Fintushel

A Rainy Day in the Land of the Blessed

The limp wrist of a California winter flutters by again—rain pitter-patter on the glass. Where I come
from the winter grabs you by the throat and twists your head off like a plug of tobacco. I've seen it slam children
against brick walls, where they would stick and drip. As in the psalm: "Happy shall he be that taketh and
dasheth thy little ones against the stones." The fellow who penned that had to have been a New Yorker, like me;
a Californian would have written, "Happy is he that clucks his tongue and gives thee a look."
Every November, when icicles started to line the gutters, my mother, to toughen us up, would hogtie us
kids with bell wire and hang us from a stud off the balcony. She got Mr. Czenuvasic, her lover from next door,
to help her. He was a bricklayer with biceps like a braided egg loaf, and it cheered him to do nice things for her.
Sometimes he humped her at the railing, through his leggings, under her skirts, in the slush, while we hung
there. Daddy would be sitting nearby in the living room in his cowboy hat, reading one of his Jack Londons or
his Zane Grays.
I mean, it was cold. Here in the sunshine country, if a leaf stiffens, they talk about climate change. Back
east, the leaves thundered down like an Egyptian plague, then the trees, then the hills the trees were on, and the
earth swallowed our houses. We got used to living underground. One time, I said, "It's dark, Mummy," and she
killed my dog. Sooner or later, the work crews would come by and bring us pemmican. Anyway, in half a year
it would be spring. One winter down there, Daddy read us "To Light a Fire," but his teeth chattered so hard that
half the words were "clack." Mummy snugged her ear right on Daddy's pie hole, she liked that story so, and it
froze to his lip, so we had to pry her off with a steak knife, which is why her ear looked like that.
Yesterday, here in the so-called "Bay Area" of Northern California, there was an early morning frost
warning. I'll tell you about a "Bay Area" and frost. We lived near Irondequoit Bay off of Lake Ontario, which is
a lake that is forty miles across, and Toronto is on the other side of it. There was this guy Sam Patch, the "Jersey
Jumper," who jumped the Genesee Falls along with his little pet bear. Well, Sam's body washed up in Ontario
Bay, is the kind of bay that is, and they never even found the bear. They don't need to issue frost warnings at a
bay like that one. The whole thing freezes solid and there are banks of black snow along the strand, lying there
like beached rotting whales. The wind whips off it like the breath out of a meat locker when the beef has gone
bad. I had a friend or two in Irondequoit. Their eyeballs had frozen solid from that nasty wind, and they used to
pluck them right out of their sockets and use them for aggies when we played marbles, and the bastards would
sweep up, because those things rolled so good.
The crybabies out here in the Elysian Fields don't know what it is to lose a bunch of toes when they stick
out from under the blankets. They think of death as a fashion crime. I remember the day Mr. Czenuvasic died.
Daddy was reading a Zane Gray in his John B. Stetson hat. Me and my sister were hanging off the porch, and
Mummy and Czenuvasic were doing the usual, but it was so particularly cold that day with the Lake Effect
snow and hoarfrost crystaling the trees, that Mummy just jammed her wire cutters into the big man's flanks, the
cutters she used to cut off the copper wire to hang us, she just jammed those cutters into him to cut out slits to
warm her hands in, like the guy in the Jack London tried to do. I recall that Mummy's hands made a funny
sound in the flesh flaps on Mr. Czenovasic, like when you squeegee a window. We just kept hanging there.

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