The Last Copy

After two days of snow in late September, the golf course on Wood Street looked like a swelling wave covered in particulate pieces of Styrofoam. A few kids had trampled the undulating parts of the turf or whatever you call it, looking for a place to sled and left all these slipping, matted-grass prints everywhere. The cold had come on so suddenly, nothing had died yet and there were even a few crushed dandelions under the grass. In one place, it was clear where someone had fallen down and left a big green swipe out of the snow. Walking by it one afternoon gave me the idea to shovel the walk when I got home.

I started on my panels of sidewalk, but there were only a few so I decided to do Mr. Morris’ sidewalk, too. When I finished that, I just kept going, thinking, I’d go at least as far as the Quality Dairy so I wouldn’t have to walk in the snow to get cigarettes.

When I got to the Quality Dairy, I left the shovel by the door and went and bought a coffee to reward myself for all the work. Buying the coffee, I noticed the smiley face cookies by the register my mom used to buy me as a kid. I couldn’t bring myself to buy one. They probably had all kinds of crap in ‘em.

I paid the 1.35 for the coffee and stood at the door reading the newspaper headlines before stepping outside to appreciate the steam rising from the hot coffee.

I stood by the ice freezer with ‘ICE’ written in snow-capped red letters, the freezer itself being capped with real snow plus cigarette butts. I imagined the red letters with little cartoon cigarettes poking out of the cartoon snow and watched the cars go by on Michigan Ave. each one with its own fox tail of exhaust flickering behind it. I thought maybe I’d go down to the library, but I still had the snow shovel with me, so I took it back to the garage and knocked the snow off my shoes on the cold concrete floor, which did no good because I had to walk right back out into the snow.

With the sidewalk shoveled, my shoes didn’t get too snowy until I passed the Quality Dairy and I sunk in almost up to my ankles. How could there already have been so much snow? It wasn’t even October.

The night it fell, I’d enjoyed the spectacle, watching the shreds of gray fall like static through the screen of the window. There was almost a hissing, a crackle of the sudden dry snap. Beyond the snow and the streetlights, the only thing visible had been the smokestacks of what ever it was on the other side of downtown with smokestacks. There was an allure in those ruddy lights and the insulated quality of the night. I imagined the silence where that light must be falling on the snow out along some railroad line and some empty buildings near the Oldsmobile plant or something. How nice it would be to go out there to the base of those smokestacks and just drop into the snow and watch the graphite skies throb with the redness of the smokestack lights. I fell asleep imagining myself lying in the snow alongside the tracks.

When I got to the parking lot, I decided to keep going. It was too cold for the snow to melt much so my feet were still dry. I walked in the alley that went behind Theio’s and the muffler place. There was some ice under the snow and, walking on it, I slipped and fell on my ass. Snow on ice makes it even more slippery. I left a big human-shaped blot on the surface of the unbroken snow, just like the kid who’d fallen on the golf course looking for a place to sled. At least the kid had an excuse. I was just walking.

I went over to Kalamazoo Street, to stop by the little gas station where I’d worked. It was almost a year later and I still liked stopping in, smelling the burned coffee, the stale smoke of the back room and the cedar woodchip-like smell of the Skoal displays. I’d stand there in the tiny building and focus on the idea that I didn’t have to stay and work eight hours. It was such a lovely feeling it made my fingers splay out just thinking about it.

I filled up my coffee with the burnt stuff at the gas station for the warmth and kept going. The Red Cedar River was just past the low scrub that grew along the side of Kalamazoo. It hadn’t frozen over yet and could be heard burbling away behind the scrub. The snow had come before the leaves had fallen and the waxy green, like something out of a magic marker on crisp white paper was still scribbled all over the scrub, the tough brown shoots were all tangled up in it. The whole thing looked like it’d grown down from somewhere, like the white ground was the sky and the bleary wastes overhead were the ground that coughed this stuff up.

The sole was coming off my left shoe and snow kept getting packed into the space under it. Every few minutes, I had to stop, make a hook with my index finger and scoop out this little puck of hardened snow. A salt truck had been down the street and had splashed a little salt around. There wasn’t a lot of traffic so I walked over the raspy salt. The coffee had gotten cold so I slipped it out of the cup in the splashing arc preferred by anyone dumping a half-cup of cold coffee into the snow. It was more like backing the cup out from the coffee than throwing the coffee out of the cup.

I forgot how far south Kalamazoo comes out in East Lansing and was annoyed at having to walk way back up north, again through the unshoveled walks of student housing and, all the while, picking those gray snow pucks out of my heel. Plus the campus yielded nothing at all to look at to the east: fields, fences and dorms—is there a more desolate landscape to contemplate in the autumn when it’s already under three inches of snow? I thought maybe I’d go find a book somewhere and sit down and read. There didn’t seem to be a lot of point in walking around. The wind was picking up, chapping my earlobes and burning my wrists sticking out above my pockets.

When I got into the track between the student housing and the campus buildings, the snow was all tamped down a miscellany of boot/shoe prints, each one smirking with a different crescent of shadow, depending on the angle of the print. Looking at them all, it was easy to imagine the sounds they’d made and the people who’d sunk them. But there was no one around. I passed another Quality Dairy. The puddles in the parking lot were frozen into a milky ice. There was only one car, probably the person working. The dorms loomed unimpressive with stories of mid-afternoon study lamps glaring against each window.

I crossed Grand River at MAC where there was no crosswalk and had to jump over the aisle of slush that had piled up between the car tire tracks. The snow in the median still relatively untrammeled.

Jeff the crustie was out in front of the Bubble (Boba) Tea place, spanging. He was the only person on the sidewalk. I stayed on the median, and walked north, hoping he wouldn’t see me, but on the damn median, I was way too exposed and he called out. Sucker than I am, I turned and crossed over to him, keeping my head down against the wind and so I didn’t make eye contact with him.

The shiny black that Jeff wore almost mocked the white cold around us and as much as I didn’t want to talk, I handed him a cigarette (of course he had none) and lit one myself.

“I didn’t think you were still here.” He said, looking at the cigarette to see what brand it was.

I shrugged. “Where would I go?”

“I thought you were moving to San Fran? That’s what your roommate told me. The one who reads all the comic books. I saw him here the other day.”

“Oh, Dan you mean.” I said, clarifying the roommate out of a sense of duty. “Yeah, I told him that, but, I don’t know. It fell through, I guess.”

“How did it fall through?” Jeff asked, taking a long drag, jealous even of the wind smoking his cigarette. I noticed his knuckles were pink, like pig pink.

“The place we were going to move into didn’t work out. Maybe it’s for the best. I don’t know what I was going to do out there, just work, I guess. I could do that here.”

“Yeah.” He said, looking around. Some girls were coming out of the Bubble Tea place and he asked them for some spare change. Two of them ignored him, but one stopped and gave him a dollar. He thanked her with the kind of individual complement he was so good at. She smiled at him. He asked her name. She demanded to know his name first and I was beginning to feel superfluous before he turned back to me like he hadn’t even been talking to her. “Yeah. There’s nothing in Cali. It’s expensive. Too many yuppies. You wouldn’t like it.”

The girl, taking the slight walked away. Jeff called after her but she didn’t turn around. “She’ll be back,” he said. I wouldn’t have disagreed.

I told him my feet were getting cold and said goodbye but before I could get away, he asked me for a dollar. I gave him another cigarette instead.

I started walking back west on Grand River and it started snowing again. Not the heavy, still, plumb-line snow that had come two nights before when I was looking at the smokestacks, but one of those whirly, premature evening, cold snows. I unrolled my beanie to cover my ears and put my hood up. It was under all these layers that I noticed it, the whole block of stores before the fork in the road at the 7-11 had been torn down. It was where the bank had been or maybe it was that sushi place that never seemed to have anyone in it because it looked fogged and dirty. All that was left were buckled pieces of blacktop and machine treads in the snow. What was it, a week ago I’d been here? Wasn’t it still there then? I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure of anything. I looked at the mussed snow and the stack of pipes destined for the ground. What had been here? Was this where that church had been? I stood in the whirling, cold snow, flakes of it actually blowing up my nose, trying to remember what had been where now there was only a frozen porta potty and a faded yellow backhoe.

I started walking again, trying to convince myself that it didn’t matter. Things were always changing, but, the whole way home, it wouldn’t leave me alone, the nagging feeling that there’d been something important in that block that I couldn’t remember. I pushed the thought out, thinking I’d remember if I didn’t think about it.

I went under the overpass past Frandor, crossing back in Lansing. Under the bridge, the snow stopped, the air dampened with the warmth of cars passing overhead and I noticed the piece of graffiti on the cement embankment with the initials and the heart. It always made me laugh because both sets of initials were the same. RS+RS and there was something either so vainglorious or incestuous about this it seemed absurd to proclaim this forbidden love in such a public way.

I smiled and the smile brought the memory back. It was winter about six years ago when I was still in high school. It had been a snowy night like this and we’d gone to the used bookstore and, finding nothing, written the story of the night on the flyleaf of a George Eliot book and put it back on the shelf. I’d gone back many times and, every time, slipped the swollen hardcover from the shelf to read what she’d written years before, to see that looped handwriting—so unlike my own jagged EKG scrawl—and to remember that evening when I’d driven up in my mom’s Buick on the ice, convinced any minute I was going to slide off the road. We’d gone to Denny’s and watched the snow pile up on the newspaper vending machines, drinking interminable cups of coffee and then we’d walked on the snowy sidewalks to the bookstore and she wrote in the Silas Marnier because there were so many copies and it looked like a book no one would care about.

I thought someone would’ve bought it before they tore the place down, but now the bookstore was a broken lot with the bundles of pipes and the frozen backhoe partially raised as if shielding itself from an impending blow and the book was probably frozen in a dumpster, maybe frozen open to that page with her writing and mine and our names, frozen open to that moment.

When I got back, I opened the door on the old carpet smell of the house and the sound of the wind soughing in the gutters and over the broken roof tiles outside; moan-whistling. I left my coat on and the light off and went and sat down on the couch. Outside, I could see the red lights from the smokestacks on the other side of downtown, they seemed to flare up in each gust of wind. Gradually, I stretched out on the couch as if feeling my way through the dark for something important and, still feeling, fell asleep.