But beside Peter’s head there is a small round blondness. Caldwell recognizes the ninth-grade Fogleman girl. He had had her brother two years ago, the Foglemans were the kind who would eat your heart and then wash the rest down the sink. Brutal Germans, brrr. It dawns upon him that she and Peter are not sitting next to each other by accident. With that kid’s brains, can it be? Now Caldwell remembers seeing Peter and Penny paired here and there in the halls. By the drinking fountain giggling. Against the annex lockers leaning broodily. Framed, blotted together into one silhouette, against the milky light of a far doorway. He had seen these things but they hadn’t sunk in before. Now they do. The sadness of the abandoned wells up. A great shout arises as Olinger’s lead expands, and the powerful panic of it licks with four hundred tongues the lining of the teacher’s strained innards.
Olinger wins.
Peter rarely takes his eyes from the game but hardly sees it, so possessed is his inner eye by the remembrance of pressing his face into the poignant absence between Penny’s thighs. Who would have thought even an instant’s access would be granted him, so young? Who would have thought thunder would not peal and punishing spirits flap awake? Who of all those pressed into this bright auditorium would dream what brimming darkness he had, kiss-lipped, sipped? The memory of it is a warm mask upon his face, and he does not dare turn his face to his love for fear she will see herself there, a ghostly beard, and cry out in horror and shame, every pore on her nose vivid.
And when he and his lather at last leave the school and go into the snow the multitude of flakes seems to have been released by his profanation. In the pervasive descent an eddy of air now and then angrily flings a tinkling icy handful upward into his warm face. Peter had forgotten what snow is. It is an immense whispering whose throat seems to be now here, now there. He looks at the sky and it answers his eyes with a mauve, a lilac, a muffled yellow-pearl. Only after some moments of focusing does the downflow visually materialize for him, as an edge of a wing, and then an entire broadening wing of infinitesimal feathers, broadening into the realization that this wing is all about them and crowds the air to four hidden horizons and beyond. Wherever he looks, now that his eyes are attuned to its frequency, there is this vibration. The town and all its houses are besieged by a murmuring multitude.
Peter pauses under the high light that guards the near corner of the parking lot. What he sees at his feet puzzles him. On the whiteness that has already fallen small dark spots are swarming like gnats. They dart this way and that and then vanish. There seems to be a center where they vanish. As his eyes travel outward he sees dots speeding toward this center; the further away they are, the faster they speed inward. He traces a few: all vanish. The phenomenon seems totally ghostly. Then the constriction of his heart eases as the rational explanation comes to him. These are the shadows of snowflakes cast by the light above him. Directly under the light, the wavering fall of the particles is projected as an erratic oscillation, but away from the center, where the light rays strike obliquely, the projection parabolically magnifies the speed of the shadow as it hastens forward to meet its flake. The shadows stream out of infinity, slow, and, each darkly sharp in its last instant, vanish as their originals kiss the white plane. It fascinates him; he feels the universe in all its plastic and endlessly variable beauty pinned, stretched, crucified like a butterfly upon a frame of unvarying geometrical truth. As the hypotenuse approaches the vertical the lateral leg diminishes less and less rapidly: always. The busy snowflake shadows seem ants scurrying on the floor of a high castle made all of stone. He turns scientist and dispassionately tries to locate in the cosmography his father has taught him an analogy between the phenomenon he has observed and the “red shift” whereby the stars appear to be retreating at a speed proportional to their distance from us. Perhaps this is a kindred illusion, perhaps-he struggles to picture it-the stars are in fact falling gently through a cone of observation of which our earthly telescopes are the apex. In truth everything hangs like dust in a forsaken attic. Passing on a few yards, to where the lamplight merges with the general agitated dimness, Peter does seem to arrive at a kind of edge where the speed of the shadows is infinite and a small universe both ends and does not end. His feet begin to hurt with being cold and wet and cosmic thoughts turn sickly in his mind. As if leaving a cramped room he restores his focus to the breadth of the town, where large travelling eddies sway and stride from the sky with a sort of ultimate health.
He crawls into the cave of the car with his father and slips off his soaked loafers and tucks his damp stockinged feet under him. Hurriedly his father backs out of the lot and heads up the alley toward Buchanan Road. At first he over-accelerates, so that on the slightest rise the back tires spin. “Boy,” Caldwell says, “this is duck soup.”
Revelations have skinned Peter’s nerves and left him highly irritable. “Well why didn’t we start for home two hours ago?” he asks. “We’ll never get up Coughdrop Hill.
What were you doing at the game so long after the tickets were taken?”
“I talked to Zimmerman tonight,” Caldwell tells his son slowly, wondering how not to seem to scold the boy. “He said he’d had a talk with you.”
Guilt makes Peter’s voice shrill. “I had to, he grabbed me in the hall.”
“You told him about the missing tickets.”
“I just mentioned it. I didn’t tell him anything.”
“Jesus kid, I don’t want to cramp your freedom, but I wish you hadn’t told him.”
“What harm did it do?-it’s the truth. Don’t you want me to tell the truth? Do you want me to lie all my life?”
“Did you-now it doesn’t matter, but did you tell him about my seeing Mrs. Herzog come out of his office?”
“Of course not. I’ve forgotten all about it. Everybody’s forgotten about it except you. You seem to think the whole world’s some sort of conspiracy.”
“I’ve never gotten to the bottom of Zimmerman, is I guess my trouble.”
“There’s no bottom to get to! He’s just a befuddled old lech who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Everybody sees that except you. Daddy, why are you so-” He was going to say “stupid” but a vestige of the fourth commandment checks his tongue. “-superstitious? You make everything mean something it isn’t. Why? Why can’t you relax? It’s so exhaustingl” In his fury the boy kicks one foot against the dashboard, making the glove compartment tingle. His father’s head is a considering shadow pinched into the pinheaded cap that is for Peter the essence of everything obsequious and absurd, careless and stubborn about his father.
The man sighs and says, “I don’t know, Peter. I guess it’s part heredity, part environment.” From the weariness of his voice, it seems his final effort of explanation.
I’m killing my father, Peter thinks, amazed.
The snow thickens around them. As it dashes into their headlights it flares like a spatter of sparks, swoops upward, vanishes, and is replaced by another spatter of sparks. The onrush is continuously abundant. They meet few other cars on the road now. The lights of homes, thinning beyond the poorhouse, are blurred in the blizzard. The heater comes on and its warmth serves to emphasize their isolation. The arc of the windshield wipers narrows with every swipe, until they stare into the storm through two mottled slits of cleared glass. The purr of the motor is drawing them forward into a closing trap.
Going down the hill beside the Jewish Cemetery, where Abe Cohn, Alton’s famous Prohibition gangster, lies buried, they skid. Caldwell fights the wheel as the chassis slithers. They slip safely to the bottom, where Buchanan Road ends at Route 122. On their right, Coughdrop Hill dissolves up wards. A trailer truck like a fleeing house pours down past them and on into Alton, the rapidfire clunk of its chains panicked. When its taillights wink out of sight they are alone on the highway.