men.”
Behind you, the low lights of Cheyenne that snow kills, and before you, the bridge into the prairie that has no end, a drive into white nothing. You’re dreading what you know and don’t know and you’ve been drinking. Did he really tell you to throw your clothes in back? You take the gum from your mouth, reach toward the window to buzz it down. "Don't touch the door!" he grabs your arm. You’re shaken. "I was only going to throw my gum out,” you say. The pink must drain from your face. The blue and green too. "Give it here,” he orders. Even sitting behind the wheel he seems tall, giving off intensity. His arms sheathed in an olive-green airman’s jacket. “What?” you say to this man from the air base. “The gum.” You hand it over. He tosses it into the ashtray.
You’re in Cheyenne, newly graduated from an MFA program and qualified for nothing. You’re twenty-four and there’s a recession on and gas shortages and a flood of graduates leaving the universities with degrees, all needing to find their way in the world. You’re a VISTA Volunteer grant writer for a protection and advocacy nonprofit that is investigating the Lander State Training School, Wyoming’s residential institution for the developmentally disabled. Your job is to compose paragraphs and fill in grant applications, to scour the Federal Register for money. You’re familiar with the voluminous testimony of the Lander Investigation. For years there have been suspicious deaths at Lander. The physically and mentally disabled transported to baths on low carts so roughly, their arms are broken passing through narrow doorways. Rumors of the alcoholic Dr. Mary, the School’s physician, ruling drunkenly over her fiefdom. Autopsies revealed that under her care hospitalized residents starved on saline-rectal drips, the kind used solely for field emergencies in WWI.
You’ve been to the Training School hundreds of miles away in bleak and beautiful western Wyoming. Isolated, its own water tower looming from the distance, you watched the magpies swim overhead, their black and water plumage flashing. Build to withstand blizzards, you toured the brick wards of Downs Syndrome adults and children, the brain damaged and severely autistic, the elderly cerebral palsied whose fate was to be institutionalized in the era before mainstreaming. The fortress-like buildings perch in the middle of rocks. During the Depression the poor sometimes left their hungry children at the School’s gates, notes pinned to them. “Feed them. They’ll work.” Many parents never returned. The children stayed their whole lives.
You’re about to leave the Hynds Building built in the nineteenth century by the cattle and minerals people, the same folks who pushed the Arapaho and Shoshoni west to the Wind River Reservation. They cleared the land of its indigenous people and erected the capitol—red granite with marble floors and water fountains like broken pieces of wedding cake. Curlicues of zinc, copper and mahogany. You say goodnight, kick through the three blocks of old snow to your flat-roofed unfurnished apartment. You pass your landlady’s window and wave. She surrounds herself with photos of her Marine son who will never age. He is as old as he will ever be.
Your apartment is practically bare, a bedroom with dresser and bed, one chair in the living room, a mirror, a stopped-up fireplace. The kitchen where you spend all your time is furnished with a low long sink like your Chicago grandmother had, a flat basin without separate tubs for wash and dry. Yes, this place reminds you of your Chicago grandmother not your Iowa farm grandmother. The Chicago grandmother whose flesh was the odor of marigolds mixed with water dripping under the sink, wallpaper flaking. The house getting to do as it pleases.
The table is gargantuan, two high-backed benches with a varnished wood slab between them, your own café booth, your reading corner. The dirty milk bowl of the light fixture hangs on thick chains, filled with dazed moths and flies. Here you’re read Jean Rhys’ Voyage into the Dark, After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, Wide Sargasso Sea. Here you’ve read Elizabeth Bowen’s The House in Paris, The Death of the Heart, Eva Trout. Most nights after work you eat Ramen noodles and make pots of coffee and sit in your booth and read. But some nights you tire of the table and the window overlooking the red, wooden staircase/fire escape and clothesline. You tire of the gas stove and old refrigerator. The linoleum swabs of green, orange, and black. Like a rattlesnake’s skin. You tire of the aging bachelor who pounds on his ceiling with a broom handle when you walk.
* * * * * *
Two blocks from the flat-roofed apartment is the Downtowner, a hotel and lounge with live bands. You’re walking in open toe platform shoes and nylon knee-highs. You’re only going to be gone for an hour or so. Work tomorrow. Still you’re good smelling from your ginger lily bath, dressed in tight, black stovepipe pants and a strapless top with tiny mirrors sewn into the fabric. A silver choker.
Snow is beginning to fall, a dusting like the tiny mirrors in your shirt. Winters, the natives tell you, cut the northern half of the state off from the south. Blizzards close the highways and roads. Nothing gets through not even snowmobiles. This morning on your way to work you saw tonight’s band checking into their room at the Downtowner, three guys leaned over the balcony, flirting. The cutest one tells you he’s the drummer.
You slip over the new snow polishing the old. Your wool jacket isn’t even a coat. Your long hair matches your large brown eyes. Cow eyes, they’ve been called.
A girl from somewhere else. Her skin soft, maybe feathers.
You pull the Downtowner’s glass door. Walk through the green-ferned lobby and turn right into the club. The room of bodies. Warm like a just kissed lip. You push into the crowd. The band is taking a break. The drummer you saw on the balcony, who told you to come tonight isn’t looking. Maybe you should have worn red spandex. You make your way to the end of the bar, take a stool and order a gin and tonic. There’s a tall angular guy in an airman’s jacket eyeing you. He’s dressed in military boots and black jeans. You know he’s looking and you’re hoping he won’t ask to buy you a drink. You watch him approach. All you can see are his boots. Heavy, lace-ups. Black. How tortuous the shoestrings look, so many eyeholes to loop. Everyone else in the bar is civilian. Cowboys, cowgirls, a few suits and ties, a convention of aluminum siding salesmen.
“Do you mind if I sit down?” he asks. His hands are stuffed deep in his pockets. Although you’re disappointed, you tell him you don’t mind. How could you mind? You don’t own the barstool. He asks to buy you a drink and you tell him you have one, but he’s already gesturing to the bartender. His name is Angus. The name Angus makes you think of the Black Angus Pancake House of your childhood, the wire wheel shining with a rainbow of syrups: maple, peach, strawberry, blueberry, stickiness stretching into infinity. You look out at the crowd. The tables are filled. A forest of drinks wreathed in smoke. The cowgirls stand holding onto their cigarettes. Tight jeans only a shoehorn could fit them into.
He’s settling on the stool next to you, and this is how the choreography begins on an L corner. His leg blocks your exit and no one else gets in. Cheyenne is off the beaten path and the farther west you travel the more off you go. Here you can see the stars in the city but as soon as you leave the city limits distance smacks you in the face. Antelope Flats. Thermopolis. Badwater Creek. Casper. Rattlesnake Hills. Ghosts of Oglala girls won in poker games and married to bullwhackers dart across lonely highways. Girls thrown away by their husbands when white women came West cry out for their lost half-white children.
Not a Godiva chocolate but a Kit-Kat. Girl of flawed beauty made of blackberry jelly and olive pits. Pale-skinned, river eyes.
Angus isn’t cute and it’s hard to tell how old he is. But age is always the opening salvo and soon you know he’s twenty-seven and he knows you’re twenty-four. He’s stationed at Warren Air Force Base. His large knuckles brush your face as he leans to light your cigarette. Smoking is something the older self will chastise the younger for. He catches the animal scent in your hair. The band is mediocre. “Abracadabra” and “The Joker.” You beg off between sets to visit the ladies room. He watches you hover around the drummer. The drummer shakes his head. He’s telling you he has a fiancée in Denver.
You stay in the bathroom, hoping that Angus will have moved on. But he’s planted himself in that seat and when you finally return he asks you to dance. You follow him out onto the dance floor, a checkerboard of flashing lights. Red. Green. Stop. Go. His mouth stays set. He doesn’t smile.
“Another round,” he waves at the bartender. There’s plenty of money in his pocket. What kind of music do you like?” he asks, when you’re sitting again. You should say. Jane Austin. Emily Bronte. Jayne Anne Phillips. Word music. But you answer, “Jazz.” As if you know something, As if you’re a cut above Elton John and Michael Jackson. “Yeah,” he says, almost a smile. “I like jazz too. Cecil Taylor. Monk. Mingus.” You add, “Les McCann.” Then he’s bringing up more players. Lester Young. James Moody. Woody Shaw. His long unhappy face has story in it, perhaps a childhood of poverty, noise. A crowded apartment where the TV is always on. More drinks appear in front of you.
The Downtowner’s bartender collects the tab. “Midnight. Last call, guys!” he calls out. This is a time before roofies going into drinks. Rohyphnol. Ruffles.
“Let’s go to the Frontier Inn. It stays open until two,” Angus says. “Listen, my buddies tell me the band playing there is supposed to be good. Jazz!” You shake your head, tell him no, tomorrow’s a grant proposal deadline. You look down at your open toe platform shoes as if they can decide for you. You haven’t established trust although you’ve talked. About Philadelphia, about how he feels forsaken and out-of-place here. If you beg off he’ll think you’re a liar, that you really didn’t like jazz after all. You find yourself in the parking lot where snow is beginning to erase the tire tracks.
His buddy lent him his car. It’s a big old car with plenty of legroom.
* * * * * *
Just for an hour. He’s promising that as you get in. The lightly falling snow is thickening and sticking. Your platform shoes slide through the snow. Your mother would not take this ride in a big dark car, his buddy’s car. That’s part of the reason you get in.
The Frontier Inn is two miles outside of Cheyenne near the overpasses. I-80. This is the truck route between Canada and Texas. Everything runs through Denver and past Cheyenne going north and south. He’s having to use the windshield wipers to bat back the snow. You stare out into the oncoming night. Tiny mirrors of snow are shimmering in the headlights. Wyoming, already crouching under last week’s snow, awaits more. He tells you about gymnastics in Philadelphia. The still rings. He competed. His upper body so strong he could hold the Iron Cross for two seconds. Suspended in mid-air both arms straight out from the sides of his body. The rings completely in his control. He loved that. You tell him about VISTA. How you receive a small stipend each month and food stamps. Maybe he chuckles when you tell him the amount.
Ahead you see some trucks pulling over into the Inn’s parking lot where a neon bucking bronco flashes. Inside the lobby the heat hits you. Where did all these people come from, in this Cheyenne that always feels half-deserted? You walk past the desk over green carpet that smells like smoke, perfume and wintergreen Airwick. The lounge is large enough to fit a herd of steers. Light jitters into your eyes from chandeliers, glass baubles dangling from eight-point elk racks. You follow Angus to the bar where you face the mirror, two strangers that are together. He doesn’t try to hold your hand.
How does this compare to Philadelphia? It doesn’t. The bartender turns. Black thread scripts his name Warren on his left pocket. Like the air base. "What will you have?" he says, sinking a dirty glass in the bubbly sink. You watch the limes float like citrus islands. He swishes a rag over the smear of fingerprints in front of you. “On the house,” the bartender adds. Angus orders a shot of scotch for himself. Gin and tonic for you. You’ve drunk way too much on an empty stomach. You ask him what happened to gymnastics. His face twists. The coach switched him to the pole vault. The vault he couldn’t control through strength and will, it was like climbing the air. You make air stairs and run up them. He sips his scotch. He tells you he liked the cheers and clapping as he used to handspring off the mats into the showers. If you don't reach for goals, his coach told him, you got be content with what others toss you. Then Coach treated him worse than dirt. Left him off all-state list.
In the ladies room you smooth on lipstick. You’d like to close your eyes and wake up in your apartment. Thank goodness the drinks are weak. Or are they? You can feel the snow falling in your mind, the sky is bigger out here and you can disappear into it. You’d like to escape his long unhappy face. You shouldn’t have accepted his drinks. You want to unswallow them.
A glam band is playing. The lead singer struts off the stage, sweeping his pink boa. Hand cocked to his hip he jitters into the audience that is mostly male. Drivers of 18-wheelers and cowhands with ten gallon hats. Women hang on the edges of the crowd. The older ones look salty. A couple of underage girls with mascara eyes stand near the men's room. The lead singer’s white jumpsuit is alive with sequins. Like fish scales or a snowdrift. The bartender orders everyone to drink up. You hear a vacuum humming like a fly. You watch your glass sink into the bubbling bar sink.
The girl thinks she hears his thoughts. All the people in this town are like snow falling and he is the night they’re falling into. The snow is ground up people. He is reality. Cold reality. She’s scared she’s gonna end up with him.
* * * * * *
You skate out the front door. You’re wondering when he will ask to go home with you. Is he expecting you to ask him? Is there anyway you can beg off? There’s the snow past your ankles and you’re sliding in the parking lot to the big dark car, and you’re drunk so there is nothing cold about the snow. The pinpricks in the wind tickle your cheeks. When you toured the Lander School you met twin brothers, albinos in their sixties, trudging behind a white horse that pulled the garbage sledge. The brothers were the School’s garbage men. They’d been there since they were babies. You wouldn’t forget how their heads of white hair shone like cold suns, how they carried willow switches, their gait matching the horse’s. The brothers and horse appearing to be a single thing. Maybe you shared with Angus all of that. And he told you of the Maltese Cross and holding himself parallel to the floor on the rings, his body stretched laterally. His body, iron. You both get into the buddy’s car. Slam the doors.
The snow is thicker and the road graders won’t be out until morning. The car tires slip. On the bridge the 18-wheelers pull off onto the shoulder to wait the storm out. You hear their radios and CB’s crackling as the car passes them. Angus adjusts the heater. You put a stick of gum in your mouth. In later years you will try to imagine what’s going on inside him. Does he already know where the car is going? Is it you talking about jazz that sets him off? Or your mindless rattling on? About your apartment and the black-haired man who lives under you and pounds on the ceiling with his broomstick. Maybe it’s your holier than thou VISTA volunteering, your crusader bullshit.
Maybe you talk about the testimony of the kids pulled into the bathrooms: how the aides were sure the cretins didn’t feel anything; if they flopped on the carts or twisted their arms like wires or half-flew through the door, the aides kept pulling. An eye doctor set limb fractures. Winter roads blocked by snow, ice and high wind. Weeks passing and the temperature not lifting its eye above zero. He’s telling you he enlisted to become a pilot but it doesn’t look like he’s going to fly. He repairs planes. The snow flurries are coming down faster. Leaving snow entrails in the air. Like strands of horsetail and mane.
You’re still a mile from Cheyenne. Snow shrinks visibility to the world of the front seat. He lets the car almost stop, then he turns the wheel and the car begins creeping in the opposite direction of town. White nothing in every direction. He drops his head on the steering wheel, resting it there. It’s then that you reach for the door handle to throw your gum out.
He lets the car swerve, snow sucking the tires. Rhythm and blues spill out of the dash for a second then die away. The car is passing under the bridge into the prairie. Into space. The car skates or he loses his grip on the steering wheel and the ice under the new snow takes hold. Wind pushes the car effortlessly toward the shoulder. Everything is beautifully slow, slow and beautiful. “You’re going to take me home, aren’t you?” you ask. “Eventually.”
When he grabs your arm your pink face pales into a dead shrimp. He says, “Throw your clothes in the back seat. Your purse too.” He could see you were scared at the club, that the night might run out and you’d end up with him. Sure you’re petrified now. He watched the bartender sink the glass printed with your lipstick into a bubbly compost of limes and lemons. You take a deep breath. "Let's go to my apartment." The car is stopped and he repeats. “Throw your clothes in the back seat.” You beg. Please let’s just go to your apartment. "Sure I've heard that one before," he snorts. “I can see the lie in your eyes. All women are liars.” You try to meet the gaze of his long angular jaw. The car moves, swerving over the dividing line, then stopping. The car can’t make up its mind.
He was watching you from the time he walked into the Downtowner. Now he tells you the snow is sparkling like Florida sand with a billion teeth. Miami where the coach took them for competition and Angus won. Looking forward to a few cool ones he saw you, a girl with long dark hair, on high heels and in tight jeans. Your eyes darted everywhere but at him. Walking toward you he saw the disappointment in your face. Not like he hadn’t seen that before. A thousand times. He saw you go up to that drummer, all smiles.
Ice builds on the windshield. The wiper blades rasp. Anyone who might happen to see the car will think it’s abandoned. You’ve slipped off your shoes and begin to peel down your stovepipe pants. Numb from the gin and tonics you’re doing what you’re told. Will he kill you afterwards? He can taste your fear. What are you doing in this car anyway? Why were you at the Downtowner? What would your father think if he hadn’t died when you were three? Your mother would admonish you for how you are dressed. Girls who show skin ask for it. "I can't believe this," you say. But why not? Where else did you think you were going?
All the slow dressing of earlier, the choosing of which top and what pants, the little shirt with the tiny mirrors comes off easy. This is reality. Total reality. He grabs the clothes out of your hand and throws them in back. You jerk the door handle up, lunge out, running into the ditch. Fight or flight. You know when it happens because you hear the wind and the thick moan inside of it. In the distance you see white. One star bawls like a herd of cattle while your own breath freezes in your nostrils. You should know better than to open your mouth. Like cattle still digging for the grass even at the last. While he was zippering you shouldered the door open and ran.
Girl swaddled in scallops & Chantilly lace. Why aren’t you wearing only your best red blood cells?
You are naked. You run. Feet don’t feel the snow and your skin doesn’t notice the cold. You’re wearing alcohol.
You keeping running into the ditch. You’ll be a snow flower not found until spring. Snow up to your knees. You don’t feel him tackle you, jumping on your back. He pushes your face into the snow. More muscles in his legs than three or four guys. He rocks your head deeper into the snow. You can’t breathe. "Sir, do you understand? Call me sir from now on.” He lifts your head from the snow. “Sir, say it!”
"Yes, sir.” You say it. “You know who’s boss now?” “Yes, sir.”
You’re back inside the car. He pushes your face to the windshield, your cheek kissing glass. Snow glitters in the headlights like the soft eyes of aliens. Fawns. Ice-blue. He wedges you between floor and seat, he has you on your knees, he enters you. You face him, you face away. You forget. You lose track of your body. He rapes you more than once. Cattle whose nostrils freeze and are too stupid to open their mouths to breath. You are dumb like cattle. The name for this doesn’t yet exist. When it is over he bangs his head on the steering wheel. You can’t explain why you feel something like pity for him.
* * * * * *
The car passes the gas station and the first Cheyenne light flickers dimly. Your body relaxes. The fear with its edge and somersaulting shrillness recedes. The snow sounds like breaking glass under the tires. You don’t speak except to direct him to the old apartment building near the Downtowner. Is he frightened you will call the police? Perhaps he thinks the air base will protect him?
The car stops front of your apartment. Angus picks up your purse, whose contents have spilled on the floorboards of the driver’s side. He opens your checkbook and looks. “You didn’t lie about your name,” he says. You wonder if he did? You and he will never meet again.
You don’t call the police. Instead you will leave Cheyenne. Leave your grantwriting VISTA Volunteer assignment. The Lander Investigation is over for you. The disabled residents in their great dormitory frigates will sail on between the jagged rocks of winter. The albino twins who shuffle behind their white horse, too pale to leave any tracks.
Your older self sees its younger self through time--the riskier one, the stupid one. You wonder what has happened to him as you look back at that Wyoming night. If he had not leapt and pulled you back into the car you would have frozen. A gruesome death your mother would have had to endure. No redemption for her daughter. He almost took your life, and then he saved it.
The snow will always be misting around the car. In slow motion you remember. The Kiowa and Apache passed this way. Buffalo and prongtail elk. The Arapaho and Crow. Date rape still doesn’t exist. It was a different age. Date rape not yet an expression. Not yet a crime. Soon it would appear in Ms. magazine but not yet. There was no definition. “Date Rape: Rape of a woman by a man with whom she is acquainted. The rapist is usually her escort.”
You lift your face into the wind as you walk toward your building. Thick drops of snow feel like edges of torn Kleenex. Has the snow erased everything? Again and again he flings you back into the car. In the darkness where there aren't real people he makes you call him sir. He dreams of the still rings. Flying and falling but mostly he holds himself rigid, the Iron Cross.
