Snow(3)

Gone, he thought now, and the word resonated like a ringing gong in the vacant chamber of his mind.

“I usually don’t travel on Christmas Eve,” the fat guy in the Bulls sweatshirt was saying, his mouth loaded with pizza, “but this was a big client and I didn’t want no one getting the jump on me. The pitch went fantastic, too. I really hammered them. Wore a suit and tie, the whole nine. Really did the thing up nice, know what I mean?”

“Sure,” Todd said, snatching up his laptop and standing. The last thing he wanted to do was spend another minute talking to Chunky the Pharmaceutical Rep. “I think I’m gonna grab a coffee.”

Chunky looked dejected. “Don’t you wanna see how the flight plays out? We got a bet.”

“No bets. And besides, I thought you said it’s going to be cancelled. That it was a lock?”

The guy shrugged his enormous shoulders. There was nothing but pizza crust left in one grease-streaked hand. “You mark my word, Perry Mason. You just watch and see.”

Todd bustled down the corridor, a few fast-food joints to his left and his right. Any of these places would serve coffee, but his eyes happened to lock on a small bistro called Hemmingson’s at the end of the gangway. Thanks to the delays, it was now well past happy hour. Fuck coffee; what he needed was a stiff goddamn drink.

The place was overpopulated, no doubt due to the multitude of cancellations and delays, yet Todd managed to squeeze his way to one corner of the bar and order a Dewar’s on the rocks without taking an elbow to the ribs. A hodgepodge of Christmas decorations and sports paraphernalia hung from the walls and, despite the smoking ban, someone was puffing away on a cigarette. The TV behind the bar was tuned to the Weather Channel. On a steady replay, the television showed clip after clip after clip of Midwesterners in parkas with fur-lined hoods trudging through the blizzard. These clips were replaced by shots from a traffic-cam along the interstate, where it looked as though the world were made up of nothing but fender benders and police lights. Todd felt something cold and wet turn over in his stomach. When his scotch arrived, he gulped down a hefty swallow in hopes of killing whatever angst was squirming around down there.

“Excuse me, excuse me,” came a woman’s voice from somewhere beyond the crowd of bar-goers. Todd turned around and saw a woman in a cream-colored knit wool cap struggling just beyond the wall of broad male shoulders. “Excuse—shit!” With that, the woman came bursting through the crowd. Overburdened with luggage and squeezed into a knee-length jacquard coat that was maybe two sizes too small, she looked as though she were about to rebound off the lacquered countertop. Todd reached out and grabbed her forearm, steadying her before she completely lost her balance.

“Whoa,” he said. “You okay?”

“Christ,” she huffed, and dropped both bags at her feet right in front of him. “It’s like Custer’s last stand in here. What’s a girl gotta do to get a drink, anyway?”

Todd grinned. “I think you made out pretty well, actually. No arrows in the back or anything.”

“Although I think some Indian brave back there cupped an ass cheek.” She pulled the knit cap off her head and a sprig of red wildfire hair exploded from her scalp. She had a cute face, though, with narrow cheeks and large, beseeching green eyes. A smattering of faint red freckles peppered the saddle of her nose. All of a sudden, what with three days’ growth on his face and dark patches beneath his eyes, Todd felt uncharacteristically self-conscious. “I really should have brought my stun gun,” she said, her eyes not settling on him for more than a split second. “March through the crowd like a goddamn cattle driver.”

“Maybe a stun gun won’t be necessary,” he said. “What do you want?”

“To drink?” She looked instantly flummoxed. Then: “Oh, yes—uh, do they have Midori?”

He blinked. “I don’t know.”

“Midori sour, if they have Midori. But do not substitute generic melon ball for Midori,” she added quickly. “It’s not the same and, anyway, I think something in the melon ball makes me break out in hives.” She raked stunted fingernails down the length of her neck, as if the simple mention of hives had summoned them into existence.

“Duly noted,” Todd said. As it turned out, the bartender had Midori. The drink was mixed and set on the bar posthaste. “Merry Christmas,” Todd said, and they clinked glasses.

“So you’re a ‘merry Christmas’ and not a ‘happy holidays’ kind of guy, huh?”

“I’m sorry, did I offend you?”

“Not at all. It’s refreshing. I’m so sick of political correctness. I’m suffocated by it. We’re so goddamn politically correct that we lose our individualism, our definition as human beings. Don’t you agree?”

“I guess I never thought of it that way.”

She downed half the drink in one healthy swallow. Then she set the glass down on the bar and proceeded to pull off her leather gloves. She was sporting a jammer roughly the size of a disco ball on her ring finger. It sparkled like a movie star’s smile.

“God,” she groaned, “can you believe this weather?”

He nodded, sipping his scotch. “Your flight cancelled or just delayed?”

“I had a dream last night that I was trapped inside a submarine and there were all these people in business suits all trying to climb up the ladder and get out of the sub.” She had totally ignored his question. “They started pulling each other off the ladder and fighting and clawing at each other like animals. Women, too, only they were in ball gowns. Just everybody swinging and punching and clawing at each other. I just stood off to one side and watched the whole thing go down. Then, from somewhere deep in the belly of the sub, some big alarm starts going off.” When she imitated the alarm sound from her dream—“WEEE-ooh, WEEE-ooh, WEEE-ooh”— several heads turned in her direction. She didn’t seem to notice. “So, shit, we’re sinking, right? And these *s are just pawing at each other like children on a playground, grabbing each other in headlocks and rolling around on the floor of the sub.” She sighed and looked instantly miserable. And somehow that made her more attractive. “I guess it was a prophetic dream.”